In this episode of Boldin Your Money, Steve Chen welcomes Leisa Peterson, a financial coach, author of The Mindful Millionaire, and advocate for financial mindfulness. Leisa shares her personal journey from growing up in a financially unstable household to becoming a successful financial expert, entrepreneur, and coach. She discusses the impact of scarcity mindset, the importance of financial confidence, and how personal experiences—both triumphs and tragedies—shaped her path toward financial independence.
Watch the video on our YouTube Channel:
Listen Now
Listen to the podcast on Simplecast or right here:
Callouts:
[00:53] The Mindful Millionaire: Overcome Scarcity, Experience True Prosperity, and Create the Life You Really Want by Leisa Peterson (affiliate link)
[24:04] Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
[41:18] Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Transcription
Steve Chen (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by the Boldin Financial Planning platform, formerly NewRetirement, create a financial plan for free at Boldin.com. Welcome to Boldin Your Money, where we explore the intersection of wealth, mindset, and smart financial moves. I’m your host, Steve Chen. Today we have a special guest, Lisa Peterson, who’s joining us from Sedona, Arizona. We’re going to talk about financial mindfulness and her own journey from scarcity to abundance. She’s the author of The Mindful Millionaire and she’s helped thousands of people transform their relationship with money, and today she’s here to share insights. So with that, Lisa, welcome to our show. Thanks for making the time.
Leisa Peterson (00:53):
I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Steve Chen (00:56):
It’s a little bit of an interesting story how you got here. You were meeting with Danny Jackson, who’s our chief of staff, her women’s group. She mentioned that you came to present and then demoed Boldin, and that’s not why we did this, but she told us this after the fact and then we were getting ready and she pulled out your book and she’s like, I’m reading the book, and she said it was super helpful, so I appreciate that we have the connection here and get you on the show.
Leisa Peterson (01:22):
I love it and I love Boldin and I just have to say that was an extra treat, so I’m a big fan.
Steve Chen (01:30):
That’s awesome. Yeah, so I would love to hear your own journey, how you came to where you are today. I was watching a YouTube video and we’ll point to that, how you came from growing up to college, your first career and then this pivot to coaching and being an author.
Leisa Peterson (01:50):
Yeah, I talk a lot about my backstory and what I create because the most important thing, especially having a book called The Mindful Millionaire, people might assume that I’ve come from money or that I had people helping me along the way and it wasn’t really like that. I came from lower middle class in the Bay Area. My parents had barely finished high school when I was born. They were both 20 and no education about money. It was not an easy situation. My mom cut hair. My dad, I kind of partly just, but my dad was a truck dispatcher and sold drugs on the side. Just to give you an idea of that was my childhood. So I say that because my relationship with money has always been good, but not because I was taught it. It was because I learned from an early age that we didn’t have any and I really liked money, so I figured out how to hold onto it even though my parents weren’t really good at holding onto it. Maybe that sets the stage for the fact that I would eventually go into finance and study finance and school, not my first pass, but my second pass because I wanted to design clothes. I got out of college, started working in San Francisco for a clothing designer, and I was making minimum wage wage. I was making less than I had made when I was working as a waitress in high school. So I was like, okay, redo. And then that began my financial journey.
Steve Chen (03:29):
Did you go get your MBA or something like that?
Leisa Peterson (03:31):
I did, yeah. I went to, at that time, Cal State Hayward and I had a business in San Francisco working for all the biggest designers, clothing designers, because it turned out I was a fit model size perfect size six, and so I built this business after I quit working as a designer, I couldn’t make any money and I was making a lot more money as a fit model, and then I came up with the idea that I could go to college at nighttime. I didn’t have any money, so that was the only way, and thank goodness for state schools because it was like a godsend that I could pull it off in a couple of years and not owe any money when I finished
Steve Chen (04:11):
For sure. I think it’s so many people have gotten into trouble with student debt. We’re dealing with the repercussions right now. I think now the next generation has definitely learned that it’s got serious consequences. We have a kid in community college right now and the first kid, we have three kids and first one went through four year state school. It’s way more affordable. Second kids in community college, which is basically in California free. I mean you have to pay for housing, but we have friends that their kids are going to USC and it’s 90 grand a year or something like that. It’s a tremendous amount of money, so more people are definitely thinking about it, but I mean college is a good investment or can be a good investment, but you have to be thoughtful about it. But taking on a bunch of debt, you got to be very careful about.
Leisa Peterson (04:54):
Yeah, I was not into it because I think coming from where we had no money, the idea of getting into debt, which was my parents’ big problem, they came of age in the time when credit started taking off in the early seventies, and so they got in way too deep. They would have cars repossessed. We had a house that we had to move out of because they couldn’t make the payments. It was really stressful growing up, and so you can see how that would set the stage for me eventually teaching people about scarcity because I lived it and I had a hard time getting out of it.
