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Happy birthday to me! As I’m turning the big 4 0 – I’m reminiscing on my FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) journey and sharing lessons I’ve learned along the way. Plus, I give actionable tips to help you on your financial freedom journey.
It’s been a crazy decade of finding my voice and power in this space. I’m forever grateful to the Journeyers continuing to bless me with their time and trust when it comes to money, mindset and motivation.
In this episode, you’ll learn more about:
- How I failed at reaching my financial independence goal at 40, but found financial freedom
- My journey from corporate America to entrepreneurship with Journey To Launch
- 3 ways to moderately change your finances for big impacts
- Why kids change your financial freedom journey for the better
- The importance of being firm in your dreams but flexible with the execution + more
Check out the video of this episode on YouTube, here!
I'm Listening to Episode 308 of the Journey to Launch Podcast,How I Failed at Reaching My Financial Independence Goal But Found Financial Freedom Instead Click To TweetOther Links Mentioned in episode:
- Moderate Personal Finance
- The 4 Ways Kids Change Your Financial Goals
- My Journey to Launch
- My Early Retirement Goals
- Read, Choose Yourself!
- Check out my new personal website here.
- Join The Weekly Newsletter List
- Leave me a voicemail– Leave me a question on the Journey To Launch voicemail and have it answered on the podcast!
- Watch me on News12 Watch my latest segments on News12
- YNAB – Start managing your money and budgeting so that you can reach your financial dreams. Sign up for a free 34 days trial of YNAB, my go-to budgeting app by using my referral link.
- What stage of the financial journey are you on? Are you working on financial stability or work flexibility? Find out with this free assessment and get a curated list of the 10 next best episodes for you to listen to depending on your stage. Check it out here!
Connect with me:
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- Twitter: @JourneyToLaunch
- Facebook: @Journey To Launch
- Join the Private Facebook Group
- Join the Waitlist for My FI Course
- Get The Free Jumpstart Guide
Jamila Souffrant 0:02
I want to teach my children that they can accomplish anything they want, and that they don't have to conform to society's standards of what happy is. I want them to create and live life on their own terms. I feel like it's my duty to live a life I can be proud of to show them it can actually be done.
Intro 0:20
T-Minus 10 seconds. Welcome to the journey to launch podcast with your host jameelah. So frogs as a money expert who walks her talk, she helps brave juniors like you get out of debt, save, invest and build real Whoa. Join her on the journey to launch to financial freedom three
if you want the episode show notes for this episode, go to journey to launch.com. Or click the description of wherever you're listening to this episode. In the show notes, you'll get the transcribed version of the conversation, the links that we mentioned and so much more. Also, whether you are an OG journeyer, or brand new to the podcast, I've created a free jumpstart guide to help you on your financial freedom journey. It includes the top episodes, so listen to stages to go through to reach financial freedom, resources, and so much more. You can go to journey to launch.com/jumpstart to get your guide right now. Okay, let's hop into the episode.
Jamila Souffrant 1:30
Hey, hey, hey journeyers, I am so excited. This is a very special podcast episode because I am celebrating my 40th birthday. I can't believe I just said that out loud. I am turning 40 years old. Well, by the time you listen to this, or watch this, because I'm actually recording this as a video podcast to where you can check it out on my YouTube channel during launch. This will come out on February 8, and my birthday is February 6. And I am officially by the time you hear this 40 years old, I'm not 40 yet by the time I'm recording this, but we're heading in that direction God willing. And I thought I usually like to do episodes. So episodes where I'm talking from my heart when it's my birthday to you. And while I was trying to think about what to talk about what to come up with. At first I said Oh 40 tips and like for this or 40 things I learned I'm like that's too much. They don't have time for that to me.And so I actually did some digging, and started to reflect back a bit more about my journey in entrepreneurship, my financial independence journey, my book journey, all these journeys that Hi, I've embarked upon since meeting you guys. And some of you may just be meeting me today if you're listening for the first time. But I started to think back and found some old blog post. And I'm gonna give a big, big bit of a backstory here. Because if you're new or you don't remember some of this, I want to like bring you up to speed of who I am Jamila souffrant what journey slash is all about. And I do intend really soon to do a financial independence refresher episode. So a kind of financial independence one on one that would be separate. But I want to talk more about my journey and starting journey to launch. Because this 40 year old Mark, for me is actually very important. It's very significant. Because there are some things I prophesized or I wanted to happen by the time I turned 40 That I publicly declared, when I started ready to launch and like now we're here. So I think it's kind of cool to look back upon the wishes I had for myself back then when I first started this and where I am now.
