12 Reasons You Need to Stop PLAYING SMALL with Money

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance podcast, why you need to stop playing small 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 going to be talking about why you need to stop playing small with money. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.co/newsletter and don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or whatever your favorite podcast player is.

And if you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating in review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now today we're going to be diving into why you need to stop playing small with money. But before we dive into that, I just have one quick announcement.

If anybody wants to work with me one-on-one, we have a very small group that we're going to be be working with one-on-one. And you can reach out to me, Andrew, at mastermoney.co. The only criteria that we ask is that you make over $100,000 per year or you have $100,000 invested. And we're going to help people through their financial situation one-on-one where you get to talk to me.

So feel free to reach out to me if you're interested. Now let's dive into why you need to stop playing small with money. Now if you were like me when I was in my 20s, I was very frugal and I would spend hours and hours agonizing about a 510 twenty $25 dollar decision.

And what I realized pretty quickly is this was not the way to build wealth. I thought cutting back expenses would be my most valuable thing that I could do right then and there. And sure, it is in the beginning. If you can reduce your expenses, every person out there should look at reducing their expenses.

But if this is the only thing that you do, then you are most likely focusing on the wrong things. See, I want you to get rich and in fact, I want you to get really rich in the term of wealth. I want you to transform your finances and they transform into something that allows you to become financially free.

And the only way to do that is to focus on the bigger decisions. And if you play small with your money, if you play small with every single dollar that comes into your ecosystem, you are going to be someone who does not get as far ahead as someone who plays big.

And I'm going to show you how to play big today in this episode. I'm going to show you how to transform your mindset because half of this comes down to your mindset. It comes down to how you think about money. See, when I didn't make much money, you only have so much extra dollars available. And you should be pretty strict with your budget.

You should be pretty frugal. If you're living paycheck to paycheck. That's the only way to get off of that paycheck to paycheck line. But then if you don't have an abundance mindset, if you don't understand that some of the things that you're going to be doing moving forward should be focused on the bigger picture, then you can fall further and further behind.

And if you're trying to save your way to wealth, instead of making some move so you can increase your income and do some of the other things we're going to be talking about about today, that is not the highest ROI available. Because if you focus on these $10 decisions instead of these $100,000 decisions, that's where you get yourself stuck.

See, I see people all the time, they start to argue about money in their relationship over 10/20/30 dollar Amazon boxes showing up at their door. When in reality, the thing that is drowning them is the car payment that is $1500 every single month or the house payment that cost 40% of their income.

And so if you don't focus on the large things, if you don't understand how the large things actually impact your money, you will never be able to truly get ahead with your money. And so that is why we want to play big with our money and make sure we are focusing on the big things and not looking at the small things whatsoever.

By the way, if you're getting value out of this show, make sure you leave a five star rating and review. It really does help us spread this message. So let's dive in to how to stop thinking small about money. So #1 is your most likely thinking way too small about money?

Meaning that most people put their energy into the small decisions. Oh, I'm having a daily coffee every single day. That's probably my big issue. Or I'm going out to eat every single day. That might be my big issue. Or I need to cut back on my subscriptions. I've got a couple too many. And sure, all of those things should be done.

In fact, I teach people to do those all the time. But that is not your number one problem. Most likely. Most likely it is a number of different things that we will talk about in this episode that are really actually creating this gap or this impact on what is leading you either to a paycheck to paycheck cycle or just not getting as far ahead as you want to with your dollars.

That $6 coffee or that $15.00 to subscription or saving $20.00 at the grocery store every once in a while. That's what people think being good with money is. And if this is you, if you feel as though saving a little bit here and saving a little bit there is what leads you to be good with money, I'm going to reframe your mindset today and I'm going to change the way you think about this.

Here's some of the decisions that actually determine if you're going to build wealth. 1 is income and career. This is a huge portion of thinking about how to build wealth. Your income is by far the most important factor when it comes to building wealth.

Now, you still need to understand how to manage that income, which is why a large portion of our high earning population in the US right now is living paycheck to paycheck because a lot of them don't know how to manage their income. Income does not equal wealth. Income is just something that is going to allow you to add fuel to the fire if you know how to handle it.

And guess what? Your boy is the one who teaches you how to manage it. And so once you get that income in, stick around and we're going to show you how to make sure it goes the furthest. The second thing is housing and cars. Those two areas I see time and time again where if someone's struggling, I can ask you a couple of different questions.

Hey, what's your housing expenses? What are your vehicle expenses? And I can determine pretty quickly based on if I already know your income, I can determine pretty quickly if you're struggling or not or living paycheck to paycheck. Because if someone says, oh, I have AI make $10,000 a month net and my house payment is $4500, well, that's going to be a problem.

And that's going to be a problem pretty quickly because it's 45% of your net income. All of a sudden you are going to be putting the majority of that money towards your house and you are most likely house poor. If I see couples bickering or they're bickering about money all the time and then I ask them a few questions, a lot of time the roof over your head is the problem.

It's not the Amazon boxes, it's not the Starbucks, it's the roof over your head. And so you need to understand and that many times this can happen. All right, investing in taxes, this is number 3. So some of the financial things that you do is really important. If you have a 2% fee that you're paying in mutual funds, well, that's going to cost you a lot of money.

