Episode 246: Money Mastery- Interview with Rose Marie Rupley

Learn More About Money Mastery for Actors About Rose Marie: Official "Auntie Bear," Rose Marie is Peter's right-hand woman at Acting Business Boot Camp. She learned the budget system and used it to completely renew her relationship with money. Moving from the kind of person who checked her bank account with her eyes closed every few months to knowing exactly how she wants to spend her resources to serve her goals. She learned this system from Mama Bear herself, which completely changed her relationship with money, empowering her to help others do the same. Rose Marie's history with money and how she came to the Money Mastery Budgeting program. I just felt hopeless. I didn't know what to do. Money was coming in very irregularly because I was working many different jobs. And I really didn't know how to manage my money at all. This system has completely transformed the way I look at money. I have like a 795 credit score; I'm able to save. I have zero debt. I paid it all off. I have savings. I have a retirement in stocks. The budget system has completely overhauled my entire life in terms of finances. I started coaching for the budget coaching in 2017. So can you explain what Jason Harris's budget system looks like? It's figuring out your predictable monthly spending and how much it takes to run us at a baseline. I'm not talking about any of the extras. I'm talking about rent, cell phone insurance. I include my gym membership in my nut because going to the gym is really important to me. And I cannot survive as a human being if I don't work out. And then also figuring out how much money you have left over for your unpredictable monthly spending. And putting it all together using the income you made the month before. So instead of trying to live with, "the money I made now gets spent now." Hand-to-mouth does not work. It really creates so much stress in your life in a way that is just unbearable. The amount of anxiety, stress, and yucky feelings about myself and who I am. I thought I could never make money. I thought I wasn't good at making money; I thought I was just not good. I had such a fixed mindset regarding income, spending, and finances. On the second night, Peter deals with all the yucky feelings that come up when it yucky feelings. We tie money up in so much of our own self-worth. You can think your way into Right Action, and you can act your way into Right Thinking. And I think your part of the course is acting your way into right thinking, and my part is thinking your way into right acting. So it supports the goal of financial freedom. More money not a problem. Less money problem. Gamifying your spending. "I am gonna have extra money left over in all my categories at the end of the month." But the other thing that you made me do, which is really revolutionary for me, and I know all of the world is such an internet, digital. We all live on our phones, and there are so many apps that let you do this: you made me carry a little notebook in my purse or my backpack everywhere through New York City, and I would write down every single thing I spent money on, and at the end of the day, I would subtract how much I spent money on, from how much I had left. And the act of writing it down just made me so much more aware of where my money was going. AND I didn't give up the first time I forgot to do it. And so the thing that I really tried to separate myself from was having to do it perfectly for it to work. The other thing I love about the budget system, you don't have to do it perfectly for it to work. The goal is to get 1% better at it and not give up the first time you hit some resistance. Because it's just numbers. I'll never forget the first month when I was in the green. I was like, "Oh my God, I can do this. This is not outside of my purview. I am capable of creating a financial abundance." Even if it was a hundred dollars, it doesn't matter. It was still a hundred dollars. The other thing that I love about this system, in terms of building confidence, is all you have to do is follow the steps. If it takes three months to get from the red to the green, that's fine. You're just working the system, waking up every day, doing it as we teach it, and eventually, you're like, "Oh, I'm a master at this." It becomes automatic after a while. When I started doing it, first of all, when Jason taught it to me, I started crying. I just burst into tears. It was humiliating that I didn't know how to handle my money. I felt like I was stupid. I felt like I was totally incapable, that I wasn't smart. These were all the things that came up for me around budgeting. And I just felt defective, and I had a tremendous amount of shame around it. And I told myself, "Swallow your pride, suppress your ego, and remain teachable and see if he's got something here that works." If I told you how much I have in savings now and how much, you know, abundance I have in my life because of his system, it's incredible. I'll never forget the first person who used the system to move from New York to la. And like all she did was run the budget system for a few months. Making rules for yourself. You have to plan