Steve Chen (05:32):
How are your parents doing now? Are they still alive or are they
Leisa Peterson (05:35):
Are not alive sadly, and unfortunately I’ve had a lot of tragedies in my life and one of them was my father was killed in a domestic dispute back in 1999, and that really was the wake up call, the first wake up call for me to say I’m not actually a very happy person. And then to face my dad being basically murdered was a big turning point in my life. So my parents, they had really, really traumatic lives. Let’s just put it that way. My mom died a few years later, unfortunately.
Steve Chen (06:11):
Oh, sorry. I didn’t know that. I wasn’t trying to
Leisa Peterson (06:13):
No, it’s okay. I’m very open about it.
Steve Chen (06:17):
We’re so informed by not just as individuals, but also as giant cohorts of people. People that were born after the Great Depression, they lived a certain way. Millennials, a lot of them came of age around 2000, the great financial crisis in 2008, and that totally affected their earning power and savings ability, but also some of their mindsets around how they think about money. You kind of had this very rough or challenging childhood and then that got you focused on I want to make a lot of money. And so you got your MBA and then you went into banking, mortgage banking. What was that like?
Leisa Peterson (06:56):
After my MBA, I started in insurance and started building a career there and then ended up getting a phone call, actually Wells Fargo in San Francisco with kind of the job opportunity of a lifetime to run a division and ended up moving into banking in 1998, and I did that for several years, but long story short, the people I worked with came from a different world than I had come from for the most part. I had come from the other side of the tracks and as I would work circles around people, but the corporate world was not actually a really good place for me. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t really know how to kind of hold my own and I just wanted to work really hard and I got up the ladder really fast, but I wasn’t ready for the corporate stuff that would come kind of after me and I ended up leaving and going into mortgage. So I stayed with Wells Fargo and I started working in mortgage banking, which by the way, nobody walks away from the kind of job. I was a vice president with almost 40 days of vacation. I was getting stock options. Nobody walks away from those jobs, and yet I was like, I’m out of here. I’m going to go do sales, which was crazy pants, but I went into mortgage banking and then eventually started working on my CFP to become a financial advisor.
Steve Chen (08:18):
Interesting. So you had a larger corporate job and then you kind of headed towards one to one service. I would imagine the transition from mortgage banking to financial advice would be pretty different. What was that like?
Leisa Peterson (08:31):
Yeah, all of it was not normal. I think the first couple of years in mortgage banking, I had a lot of lucky breaks. I was living in Tahoe at the time. I got connected to some very powerful real estate people in Tahoe, like the number one producer in all of Lake Tahoe, and she started sending me deals and my first home purchase deal, nobody could understand this in the mortgage business, was a 5.5 million lakefront at the time. So I was really fortunate, so I was able to establish myself very fast in that line of work and learn how to work with high net worth individuals because that’s who was buying homes in Lake Tahoe. And that also probably inspired me around my work that I do today, which is really understanding what it takes to build wealth. Who are these people? How did they do it? Where did they get the education and knowledge to build wealth? And then eventually I realized that I could be even more helpful to people as an advisor. Even that transition was a big one, but I was ready for the challenge.
Steve Chen (09:43):
Interesting. Do you have any big insights from working with people that have a lot of money? I mean, I think a lot of people think that many people that have money come from money. Did you find that or did you also find a lot of people had worked their way up?
Leisa Peterson (09:54):
Most of the people did not come from money. They had worked very, very hard to get where they were. A few things that stuck out, even back to that first purchase, I was an underwriter, and so that was an unusual thing that they don’t do anymore, but they allowed the producer, the banker, to also be the underwriter, especially for these very complicated loans when you get into multimillion dollar loans. So I would go through the tax returns and have to understand, and I’ll tell you that person made a big impact on me. He was giving hundreds of thousands of dollars away in charity on his taxes, and I was like, wait a minute right away, these are not the people I thought they were. These are incredibly benevolent shut down. He owned a restaurant in the Central Valley and he would shut down his restaurant several times a year to give free food to everybody in the community. I mean, just the most giving kind people. That wasn’t everyone, but that was one of the things that I was like, yeah, there’s something else going on here. This idea of giving back and caring about the impact that he was making in his community made me pause. I also noticed just the kind of risk, the risk taking that people were willing to engage in and how hard it was to get loans for people, even though most of us would think that these are really wealthy people, but they were putting everything on the line
Steve Chen (11:26):
For sure. I think that that’s part of the American dream is that you can bootstrap your way up and work hard and take risk. And I second that. I definitely, the people that I know that are successful, they all work hard. They do have an appetite for risk that’s unusual and is basically required. They say to get rich, you have to concentrate your bets, and then to stay rich, you have to diversify, you have money, don’t keep it all in the same place.
Leisa Peterson (11:57):
I like that. Yes.
Steve Chen (11:59):
So you’re doing this stuff and then you become a financial advisor, and then after that you stop being a, so how did that go?
Leisa Peterson (12:06):
So it’s probably important to mention that my husband and I have been together since college and early in our, I’d say late twenties, we realized that he wanted to build houses and is a contractor and I’m really good with money. And so we realized that there was an opportunity to build a business where we would build houses with his expertise and I would find the money for them. And so we’ve been building wealth for 30 years now through this partnership of renovating homes, living in homes for a few years, taking advantage of the tax benefits. So we weren’t building our wealth through the traditional, just like our nine to five work, it was being done on the side, and that’s where we were taking our big risks.
