248 | More Than Money with Jacquette Timmons (Part 1)

Working in finance on Black Monday (the largest single-day stock market decline in U.S. history) will definitely shape the way you think about money.

That’s the story of Jacquette Timmons, a financial behaviorist and coach who helps her clients navigate their finances with a focus on the emotional side of money.

In this episode, listen in to the first half of my conversation with Jacquette, as we discuss financial independence, entrepreneurship, and how to think about your money and your goals.

• • financial independence and the FIRE movement
  • opportunity costs and risk aversion
  • my decision to leave the law to start my business
  • disconnecting your identity from your financial situation
  • the emotional side of money
  • pricing your services
  • bringing the corporate mindset into entrepreneurship
  • how to view your goals
  • thinking about money in terms of buckets

More Than Money podcast with Jacquette Timmons

Hustle and Flow podcast with Heather Hubbard

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former 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. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Friends, I have a treat for you today, because I’m bringing you a conversation with my friend Jacquette Timmons. Jacquette is a coach, a speaker, and a financial behaviorist, and she digs into the emotional side of money and why we behave the way we do with it. I’ve been familiar with Jacquette’s work for a few years now, and I’ve had the opportunity to get to know her within the last year, and she’s just such a light. In this conversation, we chat all about money, and we also touch a little on entrepreneurship, which we don’t normally talk about on this show. I think you’ll really enjoy the way that she thinks about money, and this is a longer conversation than I typically share here so I’m going to split it into two episodes so we’ll do part one this week and part two next week. This is also a crossover episode so it also aired on Jacquette’s podcast, More Than Money. Be sure to check her out, and tell her I sent you. And with that, let’s get into my conversation with Jacquette.

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Jacquette
I am so excited for my conversation today with Rho Thomas. I’m excited because of the topic debt to freedom, and how that can really set you up for more financial independence and fulfillment. But I’m also excited because this is a wonderful story of serendipity, which I will let Rho tell us a little bit more about. But yeah, I’m really excited for today, and just again, thank everybody for joining us. So Rho, I’m going to turn the tables over to you.

Rho
Yes. Well, thank you so much Jacquette for having me. It is wonderful to be with you. Always wonderful to chat with you, as you mentioned the serendipity. So you and I met before you actually knew who I was. Back when I was still a practicing attorney, I used to listen to Heather Hubbard’s podcast, Hustle and Flow, back when, like she was still focused on helping lawyers, I’d be driving home like listening to her podcast, and you are a guest on there. And I was like, Who is this? Talking about money like this, like, what is going on? And so, you know, your name has always stuck with me. It didn’t occur to me before I had a business that I could actually reach out to you. Like, hello, right? It never occurred to me. But then in my own business, talking with different people, networking with people in the industry, I met our other friend, Niraj, and he mentioned your name, and I was like, Oh my gosh, I know her. I don’t I don’t really know her, but I know who she is. And so he put us in touch to actually meet in real time. So I am just really excited to be with you, to be able to have conversations with you, because you have such wisdom when it comes to this money space and how we behave around it.

Jacquette
Oh, my goodness. Well, thank you for that. And again, thank you for being here. I’m just so thrilled, and I want to dive into our very first question that I have for you, and in your business, you are focused mostly on lawyers, and that’s something else that we have in common, because a lot of my speaking engagements are with law firms. A lot of my coaching clients are no longer practicing attorneys who have started their own businesses doing a variety of different things. I say all of that because you focus on lawyers helping them to achieve financial independence. And so I would love to know how has your understanding of financial independence and what that means. How has that evolved, or has it evolved, both for you personally and as you have been that third person, if you will, hovering in your clients relationships. What have you seen evolving for them?

