Life Conversations with a Twist
Join me once a week for a new interview with a local, badass woman who has an amazing story to tell. Join me in conversation so you too can gain inspiration and empowerment from these stories! If you love hearing about leadership, relationships, families, motherhood and navigating hard times, then tune into my podcast and share with others. If you love what you hear, share and tag me on Instagram at @heathernelson.life. You can also visit my website at heathernelson.life.
Life Conversations with a Twist
The New Rules of Abundance —Real Talk on Money and Meaning with Laura Rotter
"Don't avoid looking at your money. Gamify it somehow to actually look at what's coming in and what's going out. Be a master of your money." —Laura Rotter
Feeling overwhelmed by bills, family demands, and the pressure to keep up? You’re not alone—so many of us are hustling just to stay afloat, wondering if we’ll ever feel secure or truly satisfied. What if there’s a smarter, saner way to handle money and life, no matter where you’re starting from?
Laura spent nearly 30 years on Wall Street before realizing that chasing bigger paychecks and a bigger house wasn’t the answer. Now, she guides women through real-life money challenges—like building an emergency fund, paying off debt, and setting boundaries with family—while helping them find confidence and clarity in their financial choices. Her practical tips and honest stories make money feel less scary and a lot more doable.
Tune in for straight talk on saving, spending, tracking your cash, handling family expectations, and learning how to define “enough” for yourself. If you want real solutions and a fresh mindset about money, this episode is your new playbook.
Connect with Heather:
Episode Highlights:
01:11 Meet Laura: Childhood Lessons and Career Beginnings
07:23 Wall Street: What It’s Really Like?
12:13 Big Money, Big Problems
16:11 The Turning Point: Time for a Change
21:13 Downsizing and Redefining Success
24:55 True Abundance: What It Means
29:24 Money Mindsets
34:04 Is It Too Late to Save?
38:24 Track Your Money: Tools
41:35 Why Moms Spend Money on Their Kids, But Not Themselves
44:53 Die with Zero
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Connect with Laura:
Laura Rotter, CFA, CFP, is the owner of True Abundance Advisors, a heart-centered, values-based financial planning firm based in New York. After a successful career managing money for institutional investors, including Citicorp and Para Advisors, Laura discovered mindfulness practices and was drawn to guide professionals facing a big life change to achieve both financial security and life satisfaction.
Since making her shift, she has been featured in CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Westchester Senior Voice. She serves on the advisory council of Impact100 Westchester, a women’s group giving organization, and leads workshops for Invest for Better, empowering women through impact investing.
Heather Nelson: Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Life Conversations With A Twist. I'm coming at you on a Friday afternoon, my time, your time too, with Laura. Laura is a financial advisor. I happened to meet, I think it was last week? It happened so quickly. I love your story. I love the work that you're doing. And I was like, you have to be on my podcast.
And so, welcome to the podcast.
Laura Rotter: Thank you so much, Heather. I'm so excited to be here.
Heather Nelson: I love this. One of the reasons why I love my podcast, I have been connected to women all over the world. You're coming from us in New York, and I just feel instantly connected to women who are doing good work. Who are leaning into their dreams, who are going through hard times, coming out and doing good work to inspire others. And so I'm so honored to have you here today.
Laura Rotter: Yeah. Excited to see where our conversation takes us.
Heather Nelson: It's gonna be great. So tell the listeners a little bit about who you are? What do you do? Where do you live? And then we're just gonna dive in, and we're gonna talk from beginning to end of your career.
Laura Rotter: Okay. My name is Laura Rotter. I'm the founder of a financial life planning firm. The name is True Abundance Advisors. I also have a podcast, Making Change With Your Money, where I interview women who've been through a big life change similar to what I went through, and live to come out the other side, and tell their stories. My life change was I had quite a long career on the institutional side of Wall Street, which means that I worked for investment groups who were investing money of large companies, or wealthy families, or university endowments. I had a specific focus on a small part of the market, which is called distressed debt investing, which is bonds of companies that were going through financial challenges, and I often look back at their career in thirds. So the first third of my career, Heather, I loved it. I was one of those nerds in high school that realized that I could find interesting work, and make a lot of money doing well.
Heather Nelson: I was going to ask you, obviously, I feel like in the financial world, you're a numbers person. What made you want to go down that path?
