Month in Money

Intro

Spray Tan Business Events

Let's talk about what's been going on. I have had a whirlwind of a month, so I don't even know what happened the first week of the month. The second weekend of June, I was at the Dallas Spa Show – the aesthetics show for aestheticians and I was there representing Infinity Sun. So grateful to Veronique, she has graciously allowed me to be part of her team and represent her company. So I'm excited about that. And let me tell you, it was so busy! I don't think it's ever been so busy. So I love it, it’s great! I just hate having to be rushed.

We had a three hour wait for spray tans on Sunday, and a one hour wait for spray tans on Monday – it was just insane. I have no idea how many total spray tans we did, but I'm gonna say hundreds, for sure. So anyway, that's about the Dallas fall show.

I came back from that on Monday night and then I flew out immediately to go to Miss California on Thursday, to again represent Infinity Sun at the Miss California, Miss Teen California Competition. That was my first time to ever be at that location, and that was a whirlwind as well. I had so much fun! I met a lot of great girls, ladies, and was very excited to see them. They were also generous and polite, and I loved spray tanning them so it was a lot of fun.

And then I came back from that. There was a rush, so Thursday was Saturday, I'm here and then I leave again, and two days on Saturday and I'm going to Vegas for the Vegas spa show, again representing Infinity Sun. If you haven't heard me say already, because I don't always talk about my Spray Tan business on my Coffee Chats. But Infinity Sun is the brand that I have used since 2009. And I have tried to bring in other things to give the best for my guests and they always prefer Infinity Sun over everything. I believe that it is the best solution and the best equipment on the market. The technology is there, there’s nothing else like it. So if you are a business owner and you are a spray tan artist/business owner and you want to set up a wholesale account, or you're interested in Infinity Sun, shoot me a DM! I can help you out! I can answer a lot of questions and what I can't answer, I can get answered for you. So just let me know if you're interested in that. And then like I said, we're going to the Vegas Spa Show, that's going to be a whirlwind ‘till early Saturday morning. And then I will come back on Tuesday morning and get right back into getting my week going.

Spray tans – I'm so thankful that I have a new Spray Tan Artist on my team. Her name is Madison, so she's able to spray tan for me while I am out of town doing these shows and events. I just kind of wanted to come on and just kind of talk I didn't want to have a plan for today, because of the travel and everything.

Sharing Fun Things

So I'm sharing a couple of fun things. So this is something that my amazing VA Savannah made for me. My company is called GottaGetATan and she made me a “GottaGetAList.” Isn’t that cute? Oh my gosh, it’s so cute! Anyway, I love it and it's a little sticky, a little notepad. I give a few sheets out to my new guests that come in and spray tan with me, plus the use of myself. And then another thing she made for me at my request, because I use it all the time, whenever I'm doing my cash envelope withdrawal. I had been doing our deposit. So you know, you've heard me say that I pay us once a month, and because I don't like going to the bank, I don't like making any trips that I don't have to make.

So I pay us once a month, and then I take out from the budget; you know, the cash that I need for my cash envelopes (that I still use even after all these years.) I still use cash envelopes because it keeps me disciplined, and it keeps me on track. I would write out a little piece of paper, and I'm writing “this many dollars $$$”, “this many hundreds,” and “this money.” Then we put it with our checks, and I would deposit it and then get the cash back. Well, I've just started doing – in fact, last month, I think it was the first time I did it, I did direct deposit, and I've never direct deposited our checks before because I've always just kind of doing it at the last minute. We do our budget committee meeting at the end of the month, getting ready for the next month, and then you know, I just print it out and just go. It's not planned like my regular payroll. I just know I get paid on first.

So anyway, I asked her, we were talking about sticky notes or something like that. I don't know whose idea it was, if it was her idea, or my idea. But she made me these cute little sticky notes, look at how cute they are! So I planned, I had some extras made some time to get those out. But it says you know I need and it says the quantity and the amount. So if I need like four hundreds, then it'll be $400, and then I have a total all the way down. And I even do my coins as well. And thank you for the bank teller. But this is what I give to the bank teller and some now this month, or yeah, this month, what I did is I just read this out, and then I did a withdrawal from my bank and got the cash that I needed for that. So that was kind of different. I enjoyed doing that. I can't wait to try it again for July.

