234 : The House Fire That Changed Everything with Karen Worthy

Adam Coelho 0:05

Welcome to the Mindful Fire Podcast, a show about crafting a life you love and making work optional using the tools of mindfulness, envisioning, and financial independence. I'm your host, Adam Coelho, and I'm so glad you're here. Each episode of the Mindful Fire podcast explores these three tools through teachings, guided meditations, and inspiring interviews with people actually living them to craft a life they love. If you're ready to start your mindful fire journey, go to mindfulfire. org slash start and download my free envisioning guide in just 10 minutes. This guide will help you craft a clear and inspiring vision for your life. Again, you can download it for free at mindfulfire. org slash start. Let's jump into today's episode. Karen, welcome to the Mindful Fire podcast. I'm so glad to have you here.

Karen Worthy 1:10

Oh, I am so glad to be here, Adam. Thank you for inviting me.

Adam Coelho 1:13

All right. So let's start by having you share with the audience a little bit about who you are, your journey, and what you're up to in the world.

Karen Worthy 1:20

So my name is Karen Worthy, and I know you have heard this story a little bit before we were talking earlier, but I am I'm on a fire journey as well as several other journeys right now, and it all started probably about, gosh, it was like 2018, 2019 timeframe, and I was at a good job, I was working at Amazon, and my husband and I, we've got three kids they were very little at that time, and we were looking at our finances, and we were looking at, What was going on because we were Bringing in a lot of money to be really honest, but we were also spending more than we were bringing in and it was very much of an eye opening wake up call for us. I remember sitting in our living room and going through all the numbers. We pulled everything we'd spent for the entire year and we're like, I can't believe we're spending this much. And it was very eye opening. And then we found Fire, I found Mr. Money Mustache, binge read all of his blog posts. I'm sure many of your listeners have done similar. And it started the wheels turning. And so we started doing it. Very fiery type things. Like we started absolutely never eating out. we pulled our kids out of afterschool care as opposed and watched them at home. And to save a little bit of money, we started looking at our expenses with a different light. And that was all going well. we were in the process of working on how do we downsize, how do we really design the life we want? And then in late 2020. We had something happen to us. And so we had a house fire that basically burnt down our house. Thankfully everybody was okay. All the important stuff. So scary. Like literally, I pulled my kids out of the house with no shoes on because I needed to get them out of there. It was so scary. But thankfully everyone was okay. We lost everything from a stuff perspective and learned so many things in there. And so, like, if you are thinking about, like, the things that matter to you, it helped me to really realize. Stuff doesn't matter to me. It just doesn't. Like, it's all replaceable. Every single thing was replaceable that I thought prior was so important. And it also helped me to figure out that it was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to have options again that I was able to say, you know what, we're not Like, prior to this, we had the perfect house, the perfect school district, the perfect commute to work, the perfect backyard, the perfect whatever, and none of that seemed to matter anymore. And so we basically had this blank slate. Thankfully, we had good insurance coverage, so highly recommend, go look at your insurance coverage, make sure you're covered for the things that you could potentially lose. But we had enough insurance coverage that we could figure out what we wanted to do next. And my husband and I took about a year. We rented a place for a little while and we figured out that we didn't want to live in that neighborhood. We didn't want to live in that school district. I was working remote at that point, thankfully, and was very blessed and fortunate and so like even the commute to work didn't matter as much anymore. And so we figured out we wanted to do something different. We bought an RV. We went traveling for three months. all over the West of the United States. It was amazing. We homeschooled our kids. We bought some land. We bought 15 acres out in the middle of nowhere and built our own house. did a very frugal way. Like my husband is very handy. My father in law is very handy. And so together they basically built the house that we're living in now. It was so cool. But like none of that was possible until we had this moment of, Oh, we can do whatever we want. We don't have to be in this neighborhood. We don't have to be in this house. We don't have to do the things that we're doing it's been a very long journey to do that, and eventually it led to me quitting my job. I decided that What I was doing was not the right thing for me anymore. And so I left. I did a personal sabbatical. Thankfully FIRE had helped me to get enough money. I'm nowhere near actually like retiring, but get enough money to have options and have choice. And that's so powerful and I was able to take a personal sabbatical for a couple months and then figure out that I wanted to start my own business. I do career transition coaching for folks and helping them has been Something that has brought a lot of joy to my life. And it's been something that's been really fun to build over the last year. So I know I just talked a bunch, but feel free to ask me any questions.

Adam Coelho 5:22

Yeah, that is. An incredible story and there's so many things that I want to dive into. I'm trying to figure out where I want to start. Feel free, wherever makes sense. Yeah, let's start, just go through it. Let's start at that moment where you're like, wow, like we're spending more than we're making. And we're making a good living, but we're spending more than we're making. Like, what was that conversation like with your husband? When you, guess, like, what caused you to sit down and look at the numbers in the first place? Because a lot of people are doing that and they just never stop to actually get the awareness of what the situation actually is.