Rho
Yeah, I love this question, because when I first learned about financial independence, I learned about it in the context of the FIRE movement. If you’re familiar with that, it FIRE is an acronym that stands for financial independence, retire early. And so there’s this whole community of people online, within the personal finance space, who are talking about achieving this number, the fire number, right? This number symbolizes your financial independence. And so when I first learned about financial independence, that was the context for me, right? It was achieving a certain number to be able to be able to leave your job if you want to, like the retire early piece never appealed to me, but just having that option was always appealing, right? As I have been in this space, working with people, even on my own journey, I realized that financial independence is not a particular number, right? It is. It evolves with your journey. So I have unlocked more and more financial independence in my own journey. As I have gone along, progressed with my finances, gotten out of debt, built, you know, my net worth, all of that kind of stuff, unlocks freedom even before you get to X number of dollars in your account. And I didn’t really appreciate that when I first learned and when I first started on my money journey, but I see now that just having a better handle on your finances, being able to unlock more cash flow, because you don’t have so much going out and all these minimum payments, being able to build wealth, all of that improves your financial independence. So even if you’re not at the point where you’ve got, you know, $2.5 million in investments that you can draw from and never work again, like if you are improving your finances, you have more money available to you. You are building your net worth. You’re unlocking that financial independence in different increments, if that makes sense.

Jacquette
Oh, my goodness, I love, love, love, love, everything that you have just shared. And there are two things that really struck me. One, I think one of the things that I noticed is that when people are talking about money, is that they lack that specificity, right? They say I want more, but they don’t say how much more. Or they’re like, I want to build my wealth, but they don’t say in what way. So they want to build their wealth, and they don’t also say, Well, what is that number that will make you feel wealthy? So that piece of what you just shared struck me. I think the other thing that struck me as the fact that you said it’s not based on a particular number. And I’m curious, when you actually pose that to people who may not have ever heard that before, what is their reaction?

Rho
Well, you know, I don’t think that financial independence is as well known as it might be to us, because we work in personal finance, right? We’re in these circles, so a lot of people have never even heard the concept financial independence, or heard of the fire movement. And so what I tell people is that unlocking the finances that you have locked up in minimum payments unlocking more wealth for yourself in saving and investing, like all of that unlocks freedom and that resonates with people.

Jacquette
That’s very cool. I love that. Let’s talk about identity, and for a moment, the intersection of money and identity. And I and I ask this because there are two common threads I see anyway. So this is not a scientific study people. This is my observation. There are two threads that I see with the attorneys that I work with, either one on one in coaching, or that I have spent time with because of, you know, being at a speaking engagement or being at a retreat, and that is that they are high achieving, they are risk averse. But, I mean, that’s what you all are taught to do, but they only define risk through the lens of what can be lost, right? They don’t think about the other side of risk, which is the opportunity cost if you don’t do something. So I bring that all up to really kind of talk about the entanglement that we can often have with our identity and money. And so how do you help clients kind of disentangle their their sense of self worth, and I have some comments about that, but their sense of self worth from their net worth.

