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Words By Tara Wagner

From Welfare to Millionaire: What I Did To Build From Rock Bottom

YT Thumb - Dec 2024 Real Talk I got sick

I went from welfare to multi-millionaire, like most people will: Over time, not overnight. I want to share the steps I took and the mistakes I made in hopes it encourages you and maybe even helps you do it faster, but first, I want to explain just how many cards I had stacked against me, so that you can see that if I can do this, big things are possible for you too. It’s not gonna be easy…but neither is staying where you are. 

My back story:

I was born into a rather tumultuous family. Fighting, abuse, and barely getting by were the norm. And being the youngest for most of that, I was often the invisible girl. When my parents divorced when I was 7, my mom found herself below the poverty line, working 3 jobs to survive with me and two teenagers. She was burned out, they were acting out, and I was often left to fend for myself. While I learned hard work and independence, I was also lonely enough that by the time I was 14, I started seeking a sense of belonging and recognition from some pretty unhealthy places. 

At 14 I was dating a 21 year old. 

Shortly after that, I dropped out of high school.

At 15 I had my first pregnancy and a miscarriage a few months later. 

I continued to sleep around and started doing drugs. 

The depression started to settle in around that time with 3 attempts to take my life between the ages of 15 and 20. 

At 16 I met a guy in just as much pain as me, who helped me learn to handle it with harder drugs. 

Together, we spent 3 months high on meth in an apartment his mother had rented for him, watching “That 70’s Show”, and cleaning the floor with a toothbrush. By some miracle, right before I reached the point of no return, our drug sources dried up, so we did what any rational 16 year old coming off meth would do…we ran 3 states away. Instead of finding a happily ever after, we spent a month crashing with a complete stranger who found us at the bus stop and took us in, dropping acid or smoking pot every day and trying to figure out how to get a job as a runaway. 

When we came to our senses and went back home, I was pregnant again. From about 4 months pregnant until our son was 4 months old, my boyfriend got locked up, so once again I felt alone. When he was released, I quickly moved in with him, hoping again for that happily ever after, but this time the relationship turned abusive. 

So here I was, 18 years old, on welfare, a high school drop out, major depression, a newborn son, and being thrown across the room. I can’t tell you what made me finally wake up. I just remember looking around my life and thinking I don’t know what I want, I don’t even know what’s possible for me, but I sure as fuck don’t want this. I knew the path I was on. I had seen my mom go down it, and my older sister was currently on it, and although I didn’t know what “more” or “better” looked like, I knew I wanted to find out. 

And this was Step One: Making a choice that carries so much conviction, it forces you to move forward.

I made a choice that I was going to figure it out. That I would not be a victim to my circumstances or my past. I would not be a damn statistic. 

You can’t move forward without wholeheartedly choosing to. It all starts with that choice. But HOW you make that choice makes or breaks it. It’s not enough to just say you choose it. What I’ve learned in the decades since then, working with clients or talking with friends, is that the emotion behind your choice will dictate whether you stick to it.

So my best piece of advice would be to get fucking mad. Give yourself a chunk of time to think about, write about, talk about, make a list of all the things you DO NOT WANT, and WHY you don’t want them. And then rant and rave about it. Get pissed. And in that anger, make a promise to yourself that you will not be the victim anymore. That level of emotion will create so much conviction that when you find yourself on the wrong track – and you will – you’ll feel compelled to course correct and get back on the right one faster. 

Step 2 is to start considering the opposite of what you’ve always done.

Einstein was quoted as saying “you can’t fix a problem with the same thinking that created it”. At 18, I looked around my life and although I had no idea what I wanted, I just started saying “what’s the opposite of this”? The opposite of being a high school dropout is getting my GED, so I studied my ass off for 2 weeks and passed it. When I realized all my boyfriends had been the same person, I started dating someone who wasn’t my type. The opposite of being unemployed was getting a job, any job. When I realized my friendships weren’t healthy for me, the opposite of that was making new friends.

In 9 months, I turned my life around and put myself on a radically different track. I removed nearly every negative influence, or choice, and replaced them with better ones. I was still depressed, I was still on welfare, I was still barely getting by, but now I was starting to feel a sense of control and empowerment. I was developing self-discipline and could feel proud of myself. And that got me excited. And that excitement kept me going.

You won’t get out of the life you’re in without making some radical choices to leave it behind. Choices you may not want to make. Choices that are hard or heartbreaking. You won’t like it when you do it, but you won’t regret it when it’s done.

Step 3 is to choose your life partner carefully.

