How to Invest for financial freedom with these tips- Part 1| #FIRE LakishaSimmons.com

tonight session is all about how to truly conquer your dreams with an emphasis on financial freedom of course because that is what I love to talk about this what we're here for because you can do it but let's first let's level set because I know you're thinking oh my goodness another one of these financial gurus right but does this sound like you have you said any of these things to yourself I feel like I should be further ahead or I really want to buy a new home or buy my first home I wanna tra

vel more I just I'm tired of worrying about money or I wanna leave something for my children I'm just not moving forward has anybody ever thought anything like that or what has it always just been me anybody yes of course you have of course of course we've thought these things so tonight I wanna tell you that I don't want you to be afraid I don't want you to think about um what you're not doing right or what you potentially are just simply afraid of I don't want you to be afraid anymore I want y

ou to put all of that fear in the past and we're gonna focus on the future does that sound good now I live by three words these are my favorite favorite three words I wanna be happy I wanna be healthy and I wanna be wealthy happy healthy wealthy that is what we that is our right that is our that's our birth right that is our desire and we should have that we just haven't always been taught the tools to get there so that's what I wanna talk to you about tonight so the first thing I want you to do

I hope you brought your your notebook your notepad because the first thing I want you to do is write this down alright I forgive myself for things I didn't do correctly and you can put whatever that correctly thing is cause we all have something that we feel was wrong that we shouldn't have done or if we could go back and redo it we would do it differently right we all have that so whatever that is I want you to write it down I forgive myself for doing X y Z and put that in the past because the

past is the past we're no longer focused focused on the past right so let's take a look here I bet you can guess who that cute little darling baby is that's me I know so cute and that is my mom my beautiful mom and I love starting presentations with this picture because it helps me realize just how far I've come can you relate how far you've come when you think back to when you were a child and how you grew up and all that you've been through in your life and I want you to be proud of that I wa

nt you to be proud of how much you overcome I was the daughter of teen parents and believe it or not I was very truent my mom had me at just 17 years old and life was really tough right it was tough for us we were we didn't have a lot I always say we had love but life got to be too too much for my mom and my dad my dad went off to the military to the Marines to try to make a better life for us but it was just too hard for my mom so she ended up having family members take care of me and I'm thank

ful for those family members who were able to take me in over the years and raise me up it really took a village to raise me up so while I didn't have my parents for most of my life I'm really thankful for all the family members that I did have but because of how I was being shifted around and living with different family members that abandonment can really wear on you even as a child so I was very depressed and I was I didn't make poor grades and I skip school a lot because I just really didn't

have any hope I didn't have a lot to live for I honestly didn't so obviously we were financially insecure and so one day in high school I'll never forget this day I I will never forget it and I'm skipping class and I'm just walking the halls and I see this flyer on the you know high school back then there was always a bunch of posters and flyers all over the walls and one stood out to me I don't know why among all the things on the wall one stood out to me and it was for a college tour so there

was a non profit organization that was taking a group of students on a historically black college tour and I thought and it and I I just remember how it hit me and I thought oh my god now I knew what college was but when I saw this I just felt like it was for me and I took down the number I couldn't wait to get home and to reach out to the organization so I was able to go on that college tour and I was able to go on to college and I graduated from Tennessee State University and I took out stude

nt loans and I went on to get my master's degree and even my PhD degree wow right that's when I think back over everything that I went through and where I'm at today it was because I was persistent and I had faith I just once I had that spark of motivation by seeing that flyer seeing something that looked like hope that changed everything for me so hopefully this presentation tonight is gonna be the hope that you need to move forward and say you know what I can do this I've been playing around I

've been slacking around but no more of that I'm moving on and I'm moving forward so I hope this what this presentation does for you today so fast forward into my 30s I was doing all the things I thought I was supposed to be doing right I was paying off my student loans I had 4 4 1 k at work I was working at Caterpillar Financial you know I have my corporate job and you know we bought the big house we're doing all the things we're traveling thinking you know we're living the life but boom things

start to go not as planned in my marriage and I ended up divorced can anybody relate that was um a tough time and it took me back to my childhood when I was financially insecure again and made me think man how how am I in this position once again feeling financially secure going from two incomes to one income I was embarrassed I thought since I was putting a little bit of money in my 4 1 k and I was enjoying life I thought everything was going great but when you go from two and comes to 1 and y

