17 Tiny Habits That’ll Make You RICH

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, 17 Tiny Habits that'll make you rich.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna be going through 17 tiny habits that'll make you rich. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join that Master Money newsletter by going to master money.co/.

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Anne, reviews. Now today we are gonna go through 17 tiny habits that we'll make. You rich. See, everyone wants to build wealth and everybody wants to achieve financial independence, but a lot of times it is making sure you get some of the really big things right, but also looking at where your habits are and some of the things that you have in your life that could impact your money dramatically.

And so today, I'm gonna give you a bunch of those little habits that I have done over the course of the last 16 or so years that have helped me tremendously when it comes to my finances. And these tiny habits have. Completely transform my finances. If you do all of these things well, you will have a very well-oiled financial machine as time goes on.

Now, from creating distance from negative people to making sure that you're tracking your net worth to building a wins tracking system, these habits are truly the building blocks of success. So get ready and let's break down some of these habits that could change your life forever. Alright, number one is a big one, and I think a lot of people don't realize that this is happening in their life, but it is very important to make sure that you monitor this and you are very aware that this is going to happen.

Most people are going to have negative people in their lives, and what I want you to do is create distance from negative people and I want you to stop caring about others' opinions. Now, this is way easier said than done. But what do I mean by this? How does this help your finances to remove negative people from your life?

So identifying negative influences and limiting your time with them is going to help you change your mindset. If you are someone who struggles with your financial mindset, you don't have a growth mindset. You don't think that there is abundance in this world and. Everything in life seems to be negative.

Maybe your plate is really full and you are just struggling to find time, or maybe you feel like the world is out to get you and you are never going to be able to build wealth. And what's happening is if there are negative people in your life that are reaffirming those specific thoughts, that is not a good situation for you to be in.

If you want to achieve financial freedom or if you wanna pursue wealth, this is gonna be a very important thing to think through. So I want you to surround yourself. More so, or just make an attempt to surround yourself with positive and growth-minded individuals, because if you can surround yourself with more folks who think in the same direction that you want to go in, that is going to dramatically impact your actions in the future.

There have been so many studies done. That the people you surround yourself with is going to impact your actions. And if you don't change who is in your circle, it is going to dramatically impact result at the end of the line. Now, there have been stories of people obviously who have had negative people in their life who can still achieve these goals, but you need to make sure you identify who is in your life and how much time you are spending with them, and are they negatively impacting your wealth going forward.

Now ask yourself this question, does this person's opinion truly matter for my long-term goals? Does this person actually help me achieve some of my long? Term goals. If not, limit your time with him. You don't even have to completely cut them outta your life, but you need to limit your time that you spend with him.

Now, sometimes there are situations where this specific individual may not be avoidable. Maybe they're at work or maybe they're someone who is in your life, like a family member that you love, but they are just negative. All the time. If that's the scenario, try to limit conversations with them or just have a conversation with them going forward.

I don't wanna have some of this negative talk happening. Uh, and then that way you can actually have, you know, a very straightforward conversation. Now, another way that you can do this, if you can't find people who have this same or common goals as you, uh, what you could do is build your own environment.

And I love to do this. I love building my own ecosystem. This is what I did early on when. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know who to talk to. I didn't know how to find people who were interested in the same things as me, so I built my own ecosystem. The way that you do this is you can do this with podcasts just like this.

Part of the goal of this podcast is to motivate you. That is one of the pillars of this podcast, is to help motivate people to stay on their path towards financial independence, and so podcasts are a great way to surround yourself with. Thoughts that are positive that are gonna help you achieve your goals.

Another one is books. Reading more often is going to help you tremendously with your mindset, and this is really just protecting your mindset. That's what you were trying to do is protect your mindset and make sure that you are continuously feeding your mindset with positive thoughts when it comes to building wealth.

And this is learning. Learning is the real way to do that and the only way to do that. And then finding groups who may be interested in the same things. Is there a. An investing club in your area. Is there a real estate investing club in your area? Is there a small business owner club in your area? Just kind of meeting up with more people who have the same thoughts and mindset can be a really, really powerful thing that you can do.

So number one is to create distance from negative people. Stop caring about others' opinions and making sure that you are protecting your mindset. That is one of the most powerful things. The people who are in your circle are going to impact your outcome. Make sure you protect that circle. Alright. Number two is to make sure that you are setting specific goals and that you know your retirement number.

So what I want you to do is I want you to think through what are my financial goals And we have a very specific course that does this. It's called Master Your Money Goals. That teaches you my specific system. If you're interested in that, you can go to master money.co/courses. But in Master Your Money goals, we teach you exactly how to set goals and you have to make sure that you are doing that.

It is a very small habit as time goes on, but you have to make sure that you are doing that so you know where you're going. Okay, so here's an example. My wife and I have a very big goal over the course of the next decade that we want to achieve. And in order to achieve that goal, we need to make sure that we are making the right decisions that move towards that goal.

So there's a lot of decisions that will come across my desk. I get a lot of emails from people proposing different things or different investment opportunities, or different ways to make more money or different things I could be doing with my time. But if it does not help me take the next steps towards my next goal, I will say.

