Transcript
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it was overwhelming, for sure it was super overwhelming.
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I mean, like you said, you know you're holding an amount of money that you don't really think you're ever going to have in your life and obviously I recognize that through my work history.
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You know I would have earned that at some point, but you don't think that it's going to all sit in your bank at one time.
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And going back to my earliest money memory, you know it's coming from a scarcity mindset, of thinking we don't have enough, and I also remember times where, when my family did have enough, the goal was to spend it on ourselves.
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I remember when my mom was getting tax refunds and we would all go to the mall and get some little thing.
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There wasn't an idea of saving or looking ahead towards the future.
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It was kind of all let's just enjoy this while we have it, because you never know when you're going to have money again.
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And money is meant to be spent, which I do think is in some regards a healthy idea.
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But when it dropped into my lap with a $600,000 check, I didn't have the necessary tools and skills to be a good steward of that and it led to some poor choices that ultimately found us in debt.
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Welcome to the Sugar Daddy podcast.
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I'm Jessica.
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And I'm Brandon.
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And we're the Norwoods, a married millennial couple, here to help you build wealth so you can live the life you've always dreamed of.
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Brandon is an award-winning licensed financial planner with over 10 years of experience and millions of dollars managed for his clients all over the US.
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Don't worry, we leave all the intimidating finance mumbo-jumbo at the door.
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Stick with us as we demystify the realm of dollars.
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So it all makes sense.
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While giving you a glimpse into our relationship with money and each other, we are so glad you're here.
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Let's get started.
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Hey babe, what are we talking about today?
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Well, I'm so excited.
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I always start with I'm so excited, but I really always am so excited when we have new guests in the stew, because today we have Haley and Justin Brown-Woods from the Price of Avocado Toast.
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We have Haley and Justin Brown Woods from the Price of Avocado Toast, one of my personal favorite podcasts, and I love the name.
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I know I'm kind of going off on a tangent already, but I love the name and, funny enough, brandon's always like only white people eat avocado toast and I'm like that is not true.
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Like what are you even talking about?
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But he, what was it last time?
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You were like I don't think I had an avocado until I was in my twenties or something ridiculous.
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That's true.
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So it's just so relevant and they are also a married millennial couple, just like we are, and the podcast is so similar to ours and I just feel the vibes and the energy is always so good slid into their DMs and now they're here with us today.
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So, Justin and Hayley, thank you so much for being with us today.
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We're so excited to have you.
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Thank you so much for inviting us on.
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We're excited to chat.
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Yeah, it's always cool going on other podcasts, especially ones that are similar to ours, because it seems like we always get just as much of a takeaway as what we're maybe sharing with other listeners.
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So thanks for having us.
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Yes, of course, and I think there's a lot of.
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There's just a lot of similarities too, because I was in education, as were you, and then obviously, I've now left.
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You guys have left, no looking back, no regrets on my end anyway, and so I just feel like, you know, our kind of life trajectories are going in a similar direction of like let's be work optional, let's do what we love every day when we wake up, you know, let's put finance as a tool right To to live the life that we want and to grow the families the way that we want them to be.
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And so it's just.
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I think it's going to be an exciting conversation.
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So the thing is you say you left education, but you're still an educator.
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You're just not a teacher.
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You're just not in the classroom because you're still educating.
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You're not a classroom teacher, that's right.
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You're still an educator though yeah, totally, and we actually lean into that all the time too Like we are still educators, we're still teaching, we just teach a new content into different learners, but it's still the skills and backgrounds.
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Of education is still super prevalent.
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And I think that's so valid because, as educators, we obviously love the work that we do, but when you're in the classroom, there's so much red tape around everything and so much admin heavy work that I mean you're what teaching 20% out of all the things that you're actually doing, which takes away the joy.
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And at least now you guys get to build the curriculum and the lessons and the learnings the way you want them to be, which is really exciting.
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Yeah.
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So, okay, we need to tell people who you are and why we're talking to you.