Laura Rotter: I find it fascinating to talk to my clients and others about money stories. I grew up in a family, we were not poor at all, but we were not financially secure. My father was someone who went from career to career. The message I ended up taking in was that it's important to find out what makes you happy. But I grew up with financial insecurity when my friends were in homes, we were in a rent control apartment. And as I look back, it's not that I feel like I was so aware of it, but both myself and my sister ended up being the primary breadwinners of our family. So I think there was a message there that we want to be able to take care of ourselves. I also think it's interesting as I interview women that I didn't have brothers with. It's sad to say, I'm a New York Jets football fan. But we went with dad to the football games, and we talked to Dad about his career. So there wasn't a sense of like, girls are treated in one way, and boys are treated another way. I found that, again, with podcast guests that grew up without brothers, similarly, might have gone into sciences or work.
So again, gross generalization, but I think there was a way I wasn't aware of it, but it was important for me to earn money. I do remember that we all look back on our career stories. I was actually an English literature major. I loved reading books. And through reading books, you learn about history, you learn about politics, you learn the background. And I feel that that was similar to what I ended up doing, because I never focused on a specific industry. In my work on Wall Street, I was what's called a generalist. So I might be looking at the pay phone industry that obviously went through a lot of change, or the newspaper industry, or the steel industry. So I was always learning stories. To me, investing at the end of the day was a story. What's going on with the companies? What's going on with the story? So I was an English Lit major, and I think my dad introduced me. I ended up working first on the platform of a bank. Opening accounts for people. There was space for someone to learn to be a credit analyst, which is what you look at to extend loans to companies. How do you decide what the right amount of loans is? And I'm telling you this story because I do have a memory. They sort of interact with each other.
One memory I had when I first met my husband. I said, if I could just earn 25,000 a year. And he said to me, you don't have much of an understanding of money. On the other hand, I do remember working for the bank. It was not a long time ago, so I think I was earning 17,000 or something. And if I became a senior credit person, I'd be earning $ 30,000. And I remember thinking, I want to earn more money. I want to earn six figures. And someone told me, if you go to work on Wall Street, you can earn six figures. So I started to go for my MBA at night. The Bank ultimately started to pay for my tuition. So I did one year full time, and it was in my head that I wanted to earn six figures. I went from this credit analyst training program with a small middle market bank in New York to getting my MBA, to getting my foot in the door in Oppenheimer Management Corp working as an analyst on their high yield mutual fund. And the rest is sort of history. But when I look back on how I built my career, I think that you couldn't do it the same way nowadays. I remember, again, being a junior person, and they asked me to look through resumes, and anyone who didn't go to Harvard, that you just threw the resumes out. I think the way I built my career, which was quite a while ago, I would not be able to do today. It's gotten a lot more competitive.
Heather Nelson: Before we jumped on, I was like, I'm not a huge finance person. Financial stuff is very scary to me. I'm obviously learning more now that I have a family and a business, and I'm gaining more of that. But the stock market, Wall Street, all of the investment stuff is very foreign to me. Can you tell us a little bit about Wall Street? What was your experience like working there? We don't have a lot of time, and I'm sure there's probably a lot of stories. But if you could sum it up?
Laura Rotter: I guess to explain it broadly, Wall Street is a lot of different things. When I meet someone at a party and they say, oh, you worked in finance. He does too. And you're like, okay, that could mean a lot of things. So Wall Street is a way that companies raise money. That's the first concept of Wall Street. Having a place where you can turn to if you want to sell a stake in your company. If you, Heather, wanted someone to invest in your company so that you had more capital to grow it, you're a small company now so you might turn to your friends and family. But larger companies, as you might imagine, need to raise more money, so they'll turn to investment banks, to turn to their customers to raise money. I guess that's a broad way of saying it. I worked in a specific part of the market. Like I said, distressed debt investing. Especially when I first started, I don't know if this name would be familiar to you or even to our listeners. But Michael Milken was very well known many, many years ago. He developed the high-yield bond market. It was a relatively small niche when I started. So there was a certain amount of camaraderie. First of all, when you start like anyone in a new job, if you are in your 20s, you're doing something exciting, and you're going out for drinks after work. So I feel like I loved what I did when I first started. And it was interesting. You could open the newspaper, something you were doing research on was in the news.