Last week, I also got my hair done and I posted on my personal account, you know, that I got my hair done, and then I didn't post anything after. So I don't know if y'all have seen it or not. I usually keep it up a lot because I'm always moving around so fast. It's not always the best. Anyway, I have rainbow peekaboo highlights and I went back to what I did originally like back. I don't know, I think it was last November last September, it was last year. I have this amazing, vivid hair specialist and if you want her contact information just reach out to me and I can certainly give that to you. She does the most amazing, vivid and vivid is the bright colors. It's just so amazing and I love it. And I actually found her on Instagram. It took me a long time before I would do any kind of fun things with my hair. But you know, I'm gonna be 50 this year, so I'm gonna do fun things with my hair. So who cares? I wanted to show everybody that it's got blues and purples and pinks and yellows, and I mean all kinds of colors! And maybe I'll have it done next week, and you can see it, who knows.

Free Budget Quiz

I have a quiz that's out: “Do you control your money or does your money control you?” And it's a quiz to find out how you're doing that. If you don't have a written budget, your money is controlling you, and you're not telling it where to go. If you want to talk to me about that and kind of get in control of that and be the master of your money, shoot me a DM, I can help you! I spent seven years becoming debt-free – my husband and I did, and a lot of people know my story. Some people well, I guess some people know my story. A lot of people don't know my story. But so in 2014, I had a traumatic event happened. A lot of things happened, did some things that I shouldn't have done as far as business wise, so it got me in a little bit more trouble or a little bit more debt. I wouldn't say trouble, but it got me a little bit more debt because of having to work around certain things. But long story short is that it took us seven years, and in seven years time from 2015 to 2020, to July of 2022. Actually, we paid off over $450,000 in debt. And we worked the plan, and we were diligent about doing it, and we could have even been more diligent about doing it. But we did what fit with us, and that was okay, I could have got it done sooner, but it was good. We actually paid off our home in 2020. So we paid it off early, because it's not supposed to be paid off until I think I think 2026. We paid it off six years early, and so that was a crazy thing to do because sometimes it still doesn't feel real that you don't have a mortgage. And we moved in this house in 1998 when I was pretty much pregnant with my daughter everything is not mine. It's ours. I've been married almost 30 years, so everything is ours. And we moved here when I was three months pregnant with her, and she just turned 24. So it's been a wonderful ride! I have a wonderful husband, a wonderful family, and I'm so thankful and grateful for all of them that have supported us over the years and they continue to support us.

So anyway, so I have that quiz. If you want to take that, that's going to help you learn if you have control of your money or if your money controls you. And then I also have a “Budget Bootcamp Waitlist” that's live!I'm sure after we get off here, that we'll add that into the comments because I don't have the links. I again, didn't prepare. So we'll add that there. If you're interested in joining waitlist for when I have the budget boot camp, you can do that. And now you'll just get the announcements of when I'm going to go live with that.

Passion for Business, Budgeting and Helping Others

Some of you don't know me, and I'm very passionate – I love helping and serving others, it's always been something that's dear to me no matter what it is. And so this platform has given me the space to be able to help others. When we started our business 27 years ago, I was 22 years old, my husband was 24, we had no experience in business. My husband just said, he wanted to have his own air conditioning business. So I was like, “okay.” I got out my pen, got my paper, and I started making a list of the things that needed to be done. And that's just the kind of person that I am and just take charge of things and just do it. If somebody mentioned something, or if I have something in my mind, I'm just gonna go after it. That's just, I don't know, it's just the Candice that you meet.

