Business and Beyond's Feature Friday ft. Dr. Barbara O'Neil

Business Lessons from a Lifetime of Financial Leadership | Feature Friday with Dr. Barbara O’Neill

True influence in business is built through consistency, credibility, and a long-term commitment to service.

In this Feature Friday episode, Dr. Barbara O’Neill shares insights from a distinguished career that bridges financial expertise, education, and leadership. As a Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC), CEO in financial publishing, and Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, her journey reflects what it truly takes to create lasting impact.

With more than 190 academic publications, over 35 national awards, and more than $1.2 million in grant funding, her work reinforces a critical business truth: longevity is not driven by visibility alone, but by discipline, trust, and meaningful contribution. Her career demonstrates how credibility, built over time through knowledge and consistency, becomes one of the most valuable assets any leader can have.

Throughout this conversation, we explore how knowledge-driven decision-making shapes long-term success, why consistency plays a key role in building influence, and how a strong commitment to service creates sustainable growth. Dr. O’Neill’s continued engagement in teaching, writing, and sharing financial insight highlights an enduring principle for entrepreneurs and leaders alike—lasting success comes from adaptability, responsibility, and a genuine commitment to serving others well.

If you are focused on building a business or career that stands the test of time, this episode offers meaningful perspective and practical insight.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Business and Beyond's Feature Friday with your host, Tanya Bardellini. And today I have a great guest for us. Her name is Dr. Barbara O'Neill. She is a CFP, AFC, and is the owner-CEO of Money Talk, Financial Planning Seminars and Publications, where she writes, speaks, and reviews content about personal finance. A distinguished professor, Emeritus at Rutgers University, she has written over 190 articles for academic publications and received over 35 national awards and over $1.2 million in grants to support her financial education programs and research. She tweets personal financial information at Money Talk One, writes weekly posts for her Money Talk blog, and is the author of Flipping a Switch, a book about 35 later life transitions published in 2020. Dr. O'Neill, it is such a pleasure to have you. Welcome to our show.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Well, thank you so much for inviting me, Tanya. Really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Oh, we are honored to have you. So after that little introduction, can you give us an overview of what your business does and why you got into it?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Sure. Um so as you mentioned in the introduction, I write, speak, and review content about personal finance. And I started Money Talk in 1992, and it was a side hustle for 27 years while I worked full-time for Rutgers University as the state financial management specialist in the state of New Jersey. And so when I left Rutgers at the end of 2019, I kind of scaled it up to an almost full-time enterprise. So it's been that way for six years. So the business has been around for a total of 33 years. And as far as why I started it, um I guess what happened back in the uh early 90s is I was starting to get requests for work that could only have been done after hours. It wasn't part of the scope of work for my job at Rutgers, but people were getting to know me and they um obviously respected my work and they were reaching out for various freelance um assignments that had to be done on my own time, not uh not on my employer's time. And it was around that time that I said, well, hey, if I'm gonna do this as freelance work, I need to start doing a Schedule C for taxes and uh start um start a business to do that. So that's what I did. The other reason I started Money Talk is because with my job at Rutgers, I was in the civil service retirement system, which meant that I did not pay into Social Security. So by having um Money Talk and the income from Money Talk, I was able to earn the 40 quarters that are necessary to get a Social Security benefit. And to this day, I or I claim Social Security now, but my benefit goes up every year. And two reasons. One is cola that everybody gets, but the other one is because the income from Money Talk Now is offsetting the very low incomes that I had in my teens and 20s. And it also replaced all those zero years. There was there are probably about 12 zero years before I started Money Talk that had to be replaced with actual earnings. And I continue to do that now. So um another thing that kind of got me into it is I I had a close friend who was an entrepreneur. She taught me a lot. My brother was an entrepreneur, so I did have some role models as well. Um, I just didn't want to have entrepreneurship be the sole source of support. Uh, but again, I guess I'm an example of somebody who did start a side hustle and then ramped it up later in my case as an encore career uh later in life. So that's an option for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Yeah, it is, and it's great that you started it for so many years. It was a side hustle. And you said it's been here full time for six years. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Correct, since uh 2020. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Yeah. And so that's the thing. People think, oh, I need to have a side hustle that I can turn into a business very quickly. And that's not necessarily the case. You don't have to do that, right? You can have a side hustle for years and years and years before you think about turning it into a full-time career, just like you did.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Right. And of course, now um I have Social Security, I have a pension. So just like I had my paycheck back in the day, uh, I don't rely on entrepreneurship for necessarily paying the bills, but again, for me, it's also a source of uh purpose and meaning in you know the latter part of my life and also structure to my day. Uh, you know, I go right into my home office. I have a like three-second commute from my kitchen to my home office, and um yeah, it makes it very easy to kind of balance uh work and play in my job and in my life.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Wait, so can you tell me in your words, what do you think is the biggest problem in your industry?

