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Women in Construction, Home Repairs, and Financial Independence with Samantha Pearl · Marci talks money (and life)

• Marci Grossman (00:15) Hello, I am MoneyMarci. Welcome. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, Samantha Pearl. Samantha is the owner of My Handy Ma'am Home Repairs and Renovations and co-host of the How to Handy Ma'am podcast. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Olivet College, which she describes as an awesome little school whose mission is to teach students to do good in the world, and an MBA from Cornerstone University, as well as being licensed as a residential builder in Michigan. She's handy as heck and passionate about teaching women to care for their own homes. Welcome, Samantha. Samantha Pearl (00:57) Thank you, thanks for having me Marci. Marci Grossman (00:59) I'm thrilled to have you. consider myself a bit of a handy woman so I'm thrilled to be able to talk about this in broader terms. And hopefully, between the two of us, we can empower more women to take care of their homes and the fix-it things and save that money. Samantha Pearl (01:17) Yeah, definitely. ⁓ there's a huge amount of opportunity to save money. Marci Grossman (01:21) As well as job opportunities. Samantha Pearl (01:24) Yes, absolutely. Yeah, that's what we found. We created those opportunities for ourselves and part of our push in educating women is to create some easier pathways for others. Marci Grossman (01:34) Okay, so what made you decide to go into construction and become a residential builder because you went to school for business administration? Did you think you'd end up here? ⁓ Samantha Pearl (01:43) Yeah, Definitely not. Like many of the things that have happened in my life, it's been sort of a meandering process and stumbling into those areas. My husband is a pastor and we were relocated to the St. John's, Michigan area in early 2020. So we moved to St. John's about six weeks before COVID started. We bought a 175 year old house and I knew I'd be changing careers at that point because my job was too far away to drive once we made the move. But at that point, I wasn't sure what it would be. So we were at the house tearing it apart, getting ready to have contractors come in and we actually had an opportunity to have three contractors come in, but before we even got estimates, the COVID shutdown started. So here we were with our entire house torn apart, plaster dust everywhere, nothing but boards and studs on the walls and thinking, what on earth are we gonna do now? And it's funny, in the first couple of weeks of the pandemic, people thought there'll be a couple of weeks and then things will be back and running again. And then after that, for a while, we're like, will things ever normal again. And that was really the point at which we realized however long it took for contractors to work again was going to be too long for the situation our house was in. So we began to put it back together ourselves and we're pretty astonished. My daughter Emily was helping me working full-time with me while Jim was at his new job. We just fell in love with what we were doing. It took us about five months to put our house back together. We did, by the time we got to that point, we were able to have the flooring done by someone else and our windows replaced. But pretty much all the other work we did ourselves and decided to buy another house to flip because we enjoyed it so much. I thought, well, this is what I want to do for a living. I don't ever want to do anything else again. And then Emily and I spent nine months in that house, kind of a full-time master class for us learning lots of things. And we finished that and sold it and then we began doing work for other people and that was five and a half years ago and yeah, here we are five and a half years later. We were so excited about how we were able to learn these things without really any formal education. We looked for classes, but there really wasn't anything. Emily was just graduating from college, so she probably could have gone into like a young person's entry level trades program. But for like a 44 year old woman, there really weren't any programs for that. So not only did we love the work, but we started to think about how could we create some pathways for other women who want to enter the field, but specifically for homeowners to be able to take care of their own homes as well because there was so much that seemed complicated. It was hard to learn, but once we learned it, realized it was absolutely something that anybody could tackle. You didn't have to go to trade school to do most of the things that we tackle in our own houses and We just feel like women could benefit from knowing how to take care of their own homes from an independent standpoint and definitely from a financial standpoint. Marci Grossman (04:44) So were you handy going into this? Were you someone who picked up a hammer and did things anyway, or were you starting from scratch? Samantha Pearl (04:51) I had the aptitude definitely. I grew up in a pretty poor family, so we did a lot of things ourselves. If you wanted nice things, you had to fix them or build them yourself. But I had worked in management and administration, and like so many hours, there really wasn't time to do any of those kinds of things. So I hadn't done a lot, but I did have the aptitude for it. I come from a family of tradespeople, so my grandma was the first licensed female plumber in the state of Michigan. And my grandpa was a plumber, my uncles were plumbers and carpenters and HVAC technicians, so there's a lot of the aptitude in our family. Marci Grossman (05:27) And was that resources as well for you could call because during