Courtney Hale's Money Story

Brenton: [00:00:00] in this episode, we're gonna hear the money story of one of my best friends, Courtney Hale. Courtney's been through a lot and he's come through on the other side as a successful C E O, A property owner, but more importantly, a successful father, a loving partner, and I really appreciate his story and I think that as you hear it, you'll come to appreciate it as well. Let's get started. [00:01:00] Brenton: Hey, this is Brenton Harrison of New Money, New Problems, and your host for the New Money, New Problems podcast. I wanna welcome, Courtney Hale, who is, uh, a friend slash family member slash brother to this point. One of my closest friends that I have whose story I definitely wanted to highlight because it's a unique one. So Courtney: thank you for coming. Yeah, man. Um, happy to be here. Yeah. So Brenton: before we even get started, I gave a brief intro, but what do you do? Courtney: Yeah, so I am the CEO, I call myself the Chief Hope Dealer of Super Money Kids. We design digital financial education resources for schools and youth organizations across the Brenton: country. Okay. Tell me what that looks like in terms of some of the products and solutions and, you know, the typical contract Courtney: you might have. What is your dayday? Yeah, so our customers are normally schools, school clusters, school, school districts, nonprofits. We license our content to them. We Deliver modules. We design 'em for K through [00:02:00] 12. So we're not teaching elementary students about retirement. Um, you know, we're talking to money in a way that they can relate to at their, at their age. Okay. Brenton: Well, let's, uh, let's go back and figure out why that became a passion of yours. So Courtney and I met. Uh, let's see. This is year 11 for me as a married man. And we met, uh, literally like the month after I got married. But take me back to the beginning and tell me about young Courtney. What was Courtney: childhood like? Yeah, young Courtney. You know, the interesting thing about about childhood is you don't really know what it's like until you're an adult and you're looking back on it. Because when you are a kid, you know, you just kind of living, you know, just going about your days with your friends and your. Family and I came from a family that was extremely loving. I primarily was raised by my mom and her sisters, uh, from North Nashville. My, my grandfather had a houses off West Trinity Lane. My, my grandparents in, [00:03:00] in true like, Black family way, were married and lived in separate houses for a long time, for reasons that worked out for them. And so my grandmother lived in on a house that was, um, uh, 27th Avenue North. And that's where we spent a lot of our, our extra time. And, that, that street, just like on one end of the street, we had a bootlegger. And, he made his, his liquor and he attracted certain people. I thought you were talking about DVDs. Not, not that type of bootlegging, like the original bootlegging. Okay. The original bootlegging. So he had, you know, his whole setup on, on that end of the street, that block, he had a corner, corner block. Then the opposite end of the street was like, I mean, I call it like, Like a crack house outlet mall. It was just like house after house, like, you know, just dope house, dope house, dope house. And I remember how [00:04:00] protective my family was of me, at that time, man. But My point of bringing that up was I didn't come from a place where there was a lot of money or a lot of wealth. There was a ton of love. There was a lot of hope, there was a ton of optimism, but there wasn't a lot of money. I live with my grandfather until I was almost middle school, element Elementary school. We were kind of like back and forth a little bit. And then my, my mom eventually got married and we moved out, and then she and my stepdad, bought a house. They were both like aspiring entrepreneurs at the time, with very different approaches to how they wanted to pursue those dreams. My stepdad was like, Risk it all, try everything. My mom was way more conservative and I mean, they, they had clashes and they were different in so many ways and it made so much sense for them to get divorced later on. , I think it gave us all [00:05:00] more peace, to be perfectly honest. But that was, that those were my dynamics growing up. It's like growing up around a lot of people where there wasn't money, but then. You know, having parents who were ambitious and really wanted like that American dream and they were scraping together every crumb that they had to. Keep the lights on to keep us fed and to fuel their dreams. And it just wasn't enough for all of those things to happen. And those stories, a lot of detail in between, but those stories definitely have crafted my ideas, about money and my feelings about money. Brenton: So you keep growing. Hunters Lane went to Hunters Lane. Hunters