So many episode 1780, advocating for your health and wealth, one cancer survivor's story. You're listening to So Money with award-winning money guru, Farnoosh Karabi. Each day, get a 30-minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnoosh herself.
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At the end of last year, my body actually shut down. So I know I've shared this email with you. But in October, I was already in remission. I ended up in the hospital for over three weeks. And towards the end of that hospital stay, I was actually in the intensive care unit.
Welcome to Sew Money, everybody. I'm Farneesh Tarabi. We're welcoming back a favorite on Sew Money, my friend Anne-Lease Wealth, who is a personal finance writer, podcaster, former CPA with over a decade of experience. And she comes to our show today with her survivor's journey, overcoming stage three triple negative breast cancer.
Ann Lease was adamant about coming on our podcast to educate all of us about her experience of self-diagnosing her illness, advocating for herself within the healthcare system, and all the ways she navigated the challenges of treatment. She also shares her powerful insights on the importance of securing life insurance, trusting your intuition, and fighting for your health.
Beyond her battle with cancer, Anne-Lease opens up about how the experience reshaped her outlook on life, focusing more on living in the moment than planning for the future. Anne-Lease, welcome back to So Money.
Thank you, finalist. You're so good to be back. Absolutely. Well, you have important updates to share with our audience. You've learned a lot over the last year and a half since you've last been on this show. The first is though, catch us up to like who you are and what brings you to the world of financial advocacy before we get into the latest.
Sure, I'm a personal finance writer, a podcaster, and prior to that, I worked as a certified public accountant. I have over a decade of experience in that space. I'm really passionate about helping people develop a better relationship with money so that they can build wealth and live life on their terms.
I'm also an author. I'm the author of Dream of Legacy, Raising Strong and Financially Secure Black Kids. Yeah, I reached out to you because, you know, for the past four or five years, you know, I left the corporate world. I started my business and I was quite busy working with my business, also reading my family's real estate business, being a mother of three, and just living life fast.
And then at the end of the 2023, I was hit with quite a disturbing news. I found out that I had breast cancer, stage three, and actually I had the most aggressive type of breast cancer, which is triple negative. So I wanted to come on the show to talk about that and talk about some of the things that I learned over the past few years.
When I got your email that this happened to you, I just had so many feelings and I wanted to hug you and we were just emailing. And I was also surprised that you were emailing me to say, I want to come on your show and share what I've learned. That's just who you are. It's your nature. It's like you're a giver. You're an advocate, even though you're going through certain things such as so hard, such as breast cancer. And actually we hung out. It was like the fall of 2023. And I think your cancer diagnosis was shortly after that.
The day that you found out, take me there, what happened, I understand you detected it, and you had to really advocate to get checked out. I was doing a self-exam in between getting a college's visit. At the time, I was 38. So, you know, in the US, you have to be 40 to get a mammogram unless you have a history of breast cancer in your family, which I don't. And I discovered a lot.
I thought it's nothing, right? And then a month later, I noticed that it was significant and bigger. And when I tried to lift my arm, I saw something odd. So I went to my GP and it was quite the experience to actually get a mammogram because my first appointment, I was laid by a couple of minutes. So I was able to see my GP and then I had to come back the next day. You know, when I saw my GP and she did like the exam, she was like, okay, we need to get this checked.
But even when I did go ahead and get a chat, it was like, oh, it's probably nothing. But it came out to be a lot more, right? So I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And so at that point, I had several lymph nodes that were impacted under my arm. So, you know, I actually had surgery last year and they took out seven. How are you today? I'm doing significantly better. I'm officially in remission, which means I had a year-long treatment.
I had six months of chemotherapy, a year of immunotherapy, and then a month and a half of radiation. And after surgery, they felt like they were able to get the cancer out, which was the best possible scenario. So I'm doing a lot better today. Obviously, they put this poison in your body to help you get rid of the cancer, but it's still poison. So I'm still recovering, but definitely on the better side of it. You are the breadwinner in your family?