I guess the one thing I want to say is, if I look back at my career in investing, if you're someone who wants relatively instant gratification, you're right. I compare and contrast it. I was the primary breadwinner, not the primary caretaker. I have three children. When you're a parent, there's no gratification. Maybe years from now I go, I seem to have done an okay job. But you're working, working, working to be with your kids. Give them what they ask for, et cetera, and there's no real feedback short term. It certainly wouldn't. What I did, it was what's known as event driven investing. So I was always looking at a catalyst. But within the next six to nine months, a relatively short time frame, I anticipated things happening because I was investing in companies that were distressed. So maybe they'd file bankruptcy, maybe they would do something with their balance sheets. And so within a relatively short period of time, you'd be like, that was a good investment decision. You could measure it. At the end of the year, you could say, I've made this much money. My bonus should be X. So there was some gratification from that job. It wasn't investing and hoping within the next three to five years that the investment thesis would prove out. And I would say, it's very different than what I do for my clients now. Besides the fact that my work is much broader than just investments, I'm also not taking a lot of risk for my clients. It's like, we're going to keep fees low, we're going to be well diversified. This is long term money. This is money that you don't need for at least the next five years. So it's a very, very, very different head, and different work than working on Wall Street.
Heather Nelson: I have a random question, because I'm in the events industry here where we live, and I see little budgets for people who spend massive amounts of money, like a wedding, or a corporate event where they're spending millions of dollars on these events. And so I'm always in awe of being around these people. I just have a different perspective of it, right? I grew up, we had things, but nobody was going on these fancy trips and spending all this money on these extravagant things. What was it like being around people who just have so much money that they don't even know what to do with it?
Laura Rotter: One thing I want to say, because I also have noticed this from my podcast guest. When I grew up, which I will respond to being on Wall Street, there just wasn't the kind of wealth that I could talk about. And again, I'm older than, obviously, Ronald Reagan, and the tax law changes that cause a massive amount of wealth disparity in our country. So when I grew up, my friends who had houses were in row houses. There wasn't massive wealth. And this has been a real learning, particularly as I work with individuals by the end of my career on Wall Street. It was attracting people. I was a nerd in high school that found intellectually interesting work that made money by the end of my career, it was really dominated quite a lot by the frat Boys in college that were leveraging their relationships. And I say it that way because Wall Street ended up attracting people on the margin that just wanted to make money. And I could analyze that they weren't respected by their dad. So they're proving themselves, whatever it was. I work with people that felt like they were working for the F Dash, Ck money. It was about amassing enough to. And when you have that head, there's never enough, right? Because now, you're collecting wine, and you belong to the expensive country club, and you have to take expensive vacations. I was a small piece of that, with the 6000 square foot home, and the expensive vacations, and the vacation home, and you get trapped by your things.
I still remember a conversation with someone who similarly felt trapped, and also felt like we're not developing real skills. We're developing skills that work in this particular field, and they're not necessarily transferable to other fields or other endeavors. And I will say, looking now at people who, I guess I was about to say, I respect, but are similarly intellectually interested. Not only driven by money, they left Wall Street and wrote books, or became teachers, or became journalists. Or like myself, started to set up a firm to work with individuals. I have an investment strategy, so I'm going to start a registered investment advisor and get people to give me money. But I want to help people. I want to work with individuals that have fear. And so I would say that certainly in the last decade of my career, that question just brings up the feeling of like, I did not like the people I work with. A lot of older men are divorcing their wives, getting married to younger trophy wives. Even the ones who weren't getting divorced, they had a wife at home with four kids, but they were going out drinking every night.
Heather Nelson: Stereotypical thing that you would see on a TV show or a movie.
Laura Rotter: I really did not respect them. Did not respect their values. It got hard and distasteful for me to work with them. To be quite honest, again, I'm generalizing not everyone, but that was my experience towards the end of my career.
Heather Nelson: So you were on Wall Street for, you said 10 years?
Laura Rotter: I was on Wall Street for close to 30 years. It was like 10 years that I loved it. 10 years ago, I had three young children. I was not the primary. But you might imagine when I came home, it was like, okay, another whirlwind. And then the last decade when I finally could settle down, I realized that I'm miserable and trapped.