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Sorry, like to ramble.
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Ok, let's get into the bio and then we'll get into your first money memory and we'll let it roll from there.
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Sound good OK awesome.
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Haley and Justin Brown Woods are a married millennial couple that began their debt-free journey in the fall of 2019.
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After blowing through a $600,000 lawsuit payout and racking up over $220,000 worth of debt in three and a half years, they got serious about changing the narrative they had created for their lives.
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In 18 months, they had paid off over $132,000 of debt and restarted their wealth journey.
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During this period, they began their podcast Price of Avocado Toast.
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Their focus has been on having open and honest money conversations with others to help remove the stigmas and shame around finances.
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The hope is that these conversations enlighten the younger versions of themselves and save them from the pitfalls Haley and Justin fell into.
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Now, over 160,000 downloads later.
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Haley is a successful financial coach who has helped her clients pay off over $700,000 of debt.
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Justin has since left his career as a public school teacher and joined Haley's business full time.
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Their family is working towards generational wealth building and a future of outrageous generosity.
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Love it.
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That is a great bio y'all.
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Thank you for being here.
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There's a lot to unpack in that bio.
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Yeah, we're going to get to it.
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As you were talking, I was like, oh, that's a lot that we've been through.
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You're like reliving it.
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You're like oh yeah, we did do that.
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That was us as soon as you said blowing through the $600,000 lawsuit settlement.
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I saw Justin's head just going like reliving through that loss.
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You're like how did I do that?
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Okay, wait, we're going to get to that, but let's start with money memories, because we always feel like your first money memory and the way you grew up with money really dictates what you do with money and how you are towards money later in life.
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Right, I'm sure you guys would agree with that, justin, what's your first money memory?
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You know it's a later memory, it's not one from when I was super, super young I was probably 10, but it's one that I told Haley the other day that really struck a chord with me and it stayed with me in such a vivid memory since my brother I have a twin brother.
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He and I were playing baseball and playing catch and I threw a ball to him and he missed it and it shattered my mom's windshield.
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And I remember super vividly racing up the stairs to tell mom and then her telling us to get out of the house and she essentially locked us out until like 8 PM that night, which, looking back on it, you know, in the early two thousands isn't.
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That isn't that bad, I guess.
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But I just remember thinking how much that windshield was going to cost our family and that my household of a single mom who worked a minimum wage job at Safeway did not have that expendable income.
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We did not have extra to go around.
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And I remember how upset I felt and how sorry I was that I put my family in this position.
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And it's such a core memory for me, it's so vivid.
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I remember exactly where I was standing when it happened, exactly my path up the staircase into my mom's bedroom.
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It's really really vivid, and so I would say that's probably my earliest money memory.
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Okay, I have to ask a follow-up what happened after she let you back in the house that night?
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we got back in and I think the next day, you know, we had it replaced for probably 200 bucks or something and my mom never made a mention of it again.
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You know, I honestly had never talked about it past that, even with her, or even my brother, uh, but it's just such a vivid memory for me and it's so interesting looking back on that.
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It's not a super early memory, but I think because, like I said, it's just such a vivid memory for me and it's so interesting looking back on that.
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It's not a super early memory, but I think because, like I said, it's so vivid, it's so deep ingrained in me.
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So here's the guy me asking a quick question as far as was it, because your brother should have caught it, or was?
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it.
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Yes, he should have caught it.
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We were playing, like you know.
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Yes, we were robbing home runs, so we would throw the ball, and the other one kind of had to track it and and rob it.
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And, um, it was just a little too inside my mom's car and so he's leaning over the hood trying to reach for it, but he's a lefty and couldn't catch it appropriately with his right hand.
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Oh well, oh well, all right.
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Well, now that the record has been set, straight it was his fault exactly you heard it here first, guys.
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You heard it here first, hayley, what is your first money memory?
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I knew that you were gonna ask this and I had to think back kind of far because I feel like money has just been a big part of my life in one way or another since like the beginning.