In fact, that could cost you 7 figures depending on how much you're investing over time. And taxes, another big thing that could be eating into your wealth building if you don't know how to optimize it. Now, W2 earners, you only have so much you can do with taxes. There's only so many things that you can put on hand.

But if you're a business owner, you have an LLC or rental properties, there are a lot more things that you could do in the tax brackets. There's a lot more things that you can do in your tax situation. And then one of the other decisions that really helps you build well is time. What you do with your time, how you spend your time, how you think about time, your time and energy are everything when it comes to building well.

So I want you to take away from this first point is that you need to understand the small things do matter because you could have death by 1000 cuts and death by 1000 cuts will sink any ship at any point in time. Any financial ship out there will sink to the bottom with a death by 1000 cuts.

But you can also really, really make a massive impact and a massive swing in your net worth if you just change some of these big things. So let's talk about the two sides of the money equation, OK?

Because money has two sides to it, all right? It has the floor and it has the ceiling. Now at the floor is as far back as you can cut. So when you start to look at your spending, you say to yourself, OK, I can cut, start to cut back some of my spending and you can only cut back so far.

There's a floor. You still need to make sure you have electricity. You still need to make sure you have housing in a roof over your head in a safe area. You still need to make sure that you are paying for your kids child care. You still need to make sure that you can fund diapers or food or whatever else that goes on in your specific household.

You need to make sure that you are also able to provide for you or your spouse or anybody else in medical care. And so all of these different things are really, really important. So you can't cut back all the way to bare bones. You can only cut back so far, but the ceiling can be significantly higher because your income can grow infinitely.

And so this is the thing I want you to think about. I want you to say to yourself, OK, if I'm living paycheck to paycheck right now or I'm in a situation where I just feel like I'm not as far ahead as I should be, can I cut back enough? Maybe you can cut back 10 to 15%. If you can cut back 10 to 15% and you can take that difference of 10 to 15% and start to put it towards wealth putting activities, meaning your emergency fund and your investments, well, all of a sudden that is a huge swing in terms of what you can do long term.

And then if you increase your income by 10%, now we have a 25% change in what we are investing for our financial future. My friends, if you do that, if you do this one simple exercise that I am talking about right now, you will absolutely transform your financial life. 25% invested means that you're going to be working less than 30 years in order to be able to reach financial freedom.

And if you start to increase the amount that you're investing over time, you will transform the timeline from where you are now to when you can quit working. And if you want to stop working one day, and I talked to a lot of people who don't want to stop working one day, I they don't want to stop working one day.

But if you want to be able to have that money that allows you to walk away from a job that you hate so that you can take a different job that you are more passionate about or more fulfilled with, wow, it is an amazing feeling to have that. And I want that for each and every single one of you. And so understanding the two sides of this money equation means that you can only cut back so much before you just hit your bare bones expenses.

But you can increase your income infinitely and that can go U year over year over year. And you can do this with skills and all these different things. Imagine you start off making $60,000 per year. Then you make 80,000, then 120, then 200. Well, all of that increase is going to make a huge difference.

Sure, there's a little bit of inflation sprinkled in there. That's OK. Because if you're making big swings and big jumps every couple of years, all of the sudden everything, everything in your life gets easier. All right #3 is your income is by far the greatest wealth building tool.

I am going to beat this into your head until you realize how important this really is. Your income is the transformation tool that allows you to build a tremendous amount of wealth. If you're making $40,000 per year right now and you feel as though I am just barely getting by, the reason why is because you don't make enough money.

And so we need to focus on the skills that are going to allow us to increase our income. Now, I'm not saying this to belittle you. I'm saying this to help you. I want you to understand that your income is so incredibly important. Now you may be saying to yourself, Andrew, that is easier said than done.

I get it. I started off making $30,000 per year when I started my career. Do you know how difficult it was to manage $30,000 per year and try to get by on your own? It's not easy whatsoever. And so if you feel as though you're not making enough money, let's focus on the income side of the equation.

I talked to people who are making $200,000 per year and they feel as though they're not making enough money. And So what we need to do is we need to decide right now some of the things that we are going to do to ensure that we are going to increase our income. One is negotiating your salary wherever you currently work, talking to your boss, making sure you put a plan in place to negotiate your salary.

Well, how do we do this? I have a free e-book that teaches you how and I have had tons of people go through there and come back to me and say wow, I just negotiated my salary and was able to increase my income by 10,000. I've heard people say 30,000. I've had people become partners at their firms from using this e-book.

It's completely free, by the way. Go to mastermind.co/resources. We're going to do an updated episode, by the way, on my system because there are some really cool things that I want to talk about in that system. So stay tuned for that because there's some cool things that are going to happen. We're also going to do some negotiation stuff inside of Master Money Academy as well.

That is going to be really, really neat. So as we start to talk through this, I want you to meet with your boss six months before your yearly review and start to have a conversation and talk through ways that you can increase your income. Then go out and do those things over the course of the next six months. Then come back to them and say, I did all of these things, now I would like to have a race.

And so there's a lot more nuance to it, obviously, but that is the bird's eye view of the system. Over the course of the next six months, you can increase your income and if you just start today, it'll absolutely transform your life. 2 though, is thinking about the skills that you currently have. If you don't have all the skills required to increase your income, well now we need to hone in and focus on skills that are going to allow us to transform our financial life.

