BOSSes Anne Ganguzza and Danielle Famble tackle a crucial and often uncomfortable topic for voiceover professionals: money and debt. Prompted by Danielle's recent experience with an unexpected studio investment due to a flood, they delve into whether voice actors should go into debt to fund their careers. This episode explores personal relationships with debt, strategic financial planning, and the importance of financial literacy in building a sustainable voiceover business. They emphasize distinguishing between impulsive spending and calculated investments, advocating for a data-driven approach to financial decisions.
00:00 - Anne (Host) Hey bosses, Anne Ganguzza here. Are you ready to take the next step in your voiceover career? At Anne Ganguzza Productions, I specialize in target marketed coaching and demo production that gets you booked. If you're thinking about elevating your performance or creating an awesome demo, check me out at anneganguzza.com.
00:21 - Speaker 2 (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.
00:40 - Anne (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and you are here with the Boss Money Talk series, and I am here with Danielle Famble. I am so excited, Danielle. It's been so long I feel like it's been an age since I've spoken to you. Hey.
00:56 - Danielle (Host) But it was just last month. Yeah, I know it hasn't been that long, but it's good to be back.
01:01 - Anne (Host) Yay, and you know talking about. One of our favorite subjects is money, money, money, money. And speaking of, I noticed you're in a sparkly new booth there, oh, this whole thing it looks like a.
01:12 - Danielle (Host) Studio Bricks. To me this is a Studio Bricks One Plus booth and I've had it for a little while now and, yeah, it's great.
01:23 - Anne (Host) Well, having investigated those studios myself, I do know that's quite an investment it is quite the investment.
01:31 - Danielle (Host) It is an investment that I took quite a long time to get to. It was not an impulse buy, but it was a purchase of necessity.
01:41 Sad news is my apartment flooded and I lost my previous apartment and also booth along the way, and so it was time to get a new booth, and I knew exactly what I wanted to get. Is there insurance for that sort of thing, like for my apartment? And so it was. My previous booth was reimbursed essentially the cost of that booth, but it was not. It was a less expensive booth than this one, obviously, so there was a delta that I had.
02:16 - Anne (Host) So you do have. Yeah, so you did. You did have some, you did have some recovery money for that but you know, it, it. It poses an interesting question. You know you, it seems to, I did yes voiceover talent. Or should you know people that want to get into the voiceover industry go into debt to pay for something like a booth or to pay for their entrance into the industry? I think that would be a good topic to chat about.
02:54 - Danielle (Host) Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, you hit the nail on the head for me. Obviously, my apartment flooding was an unexpected expense, so therefore, the emergency fund really came to be used for its intended purpose. And I you know that's a really good question, because not you don't always have the money to go after the necessities of your dreams. You know, a booth like this is quite a big investment, or even things like your demos or your equipment microphones, coaching, all of those things.
03:28 It costs quite a bit of money. I, because of my personal experience with debt and getting myself out of debt, I am pretty debt averse, so I choose to have my emergency fund pay for the things that are knowable expenses when it comes to building a life and building a career. That's what I try to do. But I can see a reason why there are ways to use debt to your advantage if you know what you're doing. But for me personally, I try to not use debt, especially if I know that something big is coming. Obviously I didn't know that I needed to get a studio bricks, you know when my apartment flooded and also moving and those kind of costs that were incurred and the stress of it all. I was living in a hotel for three weeks because I did not have a place to live. So obviously those things you know. If you don't know and you can't incur those costs because you can't predict it then debt is a tool that can be used.
04:31 I'm just debt averse, and so I try to use other tools before utilizing the lever of debt. But what do you think, Anne?
04:39 - Anne (Host) Yeah, I mean, I think really, it a lot of it has to with and we had talked about this before if you have any type of money blocks, if you grew up with a certain set of beliefs about money. Yeah, I think that I also have been in a position where I've had debt, I've had to pay off, and I don't like to be in a debt situation. Sure, and, if possible, I really encourage everybody to just create that savings account and we've talked about this before the high yield savings account, which I think is really great. But you know, I mean, banks have business loans for a purpose, right, because we are a business. Now, I think, because we are a business that sells our voice, right, we tend to think it's much lower upfront cost, right.