COVID, during shutdown, when you were learning how to do these things in your house, I assume there were times you needed an extra set of hands or an extra set of eyes that knew a little bit more than you were doing. Samantha Pearl (05:30) Definitely. Yeah, my brother Lou, who unfortunately passed a couple of years ago was amazing. He's 10 years older than me, so I'm the baby of eight. And so I'm quite a bit younger than him, but he had a lifetime of experience and I could call him and say, this is this weird thing. And I've watched all the YouTube videos and looked on Google and I'm not sure what to do next. And yeah, it was wonderful to have him to tap into. And then my brother-in-law Mike too, who works in Veterans Administration roles, but he is incredibly handy and also very helpful. So it's really nice to have people that you can go to and that part of what we're doing with creating education for women is to be the people that they can go to when they're in those situations. Marci Grossman (06:27) That's awesome. And of course, to be the person that can also be hired, your company does a lot of work. You're not just educational, you are hands-on tradespeople. Samantha Pearl (06:37) Right, yeah, so I have 10 employees, nine of them are women, and we work in the field full-time. We run a remodeling business. We have over the last three years we've trained, we take on apprentices in paid positions. So over the last three years we've trained six women who work at full time in the field. That's kind of our limited but very deep kind of educational training. And then the rest of what we do is a little more shallow but can impact a lot more people. Marci Grossman (07:03) That's so awesome. That's what I'm trying to do a lot with my financial literacy is knowing these things, understanding these things are things you need to know how to do in real life to save yourself time, to save yourself money, aggravation, and to just move yourself forward. I was the go-to person for many of my friends when they bought furniture from Ikea and it's... Samantha Pearl (07:29) yeah. Marci Grossman (07:30) It's stunned me that people didn't just know how to put these things together, because that's how I was Samantha Pearl (07:30) I know. Right? Marci Grossman (07:35) Growing up, we were my dad's extra set of hands, and then, you know, you're going to do a little bit more and a little bit more. It's so nice to not have to call someone in for the smaller jobs or be able to understand what they're talking about and what you need when you have bigger jobs. I think that's great. And the opportunities that you're creating. So let's talk about how doing your own home repairs can save money and help you free up, now we get to the financial resources, because if you do it yourself, where and how can people learn to do these? And what should they be afraid or not afraid of to do their own home repairs? Samantha Pearl (08:06) Yeah. Yeah, so there are some projects where the materials are incredibly costly, but most home projects at any level, it's the labor and the expertise that you're paying for. So if you can provide both of those for yourself, nearly any project can become, can be within your budget. So a ha ha ha Gotta love ⁓ Marci Grossman (08:40) For those listening, Morgana, my cat, has just decided to join me. Samantha Pearl (09:35) like a simple example is a toilet. So a lot of times toilets will leak because over time the bolts will loosen, the caulk loosens, and the toilet begins to rock. And then many people don't know this but what keeps your toilet from leaking out the flushed materials is a wax ring. It's just a ring of wax and they cost $5. So if your toilet is leaking and you know how to reset it yourself, you can pull the toilet off, clean it up, put a new wax ring in, put the toilet back on, caulk around the bottom, and a plumber, rightfully so, will charge a few hundred dollars to come to your house and do that for you. But if you can do it for yourself, you can do it for like $10 between the caulk and and the wax ring. So, and that's a great example of everyday things. You might choose as a homeowner that doesn't have a lot of money not to do a backsplash tile, you know, not to do some of these things, but you can't choose not to fix your toilet. So that's an area where you don't have control over how that money gets spent if you don't know how to fix it yourself. So toilet is a great example. If we look at aesthetics, a backsplash is a great example. A normal backsplash for us, we charge probably somewhere between three and $4,000 because it takes a lot of time to do it properly. But tile... You can buy super expensive tile, of course, but tile, especially like a subway tile, you can buy it at the three box stores. You could get backsplash tile for $150. And then the rest of the materials for maybe 100. So for 10 % of the cost of hiring someone to do it, you can do it yourself and have something really beautiful and really functional. Countertops, like laminate countertops are really kind of the underdog of kitchens. They don't always get a great reputation. People like prefer to have stone or something like that, but laminate countertops will hold up really well with normal wear and tear. And you can get a 10 foot section of it for like $175. Whereas it might be three or $4,000 for the same amount of stone. And they're really easy to install. Whether it's aesthetic or purely functional or some combination of the two, if you know how to do it, have the capability and the knowledge, you can save a ton of money. And that's great for people who, you know, Jim and I, we're empty nesters now, we have just one dog, the situation we're in, we can make choices like to not do something because we don't want to. We