Getting Laid Changed My Life in the Best Way: How to Succeed After a Financial Setback
Personal finance expert Lynnette Khalfani-Cox had not even stepped five feet into the reception area of News Corp’s offices in Manhattan to confirm an interview with MarketWatch when she met a former colleague who now runs one of Khalfani-Cox’s departments. She worked there about 20 years ago before she was laid off.
She’s been back before, but never like this. She’s here to talk about her new book, “Bounce Back: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Resilience,” which details losing her dream job in 2003 and turning that defeat into her successful career.
“It’s a bit surreal to be back here, but in many ways it feels like a perfect moment,” Khalfani-Cox said as she took her seat in the conference room.
After years of reporting for Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal, including serving as an on-air correspondent for CNBC Journal, Khalfani-Cox immediately escaped her layoff and started her own financial education company, Money. Her coach and her husband Earl. She has spent years helping people get out of debt and has written numerous books on the subject, including her bestseller “Zero Debt.” She had many adventures along the way, including becoming a personal finance expert on ‘The Dr. Oz Show’ and raising her three children. (Disclosure: She also wrote a freelance column for WalletPop, a website I used to run that was disbanded in 2011.)
“My last day on the air at CNBC was March 1, 2003, the same month I started my company. So now I’m over 20 years (and) going strong. And honestly, I haven’t looked back,” she says.
10 scary D’s
Miniaturization is not the only issue addressed in “Bounce Back” and its accompanying “Bounce Back Workbook,” released simultaneously. Khalfani-Cox experiences nine different “dreaded Ds”: divorce, death of a loved one, disability, illness, disaster, debt, credit damage, dollar deficit and discrimination. side.
Her secret to handling all of this came from the way she handled layoffs. This stems from the belief that you shouldn’t let bad circumstances derail your long-term goals. You deal with it and move on.
“When people face a financial crisis, they go into retrenchment mode. There is a tendency to be kind of closed off and in some cases double down on doing bad things,” says Khalfani-Cox. “People ask me what to do first. Should you pay off debt or save? And I say you should do both. The two are not mutually exclusive, and it is in your best interest to do both.”
For example, consider what happens when people take out 401(k) loans, struggle, and withdraw money. Typically, people stop contributing while withdrawing money. This makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t make sense financially in the long run. “They don’t realize that they are making the problem worse,” says Khalfani-Cox. “Especially when the stock market has had a really strong year like 2023, we need to continue to contribute.”
see: 20 stocks that rose the most in 2023
That’s how Khalfani-Cox learned to manage 20 years ago, when she had a jobs crisis and needed seed money to start her company. She was using her retirement savings because she didn’t have an emergency fund, but she also started saving her retirement savings again with her company’s profits.
“There was a time when I absolutely saved less. But then her husband and I each opened a separate 401(k) account, and we both saved as much as we could every year,” she says. “Our retirement strategy is really about broad diversity and being in the areas where we feel most comfortable. So I absolutely invest in the stock market. But we also own eight investment properties and use real estate as part of the cornerstone of our retirement strategy.”
The ‘D’ Most People Don’t Talk About
Addressing real estate issues, Khalfani-Cox included a candid chapter on discrimination in “Bounce Back.”
“As I was writing, it occurred to me that a lot of personal finances depend on judgment. “It’s like the moral police come out and start pointing fingers at people and telling them that their flaws are actually sins,” she says. “Sometimes there is little awareness of the systemic structural forces that can be barriers to people achieving financial security. So I just wanted to put it out there.”
Discrimination in the financial sector can occur in all kinds of ways in many communities, whether regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other factors. Most of them end up missing an opportunity or receiving a lesser offer in some way.
The story Khalfani-Cox shares in her book is about an African-American applicant in a predominantly white town getting her home appraised for a mortgage that was $100,000 below market value. “I can’t tell you how many black people have experienced that,” she says. She and her husband appealed through the bank, sent a second appraiser, this time an African-American man, and got a better result.
“There is a whole problem that the financial services industry needs to address around financial inclusion, and they are very aware of that,” says Khalfani-Cox. “This issue needs to be addressed from a variety of perspectives, not just from a housing perspective.”
The message of “Bounce Back” is how to overcome this and continue to fight any other disaster that may come your way.
“My sisters and I always use this expression: One monkey won’t stop no-showing. That means the show has to go on, and you have to power through things,” says Khalfani-Cox. “Change will happen to all of us. It just falls into your lap whether you want it to or not. But change is something external that happens to you. The transition happens within you, and that is when you process the changes that have occurred in your life. This is an opportunity for a new and potentially brighter future.”
