The Surprising Way I Set and Reach Money Goals for The Year
What kind of side hustle strategy will help you meet your financial goals this year?
I’ve got the answer for you inside this week’s podcast episode, which is part one of two on money goals. 💰
Plus I’m also sharing…
✔️ What my current financial goals are (and how they’ve changed)
✔️ Why we need to normalize money-motivated side hustles
✔️ How to set goals you can actually reach
This episode lays the foundation for the up-close look you’ll get at my business finances in part two. Don’t miss it!
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Show Notes:
Hey, risers. Welcome to Empathy Rising. Today I thought what will be really neat is to just talk about what my money goals are and just, um, talk through some elements of breaking down and reaching a big money goal. I've told you guys like why I started this business was just for vacation money and just for fun money and then as it started to take off a grow, I made a really large money goal and I'd had a radical shift, call it, an awakening, call it whatever you want um, where money was no longer my primary motivator. Now it is a motivator for. But it's not my primary motivator anymore, but it was the primary motivator when I started my business. And so many of you who were at the phase of just starting your side hustle, money may be your primary motivation. I really believe all four of those show up for us, especially as helpers, healers, clinicians, we definitely have all four energy and values where other types of entrepreneurs may only be money and time focused. And so for me, this goal of this house, um, while it is money motivation, it's also values motivation for me. And I'm gonna break down what this looks like. So the ultimate goal that I had for by, by November of 2025, was to have all of the money in, in a bank account to build a home in cash when Josh retired from the Army.
Um, my husband is in the army and we live off of his salary when we first met and started dating and all of that, I was in grad school and then early married, you know, working in community mental health. So we've always just lived off of his one salary and then I had the kids and, you know, was working, was not working, and then started the business. And so we've just maintained that always, like living off of his income. And my income has been to build this forever house. Some of you listening are military spouses. I know because when we connect, uh, we, we really, um, you know, get each other on that point. But if you're not a military spouse, something just kind of paint the picture is we are told where we will live and when we will live there. Um, we're at the mercy of all kinds of housing, uh, markets, and housing crises. When we first came back to Georgia the second time in the middle of 2019, uh, we were homeless, um, for a while and there were over a hundred displaced military families. Or, you know, when I hear, when I say displaced, um, you can read homeless, um, because there was a housing crisis at the base that we lived in. We've never really had a choice over the home We would live in, the area we would live in, and anything. And often when we were living in houses, they were somebody else's house, whether it was the government's house or whether we were renting from another family or whatever. And so this is part of the reason that this forever house has so much value for me and for Josh. Like his number one thing we're, we're. Very close to retirement, and I'll, I'll elaborate on some of this stuff throughout this episode, but he, the number one thing, well the number one thing he's looking forward to is not having pt, which is, um, physical exercise that he's mandated to do at five o'clock every morning. So he wakes up, um, at 3 45, 4 o'clock at the latest to go to work, and he works out mandatorily, uh, from five to about six 30 in the morning every. He hates that. So that's the number one thing that he is looking forward to not having to do. But the second thing that he's very, very much looking forward to is having autonomy over where he lives and, and in what home he lives. So it's a value for me, but it's also a value for him.
From the money standpoint, it would be super great not to have a mortgage in my forties. You know, most people when they buy a home, they're buying a home and they're mortgaging it for 30 years. And if that were to happen to us, we'd be in our mid to late sixties mid-sixties, him late sixties by the time we were out of this mountain of debt. Um, and so, I work hard and I quote unquote, hustle in this season or sprint in this season of my life to avoid that. And if we can be mortgage free by the time I'm 40, he'll be into his forties, but early forties, I just feel like that would be a level of financial independence that would make a tremendous difference, um, in our lives. It also would be, uh, breaking a generational shift, I had my mom on the podcast and we talked about some generational patterns that she broke, which I feel like lay the groundwork for me to be able to break further patterns.
Um, I just think that would be amazing to have that kind of financial independence. I also know that for the last 17 years, Josh has shouldered a lot of the financial responsibility and to be able to give him the luxury of, um, Taking a year and figuring out what he wants to do, or, you know, maybe not having to work full-time, maybe goes out and gets a part-time job or something like, you know, to give him just, just the choice, the privilege of choice that he's given me while I was in grad school and while I was doing things earlier and starting this business. It's a way to pay him back and to pay it forward for him. Um, so that feels really, really neat. And also we know that generational wealth is handed down by assets, and so if I can give my girls an asset that, you know, when I'm no longer here, when Josh is no longer here, that they can either keep and rent out or liquidate and, um, bolster their financial wealth and their financial independence. That also means the world to me. So yes, this is a money goal, but I hope that you guys can see there's values underneath this. So while we usually have a primary motivation for the business that we're doing or the work that we're doing, we also, these other, these other three motivations are usually very closely linked to it.
