#61: The Inside Scoop - Remote Month With Caro
Episode Summary
In this episode, our podcast editor Caro shares how she created a business to monetize her fiction writing after taking a Factora Wealth Circle. She also shares about how she got involved with team Factora, and what remote month means to her (hint, hint: there's a large aluminum tube involved).
Episode Notes
Follow Caro & her Cover Stories Project on Instagram.
Enter to win the Best Self Summer Giveaway.
Register for Factora's free upcoming webinar, Investing 101: Put Your Money to Work, which takes place on June 22.
Apply to the Fall 2020 Wealth Circle.
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Transcript
Last episode, we kicked off remote month for Team factor, giving us all a little extra freedom and geo liberation, as I like to call it for the month of June. Today, we have a very special guest to introduce you to our new podcast editor Kara. She joined the wall circle in 2020, hoping for some financial insight and has since monetized her writing business. Putting out incredible short stories on Instagram weekly. definitely give her a follow at Kara Claire Burke. For a treat. We'll tag her in the show notes. It's also why the podcast has gotten a lot better over the last few episodes. And stay tuned to listen to her financial transformation and her very creative plans for June. But before I pass the mic on to keroh, we are hosting a free workshop called investing one on one put your money to work. We hosted one in May and the spots filled up. Oh so quickly. So if you didn't have a chance to attend, make sure you save your spot ASAP. We'll have another link in the show notes. And last thing we just announced our very first giveaway in partnership with three other female board and focus brands on in the city flourish. And yes athleta this giveaway is designed to help you be your best self and uplevel your life from every angle as we all re enter the world. So I'm talking health, wealth, mindfulness, and intention. lucky winners will receive $100 gift card from athleta. I'm in the cities simplify and thrive course in fact, torez six figure saving scores, which is our self directed course that will teach you financial fundamentals and prep you for the wall circle and a three month membership to flourish so that you can ditch diets and feel really good about your holistic nutrition. These prizes are pretty insane. So definitely enter to win at you guessed it, another link in the show notes. This is a leg round in the wet Brantley and you're listening to the coffee and coin podcast where women talk well, I'm the founder effect aura, a company on a mission to lead 1 million women to 1 million in net worth. On this podcast, I sit down with factorial alum to share their financial stories, real numbers and how they've transformed their financial lives to prove that it's possible for anyone listening.
Hi, everybody. This is Kero speaking, I'm the new podcast editor for factoria. And today I'm going to be talking to you about a sort of hybrid combination of topics. I'm going to do my own mini wealth circle transformation, about how I launched my own business, following my enrollment in the wealth circle last fall. And I'm also going to be talking to you as a factory employee about what I'm doing during my remote month this June. So I am 20 years old, I have been working as a freelance writer for six years now. So I had one full time job after college, I worked as a marketer, content marketer. And I quit less than a year in because I kind of had this realization that I wanted to be a novelist. And so the last six years have basically been me taking freelance gigs to keep myself afloat as I pursue this artistic dream. So I think that my relationship to finances throughout this period of time was really on the the model of stay afloat. Like Don't worry too much about money, take the job that allows you to write, take the job that you know, works with your graduate school classes. And because of that, I didn't save almost any money throughout those years to compound upon that kind of alternative lifestyle choice. I decided at 24 years old to move to Los Angeles. And I lived there for three years with my now husband, Riley. So I was trying to be a writer taking a lot of freelance jobs, you know, editorial, SEO work, you name it, all of which paid the bare minimum. I wasn't concerning myself with putting money aside for taxes. And we were living in an incredibly expensive city, and I was falling in love. And during that period of time, you tend not to care about anything else. So all of that came together last April when the pandemic hit. And my husband and I decided to move home. We're both from Massachusetts, and we wanted to be closer to our families during such an uncertain time period. And we also had a feeling that what was unfolding was not going to go away anytime soon. So we drove home and moved in with my parents. And that came together with another kind of fortuitous situation which was that the company I was working for At the time, I employed a lot of writers to write about the Coronavirus. And because search traffic was at an all time high for all of this information, I ended up making more money last summer than I ever had in my life. So a lot of things came together at once where Riley and I had moved home, we weren't going out anymore, we were on lockdown. And I was finally earning, you know, a lot of money and not really sure what to do with that I think I earned maybe $35,000, over three months, which was again, very unusual for me. And I didn't know what to do with it. And that's where factorial comes in. So I had