Steve Chen (12:55):
And has that worked out pretty well?
Leisa Peterson (12:56):
Yeah, so if I hadn’t done that, I think it would’ve been hard to walk away from being a financial advisor in my mid forties thinking that we were pretty darn close to having enough money to last if we were careful for the rest of our lives. I started my business at 47 and now I’m 58, so 11 years over the course of that time, I think partly because of the work that I do and something like Boldin helped me to realize, hey, we’re okay because of all these steps that we’ve taken over the years.
Steve Chen (13:32):
Yeah, well, I think it’s awesome that you’ve done the, I’ve known some people that have done this. It was pretty prevalent in 2005. I remember people were flipping houses, but they weren’t necessarily experts at it. They’d just be trying to finance it in San Francisco, buying, fixing houses and selling ’em and making a few hundred or whatever they made. I think the way you’re doing it over 20 or 30 years definitely works. You ride up and down the interest rate fluctuations and are you keeping the houses or are you kind of fixing ’em and you’re selling ’em as you go?
Leisa Peterson (14:05):
We definitely take advantage of tax code that allows you to live in your home as a primary home for two years and then earn up to half a million dollars tax free. So we’ve done that many, many times and we try to not live on that money that goes sort of into savings, and then we live on whatever we’re earning. So we’ve done other projects, but you have to admit it’s a pretty sweet deal to be able to just live in the house almost for free with what we end up pulling off. So after a while, we had enough money that we didn’t have to get loans so that we could build another house while we were living and doing the two year thing on
Steve Chen (14:47):
The side. I got it. So you’re building ahead and then you’re moving into it smart.
Leisa Peterson (14:50):
Yeah, exactly. There you
Steve Chen (14:51):
Go.
Leisa Peterson (14:52):
Yeah.
Steve Chen (14:53):
So you did achieve financial independence or close to financial independence leading into this, and I do think that’s such an important thing. If you can get there or get some understanding of how you could be close to it, it can make a giant difference in your life and the choices you’re willing to make.
Leisa Peterson (15:10):
When I started to really think about all that I had learned that had a lot to do with me wanting to help other people and realizing that it’s not one size fits all. Everybody is going to build wealth in a different way, and there’s no right or wrong. The challenges is that a lot of people have a hard time understanding the degree of focus that it takes to get to that goal that you can’t keep going off the freeway, you got to stay on the freeway. You can’t take all the off ramps and then think that it’s still going to work out for you. So a coach is helping people stay on that path, not that it again looks the same for everybody, but you’ve got to be really focused or it’s too easy for it not to work out.
Steve Chen (15:58):
Got it. Do you focus specifically on helping women or do you help anybody?
Leisa Peterson (16:04):
I’ve helped anybody over the years. Definitely women have been drawn to my work because I bring the mindset and all the preparatory work into the practical. I like to go back and forth. It’s like, okay, well what’s keeping you from doing this? And then now that you’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk practical stuff. What do you need to do? How are you going to achieve these goals? Practically speaking.
Steve Chen (16:31):
Got it. Just as a side note, what do you think about the Ellevest situation? Did you see that
Leisa Peterson (16:36):
Ellevest?
Steve Chen (16:36):
Do you know Ellevest? It’s like a female focused bachelor.
Leisa Peterson (16:39):
I don’t know the latest news, but I know who they are.
Steve Chen (16:42):
They basically have pivoted, so they were helping, I think 70,000 people as members, but then the business wasn’t scaling well enough, so they moved over almost everybody to Betterment, and then they kept the top 300 ish clients as one-on-one clients. Anyway, I dunno if you saw that.
Leisa Peterson (17:02):
Yeah, well, talking about the video that went viral that you were watching, that was my challenge with the industry is it’s so hard if you aren’t focused on those top earning, most wealthiest clients, that’s where all the money comes from. So it doesn’t surprise me they would have to make that pivot.
Steve Chen (17:24):
Yeah, it’s tough because I think there’s so many people, like us included, we’re trying to solve the problem for the mass market, but all the money is in the top tier. Okay, so you achieved financial independence, you’ve kind of gone through this whole coming from scarcity, getting educated financially, going through all these jobs, and then you’re like, okay, now I’m going to be a coach. Was there some moment that was like, okay, I need to do this. I need to change a pretty dramatic switch?
Leisa Peterson (17:50):
Sadly, I feel like I have all these sad stories, but in 2013, I was a financial advisor and incline village at the time, and I had a doctor’s appointment in Reno, Nevada. I was in the doctor’s office, a man walked in who had been a past patient. He looked at me and everyone in the lobby and he said, you might want to leave now. And pulled out a large gun and started shooting people and killed my doctor and killed himself and shot other people in the office. I did not get hurt, but that was one of those pivotal moments. I had already thought that I wasn’t going to stay a financial advisor. I had already had some thoughts that I could make a bigger impact in the world through education, but it scared me to even think about it. And in that moment I was like, if I live through this, I am going to leave. I’m just going to do it and I’m just going to leave and I’m going to start teaching people and I have no idea how I’m going to make money, but at least I’m alive. That was the beginning of
Steve Chen (18:59):
Leaving. That is crazy.
