How I’m thinking through the move

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I’m moving. I’m 55 years old, and I’m moving from the desert to the beach. Let me tell you why. The only reason I’m able to afford what I’m about to do is my content marketing business — it’s been the most beautiful blessing since my divorce, being able to put my head down and build it. My income comes from Pinterest, blogging, YouTube, affiliate marketing, digital products, coaching, and Substack, and that world gives me a lot of freedom.

Some of you watched me get divorced — build a big business with my husband, get divorced, crash and burn, and start all over in a 700-square-foot apartment with my then 13-year-old daughter. When I got divorced there were no proceeds; I didn’t get anything. A lot of people say I’m only successful because I got money from the divorce, and I just laugh — I got a 13-year-old and no support. I loved my daughter and was very happy raising her. We agreed on joint custody, but it just didn’t pan out that way in the long run, not because I wasn’t open to it, but because there was no support. So I did it on my own.

My whole goal was that she wanted to go to a fancy art school, and I wanted her to have the social experience you get when you go to college — something I never had. I dropped out of high school at 17, got married at 17, had a baby at 21, and then my husband left me, and I had to start over. That’s about where a lot of you picked up, when I got married again. It was a crazy time for us; we had a really tough home life, and all of us basically had to leave the house — so that’s what we did, we all got married.

We built a great big business together — we owned the number one catering company in Las Vegas, and then we sold it. We got into real estate and became the number one real estate agents in all of Las Vegas, because he was an amazing salesperson and I was really good at marketing, which is still what I do today. It was a nice combination. But when we got divorced, the judge basically said, you take your car, you take your car, you take your real estate license, you take your real estate license, have a nice day — and there wasn’t a whole lot beyond that.

So I was starting from the bottom. I still had some real estate referrals, and I’d started a little marketing agency while I was still married, but I wasn’t making enough money to keep at that point. If you’ve ever started a business, you understand this — I was spending more on payroll than I was putting in my own pocket, but it was at least something to build on. When I got into that apartment, though, I got scared. I started job hunting, interviewed, and offers started coming in, and I thought, no way, I can’t do this.

One reason was I couldn’t imagine reporting to somebody, punching a clock, having to be somewhere from a start time to a start time — I’d never really done that except when I was 16 working at Wendy’s and McDonald’s. It just wasn’t something I wanted; I wanted freedom, it’s what I knew. The other reason was there was a ceiling on how much income I could make at a job, and that ceiling wasn’t going to be enough to cover her college, pay off the debt, or get us where we needed to go. So I had a choice — take the job and at least know we’d survive, or believe in myself, believe in my skills, put my head down, and build.

At first, in that tiny 700-square-foot apartment, I kept trying to build the marketing agency. I had my brothers working for me, my daughter, my sister — and it just wasn’t working, because there were many times they were getting paid and I wasn’t, and I felt like I was never a good enough leader for everybody. Eventually I told my brothers the agency was valued at around half a million dollars, and I was either going to sell it or close it — I was so burned out and done, I needed my nervous system to relax. This story is going somewhere, so stay with me.

In that apartment I put my head down and said, I’m going to make it, I’m going to do it. I was blogging a lot back then, so I made my money off blogging, off YouTube — which I still do today — off paid webinars, and off coaching. A lot of people say she only makes money because she’s a coach, and I’m not that person. I actually have three major income buckets that are each six figures on their own: coaching, publishing, and affiliate marketing.

By publishing, I mean my own content — my Substack subscribers, my YouTube channel, my blogs, the PDFs I sell — that’s all part of my publishing company. Coaching is just coaching, my group coaching program. And affiliate marketing is when I promote a product or service that isn’t mine and make money on it — could be software, TikTok Shop, Amazon influencer, the microphone I’m wearing, fashion, makeup, beauty, cat stuff, moving, furniture, whatever it happens to be.

This year I’m on track to make half a million dollars, and I’m 78.2% profitable, with no employees. The majority of what I spend is software, and sometimes investing — I’ll get on an app and start building something new, maybe spend ten grand in AI credit figuring out the systems, but that’s not a regular monthly thing.

So now I’m at the point where I’m looking around and realizing I’ve got this 2,300-square-foot house I don’t use. I have an office I never use because I’m always out here instead. What I’ve found is I love my dining room — there are two big windows right in front of me, the lighting is amazing, my energy is good, I’m out in the open. My office is dark, all heavy furniture and dark bookshelves, and I’m not creative in there — even my cats don’t want to go in there.

I do use my home gym for about an hour a day, and I have a front influencer studio I don’t really use either — I store stuff in there but make almost all my videos out here instead. And I’ve got a bedroom, which I love. So really, I’m only using half the space. I’ve got this big house, nobody’s staying here, nobody’s coming here, I don’t really have visitors, I don’t entertain — it turns out I don’t like to entertain, even though I thought I would.

I wound up with all the costs and the cleaning and the preparing. I was doing a lot with my family in the beginning — my mom, my brother, and his kids, since they live half a mile down the street — but mom’s a vegetarian, the kids all want something different, my brother and I want something different, and it just turns into work. I’ve already raised my family; I don’t know that I want to do that again.