05:26 Then, some businesses, when you have to invest and buy God forbid, you have to rent like a storefront and then you have to buy inventory. So, I think, with the advent of technology and online businesses, people have maybe, maybe it's come to be like a false sense of, hey, it doesn't cost a lot of money to invest in. Let me just open an online business, which is where voiceover tends to fall. However, there's, there's costs that you know you incur in this business and we've talked about that. I mean, there's absolutely your equipment, your studio and, of course, your voice is a cost, because you've got to be able to get jobs with your voice, and so in order to create the best product out there, you've got to train that voice, You've got to have products that showcase that voice, like coaching and demos, and so website and things like you know yeah, and so I am initially adverse.
06:25 However, I think there are, as you mentioned before, calculated strategic ways that you can invest in your business and make other people's money work for you. And you know, one thing comes to mind where my husband took out a loan because there was an offer of a 0% interest, which you know I mean gosh back when we did have some debt. I mean we were great at juggling those 0% interest cards, right, because we didn't have to pay our money in interest. And so he saw an offer and because he wanted to have some extra cushion in the overdraft account, he said let me take out a loan and so let me let me open this credit card, right, so for a certain amount of debt. And and there it sat, and all of a sudden I noticed that my credit score kind of dinged down like a point. I went, hey, what's this? What's this new credit card where there's a certain amount of debt in there and not that had been used, but there was a certain. It was just a new credit card. And he said, oh yeah, I took that out just for overdraft protection, which I think is absolutely fine.
07:33 However, I didn't like my credit score being dinged. But either way, I said well, look, because I had such a good experience with a high yield savings account, I said why don't you just take that chunk of money and throw it into a high-yield savings account? Because, first of all, you're not going to get charged any interest for about a year. So if you calculate the going rate on a high-yield savings account, which right now is about 3.75, I think mine was up at 4.35 at one percent at one point, but I mean it's still really good. And if you have even a few thousand dollars right that you can invest into or put that into the high yield savings account, you leave it in there for a few months and you don't use it. That generates money for you. And that's the thing.
08:16 I kept seeing this credit card and he wasn't using it. He was just using it for cushion, to just sit there. And I'm like well, have it sit there in a high yield savings account so that in a year, once it starts, you know, charging interest, we can have made a few thousand dollars and then way we can pay off the small amount of, you know, credit card debt that we have right now. And to me that would be a strategic way and, believe it or not, like he and I I mean we. I mean, one of the reasons why we're still married after all these years is that we very rarely have financial fights.
08:45 I truly believe that to be the case, but we always we had our own accounts. We, you know, basically have just remained that way throughout our marriage because, you know, we got married a little bit later in life, so I always had my own account, I had his account, and we just created a new account where we pool the money in for, like vacations, and so, you know, we basically live our lives trying to be debt free, and so this is just one of those things because he's really good at finagling those zero percent credit card rates, I'm like, well, at least put it in a high savings yield account. I think that that's a great way to strategically use maybe the bank's way of making money right to generate money that we can pay off our own debt, and I think that might be a strategic way.
09:29 - Danielle (Host) I like that.
09:30 - Anne (Host) Because that might be able to fund your next booth or fund your next microphone or fund your next demo Right.
09:37 - Danielle (Host) Right, right. What I appreciate about that is you were using cold hard facts, right. You were using logic, you were using numbers and you were able to calculate what makes the most sense. Let's just say I need to take out a loan for $10,000,. Let's just say and I've got a 12% one-year interest-free amount of time Okay, I know that it's $10,000. I know that I've got a year to pay it back. Can I reasonably pay back the full $10,000 in the 12 months?