Anyway, that was before Google and anything else. So we had no help. I didn't really have mentors in the beginning, either. I just had to figure out things myself. And so as time went on, I did have mentors that I didn't know were mentors at the time. But I do feel like they poured into me, things that would eventually show up in our business. So that's really, really passionate.I'm really, really passionate about business, our air conditioning business that we've had for 27 years. This month, my spray tan business I've had for 22 years, I originally started out with tanning beds, I completely switched over to sunless in 2009. And, you know, back then people didn't know what sunless was. But I knew that's just the way things were going and I love doing it! So from the moment I saw it on on the news in 2002, and they said there's this new thing that's up and it's called airbrush tanning. And I was like, I want that, I need to do that, and so I did, and that's just become my thing. So I've sprayed for 21 years, which it's seems it's a long time, but it doesn't seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things. I've just enjoyed doing it, so I'm excited to be able to start expanding on that, and it made me step back a little bit from spring and have other spray, and teach others and pass along my knowledge of that.

I help women start their business so that they can learn the business basics. Because in the beginning, you don't know and so many women, so many people I see post on Facebook in these groups and stuff like that, that they don't know about keeping their business and personal finances separate, they don't know. They're like, they just don't know things to do. And so what I want to teach is the business basics, so that you can know exactly what you need to do to get started and be a legitimate business, not a hobby. So it's not all the, you know, further, further down – this is your fundamentals, your business 101. A lot of people have said that when I've talked to them about it, they've said that they don't even teach that in business school. So there's a lot of things, as a business owner, that you learn over the years. And so I just have it all together so that it's fast tracked and can help you go faster with that, so that way you don't have to wait for so long and you can get those things out of your way and you know what your steps are. If you are a woman or even a man, I can help men, too. But my passion is women because I'm a woman and I was 22 and I had nowhere to go, nowhere to ask. So I want to be able to to pay that back and pay that forward. If you're interested in that, you're interested in starting a business, shoot me a DM! I can help you with that. Whether it's a spray tan business, whether it's something else that you want to do. If want to start a business and you have a dream to start a business, just DM me and I would love to talk to you.

So I was talking about money and stuff like that. For these trips that I had to take, I kind of had to have plans to know what I was going to spend and what I would be prepared for. But you want to make sure that you always have a plan and that you have a written budget – that's the very first thing that you should do. Whenever you have a written budget, it's not restricting to you, it's not telling you, you can't spend your money, it's actually showing you where your money is going, so that you can use your money better. So for example, when we started, when I left my full time job, and in February 2000, and started working for us full time. Very scary. And I told my husband, “Do we have to be on a strict budget?” And that was laughable, because I really didn't know what a budget was. I mean, I knew how to put numbers on a spreadsheet, but I didn't really know how to do things. So when you're doing a budget, I would always be over at the end of the month, I'd be like, “Why? Why am I over?” Well, because I didn't understand how to do a budget. I use a zero based budget, meaning that your income minus your expenses equals zero. And that doesn't mean that your bank account equals zero, it means that you have used every dollar of your income to, to put into work and where it needs to go. If you had money leftover, you paid all your bills, you paid all this, you got all these things, and you had money left over, then that should go to paying your debt or that should go to paying your yourself in savings (if you don't have any debt.) So again, I can help you with that – I’m very passionate about it and became very passionate about it during the process of us becoming debt-free. It became a game to me. So I would try to figure out how I could pay my debt quicker. Whenever I was doing our monthly stuff, and I would look at it constantly, I have this budget binder, and it's about this thick. And so now I've kind of gone digital and so I do everything on my computer. And I don't print it out. So I'm trying to be more conscious about being wasteful with paper and so forth. So you want to make sure that you have a place, you have a list of the things that you need to purchase, the things that you need to take care of so that your budget can take care of that for you. And then you have to be an adult, and it's really unfortunate. So sometimes that we have to be an adult, we have to delay fun in order to take care of adult things. We all want to grow up and be adults. And we're like, “Oh, I want to be an adult. Can't wait to get out on my own!” And then it's like, “Oh, man, I wish I still lived at home. I still want my mom to take care of me.” Yada-yada so. So anyway, you want to do that. And you would be shocked at how fast you can have, how fast you can make a difference in your money situation by just having a written budget. And it takes about three months to get that budget, you know, working correctly. But the first time that we did the budget back in 2015. And kind of starting from from zero not knowing exactly, miscellaneous and different stuff on a surplus of $145 and I was like, “Holy crap. I have 1$45!” So, I know that seemed like a whole lot. But we were going over every single month for all those years. It wasn't consistently over 14 years from me being gone, but there was a lot of times that we would go over and I just didn't know how to do it because nobody teaches you how to budget.