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Hmm. Um you know, one that I'm hearing about on webinars and things, it really hasn't affected me because I decided not to monetize my blog. But uh what I'm hearing in the industry is that uh content creators who had monetized blogs, what they would do is they would get what they call sponsored links. And so if they mentioned a company and they had a link to a website or whatever place they wanted to feature the company, uh if if uh that link got clicked on, the content creator would get a certain amount of uh revenue. And I I don't know that it was a whole lot of revenue, but again, if you do it multiplied lots of blogs and lots of sponsored links, then it starts to add up. And what I'm hearing is that um with the emergence of AI, uh, whether it's Gemini or Chat GPT, but particularly Gemini or the others that are associated with search engines, what's happening now is that the AI automated response is top of the list. You know, when you Google something, the AI generated response is top. And then usually they have next to it the sources that were cited to create that AI response. But then the problem is people aren't going any further, they don't have to, so they don't have to drill down to all the articles that are out there. So people aren't reading the articles and not clicking on the links, the content creators aren't getting that um source of revenue. So I've seen that in the industry, you know. I I've heard people talk about that recently, so that is a concern, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

But yes, and so you've chosen not to monetize your blogs, it's not a concern for you, but how do you monetize your money talk?

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Oh, well, I I do projects for clients, and um could be any number of things. This year I completely rewrote a whole curriculum for high school students, uh online course for one of my clients that was kind of a major project. And um, I write blog posts for some clients, uh I do webinars for some clients, I teach face-to-face classes here in Ocala for some clients. So um just a whole lot, whatever the client needs basically. If it's writing, speaking, or reviewing content. So I do a lot of reviews too, where people will send me content and they want me to just, you know, find the holes or the errors or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

So that's what I do, and all financial industry. Oh, it's all personal finance, yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

And again, with my background, that's where I'm able to add value.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

And so, what makes you unique in the way you help others?

SPEAKER_00 9:23

You know, I saw that question when you put it out uh last week. And one thing that I would mention is as a uniqueness, is I believe I'm the only person in the United States who is doing a deep dive uh annual review of all the personal finance events and trends that took place. I've been doing that for 11 years. Uh, I have a new client for that work this year. I did it for another client for 10 years. Nobody else really does that. So uh I that webinar is actually going to be this week, later this week. And um, I'll be putting out links to the slide deck so people can um take a look at it if they want to get some background just to kind of see what happened in the year 2025. Uh, and then I recently wrote a journal article with some colleagues about the first 10 webinars that we did, which covered 2015 to 2024. Uh, all the topics and events and laws that were passed and financial anniversaries, like this year is the 90th anniversary of Social Security, for example. So that makes me kind of unique. And I guess the other thing is uh my primary niche is personal finance for older adults. And you don't see that as often as uh what most advisors are doing or content creators is they're focusing in on um uh school. You know, we have a lot of advocates out there that are looking to get all 50 states with a personal finance mandate. We just got number 30 passed this year, so that's kind of exciting, which is you know, cool. Yeah, we're definitely moving along. And um so you see a lot of personal finance in in high schools, in elementary school, and at workplaces. But then what happens when people leave the workplace? Where do they get their financial education? So I've been building out a whole lot of classes. I probably have about 40 now that I teach right here in Ocala. Um, there's a nonprofit foundation called Master the Possibilities that is on the southwest side of Ocala and it serves um a couple of communities. Uh, one's called uh Dell Webstone Creek, another one is on top of the world. But anybody actually in the whole city could take courses if they want. They they basically focus on older adult issues. So I've been um kind of developing a lot of expertise for that, and then one of my other clients kind of found out about that from LinkedIn, and uh so they hired me this year to uh write a whole bunch of blog posts about topics of interest to older adults, and you know that that was great because I already had the classes prepped and it didn't take that much longer to write the blog, write the blog post because I already had the content research. So I'm a big believer in that, by the way, is if you can dovetail projects. So, you know, you do something as a class, you take that content, you do it as a webinar, you write it up as a blog post, or you shop it up into social media, you know, whatever way you can get kind of the outreach up, but instead of having all these separate preparations, you just kind of work smarter, not harder.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Yes, repurpose.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Yes, right, repurposing. It's all about repurposing.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