No. And so having financial goals helps you say no to a lot of different situations. Let's say for example, your big goal this year is to max out your Roth IRA. Okay? And you wanna get $7,000 into that Roth IRA this year. You love the benefits of the Roth IRA. You think it's an amazing option for you moving forward.

And so to max out that Roth IRA, you need to come up with $7,000 over the course of the next 12 to 14 months. So to do that, you need to make sure that you are saving money every single month. You're automating it into that Roth IRA, but then someone comes to you and says, Hey. I wanna go on a vacation this summer.

We're gonna go to Napa with all of our friends. Okay? We're gonna go wine tasting, we're gonna do all these amazing things. It's gonna be awesome. And you go and look and you say, well, 10 days is gonna be pretty expensive to go through this process. I'm gonna have to miss out on work. I'm gonna have to miss out on earnings.

And really does this help me achieve my goal? Now you have two questions here. A, you could go on the trip, you can go for a shorter period of time, save the rest of the money. And kind of move on. Maybe you go for five days or six days, but 10 days maybe too long. Secondarily, you can make the choice to go for 10 days, but you have to sacrifice something else in the future.

Maybe you reduce the amount that you eat out over the course of the next couple of months, or maybe you change some of your hobbies and you don't go to all those workout classes that you typically go to, or maybe you just pull back on some other categories that you spend on, but you're gonna have to make some shifts in order to achieve your goal.

So having a goal allows you to make. Conscious decisions, and this is a really important thing and a really important caveat to having goals, and so that is really, really important to know that. But secondarily, one big, big goal that you have to know is what your retirement number is. You need to know what that financial freedom number is, and I call it a retirement number.

Really a retirement. Calling it a retirement number is not the best word. It's really your financial freedom number. Because being retired is not an age. It is a number. It is a number that you have invested that will help you know when you can retire. So what is that number? Well, there's something out there called the 4% rule.

And in order to figure out what this is, we need to use the 25 x rule to calculate our financial freedom numbers. So how do we do this? Let's say for example, you spend $80,000 per year. Well, if you spend $80,000 per year, you multiply that by 25. That means that you have $2 million there, that you need to have invested in order to spend $80,000 a year, because 4% of $2 million is $80,000 per year.

Okay? So that's how we get to that number. And so really you need to make sure that you understand that number. But we also wanna create shorter term goals. We got these big, hairy, audacious goals that we wanna achieve, but we also wanna have these short term goals. Maybe you wanna start negotiating some of your bills and getting a few dollars back so that you can allocate it towards something else.

Or maybe you just wanna cut back on some of these subscriptions or make sure that you were tracking your spending every single day. All of these are fantastic goals, and so for these short-term goals, we wanna make sure that we are breaking our goals down from yearly, down to quarterly, down to monthly, down to weekly, down to daily.

Because daily is going to allow us take those daily actions towards our weekly goals. Our weekly goals are gonna allow us to take those actions towards our monthly goals. Our monthly goals are gonna allow us to take those actions towards our quarterly and towards our yearly. This is how you achieve big goals, is to break them down into micro.

Chunks. And so we have to have those goals set up in place, and then we'd want to every single week be reviewing our goals, adjusting our goals, and making sure that we are on track. So setting very specific goals and knowing our retirement number is number two. This absolutely changed my life once I did this because it changes the way you make decisions.

Alright, number three is to create a wins tracking system. Now, right now we are working on a personal finance academy. It's actually gonna be called Master Money Academy. And in Master Money Academy, one big things we are gonna have is everybody in this community is going to be sharing wins with each other.

So every time someone has a big win, we are gonna be celebrating that win together. And I want you to do that. For every single milestone that you have on your financial journey. Now, you may not have people that you are sharing this financial journey with, which is akay. That is completely fine. Some people wanna be private with their finances, which I recommend you having like a accountability partner.

But if you don't, that is akay. This community is actually there to fill in that SP, because it's people that are not in your day-to-day life, and so you can. You know, hang out with some of these strangers on the internet and be able to have accountability partners that's gonna be part of this. As time goes on.

I'll give you more information on that. But we also wanna kind of talk through and think through recording some of these small daily wins. Let's say for example, you did the five minutes drill over the course of the last month and you did it for 30 days in a row, and you're like, man, I just did the five minute drill for 30 days in a row.

I feel so much more clear about where my dollars are going. I am so excited about how I'm spending my money. This is absolutely amazing. Well, if that is the case, you wanna share that win with somebody so that you guys can start to encourage each other together. And so that is a really, really important thing that I think we need to create a wins tracking system.

So when you have big wins, you know, write this down, maybe it's in a journal I. Or maybe you just have a Google Doc of the big wins that you achieved over the course of the last couple of months, and then every quarter I want you to review that. And then every year at the end of the year, you get together with either your friends or maybe it's your spouse, and you go look at this sheet and you say to each other, look at all the things that we did this year.