So just to go back a little bit. No, I'm Jamila souffrant of Journey to launch and journey to launch is now primarily a podcast. But it first started out as a blog. So I started journey to launch as a blog officially in 2016. And actually went back to my old blog posts and my first blog post was actually on February 2016, was my first post. I was pregnant with my second child. And I talked to all about like, hey, introducing myself, I'm Jamila, I want to blog about reaching financial independence because by that point, I had this crazy commute. I already had a child so I was on my second child pregnant. And I knew that I wanted to be free of the chains of corporate America of a paycheck. And I discovered financial independence, retire early, the movement, the fire movement, and I started to listen to a bunch of podcasts on my commute, which was helpful because my commute was so long my commute was like an hour and a half each way. And because I listened to so many podcasts and I was listening for a couple of years before I actually started my blog podcasts about self development, business, money, all these things where it encouraged me to start sharing my own journey. I was so inspired by what felt like everyday people sharing their journeys. And I said, Where would I be without the people who like step forward out of the superheroes that by day are just walking around, and they look normal, but they're doing extraordinary things with their money and their lives, but they're sharing that, like, Where would I be if I didn't hear that on an episode or read that in the blog, because hearing from other people allowed me to see what was possible for me. So I started to share publicly my journey. And I not only to inspire others, but really to hold myself accountable. So it was quite like selfish, I wanted to say, Alright, I'm gonna, like, do this thing, I'm gonna reach financial independence. And I want to hold myself accountable to the small amount of people who are reading, and then hopefully, also inspire others. So that's kind of like, why what prompted me to start during this launch, and I went as a blog. So I wrote, instead of having a podcast, because I just figured a blog was easier in a way. And I was posting pretty regularly like, I go back now at the old posts, and I was posting maybe like, once a week or every other week, things started to kind of fall off a bit with the kids when I saw when I gave birth for the second time. And then I did end up starting the podcast in 2017. But there are a couple blog posts that I wrote, that really took me back to the essence of why I started this whole thing. Because as you know, or maybe you don't know, but if you ever embarked upon something, or as you get more into whatever, maybe if you are on your own entrepreneurial journey, or if you started something as a hobby and out to business, sometimes you lose the essence of why you started the thing or the passion for it. And I've been very much into the weeds now of my business. And because it's my full time thing, now it is the way that I earn money, and bring money in as part of this family. There's more chips at hand, is that right? Saying I don't know, there's more things at play that matter more. And because I'm also in this season of writing my first book, I don't feel even though I'm being creative with writing the book, a lot of that creativity is not really public, it's more inward, because writing a book is a lot of work, it takes so much. And the way that I want to do it feels very heavy, but not in a bad way. It doesn't feel heavy, like I'm torturing myself, but a heavy meaning, I don't have energy to do a lot of other things like, you know, I don't have energy to show up and be on social media, on the journey to launch page at least, I don't have the energy to like to do the reels and to, to grow the account and to like market all these things that could help my email list grow. And my subscribers grow. And, and when I first started doing this launch, I was so I know that I had so many ideas, I had so much more energy. And I'm very patient look myself in this season. Because I also recognize it's not just the book that you're writing, but you also are a mother of three small kids, you know, we are still experiencing this collective, I feel like recovery from this pandemic that we all experience. And so my energy for journey to launch, or at least what is publicly being shown now has kind of been more chill. But it's still there, it's still there. And reading these posts really reminded me how excited I was when I started journey's launch, and how hopeful I was and what my goals were. So what I want to do is go back there with you and pull out what I thought were some really important points that I made. Some involve tips. So I don't I'm sharing my journey with you.
