Lauryn Williams earned $650,000 in her best year as a sprinter and stood on Olympic podiums in both the Summer and Winter Games. She also handed $150,000 to a stranger with a “can’t miss” flip and paid for a million-dollar whole life policy she had no use for. Recorded live in front of a room of Texas A&M-Texarkana students, she explains how a future certified financial planner learned the expensive way, and why the shame afterward cost her more than the money did. Joe and co-host Jay Davis hand the microphone to students who ask exactly what you’d want to ask.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- The 24-hour pity party: Lauryn’s rule for feeling terrible about a mistake, then moving on, and why it works on a bad investment as well as a bad race
- Why shame quietly does more damage to your finances than the original mistake
- The three-part screen she uses on any financial professional: a credential, a fee structure, and a legal duty to act in your interest
- How a whole life policy got pitched as an “investment,” and the one question that would have exposed it
- Why a mentor who gains nothing from your decisions may be the cheapest protection you can find
- A freezer trick that adds just enough friction to make you ask whether a swipe is worth it
- The surprise costs of living abroad, including a 25 percent swing from exchange rates alone and a “gringo tax” on avocados
- What financial success could not buy her, and why she builds community before she needs it
- How to turn down the weekend plans without losing the friends
- The one money habit she most wants her own child to learn
Why This Matters Now
Confident voices are everywhere: an app that promises to handle it all, a short video from a “fiduciary” nobody can verify, a friend whose spending quietly sets the bar for the group. Lauryn’s story shows what it costs to take a pitch at face value and, more usefully, how to recover when you already have. If you worry that one misstep ruined the plan, a four-time Olympian offers a different clock: 24 hours to feel bad, then back to work.
From the Basement
The show leaves Joe’s mom’s basement for a live run in Texarkana, though Doug still phones in the trivia, where three students guess how fast an Olympic silver medalist ran the 100 meters. One guess was 42 seconds. Joe’s board game collection also takes a few hits.
Resources Mentioned
Texas A&M University-Texarkana: for the Eagles in the audience, and anyone considering becoming one
Worth Winning: Lauryn Williams’s financial planning practice
Texas A&M University-Texarkana Center for Financial Literacy and Investment: the program hosting the live show
Gifting Sense: the nonprofit that teaches kids to build their case before they buy
Our Mentor: Lauryn Williams
Big thanks to Lauryn Williams for joining us today. To learn more about Lauryn, visit Worth Winning.
Doug’s Trivia
- To the hundredth of a second, what was Lauryn Williams’ official time in the women’s 100-meter final at the 2004 Athens Olympics?
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Other Mentions
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Written by: Kevin Bailey
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Episode transcript
[00:00:00] Doug: Live from Texas A&M-Texarkana, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show.
[00:00:19] Doug: I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and what does it take to win with money? The students at Texas A&M are here because they wanna know. Am I right? Yeah, that’s right. So on today’s show, we feature a woman who knows how to win. She’s the only American woman to medal at both the Summer and Winter Olympics, Lauren Williams.
[00:00:40] Doug: We’ll ask Lauren about winning in sports, winning with money, and our audience will ask their questions about winning as well. Everyone wins on today’s show. And now, two guys who are ready to win the game of podcasting, it’s Joe Saul-Sehy and special guest co-host, Jay- Davis.
[00:01:00] Joe: Hey there, Texarkana. How are you?
[00:01:05] Joe: I am super happy you all came out tonight. I am Joe Saul-Sehy, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun here. It’s our Wednesday show, and man, we have a nice group of people here. But we also have an awesome co-host with us tonight. The man, the myth, the legend, Jay Davis is here. How are you?
[00:01:21] Jay: I am well, and welcome to A&M-Texarkana and the new James C.
[00:01:26] Jay: Morris Business, Engineering, and Technology Building.
[00:01:30] Joe: I’m glad you brought this up. For people who haven’t had the opportunity to be here yet, a couple weeks ago, I was on my way to a conference, and Jay texts me and goes, “You gotta stop by. You gotta see this awesome new room.” And I’m like, “I’d love to, but I’m going to the…”
[00:01:42] Joe: I should’ve skipped the conference and come to see the room, Jay, because this is awesome. Can you explain to everybody in audio land what we got going on here?
[00:01:50] Jay: Certainly. So we’re officially in the RRCU Center for Financial Literacy room. We have 12 Bloomberg terminals that our students have access to, and we really try to work with them on getting all the certifications that Bloomberg offers.
[00:02:04] Jay: And then this is also the space, uh, not only for our finance and our other accounting-type classes to host their classes here, but we also have our financial literacy workshops in this room as well.
[00:02:15] Joe: I spoke with your new dean last night at a great event we had, um, a kind of a mixer we had here in this very room.
[00:02:22] Joe: And he was talking about how financial literacy really is not something that he wants in the middle of Texas A&M-Texarkana. He really sees that as something he wants to go big on here.
[00:02:35] Jay: No, we do, and we’re trying to get this into every single one of our students’ hands. So whether that is worked into the syllabus of other classes, and whether it is humanities or chemistry, and, uh, we definitely need it in our business classes for sure.
[00:02:53] Jay: But it’s, it’s gonna be something that is going to be able to impact these students’ lives for the rest of it. I jokingly give our math professors a hard time that I’m not worried about the Pythagorean theorem. I like the compounding interest formula better, so.
[00:03:07] Joe: That’s right. And the compounding interest works better if you start when you’re in college.
[00:03:12] Jay: Absolutely. I think I saw a, uh, stat this past week that $1 in your early 20s is worth about 77 when you get 65. Wow.
[00:03:19] Joe: Wow. That’s a big number. Big, big number. Hey, you wanna meet our special guest tonight, Jay?
[00:03:23] Jay: I do.
[00:03:24] Joe: She is a woman that I feel lucky I’ve known for a long time. She is not only an Olympian, she’s a four-time Olympian.
[00:03:32] Joe: She’s a three-time medalist, including a gold medal, and she is the first American woman to ever medal in both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Give it up for Lauren Williams, everybody. Lauren, I’m super happy you got to come out to Texarkana. How you liking it so far?
[00:03:51] Lauryn: I am so glad that I came. I got a little pity tour of the downtown area today.
[00:03:57] Lauryn: I got to see all of Joe’s board games. I mean- … what else do I need in life at this point?
[00:04:02] Joe: The bar was low, and we crossed it.
[00:04:05] Lauryn: Totally.
[00:04:05] Joe: Yes. But we went to some of our fine restaurants. We have a f- nice new restaurant here in town we went to last night.
[00:04:11] Lauryn: I did. I got to meet a pig farmer, which is not something-
[00:04:14] Lauryn: I have ever done before, so that is a first for me, and I had some amazing food, including pig.
[00:04:19] Joe: Well, we’re gonna talk to Lauren about her experience, not just in the Olympics, but also as a professional athlete, as a college student, as, uh, somebody that once made a lot of mistakes with money out of the gate and not only survived, but thrived.
[00:04:35] Joe: Also, now you don’t live in the United States anymore.
[00:04:38] Lauryn: I have fled the country, y’all. Mm-mm. I now live in Medellin, Colombia.
[00:04:43] Joe: Yes, and let’s be clear. You didn’t flee the country. You just went there and loved it.
[00:04:47] Lauryn: I did, exactly. Yeah. I, I am not under arrest. I did not do anything fraudulent. I am allowed to come back to America as I see fit.
[00:04:54] Lauryn: I am still a proud American, but I do live in Medellin, Colombia.
[00:04:58] Joe: Yeah, Jay would’ve been like, “Who’s coming?” Right? “I don’t think I could be a part of this, uh, collaboration anymore, Joe.” Yeah, so we’ve got Lauren here. We got Jay here. I’m here. We got Texarkana here. Whoo. Whoo. We’re gonna hear from a couple sponsors who help us keep on keeping on.
[00:05:14] Joe: And by the way, we got one sponsor, doesn’t sponsor the show, but sponsors this collaboration. That’s Red River Credit Union here in town, Jay.
[00:05:20] Jay: And they are an incredible partner for the A&M Texarkana University, and not only do they have the namesake of our Center for Financial Literacy, but they’re also a big supporter with the athletic complex that we’re building here in, uh, soon we’re gonna be a division two collegiate athletic program with the football team, so we’re excited about that.
[00:05:41] Joe: I don’t know. You could come back here and coach track, Lauren. I don’t
[00:05:43] Lauryn: know. Yeah, I’ll think about it.
[00:05:45] Joe: We’re g- We’re, we can introduce you to more pig farmers.
