15 Personal Finance Rules That Will Keep You Wealthy!

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, the crazy difference in buying Power by Decade.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the Personal Finance podcast, we're gonna be talking about the crazy difference in buying power by decade. If you guys have any questions, Make sure you hit us up on Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter at Master Money Co.

And follow us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you want to help out the show, leave a five star rating and review on your favorite podcast player. Also, we are on YouTube. At Androgen Cola on YouTube, you can see our YouTube channel has our podcast, it has our YouTube videos, and if you wanna follow along and watch this, you can watch it on YouTube there.

So I am really excited to go through this episode today because what we are going to be doing is going through how much your buying power erodes over time, and a big lesson in this. Episode is, I'm gonna talk about how you can actually protect your wealth against inflation. Inflation has been a huge topic over the last couple of years, but we're gonna show you first how much your buying power is taken away if you do not do things to make sure you combat your personal finances, uh, against inflation.

Now each and every single person is going to have a different inflation rate based on where they live because inflation is actually location specific. So there's a lot of different things that are gonna happen there. There have been lists. That have come out as of late, that shows where inflation might be slightly higher in certain areas.

In fact, the area that I live in Florida actually has one of the highest inflation rates in the entire country over the course of the last 12 months. But at the same time, what you wanna be doing when you take this information is you wanna think through, well, what? Things can I do with my dollars to make sure that they outpace inflation.

Because the last thing that you want to be doing is stuffing your cash inside of a mattress like a drug dealer because your buying power gets eroded every single day. So there's only certain situations that you want to keep. Keep cash and some of those situations are your buffer accounts. So on the Stairway to Wealth, you see us talk about your cash buffer and why you want to have that.

In addition, you want to keep your emergency fund in there or your short term savings. So those are some reasons to keep cash on hand, but outside of that, you wanna be doing things with that cash to make sure that it's still pacing inflation and outpacing inflation. So we're gonna go through some of those concepts and how you can actually go through that.

And another thing you have to do with your dollars is you have to invest them. If you do not invest them, you will never be able to retire. But in addition, your buying power will be reduced every single day. Every single day that you do not invest your money, you are losing buying power. The value of that dollar is going down every single day.

Unless you take those dollars and put them to work, your money can work so much harder than you can. Why not put your dollars to work Set aside some of that income that you're making, that you're working so hard to build so that you can get to that level where it is. Outpacing inflation and you are actually making money each and every year.

In addition, you wanna be able to preserve wealth for future generations, and the only way to do that is to try to outpace inflation. If you wanna build that generational wealth, if that is a key for you, maybe you have kids, maybe you're thinking about your grandkids down the line, the only way to do that is to preserve your capital because you're gonna see how much your dollar will erode over time.

If you do not do this, if you do not preserve that wealth, And then lastly, one thing I want you to note is I want you to make sure that you are negotiating your salary and you are negotiating wage increases every year because your buying power is being reduced every single year over the course of the last couple of years.

If you only got that 3% raise, guess what happened? You just took a pay cut because inflation has been eight, nine, 10% over the course of the last couple of years, and if you only got a 3% raise, you literally just took a pay cut in buying power. Groceries are getting more expensive. Cars are getting more expensive.

We know housing is getting more expensive. Inflation has been outta control over the last couple of years. Now, this is not to scare you whatsoever. I don't want you to be fearful whatsoever because I'm gonna show you how to combat this. I'm gonna show you how to take care of inflation so you don't have to worry about it.

So, Make sure that this is empowering for you to learn this information. Make sure this is something that you're gonna take home. Tell people that you low tell people that you love about this information cuz it's so powerful to make sure that you keep the same buying power. If you don't know what inflation does to your dollar, imagine this for a second.

Say you have a $100 bill with inflation is at 10% just for easy math in year two, that $100 is now worth $90. It is worth 10% less than it was before. So you gotta make sure that you are combating against this and growing that money so that you can build wealth. So here's what we're gonna do, is I am gonna go through the data that was utilized to show you how much a hundred dollars would be worth over the course of the last few decades.

