You Cannot Coupon Your Way Into Financial Independence

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So I would never say that I was like really ever irresponsible with money. I mean, I had my moment in college. I think a lot of us did. When they were giving out credit cards to anyone with a pulse at the student union and then Old Navy had a grand opening at the Golden Triangle Mall and things kind of went downhill from there. But hey, you live and you learn. So once I got out of the college debt phase and became an adult, whatever that means, I could balance a checkbook, I paid my bills on time, nobody would have looked at my life and said there’s a woman who doesn’t have it together.

But here is the other part of that conversation. There were financial things, conversations happening in my own house where I basically thought, he understands this better than I do, he will make the right decision. And that was enough for me to just completely opt out on purpose. Nobody actually told me that I couldn’t be part of the conversation. I just told myself, what do I even have to offer here?

I took on that role willingly. So it wasn’t about what I knew. I was plenty capable. It was about whether I believed I had any standing to be in the room at all. And once I had decided the answer was no, I never even found out that there was a second question worth asking. The one about what is any of this supposed to build? And that’s when I started realizing how badly we have defined being good with money for women. We have taught women how to manage money. We didn’t teach them they were allowed to ask what it was for. And I don’t think I’m the only one who’s told herself some version of what do I even have to offer here about every room she actually had the right to be in.

What Unlearning Actually Means

Welcome back to Expand Your Empire. I am Amanda Taylor and I wanted to kind of start a new series, unofficially, talking about the financial advice that women need to unlearn. And what does unlearn really mean here? It’s not that budgeting or saving or paying off debt is bad advice. That’s just it. It’s only half of the advice.

We’ve been taught the defense really well. Don’t overspend. Don’t get into trouble. Keep something in reserve. What we haven’t been taught is the offense. How to own things. How to make your capital produce income. How to look at a number and know if it’s actually enough. That’s the gap that I want this series to live in. And we’re starting with budgeting because that is the clearest example of advice that solves the wrong half of the problem.

The Woman Who Mastered The Wrong Curriculum

So I’m going to combine dozens of women that I’ve talked to here, and you’ve probably met her too. Let’s say she’s 47. She’s making, clearing $200K a year. She’s got $80K sitting in cash because that makes her feel secure. She’s contributing to her retirement. She owns a house. Her credit score is good. She’s not running around buying things she can’t afford. By almost every definition we’ve been handed, she is great with money.

And then I ask her one question.

What do you need your assets to produce when you stop working?

And she has no idea.

I want to be really clear about something. Her problem is not that she screwed up. She didn’t make some catastrophic mistake. Her problem is that she mastered the curriculum she was given and that curriculum stopped too early. Nobody taught her the next chapter, so she doesn’t know it exists.

Paying your bills proves that you’re current, not that you have a strategy. Having a retirement account proves that you opened one, but not that you actually have a plan.

The Math Nobody’s Talking About

So here’s the math. Let’s say you get really serious and you find another $500 a month in your budget through real discipline and real effort. That is $6,000 a year. I’m not dismissing it. $6,000 is real money. But now there’s a second decision and it’s one not a lot of people are talking about. Do you spend the next 10 years congratulating yourself for skipping the coffee? Or do you ask what that $500 is actually going to become? Because that’s where the wealth conversation starts.

$500 a month invested for 20 years at a hypothetical 7% average annual return. That’ll grow to roughly $260,000. You’d have contributed $120,000 of your own money. The other $140,000 came from growth that you didn’t have to work for. Now, 7% is an illustration. It’s not a promise. Markets don’t move in a straight line. But it’s why finding the $500 isn’t the wealth strategy. Finding it just gives you capital. What you do with the capital is the strategy. And it’s a completely different conversation from the one we get handed by default to women.

Money advice sounds like: cut expenses, skip the latte, use this budgeting app to save more. The wealth conversation, the language changes entirely. You have equity, ownership, leverage, capital, deployment. One of those is about controlling consumption. The other is about accumulating ownership. You cannot coupon your way into financial independence. You can only cut so far. Ownership can keep compounding.

What Leverage Actually Is

Real estate is where this became really tangible for me. I’ve done deals where I didn’t have a penny of my own money in it. One loan covers the purchase. A separate source of capital covers the down payment and the rehab. So instead of asking how much property can my cash buy, we structure the capital around the deal. And once you understand this, you start to look at money differently.

I stopped asking how much cash I had and what I could afford to buy with it. I started asking what that cash could control and what other capital could come into the deal, what I’d actually own, what it would produce. That is what leverage does when it’s used correctly.

And I want to be careful here because people talk about leverage like it’s either magic or a trap. It’s neither. Bad debt can wreck you. But the right debt lets you control a productive asset without burying all your cash in that one purchase. So whatever you didn’t bury there is free to go do something else. And that is a completely different way of thinking than I have $100,000 so I can buy $100,000 worth of things. That’s not how capital works.

I’m not telling you this so you can go out and buy a rental property. I want you to ask the same questions about business, about a retirement account, an index fund, an asset that actually produces something. What am I putting in? What am I controlling? What is it producing? What could it become? And what is the rest of my capital free to do next?

