EP69 Buy Back Your Time: The Key to Financial Freedom in Latino Communities

Does working hard always lead to success? Or can it sometimes hold us back? I dive into a mindset deeply ingrained in Latino and POC communities, the belief that relentless hard work equals moral value.

Let's change this mindset and learn how to buy back our time.  I share personal stories about the guilt of outsourcing tasks like housekeeping, meal prep, and childcare, and how these feelings often prevent us from fully enjoying financial success.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why Latinos Feel Guilty About Delegating Tasks
• How to Use Money as a Tool to Reclaim Your Time
• The Power of Outsourcing for Self-Care & Business Growth
• How to Shift from Working IN Your Business to Working ON It
• Breaking the “Hard Work = Worth” Mentality in Our Communities

Tune in to learn how to achieve financial freedom WITHOUT guilt and start using your time for what truly matters!

Episodes mentioned:
Episode 68: Unpacking Financial Anxiety and Trauma with Stephanie Olano
Episode 54: Overcoming Financial Trauma\ How to Heal Your Money Wounds with Rahkim Sabree

Chapters

• 0:00 Changing Mindset Around Outsourcing for Latinos
• 13:34 Maximizing Time and Investing in Yourself
• 20:33 Accelerating Success Through Masterminds

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You know, what really grinds my gears and just annoys me is the fact that we tend to feel guilty for paying money to outsource things, to delegate or for anything that makes our life better, reduces our stress. I don't understand why we feel that guilt and feel like we're lazy, but we have to change that mindset. Hola, I am Violeta, host of the Money Chisme Podcast, and here we talk about personal finance, real estate, investing, entrepreneurship and really just have deep conversations about money, get the chisme on it and how it affects the Latino and POC community, and I want to talk about how, in the Latino community, we have this mindset of the harder we work, the more pride we have in the money that we earn. It's like we have to work hard for our money to be worthy of it. And if you're not like putting in that hard work or you're doing things like like a desk job or anything like that, that you're not working hard and it's looked down upon. And even worse, if you happen to have extra cash to pay for things that you just don't want to do or that's going to make your life easier, uh, then it's kind of looked down upon or you feel guilty, you feel like you're being lazy and I really want to like start changing that mindset in, you know, in my community, because we shouldn't be working so damn hard. We, like you know our parents especially me being first gen they came here and hit the ground running and worked really hard, but I, you know seeing them how much work they put in and now that they're about to retire, it's like for what? Because they didn't plan much for retirement, which is a whole separate topic to talk about.

Speaker 1: 2:12

But that kind of mentality continues to be passed down in generations to where it kind of is part of our culture of, you know, being hard workers. A lot of our culture have kind of like blue collar jobs where they work construction and similar jobs, and so hard work is revered and seen almost kind of like a morality thing. And so one of the things that triggered or not really triggered but brought this, you know, in my head recently was that I saw a post where someone mentioned that they felt guilty for having a housekeeper, and I remember when I felt that way I had to do a lot of healing because I had the same mentality of that. I have to work hard and I have to do everything myself, Otherwise you feel lazy and I still have to sometimes kind of correct, like my mom sometimes or my parents with when I tell them that I pay for like food.

Speaker 1: 3:33

So one of the things that I outsource is cooking. I don't have the time to to cook all the time, like I could cook once in a while, like on the weekends and stuff, but during the week, like me and my husband both uh don't have much time to cook, and then when we do, we're kind of like struggling, like okay, what do we, what do we eat? What should we cook? And then there is a lot of wasted groceries because we would think that we would want something and have time to cook, and then come to find out like neither of us had the time to do anything and so then groceries, would you know, be wasted. And so that's one of the things that I outsource.

Speaker 1: 4:17

And some people are like, really, you're paying for like meal prep and stuff, which is funny, because paying for meal prep wouldn't be seen if you were in like fitness or anything like that. Um, but for some reason, uh, just paying that way you don't have to cook and worry about it, and it's kind of like, okay, you're just being lazy and I want to talk about you know how we can stop thinking this way, because what is the point of having money if you're not going to use it to make your life better? We talk about building financial freedom and building wealth, but a lot of us don't realize what that actually means. Like yeah, it pays bills or anything and everything like that. We don't have to worry about paying a mortgage or now I have money to pay my car and things like that pay down debt. But another thing that we need to realize is that having financial freedom and building wealth and making more money means that we can use that to buy back our time. I'm going to put a book up here that's called Buy Back your Time and I'll link it down below, but it's a great read on how to start thinking about that of figuring out what you can outsource in your life to just better your life. Our lives have gotten so much easier and has taken some of that mental workload of thinking about what's for dinner, what's for lunch, what groceries we need to buy and you know how much. And you know all that because every sunday, my meals for me and my husband gets here and we don't have to think about it. You're hungry, bam, put, pop, grab whatever you feel like eating and put it in the microwave and then we don't have to worry about it.