And it's funny that you say you focus more on um the older generations because most people when they think of finance, they just think, well, it's finance, right? It's saving money, putting money in stocks, saving for retirement, maybe some 401ks, maybe life insurance. Like it's just a financial plan. Nobody thinks about the different aspects of your life needing a different financial plan. Um a little bit about that. I I would love to educate our audience a little bit about um the differences and why you were you need a different plan at every stage.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Yeah, well, you know, I guess my my financial education career, I've I've kind of created content that matched my life. So when I first started in financial education in in my 20s, it was all about saving to buy a home and renting an apartment, reading a lease, you know, that it's very starting out kind of fix. And then eventually we created a program called Saving on a Shoestring, and then we went to investing on a shoestring. So I was growing up with my content. So at this stage in my life, I'm I'm teaching classes that are also relevant to me and my friend circle. Uh so I built out classes on topics like long-term care and continuing care retirement communities. That was a big class. I had the biggest audience for that class than any other one. Um uh RMDs, income taxes for older adults. Uh so people are at the stage now where it's not about putting the money into the plans and cumulating, it's all about taking the money out of the plans and you know, decumulating, but doing it in such a way that you don't uh trigger a big tax bill. So teaching those kind of strategies. And again, there aren't that many places that have courses for older adults that really match their needs and kind of hit them at a teachable moment. So I think that's another thing that kind of makes me unique is that that is my niche versus most other people have.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

That is wonderful. Thank you for sharing all of that. Um, I want you to look back on your 30 or so years of having this business. And, you know, business owners, especially small business owners, struggle sometimes. All business owners struggle sometimes with different things. Can you give us an example of an obstacle that you have faced and how you've overcome it? I mean, keeping a business alive for that long doesn't come without its own obstacles, right? So just share maybe one or two obstacles, how you overcame them, what they were, that would be really appreciated.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Well, again, uh keep in mind that I wasn't like earning money to live through my business through all of this 33 years that I've been in business. So it's a little bit of a different lens than maybe somebody who's trying to rely on their business full time to pay their mortgage and feed their family. So just kind of with that in mind. It's an obstacle, a couple ones that I can think of is occasionally you're not um selected for a project. You know, like an organization will put out an RFP, a request for proposals. And um, many of my clients are nonprofits, so they don't necessarily have a lot of money, but they get a grant, so now they have a lot of money. Um so sometimes you don't get selected. What I've tried to do is kind of learn from that experience, try to get feedback if I can. And one time I wasn't selected, and the feedback was um that my um my cost estimates were too high. So what I've done and what I've learned from that is that now anytime I have a prospective client, I always ask them, I'll just say, tell me about your budget, tell me about your project, tell me about your budget. And then I have some sense of you know what their whole budget is and and how my piece of their project could be priced properly. So I do that a lot. Uh now I mean that's just something I I do. First thing I ask the questions, tell me about the project, tell me about your budget. And then I kind of get the sense too if the client is really um, if they really understand their project. I've had some clients who just got a bunch of money and don't really know what to do with it. So they're kind of like, Well, we'll build the bridge as we cross it. And it's like, yeah, I think we kind of do a little prep work ahead of time. So again, you know, kind of feeling out the clients as far as um, you know, what their needs are and the timelines, of course, is important too. The other thing that I've come to learn, um, particularly since Money Talk went full time in 2020, is that um ghosting happens and it's okay. What I've come to realize is that clients do come and go. There are some clients who really just don't know what they're clients who it's just trying to rebrand themselves, and every six months they have a new branding strategy and they really don't know who they are. Uh and you just kind of have to roll with that, or the people that hired you get fired, and then you know, you lose that connection to um that that particular client, unless you can make a new connection with somebody else, and um it's okay, you know, it it's not it's you don't take it personal because I guess it just happens uh frequently. I mean, I had a very steady job with Rutgers for 41 years, so I I never kind of got fired. Um, but it's not like firing in um small business, it's more like ghosting where you just don't hear from somebody after a while. It's okay. And and I've been really lucky just about the time that a client goes away, there seems to be another one that kind of pops up in its place. So for me, it's it's worked out okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

That's well, you've brought up a few really good points that I want to drive home for our audience, because a lot of people will not ask about the budget or their potential clients' budget. And it's like how are you supposed to know what they can afford and what you're supposed to propose to them if you don't know what their budget is, right? So if you can just kind of give me a little synopsis of how did you wrap your head around asking people what their budget is? Did you have a hard time asking that? Or is it because you've been in financial in the financial industry for so long, you're so comfortable talking about money that it wasn't an issue?

