Building A Healthy Relationship With Your Money With Bernadette Girvin

TTD 27 | Money Relationship

 

People need to have a better understanding of their money. That relationship with money has to be healthy. And, that relationship can go as far back as to how your parents viewed money. People usually look up to their parents so how they view money is taught at a young age.

Bernadette Girvin, a former LPGA Tour player and 10-year veteran in the financial services industry, wasn’t really taught about the importance of money at a young age. She pursued a career as a professional golfer with the help of her parents. It wasn’t until 2008 that she got into the financial service industry. And surprisingly enough, being a golfer helped her understand the business a lot more. She is now the COO of Gamblin Financial Group and also leads the strategic growth vision of the firm. She ensures a first-class exceptional client experience.

Join your host, Dr. Patty Ann Tublin as she talks to Bernadette about her life journey. Discover her early years and her relationship with her father. Find out why she dropped out of golf and into the financial service industry. Learn why it’s important to always ask “What can I do better?”  Listen in the conversation to get all of that and more in today’s episode of The Trust Doctor.

Bullets:

  • Former LPGA Tour player (3 years)
  • Entrepreneur
  • Currently CEO & Financial Advisor at Gambin Financial
  • Heads up Women in Wealth (at Gambin) – changing the way women think about money
  • Co-host Invest The Difference podcast
  • The Athlete in her is always asking “what can we do better?”

Listen to the podcast here

 

Building A Healthy Relationship With Your Money With Bernadette Girvin

I have an incredible, amazing A-list person for you in this episode but before we go any further, make sure you like, comment, share, and subscribe to this episode. Let me give you a little teaser about our incredible guest. This is a woman who has been a professional athlete and has gone on to become a professional moneymaker, although she might not see it that way. I don’t want to leave you hanging any longer. You’re going to be able to find this guest all over the internet. Let me just tell you a little bit about Bernadette Girvin.

She was a golfer. She was on the LPGA Tour for three years while she played amateur. She was a golfer at Ole Miss, which I knew as a football school so I’m glad to see we had the ladies hitting the little white ball on the tee there. After three years, she went out and started her own financial service firm. Since she was successful as an athlete, she will absolutely be successful as a professional, and then she decided to join ranks with her current partner now Claudio Gambin. She is now the current CEO and Financial Advisor at Gambin Financial. Let’s give a warm welcome. Put on your seatbelts because Bernadette Girvin is about to take us for a ride. Welcome, Bernadette and thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you, Dr. Patty. What a wonderful and warm introduction. I appreciate that.

It’s all your credentials. I just prepared them with everybody. Tell us. This is all about trust, relationships, money, success, and everything that you’ve accomplished. Share your wisdom with us. You can start at the beginning and bring us up to now or you can reverse engineer and tell us how you ended up sitting on that beautiful couch looking beautiful and brainy. Take us back.

I think I’ll start from the beginning and tell you a little bit about my backstory and how I got to where I am now. I was born and raised here in Florida. I was born in Gainesville but moved to Orlando when we were eight. I consider myself an Orlandoan.

You live next door to the happiest place on the planet.

We stay away from the happiest place on Earth.

It’s a little too crowded for happiness.

It’s a little too close to home but our kids love it. We moved to Orlando when I was eight years old. I had two teachers as parents growing up. My mother was a lifelong high school Math teacher.

My sister was a high school Math teacher for twenty years as well. She was a great teacher. I’m sure your mom was as well.

The influence of your parents shapes your lives in so many different ways.

She taught me three out of my four years of high school Math and insisted on it. I went to the same school that she taught at. She went straight to the curriculum coordinator and said, “Bernadette is going to be in my classes for Math.

Did you like it?

No, I hated it. I begged my parents every single day of high school to let me go to the local public school. My mother taught at Trinity Prep which is a local private preparatory school here in Orlando. It probably has one of the top reputations as a college prep school. Later in life, I’m super thankful for the education that I had, but at the moment, my mom taught all of my friends in high school. She taught me. She was also a tough teacher. She was strict with dress code and behavior. She was a very hard teacher in Math. I hated going to school there. All my neighborhood friends went to the local public school and that’s where I wanted to hang out.

She knew about every party so I wasn’t allowed to go to the parties, which at the moment, it’s devastating. Looking back on it now, I’m like, “I probably was saved a lot of trouble, heartache, and stuff like that.” My dad was a lifelong college English professor. I grew up with Math and English.

You got both sides of the brain going on.

I grew up with the left brain and the right brain as parents. It was challenging growing up. Teachers don’t make a ton of money and my mom worked two jobs so that I could play golf and my sister could pursue ballet. My dad, as an English teacher, during the summers, would work at local golf courses so that I would get free playing privileges. They did whatever they had to do to make my sister’s and my dreams come true as kids growing up. I have one sister and she’s two years younger than me.

