[INTERVIEW] Amy Schultz from Bolder Money: Empowering YOU to Take Ownership and Control of Your Finances

This is an AI-produced transcription of episode 250: [INTERVIEW] Amy Schultz from Bolder Money: Empowering YOU to Take Ownership and Control of Your Finances

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Key takeaways from this podcast:

• How to start saving money now
• Habits to be more financially responsible
• How to budget to leave your 9-5 job and become a full-time business owner
• How to tier your offers to make more money with less time spent in your business

Hey girl, Welcome to the Purpose and Pixie Dust podcast, the podcast where we dive deep into our passions, our purpose and really unlock our potential with some pixie dust thrown in. What is pixie dust? You might ask, it's the fun and joy that gets unlocked when you're creating and owning your magic. I'm Lindsay Dollinger dog, mama, Disney lover and high school Spanish teacher who has used my magic to grow businesses while also working full time. I'm on a mission to help other women create and own your magic by building not only the business of your dreams but also the life of your dreams while still juggling life, your full time job and all the things. So if you want more than this provincial life, let's use our glass slippers to break those glass ceilings and Sprinkle lots of pixie dust into our lives and businesses. Let's do this.

Alright, I think we're live Hello everyone. Welcome to the purpose and pixie Dust podcast. I am super excited today to have a special guest on Amy Schulz and Amy tell us a little bit about you. What is your business? How did you get to your, to your business because I feel like there's always some kind of a story, there something that led you there. Just tell us all the things.

Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm super excited. Um yes, I will give you my money story because that's what we're gonna talk about a little bit today. Um so I right now I'm co founder and head coach at a company called Bolder money and we are on a mission to close the gender wealth gap. We do that through accessible and compassionate money coaching for women. That is not how my career started at all. I started out um Over 10 years ago now um as an actuary, so I was doing wealth management wealth consulting for HR firms and I was always the breadwinner in my family. Um I always worked like 70 hour weeks, I was very much like in the corporate world and like that was just a part of who I was really was trying to like advance, you know, I would take a bunch of exams to try to get promotions and so I earned a really good amount of money before I um decided to start my business, but when I had my first son, this was in 2019, I had um was still working full time, I had $30,000 in credit card debt, I had $50,000 in student loan debt and I had absolutely no savings. Um And my 401K. And like had no idea what that balance was at the time, my degrees in mathematical economics and finance and I'm married to an accountant, so like we should have, we should have figured it all out, you know, if it were if it were that easy, if it was just a matter of financial literacy, right? So I you know, I go in to have my son and I'm like okay, obviously we didn't prepare enough, obviously we're not financially ready to have a baby, but I'm just gonna go back to work and I'm gonna change it around. I'm gonna like work a lot of extra hours, like maybe start a side hustle, like earn it all back. Right? Instead, I went in to have him and I ended up spending the first day of his life on life support. It was a really traumatic delivery. It was, we were like miracle. We're a miracle family. Um, we both survived. He's great. But everything about me changed. I no longer wanted to work for somebody. I no longer wanted to work like, you know, 9-5 every day. Um, I was just like, I felt so stuck and I, so I, and I couldn't take the time off that I wanted. You know, I had this big dramatic life change that I needed to recover from, I had PTSD and I just couldn't um, I couldn't take time off because I didn't have the money so I decided to resources problem like crazy and like how did I get here, Right? And what I found was that I'm nowhere near being alone that there's so many women out there who earn a good amount of money and are um are ashamed of their financial situations or haven't known who to ask about it. And so maybe they have credit card debt, maybe they haven't been able to save a lot of money and so they're not prepared for whatever comes next. So as soon as I realized the magnitude of this problem, I um emptied my  401K. And I started my first business coaching women to improve their financial lives, which is not how I recommend anybody does it down here for one day. Um but that, you know, I felt stuck and I felt like I know now what I want to do with my life and I'm just gonna do it. So I started building my first business that was private money coaching. What I discovered was that it was, you know, the only way that I could really increase my revenue was by increasing my prices and maybe the number of clients that I could take on, but I was a new mom, so I couldn't take on that much. And so so I was kind of um becoming a part of the problem that I had experienced in the first place, which is that people feel like they don't have financial help to go to because it's pricey or because they have to be at a certain asset level in order for a financial advisor to work with them. So when I met my co founder, we started talking about really making a program That brought the human aspect of money coaching but made it affordable for people so that they could work with a coach and so that they could have that same level of personalized guidance while also like not spending $1 million dollars on it. Um So at that point I transitioned from my first business to co founding Bulder money and that was, this wasn't about 2021. And so we've just been on a journey, we are a venture backed company, so we are one of the only, I think 0.003% of companies that have a female founder who get venture capital and um we are, we're getting ready for another fundraising round. Our team has grown by at least double, maybe triple um in the past year and it's just been amazing and it's all because there are so many women who are wanting to make changes in their lives and money has been the thing that's holding them back and that's like our whole mission is let's figure out what you want to do and then let's figure out how to use your money to get there.