Lane High School. Tennessee State went to Tennessee State for college. Okay. Now at, at some point in your TSU journey, you met Tia. Mm-hmm. Courtney: Tell me about that. So we didn't meet at tsu. We had known each other since high school. [00:06:00] And we were just friends. I kind of like dated one of her friends for a little while. We were, we were cool. We knew each other that way, but what happened was, We had a class together at TSU and there's so much behind this, but, she was in like a health sciences major. She was a occupational therapy and we had a business class together. And there was really no reason for her to have to have that class as a requirement to graduate as a health sciences major. And she fought with the heads of her department, fought with her advisors to not have to take that extra class because she already had a really heavy workload. And one thing about, Tia was she didn't really lose very many fights. And you would just have to know her to know what I'm talking about. But she did not lose fights with anybody. And, even health wise, you know, she just, Did not [00:07:00] lose fights. In our marriage even when she was dead wrong, she still didn't lose the fights in her eyes. But the one fight she lost was to drop that class. They did not let her drop that class. And fortunate for, for me, because she ended up being my deskmate. And I was unprepared in, in the true Courtney fashion. She was over prepared in true Tia fashion and she helped me get through some assignments. And after that assignment that she saved me from, we were basically inseparable. Alright. And, Brenton: uh, Courtney: so Brenton: When I met you, you were still working full-time and you were building your business in your spare time. There was a journey that you took from working full-time to part-time to, you know, just going all the way in. Tell me about your professional journey to where you find yourself as an entrepreneur now. Courtney: It's funny, I, I [00:08:00] tell people that I'm an accidental entrepreneur, but I really feel like I'm exactly where God wanted me to be, even if I never saw it for myself. I, my goal was to be, I. You know, if, if like financial services didn't work out and I didn't have like my own book of business firm to work for, you know, I, I eventually transitioned into corporate America and I was going to climb that corporate ladder and be an executive and lead teams and always be like a w W2 employee that had a bonus and a company credit card, like, and that, that was the vision that I sold Tia as well. But when I started doing the like we started the summer camp is how we, I first got into financial literacy. I started the summer camp to teach teens about money, while they were outta school. And I started doing that and people would come and just like sit in or they were bringing their kids and we got really, really [00:09:00] positive feedback on how good that program was. And even to this day, some of the things that we did in those classrooms during those summers, I think we did the summer camp thing for like three years, maybe three or four years. And when you're working in your passion, like it awakens every cell in your body, like it doesn't become work anymore. You just do it because it becomes a part of who you are. And so I quickly found myself as this once, you know, goal of ha of climbing the corporate ladder to now I'm passionate about this other project and started making changes to transition outta corporate, and it was tough, man. And it's interesting, man, look, I'm 40 now and so I feel like I have like a little bit of wisdom. I got like a few gray hairs, but one of the things that I feel like I've learned is like the universe starts to tell us and give us instruction on which direction that we should go, and I was literally like working crazy [00:10:00] hours trying to prove to people that I was good enough and better to get certain status within a company, when actually what was happening was God was like, Hey, this your time here is. Ending you're needing in another place. And, but I was trying to fight what we do. Like we try to fight our way through it. And when I quit, I remember going to work. And just, I couldn't do it anymore, man. I, I literally couldn't do it that day. I sat at my desk and I kind of spun for, I dunno, about 15 minutes. Couldn't even hit control, delete to log in. I was done. I got up, I went in my boss's office and I'm like, man, I'm outta here, man. Like, I can't do it no more. And I thought he was gonna like, try to talk me in the stand and all of these things. He was like, yeah, we knew this time was coming. It's like everybody knew except for me. And, um, the tough thing there, even through those plans, I didn't tell my wife for about two or three days that I had quit. Like, I was like leaving, like I was still going to work.