So, To give you some context, the placement that we will be retiring, which some people are like, you shouldn't share this stuff online, but whatever. Um, is my hometown, which is Prescott, Arizona. The median home price in Prescott right now, as of a Google search, is about 485,000, and the price per. Foot is about 255,000. So these are just rough internet figures. Um, they could be, you know, a little out of date, but I'm sharing this because where we're returning to is an expensive place to live. You know, it's not in New York City or Seattle or a LA or anything like that, but it's not Phoenix City, Alabama, where I live now, where we spent $215,000 on our house, and if we had bought this house in Prescott, it would have been a $485,000 house. Um, so the home that we have are looking to build is about two or 2,800 square feet. We're living in about 2000 square feet right now, and it works for us now while the girls are little but in our master bedroom. Josh has his kind of art studio in our master bedroom. He's tried to have it in my office before… Um, but it just doesn't work for both of us to be working in there. And my office is actually, what was the formal dining room in this house? So there's no doors or anything like that. So, We're planning to build about a 2,800-square-foot house. Um, it'll be our forever house. We don't intend on ever leaving, and it'll give us just a little bit more space than we have here. Um, to have, for him to have a separate studio where he can close the door for me to have a separate office where I can actually close a door. Um, and so if we do the math on that 2,800 square feet at $255 a square foot, you know, we are looking at a $700,000.
Now again, I want to acknowledge, um, the privilege with which I'm speaking. Many of you do not have a spouse whose income pays all of your household living expenses. I acknowledge that many of you don't, um, you know, live in areas or couldn't fathom spending $700,000 on a house. And I acknowledge that. Um, I shared this with you for you to be able to scale these numbers up or down, um, depending on where you live, because the principles of how do I identify a money goal and how to reach a money goal that we're gonna share a little bit later in the episode will make sense. No matter if your goal is $10,000 or 10 million. Um, For some of you, this house price seems astronomical and ridiculous you wouldn't even entertain it. I get that. I acknowledge that. And for others, you know, you live in maybe an even more expensive area and that seems like nothing to you. So I just wanna acknowledge that housing markets, housing prices are different all over our country of the US and for the foreign listeners who, um, I know are listening as well, I have listeners, um, in the UK I have listeners in Australia, I have listeners in Canada and so all of these numbers are just reflective to my particular area in the, in the southwestern US that we will be living. Um, but again, the tips that I'm, and the techniques I'm gonna talk about in a little bit work, regardless of what type of money that you're trying to make or what amount of money you're going to, you're wanting to.
So on this journey, another thing that we have to think about is the development of the land. So those of you who've been, um, friends with me for a while, maybe on Facebook would've seen this, but at the end of December 2020, We purchased our land, which is two and a quarter acres. It's very like heavily wooded. It's mountainous, it's covered in snow right now. It's super, exactly what we want. Prescott is a really desirable area and, and a higher pricey area because... Um, it has four seasons in Arizona. You might have heard me say snow and been like, what the heck? But yes. Um, like for instance, where Josh and I got married is 7,200 feet in elevation. So we have snow, we have ski resorts, we have things like that in my neck of the woods now down in the valley in Phoenix. That's probably more like what you're picturing for Arizona. We purchased this land, um, a little over a year ago for 97,000, and we paid cash for that, and that cash was generated by my business alone. My goal every year is to put a hundred thousand dollars away to be chipping away at this house, and that has started in since 2018. Now, I didn't, that's, that was the first year of my business. I did not put a hundred thousand dollars away in 2018. I think I put 12 away in 2018. So this has been growing and growing, but in 2020 we purchased our property. And again, I know some of you might be thinking two acres for almost a hundred grand. I can get 20 acres for that. Right? And so we've gotta take our markets into consideration, but we still need to develop that land a bit. Um, it has electricity to the property, but we will be doing solar. Um, so we need to install that. Uh, we need to haul water because we are out of town. So we, and I want the hauled water tank underground because it looks ugly if they sit on top of like in people's yards. I hate them when I see them in people's yards. So we'll be installing ours underground and then we'll also need septic as well because we're outside of City sewer and water. So, um, we have to haul our water and we have to have a septic tank. So those are some developments that still need to happen on the property, and they may end up being included in that 700,000 price tag, or they may be outside of that price tag. So there's also some other expenses that I need to be thinking about that might not be included just in the price per square foot. So I know that I've been talking about money motivation here, and some of you might find that you're not money motivated at all. I've had students inside Hustle where we had to set other types of goals because I was like, well, what if you just started paying your mortgage with your side hustle? Or what if you just started paying your rent with your side hustle or whatever? And they were like, yeah, it just doesn't speak to me. There might be deeper values-based reasons or different impact-based motivations for you and for your side hustle, and that's awesome.