[00:05:48] Lauryn: I, I did enjoy meeting my first pig farmer, but I think one is enough. And she was so awesome. I’m like, “There’s, there’s not gonna be another pig farmer to top her.”
[00:05:55] Joe: She was awesome. She’s incredible. She’s actually the head chef at our new restaurant. She’s amazing. All right. We’re gonna hear from our sponsors, uh, who help us keep on keeping on, giving this to you for the value price of zero, and we’ll be right back
[00:06:15] Joe: Jay, you ready to try to make Lauren sweat?
[00:06:17] Jay: Yes, let’s do this.
[00:06:18] Joe: All right. I’ve got Lauren a bunch of questions, but let’s be honest, because when we think about winning a gold medal, how rich do you get from winning a gold medal in the Olympics?
[00:06:31] Lauryn: Filthy rich. I am so rich, y’all. Woo. So much money that I just don’t know what to do with it.
[00:06:38] Lauryn: You don’t, you don’t get rich at all. Um, it is like most of the things in the world where the, the top 1% make a really good living and everybody else does, mm, okay maybe, sometimes.
[00:06:50] Joe: You’ve been very open about your peak earning years. Mm-hmm. Uh, what’s the most you made?
[00:06:54] Lauryn: I made $650,000 in my peak earning year, 2006.
[00:06:58] Lauryn: I had a 10-year career, 2004 to 2013. Well, 2014, actually, ’cause I had a, a Winter Olympics under my belt. But it was around 200 to start, and so somewhere between two and six all the other years, which, not a bad living for a 20 to 30-year-old. But it’s not $20 million like the NFL. It is not enough to be able to retire, and it’s definitely not enough to be able to retire when you make a bunch of financial mistakes.
[00:07:24] Joe: I wanna talk about those financial mistakes in a second, but, you know, you spent a long time, I mean, going to four Olympics is something that most Olympians don’t do, so your career was very long in terms of, uh, a runner’s career. At the same time, your friends are becoming doctors, they’re becoming lawyers, they’re going into social work, they’re doing all kinds of cool things.
[00:07:45] Joe: Did you ever feel like you’re falling behind on real life?
[00:07:48] Lauryn: I always felt like I was falling behind because my parents instilled the importance of education in me. And so I actually went to the University of Miami wanting to repay my coach for the opportunity to get a free education, and I worked my butt off on that track because I was so grateful to her to be able to get the education.
[00:08:03] Lauryn: And so I knew that that was a thing that I really wanted to invest in long term. And so I see my friends doing all these, you know, additional degrees and things, and I finally was like, “Okay, what else can I do?” So I went and got a real estate license. Then I got an MBA while I was competing in track and field.
[00:08:15] Lauryn: And I still was just like, “What if I fall down and break my leg? I don’t know what I’m gonna do with these things.” I was always trying to figure out, like, what’s my next move, despite the fact that I was in a pretty decent position, um, while competing in sport.
[00:08:26] Jay: You mentioned that you wanted to repay your coach, and your coaches are there to help you get into your best physical shape to be able to perform.
[00:08:37] Jay: I think a lot of people don’t surround themselves with those same life coaches. What are some of the different professionals that you would recommend people to surround themselves with to put together a good financial plan?
[00:08:49] Lauryn: Ooh, this is a great question because your financial team can make or break whether or not you’re going to be wealthy, and so many people love to use the term wealthy.
[00:08:58] Lauryn: They love to use the term generational wealth. But you can’t have generational wealth until you have wealth for yourself, and the steps to being able to do that is to be able to trust people around you. So we need a financial planner, a certified financial planner, in my opinion. You need someone to prepare your taxes, and so that’s a, a CPA or an enrolled agent.
[00:09:16] Lauryn: And then, you know, what about estate planning? So you might need a good lawyer on your team, or you might need just those legal documents in place. But the one thing I would say, especially at this age and in college, is to find someone that will mentor you, someone that you can talk to transparently about money.
[00:09:31] Lauryn: That person is not gonna try to get anything from you, and they can help you learn. You’ll say, “Let’s look this up together. Let’s learn about this together.” And that can be your accountability partner through life.
[00:09:40] Joe: What do you say to the person that says, you know, you listed somebody to do your taxes. I can do my taxes online now.
[00:09:46] Joe: A certified financial planner, I can invest my own money. What do you say to that person?
[00:09:51] Lauryn: ChatGPT gets it wrong like, frequently. AI is great. It has been a wonderful help. There are lots of different tools and tech out there now that can help us get along, but the actual interaction that you have with a real person, uh, in real life, the, the nuances will never be replaced by a computer.
[00:10:08] Lauryn: Those are the things that we need to say, “Hey, my spouse is getting ready to have a baby, and this is my fear. My student loans have been piling up on me and the interest, and this is what I was thinking. What do you think?” There’s math that goes with those things, but there’s also emotion that goes with those things.
[00:10:23] Lauryn: There’s a, a saying that personal finance is personal. If you’re gonna get deep and personal with someone, you need that intimate experience. You need someone that you can trust, not a computer.
[00:10:31] Joe: You mention good people, right? You need good people around you.
[00:10:35] Lauryn: Good people.
[00:10:36] Joe: You fell into this trap yourself.
[00:10:38] Joe: What’s the worst financial product you overbought, and how was it presented to you?
[00:10:42] Lauryn: Yeah. Uh, bad people, um, sold me a million-dollar whole life insurance policy. The thing with whole life insurance is that you pay for it for your whole life. I was- Oh,
[00:10:52] Joe: that’s how they got the name.
[00:10:53] Lauryn: Yeah. Wasn’t that clever that they came up with that?
[00:10:57] Lauryn: And so I was paying about $8,000 a year for this policy. I had no dependents. I was 20 years old, you know, well at the beginning of my life. I could’ve been taking that money and investing it, uh, and I wouldn’t have a need for whole life insurance if I would’ve been taking that same amount of money over the course of my career.
[00:11:14] Lauryn: It just wasn’t a product that was necessary for me.
[00:11:16] Jay: Well, in going into surrounding yourself with those good and not bad people, explain to us what you- Think is the most important when you’re dealing with a financial advisor or financial planner in, in how they receive their income.
[00:11:31] Lauryn: Absolutely. So I have three rules.
[00:11:33] Lauryn: You need to be a certified financial planner, you need to be fee only, and you need to be a fiduciary. There are tons of other types of financial people-
[00:11:44] Joe: Yeah, can we explain those terms? Dive into those, if you don’t mind.
[00:11:46] Lauryn: Absolutely. A certified financial planner is going to have had to have a certain amount of experience, a certain amount of education, they are going to have to follow a code of ethics and also pass an exam.
[00:11:58] Lauryn: So in order for me to become a certified financial planner, I first had to do the education requirement. Um, once I finished the education requirement, I had to pass this exam, and then they were like, “You’re still… Just ’cause you passed the exam doesn’t make you a CFP. You’ve gotta go get a certain amount of experience so we- we- people know what you’re doing.”
[00:12:14] Lauryn: It’s the same thing with residency in medical school. They, they go to medical school, they learn lots of things, but you need to go practice being a doctor before you can, like, fully, fully say that you are a physician. You need to be under someone’s wing, and I think that’s so important.
[00:12:27] Joe: The fiduciary part is difficult because I’ve seen on TikTok people calling themselves, Lauren, they’re calling themselves fiduciaries, and there’s no way in hell they’re a fiduciary.
[00:12:37] Lauryn: The financial industry is the Wild, Wild West, and this is one of the hardest things, and that’s why a lot of people don’t seek out a pr- financial professional, because they have distrust about the way that the industry works. There are people who will not be a fiduciary. Fiduciary, by the way, means they are legally obligated to do what’s in your best interest, which it also blows my mind that there are people in the financial industry- Who don’t
[00:12:57] Lauryn: that are not, right? Like, what? Um, but it is hard. You ask that question and people will say yes, which is why you need to ask additional questions.
[00:13:07] Joe: How old were you when you bought the whole life policy?
[00:13:09] Lauryn: 20.
[00:13:10] Joe: And it was a million dollar whole life policy.
[00:13:11] Lauryn: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:12] Joe: Yeah, and how much were they having you put in it per year?
[00:13:14] Lauryn: $8,000.
[00:13:15] Joe: $8,000. They probably got that entire 8,000 as their commission. Yes. Just generally, you know, when it’s 8,000, an $8,000 commission versus doing the right thing, I think a lot of people can talk themselves into that this is doing no harm, and certainly you’re gonna need insurance for a long time, so I’m just helping my buddy Lauren.
