Stefanie O'Connell: Financial wellness through chronic disease

Today’s guest is a nationally recognized millennial money expert and author of the book, The Broke and Beautiful Life - Stefanie O’Connell. Stefanie has helped thousands of young professionals get more from their money so they can go after what they want.

Stefanie’s work & advice has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Oprah Magazine. A go-to money expert, Stefanie has appeared on ABC World News, CBSN, Fox & Friends, Fox Business, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Dr Oz Show and various other print and digital media outlets.

Today, Stefanie is a sought-after speaker, consultant and media personality. Her client list has included established brands like Capital One and Charles Schwab, major universities like Columbia and NYU, and national events like FinCon.

A graduate of New York University, Stefanie lives in Harlem with her fiancé.

Episode Highlights

• 2:19 - What is a millennial financial guru?
• 3:33 - The origin story for The Broke and Beautiful Life
• 9:53 - How do you financially stay positive when dealing with chronic disease?
• 15:45 - A few statistics on chronic disease
• 16:46 - A brief history on Freddie's journey
• 20:22 - Actionable steps to turn your financial life around
• 24:02 - Don't judge the hack before trying it
• 25:51 - Tips for bringing in income while battling chronic illness
• 28:25 - Ready to act? Follow these steps
• 30:25 - Buy back someone's time with your skills
• 32:26 - Always be investing in you
• 35:24 - Freddie's takeaway and how to get in contact with Stefanie

Connect with Stefanie:

• Check out her website - https://stefanieoconnell.com/
• Get started here - https://stefanieoconnell.com/start-here/

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (00:00.322)
The lesson I think I learned was that money really does matter. And the reality is that money is just a tool. It isn't inherently anything. It's not good. It's not bad. But it's what we choose to do with it that can enable us to live better or worse. And it can enable us to serve people or hurt people.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (00:26.979)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast brought to you by AmpCoil. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on this show, we discuss the common thread survivors share after walking through the fire, the practitioners making a difference, and the treatment modalities that deliver healing back into the hands of the people who need it most. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes. Because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (01:01.347)
team. is Freddie Kimmel, your host of the beautifully broken podcast. We have an amazing guest with us today. They're always amazing because that is who I seek out to be on the show. I always try to bring people of value, people who are going to up level the day to day flow of your life. So today with us is Stephanie O'Connell. And she is a nationally recognized millennial money expert and author of the book, ironically enough, the broke and beautiful life.

She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, ABC World News, the Dr. Oz Show, the list goes on and on. Today, Stephanie is a sought after speaker, consultant, and media personality. Her client list include, guys, I'm not gonna get into her client list, it's very, very impressive.

I am going to call her out right now and I would like her to say a big hello to the beautifully broken podcast audience introducing Stephanie O'Connell. Oh, hi, everyone. I am so in love with the fact that our titles are kind of the same. I didn't I actually didn't realize it until I got your email. I was I was like, did I did I steal that from her? No, no. But I have Stephanie's book and I probably acquired it, you know, four years ago.

and it sits on my shelf and it's a guide that I use. But I want to actually, I want to jump right in. want, if you could define for me a millennial financial guru, which I dubbed for you, but go ahead. A millennial financial guru is essentially someone who speaks about personal finance and the challenges that specifically affect the millennial generation. But the funny thing about the millennial generation is that we're human too, just like Gen X, just like Baby Boomers, just like Gen Z.

And a lot of what I speak to is true across the board, taking control of your wealth, planning towards financial freedom, feeling in control of your money rather than at the mercy of your money. That's something that everyone can experience and can resonate with across the board. It's just that I happen to be a millennial myself. And so I speak a lot to my experience, but I've found that my audience really ranges across the board.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (03:10.543)
Yeah, I'm sure everybody can act on your information and your guidance and the things they pick up in either your blog or your article or your TV appearances. And I know, I know for myself that you were a great assistance to me. We actually, me and Stephanie met probably three years ago and coached me through a difficult financial time. And I was having to make some very hard choices. I wondered if we couldn't go, I want to talk about that.