As you can see, my goal on the surface is a money goal but has values attached underneath it, but a lot of you that are listening are money motivated.
So you guys now know my money goal. I'm just gonna call it 700 K. Um, It may end up being a little bit higher than that. Maybe I end up being a little lower than that, depending on what happens in the next year and a half or so. Um, but again, it'll give you context for next week. Now, if we wanna start thinking about our money goals, we need to first identify what that money goal is.
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When I started, I just wanted us to be able to like take some vacations without putting 'em on the credit card, right? Josh's income has always covered our bills and our basics, but at that point, he was a little lower ranking and hadn't had as many promotions and so extras were tight, like, you know, anything beyond kind of our necessities or our needs was tight and we would charge a vacation and then we would take our tax return. And because we had two kids, so we were actually getting money back, and then we would pay off the credit card. Um, and that was kind of the way that we rolled when we were one income. And I wanted to be able to change that for us. I wanted us to be able to have extras without stretch. So literally my goal was only like a couple of thousand dollars a month. I was like, if I made two grand a month, woo. We'd be like, we'd be awesome, and we'd be set. Um, and then I had like my first $5,000, $6,000 a month and I was like, Hmm, wait a minute here, wait a minute here. If I'm like, triple what I wanted per month and you can call that greedy or you can call it like a recognition of what was possible and to go on the woo side, a recognition of what was already on its way, like what was already meant for me. And I remember this was when, when we were still in Texas, I remember a decision of, am I gonna do this for reels or am I gonna play.
Because, right, because when I was wanting a couple grand a month or whatever for extras, it was very, very doable and it was very much within my comfort zone, and there was no growth included, like no growth involved. And I said, like, I knew it was in that, in a, in a very distinct moment where I knew I can step forward and step.
This growth and claim what I know is already on the way or I can stay right where I'm at. And I chose, I chose to step forward and it hasn't been easy and it's had ups and downs and I've shared many and many, many of them on the podcast here. I have episodes about burning out. I have episodes about mistakes I made and bad decisions that I made in the business. So you can surely scroll the archives and find all of them. But when for you, the first step is to identify what that money goal is. I've had small money goals and I've had big money goals. I really don't think the amount is what matters as much. I'm just sharing my amounts, so, You can have the real picture.
So many online businesses just share like, oh yeah, a six-figure launch. But they don't. They don't say what that means, what the actual revenue was, what the expense was, what the profit was but maybe your goal, your money goal you know, rent or a mortgage or your car payment, or maybe you really wanna get your kid into a private school, and so you wanna be able to make the private school tuition every month from your side hustle or something like that, right?
Attaching one money goal to your side, hustle, attaching a revenue amount, a dollar amount to your side hustle can be quite a motivation. And it can also be a benchmark that helps, you know, are you on track or are you off track? And honestly, I recommend it being a smaller goal first. If I had said in 2017 when I first started, The therapy-facing business, remember I had another online business before, and then when Logan was born, I took time off. I got really sick when I was pregnant with her, so I really stopped, took time off when I was carrying her, and then didn't start back in a business capacity until she was like five or six months old, right? So I took about, let's call it a year and a half off. Um, but when I came back in the therapy-facing business in 2017, if I had said I'm gonna have $800,000 in the bank. by the time Josh retires, there's no way how would I have been able to A, be motivated by that. Because at that point with my money mindset, I would've been like, yeah, Yeah. Right.
Like my, my money mindset wasn't where it needed to be to be able to hold a goal like that or to hold a financial figure like that. And it also Would've just felt like, I don't even know how to approach that. So I, I think starting with something that's actually like feasible for you at this moment, the mortgage, the private school payment, the car payment, the.
Whatever. Maybe you wanna, you know, maybe you've got aging parents and you wanna kick in 500 bucks a month for them just to ease their financial burden. Or you've got, a niece or nephew that's at college and you wanna help support them, like whatever that is. I think starting with something a little more feasible and a little more tangible can help.