Look at these amazing achievements that we made last year. We didn't do any of this stuff. And look at how cool and how much progress we have made over the course of the last year. And you can categorize these wins by financial, I do it by personal and professional growth as well. And you have these wins in place that help you stay motivated.

This is why we set goals, and then when we achieve goals, we celebrate those milestones. I think it is so incredibly important to recognize that things that you achieve, because what does this do? A, this makes you grateful, but B, this motivates you to work harder as time goes on. And I think that's really, really important and it helps reinforce positive progress as well.

So create a wins tracking system. You can even use bullet points if you want to, but create this wins tracking system, and this is gonna be a great way to celebrate milestones either with yourself or together with other people. Alright, number four, micro habit number four is to automate your money. Now this is one of the most powerful ones, and I would argue this.

Is the most powerful thing that you can do is automating your savings and investments. Now, the way that you do this is you can set automatic transfers to savings and investment accounts. I like to do it a in my high yield savings account. I like to do it with all my investment accounts and my retirement accounts, my brokerage accounts, all those different things.

And I also like to make sure that my money is. Going exactly where I want it to go, and automation allows you to do this. But thirdly, I also automate all my bill payments. So every bill payment that I have that I can automate, I will automatically make sure that that gets paid so I do not have to think about it again.

Now, if you do not automate your bill payments and you're manually still paying bills, uh, it is 2025 at the time I'm recording this, you need to make sure that you are, uh, automating those bills. It is really important to reduce just the. The mental strain that you have around finances. Now, one thing I want you to do is think through, Hey, once I start my automation system, I don't have to rely on my willpower anymore.

Your willpower is the enemy when it comes to finances. There are gonna be days that you don't want to do it. There's gonna be days that you just don't wanna transfer money over. You'd rather blow that money on some frivolous purchase because you had a bad day, and that's okay to feel that way, but automation makes sure that that doesn't happen because it automatically transfers money out of your account.

Into the accounts and the places that you want to go towards because you set a plan in place because you had goals in place, and this is going to be the way that you grow your wealth over time is automation. So you gotta make sure that you are automatically saving and investing if you don't know how to do that.

We have a ton of stuff coming out that's going to teach you exactly how to do that, but the last thing it does. Is it minimizes decision fatigue because if automation is your default, you don't have to make all these different micro decisions all the time. You don't have this decision fatigue coming into play.

Instead, you know where your money's going. You know what you're investing it in. You know what you are going to do with these dollars when they are automated. Now, the last thing I would say is the other piece that you can automate. Is your spending plan or your budget? You can use tools like YA or Monarch Money.

There's a bunch of great ones out there. I think Ramsey has every dollar. I think there's one called Ethos. There's a ton of different tools out there that you can use, uh, and making sure that you automate that spending plan is really important. Even if it costs a little bit upfront, it is worth every penny because it saves you so much more by making you aware.

You save way more money than the cost of these apps because you are aware and I cannot believe sometimes the pushback I get for like $10 a month for some of these apps. It's unbelievable. Right now I have no affiliation with any of them. I've had Monarch money as a sponsor in the past. I've used YAP in the past as well.

Right now I personally use Monarch money, but there's a bunch of them out there. They're all great and it is one of those things that you need to make sure that you are utilizing. Right now I have zero affiliation with any of 'em, but I think it is worth every single penny to make sure you at least. Use one of them.

So making sure you automate your money is really, really important. If you don't already do it, I would highly recommend giving it a shot. Number five is to audit your 55. 25 20 at least once a year. Now this habit is gonna be something that I really like to do, uh, to make sure that I am on track with the way that I'm spending my dollars.

And so the way that I do this is you can break your income down into 50. 5% of your baseline expense is what you really should be spending on baseline expenses. So this is things like necessities, and really this is a range. So it's really 50 to 60% on necessities. Now you can spend less than that, but going above that is just gonna be way too high.

And that's where I really think that most people need to make sure that they audit their necessities, because if it is way too high, you either have an income problem or you have a spending problem. And so one of those two things needs to be adjusted. Based on your baseline or your necessities. Now what falls under necessities, this is going to be your home payment, your rent, or your mortgage.

This is going to be your transportation costs, so that is gonna be your car payment, that's going to be your car insurance, that's gonna be your gas, those three things and repairs. This is also going to be things like your healthcare. This is also going to be your debt payments, and it is going to be your groceries.

Those are gonna be the necessities that come into play for most people. Now, for. Folks who have young kids, daycare is gonna be one of those line items as well. Uh, but necessities are the things you absolutely can't live without, obviously like toiletries, those types of things. And so this is something that you definitely wanna make sure that you identify first as necessities.

It needs to be between 50 to 60% of your income or less. It could be less than 50% also, but it needs to be between 50 to 60% of your income. Now, things you love is the next item. So that's gonna be 20 to 30% is what that range is, but we just call it 25. 'cause we call this. The 55. 25 20. And so 25% is things that you love.

So maybe it's hobbies or things. I want you to use your dollars on things that you value. And so part of managing your money correctly is so that you can allocate more dollars towards the things that you love. And the reason why we do this is because things like experiences with your family are going to be the things that you cherish most.

