Epi 60 - Bevin Farrand

[00:00:00] Ashley: Welcome to the Money Mindset Podcast, where you will find the inspiration and motivation you need to manage your money better so you can stress less and live the life you want. It's Ashley with Budgets Made easy and the Money Mindset Podcast. Today I'm speaking with Bevin Ferrand who started her remote based business after being laid off three times from corporate careers, that she was certain she was secure in. She then became the sole breadwinner for herself and two small children after losing her husband unexpectedly in 2019, only five days after a whirlwind trip to France for her birthday. Um, after that, she was able to scale her business to multiple six figures during the pandemic and with three kids then. While grieving the loss of her husband and continued being a great mom through it all. 
[00:00:58] So, today we are going to talk about her journey and how she uses what she calls the DAMN framework, and to just take the damn trip. So even if you are wondering how, or when you should take the damn trip or if you should, when you're paying off debt, she gives us her framework for making any decision with, without debt. Uh, you can apply it to all areas of your life. And she's going to give us her tips for, you know, getting the most out of life, doing what you want and not holding back because you know, you just never know what's going to happen and you make the best decisions you can with the information that you've got at that time.
[00:01:43] So, uh, don't forget that you can get your Free Debt Starter Kit at budgetsmadeeasy.com/debt if you're wanting to focus on paying off debt so you can take the damn trip. So, uh, please welcome Bevin. Hi Bevin. Thank you so much for being with us today. 
[00:02:02] Bevin: Thank you so much for having me. I love this topic, so I can't wait to dive in.
[00:02:07] Ashley: I am really excited about talking to you about your DAMN Framework today and kind of the background about that and your journey. So here on the Money Mindset Podcast, we talk about debt and paying off debt and really just our journey through life because finances touch every aspect of our lives, our decisions, what we do with our life, right? Like it gives us options or we don't have as many options because of debt. And so, you know, your framework I really want to dive into. So can you give us a little bit of background and tell us about the DAMN Framework and how it came up? 
[00:02:44] Bevin: Yeah, we should give a disclaimer, if these are mom's like, if you consider damn a bad word, you want to put your earbuds in, because I got to say it probably like 42 times today, but it does mean something.
[00:02:56] Ashley: Yeah. 
[00:02:58] Bevin: Yeah. Um, so I've been on religious podcast and they're like, okay, warning, warning. She's going to say. So in 2019, my husband surprised me with a trip to France for my 40th birthday. And we had six months to plan it. He gave me, he told me about it in my on mother's day and we were going in November and then two weeks later I got laid off.
[00:03:20] And the job that I absolutely loved, I was devastated. I had just taken three months of maternity leave because, oh, by the way, I had a two year old and a four month old at home when this happened. And I was, this was the third time I had been laid off Ashley. I was over it. I was tired of putting my financial health in the hands of anyone else I had when I got laid off the first time I had been in a ton of debt and I really didn't like to talk about money. And I think that's, I mean, I'm sure we'll get into that, but that was a big part of what put me in debt. Was I just, when it came to money, I just ignored it. And so when Mark and I were walking on our country road, I said to him, one night, I don't want to look for another job.
[00:04:08] And I think his brakes went. So I said, I'm tired of this. I'm tired of, if we, if I lose my job, I lose my entire income in an instant. And if I have my own business, then if I lose a client, I lose a portion of my income, but not all of it. And so I asked him to trust me and I said, let's do a proof of concept.
[00:04:31] Let me see if I can make $5,000 by the end of August. And if I can, then this is a viable concept. I'll still keep looking for jobs on the side, but let me just try this. And so I went all in on my, my business idea, which previously, when I had done entrepreneurial things, I kind of bounced around a lot. So I was like all in, I made my first thousand dollars in July. So no money in May, no money in June, thousand dollars in July. By the end of August, I made my first $5,000. I then made, started hitting $10,000 months in August. And I grew that business from zero. Yeah. I grew it from like zero to multi six figures in 18 months. 
[00:05:13] Ashley: Wow. That's amazing. 
[00:05:15] Bevin: Thank you. Yeah. And in that, we got to the trip, right? We got to this trip to France. We still were like, should we go? Like this business concept is still not tested. We still have two young children at home. Should we go? And we decided to go, even though it was totally crazy, we had an amazing time celebrated my birthday in Bordeaux. Amazing wine, delicious food, wandered through the city, got to really reconnect as a couple as who we were before we got married before we had kids and we got back and it was the week before Thanksgiving. And so Mark had taken the whole week off and we did stuff around the house. We got ready for Thanksgiving, which has always been my favorite holiday. It was pre COVID. So we have about 25 people going and had Thanksgiving. And then the next day, Mark didn't wake up. He passed away in the middle of the night, completely unexpectedly. We had no idea that he had undiagnosed heart disease. One of his arteries was 95% blocked and the other was 50% blocked.