What could those skills be? There is so many different ones out there that you could really focus on sales, marketing, those are two big ones. Communication, that's a huge one. Negotiation, that's a huge one. But there are other skills out there based on your industry. So if you tell me and you come to me and say, hey Andrew, I work in a marketing department, but I don't understand Facebook ads.

You should go back and try to understand everything you can about Meta and Facebook ads. Why Those are the most powerful ads right now. Between that, Google, TikTok, all those different ad platforms, you should have a full understanding if you're in marketing on all of those different things. Why? Well, one, you can use them at your job. 2, you could start a business running Facebook ads for other people.

You know how much those agencies make? Those agencies make 10s of thousands of dollars per client per month. Especially if you go to a big business, you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars per client per month. And so this is just one example of just a simple skill that if you work on, expand it, work on expand it, all of a sudden you can become very wealthy and increase your income dramatically just by understanding that skill.

So I say all of this for you to understand that your income is infinitely. And I want you to say infinitely can infinitely grow. In fact, you can grow your income. I, I think people have this limiting mindset. They're saying to this was, OK, I want to get to 10 KA month. No, you can get to 20 K, you can get to 50 KA month, You can get to 100 KA month.

If you lock in, you really can't. I have nothing to to sell you on this subject. I just want you to understand that you can transform your income, but it comes down to your limiting beliefs. And then you have to take action and you have to take a massive amount of action. I'm telling you, if you want to make $100,000 per month, for example, the amount of action that you have to take is going to be way more than you even think it is.

It is way harder than you think it is, but it's possible. It's possible to do, It's possible and it's something that you can do, but you got to believe that you can do it first. Then you start to take action. Now, if anybody has questions on some of the ways they can start take action on stuff like that, feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you want and I can give you a couple of ideas.

Maybe I'll even do some sort of, you know, newsletter or episode on that exact subject. When I started the Personal finance podcast, I had no idea how big it could become. I just knew I had something I wanted to share.

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Wayfair. Every style, every home. All right, next number 4 is I want you to stop playing small by thinking about the $10 decisions instead of thinking about the $100,000 decisions.

All right, so there are a lot of different ways to save 10 bucks. You can cancel a couple of subscriptions, which you should if you're not using them. You can go out and just forgo going out to lunch with with Co workers, which you should if you don't value it. You can decide that I'm not going to go to Starbucks every single day, which you should if you don't value it.

And you can decide I'm going to spend significantly less online, which you should if you don't value it. It all comes down to your values and what you actually want to spend money on. Your energy should be going towards the things that you value and spending a less on the things that you don't value. But if you're only focused on the $10 decisions and not focusing on the six figure to 7 figure decisions, my friends.

That is building wealth backwards. Or instead of, you know, focusing on saving, you know, 50 bucks with coupons and cutting out coupons at the time, what if you put that energy into negotiating a $15,000 raise at work, You added some skills to your life and you negotiate that $15,000 raise.

Well, $50.00 worth of coupon savings sounds like it's miniscule in comparison to $15,000 when it comes to a race. Or maybe you want to, you know, earn more And you decide actually, I'm going to focus my time and energy on changing jobs. I'm going to go find a new job where I can make $30,000 more.

That's my goal is to make $30,000 more. I make $70,000 per year right now. And I want to go out and I want to be able to get that 6 figure mark. And so you go start finding jobs based in your industry. You try to find a promotion eventually over the course of the next 678 months you find one land a job that pays you $30,000 more.

I think that's a much better investment of time then would be cutting back on things on the little minuscule things that don't really matter. What about reducing investment fees? If you're paying 2 or 3% in investment fees on your mutual funds or you're paying someone out there who's charging you 2% and not giving you any value whatsoever.

My friends, reducing those investment fees is A7 figure decision over the lifetime of of your portfolio. Maybe you want to buy less house or maybe you just decide actually I'm going to buy less house or I'm going to keep my car longer. I'm going to drive it for 10 years.

The average, I just saw the statistic today, the average American right now is driving their car for 13 years. And The funny thing is every single time I talk about driving a car for 10 years or longer, people are like, you can't do that. You can't drive a car for 10 years or longer. Well, that's funny because the stats just came out and the average car is being driven for 13 years.

Why? 2 reasons, One, the quality is higher than it used to be in terms of how long these can last and two, these cars are not affordable for most people based on your income and people are making very poor financial decisions buying a car that is unaffordable.

Drive your car longer and fix it. Drive your car longer and fix it. I'm going to say it over and over and over again until you get this down because a car is an appreciating asset and lose value every single year. Every single year you're losing thousands of dollars by buying a new car and you don't even see it because it's invisible.

So you're like, ah, it's done. I don't care. It's invisible money disappearing, but you're making that car payment and that car payment to that money is going nowhere. A lot of it's just disintegrating because of depreciation. And so you got to understand that depreciating assets are not your friend.

What if you spent some time optimizing your taxes, for example, I spent a lot of time optimizing my taxes this year. There's a lot of different things that I did. There's a lot of different shifts that I made, and usually I owe money. This year, I'm getting money back because I did a bunch of strategies and it was worth it.