And we're gonna start all the way back to 1910. I'm gonna go every other decade since 1910. All the way up to 2020 so that you can see what a hundred dollars are gonna be worth. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you some of the assets. There's a yes list with assets that I would invest in to hedge against inflation, and there's a big time no list that a lot of people are out there saying you should invest in specific assets, and some of them I would not invest in it.

I will tell you which ones I absolutely hate as we go through this episode. So without further ado, let's get into it. All right, so we went in and used the NerdWallet inflation calculator, and that calculator is amazing. It used the C P I over the course of the last hundred years so that you can assess what inflation rates would be based on your buying power, so you can assess your buying power over that timeframe.

Now, this is the amazing part. Because $100, what it is worth over the course of decades is amazing. The differential just over the course of a hundred years and that change, if you're interested in generational wealth, that change matters for all of us here. So we have to take advantage of activities that we can make sure that we are outpacing inflation each and every single.

Day. So we're gonna start all the way back in the 1910s. So we start at 1910. How much would $100 be worth in 1910? It would be worth 3070 $1 and 99 cents. This is over a hundred years. It'd be worth over $3,000. In 1910, but let's jump up to 1930s. So this is going to erode away significantly over this timeframe.

As you can already see, this is gonna be one of the biggest percentage jumps between 1910s and 1930. So at the time recording this, this is less than a hundred years in the 1930s. So $100 in the 1930s will be worth 1000. $821. That is a big jump from 3070 $1 in the 1910s. Now, the 1950s, a lot of things happened in between that timeframe, including the Great Depression, including World War ii.

A lot of various things happened between this timeframe, but here's how much a hundred dollars would be worth in 1950s, $1,261. Now in 1970, we've got a lot of different changes happening there. In 1970 $100 would be worth $783. So one thing I want you to note here is you're going to see people say, well, I bought a house back in 1970 for $24,000.

Well, for $24,000, you can do the math here and see the differential. A hundred dollars was worth $783. Then. So comparably, the wages were still much closer to what they needed to be for people to buy houses. That is why we have problems buying houses right now, is because our wages are not high enough for the same price of the house.

But at the same time, back in 1970, if they say they bought a house for $24,000, it was still a lot more to them than $24,000. In 1990, which to me if you say 1990, feels like it was 20 years ago, but in 1990, $100 was worth $232. Now we're gonna get to the two thousands, and with the two thousands, I'm gonna go by decades.

So in $2,100 was worth $176 and 61 since in 2010. Right after the great recession and a lot of different things were happening, the country was still not doing very well in 2010, but they were coming outta the recession and starting to try to recover. $100 was worth $139 and 47 cents, and then the last one is 2020.

During the pandemic, $100 was worth $117 and 51 cents. That's a big differential for the last couple of years. Because it's only been two and a half years at the time recording this, where $100 has changed $17 in two and a half years. That's the rate of inflation. The crazy rate of inflation that we have had over that timeframe where it's almost exactly the same from 2010 to 2020, the same inflation pace over the last two and a half years.

Was what it was over the last decade from 2010 to 2020 now, so let's compare this for a second. $100 in 2020, $117 and 51 cents. $100 in 1910 was $3,000 and 71 cents. Where you can look at 1970, which is a huge jump, $783 you can see. How your buying power can truly erode. Cuz the thing I want you to think about here is a lot of people in the baby boomer generation were born during 1970.

Their buying power has eroded from 1970, which was $783 all the way to 2020, $117 and 51 cents. That is how fast your buying power can erode if you don't invest your dollars. And that is what is going to happen to your money and how much value you can lose with your money if you do not invest your money.

You have to invest your money. So people who do not invest their money, they just keep it in cash. They're gonna have a major problem over the course of the next 30, 40 years, especially if. Inflation increases at any point in time whatsoever, even if it paces the same as it's been the last couple of years.

This has been a very rapid rate of ablation. So I want you to protect yourself. I want you to protect your finances, and I want you to protect your wealth by learning how to outpace inflation. So that is what we're gonna talk about next. Now as we start to talk about this list, I'm gonna give you a yes list, meaning the things that I absolutely love to invest in.