Oh my gosh, I love that. Just like so much about your story. I know it's going to so many people, well, I mean, you know what I mean? Like I have heard bits of, I mean not obviously the type of business that you started, but those fears and those feelings that you had of like feeling stuck or feeling trapped or not really sure, or like I make a substantial amount of money, where is it all going? Yeah, yeah, and I know so many, so many people who can resonate with that. So when you first got, when you first started talking, you said you specifically work with women because of that um that gap between women and men. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yes. So most people are mildly aware of the gender pay gap which is that women on average earn 82 cents for every dollar that a man earns. This gets much worse for women of color for women in the L. G. B. T. Q. Community. And what we don't often hear about is the wealth gap, which is unfortunately much much worse. So the wealth gap means what women own. So their net worth assets minus liabilities. That number is 32 cents compared to every dollar that men own. I know I get like every time I say it I get like Reggie about it because it's so bad that Yeah and so what it means is that yes there's a pay gap but it's more than just about earning more money. It's about what are you doing with your money? And so a lot of times we have women who are ahead of their managing finances for their household so they're more focused on the day to day finances instead of saving instead of building up money. So there's a lot to be said about habits and the way that we interact with money that we have to change. There's also in general, our society paints women as not the powerful money managers that they actually are. So a lot of women maybe saw, maybe they didn't grow up seeing their mothers um make the find the best financial choice. Maybe they didn't even see their parents talk about money, They just had no idea how it was made. So that's what we call the money story. That's kind of like your background with money and that differs very much by culture and also by men and women depending on what they've seen about their gender growing up with money. Okay, that makes total sense. And I love how you brought up that with the wealth gap. I'm still trying to wrap my mind about that number. I mean it makes sense. Like it makes sense. I just had never really thought of that before. So how do you even get started, you know, with maybe in your programs like with your clients? So do you start with the money story and that's where you start making some changes or how does that even look? Yeah. So we we get started by talking about what they really want because a lot of times people will come to us and we'll say I want to learn about investing or I want to earn more money and we're like, we really need to get a salad. Why for you. Like it sounds cheesy, but we need to know what it is that you're working towards and we need to be really be able to connect to your future self. Science has actually proven that when you do that, when you think about your future self as somebody that you are today. So as yourself, like living the life that you want, the person who's achieved the things you want to achieve, you're more likely to take the small steps that get you there. So we try to get people into that motivation mindset first and then from there we are doing two things. We're looking at their finances as a whole. So all of their assets, all of their debt, all of their spending to see what's going on. And yes, we're starting with the money story because two people could have the exact same financial situation but how they manage it going forward will completely rely on their money story. They could be earning the same amount and one of them could have for example, maybe they grew up in poverty and so they're used to that like feast or famine cycle with money. So they're not good at saving money because they never saw anybody who really like held onto their money there just never seemed like it was enough. So to people that earn the same amount money could have very different ways of relating to money and the way that we coach them and help them maybe needs to be very different. If we say one thing to one person it might come across as like an attack or you know that they they might feel shame which is never our intention. So we want to know where they're coming from so that we can coach them with compassion and make it as comfortable as possible for them. That makes total sense. And I love that. Um Now you mentioned debt and I feel like what I have always thought of debt and what I have heard of other people refer to debt is like almost two different things is their debt that is better or more okay for someone to have like what does that look like? Yeah. So debt is so yes. You know so I say yes because obviously if you have one debt that's like you know it's credit card debt and so that means it has like a 25% interest rate that means that every month on top of that balance that you paid it's growing at you know 249% or whatever when you look at the monthly, right? Whereas if you have um debt that is a mortgage and maybe your interest rate is like four or 21% that's not going to cost you as much money over time. Also having debt in a car or a mortgage or something that it's an investment right? Because you you have a value with that. Whereas with credit cards it's literally just accruing a balance over time. So in that sense when we focus on people on paying off debt, we focus on the credit card debt first, right? Getting rid of that um for some of the other debt we're like okay that's you know that's not causing that much damage. But what's important to remember is that in our society, a lot of financial experts are like they make people feel so bad about having debt to the point where then they don't want to get help because they don't want to talk about what debt they have and they feel so bad about themselves that they're like throwing all their money at this debt and so they're staying in the debt cycle because they're not saving because they end up feeling like they don't even deserve to have money because they have this debt. So the way that we talk about debt at boulders is different. We try to avoid saying like good debt and bad debt instead we try to say like you know which debt is really weighing on you that we want to get rid of first and we try to let people see like if you have a lot of credit card debt to pay off. Yes, we're going to figure it out, we're gonna figure out a plan to pay it off as soon as possible, but that doesn't mean that you can't still enjoy your life, like you don't have to punish yourself for the rest of your life because you have this credit card debt, that's what I was kind of wondering. So do you have a and it's probably not said, I'm sure it probably depends person to person, but a recommendation on paying off debt versus saving money and how to balance that out. Yeah, so we do, we definitely do both a lot of people when they come things because again they've been throwing all their money at their debt and so we're like okay, first of all it feels bad because you're still just like giving your money away so we want to get used to holding onto the money and then also when something inevitably comes up like a car repair something they're using the debt again. So that's where it's in that cycle, it feels like they're never gonna get out of it. So what we do is have them work on, You know, still pay the minimums on your debt while you build up a rainy day fund and a rainy day fund is usually around two or three thousand. It's it's good to have like one month of expenses. But if you're starting from nothing with savings $2000 to have that in the bank is amazing right? It just like it just feels different. That's what we work with. Um And then once we do that we can work on other savings goals, like an emergency fund which is a longer term savings that's for like if you lose your job, if you lose your income. And so that should be 3-6 months of earnings and that should be a little farther away. So like you don't you don't need the money necessarily within a day, but you know it's there in case you lose your job or if you want to leave your job, which I'll talk about two and um they work on that at the same time. So we look at where their money is going to try to figure out, we want to pay more to the debt than the minimum, but what's the balance that we can do that while also teaching them to save so that they can do the things they want to do. Okay before we talk about the losing or leaving your job, losing, losing or leaving I guess. Could be either way. Yeah. Either way.