Let me just tell you, I'll put it that way. This is something you should do. Maybe you spend your time building a business so that you can, you know, earn some extra money on the side instead of having to focus your time and energy on, you know, all these silly piddly things that I see people do.

Guys, it's OK to say with a coupon, it's OK to Google a coupon code every single time you're at checkout online. But to spend a bunch of time trying to save $50 is not worth it. You need to value your time more. You need to understand what your time is worth and you need to value those dollars more.

Man, this is sounding like I am preaching to you today because I am on fire. I've had probably the worst week of my entire life over the course of the last week. So your boy is on fire this week and I'm excited for this. I'm excited to talk to you guys. So couple of questions I want you to ask yourself, what are the five biggest financial decisions that you can make this year that will transform your finances?

Write those down. And I want you to spend your time focusing on those and less time focusing on things like this, like your daily coffee. OK? So I really, really want you to think about that because next is we need to start thinking in terms of ROI, OK, Wealthy people often think about money differently.

Instead of asking how much does this cost, ask yourself, what do I get in return? So everything should go through your brain is an ROI calculation. Everything I look at is an ROI calculation. Maybe it's a sickness that I have, but when I look at something and I say, OK, I'm going to buy this computer, what is the ROI of this computer?

Well, for me specifically, as someone who owns a business who is online, the ROI of this computer is absolutely massive. And in fact, I will pay extra for the computer that is faster, that saves me time because the ROI is absolutely massive. It is huge.

What you can do by doing ROI calculation, maybe something like this microphone for example, the ROI on this is massive. When I first started this podcast, one of the decisions I made was I splurged. I didn't know where this podcast was going to go. I thought I was just going to do this to help people. But one of the things that I did want to do is I wanted to make sure that I got the top of the line microphone because it was at the time, it was an audio only experience.

Remember back when podcasts were audio only? Nowadays, a lot of you still listen to us on audio only, and I actually personally still listen to podcast audio only, but there's a huge portion of listeners that watch now. But when it was audio only, I wanted to make sure I had the highest quality microphone.

And guess what? Seven years later, I'm still using the same microphone because I bought quality and the ROI was really, really high for me specifically. And I used this thing literally dozens of times a week. So it's one of those areas that I think you got to think about ROI when it comes to purchases, but you also got to think about about a number of other things as well.

I think about ROI. I have a bunch of coaches, OK, And I hired coaches for various areas of my life, whether it's health and fitness. I used to do triathlons when I was younger. I had a triathlon coach. I remember I used to, you know, I have business coaches. I have all different types of coaches that are out there that help me through things, and many times you want to think through cost first return when it comes to things like this.

A $5000 coach or a $5000 course that doesn't help you is very expensive. It is very, very expensive. But if it does help you and it gets you an ROI, it's a big, big difference. Here's a great example. I paid Alex Hormozi $500,000 and I'm going to go up there and learn a couple of things about a bottleneck in one of my businesses that is going to be worth its weight in gold to me.

And so these are the types of things that I feel as though many people out there should consider the ROI of some of these things. Let's say you can get a $5000 certification. I know for a lot of the blue collar workers out there, there's a lot of certifications out there that you can get that will increase your income by double the amount of the cost of the certification, if not triple the amount per year.

So that's a really good investment. That's a really good investment. Or a $200 a month service that could save you 20 hours a month. Maybe you spend a ton of time, you know, maintaining a lawn, cleaning your pool and, you know, cleaning the house. Well, if you could spend $200 a month to do 1, two or three of those things, well then all of a sudden it is a big, big difference on what you can really accomplish if you save this $20.00.

So I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions. OK, What does this cost is number 12, What will it return? An income, time or savings? Income, time or savings, Those are the three things that you want to think about when you are spending money. And three, how long until it pays for itself?

I think about ROI all the time. Now, if I'm trying to enjoy something, I'm not thinking about the ROI of my new Golf club because guess what? Most likely the ROI is going to be negative because I'm still going to hit it into the water. But it is one of those things that I absolutely enjoy and I value and it gives me a little fun and I get to get to, you know, just just enjoy something like that.

That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about though, is the majority of the purchases that you make in your life. If you want to figure out if it's valuable or not, run an ROI calculation in your head. Number six, stop being afraid to invest in yourself.

I think, and I have come across way too many people who are afraid to invest in themselves. Your skills are an asset and like any asset, they can grow in value over time. I cannot believe when I look back at myself at the age of 23 years old when I entered the workforce, how little skills that I have in the difference of what has become of me over the course of the last decade and a half.

I cannot believe it. And it's because I just stack skills every year. Boom, skill, skill, skill. I just keep stacking them over and over and over and over and over again. And I want you to stack your skills over and over and over and over and over again so that you can transform your actual life.

Maybe it's education or certifications. Maybe you need to get coaching within your industry. Maybe you need a career coach to help you through your career trajectory and actually mapping that out. Maybe you need someone to help you with communication and sales, or you need to take a course on communication sales, or you just need to pull up YouTube videos and go through the best once, read the five best books and watch all the way through the 10 best YouTube videos that are like, you know, 30 minutes to an hour on communication.

