Welcome to this post, “The Future of Teen Financial Freedom”
I have to admit, I never thought I would be writing this post. After I wrote my, “Farewell Teen Financial Freedom” post, I didn’t really see myself writing another blog. Maybe something here or there if I ever got the inspiration, but I never thought I would be writing this.
What Happened to Teen Financial Freedom?
I feel like there is a lot to catch you up on since the last blog posts went out almost a year ago. When I wrote my farewell post, I mentioned I would be stepping away from Teen Financial Freedom to go on a 6-month mission trip to the Himalayas. I wasn’t sure what my involvement with Teen Financial Freedom would be upon my return. For the time being, the plan was for the TFF leadership to transition to Terry, and for the team to continue on posting.
However, things started to change. Upon me announcing my leave to the team, I think some of the momentum started to fade. One by one, each of our team members decided that it might be right to step away from Teen Financial Freedom. I’m not trying to condemn any of them, as they all had good reasons, and all good things come to an end.
The reality was that our team of 6 teens quickly dwindled down to 1. That one was my right-hand-man, Terry, who we had equipped to take over TFF because of my absence. Terry was around from the beginning pretty much, was well-versed in many of the aspects of TFF, and was well-equipped to take things over.
The only problem was that it’s hard to do the things that 6 people were doing when you only have 1 person. Teen Financial Freedom quickly grew to a platform across a blog, podcast, and several social media accounts. Each of these areas were divided amongst our 6 team members, so no one person had too much to do. That changed when Terry suddenly became in charge of all of it.
Things didn’t go so hot for him. Right after most of us left, he had a busy summer, spending most of it traveling. That left a few month gap from when our last content had come out. He had plans to get back to it, but his motivation to do so wasn’t really there. I want to make it clear I’m not blaming him in any way. I myself didn’t really ever see myself blogging on TFF for more than a few months until the first team member reached out to me and offered to help.
What made TFF work was the fact that we had a whole team of teens dedicated to producing content, not just one. We all had strengths that were utilized and were able to help each other make up for our weaknesses. When one person was lacking inspiration, motivation, or consistency, the others were there to pick up the slack. However, when that team disappeared, so did our content production.
What was left was almost a year of no content, no updates, and no word from us. For that, we apologize. It was never our intention to completely go dark on our community. We’ve built something special here, and we don’t want to take away from that. Stay tuned for more of the future of Teen Financial Freedom at the end of the post, but for now, I’d like to give each member a chance to reflect on their time at TFF.
What Happened To Each Of The Team Members At Teen Financial Freedom?
Jacob
I’ll kick things off as the group’s founder and leader. As mentioned, I recently returned from a 6-month mission trip to the Himalayas which was amazing. It really was the adventure of a lifetime and really shifted my perspective on what’s important in life. I still have a passion for business and finance, but I now want to integrate that in the mission field somehow. However, I don’t see myself continuing with TFF.
I started TFF back in 2019 during a self-improvement stage of my life where I was looking to try something new. I had always considered starting a blog, and I didn’t want to regret never doing it. So, I picked a topic I loved (finance), bought the domain, and wrote my first blog post. I honestly never expected to make it more than a few months and was just looking for a way to make money online.
However, that all changed when someone named Joshua reached out to me and offered to help me with the blog. Joshua was the first of many other highly motivated, talented, and amazing teens that joined me including Terry, Amanda, Dani, Ian, Chase, and Ruby. Suddenly this went from a personal blog to a platform run by a group of teens I was leading!
Through the team we got to expand from just the blog to several social media platforms and even a podcast. A company called BetterWealth offered to sponsor and publish a podcast for us if we did all the pre-production and recording work. The podcast quickly became my favorite part of Teen Financial Freedom. It’s one thing to write about a subject you’re passionate about, but it’s a whole other thing to talk about it!
I could look at so many different aspects of Teen Financial Freedom and see so much significant growth:
- I learned technical skills about setting up, designing, and maintaining a website. I ended up using these skills to freelance on a website called Fiverr.
- I made so many cool connections with our team, BetterWealth, and the countless others we came in contact with. I’m confident that the network I made through this will carry forward for the rest of my life.
- I grew so much in my people skills, communication, and confidence. Having a podcast that forces you to speak on the fly really helps with this.
- My ability to run a business, lead a team, and take on this endeavor grew tremendously. I’m confident these skills will pay off in the future.
- Perhaps what I learned the most about was the topic of finance. The subject has always been a passion of mine, but yet I still learned so much more about, and that knowledge will be very beneficial in my own financial journey.