10:33 that's $3,000 to $4,000. You can invest in a. With data. I say go right ahead. But on the flip side of that, if you're looking at this from a place of like scarcity fear, you're not really sure if you can pay it back. Then you're likely putting yourself in a long-term revolving door where you'll need to open up another line of credit to then pay off that line of credit and then you're not building money. You're actually a victim of the bank, instead of using the banks in the way that they're using us, which is to use us to make money, you know, and interest in everything else. So you know.
11:10 For that reason, yes, but that means you have to be super dialed into the logic and the data and the numbers and the facts, and I feel like I fear that some people don't do that, and then they enter into these with, like the hope that they will be able to pay it off, and hope is not currency.
11:28 So that to me is oh that's the words of wisdom right there Hope is not currency.
11:33 - Anne (Host) I love that, Danielle
11:34 - Danielle (Host) Hope is not currency and I feel like if we're, if we're trying to hope our way by using debt as a tool, that is a recipe for disaster. But if you know that you can keep yourself financially in a good place and even actually in a better place where you can make money on other people's money, go right ahead.
11:56 - Anne (Host) You know that's so funny. I'm so glad that you brought this home and gave that perspective, because I think it really makes a lot of sense. And I'll tell you what. It was something that I was. I never really thought about using the banks to make more money because I just was never into financial money like investigation, like that, before, until I started my own business, in which case now it became very important that I had money and that I was able to keep my money or pay you know, pay for my business, right, pay the expenses of my business, especially having you know people that work for me, and paying you know my agency and all that sort of thing, so actually having like money in and money out.
12:41 I then all of a sudden really had to take a hard, cold look at my money, which I think everybody that does this for a living needs to do, because, again, we are businesses and we Anne forget that. As easy as it sounds to have to do this right, to just get on our studios and audition and get jobs and make money and or invest some money, it's really a business and you've got to take a cold, hard look at numbers in order to make it worth your while and to make it sustainable and to grow, and for me it's something that it was like an epiphany almost. I'm like, hey, why don't we do this? Because I had a good money experience here investing this and then I thought to myself gosh banks do that to us all the time. They're making money off our interest. That's exactly how it works. I'm like why can't I do the?
13:32 - Danielle (Host) same thing. Yeah, and it's interesting because the thing is banks whenever we're like doing a loan, getting a loan with them or anything else, they are investigating into us because they have a business model that they know works, so they're utilizing their data to make sure that giving us a loan makes sense for them. We have to do the exact same thing when we're looking at utilizing debt, because a bank would never just say, oh yeah, I mean I hope it'll get paid back, I hope you'll pay us. Mean, I hope it'll get paid back, I hope you'll pay us back.
14:03 - Anne (Host) I hope you'll pay it back.
14:04 - Danielle (Host) They aren't going to do that. That's why, after a certain amount of time, the interest is so high it's so much higher than you would make on your high-yield savings account because they need to ensure that they are getting their money back, plus some. We can do the exact same thing, but it goes back to making sure that you are tracking your numbers. You know your data.
14:28 - Anne (Host) You can look at historical data and you know the risk and you know the risk. I think that's an important component of if you're going to play. If you're going to play like that, you have to know the risk. Now, for us, the risk in a high yield savings account is so much less than, let's say, the stock market. I have to keep my eye on all the time and make sure that that interest rate I mean, at one point it started above 4% and now it's down at 3.7 something percent. But keeping your eye on that and then keeping your eye on the track record, how long has it been at this?
14:51 And every month I'm checking my high yield savings account so that I can say, okay, this month I made X amount of dollars, which is really great, because I just continue. It just makes me want to put more money into my high yield savings account and there is a cap on it. So you do have to know those things as well. Right, you can only put so much money into that high yield savings account. Well, guess what? I'm opening up a second one so you know when you've gotten to that point where you're making that investment. And that's where, danielle, I feel that I'm very, very fortunate, grateful and worked very hard to feel like there's my financial cushion Should something like a disaster happen.