Heather Nelson: I feel like this is your twist. This is where you lived in your career. You were wealthy, you were traveling, you had this beautiful lifestyle. Was there a moment in time like, I always feel like there's either a moment or a day that changed you from being like, I need to do something different. Or I want to do something that's more fulfilling. What was that moment for you that set that into your next journey of your career?
Laura Rotter: I'll share a couple of little anecdotes. Again, I feel like it was the last decade that I knew I was unhappy, but I didn't think I could leave and found a yoga teacher. Again, I'm a pretty type A personality. So when I first found yoga, it was through Bikram Yoga, and I'm sweating. Actually had a woman who was coming to teach yoga, and I still remember that I walked into the class and there's all these women from my synagogue. So all different shapes and size, and I'm like, I'm not coming back. How am I going to break a sweat in this class? And the teacher, if you know anything about yoga, or if our listeners do was playing kirtan music. I actually used the word God, which is a very loaded word.
But I had been a very spiritual kid, growing up and married into a family that made me feel psychotic if I felt like there was anything beyond what we could touch, feel and see. And that yoga teacher, I kept coming to her classes, broke my heart open. I then took a yoga teacher training and got involved in an organization where I started to study meditation, and that was like the first inkling that I'm not going to get a do over. This is my life. And if I'm just basically clawing my way to the weekends or to the evenings, the second realization that that's my choice, and I'm choosing to be a victim. And it's weird. You look back and you say, of course. But it was like these aha moments. And then I would say, I feel like the universe knew I was ready. So my last job on Wall Street, I was working for an investment group within Citicorp, Citibank. Right before we started to record, I talked about how it was like. We were sitting because we had confidential information. So we were on a larger trading floor, but I was in a room with no sunlight, no windows at a happy light. I had a heater under my desk because it was freezing. The head of the group sat behind me and would constantly tell me to turn the heater off. We would have a Monday morning meeting. We would have morning meetings where nobody would look at each other. Everybody was back to each other.
I took a day long meditation retreat in Manhattan, and I journaled on the train going in the next day. I'm going to see if I can change this environment. I'm going to call my boss into his office. I'm going to talk about some changes. Maybe we will look at each other during the morning meeting. And Heather, the next day, my boss actually called me into his office to say that there's a company-wide restructuring. We let 10% of the people go and gave me a very good severance package, and I never looked back. And I will say that I really felt like the universe said to me, you're no longer choosing to be a victim. You're choosing to take control. I'm going to tear up, and now you're ready for the next stage. And I do also remember a day or two later, I was still in my big house, and I slipped down the back staircase and started to ball uncontrollably. And my husband, I often laugh. He's an academic psychiatrist. He doesn't see individual patients, so he's not that great. He's like, why are you crying? This is what you wanted. And I said, this was my identity for 30 years. I don't know who I am. So yes, this is what I wanted. And yes, I'm terrified.
Heather Nelson: I remember when you and I first met, that was something that stuck with me to you. You had this beautiful life, and this big house, and you traveled, and you had to make the decision to, again, change your life and your priorities. Downsize your house, or move. It's so funny, because most of us are striving to be where you were. We all want a big house. We want to travel. Now, you're basically switching roles, changing your life and making it more simple. Talk about that transition for you.
Laura Rotter: It wasn't an easy transition. From anyone listening who's going through one of their own, I remember conversations with my husband who had both come a long way. But when I first started talking about that, I was unhappy and wanted to leave. So before I even made the change, my husband was adamant that you're the primary breadwinner. You agreed to be the primary breadwinner. You can't change. And I think money stories are so important. As I shared a little bit earlier, I took home from my father, whether he meant that to be the message that you don't do anything that makes you unhappy. You constantly strive to find what makes you happy. My father's parents were older than my parents. We're sort of children of the depression. Though they were children during the depression, they saw the impact it had. And my husband's father, I think he's karmically now the academic his father wanted to be. But when his father had a family, he left to sell insurance. And so the message my husband got was, you take care of your family. That's your primary responsibility. So when I started to make noises about not wanting to continue on Wall Street, my husband was really angry. You're the primary breadwinner. That was your agreement.