could afford to pay for some things. growing up, well, when we had, our children were small, that was not the situation, we were always broke. And when I was growing up, my mom became single shortly after I was born. So she had eight children. and she was single, no support, she just... had to make decisions based on things like food and medicine and clothing. Like that was very limiting for her. And there were some things I remember that she had to pay for that it was devastating. You know, a few hundred dollars for someone that makes minimum wage is life changing. So these are the kinds of things, especially if you, so I know that you work with people sometimes who, or you're teaching people that don't have a lot of discretionary income. So you're not talking about mutual funds and stock investments and things like that. it's about how do you run a budget where there is some extra for a cushion. That's where that cushion comes from, is doing the things for yourself that you would otherwise have to spend money on. Marci Grossman (12:57) That's true and you know, what do they call it? YouTube University. There's a lot of information there. Obviously you want to check and make sure that the people whose videos you're watching actually know what they're talking about. And you guys put out videos as well on certain topics and how to do repairs. Samantha Pearl (13:02) Yeah, yeah. We do. Our approach is pretty unique and there are lots of people providing really good content on the internet. What's unique for us is that we are licensed residential builders working actively in the field, but our target population are homeowners. So we're professionals teaching non-professionals. So a lot of times you'll have really talented builders creating a pathway for women into the trades, which is great. Or you'll have non-builders that are very handy teaching other people to do things. as far as I can tell, there aren't any other licensed female builders who's teaching population of specifically woman homeowners. And so that's really where our focus is. Marci Grossman (13:56) There's so much you can learn to do to create this extra money by the repairs that you learn to do, by the things that you can do yourself if you're willing to get your hands dirty and whether you have to buy or borrow tools, your neighbor, your friend, your family, someone has the tools you need. You don't need to buy everything to do one or two repairs. If you're starting a business, you want your own tools. But if you are just looking to do some of these repairs, so many times on Facebook and in other places, people are looking for someone to do a small fix-it job. And it's like, I look at those and go, I do that myself. it's, I want people to feel empowered to... Samantha Pearl (14:33) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Marci Grossman (14:45) to move forward and do these things, take control of these things. As you said, it helps to create that extra cushion of income or at least decrease the lack of income because that's one more thing you didn't have to spend on. Samantha Pearl (14:57) Yes. Well, and we've talked about creating a pathway for women into the trades and then teaching women how to take care of their own homes. But there's a third avenue that helps in terms of saving money, and that's being able to deal effectively with the contractor relationships you do have. So one great example is we have a listener that DM'd us and just said, any chance you'd be willing to hop on a FaceTime call so we can just talk through something that's happening. We've had a lot of contractors look at and something doesn't seem right. So we did end up getting on a FaceTime call with her and they moved into their house four years ago and they have had a sewer smell since they moved in. They have now had three or four contractors and have spent six thousand dollars and there has been no change. It's frustrating because they don't have $6,000 to just throw away on whatever. And they have spent that money and still don't have their problem solved, which is very frustrating. So we were able to just, it's like being, I don't know if you have noticed this, but sometimes you have doctors that are really good diagnosticians. They know the right places to look and the right questions to ask. They don't need an MRI to know you have bursitis, you know, things like that. Well, the same is true for home repairs. You can learn to do this for yourself. But this what we did with her is walking through, OK, walk me to where the smell is coming from. Is it stronger if you get down on the floor and put your nose right next to it? Is it stronger or is it weaker? You know, we just walk through, OK, under in what weather do you smell it? Is it worse? Is it when it's hotter? Is it when it's colder? Is it when it rains? Is it when it's dry? We just walk through those kinds of things and she probably has either a broken sewer pipe or a broken septic tank. And there's a $200 line inspection, camera line inspection she could get that will tell her the answer. And that should have been the first thing that was done four years ago. So she didn't need to spend $6,000 on that, but she has contractors telling her either, it's fine, sometimes sewers smell, you know, or not paying attention to the fact she has a sinkhole 20 feet from her septic tank and her house settles so much that every six months they have to move the latch plates on their doors. So something like that is a pretty big deal. You know, if you've got the house here and the septic tank here and a sinkhole over here, you're gonna have a lot of movement in the ground. Your septic tank is very likely to be cracked. Something is broken. Yeah. So as a homeowner and as a female in particular, and we love