TRANSCRIPT

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#101 - When Work Becomes Optional: Redefining Retirement with Bernadette Joy 

Eric Blake: Welcome to another episode of the Simply Retirement Podcast. I am your host, Eric Blake, practicing retirement planner for over 25 years, founder of Blake Wealth Management, and I would not be the man I am today without the women in my life.

On today's episode, I am joined by Bernadette Joy, author and CEO of Crush Your Money Goals. Bernadette works with individuals who are looking to take control of their financial lives and focuses on helping them build clarity, confidence, and long term financial independence.

Today we are talking about redefining what retirement can look like, how to think about work when it becomes optional, and why this matters, especially for women navigating retirement, major life transitions, or simply asking what comes next on my financial journey.

Bernadette, welcome to the Simply Retirement Podcast.

Bernadette Joy: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here.

Eric Blake: Absolutely. I know we have gone back and forth a little bit through LinkedIn and emails and all that kind of fun stuff. So I am excited about the conversation.

I wanted to start you on your work. You focus heavily on helping people build clarity and confidence around their money, especially during moments where they may be lacking control or feel like they have got a lack of control of what their financial future looks like.

And something that really stood out to me, because many of the women we work with have found themselves on the other side of a divorce, maybe being widowed, and these transitions often come with a lot of uncertainty and sometimes even hesitation around decisions that they may not have had to make on their own before.

I just wanted to start off by having you share a little bit about your work, your background, and what actually got you into what you are doing today.

Bernadette Joy: Sure. Well, I am Nette Joy. I wrote this book here, Crush Your Money Goals, and it is a culmination of my work for the past decade, specifically with the majority of women, although I do have male clients as well, who I think complement what you do.

They are contemplating that transition or anticipating that transition potentially happening, and they are just really afraid. So often I have clients who are thinking about getting a divorce but have not really told anyone and do not think they can afford to get a divorce.

Or maybe they have been a caregiver for a very long time, and this is the first time that they are realizing they do not have an identity outside of their job or caregiving.

Specifically, I run a financial education program also called Crush Your Money Goals, the bootcamp. In that 12 week program, we walk through the five steps of Crush, which gets them to clean up their finances, curate the accounts they really need, and start thinking about what independence even looks like.

Then to understand the path and the gap between where they want to be and where they are now, and then appropriately putting the spending plan together.

And then lastly, talking about the money wounds. I call them money wounds. You can call it financial trauma, you can call it a lot of other things that are very common in the personal finance space.

I have found that a lot of the things we think are holding us back are not really about money. It is about the experiences we have had, particularly as women, that are telling us we cannot do this by ourselves.

So it has been a very exciting, a very challenging job. I tell people that I have two degrees in business, a bachelor's and a master's, and also a degree in psychology. The psychology degree has actually been way more useful in this area, because a lot of what we talk about is figuring out how we want to show up in the world, and so much of that is linked to how we think about ourselves.

Eric Blake: Well, I think one of the things that is really cool, and it is something you talk about a lot from what I saw researching before our conversation, is that you talk about walking the walk and talking the talk.

You yourself have paid off $300,000 of debt within just a few years, which is incredible. What were some of the biggest shifts financially or mentally that made that possible?

Bernadette Joy: I have now been debt free since 2019 the first time around, and then I went to go buy what I thought was going to be my retirement home in 2021 and then paid that one off. So I have been really debt free since 2021, including a mortgage.

The biggest mental shift that I had to come to terms with, and that I have to teach a lot of my clients, is that debt is meant to be a short term solution and not a long term lifestyle.

The assumption, especially in the US, is that you cannot start a business unless you take out a business loan, and you cannot buy a house unless you have a mortgage, and you cannot go to school unless you take out student loans.

All of those types of so called good debt. But at the end of the day, I do not actually believe in good debt or bad debt. To me, debt is just debt.

I do not know anyone who would argue that you are freer with debt than without it. The biggest mental shift in the beginning, when I started teaching myself personal finance, was that I just wanted to get out of this $300,000 of debt.

It was $72,000 of student loans, the usual bills like credit cards and things that normal people have, a car lease, and then not one but two mortgages at the time because I thought I was going to be the next HGTV star.

It turns out 10 years later, and we can talk more about that, that I have been living debt free not only financially but emotionally and, in a lot of ways, spiritually.

A lot of people say, Bernadette, how do you have this confidence to be out here in the world, the way that you talk and doing stand up comedy or whatever. And it is just because I do not owe anyone any money. I can just do whatever I want.

There is not really that much risk to it. That is the other piece, realizing that debt can be necessary in certain situations, but for many people it becomes a first resort instead of a last.

Eric Blake: Well, I think one of the things that is interesting, there is this correlation between financial fitness and physical fitness, but when somebody decides to take control of either of those aspects of their lives, there is almost always some trigger, some series of events, that last straw.

What was that for you?

Bernadette Joy: I remember very specifically. It was January of 2016, and I had one semester left in my MBA program. I had been working at the same time and paying alongside while taking out student loans, but I did not really know how much I had taken out.

I went to look at the balance and I literally collapsed. I was sitting at my desk and thought, how can this be. How do I have $72,000. I had been paying all along. I had no idea it had accumulated to be that much. I had no idea it was earning interest along the way.

For some reason, I thought interest would not start until after I graduated, but that was not true. I just felt really stupid. A lot of people can relate to that moment when you realize a financial decision has consequences you did not fully understand.

That was that moment for me.

Eric Blake: Okay.

Bernadette Joy: I was not even paying attention to class. I went to my husband immediately after and said, I think I messed up. I took all these student loans, I have no idea how I am going to pay this off.

My husband is the calmest person ever, and he said all our friends have student loans, mortgages, all of this. It is not a big deal. But my thought was all of my friends work 60 hours a week and seem miserable, and I did not want that life.

I resolved that day I was going to pay off my student loans in two years. I did not know how, but I broke it down into daily numbers and challenged myself to figure it out.

Eric Blake: That is awesome. I want to ask how you have taken those experiences into helping others, but I am curious first, when people come to you, has that event already happened for them, or do you help them find it?

Bernadette Joy: That is such a great question. The vast majority of people who come to me do not realize it has already happened, but it did.

They have been burned out, struggling with debt, dealing with a life event like a loss, but they have just accepted that this is the way life is.

What is interesting is that when I run workshops, people have that light bulb moment of realizing things did not have to be that way.

Eric Blake: That is powerful.

Bernadette Joy: It really is. People often gloss over these moments or assume there is no better way, when there is.

Eric Blake: I want to ask you one more question. If there is someone listening today who feels overwhelmed or unsure where to start, what is one small step they could take right now?

Bernadette Joy: One small step I would like you to take immediately after finishing this episode is to grab a piece of paper and draw a picture of what your life would look like if money were no issue.

If you had enough money, what would your perfect day look like. That is a clue into what you want to retire to.

The vast majority of women I find it challenging to work with on retirement plans do not have something to retire to outside of their kids or their job.

So draw that picture and put it on your wall. I have seen this exercise change lives.

Eric Blake: That is perfect. So how can people reach you?

Bernadette Joy: You can find me at crushyourmoneygoals.com. If you would like to learn more about the Crush model, I have a free guide at crushyourmoneygoals.com/freeguide.

On social media, I am @NetteJoy.

Eric Blake: That is perfect. Bernadette, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a great conversation. We will make sure we share all those links in the resources page for the episode.

Thank you to our audience as well for listening in. That is it for today’s episode. For all the links and resources mentioned, you can go to thesimplyretirementpodcast.com.

Until next time, please remember, retirement is not the end of the road. It is the start of a new journey.

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