When I look at our family dynamic, it’s so interesting because my mom is the planner. She’s the Math brain. She’s numbers-oriented. My dad was the English teacher. He loves to draw, write, and play the piano. He’s the artistic one and my sister is a carbon copy of my father, and I’m almost a carbon copy of my mother. It’s funny how that’s all played out. I went down the financial path. In my marriage now, I’m the planner. I’m the doer. I’m the one coordinating everything and my sister went on to pursue ballet. She was doing her ballet jobs and working at the pizza joint. Her husband works for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. It’s so interesting how the influence of your parents shapes your lives in so many different ways.

When I look back on my childhood, I knew that we didn’t have what everybody else did because I went to a school like Trinity Prep so I saw what the privileged kids had. I didn’t get the car when I was sixteen years old and I didn’t get to shop at the Gap and all of those things, but we never wanted any of it. I got to play golf and my sister got to pursue ballet.

Were you on a scholarship or did the parents’ kids go for free?

I got to go to Trinity for free. My sister got to go for half of the tuition price. That’s the only reason that we got to go. Fast forward to where my life is now and I look back on how money played or didn’t play much of a conversation in our lives. It’s so interesting the career field that I stumbled into at one point in my life because we didn’t have discussions about money growing up. I knew my parents were working a lot of jobs just to pay the bills. There wasn’t a lot of money about how to save and when to save. I knew that I started working when I was fifteen years old so that if I wanted to go to the movies with my friends, I had my own money.

TTD 27 | Money Relationship
Money Relationship: Sometimes the way you think about money is perceived by how your parents thought about money. You’re projecting your thoughts and feelings about money on how they thought about it.

 

I understood the value of a dollar and those kinds of things but there wasn’t a lot of talk about how to save, what credit cards were, what debt meant, and any of that stuff. When I went on to play professional golf out of college, I went into tremendous credit card debt because I was a good player, but I was not by any stretch of the imagination one of the top players in the world. I didn’t have big lucrative sponsorship deals. I had some local individuals who pooled some money together to help me out, but most of it was self-funded for me.

When you’re talking about growing up, it’s all about your relationship to money. It’s a commodity but you attach an emotion to it. For many of us, our first experience with money is how our parents talked or more likely thought about money. It has nothing to do with how much money you had or didn’t have because it represents more than just money. I’m curious, did your parents not talk about money at all? Did they fight about it or are your parents just in the same thing? They knew what they had. They were both, “You don’t spend more than you make,” or they were comfortable in debt. How did that dynamic play out for them?

I don’t think I knew. There wasn’t fighting about money. I can pretty firmly say the fights that did happen between the husband and wife were very normal things, but I don’t remember it ever being fueled by money. They did an incredible job as a partnership of communicating about that stuff. My sister went to Indiana University, but she did not get a scholarship for ballet. That’s not a thing. They financed her out-of-state tuition and a few years ago, my mom finally finished paying it off but they wanted to provide that for her. That was important to them.

I think they did a good job of communicating about, “How is this bill getting paid? How are we sending Bernadette to this golf tournament? How are we putting Elizabeth into this ballet program?” They figured it out but we didn’t talk about that a whole lot. I don’t know if that was from a place of insecurity or shame on their part, “We can’t provide to our kids what some of these other parents can.” I don’t know. I didn’t have braces growing up because my parents couldn’t afford them so I got braces as an adult when I was out on my own and making my own money.

I remember coming home as a young woman with braces on. I was dating my now-husband and my mom cried in the kitchen with me. She was like, “I feel so guilty that we could never do that for you as a child.” I was like, “Oh my gosh.” That was not something I ever even thought about. As an adult, I wished I’d had straight teeth and had braces as a kid so I didn’t have to deal with it, but I had no idea that she carried that with her through her life.

It’s interesting, as we get older, we realize our parents, especially as daughters, our mothers were women too. She was teaching in a school where she was surrounded by wealth. She was aware of the fact that the kids were driving a nicer car than her, a 15-year-old, 16-year-old kid. It’s interesting you say that about the braces because where I grew up, we have no money and I’m one of five children. My mother until the day she died paid $25 a month to the orthodontist in town, but every single person in my family and all my block had braces except me. I felt like I missed out. Quite frankly, I don’t know why I didn’t have them, but it was so interesting. Are your parents still alive?

They are.

I would be curious as to what their conversations were like growing up because when my father was still alive, I remember my parents never fighting about money. I asked my mother later on and she said, “What was there to fight about?” We knew what our resources were. She is so practical, which is how I am with money too. I’m so practical with it.