What are some simple tips that someone listening to this right now could do to start saving if they're not good at saving their money.?

Yeah. So the first thing you could do is make sure that you have your basic savings account connected to your checking account and um you wanna start building up $2000 in it if that feels really hard for you. That's okay. Start with $25 or $50 every paycheck as soon as you get paid more that money into that account. If that feels hard for you. I want you to look at where you're spending is going? Like looking at the past two months, see where things are going. That exercise in itself, we find hundreds of dollars for our clients doing that every month going forward because they just don't realize a lot of times where the money is going. Um So definitely do that and work on, can I put you know $50 a month into my rainy day fund and build it up. Can I do it even faster. It's ok to start small but you want to like ease into that and really like work that muscle of like I want to have money to set aside. Um The high yield savings account is something that's really important for everybody to have for the emergency fund. So that can be something like um Ally A. L. L. Y. They have really good um No fees, no minimums online savings account. A Marcus account by Golden Goldman Sachs or um Capital 1 360. It's a little bit higher than um Or I should say a lot higher than a basic savings account but it's gonna have like a three or 4% interest rate. It's not it's not money. The emergency fund is not meant to be invested. It's not meant to grow, it's just meant to be there for security but you can put it in a high yield high yield account so that it does grow more than a basic savings. So once women start to have the appropriate amount of money in these two accounts then, is that when you recommend The investment account or something that is getting a little bit higher return on your investment. Yes, for sure. What we've seen is that people want to start getting invested right away or start investing right away. And so we start out with small amounts while we're building those other accounts. We want all women to like start investing today. If you're not take $20, start putting it in every month. Um or make sure that you're maximizing your retirement benefits if you have them. But it's ok to start small with that while you focus on the other funds. But when you have that emergency fund, you're able to make choices from the place of what do I want to do with my life instead of what I have to do and that's priceless. So I can't stress that enough. It's the difference between staying in a job you hate staying in a bad relationship. It really is the thing that that helps women feel more empowered and more in control of their lives. I was just gonna say that it's very powerful. I'm sure to have that that feeling.

Yeah. Okay, so for the woman listening to this who would like to leave their job to do their own thing to be an entrepreneur, what kind of a timeline or what should she be kind of preparing mentally right now to do?

Yeah, it's funny because I looked at this so much after, like I took my, I'm I'm a very um Risk tolerant person when it comes to business. So like having, having a startup where you're going after funding, it's, it's very risky. It's not especially doing it like one business to the next, I'm doing your 401K. Not great. So now what we always say to people is have a like, you know, we talk about the emergency fund being 3-6 months, you really want that to be closer to six months before you um leave your full time job. And that's because we always underestimate the time that it takes to build a business and the money that it takes to put in into a business to get it where you want to be. The other thing that I say is to make sure that you get really good at projecting your income.

