How to Automate Your Finances (Money on Autopilot!)

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, how to Automate Your Money so it runs on autopilot.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. Stop your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna be diving into a much requested episode about how to automate your money. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money Newsletter by going to master money.co/newsletter.

And don't forget. To follow us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you wanna help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now, most people, they think they're bad with money.

But what most people don't realize is you are not bad with money. It is not you. It's that you don't have a system in place that is going to allow you to build wealth. And in today's episode, my entire goal is to teach you the money on Autopilot system. This is our system on how we completely automate our money.

Now in Master Money Academy, we have a bunch of people who started to automate their money and they cannot believe how much less they have to do with their finances just by automating their money. And once you get your dollars working on autopilot, it is incredible how much faster you will build wealth.

Why? There's a number of different reasons that we're gonna talk about in this episode, but I am really, really excited for you guys to learn how to automate your money. Once I started to learn how to automate my money very early on in my finance journey. All of a sudden, everything became easier. I was spending less time thinking about did that transfer over to that account.

I was spending less time thinking about my bills. I wasn't worried anymore on if my dollars were getting invested or if my bills were getting paid or if I was saving enough money in my emergency fund. I knew how much was going to those accounts every single month, and the beautiful part about this was I didn't have to do anything.

So all you have to do is set up your automation system early, and once you have that set up, then we're gonna talk about some things that you can do after to just make sure it is running smoothly. But automation is how you spend less time on your finances and more time on the things that you actually value.

Spending time with your family, spending more time, earning more money so that you can take those extra dollars and put them towards future you. This is really where I want you prioritizing your time, is spending more on the bigger financial decisions. I don't want you in every single budget category having to worry about every single cent dollar.

No. Instead, I want you to automate your money so you can think about the big decisions, your taxes, where you're gonna be living, how you're gonna be allocating your investments, how are you gonna be thinking about. Earning more money, negotiating your salary. Those are the big ticket items that I really want you to think about.

And so you can go through this entire process and a lot of people, once they start to see money automation, they say to themselves, holy crap, I can automate literally almost everything. And a lot of people will come back to me and say, oh my gosh, I've been making my finances way too hard. This is so much better overall.

And you can get all of this done pretty quickly. Actually, over the course of one weekend, if you actually buckle down and set this up. Now we're gonna have a free automation checklist that you can download in the show notes down below. So make sure you check that out because that checklist is a free, printable, downloadable checklist, uh, that is available to each and every single one of you.

So again, we will have that linked up, down below in the show notes. Also at the end of this episode, I'm gonna give you some screenshots. We're gonna try something new here, so if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, I'm gonna give you some screenshots that you can utilize and screenshot on your phone so you have some extra things to consider.

And it's also gonna give you a list of items that you should be automating first, so the 12 things that you should automate first. I'm gonna have that at the end of this episode just so that you can just screenshot it and take it with you and take some action right away at the end of the episode.

Alright, so if you're ready to automate your money, if you are ready to dive in deeper. Without further ado, let's get into it. So the biggest thing I want everybody to realize today is that automation is a superpower. So your biggest problem is in your income. It's. Chaos. Your finances, most likely if you're new to automation, are chaotic or you're just spending a lot of time in your finances.

Bills are coming out of three different accounts. That is one thing I see a lot of people do, where they have multiple accounts. It just overcomplicate their finances. Random charges are hitting at random time, and you have no idea when that is actually going to happen. You're trying to pay some of these bills manually.

Some of your bills are on autopay, but a lot of them you are paying manually. Maybe you're even. Sending out checks. If you were on 1995 still, you're trying to remember when daycare hits. You're trying to remember when the next phone bill is gonna hit. You're trying to remember when your mortgage hits and you can't keep it all straight.

Then you have to transfer money for groceries, and then you have to transfer money for items that you forgot to remember. All of this is complete financial chaos. It automation removes all of this. It removes those late. Fees. It removes those money fights with your spouse, where you're going back and forth because you forgot to have enough cash on hand in order to pay the electric bill.

It removes the missed investments and the big opportunities that you're missing out on because you did not automate your investments. It removes the emotional decision making. So where you're thinking about, man, should I invest these dollars or should I go? You know, treat myself. Should I go splurge a little bit?

