001 | How $670,000 of Debt Changed Everything

In this first episode of Wealthyesque, I’m sharing my story.

• how I became a lawyer
• what happened when my husband and I found ourselves in over half a million dollars of debt
• how I learned the importance of self-care
• why I created this podcast
• what you can expect going forward

• Lifestyle Freedom Starter Guide
• A few of the people we found who paid their debt off quickly: No More Harvard Debt and Making Sense of Cents
• A few of the people we found in the financial independence community: Mad FIentist, Mr. Money Mustache, and Millennial Revolution
• The Calm app
• The Wealthyesque Community

If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call.

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. Each week I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to take back control of your time by reframing your mindset and managing your money to achieve lifestyle freedom. Take the first step toward regaining control of your time by downloading your free lifestyle freedom starter guide at rhothomas.com/start.

Welcome to the first episode of Wealthyesque!

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. In this first episode, I want to talk a little about my story, why I created this podcast, and what you can expect going forward.

So getting into my story, I am a trademark lawyer about to be a 7th year associate, which is so crazy because some of my favorite partners were 6th and 7th year associates when I started at my firm.

I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was 7. I used to watch shows like Matlock and Law & Order and those types of shows with my grandma, and that was my idea of what being a lawyer was.

It looked like a lot of fun, and I was like, “Oh I can do that.” Plus, my family always said I liked to argue, so it was settled that I was going to be a lawyer. And I followed that plan. I went straight through from kindergarten to law school, and I learn more about specific areas of the law as a first year in law school. I joined the ABA, and I joined a bunch of different practice area groups that seemed interesting, one of which was the IP group.

I decided I was going to be a trademark lawyer when I read about the Louboutin/Yves Saint Laurent case. One thing you should know about me is I love fashion and shoes in particular, so that case caught my eye for that reason. But reading it, I was fascinated by trademark law.

When I summered at a few different firms, I asked for trademark work specifically. I said, “I’m a first-year” or “I’m a second-year”—wherever I was at that point—“so I won’t rule anything out, but I’m really interested in trademark law.” And I loved it in practice.

After my 2L summer, I received an offer from the trademark and copyright team at my firm, and I have been here ever since.

When I got to the firm, I was super eager. I was so excited. This is my dream job, and I remember as a first year I went to our team leader, and I sat down in his office, and I said, “So…I wanna be a partner. Tell me what I need to do.”

And he was so gracious, and he said, “Well, Rho, let’s learn how to be a good associate” and he gave me all kinds of tips for how I could really stand out and develop in my practice, and so I’m truly grateful to him for that.

That first year, I billed a couple hundred hours above our billable hours requirement easily. One of my mentors told me before I started at the firm about the importance of setting boundaries with my work hours and setting expectations from the outset, so I was really good about that.

I’ve never been one to check and respond to emails at all times of night and things like that, but what I didn’t get was the importance of setting boundaries with my actual work. If anyone asked me to do a project, my answer was yes, even if I already had way too much on my plate. I had so many different clients, and I was on all the committees, and I was helping with a bunch of other investment things—read: non-billable things—and truth be told I was burning out.

This was three and a half years ago. I was at the end of my second year going into my third year, and I also was pregnant with my first child.

So after I had the baby and I was preparing to head back to work after maternity leave, I was looking at the craziness that I had been doing for the previous two years and could not imagine going back to that life.

I realized at that point that the way I had been working just was not conducive to the way I wanted to be as a parent. My husband was in residency at the time, so obviously his schedule wasn’t very conducive to being present either. But we both agreed that traditional work schedules in our professions wouldn’t allow us to be as present as we wanted to be for our kids.

So we sat down to look at our finances, and we saw that we had over $670,000 in debt and a negative $342,000 net worth. That heart-sinking, gut-wrenching feeling that you probably just felt? Magnify that by like a thousand, and you probably get how I felt.

I cried. A lot.

About $200,000 of that debt was our mortgage. We had maybe $10,000 on a car loan. And the rest was student loans.

It’s not like we didn’t know that we had debt. We had just kind of compartmentalized it. We thought about my loans. We thought about his loans. We thought about the car. We thought about the mortgage.