Karen Worthy 5:58

I don't remember exactly what caused us to start the conversation, but I do know once we started digging in, we started with a month of expenses, and we're like, yeah, this isn't really telling us the story, because our expenses were a little bit lumpy throughout the year, I'm kind of a data nerd, I'm an engineer in my background, I love Excel spreadsheets, and so, We downloaded all of our transactions from our bank, from our financial institution, from, like, we were buying a lot on Amazon. We downloaded all our transactions from Amazon. Like, I made this gigantic spreadsheet of everything we had paid for in the last year, and some of it was really obvious stuff. Like, I knew how much we were paying on a mortgage. I knew how much our car payments were. I knew how much all of that stuff was. What I didn't realize is how much I was spending on what I will call stupid stuff, like Sonic drinks or that type of thing, and it helped us to really like, put it in perspective and say, I do enjoy a good, like, slushie from Sonic or whatever, but is it worth this amount of dollars a month? Because that's a lot of dollars a month, because I was, we were going pretty often, and we were, like, we just had lifestyle creep that had gone unchecked for a while, because I was getting, honestly, raise after raise, and the lifestyle creep kept up with that, and that was something that we hadn't really thought about as in depth as we wanted to.

Adam Coelho 7:11

Yeah, it's so easy for it to happen and it's like It's not like you're going and buying like a, a Porsche, you know? no. Like, it's not like it's like all at once. No. That's what people think of when they think lifestyle cream. They're, it was like three hours at a time. Yeah, exactly. $3 at a time. For me, it's like going to Dunkin Donuts, right? Like, look, if you enjoy that and you value that, like I do, I got my Dunkin Donuts cup right here from today. So I do value it and I, so it's fine, but like, it really adds up and, I've noticed for me, it's like eating out, like with two young kids and like, work and all the things going on. It's like very easy to be like five o'clock and you're like, what are we going to do? Okay. Yes, put these kids to bed and get some Thai food, like, yeah, and that's fine too. But it's just like, when you actually sit down and run the numbers, then you can ask yourself like, Is this what I want to be spending my money on? And if it's yes, then wonderful. And if not, could I allocate that a little bit somewhere else or save it to invest it and all of that? But yeah, I think that when it becomes a real urgent problem is when it's more than what you're bringing in. And I think that it's not uncommon.

Karen Worthy 8:23

It's not uncommon at all. And honestly, like we had tried to be very budget minded before that we tried to be, we tried to watch our spending, but it just wasn't super obvious what we were spending it on and how much it added up to. And so for us, we actually, and we've gone away from this, but for a long while, we went cold turkey. So like spending, like eating out was one of our big categories that we wanted to control. Yeah. And I think it was the Frugal Woods blog or somebody I was reading like suggested just do a month where you don't eat out at all, like zero eating out. And it was, I was like, mind blown. I was like, I don't know if I could do that. Like, that would be hard, like zero, like not 10 or 20, but zero. my husband and I looked at each other, we're like, if we're gonna do this, we might as well just dive in headfirst and do this. the first week was hard, but by the time the end of the month was like, you know what, we should keep doing this. We actually like it. And so we probably went. a year and a half without eating out a single time or now we have a small budget. We spend 100 a month on it, but it's very controlled. But it took going cold turkey for us to actually get to that stage.

Adam Coelho 9:24

Yeah, no, it makes sense because like you got to get into the groove of like making the meals, right? Once you get into that groove. You're like, wait a second, this is pretty good, it's just like it takes that intentionality and that like, I'm feeling like I'm, we're reacting to like, okay, let's just get this. It's like, oh, it was a hard day, whatever, you know, that whole, like, I deserve it kind of thing, but like, but that can happen over and over again. And it gets to the point where it's like, wait a second, this is like five, this is like three times a week, four times a week, you know, you said a hundred dollars. I'm like, I spent more than that yesterday at Hibachi, but I also had a fantastic time. So that's okay. But yeah, I think it really starts with that awareness. cool. So you, you started with these changes and you started to get that spending under control and then the universe gave you this imploded. Yeah. Like literally house on fire. Yes. House was on fire and you got out of there safely. Thank God. And that gave you this literal reset from the ashes of your house. You had a check from the insurance company, I imagine, that was like, Yep, eventually, yes. Can we build this house? Eventually, yeah. Yeah, there's a whole nother story. Waiting for a check of myself from the insurance company for the audience. We were talking about this before. started the year with 40, 000 gallons of water in my crawl space and had 20, 000 of unexpected expenses, some of which hopefully will be covered by insurance, but a huge reminder to the importance of having an emergency fund. that could, if, if I was living paycheck to paycheck, if I didn't have savings, that would have been a catastrophic situation that would have had to go into debt. Oh, these, the HVAC people were so nice. They said they were willing to pay, let me put it on a, give me credit for it. And I said, oh, what's the interest rate? They said 12%. It's like a loan shark. I was like, I think I'll just pay cash. And actually you're going to give me a discount because I'm going to pay you right now. And so I saved like a thousand bucks that way. but it was a huge reminder of this is why you have an emergency fund. This is why you pursue financial independence. Because when you have nowhere to live because your house burned down and you need to go pay for a hotel and you have no insurance money.