But I asked you on the show because I think you were the perfect guest for the Beautifully Broken podcast. And I wondered if you couldn't just dive right in with your origin story of the broke and beautiful life, why you created that book. Yeah. So the story starts out mostly with me in 2008 as a fresh faced college graduate pursuing my lifelong dream of being a performer.

And actually getting to live that dream for a brief moment because I graduated in May of 2008. I had a job lined up. I went out on the road. It was fantastic. I'm out on the road living blissfully, living the dream, really doing what I love, getting paid, traveling. And I see this news report that says, you know, economy in the United States crashes at the

a time I was in China. So I was getting the world news perspective and you know, I'm a 22 year old and I'm like, okay, that sounds bad, but I'm doing great. I don't know what that means. I'm just going to keep living my life and enjoying it. And I did, but about a month later, the producers of that tour flew out and they said, we're going to send you all home at the end of next month. The tour was scheduled to go on for another year minimum. It was open ended and

So then I found myself back in New York City in January of 2019, an unemployed actress at the height of a recession in New York City. Thankfully, I had already had a job for six months that enabled me to build some financial foundation before I got thrown into that life. But it was.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (05:17.65)
terrifying because I knew it wasn't just me as an actress who was struggling. It was all my friends who got the quote unquote safe degrees and the smart jobs and who did all the right things. They couldn't get jobs either. And the first job I was offered once I came back to New York was for $225 a week to star in three shows. And I just, I cried.

when I got the offer, that's not the reaction you anticipate. You would get excited when you get a job. But I knew I couldn't meet my basic cost of living no matter how much I was going to try to hack it. Cause I know how to hack costs like nobody's business, but I couldn't hack $225 a week. And what I found was that for the next five to six years, as I was still acting full time was that I was constantly feeling like that struggle of

I, how do I make this work? And what the trade off was, was missing my friends' weddings. It was not feeling like I could go to the doctor when I felt sick because at the time I didn't have insurance and I didn't know if I could afford it. It was having a dental implant that I needed to get and crying when I found out how much it costs. And I felt like I said earlier, at the mercy of my money,

And that was like the huge limiting factor of my life. And I thought there's gotta be another way to deal with this. And so that started me on a journey of curiosity. I love to learn. I love to make things work however I can. And so I started seeking out resources to figure out how can I be better with this? I know I have limited resources. I know I live in a high cost of living city, but there's probably some p-

piece of this craziness that I can find some control over, some sense of empowerment with. And by learning a little bit more every single day about how money worked, I started to identify those small choices I could control. And it started with really simple things like where I spent my money. So I couldn't always control how much I made.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (07:38.344)
But I could control where and how I was spending. could control the choices I made to take work, to seek out additional work, to find resources to help me up level my skill set so that I could command better paying work. And bit by bit with those little small baby action steps, I started finding more and more of that sense of empowerment.

through my money, rather than feeling like I was a victim of it. And that was exciting and something I wanted to share. And so I started blogging about it at the time my blog was called The Broke and Beautiful Life and that eventually became my book. And it was really about the process, the process of going from that initial moment of being in New York, unemployed in the height of a recession to

feeling like I am in control of my financial destiny and that really is going to enable me to live life on my own terms. And so that is a long winded way of saying that it's been a wonderful journey and entirely unexpected. But the lesson I think I learned was that money really does matter. And I think there is a tendency in our culture to feel strange about that.

or to not want to acknowledge it or to feel guilty or shame about it. we have all these feelings wrapped up in money based on how we saw our parents deal with money, the lessons we heard in movies and the way we see rich people depicted in television shows is greedy. And the reality is that money is just a tool. isn't inherently anything. It's not good. It's not bad.

but it's what we choose to do with it that can enable us to live better or worse. And it can enable us to serve people or hurt people. So if we can start thinking about money that way, then we can really start to use it in a way that aligns with our values and our priorities and the lives we want to live. And that's why I do what I do. That's beautiful. I, there's, there's so many places that

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (09:56.181)
there's like four different shows and what you just said, and there's so many actionables for people. I wanna go back to 2008 and $225 a week. I wanna go back to that mindset and I want people to consider New York City where, you know, rent can easily be over 27, $2,800 for a one bedroom apartment. Much more than that sometimes. It's very...