And my, my goodness, you're going to be crushing it over the course of that time. But you just got to put in the work. What about leadership? Maybe you just got into a manager role and you need to Polish up that leadership so you can get to the next level of management. Well, make sure you are spending time doing it.

Maybe it's networking, maybe it's starting a business. There's so many different areas that you can level up and skills that you can level up, and it's going to depend on your personal situation and where you currently are. What are your weaknesses? And be very, very honest. What are your strengths? And be very, very honest. If you're really good at speaking to people but you're terrible at communicating ideas, those can be two very different things.

Well, then you just need to work on how can I communicate ideas more effectively and clearly, because if you can communicate ideas more effectively and clearly, all of a sudden you can really help people. And the more people you help, the more money you're going to make. I'm just telling you that right now your boss needs something. If you can help your boss, you're going to get promoted at some point in time.

If you do this over and over and over again, you have customers. If you can help those customers and you can get them wins, all of a sudden you're going to make more and more and more and more money. I want you to think about it this way. Every investment in yourself should have an expected pay off. Meaning if you're you're going to invest in yourself, there should be a payoff.

Maybe it's just health and fitness. Maybe you haven't felt all the way yourself, you haven't had the energy, you haven't had the time and you feel as though I just don't feel good in my own body. And then all of a sudden you invest in your health and fitness. That could explode your productivity, that could explode your mental health, that could explode every single other area of your life because you invested in health and fitness.

And my friends, this is what we're talking about when we say you need to stop playing small. Stop playing small. Stop being the frugal weirdo. Frugal weirdos don't ever get ahead. And I'm trying to be honest with you here because I was that frugal weirdo and I still am frugal, but I'm only frugal in the areas that I do not care about.

And you got to understand this. You got to understand and get this concept into your head. Otherwise you will never get ahead. OK, I want you to understand this. All right. Oh, and then one other thing that I'll say on that note is you saying that I am not willing to spend money on a course that or, or just watch videos and spend your time watching free videos on YouTube or, or listening to audio books on Spotify or reading a bunch of the top books at the library.

You saying that you're not going to do that, You're telling yourself that you're not worth it because the question really is, OK, I could spend $500 right now on this coach or $1000 right now in this coach that is going to help me transform my fitness life. But I don't want to spend it because I'm not worth it. Because if that's the case, then we need to work on your psychology.

But if it's not the case, and let's reframe the way that we think about spending dollars when it comes to improving ourselves, improving our skills, and improving our life, it is OK to spend money on yourself. I want to give you permission right now. It is OK to spend money on yourself, and you should if it's going to improve your life.

That's what money is there to do. It's just a tool that helps you improve your life #7 stop playing small with investing. Boy oh boy am I sick of seeing people with 70% of their money and just this ultra conservative thing when they are 25 years old.

Now let me just explain the way that investing should be thought through. OK? You have two phases of investing. You have the growth phase, which is when you are in your working years and you're trying to get to retirement, then you have the preservation phase. And it's now it's not a perfect line where just go straight up and then straight sideways.

Instead, there's a curve that happens there, OK. And so I want you to think about this curve in a way that is really, really impactful because when we start to look at this, and I'm going to do an entire episode on this now that we're we're talking about it. But when we start to look at this, this line going up and we say to ourselves, OK, I am in this accumulation phase.

I want to get there in the safest but most aggressive way possible. That's the way I'm looking at it because my risk tolerance is someone who I want to get there where I am very secure and I'm very happy with the investments that I'm holding. They are growing at a very high pace, but I'm also not worried that if the market takes a dip, I'm going to stress out and pull my hair out.

No, I'm happy and I'm content with the asset allocation that I have, meaning the mix of stocks and bonds that I have. But you also want to make sure that it's aggressive enough that it's just growing and growing and growing. Then you're going to see this curve. This curve is going to be the point in time where you start to transition to your preservation phase.

Maybe you want to retire at 59 and so you start to start to enter that curve at age 53 or 54. Maybe you are doing it a little later in life and that's OK. But we want to start to shift our portfolio once we get closer to preservation, because preservation means you're going start to draw on your portfolio and you're going to start to live on that portfolio.

Now, I talked to a lot of retirees who are scared to pull from their portfolio. And I get it, the psychology behind it is tough. But if you worked your entire life to build up this portfolio and then you're not going to use that portfolio, all the extra years that you worked means that you really worked a bunch of extra years where you didn't have to.

And if you enjoyed your work, great. But if you didn't enjoy your work and you slaved away at that, that is really not worth your time and energy. So if you're playing small with your asset allocation, if you're in your 20s, for example, and you've got 70% bonds, where if that's your asset allocation, if that's your risk tolerance, more power to you. But I would do some self evaluation to understand my risk tolerance and understand what the mix of stocks and bonds should be based on that risk tolerance.

OK, Do your research, do and understand what you should be doing there because it's really, really important. Secondly, fees matter a lot. And if you are holding mutual funds with 1 to 2% fees or even a half a percent fee, I fee, I'd rather pay an advisor, you know, .07 or something like that to actually help manage my money then I would to a mutual fund at .07.

I mean some of these mutual funds are wild than I would to a mutual fund unless the mutual fund gets you some delta. Now there are ETFs out there that do get you some great delta. Those I would invest in. But if there are something that doesn't get you the delta there, then I would really, really think about it and think twice about it.