Rho
Well before we get there, I want to touch on my own personal experience, because the way that you phrased that question reminded me of when I was considering leaving the law to do my business, and I think it might be helpful for your clients. So I worked in big law. I was at an am law 100 firm for seven years, right? I was, I was the like, type a, like, whatever you typically think of as a lawyer. That was me, like, I am she, she is I. I had my identity really wrapped up in being a lawyer, right? Like you mentioned being high achieving. I was very much a high achiever. I went straight through kindergarten to law school, all of that, and I decided that I wanted to try my business full time. So it started out as a hobby, like when I started on my own financial journey, it was a hobby blog. I didn’t know about making money online and all that kind of stuff. So I had this hobby where I was just sharing my husband’s in my journey. I was sharing different things that I was learning from the podcast or the books that, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And then I started thinking after having different conversations with other lawyers, like, okay, we’re not the only ones that don’t know how to do this. Like, this is a thing amongst the legal profession. Maybe I could help. Maybe I could be the one to share this information that I’m learning. So I had that thought back in 2019 as typically happens, it got put on the back burner because there was a motion for summary judgment or there, you know, whatever it was. I also have two young kids who were, you know, babies at that time, and so it really got put on the back burner. And when the pandemic hit and the whole world fell apart, I was like, Maybe I should do something with this. So that was my first foray into turning that hobby into more of a business, and I did it on the side, and then eventually I dropped down to about 50% at my firm. So I was like, kind of part time, and did the firm and the business. And around the end of 2021 I was thinking I wanted to leave the firm to go into business full time. And the reason that I bring this up Jacquette was, you said that a lot of times we think about risk in terms of, like, what we’ll lose. And one of the things that I was afraid of was like, oh, man, I worked to become a lawyer. You know, I wanted to be a lawyer since I was seven years old. I’m at this big firm. I’m making six figures, like, I made it right, and it’s like, well, what if I leave? You know, what happens then? Right? And the thing that made me decide to go ahead and try it was I thought about the worst case scenario, right? Worst case scenario, I fall flat on my face, I fail, and I have to go get another job when I was already in a job. So I was living the worst case scenario, right? And then I was like, well, actually, then the worst case scenario is that I never try and I never see what could have been right? And I’ve had so many conversations with people who are further along in their lives and their careers, even some of the partners at my firm, when I mentioned that this was what I wanted to do, they would say things like, Do it now. It doesn’t get any easier. Or I wish I had done something like that when I was your age. Like there are so many people who never try and then they they are filled, filled with regret, thinking about what could have been, what they should have done, all of that kind of stuff. So right? I just bring that up. I don’t know who that’s for, but I know that it’s a thing, especially within professions like law or other high achieving professions where we do get so wrapped up with our identity in that profession, and it’s like separating that out and allowing ourselves to go for those dreams that we have to see what could be, because it could be that it ends up being the best thing for you. Like, I absolutely love what I do. I enjoyed practicing law, but I would have missed out on all of this if I had stayed in that comfort of being a lawyer and being the one who made it and whatever, right?

Jacquette
Yeah, and, you know, nothing ever changes from a space of comfort.

Rho
Exactly, exactly.

Jacquette
Oh go ahead. I’m sorry.

Rho
Then to your question about helping clients kind of disentangle their like self worth from their income, and all of that kind of thing. I talk to people a lot about taking the emotion out of money and just looking at it objectively, like money is really great in that it’s literally numbers. We don’t have to attach all of this meaning to the numbers that we do. And I talk to people, especially in the context of, like, the shame that we tend to have around money because, like you said, we’re high achieving people, right? So we have this tendency to believe that we should be doing everything right, and if I’m not doing it, quote, right, then I’m failing. I’ve done something wrong, and we beat ourselves up about that. And I tell my people, like, it’s not fair for you now to judge that past version of yourself who made certain decisions with the information that you had at that time, like maybe you have new information now, you wouldn’t make those decisions now, but you didn’t have that information back then, right? And so to beat yourself up for making a decision with the information that you had the best decision you could at that time is just unfair and it’s unnecessary, right? You don’t have to do it. It doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change how your finances look. It only serves to make you feel bad. And if you’re feeling bad and you’re beating yourself up and you’re feeling defeated, how, like, how likely are you to like, Oh, let me look at my five. Finances and create a plan to do like you are much less likely to actually take the steps that you need to take to get to where you want to go. When you’re beating yourself up and you’re, you know, thinking that you’re a failure and all of that, because your finances don’t look the way you want them to.