Leisa Peterson (19:01):
I know
Steve Chen (19:03):
You’re the second person I know that or I’ve met, so it was one of our kids’ friends was in Las Vegas when that guy was shooting, the sniper guy was shooting into the concert. It’s so insane that this stuff happens in our society. People just do this kind of stuff and it’s real. People are like, oh, it’s to read about the news. It’s like, whatever. But you lived, I mean, it’s incredible. Well, one, I’m glad you’re alive. You must have PTSD about that. I mean, I can’t imagine that you were right there.
Leisa Peterson (19:38):
Yeah, it definitely changed my perspective. I think because I have come from a lot of trauma. Maybe it didn’t change me as much as it might change someone else, but I think that more than anything, I have a big sense of how precious life is. And I know inside of your question there was are there other pivotal moments? And I will say that that caused me to start the business. Writing the book was another big wake up call, first of all to be invited by this incredible publisher to publish the book with St. Martin’s Press, the Mindful Millionaire. We’ve sold nearly 20,000 copies, which is incredible for a financial book. And then a few years after that, my husband got diagnosed with prostate cancer. And so again, there was this other moment of, wait a minute, we’re trying to live life fully, but still it’s not enough.
(20:39):
And at that time I ended up shutting down a lot of my business, so this was a couple years ago because I was like, I want to take care of him. I think we’re okay with money. I want to live, we don’t know if this is going to be it. And we just started traveling and doing all these things that we had put off because our kids are eight years apart. So we have been parents of children in the home for 26 years. And so my son was going off to college and we were like, we’re just going to be kids again. And all of these different moments though, continue to reinforce why the work that I do is so important because I think the biggest realization I’ve had through all of this is that what happens for many of us is we go on pursuit of money. We think that money’s going to take care of us and solve all our problems, and it does help a lot, but in the course of building a life we can actually lose since the true life that we’re here to live.
Steve Chen (21:44):
How do you frame that up for the people you coach? How do you get them to think about how they should prioritize things in their lives?
Leisa Peterson (21:54):
I think writing the book is one way, but what I found is people have to be at their own moments of understanding. Nobody can force you to confront the life that you are living and whether or not it’s at the highest level that it could be lived at. I’m probably here more than anything for people when they realize that something’s not right and I’m here with my books or my videos or I’ve got a new book coming out, all I can do is position myself in places where if people are receptive to another way of thought, then my book is there for them.
Steve Chen (22:36):
What are those moments when for you, they’ve been through some very tough challenging times. Is that usually what happens? Is it someone loses a job or someone loses someone they love or there’s a health scare or something like that? Or is it, do people come to you there as just like, I’m having a great day? Actually,
Leisa Peterson (22:58):
Not so much. Not so much. Most of the time people are like, I mean, divorce would be another big one, especially for women where maybe they were used to having two incomes and now they’re working on their own financial independence and they’re struggling. There was a lot of, maybe there was codependence or there was not as much understanding as they need. I would say it’s life transitions are often why people will hire a coach in general. There’s a realization that something in their life isn’t right. And for me, I think over the past 10 years, when I first started, people didn’t even know what scarcity was, but a book came out and talked about Scarcity. And just for everyone listening, this book about scarcity by these two professors at Harvard and Princeton, it said that when we are consumed by there not being enough of something, we can lose 13 points of IQ or losing a night’s sleep.
(24:04):
And our decisions are heavily skewed in ways that don’t serve us. And so I love talking about that because what happens is we go into scarcity mode and I mean, let’s face it right now there’s been a change of administration. There’s all kinds of strange things happening and people are going into scarcity mode. They might not know that’s happening, but they’re becoming frozen, like deer in headlights. I’m not sure what to do or panic where they do things that they probably shouldn’t do. And so those are moments when having someone else to hold your hand and be like, okay, let’s look at what’s going on, what’s working, what’s not working. Let’s frame this in the context of a helpful, and that’s when all this experience that I’ve had can be really, really helpful.
Steve Chen (24:57):
No, that’s awesome. There’s so much uncertainty right now and volatility and you’re seeing, I think people, the whole country potentially lose a little confidence. The stock market’s kind of an indicator of confidence. People are like, I don’t know, maybe all these tariff changes and rule changes and maybe we don’t want to dump social security. There’s talk of like, oh, we’re going to change social security and Medicare, all these programs that people have relied on for a long period of time, that’s kind of a vote. Let’s transition to this part of it. How do you help people recognize that they’re in that mindset and then make changes to get out of it?
