Today on the show, I have an interview for you with personal finance blogger Lauren Bolling from the website LB and the Money Tree. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you so much for being here. Today I bring you an interview with a young lady named Lauren Bolling.

We're going to talk about finance in your 20s and 30s and various decisions related to establishing yourself as an adult, including how to set up a house so that it makes you money instead of costs you money. My guest today again is Lauren Bolling. She writes for a website called LB and the Money Tree.

Lauren reached out to me or actually her publicist reached out to me and mentioned a little bit about her story. Her story piqued my interest. I went over and checked out her website and decided to invite her on the show. You'll hear in the content of today's interview a little bit of background, a little bit of information on who she is, but also some of the various ups and downs of her financial journey.

She was a delight to talk to and it was really interesting to hear some of the impact of different steps that she took in her life regarding different aspects of her financial journey. I was particularly attracted to bring you this interview simply because it talks about the more normal day-to-day aspects of finance.

It talks about the things that most of us have faced, young people going out, getting their start in the world, moving to a new city without any money. Lauren's got a really fun story. Some of the ups and downs and the lessons learned in her growth as a personal finance writer.

Especially, I also love to bring you the impact of this. I want to share with you a little bit about the story of the impact that her personal finance blog opened up to her from a career perspective. Enjoy this interview with Lauren. Lauren, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

I appreciate you being with me today. Lauren Ruffin, PhD Hi. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to hearing a little bit about your story because you have, in the same way that I guess we all have, you have a unique financial journey. You've shared a good bit of that on your blog, but I'd love it if you would start and share with me a little bit about your journey as it relates to personal finance and the lessons that you've learned along the way.

Sure. I think it all started when I went off to college. I didn't have any type of money talk with my parents. I had no idea about good things to do. I got my first credit card. Being away from home for the first time, I think I was dealing with a lot of self-esteem issues which manifested itself in a huge shopping problem.

I went through college battling that. Finally, my junior year, my parents suggested I go see a therapist to help me cope with this why I felt the need to shop when I was feeling so poorly. That helped. I no longer had a shopping addiction, but I had $10,000 worth of credit card debt.

A fun reminder of a past life. Absolutely. People think, "Oh, I graduated college with $10,000 in debt." They don't think that's a big deal, but that's just credit cards. That was just extra spending. I had a job all four years. I was blowing through that. My parents paid for my education, which I'm very thankful and I see now as a huge gift and blessing.

So $10,000, that was just my bad habits. I wanted to move to New York to become an actress. I have a theater degree that I'm no longer using. I got up there. I famously moved with $300 and a prayer. I slept on a lot of people's couches for weeks until I found a job and got on my feet.

It was right around the time that I was sitting at my desk job and all my friends were out auditioning and taking great classes and meeting fun people that I realized that my bad choices had consequences. I knew that the shopping was bad and I wanted to get a grip on it, but when you spend on a credit card, it feels like a present because it's not actually coming from your bank account.

That really hit hard for me. I had to work for about a year and a half in order to pay off all the credit card debt and get into a good place. By that time, I felt like maybe the acting thing had passed me by. I vowed then and there that I was never going to let my bad financial choices keep me from doing something that I really, really wanted to do.

So I moved home. It was a 25-quarter-life crisis, whatever. I decided I'd worked at a hedge fund and I wanted to write and learn a bit more about money, so I decided to start a blog, just documenting my money choices and what I'd learned and my thoughts and feelings.

At first, it just started out as a fun project and hobby. Then people started reading and it took off and it became more of a structure and a tool I used to start the next chapter of my life. So that was about three years ago now? Yes, it was.

I've been blogging for three years. You're almost 30 then? I'm 28. Yeah, don't say it like that. Awesome. I'm turning 30 in a week or two and I'm excited about it. It's a great – don't give in to what our culture tells you about age. There's nothing better than growing in maturity and learning from your past day by day.

So obviously then you're financially independent and you make millions of dollars from telling people what to do with their money based purely on your blog and you live on a beach and you type some stuff into a computer and you're a millionaire now, right? No. No. What did I get wrong?

I am not a millionaire. I actually just had a feature come out in the June issue of Redbook Magazine called Happy at Any Income and I was profiled as a woman who lives happily on her income, which I'm fine with telling you is $75,000 a year. I was working full time and doing the blog on the side and then I bought my house and I rent out rooms so that was sort of the total income pie.