It's not necessarily, it's its own reality. you know, one reason, one of the spines of this show is sharing the survivor experience, the thread that common survivors share after walking through the fire of chronic disease. And one pillar that I hear all the time from coaching people from a place where they're stuck to a place where they want to be is,

this just limited money mindset, being lost, feeling under the control of money, that is the dam stopping them towards better health. And it's something we've all experienced, but it's really hard when you're chronically ill and you necessarily, can't work 40 hours a week. Where does that person go? Yeah. So this is where you really need to consider your particular

limitations, but also your particular strengths and what are the things that you can do that are going to be able to give you leverage in a way that is going to enable you to overcome your circumstances. for me, I wasn't dealing with chronic illness. I was dealing with $225 a week. we're each we're each dealing with, and I think this is

This is important. I had a guest say this the other day and we were talking about his experience of chronic disease, my experience of cancer and how one is not weighted more than the other. When we start to do that, that's why we can't get along as a society. We need to understand that that person's pain at their individual moment is real. It's just as real and just as heavy as your cross. Well, I personally love your story and I think we can get into that in just a minute.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (12:11.679)
But one of the things I did was try to consider where can I get more out of my time or where can I make my necessities be less taxing? So the problem was I had this very limited income. And so what I had to do was figure out, okay, well, either I'm going to need to spend less or I'm going to need to earn more. And those are the only

two ways of overcoming it. And obviously a combination helps. But one of the things I realized that I could do when I did this often was I basically got rid of my living costs, my monthly housing costs. And I know you have some stories about this too. And I started to just think outside the box of how we traditionally think around our money. We traditionally think we have these expenses and we have to have them and there's nothing we can do about that. Rent, food.

transportation and yes, we do need those things. However, there are different ways of approaching these things. So how can I still have housing without paying a housing cost? Well, one of the big things that I used to do was when I was in theater, I would always sublet my apartment when I left town so that somebody was living there and paying my rent while I was not there. And then occasionally I would maintain that sublet in my apartment

and crash with people, or I would ask permission to offer them a reduced rate and see if I could live in my living room. And it wasn't ideal, but at the time, those were trade-offs I was willing to make because it was important enough for me to be doing these jobs that I really cared about and I wanted to pursue. So I had to accept the reality of my limitations and then figure out

Okay, how can I make this work based on those limitations? And I love your story on this because you have a very similar thing where you were also able to take a cost like I think it was housing, right? It was housing. Cause this, and this is actually brings me to another point and I don't want to go too far off track, but I want to go here because I'm talking about housing and for you and housing for me and

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (14:33.027)
how hacking that cost was so transformative. And I think this is where we often make mistakes when we talk about money, is that people think about saving and being better with their money as the money they spend on coffee and lunch and all that. And like those little things certainly do have an impact. They do add up over time. But if you can create a 50 % reduction in your housing cost,

or an 80 % reduction in your housing costs by either renting out a spare bedroom or, you know, kind of getting creative in leasing your space while you're away, whatever it is, that is going to make so much more of an impact on your money than cutting out 10 lattes ever will. And so targeting big wins, and you did this too, because it enabled you to take care of your health in the way that was a priority for you, cutting your housing costs.