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But if I think of like the earliest, earliest memory, my grandma used my great grandma used to have this gigantic container that she would just put coins in.
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And I remember being maybe like five or six years old and we'd go to the bank and get the little wrappers and then just wrap a bunch of coins and she said you know, if you can count all these out I don't even know if I was in like kindergarten yet I was really young she said if you can count all of these and put them in, then we can go to the bank and we can, like, give you some of the money and then we can go shopping and get some candy bars or whatever.
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And I do remember rolling coins with my grandma.
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And yeah, do remember rolling coins with my grandma and I yeah, it was pretty young.
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Thanks, grandma, I love that.
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So she would give you a cut of the coins for the work that you did rolling yep, she did a little bit of paid labor.
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I love it that's awesome.
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Well, how do you think that your your money, memories and how you grew up with money as a couple that then got this huge settlement right, the payout from the lawsuit?
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You get a check for $600,000.
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What goes through your head?
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First off, I've never held a $600,000 check.
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So what is that like?
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I have just not for myself.
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Yeah, not the same.
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Well, your name's not on that.
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Well, justin mentioned that he grew up with a single mom and I also grew up with a single mom, so that has a lot to impact with our relationship with money.
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From the beginning, our moms did the best that they could.
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They hustled, but it just was really hard for them.
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So the financial education that we were given, passed down from our parents, was really just the best that they had at that time, which, quite frankly, was not very much financial education.
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And then when we got this money, we didn't really even know what to do.
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It's like when someone's unprepared to receive the lottery and they just win the lottery.
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It was kind of like okay, well now what do we do?
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I mean, you're the one that the check was in your name.
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How did you feel when you received that?
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It was overwhelming, for sure it was super overwhelming.
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I mean, like you said, you know you're holding an amount of money that you don't really think you're ever going to have in your life and obviously I recognize it through my work history.
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You know I would have earned that at some point, but you don't think that it's going to all sit in your bank at one time.
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And going back to my earliest money memory, it's coming from a scarcity mindset, of thinking we don't have enough, and I also remember times where, when my family did have enough, the goal was to spend it on ourselves.
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I remember when my mom was getting tax refunds and we would all go to the mall and get some little thing.
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There wasn't an idea of saving or looking ahead towards the future.
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It was kind of all let's just enjoy this while we have it, because you never know when you're going to have money again.
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And money is meant to be spent which I do think is in some regards a healthy idea.
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But when it dropped into my lap with a $600,000 check, I didn't have the necessary tools and skills to be a good steward of that and it led to some poor choices that ultimately found us in debt.
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So I think really the deepest part of it all is just the scarcity mindset, the idea that there's never going to be enough and so we might as well just enjoy it while we're here, because the future is up in the air anyways, so why worry about it?
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So what did you spend $600,000 plus dollars on?
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We want to know.
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Yeah, oh, my goodness, do you want to run down the list?
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You want me to?
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start, we did buy a house.
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We live in California.
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We bought a half million dollar house but we could have just paid cash for it and we put about $270,000 down for the down payment on a $530,000 house.
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So that's a massive, massive down payment.
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But then there's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars that kind of went unaccounted for.
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I mean, we've kind of gone through the list Like Justin bought a car which was like $30,000.
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He paid off his undergrad student loans which was like maybe under $10,000.
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He helped me with some of the credit card debt that I brought into our relationship when we first met.
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I think it was like $10,000-ish with that.
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And then we went on a vacation, spent some money there, we bought some technology like we bought like computer, camera, tv, but all of those things collectively didn't add up to $600,000.
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Yeah, because we've done this reflection a lot over the last few years, like what the heck was that?
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And, quite frankly, it was just spent on lifestyle creep, just like day-to-day spending, and at the time we must have been spending so much money because we were both working and then we both were going to school receiving like financial aid, refund, reimbursement checks, spending those on living expenses as well, as well as this six hundred thousand dollars.
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So, yeah, we were probably dropping like ten thousand dollars a month just on living expenses and at that time this is a long time ago that's a lot of money.