ou realize wait a minute I don't have as much money as I thought even though out at that time I become a professor and I was you know making a little over six figures you know I finally hit HUNDRED k Mark and that woo I'm doing it but I wasn't saving and putting up enough I didn't know anything about financial freedom I just thought I was doing the American dream I thought life was great and it was a really big wake up call right really big wake up call and I felt alone I felt like I didn't know

what to do I didn't know where to go I I had a financial planner but he didn't really teach me anything I had money and it wasn't growing at all I didn't know I didn't know what to do so I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps and say okay he should get your get your act together girl haha get yourself together and I had to get myself these Pep talks and luckily I have friends and I have family who also were there to motivate me and pick me up when I was crying and let me cry on their shoulder

s but but eventually I had to do it I had to say okay God help me help me help me help me and I said well the main thing is I'm financially insecure I'm living paycheck to paycheck cause I know you probably say okay girl you making 100 k you're doing good and I was doing good but when you live in the American dream and you got the fancy car you got the house you travel you doing this and you got the credit card day you got the student loans and when you sit down and you look at everything you li

ke wait a minute how do I make this much money but I'm actually in debt and I'm living paycheck to paycheck something's not making a lot of sense here it's not making any sense at all so that's when I said I've got to teach myself money management financial management I need to start at square one and I did and so as you can see here after I taught myself that and I got really serious about it and that's today's presentation gonna go through some specific steps that you can do cause this is not

something that I magically did that you can't do you also can do this so stick around stay to the end pay attention take good notes because I'm gonna give you the gems to help you get started on your financial freedom journey okay so as you can see here for my tips and strategies I have been all over the media sharing the good news and you also can do it so I also have two books that help me obviously I wrote them but it's based on the experience that I had and I had to get that out into the wor

ld so the unlikely achievers what really gave me that motivation that push um when I was going through and I journaled and I wrote down what I was going through and how I was gonna get myself out of those situations so the conflict resolution tips that I Learned are in this book to help me get through divorce and starting over and how to negotiate and how to speak up for myself and how to be bold all of that is in The Unlikely Achiever and in just this year I released The Wealthy Achiever and th

is is the Financial Freedom Planner this is a this is where I manage my money this is where I tracked my debt payoff where I tracked my investments where I track my time my calendar my meal planning this is where I track every single paycheck and I still do this to this day I every paycheck every piece of income I have I have sheets that I go through for each of those steps okay so that's in the Wealthy Achiever Planner they're both available on Amazon com or on my website lekishasimmons com so

make sure that you get your copies of those alright so now we're writing things down because we're getting ready to get into the meat of this so you've seen my story but now it's time for you to work on you now write this down what is your biggest financial challenge whatever that is you don't have to tell me but I want you to write it down okay so now now that there's more this holding you back so whatever that one thing was that you wrote down I'm not oblivious to the world we live in it's exp

ensive right inflation we've all heard of it we hate it we're ready for it to go back down right inflation it makes everything more expensive and also something you may not have considered but your mindset you might really be thinking about saving all I need to save more who has said that before all I need to save more I need to save more it's not just saving more I need you to consider investing you you have to and I'm gonna show you why today and just your lack of financial wellness overall yo

u may not know how to appropriately allocate should I stay for the house first or should I pay off this debt first or this credit card or the student loans what am I gonna do about all these different things it can be overwhelming can you relate right and of course it probably sounds hard right she keeps talking about investing what is she talking about investing that's hard it's not hard you're telling yourself it's hard nobody find a place anywhere online or someone who's told you that it's ha

rd but in your mind you think ah this is too much it's it's I'm overwhelmed it's a lot how can I do all this stop telling yourself that stop telling yourself that what else have you accomplished in life that was hard right you've been you you have overcome so much already this is just your next step you're right where you need to be watching this presentation this is right where you need to be so think about where you need to start okay so let's go through I'm gonna go through three steps or thr

ee stages with you and I want you to decide to decide where you are in these three stages and where you need to start okay so the first one I talked about a budget breakthrough because you're probably tired of either you you're making more money than you've ever made even if that's not as much as you wanna be making but you still feel like you're not getting ahead it doesn't matter how much you make or you get a raise here there you feel like you're going backwards and maybe you can concern that

you aren't saving enough for your future but then if you have children or other family members you're responsible for you may feel like you're not putting away enough for them either and you just tired of being on the go all the time and just not getting ahead can you relate am I preaching to anybody tonight or just myself and of course social media doesn't make it any better because we every time we look at social media we see these big fancy cars fancy purses big houses someone's and I you kn