That is the ultimate way of finding that freedom in your finances that we so often fail to consider because we're getting bogged down in minutiae that doesn't really move the needle. I hear that and I see that and I feel that on such a deep level. You know, I want to just I came up with some stats here specifically to some of the issues underlining chronic disease. And then I want to go right back to kind of some action steps here. So

We have 191 million people in the US living with one chronic disease. We have 75 million that have two or more. This is $2 trillion in medical costs and 794 billion, I want you to hear this, 794 billion in lost employee productivity. And this was the shocker. 5 % of people

account for 50 % of the healthcare spending in America. Wow. Yeah, those are sobering statistics. Sobering statistics. And I quickly, you know, I made some notes because I knew you'd have some advice on this. And I had a list to hack my situation. So long story short, I went through chronic disease and cancer and Lyme disease for additional surgeries. It is really a very crazy story.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (16:55.035)
I can make it funny so it can be a little lighter. But in 2012, I had just finished up a production tour, which is one of the biggest scale Broadway tours. I had made a little bit of money and I went in for surgery again. And it was surgery number four and I got really scared because I said to myself, how am I gonna be able to take care of myself as an adult? I'm an adult now. I was 34 years old and it really did scare me. And I said to myself, I've gotta make a plan.

So if I can't work next year, no matter what I'm going to be taken care of. And I made this list and I just said, what can I do? And basically it was I can Airbnb the second bedroom in my apartment. And I did that from 2012 to last month. So from 2012 to 2018 in December, I've never paid a dollar of rent. That's just.

Amazing. And I, and it drives me crazy because people get so caught up in, I can't imagine sharing my space. can. And for some people they might not want to, and that's totally okay, but consider the trade-off. What that afforded you is life changing. Well, we're here doing this podcast at this level of engagement and clarity. And I have the opportunity to be connected with the companies I am.

because I made those choices and because I knew it was a priority, I knew I couldn't exist like that anymore. And I knew that to be honest, it sounds like an inconvenience, but meeting people from all over the world, especially foreign countries has been.

an up level to my life in every degree because I see how people see the world in different ways. And while I wasn't well enough to get out and travel, I had people come in from France, from New Zealand, from Turkey and New Delhi, and I saw their culture and their the beauty of the people around the world. And those are my best guests. I also love how you said this thing about it being a priority. Right. So we often think about building a spending plan or building a budget around

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (19:05.592)
what we need rather than what our priorities are. And for you, your health and taking care of yourself and making sure you had the time to be able to do nothing if you needed to do nothing was the number one priority. And so you built a plan that works around that. And that mindset in and of itself is so

different from starting out with how much do I have to spend on rent based on what the average rent is. If you are paying the average rent, you're not going to get anywhere. I can tell you that even today. I'm here living in Manhattan and I'm paying well under the average rent because I share a one bedroom with my fiance and we live a little bit further uptown and we make a lot of money now. We're out of that place of financial struggle.

But the trade off that it affords us are the things that we care about. Travel, our wedding, potentially building a family, those are our priorities. And so we built our budget around those. Yes, it's beautiful. Congratulations on your fiance. thank you. It's fairly recent. I know that's amazing. I can hear little golf claps from everybody in their car and on the treadmill at their gym.

I want to keep going with this list because I want to give people some actionables. And some of these are ones that I eventually, I got to a place where I needed help with my finances. got to a place where I almost made so much income with my Airbnb and my side hustles coaching, which is now my full time. was able to put a down payment on an, on an apartment and that is one of the New York dreams. It's, it's a

Big dream, it's a lofty goal. It seemed even loftier and unattainable for me at times, but it happened. And I met with Stephanie and we talked and we started to prioritize even deeper. I have some of the notes on some of the coaching that we did. I think it'll be funny. Blast from the past. You cut into my grocery bill hard. I know, and I know your food is important to you.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (21:14.685)
And I know, but my food, was spending near three, $335 a week on food, which is very, very high. And now I cooked everything at home. So I did save money there, but I did reprioritize and actually came up with some unconventional things. Part of my recovery has been actually, and this is off topic for money, but it's not, has been incorporating intermittent fasting. And that is the idea that the body does not need six meals a day. That's old personal training.

trainer data from the 80s, it's not valid. Your metabolism does not need to be fed, but the body actually does enjoy breaks and eating just like two million years of programming as us being ancestral foragers. We didn't wake up and go right for milk and cheese and cereal. We would go long periods of time without food. So for me, incorporating fasting was an extra $155 a month just by either skipping a meal or eliminating snacks between the meal. Now I'm not wasting away.

