I got laid off a year ago…(LIFE UPDATE)

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives. Hey, guys, it’s Sharon Tseung. And if you guys didn’t know already, I got laid off in June of 2022. It’s been over a year now. So I wanted to do this episode where I recapped, what’s been going on what my thoughts have been lately and what I’m going to do moving forward. So let’s rewind, I was basically laid off from a startup that was running out of money, I was working a job in marketing, and I was making a decent salary, six figures, but the company was struggling, I don’t think it exists anymore. Everyone I looked up seems to be working at new jobs now. So that’s basically what happened. And then soon after, my husband decided to quit his job as well. And around this time, the market wasn’t doing very well. So if we see the s&p 500, here, if we look at June of 2022, things were already tanking a lot as you can see here in 2022, it kept going further down in October, but things actually did start picking up in 2023. Now we’re like, basically back to where it was. But back then, obviously, the market wasn’t doing well. Interest rates and inflation were at all time highs, and you think it’d be all bad for us, right, we just lost our salaries, things weren’t doing well in the market. So because we have passive income side hustles real estate, we basically were able to retire, we have been working on our finances for maybe a decade now we are really aggressively saving and investing and looking into more ways to start different income streams. So that has allowed us to be where we are today, when looking at our finances from when I got laid off to where I’m at now our net worth actually went up over 15% I’m not going to give you the exact numbers. But even when the markets were struggling, we were pretty well diversified. Because we were well diversified. We weren’t impacted as significantly as many others were, and we’re able to increase our net worth a decent amount. Now I know a lot of people are getting laid off during these times. I know people personally who are affected by this, it’s been harder and harder for people to find jobs. And that’s why I really advocate diversifying, looking into side hustles and businesses to start because you never know what’s going to happen. You could be receiving a high salary and then boom, you get laid off, you have no other options, and then you find it harder and harder to find a job. That’s why you got to have these backups. Now after I got laid off, I was very intentional with my bucket list. So I basically made a 101 goals list and started tackling the different items. I was doing random things like gardening, I was working on music, I even went fishing like I did all these different things. And I’m still being very intentional with how I live my life. Because ultimately I like to kind of think about what my thoughts are going to be when I’m on my deathbed am I going to look back on my life feeling like I really lived it up, or am I going to be someone who worked at a job they didn’t like until they were 65 and too old to live their lives. That fear of living with regret actually motivates me a lot. It’s also why my husband decided to quit his job because it was so stressful. He was making around $300,000 at his job, but it wasn’t worth the amount of stress like people were calling him even during our wedding because he has to take care of clients, people complain to him, people yell at him, it’s really stressful. So that’s why we decided to leave the nine to five world, we’ve also been booking a lot of travel. And at the end of the year, we’re going to live in Asia for about three to four months to do a language immersion program to get better at Chinese. And that’s something that was on my bucket list as well. Again, I’m really trying to be intentional with the choices and decisions I make, especially before I have a family. Now in terms of family, I’m actually doing the embryo freezing process next month. And what I’ve been doing every day leading up to it, I’ve been taking supplements daily trying to prepare my body for this process. Basically, Shawn and I have a lot of other things we want to do before we have kids. So that’s why we wanted to start this process. And if you guys are curious, I might do an update on this. Let me know in the comments. If you guys want to hear more about it. What I’ve realized is I’m really happiest when I’m hanging out with friends and family traveling a lot and just doing the things that I really want to do, what I find is a lot of people in our space end up really hustling all the time needing to be extremely productive. And I’m kind of the opposite. I just want to do like what I want to do. And I don’t know if you guys vibe with that or not, it might not make me the most interesting person to be followed because I think a lot of those people who work extremely hard and are constantly on the grind like those are who a lot of people gravitate towards. But I think I’m just on that wavelength of let me grow a little bit every single day. So I’m just kind of working on real estate and the business little by little, some days. I’m more motivated than others. But what I find is we have a lot of time especially like I’m in my early 30s. So I kind of feel like I can take my time because if I’m rushing it, I might just be bored if I get to a certain destination. Like I need to make sure I enjoy the journey if that makes sense. So I think I’ve worked extremely hard to get to this point. And then now that I’m at this point, I can go a little bit slower now in terms of work real estate business. I know you guys probably want to hear more about that we ended up working on this furnished rental for the past six months. We’re so and we finally got it up. If you guys haven’t seen the Airbnb house tour episode, make sure to go check it out because that’s basically what we’ve been spending our time on. In terms of business goals, I really do want to put a curriculum together around furnished rentals because we’ve learned so much from doing these different ones. We’re about to convert this primary as well into a furnished rental in the future so that we can go travel and just manage everything remotely. If you guys are interested in that, let me know in the comments below. Right now, we’re still trying to get better and better at this process though, before we create that curriculum. We’ve also been working on our email systems. So we’ve been really intentional about our newsletter. So we’re actually sending out a weekly newsletter, go ahead and sign up if you guys are interested, Sean and I have been having a lot of fun actually sending out these emails because we get a lot of responses back and we can hear a lot more about your journeys and get to know you guys more closely. So I’ll put a link down below if you guys are interested in joining 26,000 others, I think one thing is you never know what’s going to happen with your social media platform. So that’s another reason why we want to get better and better at email. We want to be able to speak with our community in that way. But going back to the traveling and hanging out with friends point I remember when we went to the Bay Area, we went for a wedding, I was a groom’s woman, I was just really happy spending my time with my close friends and I got to hang out with family hang out with my nephew, my brother recently had a baby. And it’s just been so fun hanging out with family because I just kind of forget everything else in the world. And just like focus on the present. Same thing when I’m adventuring going to different places