No, I'm not. You're not. But I was definitely very active working. And I think when I had the diagnosis in 2023, it was actually a wake up call for me to slow down because I think that I was probably doing a little too much. One of the things that I learned is also to stop thinking ahead so much. I'm a planner. That's like my nature. I'm an organizer and I learn to
Be in the moment more. Yeah. I'm so glad that you are healing and you are on the other side of this and you are in remission that is so amazing to hear because I know with getting breast cancer before age 40, my doctor would always say,
Timing is of the essence, you have to do self-exams. It can be very aggressive in your 30s. Let's talk about what you've learned and what you really want to bring to the audience. I know that there's lessons about life insurance that you experience. There's lessons about advocacy. And I'm sure there's even lessons, as you mentioned, just about
putting your health ahead of everything, which is hard, especially for women, not just because we're doing a million things at once, but because the medical industry doesn't prioritize us either. I think that's a safe assessment. Definitely. I learned quite a few things. First, I want to take you back to early last year when I made a decision to slow down and I started waking less.
I was still working a considerable amount for someone who was undergoing the treatment that I was going through. But I didn't want to be bored. But at the end of last year, my body actually shut down. So I know I've shared this via email with you. But in October, I was already in remission. I ended up in the hospital for over three weeks. And towards the end of that hospital stay, I was actually in the intensive care unit.
in an artificial coma because I couldn't breathe anymore. So they ended up intubating me. And that's when I was in the coma for three days. And after that, I woke up and told myself, all right, I'm going to take a break. So since November of last year, I stopped working for three months. I'm just now getting back into the
groove of things and i think it was just really hard for me to i'm just used to doing so many different things at once slowing down was one of the biggest lessons listening to your body was another one because earlier in 2023 when i was going to the gym sometimes i did realize all right i'm feeling a little dizzy i'm feeling like i'm getting tired faster but i never
could have been never like how serious my situation was. So, you know, listening to your body. And then I want to share a lesson that I learned about life insurance, you know, like for, you know, I got life insurance in my late 20s. So at the time, you know, it was extremely inexpensive. And, you know, I didn't have any kids. So the luck that I have is that the coverage that I have is still
significant for our three children, but I wanted to increase it because I was healthy and I was still relatively young. But I never got around to. Now, fast forward to 2025, where I am a cancer survivor, I survived stage three breast cancer, which is
Very significant because based on the stage of the cancer that you had, your premium is also impacted. I spoke to several insurance agents, I've done some research, and if I wanted to get additional life insurance coverage today, I would either have to go through my work, which I work for myself, so that's not an option.
I could wait until after I'm at the, I believe, 40 to guaranteed life insurance, which is very expensive. And then the premiums are significantly lower. The third option would be to wait at least five years because as a stage three cancer survivor, most insurance providers won't give you term life insurance until you have been in remission for five to 10 years. Wow.
So, you know, it's something that I could have done. I didn't make the time for it, and I would really strongly advocate your audience to do it while they can, while they're healthy, because some of the things that I learned, right, in terms of cancer in general, close to 40% of Americans will develop cancer at soon. Outside of cancer, just having a chronic illness touches 60%.
So I would strongly advocate to do it while you can, do it while you're healthy so that you don't have to deal with expansive premiums and actually the possibility of even not being able to be covered. I actually wrote an article about this in Forbes. Yes. Why you should get life insurance. In the article, you emphasize the importance of getting life insurance before a chronic illness, but you know,
No one ever thinks they're going to get sick to the point where they won't be eligible for life insurance. So do you have advice around how to get it down in a way that doesn't feel burdensome? People get, you know, there's a nurse show like, oh, I wanted to do it, but I just, you know, life gets in the way. And so what's the easiest way to do it?
Well, you can go on a policy genius, but it's fairly easy and they don't require the medical exam. If you go online, you put in information, it really takes maybe 10 minutes, then they call you and they call probably less than 10 minutes. And if there is no issue, then you can have a life insurance premium just like that.