ahead. Otherwise, you end up spending money that you didn't want to spend. An easy exercise everyone listening to this podcast can do right now: Print off all of your statements from the last month, Highlight any time you made an impulsive purchase, or you had negative emotions with a purchase Also, highlight all the subscriptions and things you didn't know you were paying for. What it allows you to do is it gives you some awareness so that the next time you have the impulse to spend $40 on a new shirt when you're out and about, Or get that $7 latte, especially when you're trying to fix your finances and, in the end, you don't care that much about the latte. I'm not saying don't indulge sometimes, it's important to indulge, but I think to indulge with an awareness. But also, to get all those purchases you didn't feel great about afterward, they didn't turn out how you wanted them to. You spent money, and then you're like, "Ugh, why did I do that again? I'm self-sabotaging because I have these goals, but I just spent $200 on this thing that won't serve me." And just by doing that exercise, you begin to elevate your awareness and your thoughts so that the next time that thing comes up, you'll maybe choose a different thing. Understand that your budget system is not trying to make your life hard. You're trying to find something livable and create your income around that. Because if you say, "Oh, I'm gonna live on $500 a month." Well, yeah, you're living on oodles of noodles and ramen. It's not practical, and that's not the point. Not spending money is not the point of the budget system. There's so much morality tied up in spending money equals bad. The reality is that we live in a world where we need to spend money, and also, spending money is fun when you save up. Fun funds: you're an actor saving up for headshots, saving up for vacations create monthly patterns so you can end up where you want to be. I went to Italy for three weeks last year with my fiancé. And I saved up for a year for that. But when I got to spend that money, did it feel good? And I did not even care about spending it. This is the realization of my yearlong dream. "The walls of your comfort zone are lovingly decorated with your lifelong collection of favorite excuses." Jen Sincero Mine was, "I'm bad at math, so that's why I couldn't budget. That's why I'm not smart around money." Separating your self-worth from your bank account. Acting your way into right thinking and thinking your way into right acting. Day one is the practicality of it. That's the acting your way into the right thinking. And then, day two is my teaching the thinking your way into right acting. And it's also that both your actions must support your goal, and your thoughts must support your goal. Both of those things have to be happening at the same time to achieve it. That's the recipe for success. Figuring out where did this shit come from? Without both together, you end up stuck because you can come up with a million excuses for why you can't do the budgeting. I didn't think it would work as well as it did, and I mean, countless other people have said the same. And then my thinking shifted with other things in my life because if this is true, what else is true? I can manage my money; what else can I manage? That I didn't think that I could. Think about where your money's going now and where you want it to go in the future. For example, when I started saving and investing, I put in $10 a week. That is like nothing. But I knew that if I just budgeted for that, it would get easier to add to it. And add on to that. And until you save a hundred dollars a week to invest in things. The other thing about investing is just sitting there making money off my money. And the other thing that I help think it helps with in terms of anxiety is it gives you, if you know how much it takes to run you, you're NUT. If you know how much you need in your NUT and roughly how much you spend on groceries and everything else, that's your unpredictable expenses. Then you find your magic number, which we call the number that it truly takes every month that you need to make in income. And so it also allows you to be empowered to choose how many shifts you need in a week in a month. That's on how much extra in gig work you need to make. For freelancers, the money comes in different months differently, but it also allows you to be like, "Okay, I made an extra two grand working on this acting project. Now I have two grand. Well, what do I do with that money?" This budget system teaches you what to do with that extra money when it comes in. So then, in the months that you have less money coming in, you don't freak out. Especially right now because I know times are hard with the strikes. But this allows you to feel like you have a sense of control, even if your work is unpredictable. Your money situation can be really fucked up like ours was, and there is hope. We do record this, and you can, like, you can watch the course as many times as you need to. Anyone that takes the course can work privately with Rose Marie for $35 an hour. Because people get stuck, and I want them to feel like they can get unstuck fast. Private Coaching with Rose Marie