The great thing about the blog was that in April I was able to build up my freelance writing enough to leave my full time job. Now I do work for myself full time, which has been really fantastic. But I don't make a million dollars but I do live sort of a location independent lifestyle, which is incredible.

You're primarily writing financial content for other publications or in various fields? It's in various fields. When I started my blog three years ago, my only talents were acting in theater, which I didn't want to do anymore, and then I worked as an administrative assistant, which isn't the best, most glamorous job.

I thought I was going to have to go back to school but I went into an interview for an administrative assistant position at a technology startup here in Atlanta where I live. The CEO is one of those big picture thinkers and he wanted to hear about all my passions and my hopes and my dreams.

I was telling him about this blog that I just started and how that was really an area of passion for me and social media and learning all about it. He thought that was really cool and I didn't get that job. But then three weeks later, they created a position for me to come and run their blog and social media.

From there, I entered this career in marketing that I never had to go back to school for. I feel incredibly fortunate that the blog was a springboard for me to enter a new career path. Lewis: Did you want to be a freelance writer when you started the blog? Lauren: No, absolutely not.

I wanted to be a writer but I didn't think I wanted to write about finance. I just wanted to write something every day, something that mattered that wasn't just a diary of my thoughts and feelings and what I had for breakfast and what I was doing. So I knew I wanted to write but I never had the intention of, "Oh, I'm going to start this and use it as my portfolio to have this big career." It was literally something I just fell into.

Lewis: It's interesting and the reason I'm just emphasizing it is I've seen this story play out time after time after time and I've encouraged, frankly, everyone to start sharing in some format, whether through a blog, through a podcast, through a YouTube channel, just to start sharing a little bit of their story and encouraging other people in some way that's unique to them.

It seems as though many people have the idea that the major benefit of doing that is going to be that I'm going to become financially independent off of my YouTube channel and I'm going to make all this money from YouTube content fees. But the reality is it may just simply serve to focus your thoughts and when you have an opportunity to sit down and write and express yourself or when you have the opportunity to sit in front of a microphone and speak and just simply share your thoughts, it helps you to organize and clarify what you think and what you believe.

After a while, you start listening to what you tell other people to do and you start doing it yourself. Laeigh: Absolutely. I couldn't agree with that more. Not everybody can work for themselves and I think employers especially find it incredibly encouraging when someone has the hustle to put together something online that they package and sort of brand and market themselves.

I think those are all really great skills to have. If you think about it, the only way we really learn things is by sticking our fingers in them and doing it. I mean, you can go to school, which is great, but you really only know once you start doing it.

So I definitely agree with that sentiment. People should just start doing things. Anything they want to do, just go do it. Preston Pysh (00:36:40): Practically speaking, when you moved to New York City, you were working at pursuing a career in acting. What way laid that and it sounded like the finances were a challenge.

Was it simply that you needed to work to support yourself and pay your minimum payments? What specifically happened that that career got set aside, I guess? Laeigh Nevins (00:37:02): At first, it was the finances. I moved up there with $300. I didn't want to sleep on someone's couch for forever.

Unfortunately, I had people who were incredibly kind to me and friends who were very generous, but it was the finances. I knew that I moved there with no savings, so something had to give. My parents had supported me through school, and then my mom bought my plane ticket to New York and was like, "That's it.

That's all you get. Your cell phone, your health insurance, you're off the gravy train now." At first, it was the finances, but then once I got that under control, I stuck my foot back into the theater thing again, and I realized that I wasn't as passionate about it as I needed to be in order to be competitive with the other people who I was auditioning against.

You have to get up at five o'clock and go sit outside in the cold for auditions, and you have to constantly be taking classes that you really can't afford all the time. It's a hustle, and you have to really love it. I just realized that wasn't for me. I hate auditioning.

It makes me really nervous. You come home and you think, "Oh, I had this passion," but passion isn't what you think it is. When I was a little kid, I used to write plays and perform in them for whoever was nearby, and my parents thought that that meant that I needed to be nurtured as an actor and performer.

But really, I think I always wanted to be a writer, and that was always there. Now that I have the blog and everything that's happened, I definitely feel like I finally found my fit. You mentioned the help of a therapist in connecting with your credit card debt. What specifically was that process like?