In life and the last thing you wanna be doing is just hoarding cash and not being able to enjoy your dollars. There are way too many people in the fire movement who hoarded cash early on, and they are not enjoying your dollars as much as they want to, and so that is something I want you to avoid if at all possible.

Now, I have become way more flexible when it comes to the way that I spend my dollars over the course of the last decade, where very early on I was extremely frugal. And then later on down the line, I started to spend more. And I want you to kind of think through this. Uh, maybe you spend too much right now, and so you need to get more frugal.

It might be the opposite ends of the spectrum, but everybody has their own journey on that, and I want you to think through that. But I want you to spend a certain amount on things that you love. This could be less than this range. This could be more this range, but you gotta give somewhere else. Now, here's the non-negotiable one.

Okay, the last one is 20% towards your future self. Now this is 20 to 30% towards your future self because really I want you to be saving at a minimum 25%. That's what Real Wealth Builders do, is they save at least 25% of their income. The minimum is 20% though for the starting point. So if you're starting off, you can save 25% of your income, and so that's why we have this range of 20 to 30%.

When you think about this, I want you to really make sure that these dollars are either going to two places, investments, meaning retirement accounts, or investments. Or two, they're going towards your emergency funds. And so your emergency fund is the other side of this. If you're still building out the 1 3 6, then you gotta make sure that you, that goes towards your emergency fund as well.

But these dollars are going towards your future self. And then what I want you to do is I want you to think about these spending categories and you say to yourself, well, how do I track these? Well, those tools we just talked about will track them. But if you don't do that, you could take your last three months of bank statements and go through there and categorize all your spending.

You can do this in a spreadsheet, you can do it wherever else you want to do. And you wanna identify the categories where you are consistently overspending. I want you to figure out where you are overspending and trying to make some of those adjustments. And then I want you to compare your ideal allocation to your actual spending.

So before you even do this exercise, one thing you can do is say, Hey, how much do I think I'm spending on my 55? 25 20? And then you look at it and you say to yourself, well. I think I'm spending 50% on necessities. I think I'm spending 25% on my investments and I think I'm spending 25% on the things that I love.

Well, if that's the case, let's take a look at it and when you take a look at it, if it is way outta whack, then we need to start making some adjustments and auditing this Now you're gonna get better at at this as time goes on, the first time that you're gonna be way off, and that's okay. You're gonna adjust and you're gonna reallocate and align based on your financial goals.

And so I want you to do this at a minimum once a year to make sure that you're really allocating. But a lot of you who are gonna follow some of the plans that we are doing, uh, we're gonna be doing this more frequently to make sure that you are on track with your financial goals. And so making sure you're auditing those finances is a really important micro habit that I love doing.

Alright, number six is the five minute drill. So some of you listeners may have heard me talk about the five minute drill in the past, but the five minute drill is one of the easiest things that you can do to master your finances very quickly. Here's how it works. What I realized pretty quickly is most people absolutely hate.

The B word, they absolutely don't even wanna hear that B word. If I put the B word in a title of a podcast episode, that will be my least downloaded podcast episode of the entire year. Now what's the B word? It's a cuss word to a lot of you. It's budget. And so most people don't like to budget. I don't like to budget.

And so it is something where it, you are not alone when it comes to that. Some people love it. I know there's people out there who love it, and there's listeners who are probably saying to me right now, oh, you don't like to budget? No, I don't like to budget, but it's okay. Because it's fun kind of when you're in there, but then you know, it's whatever.

So anyways, for me, specifically, what I do is the five minute drill. And so the five minute drill is every day, and it's usually around noon every single day. Sometimes I'll do it early in the morning, but right now it seems to be right around noon, right before I am going to eat lunch, like maybe I'm heating it up or whatever else.

Uh, I will go and I will do the five minute drill and I will go and log into my budgeting app and I will categorize my expenses. And also I'll just kind of take a look at my big metrics. So the big metrics I look at are things like net worth, and I look at how much I'm saving and I'm looking at how much am I investing and all these different things.

Okay? But really what it's for is to categorize your expenses that you spent money on yesterday. And so when you do the five minute drill, this allows you to five minutes or less every single day. You have a perfectly categorized budget and you don't have to worry anymore five minutes a day. That's. All it takes.

If you don't wanna do it on the weekends, you know, maybe make a 10 minute drill on Monday and every other day is five minutes. That's all you gotta do. And really, every other day I say five minutes, it's usually way less than five minutes. For me, it takes about two minutes. 'cause how many things do you spend money on per day?

Is it 2, 3, 4, 5? If you're a family, if you are just single, there's gonna be days where you don't spend any money. And so this is one of those things that you just wanna make sure that you can do this. Uh, and just stay consistent day in and day out. If you know that you're gonna be doing it every single day, you just log into your app.

And this is why I love using those apps because you just log into your app, boom, boom, boom, categorize really quickly, and you're done. So it takes you literally how fast you can move your fingers is how long it's gonna take you. That's about it. And so we call it five minutes drill. It should not take you longer than five minutes, and at the end of the month, everything is done.