And I'm gonna give you the no list that a lot of people will talk about trying to outpace inflation, but there is a no-no list for me, and not all of them are bad. And I'm gonna tell you which ones are not bad, and then some of 'em I think are bad. So between these two lists, I'm gonna show you first the good, and then we'll go to the bad.

So with the good things, Number one is the stock market. Over the long term, the stock market tends to always outpace inflation. Now, historically, that's what has happened. Now in the future, could that change? Absolutely. Nobody has a crystal ball. Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen in the future, but historically, the stock market has outplaced inflation.

Now, how does it do this? Number one, it does this through growth. So the growth of the stock market over time, it is outpacing inflation through that growth. That's the thing you see on the stock charts. For example, if you're looking at an s and p 500 stock chart, it is going to grow over time. So when you look at the Dow Jones, I'm pulling it up right here.

Even just a decade ago, the Dow Jones. Was at 14,909. Okay. At the time I'm recording this, it is worth 34,057. So that differential shows you how it is outpacing inflation and asset. It has significantly outpaced inflation over the last decade, and we have had a major crazy bull run over the last decade.

So for that, It tends to outpace inflation, and it usually does if there's really high inflation years. Sometimes it's the same, but typically it tends to outpace inflation. So number one is growth. Number two is dividends help you outpace inflation as well, because what a dividend is, it is when you own a share of a company A, they share a portion of the profits with their shareholder in the form of a dividend.

Now, if you own this in an index fund, there's a bunch of calculations that happen to. Figure out how much you produce in dividends, but that's essentially what it is. It is companies sharing their profits with their owners, you the shareholder. So between those two things, that is the major way that you can outpace inflation.

So this is gonna give you a major factor as to why I like index funds and ETFs and why I like a dividend stocks. If you're not gonna go with index funds and ETFs. Index funds and ETFs. Obviously they're a basket of stocks. You hold them. We have an entire course on this called Index Fund Pro and within index funds and ETFs over the course of time.

If you look at something like an s and p 500 index fund, what is the rate of return? Bannon? If you've listened to this podcast a long time, you probably know it by heart. It's over 10%. You can adjust this down for inflation if you want to, or you can make a different adjustment. The adjustment that I like to make when I invest my dollar, specifically with index funds and ETFs, but I do this with.

Everything is, I adjust my contribution every single year no matter what, by the rate of inflation at a minimum. What does this do? What this allows you to do is that you keep the same exact buying power over time. You're investing the same exact buying power by increasing the amount that you're contributing by the rate of inflation.

So let me give you a great example of this. So say you contribute $1,000 per year to an investment. And inflation is at 2%, which is standard prior to 2020. Inflation was usually right around 2% over the course of the last couple of decades. So let's say inflation was at 2%. If inflation is at 2% and you're investing a thousand dollars, that means that $1,000 in year two is only worth $980.

So if you only have $980 worth of buying power, you gotta make an adjustment so that you can increase the amount that you're making. People who do not increase their investments are gonna slowly, potentially start to fall behind. Sure, their investments are still gonna outpace inflation, but you wanna keep that same buying power.

It's gonna help you so much over the course of that timeframe. So instead, what you wanna do is if inflation was at 2% that tier, you wanna increase the amount that you're contributing to that investment by 20 bucks, because that's 2% of a thousand. I'm just doing this for easy math. And when you do that, you keep the same exact buying power as when you started.

So it's not like it's a massive amount of money that you're increasing it by. Obviously I want you to increase it every single year cuz I want you to build more and more wealth and has you earn more money. I want you to take that money and put it towards those investments. But I. It is one thing where you can keep the same buying power by increasing the amount that you're investing.

So you'll see me all the time where I use the 10% rate of return. The reason why I use that, I don't adjust it down for inflation, cause I adjust my contributions for inflation. And so that's the big differential there. So you'll see people arguing with me all the time with 10% rate of return is unrealistic.

Well, guess what? It's the exact rate of return historically that has been available to you and you can adjust those contributions. Or if you do not adjust your contributions, you can adjust your rate of return down for inflation. So between those two things, that is a great strategy and that is one strategy that I absolutely love.

Now, you can also do this with dividend stocks. The cool thing about dividend stocks is if you look at dividend growth stocks or you can look at dividend aristocrats, dividend growth stocks are stocks that have been increasing their dividend over a specific timeframe, depending on what type you're looking at.

