Are you a content creator or part of the sandwich generation struggling to turn your hustle into sustainable income? In this episode of Creator Money, we sit down with Anthony Weaver, host of the "About That Wallet" podcast, to break down the money decisions, business strategies, and real-world tactics you need to grow your creative brand and boost your financial future.

In this value-packed conversation, we explore the unique financial challenges facing the sandwich generation—those juggling kids, aging parents, and their own dreams. Anthony shares his journey as a seasoned podcast creator, how he’s diversified his revenue streams, and the secrets behind building strong, profitable relationships at conferences like FinCon. We also get real about software costs, mentorship, and how to manage business expenses as a solopreneur.

Meet the Guest: Anthony Weaver

Anthony Weaver is the creator and host of the "About That Wallet" podcast, dedicated to empowering the sandwich generation with financial literacy, self-care, and business growth strategies. With five years of podcasting experience, he's helped countless creators and families build better money habits and find balance in their lives.

Key Takeaways

• Financial Struggles of the Sandwich Generation: Anthony reveals how finding “me-money” is tough when you’re supporting both children and parents, and emphasizes the need for self-care and understanding your budget 00:47.
• Monetizing a Podcast: Discover Anthony’s innovative approach—charging authors and content creators a fee to jump his episode queue, which includes bonus AI-powered episode summaries and extra brand promotion 05:13.
• Conference Networking & Brand Deals: Building genuine relationships at industry events like FinCon creates new business opportunities and fuels creator growth 01:56.
• Elevator Pitch Essentials: Anthony’s top tip for crafting a killer elevator pitch: know your audience and articulate your unique value—in under 30 seconds 04:05.
• Managing Creator Business Expenses: Get the rundown on necessary software subscriptions and tips on keeping costs under control by starting lean and learning from mentors 07:56.
• Investment and Savings as a Solopreneur: Prioritize SEP IRAs, reinvest in your business, and stay educated to avoid spinning your wheels 10:54.
• Anthony's Top Personal Finance Rule: Never move in with someone you don’t plan to marry—it can have huge financial consequences! 12:04.

Ready to take your creator business to the next level?

Subscribe to Creator Money for candid conversations with industry insiders and actionable advice on turning content into real cash flow. Don’t miss upcoming episodes—hit that subscribe button and join our money-making creator community!

Creator Money is brought to you by FinCon, the business event for money creators. Want more secrets to creator success? Visit FinConExpo.com and get inspired to grow your influence and your income!

Welcome to Creator Money, turning content into cash flow, where successful creators share the numbers and the decisions behind their businesses. Let's find out who's talking money with us today. PT, who you got?

Anthony, welcome to FinCon and welcome to Creator Money.

Hey, thank you for having me.

Absolutely, man. So for folks who may not be aware of your brand or what all you have going on, uh, tell us about your Yeah, so my name is Anthony Weaver, host of the About That Wallet podcast.

Been doing it for about 5 years now, um, and really focusing on the sandwich generation to help them build strong financial habits.

What are some of the biggest problems that you see sandwich generation folks dealing with when it comes to their finances?

Right now, the biggest problem with their finances is really finding the money. so that they can really enjoy themselves. It's like they always giving to their children. And the first thing that they have is children. And it was like, man, I really wish I was there for my marriage, but they care about the children first. Then they have their parents that they also caretake for. And so really trying to find a way to still find themselves without losing themselves in everybody else's dreams.

Yeah.

And so that's one of the struggles and having that understanding that Money is a driver for all of it to kind of keep the glue. It's really the glue to keep the family together, but they still need to find themselves. And so they don't spend enough time on self-care. And so I want them to find a way to have the ability to still live their lives, you know, and really be them true selves ultimately. So that's the hardest part is really trying to find that money in their budget to make it happen.

I love that. And as someone who's right there in that space, I can really resonate with that. So you're doing great work, man. Oh, thank you. What brings you to a conference like FinCon every year?

Well, ultimately it's really the relationships, getting to know how everybody's doing, and it's almost like a family reunion really. So coming out to see the different brands that are here, and as I'm noticing, I'm also noticing the conversation with the brands are slightly different as they get used to seeing me now, I'm used to seeing them and it's almost like, hey, how's things been? How things been with business? Like, what are you looking for now that maybe I can either help them out with or they can help me out with? And we can do like a quick handshake deal on how to make things work. So coming back all the time is either how I can actually grow my business, but also give back to the community as well, because we can't do this alone. And it's really built on relationships. And without relationships, you don't really have a business.