I said, I don't remember signing a contract. I liked what I did. I don't like it anymore. There were a couple of years where we went into therapy. There was a lot of anger, and we've come through it. I will say that I'm privileged to have had this kind of earnings power. I did for a lot of my career, so that we did have savings. And I also say that by the time I left, my kids were off the payroll, which is a big deal. I had paid for college, and I was responsible for just two people now instead of five, which makes a big difference. So I was in the privileged position of making the change. And like I said, I was a financial planner for myself. The overhead of this house, we didn't have a big mortgage, but I had a 6000 square foot house. Heating that house and having the gardener come and cut the grass. I mean, I just said, I can't have that overhead anymore. And the vacation home, the same thing. I don't want to be paying taxes on two homes, and looked at the spreadsheet. And at the beginning, not only when you start a business, not only are you not necessarily earning money, you're spending money at the beginning paying for software and other things that you need. And I was really prepared to be poor, if you will. I'm pleasantly surprised to recognize that we're not.
Heather Nelson: If you're watching on YouTube, you can see your beautiful backyard. And I'm like, oh, it just looks so beautiful. And you're like, this is my happy place now. This is where you feel yourself. It's so interesting. I was thinking about this after our conversation of how long I've been working. I started working when I was 15. I always had two jobs. I always had three jobs. I've always had that hustle mentally. And I loved working. And even when I had kids, I was still constantly doing that. And now, I'm at a time where I'm like, I don't want to work so hard, and I want to do meaningful work. I want to change people's lives. I want to inspire, and I want to empower. I want to feel great about the work that I do every single day. What has that been like for you? What is the work that you're doing? Who are the people that you get to serve?
Laura Rotter: That's a great question. Thanks. I'm going to start, and perhaps, we've talked about this. I am always a bit of a seeker. I think it's very hard as an entrepreneur to find the right balance. When I first started this business, I look back and say, I was one of the worst bosses I ever had. I was still getting up at 6:00 o'clock in the morning and working all day. Every networking event, and just really hustling to build it, and learning to let go. To do exactly what you just articulated, I think is the rest of my life's work. There's certainly cultural messaging that everybody's proud of how busy they are. You've got so much to do. And to let that go, is work. I named my business True Abundance Advisors because I believe, as I said, when we talked about people on Wall Street and how they were just striving for more, and more, and more, and more, that I think true abundance has us maximizing all our scarce resources. Of course, money is a scarce resource. But so is time, and so is energy. We're always trading one off for the other, and I think it's important to recognize the trade offs we're making. And for my career, most of the time, I was trading my life energy for money. And there's a time in your life when that's appropriate. When you first start out, you want to build a base. That's what we need to do, but we don't want to keep doing that. And so that's why I named the firm True Abundance.
I work primarily with women who, similar to the women I interview for my podcast, generally, when you call a stranger to talk about your money, there's something coming up. It isn't like you wake up one day and say, oh, I'm gonna call someone I don't know, and tell them how much money I earn, and how much I save. So there's generally something going on like, I hate my job. Can I walk away? Or what's the minimum I need to earn? Or when can I retire? Or I'm getting divorced, how much do I need? There's some sort of transition that's taking place. It's interesting, I really love working with women. Having been on training desks with dudes in my previous life, I've come to recognize, and this was brought home to me by a woman who I've now been working with for many years. But when she first contacted me, she had gotten divorced. She contacted me, and we didn't speak again for another year. And she said, Laura, I didn't respect myself enough to pay your fee, because I do charge money for my services. I find that as much as I love working with women, I do work with a lot of couples. And I think part of it is that the men are like, oh, that's what this costs. I'm going to pay for it. And as a generalization, women tend to have a lot of difficulty spending on themselves, for sure. I know with the women I speak to they give me a call that's like, how much do you cost? There's a lot of fear and anxiety around money. So it's a double edged sword of loving to work with women, and getting women to actually pay for a service that they need. It is not always that easy.
And I have to say, someone who worked mostly with institutions in the past, it's tremendously satisfying work . Like I said earlier about Wall Street, people can feel like, oh, but I've got no real skill set. And honestly, I didn't say this to people when they started to work with me. I have a deep comfort with numbers. I understand financial markets. But what I do now bears very little resemblance to what I used to do, other than broadly how I see it as the stories are the most interesting part, and the numbers are the scaffolding for the life of the story. And I think that was true when I was analyzing companies. But in terms of the detailed work, whether it's understanding what's adequate insurance, whether it's understanding how to be most efficient with taxes, the kind of things I do work on, that had nothing to do with what I used to do before. And this is so gratifying that even friends will call and ask me questions. And it's nice to feel like I have a skill that actually benefits people.