15:29 I mean, and I'm you know fires here in Southern California are a thing you know if something were to happen, I would have that money and also that's money that's kind of earmarked for retirement as well. But I also have a different retirement account for that, totally.
15:44 - Danielle (Host) You've got all these different buckets for as your emergency fund, but then you're using what I like about this. What you just said is that for me, anyway, using my emergency fund and then also using the money of the interest that's being made and my emergency fund it's in the high yield savings account I'm choosing to be my own bank, so I'm using the money that I'm making as the interest. Also, I'm dipping into that emergency fund because that's what it's for, and all I need to do is either just pay my loan back my loan to myself, pay that back to bring my emergency fund back, or let the high yield savings account let the interest pay that back for me over time. Yeah, so there are ways to sort of like make it work. But you know, if you don't know what the numbers and the data and everything looks like and you're not making these informed choices and decisions by using debt, it really can, you know, become a problem. But we can also become our own banks.
16:43 - Anne (Host) Money is and also when it comes time to. You know, most recently, I just invested in a new agency to do some work for for my brands, and it was a considerable investment and it was a risk. Again, it was one of those things when we talk about taking risks. It was a calculated risk and a strategic risk because I looked very closely at the amount that I was going to have to invest and for how long. So I always want to say that I need an escape route.
17:33 Right, if you invest in something and you don't want to have recurring payments, that kind of thing. Right, you don't have recurring debt. Right, just like debt, you have to pay every month and you have to pay a particular interest charge. You don't want to have recurring debt and I try to not have any of that happening at all. But if there is recurring debt that would be like oh, I'm paying off a bill or I'm paying off like a service and it goes for so many months and it's this amount of money. Well, make sure that you've accounted for that within your business and you have the money in case your business is not making the money. Right, and that is one thing that allows me to continually invest in my business take risks and then move forward.
18:14 - Danielle (Host) You have to. You have to constantly be looking at that. This is not a job, a career in any business, business, really, where you're just doing the passion, the thing that you really enjoy doing. There's this entire other operations and data management and education aspect to it that you constantly have to be investing in, and the investment isn't always financial, it is in time, it is in learning, it's in investing in yourself, it's investing in the person and the entrepreneur that you want to be in the future. And yes, money powers that, but it's not always a financial investment. So, really, just make sure that you are able to take the time to do that, to take the time to invest in yourself, and you know the ramifications of it. But debt is I'll go back to this debt is just a tool that you can use. So use your tools wisely. Maybe you need to use other people's money, maybe you use your own currency, but there are ways to grow by utilizing debt. You know, I still try to be. I try to be the bank first and then, sure.
19:24 - Anne (Host) Well, I don't like owing money. I mean I'm that person like at the end of the month, man, pay it off, just pay it off, just get. Although you know there there is, you know when you talk about it, when you take out loans like a car loan or a home loan, I mean that does establish better credit. And so you know, not having like not having credit at all can hurt you Exactly. And so not having some debt or a loan can can hurt your credit. And so it's that game of playing like paying it all off is great, but sometimes it damages your credit If you don't have enough credit open because the banks think, well, I mean it's good that they've paid. What is that? What is the mentality behind that? It's good that they pay off everything, but why is it that you need to have a credit card in order to have better credit?
20:09 - Danielle (Host) That goes kind of back to like for me. That goes back to my history and psychology with money and debt. I was just flat out told debt is wrong, Credit is wrong, it's bad, don't use it. And so when it was time for me in my mid-20s to get a credit card or at least try to make bigger purchases, I had no credit history there was no record.
20:34 So you can't show that you are credit worthy. Until you have a history, until you have credit. And it is this cycle that you really need to understand. And since I was completely ignorant of that because I was just told it's bad, don't play that game. I was at a disadvantage. So you do need to be in it to utilize it, sure, sure, but if you don't, then you're not going to be able to show that you're credit worthy.