Then I started getting popular in town — made a ton of friends, joined book clubs, went to karaoke bars at night, did all the things. For about 18 months I entertained, I dated, I had girlfriends over, we’d come back here after going out, have pool parties, work out in the pool, I’d serve breakfast to everybody. And it just wasn’t making my soul happy — I was too concerned about everybody’s needs, who’s allergic to the cats, are the cats happy, all of it. So I just stopped.

After dating for 18 months, which was a wild ride at my age — dating is so different today, nobody wants to commit, it’s a crazy world out there — I decided to lock back in. I didn’t want to be out there drinking, out there at all; there were a lot of reasons. My nervous system was completely out of whack, I could not relax, and it took about 18 months after all that before I was finally zen again. So I locked in for about two and a half years. I don’t hardly see my family — everybody says, yeah, but your mom’s there — but we don’t really hang out like that, we’ve never been close that way. I see my little brother more at a business event or when we travel than I do in town.

So I started thinking, what’s left for me here — it’s the desert, and my allergies are going crazy. I’m about to turn 55, and everything has changed. I have insane allergies that seem to get worse every year with the dust, and the heat in Vegas when it’s triple digits — I used to love it, I’m a pool girl, a summer girl — but I don’t like it anymore, it’s too hot.

So I started thinking about all these things. My daughter went to college, and I’m still carrying her college loans — $250,000 worth, including room and board, phones, all of it. Other than that, though, I’ve been debt-free, until I just took my whole family to Alaska, and I’m not even going to tell you how much that cost, because it was a pretty penny. I took them all first class, a big cruise, two rooms with balconies, all the things, and a lot of that went on a credit card. I make great money to live and survive, but when it’s that big a thing I may not have that much cash sitting there, and it goes on a credit card. So I’ve got the college loans and a little debt from traveling this last year — I traveled a lot and did a lot of really cool stuff.

In the five years I’ve owned this house, I’ve accumulated about $300,000 in equity, and I’m realizing this is one of those things I call a divine download. I’m a spiritual person, I believe in signs, intuition, and synchronicities, and I kept getting this instinct that just dropped in out of nowhere. I took some trips this year around water — my first solo trip a couple of years ago was to Santa Barbara, then I’ve been to the LA area several times for TikTok and Google events. My daughter is in LA now, so I’ll visit but stay at a beach place, because I don’t want to stay in LA — I’ll make a vacation out of it. I recently went to Rancho Palos Verdes, and it was absolutely beautiful, one of my favorite trips — I solo traveled there. I’ve also gone on multiple solo cruises, sometimes with other people. I’ve really learned that this is what I want my life to be.

After my daughter left, I was really grieving, I was hurting, and I didn’t know what my purpose was or what the future would look like. I sat in this house for a year feeling a little hopeless — I still worked hard, but I didn’t know what I was doing it for anymore. I was doing it to put her through college; that’s honestly what kept me going, not for myself, for her.

But after that — and it was only a year ago, she graduated last year — I started thinking, why am I here. Then I’d go on these trips, be around water, the temperature cooler, the allergies gone, and I’d feel better. On the last trip I literally said, can I just live like this, can I just live like I’m on vacation. Do I have millions of dollars? No. Do I have a retirement account and a ton of savings? I don’t. I’ve been an entrepreneur forever, I’ve lost everything more than once, started over more than once, but I’m really good at making money — that’s my strength. I believe in myself, I know what it takes, and I pivot fast.

If a platform changes, I pivot. When Google knocked us out, and we were all getting business from SEO, I pivoted right away — got on TikTok, didn’t even know what it was, and made six figures two years in a row on TikTok Shop. Content marketing is my thing, and there’s always going to be another platform, always something else to teach. YouTube has been the one solid constant the entire time, and blogging — even though it isn’t the same as it was — just changes. Now it’s kind of on Substack, which is a really cool new place to be, and I’m still blogging on my WordPress websites, driving traffic through Pinterest, making ad revenue, selling digital products, and doing affiliate marketing.

I believe in what I can do, and I’ve started investing. It’s okay if it’s not always $500,000 a year — I’d love to make my first million in a year, I still would like to do that. When I was married, we did it with our catering company, but we had all these employees, so it wasn’t ours to keep. I’d like to do it with my creator business, and I’m hoping next year or the year after, based on how growth goes. But I’m okay even if it goes backwards.

So this is what I’m doing. I’m going to sell this house and take the $300,000 out of it — hopefully, based on my neighbor’s sale, I should get at least that, minus commissions. I’m a real estate agent, but I’m going to have my brother help sell it, because you really don’t want to represent yourself in a transaction like that. And this is going to sound crazy — remember, I’m in the desert — I’m going to go to California.

I’ve decided I’m not going to buy anything. I’ve got a daughter in LA and a brother in Huntington Beach, so I’m going to go for one year — the lease is only about nine or ten months, I’ll sign one lease, and furnish the place with furniture I like but that I can easily walk away from — nothing sentimental, not going to Walmart, but nothing too precious either. My plan is that at the end of that year, if the income changes and it doesn’t make sense to stay in an expensive beach city, I’ll look at it as though I went on vacation for a year.

