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While I share money-making strategies, nothing is "typical", and outcomes are based on each individual. There are no guarantees.
For a while there, I had myself half-convinced I was on my way out.
Not out of work, exactly. Out of relevance. I’d look at the platforms — the fast ones, the young ones, the dance-on-camera ones — and there’d be this quiet little voice going, “This is a young person’s game now, Lori. You had your run.”
I was wrong. Flat wrong. And I want to walk you through exactly where I was wrong, because if you’re over forty, over fifty, and you’ve heard that same voice, I need you to hear what it actually got backwards.
The fear, said out loud
Let me just say the thing most people my age are thinking and won’t admit.
You watch the algorithm reward the twenty-somethings. You watch the trends move faster than you want to move. You catch yourself in a video thumbnail and notice the wrinkles before you notice anything else. And somewhere in there you start telling yourself a story — that the internet moved on, and you’re the one who didn’t get the memo.
I had that story. I’ll own it. I even started a podcast with no camera at one point, partly so I didn’t have to do hair and makeup, partly so I wasn’t going to get judged for the wrinkles. That was me managing the fear instead of questioning it.
And the questioning is the whole thing. Because when I finally questioned it, the fear fell apart.
Where the story was backwards
Here’s what I had upside down.
I thought my age was the liability. It’s the asset. It’s the entire asset.
I found this out almost by accident on Substack. I came onto that platform to teach people how to make money online — that’s what I do, that’s my lane. But the thing that took off had nothing to do with making money. I told a story about getting divorced and starting my whole life over. And it went viral.
Why? Because I have a divorce to tell you about. I have a life that started over. I have decades of “I tried that and it blew up in my face, and here’s what I learned.” A twenty-five-year-old, bless them, cannot fake that. They haven’t lived it yet.
The over-forty crowd, and especially the over-fifty crowd, we are cleaning up in storytelling right now. We’ve got the receipts. We’ve got the range. Everybody wants to connect to somebody who’s actually been through something, and we have been through something. That’s not a consolation prize for getting older. That’s the edge.
I’ve been early before — that’s the part that compounds
Let me give you a concrete one, because I don’t want this to sound like a pep talk floating in the air.
Back in the nineties, I wrote what was, as far as I knew, the very first guide on how to sell a house as a short sale. Nobody was talking about that yet. I saw a thing coming, I sat down, and I wrote the guide. That’s where my whole ebook fluency comes from — I’ve been packaging what I know into something people will pay for since before most of today’s “digital product experts” had email addresses.
Here’s why that matters for you. The instinct to spot a thing early, write it down, and put it out there — that’s not something you learn in a weekend course. That’s a muscle you build over decades of paying attention. I’ve got a brother who laughs at me because I tend to sense things before they happen. It’s not magic. It’s just a lot of years of watching how things move.
So when I tell you your experience is the asset, I’m not being inspirational at you. I’m pointing at a real mechanism. The longer you’ve been paying attention, the faster you can see the next thing — and seeing the next thing early is worth more online than almost anything else.
The wrinkles are working for me
I want to push on the wrinkles thing for a second, because that’s where a lot of women my age get stuck, and I was stuck there too.
Here’s what I figured out. When I show up on camera as exactly what I am — a woman in her fifties, not filtered into oblivion, talking honestly about money and life and starting over — that builds trust faster than any polished thing I could do.
The little self-deprecating moments about aging? The honest “yeah, these are my wrinkles” energy? That’s not me apologizing. That’s me handing you a reason to believe me. People are exhausted by the airbrushed version of everybody. When you’re real about where you are in life, you become the person they actually trust.
So the very thing I was trying to hide became one of the most valuable tools I have. I’ll let you decide what to do with that, but I’m telling you, it’s working.
What “real time” really means at my age
This is why I renamed my whole Substack publication The Real Time Creator.
It’s not just that I share what I’m doing in real time. It’s that I’ve got enough road behind me to know what I’m looking at when I look at it. When I watch my own numbers go backwards, I don’t panic — I’ve seen things go backwards before. When something works, I know why fast, because I’ve got decades of pattern-matching to draw on.
I can spot patterns pretty quickly, and I’ll own that — but that’s not some gift. That’s just mileage. You drive enough miles, you learn the road. The thing the young creators have in energy, we have in judgment. And judgment is what keeps you from burning out chasing every shiny trend that doesn’t fit you.
That’s the real-time advantage of age. Not slower. Wiser about where to put the speed.
What this means for you, concretely
Let me get practical, because a reframe with no action behind it is just a nice feeling.
If you’re over forty and you’ve been sitting on the sidelines because you think you missed your window, here’s what I’d actually do.
Pick the platform that fits how you like to work. If you’d rather write, go write — Substack is wide open for midlife storytelling right now, especially for women. If you’d rather talk, do video, start with one long-form piece and let it feed everything else.
Then mine your own life. The divorce, the career you walked away from, the business that almost didn’t make it, the thing you tried in the nineties before anybody else was trying it. That’s your inventory. The younger creators are buying their stories. You already own yours.
And here’s a concrete way to start, because “mine your life” is easy to nod at and hard to do. Sit down and list ten moments where something went sideways and you came out the other end having learned something. The job that fell through. The move across the country. The relationship that ended. The risk that paid off and the one that didn’t. Don’t make them pretty. Just list them. Each one of those is a story, and each story is a note, and each note is a front door for somebody to walk through and decide they want more of you. You’re not short on content. You’ve got fifty years of it.
And lead with the story, every time. Let the how-to ride inside it. Nobody over fifty needs to out-trend a twenty-two-year-old. We need to out-tell them. That’s a game we win.
The honest caveat
Now, the thing I always say, because it’s true.
There’s no guarantee here. Nobody’s results are the same — not the niche, not the effort, not the timing, not the life experience you’re drawing from. I’m not telling you that your age automatically prints money. I’m telling you that the thing you were told was a disadvantage is, in this particular moment on these particular platforms, an advantage you can actually use. What you do with it is on you. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a hundred factors I can’t see from here.
But I went from quietly believing I was aging out to becoming a Substack bestseller in four months — built on a story only somebody who’s lived my years could tell. So I’m not speaking in theory. I’m speaking from the other side of the fear.
If you want the next step
If the writing path is calling you, and you want to see how I structure the whole thing — the free versus paid, the notes, the paywall — I put all of it in my Substack 101 guide. You can grab it here: https://loriballen.com/product/substack-101/
And if you want to watch a woman in her fifties test, fail, and figure this out in public, come find me at The Real Time Creator on Substack. That’s the whole brand — real time, real age, real numbers, one note at a time.
You didn’t age out. You aged into the exact thing the internet is hungry for right now. Go use it.
Income disclaimer: I’m sharing my own results, which are not typical and not a guarantee of what you’ll earn. There’s no typical income, no guarantee, and no fast track. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a range of individual factors.