known about factoria, because a few of my friends had taken the course at earlier iterations of the company, I had a friend who took the incubator far earlier. And then I was connected to Julia through a good friend. So I've been watching factoria from afar. And when I finally had, you know, extra money in my checking that I didn't immediately know, was going to go towards my credit card bill, I decided that now is a great time for me to take this 12 week course, because Riley and I had also gotten married a year earlier, and neither of us really had individual financial plans, we weren't very disciplined with our money. And we also hadn't created a joint financial plan for our marriage. And so it just seemed like you know, a perfect opportunity to kind of kickstart my relationship to finances. To get a little bit more specific about my relationship to finances, it's almost like there's nothing to say, because I didn't have anything like I kept my money in checking, I paid off my credit card bills, when I could, I very frequently didn't pay off my credit card bill in full, I had a 401k. From that one year, I worked full time, but I had not mapped out 401k contributions. as a freelancer, I frequently came in behind with my taxes. And this is all concerning, I think for any person. But I think it's particularly concerning when you're trying to pursue a path that doesn't include gainful employment from a stable company. And I think that that's increasingly common for a lot of people. So I won't pretend that that's just for writers. But I do know that as I was becoming increasingly invested in my writing, and as I was getting closer to a book deal, you know, I signed an agent, I went to grad school, I was starting to realize that that magical book deal that I had in my head was not going to be the thing that saved me. And a lot of that came from getting to know other writers and learning about how the publishing industry works. You know, even if I were to get a $500,000 book deal, which is the equivalent to seeing a unicorn on the side of the road, then that would be distributed in installments over the course of you know, four to eight years, and that would be taxed. And so I was slowly coming to realize what this really terrifying awareness that I didn't have a plan, I had no plan for how I was going to write and also afford the type of life that I wanted, which is, you know, owning a house not being up at night, worrying about bills, all of the basics that I think we all kind of aspire to. So to add one more ingredient to this recipe of just complete chaos. So let's just reiterate, moved home, I suddenly had a little bit of money laying aside, didn't have any idea how I was going to become a quote unquote, professional writer. So to add on to that Riley and I made two other really big decisions, which was we use 10,000 of the dollars that I'd earned over the summer towards a vintage Airstream ambassador, which if you're not familiar with that is one of those really shiny RVs that you often see on Instagram or on the road. So we bought an Airstream with the intention of renovating it. Riley is very handy. And we also bought a house, we bought a 1930s bungalow, two bedroom, one bath bathroom in the kitchen, you know, good bones, but kind of falling apart. And we bought it in the town where I grew up. And we bought it right before the real estate market went insane. And we bought it kind of thinking there's nowhere to rent. We can't we know we can rent it out in the summers because we live on the water in Massachusetts. And we're not going anywhere anytime soon. So maybe we'll just work on this house and then rent it out. And then we will also always have a home to come back to when we visit our families over the years to come to all of which is to say it was literally the perfect time for me to take a financial course because we were really shooting from the hip. You know, we were taking a lot of chances. And while I'm happy with a lot of those chances, it felt very precarious. Like, oh, we are signing on to be homeowners, we have no idea what this means we have no idea how much interest we're paying, or just how much we have to rent it out for in order to make more than we would have if we just invested that 10% down payment in the stock market. Blah, blah, blah. So that brings me to the wealth circle. So I took it last September and I actually in preparation for today's episode I wrote everything down. I also feel like I sound like Scarlett Johansson right now because my voice is totally out from a wedding I went to this weekend so I hope that you're enjoying this. Anyways, what I gained from the factory weld circle. So I opened a health savings account and I filled it with I would say a three month emergency budgets around 12,000 In dollars, I opened a titan account an investment account, asked me about my referral. And I put the remaining money I had left over after the close of our house and the airstream and all that stuff, which wasn't, you know that much, I would say it was maybe $5,000. And so I invested that in our Titan account. Riley and I completely merged our finances, I recovered my old 401 K's which had been basically sitting as cash for the last five years. So I recovered those old 401k is rolled them over took forever, but I'm so happy I did it. And I invested them to in Titan. Most importantly of all these things, I mapped out a business for how I was going to monetize my writing, which is something I have never done before, wouldn't have even dreamed of doing before I took factors well circle, I had it in my head that the only way for me to make money off of my writing was to get