Jacquette
If that self talk is real, because if it is all negative, the quality of your decision will reflect that exactly, if it is positive, without being pollyannish, but positive from the standpoint of I see possibility. I think that affects the quality of the decisions and the choices that you make as well. There are two things that I want to just piggyback on. It’s interesting because you’re like, take the emotion out. And my perspective is that the emotion is always there, because we’re human beings. To me, it’s about position. Are you in front leading? How you are letting that emotion affect you, or are you in front being pushed by your position stays the same, but there’s a difference between when you are leading it. You are acknowledging it, but you are leading okay, this is what I’m going to allow this emotion to do, versus you’re not aware of it, or maybe you are, but you’re, you’re all caught up in the shame and the judgment and all of that, and you’re being pushed by it, and so you have actually abdicated your control, I think, in that instance. So I just wanted to share that, because that’s how I look at it. Like we’re human beings, we’re always emotional, and so focus on where you are from the positional standpoint, how it also though what you share ties into a pet peeve of mine that I use every opportunity that I can to just kind of spotlight, especially when I am speaking to a group of entrepreneurs or small business owners, is to get rid of that phrase, charge what you are worth. I hate that phrase. I know it hates very strong but I really do feel that way. And the reason that I hate it. You know, look, I’m black. My heritage is Jamaican American. We have an ancestral history where there was $1 amount attached to our humanity. And so even if someone doesn’t mean that when they say it, that is how I viscerally experience it. And so it’s like nails on a chalkboard when someone says it, because I’m like,

Rho
That’s a really insightful point that I never considered. And I think to like to your earlier point about disconnecting our self worth from money, like you are infinitely worthy just the fact that you are alive. You’re a child of God. I believe in God, yeah, Child of God, right? You are infinitely worthy, and you can charge for services that provide value to your clients, but that doesn’t take anything away from your worth. Like if you charge $1,000 versus you charge $100,000 it’s not that I’m worth $1,000 or I’m worth $100,000 right? So I agree with that.

Jacquette
Exactly. Yeah, I always tell people to help them kind of, you know, really embrace the notion is that what you’re charging for is a concatenation of what’s the education, both formal and formal, that you are bringing to the table? What’s the question or the challenge or the frustration or the desire that you’re helping someone address or achieve, and what’s the container in which you are doing that? And our conversation is very different than a six month engagement. Is very different than a multi year engagement. So the pricing reflects all of those dimensions. I think it also reflects and this is where I think it can get convoluted for people. It reflects your gifts, your talents, your perspective, your expertise, right? And those things, I think, can make it a little bit murky for folks, but it’s just, it’s not you, it’s all of these things wrapped up into it, right? And also, I think, you know, when it comes to the price that people charge, it’s all those things that I’ve just ticked off, but it is also, not only what do you need right now, but what are you going to need in the future? Because so many people I’ve I see price on what they need right now, but they’re not pricing factoring in that there’s going to be a lull. You’re going to have a few months where you may not have any sales or your cash flow may dip, you know, versus other months, are you pricing in such a way that you can even out as much as possible and be sustainable? Yeah, and those are the things that people often miss when, when they when they say, charge what you’re worth, they’re missing all those other dynamics,

Rho
I think, to your point to this conversation, like one of the things that we talked about before we hit record was how our pricing can evolve over the course of our career, right? Like, when I first started out, I was charging a lot smaller one because I had not actually helped someone, you know, do this a. Side from doing it on a hobby basis, like I said, maybe, you know, you can’t say you’re a friend. We sit down, you know, at the table or whatever, and I help you map out your budget, and I help you plan how you’re going to save, you know, that kind of thing. But I hadn’t helped people in a formal capacity, right? I also did not have confidence to charge at that point, because it was my first time. So it was like, oh, will someone pay me for, you know? And so your your pricing does evolve over time, and you get to experiment with that because you are the business owner. You are the entrepreneur, right? So you get to decide how you’re going to price. What different pricing models are that you want to do? What different business models are, you know? Like, yeah, I started out doing one off budgeting sessions, right? So it was like, you know, get an hour and we would map out your budget. And then I started doing packages, like, one on one packages for months at a time. And now I’m moving into more group work, right? You know, we get to change it. We don’t have to stay stuck in things. And one of the things we talked about our friend Heather, one of the things that she talks about a lot, is breaking out of that kind of corporate mindset when you’re getting into entrepreneurship. Because for those of us who are kind of steeped in that corporate corporate culture, we bring it into our businesses, and we start running our businesses like we’re still in the corporation.