You're not spending two hours going through your budget, making sure everything is lined up perfectly. Instead, you just do the old fashioned five minute drill. So this is one of those micro habits that I absolutely love and is one of my favorites. Alright, number seven is to learn about money weekly. So this is something I think really, really helped me early on in my financial journey and I have stuck to it.

As time has gone on. So what do I mean by that? Really early on when I decided I'm gonna turn my money around, I made the commitment to start reading one book every single week. And so when I did that, I dedicated about one hour per day to learning about finances. But this actually turned into a lot more than that, and I'll explain why in a second.

But I wanted to at least dedicate one hour per day to learn about finances. Now you don't have to spend an hour a day. You can, you know, read a couple of pages a day, but you just wanna learn about money every. Single week, if I were you, I would dedicate one hour every single week to learning about finances, and that may just be plenty for you.

Maybe it's 10 minutes a day, maybe it's five minutes a day. You do your five minutes drill, you do 10 minutes of reading and boom, boom, badda, bing, badda, boom, you're done. Okay? That's what you could be doing. How do you do this? Well. You can read books, you can listen to podcasts just like this. If you listen to one of these podcasts every single week, you spent an hour dedicated to learning about finance, and that is the big thing that you can do In order to learn more.

You can watch educational videos. We have this podcast also on video. If you like video, boop boop, you can search my name. Um, and so between all those things, I'm making way too many sound effects today. Sorry about that. So between all of these different things, this is how I really, really accelerated my path to learning.

Now what I did a lot is when I was in the corporate world. I would sit in my office, or at the beginning I was in a cubicle and I would sit there and listen to podcasts. There was a bunch of early podcasts that I would listen to. One was called the Dull Roller Podcast, which is now Rob Berger show. Great show.

First just had a dedicated podcast. Now he has a YouTube channel. Uh, really, really good stuff. I would listen to shows like Radical Personal Finance, Joshua Sheets, another great show, and I would listen to all different kinds. Like my friend Joe Saul Cihi. I would listen to Stacking Benjamin's. There's a bunch of shows that I would love to listen to, uh, back in the day.

And so I was spending time learning more. About finances, which was very important to me. And so when we started that journey that was really helping me was I was reading a little bit every single day, and then I was listening to podcasts, and that made a tremendous difference in my specific life. Now, if there are really big ticket items that you wanna learn, and writing down notes and having summary keys can be really, really helpful for you.

And then continuously just expanding your financial knowledge is really, really important. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is kind of go deeper into some of this stuff as you start to get the baseline stuff. So maybe you understand, you know, emergency funds and you understand budgets and how to do certain things.

Well, let's go deeper. Well, how do I minimize my taxes? Okay, you got all these different things mastered. Okay, now how do I figure out my estate plan and how do I put that together? And kind of just think through some of those things if you're interested in the topic. But really all you need is the basics first.

And if you're trying to turn your finances around, you need the basics. And you don't have to go further than that if you don't want to. But if you love this stuff, like if you're a nerd like me, uh, about this stuff, then you can definitely go much deeper. Number eight is tracking your net worth. So tracking your net worth is a really, really important thing.

I think a lot of people probably need to consider doing it at least quarterly or yearly. Uh, you could do it monthly too, if you're really a nerd about it. One of the best things to do overall with your net worth is just to utilize it as a scorecard. So you break down your assets versus your liabilities, and you can see your progress clearly.

So a lot of those budget apps that I talk about, they all do that for you. Um, but if you don't wanna do that, there's another tool called Empower that is completely free. That will also do it for you, or you could use a spreadsheet, you can get a net worth spreadsheet going, uh, and maybe we need to create a net worth spreadsheet for you guys that's free so you guys can have one available.

We'll look at doing that for those who don't want to kind of plug their bank accounts into some of those apps. Um, but with your net worth, this is a really important scorecard to have. Now I like to track it because it will tell me kind of where I am. Now, if you do it on a monthly basis, it's gonna fluctuate a lot.

Why? Because the market shifts all the time. And so that's why I don't love looking at it on a monthly basis all the time, but I will look at it if it is connected to something like one of these apps. And so you gotta make sure that you have those in place first before you go through that process. But also you wanna make sure that you are simplifying some of the tracking with some of these other notes.

Now, this is gonna be a big part of your goals, is when you think about your net worth, you wanna kind of set up some of these net worth goals in place. So when you're thinking about your goals, set goals to increase your net worth incrementally. So my. I first one, for example, was to get to my first $10,000 in net worth.

You may have a negative net worth right now. If you're in debt, your net worth will be negative. But if you are someone who is goal oriented, you can set these up in a way where, hey, maybe it's first $10,000, then it's getting to 25,000. Then it's getting to. 50,000, you're starting to ladder up to your first a hundred K.

Now you know, your first a hundred K is the hardest place to get you with your finances, but after that, everything starts to get slowly much easier where you will see your net worth grow. And so maybe your first big, big goal is to get your first a hundred K net worth and then go on from there. But this is a great way to start setting goals and big goals for your financial life as well.