[00:06:18] Oh. And now. I was a solo parent of two children under the age of three. Fledgling business that really has not been tested. Sole financial provider and then without my best friend and the biggest cheerleader and the love of my life by my side. So my life was completely flipped upside down. And in that about a month after things started to settled, I mean, it's still not completely settled, but about a month later I made a post and I said, I was so glad that we had gone on that trip together, gone on that adventure and been together.
[00:06:55] And that whenever we're faced with the choice, just take the damn train. And that resonated with so many people. And so I didn't know what it was going to be, but I knew it was going to be something. And so as I looked back at my life and the hardest things that I've been through. Not just losing Mark, but losing my dad to cancer when I was 24, going through debt and, and learning about money, um, losing my home in a house fire in 2010, going through, years and years of fertility treatments to have my children. But then also looking at these amazing things that I had done. Like, like I said, growing my business to multiple six figures, we built our dream house. I ended up, um, when Mark passed away, we were 60 days away from starting our next round of IVF. And in 2020, I decided to move forward with that, with the embryos that mark and I had frozen. So now I have three children, five and under, still using this framework. So I looked and I said, what is it that I do differently than other people? Not better, but differently. That allows me to navigate these situations.
[00:08:02] And that's where the DAMN Framework came from. And, um, it was at first it was like, Take the DAMN Trip. And now it's, the movement is Take the DAMN Chance because it's not about vacations. Because people here it's about vacations and then they're like, delete. I don't have time for that. And I'm not, I'm not a travel agent. But it's about taking the chance on that big, bold, crazy dream that you have a, chance on yourself. And so the framework is Decide and Declare, Attend Your Own Party, Moments Not Minutes, and Now Is The Time. And that is now the basis of everything I teach. It's, it's really something I use every day when I'm thinking about how I want to parent my children. When I am working with clients who are either starting a business or who are growing their business, it is once you see it, you can't unsee it.
[00:08:54] Ashley: Can you dive deeper a little bit into the framework? Like what each thing means, because you know, as you're telling your story, I mean, I can't even imagine going through just one of the things that you've been through and, you know, as humans, we have a tendency to focus on the negative. Right. But as you said, you know, you've focused on the positive and all the good things as well. And you know, for me, at least I know I would have probably spiraled into a big depression and, and I'm sure that you've dealt with all of those things too through the years, but how you have been able to take your, you know, tragedy and your, uh, heartbreak through the years and turn it into something positive that helps other people. So can you kind of dive into that a little bit?
[00:09:42] Bevin: Sure. And to be clear, I did not pop up the next day and say, how do I make this meaningful? And how do I turn this into a movement? And I remember talking to a grief coach I worked with and I said, you know, it never, it never occurred to me to curl up under the desk and stop. And she said, well, nobody would have blamed you for doing that. 
[00:10:02] Ashley: Right, exactly. 
[00:10:03] Bevin: And I said, absolutely. And there are still days now, even now that I like curl up on, I don't know why it's like my closet floor or the shower and just bawl my eyes out. So there's still days that that happens. I just, one of the pieces of the framework is that we can't choose what happens to us. We can only choose how we respond to it. And so 100%, this was something that I am not a Suzy sunshine kind of person. Like I actually don't think everything happens for a reason, at least not a good one. Like you're never going to convince me that my husband died for a good reason. But I do know that I am 100% radically loving, responsible for my experience of life, for my role in the experience of my life. So we'll get into that. So the D the decide and declare is that we have to decide what is the most important thing to us right now. We have to choose our top priority, because if everything is a priority, nothing is.
[00:11:05] So if your audience is thinking about like, they want to pay off debt, right? That becomes their decision. They are deciding that. Which means that's their top priority. So they may not go on a trip. They may not go out to dinner as often. They may not, you know, buy a new car because they have decided to reduce and eliminate their debt. And then we declare it and we don't declare things in like shouting from the social media rooftops. Instead we do what I call the layer declarations. And we start with a very, very small group. When I decided to move forward with the IVF, I told three people and I said, you are my cheerleaders. Your whole job is just to say, yay, blood test, yay ultrasound. Like that's your job. And then as things start to get more comfortable on your building, more confidence, you start to expand those circles out of who you are telling and who you are sharing it with. And so when, when we decide, I say, that's where we find our yes and our six dimensional why. Because, yes, I want to pay off debt, but then there's the why.
