249 | More Than Money with Jacquette Timmons (Part 2)

As a financial behaviorist and coach who focuses on the emotional side of money, Jacquette Timmons has some interesting views on personal finance.

In this episode, listen in to the second half of my conversation with Jacquette, as we discuss enjoying your money, using debt strategically, and personal lessons from entrepreneurship.

• • fun money and enjoying your money
  • saving and paying off debt at the same time vs. one at a time
  • strategies to pay off debt
  • maintaining your well-being while navigating debt
  • using debt strategically
  • lessons from entrepreneurship
  • defining success
  • words of wisdom for your finances and life in 2025

Rho’s 5 Debt Mistakes guide

Rho’s LinkedIn

Jacquette’s website

Jacquette’s LinkedIn

Jacquette’s Instagram

Jacquette’s Financial Wheel exercise

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.

Hey friend. Welcome back. This week, we are diving into part two of my conversation with my friend Jacquette Timmons. If you missed part one, stop the episode now, and go back to last week’s episode and listen to that one first. But if you’re already caught up, let’s jump into part two of the conversation now.

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Rho
Another thing that I do with multiple accounts, I’m reminding myself of things. Another thing I do with multiple accounts is I have my clients actually open up a separate account for fun money, and they can put money in that account, and they know that they can spend that money and not take themselves off track from their goals and not, you know, be at risk of not being able to pay their bills or whatever, right? Because I’ve intentionally set this money aside for fun, right? I’ve planned it, and that was actually, I don’t know if we’re connected on LinkedIn, but I’m mostly on LinkedIn, and they were eating me up. They were eating me up maybe a month or two ago because I posted about how I bought my first pair of, like, luxury shoes while my husband and I were in debt. And was like, Oh, that’s so irresponsible. Blah, blah. But the point of the post was that we do this with the fund money right set aside a set amount for each of us in a separate account that we can spend however we want to. And we already planned how the rest of our money is going to go to our bills, to our goals. You know, whatever it is, but we set this money aside. And so what I did with mine was I didn’t spend it every month. So I left a little bit in there, and I kept doing that until I had enough to buy these shoes. So even though we were in the throes of paying off, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars of debt, I had this money set aside, and I knew that I could buy those shoes and it didn’t impact our goals. So I’m a huge proponent of having that separate account, yes, for fun, so you can go spend that money, worry free, guilt free, all the things.

Jacquette
I love everything about what you just shared. So thank you for sharing that. Thank you for posting that on LinkedIn. I cannot wait to see it. And also, here’s another reason why I appreciate this story, because it really reminds us that it’s not really beneficial to be either or like to have that either or thinking like it can be both and and I don’t know if you agree with this, but I always tell people that you have to both save and work on getting out of debt, even if that means you can’t do either at the speed that you want or to the extent that you want, and I love that you’ve added on, and also make sure you have some fun. Because look, if you’ve got, you know, student loan debt in the six figures, which a lot of lawyers have, a lot of doctors have, you not buying a pair of really wonderful shoes that will make you feel fabulous, that ain’t gonna make that much of a dent in the scheme of things, especially if you have set aside the money to actually do it. And I just feel like there’s so much conversation out there in the zeitgeist, that is all about people not experiencing joy when it comes to their money. And I’m like, Why? Why? Why perpetuate this notion that it has to be this miserable experience? You know, it’s just like the way that I position it, money is one of those things, is the thing that you’re going to have the longest relationship with, one of the things that you’re going to have the longest relationship with, my God, can’t you have some joy?

Rho
You don’t have to go and buy the designer shoes every month. Right? I didn’t do it every month.

Jacquette
Exactly.

Rho
It’s okay to have a little fun. And so what I did do was those things on the smaller scale, I still went out to eat. I still go out to eat, even though, you know, going out to eat, family vacations, like all of that kinds of, shopping, like, I’m a big makeup person. I love buying, you know, the new things that come out, and you can give yourself money to do that and make sure that it fits within your plan, so that you don’t take yourself off track. One thing that I will say that we are a little bit different is how we handle the like saving versus paying off debt. So I’m a big fan of focusing on one thing at a time, because what I often see is people are trying to do all these different things all at the same time, especially in regards to, you know, saving, they’re paying on like five different things at once, blah, blah, blah, and it’s making things take a lot longer. And I think we get more motivation when we get to a goal quickly, right? So if I focus on getting to, like I decide that I want to have, let’s say it’s $10,000. I want to have $10,000 in savings. If I focus all of the additional funds that I have beyond my needs, beyond my wants, right, focus that on the saving I could get there in a few months. And now the savings is done. And now all that money that I was pouring into savings, I can pour right on debt, and I would do it one at a time, because what often happens is people will do like five different ones right, like split their extra payment, or they’ll do an extra payment on one debt this month and on a different debt the other month. And what happens is, then that interest builds back up. So you don’t really make, if you just focus on that one, you finish it, you get done with it, you no longer owe that minimum payment. So you’re freeing up cash flow for yourself, and now you’re able to move on to the next thing. So I like to focus on one at a time, with the exception of saving for retirement, especially if you get a match. So you know, for most people, you can, you know, still put in enough to get your match and still have enough to, you know, save and invest and all of that. Or, excuse me, save and pay off debt and all of that, because retire, saving for retirement is investing.

