763: 6 Areas You Need to Focus On to Be Wealthy in 2024

0:01Okay, I have been on this ruthless pursuit to purge any clothes that I'm not actually wearing. Like if I haven't reached for it in months, it's got to go. I am trying to be really intentional about what I bring into my closet right now, which means I am only buying pieces that I know I will actually wear and use. Revolve just gets it though. I'm literally wearing my brown Autry sneakers from there right now and my new suede purse. It fits my laptop in it. So it's basically a fancy shoulder bag that works for everything. I love finding pieces like that. Things that look good, but also work hard for my actual life.

0:35Their holiday shop is live right now with all the good stuff. Sparkly party dresses, cozy sets, cute gifts, everything you need for whatever is on your calendar. And it's all in one place, which makes shopping feel way less overwhelming. Whether it's a weekend away, a big night out or a holiday party, your dream wardrobe is just one click away. Head to revolve.com forward slash gold digger, shop my edit and take 15 % off your first order with the code gold digger. Fast two day shipping, easy returns. it's literally the only place you need to shop from. That's revolve.com forward slash gold digger to shop by favorites and get 15 % off your first order with the code gold digger.

1:13Offer available for a limited time. So happy shopping. What I just always share with people, Jenna, is like, look, if you have a vision for your life, it's your duty and responsibility to protect the vessel needed to execute the vision. We only get one vessel, right? And so we want to make sure that we are mentally and physically well for the journey. Hey, my name is Jenna Kutcher and I am obsessed with all things business, marketing numbers, and helping you to navigate both the messy and the magical seasons of this thing called life. I'm a small town mama who took a$300 camera, grew a successful photo biz, and now I work from home and run a seven figure online business.

1:51I teach you the tried and true secrets to building a career you adore. Shy away from the real talk? No way. Money, hardship, growth, loss, and marketing are all topics we discuss here. Think of this as your one-stop shop for happy hour with a gal pal mixed with business school. Pull up a seat, make sure you're cozy and get ready to be challenged and encouraged while you learn. This is the Gold Digger podcast. If you listen to the Gold Digger podcast, you know that I love meeting new people. And today's interview is with someone I have been dying to meet for literal years. I got to meet today's guest at a mastermind last year, and I instantly knew we needed to get her onto the show.

2:33She's named by Success Magazine as one of the top 25 influential leaders in personal development. Her name is Patrice Washington, and she is a conscious thought leader, an award-winning podcaster, author, a sought-after media personality, renowned transformational speaker, and hope restoring and tough love coach on the PBS TV series, Opportunity Knocks. I also have an epic text thread with her and a few other women from the mastermind, and I am just in love with her. She is the founder of Redefining Wealth. Patrice has built this thriving international community of purpose-driven individuals who are committed to creating a powerful life by weaving together the aspects of their careers, home, health, and personal finance.

3:17Through her teachings and intuitive guidance, Patrice empowers her international community to look at life through this lens of abundance and opportunity instead of lack and scarcity. And that's exactly what she is teaching us today. You're about to sit in on a workshop with Patrice about her six pillar approach to prosperity, where personal development, spiritual growth, and personal finance success converge to create a roadmap for your ultimate success. This conversation is so powerful. I cannot wait for you to tune in. Patrice Washington, welcome to the Gold Digger Podcast. Okay, real talk.

3:53Are skinny jeans out or are they in? My friends and I continue to have this debate and it just goes to show that trends come and go and come back again. And the same goes for marketing strategies. Like who can even keep up? Luckily, HubSpot makes it their job to keep marketers on trend and on track to hit their goals. Their 2024 state of marketing report is an all-in-one guide for everything happening this year and how marketers can best approach it all. HubSpot surveyed more than 1 ,400 marketing pros across the world and curated the top trends they're thinking about. Sure, there's AI, but there's honestly so much more.