Each of those amounts felt manageable by themselves, and we just hadn’t really put it all together. Actually, we did put it together when we had to do the mortgage application, so we got a glimpse of it back then, but the mortgage application didn’t include the $200,000 mortgage at that time and it also didn’t include the thousands of dollars in interest that my husband’s loan had accrued since the time that we bought the house.

Somehow $400-something-thousand felt more palatable than $670,000. The $400,000 was still a gut punch, but it was much less so than seeing $670,000. I think maybe it’s because this time we were so far over half-a-million dollars.

The thing that got me about that whole situation was we had been doing all the things that we were “supposed to do” with our money. We paid our credit card off in full every month. We were maxing out our 401(k)s. We were saving 20%. All of that, so how were we so freaking broke? It didn’t make any sense to me.

Seeing the state of our finances was the moment that changed everything for us. We knew that having that kind of debt hanging over our heads wouldn’t allow us to make changes in our work schedules, and so we started looking into how to pay it off.

We came across people paying their debt off in a year, 3 years, just these really short time frames that we never considered as possibilities.

People were paying their houses off in 5 years, and I’m like, “This is a thing?!”

In my mind, you get the loan, and you pay the amount the lender tells you to pay, and that’s it. But doing those searches eventually led us to discover the financial independence community.

The financial independence community is a group of people who are going against traditional financial advice, and they’re saving and investing upward of 50% or more of their income to eventually reach the point that their investments cover their living expenses, and they’ll never need to earn another dollar.

When we found the financial independence community, we’re seeing people who are retiring from the traditional workforce in their thirties and forties. Paying off your debt early was crazy, but that was insane [laughs]. I was instantly hooked. I wanted to know more about what these people were doing. It was amazing, and I binged everything I could.

Although early retirement doesn’t appeal to us because we actually like what we do, the idea that we could be completely independent of our incomes and our employers was huge because that would give us the control of our time that we wanted to be able to be more present with our kids.

So now we had a plan, and I was starting to feel a little better about things. I started a blog to document our journey, and I wrote it for about a year-and-a-half. It provided a lot of really cool opportunities, including features in some major publications, and it also set the stage for me to eventually do this podcast, so I am grateful for the time that I spent in the blogging community. I met a lot of great people, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

By the way, working our plan, we paid off over $350,000 of our debt so far over the last three and a half years, and we now have a positive net worth and are well on our way to financial independence. I am super excited about that.

Meanwhile, jumping back into work, when I got back to work after having my first kid, I was killing it after a few months. I felt like I slipped effortlessly back into my groove, and I was like, “This whole working mom thing isn’t so bad.”

And then two-and-a-half years later, I had my second kid, and all that changed.

One of the partners I work with told me before I had him that having two isn’t doubly hard, it’s exponentially harder than having one, and oh my gosh, she was not lying.

My second kid is, first of all, much more stubborn and headstrong than my first was, so I’m managing that and on top of that running after this toddler who’s doing a bunch of stuff that he never did before, and it was just crazy town.

But then when I returned to work after my second maternity leave, it was so much harder to balance work and life than the first time around. This time, I felt like I was failing in all areas of my life, and I couldn’t get a handle on it.

Ultimately, one day I found myself crying in my friend’s office at work about the stress of it all. I felt like I was not doing what I needed to do. I wasn’t hitting the goals that I wanted to hit. I wasn’t hitting the standard that I set for myself.

So I talked to my husband about it that night, and he suggested that I try therapy to work through my feelings. I was like, “Do I really want to do therapy?” and went kind of back and forth on it, but ultimately, I decided to go.

I found a therapist, and in my first session, I was telling her about how I felt. I told her, “I feel like I’m not being the wife I want to be or the mom I want to be or the lawyer I want to be.”

And she said, “What about the you you want to be?” I’m like, “Say what, girl? What are you talking about?”

Because it never occurred to me that there was a me outside of all of these other roles that I filled. In working with her, I realized that that’s the part that I’ve been missing all along, even where I thought I was killing it after my first kid. I had forgotten about myself. I was so worried about trying to do everything for everyone else that I wasn’t doing anything that really recharged me. Yeah I was getting the little manicures and stuff like that, but I wasn’t refilling my cup. Each day I’m trying to pour from this empty cup to help everyone around me. All of that was magnified with the extra demands on me after having my second child. So I needed to learn to shift my mindset and make myself a priority again. I had to take time to refill my cup, to set strict boundaries, and just to put my needs first.

