How I would Invest Large Sums of Cash – Money Q&A

Transcript:

On this episode of the personal finance podcast, how I would invest large sums of cash on this money. Q and a

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 through. How I would invest a large sum of cash. If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up on Instagram, Tik TOK, Twitter at master money co.

And one of the best ways to get a response from me is if you're on the master money newsletter. And if you're on that newsletter, you can just reply to that email. And I will at least see all of those. And a lot of those end up on the show on these money Q and A's like we have today. And if you get value out of the show.

Consider subscribing and leaving a five star rating and review on your favorite podcast player. Cannot thank you guys enough for leaving those five star ratings and reviews. Now, today we are going to be going through three questions, and then I'm also going to be talking about a brand new scam that a lot of people are susceptible to right now, uh, that we'll be going through in, uh, the five.

Fourth segment of this show today. So the first question is we're going to go through someone who is at the age of 50 and they want to retire at 62. How can they retire? We're going to put together a little mini plan for them and kind of talk through that. Number two is a question about, should I keep my job?

And they go through their very specific situation. And there's a lot of intricacies that we'll go through in that question. Number three is how would you invest? Big, large lump sums of cash. And we're going to go through how I would do that. Especially if you get larger financial windfalls, or maybe you make a lot of your money seasonally, uh, that would be something that we're going to be talking through today.

And then lastly is we're going to talk through a brand new scam that is out there, uh, that we want to make sure that you all are aware of that so that you do not fall prey to this financial scam. Um, and it's really, really important that you hear about this one. So really excited for this episode. So without further ado.

Let's get into it. All right. So question number one is good morning, Andrew. I just watched your podcast and I have a show idea. And speaking of which, if anybody out there has a show idea or they want me to do a show on a specific topic, you are always welcome to send me an email and respond to the master money newsletter.

That is one of the best ways to get your show idea out there is just kind of reach out to me. And sometimes we have already done the show. If you haven't seen it, you know, we have 300 plus episodes now. So sometimes we have older episodes, but we are always willing to bring you as much value as possible.

That's the entire goal of this podcast is to bring you all as much value as possible. I want to create the content that you need help with. I want to create and help you solve your money problems. That's the entire goal of this show. So if you have questions, make sure you reach out and just respond to the master money newsletter.

We'll take a look at those things and we'll put them on the list. If there's stuff that we haven't covered yet, and if we have to. Maybe the team will reach out and kind of show you which episode we covered that on. So just a quick break there to talk about that real quick. So thank you so much for sending this in, but will you please think about doing an episode on starting to invest at the age of 50 and wanting to retire at 62 maxing out both Roth IRA and solo Roth 401k love that combination.

I don't quite understand how compound interest works. So if retirement can be done for me, Will you please explain? I'm sure I'm not the only one starting late in life. You absolutely are not the only one starting late in life. In fact, we've done a couple of episodes on what you should do if you started investing late.

And recently we just did another money Q and a on some of the things that you can do if you started investing late. But what I want to talk about today is I'm going to show you the math on your exact situation. Meaning you're starting out at the age of 50, and then you're wanting to retire by the age of 62.

Now, the first thing I always. It is never too late to start investing. It is never, ever, ever too late to start investing. And your motivation should be, I got 12 years here to allow compound interest to start working for me and allow these dollars to start to grow over time. The best time to start investing was obviously yesterday, but the second past time is today.

And you need to start today so that you can have success. So much better of a retirement and you can create that financial freedom for your life. Now I'm going to talk through first, some of the things on why these accounts are great. So you have chosen the Roth IRA and the solo Roth 401k now the Roth IRA.

If you haven't heard in 2024, you can contribute 7, 000 to a Roth IRA and to a Roth 401k, you can contribute. 23, 000 to your Roth 401k. If you're under the age of 50. Now, the beautiful thing about this is if you're over the age of 50, there is something called a catch up contribution and with a catch up contribution, specifically with the Roth 401k, for example, you can add an extra 7, 000 for.