Number nine is we wanna create a once list. So this is a micro habit that can help a lot of people who find themselves just spending money frivolously on Amazon or Target or Walmart or wherever else, and you know who you are. If you were the person who just puts things in your shopping cart and goes out and buys them, you may want to create a once list.

Now, this is a list that you could put together in order of operation. Now what do I mean by that? This means that you put your most wanted thing at the top of the list and your least wanted thing at the bottom of the list. So you create a list of things that you want in life. Maybe, uh, I don't care what it's, it could be a list of things like you want a brand new hobby, or maybe you wanna start taking a workout class, or maybe you want to buy a new shoes, or maybe you wanna buy a new handbag, or maybe you wanna buy a new shirt, or maybe you wanna buy new golf clubs, or maybe you wanna buy a new fishing pole.

I don't care what it is, but creating this once list and putting it in order of operations from best. To worst is gonna be really, really important. Now, why is this really important? Because this gets a hit list going for you. You know how expensive this stuff is going to be. And so if you put it in order, you can start to look at these things and say, Hey, I have some extra cash on hand.

I have my fund money, my 25% that we just talked about. I have this extra cash on hand, and now I can A, I have enough saved up to buy the first one. Okay? Then we go down the list. Now I have enough money to buy the second one and the third one. Now, you could do this in the Notes app on your phone. You could do this on a spreadsheet.

It doesn't really matter where you do it, but this just helps you get organized on the things that you wanna buy, specifically, the bigger ticket items that you wanna buy. You probably know someone in your life who doesn't spend any money whatsoever, and all of a sudden they get this. Big giant purchase that they make.

Well, the reason why they do that is typically, probably in their head, they have a once list and they're thinking through, okay, I gotta save for a few months to buy this thing, or I gotta save for a year before I can buy this thing. And so that is a really great way to make sure your dollars are going towards the things that you value.

That's exactly what we want you to do, is ensure that those dollars are going towards things that you value. A once list helps you to do that. All right, number 10, this micro habit is a really big one. I think most people will benefit from this if they actually do this. And here's where this stemmed from.

Very early on, when I used to cut back on some of my expenses, I would realize pretty quickly that the money that I cut back would just go back into my checking account. It would get comm mingled in my checking account and just disappear. And I said to myself, well, why do I continuously doing this? So instead, I created what I call the c.

I A method. What does CIA stand for? This stands for cut, identify, and then automate. Now, let's go through this. Cut is to eliminate any unnecessary expenses or subscriptions. So if there are expenses that you have within your budget that you absolutely do not care about, it does not bring you value. A big one for a lot of people is streaming services.

Maybe you have HBO Max, you have Apple tv, you have Paramount, you have Netflix, you have Amazon Prime, you have all of them. You got 'em all. You do not watch all of them every single month. Maybe you're watching one show on one, and then the next month you're watching another show in a different one. But you do not use all of them every single month.

Well, if you have all of those subscriptions, you're paying 70 plus dollars for all of them. So instead, what C is for is to start cutting back on some of those subscriptions. But I comes into play, and this is very important because I is identify. So once you cut back on something, you cut back a subscription, or maybe you just.

Cut out an expense from your life. Once you cut it, you need to identify where this money is going to go. Okay? Because if you put it back into your checking account, it's just gonna get lost. It's gonna go towards random things that you do not care about. So if you identify where this money is going to go, then you can choose how you want to allocate this.

For me specifically, I always like to put it towards something like an emergency fund or something towards investments. That means my money is gonna grow or it's gonna go towards future me to achieve financial freedom. Okay, so when you identify. Where it wants to go. Then you A automate it, CIA. So automation means that you take that money and you start automating exactly where you want it to go.

So let's say for example, that you're saving for a new house and so you're trying to cut back so you can start saving more money for that new house. Well, if you have a budget line item within your high yield savings account, for example, then what you can do is you can cut back subscriptions. You identify that you want it to go to your down payment, and then you automate that money into that savings bucket, that is your high yield savings account.

Now, this is a very important process because once you automate it, you don't have to think about it ever again. It's just going in there automatically every single month. Maybe you already have an automation set up and you just increase it by a 50 or 70 or a hundred dollars, whatever the number is. So that you make sure that money goes where you want it to go.

So utilizing the CIA method, make sure that when you cut back money, you're actually cutting it back and actually saving it. Most people cut back and don't save, they just cut back and spend somewhere else. So instead, you're cutting back and you are saving those dollars towards something that you value.

Number 11 is to invest in yourself. So learning how to invest in yourself is one of the most important things that you can do. If you are in your twenties or your thirties and you are listening to this podcast right now and you're saying, I have never ever gotten to the place that I thought I would be at this point in time, you need to invest more in yourself.

This is one of the most important investments that are out there, and so investing in something that is gonna help you make more money is what this is all about. So what I want you to do is I want you to allocate time. I want you to allocate money, and I want you to allocate brainpower towards a specific skill and knowledge that is going to help you improve your earning potential.

What do I mean by that? Okay. Let's say for example, you are a nurse, and if you're a nurse, there's only a couple of different ways that you can make more money. You can start to create, I guess, online nursing content. Uh, you could start to go out there with a side hustle with something related to nursing.