You’re saying that and I’ve never thought about interviewing them now about life then. I really should. It would be fascinating to dive a little deeper because the way that I think about money now is probably perceived or I’m projecting my emotions onto them. My thoughts and feelings about money are how they probably thought about it. It would be interesting to go back and say, “Tell me more. Why were you so emotional about the braces thing with me? What were the conversations between you and dad about money?”

I can remember some things. My dad is the one that taught me to play golf. He was a very good golfer himself and we have this old gross white station wagon from the ‘80s forever. I think at some point in 8th or 9th grade for me, that car finally died. It didn’t have air conditioning or power steering by the time it was on its last wheel. My mom wanted a Saturn Station Wagon, but we couldn’t afford it. However, my mom reverse engineered, “If this is how much it’s going to cost, here’s what we could afford as a monthly payment. Here’s how much we have to put down.”

Wealthy people are not wealthy because of the amount of money they have. They’re wealthy because of the options money gives them.

My dad went out to the golf skins games every week, played in them, and gambled money to earn enough money to make the down payment on that car. He was a ringer. It took a year to win enough money in these little golf games every week with his guys but he won enough money. I think it was $1,000 or $2,000 down from my mom’s car. It was that stuff that I recall.

We’re not advocating gambling, but having said that, I think that was a very healthy relationship that your parents had. My guess is that your parents could write the book on a healthy relationship towards money, but I might just be picking up what I’m feeling from you.

I love my parents dearly. They did sacrifice a lot for us. Now that I’m a parent myself and I look back, it never even phased me what they did for us. Now when I look back and think, all of the nights and weekends that they sacrificed toting us around from golf tournament to ballet camp to whatever it was, selfishly I think, “I can’t believe I would have to maybe do that for my kids one day.”

I love them a lot. They sacrificed so much to make sure my sister and I could pursue our dreams, but I’m sure that there were difficult times. I’m sure that there were stressful money conversations. We all know that money is one of the major reasons for divorce nowadays, but I also always am like, “I wonder if it’s easier to have less or more.” I’m like, “More money, more problems, or when you know exactly what you have to work with, what your budget is, can life be a little bit easier because at least you know?”

I’ll share with you my thought on that. My second bestselling book was called Money Can Buy You Happiness: Secrets Women Need to Know to Get Paid What They’re Worth! It was about women and their relationship to money and negotiating. I got some scathing emails when it was published saying, “How could you possibly consider yourself a clinical psychologist?” Money cannot buy you happiness and so on. Here’s what my experience coaching and working with people, women, and families for over 30 years personally has been.

Money allows you the opportunity to have experiences and make choices that you would otherwise not be able to make. From that perspective, it can make you happy because you can buy stress out of your life. For example, you’re probably like me. When I was raising my four kids and I’d have a long day. I call my husband or he calls me, “What’s for dinner?” I’m like, “I don’t know. What are you bringing home,” or, “Let’s get takeout or let’s go out to eat.” That was a luxury my mother and I suspect your mother was never afforded.

My mother would have to come home from a hard day’s work and she worked in media in the ‘70s with all that was going on there. Commuting an hour and a half each way, come home and have to make dinner and check on the kids. It was insane. I know the money would’ve made my mother’s life a lot happier from the perspective of less stress and she was a happy person. She had a full life.

I’ve worked with people that the stressors attached to money don’t disappear when you have a lot of it. I work with a woman now. The husband makes an incredible amount of money that I’m coaching her with, but they argue over how much money they should give to their families to make their lives easier now.

Trust me, when I tell you these people are generous. They bought off every sibling’s mortgage. They buy their friend’s dinners in a very generous non-manipulative way. I’ve never seen anything like it in my years of working with people. By the same token, I know people that have had a ton of money and it will never be enough. I think the research shows now and we used to think for a while at a certain level that money means nothing. I think that’s just nonsense.

My business partner and I say all the time to the clients that we’re working with, our wealthiest clients are not wealthy because of the amount of money they have, but because of the options their money gives them. Money is not the most important thing in life but it’s right up there with breathing.

TTD 27 | Money Relationship
Money Relationship: Teach your children about the value of the dollar and how you need hard work to get it. Let them know that it’s okay to make a lot of money and that they can do good with that money.

 

It’s not everything, but it’s like air or something.

It takes money to get things done in life every single day.

We were talking about how your parents sacrificed so much for you and your sister and you’re like, “I don’t know if I want to be doing that,” running around with tournaments.