Heather Nelson: I'm like, where do I sign up? Especially as you own a business too. The tax side of it is so scary, so daunting. I feel like we're just spending all this money on taxes. I'm like, there's gotta be a better way. I can appreciate people who are doing the work that you're doing, because we need help. And again, especially as somebody who's not in finance, that's not a strong suit for me. It's scary. It's interesting. I do women's retreats. At our last women's retreat, we actually had someone come on and talk about money. We always try to talk about money. We've had different speakers on different things, but she was talking about how we all have different money mindsets, and it usually stems from our childhood or how we were raised. Do you find yourself working with women a lot to change that, or help them see things in a different light? I'm assuming that you probably experienced that a lot.
Laura Rotter: I think the money stories, as I said and talked about the difference between myself and my husband, for example, I think the money stories are fascinating. One thing you recognize is that people's financial resources have very little correlation to how people feel about their money. One of the first stories I had was when before I had an office, I was going to people's homes when I first started to work. So the first home I went into, I still remember this. It was gorgeous. I walked in, it was a large home with a large baby grand piano, and floor to ceiling windows looking out over their pool. And then we started to talk about their money. The husband was already retired and collecting Social Security. They did not have a lot of money, and they had kids that were about to go to college, and they were going to not deny their kid to go into Harvard. They were going to Harvard. I literally said to them, are you expecting a big inheritance? Are you buying lottery tickets? What's up? And that very same day, Heather, I walked into the home of a widow. It was a row house. She was connected to other houses. She was wearing a lovely polyester pantsuit, and her big night out was going to church and playing bingo. I remember the little Glass Menagerie collection. She was worth millions. So the way people spend and the amount of money they have is very little correlation to money in terms of fear, or very little correlation with how you were raised and the stories you were raised with, that's really the impact you have. And then I have to share, I love working with archetypes. So I am interested in astrology. Right now, I'm studying the Enneagram and the connection between Enneagram types and - I just find it fascinating.
When I first start to work with someone, I do ask their money stories. I just recently did or still in a mentorship for what's called financial life planning where I am more asking clients questions that make them aware that life is not endless. Have them really think about what's important to them. And if they had all the money they needed, what would they change in their lives? If they knew they had five years left to live, what would they change? And if they heard they had 24 hours left to live, who would they regret not being? And what would they regret not doing? And that's been very, very powerful work for me, because I've learned to be silent and just read the answers back and listen. Just asking these questions has led my clients to have conversations with other family members, to just be less defensive about things like, just tell me how to make as much money as I can? And to really think about, what is your money for? And who would you like to be? That, to me, has become just as powerful as looking at the past. Because money stories, to a certain extent, it's important to understand, especially when you and a spouse have a very different money story. I think it's important to recognize that. And I'm really enjoying this idea of seeding ideas for the future. Okay, this is who you've been. What would you change?
Heather Nelson: One thought that I just had is, I actually just had this conversation with a friend of mine here in Sonoma County, it is very expensive to live. We literally live paycheck to paycheck. Some of us have second jobs just to support, just to live, and not even to go on vacations or do these things. And I had a friend who, she's like, I don't even have money saved up. She's an entrepreneur, and owns her own business. Is it too late to save money for your retirement? Again, this is a loaded question, I guess for me, and I want to assure her that it's not too late to start investing money for your future.
Laura Rotter: So a couple of things come up in response to that question. First of all, I always recommend having three to six months of money just in an emergency fund. Three to six months of money is needed so that when you blow the tires on your card, you're not suddenly drawing down on your 25% interest rate credit card bill. So I would say the first priority is just having savings in a bank account. Nowadays, you could actually earn a decent amount of money in your bank account. So that's number one. Number two, repaying that credit card debt. So if you've got some credit card debt, it's often yielding 20%, 25%. That's like an automatic investment return every time you start to pay that down. So I would say that's another priority. That being said, even if you have credit card debt, you could put away $5 a month just to that momentum towards making a change in one's life. And I also want to say that we go through different stages in our lives. I have a client who just had a newborn baby. It's her second child. The daycare is so expensive. And I said, this is going to be one of the most expensive periods of your life. Don't beat up on yourself if you feel like everything that comes in each month goes out each month. This is not the time in your life to feel like you're supposed to be generating so much additional cash. So again, I don't know how old your friend is, I don't know what time of life they're in, but there will come a time where there should be more money flow. What's most important as I'm, again, looking at different archetypes, we can put ourselves in broadly, are you money avoidant? Are you a money worshiper? Do you see money as status?