the guys in our lives, but there's no question that men do not treat women with the same respect. Marci Grossman (17:32) Something is broken. Samantha Pearl (17:49) when they're dealing with male homeowners. So they will tell you like, that's not possible when it is possible. It's just hard and a pain in the butt and they don't wanna do it, you know? Or they'll say, ⁓ it's fine when it's not fine. And so for homeowners to know something's not right and to be able to say no, you didn't fix anything, I'm not paying for this, let's keep going until we figure out what's actually wrong, can save a huge amount of money, even more than what you can save doing work yourself because the contractor work is where you're going to spend a ton of money. So if you know how to advocate effectively for yourself and how to know red flags and green flags with your contractors, you can really protect your family and your finances in a way that can be life-changing. Marci Grossman (18:32) That is so important. And that'll just carry over into every other aspect of your life. If you bring that confidence, I have important things to say. I have real things to say. What I am saying, what I am questioning, this all matters. And a lot of times, ⁓ women when they're dealing with men, they just aren't on a level playing field to start with. And they're just not heard as well. Samantha Pearl (18:58) Mm-hmm. No, and I think about like Jim and I, my husband isn't very handy with anything and like neither one of us are handy with cars. And so we drive newer vehicles. They're nice to drive, but primarily because nothing goes wrong with them. So we had a lot of experiences early in our marriage where we had bad experiences with car repair because we don't know anything. So you could make up a part in my car and say it's broken. I wouldn't even know that that part doesn't exist. So it can put you at a real disadvantage when you have a lack of knowledge and a lack of confidence combined. You rely on contractors who you don't know, and you don't know for sure if they're trustworthy. You rely on them, and sometimes that's devastating. We had a customer of ours that had a couple of decks off the back of her house that were actually unsafe. They weren't even unsightly, they were just unsafe. They were like 15 feet off the ground, she had pretty high, like second story, and they were built with four by fours that were twisting and cracking and that lumber is not adequate for that height. And so she had to have them rebuilt. And she had a company come in and they said, we can do this for you in a reasonable amount of time, but you have to pay all of it upfront, which is never okay, not ever okay. So they took her money, they did a completely subpar job, and then they went out of business. And... she didn't have any leverage, she's already paid them everything. But that deck wasn't very unsightly either, it was just also extremely problematic. So she had to pay somebody else $10,000 to fix that. Marci Grossman (21:17) Right, and that's not a two-foot deck, you said that's 15 feet off the ground? It better be safe if you're 15 feet off the ground. Samantha Pearl (21:20) 15 feet off the ground, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah, and she had, so she had one deck was big and looked like a normal deck and the other one, she basically had a catio built on it for her cats. But the windows, if you push on the windows, they would flex outward. which is very dangerous at 15 feet off the ground. And he was like, that's normal, all windows do that. Well, no, windows don't, the window and the wall, neither one of those things should move when you push on them. Just the audacity sometimes. And I'm not ragging on guys, just, they have the unfortunate designation of being 97 % of the workers in the field. So normally when crummy stuff happens, it's a guy that did it in construction. Marci Grossman (22:04) And that makes sense. mean, just the sheer volume. You can say 2 % of them do it, but chances are, with the odds, that 2 % is going to be guys. Samantha Pearl (22:08) Yeah. Yeah. So for her, had she asked us about it ahead of time, I would have told her under no circumstances should you ever pay for a job like that upfront. Materials is reasonable because you should not expect your contractor to pay for your materials. So 100 % of materials and they should get delivered to your house. And then anywhere between 25 to 50 % of labor, you know, that's reasonable. That's not unreasonable, provided the last payment doesn't get done until you're completely satisfied with the job. So you maintain some leverage, some financial leverage in that situation. Unfortunately, we didn't talk to her before it happened, but after. Marci Grossman (22:54) Yeah, and that's another reason that you should always get more than one bid when you're doing a job. The larger the job, the more important it is to get references. Hey, I worked with this company before, or get a couple of bids so you can say, wow, this one has me paying all up front and this one doesn't. What's going on here? It can help you view the red flags if you talk to a couple of different people. Samantha Pearl (23:05) Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, the episode that we aired last week was contractor red flags and green flags. And some of the things is to know is if someone wants you to make a decision in a hurry, that's a sales tactic. You should never make a decision in a hurry. They will offer, you know, $1,500 off. Jim and I, we just made the decision like any contractor that wants us to make a decision while they're at our house is just an automatic no. And then anyone who offers huge discounts, you should definitely be suspicious of because most contractors we