The thing I feel the most grateful for was the community that was established around Teen Financial Freedom. Yes we had our team of 6, and all those at BetterWealth, but we also have all of you. You were the reason that we kept doing this. We said it from the beginning, but if all of this impacted just one person, it would be worth it.
So with that said, I have absolutely no regrets with starting Teen Financial Freedom. This has been one of the most impactful experiences of my life that I will always look back on very fondly. I want to leave you with the encouragement to pursue your dreams, do the things you’ve always wanted, and leave this life with no regrets.
Terry
Hey guys! Here’s a quick update from my end about what I’ve been up to in the last year-ish, reflections on my time at TFF, and any other thoughts that might pop up. 🙂
I joined TFF in the fall of 2019 after I wrote a few guest posts for Jacob and wanted to continue contributing. I had been interested in content creation for years, and even launched my first blog when I was 13 years old, which was all about investing as a teen (though, unfortunately, it was short-lived… it’s a long but kinda funny story lol). When I joined TFF I never would have expected what was in store for us, from the roughly three-year runtime to the incredible podcasting opportunity offered by BetterWealth, to all the connections I made with my team and our readers.
TFF helped me build technical skills such as learning how to launch and run a website, producing different kinds of content (written, audio, etc.), and what productive meetings looked like (we had a lot of them at TFF!). But I think what impacted me the most was the harder-to-notice, subtle growth in my soft skills. Podcasting improved my speaking skills and confidence; a plethora of failures led me to seek feedback from my team members and taught me how to learn from my mistakes; and a year-long accountability system gave me an incredible amount of insight about what makes me tick and how to work effectively. For all of those things, I’m incredibly grateful. Thank you to the team I worked with, thank you to Caleb and BetterWealth, and thank you to you guys for checking out our content!
The last year or so has been a blur. In the spring of 2022 when TFF was being handed off to me it seemed like I had an empty year ahead and nothing to do but grind on a few small businesses at home (TFF being one of them). I think May was when the transition happened and Jacob handed everything off to me. June passed by fairly uneventfully, but once July hit… the rest of my summer break evaporated. I ended up traveling to Puerto Rico, Denver, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Cincinnati in about the span of a month and a half (excluding PR). All my trips were incredible experiences, and while I don’t want to make excuses, I do think it hurt any momentum I had been trying to build up previously.
Once school started in August I tried to pick up where I had left off. I recorded a few podcasts, but I never ended up posting them. By the time December rolled around, it was becoming painfully obvious that I needed to make a decision about my commitment to TFF. My head was telling me not to give up on it and to take advantage of the opportunity… but my actions were saying something completely different. This is the part where I could easily dive into a 500+ word analysis about that disconnect, but this probably isn’t the place for that. The gist of it is that I eventually decided to communicate my struggles to Jacob and Caleb (from BetterWealth) and to let go. Frankly, I’m still not 100% satisfied with the decision, but it is what it is. Between school, several hobbies (learning Chinese, working out, making friends at college), and my other two businesses, it’s difficult to manage everything well. And TFF was consistently getting my scraps and ending up at the bottom of my to-do list.
So, guys, I apologize for that. I had (and still do have) a lot of aspirations for TFF. It’s a bummer that they didn’t pan out through me in the last year as I hoped. I definitely let you guys down, and I’m sorry. But let me be clear — this isn’t a pity party! I’m glad I had the opportunity, and I’m still incredibly grateful for all the time I did have at TFF. It’s important for me to take ownership when I screw up, and this is also a great learning opportunity for me. I’ve learned a lot from what I struggled with at TFF that is going to help me tremendously in my future endeavors.
All of that said, you’ll see at the bottom of this article that there is an opportunity for the right person to reach out to us and help us reboot TFF. Maybe I’ll come back to TFF with renewed interest in a year or two, with or without a new team. I’m not really sure. Either way, at the end of the day, at least I know I won’t have the regret of not giving TFF a shot… and that seems like at least one small win. 🙂
Dani
Hey! It’s been a while since I last wrote for Teen Financial Freedom, and as I’m writing this last section, all the memories of writing a blog are rushing back into my head. I remember the excitement of coming up with a great new topic to write about, and the pride and relief of typing out the last words and scheduling it.