a book deal, which is a very unstable source of income for writers even when they make it back. And one of the assignments for the wealth circle was to map out a plan for a business if you have an idea. And I had a very nascent idea in my head of a direct to consumer story platform, which could allow me some level of financial stability while I continue to pursue my goal of being a novelist. So at the time, I had already started sharing stories on Instagram, I write short stories based off of popular songs, and people would read them on my Instagram stories. But from factor, I mapped out a business plan for what is now the cover stories project. So here's how the cover stories project works. I have a Patreon platform where people can sign up to be founding members of my project. And that means that they get access to certain aspects of my writing that other people don't. So every Sunday, I share a story at 9am to my Instagram stories, and one Sunday a month. So one out of the four stories that I share each month is members only. So anyone who signs up to my Patreon, I take their Instagram handle, and I add it to a close friends list. And that means that they get to read the members only story, they also get to download copies of the stories that I share every other Sunday. So it's this really cool hybrid where I get to continue to grow a following around my writing, I get to share a good amount of my writing to people who can't necessarily afford it. And I also am slowly building out a membership, which has created a type of financial stability in my life that I haven't previously had. And that's because I'm working for myself. I think a lot of freelance workers know that the level of instability around contract positions can be incredibly overwhelming. And you can spend half of your day just trying to map out Do I have enough freelance jobs, should I you know, try to get another one in case one of them ends, you can spend half your day doing that kind of math and not actually doing work or working towards the thing that you decided to pick up all these freelance jobs for. So as of June one, I had 174 I believe paying subscribers, and all of the money that comes from my project every month goes straight into a betterment account. So that was something that I talked to Riley about that we would use our other sources of income to pay for our lives. And this source of income, we don't touch and we are basically investing it every single month, it's a little bit more as more people sign up, and it goes straight into a betterment account. And I have certain plans for what I want to do with that money once it grows. But for now, I basically view it as socking away, you know, five or $600 every month towards my life with Riley, and hopefully our future children 15 years down the road. So obviously, slowly moving towards full time work with my fiction writing is incredibly exciting all on its own. But I think what factoria gave me with this business plan was the ability to sort of blank and take a fresh perspective off of what I want to do with my life and how I can combine that with what type of life I want to live. And I think previously, I had kind of held those two notions separately of I want to write full time. And I want a nice life. I want to own a house, I want to have, you know, a big area where my kids can run around, I want to not stay up at night feeling anxious with bills. And I don't think I ever reconciled those two dreams until I sat down with the wealth circle and sort of mapped this out like what does this look like? How much money do I need in order to comfortably right and not feel like I'm making a really terrible decision with for my family and for my future, you know, financial stability. So the project is still really young, but it's very exciting to see it grow. I think I average between eight and 10 new subscribers every week. And I'm hoping to exponentially grow that. I won't share all of the metrics around this project. But I will say my long term goal is 40,000 subscribers. That's what I'm working towards. And maybe we don't get there, or maybe we surpass it. But I think that that was another thing that factoria taught me is how to deal with economies of scale. And so the whole goal of this project was to create something that would scale easily. So a very small monthly contribution can exponentially grow. Which is absolutely what I'm hoping for, because another thing to come of the last year is that Riley is switching careers. So previously, he was the director of strategy at an advertising agency in Los Angeles. And he will be making the jump to architecture over the next few years. So the plan is for him to apply to graduate schools in the fall, and then go to graduate school. And that takes about three years. So we have kind of switched roles for the last year, or I guess I would say, for the last four years, Riley has been the one who has been very stable financially. And I've been kind of like the free whirling dervish who kind of runs around with her head cut off. And now you know, the roles are switching and I'm gonna be the one who allows him a little bit more leeway to pursue his dreams. And the plan is for me to do so with my own freelance work and with the cover stories. So it's terrifying in many ways to take basically my own business and and rely on it and put my time and effort into growing it, as opposed to putting my time and effort into sending resumes to a ton of other jobs. And that's something that I'm slowly moving through. And I think a lot of the confidence that I have towards building my own business versus immediately contracting all my free time