ow I see it you see it and I I probably been just as bad because I go on a trip like oh my gosh I'm in Jamaica I love Jamaica and other people see they're probably like I wanna be in Jamaica why I don't get to go to Jamaica this year but the world we live in is so full of showing us all the great things and the flowers but what you're not seeing are the seeds that were planted because when I started on my journey it was a sacrifice after that divorce and I started cutting back I had the big hous

e on the hill and I sold it and I moved into a two bedroom apartment and just about everybody thought I was crazy for doing that but I knew I was living paycheck to paycheck and I knew if I was to be laid off I was gonna be in trouble and I couldn't bear the thought of that I needed to get my head above water so I did the unpopular thing and sometimes you have to do the unpopular thing who are you trying to impress the only person you need to try to impress is yourself and God are you doing the

work that you need to do on you so that you can live the life that you deserve to live so that you can travel so that you can have the big house so that you can have experiences with your family and friends without going to bed thinking oh I shouldn't have spent that oh how am I gonna cover this now I got the Rob Peter to Paypal no that's not that's not that's not what we're gonna do cause we're happy we're we're healthy happy and wealthy we live in abundance and we have an abundance mindset but

we have to do things in a proper order does that make sense okay good now when we're talking about our budget because I know this is this is one of those topics people are like oh here we go with this budget if you do not tell your money what to do and if you are not tracking your money your money will control you and it will just disappear you're wondering man the money went into my bank account and it's gone already I didn't even get to enjoy it that's because you're not in control of your mo

ney and I hear this from women all the time I wanna be more in control of my money well you have to get you an effective budgeting system so because I'm such a fan of budgets and controlling where your money goes and what you're spending your money on you can get this for free on my website just go to locationsimmus com and there's a budget tab click that and you can download the exact budget that I use every month and the spending logs I've got a couple spending logs that I'll send to you once

you download this that all comes to you I want you to start paying close attention to what you're spending your money on because I know you're probably thinking well I just I'm already doing good with my money I just need more money that may or may not be 100% true because you are likely spending money on things you don't even know what you're spending on so until you actually track what you're spending for the next three to seven to 10 days I want you to write down everything that you have to s

pend money on and I don't care if that's Girl Girl Scout cookies your best friend's daughters dance recital donation um your bank fee whatever it is you need to write it all down so you can see what is sucking your money find the leaks there are leaks in your budget there are I guarantee you I coach women every week and we sit down and we pull those credit card statements and we we look at everything that's coming out and everything's coming out they don't even know what's coming out and it happ

ens to me as well it is same thing happens and I'll look and I'll say well what is this why is this figure why did this go up and why am I paying for this so you have to get control of and only ways to sit down and start tracking it and does it take time yes and that's the key show was the things that our um the participants that are on this call um they have all gone through um a lot of like training in regards to cracking expenses and budgeting so they know exactly what you're talking about an

d some of those challenges good that is awesome and the next part of that challenge is to commit to cut your expenses by 10% this is where the sacrifice comes in so it's great to find the leaks but then you also have to take the next step and say alright I need to get rid of some stuff if I've got Hulu Prime Netflix BT Lifetime this is it what are you gonna cut you have to cut some things you might love your public's grocery store or your whoever grocery store you need to start shopping at Aldi

you need to think about where you must sacrifice in order to get to the next level I only got to this point because I took sacrifices it doesn't matter you can make $250,000 a year and still live paycheck to paycheck I know people doing that I know I know I look at their money and they're doing it and they don't think there's anywhere they can cut yes sometimes you can cut money so let me tell you Marquita was a traveling nurse or she still a traveling nurse and Martina came to me because she wa

s a high income earner but she didn't know where money was going and so once we went through this step just like as the people on this call have done she was able to reduce our expenses about $300 a month and she started investing that $300 so again you have to cut things you have to and I always tell people you can always add a service back but go ahead and cut it and see if you actually miss it or not okay so shift that mindset one of the things that you may not have considered which I love wh

ich is Mint Mobile so if you just go to Mint mobile com forward slash Dr kesha you will see how much money you can save just by switching your mobile phone service $1,000 a year who would value having an extra thousand dollars a year this not going out on something like a mobile phone I've had Met Mobile for I think I think this is my fourth year having met Mobile and people always say oh girl I'm fine with mine I don't wanna switch why would you pay $100 a month when you can pay $20 a month for

