Participants would pay $199 for the workshop and a private coaching session. If they registered at least two days in advance, they could bring a friend for free.
But the registrations didn’t exactly roll in on their own. Rosenblum kept adjusting her reservation: a room for 100 people, then 50, then 30.
“Then I made the most of it with my 12 people,” she said of the final attendance.
That first workshop wasn’t exactly a moneymaker for the CPA who had previously built her career in corporate accounting and finance.
“I left a six figure job to start a business and I knew nothing about starting a business,” she says now. “I thought I could set up my shingle and everyone would come.”
But those 12 audience members were the foundation for Rosenblum’s financial coaching services through her company, Own Your Money.
Running Her Career, but Hiding From Her Money
Rosenblum didn’t always have the confidence to teach others about personal finance, although she’s always had a knack for numbers. In her first job as a teenager in New York, she provided bookkeeping services for a local security company.
But she’s had her own struggles with money. Rosenblum remembers her parents fighting, often about money, before they divorced when she was seven years old.
“What I concluded at the time was that money was pain for me,” she says. “The more money I make, the more pain I’ll be bringing into my life.”
She suspects that belief kept her from earning what her skills were really worth after she graduated from college with honors in accounting.
Rosenblum also had to fill in as financial manager for her family.
When she was 21, Rosenblum’s father had a stroke. “All my friends were partying and going out, and I was taking care of him in the hospital,” she recalls. Her dad didn’t keep tidy records, so she found herself patching together his financial story, managing expenses on his home and his medical treatment while taking care of her own finances.
“Once I felt like he was stable, and I Band-Aided things together with our personal finances, I focused back on work.”
Frequent business trips meant Rosenblum would return home to piles of mail that she couldn’t bear to open on her brief weekend breaks. “I would just bring it home and put it on any free surface. The desk, the table, the basket,” she says. And it wasn’t just her own bills and statements in those piles — she couldn’t even bear to deal with her dad’s mail.
She finally collected all the piles into one place. But overwhelmed with guilt and shame, she couldn’t bring herself to open and sort them. She worried what people would think of her if they found out. “I’m an accountant for goodness sakes,” she thought. She was 28.
“Financial independence didn’t mean I had to do it alone,” she decided, and called a friend for help. Annette came over that weekend and started opening bills, asking Rosenblum which pile to put them in, which to pay and which to file.
It took six months for Rosenblum to get organized and develop a system where she could easily manage her own and her dad’s finances, even if she was on the road.
Forging Her Own Path
Rosenblum went on to manage her six-figure salary so well that she saved up her first million by the time she was 33.
But a corporate restructuring in spring 2007 left her figuring out what was next. She took her handsome severance package and traveled to India and Costa Rica. She thought she’d be able to find a job quickly, but none of the offers she received in corporate finance felt quite right.
Even the idea of being a financial advisor didn’t sit right with her, even though she had several offers in that field. Talking with the women in her life about their approaches to money exposed the flaw in that plan.
“When I told them I was going to be an advisor it was almost like they clutched their purse tighter,” she says. “Like somehow I was going to take their money or something or like try and invest them or try and change them.”
Instead, Rosenblum started to explore our relationships with money. “What I really felt like they needed more of was…how do they approach money in a way that felt good? That didn’t feel so scary and filled with overwhelm and shame? That was more interesting to me,” she says.
Finding Financial Independence, Together
Just a few months after Rosenblum’s first weekend workshop, the economy crashed into recession. But by then, she had already created a framework to help people deal with their financial baggage, to move through their mental roadblocks and take action toward meeting their money goals.
So she pressed forward.
She built out in-person training programs before expanding to online courses and a series of books for self-paced work. Since she started Own Your Money, she’s gotten married and welcomed two children into the family. Her husband now works on running Own Your Money alongside Rosenblum.
Her clients range from their mid-20s to early 70s, she says. Changing their mindset, she says, is often the biggest roadblock for people hoping to make progress managing their money. “We’re not born knowing money, and it’s amazing how much pressure we put on ourselves that by osmosis we should have figured it out,” she says. “We collect information, but not necessarily the best or right things.”
She notices her clients drawing conclusions about money at the ages of six through 10, much like her own revelation when her parents fought over money. Then “at 36, 46 or 56, we’re still holding on to what happened when we were six.”
She focus on helping people examine what she calls their money story, and on giving them a nonjudgmental space to talk about their challenges. She hosts private Facebook groups where clients and course participants can share their wins. Sometimes, it’s easier for a stranger to be happy for you when you get a big raise, Rosenblum says an example, than someone close to you.
“I remind them that we’re all here for them, that they’re not alone,” she says. “Maybe you’ve done it alone for literally 60 years, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.”
Lisa Rowan is a senior writer and on-air analyst at the Penny Hoarder.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
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