500 per year into the Roth 401k. And you can add those dollars. If you're over the age of 50, this is called the catch a contribution. The IRS gives you this as a little bonus for trying to catch up for people in your situation. And also in the Roth IRA, you can add an additional 1, 000 into the Roth IRA.

Now I would do everything in my power to max both of those out. And I'm going to show you why, because it's really, really powerful, which you can do. And we'll go through the math here. In a second on what's going to happen over the course of those 12 years, just to show you how powerful your dollars can be just in 12 years by maxing out these two accounts.

Now, the beautiful thing about the Roth accounts is that for both of these money goes in, that's already been taxed. These are your dollars that have already been taxed. Your money grows. And when you pull the money out, you are not taxed again. So your money grows tax free. And the cool thing about that is the majority of your dollars are going to be the growth.

And we'll show you how much growth you will have over this timeframe as well. As we go through this. But you definitely number one need to make sure that you have that catch up contribution rolling. And number two is I would have an asset allocation. Personally, if I was in this situation, I would have an asset allocation that is a little more aggressive because you want this money to grow fast and you want it to grow in compound over time.

Now, as you approach retirement, H, then you can start to reevaluate your asset allocation. And I would honestly reevaluate it every single year because then you want to start to preserve this money so that you can retire. And so this is something that you can definitely make a big, big impact on this over that timeframe.

Now, one big thing also that you want to make sure that you're controlling right now is your expenses, because since you're starting late, you just need to control your expenses so that you have those extra dollars to max out these accounts. And if you go beyond these accounts, one thing you could consider is investing in real estate.

Or putting those extra dollars in just a standard brokerage account. So you have additional flexibility when you get to retirement, that you can utilize those dollars for retirement as well, but investing as much as you possibly can every single year is imperative when you have a shorter timeline. So this is really, really, really important.

Now you can also think through, Hey, I'm going to have social security when I get to retirement age. And so that's something that's going to help set you up. supplement your income once you get to retirement age and so just thinking through that and making sure you add that to your retirement plan is going to be really important and also having cash on hand is another thing that I want you to think through as you go through this but just making sure that you have that asset allocation meaning the mix of stocks and bonds that you have Making sure that it's more aggressive.

So what's more aggressive having something like, uh, the majority of your portfolio being stocks is going to be a more aggressive portfolio than having more of your portfolio in things like bonds. So for me personally, one of my favorite portfolios out there is I use the Warren Buffett portfolio, which is I put 90 percent in the S and P 510 percent in bonds.

And so that's one way you can think through that. We have a whole entire episode talking through that and that asset allocation and how I have that set up, but that is one of my favorite portfolios. If you're looking for some growth here and you're trying to grow your portfolio over time. Now let's go through the math on what would happen over the course of this 12 years.

If we took historical returns, um, when it came to doing some of this. So let's say for example, that you maxed out both your Roth IRA and your Roth 401k, and you also got those catch up contributions. So that'd be about 38, 000 per year. And that'd be about 3, 166 and some change per month that you are putting into these accounts.

So monthly, you're putting a little over 3, 000 into these accounts. Now, what would happen if you started to invest those dollars? Well, let's look at it with a different rate of return over time to see how fast you can do this. So let's just look at the rate of return over the course of 12 years. So you are age 50, you want to retire at age 62.

So if you did this and you maxed it out over the course of the next 12 years and you've got an 8 percent rate of return, the money that you contributed would grow to about 756, 957. So your total contributions in that situation would be 461, 000. And the total growth would be another 300, 000. So just choosing to invest your dollars in an 8 percent rate of return means that you're going to have an additional 300, 000 in retirement over the course of this 12 years.

Now, as we know, compound interest is really important when it comes to this. And I know you're new to compound interest, but one big thing you really need to understand when it comes to compound interest, Is that time is the biggest factor in order to help your money grow over this timeframe. So I'm actually going to show you even a slight variation of years.