the exact same service doesn't make sense you probably say well it must be something wrong with it no it's not it's not it's nothing wrong with it I have an iPhone it's just the way this society is built to make you think if something is cheaper it's not as high quality and that's just not true so you got to step out of your own way sometimes all right let's talk about your workplace retirement accounts because this is my next area that you need to assess where you at with your 4 O 1 k are you

able to invest at least up to the match hopefully if not maybe there's some areas you could cut or maybe there's some areas where you can say I need to create some additional income for myself and we can talk about that in a little bit how you can do that because I I I'm not gonna sit here and say at some point you've you've cut everything you can cut and you still need more I understand that so at that point that you've cut everything you can cut you have to create more income for yourself and

in this gig economy and this digital economy there are plenty of ways you can do that alright so your 4 o 1 k is so important because not only will you be investing for your retirement to have a soft comfortable retirement but it also reduces your taxes today so you end up bringing more money home in your paycheck and I know that sounds counterintuitive but again these are the things you just haven't been taught so don't knock it until you try it all right so as you can see here on the screen th

e person in the middle doesn't contribute to a 4 0 1 k alright you may have a 4 O 3 b you may have a 4 o 1 k if you're a business owner you can have something for business owners a Sep or solo for 1 k but those traditional types of retirement accounts qualify retirement accounts all work the same way they're in you're investing with Pretex money so if you can invest with money before taxes come out that's a benefit for you and then you pay taxes later but all of that money grows tax free and all

those investments and dividends grow for you over time that's a huge difference in a minute I'm gonna show you a chart of what it looks like for that money to grow when I say grow again you're planning a scene and it's gonna grow so everybody saw the $750,000 that I accumulated in four years but someone said well how did you do that if you only made $100,000 in that time period how did how did you end up with 750K because again it's called investing it's shifting that mindset from saving to inv

esting okay so again this person in the middle they're not making any contributions and their take home pay looks like it's more money because they're not investing anything and they have $96,000 after their you know taxes come out but the person who's actually contributing $12,000 is actually still bringing home more money when you look at the savings you look at this 98,400 they put $12,000 into their for 1 k at work and they also had less Texas taxes taken out of their paycheck and then all o

f that $12,000 is invested so over time the stock market has always gone up overtime and we would hope that it would continue to go up over time day to day it generates it's up and down like your blood pressure right some days you have good days some days you have bad days same thing but over time the stock market has always gone up for us and that's why so powerful once you get your um budget under control that you start taking advantage of return of of investments so you're at that array so th

is is a this is the next step so you're investing at work and if you let's say they don't have a 4 1 k at your workplace well you can still invest for retirement through something called a Roth alright I love the Roth alright I think it's just a really savvy way for women especially to get it started to get started investing because it's low for reals it's really easy to understand and you open the account the way you would go and open up any other bank account at a bank once you open it and you

send money there you can then buy stocks now you gotta decide what stocks you wanna buy but once you buy those stocks and you let that money grow again you're planting that seed in there it's just I mean it is similar to when you go to a bank and open a savings and you put money in and over time you get interest right but with investments over time you get something called capital gains and dividends and so I'll talk to you about that in a minute and those are more lucrative and their tax way l

ess you can even make a a great amount in capital gains and not pay any taxes but you will always pay taxes on your savings account every dollar of interest will be taxed period okay so now the Roth alright this is invested with after tax money and I have a whole workshop on the Roth alright that's how much I love it and that's how much I believe in it that everyone who works and has wages should invest in it and that's my personal opinion that's not professional advice okay but if you have if y

ou work or you have a business if you're not maxing out your Roth IRA why not what is the reason I would love to know why not all right so there's and if you wanna retire early this is one of those really great accounts to open to have for you or if you feel that you might need the money earlier you can take money out of Roth IRA without any penalty you can always take out what you put in if you put in $7,000 and a couple years from now you say you know what I'm gonna take that 7,000 the market

has gone up I need to take the $7,000 back out and put down on a car or house or whatever you can do that without any penalty and you don't have to be fifty nine and a/2 okay these are things that you just haven't been taught right isn't that good to know it makes you feel a little more secure with doing that so again as I said I have a complete session on I mean several hours worth of information and content all about the Wrath IRA how to open one I walk you through step by step how to open one

at Vanguard and how to open one at Fidelity and how to get started investing in it so you can check that out on my website location Simmons com now step three