Virginia Chamlee was raised from six weeks old by a grandmother who bid on lost shipping containers at the Jacksonville port and sold the furniture off their front lawn. She’s now an artist and a writer, which are two of the least predictable ways to make a living, and she has somewhere around nine income streams she mostly never planned for.

She’s the author of Big Thrift Energy, now in its fourth printing, she still writes for People magazine, her art is sold at Anthropologie and Chairish and hangs in the green room at Jimmy Kimmel, and she has close to a million followers between Instagram and Facebook. In this episode she sits down with me to break down how she actually affords it.

Virginia and I walk through every single one of those income streams and what they add up to, the $95 trunk she’s since been offered $30,000 for, the $100 brass chairs from a Salvation Army that ended up with a tech CEO in San Francisco, and how a book advance actually works.

Plus, she shares exactly where to go to find the good stuff, what to do when you’re standing in a thrift store with no idea what you’re looking at, and how to tell whether something is worth anything while you’re holding it.

Virginia reveals the spending philosophy she knows her financial advisor would not approve of, the portfolio she built herself that got called the riskiest one he had ever seen and what she gets gifted in a year.

Download Ashley’s free Investing Guide (https://www.thefiscalfemme.com/investing-guide) for everything you need to start investing confidently and competently, including how to decide what to keep in cash first.

Get Virginia’s book, Big Thrift Energy (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696602/big-thrift-energy-by-virginia-chamlee/) and follow her on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/vchamlee/) and TikTok at Virginia Chamlee.

Subscribe to Virginia’s Substack (https://www.bigthriftenergy.com/).

Check out Ashley’s Money Club (https://www.thefiscalfemme.com/money-club) to join a community of women unabashedly going after their money goals.

Take this quiz to get a personalized Wealth Building Blueprint (https://bit.ly/4v94g2C)