Karen Worthy 11:43

It's a real, it's a real thing. Like, The fire started about two or three o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday afternoon. By the time we had, the firefighters were done, we had done doing what we needed to do physically there, it was probably like seven o'clock at night. Thankfully my in laws live close by, they came and picked up the kids, but my husband and I took our car and we're trying to figure out where do we sleep tonight, what do we need, literally what do we need, and. I was on the phone with the insurance company for probably about three hours that afternoon, if not more, trying to get them to do things like book us a hotel as part of our policy. They were going to book us a hotel for the foreseeable future, but they were dragging their feet. It was probably nine o'clock at night before they got their hotel stuff figured out. But because I had that emergency fund and because we'd started this fire journey a couple years prior, we'd started to slowly build up. We were nowhere near, anywhere near fire, but we had the emergency fund. We had enough put away. And it allowed me to go ahead and book the hotel on my credit card until the insurance company got their stuff figured out. It allowed us to go to Target and buy things like toothbrushes, toothpaste, shoes, like all of the stuff that you need when your entire possessions, like, burned to the ground. but I was able to do that in a way. I wasn't worried about money that evening, but if I hadn't had that emergency fund, I would have been stressing about not only the tragedy that had just happened, but worrying about money as well, and just having that, like that in itself is a reason to do this, is when things go wrong, you don't need that added worry of how am I going to survive until the insurance check kicks in, for example.

Adam Coelho 13:13

Well said. Goosebumps, whole body goosebumps right there. That is why we do this, right? First and like the freedom and all of that is a wonderful goal But we do this to make sure that we can Navigate life and the ups and downs and the tragedies that are gonna come. Yeah, we don't know when we don't know how they're gonna come and we can not have that added stress, which is huge right? If you have to worry about how am I going to pay for this? How am I going to like, for me, like, how am I going to heat my house? Pay this 15, 000. How am I going to do this? Yep. That's like really terrible, right? And it's on top of the stress of the situation already. Having financial independence or some level of an emergency fund and financial independence. makes that whole thing smoother. So I'm glad we, we dove into that. I think that's so important. You have this reset and you decide to go and really reflect and decide, no, this is not for us anymore. We want something different. And you went and bought 15 acres of

Karen Worthy 14:20

land. We did. Yes. We bought an RV and we bought 15 acres of land. There was a lot of reflection in there and it, it was not a. Not a simple, short process. Like, like I said, we rented a house for about a year after that, and it took us about that long, maybe six months, to figure out what we wanted to do but it was a lot of reflection. Honestly, it was a lot of envisioning, like what I know you talk about, we wrote down and like I did journaling around what do I want my life to look like? What do I want a day in my life to look like? There's so many different things. things that we had to consider and had to wade through. Like, even, like, we're, we live in Texas. Like, even to the point of, do we still want to live in Texas? Like, the whole world is literally open to us at this point. And so what does that look like for us? And we figured out we wanted to travel. That was one of our priorities. I've got, Three young kids, and we wanted to make sure that we spent time and showed them a little bit of the United States before we didn't have that opportunity to do so, and then we'd always wanted to eventually get out into the country and have some land, but it would all, it was always like a retirement dream. It was always like, someday I'll do this, and now we have the chance to do that now, and I won't say it was easy, but it was definitely something that we could do because we had wiped the slate clean like that.

Adam Coelho 15:30

that's amazing. How was it traveling for three, for a few months? Three months, yeah. Three months with three kids?

Karen Worthy 15:36

So that was, they were probably, what, sixth grade and second grade, so I've got three kids at that point. It was, Good. I loved it. I think at the end of it, my oldest kid was like, that's enough. Let's go home. But I overall, it was really good. We basically went and did a loop through the West. So we started in Texas, went up through Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and then came down like through California and then back across through Arizona and New Mexico. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Adam Coelho 16:03

Wonderful. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah I love the idea of doing that. My wife loves it less. Maybe start with a shorter trip then. Find me a nice hotel. I don't want to be trapped in a metal can with these, with you and these kids for three months.

Karen Worthy 16:19

It was so nice though, because you bring your home with you. Like, we slept in our bed every night. We had our kitchen every day. Yeah, it wasn't a strange hotel or a strange Airbnb.

Adam Coelho 16:29

that's, I can see the consistency of that being a nice aspect. I would love to hear about this house. anyone who's listed as podcast knows, it's my dream to design and build my own house slash. skate park, casita. Oh, there you go. yeah, I have this like plot of land in my neighborhood. That's not really a plot of land. It's part of someone's yard. my vision. I'm putting it out there is to subdivide that land off of their property. Cause it has street access. It's like an appendage to their land. And I want to build. This skate park casita, which looks a lot like this room in the neighborhood and just like walk over there and do my retreats and my, my coaching and business and stuff from there. So I like literally like walk over there sometimes and just like stand in the grass.

Karen Worthy 17:16

And you envision it while you're standing there. I

Adam Coelho 17:18

love it. I do. So one of these days I'm going to go up to their door and be like, how much would you like for this? Oh, so they don't

Karen Worthy 17:26

know that

Adam Coelho 17:26

you're planning this. They don't know. I haven't, I don't know. I don't even know them. One day I'm just going to get the cops called on me for being in their yard. Oh, I love it. So tell me about the process like of designing and building this house.

Karen Worthy 17:40

It's a long process. I probably drove my husband crazy. daily on it because he was the one doing a lot of the work, him and my father in law. And he was the one doing a lot of the designing. And so he would come to me and be like, which light fixture do you want? And I'm like, I don't know. I've got to go figure that out. And, or he'd be like, do you want a light switch here versus a light? I was like, I don't know. Like, why do I need to know these things now? I'm much more of a tangible person. I like to see it and feel it. And like, it wasn't. An option here. And so I drove my husband crazy during it, but it was it turned out really well in the end. So long process.

Adam Coelho 18:14

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, you were able to do that and they literally built it.