I started incorporating mindfulness into my work week. I did meditation with the Calm app, which is really helpful, especially their Daily Calm meditations. It’s 10-minute guided meditations that are really easy to fit into your day before work.

I also picked up my physical Bible and started doing for real Bible study, instead of the drive-by devotionals that I had been doing on my Bible app, and I started journaling.

I’m still working through a lot of that because let’s be real we’re never done working on ourselves, right? But I feel so much better and so much more in control and so much more myself than I did before. Even now, with all that’s going on in the world, I don’t feel as overwhelmed as I felt back at that point.

I should also mention that over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to speak with a lot of other lawyers who felt stuck or were miserable in their current situations or just wanted to make some sort of change. I coached some of them with their money because their money habits were a factor in their ability to make the changes they wanted, but I found, though, that they often had mindset blocks, too.

For example, some people felt like they have to sacrifice everything for their clients or they’re not a good lawyer.

Or people don’t want to take advantage of a reduced hours policy at work that would fit their lives better and make them happier because they thought it would show that they can’t handle firm life.

Or people knowing that law just isn’t for them but feeling like they couldn’t leave because they’ve invested so much already, and they’d be throwing everything away, and what would people think?

I’ve learned that mindset is key to anything we want to accomplish and any change we want to make in our lives, and achieving lifestyle freedom so we can have more control of our time is no different.

That’s my story in a nutshell.

Now getting into why I started this podcast, as I mentioned before, I had a blog that was documenting my husband’s and my journey out of debt and toward financial independence.

Last year, I started feeling this tug to make that blog a resource for lawyers specifically.

In addition to money, I wanted to talk about common things we tend to do, especially as related to the practice of law that just don’t serve us.

I’ve been playing with the idea for almost a year now and talking to different people about it, and ultimately, I decided that it would be better for me to talk and do a podcast, as opposed to trying to set aside time to write articles, so here we are.

I believe that truly wealthy people are the people who have control of their time. This show is called Wealthyesque because I want to live my life in the way that truly wealthy people do, and I want the same for you.

I want the show to be a resource for lawyers, and especially women lawyers, who feel stuck or who feel like they don’t have control over their time, feel like they’re being pulled in a bunch of different directions, feel like they want to make a change but can’t.

I want you to have the freedom and flexibility to do what you want with your life because no one should have to feel stuck in a situation that no longer serves them. Life is just too short for that.

That’s what lifestyle freedom is all about. It’s having the ability to make decisions for your life in line with your values without regard to external factors like what other people think or money constraints or that type of thing.

So now as for what you can expect from the show, the two foundational blocks for achieving lifestyle freedom, at least the way that I conceptualize it, are mindset and financial independence. So, each week we’ll discuss a topic related to either mindset or financial independence.

I’ll give you tips and insights and all that good stuff that I’ve learned so far on my journey and actionable steps that you can apply in your own life.

Today, there are two more episodes available. There will be another one released on Friday, and then we’ll go weekly every Friday from there.

If this show helps even one person make their life a little bit better, then I will consider it a success, and all of this will have been worth it.

One of my friends told me that my story has the power to bless someone else, but if I’m not allowing my story to get out because I’m so concerned about what other people might think, I’m blocking another person’s blessing. So here I am trying to lay it all out on the table and hoping that it blesses somebody.

Okay that’s it for this episode, I hope that you will join me over in the private Facebook community that I created—it’s The Wealthyesque Community—and let me know what you think of this concept of lifestyle freedom and what it means for you.

If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe to the show on whatever platform you’re listening on, and consider leaving me a written review. It’s really helpful to get the show seen by other people.

If you have a friend who could benefit from this message, don’t be stingy. Go ahead and share it with them, too.

And if you want to connect on social media I’m @iamrhothomas on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Okay, friend, I pray that you find clarity in whatever you want for your life.

I pray that you have peace even in the midst of all that’s going on in the world.

And I pray that you will say yes to yourself and take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve.

Talk to you later.