Jacquette
And it’s so funny, get out of that, because you’re like, I want to do my own thing. And then you’re like, oh, but that’s how we did it over there.

Rho
So, yeah, like, give yourself that permission, yeah, to create the business that you want to have, it does not have to look how your nine to five looks. You can create it however you want to.

Jacquette
Yeah, definitely. I really appreciate you raising that point. And then also, you know, talking about the value of experimenting and not looking at either what drove an experiment or the results of the experiment, not having that be tied to your worth either, because it’s all feedback at the end of the day, and you don’t know if something is going to land, if it’s going to work for the people that you want buying from you, if it’s going to work for you until you try it.

Rho
Exactly, yeah, that’s kind of what I meant when I was talking about taking the emotion out of money, because I think sometimes we will do certain things or not do certain things, and we see the result, and then we make it a reflection on us as a person, versus just seeing it as the data, as the feedback for me to make the next decision.

Jacquette
Yeah, totally. So juicy. Well, speaking of that that’s a perfect segue into talking about mindset. And it’s not that lawyers are that unique in this regard, but I think lawyers and doctors perhaps that they often face unique pressures when it comes to income, when it comes to what they describe out in the ethers, lifestyle, inflation and debt. And I remember, before I get to my question, I remember one time I did a retreat for an am law 100 firm, and it was for their women, partners and associates all across the globe, and we all convened who knew that two months later we would be in a pandemic.

Rho
So glad you had a chance to do it before the

Jacquette
Exactly you know we were concerned about the California wildfires, little did we know what was really around the corner. But I bring that up because I, you know, did my talk, but I also did two days of one on one coaching, and one person said to me they weren’t an associate, and they were like, you know, I don’t get home until 11 o’clock. I get home, I watch a show, an episode on Netflix, I pour myself a glass of wine, I go to bed, I get back up, I do it all over again. I don’t want to think about my money. And that brings me to the question of, What are some common mindset shifts that you help people adopt or tweak that help them to align with their financial goals and with their values.

Rho
Yeah, I think first, the fact that you said, align with their financial values, with their financial goals. A lot of times, people don’t think about it like they are not thinking about what the actual goals are that they have. Like, one of the most common things that lawyers say to me is, I’m not saving enough. Like, okay, well, how much is enough? Well, I don’t know. You know, I don’t know. I should have, like, three to six months. Okay, well, how much is that? Well, I don’t know. We we’re just like, beating ourselves up. We don’t have like specifics around what those goals are, what those things are that we want to accomplish. We just have this like, amorphous thought about what should be and that it’s not enough, like whatever it is that it should be, I’m not doing it right, right? And so one of the things that I help my clients with is actually defining goals, like, how much do you want to have in a savings account and how much do you want to pay off in such and such amount of time. And I don’t think of goals as like these destinations. I think of goals more as our guide posts. So I think sometimes we can use goals to beat ourselves up. If we say that I want to have X amount in savings by December, and we get to December and we’re not quite at x, then it’s like, oh, I failed. You know, right? I think about it in terms of if I am closer to that goal, then I’m moving in the right direction. And I think it’s a much more productive way to look at our goals, because your goals, they don’t have to be that end point. You know what I’m saying? I do so setting goals in the first place, knowing what you’re actually trying to achieve, is one of the first steps. And then looking at your values, what are the things that are important to you? And that can be values that are more intangible, like freedom, that’s a big one for me, but it could also just be like, physical things that you value, or things that you enjoy spending your money on. And I’m really big on aligning your spending with those things, because a lot of us are spending a whole lot of money on stuff we don’t even care about, yep, and it’s causing us to not have money for the things that we do care about, right? It’s causing us to not have money for our goals. Yeah. And so when we can define like, what are those things that are important to us, what are those things we value, then when we are creating plans for how we’re going to use our money, we can make sure that those things are accounted for, and we can make sure that we’re not spending so much on these things that we don’t even care about in the first place.