Even if you could wait three more years, how much bigger this account can grow over that timeframe. Now let's look at a different rate of return. I'm always. All for planning conservatively. So I'm always all for planning with a seven to 8 percent rate of return, but always thinking optimistically that the market has returned over 10 percent historically.

So you want to think through optimistically, and this is going to help you kind of stay motivated over this timeframe, but let's just say you've got a 10 percent rate of return. So after those 12 years, if you're putting about 3, 200 bucks, we'll just round up, uh, into this account, you would have 860, 290 over the course of that 12 years, meaning that your total contributions would be about 461, 000.

And your money would have earned an additional 398, 000. This is something where you can see, Hey, I'm going to have 398, 000 in additional retirement income, because I decided I made the decision over the course of this 12 years to invest my dollars. But here's the kicker is also that 398, 000 is completely tax free because you have it in Roth accounts.

Now, what would happen if you stretch this out an additional three years, just Three years more. How can compound interest really help you start to roll downhill and snowball? Because you've heard me talk about this possibly in the past where I say your first hundred K is the hardest because you really have to grind and you really have to push to get to that first hundred K.

But if you just waited three years longer, that 10 percent rate of return, you would go from. At year 12, you'd have 860, 000 in year 15. You'd have 1. 278 million in that account with a 10 percent rate of return. This is where it massively shifts because once you get to your first million, all the sudden compound interest, this really starts to accelerate the more dollars that you get invested.

And the longer the time horizon, that is really going to create a compounding machine, which is the beautiful thing about compound interest and why I love giving these examples so much to show you just that three year differential is going to make a massive, massive impact. It's going to take you to 1.

278 million, where your money would have grown an additional 6. 700, 000 in that timeframe. So really important just to kind of understand this stuff and the concept. And that's kind of how you want to think through this. And if you want to run these numbers yourself, you can go out and use an investment calculator.

For example, there's a bunch of them out there. Um, a bunch of great ones that we use, and they're all pretty fantastic in terms of you can just Google, you know, investment calculator and just use one that's out there. Um, but these are some of the best examples of how you do that. Now you may be asking yourself, well, how do I know how much I need to live on?

So say for example, That you want to live on 60, 000 a year. And so that's how much you need in order to retire. And that's how much you spend every single year with all your expenses added up. Then what you would need is to think through the 4 percent rule. The 4 percent rule basically States that you can preserve your wealth over the course of 30 years.

If you draw it on 4%. Now a lot of people think it's pretty conservative and I am one who. Would rather be conservative than not be conservative. But when you look at the 4 percent rule, that means every million dollars, you can draw down 40, 000 per year. And so if you wanted 60, 000, you need a million and a half dollars invested in order to be able to draw that down.

But if you add in social security and some of these other options that you may have, it may be able to supplement you enough to get to that point in time. So this is really, really important to think about. Think through this stuff. If you got to that year 15 or maybe even market even accelerated and you got lucky in the market did even better than 10 percent over the course of the next 12 years.

For example, you may get there faster, but let's say you had that 1. 2, seven, 8 million there, uh, that you can utilize to go ahead and go out there and invest that you could actually take that. And you'd be able to have 50, 000 per year, roughly that you could draw down every single year, just from that 12 years of work that you put in to max out those accounts.

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Uh, excuse me, 15 years that you utilize to max down those accounts. So it's a beautiful, beautiful thing that you are looking at here where you can start investing now. And these examples are going to help you know, if you have more dollars to invest over time, maybe you want to add real estate to your portfolio.

Or maybe you want to add in a taxable brokerage account where you can get more dollars invested over this timeframe. It's just going to help you get to that point faster. And it's going to allow you to have that financial freedom faster. You can get to financial freedom in 10 years or less. There are countless examples of people who have done so.

It is just having the discipline, increasing your income enough to get those extra dollars invested. That's the most important factor overall. Is your income when it comes to your personal finances is grow that income, grow it as much as you possibly can. So you can take those extra dollars and fuel the fire and grow the fire, which is your investment accounts.

