October 15, 2019

Paige, The Millennial Guru, shares some savvy saving tips to help you think about priorities, wants, and needs and how to budget for them.  You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Kristin:  Welcome to Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  I’m Kristin, co-owner, and I’m here today with Paige Cornetet, and she is known as the Millennial Guru.  Welcome, Paige!

Paige:  Thank you!  So excited to be on the show today!

Kristin:  Yes!  Tell us about why you started Millennial Guru.  You’re also an author.  Fill us in, since you’re a local Grand Rapids resident and business owner.

Paige:  Absolutely!  So I started the business with the intent in mind of how to help  my generation.  I’m a Millennial, too, so full disclosure, I’m a Millennial helping the Millennials.  It was about how to help my generation understand themselves and dive in a little bit further, as well as teams.  Obviously, when you get out of college, you get a job and you go to work, and you work with a different type of generation of people, so yourself, as well as different generations, and kind of how to bridge that gap with the different generations.  What does that look like with different technology, with different concepts, with different philosophies.  I think the most important thing with who I work with is starting with yourself.  Who are you?  What are your talents?  What are you good at?  Then, once you understand that fully, how can you express that to your team and understand your team members and their talents.

Kristin:  I love that!

Paige:  You, yourself, is kind of the thought and the basis of the philosophy for my business.  Then it kind of led into not only understanding yourself but also understanding your wealth.  Those kind of go hand in hand.  I wrote a bunch of different children’s books, and it was really fun.  It was with the intent of, okay, so I’m helping my generation understand about themselves and also about their wealth and that the themes are and the concepts and the understanding.  Then I was thinking, how can I help the even younger generation, the kids, the little guy, understand at even an earlier age.  They’re not going to necessarily understand themselves yet, but they can understand themes and concepts of their wealth or their future wealth.

Kristin:  My kids have one of your books, and they love it!

Paige:  Yay!

Kristin:  So as far as focus, how can people who are local to you connect and figure out, even if they’re not ready to have kids, maybe how to plan for their future of wanting a family, wanting a house/

Paige:  Yes!  First of all they can connect on the website or my email, paige@millennialguru.com.

Kristin:  And you’re very active on social media.  They can find you on Instagram, Facebook, everywhere.

Paige:  Exactly, all of the above.  I think that, first of all, they can connect with me, and then we can have a bunch of different conversations.  I do workshops, on top of that.  It’s understanding first what you’re good at and what that looks like for you.  So, for example, one of my talents is Maximizer.  I love doing many things at once, meaning killing many birds with one stone.  That’s the high pressure life, and how I do things is make sure that I’m covering a lot of things.  It’s kind of for the greater good, the excellent.  So I bring that to my business and also my personal life, as well.  So when I’m investing, I want to maximize my return.  I always want to maximize; what is the best way that I can do it to get the most out of it?  That’s how I do things, including my goalsetting.  As an example of a big goal, I have three siblings, and I wanted to go on a trip with them each individually this year, which is a lot of trips.  My 30th birthday is coming up, and so I thought what if I can just do a whole sibling trip and we can all go together and I can check all those boxes off at once?  We’re about ready to do that.  We’re going on a safari in Africa, the four of us together, soon.  That’s an example of how understanding yourself and how you approach things can apply to you professionally, to your goals, your personal goals, your business goals, and to your future financial planning goals.

Kristin:  What are your priorities?  If travel is a priority before having children, how do you save for that and craft out the time in a busy work schedule?  Life in general is busy.

Paige:  What?  It is?

Kristin:  Right?  And then saving for a family if that’s something they desire, as well as checking off those boxes of travel and things that they want to get accomplished.

Paige:  Absolutely, and I think you said that really great.  Priorities means establishing what are your wants and what are your needs.  Once you have the needs covered for you, you also have to think about the needs when you have a family.  What are the needs for the kids?  What do they need?  What are their wants?  First, if you can do it with yourself: what do I want?  What do I need?  Planning financially for that will help make it easier going forward when you do have a family and you have kids.  It’s like, okay.  Do I want those really cute little baby shoes for them, or do they actually need them?  They’re really cute and they’re Instagrammable, so…

Kristin:  So much of life right now is the Instagram filters and photos!

Paige:  And they do grow, so eventually, they probably won’t need those shoes.  It’s things like that.

Kristin:  And you also travel quite a bit.  We have listeners from all around the country, and you do workshops and speaking engagements?

Paige:  Yeah.  It depends on who and what and how and also where, but I’m mostly in Eastern standard time.  That’s kind of where I stick myself a lot.  It’s a little bit easier for myself.  Again, my Maximizer can’t help it.  Let’s just stay in the same time zone so that I don’t have to catch up on sleep!  But yes, I’m all over.  I do a lot of speaking engagements and workshops, mostly focused around yourself and your wealth.

Kristin:  And we had talked ab bit when we met up for coffee recently.  You do some strategy session for entrepreneurs like myself and helping small businesses maximize their wealth, personally and for the business itself.

Paige:  Absolutely.  It’s interesting that you say that because I’ve been thinking about that a lot as myself being an entrepreneur.  Where is my margin?  Where is that space where I can have creative development for that, and where is the space that I can have financially, as well?  So the margin has been kind of at the forefront of helping entrepreneurs.  Where is that cushion — and margin is the word that I use for it, but you could use a lot of different words — of financially, and so feeling that way or distributing or redistributing things, as well as your time and energy as an entrepreneur.  Are you doing it all?

Kristin:  Yes, or can you outsource?

Paige:  And that goes back to families, too, right?  If there are certain things when you’re having kids or having a family, what can you outsource?  Who can you use to rely on, if it’s a community or if it’s grandparents.  Extra set of hands!

Kristin:  Yes, we’ll have to talk about some of that outsourcing for families in our next episode.  We’ll have you on to talk a bit more about savings when you have a newborn.  And again, if people are interested, they can find you at your website.

Paige:  Thank you so much!

Kristin:  Yeah!  Thanks for being on!