[00:11:00] I, uh, in Brenton: high school I got, um, It's a long story, but I was not able to come for a few days and, uh, this is before them sending emails home for everything. So I used to get up and we had a uniform and I would get up every day and put my uniform on like I was going to school and I would just go to Green Hills Mall. Courtney: That's exactly what it was. I was faking it, man. Yeah. Brenton: But you know, it's, it's interesting you say that for a couple of reasons. The first. Is your passions aren't aligned. They're also just because I know your story, you are talking about a period where you are not feeling fulfilled at work and there's a lot going on at home. We will touch on that. Even before that point in time there was a period, so you bought a home and there was a period where you moved out. Yeah. To take care of some things Courtney: financially. Mm-hmm. So we were coming back from, we had went to a wedding in Vegas and I was on the plane literally [00:12:00] sleeping. I just had this idea. I was like, man, we could rent our house out, move in with Tia's dad and pay off all our Debt. And, I say all good financial ideas come when you're leaving Vegas. Right. So I wake up Tia's next to me. I was like, Hey. How about we move in with your dad for a year and pay off all our bills? And so I, I, I presented her with the proposal and how it made sense. The biggest point being that. T and i's goal was to always create a life for our kid that was better than what we had. And we at that point, at, I don't know how old were we? Maybe right at 30, maybe it was right at 30. She was 29. And at that point, for me, we had already exceeded what my childhood had been like. So on my end, I had honored the commitment to our future kid at that point, so I was good. But for her, her dad had done, always done really well in his career and, had created, you know, a really good middle, [00:13:00] middle class lifestyle for her. You know, growing up she always had nice things, so we needed a little bit more work to create a better lifestyle for our kid than what she had. And, I knew in order for us to do that, we needed to start investing our money. She hated the idea. But she knew that it made sense and so she went along with it. So we moved in with her dad. We were there for 14 months. And I I, to this day, man, I know you talk a lot about like the emotions that are attached to our money and the things that we have. Then when we moved out of that house, I remember the last day, we swept everything, cleaned the floor, and we literally had everything out of this house that we had bought. You know, it's 20 as 23 or 24 year olds. It was completely empty. Everything that we had, we had packed up and we were getting in the truck to go live with her dad. I felt like somebody had died to this day. You know, ultimately we hadn't got to the part of the story yet, you know, but, but Tia passed away, May [00:14:00] 2020, which is, which will probably forever be the saddest thing and the most hurtful thing that ever happened in my life. The second was moving out that house. It tore me to Brenton: pieces. What was it about that that made it so impactful, Courtney: so visceral. The, the biggest thing was I knew my wife didn't want to do it, and. I think she felt like we were giving up and the level of independence that we had created at that age, we were choosing to sacrifice it to go lose, to go live with a parent. And I think that she felt defeated and I allowed, I not allowed, I, um, I took on those same feelings. I knew what we were doing was right. It made sense. We were, we were with her dad for 14 months and we paid off, you know, we paid off a card. We paid off through Loan. Debt. We paid off credit cards. It [00:15:00] was in a, we paid off, um, 40 some odd thousand dollars a Debt in a year. It was the right decision, but, you know, we care about our wives and we want our wives to be happy, and, and so anyway, so it was just, it was just hard. Yeah. I took on her feelings about it and, um, it wasn't that we were giving up our independence. We were investing to have greater independence later. Yeah. Brenton: You know, you and I have had conversations, but even on the podcast, Some of the earliest listener feedback that we received was when I told people that they needed to stop contributing to their 401k if they had not reached a minimal amount of savings or if they were getting slammed by credit card Debt. And it's a little deflating if it's the first user feedback like, Hey man, I got this brand new shiny podcast. Someone's like, what are you talking about? And through experience, I can say that some of the things that are hardest. For people [00:16:00] to come to grips with are when you are in a situation with your housing where you need to take a step back or take a step down when you have a child that is in a private school that financially you really can't afford to send them to that school. Yeah. Uh, when there's something