Jacquette
You basically do a snowball effect, but you do it a little bit differently.

Rho
Yeah, well and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be the snowball like, okay, I know the debt snowball is very popular. Another one is the debt avalanche, where it’s like paying on the debt that has the highest interest rate. But I’ve also had clients where there was a particular debt that bothered them, like one client, her mom, had co-signed on that loan for her. It wasn’t the smallest one, it wasn’t the highest interest rate, but it bothered her, and so she focused all of her attention on that one until it was paid off. Like, I don’t care what plan you use, I personally like the snowball, and that’s what I did, because, you know, you get those quick wins. Like we had, I don’t think I’ve said this on in our conversation yet, but we had over $678,000 of debt. About 500k of that was student loan. So it wasn’t like we could just sell stuff and pay it off, but in that, the smallest loan was like $1,500, $2,000, 3000 right? It’s like 500 feels overwhelming, but I could do 1500 right?

Jacquette
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rho
Knocking out those smaller loans helped us to build so much momentum. So then when we got to the 20,000. 25,000. 30,000, you know, all of that we had, all of this evidence behind us that we could do it, because we had already done it. And so then we just kept chipping away at the five figure ones. And then my husband had a big, consolidated six figure one. That was the monster, but we had paid off everything else by the time we got to that one. So I was like, Okay, it’s just a matter of time. Yeah, we just gotta keep doing it. So that’s why I like that method, yeah, but I understand everybody doesn’t, and that’s okay.

Jacquette
Yeah. Oh my god. I love that. I love that. Okay, so then debt can be very stressful, especially if it, if it feels unmanageable and if it feels like you will never see the light of day. So how do you guide your clients through navigating and managing that stress without them compromising their mental or emotional well being?

Rho
Yeah, I think some of the things that we have already talked about play into that, right. Looking at how they’re viewing the debt. So, you know, I talked about taking the emotion out of money. I think part of that is how we think about things. So an example that I give all the time is, let’s say $200,000, like somebody has $200,000 of debt. That’s often around what clients have when they come to me and it’s, you know, they’re thinking, it’s so overwhelming, it’s so much, I don’t know if I’ll ever do this, all of that right? $200,000 of debt, in my position, when we started with $500,000 of student loans, when we got down to 200,000 we’re like, yes, we’re doing this. We’re almost ready, right? The fact of the matter is the same, $200,000 of debt. It’s the same amount. The thoughts about it are what’s different, and those thoughts impact how we feel about it, right? And so it’s changing the way that we think about things, changing that perspective, and then taking the emotion out of it. Because on top of that feeling like it’s overwhelming, there’s often this feeling of failure, of shame, of, you know, all of these kind of, like defeating, because we’re not in a position that we think we should be in, right? And I will say, I hate the good debt bad debt conversation. I think it’s silly. It is something that somebody made up one day, and everybody was just like, Yep, that sounds good to me. Like, what if there is no such thing as good debt or bad debt? What if you don’t have to feel bad about yourself because you happen to have credit card debt instead of, you know, whatever, student loans, right? Like, it’s all debt, and it is okay. You’re gonna get over it. You’re going to get through it. It does not have to be a good debt, bad debt thing. And I think that all of our debt, like we can look at how it has helped us. So even if it’s credit card debt, that credit card debt allowed you to take a vacation, that credit card debt allowed you to invest in that class that you needed, that credit card debt allowed you to do whatever it was that you did with it. I know for us, like our student loans, I wouldn’t have been able to go to school if I didn’t have student loans, even though we ended up with almost $500,000 and people were like, Oh, you shouldn’t have got. Okay, well, I did.

Jacquette
Right exactly, yeah.

Rho
And it helped us to get into, you know, get our education, to get into the professions that we’re in. And so I think if we take like, the way that society teaches us to think about debt, like, throw all that in the trash. It’s garbage. We don’t have to think about our debt in that way at all, and we definitely don’t have to beat ourselves up about it, because we happen to have this type of debt instead of that type of debt.