Karen Worthy 18:18

we hired out a couple of pieces. We hired out the foundation and then it's a steel frame house. So we hired out the steel frame. And we hired out the air conditioning because you have to have a special license to do the Freon and all of that kind of stuff, and we hired out my husband's father is a plumber, so he did all the plumbing work all sorts of other pieces like he knows how to do the only other thing we hired out is once everything was we hired out the painting, interior painting of it, mostly just because we didn't want to do it, but everything else, every fixture, every, I laid the flooring and our second floor flooring, I like have installed different, like I painted the stair, like there's so many different pieces that I can be like, Oh, I did that. And I did that. And it's, it's really

Adam Coelho 18:58

cool. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. I love that. So let's transition now and talk about how pursuing fire, building some level of financial independence gave you the confidence to go out on your own and to make this huge leap. I'll speak for myself and I think I've talked to a lot of people they want to go out and do their own thing or they want to leave that secure, high paying job, that's maybe not a perfect fit or maybe a terrible fit, but pays well and maybe is reasonable, in terms of the workload, but you realized, Hey, I have options now and I don't want this anymore. So tell me, walk me through that. Yeah, how that came to be and what role fire played in

Karen Worthy 19:46

that definitely. So it was late 2022 and I was working in a really good company. I was, I had a really good job. I was the vice president of people for that company at that point working in their recruiting and HR sections and. Absolutely, like, it was not a bad place. It wasn't like I was running from something, but I felt that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, and I wasn't quite hitting what I needed to at that point. I've also, like, a lot of people say, oh, start your side hustle while you're still working at your full time job. I've tried that. I'll be really honest. I don't have that skill set. Maybe I still need to learn it, but like I'm not great at that. I am one of those people I go 110 percent in and I have like full speed and zero speed basically in most cases. And so I knew for myself, like I needed to separate, step away. And that would be what would be the impetus for this and so my husband and I did a lot of planning, we saved as much money as we could and decided that I was going to do a personal sabbatical so we had enough money saved up where we could go somewhere 6 to 12 months without zero, without any income coming in and we would be fine and still have all of our retirement and all of that kind of stuff. And so we said, you know what, yeah. It'll take three to six months to get another job, and so we're going to set the first six months as go figure it out, go try starting something and if it doesn't work, you can go back and get another job, like, I am unfortunate to be highly employable right now and so I left in November. So in November, December basically doing a lot of like decompressing and spending time with my kids and a whole lot of nothing. I think we were sick at that point too. And then in January, I started to get I started to get bored. And so I, everybody, this was January, 2023, everybody was being laid off. a bloodbath. It was a bloodbath. It was a bloodbath. Everywhere. everywhere. And I knew that I had the skills to help them. I didn't know that this was what I was supposed to be doing, but I knew that I had the skills to help them. I'd been a recruiter, I'd been in HR, I'd been trained as a, interviewer at Amazon and all these other great places. Like, I knew that I had the skills to help them. And so I started volunteering and doing that. And so this is one thing I'd highly encourage if there's somebody who's like, I don't know what I want to do, but I think I might enjoy this. Do it for free, do it for volunteer work, and see if you really enjoy it, see if you're really interested in doing it, even when you're not getting paid, because then you can turn it into a paying thing. So I started volunteering, figured out I really liked it, figured out I was good at it, the people were getting jobs, and so I decided I was going to jump in and start my own company. And it was a long haul it's been a fun year, I've learned so much things, but without fire. I would not have been able to have that opportunity to focus that time, focus that mental energy on that.

Adam Coelho 22:28

Yeah. So that's amazing. I'm thrilled to hear it. And when we connected, I think it was like, you were just starting. I was just

Karen Worthy 22:36

starting. It was like March or April of last year. Yeah,

Adam Coelho 22:38

it's like, I don't know if it's gonna work at that point. So the fire piece, it's like you ran the numbers like I assumed that you had since, what we talked about earlier, you had had an understanding of how much you're spending, how much you're making. Oh, yeah. your net worth and where all that money was. And so I imagine you looked and you said, okay, we've, we plan, we set aside this. Yep. Six months to a year of expenses that if we make no money We'll be okay. We can pay our bills. Yep. And was your husband working as well during that

Karen Worthy 23:07

time? he's part full time parent and part consultant. He's a web designer, web developer. And so off and on, yes, but not significantly. it was a tough decision because I was the main Main income earner at that point. And so It was something that we had to choose, like, that we're going all in on this. like, it's one of the things about Fire Atom that I really love is it gives you choices. Once you hit, and it gives you choices almost from day one. I had somebody, maybe it was like middle of last year, ask me like, what's your fire number? How many years till fire are you? I'm like, I don't honestly know, because I don't think about it like that anymore. I used to, but I now think about it more in terms of what choices does this allow me to do right now? Because the right now is where I'm, like, my kids are growing up so fast. I'm sure everybody, every parent feels that way. But, like, I know I only have a certain number of years where they're still at home, where I can spend all this time with them. And for me, like, it wasn't about hitting financial independence five, ten years from now, because what am I going to do with that at that point? My kids are out of the house. I need something now. And so it gave me optionality now, and that was huge.

Adam Coelho 24:12

I love that. I always say, And people have heard this in the intro, like, for me, where mindfulness and financial independence come together is awareness and choice, right? And financial independence, that's what it gives you. It gives you options, it gives you choice and agency in your life, right? Whether you want to do something with it or not, you have that capacity, and it's really nice to have that, kind of in your back pocket, like, if this isn't working for me, like I can go, I can take this time off, I can move over here, I can do, I have options because I have the awareness of my situation, what my life costs, how much I'm bringing in, all of that. I think that's so powerful.