out to others, has come from factor honestly, and being comfortable with the math and not being afraid of looking at it and saying, okay, here's what we have. Now, that's not enough to live off a full time. Okay, so I need one other job, and not really shying away from those conversations as much as I think I would have previously. And this brings me to my job effect hora. So I signed on as the podcast editor for factoria, I believe, about a month ago, and there really isn't anything profound behind why he did it. Besides the fact that I think, taking account of the way that I've spent my time over the last six years, I think it's ironic, because when I talk to people about it, I will say, the I'm pursuing my dream, you know, I'm pursuing this goal. But the reality is that in trying to do that, I've spent a lot of time doing a lot of jobs for people that mean nothing to me. And so when I saw the role open up for factoria, I thought, What a perfect opportunity for me to pick up a freelance, you know, contracting role, but to have it holds meaning for me and to work for women that I so admire, and learn so much from in the fall. And to not feel like I have this on and off switch, which I've felt so much like in the past where, okay, I have three hours of my own writing time in the morning, three hours at night. And in the middle is just this blank dead space where I just go on to the default mode and try to survive this horrific freelance job. Sorry, to all of my employers who are listening to me right now. Love you guys. So yeah, so I signed on to factorio. It was a no brainer. I mean, I think that this company, is brilliant. And so professionally, I thought it was a huge win to get involved. Personally, it's such a joy to work with Allegra and Julia and Whitney, and Taylor and all the women who are joining on. And so it, I don't even really think it requires explanation. Personally, I think it was like such a gift for me to be able to join when I joined.
But I know that last week, Whitney, Julia and Allegra each shared what their personal values are. And that is something that I'm supposed to talk about today. So a quick rundown of I think the personal values that guide me, a lot of which I think I've learned through the wealth circle, one huge thing is trust, like trust in myself and trust in the things that I want to achieve, that there is a way to achieve them. Because I think in order to do anything exciting, you really have to go out on a limb. And one thing I've learned from my own business, and you know, self promotion on Instagram, is that you're going to put up with a lot of silence when you speak up about something that you want to do. And you really have to believe in what you're doing in order to not kind of get freaked out by the idea of well, why me? Why do I think I can do this when there are so many better writers out there are so many other smart people that I went to college with, why should I start this company? Why should I do any of these things that I think I could maybe accomplish? And so trust has been a huge thing for me this year. And what I found is that it's much easier to trust other people than it is to trust yourself. So that's something that I'm constantly working on personally. Another value that I would say has become increasingly important to me is discipline. I am not a disciplined person. I am type to the max. And both this project and my increased interest in moving towards financial independence have required to be way more structured than I usually am, I have to keep tabs on things, I have to create lines in the sand for Riley and I to live by, and I am not perfect at it. And I am not a naturally disciplined person. But I have learned that a lot of the things that I think I know about myself are really just habits that I've fallen into, and I can change those. And so sort of leaning into the excitement of discipline and of seeing a different side of myself has been exciting, and also sometimes stressful, because I don't always do it, right. But I'm very proud of the fact that I share a story every Sunday at nine. And that's something I never thought I'd be able to do. And a lot of that discipline has been grown over the last year, it's not something that I maybe grew up with. Okay, the last principle that I'll share, I don't even know if it's a principle, but a sort of inside joke between Riley and I is that he often says I have a lot of joie de vive. And so my principle is vive, like, you've got to have a lot of life and to be excited about the stuff that you're doing. Because that's the only way that other people want to join you with what you're doing. And I think it's what I found, in fact, Torah is that there's a lot of vif going on in there, a lot of women who are excited about what they're doing, and proud of what they're bringing into the world. And that's contagious. And I think when you're a small business owner, or if you're working at a huge company, I'm sure having excitement and energy about what you're doing at any given point during the day is so much easier said than done. And I think it's something that I've grown from having as kind of like a fun little weekend motto to a full business model of, Okay, if I'm going to be writing this much, if I'm going to be writing, you know, 8000 words a week, I've got to find a way for it to be fun in the moment and not just fun when it's completed. So I'm not really perfect at that yet. But it matters to me, and I'm trying. So the last thing for me to talk about today is what I'm doing for remote month, where I am how I'm spending it. So I'm still in Massachusetts, we are finishing up work on our