I knew very early on that there was a strong dichotomy between what these kids had and what these kids had. I saw what my parents were doing in terms of working jobs all year long as teachers. My mom worked at night and my dad worked in the summers. I thought, “There’s got to be a better way.” I don’t know what it was. It’s hard for me to put my finger on it, but I knew that I wanted to achieve a different level of success in life so that I could generationally change wealth within my family. It’s because I wanted my children to grow up valuing the dollar, understand what hard work is and how to get it, but I wanted to give them opportunities and experiences that I didn’t get growing up.

I wanted them to know that it was okay to make a lot of money and that you can do good with that money. That’s a lot of what fuels me now and what drove me a lot. When I found my passion for golf, I was probably a sophomore or junior in college when I knew that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I poured every single minute of my day into getting better as a golfer and it was because I wanted to be a good golfer. I wanted to break records. I wanted to do amazing things on the LPGA Tour but I also wanted to experience financial success. If I’m being very honest about it, I wanted to be able to create a life that was different than what I had.

I didn’t want to have a car that didn’t have power steering. I wanted to be able to have a new car that I didn’t have to worry about breaking down on the side of the road, that I didn’t need to know how to change the oil in the car because it was leaking all the time. Those were things that I wanted to be able to leave in the past. Golf didn’t end up working out, but I found my passion for doing what I do now. It has brought amazing blessings into our lives and I couldn’t be more thankful for it.

You did golf for three years and people don’t realize it, but it is grueling to be a professional athlete on the road. One hotel room looks just like the next. Did something happen where you said, “It’s time to hang up the club,” so to speak?

Yeah. I spent a year on what used to be the Futures Tour. It is now the Symetra Tour. It’s the developmental tour for the LPGA. In my last year on the LPGA Tour, I had conditional status. I was going back to Q school. I was having to do a lot of Monday qualifying. It was a very difficult life. I was playing 10 to 12 weeks in a row. I was away from home. My friends were the friends that I traveled with on tour. I didn’t have a boyfriend. Life felt like it was flying by me and I was struggling with money. I was in tremendous amounts of debt. I was struggling with back injuries.

I had a bad back. I didn’t realize I had structural spinal issues until I was playing that much golf. It got to a point where all of these things slowly started piling up on top of each other and I thought, I love golf, but I also want to have a family. In 2005 and 2006, the LPGA didn’t have the childcare situation that they have now and the maternity leave policies that they have for women. A lot of women made the decision to either keep going and probably forego family life or quit and start a family and have a normal life.

It was not that long ago that you’re referencing, right?

Real friendship is important because those are the people that can get you through difficult times.

Yeah. It was in 2005 and 2006.

Before you go on about the family when you’re talking about friendships because you want to talk about happiness and relationships, friendship is a big part of it. Where are those real friendships? Where are they superficial friendships? What was that about for you?

I have always been the kind of individual that had a handful of very close, deep relationships. I never was the person that had a million friends. I had two bridesmaids at my wedding. I’m not an extrovert. I’m not an overly social individual, but I like to go deep with people. The friends that I did have out there, there were a couple of girls that I traveled with every single week. We’d share hotel rooms and split rental car fees. This one girl Libby, she and I drove all across the country together. I had a couple of really good close relationships that I am still in touch with but it’s a tour full of women. Just like any other place in life, you get a whole bunch of women together and cliques will form.

There is superficiality surrounding some of the stuff, but by and large, I would say it’s very much a community out there. Everybody is in it together. Everyone is facing a lot of the same struggles together, missing families, for those who were married, missing husbands and children, and missing friends back home. We talked a lot about how hard it is to keep friendships. How hard it was to have boyfriends. There was a lot of interconnectedness that happened as well, but for me personally, I had a handful of close, deep relationships out there.

It’s so important because those people get you through difficult times. It is a very lonely lifestyle. You’re still dealing with your own struggles on the golf course or between your ears, your own personal relationships back home. Friends are great, but they’re not family. It can be very lonely and difficult.

What was the last tournament that you played in where you’re like, “Game over.” Was the decision made for you? How did that work?

I don’t remember the exact tournament, but it was sometime in 2007. It may have been when I went back to qualifying school for the LPGA Tour for the last time. I had walked away once again with conditional status. I was at the time living in Naples and I was working at a golf course part-time. I had a Saturn of my own that was on its last leg. I remember calling my dad one day and I was crying. I felt so guilty for what I was about to tell him considering everything that he had poured into me for all those years but I told him.

I said, “Dad, I don’t think I can do this anymore. I’m ready to close this chapter of my life and move on to something else. I don’t know what that is right now, but I can’t keep doing this. The injuries that I’m dealing with in my back are pretty terrible and I’m afraid that it’s going to hurt me in the long run. I’m making no money. I’ve got tremendous debt. I want to move on from this.” He was not happy.

How old were you at that time?