But what I always want, even when I'm doing solo episodes is that you get something from this. And whatever that is, whether it's personal inspiration for your own journey, or to do something that you've been wanting to do, or actually like a finance tip or money tip, I want you to get something from this. So I'm going to be sharing some things that I thought were really important or blog posts that I thought were important. And then there are actually four of them, that I'm going to be either reading from or taking points from. And the four of them, one of the earlier ones was moderate personal finance. So I named this blog post moderate personal finance, because at this point I had been in, you know, the blogs and listening to the very intense financial independence people who were saving like 50% of their income and aggressively reaching their financial independence goals. And some of them were super frugal, they weren't spending a lot of money. And I realized pretty quickly on that I did not want to reach financial independence by frugality. That wasn't going to be my superpower to boost me forward. It was going to be part of it, but not all of it. And I really knew that I wanted to still live my life and enjoy it. So In this blog post, there's a section that I thought was really interesting that I want to share with you and read.
So this is from March 4 2016, one of my earlier blog posts, I say, every once in a while there is a nagging part of me that wonders if I die before I meet financial independence with my financial independence goal, would all of the sacrifices I've made been worth it, but are they really sacrifices using the word sacrifice implies that the actions I'm taking to reach my financial goals are at the expense of something important to me, the word sacrifice has a negative connotation to it. So rather than looking at it as a sacrifice, I want to look at it as a necessary means to meet my end goal. If you can learn to truly be happy with cutting back in certain categories, then saving towards financial freedom won't feel like a sacrifice, it will feel like liberation, make the changes gradual, so they won't feel like a shock to you. And so instead of making radical changes that can be traumatic to your psyche, start with moderate changes to your personal finances. And then I went on to list actually three ways that you can actually start making moderate changes. The first one is to cut back unnecessary bills, spend that time calling around the service providers that you have saved some money there. The second thing I talked about in that blog post was find the root of your spending happiness. And I thought that was interesting, because some of the things that we're spending money on that take us over the edge with our budget, maybe involve going out to eat, or I'll talk for myself, it's food going out to eat, we don't go out to drink as much, but drinking and or just wanting now at this point to travel. And so I talk about what is it that you want to experience when you do these things. So for example, if it's going out to eat, are you enjoying the time you're spending with the person you're going out to eat with or you just didn't want to cook that day, and you want something convenient. And so is there a way that you can still receive that end result, but it's modified, and it supports your goals, your financial goals. So in the case of if you like being with people, right, you like going out to eat and being with your family and friends is there are there ways that you can do that at a cheaper restaurant, invite people over to do potlucks, maybe when it comes to drinking you rather if your favorite cocktail cost $20 or $15 at the bar, how you want to learn to make that at home, that might be fun for you and your partner just by yourself. And then the last thing was making sure you had blow money, enough money that you put in your budget that you can spend however you want, no justification needed. And I thought those were very good tips that I gave back in 2016. And they're still they still are relevant today. And what I noticed about this post is that I've always, you know, I, sometimes I forget that I've been true to this journey, and that I want to enjoy it. And in the beginning, I actually thought I could do this aggressive saving and not spending a lot of money. But quickly, I realized I didn't want to do that. And so I really enjoy that I wrote this post called moderate personal finance, because it truly is a journey. And if we make the changes too fast, some changes it they won't be sustainable. So that was like the first blog post I wanted to mention.
Now the second one, I'm actually going to skip ahead and then go back to an earlier one. But the second one I thought that I'll talk about was the kid the way kids change your financial goals. So at the time that I wrote this blog post, I had just given birth to my second kid, which is crazy. Why am I writing blog posts after giving birth, but it was June 23 2016. And I went my second I gave birth June 2 2016. And what stood out for me and this blog post was more about the way kids change you the way becoming a parent changes you and so if you are a parent, then you also know and it's gonna be different for everyone. But for me, each kid represented something different, prompted me and pushed me forward. In a way I don't think I would have, I don't think I would have done without having kids. But who's to say I don't know, maybe my journey would have looked totally different. But my first son, when I got pregnant with him, that was what pushed me to the edge to find an escape route, to not want to be at my work in corporate life forever. Like I knew I didn't want to do that with that commute. My second son, or my second kid, when I pregnant with him, that's when I started wanting to launch. That's when I got the guts to actually start sharing my story or my journey publicly. And with my third and last child. I mean, her middle name is journey like I made the decision to leave my job. As soon as I found out I was pregnant with her and there was no turning back. And I don't know that I would have did that this aggressively or taking that kind of risk without having them.