Now, if you've been doing your money mindset work in, in your practice, or you're past this, go ahead and set that huge, hairy, scary goal. Like whichever one is gonna speak to you. But having some dollar amount in mind makes it measurable, makes us know, like, what are we aiming for. All right, so now that we've kind of thought about identifying that goal for you, if it's something, a small monthly amount, if it's a large amount over time, whatever that might be, when it comes to your side hustle, we can't talk about money goals without talking about two things.
The first being marketing and the second being pricing. Hey, because we have to acknowledge that there is an inverse relationship between audience size and price. And, to explain a little bit further, if you have a low-priced product, you need a big audience. It's just the way that it is because you're working in a volume capacity. The way for you to hit your goal is to sell more of things.
Now, the opposite approach is a premium product with, a higher price. , that means you can get started with a smaller audience. This is why I so, so strongly recommend group programs. I, I help my students launch all kinds of things, courses, workshops, membership sites, um, VIP days, all kinds of things but when people ask me, What is your preferred approach? My preferred approach is a group program because it allows you to high to charge a higher price out the gate, and you get to monetize right away. You can fill a group program with a hundred people on your audience, in your audience, right? There are personal outreach sales strategies that I teach that have nothing to do with mass sales or mass conversions, and it is possible to fill your group program with an audience of a hundred people.
So let's use Lindsay as an example. She's recent graduate her group program is beta-priced right now at her first round for 750. Her plan is to, um, Get that closer to like 1200, I believe. I might be making that up, but I know her plan is to raise the beta price eventually, and for her first launch with an audience of under 200 people, she sold, and she enrolled four students in her group program. So it was a $3,000 launch for the very first time with less than 200 people on her audience, in her audience, on her email list, right? So these are things that are possible with a group program now I've teased my, um, lifestyle program that's coming up and, um, that's gonna be a membership site, but the membership site will be $250 a month, which is high price premium priced for a membership site. So I'm not telling you guys to just go out and jack up your prices without there. A reason without there being a value behind that price and without there being, um, legitimacy to that price.
And I do believe in my membership site, what I will be offering is totally worth $250 a month. Just like, let's go back to a house. The house analogy, right? What's happening in the housing market right now is homes that were x price are now x plus a hundred thousand dollars just because people are buying them at that price but the, then the appraiser comes in and the appraiser values it lower than the sales price and kills the whole deal. Obviously, I'm seeing a lot of this on like real estate Instagrams lately, but I think that appraiser has integrity, right? Because he or she is going and. It's not worth this inflated, astronomical, basically made-up price that you're asking and so the appraiser is really the voice of reason here. And the ones who step up and say like what the real value is, I think are really admirable and I really respect them. The same thing is true with your online offers. You can't just jack up the price without there being substance there. There are coaches and people out there who will tell you, like charge as much as you can.
If a person's willing to pay for it, it's on them. And I just don't believe in that. I believe in let's find a fair market value for your course. Let's also value your expertise, your experience as a clinician, the years and your EDU education that you've put into this, and everything like that. And then let's come up with a price that is premium but is substantiated, right? I do think we have room as helpers, healers, those of us with a little bit of martyr syndrome. Um, we have room to raise our prices because we tend to undercharge. However, I do not advocate for just charging anything just because someone out there is willing to pay it. There has to be substance to there to the price.
So I think. When we are talking about hitting our money goals, we wanna do so from, from the place where we're priced appropriately and probably priced higher than our initial thought, and with a marketing plan that makes sense. , you might really value accessibility, and so you might be keeping your price lower for your ideal customer, and that's fine or you might be trying to reach somebody who doesn't have a ton of purchasing power, like a stay-at-home mom, like a college kid, like a whatever. And so you do keep your price point lower. It's totally fine. You just need to know that. That then means that your audience needs to be bigger and you need to account for that in your marketing plan. Okay? None, neither approach is better. I personally vouch for the group program approach because you can start sooner and you don't have to wait as long as you still have a bigger audience, but we can make this work regardless of what you choose.
Another thing to think to take into consideration is your timeframe for your money goal. So if you told me I wanna make a hundred thousand dollars in the next 12 months with a $20 membership site, I'm gonna look at you and say, okay, do you understand what size audience you need to have in order to hit that goal? And do you have the wherewithal or the money to build that audience? Right? But if you told me I wanna make a hundred thousand dollars in the next 12 months with a $5,000 group program, I would say, okay, that's much more feasible without having to hustle hard or invest in ads and things like that to build the audience. Okay, so timeframe also plays a role here.