don't offer discounts because we're we're not pricing in such a way that we could offer a discount. We've given you what it makes sense for us to run a business with integrity and provide quality service. We're not building in 15 extra thousand dollars so there's no way I could give you a discount like that. you know anyone who wants you to hurry, anyone who gives you kind of a sense of urgency about losing out on something that's just not a contractor you want to work with. Anyone who asks for like an unreasonable amount of money and then the big one for us is if a contractor does something that makes you uncomfortable, whatever that is, like you ask for more information and they say no, or you want to, talk to former customers and they say no, whatever the case is. We've had some customers make some pretty, what I would consider unreasonable requests of us, and we give a ton of information, are very transparent, but in the end I remember it's their house. They're inviting us into their home. So, you know, if it's something crazy that just isn't workable for us, we'll just decline because it doesn't work for us. We're just not the right contractor for them. But if a contractor wants to pressure you into doing something that makes you uncomfortable or if they are unwilling to accommodate reasonable requests, it's not going to get better. It's only going to get worse. Marci Grossman (25:05) Right because once you've paid them some money and once you've signed that contract you're not going to walk away from it. You're not going to want to walk away from it so as things get more challenging it's like the movie Money Pit Samantha Pearl (25:12) No. No. Marci Grossman (25:18) time they're going to be done two weeks two weeks two weeks and i don't remember how long that job stretched to but yeah yeah it's it's people don't like leaving Samantha Pearl (25:21) Yeah. Yeah. Marci Grossman (25:29) the money on the table that they've already spent and so it's hard for them to walk away so you want to do your research before you give money and before you sign a contract of any kind. Samantha Pearl (25:40) Yeah, and don't rely on photographs to tell you that someone does a good job because it's really easy to take photographs from the right angle or the right distance to make things look good. you know, if it's low stakes, like someone's coming in to put baseboards in a bedroom or something, that's pretty low stakes. know, worse is going to happen is you're going to lose a few hundred dollars on a job that's not done really well. ⁓ But most jobs that people hire people to do are bigger than that. And talking to other people who have like lived through the process with that contractor can reveal a lot of important information. Marci Grossman (26:17) is definitely they can safely tackle a project by themselves? If you've never done something before, how do you know whether it makes sense to try and learn and do it versus, this is something I need to call a professional in for? Samantha Pearl (26:33) I think the most useful thing is to ask yourself, what are the consequences if I do the worst possible thing? So if you're going to run new electrical wires in your house and the worst possible scenario is you could burn your house down, it's probably not a good chance for you to take. If you're going to change out a faucet and it might leak, but it's going to leak under your sink and you're going to see it, that's pretty reasonable. But if you're going to fix some plumbing in the wall and then drywall over it, you're not going to know for a while if it's a problem. That's probably something you shouldn't tackle. So we still do this in business when we're tackling things we haven't done before we ask ourselves, can we live with the potential consequences, both financially and emotionally? Can we live with the potential consequences? If the answer is yes, and we want the knowledge, then we'll go after it. If the answer is no, there are some things we'd like to be able to do for our customers, but we know we're not the right people for that. And the consequences of doing it wrong are more than we can manage for us from a customer service standpoint or from a financial standpoint. Yeah, so for homeowners, Another good consideration, so some things are just aesthetic, but if you have to spend $6,000 on materials and you might do it really poorly, for you, could probably spend, you know, $6,000 is a good investment in a professional. So you might make that decision also just about expensive materials. We have done two jobs in the last year where the tiles were two feet by four feet. So huge. They weigh like 50 pounds a piece and cost $125 a piece. So before we did this for a living, I would have tried like sheet tile or subway tile. I would not have taken a risk with $125 tiles. Sometimes it's financial, sometimes it's a safety risk. So those are kind of the two. Yeah. Marci Grossman (28:23) Those are good guidelines. They make sense. And then I think something important that a lot of people are going to want to hear or not hear is things you should be considering when you are doing projects if you are looking to the future and wanting to be able to age in place. Samantha Pearl (28:41) Yes, that's very important right now, especially with interest rates kind of out of reach for a lot of people. People are not eager to move, especially if you're, know, in retirement age and you've been in your house for a long time, you probably have a pretty nice interest rate or your house is paid off. So you don't want to just move if that's going to require a mortgage at six or seven or eight percent interest. So making changes to your house is going to be more affordable, even if you have to take like a home equity line of credit, but then