And so really important to think through that again, never too late to get started. I am so proud that you are getting started now, even at the age of 50, you have time to do this. You can absolutely do this. And I truly believe in you. If you have any other questions, please reach out to me because I love helping people through these situations.

The next one is first of all, I just want to say I'm a huge fan of your podcast and started listening as of a few months ago. Well, thank you so much for listening. I really, really appreciate it. My entire life, nobody really taught me anything about finance, so I've been figuring most of it out myself. I feel you there on that one.

That is one where I had to do the same exact thing. So it is one that we definitely, uh, want to get through and talk through as we do this. It first started about two years ago when I realized my credit score was in the mid 500s. Today, I now stand at a proud 750. I educated myself on credit scores and how I can build it back up fast, including some of your podcasts, which have helped so much.

My issue now is that I'm 31 years old and I'm starting to invest and learn. Everything there is to know about building my financial education. I still have so much to learn and don't know where to start. I have a few thousand in credit card debt, which I'm trying to pay off. And I currently rent and share my card with a girlfriend.

I did not go to college right out of high school, and I started working a sales job. And that's all I've done since then. I've sold a variety of different products and services, and the pay isn't anything amazing, but I'm just trying to get myself out of the rat race. Here's my question. Should I stick to the sales job since that's what I know and I don't have the time to go back to school and I really want to focus on building wealth for myself and my 10 year old son.

I want to teach him what I've learned and I wish someone taught me at a younger age. Well, that's an amazing thing that you can gift to your children as well is to give them the gift of financial education. If there's any tips or advice that you could give me, I greatly appreciate it. So first of all, congratulations on boosting your credit score.

That's a great first step. That's going to save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your lifetime, depending on what you do with your money and how you borrow money and those types of things. So going from the mid five hundreds to a seven 50. Is really, really important to do. So I think that's really, really helpful overall.

Now let's start here is first continuing to build out your financial education. I understand that you want to like learn all this stuff all at once. And I think it's really, really important to understand that sometimes this takes time and now you can read five to seven books and be able to have a really, really good financial education, things like I will teach you to be rich is a great one.

Uh, the simple path to wealth is another great one to go through. The millionaire next door is a great one. Just keep buying by Nick Majuli is another great one. Just kind of. Continuously learning over time. You're going to see a lot of overlap within a lot of these teachings in these books, where you're going to see personal finance has somewhat of a path that you can follow.

And so that is number one is kind of continuing to build out that financial education. Podcasts are an amazing way to do this. Continue to listen to this podcast. There's some other great ones on business and some other things out there as well. So podcasts are another great one. Audiobooks are another great one.

We just continuously try to learn as much as you possibly can and don't go down the wrong rabbit holes. Don't follow the crypto. Crypto pipeline, don't follow all these people that are going the wrong way with MLMs and all these different things. Just make sure you beware who you're listening to out there.

It's really, really important to kind of think through that stuff. Now, the first thing I would do in your situation is also tackle your credit card debt. You said you have a few thousand dollars in credit card debt. Well, credit card debt is typically very high interest debt. And so it's really, really important to make sure that you get rid of that high interest debt.

Upfront. And in addition, make sure you're kind of budgeting out and tracking your money flow as you go through this. And you know, where your dollars are going every single month. Now, when it comes to investing, I want you to kind of think through and start small and start to build up that portfolio. If you haven't started investing.

And I think you've got some amazing work here that you're helping, trying to teach your kids. Um, you know how to invest and how to actually manage their money, which is so incredibly powerful. And then after you get that high interest debt done, then you can build up that emergency fund and some of those other pieces as well.

So the emergency fund is going to be really, really important. And if you haven't seen the. stairway to wealth that we have, um, the stairway to wealth will really, really help you with that order of trying to figure out where should I put my next dollars and those types of things and getting on those different flights is going to be really, really important.

So right now you're on flight one. And so getting through that flight is going to be really helpful by getting that high interest debt paid off and then getting that emergency fund built up. And I'm really a big proponent of six months in the emergency fund and going through that. Now, the big question here is what should you do with your career?