So one of the things that I say in this blog post that really is stands out is this part where I say rethinking retirement? This is a section in there it says, I mentioned in an earlier posted that in my 20s, I wanted to retire by the time I was 30. Because in my 20s, guys, this is a sidebar. I always said, I'm not working for anyone past 30, I'm going to figure something out. I was very ambitious, in my early 20s And as a teenager, and then I started working in AI, I was like, how am I going to do this? I can't. And so I was 33 at the time, now I was working. So in this blog post, I say now at 33, I'm still working, I have kids. And it's actually prompted me to look at ways in which I can exit the rat race earlier than the standard age. Some may say that kids would have had the opposite effect on their financial goals due to the increased expenses it takes to raise kids, which is true, that if we didn't have kids at all, I would be able to aggressively save and retire early. Because there's less bills, things we have to worry about. But my kids actually give me the motivation to save and plan for a future that I don't think I'd be otherwise be as motivated to accomplish. So ultimately, I would love to spend more quality time with them in their formative years, while living life on my own terms. And I just felt like that was definitely a very big part of my journey and sharing and starting journeys launch. And then quitting my job are my children. And so while it's definitely not easy raising three small kids that are very rambunctious, energetic, amazing, and it's tough on a day to day level, it really is, I thank God, obviously I thank God for them. And what having them in my life has has not only made me I feel like a better person or and develop me as a mom, but finance wise, like my perspective has changed even since this blog post about how I want to spend my money and time with them.
All right, so let's get to two other blog posts I want to mention, that really stood out to me because in these blog posts, I specifically mentioned what I wanted to do at 40 years old. And so the first one that I will talk about is the one where I declare that I'm going to retire by 40 years old. So let me pull that up. So that blog post is called my journey to launch. So my journey to launch. Wow. I posted this back in 2016, march 2016. And it goes like this. When I was in my early 20s. I said that I would never work for anyone after the age of 30. I had such an ambitious can do attitude. I didn't like the constraints of my corporate America job and I didn't want to have to call anyone else boss, I would sit at my cubicle crafting ways in which quitting at 30 was possible. I thought I could do it by my investments in real estate, and starting my own business. By then I already had one property in my portfolio, a studio apartment in a nice area of Brooklyn called Dumbo. I was working on my online magazine that I created with my best friend. And my hope was that the magazine would take off and provide a full source of income in the near future. But somewhere along the way, as I approached my late 20s I realized my GMO quitting the mainstream workforce was not going to happen. By then my zeal for thinking outside of the box had slowed down. I no longer had the energy needed to put forth in the online magazine to make it a true success. My friend and I decided to call it quits. At the time I was making a good salary. I was getting more serious with my boyfriend. And then now husband, we got engaged at 27 and I was consumed with planning the wedding our three week honeymoon in Europe and starting a family. By 29. We were married. And by 31 We had our first child and purchase our primary home together. Now at 33. I'm pregnant again with our second child due in May, but he actually came in on June 2. It has been a world when I've arrived for the past seven years. During that time, I had somewhat laid to rest my big fantasies of being a boss, my own boss, I started to get comfortable with the idea of working at a job forever in order to provide the best life for my growing family. I still have the entrepreneurial spark in me which was evident because I started a vending machine company at 31. But something definitely did change. My lofty plans to not fall into the rat race had subsided and were replaced with what seemed to be just the normal course for what so many people have which is work a stable job until retirement. I had suddenly become one of those people I had vowed I'd never be I was okay with running on the hamster wheel and the never ending rat race. How the hell did this happen? Now at 33 My internal fire has been lit again. I may have missed my note working for anyone after 30 goal, but it's not too late to turn it all around. In light of my current place and responsibilities in life. I have found a renewed sense of purpose and drive. I want to be a present mom and wife, I don't want to spend 80% of my time doing something I don't love. I want to teach my children that they can accomplish anything they want, and that they don't have to conform to society's standards of what happy is, I want them to create and live life on their own terms. I feel like it's my duty to live a life I can be proud of to show them it can actually be done. With all that said, I currently have a fantastic career, I make good money in a field I'm actually actually interested in, I get up to six months off for maternity leave and work in a supportive environment, that it actually encourages a work life balance. What I can do without is the office politics and mindless reports that are just part of what comes with the job. I also have