How did that person encourage you? How did they help you? What did that actually look like? It was eight years ago. It was 2007. I'm trying to think back. I know we sat down and we talked a lot about what was bothering me, and then she asked, "Well, when you're upset, walk me through.

What do you do? Do you go home and do your journal? Do you have someone you talk to?" I said, "No, I go to the mall." I walk around, and all the shops cheer me up. I'm walking. It's exercise. It's fine. She's like, "But then what do you do?" I say, "Well, I go into a store, and I always leave with something." It was just a lot of Q&A around identifying these patterns that I had.

Then, once we found my pattern, we worked really hard to find out what it was in my life that was a spending trigger. For example, I was in college at the time. Anytime I didn't do well on an assignment, that was a trigger. I had to work especially hard to not go to the mall after class or when something bad happened.

I think I was in there for about four months with her, just talking through everything. Tavis: Did you work to adjust your spending habits on your own? Were you conscious of a desire to change and simply weren't able to do it, or was it almost subconscious? Jessica: I think with any addict, and I use that word lightly because shopping can be an addiction, but with any type of bad habit, there's a rock bottom.

I think for me, it was at the point when I maxed out all my credit cards, and I had to move home with my parents for the summer. They were like, "Where did all your money go? Where did the money go that we gave you, the money that you worked for all year in your part-time job?" and having to come clean and see how upset they were when they found out that they were working really hard to give me something to set me off on the right financial foot.

Then behind their back, I was undoing it with all of the credit card spending. Seeing how hurt they were definitely made me get my act together. Tavis: Have other people talked to you about this topic since you've shared that publicly and shared experiences with you about their own compulsive spending and how they tackled that?

Jessica: A few people have reached out and emailed me and said it was something that they struggle with. The more surprising reaction has been from people I know, especially back college friends from that time. They were like, "Well, we knew you were spending, but we had no idea that it was this thing." I had one reader email me and tell me she had a problem getting drunk really late at night and then she'd shop online.

Then she'd wake up the next morning and have all these emails like, "Thank you for shopping at AmZam.com." I was like, "What should I do?" I said, "Well, something's happening. You're spending triggers that you're home alone at night." I have to straddle a line to not be careful because I'm not a certified financial planner.

I'm also not a therapist. I don't ever want to give someone advice because I feel like I'm not qualified to do that or it makes me a little uncomfortable. Dave: It's an interesting discussion as far as paying attention. I sometimes wonder with regard to helping people. I sometimes wonder if it's possible to learn some of these lessons without making mistakes.

Thankfully, I didn't max out all of my – well, actually, thankfully in college, I wasn't maxing out all of my credit cards on compulsive spending. I did go into credit card debt when I was in college. It was primarily paying for class and things like that. I remember an experience that really affected me and it was when I was in high school.

At that point in time, I was working during the summer in order to earn a little bit of spending money and also in order to be able to earn some money to contribute to my high school tuition. My parents paid the majority of my high school tuition but they sent me to a private school and one of the aspects of our deal was for me to contribute a little bit of money to that.

I don't remember how much it was. It was fairly negligible, I don't know, $100, $150 a month, something like that, not a big deal. I had to work during the summer and I had to make my way through that. There was one summer I was working on a sod farm and I had a little bit of freedom in terms of coming and going.

There was a gas station near that sod farm and at some points, I had a fairly boring job and I would go to the gas station and I would buy food from the convenience store. They had these amazing chicken wings there and a little fried food thing. I somehow wound up, I would go there every day and I guess I would wind up going there at lunchtime and then I would take a mid-afternoon break and I'd drive over there to the gas station and I'd get some.

I get to the end of the summer and it comes time to pay my tuition bill and I look in my bank account and instead of the $3,000 or $4,000 that I usually had there with $1,800 for tuition and a couple thousand bucks of spending, I look in there and I have something like $1,500 in my bank account.

I went and I was very embarrassed. I went to my dad and I'm like, "I don't have the money. I don't have any money." He made me go back through and figure out what I had done with the money. I went back and did a forensic accounting process of what I'd spent.

I started to figure out how much I had actually spent on chicken wings and soft drinks at this gas station. It was a horrifying amount. It was thousands of dollars because I would go every day and I was like, "Okay, $5.50 here." It was absurd. That entire year, I was so broke that I was the cool high school kid.