[00:13:34] Lauryn: That’s what we call suitability, and so if you’re not a fiduciary, um, you do what’s suitable for people. And what’s suitable for someone may not be what’s absolutely in their best interest, and that’s what’s problematic. We wanna make sure that the person is doing what’s right for you, not just right for them.
[00:13:48] Lauryn: And I don’t even think it was just the first year. I did some research on whole life. It’s usually the first 18 months of the premium-
[00:13:54] Joe: Oh … that
[00:13:54] Lauryn: the person is collecting.
[00:13:55] Joe: Holy cow, so we’re looking at a $12,000- … commission.
[00:13:59] Lauryn: All going
[00:13:59] Joe: in his pocket. And that’s… I’m in the wrong business.
[00:14:01] Lauryn: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:01] Jay: Well, the good- The good thing is, is you at least were the, uh, topic around the water cooler, you know, once you purchased that life insurance, uh, policy- Right
[00:14:10] Jay: from that agent. Look who I
[00:14:11] Lauryn: sold some life insurance
[00:14:12] Jay: to today. That’s right.
[00:14:13] Lauryn: That’s right.
[00:14:13] Jay: That’s right. Now, w- when you’re, when you’re looking at products to help develop and protect your wealth, what do you recommend or, or, or what type of questions do you ask people when you’re trying to develop those tools to develop their wealth?
[00:14:27] Lauryn: Yeah, so diversity is one of the key pieces that everyone talks about with investing, and you wanna make sure that you have a diversified portfolio. I also wanna make sure that my portfolio’s gonna be low cost, and there’s a lot of tools now, you know, even robo-advisors, that will allow you to be able to have a low cost investment portfolio.
[00:14:44] Lauryn: When I say low cost, I’m thinking about expense ratios, which we got a lot of terms we gotta break down here. But, like, what is the cost to having this actual investment in my portfolio? Understanding that and trying to keep that cost as low as possible. Those fees can get pretty high pretty quickly.
[00:15:00] Joe: I wanna go into your career.
[00:15:02] Joe: Well, actually, I do have one more follow-up question first, which is that if you were a finance major- And so y- you must have had some training about, uh, financial tools. Like, what did the person say that overrode your spider sense, as, uh, my partner OG says, that this might not be for you? What, what was the sales pitch?
[00:15:26] Lauryn: I did not actually have enough financial expertise at 20 to, to know the difference, but what I was told was that this was an investment, that this was gonna be really helpful for my financial future. And like you said, I now know that to be different. Whole life policies grow kind of at the rate of maybe a, a bad interest rate savings account at, at this point.
[00:15:46] Lauryn: I didn’t know what questions to ask. I took the information at face value, and I think that’s why it’s so important to have a mentor- Yeah … or an accountability partner, because if I had just one person to bounce that off of, they probably would’ve come up with even more questions that I could’ve
[00:15:59] Joe: asked.
[00:15:59] Joe: At least yellow flag.
[00:15:59] Lauryn: Exactly.
[00:16:00] Joe: Yeah. A great thing that our, uh, friend Roger Whitney said to me a long time ago, which I really like, is that if the professional leads with product, if they meet you and they go, “Hey, Jay, I got this great thing that’ll solve all your problems,” you need to run. If they lead with process, like, “What are you looking to achieve?”
[00:16:20] Joe: Much more likely that you might be in the ballpark.
[00:16:22] contestant: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:23] Joe: Let’s go to your athletic career, because I think there’s a lot of career lessons, and at Stacking Benjamins, you know, it’s about leading this life that you like and really going through the good and the bad. Athens, your first Olympics, you are the, quote, “college kid” with all these pro athletes.
[00:16:42] Joe: You bring home the silver medal. You must have been flying high.
[00:16:46] Lauryn: I felt pretty good, but I was a little bit kind of like, “Oh man, what if I would’ve won?” Um, the overarching feeling was like, wow, I’m so excited to have made it this far because at the beginning of the year I didn’t have Olympic goals, and I think that’s the biggest piece of the puzzle for me was that I didn’t know what life had in store for me.
[00:17:05] Lauryn: I was just trying to win the national championships in college that year. So to make it to the Olympic stage, have eight members of my family there to represent me, um, after a fundraiser was done across, you know, pretty much the whole nation. Detroit, Michigan and, and Rochester, Pennsylvania, or Beaver County, Pennsylvania.
[00:17:20] Joe: This is cool by the way, you told me earlier today your family didn’t have money. Your community had to raise money to make this happen.
[00:17:27] Lauryn: Yeah. No one was going to the Olympic Games to support me without my community getting behind me, because we just didn’t have any extra funds laying around. And you, you make the Olympic team usually in June, and the Olympics are either in July or August.
[00:17:39] Lauryn: So it’s a very quick turnaround. Prices are up, people have already paid in advance, and you don’t know whether or not you’re gonna … We had no plans to make the team. So they rallied behind us and they made sure that not just one person could go, but eight people were there to support me, and I was so proud to have them there.
[00:17:52] Lauryn: I was so proud of what I did, but I also wanted to, you know, get to the gold to, to like show them it was worth their time coming. But they loved me anyway.
[00:17:59] Joe: Later on, Beijing doesn’t go your way, your next Olympics. Mm-hmm. Talk about that for a second. What, what happened in Beijing?
[00:18:07] Lauryn: Beijing was a huge letdown because it was my first Olympic Games as like a professional, professional athlete.
[00:18:14] Lauryn: So in 2004 I was professional. I had, you know, given up my college eligibility, but I didn’t feel the pressure of like, I have to earn money to do this. In 2008 I was like, “This is my job. Someone is paying me to get out here and win.” And not only that, but I was in great shape. I still maintain to this day that in 2008 was the best shape of my life.
[00:18:32] Lauryn: Just those moments in time did not go well. I don’t know what it was with the energy. There was, you know, a problem with the starting they, they talked about. I got fourth place, which I will tell you is the worst place that you can get at the Olympic Games. You’d rather be eighth than fourth, because to be the first one out of the medal count is just devastating.
[00:18:51] Joe: You came up with a term … a way of thinking about losing.
[00:18:55] Lauryn: Yeah. I started to enact what I call the 24-hour pity party. You get really, really low in moments when you don’t win, but it’s not all about winning, and I started to learn that over the course of time. That was not the first race that I’d lost. I also had to think about, like, what am I gonna do with the rest of my season?
[00:19:12] Lauryn: I think that I am in great shape, and I want to go ahead and, you know, finish out my season strong. How do I pick myself up? And I said, “Okay, I am going to wallow, wallow, wallow for 24 hours, and then after that you gotta put on your big girl panties and get going.” And it worked. And every time I started to experience defeat, I was just like, okay, you get 24 hours, but you don’t get to sit and, you know, stay in this, this funk that comes from being in a, a rough place or being defeated by something.
[00:19:38] Lauryn: Actually, the, I think it was like two weeks after the Olympic Games, raced the Olympic champion and I beat her. Um, I mean- Wow. Wow … didn’t get an Olympic gold medal for that, but, you know, I think it was due to picking myself up and saying like, “Hey, like, like, let’s make the most of the rest of the season.”
[00:19:52] Jay: Well, well, for me, I like being able to sort of look at that 24-hour pity party rule in your finances too because once you realize after you’ve talked with someone that maybe you’ve made some mistakes or there’s some things that you haven’t done- You can complain about that for about another 24 hours and then you have to start.
[00:20:11] Jay: ‘Cause a lot of times I have students come to me and maybe there’s some credit issues that we need to fix. If a credit issue’s gonna take 12 months to fix, regardless of when you start, it’s still gonna take 12 months. So if you wait six months before you start or you wait 18 more months, you’re, now you’re looking at, you know, a year and a half.
[00:20:27] Jay: So I love the aspect of being able to possibly start sharing with those that I talk to. You’ve got 24 hours to sort of absorb this. Joe and I talk all the time is that, you know, we made a lot of mistakes when we were younger. Sooner or later you just have to sort of buy into that and, and then just move on.
[00:20:42] Jay: But tell us what you did to be able to move on. ‘Cause I mean, I know it had to be hard w- once you started developing the concept.
[00:20:50] Lauryn: Yeah, I had to start to look forward, and I think you bring up a really good point a- about doing this with your finances. Shame is one of the most dangerous things that you will experience that will stop you from creating wealth, because it creates this paralysis.