Leisa Peterson (25:37):
So recognizing it is definitely a crucial step towards transformation. It can show up in these subtle but pervasive ways. So worrying about not enough or anxiety coming around expenses or surprises or the unknown, even something thinking to yourself, I can’t afford, that can be a response. So being able to notice it is really helpful. Knowing yourself, well, knowing the patterns that you fall into. For me, I will go into worst case scenarios and that’s when I’m like, okay, something’s not good here. Slow down. And what we do in that when we catch ourselves is we can ask ourselves, is that actually true? Do you have factual evidence that this thing that you’re worried about is true? And many times we’ll run on outdated programs that don’t relate, but if it is true, then we can still come up with a very clear strategy of what am I going to do about it?
(26:46):
Because I hang out with a lot of finance people and we’ll just talk about the market for a moment. Some people, they have nerves of steel and it does not matter to them what’s happening with the stock market. I am not one of those people. Some of us are not like that, and we have to have a way so that we can sleep at night. That’s it. So you got to know yourself and know what, you can’t just be like, it’s not happening, it’s not happening. You got to understand what your strategy is and how do you take care of yourself. I also would say things like practicing gratitude deliberately. Again, back to Boldin, one of the things that I love about Boldin is that it allows me to be like, you’re going to be okay. This might go down, but you’ve seen the picture where you’re at. I can normalize it with a tool that actually gives me some factual data that keeps me from running into patterns that might be helpful. So gratitude platforms that give you information. I also think it is really helpful to surround yourself with abundance oriented people, people that are curious. And even when the market drops, that means that there’s an opportunity to actually take advantage of something new, make sure you’ve got those people in your life. Does that make sense?
Steve Chen (28:15):
Yeah, a hundred percent. There’s a self organizing group of our users that invited us in last week to just meet with them, and there was a bunch of, it was actually all guys. We were asking where the women were, but it was like a lot of guys, and they’re all kind approaching retirement, and they were there because they kind of supported each other and they were sharing their stories. And I mean they’re pretty open with each other. Once they learned to trust each other, they want to understand and learn from each other. What are their blind spots? What are they doing well? What are things they’re dealing with in their own lives and how do they do that with their partners or spouses and with their kids and things they’re trying to get accomplished? And it’s kind of super interesting to watch. So I definitely agree a community of like-minded people that have seen it before.
(29:06):
So personally, I used to be more active in the market and worry about it, and then I took the index and chill pill and just like, Hey, I’m just going to invest in low fee index funds and just keep doing that and not think about it. And this is after doing 80 podcasts, people like you that know what they’re doing. And generally, I mean the market’s been up to the right, it’s been working, but even now and it’s volatile and I believe the US economy and the world economy is pretty resilient. We’re investing in productivity. It’s worked for a hundred something years generally. I mean, well, there’s an impact to the climate we have to be thoughtful about, but generally we are helping. We’re getting more productive and that is helping people live better lives. And that’s a good thing. You can participate in that through the stock market. I’m not trying to pick the perfect equity, I’m just trying to ride along with the market and I would say the gratitude thing is also huge. That’s super important. How do people’s thinking change people who are coaching as they recognize this hopefully scarcity mindset, learn to adapt and get out of it, how do you see them changing as they get to more of, I guess an abundance mindset?
Leisa Peterson (30:20):
First thing that comes to me is confidence. A lot of people struggle with having confidence particularly around their financial choices. And when I say that, I say women more than men and being able to have somebody to kind of talk through their plan, talk through their strategy, check and make sure it’s going where they want, make sure that their mindset is oriented to what they actually want to achieve, then people actually do it. They deliver on the things that they’ve always wanted to do. They don’t make the excuses maybe that they kind of got trapped in so they get out of their own way. They take action. I would say I work with entrepreneurs and also people who work for others, and I’m always blown away at people taking huge leaps in their career, which isn’t actually all that common that it happens, but that is one of the things where they were when I first started working with them, they’re at one level and a few years later, they’re a couple levels above where they started at a much higher pay and they’re responsible for a lot more people and their mindset and the confidence that they have and the strategic wisdom that they’re applying, it really shines brightly in their organizations.
(31:47):
And again, back to a lot of companies don’t invest in their people with coaching. So these are people that have invested in themselves, they paid for it out of their pocket, which I don’t even know if I would’ve done when I was working in those roles. I got some coaching and some other stuff way back. It takes a risk to invest that money in yourself without the company paying and it pays off in a big way.
Steve Chen (32:12):
I can see that when we renamed the company from New Retirement to Boldin, we called it your financial confidence platform because that’s what we thought kind of the main benefit is people, they understand their money, they get more literate and they build confidence, and that confidence can express, I mean, not that there’s your financial competence and then there’s your career competence and everything else, but agreed that it’s a key part of being successful.
Leisa Peterson (32:36):
Yeah, I think it goes together. I often think to myself like, oh, if I had to go back to work and I had to go into a job interview, having been self-employed, I know that that has its own baggage, but I feel very confident that it wouldn’t take me very long to be able to prove the value that I could make in an organization because I am so confident about what I’ve been able to do on my own and the idea that I could bring that into a company, I know it’s possible, and I say this in the book actually, I was revisiting something in the Mindful Millionaire, and I talk about the fact that your level of personal prosperity that you feel is a hundred percent connected to how you feel about money, and that prosperity doesn’t just apply to money, it applies to every aspect of your life and people can feel it.