Speaker 1: 6:21

Another thing I would outsource is housekeeping, and that's a big taboo. Cooking, and, you know, cleaning your own house in our community, is a sense of big pride, right, we're known to cook, you know, be great cooks and same thing with cleaning our houses and stuff. But to me that's time away from one family. I have a eight-month-old daughter and I rather spend that time with her, with my husband, with my stepson, just doing self-care for myself, like just going to pilates or whatever, and cooking and cleaning. That time to me is more valuable spent on those things.

Speaker 1: 7:13

In some people's mind that's seen as lazy, but I think one of the things we need to understand is how valuable time is, and I think with me because you know I'm being military. I spent a lot of time away from family and now I'm realizing you know how much time has been. And the same way with doing all these tasks and working so much and working those long hours, if you think about it, with my parents, how much free time they have sacrificed to be able to put food on the table, pay the bills and all that and all the other times that they did have, like the free time they had to focus on cleaning or on taking care of me and my sister and all just these little tasks. And I don't want to continue that. I want to enjoy my time because, again, what is the point of making more money, getting financial freedom and building wealth if you're not enjoying life?

Speaker 1: 8:36

So how do we change this mindset? Number one we got to understand that a lot of it is our own mentality. Like I said, it's kind of built into us of working hard and being prideful of things, kind of pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and being this idea of being self-made. So if you're paying for a housekeeper and you know meal prep and stuff like that, are you really self-made and you know? But yes, yes, you are, because now that time can be focused on, you know, building your business, your job or you know family, that is an investment as well, spending time with family, and so one of the things is addressing that mentality and realizing that we have been kind of indoctrinated to think that working ourselves to death, you know, has this high moral value when it really doesn't, we're just burning ourselves out. And that's why we have a lot of burnout in our community and we just work, work, work, work.

Speaker 1: 9:55

And then towards the end it's like, yeah, we made money and all that, but in that time we forgot to live life. And one of the things that my dad would tell me is that, you know, don't forget to live life, acuérdate que el dinero es para disfrutar. And you know, my dad would say remember money is to enjoy, you know, life. And unfortunately, because the hard work ethic and that, that mentality of being self-made and all that, and on top of that, being an overachiever, because just being first gen, it did it kind of fell on deaf ears for a while until now, and that I'm realizing, and it was because, you know, it finally caught up to me and I started having, you know, breakdowns and everything being burnt out and just feeling so overwhelmed because I was just doing too much and trying to do it all. And then know my daughter came along and then just threw a wrench in everything because like there was no time to do anything. And now we have finally, you know, started buying back our time because like we can afford these things. Same thing with the babysitter. Even though my husband works from home, uh, and some, and I telework every other day and I have, you know, days where I'm off and all that, we still pay to have the babysitter from eight to one because that gives us, uh, that timeframe to just focus him on, just focus on uh work, and then me, if I'm not working, like on the podcast, youtube and all that I could focus on, maybe learning, reading my book or, you know, doing stuff that needs to be done around here.

Speaker 1: 11:51

And the second thing is addressing, you know our traumas from. You know that financial anxiety and financial trauma which, by the way, I just had a great conversation on episode 68 with Stephanie Alano, and then I have another one that I'll link as well with Rakim, and those two episodes great conversations on, uh, how financial anxiety and financial trauma affects our communities and steps that we can take to start healing that and the importance of that. So definitely check those out for more on how you can heal, and well, one recognize it and address it, and so that's another thing that we have to do. And number three is, you know this idea of buying back our time and learning how to do that, and so we have to learn how to leverage our time and look through your day and look at your finances and think, well, you know I have I could spend more money on. You know I have this extra cash. Can I, you know, allot that on doing something for me to buy back my time? So, for example, for me, I have the extra funds to pay for meal prep and for the babysitter to have extra time, that I can now use that time to work on my business, on this podcast, on this YouTube.

Speaker 1: 13:34

You know, and you know not only in that, but I also do, you know, invest in real estate. So, learning about that, being able to have time to attend I am in like three to four groups of consists of real estate investing, just general business support groups and podcast support groups and podcast support groups. And you know, I'm able to attend those meetings and learn and network because I don't have to be, you know, balanced and be like, well, I don't know, I don't think I could make that this weekend because I have to clean the house, I have to do laundry. I had to do that yesterday and I spent all day just doing laundry and that time could have been spent doing this video and doing this podcast, um, and then now I could have spent this time on other things and, uh, kind of behind on several things as far as, uh, the podcast. So I could have been doing that, but instead I was stuck doing laundry.