that you're Dr. Like the things that we feel symbolize a level of success, and when we're forced to give up those things, the emotion that's attached to it. Especially in your case when it's like you saw that as kind of like the house on the hill based on Sounds like the way you grew up. Yeah. Like this house meant more than just me buying a house. This says something about who I feel I am as a person. Absolutely. Courtney: And I'm giving that up. Absolutely. So Brenton: you give it up, you pay off a tremendous amount of Debt. Um, at what point does TIA get sick? Courtney: About a year later, about a year living with her dad. She [00:17:00] gets sick while we're at her, while we're living with her dad, but we, we don't have any idea as a severity though. Mm-hmm. Which is, these things happen and, um, you know, these, these things were happening and we didn't understand. She kept getting diagnosed with pneumonia and, um, We're, you know, we're just kind of going along with it. And she had a, a instance to where her heart rate dropped extremely low and we had to get her to emergency. And then that was when, um, that was when we found out about the heart condition. And at that point, we hadn't been back into our house for a year yet. And so, you know, we go from moving out of our house to paying off the Debt, having a kid. Cuz while we're living with our dad, we end up having a kid. So we go back home with our newborn and, within a few months, Tia is back in the ER for the second [00:18:00] time in, like less than a year. And, her heart rate dropped to levels that I think if it's any lesser of a person, you know, we would've been out of there. Right. And, and, you know, she, she made it through that. And so from there, Life, lifestyle change drastically figuring out what was to happen next, waiting to see if as time passed and she was further postpartum, if her heart was going to heal itself because there was this idea that. the pregnancy definitely puts more stress on the body, makes the heart work harder. And you know, as time passes, maybe the heart gets better and she got better physically. And I think mentally she got better, but the heart never got better. Right. And um, Things got, things just got really, really tough. She would go on to have a heart transplant and that made that, that was the [00:19:00] best 11 months of our lives, right? For all of us, for her physically, for me, for our daughter. That 11 months was great. Within that 11 months, we started a pandemic. And, and, you know, when people were complaining about being quarantined at home, I was like, man, this, this is kind of cool, you know, being with my, my daughter and being with my wife. And, um, but she passed May, 2020. Brenton: You referenced your daughter, uh, you gotta know his daughter. And if you, I, if you know her, You're listening to that sentence and you're smiling because she is an a, a, like an explosion of personality. Courtney: She is man. And you know, our lives were full of action from the time that. I dunno, really, from the time that we got married and we moved into that house or whatever, there was just like always something happening, always something going on. Lots of highs. [00:20:00] And it just made so much sense that we would be blessed with a daughter. That was the way that she was, the way that she is. Everybody like loves their kid. But there was just something special about Ever's personality that I think gave us like this something extra to get through all of the things. And, um, and I, I, I know for a fact that, you know, that little girl brought something else outta her mom that helped her make it time after time, after time right. [00:21:00] Brenton: For someone who doesn't know you, what is it that you think, not about just yourself, but about your crew that has allowed you to still thrive and pursue joy in the Courtney: midst of Brenton: [00:22:00] hardship? Courtney: Midst of hardship? Yeah. I think that you have to realize, and I've struggled with this, but our lives are bigger than like how much money we make and paying our bills. I've struggled with that even, even to this day. But I think what happened during this period, as the Super Money Kids brand began to develop, it's like this became like who I was. And I, I can't abandon me. Like I had swam so far out in the ocean that there was really a point of no return. Then plus you start talking about all the things that I had been through. I had been hurt. Had gone through so much hurt, like I wanted happiness in the work. This work brought me joy and it also, I knew that this work would also bring joy to a lot of families throughout the country as well. I knew a lot of people that were from their own versions of North [00:23:00] Nashville throughout the country. And various young people who had all types of traumas and, but they had big goals though, and they just never really saw a way out of what