Steve Chen (33:30):
Yeah, I think that if you go off, if you’ve never been an entrepreneur, if you go off and you figure out how to do this stuff on your own, then people can’t really take that away from you. So you’ve been outside the corporate world, but if you went back in, you’d be like, okay, I’m playing. But I think your orientation probably much more like, is this worth my time versus should they, when you’re first getting a job, you’re like, I hope you pick me right? It’s like, please pick me so I can work here. But once you’re out, you’ll be like, well, is this worthy of my time? Right, because our scarce resource is our time and is the organization, we see this a lot with people in our company. It’s like they’re really being thoughtful about and they have choice about what they want to work on, who they want to work with. Do they think they’ll be doing something good in the world? And more companies are getting that way and more younger generations are definitely way more this way.
Leisa Peterson (34:23):
Wow, I love that so much because that’s not what we always hear about in the news.
Steve Chen (34:32):
Well, I mean not everybody has choice and it is definitely a privilege. So what are some of the habits that you encourage people to develop so that they can build their resilience and confidence?
Leisa Peterson (34:47):
One of the things specifically to women that I was thinking about coming into this conversation is a lot of women feel like they’re faking it with finances. They don’t feel like they have all the information. Even the group that Danny’s a part of, they’re so successful. I don’t think people would believe this. Just some of the most successful women on the planet and still the confidence isn’t there around finance, there’s still a lot of unknowns and so we’ll call it imposter money mindset. There isn’t the understanding of just how far along they are. And so back to your comment about community, I think it’s super powerful to be in community with other women talking very openly about your financial situation because where else are you going to get that? Wow, you’re amazing kind of feedback. We don’t know if we don’t talk about it, how would we know that we’re so good at it?
(35:53):
And when we don’t know, we might self-sabotage, might undercharge, we might avoid financial conversations altogether. Owning that, owning your financial authority, knowing that women are actually, all the data says that when women apply themselves, they’re actually more successful investors overall than men, which is fascinating. Most people don’t necessarily believe it, but the data says it. They do really well. We also can be very hard on ourselves and we have this perfectionism mentality, but that isn’t the way that money goes. Money is like, you really do have to feel this way. I am doing the absolute best I can in this moment. And that’s enough. That’s it.
Steve Chen (36:37):
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think women, well, we just had Toussant Bailey on the podcast. Here’s talking about this book 2030 that says that in 2030, women are going to globally are going to control two thirds of the wealth in the world.
Leisa Peterson (36:52):
Oh my gosh.
Steve Chen (36:53):
I think we’re definitely heading that way.
Leisa Peterson (36:55):
Yeah,
Steve Chen (36:56):
I would love to look at the data. Agreed. Long-term investing, I know that there’s also data that men, especially younger men, are much more comfortable with risk and risk taking appropriately applied is a key part of this, of building wealth, and this is from someone who took weight, not enough risk when they were younger. As you learn to embrace risk and take a long-term perspective, it totally changes your outcome in a huge way.
Leisa Peterson (37:23):
Yeah, that makes so much sense. The other thing that women get really, I mean it’s just a fact of nature, is that there’s a lot of emotional and financial caretaking happening through money by women. We end up taking care of children, we take care of parents, we take care of a lot of different people, and I think it’s good to have allies in that experience because giving more isn’t always the best solution and if you only have yourself to go through the decision, I think that’s putting a lot of pressure on people without any experience of how can I do this better
Steve Chen (38:03):
Caregiving is going to become is and is becoming a much bigger drag on society. I mean it’s important, but people are living way longer. I think people over a hundred are the fastest growing demographic now, proportionally people are just living. It’s good. It’s not free. It’s a huge reason to really invest in your health, continuously be ready to be working out when you’re 75, 80. It’s like that orientation.
Leisa Peterson (38:32):
I don’t know if you pay attention to this, but I’m super curious because even emBoldin, I haven’t set it to go beyond a hundred, even though I know that there’s a good chance I have grandmothers who’ve lived into 97, 99. Do very many people set it beyond a hundred?
Steve Chen (38:48):
That’s a good question. I would imagine more people are taking it out farther, and if you’re planning to live or think that you could be alive past a hundred or who knows what’s happening with technology, then you really want to get to a place of equilibrium where ideally your assets can pay for your life on an ongoing basis. I mean, what does happen is people spend less over time. Everyone’s worried about having enough money when you’re 95, and actually the odds of you being alive are lower, way lower. If you look to the average 95-year-old there, one, we’re not supposed to live that long, but two, there’s no beating 95, you’re still whatever that age, but you do spend less money as you age. When you first retire people, they call it the go-Go slow. Go, no go. I mean that definitely is a real thing. People spend about 1% less on a real basis per year, so about 10% per decade. So if you’re three decades into retirement, you’re spending 30% less than when you first retired.