Jacquette
God, you are just, you are just speaking words that are just making me swoon, because I do feel like there’s an interesting convergence, I think, with regard to the growth of the self help movement and personal finance, and the conversation around what you’ve just outlined, in terms of basically perpetuating this notion that if you have debt, then there’s something wrong with you, that you are deficient, or, yeah, you’re deficient in some way. And I think it’s interesting from the standpoint of how often debt is used by other communities as leverage to start things, and how, when I think of even my own journey of entrepreneurship, you know, there are just some things mistakes you just had to make, and that those were going going to be a part of the growing pain. But if there was one thing that I would have done differently, I wouldn’t have used my own money. I wouldn’t have used my own money to start it. I wouldn’t have used my own money when I was having cash flow challenges, because one of the reasons why I didn’t go and get a loan was because, oh no, don’t get debt. That’s not a good thing. And so we’re told not to. We’re told, you know, debt is bad, so you don’t tap into it to help you grow your business. You don’t tap into it to use it as a tool for leverage. And I always say to people that, to me, it’s not so much that debt is bad. It’s debt without a game plan. That’s bad.

Rho
Yes. 100% yes.

Jacquette
If you haven’t figured out or thought through, how the heck am I gonna get out of this? That is when it is bad. But sometimes you just need that breathing room.

Rho
Well and I tell my clients too, like, all right, you have made the decisions that you’ve made to this point, right? Maybe you have credit card debt because you went on a vacation or you, you know, whatever you bought some clothes you didn’t actually have the money for, whatever the case may be. We are now learning some different things. So going forward, maybe you’re going to use your debt more strategically, right, right? So kind of like what you said, investing in your business, investing in your practice. Like, if you’re still practicing. There are all kinds of trainings for practicing attorneys, right, that you can also invest in, like, because at the end of the day, our debt is what detracts from our net worth. So when I’m taking on debt, I want to make sure that I’m going to be able to get a return on it. And yes, you get a return in that you have a great experience when you go on vacation, right? But you don’t typically get an actual ROI on it. And so, like, I have invested in my business using debt. I remember, like, the very first thing that I did for my business. I started this business I didn’t know anything about, like, how to get a client, how to sell, like, any of that kind of stuff. And so I purchased a program. It was $2,000. I didn’t have $2,000 in my business because I didn’t know how to make any money, and I didn’t want to, like, because this is kind of like a, a trial at that point, like I was taking this hobby and, like, turning it into something, I didn’t want to pull 2k from our family, and so I put it on a credit card that I have, and I was like, Okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna invest in this program. I’m gonna learn how to sell. And I ended up making the money back within, I’d say, two months, something like that, because I learned how to sell from this program. And I know for a fact, like, based on some other people that I had made friends with, like, you know, you get into entrepreneurship, you start getting into the entrepreneurship groups and stuff. There are a few people that, you know, I met in those groups, that I became friends with, who have since given up on their businesses because they weren’t willing to invest and they didn’t learn how to get it so they couldn’t really get the traction right. And so they just went back to, you know, their nine to five, right? And so I say that to say, like, be willing to invest in yourself. And like Jacquette said, like, you want to have a game plan for what you’re going to do with the debt. We’re not just blindly, you know, getting into debt. I, you know, did that program, and I believed that I would be able to pay it off with the earnings from my business. But even if I weren’t, I also still had my fun money that we were setting aside, and so I just kind of viewed it as that, right, like it’s, it’s this hobby, like I’m kind of trying out, and I could pay it off over time from that money, if I needed to.

Jacquette
Right. I love that. I love that. Okay, so as we begin to wind down, what—and maybe you already talked about it before, but what’s one unexpected personal lesson that you’ve learned in your journey, especially once you dove in to entrepreneurship? Because, you know, I say to people, if you want to go on a personal development journey, focus on your money and start a business, because both will take you through some things, yeah, and both will, you know, prompt you to confront parts of yourself. So, yeah, what’s in another unexpected, yeah, unexpected lesson that you had.

Rho
I think the biggest thing for me has been building that confidence, getting over the self doubt, imposter syndrome, like we I think being in entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, understand that those things are just kind of a part of it, but I didn’t know that getting into it, and I always have considered myself to be a pretty confident person, like I am, like, Okay, I’m gonna do this thing. You tell me what to do, and I’m gonna do it. But getting into entrepreneurship where you are the one who is offering the service, you are the one who’s setting those prices. You are the one who are, you know, who’s responsible for all of the things, I had a lot of can I really do this? Will people like this? Will you know all of that? And so learning to trust myself on an even deeper level, I think, has been the biggest lesson, biggest transformation for me in this journey. I’ve been in entrepreneurship about four years now, and I’ve had lots of different pivots in my business. And like I said, my pricing has changed over time, as I’ve gotten more confident, as I’ve actually helped people get results and realized the value of the knowledge that I have and the service that I’m providing. So I think the biggest lesson is just learning to trust myself, learning to have confidence that I do know what I’m doing and that I can help other people.