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We also did have a $30,000 wedding, which was totally worth it.
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That is one thing that we both say we would do again in a heartbeat.
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It was the most fun.
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I would honestly love to relive that day any chance I get.
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So that was well worth it.
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Haley's engagement ring was $10,000.
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So that was added in there.
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I paid off my mom's car at the time, which I think was like 13 grand.
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And then the other wise financial thing we did was invest in my Roth IRA.
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So I put in for two years.
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At the time when I got it because I got the check in, I got two checks.
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The first one was $60,000 and the second was 540.
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So when I got them it was January and I think March.
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So I was still able to do the Roth for the previous year and the current year and so we did invest in my Roth IRA as well for two years.
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So there were bigger chunks like that.
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But Haley's right, predominantly it was kind of lifestyle creep living in a townhome, or I should say renting a townhome that we had no business affording until we bought the home, going on plenty of dinner dates that included wine and wine tastings that we probably didn't need to go on Like $200 dinner date on a Wednesday.
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It's just, yeah, just lavish spending that we didn't need and we had no clue how to manage it all.
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See, I would give you some grace and say that you didn't necessarily blow through 600,000.
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Reason being is that you did make some smart choices with the money and I would say, from the numbers you provided, over half of it I would say, went towards smart choices.
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You know, we have shared this story so many times with so many people on our show, on other podcasts.
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You're the first person, I think, who has said like, hey, you did make some wise decisions, so thank you, brandon.
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That makes my heart feel so good.
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I think that's the financial advisor in me.
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Yeah, seriously, yeah, looking for the positive, I love that.
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That seriously makes me feel so good.
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Four years we've been sharing this story.
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Somebody's like hey, you only blew through half of it, Don't worry.
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Don't worry.
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Well, do you feel like I mean?
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At any point did you sit down and say, hey, here's how we're going to allocate this money.
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Here's what we want to do?
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Yes, we want to go on a couple of nice vacations.
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Let's set aside 30K for the wedding, 10k for your ring.
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At any point was there a?
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Let's write this down, let's list it out, let's have a conversation or was it?
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hey?
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Hey, it's in our account now and let's just swipe until our heart's content.
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Jessica, there was no conversation until it was spent, and then we were like wait, what just happened?
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yeah, like at all there was no conversation.
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I remember casually we'd be like, oh, let's just transfer another twenty thousand dollars into our checking account, like no big deal.
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Frequently.
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And yeah, there was no.
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There was zero, zero conversation, which is crazy, that's also that's indicative of when you're younger, that's indicative of when you're younger too.
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You know, like I would say that majority of people, if they were in the same scenario, would have done the same.
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Actually, honestly, I think majority of people would have done the same.
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Actually, honestly, I think majority people done worse because they probably wouldn't have spent half of it towards, you know, a home, do smart things.
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Much more of it would have gone towards things that they didn't need and, you know, just blowing money we were both also in, you know, like cupcake lane, so I think we were both just like so enamored by one another.
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It was like let's just spend on all the things fun, because we love being around one another, and we had no clue how to talk about money.
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Yeah, it was, oh boy there was this one time for justin's birthday and I made this I gotta go find it.
00:18:27.919 --> 00:18:34.241
I made this little like word doc spreadsheet thing being like, okay, it's justin's birthday, here's how we're gonna spend.
00:18:34.241 --> 00:18:35.051
He was turning 25.
00:18:35.051 --> 00:18:43.419
We're gonna go spend like a thousand dollars at this, like uh, bed and breakfast, go get massages.
00:18:43.419 --> 00:18:49.337
Then we're going to go do a whole day like wine tasting, pool day thing, and then we're going to go do a fancy dinner.
00:18:49.337 --> 00:18:54.736
It literally probably was like a $2,500 two day birthday thing.
00:18:54.736 --> 00:18:59.265
And if anyone wants to spend like that, that's totally fine, no judgment.