No. It removes that from the equation. 'cause you know exactly what you're gonna be doing. We're gonna set up a plan that allows you to transfer those dollars. It removes guilt, it removes overwhelm. All of these things are why I absolutely love automation. And if you are someone out there, most people hate this word.

When I say this word, I see a lot of people cringe. It removes the need to always have to budget. The B word is something most people don't like now. There's gonna be seasons where you're always gonna have to budget. If you are in a season of life where maybe you lost a job, well, if you lost a job, you're gonna have to budget 'cause you didn't even know where every single dollar was going.

But once you get this automation set up, and once you get this system in place, you have to budget way less, if not at all, depending on what your income is and how much room you have. And then it also just eliminates procrastination, which most of us are guilty of when it comes to our finances, myself included.

And so removing procrastination from your equation is really, really important. Now, here's the big thing is willpower is something that is finite, meaning willpower is going to dissolve, it is going to go away. We cannot rely on our willpower. We must rely on our discipline. And so when this happens, most people when it comes to their finances, are trying as hard as they can to rely on their willpower, and it's impossible.

It is absolutely impossible to rely on that. If I relied on my willpower, I would never be where I am today. Automation changes that for you and you only have to set it up once. So let's dive deeper into what we need to do. Now. I'm gonna talk about the first thing you need to do, 'cause we have six steps in this episode that I'm gonna talk about.

The checklist that we have for you to download is gonna break it down even more. But in these six steps, we're gonna go through all of these. So we're gonna build our flow account where, where our money's gonna pass through and flow through. We're gonna automate our wealth, we're gonna automate our bills, we're gonna go through a spending plan.

We're gonna automate some safety nets as well so that we can preserve some of our wealth as we go through this. And then lastly, at the end, I'm gonna give you the 10 minute monthly review that you need to be doing in order to make sure that your automations are running correctly. So let's get into step one next.

So step one is we're gonna build our flow through account. So most of you have a flow through account and you just didn't know that that's what we're gonna call this today. But this is where everything starts. Every single one of your dollars needs to flow through this account so it can go towards the proper automations.

Now what is this account called? It's called a checking account and every single one of you has a checking account. But I want you to train your brain to reframe what the checking account is. All this account is is a place for your money to flow. So your paycheck is going to hit that checking account and it's going to flow and trickle down to all these other places.

This is why typically I keep my checking account pretty lean. The max. I tell most people in Master Money Academy to ensure they you have in their checking account is right around a month's worth of expenses max. You can have a month and a half if you really want to, if that makes you nervous. It depends on your personal preference, but I don't want you to have more than that in your checking account.

Now, some of you may be saying, man, I'm just trying to get by. I barely have enough money in my checking account. And others may be saying, well, I have a hundred thousand dollars in my checking account. Why do I have so much? Let's talk about this. You need to make sure that you're running this thing lean, because we wanna optimize where our dollars are going.

We wanna put them in the best possible places, and in order to do that, it needs to flow out of our checking account. A checking account is a terrible place to hold your money. Unless you have a high interest checking account, you really don't earn any money in your checking account. And a lot of times it gets commingled in there and people just end up spending those dollars that are already in their checking account.

Most of you're listening right now, nodding your head, noting that a lot of times if you have money in your checking account, you know, Hey, I go on those target runs and I spend that money. Or, Hey, I just went over to Dick's Sporting Goods, bought myself a brand new driver 'cause I had enough money in my checking account.

That's what happens to a lot of people. And instead, what you need to make sure that you are doing is moving that money into places that it needs. To go. So I like having around a month. A month is gonna give you enough buffer where anything could happen and you still have enough cash on hand in your checking account if you wanna run it leaner.

If you're really on top of your finances, you absolutely can, but you gotta make sure that there's no surprises and nothing jumps out at you. So this is where all your income lands, and this is where all your automations are gonna flow from. So you can think of your money automation system as a waterfall.

This is the top of the waterfall before everything kind of flows down and trickles down into all the other places, it's gonna pull some of your bills, it's gonna pull some of your transfers and flow through all of those different areas so it's not scattered across a bunch of different. Accounts. Now, if you're a couple or you're in a relationship, then finding ways to build up even if you keep your finances separate.

Now, I'm a big proponent of having combined finances, but some people just do not wanna do that. And it's personal preference. If you don't wanna do that, whatever your reason is, personal finance is personal, and so if you do not wanna have combined finances, what I would say. Is at least have a combined checking account where you transfer your bill payments into that one combined checking account because it's gonna allow you to ensure that you can at least get your bills paid together so you're not ven mowing each other back and forth.