Jacquette
That’s awesome. You know, I was thinking about this for myself, and I think I don’t know if we had this conversation when we chatted before, but it’s 2003 and I’m having my annual meeting with my CPA at the time, may he rest in peace, and it is going along as normal, until toward the end, where he takes his glasses and he brings them down to the bridge of his nose. And you know, whenever somebody does that and they start to point their finger at you, what comes next is not typically going to be so good. And he’s like, when are you gonna stop mortgaging your life? And I’m like, What are you talking about? Like, it was literally, you know, I’m a person of a certain age, so grew up on Saturday mornings watching Scooby Doo and so you’re like, What are you talking about? He had been doing my taxes, my personal taxes since 1988 my business taxes since 1995 and in all of those years, he had never asked that question before, so it completely took me by surprise. I didn’t know why he was asking it, and probably worse, I didn’t have an answer, so I left all in a huff. You know, get on the Long Island Rail Road, come back to Brooklyn. Hmm, what is he asking me that question? Fast forward, a couple of days later, I’ve got a business bill to pay. I don’t have enough of my business account to pay the bill. So this is 2003 right? We don’t yet have online banking, so that means that I need to go to the branch. I need to get a withdrawal slip from my personal savings account and a deposit slip from my business checking account, and as I’m standing in front of the teller to give both of those slips to her. It was a her. I was like, Oh, this is what Mr. Bethu meant, if I don’t interrupt this pattern of every single time my business is short on cash, of either dipping into my savings, calling up the broker and saying, Hey, I need to sell some shares or increasing my debt. He’s right. I am going to end up mortgaging my life. And the lesson for me there was that I was making choices that I thought were smart choices because I didn’t want to have a business that wasn’t successful, that wasn’t profitable, and that left me broke. And yet, while I was doing the things that would help me not be that, I was actually creating that right, I wasn’t successful. My business wasn’t as successful as I thought it was because I was, you know, subsidizing it, duh. It wasn’t profitable, and I was putting myself in a situation where I was broke, and so that is why I said earlier that your choices are both in service to something and motivated by something, and the intent of the choice does not matter. And I think that was the that was the harsh lesson, like, Okay, you’re doing all these things for the right reason, but it don’t matter, because look at the result, yes, not generating for you what you what you want or what you need, and just that, you know, recognition too. Of I was looking at the same numbers. He was looking at like I wasn’t looking at my numbers. But he had the up, you mentioned this before, the objectivity. He had the objectivity to see what I could not see so clearly because I was so close to it. So for me, the lesson, the unexpected lesson, is that lesson around choices and the fact that you know you can have all the good intentions you want, but sometimes they’re not going to net you the results that you want. And I think that was a bit sobering for me, because I wasn’t expecting that.

Rho
How did you change that? Like, what did that process look like, of turning things around?

Jacquette
Oh, my God, it was a long, it felt really long. It probably felt longer than it actually was, but it required, you know, reevaluating everything. And so at the time, you know, when I first started my business, I was working as a money manager, an investment advisor, manager. So I was registered with the SEC, and so that part of it was regulated, so there’s not much you can do in that regard, but on the coaching and speaking side, that’s not regulated. And I was probably making all of the newbie, you know, mistakes of not charging enough, not being consistent, you know, like all those, those kinds of things. So first thing I needed to do was to increase my rates, which all of my mentors told me what they were too low anyway. And then, you know, kind of systematize and structure and productize, if you will, my coaching and my speaking much more than I had done before. So it was, it was, it took, it took a, you know, some time to turn the boat around. Thank God. All these years later, I’m still here. But yeah, that’s how I turned it around. Like charging more, systematizing things, productizing things, and I’ve long since let go of the investment management piece, so I don’t do that any longer. But, yeah, that’s around.

Rho
I think the key in what you’re saying is like this person gave you advice like he’s looking, you know, from the outside in at what’s happening, he’s giving you this advice, and you actually acted on it. Because so often we get advice, we get, you know, those little nudges, and we don’t do anything.

Jacquette
Yeah, yeah. That’s true. Like I said, may he rest in peace. Um, I love my CPA that I have now as well, but may he rest in peace, because I really do think that while it felt harsh in the moment, it really has served me so incredibly well all these years later, well.