Maybe you start a Scrubs brand that competes with figs or whatever else. Or you could go out there and you could just. Go get an additional certification that allows you to make more money day one. Well, if that is you, investing in yourself means investing more dollars into that certification so that you can make more money forever.

It is the one of the most worthwhile investments that you will ever make. It's the highest rate of return that you will get if you are a nurse, because you're gonna make more money. Let's say for example, you wanna become a nurse practitioner. Well, if you become a nurse practitioner, you're gonna make what?

10, 20, $30,000 more every single year forever. That is an amazing investment to go out and get your degree to make sure that you can continue that education and earn more money. So investing in yourself is a really, really powerful thing. Or let's say for example, you are in coding, I. And you're someone who has been coding for a really long time, you've been vibe coding over the course of the last couple of months, and then all of a sudden what you say to yourself is, well, AI is coming up.

I gotta figure out how to take advantage of this. So you start taking courses and classes on how to maximize your potential with ai. You go through this now you have this skill that you can utilize forever to earn more money and make yourself more marketable. Or let's say you're a project manager and you know, hey, I gotta make more money as a project manager.

And so you go out and get your PMP, or let's say you're in sales and you start investing more dollars into sales skills, or you're in finance and you start to take all these different Excel classes that are gonna help you create additional reports. All of these things are investing in yourself and they're gonna help you earn more money forever.

We talk about investing in the s and p 500. Alex Hormoze has one of my favorite quotes on this. He calls it investing in the s and p in me. And so this is one of those things where you're investing more dollars in yourself. It's gonna help you earn more forever. And so that is a really, really powerful way to think about this.

Number 12 is to use the 1% rule. And so what I want you to do is with the 1% rule, this is going to be a way for you to increase your savings and investment rate and or increase the amount that you're putting towards your emergency fund or decrease how much you are spending every single month. How does this work?

The way that this works is it's going to allow you to make small, consistent changes. So let's say for example, that you are overspending. In the grocery category. Okay. Let's say you're spending $1,000 every single month. Well. In month two, what I want you to do is if you wanna reduce this down to $700 a month, then I want you to reduce it by 1%.

That means you're reducing it down 1% every single month over the course of the next 12 months, where you're gonna spend 12% less on groceries. If you reduce it by 1% every single month, by the end of the year in two years, that's gonna be 24% reduction, and it's going to help you gradually reduce that spending.

Or let's say, for example, you wanna invest more into your Roth IRA, and you invest 10% of your income. Into your Roth IRA. Well then what I want you to do is increase that investment to 20%. And the way to do that is to 1% every single month, increase your contribution to that Roth IRA. And over the course of the next 12 months, you'll be investing 22% of your money into that Roth IRA.

So these small, consistent changes removes the friction and it also just removes the fact that it really is painful at first to make these big shifts in your money. And so small changes can help you over time reduce that impact. Number 13, and this is for those folks who, again, are really prone to making purchase decisions really, really quickly.

And this is to use wait periods before you make a purchase. So you need to establish some windows before you make specifically big purchases, but you gotta figure out kind of where you want these to land. On how you spend your money, specifically on things that are not essentials. So let's say for example, that you spend a lot of money, you make a ton of a hundred dollar purchases, just random a hundred dollar purchases, uh, on different things.

Like, you know, last week you bought sunglasses. The week before that you went out and you bought something else, and you, you go down the line and you just go look at your purchase and you're like, I'm just spending way too much money all the time. What you wanna do is create cooling off periods for yourself.

What does this mean? When you wanna buy something, if it is a certain dollar amount, you have a specific cooling off period. So let's say for example, everything above a hundred dollars, you wait at least three days before you buy that item. What this does is it ensures, A, that you actually want that item, but B, it gives you a cooling off period to take the excitement outta the equation, take the marketing outta the equation, and all of a sudden all the dust settles and you realize, ooh.

I actually don't really want this thing. I was just going to buy it really quickly 'cause they had some good marketing or, Ooh, I really don't want this thing. A lot of things have changed over the course of the last couple of days. So here's the way to think about this is everything that is a hundred dollars or less, you wait 24 hours.

Everything above a hundred dollars to $200, you wait three days. 200 to 500, you wait seven days and anything above 500, then you're going to wait at least 30 days before you make that purchase. If you go through this process, this allows you to cool off and it's going to allow you to save so much more money and you're not gonna have to worry about just making these frivolous purchases and instead you've actually thought through this process to make sure you actually wanted that item.

Number 14 is learning how to ask the right questions. And so when you are thinking about your finances, what I want you to do is regularly assess your actions and making sure that it aligns with your financial goals. So when you are actually making decisions, you wanna ask yourself, does this help me achieve my goal?

If it doesn't. Then that is something you do not do. You have to learn to say no more frequently, and if something doesn't align with your goals, then you do not need to be doing it. Or a second thing you need to be doing no is making sure you're asking the right questions to experts. So if there are people in your life who can help you tremendously with your finance, it's a great example for me as someone like a CPA.