I was 26, 27, or somewhere around there. My dad and I had a difficult but good relationship growing up. I was daddy’s little girl. I was the tomboy. It was funny considering that my sister is him and I am my mom, but my dad and I were the ones with a close relationship and she was close with my mom growing up. He taught me how to throw a baseball and ride a bike. I was always wanting to play sports.

TTD 27 | Money Relationship
Money Relationship: A lot of character traits that you learned in golf carry over into business. Traits like self-confidence, good work ethic, and understanding how to create habits in your daily life.

 

When I started playing golf, he taught me how to play. He bought me my first set of clubs and cut them down. He and I literally spent every single day together from the time I was about thirteen years old until I went off to college at the golf course hours on end every single day. There are a lot of amazing memories that we look back on and a lot of girls and dads don’t get to say that they had that kind of time together, but it also caused a lot of fights.

He was trying to be my dad. He was trying to be my coach. He was trying to be my caddy on the golf course. We didn’t see eye to eye all the time. He came from a military family so he was an incredible disciplinarian. Once I decided I wanted to play golf, I didn’t get to do anything else. I didn’t get to go on spring breaks with my friends. I didn’t get to water ski with my friends.

Was that his choice?

He told me, “If you want to be great at golf, you have to eliminate all of the distractions and you’re all in on this.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I have this real back and forth with my brain all the time of like, “I feel like there was a lot I missed out on in life.” I think that maybe we could have had a healthier relationship, but I also really believe that I got to where I was because of the work ethic that he instilled in me. I believe that I’m as successful as I am today because of the work ethic he instilled in me that I carried forward from golf, but I also can be a workaholic.

I can be unrelenting in my need to check the things off of my to-do list. I don’t always have a great balance in my life between work and family. I think some of that is carried forward. He actually said something very profound and impactful to me. I don’t even know if he realized it. I forgot what we were talking about, but out of the blue he said to me, “Do you forgive me for how I treated you growing up with golf?” That was the first time he had ever shown any sense of vulnerability, “Maybe we were a little too hard on her.” He was by my side every single day and lines get blurred. You hear horror stories about the tennis and golf dads that are too hard on their kids.

It’s like Tiger Woods. Knowing nothing about Tiger Woods more than anybody else knows, I truly believe that a lot of what happened to him after his father passed away and whatever the addiction he has is because he was raised to be a golfer, period, full stop. I don’t know if his father showed him and again, I’m assuming. I’m not casting judgment at all, but I don’t know how much he was taught to be a man, husband, or a father. It looks like he’s turned his life around and I could not be happier for him. I thought that was true for A-Rod too. Now, I don’t know so much. In the psychology world, we say, “If you have to make a mistake with your kids, smother as opposed to ignore.” There are two extremes. You knew he loved you, but it is interesting what you are saying. It’s like, “But.”

The thing is at the end of the day, I knew that it was coming from a place of love and care. Maybe it wasn’t expressed in the healthiest of manners all the time, but the one thing I can say unequivocally is that my dad loves me and my sister more than anything in the world. He would lie down in traffic for us. I’m sure a lot of how he was with me was carried over from his dad.

His father was a career military man?

Yep.

Which branch?

As a financial advisor, your job is to find people and convince them that they need your services. You’re basically a salesperson.

The Army. On my whole dad’s side, my great-grandfather whose house my parents still live in, was a full Colonel in the Army. He got invited to Eisenhower’s inauguration. His son, my grandfather, was a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. My dad never went into the Army. His brother did.

Were they West Point grads? If they were, you wouldn’t have to think about it.

My grandfather went to UC Santa Barbara.

You mentioned it. I was going to ask you, “What are some of the similar qualities that made you successful as an athlete to a successful businesswoman?” We talked a lot about golf and money, but let’s talk about your financial acumen and you rocking it in the financial world where there are not a lot of women.

It’s interesting because in the golf world when I grew up there, I was surrounded by men my whole life. Once I entered the financial sector, it was very heavily male-dominated. I learned from a young age how to just be around dudes, how to deal with them and their talk, and their band tour. Sometimes I think back about, “Dad, you let me hang around those guys.”

I’m not an easily offended individual. I recognize if there is bias, but I don’t let it get to me. I developed a lot of individual personal self-confidence as a golfer. I also think I wasn’t great at that and I think that what held me back a little bit in golf was some of the ego, the self-confidence, and that killer instinct kind of a thing.

Is it the mindset or the self-confidence?

I think a little bit of both.

It’s nice to hear you say that because I feel you as so confident.

People say that all the time. Again, I was like, “Maybe I do need to believe in myself more than I probably do.” Even to get out on the LPGA Tour, you have to have a level of self-confidence and belief in yourself that you’re capable, you can get a good shot and you’ve got the skills to do all those things. I, for sure, believe that I carried that over into business with me as well. The work ethic, understanding how to create discipline and habits in your daily life that are going to lead to success. Understanding what those leading indicators are that are going to bring the results on the backend.