[00:12:16] And so I would encourage anyone listening if you are not, if you are not solid on your why, because it has to be multi-dimensional. That's why I say six dimensions. You have to know why you want to do it, how it's going to impact you financially, emotionally, mentally, physically, socially, and spiritually. And so I have just a super quick 10 questions to walk you through that at sixdimensionalwhy.com that you can think about. Well, yes. You know how paying off your debt is going to impact you financially. But how is it going to impact you emotionally? How is it going to impact you socially? So I really encourage people to dig into that. Cause I always say, I always say your big, bold, crazy dream can't hang on to one flimsy, little why? Because if it's just one, then things get hard and you're like, eh, it's not that important. 
[00:13:04] Ashley: I love that because I have heard before, digging down deeper into your why, but not those six dimensions. So yes, definitely going to tell people about that and I'll link to it in the show notes too. Because that you really do have to dig down deep into why you want to do it. If you're going to have that, long-term follow through success because it's not always going to be easy. 
[00:13:28] Bevin: It's not, it's not going to be easy. There are going to be times when it's hard and it works for anything for fitness, for business. Again, for like your relationships, your relationships with your kids is we have to think about if it's really that important to us, it's going to impact so many areas of our life. So we need to think about what that is. 
[00:13:46] Ashley: Absolutely. 
[00:13:47] Bevin: So the A is Attend Your Own Party and that has really two pieces as well. The one is, if you've done yoga, you may have heard it like stay on your own mat. So we stay on our own party. So we are comparing ourselves to where we've been and where we want to go. Not where other people. Like, there's nothing useful about about comparing yourself to other people. And we also take, like I said, 100% radically loving responsibility for our role in the experience of our life. And that is because we create our experience through our thoughts. Our thoughts actually create our emotions. So if we're specifically talking about debt, and we're feeling like ashamed or frustrated or whatever it is. That's coming from our thoughts about it about. Oh man, I shouldn't have spent all that money. How embarrassing, how frustrating? Oh, if I'd been stronger, I wouldn't have done that. Those thoughts are useless. If we, and we get to control that, we get to say, let me think of a couple of different ways I could think about this.
[00:14:51] And just by asking yourself that question, how else could I think about it then we see, oh, I do get to decide. So instead we could say, wow, look how amazing that I have decided to like put my stake in the ground and pay the debt off now. Or look, you know, I, maybe your debt came from medical bills or from buying your home or something where we're like, wow, that was such a good investment and now, and maybe it was a good idea at the time. Like that's what, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Right. We don't actually try to put ourselves in difficult situations. Hey, seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I need to deal with moving from.
[00:15:34] Ashley: Yes. Yes. I know. I try to get that across to people because we make decisions based on what we know right now. So you're doing the best that you can with what you have and what you know, right now. And so beating yourself up about what you did five, 10 years ago, does nothing for you. It doesn't move you forward. So.
[00:15:55] Bevin: I ever got, I was 13 years old, so it's pretty good advice. If it's lasted is the best before until now I would, I had been accepted to a. Boarding school, um, with a full scholarship. And I sat down with my dad and I said, I don't know what I want to do. Do I want to go? It means I'm giving up all my friends. I was in theaters. They didn't have a theater, strong theater program, all these things. And we sat there for three hours and went back and forth about which way to go. And at the end of that dinner, my dad looked at me and he said, Bevin you are going to make the best decision you can with the information you have at hand.
[00:16:29] If you make a different decision in six months or six weeks or six days, it is not because this decision is wrong. It is because you have more information and you are making the best decision you can with the information you have at hand. And that has like eliminated so much regret and guilt because I'm like I was doing the best I could.
[00:16:47] Ashley: Yes exactly. Yeah. That was very smart. That's awesome. 
[00:16:54] Bevin: Okay. So Moments Not Minutes. The M so the Moments Not Minutes came from when I was deciding to have Marastella and I was like, how do I build a business to support these three kiddos as a solo parent, give them like, have the money to do it, but also have the time. 
[00:17:14] Ashley: And this is during COVID too right? 
[00:17:16] Bevin: Middle of COVID they'll greet me in the lab. Like, you know, all the things completely upside down. And a friend of mine asked me, she said, do you want to be there for the moments or the minutes? And I was like, damn, like, that's how I know something's good. If I have that full body, like damn. And I said, I want to be there for the moment. And so every day I leave my desk at three o'clock and I go pick my daughter up from preschool and seeing her run out of the door. It's like, she had never seen me before in her life. It's the best. Yeah. And that's a moment I don't want to miss, and I'm not with her every single minute of the day. And you know what? I don't feel guilty about it. Because I know that I am present for the moments because that's the other part of it. When we are fully present in the moment with whoever we're with, right? Our spouse, our kids, our business, our friends we're fully present. Then when we step away and we're fully present with somebody else, we don't feel that guilt because we weren't trying to straddle multiple lines and be at the zoo, but also on the phone. 