a long driving commute about one and a half hours each way. So I like to say the most stressful part of my day or my job is getting to and from work every day. I dare say that I haven't good in these regards. But I want better. And this is where my seven years to launch plan comes into play. By the age of 4010 years after my initial target date of 30. I want to be able to retire from my current job. I don't know if I really want to stop working by then. But I want the flexibility and fu money to make it happen. By then my kids will be nine seven. And if we have another five. I love hard predict like that I would have a third child exactly two years later. The perfect time in my head of when I would want to really be hands on into lives and tending games, dropping them to and from school, helping with homework, etc. So what will the next seven years look like for me, we will live below our means but live well. That means trimming the fat in our budget and cutting down our bills and unnecessary expenses. This allows us to focus on what truly brings us happiness, not the frivolous and consumer push products that society deems as important. cutting expenses will allow us to save and invest more money, which would help us reach my seven year launch plan. increase income. While we both are working, we want to maximize our income as much as possible. In my career, that means climbing the corporate ladder and actually being present at my job. The more I learn and apply myself there, the more chances I have to work on bigger and better projects, which will hopefully hopefully translate into increased earnings. My husband's job also gives him plenty of opportunity for extra income. He's a physical education teacher and coaches multiple sports activities at school, he works morning school summer school, we're going to continue to maximize our earnings in order to aggressively Save, and then invest and save I talked about in this next part, which I'm not going to read I did talk about that we're going to put our extra money into investing and saving.
Ad 22:50
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Jamila Souffrant 23:40
I talk a little bit more than now I'm just kind of getting into the weeds a bit here. Maybe I'll put these links in the show notes. So you can read it directly. But I talk a little bit about just like what our investing plan looks like. Then I have I'm going to enjoy the journey. So while on this journey to launch, I want to make sure that I live in this moment and enjoy every part of it. I don't want to work towards this goal in misery. I am in the prime of my life. This stage of pregnancy and having young kids is such an important time, I want to enjoy every moment and live my life to the fullest, which also means enjoying my current career and taking as much from it as possible. Although I'd like to retire from my corporate job, I would want to find other sources of income through my own business, or enjoyable work that I really want to do. I ran the numbers I've created countless spreadsheets and my seven year plan is very achievable. In fact, it almost seems like we will have too much money in our retirement accounts. Guess that's not a bad thing, which means I may be able to accomplish my goals sooner. So are you ready to join me on the journey to launch What's your launch plan share them and so that was kind of like how I ended it and then I said PS So my original name for the blog actually was Mrs. Budget fab. Can you imagine? My name for the blog was Mrs. Budget fab and we At this post, I changed the name of the blog, and then brand's journey to launch. So in the end of this post, I say PS, I changed my blog name from Mrs. Budget fab to journey to launch, because I feel like it more accurately captures what I want to share and write about. Budgeting will still be a huge part of how I, I will accomplish my goals. But it's not the only thing I want to discuss. I want to share my journey and learn from others on their own launch journey. Journey to launch will allow me to explore and dive into broader topics. That is not just about the end goal, but the journey, okay.
So I love how I captured in that blog post, like I declared, I'm going to quit my job or get to my financial independence number at 40 years old. And in this plan that I wrote about, I was actually going to be working that whole time. So I wrote that at 33. And my goal was to work for those seven years and in corporate America, make as much money as I could get all the money from the bonuses, all the money from the checks and invest. And if you have been following my journey, you know that it actually didn't turn out that way. Because I ended up quitting my job when I got pregnant with my third child. And so I changed courses, I change course. But what's fascinating is I set this, what I wanted for myself at 40 was freedom. In this blog post I talked about wanting to be with my kids like at these the ages, they are now having the ability to pick them up, drop him off from school, homework, all these things. And I even though I didn't reach my financial independence number that I wanted, I hadn't living the life, I'm living that life now, without the numbers necessarily, without the millions of dollars in the bank, you know, that I wanted to have. But I'm still able to live this life of freedom. And it just goes to show you, you may start out one way and have your intention set like a end goal. But how you get there is going to vary and even your end goal can change. And that's okay, you you just you have to let the journey unfold, and take the steps as they lay out in front of you. But it does require some action.