So, and a couple other things that I would say is 1, how much you consistently invest matters enormously. If you go from $500 a month to $1500 a month, well, that's going to be a huge impact long term on your wealth. And so you really need to consider how much you're investing and focus your time and energy on your income and then putting it into an asset allocation that's aggressive enough to get you to the point in time you want to be at.

So let's just think about this for a second, because if you go from $500 a month to $1000 a month, then $2000 a month, it's a big difference. At 8% rate of return over the course of 30 years, $500 a month is about $745,000. At $1000 a month, you're looking at $1.5 million and at $2000 a month, you're looking at almost $3,000,000.

And so because of that, it's a huge gap between what you should be doing and considering and what you are currently doing. And you want to make sure that you're thinking about that. Now one of the things that playing small comes with is often thinking about things in too short of terms.

It's the next thing I want to talk about is thinking about decades, not just days. Many of us, the investors that play small, they think about things in days and they try to trick themselves by saying, no, I'm going to make it big by trying to day trade. I'm going to make it big by trying to swing trade. I'm going to make it big by trying to make it sure I'm doing all these different things.

But those folks can't really think far ahead enough to realize that long term investing is the way it is, the way to truthfully transforming your financial life. I also see people saying, hey, I can't afford to invest $1000 this month. It only looks at that specific month. But an extra $1000 a month at a hypothetical 8% rate of return after 10 years is about $183,000.

After 20 years is about $589,000, and after 30 years is about $1.49 million. This is why time matters so much. The timeline that you have and the time horizon that you have is really the transformative thing that'll change your returns long term.

Every year you wait is going to shrink this number more and more and more. And so these small money decisions that you make every single month can have $1,000,000 impacts if you just think about it in a way that makes sense. And #9 this is a big one for a lot of folks is stop letting lifestyle inflation steal your raises.

Many folks begin to make more money. And every single time they make money, they increase their lifestyle to the level of their new income. And there's nothing wrong with lifestyle inflation. I actually like lifestyle inflation. I think it's important to have some lifestyle inflation because that means you are spending on your values.

You are pointing more dollars towards your values. And so if you increase your lifestyle by 15%, let's say you got a 20% raise, OK, you get this 20% raise and you take 7% of it to increase your lifestyle and the other 13% starts to go towards your financial future.

Well, that's a really balanced and a perfect scenario of what you should do every time you get a raise. You shouldn't hoard all of it and throw it in your investments. You should spend some of it. You should enjoy some of it, go on more vacations, go eat out more if that's something you value. Go do other stuff that you want to do, but don't take all of it and do that.

Take a portion and use the other portion towards your financial future unless you already hitting your retirement goals. That's the way to think about it. Because what happens with most people is they get a raise and instantly they go and buy a nicer car and all of a sudden their raise is getting eaten up by a new car payment. Or instantly they upgrade their house and all of a sudden their new raise is getting eaten up by that new house payment.

Or instantly they begin to dine out more, increase their grocery budget and buy a bunch more subscriptions and it's death by 1000 cuts and all of a sudden it's all gone to things they don't value. And so instantly that new income becomes a new normal. But if you can live on the previous income and decide I am going to take a good chunk of this and put it towards my financial future, you'll be financially freeway faster than you ever thought you would be.

So that's really, really important to look at that. All right. If you've heard any recent. Episode of health corner you know that I have spent the. Last few years trying to optimize my sleep, I've tried sleep trackers, cooling my room, changing my nighttime routine, all the different things, but nothing really matters as much as having the right mattress.

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It's kind of amazing. How much can change in just a single year? Every summer, the kids are a little bigger, a little more independent, and life looks a little different than it did the year before. And it reminds me that while we can't predict the future, we can prepare for.

It. That's one of the reasons I like Policy Genius. See, Policy Genius isn't an insurance company. They're an online marketplace that lets you compare life insurance quotes from some of America's top insurers side by side for free, and their license team helps you compare coverage prices and terms, answers your questions, and even handles the paperwork so you can get the right policy without the hassle.

For me, having life insurance isn't about expecting something to happen. It's about knowing my family is protected so I can actually enjoy these moments together instead of worrying about what comes next. And with Policy Genius, you can find 20 year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million of coverage.

Head to policygenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you can save. That's policygenius.com. #10 is I want you to make. These multimillion dollar decisions correctly, OK, the big six are housing, cars, food, childcare, fees and taxes and income.

You can focus on these six areas and make sure that you're on top of it. Boy, oh boy, are you going to get way ahead of many other people. And I really want you to take those six and see how many of those you can attack immediately. How many of those can you really make a transformative move?

Because that is a really, really big impact, OK. Because #11 is a big thing. I want you to stop thinking about $1 million as an impossible number. Every person listening right now, I want you to become a millionaire and I want you to become a multi millionaire.

We have people who've just listened to this podcast who have claimed that they have become millionaires just by listening to the show. And I cannot tell you how awesome that is, how amazing that makes me feel. That's why I yell on these episodes because I'm trying to motivate you. I want you to understand every single one of you can become millionaires.

In fact, I want our audience to be the highest population of millionaires of any other audience that's out there. Why? Because you're taking actionable steps to ensure, and that's what it comes down to. It comes down to taking action, but you're taking actionable steps towards getting towards that $1,000,000.