4:27The report covers everything from increasing awareness and engagement to ensuring privacy and boosting efficiency and growth. This report will give you all the info you need to shape your strategy for the year and keep on winning into next year. So friend, do not get caught hopping on an old trend. Visit HubSpot.com slash state of marketing to get your free copy of the report today. That's HubSpot.com slash state of marketing. We're going to dive right in, Patrice. So much of the financial information that is coming at us is, let's be honest, coming from white wealthy men. What is something that you keep hearing these financial quote experts share about that you disagree with?

5:12one thing yeah right we can we can start with the one thing yeah I would say not sharing with people that any personal finance journey you go on is really 80 percent mindset and behavior and it's only 20 percent skill set and so when we shame people for not having this concrete skill set stuff it doesn't really support their journey at all because truly foundationally there is no personal finance success without personal development. That's something that I've had to learn over these last almost two decades in supporting people with personal finance. I went back to school to get an MBA in financial psychology and behavioral finance because there's a missing link.

5:55If you want to keep talking to people about personal finance, but you don't talk to them about all the parts of their life that impacts their finances, even when they're not thinking about it, they will always experience failure after failure. Even people who achieve great financial success at some point, it has to become about sustainability. You can hit it, but can you keep it? And so if we don't cultivate the entire person, then we just lose and we have to keep starting over and over and over. So I would say that's one big thing that really has my attention in this season. I think this is such a powerful place to start because so much of financial advice out there is so focused on the skill set.

6:37And it's like, just conquer the skill set, just learn this and become an expert in this skill set. But you're so right. If you don't have the mindset to back it up, your default is not going to be leveraging these skill sets is going to be going back to what you know and where you come from. I think that's so powerful. I mean, every single time, it doesn't matter who you are or what you do. Many of us are simply on autopilot. We are doing the things that we learned most of us in childhood and in adolescence. And a lot of the lessons that we learned just because of where our parents were from or what their experience was, or any adult that had influence over us, we're doing the same things that they're doing, even though we may have, you know, achieved greater education or greater employment, we still find ourselves going back to those cycles of paycheck to paycheck or making really rash decisions or making very emotional decisions.

7:33And when you don't address that, you can't really change anything. I always say you can't recondition what you don't recognize. And when you're on autopilot, it's essentially saying you're asleep at the wheel of your life. You don't even recognize that your habits and behaviors are unsupportive of the things that you say you want. And as long as you stay out of alignment, you're out of alignment. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. Tell me how you got to this place. Did you always think you would become this expert with finance? Like how did you arrive where we are today? Okay. No five-year-old is like, you know what I want to be when I grow up?

8:14I want to be a financial psychologist. Nobody is ever saying anything like that. No, you know, I'm first generation American. You know, I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in an area called Leimert Park, not the best neighborhood. And Jenna, when I was six, seven, you know, years old, I used to tell my family, I don't belong here. Like I got to do something. I knew as a very little kid that there was just more. And so I was always in search of the more. I always felt a great sense of purpose. And so I was very intentional about getting good grades, going to the University of Southern California.

8:50I thought education was the key to everything. I did all of the things. I followed all of the steps, graduated with honors, started a real estate and mortgage brokerage at 22 years old, and literally thought I had hit it. And then, and then 26 years old, the seven figure business that I built went belly up in the recession. And I literally went from seven figures to scraping up change. By then I was a new mother. I actually was in the hospital on bed rest. I fell down the stairs at 20 weeks pregnant and let me into preterm labor. I was in the hospital for 10 weeks watching the banks that I work with close down day by day by day.

9:31And then my daughter was born 10 weeks prematurely at 30 weeks. Everything that I thought I had done the right way. Right. And all the steps I followed came to a head in 2008 when I literally lost everything and had to start over. And I had what I would call a come to Jesus moment, a deep bathroom floor moment where I had just chased the power man down with my baby on my hips, begging them to turn the lights back on or my daughter's milk would spoil. And I went back. my he's now my ex-husband my husband at the time took my daughter on a walk and I remember just getting in the mirror and going god why me like I've been a good person I did what they said to do go to school get good grades get a good job start a business something I followed all the steps I feel like I've been a good person what the hell is happening and I went from asking god why me to just crying to ugly crying to sobbing until your face is like unrecognizable and ended up on the bathroom floor in fetal position.