[00:21:02] Lauryn: I can’t go on because I’m so ashamed of what I did. I need to hide. I need to, you know, be afraid. I need to not tell anyone, and on and on and on. But you’ve just gotta, like, rip that Band-Aid off and say, “Hey, how do I move forward?” And that was on the track and that was with my finances. I made tons of financial mistakes, which I’m, I’m sure he’s gonna ask me about a couple of those questions at least.
[00:21:23] Lauryn: It took me a while, I’ll say. One was, uh, you know, giving $150,000 to pretty much a stranger, thinking that I was making an investment and that my money was gonna be flipped. A really, really dumb mistake, and I still feel ashamed. Sitting here saying it today, 15, 20 years later, uh, it was a really big deal.
[00:21:40] Lauryn: But for a while I hid in that shame, hid in that shame, and I couldn’t get past it. I couldn’t start to build wealth again because I was so ashamed.
[00:21:46] Joe: This is why I love the 24-hour pity party, because, you know, with most things, and Jay you know this, it, it, none of these are revocable. There’s a few decisions that are Once you make ’em, man, you gotta live in it.
[00:21:59] Joe: But all three of us have made big mistakes with our money and we’re here on a podcast talking about it, not only okay, but thriving. And look at what’s amazing. I love your turnaround from Beijing, ’cause Beijing you could’ve walked away. Could’ve went, “You know what? Fourth place. I’m done. That’s it.” You came back for two more Olympics and even changed which Olympics you were a part of.
[00:22:21] Lauryn: The story was not done yet.
[00:22:25] Joe: You had a gold medal in you. Next time you come back you’re part of a gold medal-winning team. And talk about, we were talking about, Jay was asking you questions about your financial team. That 4×100, I feel like, Lauren, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of transfer there. I mean, you gotta trust your partners, and they gotta be pros as much as you are to bring home that gold.
[00:22:43] Lauryn: Yeah. Not only do you need to trust your partners, you need to trust in the idea of creating chemistry among the people. A very long story short is in 2004 I was a part of the relay team. We did not get the stick around the track. We were probably gonna break the world record in 2004 as well. 2008 it happened again, and it was me both times.
[00:23:02] Lauryn: Oh. My, my hand to someone else’s hand, the, the connection didn’t happen. I have never dropped a baton in my life. I’ve never had a faulty, uh, exchange except for the
[00:23:12] Joe: two times- At the Olympics
[00:23:13] Lauryn: Oh my goodness, can you believe it? Uh, so devastating. I got to that third Olympic Games where we actually did break the world record in 2012, and I knew what was important.
[00:23:22] Lauryn: It was chemistry, it was camaraderie, and it was working together, and I think that transfers over into this idea of, like, your finances. Like, you need somebody else around you. You cannot operate your finances in a solo. Yes, they are your personal finances, but you need this team. You need these other people around you.
[00:23:38] Lauryn: You need communication in order to be successful.
[00:23:41] Joe: Yeah, y- it goes back to you gotta have the right people. Just having any people is not good because- Yeah,
[00:23:48] Lauryn: you couldn’t have been on my four-by-one.
[00:23:49] Joe: Yeah, I couldn’t, couldn’t… Look-
[00:23:51] Jay: What ab- what, what about me?
[00:23:52] Lauryn: Mm, no.
[00:23:52] Jay: No. All right. All right. All right.
[00:23:54] Joe: Wow, that was quick, Lauren.
[00:23:55] Joe: Sorry. Both cases. We’ll try not to- I love you guys, but- Jay and I will try not to be offended. You say, I don’t know what happens, you say, “Screw the Summer Olympics, I’m going winter now.” Like, how do you, how do you make a big change? I think this is important. You know, most of our Stackers, we’re never gonna be Olympic athletes.
[00:24:12] Joe: We will have these times in our career where we maybe need to pivot, we maybe need to do something that we think is crazy. There might be somebody right now sitting in a cubicle going, “You know what? I hate this job. I gotta do something different.” You change from the Summer Olympics, all of a sudden you’re part of a bobsled team.
[00:24:26] Joe: How the heck does that happen?
[00:24:28] Lauryn: Well, when opportunity knocks, you just jump in a bobsled and ride down the ice, like… Isn’t that a great saying?
[00:24:35] Joe: That’s all it takes.
[00:24:36] Lauryn: I ran into a girl in the airport. Uh, I had read an article about her having tried bobsled, and simply asked the question. We were both headed to a race in Europe, and she was like, “Lauren, it’ll be great.
[00:24:44] Lauryn: You should try it.” For me, that opportunity knocks or that, that moment where I felt like I needed to pivot, I knew I was in my last year of competing as a track and field athlete. I knew that I was not 100% sure about what I wanted to do. I was interested in finance, I was interested in being a certified financial planner, but I didn’t know the path to that.
[00:25:01] Lauryn: I felt a lot more comfortable, even though it sounded crazy to try bobsled, which is a completely new sport and a cold sport, than I did to, you know, go put my big girl pants on, if you will, and jump into financial planning. So it was kind of a way to stall from adulting, if you will, and try something different.
[00:25:18] Lauryn: But yeah, sometimes you don’t know what’s coming around the corner, and you just gotta try it anyway because the alternatives can be really, really good.
[00:25:25] Joe: It would be hard for me. You’ve got this person, this woman in the front of the bobsled, like, she’s a pro. She’s counting on this complete novice. Is it hard for you to convince her that you’re not gonna be a liability?
[00:25:38] Lauryn: I resent that. Complete novice. You gotta know what your job is and you have to be good at your job in order to be successful. My job was to be the Flintstone feet that got that bobsled going. And I was like, “Oh, you just, you need me to be the engine. You need me to push this thing as fast as I can. I can handle that.
[00:25:55] Lauryn: Now, if you wanted me to drive this thing, we, we’d be in trouble. We’d be riding on our heads.” So it was, it was really hard to have the pressure of knowing that this girl had trained for years and years and years to be able to drive well, and was counting on me for her Olympic experience, and that was the first time I was in that boat, uh, because track and field has been traditionally pretty much an individual sport aside from the relay.
[00:26:16] Joe: I want to talk about one more transition you had. So you transition to financial planning. You become an intern in Houston. I’m wondering what it’s like. You’re 30 years old. You’re an Olympic champion. You’re the first woman in history to win an Olympic medal in both the summer and winter Olympics, and now you’re in this office and you’re the low intern on the totem pole.
[00:26:40] Joe: Like, how hard is that?
[00:26:43] Lauryn: It’s not hard when you see where you wanna go, when you have a very clear path to what you’re trying to achieve. Um, and when I say clear, it’s like a murky clear, because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be, but I knew that this was a path to take me somewhere other than where I had been.
[00:26:59] Lauryn: And with all the things I had experienced financially, I was like, “I need this financial information for myself in order to be able to, you know, take myself to the next level as far as what I wanna achieve.” So it was easy to say, “Hey, let me pause. Let me learn this information,” one, because I had that emergency fund that we talk about so much.
[00:27:18] Lauryn: I had dollars to be able to support me, to be able to, you know, cover my rent and my expenses and things like that during that time while I was earning $12. But two, um, I’m investing in what I wanna do and what I wanna be in the future, and with that clearly in mind, it, it was easy to say, “Hey, it doesn’t matter that this is $12 an hour.”
[00:27:34] Lauryn: Honestly, I would’ve done it for free.
[00:27:35] Joe: It’s just still 600… You made 600,000, over 600,000 at the top, and then you’re making $12 an hour.
[00:27:42] Lauryn: It is. I mean, I’ve also driven Uber. Like, yeah, after I retired, my sister was driving Uber. She’s like, “Hey, I can get this bonus if I can get somebody to do 30 trips.” And I didn’t need Uber money, but, like, I’m not above doing whatever it is that is gonna create a new experience, because you never know what’s gonna happen from it.
[00:27:59] Joe: Should we start asking our Uber drivers, “Are you a former Olympian?”
[00:28:02] Lauryn: Yes. Yes. You absolutely should.
[00:28:03] Joe: I bet you’re an Olympic champion ’cause man, look at the way you turned left back there.
[00:28:06] Lauryn: Yes.
[00:28:07] Jay: So how, how did you replace the external aspects of- cheering, in winning, in having the success that you had, and then sort of having to start at that $12 an hour knowing that you had to rise back up to the top.
[00:28:26] Jay: What, what was the internal drive that you had to, to get you where you are today?
[00:28:30] Lauryn: Yeah, no one’s cheering for you when you are earning $12 an hour. They’re telling you, “Hey, go do your job, and I’m gonna evaluate you on whether or not you did a good job for that $12.”