[00:18:28] Ashley: Yes. It's hard not to do that. Especially as a business owner, like your mind is constantly going like, oh, what do I have to do? What do I need to do? I'm sure as a, not just business owners, but you know, that's where we're at. And so it's like constantly, what do I got to do? What am I going to do? 
[00:18:47] Bevin: I'm not saying I'm perfect at it by any means. Right? Like when I don't have childcare on the weekends and I'm also trying to work, I, I know I'm not as effective at either. Right. So, so then I noticed I'm like, Can I just put the work away, be present with the kids, spend an hour doing work after they go to bed. I don't normally like to do that, but I'm like, just do an hour later. I'm going to be way more effective than if I try to spend three hours doing both. 
[00:19:13] Ashley: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. 
[00:19:16] Bevin: That's the moments, not minutes as we focus on the special, precious moments that can not be replicate. And then now is the time is the fact that there will never be a perfect day. So why not today? Right. We never know what's going to happen to ourselves, to our kids, to our family, to our jobs, to our, like if 20, if the COVID taught us anything, it's that we never know what's going to happen tomorrow. 
[00:19:44] Ashley: That's true. 
[00:19:45] Bevin: That is not a reason to live scared, but it is a reason to live fully.
[00:19:51] Ashley: Yes. Yes. 
[00:19:53] Bevin: And so we get into action and it starts with micro action. Because again, I'm just going to relate this back to your listeners, right? If you're looking at your debt, whatever it is, a thousand dollars, 5,000, 10,000, a hundred thousand, I don't actually care what the number is. It can look so daunting. It can look like an entire mountain that you have to climb. Well, how am I even going to do it? So why even start? 
[00:20:19] Ashley: Yeah. So I hear that a lot. Yes. 
[00:20:22] Bevin: So micro-actions are the smallest possible action that you will actually take it is that first tree on the mountain. You just go to the first tree, then the next tree, then the next tree and you go tree to tree to tree. You can climb an entire mountain. So it is the very smallest if you're like, Hey, I'm just going to pay that first credit card bill. That's my first thing. That's too big. That's way too big. Pay the first, if it's, let's just say for years, you've been paying the minimum balance, right? Pay $10 over that minimum balance as your first microaction just to. Then the next month, maybe do $15. So that you're slowly building that momentum that gets you out of the inertia. Because the object at rest tends to stay at rest. That's the hardest scariest place to be. It takes the most energy to get your, your train wheels rolling. Just micro-actions. And then you start to see momentum and then the momentum starts to help you keep going forward.
[00:21:22] So you pair that like yes, and six dimensional why with your micro-actions and you will get there so much faster, so much more powerfully, it'll mean so much more to you, and you will all of a sudden see yourself achieving goals that you never thought you could do. 
[00:21:38] Ashley: Yes, absolutely. This is so good. I need to have you on like every week now 
[00:21:47] Bevin: We'll be like, here comes down with another damn snippet.
[00:21:51] Ashley: That's right. That's right. Oh, I love it. So what would you tell people? And you've already given us so, so many good things to think about today. But, you know, the, the mom that's overwhelmed, she has too much debt, uh, you know, start with the micro actions, you know, dig deep into the why. Um, do you have any other last words of wisdom last minute tips? Cause I know you said you paid off debt too, and you know, we're not sharing your debt pay off story, but you know, you've been there too. And I can tell by what you've said so far that you have really been there too. So yeah. Do you have any? 
[00:22:30] Bevin: I'll be honest. And I don't talk about this a lot, that I filed bankruptcy because I, at one, there was one day where I had a dollar 27 to my name. Like in my wallet, dollar 27, no money in my checking account, I was going out on a date and I literally could not pay the parking meter. And so I was like, I'm going to park here. And if I get a ticket, I can pay it next. Like if that's the level that I was at and I decided I never wanted to be there ever again. So I decided to learn about money. And I spent a good two years learning about how to make it, save it, invest it, spend it. And I remember in that training, one of the questions they, cause I did see lots of trainings and read lots of books. Right. And one of the questions that somebody asked in a training was they asked everybody in the room, if you didn't make another penny going forward, how much, when would you run out of money? Right. And at that point I was like, ah, like six weeks. And I was sitting across a woman who said, who, who was terrified. They were like, rank your fear from a zero to 10. Right. And she was like at a nine. So she was very terrified and they, but she had 12 years. And she was a nine. She was nine. And that's when I realized that it's not the dollar amount in our bank account. It is our thought about it. And as our thought about what we have the ability to create. And so if we know that no matter what happens, we have the ability to make money. We have the ability to be creative and pivot then, that fear dissipates. Right? So when my husband passed away and I was like, oh my God, I have to make money to pay my children or to pay for our lives and our children, my children.