10:37And I heard what I refer to as a still small voice, but I got this nudge internally that was like, get your Bible. And there was a scripture, Proverbs 17, 16, it said, what good is money in the hands of a fool if they have no desire to seek wisdom? And it was something about that scripture. What good is money in the hands of a fool if they have no desire to seek wisdom? It's why my name on Instagram is seek wisdom. VCW, it's that reminder that this journey is about seeking wisdom. It's not about necessarily collecting all the knowledge and information. And I never knew those were two different things until that day.

11:15I looked it up. Knowledge is information and education. And going back to your original question, the reason that a lot of traditional personal finance education doesn't necessarily work is because it thinks that if you stuff information down people's throats, they're just supposed to all of a sudden know what to do with it. Wisdom is knowing how to apply it, when to apply it, where to apply it, with whom to apply it. They are not the same. And that scripture and that moment changed everything for me because I'm like, all this time I've been gathering information. No one truly taught me that there was a bigger picture for how you implement and that my whole life needed to be supporting what I said I wanted.

12:02Right. I'm just over here chasing money. This is why the mantra of redefining wealth is chase purpose, not money. Right. That doesn't mean that we don't make money. Like I make money, but I'm not run by money. And I don't make every decision around what I do in my life from the lens of, well, how much is it going to cost? Or how much am I going to make? I make integrity, faith-based choices, right? And so I've been passionate about this now since 2009, March 9th, 2009 is when I had that bathroom floor moment. And ever since I've just been committed to helping other people understand that there's a much more holistic approach to this.

12:45And it's really how I rebuilt my life and then rebuilt another seven figure business. What did you do from that bathroom moment? And with that new kind of lens of wisdom, walk me through that path. Because I think a lot of people have had those moments, though they might look different, right? Of like those moments of like, is this it? Is this is this what I'm doing? Is this my purpose? Is is there more? How did you kind of follow that path kind of down uncharted territory into what you're doing today. Now, when I look back, what I recognize that I was doing was learning to trust my own intuition.

13:28Like a big piece of all of that was I had the audacity in one of my most broken and broke moments to still believe that I should share this with people. Like, think about that. I'm facing eviction notices. I have had a foreclosure now. I went from a 6 ,000 square foot home in California to living in a 600 square foot apartment in Metairie, Louisiana, right? I'm riding dirty, meaning I don't have any car insurance. I'm making decisions between do I get milk or do I pay this bill? Literally, this was my life, 2008, 2009. And I have this experience. And then all of a sudden, I feel this thing in my belly that's like you should share.

14:14Now, I have to tell you, my first grade teacher, Ms. Boynton, told me when I was six years old, Ms. Cunningham, when you know something, you have a responsibility to share with friends. It's not enough that you just know it and that you are the know it all in the class. You have to share with friends. So since first grade, I always had this idea that if I knew something, it was my responsibility to teach. It's how I built my original business in the first place. It was teaching people. And so that kicked in and it led to me starting my first blog, maybe a day or two later. And it's still up to this day.

14:52For those who want to fact check, it is the ugliest thing in the world because I knew nothing about nothing. I owned a brick and mortar company. I had never done anything online. I had just heard of the term blog some weeks before. And I was like, maybe that's the way, you know, I started that free blog spot. at seekwisdomfindwealth.blogspot.com. And it is lovely. It is scrappy. It is like, I just had to start, right? But I started blogging every week and just wanting to share. And I really didn't think anyone was paying attention because my mom and my husband at the time, they weren't even reading.

15:27And I was like, well, if they're not reading, who the hell's gonna pay attention? And I stopped doing it. I got discouraged after several months. I got discouraged and I stopped for a few weeks. And then a strange man reached out to me in my then Yahoo email account. And he said, hey, I hope you're well. I've been enjoying your blog. Jenna, I didn't know how to read the back end. Like I knew how to publish the things, but I didn't understand analytics. I didn't know that people have been commenting and I needed to approve the comments. I didn't know anything. And I say that now because what I've learned is an audience of one is still an audience.