[00:28:39] Joe: That’s the best coffee anybody ever brought me.
[00:28:41] Lauryn: Right. Com- com- completely different than you are the best in the world and, and let’s go. But I had to really think about, like, what do I want for myself? Who’s in charge of my life? Who is the driver of this person right here? And my dad passed away in 2008, and I think that was a time where I really started to reflect on who am I beyond the track?
[00:29:02] Lauryn: Uh, who do I wanna be? And so I really started to focus on, like, what that looks like. What do I wanna be outside of this despite the idea of what people think of $12 an hour, or despite the idea of what they think about the fact that I was an Olympian. I bought a house, you know, my, my fourth house in cash.
[00:29:19] Lauryn: I did it because I wanted financial security. A lot of people were like, “That’s a terrible financial mistake.” I got really clear about who I was and what I wanted for myself, and I don’t think a lot of people spend time doing that. I think they spend a lot of time chasing the narrative, you know, trying to keep up with the Joneses, and Instagram influencers, et cetera.
[00:29:36] Lauryn: You gotta be really, really clear about who you are and where you wanna go.
[00:29:40] Jay: We, we talked last night and I told you what our foundational discussions were here at the center. We talked about, you know, emergency fund, being able to develop the budget. We talked about debt reduction, and then I talked about credit management, and I asked you for a, a fifth or sixth one, and you just came up with goals.
[00:29:58] Jay: And it seems like to me that that is what you go back to every single time. So whether it was Olympics in the summer or if it was the Olympics in the winter or when you started your new job, you had those goals in, in mind. What led you to be able to set those goals for yourself?
[00:30:14] Lauryn: I had to really just think about, like, who I am, what are my values, and where do I wanna be in life, and I think that is the, the crux of goal-setting.
[00:30:22] Lauryn: Where are you trying to go? Because we’re all waking up every day, we get 24 hours in that day to make the most of it or to let it pass us by, and if you don’t know where you’re going, then you’re gonna be, you know, two years down the road and in the exact same spot, kind of like that movie Groundhog Day when he just got stuck.
[00:30:38] Lauryn: Uh, so really thinking about, what do I want for my life and then how am I going to achieve it, I think, is step one regardless of whether we’re talking about finances or the Olympics or where you wanna be spiritually or emotionally. Where do I wanna go and why is this important to me? Not what everybody else thinks, because I get to choose where I’m going in life.
[00:30:58] Joe: Well, Jay, I’m a little annoyed we didn’t make Lauren sweat. She made it through the first half of today’s show without even breaking a sweat.
[00:31:05] Lauryn: Cool as a cucumber.
[00:31:08] Joe: As if she’s been on a stage this big before. Right. I’m not sure she’s been on a stage this big. But at the halfway point of every show, we have a trivia competition.
[00:31:18] Joe: Uh, we’re gonna meet a few students, because on Wednesday normally, Stackers, as you know, we ask you all a trivia question, but today we’re gonna play Like It’s Friday. On our Friday shows we have a competition, and today we’re gonna have three finalists. We’re gonna give away three things of which, you’re gonna be really excited to find this out, I forgot to bring.
[00:31:36] Joe: So we are going to mail you either, if you take first place, you have your choice, either a Stacking Benjamins cool shirt, amazing shirt, so you can show everybody here, all the other Eagles, how cool you are by being a Stacking Benjamins fan. S- no snickering. What’s the snickering? And then second, you can, uh, have a Stacking Benjamins mug.
[00:31:57] Joe: Third, I wrote this book that, Lauren, you’ve had in your book club twice- Mm-hmm … called Stacked: Your Super Serious Guide to Modern Money Management, which is all the fundamental things that Jay and the other fine people here are teaching you. So whoever’s first gets the first choice. Whoever’s second gets from the two that are left.
[00:32:14] Joe: Whoever’s third’s gotta take whatever’s left. Deal?
[00:32:16] Lauryn: No, no, no. Say no. You wanna negotiate. As a student-
[00:32:20] Joe: Let’s get moving … I’m
[00:32:21] Lauryn: a broke college student. I need to stack some Benjamins. Please give me Benjamins, Joe. Don’t give me a shirt, I need Benjamins.
[00:32:28] Joe: Lauren thinks this podcast has a budget. But we don’t have a budget, we have Doug.
[00:32:33] Joe: So Doug, Doug, what’s our question today, man?
[00:32:40] Doug: Hey there, Stackers. Wait, hold on. We’re on Texas A&M-Texarkana campus, right? Steve, we’re gonna roll that one again. Let’s go Hey there, Eagles. I’m Olympic caliber athlete and guy who once made it from the couch to the refrigerator in under four seconds, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. You know, it helps when that little mini fridge is right next to the couch.
[00:32:59] Doug: Anyway, today we’re doing things a little differently because we’re here live at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. We’ve got three A&M-Texarkana students ready to battle it out for trivia supremacy, and sitting right here with us is someone who knows the answer to today’s question better than anybody. At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Lauren Williams lined up for the women’s 100 meter final.
[00:33:27] Doug: And for those of you who aren’t track people, 100 meters is just a little longer than a football field from goal line to goal line. Lauren raced against the fastest women on earth that night and came home with the Olympic silver medal. Let’s give her a hand. So students, here’s your question. To the hundredth of a second, what was Lauren Williams’ official time in the women’s 100 meter final at the 2004 Athens Olympics?
[00:33:56] Doug: Closest guess wins. And Lauren, no helping. Make them earn it like you had to. I’ll be back with the answer right after I challenge Lauren to a 100 meter race, at which point I will immediately remember that my hamstrings are tighter than Joe’s mom’s purse strings.
[00:34:14] Joe: That, that almost sounds like Doug, uh, doesn’t wanna do the 100-yard dash.
[00:34:18] Joe: Let’s find out who our contestants are first. Our first contestant, what is your name?
[00:34:23] contestant: Callie Lambert.
[00:34:24] Joe: Callie. Callie. Callie. Callie, where are you from originally?
[00:34:28] contestant: I’m from Dekalb, Texas, so like 40 minutes away from here.
[00:34:31] Joe: From Dekalb, Texas. I’m super happy you’re here with us. You get to guess first, Callie. W- how fast do you think Lauren ran the 100 meter dash back in 2004?
[00:34:40] contestant: 42 seconds.
[00:34:42] Joe: Whoa. 42 seconds. All right. Nice guess. Let’s see who our second contestant is. And you are, sir?
[00:34:50] Speaker 6: I am Samuel Jones.
[00:34:51] Joe: Samuel. Where are you from, Samuel?
[00:34:53] Speaker 6: I am from good old Texarkana.
[00:34:55] Joe: Whoo. I, I wish you had some enthusiasm, Samuel. Whoo. If only Samuel could get excited. Samuel, Callie said 42 seconds.
[00:35:04] Joe: What do you think?
[00:35:06] Speaker 6: For me, um, I’m gonna challenge her and say, um, I believe she probably did it in like, um, 35.
[00:35:13] Joe: 35 seconds. All right. Which means we have our third contestant, handsome man here. What’s your name?
[00:35:21] contestant: Hello. I’m Stephano.
[00:35:23] Joe: Stephano. Where are you from originally?
[00:35:25] contestant: From a little country in South America called Ecuador.
[00:35:28] Joe: Called Ecuador. L- like right around the corner, like Dekalb or Texarkana.
[00:35:32] contestant: Yeah. Like, you know-
[00:35:33] Joe: Yes …
[00:35:34] contestant: you take two planes
[00:35:36] Joe: and- Besides that, it’s all the same, same. Right. Yes. Samuel said 35 seconds. Callie said 42. What do you think?
[00:35:44] contestant: 28.72
[00:35:47] Joe: Stefano says 28.72. Now let me tell you what’s funny is that, uh, Lauren and I were talking earlier today, and Doug said that Lauren knew this better than anybody.
[00:35:59] Joe: And Lauren, what did you tell me?
[00:36:01] Lauryn: I don’t know the answer to the question.
[00:36:05] Joe: She could not remember. But then we looked it up, and she’s like, “Yeah, she did remember.”
[00:36:09] Lauryn: But, but I did have a guess.
[00:36:10] Joe: Yes, she did have
[00:36:11] Lauryn: a guess. And I think I won the trivia with my guess.
[00:36:13] Joe: All right. Is Stefano gonna win this at 28.72, Samuel gonna win this at 35 seconds, or Callie at 42?