Karen Worthy 24:55

so powerful. I think the other thing that people don't realize is even if you're not going to take yourself up on that, like you're not planning to quit, you're not planning to do a side hustle, it makes you better at your job. If you know that you have a few money, if you know that you have enough savings that you could survive without that job until you find another one, It makes you take a little bit more risks, it makes you a little bit bolder, it makes you a little bit more opinionated at work, and that's actually really good for your career and it makes you do a better job at work, subconsciously.

Adam Coelho 25:23

absolutely, we were talking before we started recording about some challenging situations I'm having at work and it's easy to get caught up in that and just trying to, you know, in this layoff environment, just trying to do a good job and continue to, do good. So you keep, can keep your job and you can do all this stuff. If it turned into like, no matter what I did I, I was still getting, challenging situations. We'll put it that way. But when I stepped back and I look at my financial situation and I look at what my life costs and how much money I've saved and invested over the years, I'm like, why am I doing this? why am I reacting to this person? who has no concern for me as a human being. Why am I letting that dictate my life? When I have all this money that I've been saving and I have F you money, right? I don't want to say F you, but I could. And that gives me more confidence to go back and continue doing a good job, but also not take nonsense. I don't have time for nonsense. I don't need to deal with that. And if they want to lay me off, be my guest. Please do. I'm all good. I told my boss that I told my team that anyone who would listen, I said, listen, I don't want to go, but if I, if it's my time, I'm good because I've been preparing for this. So there's a, a real confidence that comes with that, and I think it's so, it's really

Karen Worthy 26:53

powerful. It is really powerful. It also helps, like, that amount of emergency fund or savings or whatever you want to call it, it helps you if you do want to start that side hustle, but if you want to start that next thing earlier while you're still working, it helps you with that. I'm working with one of my clients right now, and she is still fully employed, but she knows that she wants to work in her way into this other like a coaching role that she's working towards, and I'm working with her to help her figure out how does she start it while she is still employed, what, how does that fit with her schedule, how, what does the products look like, like all of that she could not do. If she didn't have a little bit of money saved up to invest in things like her website, like the coaching product, like all of those different things. And it just helps you, again, it helps you have options. It helps you have choice. It helps you move faster in different situations. And so definitely worth it.

Adam Coelho 27:41

Yeah. it's so important. And I think one of the things that you said is like, it's not about getting to the goal of financial independence and then living your life. Like your life is happening right here, right now. Every moment. So like with my coaching programs, let's get really clear on what you want. What do I want my life to look like? What is an ideal day if I set aside all the limitations? You don't have to burn down your house to set aside your limitations. Please don't but you can Set those limitations aside, those constraints, all of that stuff and think really big and dream about what would I do if anything was possible. And then the third, like my program is really all about like, how can you start living that right now? How can you start putting your predictive brain to work to make that a reality for you? Right now. And, it's an eight week program, and my goal, my success metric for the program is, at the end of this eight weeks, you should be able to point to specific ways that you're living that ideal life right now. Big and small ways. Could just be realizing something that you think you needed out there is actually already in your life or can be with a slight tweak, or it can be trying something, right? Having a conversation, starting to reach out to people in, in a different way. It can, you can actually do it right now. You don't have to wait. I love that aspect that you highlighted of how fire enables you to do that.

Karen Worthy 29:11

It definitely does. Fire enables you. It gives you options. It gives you choices. Like, when I'm working with career transition folks, people who have been laid off, people who have involuntarily left their full time role, they don't feel like they have a choice at that point. But if you have some savings, if you have been following the path to FIRE, it allows you to have more optionality at that point. It allows you to be less stressed. It allows you to be more picky as you're selecting your next job so that you can find the fit that is right for you. And just, it takes away some of the stress so that as you go through what is really a difficult part in your life, and I've coached many people through this, it's one of the hardest things that you're going to have to go through is this involuntary career transition. But having a little bit of savings saved up is going to make it a little bit easier.

Adam Coelho 29:57

It's exactly what we talked about with your house burning down, right? if you also have to add worrying about money and rushing to get that next job so that you can pay the bills to support the life that you've built on top of the. injustice of being fired in the middle of the night, perhaps. Yes. Yeah. Just hypothetically that is a level of stress that you just don't need and is not going to set you up. You know, I always think about that. Like the moment where people need the confidence. And like belief in themselves to go out and get a new job is at the exact moment that their confidence is at the lowest possible point. Like, I'm just curious, like, this is not really relevant to what we were talking about right now, but like, how do you help people rebuild that confidence?