Well, the cool thing is you're in sales and sales is one of the most powerful and high income earning skills that you can have. So maybe you've been in sales for a very long time and you haven't gone through the process of maybe furthering your sales skills. Maybe you have, maybe you haven't, but one of the biggest things that I would invest in is learning how to further your sales skills and become one of the best salespeople in the country.

Because if you can do something like this and you can really, really hone in those sales skills. You can make a million dollars a year. You can make as much money as you want to, if you enjoy sales. So if you don't have the time to go back to college, I would consider maybe going back and learning and taking courses.

And there's free courses out there. There are paid courses out there. You don't have to go with the paid courses upfront. You can learn as much free sales content as you possibly can to start. They're all going to try to sell you a course in the back end, but you. Take the free stuff first, read sales books, read sales material, listen to sales podcasts as well, and start to really hone your sales skills.

And you may be a good sales person now. And so what I want you to do is if you're taking a low paying sales job, try to elevate yourself to look for these really high paying sales jobs. There's a bunch of them out there. There's medical sales. Sales where you can make a ton of money out there. There are other sales jobs out there where you can really just crush it and increase your income dramatically just by getting really good at sales.

You've done it for a long time. Maybe you're working for a car dealership or something along those lines. Well, now let's take it up a notch and you can make even more money in different avenues and try to look for those avenues and try to network with people in sales and kind of go through that process.

I think this is really, really important to leverage that sales experience and look for as many ways to continue your education and sales as you can. I want you to continue your education in personal finance and in sales. Those are the two areas I would really, really focus on. There's a bunch of great sales books out there.

And I would also look at negotiation books, which are really, really helpful. Um, things like never split the difference, getting to yes. Those are great negotiation books that you can look at. And there's just tons of great sales books out there, uh, that you can go in and look for as well. Now. When it comes to your kids, I love that you're just starting off by teaching them this information and kind of teaching them how to handle money.

That's going to be one of the most powerful things that you can do. And so continuously doing that is going to be really powerful. And then looking for maybe some folks in the sales world, um, who you can maybe find a mentorship or something like that as well would be really, really powerful. If there's local meetups of people who are in sales, that would be really, really helpful to maintain motivation and all that kind of stuff.

So I think that that is a really, really cool thing that you're doing is you're looking for different ways to actually increase your income. And that's going to be the number one thing is you can get out of the rat race pretty quickly if you get really, really good at sales. And so I think that's going to be something where, uh, I definitely would focus a lot of my time on is.

Really increasing the skills that I already know, increasing and leveraging that skill so that I can earn way more money. Cause once you start to earn more money, you'll be able to reach financial independence, 10 X faster. If you can take those extra dollars and invest them into things that will help you with your financial freedom.

So congratulations on getting started on this journey. Congratulations on increasing your credit score. That takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of financial education. So you are doing an amazing job and I absolutely love that you're taking this initiative. So please reach out to me with any other questions that you may have.

All right. So the next question is, I am a small business owner who experiences seasonal windfalls. I work in the wedding industry. So spring and fall return, heavy gains. You frequently encourage small investments that offer big returns over time, but I'm wondering, If you might have a recommendation for how to best invest a large chunk of money.

Currently, I have about 50, 000 in cash, and I'm hoping for some guidance on my options. I have no debt. I've maxed out my 401k. Amazing. And I have a healthy emergency fund. Love it. And additionally, I have 175, 000 in a CD. And I make monthly contributions to the stock market. That is a massive amount of CD.

Um, and I'm open to having a bit of fun with this chunk and can afford a bit of risk. Thank you for considering the question. So first of all, amazing work thus far. Congratulations on what you have there. And this is absolutely amazing. You have an emergency fund that is healthy and you have 175, 000. In a CD, you have a ton of cash on hand.

You are really well protected here in terms of protecting your personal finances as time goes on. And so if you're maxing out your 401k, if you are taking your extra dollars and you're putting them towards investments and you want to think through, Hey, what can I do with this additional income that can really help me over time?