And yes, we don't think about getting sick or, you know, like getting severely sick, right? Like getting a... I mean, some chronic illnesses are manageable, so they're not necessarily going to impact your premium, but the ones that are more serious will. And yeah, it actually impacts your ability to get decent life insurance. So I think as a precaution, just
Go ahead and do it. And you got it in your 20s when I would argue you didn't even need to get it in your 20s. So that was lucky because a lot of 20 year olds who don't have dependents yet, they're not thinking about getting life insurance. But maybe knowing your family history, that could be a variable in deciding, oh, yeah, I should get this now, even though maybe I don't have a need for it right now, but I might be ineligible down the road.
Yeah, I think the reason I don't even know, like I said, I didn't even have any children and husband. I mean, he worked. So he wasn't, yeah, so I didn't have like dependent on anything. But that's something that my parents had been doing. So I think that's probably just watching them. I thought that was a good idea. And then once I realized how inexpensive it was, I just went for a larger premium and I'm so, so glad I did.
You write in your article that a $500,000 policy that is a 20-year term insurance policy, meaning it lasts for 20 years. The average premiums for healthy, non-smoking men and women are obviously less as the younger you are, the cheaper it is. If you're in your 20s, it's like $177 for women, 216 for men. In your 40s, it jumps on average to about $282 per month and $334 per month for men.
Still very worth it. Term life insurance is the way to go of all the insurance options in most cases for most people. Yeah. And you know, it's been so much debate about term versus whole and I'm 100% with you. I believe that. Well, first of all, I want to say that each type of insurance serves a purpose, but I think that for most people term life insurance is the way to go.
I agree. I think for most people, term life insurance is what makes most sense. There are studies that show that folks who open up a whole life insurance policy have a higher chance of being enabled to afford it. It's a pretty pricey premium, right? So if you lose your job or you're experiencing financial challenges, that that is often one of the first things to go.
If you don't pay, you lose all those, you know, it's like it just stops. It's not like there's a little bit of a nest egg waiting for you. It is a serious commitment. And I don't think that, again, the average person or most people actually would benefit from that. I wouldn't go back to what you were saying about advocating for yourself in the hospital.
This isn't really a financial question, but it touches the quality of our lives, our finances too, when you're able to get what you need efficiently in the hospital, get the care that you need, which sometimes isn't always just given to you. It's not a given, right? You need to advocate for yourself. Even as far back as when you self-diagnosed yourself, there was pushback.
from the healthcare providers that you visited with. Tell us about how you navigated that and how you ultimately were able to get them to give you the care that you needed. The first appointment that I had, I did mention that I was concerned about potentially the lung that I found being cancerous when I was on the phone. And once I got there, my GP's office, they have a 15 minutes
late policy. So if you get there within 15 minutes of your appointment, they can still see you. And so when I got there, I looked at I was exactly 14 minutes late. And but somehow on their time, I was 15 minutes, 30 seconds late. And that was the cut off. So I'm talking to the lady and I'm telling her, this is actually serious. Like I found a lump and she's like, Oh, we don't have any appointments. I can try to fit you in next year.
Or it can go down to the clinic and see what they can do. I ended up going downstairs and then like, no, we can't do anything without prescription from the doctor. So we're gonna have to go back upstairs. And I'm telling her, this is serious. I found something and she's like, okay, well, we'll see. I think there's something for tomorrow.
So I'm coming back tomorrow and once she realizes after I leave the doctor's office and my GP is concerned, she's like, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize it was that serious. I mean, how did you not realize it when I told you that I found a lump that was concerning in my breast? So that was like one experience. But when I was in the hospital, I think that was
the most challenging part. So, you know, when you're in the hospital, they hook you up to those machines and they're checking your blood pressure, your oxygen level and things like that.