I like 10 plus years or more specifically. And really what I like to hone down for is a dividend aristocrats, which have been increasing their dividends. For 25 plus years, these are great options for most folks who want to be investing their dollars and the aristocrats are like just Titan Classic companies that you know have been around for a very, very long time.

Johnson and Johnson, Clorox, ExxonMobil, these massive companies that have been paying a dividend for over 25 years and have been increasing and or paying that dividend over the course of 25 years. Love those companies. That's another great way to outpace inflation. A lot of people in the baby boomer generation, that's how they built wealth.

Was with big blue chip dividend paying stocks. There's a story. You have a janitor. His name was Ronald Reed, who retired with 8 million. You can look him up. Just type in Ronald Reed janitor and you'll see his story. Ronald Reed only bought blue chip stocks that paid a dividend and Ronald Reed. Who had on a janitor salary amassed the fortune of 8 million by buying big, old blue chip dividend stocks.

So it's a great strategy over that timeframe. It's amazing what you can do when you start building wealth. Number two is bonds. So bonds are something that would not be my primary strategy of investing. Thing. They are something that's going to help me hedge against inflation if I have cash on hand that I don't know what to do with.

So there's a couple of different types of bonds out there. There are specific bonds that are actually created to help you hedge against inflation. So tips are one of them, T I P S, and it's a US bond that hedges against inflation in the treasury. Inflation protected securities, that's what it stands for.

Treasury inflation protected securities are tips and they're issued by the US Treasury Department. But there's also other ones that I like more like. iBond. So iBond is a great one. iBond uses a formula that consists of two parts, a fixed rate, and it also makes an adjustment based on inflation. So you've heard me talk about IBOs back when they were 9.82%, and we have an episode talking about them and going through how you buy I bonds and how you go through that process.

But they are a great hedge against inflation. Specifically if you have cash, you don't know what to do with that. You can only buy $10,000. Of I bonds per year per person. So if you are married each, you and your spouse can put $20,000 in and if you have a business or an llc, you can put another $10,000 in there.

So there's a couple of workarounds there, but with iBond you can only put a specific amount in every year, which brings me two T-bills. We had an entire episode talking about the TBI ladder on a money q and a, and talking through how you can utilize T-bills because they have a high rate of return right now.

You can use treasury bills in order to hedge against inflation and make sure at least your money is working for you. So if you have cash on hand, you want to get a little bit of a higher rate of return. You can look at some of these options when it comes to bonds and making sure that you utilize some of these because they do factor in inflation.

And the inflation rate and the rates will rise when inflation rises and when the fed adjusts rates. So those are some of the factors that you wanna make sure that you consider, and some of those are adjusted based on inflation. Number three is one of my favorites, and number three is real estate. Now you've heard me talk about real estate a bunch.

I've been investing in real estate since 2018, and real estate is a great hedge against inflation for a number of different reasons. So, Number one is that real estate appreciates over time. Sure, it's gonna go up. It's gonna go down. It doesn't appreciate forever, but it does increase over time. It is one of those assets that we'll appreciate over time.

Historically, if you look at the price of real estate now, this is specifically investing in rental properties. I am not talking about your personal residence here. Your personal residence actually struggles to outpace inflation, and it's not that great of an investment. Your personal residence is much better suited for your lifestyle needs or your wants or the things that you value.

But what I'm talking about here is outpacing inflation with rental properties and or owning pieces of real estate. Things like commercial real estate, that kind of stuff. So number one is that appreciation, because these properties are gonna be appreciating someone is going to be paying you rent in cashflow, and so they're gonna be paying off your loan and these properties are gonna be appreciating, and you're gonna get that value, that wealth added to your net worth.

So you wanna make sure that you understand how real estate works before you start to investing in it. The number two though, is that real estate is a hard, tangible asset, and these hard, tangible assets typically can outpace inflation specifically when it comes to. The appreciation of real estate. But the other piece that can really, really help you here is the income generation.

So income generation, with real estate, you are getting paid rents every single month, and typically rents start to rise when inflation rises. So you can see this a great example of this. Over the course of the last couple of years, when inflation rises, the price of rents go up. And that's what usually what happens in the market and.