So something that new business owners really struggle with when they're looking to take their business full time is there? Like how would I, you know, I have really great months and then I don't, so how do I get that to be consistent enough to be?

The thing that like supports me. And so it's like you have to be able to plan it out so that your, your minimum is the amount you can live off of and then you're using, you know, extra money as it comes in but sometimes it's about making sure you can plan for that minimum and you know exactly what you need to do in your business and you have like backup plans like if something else falls through, you have another stream of income maybe. So it's really about just being good at planning going forward.

Do you recommend people have more than one stream of income? I

do I I think if you are, if you are going to be an entrepreneur and a business owner there's going to be a point like usually you start out and there's a lot of work that's put into it. So it's always smart to start thinking about what's something that I can do that's not as active, that's like more passive income for some people that means you know making a note of um for coaches for example making a note of everything they're doing with people and start thinking about turning it into a course for some people that might be um looking at that you know in something completely different like investing in rental properties. The only like real true passive income is investing which is why it's so important with your business goals to make sure that you are or earning enough like including your goals and what you need to earn, not just your living expenses but including like I want to have this set aside for retirement and savings and that kind of thing that needs to be included in the amount that you know, you need to make every month to support yourself.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I have talked to  someone I just had on the podcast pretty recently was saying that she had a set amounts and she left her job and then like her business kind of dipped and she got to the point and then she ended up going, I feel like more on her taxes maybe then she had projected and it was just like kind of like an old crap moment and it ended up working out fine, you know, it's kind of like lit the fire on to do things, but yeah, I think that six months, I was even thinking you were going to stay closer to a year.

Yeah, it depends on, I think my um My co founder had done like 18 months or something when he had like, we were like the opposite, like he had planned it all out and so I think it really just depends on like, you know, what is your situation um and yeah, that savings is huge because there's surprises like you for the first time might be paying for your own um health care, that like you had to go to the marketplace or something because you're no longer on corporate benefits or you might suddenly realize that you um you know, you have been contributing to retirement and now I don't, I don't, I have to contribute to that separately. Um yeah, you might have a dip in your business and it training might come up that you want to pay for. I think it's important to include in that, that like emergency fund that runway to think about what are the things that I'm going to want to invest in my business to, to help it grow. I remember investing a lot in like client attraction programs and like marketing and that kind of thing because that wasn't that it wasn't something that I had ever learned before. So I was like, I know this is something I'm gonna wanna invest in, but it wasn't, it wasn't cheap. And so that had I planned, well that would have been included in my initial cost. Oh, that's so smart. Yeah, that's why I was just thinking all the things um because I'm doing my taxes right now, so I'm like tallying up all my, you know, that I've invested in and I'm like, it can get pretty high, especially at the beginning stages of your business because you're investing a lot in training, like you said, coaches conferences, all those and um it's really hard for me to say no to those things. I know it's so it's almost like addicting because of the growth that you experience as a person when you do that. I at one point I had like three or four coaches and I was kind of like, is this like your, like at some point I've got to stop this. Yeah, I got to pick one or two. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So what does your, what does Bolder Money look like right now? Like what are the different ways that women can work with you guys?

Yeah, so we, we have a free community, it's just boulder money dot com slash community and we do free master classes and there that our coaches lead that are around um things like money and marriage, um things like how to invest in rental properties, how to get out of debt. So that's where we have a lot of free content. We have our paid coaching membership where you sign up to work with a coach one on one and most of it is done through text message, so you have quarterly calls with your coach and then we have a step by step process that we walk you through to get Really organized to set your goals and then to figure out how you're going to get from a to B by creating a monthly spending plan for you, your coach. You know, we talked about the money story, so they also look at the emotional side of what's going on with your relationship with money and what needs to shift there. So that is as low as $49 a month depending on the program length that they sign up for. Um and so from there we have, you know, we have group coaching sessions that we run for the paid coaching members where we do deeper dives into the mindset work. We just had one today about financial boundaries, so setting boundaries at home network. So we really try to give like a holistic um support system for the women that enter our program.

I love that those financial boundaries, I'm just like thinking to myself like I need somebody some time for yourself. Yeah, I'm a thunder. So mine are always with myself like what boundaries starting to reset Exactly.