Speaker 1: 14:42

And those are the types of things that we want to switch our mentality on seeing how much better we can spend our time, how much effective it could be just simple as being able to go to Pilates or go to the gym or just sit and read your book or meditate or whatever it can be. That is not a waste of time, because I know in our community that's also kind of seen that way of like. We don't have time to go to the gym, I have to work, I have to clean, I have to take care of the baby, I have to cook or whatever, and it's like, no, that is an investment in ourselves and you know, the best investment that you're ever going to make is yourself, and that includes your mental health, physical health and your, um, just your overall happiness and education. I'm constantly learning. I have books over here. It's not even like all the books that I have and that's not including audible, uh, like so many books and courses that I've taken, workshops that I've taken, that I invest in. That many people might see as like a waste of money, but that's an investment and I could do that.

Speaker 1: 16:12

Because I outsource things. I'm buying back my time to do things with that time that I want to do. So let's stop glamorizing, overworking, working ourselves to death and it's like I'm not saying don't work hard because it obviously got me to where I am now. But at some point we have to learn to pivot and start using those funds, and, you know, to our benefit. Because how many people in your family or friends that you know have money in accounts or they make, you know, decent money, but they're so scared to use it for anything and they're just stressed and you know their quality of life could be better if they just, you know, allotted a little bit of that money to you know, outsource whatever it may be. It could be longer.

Speaker 1: 17:11

If you don't like doing laundry, see if you could outsource it. You don't like, uh, cleaning the house? I hate cleaning the house. I would outsource it. The only reason I don't right now is because we downsized to a two bedroom in preparation to our move next year. So it takes me like 20 minutes to clean this whole house every day. So not not a big deal, but cooking it's that takes time and I just, I just cannot stand it. I just not cannot stand thinking of what to cook, taking the time to cook and then putting it up and everything.

Speaker 1: 17:47

So, no, just think of little things that you can start doing and if you can't do it now, just find the thing that you wish you could outsource and try to work towards that. And the way to do that is, of course, increase your income. Uh, you know you could save, but you're only limited. If you make, let's say, 60 000, you can only budget so much before you can't budget anymore. So you're going to have to, at some point, start making more income, whether that's, you know, side hustles or whatever. It may be getting a promotion or just switching jobs, uh, which is another rent in itself. Sometimes we're just too loyal to these jobs. Jobs, um, when you could just go somewhere else if possible, right, uh, but that's another, that's another rant.

Speaker 1: 18:43

But, yes, let's start changing our mindset on how we view on of buying back our time, and not just for ourselves, but our businesses as well. How many people, including my dad, did not create systems or find ways to outsource several things. So now they are working in their business versus on their business. And so now you have all these businesses that rely on the owners to be successful and if something happens to the owner or, you know, the kids don't want to take it over. There's lots of businesses out there that are being sold now because there's no systems in place to keep the business going and nobody wants, like you know, their kids or whatever don't want to take it over, and so now it's being sold.

Speaker 1: 19:43

And that's because we have this mentality of that. We don't want to outsource anything. We see it as a waste of money, like, why spend that money when I could DIY, I could do it myself? And we have that mentality with lots of things with you know, hiring coaches, hiring uh advisors or taking courses. We see it as, like you know what? I could just Google this. I could Google how to invest in real estate, I could Google how to invest in stocks or whatever. But it's more than just that. Um, you have to see the value of you know this course Maybe, yes, got all the information is out there, but, for example, with mine, I make the information more digestible.

Speaker 1: 20:33

It's catered in a certain way to help guide you, same with lots of courses that I've taken or um, that the way you know, I could have learned all this online, but I did for like almost a year and nothing came of it.

Speaker 1: 20:50

And then I went and did this mastermind group and it was just like a light switch, like everything started to click and, you know, accountability was one too, because we met weekly and so I was like it accelerated the creation of money, cheese man, and now I have a pretty good foundation that now next year, I can uh focus on actually being profitable. And I can do that because I have learned the value of buying back my time to be able to attend workshops and masterminds and spend that money and not see it as something that I need to hoard and do everything myself. So that's just a mini rant that I had this week, and let me know your thoughts below. How do you view money? Does it feel like you have to do everything yourself, or what are some things that you wish or can outsource to make your life better and start buying back your time? But yeah, other than that, I will see y'all in the next one. Bye.