TTD 27 | Money Relationship
Money Relationship: Create a structure and a routine in your day. Doing that will set you up for success so that you can show up as the best version of yourself every day.

 

I’m a very self-disciplined individual. If I want to accomplish something, you best believe I’m going to do it. You wouldn’t necessarily think in the financial services industry as a financial advisor, that’s important, but we were in a sales role. At the end of the day, my job as an advisor is to go find people and convince them that they need my services. Certainly now as a business owner with GFG Solutions, Claudio and I run a business every day.

Not only am I thinking about our clients and how we’re serving our clients, but I’m also now thinking about our staff and how we are leading and managing our team. I’m thinking about our marketing efforts, financials, practice management, and our client experience. There’s a whole host of things that are now on my radar.

Being able to create structure and routine in your day that’s going to set you up for success so that you can show up and be the best version of yourself every day is another thing that I carried over from golf.

You seem very self-motivated and driven as well.

I have been. I wasn’t very driven in school, I will say. I wanted to do the least so that I could get done with school and go play golf.

I made good grades. It wasn’t like I didn’t make good grades, but I did what I had to. The things that I love and that I am into, I am a very self-disciplined, self-motivated individual. My husband all the time is like, “You make me feel bad about myself all the time. The number of things that you can get done in a day is incredible.” I do think some of that is just a function of being a woman and a mother.

Those are some of the biggest things that I carried over. The things that I didn’t take with me, the things that I failed at, are just as important learnings and mainly on the money side of the business like, “Nobody is going to care about you as much as you are so don’t ignore the boring stuff.” Know your numbers, understand money, and ask questions.

I went into tremendous debt because I didn’t know the right questions to ask. When I was opening a credit card or I was going for a line of credit at the bank, I would listen to whatever man was sitting in front of me telling me what to do. I would just say, “Okay. That sounds great,” knowing that there was probably more I should be asking, but figured, “This person is wearing a suit and they look smart.”

I think that’s a classic, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

One of my favorite questions to ask now when I’m in a situation where I don’t know something, I went through this. We’re under contract to buy our first commercial real estate property but that was the first time I had ever gone through that process. I will straight up look someone in the face now and say, “I have not done this before. What am I not asking?” It has served me well.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, just look someone in the eye and say “What am I not asking?”

The other thing I’ll tell people is, “Answer the question I don’t know enough to ask.” It’s like when I take my car I used to be like, “I know nothing about cars. Please don’t rip me off and there’s a special place in hell for mechanics that rip women off.” They ripped me off anyway but I am curious. I want to go back for one second. You said that your father years ago paid off your sister’s Indiana loan. What do you think about the whole credit loan?

I was fortunate to go to school on a full-ride scholarship so I never even had to deal with student loan debt. My sister didn’t either because my parents handle it for her, but in our industry, they project student or tuition costs to be inflating somewhere around 5% to 8% a year. I think to myself all the time, my oldest daughter is five years old and by the time she gets to college, can we even afford that? Is that sustainable? Is college the answer for everything?

I grew up with teachers as parents so the path in life is you go to school, you get your education. That’s first and foremost and then you pursue everything else.

I think you need your education. I’m not so sure if college and education are the same these days.

I think all the time about my daughter. If she’s got a passion that she wants to pursue that does not include a college degree, but she’s got a real plan on how to make that happen, I’m totally for her pursuing that. I don’t think college is the only path unless you have to go something super specialized like being a doctor.

I know you wouldn’t have said that years ago, but I believe in the certification program. There’s so much noise in college. They own the land. I do get it, but it’s amazing to me. It’s the only industry where you keep raising prices and people keep going.

I don’t know who they are, but they are making it so difficult for young adults to go to school, graduate, and be financially stable out of college with the price and the cost of tuition, room and board, books, laptops, and everything that goes into it. It’s worrisome for me what kind of debt a lot of young people are walking out of school with making $50,000 a year, let’s say. You walk out with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. It’s going to take you most of your life to pay that off.

Again, it’s that head and heart decision. A lot of times when you’re looking at financial decisions, it might cost me a little bit more, but is it driving some level of value or happiness in my life or purpose that I need to pursue? If that’s the case, then probably it’s worth the investment. If it’s a pure dollars and cents decision for you, then maybe it’s not what you need to go do. It’s a very philosophical conversation to have around education and the cost and the amount of student loan debt that’s out there. It’s heavy.