I mentioned I started dating guys who weren’t my type. Because obviously my type wasn’t healthy for me. And within those first 9 months I met my husband. We’ve been together almost 25 years now, and when I look through the lens of my “welfare to millionaire” journey, my decision to marry him was a big part of my success.

This is something a lot of people don’t talk about, but if you don’t have a partner who shares your values, or at least complements them, it’s going to add more friction to your path. I loved my husband when I married him, but that’s not WHY I married him. I married him because I knew we’d make a good life together, because we had the same definition of what a good life was, and because we could support one another along the way.

Now I want to say, my husband is not as driven or as motivated as I am. And if he was, perhaps we would’ve moved faster. But I think it’s a good thing we didn’t. Two driven people can often miss out on the other areas of life. They can be so focused on the goal, they lose sight of the why. My husband kept us grounded. Where my values for growth kept us moving forward, his values for stability and a simple life kept us healthy.

So my advice to anyone single would be to date based on shared values and a life vision. And for anyone in a committed relationship now, start having conversations on values and life vision to bring you into alignment. Because how far or how fast you go, will be determined greatly by who’s going with you.

Step 4 is to start developing skills that pay the bills. 

You can’t radically change your life without radically new skills. Hard skills, like job skills, and soft skills, like communication. 

Within just a few months of crumby $7 an hour jobs, I realized they weren’t gonna cut it, and got myself into a trade school. I knew I needed skills, I heard massage paid an average of $60 an hour, the schooling was under $10k, and I liked that math. 

If you want the fastest way to make money, I’m telling you this as an accredited small business consultant…start with a trade. They pay well, they often come with on the job training or the schooling is 10x less expensive than traditional education, and you can turn all that into your business when you’re ready.

You need to remember this: it’s very difficult to become financially independent, when you are financially dependent on what some job can or is willing to pay you. You may not be able to jump right into starting your own business, but at least put yourself on that path. Because it has been the most consistent path to creating wealth that anyone has found.

This step is not a one and done though. Gaining skills needs to become a lifelong habit of asking yourself, “what can I improve to move me forward” and fill your free time with books, podcasts, videos, courses, mentoring, communities that will help you learn and keep you immersed in those skills. Learning is earning, as long as you’re learning the right stuff.

Step 5 is to take risks…but calculated ones.

I started taking massage clients while I was still in school but then worked for chiropractors or other companies after I graduated. I never thought of going full time for myself because it felt too risky. Then I met another massage therapist who worked for herself, with just a small ad in the phone book. She would call me to cover her overflow 4-5x a week. Then one day she told me she wouldn’t need me anymore. She was pregnant and they decided she wouldn’t work. She was cancelling her ad and I was gonna lose my revenue source, unless I took a risk and got my own ad.

At 20 years old, this terrified me. I had to commit to 6 months, and each month was as much as my rent. I’d also just bought my first car, so I was looking at that new payment, plus insurance. My history told me money was scarce, good things don’t last and the other shoe would drop. But if there is one thing I’ve learned over the past couple decades is that whatever I’m terrified to do is almost always the exact thing I should be doing. So I calculated the numbers and figured out how many clients I’d need to see in one month to cover all of this and the worst case scenario showed me it was doable. So I took the risk and from then on out, I have only ever worked for myself.

This actually leads me to a common mistake though: Don’t hold onto the first level of success you get for fear you’ll lose it. Once I had a certain level of success with those ads, I never scaled my marketing to get more calls. It seems stupid now looking at the data, but I was afraid of losing what little success I had by taking on a bigger marketing expense, even if it was almost guaranteed to lead to more success. My fear of going backward kept me from going forward. I tried to scale the business but I tried to do it the safest way possible with no scary investments, and it came at the expense of everything. After 8 years of grinding unnecessarily, I burned out so badly that I had made myself sick and I sold the business for a measly $1000 just so I could more quickly tuck my tail and hide.

The lesson here is this: 

If you have a history filled with losses, your brain is programmed to avoid more. It makes things feel scary in an effort to keep you safe. But only by doing something new can you get something new. So don’t be stupid, by any means. But remember that your feelings aren’t the facts…do the calculations, create a backup plan so you have a sense of security, and then take some risks. 

In the words of Denis Waitley “There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.”

Step 6 is to change your identity…and this really should be started from the get-go.

My identity at the beginning of this was that of a teen mom, with a rough background, no education, and no clue. I had messed up teeth and cheap clothes and for a while an old beat up truck whose windows would shimmy down while I drove and whose bumper was tied on with a bungy cord. People judged me for being young, being a teen mom, being poor, being a woman. 