Money automation doesn't work when you are ven mowing your spouse back and forth. And so I want you to make sure that instead you have your either finances combined, number one, and or if you don't wanna do that, you at least have a combined checking account that you pay your bills. Got it. Perfect. So that's what we're gonna talk through here.

We don't want any more chaos in our life, and so this pass through account is gonna be the starting point. Now, where do I have a checking account? You can go to your local brick and mortar bank if you want to. Mine's at Chase just because the closest bank to my house. That's literally the only reason. I am not a big proponent.

A brick and mortar banks. Credit unions are also great, but I want. Ease of access. That's the only reason why I have it at Chase. 'cause if I have to go get cash for something, or if I just have to make a deposit really quickly, I can do it and it's close because I know it's gonna take me an extra week if the bank is farther away.

And so that's the reason why I keep mine at Chase. But you can keep yours wherever you want to. It's all up to you. Now step two is we are gonna be talking about the most important thing that we can do with our dollars, and what is that we can find a place to grow our wealth. And so when we do this, we wanna automate our money, automate our wealth, so we don't have to think about it anymore.

Now my friends, we are living in the 2020s right now, meaning that we have a beautiful thing available to us that allows us to automatically build wealth without even having to think about it. And so I'm gonna talk about this today, but you need to make sure that you are automating your investments. So your investments are the number one way to build wealth.

It is the only way that you will ever be able to retire. And so you gotta make sure that you are automatically investing every week, every month, bimonthly, whenever you set up the cadence. The cool thing about this is, is we're gonna talk about this, but you can set up automatic transfers to Vanguard or Fidelity, and you can automatically invest.

In fact, fidelity has been able to do this for a while, and Vanguard is now able to do this, where you can literally automatically invest directly from your checking accounts into your brokerage accounts or whatever other retirement accounts that you have set up. So you don't even have to think about buying the investment.

Instead, you can automatically buy investments directly from your checking account. And so here's the thing I want you to think about. When money hits my checking account, I want to pay myself first. You always pay yourself first, then spend. What is left over. And so we wanna make sure our dollars are getting invested and paying ourselves first.

This is why this is the most important step and the first thing that you need to be doing well. Now you may be saying to yourself, well, which order should I be automating my money? Well, I'm glad you asked, and it depends on each and every single person. But here is the order of operations of how I would think about automating my dollars.

Number one is getting your employer match. We know your employer match is free money and every single person out there. If you are not getting your employer match, you need to make sure that you are getting it. Go to your HR department, look at your employee handbook and see what your match is. Take advantage of your employer match.

It is free. I love free money. I don't know about you, but I love free money. In fact, free is my favorite number. And so because of this, we wanna make sure that we are getting that free money from our employer. They're trying to help you out there. And in fact, if you get your employer match every single year, even if it's a modest two to 3%, it will change.

Your retirement over the course of 30 years by well over six figures, and I've seen a lot of times if the match is higher, you can have a million dollar difference in your portfolio just by getting that employer match. You gotta make sure that you are getting it if you are not already. Number two is if you have a high deductible health plan, you could take advantage of the EHSA.

So the HSA has triple tax advantages. It, and I like using it as a retirement account, so money goes in tax free. It can grow tax free, and you could pull the money out tax free as long as you have a qualified medical expense. We will link down below in the show notes our entire episode about the HSA, because this is a really powerful account that, and you need to take advantage of number three.

Is the Roth IRA. So for a lot of folks out there, a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA, if you're gonna do a backdoor Roth IRA is a fantastic account for most people. Why? 'cause money goes in that's already been taxed, so your paycheck was already taxed. It grows tax free and you could pull the money out tax free.

Number four is your 401k. So your 401k. Typically the money from your 401k. It's going to go from your paycheck, so you don't even have to move it from your checking account. It's gonna come from your paycheck already. So how many of you out there have a 401k and you went and never looked at it? 'cause you didn't think about your finances and maybe you were working throughout your twenties and somebody told you, maybe an uncle, maybe your parents told you, Hey, you gotta contribute to your 401k and make sure you're getting some dollars in there.