Karen Worthy 30:46

It's a great question. It sounds interesting to think about it this way, but one of the feedbacks that I've gotten, like, I do a lot of resume prep with folks, I do a lot of interview prep with folks, do a lot of networking, like, skills building, but one of the things that I have heard over and over again is, yes, they get a tangible, they get a piece of paper that's their resume, they get a list of stories that they're going to tell in their interview, but really what they get out of it is they get confidence, because once you put your accomplishments on paper, you now look at your career and your work experience with a new with open eyes, and you can see what you've accomplished, and you can see it through the lens of how a hiring manager might see it, and it gives you more confidence. There's actually a course that I built, it's called the Five Hour Resume. And it walks you through step by step how to go about doing this, and it will help you build your confidence along the way. And it's something I recommend whether or not you're in transition, but even if you're not in transition, you should always have a resume ready to go. In this day and age, and I hate to say this, but Nothing stable, like this idea that I grew up with and my dad grew up with of I'm going to go work at a place forever and retire, hire in after college and then retire when I'm older from the same company. My dad basically did that. I started at Procter and Gamble thinking I was going to do that. And that's just not the world we live in anymore. Nothing is stable. Nothing is secure. Even these big companies aren't. And so you always want to have your resume ready to go. I have a website. It's called worthy career paths with an S at the end. And it will. It'll show all the different things, but one of these things is this five hour resume. It's an online course and because I know that this is important for folks to build their confidence regardless of whether you are planning to job search or not, I highly recommend Go take this course and build your resume now. It will give you confidence to help you make those choices that you need to do. It's normally 150. There's a code, Mindful, so M I N D F U L. And if you enter that in, because you're a listener of this podcast, you'll get it for free. So I want to share that as well.

Adam Coelho 32:46

Thank you so much. That's so generous, Karen. And yeah, I think like it's so important, right? Like I'm probably going to go do that myself because I think about my resume, I have not updated my resume in eight years. It's time. It's well past time, Adam. It's well past time. And the reality is, is like, it's overwhelming to think about that, right? Yeah. And if you've been laid off, like, it's really overwhelming to go from that, that injustice to Yeah. Going and doing that. So I would highly recommend going and grabbing that. It will be in the show notes as well. thank you, Karen, for making that available to our audience for free. That's amazing.

Karen Worthy 33:26

Of course. One other point on that is, I've heard time and time again from folks who have been laid off or have left their roles, how much they wish they would have done their resume while they were still employed. Because they're gonna, like, I ask them for questions, like, What percentage improvement did you see on this? What are the numbers behind this particular achievement or accomplishment? And they're like, Oh, it was in that database or in that presentation that I no longer have access to. So if you do it when you're employed, you have access to all of the information at your current role that you, so you can fill out your accomplishments much, much better.

Adam Coelho 33:56

Excellent point. Excellent point. Yeah. You need, you sometimes you need that, those specifics, right? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. You need those specifics. So Karen, I know myself and a lot of people want to build their own thing whether they're hoping it's going to become like a full time replacement of their income or just something they want to do on the side or as they transition out of full time work to, post fire but they don't necessarily know how to go about getting started, right? You chose not to do it as a side hustle and got your financial situation in order you prepared so that you would have some runway to go and build this. Walk me through you leave your job, you have this decompression period and you start to think. Maybe I want to do something. I have some ideas. I want to build this business. How'd you go about like going and doing that and finding your first customers and all of that. I'd love to hear more about that journey.

Karen Worthy 34:51

It's been a journey. Cause I have figured out that there are things I am really good at and there are things that I've never had to use in my career. Like I. And at one point in my career, Adam, like I deleted all of my social media accounts. I was not the person who was going to be sharing out there. But then I decided like that was part of how I needed to get my clients. And so I did my first ever post on LinkedIn and was terrified, absolutely terrified. But it went well. And then I did another one. And then I did another one. And so a lot of my early clients came through LinkedIn, which is I know how you and I met as well. it was scary at first. And I also found. People who could help me and be role models on the journey and teachers along the way. And so there's some really good communities out there like there's Julie Morris has a DIY influencer community that teaches you if you do want to post on LinkedIn. It's really good. And she is a thought leader in that space. there was a women's network that I was part of that helped me to bounce ideas and have a safe space to be part of it. And so one of the things I would highly recommend, do it now, even before, if you are thinking about quitting your job. Find your networks, find your professional organizations, find your support groups, and start being active in them. You will, and find people who are living the life that you want to live, and start being near them, start listening to them, start talking to them on a more normal basis, because it will help you to open up your eyes to the nitty gritty details of what. actually needs to go on to it. So I started on LinkedIn. I started posting. That got somewhat of attraction. It wasn't as big as I wanted at first. It took me a while to actually get some dollars flowing in. And over time, what I figured out is there's certain pieces that help a lot. And so for me, I've always been a giver. I want to help as many people as I can. And I had an aha moment. I did a a free workshop for a group of probably about 60 women about how to write your resume and resume do's and don'ts and that kind of thing. And I literally poured my heart out. I gave all of my tips. I gave everything on the table. I was like, there's no way I'm going to get any clients from this. I'm just helping them because I'm literally telling them every single thing how to do. And I was shocked because The reaction was not what I thought the reaction was, wow, there's so much more to this than I originally thought. I want to hire you to help me with this. And it was very eye opening for me of there's not a like a lot of entrepreneurs. A lot of people think I have to like gatekeep. I have to just give a little bit of this. And what I've found is if you give it all away. They're not going to know how to do it all for themselves, or they're not going to want to do it all for themselves anyway. But then it helps them, it helps the self starters who can and want to do it for themselves. And it also builds your reputation in terms of you are the one that knows how to do this. And so give everything away for free because it will actually pay you dividends in the end.