This place has multiple pools, tennis courts, pickleball, massage rooms, concierge, a restaurant on the premises, and it’s right next to shopping and dining. I’ve always told my brothers and sister and mom that I want to live where everything’s right outside my door — where I can walk to the doctor, the dentist, take my cats to the vet. I have that here in the desert, pretty much, but it’s too hot to walk — it’s 112 today — and it seems like the older I get, the harder that is. I want it right outside my door, and I want 65 to 80 degree weather at this age; that would make me really happy.

I’m sharing this journey with you, which I don’t normally do on this channel — this channel is normally just how to do digital marketing — but I think it’s time for a bit more of a pivot, because we’re in this world of AI, and people want real, they want people they can relate to, they want honesty, they want you to be authentic. That’s how I feel anyway. So I’m showing up as a human saying, okay, this stuff really does fund my life, here’s how it’s going to fund my life, and if you want to learn more about how to do it, come join me at Ballen Academy and I’ll teach you how.

But here’s the real deal — this is what I’m doing. A lot of people say don’t sell your house, they’re hard to get, you’ve got a great interest rate, you might never get a house again. I don’t ever want a house again. I’m a single woman, and it’s so frustrating when the water heater floods my garage, which already happened once in five years, or the dishwasher goes down and has to be replaced, which it already did in five years.

I put somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 into my backyard — all the trees died, we had such a hot summer it killed everything, all the palms, all the trees — so I had to get a landscaper out there, and I have to keep getting a landscaper out constantly. Even in the desert the backyard’s always a mess, weeds everywhere, leaves from the Japanese blueberry tree all over. I built a big, beautiful pool that I thought people would be in all the time, and it turns out it’s just me — and now I don’t even want to be out there, because it’s too hot, literally too hot to swim without getting baked by the sun.

I have to pay the pool guy, the bug guy, I had to get my air conditioner fixed twice, and I’m thinking, this is five years in — what’s it going to be like at ten, at fifteen? I don’t want to take care of all that. I also have to say there was comfort in that little apartment I was living in — I felt so cozy and safe. When it’s small, it’s cozy, you’ve got this little nest. When it’s big, it’s not quite the same.

My house isn’t a mansion, but I’ve got a living room with a couch that seats like ten people, and I’m constantly looking at an empty couch. I’ve got a beautiful six-seater table that nobody’s sitting at, and it’s a constant reminder that I built a house for people who aren’t here, and it’s time for that to change. I’m not lonely, by the way, not even a little bit — but it’s a reminder.

Now, I could go to California, stay a year, and decide this isn’t for me — forget it, I still own a property here and still have a business here, so it’s more like taking a vacation. I don’t even know if I’ll transfer everything over; I may not even forward the mail. I still have my mom and brother here, so I might work part-time here, part-time there, since I still have my real estate license here — we’ll see what that looks like.

But at the end of the year, if I say California isn’t for me, if I can’t do the traffic, whatever it is — even though I’ll probably be in a little bubble not leaving my place much — I will be driving to LA to visit my daughter, driving to Huntington Beach to visit my brother, driving to other little areas sometimes. And if I say I can’t do it, then I won’t do it. That’s the beauty of being untethered and unobligated.

People will still say after hearing all this, gosh Lori, you should keep that house — and I’m like, are you not listening, you missed the point. The point is I don’t want to be attached, I don’t want to be burdened, and I want the debt paid off, because if I sell this house and take all the equity, I start over debt-free. How many chances do you get in your lifetime to start over debt-free?

Her college loans will be paid — done, behind me. Everything I worked for, done, behind me. All that cash comes back to me, and then I can invest more. I invest now, but I can invest more, and my intention is to really get good at investing besides physical real estate — meaning I don’t want to hold real estate myself, though I might still invest in it. I do own another property in Vegas that’s technically my mom’s house, but I own it. There will be things here, but I just don’t want that kind of tether anymore.

Down the road, could I buy a little low-maintenance condo — maybe something in Palos Verdes, where you can buy one of their casitas, and it gets rented out as a short-term rental most of the year while you stay there no more than a certain number of nights? It’s not a timeshare, because you own it, but the hotel manages it for you, so you get income back but you also get to vacation there. What if I owned a few of those — one place for a while, another place for a while, maybe Florida since I love cruises? What a beautiful thing, to be able to dream and go explore.

But if I picture people having to drag that house out of my hands as I’m being taken to the cemetery, because I got a great interest rate — hell no, I’m not going to be chained because I got a good deal on something. I want to live my life. At 55 years old, I am not afraid of not having enough time left. I’m afraid of wasting the time I have left.

I want to live my life, I want to go see, go do, go experience these things, and sitting here in the desert in triple digits by myself, not going anywhere, not dating, not doing anything, is not what I want the rest of my life to look like. And to be clear, I don’t want to date — that’s not what I meant. I just meant I’m alone, and I want more out of life. So I’m going to go play, I’m going to go experiment. Let me know what questions you have down there, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.