I wouldn't deign to ride the bus. I would drive the car and I'd put $3.37 a gas in it because that was all the money I had and I would beg lunch money from my dad and not buy lunch and just go hungry so I could put gas in the car.

I just remember how deeply that impacted my life for the good because the mistake was so deeply imprinted on me and I never wanted to do that again and to this day, every now and then I'll buy something at a convenience store. But if I ever look at a convenience store, there's such a deep suspicion in me that thing's going to come out and get me.

I got to have my guard up, my defenses up, that it really helped me. It's one way of just sharing my little story but I often wonder if experiences like that, if they're optional or if they are an important part of growing and learning and if in fact they don't contribute far more than they take away.

I think that at some point you do have to make a money mistake in order to really sit up and pay attention. Something about, and me and my finance blogger friends talk about this all the time, something about money just isn't super interesting to people as a whole. So you have fashion bloggers and beauty bloggers and they get tons of traffic day in and day out and you're like, "Why isn't there a money blog that has that much traffic?" I think it's because people don't really pay attention to their finances until they really have to.

Mad Fientist With regard to a philosophy, where did you go after tackling the spending issues? Where did you go to start learning about the overall construct of money and personal finance? Jessica Lange Right around the time I had my desk job in New York, LearnVest, the financial planning startup had just been founded and they were kind of making waves.

They had this great library full of tutorials in terms of how to budget and what you need to be doing with your money. I looked at Mint and I looked at LearnVest as far as a spending app to track my money from my checking account. So I went with LearnVest because I felt like they had such a much more robust library.

From there, that was sort of my first crash course in education. I can't remember. I'd have to go back and look. I think you might have to pay for those courses now, but back four years ago or five years ago they were free. So I learned about the 50/30/20 budgeting method where it's like 50% of your take-home pay to your expenses and then 20% to debt repayment and 30% your spending money.

Having those little buckets really helped me make my first budget and stick to it, which is how I was able to successfully pay off the $10,000 of credit card debt in about 16 months, I think. Have you changed your approach since then or do you continue to follow their recommendations?

It's a little bit more lax now, especially since I just started working for myself. My budget is kind of all over the place because when you have freelance clients, money doesn't always come in on the first and 15th of the month like you'd like it to. For the most part, I think I live well within my means, especially being a homeowner and renting out the rooms.

That really helps create extra income. But it is a little bit more lax. I kind of just separate money for my expenses and then money that I want to put away and then everything else I kind of just spend as I choose. I used to really ration it out like I can only spend $100 on eating out and now it's just sort of what comes up because every week is different, especially working for yourself.

One week you may have a lot of meetings and the next week you don't. So I kind of just spend as I can with what I have. You've been very focused on your blog and talking about your adventures in the real estate market. Share with me some of the background as far as your goal when you got into the real estate market, some of the things that have been fantastic and worked well and some of the surprising disadvantages that you found.

That's a loaded bag of questions. I was a finance blogger in 2013 reading all the financial content. I was like, "I think it would be a great money move for me to buy a home." And shortly before I left New York City, I got the last of my Christmas bonus from this hedge fund I worked for.

And so I had a windfall and I wanted it to mean something. I wanted it to be money that I could make it grow in some way and I really thought a house was the way to do that. So I bought a home. The story goes I was shopping with my then fiance.

We are no longer together. We didn't get married. So I bought a house that was much larger than what I actually needed because I thought we'd be living here together and having a family and all of that, which was disappointing when that ended. But it actually ended up being a blessing because now I have all these extra rooms to rent and I don't pay anything to live here basically.

My mortgage is completely covered. Tyler Lenz: Are you willing to share the numbers? How many rooms, how many renters, that kind of thing? How much are your mortgage payments? Shana Grayson Sure, sure. So my mortgage payment is $900. That was also in the Red Book article. And I have two roommates.

I have three bedrooms. One is like an attic sort of master suite that I live in, which is nice because I have that separation from them downstairs. And then I have two tenants. One is my brother and the other is a friend. And the third person kind of cycles in and out.

It's been someone different at different points. But my brother's always been here. And they pay me $500 a piece, which is really great, especially now that I work for myself. It's nice to have that extra level of security. So buying the home and being able to recoup some of the money that way by renting out has been great.