This is going to be really powerful. Now, one thing I want to note up front. Is that we've done an episode on this too, but if you get larger chunks of cash, we have talked through this an entire episode, but large lump sums of cash, just investing them all at once historically has outperformed dollar cost averaging, meaning taking your dollars every single month and investing them over time.

So if you've got a large sum of cash and you started to invest that large sum of cash monthly to try to dollar cost, average it out, just investing the entire kit and caboodle, the whole thing. It has historically outperformed actually taking small chunks of that cash. Now, if you only have so much money coming in every month and you're taking those extra dollars in dollar cost averaging, that's a different story.

What I'm talking about here is say, for example, you get a hundred thousand dollars and you want to dollar cost average that, and you invest 8, 000 for an entire year per month that historically has not performed as well as if you just invested the entire lump sum. So really important, uh, caveat there for sure is if you have a large lump sum of cash and you know what you want to do with that cash, I would consider looking at some of the data here because the data shows just investing a lump sum all at once is going to be the best bet.

Now, if your psychology gets nervous about that, or you're just really, really worried about that, then you could dollar cost average. It's not a huge deal, but at the same time, I would most likely put the entire sum of cash. Now, if you're looking for some fun ideas for this, uh, for sure, I would consider a number of different things.

First is. Are you interested in real estate investing because real estate investing is one fantastic way where you can invest your dollars. Now there's a couple of ways to do this. You can do this with something like fund rise, for example, or you could do this with something like a physical real estate where you can buy single family houses, small multifamily houses, those types of things, and get started with some cashflow in real estate.

Now, if you're not interested in tenants and toilets, and you don't want to go the real estate route, just because you're not interested in that, you really do have to be interested to do this. Then you can go a couple other routes. Another thing to look into is, are you interested in buying a business?

Because you can buy businesses. If you have 50, 000, you can definitely look and see if there's businesses out there where you have an additional business that may be less seasonal than your wedding business. Where you can run the business and hire employees. And if you haven't heard our two episodes, we have one with Cody Sanchez, and we have one with Walker Dybel, who wrote by then build, both of those are about business buying and they are really, really powerful episodes that I think, um, really influenced me.

And when I talked to both of them, I ended up starting to buy businesses. That's what I do with a lot of my extra cash now is we look to buy businesses because I think there's a ton of opportunity out there to go out and buy businesses. So that may be one option as well. If you're interested in that.

Now. If you have less time because you already are a business owner, then real estate may be the better option out of those two. Um, and those are the two that I'm really bullish now. Also, you can go look at like individual stocks. We just had an episode talking to Brian for Aldi and we talked through, you know, investing in individual stocks.

That's another great way to do this. If you're interested in that stuff, um, you can look at a very small portion of your portfolio into crypto. I would not. The entire house on that or I, you know, for me, my rule is 5 percent or less on my portfolio can be in crypto. And I have a very small amount of my portfolio.

I think it's a less than that in crypto. For the most part, I'm an index fund investor through and through. Uh, we've done a crypto episode talking about that too, but, um, yeah. But that's another option for a small portion of that. If you want to go into that, I mean, it's really hot right now because crypto, when it flies up, everybody tries to get in.

And then when it's down, nobody wants to invest in crypto. I am not a big crypto proponent, uh, as you can tell. Um, but overall, there are a lot of different things that you can do when it comes to investing these dollars. And it really comes down to what types of things do you want to do? You can also invest in things like real estate notes.

There's so many different ways that you can invest these dollars. So first you have to just ask yourself, what am I interested in? What seems very, very interesting to me? And how can I take these dollars and put them towards some very interesting concepts? And so for me, I light up when it comes to buying businesses, buying small businesses, and you can look through places like BizBuySell.

And that's a great place to start looking at what businesses are out there. And then you can start to see, hey, what am I interested in? Maybe. If you have a wedding business, maybe you want to buy another portion of a wedding business where you can have two different arms. That's another great idea that you can actually look at.