I’m looking around, I’m not thinking about what I need to do next. So that’s really what I’ve been trying to do just really focus on the present, focus on my relationships, and just do more of what I enjoy. So another thing is I’m working on music more, I’ve been making more and more songs. But now we’re actually filming music videos. So Sean actually helped me film this video. I don’t know if you guys noticed, but we tweak the camera settings. Hopefully it looks a little bit more cinematic, we’ve been using this camera to film a little bit more for me. So that’s kind of one of my goals to start releasing more music. If you guys are interested, my music handle is Sharon e Ste. And that’s where I’m gonna be putting out more songs and as kind of an announcement but not really, Shawn and I are actually thinking about moving to LA for a couple years, we’ll see if that actually happens. But basically, I’ve been trying to be more of my creative zone. And I think that being around that energy would help us I’d be in the west coast. So I’d be closer to family and friends, I have some friends living in LA, I think it’d be cool to be around that energy and maybe meet other creatives and work together and collab, we’ll see if this happens. So this would basically happen after traveling around Asia. So instead of going back to Dallas, we would just straight move to LA but I’m not completely sure if we’re going to do that I still want to invest heavily in Texas because I really enjoy it. And it’s nice to be near our investments be able to fix up different things like we’ve learned so much from working on our properties, like I’m learning how to clean the condenser units for ACS and learning how to repair cracks and walls and learning how to get water out under vinyl plank flooring, like I’m learning all these different things by being close to my investments. So really, as you can see, I’m just doing a lot more of what I’m passionate about, I would say something that I do struggle with. Sometimes it’s like I get in this mode of like, what’s the point because sometimes we get caught up in trying to make more money. But then to me, I think money doesn’t motivate me as much because I don’t really spend that much money. Like I’m not trying to buy nice cars, I don’t really care about upgrading my house that much. So I think with the lifestyle I live, I don’t really need that much. So I know that I’m financially free. But I know there’s so much more I could be doing. So the way I try to motivate myself is to really tap into other things like how I could be creating more impact in my community, how it could be getting better at online business in real estate. So that’s what I try to tap into. And when I am fixing up properties and like working on real estate, I really feel like that’s what I could be doing the rest of my life because I really enjoy just the process of making things beautiful and learning about homes and what goes into them. So I think once you become financially free, you’re gonna be bored. If you don’t work on anything, to be honest. That’s why a lot of people end up going back to work. A lot of people lose that sense of purpose. They don’t know what to do with their time how to fulfill themselves. So that bucket list of items definitely helps me another struggle I think that we do face is I think Shawn sometimes gets into like a scarcity mindset or like comparison mindset where he feels kind of worried about stability. And I’m kind of like the rock where I have to be like, Hey, we are doing really well. I’m at this point where I would have never imagined even being at this point. So I kind of have to let them know like how abundant we are. And I think honestly a lot of this financial freedom stuff is mindset because you can have enough but still, like worry that you’re not having enough whereas I’m like showing him the data. Look, our net worth has gone up our income is good. We’re doing really well with our real estate, our online businesses and everything like that that we are financially free. So sometimes it is kind of a struggle for me to have to be the rock in some ways. So I kind of feel like I have to let them know to enjoy stop feeling guilt like you have to work all the time. but also work on the things that we actually care about, and we want to improve on and then just feel abundant because we are abundant. But if you always compare with those people who are constantly hustling, you’re never gonna feel happy or satisfied. And honestly, I think that scarcity mindset has a lot to do with having immigrant parents, because we’re taught a lot to save and make sure that we keep all of our earnings because they came from background where they had it a lot harder, they had to sacrifice a lot for us. And they’re just trying to teach us how to make sure that we’re okay. But I think that we’ve worked so hard to get to where we are today that we need to sometimes let go a little bit of that scarcity mindset and make sure that we enjoy ourselves, make sure that we feel abundant, or else you’re gonna keep wanting more and more and feel unsafe, when in reality, we have a multiple, seven figure net worth, and we have passive income that more than covers our expenses and allows us to invest even more. Now again, if you’re in that position, where you got laid off, and you’re trying to figure out what to do, I would just apply aggressively, like I would send out tons of resumes and cover letters every single day, but also look into other side hustles that you can start because that’s the way you can create freedom. If you have more income streams that are working for you, you don’t have to be dependent on your full time job. And I can’t emphasize this enough, because the amount of freedom that I feel versus where I was before is just significantly different. Like I was feeling extremely stuck feeling like I didn’t have that much control over my life. Whereas now I feel like the opportunities are limitless. Honestly, having income streams helps me with that mentality. And I think it would help you guys as well. So overall, I would say that my life has definitely increased in happiness. After getting laid off. I think it was the push, I needed to realize that like I have enough because I think that’s one of the problems a lot of people face, they don’t know what is enough, and they just keep grinding and hustling. Removing the full time job allowed me to focus on things that I really cared about, and I have more time to spend on the business. I don’t have to feel guilty if I want to put my attention elsewhere. Whereas back then I would feel guilty if I were working on side hustles while having that full time job. I think layoffs can be the kick you need to kind of reevaluate your career path, your life and everything like that and can actually be a good thing. It’ll also help you realize that nothing is permanent and that you should create these backup plans to make sure that you’re okay, so that’s kind of my positive spin on it. Let me know if you guys agree or not, but that’s basically my recap for the past year since being laid off. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.