But I definitely think were I to do it over again, I would have bought a house that fit who I was at the time and what I needed and not sort of this aspirational dream of where I thought my life was going. And I definitely wouldn't have bought a home that needed it was a complete gut job.

I did a massive $60,000 renovation on this home. It's a huge project for a first time homeowner, but someone who ended up finishing it alone. It was very overwhelming and stressful. And I think it's not something I'd ever want to do again. How did you come up with the $60,000 for the renovations?

So I lumped in the renovation costs with my mortgage via a 203k renovation loan. So I bought the house and these numbers are all on my blog. You can find out I bought the house for $65,000. I took out a $60,000 renovation loan. So then the total was $125,000 and that's what I pay each month.

So it was well under what I qualified for. And you can do that. You know, ask your mortgage broker about it. Tell me about the incentives that you shared on the blog that were able to help with some of the initial costs as well. So there were tax credits for renovating a home in historic neighborhood that I qualified for.

Also at the time, they're not doing it anymore, but the city of Atlanta was offering grants, soft loans really, to first-time homebuyers who bought foreclosed properties in zip codes that were particularly hit hard by the recession. So I bought a foreclosed home in one of the dodgier neighborhoods of Atlanta.

It's definitely coming around, and I feel safe here, I should say for anyone listening who knows me. But I got $15,000 because I did that, and that could go towards my down payment, it could go towards closing costs, and it's forgiven, $3,000 are forgiven for every year that I live in the home as my primary residence.

So basically I get three grand a year to live here, which is nice, and I only paid $1,800 at closing, which is unheard of. So on your blog you said that you get paid about $4,000 a year to be in the house. What made the renovation, what made it so stressful in the fact that you said you wouldn't do it again?

It sounds to me like it was a brilliant financial move. Thank you. I can see that in hindsight, but at the time it was my first time working with any type of contractor ever. I didn't do my homework, I didn't vet him as properly as I should have, I took the word of somebody who I also did not know super well, and he ended up just charging me out the butt for everything.

Everything was extra, he was doing things without checking with me first, so then everything was a battle. The biggest point of contention was when he put the air conditioning unit in the wrong place and we couldn't pass inspection. I said, "Well, you need to move it, it's not my job to know what the building codes are for the city, that's your job." We went back and forth and back and forth and my parents had to get involved, which was embarrassing because I'd been independent for so many years and I thought I was a big girl and then when stuff hit the fan, I had to get my parents involved.

I'll tell you, I used to think that way. I don't know, maybe it's because I'm turning 30 these days. Certainly I am responsible for my own life, but I am thankful for the help of other people more than I ever was. Absolutely. I'm so thankful my parents are so kind and they're always willing to step in.

Especially being a woman, you're like, "I don't need anybody's help. I'm a strong, independent, Beyonce type." They helped me out, we finally got it settled. I racked up more credit card debt, finishing the renovation and overages. The $60,000 wasn't enough to cover it. You turned that into a story.

Tell me the story of paying off that credit card debt. You've done your homework. You read my blog, I appreciate that. I had about $8,000 of credit card debt at the start of 2014. I didn't pay it off like I should have. I was exhausted emotionally from the broken engagement and the runaway renovation.

I just ignored it for all of 2014. I was very ashamed to be a personal finance blogger telling everyone what they needed to do with their money and I still had this debt that I hadn't really told anyone about. At the start of 2015, my New Year's resolution was that I was going to pay off all of my credit card debt and I was going to do it in 90 days.

I did and it's gotten a lot of attention. It was republished on Business Insider and a little bit of it's going to be in Women's Day magazine in the fall. It was very exciting. Why was it such a big deal to you to share that you had credit card debt?

Why was it so tough for you? Because it's a mistake I've made before and you'd like to think that you know better or that especially reading and writing about money all day every day that you'd make better decisions. But one good thing that came out of it was and how kind and supportive everyone was once it came clean was that I realized that especially with everything but especially with money, you shouldn't be so hard on yourself.

The way I look at it now is I'm going to be dealing with money for the rest of my life and I can't really say what's going to happen. And so it's completely impossible for me to think that I may never be in credit card debt again. What matters is how I rise from those kind of setbacks.