And so you start to invest your money in your 401k, but you didn't look at it again. You just let those dollars go into your 401k get invested and it grew over time and all of a sudden you opened up your 401k and you said. Holy cow. I got way more money in there than I ever thought I did. Welcome to the magic of automation.

This is what money automation does. It allows you to build wealth without having to think about it. And your 401k is the clear example that most of you have experienced that allows you to automate your money and build wealth automatically. I can't stress this enough. This is a really, really important step that most people need to note.

And so your 401k is a great example, and that would be number four. Number five is your taxable account. So for most people out there, and I am starting to prioritize a taxable more and more and more because of flexibility. This is by far the most flexible account that you have out there. And so for people who wanna retire early, a lot of my audience does.

For people who want to go out there and have additional flexibility when they retire, the taxable account is. Absolutely fantastic for that. And we probably need to do an updated deep dive on the taxable account and some of the cool things that you can do with it now in the next coming year because there's some new laws and updates that allow this to be even a more tax advantage account.

And then number six is any other goals that you have at 5 29 playing for your kids. Maybe your kids' investing accounts, those are gonna be the things that are last. Those come at the end, and the reason for that is you need to take care of your retirement first, and then everything else comes into play.

Too many people out there, I'm seeing there are way too many people out there that I am seeing investing in a 5 29 before their retirement. Do not do that. I know you wanna put your kids first, I get it, but guess what? You're gonna be a huge burden to your kids when you need long-term care or you need some help, and they have to financially support you and your long-term care because you did not put a retirement plan in place.

You do not wanna be a burden to your kids. You gotta make sure that you contribute to your retirement first, then your kids come next. Understand this is very, very important. There are no loans for retirement. And so you gotta make sure that your retirement comes first before everything else. Now, step three, we're gonna talk about those pesky things that none of us like to pay, which is our bills.

So here is something that I want you to say to yourself. If it has a due date, I want you to automate it. So, because here's the math one. Late fee is about $29 and one late fee for a month over the course of 10 years is about 34,000. $80. And if you invest that at 9% rate of return, you lost $5,500 just to late fees alone.

And so if there are still folks out there that I have come across who are manually paying your bills, and if you're listening to this podcast right now and manually paying your bills, that is not the move whatsoever. So you need to make sure that you are automating every single bill. Now, how do we do this?

We do this one of two ways. One, you have your flow through account. What's our flow through account? Again, that is our checking account. That's where money flows through that account so that we can ensure that we are actually getting those dollars to where they need to go. So some of this money is already going to our investment accounts and we are starting to automate it out.

Into our investment accounts. Now we're gonna start to automate our bills. Now our bills can come out of one of two places. Number one is they can come out of your checking account. So a lot of things will come outta your checking account, like your mortgage, for example, maybe your rent, things like your electric bills or your utilities.

There may be some other bills that you have on hand where you can pay with the second option, which is a credit card. Now, let's talk about this for a second. For a lot of folks out there, they wanna earn points and miles. They wanna earn rewards, they wanna make sure they get all these extra perks and it's credit cards are great for that.

They were a great option to pay your bills as long as you pay the credit card off every single month. Now, here's the note is if you have ever had trouble with credit cards in the past, I don't want you using a credit card. I'd rather you pay cash outta your checking account and make sure you pay your bills there, or your debit card, whatever you wanna use.

But if you've never had issues with credit cards and you have been responsible with credit cards, they are a great way to get free vacations. They are a great way to get cash back. They're a great way to get all these extra perks just for paying your bills. And so I put as many bills as possible on a credit card.

Every other bill that is not possible to put on a credit card, then I will pay it outta my checking account. Now, a lot of you right now may be saying to yourself, well, I wish I could pay my mortgage, or I wish I could pay my rent with a credit card. That's coming my friends, you can pay your rent with the built card and the built card is coming out with something also that allows you to pay your mortgage.

There is another card coming out that allows you to pay your mortgage so the rewards for paying your mortgage and rent are coming and they're getting better and better and better. And so these are things where at some point in time, you're gonna be able to pay all of your bills on a credit card to acquire points and miles.

Again, if you have not been responsible with your credit cards in the past, you gotta make sure. That you are just using a debit card and your checking account. Okay, so here's my system on how I do this, okay? I pay most of my bills with my credit card, as many as I possibly can. Then I pay off that card with my checking account every single week, but Andrew.