16:02I wish I could get in that old Yahoo account somewhere and reach out to that man and thank him because from there It encouraged me that maybe my mom and my husband were not my audience But there were other people out there who resonated with what I was trying to do So I got back to blogging it turned into me writing for a few magazines Like black enterprise and upscale magazine and then one of my articles went viral I was invited to go on a radio show next thing. I know I ended up You know, by 2014, I was the personal finance voice of the Steve Harvey nationally syndicated radio show that turned into me like writing my first books.

16:40I now have five books and my own podcast, Redefining Wealth, you know, and we like all the things. But it came from that one internal nudge that said you should share this with other people. It was scrappy. It was ugly. It was imperfect. It was all the things, but it was the sincere desire of my heart to help other people. And that has been the sincere desire of my heart this entire time. Yeah. Look, I've become kind of a systems nerd and anything that gives me more space in my day, I'm all in. And a reliable connection is a huge part of that because when the internet lags or cuts out, everything pauses and suddenly the simplest tasks take forever.

17:24I learned really early on that dependable internet, it's not a luxury, it is a must. Whether you're a content creator like me, a restaurant owner, or running a busy dry cleaning business, you need that steady connection to support your team and your clients. That's why I'm excited to share a solution for my fellow business owners. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all types connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services, all with connectivity solutions built for your budget. And they have a truly incredible offer. Business owners can get free business internet advantage forever when you add four or more mobile lines.

18:01It's simple with no contracts and no added fees. Visit spectrum.com forward slash free for life to learn how you can get business internet free forever. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. When we were young, we dreamed of castles and fairy tales. And as we grow up, those dreams might shift into building something real, like starting a business. You need a website, payment systems, a logo, and a way to reach customers. It can all be overwhelming and confusing, but thankfully, that's where today's sponsor, Shopify, comes in. Shopify powers millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all U.S.

18:40e-commerce, from big brands to folks just getting started. They offer beautiful, ready-to-go website templates so you don't need design skills to look professional. Their AI tools help with product images, descriptions, discount codes, and more. Shopify also makes it simple to run email and social campaigns so people can find you. And if you ever feel stuck, their award-winning 24-7 support is always available. Turn those dreams into... And give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash gold digger. Go to shopify.com slash gold digger.

19:19shopify.com slash gold digger. I love this so much because I think something has shifted, especially in recent years where people are so afraid to be seen as a beginner. It's like this weird thing where it's like, when I think back, cause I was very similar timing when I started my own blog and same thing, like trying to figure out HTML coding and how to make a sidebar look pretty and all these things. And, you know, it's so interesting because I think that this, somebody listening today that hasn't started yet, they have to take that audacious spirit that we had at the beginning of like, this isn't going to be pretty, but I'm going to put it out there.

20:05And I think social media has shifted that a lot for people where it's like, they want to be seen when they have it all figured out and have it all together. So they're never seen because they're not going to show up. No one has it all figured out. No one has it all together. What was a big thing for you when you started to figure out like, wait, I have my own approach. Because as we said at the beginning, there's so much information out there, right? Like we can take other people's information and regurgitate it in different ways, but like you started to develop some really impressive frameworks and approaches.

20:34What did that look like for you? Well, it didn't come until I had my bolder moment. So let me take a step back. So I was known for a brand called Real Money Answers. So all the things happened from 2009 by 2014. I did my first interview on the Steve Harvey Morning Show. They asked me to come back weekly. And then that turned into a regular spot on Dr. Oz. And, you know, now I'm in Cosmopolitan. I'm spreads in Essence Magazine. All of these things are happening and it's beautiful. But also internally, I have this little whisper that's like, this is not quite what you were committing to when you were on the bathroom floor.

21:15Because the other thing that I learned, not just the difference between knowledge and wisdom, that was also the first time that I really researched the definition of wealth. And I didn't stop at the surface level definition, which the first one we typically see is an abundance of material possessions and money. right material possessions and money and i kept like digging and digging and digging and realized the original 12th century definition was the condition of well-being and happiness that's what wealth actually means we've layered stuff on and basically said well when you have stuff you'll feel well but many of us have experienced getting the stuff that we thought would make us happy and then we did not feel happy.