But do you feel that it was a mistake for you to get into credit card debt again? No, looking back on it now, I had stuff I had to do and I had no money and so credit cards were the way to do it. The mistake wasn't using it to sort of finish the project and move on with my life.

The mistake was in letting it hang out for a year and accrue interest and not kind of stick my head in the sand and not pay attention to it. I guess what I'm getting at is I'm driving at the point in effort to expose it because there's a real challenge that we face in the personal finance world in that some people have an outsized focus on no debt ever.

And yet my experience has been that many people have used debt to establish themselves and have used debt to establish business. Most business owners with whom I've interacted, especially in the beginning, they have gotten themselves into a position of many of them deeply in debt, some of them a little bit in debt.

A lot of times your credit cards just simply become the way that you get things going while you're building your idea and while you're working your way through. For me, what I understand, at least from your writing, was that that credit card debt was primarily incurred as a result of finishing the renovations on this house.

Was that accurate? That is accurate, yes. And I agree with your position on that. I'm not one of those bloggers that says no debt ever, that you should only pay for things if you have the cash to funnel them. I mean, I'm a freelancer now and as I said, I don't always get paid so regularly.

So credit cards are how I fill in those gaps and then I pay it off at the end of the month or whenever the check I'm waiting for comes in. So I see your point. Yeah, and there's a big difference and here's where I think we need to do a better job, especially those of us in the personal finance discussion side of things.

But there's a big difference between your going out as, or my going out and putting chicken wings on a credit card or you're going out and putting whatever your drug of choice was on the credit card. There's a big difference between consumption spending versus investment spending. And if you say, "I put $8,000 of credit card debt to finish renovating this house," and in essence, let's say if you were in local rents to rent an attic apartment like you were having a one bedroom apartment in your market, what would that cost you?

In Atlanta? Yeah, in Atlanta. About $900-ish? Yeah, about. They're in a nicer neighborhood than the one I live in. Okay, so a little bit less. You said on the blog that you were spending something like $900 on rent before that. So if we were just to use $900 a month and then on an annual basis, that means that that's $10,800 of cost that you're saving for having the house renovated plus $4,000 of net profit basically in addition to your personal living expenses.

That's $15,000 per year of imputed income and actual income based upon that situation. $8,000 of credit card debt to get $15,000 per year in place is really not – I mean that's not such an out of whack scenario. $8,000 of credit card debt on the latest Manolo Blahnik or whatever your shoot of choice, that's going to sink you.

But $8,000 on a house that's going to cash flow at the end of the day is not going to sink you. It could if it were $80,000 and it could if the market turned and if you hadn't covered your downside. But I just don't like the I guess emotional baggage that comes down to credit cards and I'd like to differentiate a little bit between investment debt and consumption debt and whether or not you take – in my mind, if you take consumption debt and you put it down and you put it on a home equity line of credit and it's all consumption, you're destroying yourself.

If you take investment debt and you put it all on a credit card as you're starting a business and getting things going, that's probably – if it all works out well, that's probably going to have a net positive gain on your future. So I don't like necessarily the fact that oftentimes we feel this emotional pressure not to talk about things because what can happen is especially in the personal finance business is we can present an image that is not in line with reality.

Most business people that I've interacted with have borrowed money to get things going and then when we find ourselves in a situation of needing to do the same thing, then we're somehow more critical because well, we're not those who do that. Rebekah: Right. I'm going to call you the next time my finances go south.

I'm going to call you to get a little ego boost and tell me that everything is going to be OK. I think it's brilliant. I was reading your blog and you're talking about, yeah, I made all these decisions. But look, I mean you've got this big house that's been renovated.

You got favorable terms. You took advantage of your mortgage credits. You had the mortgage credit certificate program. You took advantage of these special incentive programs and yeah, it was a ton of work. But you've got yourself in a situation where you can now make a transition from full-time employment to freelance employment and that from a lifestyle perspective will open up to you a lot of amazing possibilities.

So in my mind, yeah, perhaps you would go back and do things differently but there are a lot of benefits to it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I agree. Question regarding this new YouTube series that you're doing. Why? Awkward Money Chat. So it's not 100% new. I actually started it last year.

And I've been blogging for three years and I kind of wanted to do something a little different and I have a theater background. I love being on camera. I'm not afraid to say it. So I thought let's do a video component as part of the blog where people come in and – because sometimes I feel like the blog is very much me and my story but I love hearing about other people's stories and the choices they've made with their finances.