Deploy is the whole thesis. Once you have created excess money, parking it isn’t the end of the decision. It’s the beginning of the next one.

The Rule I Now Use

I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. I sat down with my financial adviser because I was getting interested in real estate and I was learning more about banking and insurance and I wanted her to help me understand how all of that might fit together. And her answer was basically, you know what, that’s not a good idea. And when I asked why, that’s where the conversation kind of fell apart. So I never got a real answer. And eventually yes, I moved my money.

But I keep coming back to this story because it holds a different lesson every time I look at it. I’m not telling you the story to say that financial advisors can’t be trusted. That’s not the takeaway. The takeaway is this. I don’t need to know everything she knows. But if someone can’t explain to me why something does or doesn’t belong in my financial strategy, I’m not making that decision blindly just because she has a license and I don’t.

Here’s a rule I now use. If you can’t explain in plain English why you own something, what job it’s doing, and what could go wrong with it, then you don’t really understand it well enough yet. That’s not a call to go get a finance degree. It’s just a call to stop nodding along.

The Five Questions

Instead of perfecting every category in your budget, I want you to ask these five things. Let’s run them on our woman from earlier, the one making $200,000 with $80K sitting in cash.

Question one: what am I earning? That is your salary, commissions, any business income, rental income. Most people know this one cold. It’s the number on your paystub and you can usually tell someone within a few thousand without having to look anything up.

Question two: what am I keeping? This is where budgeting actually earns its keep. You’ve got a rough sense here too. You’re not overspending. There’s some margin every month, which is exactly why our woman has $80,000 sitting there in the first place.

Question three: where am I deploying it? Here’s where it gets quiet. Some of her money is going automatically into her retirement, a 401k, but she couldn’t tell you why it’s invested the way it is. And outside of that automatic contribution, the margin she’s been so disciplined about creating has mostly accumulated in cash. She’s never consciously decided which dollars are reserved, which dollars are long-term capital, and what each should be doing.

Question four: what am I owning? She owns a house and that 401k that she probably didn’t choose the funds in. Someone set it up for her years ago and she’s never opened it since. Outside of that, she would struggle to name a single asset she deployed capital into on purpose.

Question five: what does what I own actually produce? She probably doesn’t know what her 401k will generate as income when she needs it. She doesn’t know what role equity in her house plays in her entire plan. She’s never run the numbers on what it produces because nobody ever asked her to.

So we’ve got a huge gap between what we learned and what we are now learning to consider. That is not a woman who is bad with money. That’s a woman who was only ever taught to answer the first two questions and never handed the last three.

Cash Has A Job. But So Does Growth Capital.

Cash is not bad. Cash has a job. Your emergency fund has a job. Liquidity and stability. It needs to be there the day you need it. No questions asked. The problem starts when money you actually intend to grow sits in cash too. Not because it needs to be liquid, but because deciding what else to do with it feels scary. Your long-term capital has a different job than your emergency fund and that is growth. Confusing the two jobs can feel safe, but it quietly makes your long-term plan less safe.

So we’ll take that same $80,000 from earlier. Maybe only part of it is genuinely needed for that emergency fund, that short-term liquidity. At that hypothetical 7% return, $80,000 becomes roughly $157,000 over 10 years. If you’re leaving growth capital sitting undeployed, that has a cost too. We just never get a statement showing us the money we never made. So it never feels like a loss the way something in the market does.

But inflation is a risk. Living longer than your money is a risk. Having your whole net worth tied up in one house is a risk. Avoiding the market doesn’t remove the risk. It just changes which risk you’re carrying, usually without you ever having decided.

What Actually Changed For Me

We started this episode with me telling you that I convinced myself early on in my marriage that I had nothing to offer in the room where those financial decisions were being made. What changed wasn’t that I suddenly became a financial expert. But I stopped believing that expertise was the price of admission. I started getting curious and asking questions. What do we own? Why do we own it? What could this become? And those questions changed my financial life more than learning to build a better budget ever could.

Most of us don’t actually want more money. We want what it buys. The ability to leave a job, to help a parent, to walk away from something that isn’t working without every choice running through the paycheck first. That is what ownership gives you that a perfect budget never will.

What To Do This Week

So this week I don’t want you to go overhaul anything. Just answer the five questions. You’ll know the first one easy. You’ll have a decent guess on the second. But if the deploy, own, and produce questions make you uncomfortable, sit with that. This discomfort is exactly why I want to do this series. It exists because half of the advice was never going to get you where you actually want to go.

I am not interested in giving women a better budgeting tip. I am interested in giving women the second half of the education. The part about deploying capital and owning things that most of us were never handed.

I don’t want women to just earn more or save better. I want women owning things. Because when women control capital, they control the choices available to them. And that changes everything else.

If this episode made you realize that you know your income and your spending but you’re not sure whether you’re building enough, I’ve got a free worksheet for you. The link is in the show notes. It walks you through the whole thing: the earn, the keep, deploy, own, and produce for your own numbers.

We’re going to continue this conversation, re-evaluating and unlearning all of the financial advice that we’ve gotten or haven’t gotten. Because I don’t believe we have the full picture.

Until next time, keep building.