Jacquette
Yeah, that is so good, so good. And one of the things that I always say when trying to get people to get specific, especially about the numbers attached to a goal, that it’s not about the certainty of it, it’s about clarity, because if you know what the number is, you are better able to see well, what is the choice that you need To make today that will help to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be. And I think, yeah, that’s just a way of dovetailing.

Rho
I think that’s 100% correct. And then there are also people Jacquette who are saving out of fear, right? It’s like they’re saving, they got this good stock pile of money, and it’s like they don’t know what they’re saving for. So when we can define that goal, we can we can define how much you want to have in savings, then you know, once you’ve reached it, and then you feel more confident. You feel safer, clear to use that money for the other things that you want to use it for, yeah. Feel like you have to just keep piling it up, because I’ve defined now this is how much I want to have. This is the reason why I want to have that amount, and now I know I can use that the rest of that money for other goals that I have, or to fund things that I want to do in my life, without that fear in the background that I’m not going to have enough.

Jacquette
That’s such a really good point. Are you? Are you? What’s the intention about it? Because, you know, one of the things that I often say is that when we’re making choices, there, to me, there are many dimensions to it, right? There are the choices that you make, the choices that you don’t make, the choices that you even see available to you to make. And there is recognizing that your choices are a combination of being in service to something and being motivated by something. And do you suggest to your clients that they have multiple buckets? Absolutely, instead of like having a bucket, I’m just throwing out numbers, a bucket that has $100,000 in it. Maybe they’ve got one bucket for one goal and it has 20, and maybe they’ve got a bucket for another goal and it has 50, and then they have a bucket for another goal and has and then they have 30,000. So is that how you approach it?

Rho
Absolutely. You are speaking my language. So I talk about buckets in two ways. I think of our money as a whole as like, we’re always funding three buckets. We’re funding our needs, we’re funding our wants and we’re funding our goals. Got it. What often happens is we got a bunch of money going to needs, you know, maybe a little money going to our wants as well, but then nothing going to goals, right? Or it might be that we know we’re splitting. It’s often like, needs and wants get a lot of attention and goals get none. Goals just kind of get the scraps of what’s left, if there’s anything left, right. And so we’re thinking about things in terms of these three buckets. It’s like, okay, how do we make sure that each bucket gets filled right? And that comes from intentionality, right? So there’s that. But then to. The point that you are making of like, okay, I’ve got this pot. And I think you were referring to savings. Is that, right? Yeah, yes. Like, I’ve got this pot. I think it’s so helpful to break out your savings into these different goals, because what often happens with the big pot of, you know, money, example, is people don’t know what money is for what, and so they’re afraid to pull money out when they need to or when they want to do this or want to do that. And so I’m a big fan of Ally Bank’s savings account. This is not sponsored. I need to sponsor. I need to get some sort of sponsorship, because I’m always talking about them, but their bank account has this savings bucket feature where it’s one account, so you don’t have to open up a bunch of different accounts. It’s one account, but you can within that delineate, this amount is for my emergency fund. This amount is for the new car. This amount is for vacation. This amount is whatever, right? So you know, like, okay, I can pull however much from vacation, because it’s for vacation. I have saved it for my vacation, or I’m saving it for this new house, or whatever, you can pull that money out without fear that you are somehow putting yourself at risk or dipping into other goals that you have, because that pot is divided up into the different buckets.

Jacquette
Yeah, yeah. I love that, because it also gives you a way of being able to track your progress and to really know whether or not you need to put your foot on the gas a little bit more and speed up, or if you can just like, coast a little bit because you’re there or you’re very close to it.

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All right, we’re gonna cut the conversation here, but I hope you’re enjoying it so far. Didn’t I tell you? Her personality is just the best. Be sure to come back next week for part two of this conversation, and be sure to share this episode with a friend or two. As always, I appreciate your support. As we close out, friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to take back control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.