And so I wanted to sort of put together a show that highlighted that, that was both educational and entertaining. My friend Kyle Bumpus said that it was like the Funny or Die series between two ferns but with Zach Galifianakis but for finance, which I thought was so perfect because that's what I wanted to do.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what he's referring to but it sounds really funny. He's interviewed Justin Bieber and Barack Obama and all of his castmates from The Hangover. It's really funny. You should look at it. I'm the worst pop culture consumer of all time. I consume zero pop culture.

Sorry to display my ignorance. Usually I'm online with things that are online but in this case I guess I'm out of the bar. Two last things that I'd like to cover unless you've got other ideas. I want to talk about your article of the 30 financial milestones before age 30.

Whose idea was that originally? It was Bridget from a fantastic site called Money After Graduation. She's from Canada but it was actually her original post and a lot of other bloggers did it and then I thought, "Hey, my birthday is coming up. I'm turning 28. It'd be a fun thing to do." Do you feel like these are important milestones for people to consider reaching?

I think some of them are really great. I think she got it from an article that she read but she was the first one to kind of put pen to paper and sort of track her progress. Some of the ones like you should merge your finances with a significant other by 30, I'm like, "Ugh, that's bullshit." What if you're not married by 30?

What if you don't want to merge your finances with someone that you're living with? I've done that. It didn't work out and it was terrible extricating our finances from one another's. So now when anyone asks me I say, "Do not join your bank accounts until you are legally married." Have you purchased your house with your fiancé?

No. No. I bought it myself because I was the primary breadwinner but then also with our combined incomes we probably wouldn't have qualified for some of the programs that I participated in. So I bought under my income. But we did have a joint checking account and we'd paid for a lot of wedding stuff together.

So why was it a disaster to have finances joined? Because after we split we had some problems with direct deposit, getting that separated because it was one of the things where a certain portion of both our checks because it was our bill pay account. And then having to call someone up and say, "Hey, $700 of mine is in the checking account that you're still in charge of.

I need to see you. I need that back." So having to be broken up and have this big emotional split is not fun. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. Why did you originally join finances? Well, we thought we were getting married and we thought we were moving in together.

It just kind of seemed like the thing to do. But that taught me. I don't know if I just being a financial blogger and I've been in charge of my finances for myself for so long now. I don't know if I could do it when I get married. I imagine it's probably a big deal.

It's one of the people who are very strongly opinionated about it from multiple perspectives. Some people are very strongly opinionated at why you should never merge financial accounts. Some people are very strongly opinionated about why you should always merge financial accounts. It's one of those extremely hot button issues in finance that if you want to make people upset just start telling them how they should manage their finance.

I've got my own perspectives on it. But I'm drawing you out just because it's something that very few people seem to talk about and I hate seeing couples merge their finances prior to marriage. It's almost always a disaster in my mind. But there are people who anecdotally will share that it's not.

So you have to look at that and recognize the impact. Yeah, no, completely. Because when you're married you're going to be separating a lot of things legally anyway so a bank account is just another thing. But when you're not married and then you have this bank account together it's like, "Ugh, why can't we just split and be done with this?" So it feels more like a divorce in that way even though we were just engaged or if you're just with somebody.

That's what happens even within the context of marriage. Marriage just becomes a very difficult breakup of a financial partnership. It's extremely, extremely challenging. Other benefits of the blog and this was kind of the last perspective. What stands out to me about your experience is it demonstrates you went to school for – I mean you had a desire to pursue acting and no desire to pursue writing and yet you've come up in a perspective where you're creating this web series and in a way that's utilizing some of your acting ability and you've built a new lifestyle for yourself.

Was any of that accidental? Was any of it intentional? What combination of accidental and intentionality was there in that? That's a toughie. I would say that it started out accidentally for sure, probably like 95% accidentally. Maybe there was a glint in my brain that maybe this could be something.

But mostly it was just me starting a blog, throwing stuff at the wall, seeing what stuck and then when I finally took a step back and said, "Okay, here's what sticks and here's what doesn't," then I became more intentional with it over time, creating more of a structure to content, getting more targeted with what I was writing.

