Shifting Goals in 2021 with the Happy Hour Ladies
Shifting Goals in 2021 with the Happy Hour Ladies
Today is the last Friday of the month and my regular listeners know that on the last Friday of the month, I host the happy hour on the podcast where I gather great friends with me to drink cheap drinks and talk about money topics.
Today is the first happy hour of 2021, and what an eventful first month it has been so far. As many of you know, or may remember, our regular happy hour cohost Liz, aka Mrs. Frugalwoods, is taking a sabbatical from the show. Starting this month, our good friend, Kassandra Dasent, will be filling the extra happy hour seat. Kassandra joins the show today to share more about her personal journey, and we all discuss our goals, plans, and thoughts on a new year. We will miss Liz, but you are really going to love hearing Kassandra’s take on personal finance.
What are we drinking?
Melanie from Dear Debt, Lola Retreat, and MentalHealthandWealth.com — Mocktail from The Mocktail Club
Tonya from Tonya-Stumphauzer.com — Water
Kassandra from kassandradasent.com — Green tea with lemon
Shannon — Boxed red wine
Podcast Notes
Kassandra has been a podcast guest a few times in the last six years, most recently in summer 2020. Kassandra describes herself as a multi-hyphanate.
Prior to 2014, Kassandra paid off about $55,000 of consumer debt and decided to start a blog, and this is where she met Shannon, Tonya, and Melanie. Since then, they’ve all kept in touch.
Kassandra is a singer/songwriter/producer and she owns a consulting company, in addition to working full time and being a stepmom and a wife and a long-distance caregiver to her mom.
Kassandra was born in Trinidad and lived there and also in Montreal. She has seen and experienced a lot of different cultures and she describes herself as being very real.
Shannon and Kassandra met up in 2015 in New York for a “drunch” and talked about everything. One topic they talked a lot about is being women of faith. At that time, Kassandra was looking to leave the blogging space, because she was getting another full-time job. Since then, Kassandra has been in and out of the personal finance blogging space.
Kassandra’s 2021 goals include:
Laugh more, live more, give more, love more. She is trying to hold on to these basic tenants, and she is trying to find the beauty in the moments wherever she can, because she lost people in her life to COVID last year. Those losses cemented these core tenants and makes her really savor her life and be grateful for what she has.
In 2020, her giving was at an all-time high, and one of her goals for 2021 is to top that giving. In addition, she wants to spend as much time as she can with her mom.
Regarding numbers and financial goals, she is at a point in her life where she is doing well and her finances are on autopilot, to a point where she will get to where she wants to go. She is more focused on her health, including her spiritual health and mental health.
Kassandra’s husband is a sound engineer and his job was completely sidelined in 2020. She feels blessed, because her income increased and she is earning the most in her professional career to date. Financially, she switched into a mindset of how can she help others and she started giving more. As she did that, more started coming back to her.
Melanie’s goals and intentions are pretty much the same as 2020, which is to stay alive, stay healthy, and stay debt free. She has a lot of financial goals and business goals, but with how heavy everything feels right now, this is not her main focus.
Melanie started a new Mental Health and Wealth challenge today, which is all about spending 13 minutes a day on self care: 7 minute workout, 5 minute meditation, and 1 minute checking your finances.
You can still sign up, because it is self-paced and you can do it on your own. Click here to register.
A big lesson in 2020 for Shannon was understanding triggers people have around different issues. She began to see more clearly events that could be triggering to people she cares about. We can’t control what happens, but we can control how we respond to it.
For Kassandra, with the breach of the Capital, what upset her wasn’t that security was breached, but the loss of life. It could easily have become a massacre. Life is life and it didn’t have to come to this. Being a black woman who has a black husband and stepson, she prays that her husband comes home safely every day.
If people weren’t clear on the type of person that Trump is, did last week’s events change their perception?
It starts with the people we elect to represent us. A big issue is that there aren’t term limits in Congress and they can be out of touch. The democracy of America started with injustices.
Since December, Tonya accomplished a lot of things, including writing a song. She finally picked a theme for 2021, which is Confidence. Tonya tends to be a people pleaser and she wants to reign that in. She is dividing it into subgroups.
Tonya paid off all of her debt and her net worth is at an all-time high, but she is still more asset rich rather than cash rich. She is currently weighing out the pros and cons of starting another personal finance YouTube channel that isn’t part of Budget and the Beach.
Tonya is learning to take what she is seeing and put it into deliberate action. She doesn’t want to feel anxious, worried, and stressed about what is going on in the world, but if there is something she can do about it she will do it. Worrying doesn’t serve a purpose and she is focusing on staying calm and doing deliberate action to fuel her confidence.
The last week of 2020 was horrible for Shannon and involved a lot of tough conversations with investors about The Gym running out of money. She will share more about this in a podcast later. The Gym survived 2020 and ended the year with a 43% increase in revenue compared to 2019, but investors were still not happy.
Shannon is going to take a week off, go to Florida, and unplug for five days. The last time she did this was in April 2020.
The last time Melanie unplugged was in January and February 2020, when she was traveling. She is in need of unplugging as well.
For Tonya, it was February 2020, when she was in Hawaii. She experienced this a little bit when she went away for a few days in June to Bass Lake.
For Kassandra, it has been years. Unplugging for her isn’t something she looks forward to, because she works in IT. She hasn’t taken a vacation in a long time and she is always connected. The last time she didn’t connect to a laptop was in 2015 or 2016.
Sometimes you just need to hit the reset button and recharge.
Shannon started dating during the last four months of the year. One guy she dated worked in IT, and he never got a break, because technology kept breaking.
Tonya recommended the show Bridgerton, and Kassandra recommended Lupin, both on Netflix.
Focus on what you can control and take care of yourself. If you are super sensitive, you need to control your inputs and what you are putting into your mind. Melanie limits her time on social media and she uses a newsfeed eradicator to get rid of her Facebook and Twitter feed headlines. Do what you need to do for your mental health.
TAKEAWAY: My biggest takeaway is the value of focusing on the things we can control in life, especially where our finances are concerned. There are so many factors out of our control that can impact our money, but when we focus on what we can control, as much as possible, it will insulate us from the times we are less in control of the situation, which is inevitable. The more we can control, the better we are for the times we can’t.
This pandemic has impacted all of us in a number of ways, and if your finances were something that stressed you out in 2020, I hope you’ll break the cycle in 2021 and start fresh with The Financial Gym. We’ve literally seen it all and we’ve literally fixed it all, so I hope you will leave your financial stresses in the past, like 2020, and head over to, or send friends to, financialgym.com.
If you have any topics you would like for us to talk about during happy hour, please feel free to email me at shannon@fingyms.com or tweet to me at blonde_finance or join the private martinis and your money Facebook group and let us know. Until next time, take care!!