And guess what? It's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen in five years for some of you. It's not going to happen in 10 years for some of you, but it's going to happen. And when it happens, it's going to be one of those things that is transformative. You'll be amazed at how far you've come from where you started to where you currently are.

Listen, I can tell you time and time again to go and make sure you're maxing out your retirement accounts, or go and make sure you have your emergency fund, or go and make sure you're investing a portion of your income, or go and make sure you're automating your money. But I can say it till I'm blue in the face. If you don't take action, there's nothing I can do for you.

There's nothing else I can do. You can listen to me over and over and over and over and over again. And some of you do. Some of you listen to me and you don't take the action. And maybe you're freezing because you don't know which action to take first. Ask me. You can ask me. Your boy's here for you. And that's all I really want you to do is I want you to understand that a million is not outside, or it's not an impossible number whatsoever.

And guess what, if you want to reverse engineer $1 million, let's talk about this for a second, you can't. Let's say for example, you want to hit $1,000,000 over the course of 30 years. Well, that's $671 a month at an 8% rate of return. Let's say you want to do it in 20 years, that's $1698 a month at an 8% rate of return.

And so there's some goals that I think are worth chasing and goals that I think you should really try to focus on if you are someone out there who is really, really laser focused on your finances. What if you could invest 100K by age 30? Let's say you're 25 right now. By age 30, you're trying to get your first hundred KA $1,000,000 net worth by age 40.

That'd be really cool to get your first $1,000,000 by the age of 40. Invest $50,000 this year because you got a big raise and big bonus. What if you did that? You invested a $50,000 over the course from today to this date next year. What if you decided I'm going to double my income in five years?

It's easily possible. I did it multiple times. Definitely something you could do. What if you want to be financially independent by 50? You don't want to wait till 60. You want to go explore and do the things you want to do by 50. Maybe you want to do by 45 or 40. Really cool goal. This is a fun one. What if you want to give away $100,000?

There's a 'cause you believe in that. You know the money is going to go to the cost that you want it to go to, and you want to give away 100 grand. Wow, that'd be cool. Or maybe you want to pay cash for a dream trip. You want to take your whole family and you want to go on this dream trip and you want to pay full cash for it. And you want to feel good on that trip and you want to make those memories and you want to be able to take a photographer with you if you want to.

That stuff is cool and that's what money can do. But if you start playing small with money, you're never going to be able to do any of that stuff. If you start playing small with your mindset, you will never be able to do this. And so I want you to transform. I don't care where you are right now. You could be in the worst possible situation. You could be sitting in the poorest neighborhood in your city right now listening to this podcast with no car.

You have to walk to work every single day. Maybe you have no job and you can pull yourself out of it. Maybe your family tree never had wealth. You could be the first one, but you got to make the choice today to decide I'm going to be a millionaire and in fact, I'm going to be a multimillionaire. And you have to know how far you can do it now, reverse engineer it and start to think through what are the steps I can take today that is going to allow me to get on path to becoming a millionaire if you're not already?

We have a lot of millionaires that listen to this podcast, a lot of them. And if you are a millionaire, I want you to comment down below on Spotify or Apple podcast or wherever you listen YouTube and tell us what are some of the steps you took to become a millionaire that you think could be valuable for the rest of the audience.

What are some of those steps? And if we get enough of those coming in, or you can shoot me an e-mail, if we get enough of those coming in, I'll do a full episode on those two. All right #12 is playing. Big isn't about spending big. Say what? Yeah, playing big is not about spending big.

I'm not talking about you need to spend all your money on the Lamborghini or the Ferrari or the mega mansion or the house or the whatever else. No, playing big does not mean buying the bigger house. It does not mean buying the most expensive car. It does not mean taking reckless risks with day trading. It's not trying to get rich overnight.

It's building your income. It's keeping your lifestyle under control. It's having discipline. It's investing consistently over time, month in and month out no matter what the market is doing. It's taking calculated risks and it's thinking long term. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is you can decide actually, I'm going to take a calculated risk.

And if you take that calculated risk and it goes the wrong way, sometimes the best thing to do is to get yourself out of that situation. Why? Sometimes people hold on too long, and when they hold on too long, they sink their ship. And if you want that ship to continue to float, you need to make sure that if you do take a calculated risk, you're very cautious about it.

So I want you guys to realize here that this is all all about making sure that you all live the dream life that you want. Money is a tool to get you. There you may have a boring job, and that's OK. Boring jobs can pay well.

You may have a boring job that doesn't pay well, and that's OK. Let's find a little more exciting job that pays better. You may feel as though right now you're in a job that pays really well, but you absolutely hate it. Money gives you the freedom to leave that job if you want to. You may feel as though you are trapped in a situation where you have no idea how you're going to get ahead.

Well, understanding your finances, budgeting out your finances when you're on a fine line like that is going to allow you to get a little bit of cushion, a little bit of breathing room so you can get farther ahead. You may be making $500,000 per year right now and you're saying to yourself, I absolutely don't even want to wake up every single day anymore to do this.