But if I had allowed that to be my identity I wouldn’t have gotten ahead. I couldn’t change my circumstances, but I could change my demeanor. I might have been poor but I wasn’t gonna be white trash. I might have no idea what I was doing, but I was gonna figure it out. And I might run into people who didn’t believe in me or even want me to succeed, but I wasn’t gonna waste my time on what they thought. I was gonna find a way.

I don’t believe in “fake it til you make it”…I think it’s “practice til you perfect it”. 

No one else could decide who I was or what I could do, but me. And I decided I was an overcomer. I was a success story, the underdog that people would want to root for. So I acted the part. I was mature, professional, thoughtful, well spoken. I couldn’t afford massage scrubs, so I found an all black outfit that looked presentable. I practiced projecting my voice and confident body language. I practiced phrases and greetings while I drove to a client’s house. I eventually got my teeth fixed, and… I won over the people who judged me, or I passed them by. I practiced and put into place a new identity of me, the best version of me. And I didn’t realize it at the time but I was rewiring my brain as I did.

I teach this in my Breakthrough Boss course now with all the science behind it but here it is in a nutshell: what you physically, mentally and emotionally practice, eventually becomes your reality. I don’t mean everything outside of you changes. I mean you change. You become someone new, someone who makes different choices or carries themselves in a new way. Someone who thinks and acts and reacts differently. And because of that, people treat you differently, and you get new opportunities, and you’re able to navigate tough situations better than before, and eventually YOU change everything outside of you. 

And all these internal and external changes…they add up. They snowball. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen in all cases. We become what we practice. And what we become changes what we do. And what we do changes what we have.

I’m not the 16 year old meth-head I once was. That girl could never have created all this, couldn’t even fathom it. I had to grow and that process wasn’t fast or easy. In fact, it was painful. I had to look at all my traumas and do the work to heal them. I had to destroy that old identity and that’s excruciating. And that pain almost stopped me from continuing. 

But there’s a quote I found around that time that helped me understand it. It goes, “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” (Anatole France)

I would have days where it felt so hard, and there was so much grief and doubt that would come up, and I would question if that meant I was on the wrong track. And when that happened, I would read that quote and I would think about a seed, and how it has to basically destroy itself to become its full potential. 

I think a lot of times we’re told money changes us, or people see us growing and it makes them uncomfortable so they accuse us of changing. But change is the natural order of things. We’re supposed to change. And as long as you’re changing in alignment with your values, fuck what anyone else thinks. At the end of your life, you’re gonna have to be content with your choices. 

And this is another mistake I made and that I’d tell you to watch out for…As much as I wanted to become my best self, too much of it was focused on doing it for approval from others, and not for myself. At first, I wanted to rise up from poverty and earn others respect. But as I continued to grow or even outgrow, I started becoming afraid. As I become more successful, would others reject me, judge me, take advantage of me? It took me way too long to realize that people will think poorly of you if you’re rich or poor. They will see you how their own belief system tells them to see you and you have no control of that. So if you’re gonna be judged one way or another, which way at least aligns with your goals and values and the vision you have for your life? There will always be humans ready to hold you back…don’t let your own fears be one of them.

Ask yourself, who do YOU want to be, who is your best self in THESE circumstances you’re currently in, and how do they show up? What goals align with your values and vision? What actions align and will take you there? Then practice those things. Build that identity, your own identity, for you and no one else. 

Step 7 is to create a map to make more money. 

Like I said before, it’s hard to become financially independent when you’re financially dependent on what someone else can or will pay you. You need to take this into your own hands. 

This could mean making a plan to gain more skills to earn a raise, or to get into a better paying job. It could mean starting a side hustle. Or in my case, it was starting my own businesses. 

Just whatever you do, don’t listen to the bullshit advice to save your way to success. You can only cut expenses so far. The goal is not to live like we’re poor in hopes of one day being rich. The goal is to outearn your damn expenses. And to do this you need to be working on Step 8 at the same time…

Step 8 is to study money like a language.

Because it is one. For most of my life, money, economics, investing, earning strategies…they felt ethereal and out of reach. And so they stayed that way. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30’s that I decided to tackle that. The few years before that had been tough. I had sold my business, the ‘08 recession had put my husband out of a job a year and a half later, we had lost our house, we decided to make the most of it and travel full time in an RV …but we were once again below the poverty line. 

Then I started studying money…and things that made money. I started studying marketing, and sales, and copywriting and practicing what I was learning. And very quickly we were making $250k a year…but we still felt broke.

This is another mistake to avoid – when you start making money, keep close track of it. We had spent so many years living off thrift store clothes and broken hand-me-downs, that we had a few years of just catching up, replacing old stuff, and getting life on track. But we also just blew through it.