It's been a process over time finding out what my audience likes, what it doesn't, but then more so than just creating content, it's been 80% promoting myself through podcasts like yours, through press mentions, through guest posting, through SEO. I mean it's a constant battle to increase traffic. But the great part is that the more successful I've been with branding myself and growing my own personal brand, it has demonstrated to my employers that I am very good at marketing and branding other things.

And now I do that for my freelance clients. So it started off accidental and then became more intentional over time, if that makes sense. Was it difficult for you to promote yourself? No, but I had kind of a crash course in that being an actor. It's all about promoting yourself.

You're auditioning, you're constantly putting yourself out there. A lot of my blog coaching clients have a hard time with getting comfortable with the idea of promoting themselves to friends and family, which ideally those are your first blog readers and the people who are going to go on and spread the word about what you're doing first before you get mentioned by big name sites or really get your name out there.

I'm going to invite you to come and speak to a group of high school graduates gathered together. And they're coming together and I'm inviting you to come and speak about finance. What would you share with them for a few minutes? I would say definitely don't shop your feelings. That's bad.

And second of all, just live within your means. I mean, it's hard, but it's actually so simple. And it's easier to live within your means before you kind of get into your later 20s with this lifestyle inflation and you're making more money and you want to enjoy it because you work so hard.

I think a lot of my troubles just came from me expecting a certain type of lifestyle or perhaps the lifestyle my parents gave me rather than the one I could actually afford. And I see this all the time even with some of the people I know in my real life just not living within their means.

Lauren, I appreciate your coming on the show. Plug your website and share anything else that you'd like to share as we go. So I'm Lauren. My website is lbenthemoneytree.com. That's L-B-E-E like bumblebee and the moneytree.com. I have a YouTube series called Awkward Money Chat, which is also on the site.

And if you sign up for my email newsletter, you can get your Grow Your Money Tree Toolkit for free, which includes tips on how to start a side hustle and grow a personal brand of your own. And I forgot to say you are an award winning blogger, a Plutus award winning.

Yeah, for Awkward Money Chat. Yeah, I won last year. It was very exciting. It was a big day. You'll be in Charlotte this year for FinCon? Oh, absolutely. We'll have to meet up. For sure. If anyone else wants to come out and meet you, FinCon is the place to be as far as if you want to meet Lauren and many other personal finance bloggers.

Lauren, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I hope you all enjoyed that. I always love personally hearing different people's stories and hearing all of the twists and turns through which they've gotten, which have brought them through to where they are today. And I think it's interesting.

I especially just love hearing people's financial journeys, especially when they chronicle them written down in the finance blog. And then I'm always interested to hear the twists and turns in the path of their career, just listening and understanding how their career changes because of their various activities. So I hope you all benefited from that.

I hope you learned something and enjoyed, maybe found a few good ideas for yourself. Check out Lauren's site, lbandthemoneytree.com. Lbandthemoneytree.com, I think you'll enjoy some of her writing. She does an excellent job there. And also make sure to check out her Awkward Money Chats program on YouTube. You can find that on her site or just search YouTube for Awkward Money Chats.

Oh, in addition to that, FinCon 2015 that we mentioned right at the very end in Charlotte, North Carolina, that will be coming up this September. I will be there. Lauren will be there. I will be hosting a listener meetup while I am there. Details on that one, I figured them out myself.

But I will be there for that event. June 30 is the ending of, I think there's a rate increase on the tickets at June 30. So if you've been thinking about going and you've kind of been sitting on the fence, buy your tickets by June 30, 2015. Otherwise there will be a rate increase.

And I think also June 30 is when the block of rooms that are reserved for FinCon attendees is being released. I'm going to buy actually my hotel room before I get that done tonight, get that squared away. So if you want details on FinCon, go to FinConExpo.com, link in the show notes.

If you want to buy a ticket, please use my affiliate link and I will get a commission on the sale of the ticket. You can find that link at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/FinCon. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/FinCon. F-I-N-C-O-N. I'd be greatly appreciative if you would use that affiliate link. Also if you've gained and benefited from today's show and you'd like to see the show continue on, I would be thrilled if you'd become a patron of the show.

For details on that, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Sign up to support the show there at any level that works for you. We'll do a bunch of different bribes and benefits for you at different levels, anywhere from a buck a month to $200 a month. Thank you to the over 200 of you who do that and I will be back with you soon, very soon.

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