[00:36:22] Joe: We’re gonna find out in a second. We’ll be right back. All right, let’s put Callie back on the microphone for a second. So Callie, you said 42 seconds. Samuel said 35. Stefano said 28. You feeling confident?
[00:36:34] contestant: I suppose, eh.
[00:36:35] Joe: All right.
[00:36:37] Lauryn: What was your thought process in coming up with that number?
[00:36:39] contestant: I mean, it’s the 100-meter dash, so it wouldn’t be like…
[00:36:42] contestant: At best it would be at least one minute, but-
[00:36:45] Joe: Yeah …
[00:36:45] contestant: the Olympics, it’d probably be shorter than that.
[00:36:48] Joe: Yeah, it’s not gonna be super long. So Samuel, it looks like you got sandwiched, man, uh, with Callie at 42 and Stefano at 28. How you feeling? Feeling confident?
[00:36:58] Speaker 6: I’m definitely feeling confident, let me tell you.
[00:37:00] Speaker 6: I feel like I’m taking it home. That is-
[00:37:02] Lauryn: Okay. Wait, wait, wait, but why 35 then? Yeah. Tell, tell us why you came up with 35.
[00:37:07] Speaker 6: Well, I came up with 35 because I just had confidence in those feet.
[00:37:11] Lauryn: Have you ever watched a track meet before?
[00:37:13] Speaker 6: I have, and I kinda feel like I put a impossible dream on it. But then I was thinking about Happy Feet and thought I might have a chance.
[00:37:22] Joe: He should’ve negotiated. He should have. That’s, uh, yeah. Mm-hmm. Uh, and Stefano, you’ve got the lowest one with 28. You feeling good?
[00:37:31] contestant: Uh, not as confident as contestant number two. Uh-
[00:37:36] Joe: I think it’s impossible to be as confident as contestant number two. Do
[00:37:40] Lauryn: you think you’re the winner, or do you think someone else is the winner?
[00:37:43] contestant: In my mind I’m always the winner, regardless of what the books say.
[00:37:46] Joe: Oh.
[00:37:50] Joe: Oh, that’s what I love about our students here, Jay. All right, let’s see who is taking home the gold, silver, and bronze. Doug, what’s our answer?
[00:37:59] Doug: Hey there, Stackers. I’m finely tuned athletic machine and holder of several basement land speed records, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Before the break, I asked our three Texas A&M University-Texarkana contestants how fast the woman sitting right here with us, Lauren Williams, ran the 100 meter final at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
[00:38:19] Doug: Now, here’s what makes this number ridiculous. The gold medal that night went to Belarus’ Yulya Nesterenko. Her time, 10.93 seconds. Think about that. Years of training, thousands of starts, thousands of workouts, making it all the way to the Olympic final, and the difference between gold and silver was… Well, I’ll have that in a few seconds because it’s less time than it takes OG to say no.
[00:38:45] Doug: Which of our three students came closest? Because Lauren Williams crossed the finish line only three one-hundredths of a second behind Nesterenko in Athens and won her Olympic silver medal in 10.96 seconds. 10.96 seconds.
[00:39:04] Lauryn: A turtle could have gone faster in 28 seconds. Yeah. 42 seconds for the 100 meters?
[00:39:10] Jay: I think even I could’ve beat those three numbers. I’m that
[00:39:13] Lauryn: turtle. For frame of reference, I also ran the 200 meters, and my fastest time in the 200 meters was 22.2 seconds. Like so we could have ran double the space with the shortest person and still had time left over.
[00:39:30] Joe: But isn’t it great, if you had won 42 seconds slower than your 200 time, Callie would’ve given you a high five.
[00:39:37] Joe: Like, that’d be great. She’d be like, “Great run.” Like, that is awesome. All right. Stefano, you get to go first. Do you want the book, the mug, or the sweet swag?
[00:39:48] contestant: I’ll, I’ll take the swag.
[00:39:49] Joe: The sweet swag. I want to
[00:39:50] contestant: represent Stacking Benjamins.
[00:39:51] Joe: Awesome. Good work. Nice job. Samuel, you got second. You got the mug or the awesome Stacked book.
[00:39:57] Speaker 6: I want the awesome Stacked book ’cause knowledge is power.
[00:40:00] Joe: Awesome. Nice job. And Callie, you’re taking home a mug. How about that?
[00:40:03] contestant: Hey, I
[00:40:04] contestant: like mugs.
[00:40:05] Joe: Fantastic. Big hand for our three contributors, everybody. All right. And by the way, the second half of the show is going to be your questions, so we’ve got lots of people here, and we’d love to s- find out what our students are thinking.
[00:40:19] Joe: But Jay, while people are lining up to ask their question, maybe you’ve got another one for Lauren to kick us off in the second half?
[00:40:25] Jay: So the question that I get asked a lot from our students has to deal with credit cards. There are talking heads out there that some just say you should never have a credit card ever, and then there is a, an approach where you should have one and manage it well.
[00:40:41] Jay: What are your thoughts on credit cards?
[00:40:43] Lauryn: I think you should have one, and you should manage it well. I know the talking heads say no debt ever, but you never know when you’re going to need your credit- And the way that the economic system is set up in America, you, you are likely to need your credit over the course of time.
[00:40:57] Lauryn: And no time like college to start building that credit. I recommend a secure credit card. Uh, when I say secure, that means you, you give money to the organization that is giving you the credit card, and then you spend on it. And so now you have the money already there as collateral, so you can’t really get yourself in trouble, but you do, you go ahead and pay it off on time.
[00:41:17] Lauryn: But that’s a great way to build credit without making sure that you end up in any kind of trouble. So unsecured idea would be like, “Hey, I can run this card up to the limit, and nobody can do anything about it if I don’t pay.” But you absolutely should pay. You should pay on time, you should pay in full, but the secured way i- is a way to go to get started.
[00:41:34] Joe: Jay, you’ve got a cool method to make sure the credit card gets paid in full every month as well, I know.
[00:41:39] Jay: So every one of our students has a subscription to something. And so regardless of how many they have, but put one of your subscriptions on there, we’ll pick on Netflix. You pay your Netflix bill with your credit card, and then you go into your credit card app, and you turn it on to where it gets paid off every single month.
[00:41:57] Jay: And then you go ahead and take that credit card, put it in a glass of water, and put it in your freezer. That way you’re gonna have some, uh, delayed, uh, reaction the next time you wanna try to use that card.
[00:42:08] Joe: Back when I was bad with money, I did this trick myself, Jay, and I gotta tell you, you feel very foolish when you’re at the sink with a hairdryer trying to get to your cash.
[00:42:17] Joe: That’s a little awkward. And you think about it, it’s just that little, little moment you need to go, “Is this really worth it?”
[00:42:23] Jay: Well, one of the things that we talk to our students is just you wanna try to build some friction away from your money. It’s very easy just to tap your phone. It’s very easy just to tap a card.
[00:42:34] Jay: It’s amazing how many times I will leave a grocery store, and I don’t even know how much I spent, ’cause I didn’t even have to look at the receipt, didn’t have to look at the register, ’cause I just tapped my card or-
[00:42:44] Joe: Isn’t that wild, by the way, that they, I mean, companies really are in the business of making it as easy for you to get in trouble as possible, Lauren.
[00:42:52] Lauryn: By design. Yeah. Absolutely. We, we think about, like, oh, points. That’s another one that gets people. I wanna earn all these points. But if you can’t pay the bill in full, and you’ve got a 30% interest rate, uh, those points are you’re not winning at life. They are. Yeah. Those big companies know exactly what they’re doing by gamifying things and making it so easy for us.
[00:43:10] Joe: Well- Yeah … let’s gamify this show and answer some questions. Uh, your name and your question.
[00:43:16] contestant: Cheryl, and I have this name that’s Saul-Sehy, similar to one of our hosts. So Lauren, you moved overseas, and a lot of Americans are doing that now for one reason or another, but for a lot of people, it’s just the cost of living.
[00:43:28] contestant: They find it’s, uh, in other places, and you budget for that, I’m assuming ’cause you’re an intelligent woman and did that. But have you found that there’s expenses you just did not expect would happen, and what were they?
[00:43:39] Lauryn: 100%. Um, moving to Medellín, Colombia has been a great experience. Uh, the general cost of living is better than America, but you’re right.
[00:43:48] Lauryn: I get caught off-guard frequently with little things. So one, bank expenses. Uh, I actually just did my Colombian taxes and realized I paid $125 in government fees, just miscellaneous fees that they just randomly pull out of your account here and there. And you know, it doesn’t work like that in America.