Oh my gosh, that's so funny. I love to though how your business model is tiered in different ways like that too so that you have, you know some of that more passive stuff and then you have, you know the more one on one, I think that's a great business model um to model for your, for your clients who are in business especially. Yeah, because that makes a lot easier. Yeah and I, so I did, you know, for the coaches out there, I did private coaching for a long time, it was very fulfilling, very rewarding. Um I do miss it sometimes doing more of that, but as I switched into studying group coaching and doing more around that like the power of that and the The ability to really scale that is something that I think everybody should consider who has like a 1-1 business because when you get people together, they are so much more motivated, they do feed off of each other. It's actually less work for you and it can really build your business up a lot. So yeah just something to throw out there, don't be afraid to pivot and try something new. Um I was just thinking in the car on the way home today, I usually run a couple 8 to 12 weeks small group coaching programs and like I feel like it might be time for me to start one up again because it is there a lot of fun and I do love the energy and it's almost like when you're in a mastermind where you hear someone's answer to something else and you're like, oh I actually have that problem too. That's so interesting. You know like yeah there's some stuff that can come up that way that I think some people will look at and be like I have to do one on one which I do, I do think there's a place for one on one also for sure. But that group coaching is a really smart business model to. Yeah and we, you know we do a lot of like studying our clients and seeing what are the patterns so that then we can build out D. I. Y. Programs to which we're working on so that there you know there's somebody where they are earning $75,000 a year and they have $10,000 in credit card debt and they're a single mom, like we know pretty well how to help them step by step. So there's, there's a, you know, a $15 program that needs to be built because there's, there's people that, um, that's the price point that they would feel comfortable paying and then they can still get the benefit of it. But I think having a group allows you to just like study more people at once to yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, or they call it, oh my gosh, I can't think of like, like a focus group or like beta testing. Yeah. Like the beta testing. So one last tip for the woman who's listening to this and she's like, okay, I'm going to get started and I'm going to take control of my finances. What is one thing that she can do tonight to move forward in that? So look, this is so important. So look at your car calendar. Look at your upcoming paydays at an event on your calendar and in the description or in the event, your title money date. Make it like recurring for your paydays and the description, right? Am I moving my money to build the life that I want and when that payday comes up, when your paycheck comes in, think about, you know, do I need to buy this or that? Or should I move this money into my runway so that I can take my business full time. Having that reminder on the calendar is really important. It's similar to having like a coach who's holding you accountable. So in this way you're kind of like, you know, a couple of weeks might go by and you might forget about this podcast interview or you might forget about, you know, the little steps. But then every two weeks you have that on your calendar. So you can be reminded, Oh yeah, I need to add a little bit to savings or I need to leave work early tomorrow so I can work on my business or whatever it is.

Oh my gosh, I love that. I love that so much. It's so powerful. Amy, this was so good. Everyone needs to save this episode and re listen to it every time you need a little kick in the pants in regards to your finances are a little reminder and I just really love your mission. I love that you're doing this. I love that you are specifically helping women because together we can all rise and bring each other. So where can everyone find you find you kind of set already. But just give us a little quick reminder. Where can they find you? Where can they connect with you? Um, and where can they find your programs? Y

eah. So go to head to www.boldermoney.com, You'll find the community there. You'll find um, our coaches list there. So you can actually pick your coach and sign up um and then more on instagram at bolder.money, I'm on instagram at Amyschulzmoneycoach. I post money tips, I also post like silly things about my life, so you can find me there um but yeah, boulder money dot com is the best place to start. You can take a quiz on there that can give you some tips and ideas of things to start and then I just, I hope to hear from some of these entrepreneurs out there because it's, we love working with entrepreneurs there, it's just like a different energy, it's exciting and I feel like there's probably a lot of potential there to like, because there having this income coming in from their business and let's do some big things with it awesome. Everyone go over find Amy, follow boulder money, check out their community. I know I'm getting ready to head there right now, as soon as we get off here and Amy again, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you.

Thank you. Thank you so much Lindsay.

And that's a wrap on today's episode, I hope you're leaving today inspired, Princess, to create own and spread your magic to the world. If you found by you in this episode or no, a girlfriend who needs to hear it, would you screenshot it and send it to her and if you're feeling really generous, pop it up on your, I. G. Stories and tag me at Lindsay Dollinger so I can see you loved it and tell you, thank you. I appreciate you. Now let's go do some amazing things bye bye

About Amy Schultz: Amy Schultz is the Co-Founder of Bolder Money, a company on a mission to close the gender wealth gap with financial coaching that addresses the emotional side of money. Amy left her career as an actuarial wealth consultant to pursue money coaching when she recognized the need for inclusive and shame-free personal finance guidance in her own life. Since then, Amy has brought the power of money coaching to thousands of women+, helping them earn more money, pay off debt, build savings, and ultimately create better lives.

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