Ember cup & Black Rifle Coffee Plug

So quick little shout out – my little Ember cup. You see the light on? It keeps my coffee at, I forget what degree, but it's like 119-or-125-or-something-like-that-degrees so it keeps my coffee warm. This is really awesome when you're sitting here talking and your coffee is getting cold because you're not drinking it. Also it's really cool during the wintertime, when you go outside and it's cold and you know the air takes away the the heat from your coffee, it will keep it warm. I really love it and this one is rose gold and it comes in a couple of different colors but I wish the battery was a little bit longer, but I do love this cup! It has a little base that looks like a little saucer and I keep it up on my coffee pot so that I charge it. But you could put it at your desk and and then it could stay warm all day, it could keep charged all day. I don't know if I would want to do that, but you can do that. So I have that and when my little battery dies because I end up talking too long or something, then I'll go get a regular cup and it kind of makes me sad because now my regular cup, I have to drink my coffee really fast because it goes cold quick. Also I brought in the the bag – My husband just ordered a bag of this Black Rifle Coffee Company. And this one is called “Just Black” and it's definitely a man's man Coffee Company for sure. I say that because it's really geared towards like their store and everything is kind of geared towards men, but it's veteran owned and they give a portion of their sales to first responders. I think that's super great. I love any kind of place that will that give back to people who are in service for our freedoms. So anyway, that's called Black Rifle Coffee Company, and they have a lot of different colors. I mean, a lot of different flavors, but this one is “Just Black.” And so yeah, so there's that. I feel like I'm a little commercial today.

It is raining you guys, I'm so excited. I mean, it's like literally like pouring down raining. So I don't know how long it lasts, but super excited about it. It's really great to for my husband and, and his guy because with it being so hot outside you know, it's very difficult for people who have to work outside in the heat during these times. And for my husband and his guy. His guy’s name is Logan. And so them they're having to work in attics. And the temperature is 140-150 degrees and and it's just really hot and it's hard on their bodies. So so I thought it's raining kind of cooling off a little bit. It also helps cold out our houses and stuff like that when our air conditioner is not working so.

Being Optimistic and Grateful

So, anyway. If you if you think that I can be someone that can help you out, then reach out to me because you know, I'm really easygoing. I like to laugh a lot. My mom always says that I laugh about everything. And I really try to stay as positive and optimistic as possible, even in the darkest of times. There was time whenever I couldn't, but I've made it through to the other side. I'm super optimistic about it.

And I'm grateful for so many things in life, but I'm specifically grateful, [right now] for Veronique with Infinity Sun. With her helping me, the way she has been giving me the opportunities that she has, and in such being such a great friend.

I'm also grateful to my husband. I mean, he is the most amazing person ever! He's my soulmate, and I'm so happy that we found each other – we actually found each other on a blind date. Who would have thought? We've been married for 29 years and we've been together 30. So anyway, that's a whole different other thing. But I guess it says a little bit for our loyalty and our relationships – in the value that we put on things, so our business, our friendships.

And then of course, I'm thankful for my team. I have a team of great people. So to have three businesses, you have to have a team, I can't do it all by myself. And for a long time, I was trying to do it all myself. Molly is our is our dispatcher, office manager at our Air Conditioning company. And then Logan, he’s really Eugene’s team, but I'm gonna say he's my team, too. He is Eugene's helper. Then of course, I have Eugene.

I have Madison in my spray tan studio – she's a new spray tan artists that I've trained!

I have Savannah, who is my rockstar VA that I love dearly! And then I have my other two rock star VA’s Marj and Svetlana, and they are in the Philippines.

And Savannah, she's in Texas, about two hours away from me. So I'm trying to think that I missed anybody. I don't think I missed anybody if I'm missing, but I'm really sorry, but I don't think I missed anybody. So that's my team, and I'm constantly trying to find ways to help others do things for others because that makes me feel good.

Month in Money

Ready to take ahold of your month? Check out our monthly planner!