house before we rent it out to renters starting in July. And I will say I don't have very exciting plans for June. But I have very exciting remote plans for the next year. So here's what's about to happen. Between the airstream renovation and the home purchase. We are using these two investments, I guess I'll call them to kind of hack our way through Riley's graduate school phase, the house that we're living in, we are going to rent out while we're gone for $400 over the mortgage cost. And in the summertime, we can rent it out for about three times our monthly mortgage bill because we live in a summer town, we're close to the water and so people come here for months at a time. So while we are renting out our house, we are going to be living in our Airstream. Yes, Van life. Except it's not a van. It's really cool. The plan is basically to kind of house hack our way through Riley's graduate school and try to make as much money as possible from that investment to put towards his tuition so that he doesn't graduate with a bunch of debt. And so that we can sort of manage to live off of my freelance work while he's a student. So to get a little more granular about it, because I know I'm not sharing as many numbers as a regular wealth circle transformation would be. But I just don't have the numbers yet, folks, I'm not that organized. This is what my next year is going to look like. So we are renting our house out to two different families, one for the month of August, and one for the month of July. And then we are renting it out for a period of time from September through May. So about 10 months, we are using that money and putting it aside the surplus money we get beyond paying for a mortgage we're putting into a bank account and not touching. And we're hoping to put that towards what will be the the money for Riley's graduate school that will start the following autumn. During that time period, Riley and I are planning on taking off in the airstream probably around September and traveling around the country. And so we're hoping to spend most of our time boondocking which is when you stay in an RV without paying for a campground you can use a lot of different apps to find out where you can legally stay overnight for free. And as you go further west, you can find more places because there's a lot of public land that you can use. So we're planning on driving all over the country and kind of taking some time to travel and see friends and just sort of you know, spend time with one another while I'm growing up cover stories project. And so the hope is that this will keep our monthly costs pretty low that we can continue to save up for rallies graduate school, and that we're also hopefully going to have a hell of an adventure. So right now I am back where I feel like I always am which is living in my childhood bedroom. It feels different than it has in the past because it's so exciting to be working towards like such huge It really does feel very big. And I think I wouldn't have been prepared to take on the idea of my spouse going back to school. If I hadn't gone through a factory a class, honestly, I will say, I'm genuinely not trying to be coy when it comes to sharing the math on all this, I just Riley and I have been putting our money in so many different places that I think it's going to take several months before I can actually map out what we've saved, quote, unquote, because as we have, again, quote, unquote, saved money, we've put it almost immediately back into our house and Airstream renovations. So he and I have tried to do a lot of work on the house ourselves, we painted it ourselves, we're currently retailing the bathroom, all these tiny things. And then we're also paying for, I would guess, in the grand scheme of things, it's a small renovation, in which we're just kind of replacing the kitchen. And then we also have put a ton of money into our Airstream with the hope that it will basically serve as like a little home for us. So right now we have maybe $9,000 in our ally account. So that's another aspect I think a factor that has sort of changed my perspective on finances is that I'm thinking about saving money and investing in a more creative way. I'm not just thinking about what I'm putting into my bank account, but I'm thinking about the decisions that I'm making about where I put my money and how that will benefit me 20 years from now, as opposed to, you know, a year from now. And so what that has meant for us in the last year has been fixing up this house so that we can rent it out kind of ad nauseum and finishing this Airstream renovations that we can take off in it. I think we only last talked about it. We thought we had put about $30,000 into our Airstream, which would have us at I think 40,000 I don't know if that's a clear estimate. But I do know that the resale value of vintage renovated airstreams tends to be much higher than that, you know, a really, really beautiful vintage Airstream that's been renovated can sell for between 80 and $100,000. So that's another thing that we've talked about is that maybe we travel around the airstream and then we sell it. So that is basically all I have for you folks. I hope everyone is having a beautiful June. If you want to subscribe to my cover stories, you can go to my Instagram which is Carol Claire Burke and click on the link in my bio. And you can also follow me on Instagram to see what I'm doing with this Airstream adventure and to get a few sneak peeks of my really adorable Scottish Fold cats if that's something that you're into.
I hope everyone's having an absolutely beautiful day. And I look forward to chatting with you guys soon. Peace