Ever since I left Teen Financial Freedom, I started a new brand, called Productivity Key. You can follow @productivitykey on Instagram and TikTok! My goal for this brand is to help teenagers become more productive, gain self-discipline, and improve their mindset. Working at Teen Financial Freedom inspired me to create this new account, and if it weren’t for TFF, I probably would have never even thought of making a social media account. All the blogs I’ve written for TFF has helped me learn more about how I want to live a productive, healthy, and fulfilling lifestyle, and I hope to share on all the knowledge I’ve learned through Productivity Key!
I will forever be thankful for the team at Teen Financial Freedom for giving me the confidence and knowledge that I will continuously use all throughout my life. TFF has been the seeds that I needed to discover my true purpose and meaning in life. I promise you, this is not an exaggeration. This one opportunity that I took at Teen Financial Freedom has opened so many doors for me that I will always be on the lookout for.
I’d say the top skill that I left TFF is with is consistency. Almost having written one blog a week for about 2 years, I learned the power of staying consistent and why it’s so important. There were many weeks where I didn’t feel like writing a blog, but I pushed through and wrote one anyway. Although they may not have been of the highest quality, I still showed up for myself and the values that I believe in.
If there’s one last piece of advice I can give on this website, it’s to create opportunities for yourself starting from a young age. If you’re in middle school or in your first year of high school, now is the perfect time to join something or create something for yourself! You are never too young to do anything. Secondly, stay consistent and show up for yourself, whether this means just doing something small.
Alright, that’s it for me! If you want to continue receiving advice about productivity, be sure to follow @productivitykey! I wish you all the best for your future endeavors and journeys!
Ian
I joined TFF about a year and a half ago, all hyped up on Graham Stephen or Meet Kevin videos (I still have them on in the background). TFF has the brilliant mission of teens mentoring teens to financial freedom, and learning from our mistakes.
I joined the team as the podcast manager as I have previously managed other podcasts. My duties was to schedule Terry and Jacob’s interviews, guests, podcast outreach, editing, and the publishing of episodes.
Both were amazing bosses, mentors, and friends. Despite the team going our own ways, we remain great friends and will invite each other to our mansion warming parties once we reach net worth’s of $100 million.
I am sad to leave such a wonderful team but we all mutually agreed our lives are heading in new, exciting paths. Personally, I just turned 17 and accomplished a net worth of $25K. I am prepping to study for my real estate license in California and looking into getting a financial coach certification. I enrolled in dual credits with my local community college to speed up my business degree while lowering the costs of my education.
Wherever in life you may go, I hope we cross paths professionally and financially.
Ruby
I joined TFF while looking for graphic design work opportunities, and when I came across TFF on Instagram I really wanted to work with a business that directly aligned with my own personal values. At the time I discovered TFF I was at the peak of my exploration in personal finance and so the TFF mission really stuck with me. I noticed that web design might need some help, and I was excited to have a graphic design project related to something I was passionate about. I ended up joining the team and helping out with socials, which allowed me to help share valuable financial content with other curious teens.
I’m currently still running my start-up clothing brand, B.D.F.O. (Bold.Determined.Fierce.Outstanding.), working as a barista and freelance graphic designer. I just finished my basketball season and closed out my track season as well! I’m extremely excited to attend Northeastern University at Boston Campus with a major in Business: Entrepreneurship and Marketing this fall.
Thank you all for being a part of the TFF community!
The Future of Teen Financial Freedom
Now if you read all of that and are thinking, “that sounds awesome”, we have an opportunity for you. While all of us have stepped away from TFF, we don’t want it to end. We plan on keeping the website, podcast, and other content up for as long as possible. We’re prepared to pay the hosting costs indefinitely as a way of saying thank you to this community and everything we learned.
While we don’t have any intentions of posting content again on Teen Financial Freedom anytime soon, we want to leave it open for you. This is a community of people, not just based around one group of teenagers. We want to leave it open for teenagers who have the same vision as us to continue TFF. We’re not quite sure what this looks like, except that it would be a revival/resurrection of Teen Financial Freedom in some capacity.
If you have any interest in that, or would like to discuss what this could look like, please reach out to us. You can find our contact information here. Or alternatively if that doesn’t work out, please contact BetterWealth, by finding their contact section on BetterWealth.com. We would love to hear from you and discuss the future of Teen Financial Freedom!
The Takeaway
That’s all we have for this one. I hope you enjoyed reading about what happened, our own personal reflections, and the future of Teen Financial Freedom. Really the last thing I want to say is THANK YOU! None of this would have been possible without you reading, listening, or otherwise somehow partaking in this community. We will forever be appreciative of what Teen Financial Freedom has been and will look forward to what the future has to offer. Until then, and for one final time, best of luck with wherever your financial freedom journey takes you!