And I want to also share this one last post that I really felt captured where I am today and what I wanted. And I actually wrote this in May 3 2017. And the title of this one was my early retirement goals. So this was now a year after I made that original post my journeys launch and declared that I wanted to, you know, leave at 40 years old. All right, so it's at this point. Now I've been running journeys launch as a blog for a year or less than a year. And then I start or it was actually a little bit over a year. And I start to realize, Wait, something's happening here. What's going on, like you had this plan in 2016. And now you've been working on journey to launch and something's changing, your plan is looking like it can change. So I want to read this as my last blog post, and I hope it inspires you the way it did when I first wrote it. Okay, retirement in the traditional sense means the action of leaving one job and ceasing to work. The standard retirement ages ranges from 59 and a half to 66 years old, full Social Security benefits start at 66 years old. If you're like most people, you probably planned on working until your late 50s and mid 60s Because that's just what you were told you were supposed to do. But it doesn't have to be that way. Gone are the days of people waiting until their golden years to retire. There are people like me challenging the standard retirement age, and redefining what retirement means. Whenever I tell people I want to retire by the time I'm 40 years old, they either give me an encouraging look of wonder, or a discouraging look of disbelief. The dot process probably ranges from Who does she think she is everyone has to work or hey, I never thought about doing that. I wish I could do that too. First, let me take a step back and clarify what early retirement means to me. retiring early does not mean I won't work anymore to earn money. It just means that I'll work because I want to not because I have to. I want to retire from my full time nine to five job and retire into my full time life. Instead of working out of obligation I want to work out of service and dedication. I started Johnny's launch as a way to chronicle my journey to the other side of financial freedom and to help others who want to improve their finances. I've come to quickly realize that this platform provides the thing I was looking for, or the thing I was looking to retire into meaningful work. Over the next few years, my husband and I will continue to aggressively save and invest as much as possible. While I work on growing this platform. And even though I don't want to have to work for an income in retirement, it would be nice to supplement my husband's income because he still would be working. The plan would just be to live on his income. In our investments, but it's nice that bring in additional money to pay for the extras in life, vacation, restaurants, extracurricular activities. So how do I envision my early retirement days, it'll still involve me waking up early, but instead of rushing off to my long commute, I'll be waking up doing whatever I please, I'll be dropping my kids off at school, spending the remainder of the day working on journey to launch, running errands, picking up my kids from school, and at the end of the day, we'll be able to sit down as a family and enjoy dinner together. That's what early retirement at 40 looks like. To me. It looks like a life I crafted in control. It looks like freedom from the cubicle or a boss. It looks like days spent working on something I enjoy and ditching for hours in the car. It looks like I choose myself. And that actually was a quote from James all teacher, his book was called the Choose Yourself guide to wealth. And he always said I choose choose yourself. So if you have a goal of early retirement, what does that look like for you? What would you do if you didn't have to work for money? Then ask how can you start taking those first steps to turn your early retirement dreams into reality? Then I kind of go through in this blog post, how much you need, how do you figure out how much you need to retire comfortably, and how to set that up. So I'll definitely like that. So you because I want you to you know, I always want you guys to do the work with me. And then I say here, I'll leave you with an excerpt from an email sent by a co worker who recently retired, she sent it to everyone on her last day of work. She said, I have everything that I wanted as a teenager, only six years later, I don't have to go to school or work, I get an allowance every month, I have my own pad, I don't have a curfew, I have a driver's license and my own car. And then this is not me talking to you. I don't know about you. But I don't want to wait until six years later if I can help it. And that, again, was written in 2017, where I am saying what I wanted, where I wanted to be at 40 years old, which was living life on my own terms. And at this point, I did say in this blog post, I want to journey to launch B, the meaningful work that I retired into.