Leisa Peterson (39:44):
So what that tells me, combined with all the different things like long-term health insurance, which we do not have, this is why when you’re in your forties, fifties, and sixties, you want to be really good friends with your children to the point where they’re like, yes, mom and dad, you’ll have a place to live when you are 95 years old. We love you so much and you do not annoy us to no end. That’s when you work on who you are inside to make sure that your kids would actually be agreeable to something like that.
Steve Chen (40:20):
This whole idea of intergenerational planning I think is real. And yeah, this idea of the older generations, they have all the money and they can use it to help their kids buy houses and stuff like that, but maybe they should also have contracts that yes, okay, I’m going to help you buy your house when you’re 35 and 45, but yeah, you be helping take care of me when you’re 65 and I’m like 95.
Leisa Peterson (40:44):
We do that. If you’ve read Die With Zero Bill Perkins work, he came on my podcast several years ago. I was like, oh yeah, we’re going to help our kids buy houses. We are going to get them set up so that they’re not going to have student debt. All those things that can help them early in life so that they have a really strong foundation and then they don’t need you again hopefully. And then later in life they’re like, you were so wonderful to us.
Steve Chen (41:13):
I read the synopsis of Die With Zero, but I’m going to have to listen to your podcast and maybe I’ll try it again. It’d be interesting. It’s Bill Perkins you said?
Leisa Peterson (41:18):
Yeah, bill Perkins. It’s good. The conversation with him that I had, I’ll send it the link to you, but it’s so good. It definitely was one of those conversations. I’ve had three or four or 500, I don’t know, I’ve lost count. And that was one that out that I was like, oh yeah, this is a game changer for me.
Steve Chen (41:36):
That book keeps getting circulated. People are like this idea.
Leisa Peterson (41:40):
It’s an interesting
Steve Chen (41:40):
Idea. So are you a die with zero person or are you
Leisa Peterson (41:44):
I’m hoping that I can give them money when I’m done, but I definitely am not trying to amass some huge amounts. It’s more of lifestyle. We just got back from three weeks in New Zealand. We went last year. We definitely live a very adventurous life.
Steve Chen (42:04):
Give me your top three adventures.
Leisa Peterson (42:06):
Well, the New Zealand chip have been great. We actually took a helicopter to the top of Tasman Glacier near Mount Cook. That was amazing. We love mountain biking. We ski, we travel all over. We get ski passes and travel to different locations and thinking about Mont Blanc and my daughter and her husband now a few years ago during the pandemic, neither of them especially my daughter wasn’t really, she was out of college. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do. She was working as an EMT and thinking she was going to go to med school and Covid happened, and long story short, we asked them to quit their jobs and move here to Sedona to build a house with my husband and learn how to do it. And in the course of building this house, which we’re now about to sell, they started an Instagram company like content creation that has exploded and they have close to 750,000 followers all over the world. They negotiate deals with the biggest brands in the world, all because of taking this time off of the normal path and following their passion. And so they do adventure travel and backpacking. They’re based in Tahoe. And it’s just so exciting to watch the lives that people can create. And I have to say, my daughter has an abundance mindset and I think it has a lot to do with this work. And growing up in a home where we were trying to figure it out, she just ended up getting it.
Steve Chen (43:38):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, it’s interesting to think about the generational evolution. Well, you’ll have to introduce me to your daughter. Well, we’re looking for influencers. We should have gotten her on the podcast too with you. We should get my son on the podcast. And your daughter. My son is an entrepreneur, my oldest son, he watched us and then right out of college he’s like, I’m going to build a company. And I was like, this is a terrible idea. And then you’re copying someone else’s idea anyway, but of course he makes it work and he’s grinding it out and now he’s having a lot of success. And it’s kind of interesting watching him apply. Hopefully by the way, younger generations that they’re paying attention and leaning in, they are so much more sophisticated than previous generations. There’s just so much information out there.
Leisa Peterson (44:23):
There really is. And they have us, I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m my daughter and her husband’s personal everything. And so they’re benefiting from that and their friends might be as successful with views, but because Zoe and Kelby are so tight with the money and so clear about what their goals are and what they’re trying to achieve, they make more money. They keep more money, and they’re building wealth and have very, very clear wealth goals. And they’re 27 years old.
Steve Chen (44:56):
It’s an example. It’s like if you’re super intentional, it’s game changing. I mean, you have to be careful. There’s also people, it’s so funny, there’s so much noise about the crypto stuff and stuff like that, which ends up being, I mean, maybe some of it you should have a little exposure, but there’s low intrinsic value. If you do the basic stuff of saving and investing, you’re going to have way better outcomes.
Leisa Peterson (45:21):
Yeah, we’re pretty conservative around here. So I have a bit of crypto and it’s really funny. My son is in college and he’s learning about all these things and he’ll send me notes. I hope you sold all your crypto mom. That’s really irresponsible for you to have it. He really is saying that. I’m like, honey, it’s going to be okay. I don’t have that much. It’s kind of play money, just that’s all I look at it for.