[00:24:12] Right. Like, you know, they had some social security benefits, but didn't support it didn't bring in all the money that mark had brought in. And I was like, but that's okay because I've, I know how to make money. I know how to do it. And so I would say what changed that changed for me. But the other thing that really changed for me was when I started talking about money. Normalizing that we talk about money. People would rather talk about sex than money. It's like normalize talking about money, right? Looking at money. Like some people automate their finances. I check my accounts just to see where I'm at almost every day. And so I think once I started looking at that and saying money is not, there's no emotion attached to money unless I put it on there. It's just an exchange of services then I was like, okay, cool. So doesn't really matter. So I would say to somebody listening, like just whatever, wherever you are, it is okay. You are where you are and there's no shame about it. There's no, there's no nothing unless you attach it to it.
[00:25:21] And so just start being, okay, like, just start releasing the emotion. Yeah. Just look at it and be like, Hey, I made $50 this week. That is just a number. Think about how easy it is to say your phone. Right. You can say your phone number, that easy, you can start saying money numbers around money that easy. My phone number is whatever, I'm not going to see my phone number here, whatever it is, whatever it is. And I have $10,000 worth of debt. And it's like, that's as flat as you need to be about whatever your debt is and then say, okay, now I'm just going to take it out. 
[00:25:55] Ashley: Yes. Because our emotions control, like, I don't know, like 80% I think is the number of what we actually do is based on emotions. So when you have all that negative emotion about money, it really impacts what you do with it. So I love that you brought that up. Um, and thank you so much for being with us today. This was an amazing interview. Um, and I always ask, 
[00:26:19] Bevin: It flew by, it was very fast!
[00:26:23] Ashley: And I always ask people, if they have a non-fiction book to recommend to improve our lives, you know, that's what we like to do here is learn and grow. Uh, do you have a favorite book? 
[00:26:34] Bevin: I do. So I have two that I'll recommend. One is called The Big Leap by Gay hendricks. And it's just a wonderful book about, um, our upper limiting systems that we like, we get, we do things that we're doing really well and then we sort of stop ourselves from going further. It's really great about staying in our zone of genius. So it's just a really great book. And the other is, and I would imagine somebody has recommended this before, but it's The Four Agreements by Don , Don Miguel Ruiz. And I talk about them all the time. I actually have them printed on my nightstand in a frame that somebody gave me. It's really the ones that I think would be so good are like, we don't take anything personally. We don't make assumptions. We just, we ask until there's clarity. What does, I can't remember the third one, but then the other one is always do your best.
[00:27:26] And that's the part where we talked earlier about, we're always, we're always doing our best, but just know, always do your best and no more because the hard part is when we expect more of ourselves than we have the capacity for at the moment. And so if you know, you're always doing your best, then on the days where you are, frankly, it's snapping at your kids, you're frustrated, you don't feel like the mom, you want to be, that's the best you can do. But on the days where, you know, you're like doing the crafts and taking them to the zoo and making the popsicles, instead of buying them, that's your best too. And if you know, you're going to do your best on those days, and it's okay to give yourself a little grace on the day when your best is just getting out of bed.
[00:28:11] Ashley: Yeah, I needed that reminder. 
[00:28:14] Bevin: I do too. There's times, I like, I'll be like, get in the car seat and I'm like, okay, I'm doing the best I can. I'm doing the best.
[00:28:23] Ashley: That's all we can do, right. Oh, I feel ya. All right. Well, thank you. So, oh wait, where can people connect with you and follow up with you? 
[00:28:32] Bevin: So I'm at bevinfarrand.com and also on Instagram Bevin Farrand. We have a, um, a Facebook community, um, facebook.com/groups/takethedamntrip. And then I do recommend people just go get that sixdimensionalwhy.com because that is just going to be so powerful as you are moving on this journey, just to remain, be able to remind yourself why you are making these choices.
[00:28:56] Ashley: Yes. So good. Thank you so much for being with us today. 
[00:28:59] Bevin: Thanks for having me. 
[00:29:01] Ashley: Thank you so much to Bevin for sharing her story with us today. I know it's going to inspire and motivate some of you to start taking action and just do those little micro steps and to get started. You know, one micro step is to go download the Free Debt Starter Kit, so go grab it at budgetsmadeeasy.com/debt, and I will talk to you guys next week.