And I think when you're in the ICU, sometimes depending on what type of which nurse you get, they might be desensitized because they see conditions all the time, right? And so I started pointing towards my oxygen level. I was like, look. And she's like, oh, don't worry. Everything is going to be hot. So that's after I woke up from my book.
Within an hour, I had, I don't know, two doctors, five nurses, because again, my oxygen level was crashing and they were worried that I was going to have a heart attack. No.
So after that, the rest of my stay, I realized that I needed to check my parameters. I needed to ask for the exams if they said they were going to do something and they forget, just stay on it. And then also, when you're in the hospital, it's really hard to rest, right? You have nurses come in.
every, I don't know, hour or so, or in the middle of the night, you'll come every four hours or three hours. And I remember agreeing with a nurse that she would come in at 6 a.m. to check my parameters and give me my medication. But
waking up at four because someone is giving me a shot. And she was like, you know, I saw someone coming into your room and I said, I figured I'll just do it right now. Figured. Okay. And I was like, no, no, no, please, this cannot happen again. And I actually asked to speak to the person in charge of the floor. And after that, there was a sign on my door saying nobody comes in between the hours of 1230 and 6am. Just little examples like that. But
Also, after a while in the hospital, I realized that I would probably recover faster at home. And so I started educating for myself in that sense. I first, the doctor in charge, who technically wasn't even my doctor, he was just in charge for that week.
He was like, we probably will need to keep you for another week. Hmm. I was like, but why? Because they love to keep you in the hospital. Exactly. And then we don't have to tell you why. Well, it's, you know, especially for money and insurance, right? Exactly. Which I found out just that hospitals, they cost my insurance over a half a million dollars. Wow. And how much of that did you pay out of pocket?
I only ended up paying, I'm saying only, but for the whole year, yeah, less than 30,000 out of close to $2 million. Shit. Exactly. Oh my God. Another thing that I learned is that they really overcharged $2 million. I'm sorry to keep one person.
You know, I get it. There's a lot that goes into treating you and people and specialists and, but $2 million. And why is it only $2 million on this side of it? It's cheaper to build 10 houses with that budget than to give you the surgery and the hospital stays. And it sounds like it wasn't even the best care you had decided to go home for a lot of it.
Yeah. And then my own colleges, you know, he ended up sending me home two days later, right? So but he found an ass. I probably would have just sat there. You're really right about needing to advocate for yourself. When I was during COVID, my son had an infection and we took him to the, it was a wound that he had that had gotten infected. And so we were worried about like a staff infection and all of that. So we took him to the hospital and they immediately gave him, they hooked him up to an IV. They started to pump his body with medicines to help him with the infection.
And the ER doctors were like, I think he's going to be here for one night, 24 hours is if it's improving, that's good, that's a good sign. You can usually check out when we see that sign. And we lived about 15 minutes from the hospital. So we spent the night and, you know, it's COVID. It's a hospital. Nobody wants to be there, right? And my son, especially, he's only five. So it was traumatizing.
The nurses were great, though. They brought him unopened toys. I was like, wait, what is this? The toys are us, but they were so cute. The head doctor came in, checked him out. And so I think he should stay one more night. And I said, but why? I have photographs of all of his, like, you know, I've timed it. So every few hours, I take a photo of the wound and the medicine is working. It's shrinking. The infection is getting better and better. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think just to be safe, you should stay another night. I turned to his students, you know, he's got the interns. And I said, what do you think?
But I asked them that when he left because I didn't want them to answer in front of him. And they said, to be honest, I think you can go home. And honestly, if it flares up again, you're 15 minutes away. You can just come back. And I said, you know what? I'm going to take the risk. And in the meantime, I'm looking up my insurance every day. Patients, right? The hospitals weren't kind of turning away like things that weren't too serious. So I knew they were needing money. Most hospitals are broke. I've learned.
