71: {Solo} The Importance of Financial Planning and Protection

Do you hate talking about Finances? I've been there and have had to learn how to embrace those conversations both at home and in business! Today's conversation is about the importance of financial planning and protection in the face of life's uncertainties such as death, disability, and divorce. I share my personal experience with being previously divorced (now happily remarried) and being temporarily disabled last year due to an accident. The conversation highlights the significance of discussing and addressing these topics, despite the stigma surrounding them.

Transcript

Caroline Pennington (00:01.357)
Today I wanna talk about a topic that is lighting me up this week and some of you, and I tell you what it is, are gonna be like, ew, ick, and I totally understand because I've been there too. But the topic is finances and the reason I say that is because earlier this week I interviewed a certified financial planner. She also is a female entrepreneur and she understood different businesses. One is she works with high net worth women on structuring their assets.

having their make money make money for them. And the other arm was working with women who are just like everyone else and maybe going through transitions and need to figure out how to invest their money in the market so it can grow and make money for them eventually through their investments. And so anyways, the interview coming up is with an individual named Stephanie Vockrell and look for it in about a month. It should be on my podcast guest list.

But we talked about one thing that I really wanted to talk about with you guys today and that is that we all go through things in our life. And one thing that she brought up and she made a great point was there is the three D's that exist in our life. And you're probably sitting there thinking like, what are the three D's? Well, they're death, disability, and divorce. And those are three things that can really rock our world when it comes to finances and things that we need to.

prepare ourselves and protect ourselves for if possible. And for those of you listening and know me, you know I've been through two of the three things, obviously not in depth, I'm here talking to you in this podcast, but in my 20s I went through a divorce and in my 30s I went through a six month period where I was disabled, I couldn't even walk. And that was last year after I had a terrible accident and I'm gonna get into that in a minute. But anyways,

I'm only 37 and I've experienced two of the 3Ds already. So my encouragement for you is to get it together in the financial department so you can start investing in the market and yourself so you can create a life that you love and are financially safe. And for me, the disabled thing, so last year I was taking my dog out and we live in an area in Beaufort, South Carolina where there are a lot of deer. And we don't have a fence at our house.

Caroline Pennington (02:25.674)
And so I was taking my dog out on an retractable leash and Zena went crazy. This deer came into our yard the exact same moment. She went, not so. I basically flew down the stairs and cracked my heel bone completely in half. And that literally rocked my world, changed my life. I'm a huge advocate of exercise. I exercise, lift weights, or run six days of the week.

And so the fact that I had to have this emergency surgery situation and have three screws put back in my foot to put it back together, not to mention the 16 weeks of rehab I had to go through after the surgery, it was literally a terrible time. My husband is a saint and an angel and took care of me. But at that time, I was not able to be myself and be active and be mobile. And so...

Anyways, my point is you never know what's gonna happen and so you have to protect yourself and set things up so that you are, can still live your life as normal. And same thing for the divorce. In my 20s, I mean a divorce, you never go into a marriage expecting to get divorced, right? I don't care if your marriage right now is Ramos and Ponies, that's great, I'm happy for you. But at the time, I entered that marriage and wasn't expecting to get divorced like most divorces.

And so I think it's super important to protect yourself and have a prenup. There's also such thing as a post -nup, which is important too. In a post -nup, that would be a scenario where maybe you got married and started a business and the business started exploding. And so that would be a time where that would be necessary to bring in and talk to your partner with. And prenups and post -nups have this dark cloud over them. They're like, we don't want to talk about them. There's a huge stigma to them. But in reality, they are...

really great ways to protect yourself. You want to look at protecting yourself if you are a business, you want to protect your business as well and I'm not here giving financial advice for the record but it was really lighting me up talking about these things because I think they need to be talked about. And so anyways, that is my short set of sharing a little bit of what's happened to me or some things that have happened to me that also relate to the podcast that we were talked about and why you need to protect yourself.

Caroline Pennington (04:46.695)
for financial things coming up in your future. And either way, if you wanna talk about this, you can DM me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, I'm here for you, we can talk about it. Until next time.