So I love that perspective and thank you for being here. And you're speaking this year as well, right?

Yes.

What's your topic?

I did a first-timers orientation today.

That's right. Yes.

Yeah. So standing room. So I was actually pretty excited to see that. A lot of new faces, a lot of new people here. I can give a shout out to a couple of people that were in the front row and I commend them because I was like, hey, I just saw you yesterday when you were getting your badge and it was just really cool to see them. showing up and to really take all, take this all in and to be that first face, that first voice that they hear, diverse supporter for them to be here at FinCon. And it seemed like a lot of people really are resonating with it and they love it. So.

Well, I appreciate you doing that.

Yeah, no problem.

And even some of the CPA firm team members, it was their first FinCon. And so I think they tried to go to that session and learn from you guys. So thank you for sharing all that and leading the way and setting a positive tone for the conference.

Oh, it was amazing. Like I had a great time on stage and just kind of seeing all the faces and really realizing that a lot of people don't have their elevator pitches together. So that was interesting.

It's important at an event.

Yes.

Especially as a creator, because there's so many, there's other creators to talk to here, but there's also brands here who may wanna sponsor what you're doing. So yeah, it's important to— so what's your tip for a good elevator pitch for a conference?

So the first thing I'll say, the number one tip is to understand who are you serving? If you don't know who you're serving and know your audience, then how can you actually say that you help somebody do something? So if you're not helping those people, then okay, that already puts you in a nice niche. But then it's like, how are you helping them out in that particular way? That's the second part of your elevator pitch, which is, What do you do? What's so special about you that can put you in that position to actually help those people? And that's the second part of the elevator pitch. So that actually really is just A plus B gives you that solid elevator pitch. So when you start talking to different brands, and it should be under 30 seconds, enough where they can know what you're about, but enough also to kind of bring in that curiosity. So tell me a little bit more about that. And that's kind of what you want to do in your elevator pitch.

That's awesome. Good tip. All right, now we're going to get into a little money talk if you're comfortable doing that.

I'm okay.

You mentioned you have a podcast and that's your primary vehicle for content creation. Does the podcast have sponsorships? Does it produce some revenue?

Yes. So I just started this year diving in different ways of revenue. So one of the things that I started doing is to create a As you can say, like a fast track for some of the content creators or businesses. If they want to have content that they coming out with, a lot of authors usually reach out to me and they have books coming out. So I do charge them if they want to jump my queue. And that has been the highest driver for me outside of the regular deals. Yeah. There's so many people writing books this year for some reason.

So it's like I'm overbooked pretty much most of next year is already done.

Oh, wow.

Already, um, that I have my backlog set up for.

And so it's like, hey, here's my normal schedule.

Yep.

But if you wanna jump to the front of the line, it's a, there's a fee for that and we'll maybe do some extra promotion around what you're doing and—

Yeah, so with that fee, it's also, I give 'em an AI episode on top of that episode and then I do more posts on social media. They also get tagged in my newsletter. And then also when I do any future endeavors, I try to make sure that their brands are also social on that. And then no ads on that particular episode for a whole year. So I'm giving them a lot of value just by paying a little extra to jump the queue.

Did you call it an AI episode?

Yes.

What do you mean by that?

So we'll do a regular— so like how you and I are doing this conversation, I'll take the transcripts from this particular session, send it over to NotebookLM, which is Google's platform. And then what it does, it actually has— they just released this too. just yesterday I found out about it, is that it would do an AI episode, the one I was usually doing, which is 2 voices. They would actually talk about the show. So they were like, hey, we're just gonna do a show deep dive. But now they actually have an argument side of the house. So they actually take a stance on one view and then somebody else would take a stance on another view of the same topic based on the content you put in. And then they leave it up to you as the audience to say which side has a better argument about it.

Wow.

And so I was like, that is pretty cool. So those are the episodes that I actually put out there on top of the regular interview we do. So if you don't wanna sit down and listen to the whole hour and a half or 30-minute talk, you can get like this nice little 6-minute review of it and say like, hmm, I really wanna dive into the full show now. And that's how I leave it at that.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

I'm gonna steal that idea.