Why would you do it every single week when you said pay it off once a month? The only reason why I do that is because I wanna stay on top of it. I just wanna stay on top of everything. I don't like when my credit card balances get bigger. It's just a personal preference. It's probably an emotional thing.

I just do not like credit card balances whatsoever. So I pay 'em off weekly. For all of you out there who don't care about that, you can pay it off monthly, no problem. But we have rules with credit cards and we will link up our episode down below that talks about credit cards and why you need to make sure that you are responsible with them.

We have rules around credit cards, so if you haven't heard that episode yet, I highly recommend that you check it out. And so let's talk about some of these other bills. Your rent or mortgage, we need to pay that outta the checking account, your utilities outta the checking account, your insurance, like car insurance, those types of things.

My car insurance is through State Farm. I can pay my State Farm with a credit card. I don't know about you and your car insurance, but depending on what that is, you either have to pay outta your checking account or your credit card. Things like life insurance is gonna come outta your checking account.

Other things like umbrella insurance or business insurance, a lot of times it depends on the company, but those are things that you can pay either way. Subscriptions. Great place to put on your credit card and just making sure you track those subscriptions and stay on top of them is the biggest key.

Your phone bill, mine's on my credit card. You can put your phone bill on your credit card. Things like internet, those types of things can all go on a credit card. Things like daycare. Usually need to come outta your checking account. Then you have like HOA payments or student loan payments. All those things are typically gonna have to come outta your checking account.

And then lastly is obviously paying your credit card. So last thing and I that I will say about this is automation is really important even when paying all these bills. So I want you to go into each of those and I want you to set up autopay. So you go into each of those accounts, set up autopay. Turn on autopay, make sure it is fully paying those, and they just make a quick checklist of all those items so that you can ensure they're getting paid every month when you do your 10 minute checkup.

Now, one other thing I'll note is on all my credit cards, I always turn on autopay just in case I forget to go in there and take a look at them so they automatically will get paid no matter what, every single month. And so that is another big key. Now, if you are someone who is living paycheck to paycheck, and you're saying to yourself, I don't know how I'm gonna automatically pay my bills when I can.

I'm barely trying to get by, and so I manually pay them currently, right after I get paid, I manually pay each and every single one of my bills. Well, here's a little hack for you in a tip, and we talk about this. We have a, a course called Automate Your Money in a Weekend. It's a $27 course, so if you're interested in that, we'll link it up down below as well.

Uh, and when you download the checklist, you'll probably get prompted to look at Automate your Money in a weekend. But for this episode, we are market it down to $27, normally $99. And so when we are looking at this. There is something we talk about in that course where you can move your, the date of your bills, you can actually move the date that your bills fall on and you can call up these companies and I like to put 'em just a few days after when I get paid.

And so you can look at your bills and say, Hey, I need to move this bill, you know, three days after I get paid in order to ensure. That I can actually pay it on time. So you can move your bills to two different days throughout the month. Maybe you put some of 'em on the first and some of them on the 16th, for example.

And when you do that, that will ensure that you have the money or the cash there and you know what date your bills are gonna be paid. And so if you're living paycheck to paycheck, or you are tight right now, money's tight right now, that's the best way to do it, is to move your bills around. You call up each company, try to move it on specific dates, and then you'll be able to make those payments and understand where those dates.

Fall tools like Monarch Money sponsor of this show, they are also great because they show you the dates of your recurring expenses, and so there's a little calendar view there and it shows those dates of those recurring expenses. If you want 50% off of Monarch money, just use code PFP. It's like four bucks a month if you pay for the entire year.

Alright, the next step is we're gonna talk about automating our spending. And so to automate your spending, one of the most important things I think most people need to realize is, can you automate your groceries? Can you automate restaurants? Can you automate fund money? Yes, you absolutely can and you can do it a couple of different ways.

One is I use a tool like Monarch Money, which we just talked about, to ensure I am tracking all my expenses. Monarch money, once you set up some rules inside of there, will automatically help you track your expenses, where you don't even have to think about it, it just puts 'em in the correct category.

Every single month in Master Money Academy, we're about to do a Monarch money breakdown of exactly how I set up my Monarch money. So if you're not in Master Money Academy, make sure you join. Uh, we'll have the link down below so you can check that out. But this is just one of those. Things that I think is really, really important for most people to understand is that you wanna make sure you're tracking your spending, but you wanna make sure you're tracking it automatically.