I'm the same weight as I was then the same body fat, same muscle. And I saved $1,900 a year doing that one simple hack. The other thing that you advised me to do and we had talked about was cutting the cord. I cut my cable cord, which was $55 a month. There's 660. So now we're almost to $2,600. This was a big one from our meeting on I until recently, I can't lie. I recently had a relapse with coffee.

Buying out coffee big because it things evolved, you know things evolved Like you said it shifted from the big savings to the little savings in the micro I could let go of some of those things as sacrifices, but I didn't get coffee for about four years out and Daily coffee at home for the year the beans that I was using was about $78 first my out-of-coffee home habit, which was around $1095 a year. So that puts us above So it's one two three

almost $3,700. I added additional coaching sessions, one-on-one coaching. I upped my prices, upped my package and what I was offering. That was an additional $4,000. And then meal prep. Meal prep, you know, it cost me about $13 a day to meal prep versus $54 a day eating out. And that's eating cheap in New York City, you know. But over the year, the meal prep,

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (23:34.975)
daily $13 versus $54 a day. That's either $4,745 or $19,710. Okay, now add in how much you saved on rent. Oh, I mean, what? don't know. I don't know what my rent was. My rent was about $2,100 a month.

times 12 times five years. Yes, we see how we came up with enough down payment to buy a home. Yeah. So I had a will and there was a way but I think again, above you know, the planning or how I got in my action steps was my why. And my why was so strong. It was so easy for me to prep my own meals every day. It was easy for me. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be really shady right now. I bring avocados in my pocket still.

I will still bring an avocado to a store because I know, and this is so frugal, but I know that there is like a quarter of an avocado in a guacamole serving, or I can have my own for a buck and that avocado guacamole side might be like $3. At least. At least. So I still carry with me some of those things that are so, I know it's a small mindset. I've got to work on unprogramming those, but we have programming from our parents and what we've learned.

We absolutely do. But the, what I really liked about all of these adjustments you made is that you didn't judge the hack before trying it. So I think a lot of people think, I would never walk around with avocados in my pockets. Maybe you won't, but also just try something for a little while. Try Airbnb in your place. If that's the way you want to go, try raising your rates. If that's the way you want to go, try something.

and know that it might not be the solution for you, but you cannot make an assessment of whether the trade-off is worth it if you haven't tried and you haven't seen what it frees up for you. And what happens with money is we have all these pre-existing judgments and then that keeps us from experimenting and then finding those really simple changes that can create really massive lifestyle opportunities.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (25:51.209)
Yes. Do you have any advice for someone who would be in that situation of, the avatar is someone who's chronically ill. Maybe they're dealing with an autoimmune or Lyme disease or cancer and they're, they're at home and they do need to make some money. Where does that person go? Do they look for work that they can do or, or would you tell them to entertain the idea of acquiring a new skillset that might open another door down the road?

So I think you have to start by taking inventory of your skills, knowledge, and experience. And that means making a list of things that tend to come really easily towards you or things that people ask you advice about because it tends to be the things that we overlook because we think of them as so simple. But those things that are simple to us are often not the case for others.

And if we can identify what that overlap is, what is simple and easy for us, but difficult for others, that is something that we can then offer for money. Right. And this can be anything from being really well organized. So for example, I have a virtual assistant and she works completely on her own hours and she helps me manage my email inbox.

and she helps file things for me and she helps make sure I respond to things if I haven't responded for a week. And she doesn't have to be able to code. She doesn't have to know the ins and outs of social media or any kind of specialized skillset. I just needed someone who was really well organized and responsive. And she makes over $20 an hour and totally on her own time, totally from home, totally remote. So those opportunities are out there.

