207 | Welcome to Love, your Money with Hilary Hendershott

Hilary Hendershott: Well, welcome to the Love, your Money podcast with me, Hilary Hendershott. This show is formerly Profit Boss® Radio. And if you’ve stayed subscribed for more than a year and a half while I was not publishing episodes, thank you. Really, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. And I have heard from some of you who’ve been listening to back episodes and reaching out by email to let us know that they are making a difference for you. So, that’s amazing.

And we’re relaunching today with a different podcast name, but the very same intention. My intention is that you thrive, specifically that you have the opportunity to understand what money really is and to create from what’s most important to you, what money is for you and your family, and who you are in relationship to your money. And yes, you can make friends with your money.

First, what happened to me and what happened to Profit Boss® Radio? All right. Let’s start with what happened to me. Basically, my five-year-old daughter, she was five at the time, she’s now seven, she got really sick in February of 2022. She has had a lot of health issues in her life. If you’ve been listening to this show, you’ve kind of been aware as I’ve come in and out of my podcasting seat, it’s been tough.

We were in Puerto Rico when she was diagnosed in 2022. We flew back to California, where we still own a home so she could be a patient at Stanford Children’s Hospital. She and, therefore, of course, my husband and I and like much of our family, were in the hospital much of 2022. My team and I tried airing back episodes of Profit Boss® Radio every week for a while, but eventually, it just became too much and we quit.

So, now, my daughter, she’s still receiving treatment, but we’re on a much more regular schedule. Everything is going per the plan. She’s actually in public school in second grade down the road and will be done with her treatment in spring of 2024, so I’m back. And as far as the Profit Boss Radio name, to be honest, I wanted to up-level. Profit Boss was something I created back in 2015. And it’s appropriate for me to grow as a professional and in my thinking so that yours can too.

Let’s talk about Love, your Money. So, first of all, it’s a bit of a double entendre. So, it’s love comma your money, as if money was writing you a love note and signing it with love from your money. And also, if you just take the comma out, of course, it’s Love your Money, like a command or a context from which you can live. I love my money. My money loves me. We’re happy together.

And in order to get to a place where you have a powerful and, yes, even loving relationship with money, including the money that’s in your bank accounts now, and also the money you’ll earn and keep and grow in the future, we need to talk about tactics and mindset. So, when I say mindset, you could use the terms, money mindset and also relationship to money sort of interchangeably. It’s what you think and feel about money because these sometimes inherited ways of being about money, like ways and ideas you just grow up with, can really make a big mess of things despite your best intentions. How do I know? Because it happened to me.

And now, I’m here to help you shorten your learning curve. Let’s talk about who this show is for and what we’ll be talking about here, so what you can learn if you subscribe to Love, your Money, and I hope you will. Firstly, this show is for anyone with money, ha-ha, specifically though, for many years, I’ve said that this show is for women and that was really because women have been so underserved and maybe even ignored by the financial services industry. I know this because I spent 14 or 15 years in the industry before I launched my own business, and I’ve seen the underbelly, folks. Yes, I have. I have personally been ignored, talked down to, dismissed, and generally underestimated by my slightly older and maybe opposite gendered colleagues. And it got to me, I was really insecure in the beginning. And when the people who are more successful and tenured than me didn’t think highly of me and my potential, it really hurt.

And one day, I had the kind of thought that changes everything. It was the kind of thought some people call it a download. Once you have it, it changes your thinking forever and you never see things the same. And the thought was this. See, for years, I had only been willing to see female doctors. I had a weird experience with a male doctor in my teens and I said to myself, “You know what? Let’s just avoid the problem and see female doctors.” And there’s plenty of female doctors to choose from. Let’s just have it be that I go see the ladies.

And that solution worked for me. And it still works. And the thought I had this one day was this, if these guys are treating you, these financial advisor guys are treating you badly, Hilary, imagine how they’re treating their female clients. Doctors have an intimate role in our lives, and so do financial advisors. So, I just bet there are people out there who really, really both want and deserve respect, honor, a seat at the table. They want empathy, compassion. They want to work with someone who knows with certainty that money doesn’t have to be talked about in the language of Wall Street, who wants to develop an understanding of how money works in their life and doesn’t really want to read The Wall Street Journal on the daily.

So, that’s who I became. I’m here for you. If you just don’t resonate with Wall Street speak, but you still want financial success, I’m helping you create your own money vocabulary and sharing with you the secrets of success that really do work. I’m part financial advisor and part translator, and I’m here to tell you what you need to know to share with you how to change your current money programming and to interpret what you read in the financial news media. This show was founded on being for women. And at this point, my team and I work with lots of men. So, while I’ll always embody and embrace traditionally female traits such as compassion, understanding, and even love if that resonates with you, this is for you.