Hey, go for it, man. It's free. That's what we're here for.

I love that. I love that. Okay, so you got some revenue coming in, um, with the business and with the, uh, sort of the slotting appointment driven for, uh, the show, which I think is smart. Um, secondly, uh, you're spending money as a creator.

Yes.

Right. So what are some of your business expenses that you're having on a regular basis?

On a regular basis. Uh, so I also do a live show every Thursday at 8 PM. And so I had to pay for that streaming platform to do it that way. So that's about $250 a year for that. And then I also have an AI where I do all my recording, which is Riverside. I know it's going like a lot of name dropping here.

Yeah, no, no, no, bring it. I like that.

Okay. So with Riverside, I'm also paying about $150 for them. Still have Zoom around for now. I'll say for now, because that was one of the things that I'm trying to pivot a lot of my business to streamline a lot of my stuff. But for right now, Zoom is sitting at around like $140. And then obviously I have like the hosting platform for my podcast, which is like $20 a month.

Yep.

And then you have the website, which is another $100 or something for that. And then also the The email hosting, like it goes down the list. Like there's a lot of hosting stuff on the back end.

It can get expensive to run a creator business, right? If you let these subscriptions build up, build, and expensive is relative, right? Because if your show's making decent money, then the margins can be really strong, right? Because you're typically not necessarily paying to have an employee or there's not much overhead like rent or typically. So It's usually just software subscriptions, right?

Mostly, yeah.

Or some type of hosting plan or something, which are good investments, right? But you wanna spend those wisely and make sure you're actually using those services, which makes a lot of sense. So that's good. Well, thanks for sharing that. Any tips for other creators out there who are kind of maybe trying to keep costs down on the expense side?

Yes, I will say get a mentor.

Okay.

Or if you don't have a mentor, is to just try it dirty. Um, do a lot of free trials and really make sure that it fits your model because the tools that I'm using now are things that I grew along the way. Like, because at first I was just doing it by bootstraps. I did Zoom because Zoom was able to like, hey, everybody uses Zoom. I was like, I'm comfortable with it.

Cool.

Let's use it. Um, and then I was like, cool, let me learn these other tools. And as I was learning more, I branched out to different tools. And by coming to this conference, opened my eyes up to what tools are out there. Because there's so many people that are doing great things, but you don't know about it unless you're in a space like this. So I greatly appreciate that.

I love it. I love it, Anthony.

Okay.

On the saving and spending side, oftentimes creators get their revenue going, they've got their spending very efficient, and they're starting to bring some money in, but they might've left a corporate job or left a place where they had access to retirement savings accounts. Saving was easy to a degree. It was automated maybe. As a solopreneur or as someone who's an entrepreneur, how do you think about like taking some of those business profits and turning that into saving or investing?

Usually just start very basic, which is to start with your SEP. So you're in a solo entrepreneur investments, just start there. Secondly is always reinvest into the business. Yeah, I know. I mean, it's hard to say like anything outside of that because If you're not investing in your business, then you're being stagnant and you're more than likely going to be left behind. And then your audience is going to wind up losing. And each level is a different level. Like you need to invest in new things to grow and be marketing.

So once you get to a certain level, then you got to look at marketing. How are you marketing yourself and go beyond that? But as far as the investments and savings side of the house, the savings, it just got to go by education again.

Sure.

Because if you're not knowing what's out there, you could be spinning your wheels learning all this information, but not taking action. That's a problem.

Yep. Love it.

I'm sorry, I'm not giving you a direct answer, but it really depends from either from finance side of the house. Sure.

Yeah, yeah. And each person's individual.

Yeah.

Last question, since we're at FinCon.

Yes.

Gotta ask a personal finance question. Give me your best personal finance tip.

My best one that I learned took me six years to learn this, which is do not move in with somebody that you do not plan to marry. Okay, that is my best tip.

I agree. That's a good one. That's wise. Right, Anthony? Thanks for being on the show. Hey, hope you have a great rest of your FinCon and yeah, and best luck to you. All right.

Thanks a lot, PC. All right, guys.

That's a wrap on this episode of Creator Money Turning Content into Cash Flow. If you wanna hear more creators talk this openly about the money behind their businesses, subscribe to Creator Money so you don't miss the next conversation. Creator Money's brought to you by FinCon, the business event for money creators. Thanks for listening.

Thank you.