I can ask my CPAA number of different questions, and I have to ask them the right questions to make sure I am getting the optimized result that I want. And so in order to do this, I need to make sure that I come with a list of questions every time we have a meeting so that we can optimize my taxes to reduce my taxable income for you.

This may be. Asking someone in your life, you know how you can save more money, or this could be asking someone in your life how you can invest your dollars better. But it depends on what your goals are specifically and where you wanna get to. But continuously mastering and asking the right questions can be a huge, huge difference maker for your money.

Number 15 is to simplify your money. If you are the type of person who has 15 different investment accounts, you have three different checking accounts, you have four different savings accounts, and you have your dollars all over the place, let's work on simplifying our financial system. Now, here's how you do this.

One brokerage account that holds your Roth IRA, your taxable brokerage account, any other investment that you have outside of maybe your 401k, which has to be somewhere else. So if you can keep 'em all in one place, even better. But having one place for all your investments, one place for all your banking and your credit cards and all of that stuff can be in one place as well.

But just simplifying and reducing the amount of counts that you have Married couples. If your money is separate, you have complicated your finances, and so if you have two separate accounts out there, your finances have been complicated. So if it feels like it's over complicated, if you're ven mowing each other back and forth all the time, this may be a situation where you wanna have a conversation to simplify your finances, but.

Figure out ways to reduce friction within your finances that is going to allow you to create an easy to follow process. Sometimes for a lot of people, when I look at their financial situation, the reason why they are having so much trouble is because their system is way over complicated. And if you overcomplicate a system, you will never get a grips on what the heck is going on with your money, and you will never be able to build wealth if you have no idea what the heck is going on with your money.

That is the hard truth that a lot of you need to hear. And if you don't think that that is going to work for you, then just think through a process of how you can simplify more. 16 is to create more than you consume. So if you are finding that you are not where you wanna be in life, one big thing could be that you are consuming way too much instead of creating more.

What do I mean by this? Go first and look at your screen time right now and go say to yourself, how much time am I spending on my phone scrolling social media or doing other things? How much time am I consuming? Then I want you to think about how much time am I creating value? So how much time am I going out to my job and creating value for my job to earn more money?

But outside of that, how much time am I spending creating value for myself? Maybe you're investing in yourself, or how much time am I creating value for a business? Or how much time am I working on a side hustle? All these different things. And if the amount of time that you are consuming is higher than the amount of time that you're creating, you need to flip that equation.

If you're watching Netflix for three hours a day, but you also are not where you wanna be financially, then maybe we need to make a shift. Or if you are someone who is scrolling on TikTok for five hours a day and you are not where you wanna be, then let's take some of that time and put it towards creating more.

You need to look at your time management and understand where you are, and you need to create more than you consume now. Create means creating value, creating more value. That is the key to making sure that you turn your financial situation around. The last one is to avoid saying yes to everything. So this is something that I had to learn over the course of the last couple of years where people would send me requests for meetings, for example, and I would just accept the meetings at whatever time because my calendar was open.

And very quickly I realized that I had to say no to a lot of different meetings and a lot of different times because I had to protect the specific time that I was most productive. So for me, I am most productive in the mornings, and it's usually from 8:00 AM to 12, is my high production. Activity time.

And so during that timeframe, I do not take meetings for the most part. Majority of the time, I do not take meetings anywhere from 8:00 AM to 12 o'clock. 12 o'clock beyond is when I will start to take meetings and I'd be willing to have conversations with people, but I learned, I had to say no to protect this timeframe because I am prioritizing this timeframe for what I need to do every single day.

Maybe for you, you need to protect time that is going to help you. Be more productive over time, or maybe you need to just start saying no to specific situations that are causing you to spend way too much money. So, uh, there's a lot of people out there and they know who they are. The movie 27 Dresses, for example, is an example of this where maybe you're a bridesmaid in every single wedding that has ever happened within your hometown.

Well, if that is you, maybe there's a situation where you gotta start saying no a little bit. 'cause these weddings are getting pretty expensive. And so I know that is a hard and a difficult conversation to have, but if people are asking you to be in your wedding and you don't. Classify them as one of your best friends.

And maybe you need to start having some of these conversations to reduce the amount of money that you are spending. So learning to say no is a skill, and if it is not something that you are really thrilled to go out and do, it is something you wanna make sure that you're protecting your time, your money, and your energy.

So I want you to draw three lines on a piece of paper. Time, money, energy, what is sucking the most of those three out of your life. And I want you to say to yourself, how can I protect myself from these things? This is gonna be a really, really important skill to learn. 'cause once you start to master this, all of a sudden your life starts to come together and you can be more productive, you can build more wealth, and you get more of your time back.

So think about those three things. Think about saying no first. Then you say. Yes, after you think about it more. Listen, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. If you guys have any questions, please join the Master Money Newsletter by going to master money.co/newsletter. And don't forget to follow this podcast on Spotify, apple Podcast, YouTube, or whatever your favorite podcast player is.

I truly appreciate. Every single one of you be in here and we will see ya on the next episode.