So back in the day, what I would do is I would take my transactions, I'd move 'em in a spreadsheet. It was the most tedious and time consuming thing ever. I'd spend like three hours at the end of every single month, just making sure all my transactions are in order, making sure I got all of 'em, making sure the dates are correct.

It was the most annoying thing ever. Now you could spend $4 a month, like I said, on Monarch money, and you'd be able to track all this stuff automatically. And then if you are living paycheck to paycheck or you're tight, then I recommend doing something like the five minute drill. The five minute drill is basically where you take two to five minutes every single day.

Just categorize those transactions, make sure they fit within your budget so that you are on top of that budget there. So when you are in a season where you have to budget a lot, it is a great. Way to do that, but for most of us, we just need to make sure we have a tool in place that allows us to track our finances, and a lot of those tools out there are pretty cheap.

Most of you spend frivolously on random things that cost a lot more than those apps do for one month. I would highly encourage you to invest in one of those apps. You will be way better off with your money if you actually use an app. Alright, step five, and this is gonna be a bonus step that we're gonna be talking about here, is to do the bucket method when it comes to your savings or to automate your safety nets.

And so what I like to do is have a high yield savings account set up and ensure that I can automatically send money to that high yield savings account and have it in different buckets. So I have Ally Bank. Not affiliate with them whatsoever. I just have them because they have buckets set up. Uh, there's other places out there that you can do that with.

I think SoFi Betterment. There's a bunch of other places where you can find ways to set up these buckets to ensure that you have the bucket method set up. Now we have a full episode on the bucket method. If you have not heard that episode, I highly encourage you to check that one out. This is basically a way for you to make sure that you are set up for your savings goals.

So that means sending money to your emergency fund every single month, automatically sending money for car repair, sending money over to for any other savings goals that you have on hand. All of these are really, really important, and I highly encourage each and every single one of you to set up these automations that just goes directly into that savings account.

And so this is a big area where I think a lot of folks, if they just set up some of these. Buckets inside of their high yield savings account, it would change their life forever. So let's say for example, you're saying to yourself, well man, I am really tired of car payments. I don't wanna have a car payment anymore.

It feels like it just drains my finances every single month. I wanna get this car paid off and I never want to have a car payment again. A lot of people will say that and say, how would I never have a car payment again? Let me show you. So for most of you. You've heard us talk about, we don't want you to have a car loan for longer than four years, and once that gets paid off, we want you to drive that car for at least 10.

So for the next six years while you are having zero car payment, one of the things that you could do is you could start to send money to your car bucket. And what this is gonna mean is that you are saving up cash in a bucket that allows you. To pay cash for a car, and so for six years in a row, you are saving up this money over that timeframe.

Maybe you drive the car for 10 years, maybe you drive it for 15. That means you would have even more time to save up cash for that specific vehicle. This ensures that you never have a car payment again. And for wealth builders out there, I really want you to try to find ways to never have a car payment again, this is one of the things that I am looking to do.

I'm looking to never have a car payment again because I was so sick of just having these car payments over and over again. Now, if you get a really favorable interest rate or something like that, I get it. I get the math, I understand the difference there, but for me, it's just not something I'm super interested in having long term.

And so because of this, if you follow our rules, putting 20% down, only having four years of car payments. Driving those cars for 10 years or longer. Then you have a lot of time where you can take some of your extra money on years that you have no payments. Save up for a car, take the rest of it, put it towards future you so you can build wealth for your retirement, and this is gonna allow you to never have car payments again.

The average person in the US right now has almost $900 in car payments every single month. I want you to eliminate that and put that towards future you or put it towards your vacations or whatever else you wanna do with that money. I don't want you wasting it on depreciating assets like a car. And so that's one of the things that we look at all the time.

So that's just a big example of ways that you could. Automatically save for your savings goals and some of the things that you wanna do. So another one we talk about all the time is holiday savings. And so here's the way I treat something like holidays. You're gonna look at your holiday bell this year or last year, and you're gonna say to yourself, well, here's how much I spent it.

And every single year, it seems like Christmas or the holidays just creeps up on me and I have to spend all this money. And I either go into debt and or I just. Ruin my emergency fund or whatever other cash I have on hand. Well, let me explain how Christmas works or the holidays work. This is something where you're gonna spend money on the holidays every single year, so you need to treat it like a bill.