they were going through in the present. And I believe that our work provides a pathway out of those traumatic experiences. It gives young people the opportunity to dream for whatever they want and live a life that gives them purpose, utilizing their talents. It's like everything that we want as humans, you know? I feel like our work empowers us to be that and not have to be, you know, slave to a temporary problem. And that's what our brand is about. And so as I remember why I was called to do this work, like my personal struggles weren't enough for me to stop doing it because we were creating hope for a lot of other people. Brenton: You see that hope that you've given [00:24:00] to a young person who is a young you when it comes to the financial literacy that empowers not just them, but empowers their family. What do you get in return? Courtney: Man, you know, I never thought about it like that. I never thought about like what I get in return. I've always thought about like how our community is better. It's like how our society is better when we have more people who can participate in capitalism. Like our economy is better when we have more people who are business owners and investors. Our communities are stronger, our schools are better, we're healthier. We, we create new things. There are different levels of happiness. And that's rewarding. I give, I, I think the example of Super Money Kids becomes like a case study that the next generation can refer to for options. I think that for me personally, I've shown my daughter how you can pursue your dreams and you can do [00:25:00] anything. Because if I can take, look, when when I started this work, there were not a lot of schools lining up to pay me for this. Okay? And, and in a very short period of time. So, um, and I don't want to lose my thought about what I get from this. I'm a veer. I'm a veer away for a second. To make a point, um, we created a program. We created a, the first digital. Program we created was not Super Money Kids, most people think that it's super Money kids cuz it's like we did the banks and Super Money kids. That was the thing that was marketable and that's the reason why we completely changed the brand from Knowledge Bank to Super Money Kids Before Super Money Kids. We created another kind of like hybrid digital program. And we created this set and I was still young and passionate. And I wrote out, I just sat down and I wrote out all of these scripts. I remember in one of Kanye, Kanye West song, he talks about Imagine writing six songs a day [00:26:00] for six summers, right? That's what Kanye, he's like, he just. In his bag. Right. And that's exactly what I was doing. We created this program, it was amazing. Still probably the best thing we ever created, and I couldn't get one school in America to pay for it. So fast forward. To now school's been more open to digital programming and now we we're, we've been able to sell this programming. So it's like, what I get is when you see something as a opportunity or when you have vision for something, just pursue it. Sometimes our vision manifests before the rest of the world catches up. That can become a story for other people. Um, And then I gave all of those examples. But then the thing for me that'll make me like sit back and just be like, you know, my personal satisfaction is just that I did it. Like I said, I wanted to do this thing and it wasn't about the money, it wasn't about the publicity it, you know, [00:27:00] it was honestly all of, it's not even about the social impact, it's just for me personally, I said that I wanted to do something and I actually did it. And it was successful. Like that's my satisfaction. That's it. Like I'm, I'm happy with that. Brenton: Uh, through the 11 years you have had joy. This is probably the most at peace that I've seen Courtney: you. Why? Man? I know better than anybody that like tomorrow's not promised. I don't care how old you are, how good you look, how much money you like it, it's not promised. We don't have a lot of time here. And you can't waste these moments in worry. It's like, You know, worrying about the future, the regret from the past is like, no. Like you would just be here. [00:28:00] And I mean, that's kind of come through pain. Like I, I'm still not doing everything right. Um, I, I, I am, I'm, I'm doing a lot. I. I'm doing a lot of things right actually. I'm doing a lot of things right and I'm happy about that. Now, I'm not gonna be perfect, but I want to be, I want to enjoy the moment, like early on, you know, when you get married, it is. Getting married is a lot for me. For me, I speak for myself. Getting married was a big responsibility. And I took that with pride and I wanted to do it well, and I knew that I needed to be able to provide. I had a, an amazing father-in-law who had created an amazing lifestyle for my, for my wife, and I wanted her to continue to be happy with her