Over the last two and a half, three years, rents have gone up to record high levels in a lot of areas. So this is one thing where rents are gonna rise over time. They're gonna help you protect it over inflation by doing so, and then there's leverage. So real estate is one of the few investment vehicles where leveraging borrowed money can be done safely if you do it the right way.

So, say for example, you're gonna put 20% down on a rental property. When you put 20% down on your rental property, then you're borrowing 80% of that money. Somebody else is getting up every single day. They're going to work, they're commuting through traffic, they're dealing with their boss. They're coming home every day.

Then they're paying you rent based on how much money they're making. And they're paying you rent. When they do that, they're paying down your loan for you so you can utilize leverage where the amount of money that you put down is all that you put into that property outside of your sweat equity and all those other pieces, and then the rent that comes in is going to pay for your expenses.

It's going to pay for your capital expenditures, it's going to be paying for your taxes and all these other things. That's the beauty of a rental property is you can utilize good debt and or leverage to be able to build that generational wealth. And then we have things for like our emergency fund. So when it comes to your emergency fund, you still wanna put those dollars into something that's gonna help you outpace inflation, or at least keep up with inflation.

At least get as close as you can to keeping up with inflation. Do not keep your emergency fund in something like a regular old bank savings account. Instead, what you wanna do is keep it in something like a high yield savings account, which is number four. So things like your home down payment, high yield savings count, things like your wedding fund, high yield savings account, your emergency fund, high yield savings account, your cash buffer.

You can keep it in your regular savings account. Or you can do it in a high yield savings account. So keeping it in a high yield savings account, which right now at the time recording this actually has a high rate of return. It's right around 5% at the time recording this. So this is gonna help you hedge against inflation.

So inflation doesn't erode away your money every single month. And then the last one is dividend paying stocks. So if we talked about the top and dividend paying stocks are gonna help you outpace inflation because they pay that dividend. That dividend typically grows over time if you're buying the right stocks.

And so this is gonna help you compound over time. Now, if you're interested in investing in dividend stocks, we have an entire episode talking about that, which we can link up in the show notes. But also, there is a book out there called The Single Best Investment. I've recommended this a couple of times.

It's by Lowell Miller. That book is one of the best investing books and one of the least talk about investing books I've seen ever, and it's one of my favorite books out there. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to at least read it and see what you think about that dividend growth strategy because there is a lot of things that you can do with dividends, stocks, and really generate a ton of wealth.

Now let's get into my no list, which a lot of people like to talk about are great for hedging against inflation, but it's not my favorite. Okay, so here is my no list for hedging against inflation. Number one is crypto, and a lot of people know my philosophy on crypto, if you're going to invest in crypto, it needs to be a very small percentage of your portfolio.

Why is that? Crypto has zero intrinsic value. There's actually a commonality with crypto number one, and what number two is gonna be, it has zero intrinsic value. What do I mean by that? Crypto does not produce cash flow outside of Ethereum. There's an argument to have with Ethereum that it does produce cash flow, but outside of this crypto has zero intrinsic value.

What that means, it doesn't have balance sheets, it doesn't have things to back up what it's actually worth. So when you invest in crypto, you are banking on someone else thinking it's worth more than what you bought it for in the future. Now, is that possible? Absolutely, that's possible. In fact, some of the record level returns for people over the course of the last 15 years have been in crypto.

If you got into Bitcoin in 2010, you have amazing returns and you are very wealthy right now, even with the lower rates that crypto has gone to over the course of the last couple of months. But at the same time, You have to think about intrinsic value when it comes to hedging against inflation. So if you're gonna invest in crypto, I have no problem with that.

But if you're going to do it, keep it a very small percentage of your portfolio and invest in the bigger coins. Or if you have fun money that you don't care about blowing and you're just trying to buy a lotto ticket, then you can invest in some of the alt coins and some of the other ones that are out there.

But Bitcoin, Ethereum, outside of that, there's not a ton that I would be looking at. Personally, and it is one where I own a small, small percentage of crypto, but within that crypto portfolio that is with fun money, it is not money that I'm utilizing to build generational wealth. Number two is commodities.