So instead you set up a savings bucket and you send money every single month. To that holiday budget, how much do you send? Well, you look at how much you spent last year. Divide that by 12. That's how much you send. So if you spent $2,400 last year, then you take $200 per month and start to put it into that account.

This is gonna ensure that you get to the holidays with zero stress whatsoever. The money is just there and there is power in having the money there. The same goes for your emergency fund. So most of you know the 1 3 6 Method is our system for saving for your emergency fund. That means saving one month, then three months, then six months, and there are things you do in between.

That is where you do it, is saving up here automatically. You can get those built up into six months of expenses. It is really, really powerful what we see people do with their emergency fund when they actually automate this. All right, perfect. Now let's dive into step six, because step six is just your 10 minute monthly review.

So what I want you to do is every month I want you to think through this checklist to ensure that your money actually went where it's supposed to go. Number one is did every investment go through? Number two is, did every bill hit? Number three is did any subscriptions change? Did anything shift? Did the price go up on some of these subscriptions?

What kind of happened there? Do I wanna still keep the subscription? A lot of those subscriptions out there are going up 20, 30, 40, 50% per year. You get to have things like Disney Plus, or if you have Hulu or Netflix, they're all going up in price, and honestly, they're starting to rip us off, I think. But that's a whole nother podcast episode and a whole nother rant.

Did I adjust anything or do I need to make some tweaks to this? And then lastly is, do I need to automate something new? So 10 minutes, that's the entire job. That's all you have to take at the end of every single month. And so literally, we might be taking, you know, two hours max on our money if you really set this up properly.

Now I wanna give you a couple of examples here as we're talking through this. So in Master Money Academy, we have had a number of people start to automate their money, and a number of them have come to me after and said, Hey, I feel like I'm not doing enough. And what they feel is because they set up these money automations, they feel like I should be in my spreadsheet or I should be doing all this other stuff, but instead I don't have to do that anymore.

So I don't know what to do. And this is the beautiful thing about money automation. As we have seen this time and time again where people will come to me, then they feel they're stress relieved. Some of them, if you're type A, you might feel a little bit of stress 'cause you're not doing enough, and that's the key.

That means the system is working, that you set up the automations correctly and so that you were able to not have to worry about this anymore. So you could focus your time on getting those raises or focusing your time on your family or focusing your time on your hobbies instead of having to worry about your money every second of the day.

Automation is how you reduce that stress. It is how you reduce that anxiety. For me specifically, I've told this story a number of times. When I first hit rock bottom with my finances, I didn't have enough money to even fill up a tank of gas. And so when I did that, I started to set up money automations for everything, and this changed my life forever.

'cause I set up those automations. Money was just going where it was supposed to go. I wasn't spending frivolously on just random stuff all the time. And so instead, I had a plan for every single dollar and where it needed to go. And so this is what clawed me outta the paycheck to paycheck cycle, saving my first a hundred K in two years, getting my first million 10 years later.

And this is how I did it, which is making sure I automated my money and it worked for me automatically. And your money can work so much harder than you ever can if you set up these automations properly. And so I highly encourage each and every single one of you to set up these money automation systems.

If you get the checklist down below, I highly encourage you to check out that checklist again. That checklist will prompt you to a $27 course called Automate Your Money in one Weekend. Where I. Go through all of this and show you screen shares of exactly how this all works. And so really excited for each and every single one of you to check that out.

Also, if you're in Master Money Academy, you get that completely for free. So if you wanna join Master Money Academy, make sure you join down below. We will have that linked up below as well so that you can check that out and you get all of our stuff for free. And you get to do weekly calls every single week with yours truly, where you can ask your questions.

And we go through a ton of other stuff in Master Money Academy. We have a bunch of courses. We have a deal section. We have so much stuff inside Master Money Academy. Really, really excited to meet you in there and, and see you inside. So listen, thank you so much to each and every single one of you for being here.

Our goal is to bring you as much value as we possibly can with each and every single episode. I hope you did that today. Make sure you subscribe on YouTube. Make sure ears subscribe on Spotify. And again, one cool thing that's coming up is we're gonna have Spotify video coming up as well, so not just YouTube, but also on Spotify.

So really, really excited for that. And so if you have a question or a comment, leave a comment, uh, in YouTube or Spotify and we'll try to answer all those questions for you. Again, thank you so much for being here, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Personal Finance Podcast.