[00:44:06] Lauryn: The government is not taking money out of your bank account. What you have in your bank account, well, I mean, unless you’ve been garnished, but that’s a whole nother story. Um, but yeah, little fees like that, and then things being added on, uh, when you go out to… It’s what we call the gringo tax. So if your Spanish is not very good or if you don’t have any Spanish at all, the price is different than the person in front or behind you.
[00:44:26] Lauryn: Uh, so as my Spanish has gotten better, as I’ve learned, uh, my way around the city, I’ve understood, like, okay, an avocado only costs a dollar. It doesn’t cost, you know, $3. But I’m like, “Ooh, a $3 avocado. This is great. Look how big this avocado is compared to the price of America.” So little things and little fees I think have been the thing that have kind of snuck up on me.
[00:44:44] Joe: As an American, you’ve gotta deal with exchange rates as well. That’s gotta add some complexity.
[00:44:49] Lauryn: Yeah. This time last year, I was paying 25% less than I’m paying for my bills right now on, on a regular monthly basis. So a 25% increase in one year, uh, if you don’t get a 25% raise, you feel it.
[00:45:00] Joe: So that’s not a change in prices, to be clear.
[00:45:02] Joe: That’s just the dollar versus the local currency in Colombia.
[00:45:05] Lauryn: Exactly. Um, the dollar is not very strong right now. It is not the Colombian economy that is driving that. That is the American economy, and yeah, things just cost a lot more for me. So you take sometimes for granted that in America we have strong currency, and that it’s, you know, gonna stay the same, but, uh, I have to deal with that.
[00:45:24] Joe: Thank you for the question. Our next person, your name and your question.
[00:45:28] contestant: So this is Stefano again. Throughout this podcast, we have been able to hear the amazing stories that you have to share for all of us, and we can say that you have achieved a lot of really important things representing your country, but also representing yourself financially.
[00:45:42] contestant: So I am curious to know what becoming financially successful did not solve for you?
[00:45:47] Lauryn: What did financial- becoming financially successful not solve for me? I would say community. Uh, there are things that money just can’t buy you, and part of my reason for moving to Medellín, Colombia, was I did not feel community where I was living.
[00:46:00] Lauryn: I was in a city where I didn’t know anyone. I was having a really hard time making friends. Uh, after 10 years of being in that city, I almost instantly in Colombia started to build community, uh, and that has literally been priceless. When you get ill, uh, I had a baby 16 months ago, the moms that came around me and helped me figure out, like, you know, how do you do this momming thing?
[00:46:21] Lauryn: Or, “Can you watch my child for a bit while, you know, I go and do this thing?” Community is something that you can’t pay for. We talked last night about the idea that your network is your net worth. I also feel very supported by that community and how, you know, it’s helped me keep business going as I’ve kind of revamped and remodeled and, and moved along.
[00:46:39] Joe: I used to think that community was really important at the beginning of your career. As I’m studying a lot the nature of retirement, I’m finding it’s equally as important at the end of your career. In retirement, if you don’t have community, the loneliness epidemic is a huge, huge thing. Retirement’s either the best time of your life or it’s horrible, and it is those communities that you forged pre-retirement that you’re holding onto during those retirement years that also really matter.
[00:47:06] Joe: So making friends early, but then continuing to make new friends in your 30s, 40s, 50s. People struggle to make friends in their 40s and 50s and 60s, and man, if you can continue to do that, you’re ahead of the game in being happy. ‘Cause more money does not make you more happy.
[00:47:22] Jay: Yeah, I, I definitely wouldn’t want you to confuse net worth and self-worth.
[00:47:27] Jay: They’re not tied together at all.
[00:47:30] Joe: Next up.
[00:47:32] Speaker 6: Hello, it’s Samuel back again. My question to you, Ms. Lauren, is what financial services do you recommend to a first-gen student to begin their journey?
[00:47:43] Lauryn: I think the most important thing to do, and Jay brought this up earlier, is set a strong foundation. So get that emergency fund in place.
[00:47:52] Lauryn: I don’t know if this question is still coming up anymore, but somebody had asked me earlier, uh, if I was in my 20s and I had $1,000, what would I do with it? I’d put the majority of it in an emergency fund. That’s the one thing a lot of people don’t have. If something pops up and you need to get home to your family, if, you know, you get four flat tires, I’ve actually seen that with a client before, you’ve gotta be covered, and covered means having some cash on hand.
[00:48:14] Lauryn: And like I said, we hear the, the phrase all the time, broke college students, so there’s usually not a lot of extra cash. But start to build that emergency fund, get that foundation in place, and then also be thinking about the big, bad B word. And I’d, I, I’d like to call it a spending plan instead of that B word, to say, like, I need to know, like, what I have and what I can spend, what my expenses look like.
[00:48:33] Lauryn: But ultimately, start setting goals. Who do I wanna be 20 years from now? Who do I wanna be 10 years from now? And you’re not gonna know exactly the answer to those questions, but you need to start formulating what it looks like to live in a $500,000 house or to buy a $30,000 car. What does it look like to be able to afford those things, and what do I need to do now to put myself in a position to have them later?
[00:48:58] Joe: What I like to do, too, Samuel, tactically with an emergency fund, uh, that a lot of people starting out don’t know, separate that from the main account where you spend money. 100%. Don’t commingle it with your main checking account. Have your checking account at Red River Credit Union, and then have y- a separate savings account at Red River that just is my emergency fund.
[00:49:17] Joe: Because when you commingle it, all of a sudden all of these expense… Y- your brain has all these wonderful ways of spending money, at least mine does. “Oh, you know what we could do? Yeah, yeah.” Thanks for the question.
[00:49:28] contestant: Angelo Mitchell. My question is, y- you’ve spoken about the importance of having professional people around you that you surround yourself with.
[00:49:36] contestant: Did you see any, um, particular experience with your personal people that you surround yourself with, friends, family, whatnot, when you were in college, as far as the influence they might have had on your financial wellbeing, influences and things like that?
[00:49:51] Lauryn: Absolutely, and, and I think there’s a, even the, you know, this idea of FOMO, there’s students who pay out of pocket for college, who come from a different socioeconomic background, and you wanna kinda try to keep up with them and what they’re able to do on the weekend.
[00:50:05] Lauryn: There was no allowance coming my way. My dad used to send a, a food stamp card. So you know, food stamps used to be, like, a paper thing that you, you’d have, uh, and then they switched it to a card. He’d mail the card to me. I was allowed to buy groceries with half of it, and then I would mail it back to him and he would buy groceries with the other half.
[00:50:20] Lauryn: Um, so that was kind of, like, our financial situation. But you’d see other people going out to eat or, you know, grabbing the, the local fast food. I’d realize, like, hey, like, I can’t, I can’t do that all the time. I can only do that occasionally. The dollars and cents don’t add up. And so then it also prompted me to start kinda thinking about, like, okay, I wanna be in, in groups of people where they can spend, and I wanna figure out how I can spend more, or be in a position where I can spend comfortably like that.
[00:50:44] Lauryn: So I don’t wanna not be in this group, but I also don’t wanna hang out all the time with you know, the, the people that can’t afford anything. So it’s like deciding what rooms I wanted to be in and how I was going to influence my friends versus let my friends influence me.
[00:50:56] Joe: Is that a difficult conversation?
[00:50:57] Joe: I, s- I don’t wanna go out tonight.
[00:51:00] Lauryn: Absolutely. Um, at that age, it was, it was very difficult. They’re like, “Come on, yeah, you can. Oh, it doesn’t matter. YOLO.” That was a, a fun phrase. Is there a new YOLO phrase or is… Oh, YOLO’s still a thing? Okay, great. Um, but as you get more clear about your goals, you get more confident in being able to say no.
[00:51:18] Lauryn: I like this idea of being able to come up with an alternative, so, you know, let’s not go out tonight, let’s stay in and play one of Joe’s board games because, you know, that’s free and fun.
[00:51:27] Joe: It’s always the best idea.
[00:51:28] Lauryn: I don’t know, unless the board games are not fun.
[00:51:30] Joe: Just stay in and… D- no. My board games- Yeah
[00:51:32] Joe: super fun.
[00:51:32] Lauryn: I haven’t played one yet. I don’t know.
[00:51:34] Joe: I know.
[00:51:34] Jay: And, and, and one of the things that we discussed yesterday that I definitely want to include today is that those that are around you, share what your goals are. That way, when they do ask you to do something, they’ll be understanding when you choose not to do it, or you provide that alternative and be able to still spend time with them.