On Love, your Money, we’re going to talk about all the things. Some of the episodes I have planned for you are about improving your money scripts, meaning what you think, feel, and say about money. We’ll also talk about investing and sometimes insurance and whether you should do a Roth IRA conversion. We’ll talk about finding the number that for you is enough so you don’t have to be on the treadmill until you die. We’ll talk about raising financially empowered kids and saving in 529 accounts to pay for college and how to use them. And I really do like to talk to business owners because I’m a bit of a profits whisperer and so is my team. Too many business owners launch their businesses with talent, creativity, and best intentions and find themselves many years later languishing in poverty because they just never learned how to maximize profits.

So, about half of the episodes of the show will be for people who run businesses, and half won’t be related to running a business. And I’m offering live money coaching now, and we’ll be airing some of those coaching sessions so you can hear for yourself how those work. So, you know who I am. I’m Hilary Hendershott. I shared with you my professional designations in the introduction, but my team and I are all certified financial planners. We’re also Profit First-certified professionals.

I founded my firm, Hendershott Wealth Management, in 2014 after about 15 years of working in the industry. Since then, we’ve grown to be a medium-sized wealth management firm with well over $100 million of client assets under management. Actually, we’ll probably be at $200 million within the year, which means I have lots of experience helping people grow real wealth. I have seen it all over many economic cycles and I can help interpret for you what’s happening to bring big picture perspective back.

My firm offers a consulting package. It’s called the Money Blueprint Program for business owners, where we teach you everything you need to know about your business finances. So, again, this show is for people who own a business and people who don’t. Maybe if you don’t own a business, you skip the episodes that are about creating profit and keeping what you earn in your business, or maybe you find them interesting because you’ve always thought about launching a business. At any rate, if you’ve got money questions, Love, your Money is for you.

So, let’s talk about what happened to me, financially speaking, many years ago that kind of set me on this path of sharing what I’ve learned in a pretty unique way. I often say on this show, I’m a graduate of the Financial School of Hard Knocks, and here’s why. About seven or eight years after I graduated from college, I found myself with about $100,000 in income and about $120,000 in spending. I was a massive overspender. And this is despite having earned a degree in economics.

So, after a handful of years of overspending like that, in addition to buying a condo that I really could not afford, I found myself in a massive financial mess. It was also a bit of a crisis of conscience, too, because I was being a financial advisor during the day, getting paid to advise millionaires and multi-millionaires on how to grow their nest eggs. And at night, I’d come home to a stack of bills that I wouldn’t even open because I couldn’t pay them.

At my financial worst, I had about $150,000 of combined credit card, student loan, and auto debt. I had $420,000 of mortgage debt on a condo that, in 2008, fell to $190,000 in appraised value. And I had a FICO score, credit score in the 400s. I was sad. I felt defeated. I felt like a massive failure. And I had a ton of shame and regret about all of that.

I looked around and I thought, well, all this book learning about economics and finance isn’t really helping me. I have good intentions, just really bad results. And I know results come from actions. And actions are all based on our psychology. So, I said, “Okay, I am going to figure this out. I am just not willing to have my finances be a complete mess for my entire life.” I decided to figure it out and I researched and studied and read books and went to conferences and talks. And I began to see if you study behavioral finance, how all of my financial decisions were a function of some money dysfunction that got created during my childhood.

My beliefs about money were that there was never and never going to be enough of it. And I was manifesting that all over my life by overspending and borrowing money I couldn’t afford to pay back. So, I double down on doing everything different with money. I learned how to engage neuroplasticity to change my money mind. I had to unravel all those money dysfunctions or inaccurate beliefs about money. And slowly but surely, my results began to change.

So, I paid off the debt, I rebuilt my retirement savings, and I began to have more business success than I honestly ever imagined I’d have. At this point, my husband and I own homes in California and Puerto Rico. I pay myself an executive-level salary from my business profits, and to be completely honest, in terms of personal investment net worth, which is the sum of our family real estate holdings and investment accounts. I work because I want to, not because I have to.

So, I really have learned something about how to not just stop inviting money to leave my life, but also how to become someone who invites money into my life and has it stay. I turned the pattern around. And it is okay if you’re listening to this. It is okay, it is safe, it is moral, and it is lovely for you to want that for yourself. And along the way, I started to realize that I was creating real and valuable results in my life. And I recognize that so many people struggle with money. And if I’ve really figured this money thing out, it is a way I can provide very real value to people.

So, that’s what I’m here to teach you and show you and guide you to do. So, if you’re up for that, please consider subscribing to the show in your podcast player and we are off to the races. Thank you for being here.

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