So all the money they're charging, that's unbelievable. A lot of them are broke. I've had interviews with experts on that on the podcast. And anyways, I remember feeling very tricked in that moment. I was like, I know what he's trying to do. And I think he's trying to scare me into staying, but I don't think I really need to. A small story compared to what you experienced, but just to emphasize again, the importance of
Speaking up getting a second opinion being your advocate trusting your body and at the end of the day, your doctors are there to help you and support you, but they're also trying to run a business and sometimes those interests can sometimes get compromised. I have another story that happened to me and I think I almost try to erase that from my memory.
The first few weeks when I was in the hospital, I was having fevers that they couldn't explain. They thought it was like an infection. They tested me for everything. I had a couple of procedures trying to get to the root of the problem, but they couldn't figure it out. And so when I was intubated, the doctor actually told my husband, we have one procedure that we needed to do. We didn't get a chance to do it.
We can do it while your wife is in this induced coma so that she doesn't suffer, right? So she doesn't have to suffer, but they didn't do it. And when I woke up, all of a sudden the fevers were gone, but they still wanted to do the procedure. And my husband, I had to be like, I'm sorry. No, if it's to find out the reason behind the fevers, then no, there's no reason to do the procedure now that the fever is gone and the fever never came back. Wow.
So you're also raising the importance of having a good health care proxy, right? Your husband was by your side. That's important for anyone listening ahead of time to identify someone in your life.
who can be an advocate for you, whether that's just a friend or a partner who comes in and simply just takes notes down, you know, records, because things are happening so fast. You as the patient, you're going through all this. You're in a cloud. You know, you're just like, I'm sick. I'm in pain. And so you're not really in the headspace.
to also be remembering things and even advocating for yourself. So having someone, my husband, I remember I got sick. I went to the ER last year for nerve pain. And I actually went to go back to the hospital because the first time I went, they didn't do a proper thorough check out of me. They just sort of assumed it was one thing and gave me medicine for it. And it
That wasn't the right diagnosis. So then two days later, I'm still in pain. I went back. And this time they're like, okay, we're going to do a scan. And on my way being wheeled into the MRI room, my husband wrote down on a piece of paper and stuck it on my chest. And he was like, dear doctors, please check the back of her neck. Please scan the back of her neck. Because he knows sometimes I don't speak up. He said like you sometimes downplay your pain. I think that's a female thing sometimes.
You know, I'm okay. I'm okay. You know, don't worry about me. I can take care of myself. And he's like, no, you sometimes underestimate and downplay how much pain you're in or, you know, the symptoms. And he's there to kind of step in and interfere. And I love him for that. So I'm so happy you had a partner to help you navigate all of this.
I want to go back to what you were saying and least just about your new perspective on life, the importance of living in the moment. You're a planner, but we have to balance those two, right? How do we hold those two in balance? How are you doing it? Honestly, I'm still trying to figure it out because I'm so used to looking into the future and planning for the future. And last year was the first time where, you know, my future was not
promised, right? I wasn't guaranteed. So I could only think, all right, let me get through this year. And now I'm trying to get through this next year. So I'm giving myself this year to figure it all out. You live, you learn. Well, I'm so honored, grateful, and happy to see you, to have you with us. You're a survivor. I hope to see you again in person next time. Next time we talk, I hope it's in person.
Is there anything you're working on now that you want to send us, you want us to take a look at? Well, first of all, thanks again for having me and really a pleasure to share my story with you because it was the first podcast that I was ever on. So good to be back. As far as what I'm working on, I think one of the things that
I'm working on all of my families, like a family foundation. And obviously with my recent story, with breast cancer and also my sister who passed away from cancer over in the primary, we definitely want to do some work around that. And when the time comes, I will definitely share it with you. Thank you so much. Please stay connected to us. Thank you so much for all this information and insight and advice and least wealth. Happy new year. Thank you. Fine.
Thanks so much to Anne-Lease Wealth for joining us. I will link to her article in Forbes about the importance of securing life insurance, as well as a link to learn more about Anne-Lease. I'll see you back here on Wednesday, and I hope your day is so money.