[00:51:52] Lauryn: Talking is so important. That would be the one big thing that I would say. Like, what would I say to, you know, what would old Lauren say to young Lauren, is be more open talking about your finances so that you can understand what’s happening with the people around you, but also you can learn more from them if they’re open and you’re open as well.
[00:52:09] Joe: Well, yeah, because if people don’t, if you just say, “No, I can’t go,” then to Stefano’s point earlier, like community, where we were talking about, you know, community’s so important, you’re gonna lose your community.
[00:52:19] contestant: Mm-hmm.
[00:52:19] Joe: You don’t wanna lose your community, so you gotta give them the, the alternative and what the goals are, like Jay was saying.
[00:52:25] Joe: We got time for two more questions.
[00:52:28] contestant: Got a question for you. My name is Kimberly. My question for you is, as we’ve said earlier, the older you get, you gain knowledge with how to handle wealth and managing money. You also mentioned that you’re a mother. So as a mother, what is something that you want to instill in your child?
[00:52:50] Lauryn: Delayed gratification. Um, I think it is so important to, to kind of ditch the idea that you deserve everything right now, that you can press a button and it show up, presto chango. That is not the way that I grew up. You know, now even though I am a millennial now living in that world, and I appreciate those comforts, I think there’s so much value in being able to say, “Let me pause.
[00:53:12] Lauryn: Let me think about, like, whether or not this is a good decision for me. Let me think about how long it’s gonna take me to buy that piece of candy or buy that ice cream cone. Let me save up my allowance.” Those small principles I think go a long way when you’re 17, 18 years old, and you’re, you’re heading off to college and, and you’ve been told that your whole life.
[00:53:29] Lauryn: You already had those habits in place. So I think delayed gratification is really important.
[00:53:33] contestant: I think that’s
[00:53:34] Joe: huge, and it’s so tough. Delayed gratification is very difficult. We’ve got a wonderful resource for people. A woman named Karen Holland has a nonprofit called Gifting Sense, where starting in middle school where kids really start to feel that urge to buy lots of stuff, it teaches them to build their case before they do it, and then they learn that, “You know, maybe I don’t want this stuff.”
[00:53:55] Joe: A great resource. We’ll link to it in the show notes ’cause delayed d- gratification, I think, is everything. Uh, we’ve got time for one more question
[00:54:04] Speaker 6: This is coming from me being a student at A&M, and also being a social work student as well, and studying in the micro, macro, and a meso level. For up-and-coming athletes, I chose to not be selfish with this question, um, what advice would you give an up-and-coming athlete who doesn’t have that community support?
[00:54:27] Speaker 6: What advice would you give them on how to, if they can’t get it, how to move forward, how to process that, um, say if we come from the backgrounds where you don’t have the support, but you do have the drama. You know what I’m saying? Mm-hmm. So how would you empower them to have a paradigm shift?
[00:54:43] Lauryn: I would say find someone.
[00:54:45] Lauryn: Uh, you know, there’s another saying, like you said, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, find yourself a new room.” If you can’t find anyone in your immediate circle of, you know, what you refer to as your community, start building a bigger community. You know, I don’t say throw your community in the trash because, you know, there’s people that, you know, serve for various parts of your life, various purposes in your life, but they’re not serving the purpose of where you wanna grow, and you need to put yourself in a new room and figure out people that are gonna be willing to talk about finance, that know people that are ready to talk about finances.
[00:55:12] Lauryn: And as an athlete, you’re a business. For a lot of athletes, you gotta figure out how to set money aside to pay taxes, you might need to set up an LLC and an S corp, you need to pay your massage therapist, pay your coach, pay all of these different people that are on your team. Uh, and so you’ve gotta get someone around you that’s gonna help you understand, how do I run a business?
[00:55:30] Lauryn: Because overnight I became a business owner when, you know, yesterday I was just a, a college athlete, today I’m now earning income and I’ve gotta put all these different pl- uh, pieces of the puzzle in place.
[00:55:41] Joe: It is so hard when you’re young, especially when you’re in college, to look at some of the people that you really wanna ask questions to ’cause you think, “I’m just a college student.
[00:55:49] Joe: Why do they wanna talk to me?” I, I’ll tell you from the other side of that, they wanna talk to you and they wanna help you. So being brave and asking some people, uh, the question. I think the issue, I, I would say that probably, Jay, I don’t wanna speak for you, but we’ve, you and I have had this discussion before.
[00:56:06] Joe: The problem that you and I get, and Lauren, you and I have talked about this, we don’t have enough people asking us. We would love to answer more people’s questions, um, if they’re wondering and they need somebody that has been there before to ask them a question. And I know that’s tough, but being a little brave and asking, it goes a really long way.
[00:56:23] Joe: What’s the worst they can say? They, they can say no, and you’re already at no, right . You’re already there, so it’s not gonna get any worse. Well, speaking of being brave, big hand for everybody that asked questions tonight. That’s fantastic, helping us make the show. Jay, what’s next here with this beautiful program of yours, my friend?
[00:56:41] Jay: Fortunately, we’re gonna be bringing in anywhere from 400 to 450 high school students. With the help of RRCU, we’re gonna have an event that we call Spark. But we have a reality fair that we will send all 400 of those students through. It’s basically a budgeting. You know, they’re given their annual salary, now they have to go purchase a house or rent a car, what size truck they’re gonna have, utilities, you name it.
[00:57:05] Jay: Some of them are told that they have a child, some do not. And then we’re also gonna bring in some workforce companies here that are gonna talk about the skillsets that they need to be able to develop between now and graduation date, so that they’re not just leaving A&M with an incredible, incredible theoretical book degree.
[00:57:23] Jay: We want them to have those soft skills as well, but we’re thoroughly, thoroughly looking forward to that.
[00:57:27] Joe: Wow, that’s cool. So we’re not even talking college students, even local high school students.
[00:57:30] Jay: Yes, so w- And we also get to give them a tour of campus, and so hopefully we’ll have some future Eagles that, uh, come into campus already with some financial literacy background.
[00:57:39] Joe: That is, that is awesome. Lauren, thank you so much for coming here.
[00:57:44] Lauryn: Thank you for having me. This has been a game-changer. Uh, it’s really filled my cup. I haven’t done anything like this in a while, and I, I love giving back to communities that are the next generation of people that could be financial planners, that are gonna be productive citizens, that are gonna be financially free and financially independent, so let’s go.
[00:58:06] Joe: And people find you at worthwinning.com?
[00:58:09] Lauryn: Worth-winning.com.
[00:58:11] Joe: But yes. Worth-winning.com. All right, that’s gonna do it for tonight. Thank you so much everybody for coming out, for being a part of this lovely community. Doug, you’ve got it from here, man. What should we have learned on today’s show?
[00:58:23] Doug: So what’s stacked up on our to-do list for today?
[00:58:27] Doug: First, take some advice from Lauren. Winning with money means getting started. Even if it’s small amounts, you’re one step closer every time you lock money away. Second, just like Lauren’s workouts, building your money engine means building a base. You don’t need flashy investments or a big-time job to win.
[00:58:46] Doug: The little actions win the day. But the big lesson. Okay. Lauren Williams is an Olympic medalist and a financial planner, right? Which means I finally found someone qualified to accept my challenge, the financial 100 meter dash. Here’s how it works. We sprint 50 meters, stop, rebalance a three fund portfolio, sprint another 25, calculate the tax consequences of a Roth conversion, then sprint to the finish line while explaining to Joe why my cryptocurrency is absolutely coming back.
[00:59:21] Doug: I don’t- Lauren, I’ll warn you, I’m very good at one of those things.
[00:59:26] Joe: I don’t
[00:59:26] Doug: think- Okay, Joe. I don’t think that was necessary. Special thanks to Lauren Williams for joining us today. For more on Lauren’s financial planning practice, head to worthwinning.com. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com.
[00:59:44] Doug: Thanks also to Jay Davis for joining us. Nice job, Jay. We could use a better host for this show. Look, Joe, sorry, you had that coming. Want more information on the RRCU Center for Financial Literacy and Investment? Head to the university website at tamut.edu. And speaking of the university, let’s hear it for all the Eagles who came out tonight.
[01:00:07] Doug: Looking for a great education right down the road from Joe’s mom’s basement? Come to Texarkana. Apply at dammit.edu. Wait, that, that didn’t sound right. I probably should spell that out. That’s T-A-M-U-T.edu. That’s what I said, dammit.edu.
[01:00:29] Doug: This show is the property of SP Podcast, LLC, copyright 2026 and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. And oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
[01:00:55] Doug: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamins show.
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