And the worst thing to be, I'd have to say, is money avoidant. Even if it's painful, give yourself a glass of wine first. But don't avoid looking at it. It sounds like your friend isn't avoiding it. Well, this is what's coming in, and this is what's going out. I just started to work with a woman who one of the first things I do is make sure they have a system set up for tracking. And nowadays, it's so easy to set these systems up where you link accounts and use AI, and everything's categorized. And she's like, shit. I gave my daughter access to these dating apps. And she didn't realize, like I said, I'm gonna pay for your dating app. And she didn't realize that it's recurring. She thought she paid one since she's done it. And every month, she's getting hit with a $30 charge until she actually linked her account. It's tiller. But there are several like this. She didn't realize she was spending that money. She had no idea. Because so many of us, even if we're not avoidant, and I have a family member who is avoidant, can't even manage to link their account to an app. All you have to do is won't do it. Every time I ask, they change the subject. But even if you're not avoidant like that, even if you're just like, who the hell has the time? We'll make the time.
Heather Nelson: Every single penny that goes in and out from any of my personal accounts, my husband's accounts, my business accounts, I know every penny.
Laura Rotter: I actually use this app, the one I'm recommending, though there's two that I recommend, Monarch money. I use something called Tiller. You can use it in a Google Doc, or you can use it in an Excel spreadsheet, whichever you're comfortable with. And every single day, I get an email from them that shows me all my transactions and all my balances, both in my bank accounts and my credit card accounts, so I can't avoid it. I make an effort to be grateful, because one could look at that email and go, I don't want to open it. Oh, my god, I spent that much money. And so it really is my practice to put my hands on my heart and say, how lucky am I that I have this money in the bank, and that I have this money to spend. Because at the end of the day, money should be in flow. If you're like a money miser because of the stories you grew up with of scarcity, and so many of us do have that scarcity mindset. We're like squirrels with acorns in our cheeks. We want more. We want it all to be in the bank. Money is meant to be spent and keep the economy going.
Heather Nelson: From doing all this work, what is the number one advice that you, I would say, probably the number one advice that you've given to your clients over the years that you would love to pour into the audience today?
Laura Rotter: Well, I do. It's interesting how everybody has different circumstances. I hear myself saying, and I might have shared this anecdote with you. Someone from my neighborhood reached out to me. They had just gotten a little bit of money. It was really quite a small amount, but they wanted to know how they should invest it. And so I said to them, on average, I expect my investment accounts to earn, let's say 7% on average over time. And so this woman had $10,000, and she said, so my $10,000 can become $70,000? And I said, no, no. That's 700%, that's not 7%. So she said, it was a reasonable question, so how do people build wealth? And so back to our conversation from a couple of minutes ago. I said, you make sure that you earn more than you spend, and you find some money to invest. Because the power of compounding, especially when you're young, is astronomical. It feels ridiculous to put $5 a month, but it's $5 a month. And whether that's 4% in a bank account or 7% on average in a diversified low fee portfolio, you're going to turn around that $5 a month in 10 years. You're going to be surprised at how much that's worth. And so it's a certain amount of discipline that I recommend that you have. And that gets back to what we just said, which is, don't avoid looking at your money. Gamify it somehow, something to actually look at what's coming in, and what's going out. And be a master of your money.
Heather Nelson: So good. Do you find a lot of women who have kids who spend an obscene amount of money on their children, talk about their Lululemon clothes, they're getting their nails done, but they won't spend a single dime on a retreat or a new pair of shoes for them? Do you see that often? Because I definitely know my world. I see it very, very often.