In our case, some of you have kind of picked up on this, especially if you're military savvy. Um, but our timeframe has moved up by two years. So Josh had a blood clot and, um, it's not an isolated incident. Sometimes we thought it, or at the beginning, we were wondering if it was like he was asymptomatic for covid except for this but I shared this story. My father-in-law decided to disclose a whole family history of blood clots, you know, Over a decade into being married to this man and knowing this man since I was 16 years old. So two decades of knowing this family, which I can, you can tell I still get a little heated about, so this long story short, Josh is going to be medically retired, uh, as of July of 2023. So he will remain in the Army for another year and a half at the time of recording, and he will retire at 18 years. This is something strategic that the Army doctors are working with him on and stuff like that, so, so we're not getting, like medically retired tomorrow, they are gonna make sure that he hits that 18-year mark because at 18 years he'll be eligible for a full retirement. So not only an army pension but also the VA disability that he's entitled to. So instead of being in the Army until November of 2025, we will be in the Army until July of 2023. There, there's only a hundred dollars a month difference between an 18-year retirement and a 20-year retirement. And so it's totally not worth it for us to serve, uh, for two more years. It's just not worth it for a hundred dollars more a month. No thank you. No thank you. Um, but at 18. , I'll have, Josh and I will have full medical benefits for life that girls will have full medical benefits until 26 as their dependents and things like that. So we are willing to do another year and a half, but we're not willing to do another three and a half.
So what this has done for our timeline is basically chop two years off of my goal. And again, I had another talk with Josh and a talk with myself, and a talk with my mom. Do I push really, really hard and try and make up those other two years of revenue and just scooch it up and try and slam it into the year and a half that we have left and I decided no. So what that means is I will not have the money for the house in cash by retirement. Could it be possible if I really, really, really wanted to work my ass off for the next year and a half, it could be possible. But what if I missed it by 50 grand and I worked that hard? How would that feel? Right? So instead, what I decided is to just stay the course and to have, uh, so we won't have $700,000 by retirement. What we'll have is about half of that. And then, so we will need to get a mortgage for the other 350 or whatever. Um, but a mortgage on three 50 is super reasonable and the super reasonable in our income level of what the types of numbers that I'm talking about, and it's something that I can pay off in two, two and a half years. So the timeframe, the original timeframe of November 2025, call it 2026, the beginning of 2026, that's actually still possible. Will just have two years of a mortgage there, two and a half years of a mortgage, and I won't be making the minimum mortgage payment. I'll be paying huge chunks and huge chunks and huge chunks. We should still be mortgage free by the end of the timeline, but, or by, by the original timeline. But we'll be actually living in the house, which is kind of neat. Um, so that's kind of my last kind of word of wisdom, if I could offer any, is that having your primary timeframe for your money I think is important. It's what can motivate us if you're money motivated and it can also, um, keep you on track, let you know if you're hitting those benchmarks. We can put, um, key performance indicators around that money goal so we can know, we can have indicators leading up to it, and then we can have indicators lagging off of it, and we can, that can tell us how we get on track next time or whatever, but I want you guys to think about a backup plan or even, even differently than looking at it, at it as a backup plan, having flexibility around this plan. How can we have some goals, but also be more detached from the outcome? Of those goals. How can we have goals and priorities and intentions that we're working on without letting them rule our lives or becoming obsessive about them or beating ourselves up if they change? And that has been a huge lesson for me I feel like the reason I'm not money motivated anymore is because my timeline was shot to shit it was like, oh yeah, you think you're gonna have it by this day? Well, we're gonna take that day away from you. And instead of feeling devastated, what I felt was relieved. I felt like, wow, well if the timeline's gone anyway, then what else is possible? Like, how else can I look at this differently? And so that is the kind of energy that I want you guys to carry forward into this. Yes, we are normalizing the talk about money. Yes, we are stepping out of the shame around women wanting wealth and women going for the types of money and the amounts of money that they want. And I want us also to not get too caught up in the pursuit of money. My, my daughter Sawyer, she just started listening to real music she used to listen to, um, to like, uh, Disney music, like songs from Disney soundtracks, frozen or whatever. And she recently started listening to Real Music and there's this song by Andy Grammar that I really like. It's one of her favorites. It's called 85, and he says, um, I don't wanna be 85 and realize I missed it because I was chasing money. And so I feel like that is part of what my, my work has been the last six months is how can be motivated by wealth. Be passionate about wealth, but be detached from wealth.
So I hope that this has gotten you thinking not only about what your money goals might be but also how to identify them, how to set numbers to them, and numerical values to them. The thoughts you need to be thinking about when you're thinking about your side hustle in terms of what type of side hustle, what price of side hustle, the size of the audience you need to hit your money goal, as well as timeframes around your money goal and how attached you are to your money goals.