If that's you, I promise you getting your finances in order is going to relieve that pressure. And then all of a sudden you're going to have options because your finances are in order. If you spend every single dollar that you make, I don't care if you make $2,000,000 per year. If you spend $2,000,000, you will never get, as a head of someone who is a teacher, making $63,000 per year but saving and investing 20 of it.

Guys, wealth is not about the Lamborghinis. It's not about the Ferraris, it's not about the big houses, it's not about the oceanfront properties. It's about making sure that you invest your dollar so that you can get back the most valuable asset of all, which is your time. If you can't get that time back, what are we doing here?

Time is your most valuable asset, and having the option to use your time the way you want is what most people want. So I want you to get off the rat race. I want you to get off the hamster wheel. And I want you to understand that if you stop playing small with money and you start playing bigger with money, all of the sudden everything gets simpler.

And so that's what I want for each and every single one of you. Now let's jump into a couple of your questions. All right, so we had two questions. Come in. That I think are great. So this is a great question from Sarah. And Sarah talked about a lot of the correlation with the bond market with high yield savings accounts.

And so she went into kind of some detail there and it said, anyway, a high yield savings account earning 3.75% shouldn't keep me up at night because I'm not in the bond market, especially when people are freaking out over the bond markets recently. Is that correct? Yes. So Sarah, this is a great question. You should never, ever have stress about your high yield savings accounts interest rate.

And I want everybody to kind of hear this because I see a lot of people stress about this. I have friends who stress about this where if the high yield savings account interest rate is shifting up or it's shifting down, it's not a big deal and it's not something you can control. OK, Now if it swings from 3.75% to 0, which would be a very wild swing, then sure, you can have some sort of concern there.

But because it's dropping and rising, that is just based on a lot of the Fed's decision to increase or decrease interest rates. So when the Fed increases interest rates, that means the interest rate on your savings account in the course of like a month or so is going to begin to go up. When the Fed decreases interest rates, your savings account interest is going to go down.

This is why we had some big fat, juicy interest rates in our savings accounts when 2021 and 2022 was hitting because the Fed continued to increase interest rates. But then as they started to decrease them back down, then your savings accounts went back down.

And so this is something just to understand quickly is that your savings rate is correlated with what the Fed does. And so you need to understand that. But outside of that, I would not stress out whatsoever because it's not something you can control. So do not worry. The next question is from Dallin.

Dallin says Hi Andrew, I love the show. I've been listening for a few months now and really appreciate all the practical advice you share. I have two quick questions about applying your 136 method to my situation. My employer pays a significant portion of my health insurance premium, so I only pay a fraction of the total cost out of pocket each month through payroll deductions.

When calculating my one month baseline emergency fund and my ultimate 6 month target, should I only base my baseline expenses on what I personally pay or do I need to account for what the full premium would cost if I ever lost my job? So currently what I would do is account for it based on whatever you pay currently.

And then if you ever do leave that job, then you can start to add to your emergency fund based on that. This is why we want to make sure that we're evaluating our emergency fund on a yearly basis is because it allows us to ensure that if we do need to add some dry powder to it, then we can. But in your current situation, I would just worry about your current situation that that stresses you out, then go ahead and you can add it to the the additional premium.

But I would just ensure currently that it's the amount that you pay right now. Now the second question is that a Roth IRA in four O 1K versus high interest debt. So right now I invest 1% of my income into a Roth IRA and 1% into a four O 1K. My employer does not offer a match Once I reach my one month emergency cushion and shift focus to tackling high interest debt.

Should I pause both those 1% contributions completely if clearing that high interest debt will take one to two years? Or is it better to stop investing entirely and pay off the debt faster or keep contributing that small amount to maintain the habit? So high interest debt, let's talk about this for a second. If it is high interest debt like credit card debt, that is definitely something that you want to get every extra dollar moving towards.

Why? Because you're paying off something like a 24% interest rate. You are not ever going to get that in the market consistently every single year. And so you know, I'm getting a guarantee return and I'm putting quotations with my fingers guaranteed return on that money by paying off that high interest debt.

If we're talking about a mortgage though, like something like a mortgage and it's a 7.5% interest rate mortgage, well, that's not something I'm rushing to pay off faster. Or if it is like a, a car loan that's a 7 or 8%. Instead, I'm just kind of trying to focus on refinancing those things as time goes on. Then you can get this paid off later on.

So credit cards, absolutely, I would pause and move out of every extra dollar towards them. But if it's like a car loan that's 8% or if it's, if it's your home, then don't worry about those two. That's not something I would worry as much about. So thank you so much for the questions. I truly, truly appreciate it. Well, that's it for today's episode of the Personal Finance Podcast.

Thank you guys so much for listening. Stop playing small with your money, please. And if you have questions on how you can play bigger with your money, feel free to shoot us some questions. Shoot us an e-mail. Be happy to answer any questions that you have. Also, if you want to work directly with me one-on-one, we are taking a limited amount of people. You can e-mail me andrew@mastermind.co.

Or if you want to work in a group setting, you can join Master Money Academy. Master Money Academy is the place where we have all of our courses and we also do group coaching once a week inside Master Money Academy. So feel free to check that out if you want to. I teach you how to build wealth. I teach you to invest in Master Money Academy.

There's so many cool things that we are doing in there. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you. And we will see you on the next episode.