00:18:59.265 --> 00:19:02.140
But looking back I'm like, oh, that's where it went Little things like that.
00:19:03.790 --> 00:19:10.556
Little things like that, that add up Little little $2,500 birthday treats, just a little bit.
00:19:10.556 --> 00:19:19.691
Well, I love that you guys have this story to share, though, because I mean especially at that age, right, I don't?
00:19:19.691 --> 00:19:26.233
I mean, I'm thinking about my spending habits in my twenties and somebody hands me $600,000.
00:19:26.233 --> 00:19:34.637
Yeah, you probably don't think that that's going to run out anytime soon, until one day you wake up and you're like, oh, my God, where did my money go?
00:19:34.637 --> 00:19:37.756
Right, and I think I think you're in the majority.
00:19:37.756 --> 00:19:44.733
I don't think that most people, especially in their twenties, would have been like, yeah, let me max out all of my accounts and let me put this away.
00:19:44.733 --> 00:19:51.972
And like, sure, now we know, yeah, I probably could have quit my job if I did the right thing with $600,000.
00:19:51.972 --> 00:19:55.236
Right, but that's not where our head is in our twenties.
00:19:55.236 --> 00:20:07.067
Unless you literally I know we're all doing this for our children now unless you're literally giving your children the financial tools that we wish we all would have had in our 20s, right, yeah?
00:20:10.394 --> 00:20:12.356
But that's just not the reality.
00:20:12.356 --> 00:20:23.373
I say that even my upbringing, I would say, was different than other people's, in the sense of more beneficial the fact that even though I was raised in a single household, my mother raised my brother and I.
00:20:23.373 --> 00:20:34.281
My mom was still more financially literate to a certain degree and she was also very frugal, and so money was not an issue, thankfully, in our household growing up.
00:20:34.281 --> 00:20:42.897
But even in that scenario I would have never had the proper financial literacy to handle $600,000 at 25 years old.
00:20:43.018 --> 00:20:44.541
Yeah, absolutely not.
00:20:44.541 --> 00:20:54.807
What's really crazy is I tell my clients all the time this is a crazy amount of money and yeah, that's a lot, but it actually doesn't matter that it was $600,000.
00:20:54.807 --> 00:20:56.777
We would have done the exact same thing if it was 6,000.
00:20:56.777 --> 00:20:58.428
We probably would have done the exact same thing if it was $6,000.
00:20:58.428 --> 00:21:07.657
We probably would have done the exact same thing if it was $1.6 million and it just came from the foundation of like we were not ready to receive that amount of money.
00:21:07.657 --> 00:21:14.579
It's the same thing that happens when someone receives a large tax refund of like $5,000 to $10,000.
00:21:14.579 --> 00:21:17.484
They blink and it's spent by June 1st.
00:21:17.484 --> 00:21:21.299
It's the same thing, just on a crazy, bigger level.
00:21:23.550 --> 00:21:29.181
I agree with you 100%, because with my clients, it's all about the behaviors.
00:21:29.181 --> 00:21:41.682
If you are making, say, $100,000 and you have bad behaviors and you're just thinking that, hey, me making more money is going to fix all my problems, no, because when you start making more money, you haven't changed the behaviors, so you're going to be in the same scenario.
00:21:50.058 --> 00:21:52.721
Just spending more on nicer things.
00:21:52.721 --> 00:21:54.042
Yeah, right Of like.
00:21:54.042 --> 00:21:55.664
Oh my gosh, where did our money go?
00:21:55.664 --> 00:22:08.518
And then it seems like you, you know, put your boots on and got to work because you paid off 130 plus thousand dollars in 18 months.
00:22:08.518 --> 00:22:09.058
How did you do that?
00:22:09.058 --> 00:22:13.893
Walk us through like your aha moment and then your plan to pay off a very significant amount of money.
00:22:15.015 --> 00:22:24.757
So the aha moment is our famous pumpkin muffin story, and we laugh about it now because it's such a pivotal moment for us in our relationship.