21:05 So so, it's a, it's a it's. It's an interesting thing and I think really it should start with education.
21:10 I wish I was educated on it a little bit earlier in life so that I could have a longer amount of time to show hey, I am credit worthy, I am paying my bills on time, I am paying my debts off, and and here's my history of being able to do it it's it's interesting are ways. I think there are ways to learn about it and not get burned, so that you can have a positive experience with money and debt instead of just not knowing or having worse, having fear about it.
21:40 - Anne (Host) I think you make a valid point there and I think I personally, having come from an education background, really believe that financial education should happen in like grade school. Oh yeah, I mean in grade school.
21:53 And there should be, because there's so much, I think, fear For me. I always said it was denial Right, because when I got my first credit card I was like, woohoo, you know I can go and you know, buy this, I can buy anything I want. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, wait a minute, I've got this thing called interest, and why do I have to pay this extra money? And it was interesting because I wasn't really educated in high school about credit cards or finances or really much of any of that, and so it can get out of hand. I mean, I literally just had such a shopping spree with that credit card thinking, oh my gosh, well, I've got a job, I can, you know, I can pay this. But then it can get out of control, it can spiral quickly. You know, I think if I were educated a little bit, I think really the best education that I have gotten recently is having my own business, because for a long time and I think a lot of people might feel the same here it was denial right. I would get that credit card statement at the you know every month and I'd say, okay, all right, it went up a little bit, I can pay that by. You know, all I can do is pay a little bit more every month, and it just was one of those things where I kind of stopped looking. I was like, yeah, here, here's my card.
23:02 And I think denial is a form of fear.
23:04 Oh yes, it is a fear of really looking at the real numbers and seeing what's there.
23:10 And I think, for voice actors just getting into this industry, there are investments We've talked about this in our past episodes investments that you have to make, but they're minimal compared to, let's say, a storefront that requires inventory, but they're still investments, and so, therefore, you do have to be willing to take a risk and make an investment in your product, and that means good coaching and experience having a business.
23:36 That's also something that I think is priceless. Can you really pay for having a business experience like having a voiceover business? I think if I had really succumbed to my fears in the first couple of years, where I wasn't making a whole lot of money, I would have given it up. I would have given up my career and said I'm not making any money and so, therefore, maybe this isn't a viable business for me. So there's that, I think, that balance between taking the risk and then if I had had a financial cushion back at that time when I was taking the risk and then if I had had a financial cushion back at that time when I was taking the risk, I think I could have grown my business much faster.
24:12 - Danielle (Host) Your financial cushion we go.
24:15 You know this goes back to earlier episodes where sometimes your day job or you know other things that you are doing to make money outside of voiceover or outside of this business is your financial cushion, and that's a wonderful thing to have.
24:28 So don't look at it as a detriment. Look at it as something that you are using as another, one of those tools to be able to further your investment in yourself, in your business, in your coaching, in all the things that you would need to support yourself in this business, to support yourself in this business. There are so many different ways to fund this dream, this business, this career. It doesn't have to just be one tool, but you really do have to stay on top of understanding how to use a tool and what it's going to cost you in terms of paying it back or what you're going to gain from it in terms of you know, using the interest If you are using a line of credit, for example how you can really win. That's really what it is is. You can take risks, but it's a calculated risk so that you can make sure that you always are in the winning position.
25:19 - Anne (Host) You want to win. Win that game. Yeah, absolutely, because it's scary to not be in a winning position. For sure, that is for sure. Wow, absolutely, because it's scary to not be in a winning position. For sure, that is for sure. Wow. What a great conversation, danielle. I really appreciate it. Gosh, I love talking to you about money.
25:32 - Danielle (Host) I love talking about money, so let's keep doing it.
25:35 - Anne (Host) Oh gosh. Well, thank you so much. And, bosses, I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network and talk money like bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Bosses, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye.
25:53 - Speaker 2 (Announcement) Bye. Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at VOobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.