Rho
And sometimes I think we need the harsh, yeah, sometimes we need like that, that kind of shake, to wake us up. Because if he had said it softer, would you have really taken it to heart in the same way? You know?

Jacquette
Yeah, yeah, I needed to get goodness. Okay, so one of the things we were talking about before we pressed record was, how do people, and more specifically, lawyers, since that’s who your primary audience is and client base is, how do they define success? So how do you help your clients define success, especially it’s a two parter, how do you help your clients define success, and especially if they are looking to make a transition and maybe not work in big law, how does that transition affect their definition of success?

Rho
So I’m not the right person to speak to that second part, but I do have a friend who does that. I’m gonna give you her information, okay, but on that first part, really, it’s setting those goals. Like, what does success mean to you? Because, again, it’s one of those things that we have this amorphous definition of, like, I should be successful. What does that mean? What does that look like? And then from there, we’re able to make the necessary changes, take the necessary steps to get there. I think one of the biggest reasons that people have these feelings that they’re not successful, they’re not doing enough, or, you know, all of that kind of stuff, is because they’ve just never defined these things for themselves. So they don’t know what success looks like for them, or what enough looks like for them. So once we define what that means, now we know what we’re working toward, and we know if we’re getting closer or if we’re maybe going in the wrong direction, and we need to tweak something to get us going the right way.

Jacquette
So it is helping them to set goals. It’s helping them to define those goals, personalize those goals for themselves, as opposed to perhaps using a goal or a framework that somebody else has created, and they’re just exactly modeling it or copying it exactly. Yeah, that that that makes a lot of sense. Okay, I want to be mindful of time. We’re recording this in December, and this won’t go live until the new year, and so, um, when people hear it, they’ll still be hopefully in reflection mode. So as they’re reflecting and they’re getting ready to take on 2025 with all of the energy and the joy. Um, what words of wisdom do you have for them?

Rho
The biggest thing is looking at where you are now, right? Like, what is the current state of your finances? Do you like where you are, and if not, take the necessary steps to change it? I think so often we just kind of throw up our hands and it’s just like, oh, well, this is just what it is like. We act as if money is happening to us, but money is not happening to you. You are 100% in control, right? You can change it if you want to. Other piece of that, though, is just because you decide that you want to change does not mean you have to beat yourself up for where you are. So I would say take that time to reflect on where you are currently with your finances and what you need to do to get to where you want to be without the shame, the judgment, the whatever else that we often bring along with it.

Jacquette
I love that. Thank you for that, and what else I will add to that. Everything that Rho said. Have patience, because if you want to change something, the thing that you want it to change to is not going to happen overnight, because more than likely your current state didn’t happen overnight.

Rho
Exactly. Yeah, like, we cannot expect an overnight solution to something that took us time to get into.

Jacquette
Exactly, oh, my goodness. Well, Rho, thank you so much for making the time to spend your time with me today and to have this conversation with me. I think it is going to be a blessing for my audience, and I know we’re doing this as a crossover episode, and so I hope that your peeps will enjoy this as well. So thank you again so much for hanging out with me today.

Rho
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It has been such a joy as always to talk with you.

Jacquette
Awesome. And so if folks want to connect with you, how best can they do that? What should we add to our show notes? What links?

Rho
Yes. So you can find me at Rho thomas.com. That’s Rho thomas.com and I actually have a free gift, if that’s okay.

Jacquette
Yeah, please, yeah.

Rho
I’ve got a free guide on the biggest mistakes that I see lawyers make when they want to get out of debt. You can find that at Rho thomas.com/mistakes and then if you happen to be on LinkedIn, I’m Rho Thomas over there. Where can my people connect with you Jacquette?

Jacquette
Oh, my goodness. My website is Jacquette timmons.com I am really active on LinkedIn and Instagram, so just put in my name, Jacquette Timmons. There aren’t too many of those out there. And mine is, my free exercise, is the financial wheel, and that is really about helping people to either reconnect or create the vision that they have for their money. And it helps them to, like, close the gap, like you were talking about, where are you currently? Where do you want to be? It helps you to close the gap and identify what areas of your money might be in conflict that are causing stress, so that’s what people can tap into.

Rho
Love that.

Jacquette
Yay. All righty, thank you again and everyone. We will see you next time.

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All right, that’s it for my conversation with Jacquette. I hope you enjoyed it and got some different insights into how you can think about and approach your money. If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and subscribe to the show and leave a review. Both of those things help the show to get seen by more people. And I always appreciate your support. And don’t forget to connect with Jacquette and check out her podcast, More Than Money. 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.