And I'm here, like I did it. And I'm not gonna lie, it's still it's still scary doing what I'm doing. Because I don't have it all figured out. You know, I'm in this stage of writing this book, I'm focused more on that than growing, the income attorneys launch at this point. And doing extra work just for the sake of it. And so sometimes I do get scared, like, all right, financially, we're okay financially. But if I want to do the extra things with my kids, take them to Disney World, put them in all the things which we can still we can do some of that. But if I really want to do that, like we still need to bring in more money or at least sustain the income going forward for journey to launch. And being an entrepreneur and doing this is not easy. But what I value is that I can wake up at 40 years old, which I still can't believe I'm 40 This makes no sense of who left me in charge, because I'm a big kid myself, is that I'm doing that. And it's pretty cool that I was able to kind of Chronicle and show that along the way I totally forgot about these blog posts. But it reminds me why I started this platform, why I'm doing what I'm doing. It helped me get out the weeds a bit with the book and reminds me what this book could be for people. And I'm really excited. I'm really excited to embark upon the next decade with you. However that looks. You know, I will be I'll come back in a year and something has changed, I don't know. And that's the beauty of life. It's really you can plan as long as much as you want. But a lot of things are are very unpredictable and outside of your control. But I'm happy to have you on this journey with me.
And so I hope you enjoyed this episode I tried to I tried to actually have notes and not ramble too much. If you're on social media, I'm at journey to launch and at Jamila souffrant so Jamila souffrant it's kind of where I share more personal stuff that I do want to on the day to day which is like go to the gym, run or just live you know my life and so you can follow me there at Jamila souffrant and for my birthday gift so I'm going to ask for a birthday gift is that I just want you to share this episode if you enjoyed it with someone else, or the podcast with someone else, you know whether it's a friend, family member, co worker, send them the link journeys launch.com Or you can wherever you listen to this there is probably a read more or see more or a link button that says Copy link, copy that bad boy and send it to someone because the best way that you can help me to give something to me for my birthday is that you help spread this message so that I'm not on this journey alone that you're not by yourself either that you have people who care about you or who you can get support from on this journey with you. So share this episode with them shared journeys launches a platform with them. If you want I will probably also Put this in not only in the shownotes, but on my email. So my goal this year is to actually grow my email list and to provide more valuable content in there. So if you want to get the links directly to your email, go to journey to launch.com/join. And then you can join my newsletter, and then you'll be on the list. And you'll start receiving updates there just in case you don't get to listen to this podcast every week, which I don't know why you wouldn't. So make sure you're also following the podcast. I'm really excited next week.
So next week's episode, it's going to be really fun, I'm going to be sharing some fun things I've been doing lately in spending money. And so to prepare for my 40th birthday, I have this funny thing that I keep saying I'm probably using it in the wrong way. But you know, I'm saying you know, I'm turning into a city girl, or a Material Girl, meaning I'm like getting all the things done. And it's like almost like an experiment. So if you're watching the video, you see that I have braids, I got my eyebrows done, there's a couple more things I'm spending money on just to, to just giving it a try doing something a little different. And I'm going to document or share, like the cost of all these things. And my thoughts on spending money in this way, because I usually don't, and I'm excited. So that will be next week's episode. So come back and listen to that. And once again, I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, especially if you've been listening since the beginning, or even if you just come in and you popping in and out. Or even if you just listen to this episode, and you listen all the way through, I just want to thank you, because I wouldn't be here, literally without your support your feedback. And I hope that you get as much out of this as I get from it too. All right. Until next week, keep on journeying journey airs.
Outro 36:49
Don't forget you can get the episode show notes for this episode by going to journey to launch.com. Or click the description of wherever you're listening to this. And you can still grab your jumpstart guide for free to help you on your journey to financial freedom by going to journey to launch.com/jumpstart.
If you want to support me and the podcast and love the free content and information that you get here, here are four ways that you can support me in the show. One, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast wherever you listen, whether that's Apple podcasts, that purple app on your phone, your Android device, YouTube, Spotify, wherever it is that you happen to listen, just subscribe so you're not missing an episode. And if you're happening to listen to this and Apple podcasts, rate review and subscribe there I appreciate and read every single review. Number two follow me on my social media accounts. I'm at journey to launch on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And I love love love interacting with journeyers their three supporting check out the sponsors of this show. If you hear something that interests you, sponsors are the main ways we keep the podcast lights on here. So show them some love for supporting your girl for and last but not least, share this episode this podcast with a friend or family member or co worker so that we can spread the message of Journey to launch. Alright, that's it until next week, keep on journeying journeyers
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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