I get the sense that as a person, a woman, or a daughter, there’s a part of you that feels like, “The student debt, you take it out and you pay it,” but as a financial advisor with a crystal ball into the future, you see the burden that debt places on the individual and then by association, society. I wonder about the people like your dad that paid off his kids’ loans. He sacrificed everything. I made a choice. It was a very easy college choice for me. I can remember laying all the acceptances out on my mother’s kitchen table, adding up the all-in number which did not include spring break or Starbucks. Whoever gave me the most money won and hence began my illustrious career at NYU. If you’re going to be a teacher or a nurse, I don’t know if it matters where you go to school.

At the end of the day, there probably are people out there that care where you go to school, but I am also very much of the mindset that life experience and work ethic will outpace any education there is. I would rather hire somebody that doesn’t know anything about the job that I’m hiring for, but they are an incredibly hard worker and they’re aligned with our values. That person I can teach to be successful. I don’t care how fancy your degree is.

TTD 27 | Money Relationship
Money Relationship: Life experience and work ethic will outpace any kind of education that there is. Some people would rather hire somebody that doesn’t know anything about the job, but they are hardworking and aligned with their values.

 

If you’re not aligned with our values and you don’t have a work ethic, it’s going to be hard for you to be a good culture add within our organization. That’s probably across the board with any industry. My sister’s education and the student loans that she graduated with, my parents paid it off, but she went on to do professional ballet and she pursued her career. I can’t remember what her major was. I think she majored in ballet with a minor or a second emphasis in Nutrition or something like that. Other than the fact that Indiana University had the best ballet school program in the country, did she need that college education? I don’t know.

In Florida, it would have been much less expensive for your parents but you don’t want to curtail your kid’s dreams.

This goes back to that head and heart decision. It’s easy to say dollars and cents-wise, it was probably a giant waste of their money. She went to Indiana. She did her thing. She graduated and never used her degree again. She’s a beautiful stay-at-home mom expecting her second kid now, but that was her passion and it fulfilled a part of her life for her. The joy that it brought my sister and in return brought my parents for being able to fulfill that for her is maybe priceless.

It’s such an intrinsic fabric of who she is and so many great qualities, but let me get back to you because I want to be respectful of your time. You decided to leave golf and then you went out on your own. You’ll have to give us the reader’s digest version. You went out on your own for nine years and then you decided to join partner with somebody else. You and your sister, those are very much individual sports. I get the flying solo. Why the team up?

I joined the financial services industry in 2008. It was a really great year to get into it. I started with a big box mutual company selling life insurance. I did that for a while. I eventually got into the investment space. I had my own practice for a while and then I decided, I don’t love sales. That’s not my wheelhouse. I love the relationship side of what I did, but I hated the prospecting. I hated having to pick up a phone and cold call people every day.

I got a little bit more into the training, development, and recruiting side of our business with the firm that I was with in Atlanta. I moved back to Orlando in 2015 for my now husband and that’s when I met my business partner Claudio Gambin. I had gone back into the field. I had my own practice again. He and I became friends. My husband and his wife, we all hung out together all the time. He was somebody that I looked up to and respected. He had achieved some tremendous success in business at the time.

He was working with business owners and I was working with business owners. We happened to both have the same niche market that we worked within. One day, he was mentoring me in the business and he had said to me, “My director of operations is leaving and I’m so upset about it. She’s so good, but I’m really trying to see this as an opportunity to grow the organization.” I was pregnant with my second child at the time. I said, “Claudio, I feel like there might be a really good synergy here between the two of us. You are great at sales. I’m great at the operation side of the business. I think that we should partner together.”

He denied me at first and he said, “I don’t want to mix business with pleasure. I love our friendship. I don’t want to ruin that. You’re a good advisor. I don’t want to cut you off at the knees, all this sort of stuff.” After talking it out some more, we realized that we would be a really good fit for each other. He is very much the visionary, super entrepreneurial spirit that comes to me every other day with a new idea. I’m very much the integrator. I love taking the idea and implementing it. We bounce ideas off each other all the time and figure out what’s the right thing for us.

I take that and I go back to my team. I help implement that in the organization. In 2017 or 2018-ish, we formally partnered together. We were still at our former firm and we started visioning what Gambin Financial Group was going to look like. We started realizing that the work that we were doing with our business owner clients, we were struggling to do within the construct of the firm that we were at because they were very life insurance-based. We were doing a lot of other planning and consulting work for clients, but we couldn’t get compensated for any of that work unless they bought a product for us.

We felt this inherent conflict of interest and bias in some of the recommendations we were making. In 2019, we decided to leave and launch our own firms at that time. The last two and a half years have been amazing and difficult, but I’m truly so very thankful for the partnership that I have with him. Golf resonated so deeply with me because I’m an introvert and I like to be alone. I draw my energy from quiet time.