Laura Rotter: Yeah. Like I said earlier, when potentially meeting with women to become clients, they will spend money on their kids. They will spend money on their family. But to spend money on something that they think is for themselves, it's much, much harder. I would say also, it's not necessarily only women. I think in general, culturally, and it's a beautiful thing, we feel like we don't want to deny our children. I'm working with a couple. They recently got divorced. I was working with both of them, and now I'm just working with the woman. And I guess I'll share this is a New York City suburb thing. Perhaps it's the same where you live, Heather, but I invested in this software for colleges. Which colleges have merit scholarships? Because the people I work with often aren't going to qualify for need based, so it was an expensive database and different scholarships they could apply for. It didn't matter what the best school that their kid got into. If the kid wants to get 90,000 a year, room and board, they don't care if they'll have to draw from their retirement account. Luckily, I didn't have any work with anyone that got to that point. But I realized, why am I investing in the software? They don't care. They're going to send their kid to the college that their kid wants to go to. That's just the culture that I live in. I'm sure there are people that will say, I actually tried to do it with my son. There's a very good New York State School I know. Even when I said it, it was a joke. I said, if you apply to this school and get in - and he didn't apply to it. He went to the University of Michigan as a state student, and had a great time. I don't regret it, but I'm part of that culture that you don't deny your kids, which is different from my money avoidant child who's now in their early 30s. That really is a work to say, I can't solve this for them. They need to earn more money. They need to spend less money. I'm happy to be a resource out of my three kids. They're the ones most economically challenged, and least likely to ask me for any financial advice, par for the course. It's hard as a parent to not want to deny.
Heather Nelson: I feel like that's a whole conversation in itself about college, why we send money, and why we shouldn't spend so much money. And they could go to a JC, and now they could learn online. I feel like that's a whole thing, so I didn't even think about this whole thing. You have a book. What is your book called?
Laura Rotter: I do not have a book.
Heather Nelson: I have a book, Die with Zero, you must have told me.
Laura Rotter: Yes, not my book. I've said to a lot of both my clients and other people I've met, the title says most of it. And obviously, it's speaking to a certain population. But in my field, there's something called the Monte Carlo simulation, where you put all the numbers in. This is what you're spending, Heather, we're going to inflate it. And this is what you're earning, we'll inflate that too, and we'll project out what you need for college and blah, blah, blah. And at the end of the day, it's like, okay, you're going to live till 95. What's the probability that your money will last till age 95? And it's called the probability of success. And everybody wants to see something close to 100. I have to say, I'm similar. And Die with Zero will say, if you've got 100% probability of success, you are dying with way too much money. You're denying yourself trips. You're not giving as much money as you might give to charity. You're not helping their kids when they need it. Now, maybe a down payment on a house, rather than leaving them a legacy that your probability of success should probably be 80%, if not lower. Because anything that high is just overcompensating. I'd have to say that I agree. On the one hand, one of the hard parts about being a financial advisor is like, who the hell knows? You use these numbers, but you don't know what's going to happen in the world. On the other hand, speaking for myself, I'm inflating my expenses till age 95. I watched my parents. They slowed down way before age 95. They weren't even around way before age 95. To the extent that we try to build in all these buffers as a financial advisor, you're almost guaranteeing that people will die with way more than zero. So it's a concept of just back to the squirrel and the acorns in the cheeks of just recognizing the balance. Obviously, Die with Zero is what my child is trying to do there. And so far, they're going to be very successful. It's not written to that population. It's written to a population of people that do, have accumulated financial resources, and are afraid to spend.
Heather Nelson: I'll have to read it. But you're going to write a book someday. I know it. You haven't even said it, but I know it. How can my listeners find you? You talked a little bit about your podcast, how can they connect with you?
Laura Rotter: Thank you for asking. So my website is trueabundanceadvisors.com, and I have a link there, either to just subscribe to my newsletter. I do blend a little bit of mindfulness teachings in my newsletters, so I send that out once a week. Or if you're interested in having a conversation, I certainly like most service providers, first connect with someone without charging just to get a sense of who you are. So that calendar link is on my website as well. My podcast is Making Change with your Money, where I've been privileged to meet so many wonderful women like yourself. I feel so privileged to be in the position to have these kinds of conversations, Heather, rather than just sitting in a windowless space grounded by people whose values I don't share. So this continues to be a sort of very creative period of life for me. And I just love meeting new people.
Heather Nelson: I love it. Thank you for the work you're doing. I'm so glad that we got connected. Thank you for being on my podcast. I'll be going on yours as well in the future. And again, I'm just so honored to have you here, so thanks for being here.