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah, it really wasn't an issue. I I just kind of said, well, tell me about your project, tell me about your budget, and you know, just kind of put it out there, and then you kind of get a sense of how much the client has thought through the project as well. And then the other thing that I do with all my clients is have a letter of agreement. And if they have their own letter of agreement, I will generally sign theirs. And some of them are like pretty heavy-duty non-disclosure, all this kind of stuff. Um, if if the client is kind of small and and doesn't have a letter of agreement, I have one of my own that will just it's a one pager and basically has my signature at the bottom and the representative of the client. Uh, so for example, I do some webinars for libraries, they're kind of like one and done projects. But we do a letter of agreement and it just specifies the um time of the engagement and um the payment. And um, you know, it's everybody's on the same page. So I think that's really important for all business owners to have um something in writing with their clients.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

So as a business attorney, I think it is imperative to always have something in writing. Um it's not a full on, you know. 30-page contract, but at least something that clarifies the expectations, who does what by when, what are you know, what are the deliverables, what happens if, right? Just some kind of terms so that I find people will always meet the expectations if they know what they are.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Right. Yeah, that's true. And yeah, the other thing I include in the uh letter agreement, my my letter agreement, but it's usually in everybody else's too, is that you know, I'm responsible for the taxes. And um also I I need to acknowledge that the work that's created becomes property of a client. So yeah, I'm sure you have all that kind of wording in the contracts that you use with your clients as well.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Yeah, there are all kinds of ways to do all these, yes, but I I love that you're so savvy with first asking about the budget, right? Don't be afraid to ask and talk numbers. Um you're selling a product, if you're selling a service, you need to talk about money, right? There's nothing wrong with that. Um, the other thing that you had brought up was ghosting, um, and the fact that it's not personal. You know, people don't know you, they're not here going, oh, I don't want to talk to that person, I don't want to hire them. It's hey, you know what? I don't have time right now. It's not a project that's a priority for me right now, or someone else came in and gave me a better price, and I hired them and I'm done and I move on, right? So it's not personal and it shouldn't stop you from continuing to grow and just learn from it. Learning from it was the third point that you had brought that I wanted to really bring up was when you're not picked, when your proposal is declined, ask for feedback, figure out why so that you can do better the next time or with the next potential client.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Um exactly. And I had a lot of practice from that being an academic for all those years. So whether it was a journal article being turned down or a grant, um used to always get feedback so that you could do better the next time. So, same thing with um contracts with clients. So a lot of things transferred from my academic career to my you know money talk business.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

That is wonderful. So we've talked about some of the obstacles that we've over you've overcome, and I'm sure you're continuing to overcome because that's just business. Um, what is actually working well in your business and how did you get it to work well?

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Um, well, I mean, I think a couple of things that work well is I try to automate anything that's repetitive. So I have templates for letter of agreement, I have templates for invoices, you know, basically anything that's going to be done over and over. We have templates for that, so that makes it easier. Um I try to market on a regular basis for free. I don't pay anybody anything, but I you know, I have the blog post and I try to post that on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays, sometimes Wednesdays, but generally Thursdays, depending on the week. And uh say there's a regularity to that of having a new blog post on my website um every week. And also I try to, you know, focus on uh my clients that are my repeat clients and even suggest to them some new projects that they might not have thought about, you know, like have you thought about this? Um just because it might add strength to what you already have. So that curriculum that I was talking uh about that big job that I did, I tried to suggest, well, you know, three more modules would give really good um, you know, breadth of your course and it would tie to more state standards. So, you know, kind of pitching ideas and uh sometimes they stick, sometimes they don't, but uh I think clients appreciate that you're thinking about making their product or service better.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Oh, I love that. So automate what you can, right? Efficiency, your workflows, standard operating procedures, really, right? Um be an advocate for your client, don't just do what they think they need from you, actually care about them and what their goals are and try to see what else you can help them with, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:09

That's right, which of course becomes a new deliverable for you. So it's kind of a win-win for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Yeah. So when you build those relationships and you start getting to know your clients and their needs and their goals rather than just this is what I need from you from this project, that's where you start building more revenue and helping them more and win-win, just as you said. Um, so those are fantastic little nuggets. Now, when you said you do marketing, you don't pay anyone. A lot of people think of marketing, well, I have to pay an agency and I have to do all these big things for marketing, and I just can't afford it. But there are a lot of marketing things that people can do that they can do themselves that are not gonna cost them a lot of money, but they're gonna give them a big return on their investment, right? And so one of the ones you were talking about was the consistency with the blogs, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:11