standards of living. I wanted her to be proud that I was her husband. So I always put a lot of pressure on myself for [00:29:00] the wrong things and now it's just like I'm not putting pressure on myself. I'm not worrying as much. Again, we're still human when we want to have all of those feelings. At the point that you stop having some of these feelings, you need to go, like, we all need to go talk to somebody. But if you not experiencing all of the feelings, like you need to get there, like immediately. Okay. Because something is a little off, but like now I'm just, I'm just living, I'm, I'm just living. Brenton: That's powerful. You know, we're bringing this to a close. You, you know what I'm about to ask you? We ask everybody about their financial habits. So I will ask you all of the things we're talking about in spite of the hardships, uh, entrepreneurship. You are a business owner that's made it through a length of time that a lot of people don't, you know, survive entrepreneurship. You're a property owner, which we didn't cover, but you have rental properties. Your business is growing, you travel, you've, you've built a life that [00:30:00] is admirable. But there are things that we all do with money when we're not acting at our best. Yes, can be. You know, uh, something that gets in the way of your success when you are operating at your worst, what are some of the habits that make it hard for you to succeed Courtney: financially? This one is really, really tricky for me because I know, I know exactly what I, what I want to say in it, and I know how it can be perceived. Um, But I am, I am really like planning for like my next breakthrough. And I feel like from a business perspective, what's involved in that is like great investment, right? And I feel like, um, sometimes like I'm over investing and I'm like, I know I'm gonna get it back. I know I'm gonna get it back. I, I really think, I really think that that's like my biggest problem right now. And I've done it in the [00:31:00] past too, like, like over-invest and, um, and then the, just the idea of the, I'll make it back that that is a problematic. Mental space to be in, you know, I suffer from Brenton: it. It the worst thing that happened to a gambler is for them to win. Courtney: Yeah. It's, it is, it is tough, man. It really, like, I, I think that there are benefits and I definitely think there are weaknesses. I, I talk about the dynamics between my parents growing up and I always talk about like my stepdad, like just willing to like risk it all and do whatever. And my mom being more conservative. Um, and although they clashed, I think they were both right. And, um, but even in that, I still think that I lean more towards like my stepdad and in my head it's like I know that I'll make it back, but I always think that that's in a moment where I am tired and I don't have a lot of justification and, and maybe I'm not. All of the way thinking [00:32:00] things like, I'm, I, I'm not like stopping, like I'm just going, that's like the biggest thing right now. Okay. Brenton: Now there's positives, there's a flip side to everything. What are the things about your personality that help you succeed financially that you feel are unique to you? Courtney: I think that now I am thinking about. To As before, I used to think about, man, how I'm gonna get, you know, how we gonna make money next month, you know, the month after that, you know, I may think, you know, two, three months at a time, like now I'm really thinking about five years. And I'm always thinking about like, what, what's the next investment and how can I be a part of a opportunity that would not have been given to me? Without certain relationships. Brenton: Understood. Well, I want to thank you for being willing to share your story. Good, bad, and indifferent. Uh, I knew a [00:33:00] lot of it. It's always good to share unique stories with the world, especially for those that I love. And I love you. I appreciate you and thank you for being a guest on the New Money, New Problems Courtney: podcast. Hey man, this is this podcast. Is going to inspire, educate. Like this, this podcast is like, this is the next one. Okay. Alright. Like, you don't know it yet, but the, the themes that come out in this, like, these are conversations that need to be had as we're in the middle of like, the greatest transferal of wealth in American history and in the midst of a, a number of different things that's happening right now. This, these are conversations that need to be, had people know it. And just get ready, man. I'm happy to be, I'm thankful to be able to be like one day. If you go back to episode three, go, go back to, I don't know what we episode 11. I don't know. You know, you gonna be on episode [00:34:00] 325. I'm like, y'all go back and check out my interview. I was episode number 11, so I, I'm appreciative of, of being able to make the credits. Hey, I receive it.