So commodities is a big one that people talk about, especially older generations when it comes to trying to hedge against inflation. Why do I not like commodities? For the same exact reason, commodities do not have intrinsic value, meaning there is nothing backing up their value. All it is is what is somebody else willing to pay for this?

It's not generating income, it's not generating a balance sheet. It has no assets on hand besides what the actual asset is. So this is things like gold, silver, precious metals, diamonds. This is also why I don't like commodity index funds and ETFs, cuz this is what they're investing in. And so when you look at something like this, sure, commodities actually have outpaced inflation over the course of their timeframe, but I don't like anything that doesn't have an intrinsic value.

That's just my personal selection. There was nothing wrong with investing in gold, if that's your thing, more power to you. But I wouldn't make it a huge portion of my portfolio personally. Number three is actively managed. Mutual funds. You know, if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, how I feel about actively managed mutual funds, they have really, really high fees and they underperform something like an index fund.

And so actively managed mutual funds are mutual funds that are managed by a fund manager, and that fund manager collects a percentage from you for managing that funds. So you'll see these a lot in 401ks. You'll see them a lot where you'll see at expense ratio of anywhere from a half a percent. All the way up to one, two, 3%.

A lot of financial advisors like to get you into actively managed mutual funds because they get a larger percentage of a commission if they get you in there. So making sure that you understand that these will eat into your buying power and your inflation power is gonna be very, very important. Number four, life insurance.

Now I am now someone who is. Sick and tired of the wolves in sheep's clothing that are the life insurance salespeople. And if you've seen this on TikTok, anything from I U L or M P I or whatever they call 'em now, cash value life insurance is not an investment and anybody who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something to gain a commission.

Do not fall for the wolves in sheep's clothing. This is something you definitely need to understand. If you don't understand this, I need you to listen to some of our episodes that we've talked about this. I will do an entire episode on this, I promise, but you gotta make sure that you do not fall for this stuff.

Cash value life insurance will not help you outpace inflation. In fact, they have a very bad rate of return over time if you look at some of the numbers. And there are just so many additional things. So if you're looking for life insurance, just do term life insurance. It is the cheapest, most viable for most people.

Now, cash value life insurance. There are select few of advisors out there who know what they're doing and know how to handle this for people. But 99.9% of the time you're not talking to 'em. And the number five is inflation adjusted annuities. So these are packaged as things that will. Help you in inflationary times.

But annuities, a lot of them have really, really high fees, and some of them are complicated to understand, so they package 'em together. They make 'em very difficult to understand. The fees are always incredibly high, so annuities are not something I would be interested in, especially these inflation adjusted ones because what they try to do is they try to adjust your payments and your purchasing power on your annuity payments so it doesn't decline over time.

But this is something that comes with a fee and it comes with a price, and I would avoid them at all costs. So one and two, crypto and commodities are the two that I would be more interested in than the bottom three mutual funds. Life insurance and adjusted inflation annuities stay away from at all cost, in my opinion.

But crypto and commodities, like if you're really wanting to get into something else, then. You know, whatever, but make it a small percentage of your portfolio. Do not make it something where it's a major factor in your portfolio. Real estate, amazing index funds, ETFs, stocks, amazing dividend stocks, amazing.

Putting your cash into either bonds or a high yield savings account. Those are all amazing ways to build wealth. They are tried and true, and they're things historically that have been performed really well. Now, in the future, we don't know what anything is going to do. We don't have a crystal ball, we have no idea, but just remember that all we have to go on is based on those, some of those historical values.

Listen, I hope you guys learned a ton today about how to protect your wealth against inflation and how you're buying a power can erode over time. If you guys have any questions, make sure you hit me up on Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter at Master Money Co. I know sometimes it takes me a little while to answer some of those questions.

I apologize for that. But I appreciate you guys leaving those questions and I will get to them. I promise always when you send them over, we're going through 'em one at a time. So appreciate each and every single one of you. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. And if you get value outta this podcast, share it with a family member, share it with a friend so they can learn how to build generational wealth just like you are.

Thank you so much again for listening to this podcast, and we will see you on the next episode.