I would say in addition to taking inventory of your skills, knowledge, and experience to see where you might have something to offer. Also look at what is out there online. There is a world of opportunity out there from virtual assistants, to more, technical work, to graphic design, to photo or video editing, to social media. There's just this brand new world of job market that isn't in a physical space.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (28:08.424)
And the wonderful thing about those opportunities is that they're really flexible. They generally allow you to work on your own time and terms and you can moderate how many projects you take on so that if you aren't feeling well, you don't have to commit to working a minimum of 40 hours a week. Yes, I want to go back to that idea of the inventory. I really like that. I think it's a good again. I really want to give people actionable on the show. So I think that's a good exercise.

Could you outline that exactly what that would look like for someone just wanting to do take action today? Yes. So when I say take inventory of your skills, knowledge and experience, mean really making a list. What am I actually good at? So if you can sew, that would be a skill. If you speak Spanish, that would be a skill.

An experience would be something like for me, I live in New York City. Now that might not seem like anything special, but think of how many things have to do with knowledge of New York City, being a tour guide, being someone who offers travel advice. So being somebody who can offer someone a place to stay if they're living in New York City. So these are the things you want to make a list of these things.

and then brainstorm ways to monetize them. So like I said, with New York, those, the tour guide thing, the offering a space, the giving advice, those are all ways of monetizing. The thing that's really important to think about is how your skills, knowledge and experience can serve somebody else. I think what happens is we often get caught up in a mindset of what you are or are not capable of instead of

focusing on the person you're serving. Because like I said, we underestimate the value of the skill we bring. But if you realize that the person you're serving can't hem their own pants, even though to you it might seem like the simplest thing in the world, if you can realize that your skill has value, then you can make it monetizable. And it's really hard to monetize if you aren't understanding that from your potential customer's experience. So you really want to think of it from that perspective.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (30:24.564)
This has been such an evolution in my thought process being in this position now today where I am having multiple streams of income and my business is growing and really, and now I understand because if you had told me to job out of service six years ago, I would have laughed in your face. There's no way I would have entertained it. It's something I thought I could have learned and done, but you get to a certain point where time is, is there is no more time. Time is the ultimate.

resource. It is the thing that is completely non-renewable. And so people are willing to pay a lot of money for things that save them time. And this ranges everything from the most basic things like cleaning up the house, right? Most people, a lot of people already hire people to do that, to childcare, to the things we know about, right? Babysitting, dog walking, but it goes across

the board. can be health coaching, as you know from your experience. It can be someone who can just sit down with you and organize all of your pictures that are, you know, all on your Instagram feed into albums because they want to have physical copies. You know, think of the things that are pain points for people, especially in today's world. Time is the

ultimate thing we're all desperate for more of. So if you can offer a service that's going to help somebody buy back their time, you are going to be extremely valuable. Yes. I mean that, that right there, the social media, I mean, that's a lot of time and it's a lot of effort to keep up with. And I think a lot of these, entrepreneurs out in the field, you see that it just, I remember there was a time when I was investing so much time, what I was writing, what I was posting at the time it was needed.

And now I don't always even remember to do it because I'm too busy doing the work. I'm too busy doing the business. I want to jump back to one thing, the idea of using the skills that you already have. I remember again, I remember our meeting and at the time I was doing, I was a certified personal trainer and a Reiki healer and a gut health expert, but I hadn't really done a health coaching program. And I think we had even talked about this

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (32:44.514)
We had met with, we had a little mastermind with a upcoming Broadway choreographer, Antoinette DiPetra Palo up in Harlem. And we were talking about our businesses and how they were unfolding. And I remember looking at what you were doing and how exciting it was and you had your book and you were starting to get these job offers and you had a beautiful website. And I remember thinking to myself, I really, want those things for Freddy Seco. I really did.