College is not the only path, unless you have to go something super-specialized, like being a doctor.

I could go to the golf course for hours on end, put my AirPods in and be alone and practice by myself. It was me and myself that I relied on for my success and now I have to rely on somebody else and we have to communicate. Now, we have this big team of people. It’s pushed me outside of my comfort zone beyond my normal limits and capacities, but I’ve grown in so many amazing ways over the last two and a half years that I would never have even imagined.

I think that I’m in a position now where I am more fulfilled than I’ve ever been. It’s been a dream come true for us. It was a big, scary leap of faith that we took leaving this world that we were in for about 7, 8, 9 years or something to start our own venture in a brand new space three months before the pandemic went into full swing.

You’ve mentioned you have two children.

My son is about to turn three in 2022. He’s got long hair so he gets called a girl all the time.

What does your husband do?

My husband owns an ATM business. He’s been doing that for many years. It’s an interesting business. He hates it, but he loves the time that it affords him. The freestanding ATM machines that you see at convenience stores and bars and stuff like that all around central Florida, he services them. He makes a good living but doesn’t have to invest a ton of time in it. He’s with the kids a lot during the week, which is great for our family. The clientele that he has to work with is not his favorite. We have some interesting stories at night about the people he’s had to interact with on a daily basis.

When I met him, he had taken me on one of his ATM routes and we pulled up to this really bad part of town in Titusville, Florida in this awful gas station. He came back to the car and I was like, “Do you carry a weapon with you every day?” He’s like, “No.” I was like, “That changes now.” He carries so much cash around with him every single day and he goes to the same accounts. I was like, “All it’s going to take is for someone to pick up on a pattern or a routine with you. I want you to protect yourself.”

My last question is, what’s the last book that you’ve re-read?

I think it was Good to Great.

It’s by Jim Collins.

That was a good one. I tend to alternate between a leadership self-help type of book and some fun book that I enjoy reading. I like nonfiction-type books. I’ve recently read one. It was about the factory workers in the early twenties that worked with radium and a lot of the factories around here. They were being told by their CEOs and the government that the radium was safe, but in fact, it was slowly poisoning them. It was a sad, but fascinating read.

Why Good to Great?

I re-read it because we were at a point in our business when we had launched our own firm where I found us having a lot of conversations about, “We’ve always done it this way.” Claudio and I would sit down.

We were building systems and processes based on how we’d always done it. I felt like I need to be able to have some conversation with him about why we need to completely rethink why and how we do things because we are trying to serve clients now in a different way at a different level. We cannot always do things the way that we’ve done them if we want to achieve the great success that we’ve had. For me, it was just timely.

Tell people how they can find out more about you and your work. Where would you like to send them?

You can follow me along personally on Instagram if you want. I’m @the.band.tee.ceo. I love wearing band tees to work every day. You can follow us @GFGSolutions on Instagram. For any of the ladies reading out there, I launched an initiative within our firm last year called Women in Wealth, where we are helping change the way women think and feel about money. You can also follow us @Women_In_Wealth on Instagram. GFGSolutions.com is our website if you have any questions specifically related to money and business planning.

Thank you so much for your time, Bernadette. That concludes this episode and because I know you love this interview, don’t forget to like, comment, share, and subscribe to this show. Until next time, be well.

 

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About Bernadette Girvin

Bernadette Girvin, a former LPGA Tour player and 10 year veteran in the financial services industry, is passionate about her role as Chief Operating Officer with Gambin Financial Group. In 2019, after 9 years as a solo-entrepreneur and financial advisor managing her own practice, she formally partnered with Claudio Gambin of Gambin Financial Group to open their own office in downtown Orlando.

Bernadette is leading the strategic growth vision of the firm, overseeing financial performance and helping ensure a first-class, exceptional client experience. It is a top priority of hers to always be asking the question, “what can we do better?”. “As a former professional athlete, the competitive side of me is always wondering how we can get better. Whether that’s in the planning we do for our clients to help them achieve financial security, the efficiency and thoroughness of our operational processes or in the growth and development of our staff.”

Bernadette graduated from Ole Miss in 2003 with a B.S. in Psychology while playing on the Women’s Golf Team. After graduating and then playing for 3 years on the LPGA Tour, she joined the financial industry and worked in several different capacities but ultimately fell in love with building out successful teams and helping organizations execute on their strategic vision. “Our Core Values at GFG are Gratitude, Integrity, Loyalty, Personal Growth and Personal Responsibility and we try to make sure these values influence every decision we make.”

Outside of work, Bernadette is a proud mom to her two children, Gates, 7 months, and Presley, 3. She and her husband, Charles (who are both Orlando natives), live in College Park and love their community.

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