21:58Right. And so reflecting way back in 2009, I was like, I want to do this differently this time, but this was an internal thing to me. I was doing the blog and doing the things, but on myself, I was experimenting with all the things. So that's when, you know, my meditation practice really got into place. That's when I started to really take more of my physical fitness seriously. That's when there were just so many things that I started to do personally. Now, mind you, I just said I started to attract all of these opportunities. I really didn't pitch much at this time. It was literally all of these serendipitous things happening where someone would say, oh, I saw your work and we'd love you to do this.

22:39Right. So I was starting to attract all these things, but I didn't know what to call it. And then as my career grew and I became more and more known as America's Money Maven, then it became budgets, credit reports, debt elimination, all of the skillset stuff that I had learned and that has been regurgitated over and over again. But in my private life, I was doing all of this other stuff. So people were seeing the public success and assuming that privately it was about, oh, she's really working on her credit. It's like, how much can you do with that? You got to work on your character, like not just credit.

23:15You can't just work on your budget. You have to work on your behavior. You can't just work on money. You have to be shifting your mindset daily. Like there's so many other things that I was doing in my real life. So I'm on the Dr. Oz show in 2016. And the whole concept is like, we're going to help people save on their groceries. And while I'm really grateful to be on the Dr. Oz show, I'm also like, I don't want to do this. You know, it's like, this is like, I believe that there's so many other things and that's still small voice said, but you're not saying it. You're not saying it. You're going from stage to stage.

23:50You're getting on platform after platform. You're on the radio every week. Why aren't you saying the stuff you really do? That was the pebble. Then the rock was, I actually, there was like so many things that happened, Jetta, like back to back. You know, I was pretty disobedient. You know, when you're like, oh, I should do this. Your spirit says something, but then you're like, I'm too busy to follow it. Yeah. Well, a series of things happened. The boulder came when my site It was hacked and all of my files were literally corrupted and deleted. When I talked to the hosting company, they're like, you sound like a nice woman.

24:23This is one of the worst hacks we've ever seen internally. That was the boulder. It was one of the boulders. I had already had my, someone else was trying to get me to abandon my trademark, a bigger company who I think knew I existed for a long time. But then when I got big, they were like, oh, we got to shut her down. So all these things happen. And I'm like, shoot, OK. And my attorney goes, is there anything else you could do? Like, do we have to keep trying to force this issue? Can we pivot again, please? Can we pivot? And I finally sat down and I was like, I just want to help people redefine wealth for themselves.

24:59I want people to stop feeling like wealth has to be a certain dollar amount or you have to have a certain type of business or when really you might experience this feeling of well-being and happiness like at any level yeah I've had moments where I wasn't making that much but I was super happy because it was aligned and I was just able to do the things I needed to do and I was like what if we all just redefine wealth for ourselves and it was like boom and in 2017 I did the full pivot everything came down I stopped everything I like shortly after launching the Redefining Wealth podcast in September of 2017.

25:40By around April of 2018, I left the Steve Harvey show because I didn't wanna keep getting sucked back in. And I love them. I'm so grateful for the four years I had there. But there was something in my spirit that said, those people stumble upon you, but where you're going, people are searching for something and they need it in the way that you deliver it. And so I took inventory of everything I had done from 2009 to about 2016. This is seven years. And I was like, what are the things that really moved the needle and backtrack and look? And from there, the six pillars of wealth were born. And I tested it before I actually launched.

26:18I also worked with several private clients and used it in some of my group coaching programs. And people started to have phenomenal success and really get back to who they were authentically as well. And that's where it was born. I love that story. I hate that that happened to you. I think that's people's greatest fear of like, what if it was all gone tomorrow? But there's also some sort of beauty of like, what is worth rebuilding, right? Like, yeah, you really have to face that question of like, if I'm starting over again, what am I taking with me? And what do I have permission to leave behind?