And none of them would have happened had I not invested in training. I went to the Institute of Functional Health Coaching, which is really a complete system structure, how to do your business, legal disclaimers, how to coach from A to B, forms all the way through, continued education built into the program. It was a big chunk of money. Yeah.

I've made massive investments in my business. And to this day, I would say about 50 % of all the revenue I earn goes back into my business. But those investments have paid off in a way that even the money in my retirement accounts hasn't paid off. Right. And this is not to discourage anyone from investing in their retirement accounts. You absolutely should. And I don't really recommend raiding your retirement account to do things. However, you know,

A good return on an investment over a long period of time is about 7%. The investments I've made in my business have been 200, 300, 400%. And so I think what you're saying about this idea of not being afraid to think big and thinking about how you can make smart investments that help you uplevel your skillset and command more and be able to improve your skills, knowledge and experience base such that you can offer

higher value products and services is one of the most transformative things you can do for your money. I think that's an amazing spot. I already know in my heart of hearts, we're going to come back. We're going to do this again. I love it because we have a lot to talk about and this is needed. This is information that I know exists in and where you're living in your lane. And then I'm living over here in the health coach lane. They don't always intersect and they need to. Absolutely. It's a conversation that needs to happen.

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (35:02.34)
I see a lack of it on all sides of the field and I want to keep it going. I would like everybody that listens to this podcast, again, we have our actionable, I think we can all do our self-assessment today of our skills. I think we can examine where we're putting our money, where we're prioritizing and understanding. A baseline message for me from this was, is that we really can't put a cost or a value on our health.

It's It's what it means to you. But it's something that if you have your health, if you have opportunity to go out there and make decisions and pursue any type of work, you have everything. Even if it's at a low level, you have everything. I used to have my, this is the saddest story, I'll tell this once. I used to have my mom when I was in intensive care for about a week and I couldn't eat anything. I'd have her push me down to the lunchroom and just like look at the chocolate milk. And I wanted to watch the people walk in and out of the hospital with cups of coffee.

And I couldn't drink anything. had the tubes in and whatever. And it was just, it was, I was like, can't wait to have coffee again. I can't wait to walk in and out of a hospital again. That's going to be so amazing. And even at most of my diminished states, it was still, it's just always, it's always a gift. And, and I trust there are people, every, everybody's going through a painful experience in life. We're all broken. We're all beautiful. I want to close it out with first, I don't want to forget this. How do people,

Reach out and either get your book or get on your email list to get this high up leveled information or Digest more of the message that Stephanie is bringing out into the world. Absolutely Well, the book is called the broke and beautiful life And if you're a fan of the podcast, you should hopefully be able to remember that title and I'm online at Stephanie O'Connell comm you can sign up for the email list there and on Instagram YouTube

However you like to get your information, I probably have a way of delivering it to you. That's, I hope people act on that because her stuff is high level. It's stuff that you can do tomorrow to upgrade your financial profile and mindset. And I think for today, we are going to end it out there. She has one last question. So the question is for our beautifully broken guests, I almost said broken, beautiful. Would you trade the most, one of the most

Freddie Kimmel and Stefanie O'Connell (37:24.932)
painful experiences of your life, finding that job on tour, finding that, you know, that that first national gig, starring in a show, singing, dancing, getting paid what you want for a living, and then falling into that financial crisis of 2008. Would you trade that painful experience for easier days? No, of course not. No, of course not. That's an easy one. All right, so we're going to close it up there. Guys, I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel. This is a beautifully broken podcast.

I really believe in the level of information that comes on this show. really believe in these people that we're connecting with. This is a message that needs to be sent out into the world. If you can do me a favor, if it speaks to you, if you're inspired by what you heard, another massive action you can take today is subscribe to the podcast, download an episode and leave a five star review. I appreciate it. It helps my heart.

And it's going to help me inform who I get on here and where we take the direction of the ship because it could go anywhere. Trust me, wherever it steers, it's going to be with the mission to up level your life, make you move better, easier, with less pain. Again, the beautifully broken podcast. Namaste.