Steve Chen (45:48):
Our oldest son, he one day he’s like, yeah, my fraternity brothers and I have started trading these things. They were all trading with each other, but they own some meme coin. And they’re like, yeah, it’s worth 20,000. And then two days later he was like, it’s worth 40. And then it was like 81 60, and then it was like, I have $600,000. This is a 20-year-old. And I was like, you need to sell all this stuff. Oh my gosh. And then of course it tanked. Their fraternity had 10 million of one coin, but they owned the market, so they basically were trading among, it was a life lesson in volume matters. Trading volume matters. How much liquidity matters, who’s your counterparty? All these lessons.
Leisa Peterson (46:30):
Wow.
Steve Chen (46:30):
I dunno. People think it’s all just because one share of Google or Nvidia trades at whatever one price doesn’t mean that the market’s that deep. And if everyone starts selling as we’re seeing now, things go up and they go down. Any final thoughts for folks based on your book and things you’ve learned on your own journey?
Leisa Peterson (46:49):
Something that came to me when I was prepping for this conversation that I don’t know that I spend enough time thinking about because many of us may be on the Boldin platform, are doing this on our own versus having some other folks who knows. But I realized that having a personal investment policy would be really, really helpful. And I started getting into AI and kind of asking myself some questions. What would that look like? What should I be asking myself? Because especially in these times right now, things change and it’s good to revisit the strategy. It’s good to make sure that the risk and the goals and the management are all in alignment with each other because sometimes we do get it to a point where we’re like, okay, everything’s great, and then something changes and we might not go back and revisit it. And so that was just something that was coming to me as we came into this conversation. I don’t know if Boldin, you guys write about those things, but sometimes inside the app we might forget if we’re using the app all the time.
Steve Chen (47:56):
Yeah, fair. No, I think that’s important. We’re definitely doing a bunch of work to try to help people be clear about their goals and align their activities and also show progress. Right now, sometimes I think of our app is Grand Theft Auto, but it really could be more. You can go anywhere you want and do lots of things, but really could you make it more methodical for people so they can kind of see their progress. What you were saying about women or people in your groups recognizing that they’re doing a good job, how do you know that? How do you benchmark and say, well, I’m actually pretty financially literate or I’m saving at a high rate. We did roll out these financial metrics and stuff like that, which is good. So there is that view, but just the progression versus your peers and your own security, making that kind of stuff obvious and calling it out to people. I think it’s important.
Leisa Peterson (48:44):
Yeah, I do have to say this and why, one of the reasons I love the app so much is it was the first time that I could ever not just have it be a mindset that I have enough that I could actually feel it in my bones. I have enough. And I feel like that is one of the most beautiful statements anyone could ever say to themselves in the society that we live in. And I just don’t know that that would’ve been possible without the app. I’ve learned how important it is for me to celebrate those moments of you’re going to be okay. You’ve worked really hard. It’s paid off.
Steve Chen (49:22):
Yeah, there’s this famous quote, I have enough, I got to find it now. Hold on one second. I think it was
Leisa Peterson (49:30):
Kurt Nne. Kurt
Steve Chen (49:31):
Nne. Basically, they were talking about how different people have different amounts of money and he says, well, I have something. He’ll never have the rich person, which is like, I have enough. And then knowing that that you have enough money and knowing how to also not screw it up once you get there, you can also do that. We have to basically defend ourselves against our own bad habits.
Leisa Peterson (49:56):
Totally. I am always dealing with that because I am very comfortable with real estate, not as comfortable with the markets, and so when I have a whole bunch of cash, it’s like, okay, what do I do with it? Those choices are never going to go away. I’m going to have to deal with that and I’m navigating it and making sure that I’m making good decisions because yeah, cash isn’t always our friend.
Steve Chen (50:22):
Just as an aside, I was same. I was an entrepreneur. I had a bunch of cash, cash in long-term money buckets like retirement of, I have all this risk in the company and then I just want to know that I have liquidity. And it was totally the wrong way to approach things. And I think usually we just have to be diversified, right? It’s like I have friends that are all in on real estate and they crush it, but I also think it’s important to do both. Have real estate, have some regular stock market investments, different kinds of things. If you can have that, because these things are very often countercyclical, they don’t behave the same way. So
Leisa Peterson (50:58):
Yes, I love diversification. That’s a great way to, and
Steve Chen (51:04):
Lisa, this has been great. I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective and your stories about how you got here, and hopefully it’s inspiring for our listeners. I will definitely link to your book, the Mindful Millionaire and your website and your YouTube video, which is awesome. I appreciate the work you’re doing and I’m actually going to be up in Tahoe this weekend, so maybe at some point when you’re in Tahoe next time, just let me know. We do a ski lease up there and we try to bust up there on the weekends to go ski at Palisades and stuff like that.
Leisa Peterson (51:35):
That’s awesome. Yeah, definitely.
Steve Chen (51:37):
All right. Thanks Lisa.
Leisa Peterson (51:39):
Thank you.
