How to Achieve a Better Financial Quality of Life

On this episode of The Long View, Jill Schlesinger, business analyst for CBS News and author of a new book called The Great Money Reset: Change Your Work, Change Your Wealth, Change Your Life, discusses the pandemic, workplace negotiations, and the current financial landscape for investors.

Here are a few excerpts from Schlesinger’s conversation with Morningstar’s Christine Benz and Jeff Ptak:

‘The Great Money Reset’ and COVID-19

Christine Benz: Well, it’s great to have you here. We want to talk about your latest book, The Great Money Reset. It’s about people navigating transitions in the wake of the pandemic. Why do you think the COVID-19 crisis was such a catalyzing force for so many people to undertake big changes in their lives?

Jill Schlesinger: I don’t remember a time in my life when collectively we all went through an excruciating experience that kind of forced us inward. And that goes for people who were maybe pulling their hair out of their head and saying, “Oh my, God. My kids are home. I’m schooling them.” And it’s been in the quiet moments where you were really thinking, “What is this pandemic? This is so scary. My physical health is threatened, and I am looking around, and I’m seeing chaos, and I’m scared.” And as that fear kind of started to morph into something else, I think it became this self-examination where so many people were forced home that allowed them to maybe have the space in their minds to be able to contemplate a really critical question that you wish you asked all the time, but sometimes you just don’t, life gets in the way: Is this really how I want to live my life?

And something was interesting that’s happened. I’ve gotten questions like that when I was a financial advisor for 14 years, I think that oftentimes when people go through traumatic experiences—it can be an illness, and it can be a death, and it can be a divorce—that it does require some introspection. I just never had experienced the amount of people who were talking to me on my podcast during the early pandemic, the summer of 2020 through the end of 2022, who really said, “I don’t know if this is how I want to keep living my life. Whatever going back to something was normal or whatever the prepandemic life was, I’m not sure that’s what I actually want to do.” And I was really struck by that. Frankly, I didn’t really want to write another book. I’m not like you. I’m not as prolific as you. So, I felt like I couldn’t write a book, and then this book came out of my experience just listening to people, hearing these stories, and trying to walk them through the process where you could make a decision to give people a framework to make a reset, to make a big change.

Big Life Changes in the Pandemic

Jeff Ptak: What are some examples of big life changes that you’ve seen people make?

Schlesinger: There have been radical ones and not so radical ones. One of my favorite stories in the book is a story of a woman who was a nurse, and her husband was a physical therapist. They were living their lives as you might expect. I would call them like upper-middle-class people. They made good money. They had some kids. They took on a bunch of debt to put their kids through college. So, there they were in their 50s, and COVID hits, and the kids are out of the house, but Pam and her husband Tom are really still servicing a lot of debt and feeling tremendous pressure. One day in the operating room, the doctor started talking, and we’re talking about real estate in their area, and she was like, what do you mean? How much our house is worth? And by the way, this is what people are talking about when they’re operating on you, I guess—the real estate market, just to put that in perspective. And she was sort of struck, “Don’t you know someone who’s a realtor, get them to come to your house and just see what you think the house is worth.”

When they did that, they found out the house was worth so much that almost in a split second, Pam came to this idea, if I sold this house right now, I could essentially pay off all the debt and not have to work so many hours to service that debt and maybe extend my work life. Because part of the problem is that when you’re in your 50s and you still have the overhang of big expenses, you’re crawling to the finish line. And she was taking on a lot of extra work, working many extra hours and overtime to make up for it. So, I was like, “Oh are you burned out because of COVID?” She’s like, “No. I’m burned out from debt.” And what she and her husband decided to do was sell their house, pay off all the debt, reduce the number of hours she worked, and actually take the money for a while and push it aside, just keep it safe and keep working and see how they felt. They didn’t feel like they had to buy anything. They actually went into a long-term Airbnb, and they are still there, and they were very content to see just what an emotional relief the reduction of that debt was.

So, instead of feeling like she was going to limp to this “finish line” of 62 or 65 and not even knowing that she could get there, she said, “Without that burden and without working all those extra hours actually reminded myself that I like my job when I work normal hours and when I work normal shifts.” And he felt like he could pull back on his physical therapy practice, not seeing 14 clients in one day, that they both felt like the easing of the burden allowed them to have much more longevity in the careers that they really did love. And to me, that was just the perfect great money reset: “Wow, I’ve got this unlocked equity in my home, and it allows me to make different choices going forward.” And I think that’s one of my favorite stories of the book, because it doesn’t feel so novel, doesn’t feel so out of reach for many people in that kind of a situation.

How to Achieve a Better Financial Quality of Life

Benz: It’s not radical. Would you say that’s sort of a commonality among a lot of the stories that you discuss in the book where people are down shifting in some way in an effort to achieve a better quality of life that maybe they’re making some financial sacrifices or changes, but the greater good is just a more peaceful, tranquil, balanced life?

Schlesinger: I think that that’s a lot of it, and I think that I would have thought that was very common among, say, late 50s to the 60s. But I also found that to be the case often with even younger people. I start the book with a story about one of the young, rising star producers that I used to work with. And she really was seen as this person who was like on the pathway. I’m sure you guys have experienced this. You meet these people and they’re in their 30s, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s one. That one has got it, got something there.” You know they’re destined to just kill it. She was ambitious, and she did all the right things. And at some point, amid the pandemic, I think she just was flat-out exhausted. She really wasn’t sure whether all that ambition was worth feeling the way she felt, just feeling kind of like at the end of her rope constantly.

I think that for someone who is in their 30s to make a kind of reset often requires introspection and a longer period of time. So, when I hear from people in their 50s, sometimes it is like somewhat of a downsizing and a balance. And when they’re in their 30s and 40s, sometimes it’s, “I’m not sure I’m on the right path. How do I figure that out? How do I give myself a self-imposed sabbatical so that I can figure out what it is that I really want? Because I’m not sure the path that I’m on is going to do it.” I think that for many people who work in that sort of achievement-oriented way, when you’re getting the external confirmation that you are on the right track, sometimes you forget whether or not you actually like what you’re doing. You’re in it, and then all of a sudden, this thing, the pandemic hits and it’s forcing you to come to terms with certain parts of your life that you may not have been so happy about.

I think that in many ways the pandemic was like this precursor to people saying, “OK, wait a minute. Wait, I need a little bit of a timeout here. What am I going to do?” Some people really come back and say, “I’m doing exactly what I want to do because I know plenty of people who have done that.” In other cases, there’s a risk in doing this, and it’s scary to do and maybe you can do it for six months, but you can’t do it for three years. And one of the things that I think that the framework of The Great Money Reset can do is that it can give you the parameters to actually weigh your options, and it can give you, I hope, a time frame that you can impose on yourself to be able to determine, OK, what’s my next step? How long am I going to give myself? I have a side hustle. I want to make it my main gig. What’s the runup to that? I have a consulting practice. I’d like to expand it, or I’d like to make it smaller. What’s my time frame to make that happen? What portion of the money that I’ve saved am I willing to allocate to this project called a reset without blowing up my entire financial life?