only the line of credit is at 5 or 6 or 7 percent and not the main mortgage. Our niece and nephew are doing the same thing right They're doing a giant like a $200,000 addition on their house and I asked them just out of curiosity why they chose to do that because they have to move somewhere else for six months and so why they choose to do that instead of buying but they have like a 3 % interest rate on their mortgage. So they're like this is cheaper than buying another house, you know, even with renting someplace to live for six months. The difference in the interest rate is so substantial that it makes more sense for them to do that. So as we're thinking about aging in place. Part of it you can do as you're doing renovations just all along. So if you're gonna do a renovation in a room, like a bathroom, and you don't need grab bars right now, but the wall is open, that's the time to put the backing in that you're gonna need for the grab bars that you'll put in later. If you are replacing your front door and you're already spending a couple thousand dollars, that's the time to be thinking about is this door 36 inches wide? Is this an opportunity when I'm already spending money to put it into making it, you know, aging in place friendly at this point. And then there are lots of really small things you can do to stay in your house. One of the things that people have the most trouble with aging in place is mobility, fall risk, and then just navigating their house. And there are lots of like handrails and grab bars that make a big difference in how you navigate through your house. And one of the best things we found, a lot of houses have, they don't have like enough of a drop that it makes sense to have like a handicap ramp, especially not like inside your house. A lot of houses have multiple levels throughout, but not by very much. and Amazon, I'm sure others sell it, but we found them here to be affordable. On Amazon, you can buy these rubber ramps that are made from recycled tires. So they look like tires, they're black, they look like, I mean, the treads are obviously new, but they look like they have treads like a tire does. And they're incredibly heavy. But what's great about that, they come in a variety of widths and depths and heights. So if you have a three inch transition from one room to the other, you can just buy the one with a three inch rise, and then you just lay it on the floor right in front of that. And don't even have to affix it. They're so heavy, they don't move. We use those a lot in people who don't want to leave their homes. They need a little bit of help, but they're not all the way to needing like something really significant. So there are lots of little things you can do to your house to stay in place. And you should definitely be thinking about it. No matter what age you are, if you're making any kind of change to your house, if there's a way to modify it to make it easier to age in place, whether it's for you or to make it more attractive to the next people who buy your house, then those are important things to consider as you're going along. Marci Grossman (31:52) Now what's interesting is a lot of things for aging in place are convenient for if you have little children as well. Samantha Pearl (31:58) Yes, or like we're moving my daughter Hannah into her first house and last weekend I fell down her stairs. She has a section of stairs that don't have a handrail. We were in and out in the snow, then in the house on the hardwood floors and back out in the snow and you know, so everything's wet. And I just slipped and fell down this short set of stairs and there wasn't a handrail and ended up in a sling for a couple of days just with a minor shoulder injury. But like I'm not old, you know, I'm not necessarily, and definitely at my 27, old daughter's house I'm not thinking about aging in place but simple things like that sometimes people have a temporary injury that has nothing to do with age and they can't come home. We had a customer who could not bring her husband home after knee surgery because they didn't have any facilities on the first floor. Everything's on the second floor. Their bedroom, the only bathroom those kinds of things and he wasn't old it just happened to be situational so yeah Those things aren't just for old people. Marci Grossman (32:56) ⁓ Does your daughter have a handrail now? Samantha Pearl (33:00) Not yet. I had just fallen and hurt myself. So this weekend we'll be installing the handrail. Marci Grossman (33:03) Hahaha! Yeah, it's great to catch things when you can. Samantha, Is there anything you want to mention that maybe we have not covered yet? Samantha Pearl (33:15) I would just say part of what we're doing is not just teaching women ourselves, but building a community of women who can come together and you have a place you can go and ask. So on Facebook, our group is How to Handy Ma'am. So that's Ma'am, M-A-A-M. So if you want to join other women and learn, like kind of, you could just lurk in the group and learn things from other women or get advice from us too, we're there to answer questions. If you need a place to go, like where do I even start? Then that is a good community of women to join. There are maybe seven or eight hundred women in that group who are available to help each other. Marci Grossman (33:50) That's awesome. Samantha, thank you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate you taking the time to join us here. Samantha Pearl (33:57) Thanks for having me, Marci. Marci Grossman (33:58) To my listeners, I will be sharing a link to Samantha's information and her group in the show notes. Please check her out. She shares a lot of interesting information. And don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this.