On social media too. Um, you know, I try to post on X, Twitter, um, several times a day, and uh also I don't know, maybe 10, 12 times a week on LinkedIn. And so I think people value seeing your contributions and um you know the regularity of it. You know, you're you're continuing to show up week after week. I think that's kind of important. Uh the other thing that I do, I attended a seminar years ago about a concept um called working out loud. And what that basically means is you're just sharing your work online. So just finish the slides for a new class in you know in Ocala. Um, you know, I I I post the like maybe a digital of graphic of the first slide or something so people can see what the class topic is. So constantly putting out your work, not in a braggy way or anything, but just in a sharing way. Um got a new class, ABCs of C CRCs. And uh and also I'll I'll sometimes um post questions on social media. So I've been doing that this week because the uh personal finance year and review webinar is coming up. And so I'll be put I I created a graphic. I do that every year. I copyright, I create and copyright a graphic that shows all the um events and trends from the the year. So I've been putting that out on social and asking the question, what else would you add to this list of 2025 financial events and trends? And so again, that gets conversation going. And uh I'm I'm sure you know people realize, oh, that's the one that does the year in review, you know, because I've been doing it for so many years. It's kind of what you're known for. So yeah, that doesn't cost anything, just a little bit of your time to uh, you know, make the post.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

But again, it's the consistency, right? Because we hear over and over people do business with people they know, like, and trust. And what a better way to get trust from people you don't know than by being consistent. Because then they can trust that they know what they're gonna get from you and when, right? I think consistency, especially on social media, on your blogs, on whatever it is that you're doing, really is a um catapult to trust, right? Because people know what to expect from you. Um, so I love that you're doing that. Um, what's one thing fun about you that not many people know about? Since we've been talking all business, let's just a little later.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

Well, I love to go to plays, and I I used to go into New York and Broadway quite a bit when I lived in New Jersey. And just last week I went on a play bins uh in in Florida. I I saw a play in uh Sarasota and I saw a play in um uh what was the other one? Straws in Tampa. Uh so lay Miz last week at the Straws. I had I'd never gotten a chance to see it on Broadway, so that was kind of exciting. It was a bucket list item.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

How fun. Um, so how can people get a hold of you if they want to work with you, if they want to get in touch with you, if they want to network with you, you know, link to blogs.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

Well, uh you can start with my website because on the website I have posted a lot of links to uh podcasts uh that I've done with people. I don't have my own podcast, but I I I serve as a guest for others. So I I have all those links and uh links to articles where I've been quoted and links to conference presentations that were recorded. And uh so you can really kind of check out some of my work, some of the class titles that I've presented face to face. I've also done online, and those are all available for anybody to look at. So the website is money talk bmo boy Mary Oscar, my initials. So money talkbmo.com, and then my um email address is money talkbmo at gmail.com. So, and then if you use uh X or Twitter, uh it's at Money Talk One.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Nice, and if you missed that, don't worry, it will all be on the bottom in the comment section, so you can always get a hold of Dr. O'Neill. And so before I let you go, okay, there was one piece of advice that you would give to entrepreneurs or small business owners as far as how to be successful in their businesses. What would that be?

SPEAKER_00 33:25

Well, I think one piece of advice would be to set some time boundaries and respect them. Because I think sometimes a business can be all consuming, and it's not like you have a defined end of your day like you would if you were working a nine to five and leaving an office. You know, if your home is your office, you're already at work, and it's it's it can be very easy to kind of extend the timeline. You work until five o'clock and six and six thirty, whatever. Guilty as charge. And so I think trying to set some time boundaries and and respect those boundaries and and also manage expectations from people. Uh you know, there's a the saying you want to uh under underpromise and over-deliver. So I think that's really important, you know, make clients say wow. Um, but again, you've managed their expectations. You set them kind of low. So if you do better than what you set, you're gonna look like a hero. So I think that's kind of important too.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Well, those have been great nuggets for business owners. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. Um, they are so very important, not just for your business and your personal life, but your mental health and physical health as well. Um, and yes, what is it? Underpromise and underpromise, over deliver. Yeah. Right. Nobody likes to get anything less than what they've bargained for, and everybody likes to get more than what they've bargained for. So, Dr. Barbara O'Neill, thank you so much for joining us today. This has you're quite welcome. Fantastic, and we will see you all next time. Have a great day. Bye bye.