Adam Coelho 37:35

makes so much sense. Yeah. Like there's nothing worse than somebody just like, inviting you to a webinar and then tricking you. Like, there's a pitch coming at the end and it's like, that's fine. But like, yeah, don't hold back like just, and that's what I've seen. Like people that have success on LinkedIn and with myself, I put it all out there on the podcast. I give my, my guide, that's the question. Like, what do you actually want? Go and get my free envisioning guide at mindfulfire. org slash start and start asking yourself this big question and Pen to paper about what you actually want. That's the crux of what I do But like there's a lot more once you get that vision is like, oh how do I actually make that happen? Right that people hire people like us for the implementation Yeah, for the either do I do it for you or do it with you? Yeah, and so I think that's really good. It just builds your credibility and trust.

Karen Worthy 38:25

Yeah It's such a powerful thing to have that person with you on your journey one of my most popular things is a three month program where I literally walk beside you side by side for three months as we go Help you get your next role and it's one of those things that I actually don't Do a sales thing for it. I just offer like 30 minute calls for anyone that is interested and would love to open that up to your audience as well. But in that 30 minute call, it's about 10 minutes of us getting to know each other. And it's about 20 minutes of me helping you for free with whatever it is you need help with. And usually that turns into folks hiring me for this three month program. And so it's definitely something that I've learned. Just keep helping people and like karma is a real very risky.

Adam Coelho 39:03

Yeah, it is, you know, and it's like, Get clear on what you want. And then go out there and give, right? Go out there and give, connect with people, tell people about your vision. They will, when you tell people about your vision, you're planting seeds for yourself, but you're planting seeds for them. when something comes along that is aligned with your vision, they can let you know. and you can start to build this and you're getting experience as you do it, too it's really amazing how that can come full circle

Karen Worthy 39:30

when you tell people about your vision you bring your community along with you and they help you in ways? You don't expect I was talking with the DIY community that I'm part of and I recently launched an interview prep boot camp. It's a week long event it was the first one I've been doing and I was really nervous about it. I was like, what if nobody signs up? What if I don't earn any money from this? What if it's a disaster? And I was very honest and sharing this with the small safe community. And the outpouring of support that I got was amazing and it's sold out now. Like it's something that is like, but just sharing it and putting it out in the world has helped so

Adam Coelho 40:04

much. It's so powerful. And you're like, you, when you're doing this stuff, it feels like, Oh, it's got to be perfect. You know, like as I was talking about the importance of emergency fund, I was like, Yeah. I wanted to write an email about that with pictures of my basement. And I might still, but like, ah, it's like, oh, it's gonna it's not gonna be perfect. So like, I'll just put that off. what you're saying is like, put it out there, try, and then you learn and you iterate. Like when I started my workshop at Google for envisioning, like it was fine. It was good, but like it improves every time little by little, every time. Same thing with the podcast. And so like, yeah, if you want to try something like this, you have a passion that you're interested in exploring, you want to start a business, go out and talk to people, put yourself out there, give it a try and you're going to fail and you're going to learn and you're going to keep moving forward.

Karen Worthy 40:55

Yeah. And if you're struggling with what to do first, reach out to me. I'm on LinkedIn at Karen Worthy. I am happy to do a free half hour call with you and figure out what makes sense and help you figure out that first step.

Adam Coelho 41:05

Fantastic. Even better. The generosity continues. Thank you, Karen. All right, Karen. So let's switch gears now into the mindful fire final four. you ready? I'm ready. All right. So the first question is about envisioning. You've made a lot of things happen. That you've envisioned. I'm curious now what, what is your big vision for the next three to five years?

Karen Worthy 41:26

One of the things that I'm envisioning right now is how do I scale my business and how do I help more people without scaling the amount of effort and time that I'm putting into it. And so it's one of the things that I've really been trying to think about. I want to help these folks as they're going through the career transition. But I also want to help them get, we talked about optionality and choices so much in this podcast. I want to help people get, like, there's a piece of my business that I'm envisioning right now that is helping people figure out more optionalities, figuring out how to have, I call it a portfolio career. It's a career that's not just one thing and where you have a lot more flexibility, you have a lot more choices and really figuring out how to scale my business to help them get there on theirs as well.

Adam Coelho 42:07

Yes, I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about what did you call that a portfolio

Karen Worthy 42:12

career. So if you think about your career, your income stream, so like Westfire, we tend to think about we want diversification of our investments. We want diversification of all these types of things. Why not have diversification of your income? And so you want to make sure that you are not just reliant on one source. So if you have a full time job, you should have a side hustle. If you have, if you're an entrepreneur and you have a company, you should have different products or different revenue streams within that. I'm actually going a step further. I'm a fractional head of HR at a small startup as well. And so I've got different income streams going at the same time. So if something happens to one of them, my whole world doesn't fall apart. And so that's something that I'm very passionate about as well.