And it’s because we weren’t raising our mindset. We were focusing on feeling good about money and changing our thoughts around it, sure. But that’s only one part of a money mindset. The other part is our habits and choices, and especially our skills. That’s the part that locks all those good feelings into place – when you have real proof that you’ve got this, that you’re capable, that you’re no longer poor – financially or mentally.

So we learned budgeting wasn’t just for when you were poor, that an emergency fund was really just a peace of mind fund (and that you need one for your personal life AND your business) and we learned how to start investing. For the next 5 years, we’ve lived off my profits and invested everything my husband made, just to catch up on our investments. But then as my husband went from a freelance position to running his own business, and we had more profit to invest, we had to learn to stop saving and actually start enjoying it.

Which leads me to step 9 – remember your real goal.

Look I’ve been dirt poor and I’ve been wealthy, and I won’t lie. I’d rather be wealthy. But money is not the point. In fact, no one would know we’re multi-millionaires. We drive a 2016 Chevy Volt that we bought used. We live in a nice suburban neighborhood, but it’s not super fancy. We buy most of our clothes on Amazon. We don’t eat out. In fact, most of our wealth is in investments and we live off about $8k a month. Because for us, money isn’t the goal.

In my 20’s my goal was to prove to myself and everyone else that I could.

In my 30’s, my goal was just to have peace of mind that should my health get worse, we would have flexibility. Which the past few years have shown was a smart move. 

In my 40’s, it’s just about having options. It’s about buying the organic food and giving to charities. It’s about having the money to invest in my healthcare – which with my health conditions, is a big expense, but I’m so grateful that it’s one I can afford. It’s about, hopefully, being able to travel again and at least partially retiring by the time we’re 50. It’s about creating something to leave behind for our son or nieces and nephews. 

Basically it’s about living our version of a good life. And if you don’t know what that looks like for you, you could make the mistake of not knowing when to slow down and enjoy the fruits of your labor. This was a mistake we’ve made over and over again – not remembering to enjoy what we had, to slow down and be proud of our progress. You can be content and happy with what you have AND strive for more at the same time. You can. And I highly recommend it. Life is much sweeter and the progress much easier when you’re loving the process and the outcomes all along the way, and maybe even the setbacks. And there will be setbacks. It will be hard. But not as hard as staying where you are.

Someone once told me “there’s a big difference between living 10 years and living the same year 10 times”. Fact is, the next 10 years are gonna be hard for you, just because you’re alive and life is messy and hard…but do you want them to be the same hard year after year, or a hard that leads you to something easier?

These days it seems like I hear half of people saying it’s easy, and that’s bullshit. Nothing worth having comes without effort. But the other half of people say it SHOULD be easy, but it’s just too hard. That there are too many cards stacked against them. That the racism or sexism or injustices of the world are keeping them from having or doing better. That it’s all luck, and hard work isn’t enough. 

And of course all those injustices exist. And yet, it’s still possible for you. Maybe you’re like me and starting 10 miles behind the starting line, or you’ll run into major barriers like I did with my health. Maybe you’ll have some failures and bad luck along the way, and maybe others will outpace you. Maybe you’re gonna have to work harder and maybe it’s gonna take longer. 

But I can tell you what is even harder and takes even longer…waiting for the world to change. I don’t deny it’s a mess out there. But does that mean we need to let it turn us into a mess “in here”? And if you really want to see change in the world, you know what helps? Having money. To support candidates you love or give to organizations that are doing real good. 

I want to see more good people making GOOD money…so we can do more good with it. In fact, I think anyone who is able has a moral imperative to make as much money as they can. Because right now as a society, we’re accepting a narrative that only unethical people are rich, which drives home the belief that money is bad or makes you bad, which makes us avoid doing things that will give us more money, which just concentrates money in the hands of those who may not have morals or ethics or values that will guide how they use that money. But you do. 

So how much money would you need to live a good life, to hire other small businesses and solopreneurs, and support local organic farmers, and give to charities, and invest in technology that will protect our planet? It’s highly unlikely you’ll get there overnight. But it’s highly likely you will get ahead. And if you keep making smart moves, you’ll keep snowballing that success. 

If I can do it with all the cards that were stacked against me, you’re capable of it too, despite any cards stacked against you. But it starts with you making that choice. What do you want? And what are you willing to do to create it? And when you do create it, what will you do with it? I trust it’s something good. You got this.

xoTara

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About the author

Picture of Tara Wagner
Tara Wagner
I’m Tara Wagner, creator of the Breakthrough Boss®. I help small biz owners overcome burnout and create part-time schedules with full-time profits. Not with some new marketing strategy, but with a holistic approach to how you operate. Click here to learn more.
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