Adam Coelho 42:52

Yeah, I love that idea. I've never really heard of it put in that way, a portfolio career, but it makes sense, right? Like, I've heard about having multiple sources of income, but that's usually people like, yeah, I sell things on eBay, and I also, mow lawns, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I like this idea of like, having multiple, You know, you do some consulting, you do some fractional HR, you do career transition work, right? And I'm looking at doing that as well in different ways, but I think it's, it makes a ton of sense. All right. So the second question is what piece of advice would you give to someone early on their path to financial

Karen Worthy 43:29

independence? It's a great question. I have probably have two pieces. One is have a support system. So whether like for me, it was my spouse, it might be a friend, it might be. I know, like, there's a lot of different Phi communities out there that have built in support systems. But have a support system and then I would put your own systems in place. I'm an engineer and an operations nerd at heart and so put your systems in place. So I think about systems that really helped me when I was early on. One of them was I automated all of my investments into Vanguard. And so instead of having to think about moving my money twice a month, I had. And like that just took it off of my mind. It was just like any other bill. I was just paying myself into Vanguard. The other one I did is my husband and I, as we went through and figured out how much we were spending, there was a lot of things that really didn't fit into a budget category. They were like, Oh, I bought a new shirt on Amazon or my kids need a haircut or. the car needs to get washed or whatever it is. And so what we did is we created a budget category, we called it stuff because we didn't know what else to name it. And what we did is we said, you know what, we're not going to do these as impulse buys. We're going to put them on a list when we think we want them. And we have, created Stuff Weekend, and once a month on a particular weekend, we'd go evaluate, we had a budget, and we said you can only spend this number of dollars because that's what we can afford, and let's prioritize, and let's do a big buying weekend, and then anything else we want goes on the list for the next month's Stuff Weekend, and that has saved us so many times. So put your systems in place.

Adam Coelho 44:54

I love that, and I think that's such a good idea because it's, I mean, you know, you worked at Amazon. It's too easy to hit that buy button and know that it will be here tomorrow. I love that. Get the systems in place, automate as much as you can so you don't have to think about it. that's super powerful. Alright, Karen, the third question is, what piece of advice would you give to someone getting started with meditation and or mindfulness?

Karen Worthy 45:18

So I will caveat this with, I am not amazing at meditation and mindfulness. I try, but I am not amazing at it. so the biggest thing that's been helping me is surround myself with people who are role modeling it. Because it just continues to reinforce that I need to keep trying, I need to keep being, trying to be consistent with it. I think the biggest thing if you're trying to start out is don't do it alone. Surround yourself with people who are already a little bit further along the journey than you are.

Adam Coelho 45:43

Yeah, that is excellent advice. And I'd add also just like be kind to yourself, right? Like there's no like grade at meditation, right? It's just like showing up to the gym, right? Just try and try again. And if you fall off, start again. But I love this example of like, Having role models, right? I think about my old boss, Paul, he is like one of the most resilient guys, like had to have his appendix out in Mexico level of resilience. and he just got laid off. But what is he doing is I talked to him last night. Is he resentful? Is he mindfulness. He's experiencing the emotions that are there to be experienced. And he's still showing up for his team, right? Above all, even though this company did him dirty, in my opinion he still, like, asked, Can I have these performance review conversations? These people. That's a great leader right there. Oh, he's incredible. He called me on Friday before this happened and was like, Hey, here's what I know. And I haven't worked for him for two years. Okay. I need to tell Adam. I need him to like all these people need like know what I know. And he was not feeling great about his chances. And unfortunately, it went that way, but he's going to be fine. not only because he has this mindfulness, but also because he has the financial, setup and circumstances that he has created by saving and investing to weather the storm. So it's so important. Karen, the last question is how can people connect with you online, learn more about what you're working on, download your course that is free for our audience. Please share us all the, all the places where people can go and connect with you.

Karen Worthy 47:24

So there's probably two to three main things. LinkedIn is where I do most of my social media stuff. So I'm Karen Worthy at LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Karen Worthy, but you'll, you should be able to find it. I'm probably the only Karen Worthy that's career transition. Feel free to connect, follow. I do post free advice there on a pretty normal basis. I have a website, Worthy Career Paths. com, and that's where you can go to find the course for the resume writing with the code mindful. I did a free webinar every week in January, and I recorded all of those and put them on the website as well, so you can go and download those. about everything from like, how do you get an employee referral when you don't know anybody at the company, to how do you fix your resume, there's all sorts of different topics there. So feel free to reach out, and if you want to just email me, that's another option, it's karen at worthycareerpaths. com.

Adam Coelho 48:13

Wonderful. Thank you again for the generosity for the audience. I think this is so important whether you're looking for something right now, or you just want to make sure that you're ready, right? Just like an emergency fund. Just like an emergency fund. Exactly. Be ready for whatever comes your way. And take that time to like, know your worth, right? No pun intended, right? But like, really like what you said about building confidence, like looking at your accomplishments and your skills and your, like, You're going to feel so good. I really encourage you to go and Get that free course and do the work. And if you want to go further, work with Karen. I mean, She's wonderful. She's been a huge resource for me. So I highly recommend connecting with her and learning from her.

Karen Worthy 49:01

Thank you, Adam. I really appreciate it. And if y'all haven't, you should go download his envisioning guide. I did that about a year ago and it was amazing.

Adam Coelho 49:08

All right. Yeah, you can grab that at mindfulfire. org slash start and all these links will be in the show notes below this, wherever you're listening to this. Thank you so much, Karen, for being here. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Karen Worthy 49:19

Thank you, Adam. Thank you for having me.

Adam Coelho 49:21

Thanks for joining me on today's episode of the Mindful Fire Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, I invite you to hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this. This just lets the platforms know you're getting value from the episodes and you want to be here when I release additional content. If you're ready to start your mindful fire journey, go to mindfulfire. org slash start and download my free envisioning guide in just 10 minutes. This guide will help you craft a clear and inspiring vision for your life. Again, you can download it for free at mindfulfire. org slash start. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next time on the mindful fire podcast.