Maybe, for example, if you're in the wedding business and you do wedding planning, okay? Maybe you want to buy a florist, for example, or someone who can actually handle all the flowers for a lot of these folks. Or maybe you want to go out and you can buy a business that, you know, rents out those arches, like the side hustle we were talking about, the wedding arches.

Or maybe you want to go out and you can buy a business That, you know, runs a bunch of different, uh, DJs and photography, those types of things. There's all different things that you can do. Uh, but just talking through this overall and kind of thinking, you know, what can I do to expand my current business is also a great idea and be an amazing investment.

Cause you can increase your cashflow drastically and you already know that business. So that's another great thing that you could be doing as well. Also looking at, you know, the traditional stuff that we talk about all the time here, do you have a high deductible health plan where you can go with an HSA?

And so there's a bunch of options here. That you can really think through what am I personally most bullish on a I want you to do the traditional stairway to wealth route first, but then once you go through that route, I am really bullish on things like real estate and small businesses. Those are the two things that I'm really, really bullish on.

Real estate is harder to find now. Small businesses are way less difficult to find right now, and you can even Find some passive ones out there, like Cody Sanchez, when she was on this podcast, talked about her laundromats and how she has all these different laundromats that are much more passive and almost like a real estate player where you can get some nice cashflow on those, the recession resistant, those types of things.

So there's a ton of different options out there. And I could really go on about this stuff all day long, um, that I think you have available to you. And so as you get this cash on hand, I love how protected you are with your wealth. I love the cash that you have on hand. If it keeps you comfortable, if you're happy with how much you have on hand, I think that's great, but you can take these large lumps of cash and you can really accelerate your path to wealth with some what we call wealth accelerators.

And that can really, really help you overall as you go through this. So congratulations on what you're doing. Um, I think it's amazing that you have all of this stuff and just decide what you're interested in and dive deeper into that is what I would say. Uh, because I think that's really, really powerful.

Now, if you don't have much time, the stock market's always your best friend. Uh, that is the easiest way to invest your dollars when you have no time. So, uh, just thinking through that is going to be really, really powerful stuff, amazing, amazing work. All right. And then the last thing I want to talk about is just a quick scam update.

So, you know, a lot of times on these money Q and A's, we'll give you an update on different scams that are going on right now, and, uh, this segment is brought to you by delete me. So delete me is one of my favorite services that I have ever used. Ever, ever utilize. And what delete me does is they go out there and they remove your personal information on the internet.

So a lot of times data brokers will get ahold of your personal information and without your permission, they'll just throw it on the internet and they'll put it on the internet. And what this does is this allows for scammers or financial scammers to get. Access to your personal information. So if you Google your name or you Google your address in quotations, or you Google things like your phone number in quotations, you're going to find all this information about you on all these weird websites that you've never heard of.

Well, these are data brokers that have taken your data and put it on the internet. And when you remove this information off of the internet, it is less likely. Free to be able to get scammed online financially because they can't find your information. So say, for example, a scammer goes out there and they get a hold of a piece of your information.

Maybe they get a hold of your email or your phone number, your address, and they go online and they start to search for where's the rest of this person's information. So I can start scamming them and, you know, putting their information online. And start to open up credit cards in their name, or I want to open up a student loan in their name.

And so when they go out and do all this stuff, they look for your information online. Well, what delete me does is they go to those data brokers and they say, Hey, this person never asked you to put this information online. You need to remove it. And they go through the hoops to remove your personal information online.

Sometimes they have to send a letter. Sometimes they have to do a bunch of other different things that they're out there, uh, that need to be done. And so it takes you a ton of time to remove your personal information online. Delete me has this down to a T and they can do this really, really quickly. And just a couple of days, they remove thousands of entries that I had online that I did not want.

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And this increasingly becomes more and more important every single year that we talk about this. So we, uh, are really, really huge proponents of getting together a financial protection plan. And so this is one of the number one things that you should do, uh, is make sure that you are removing your personal information online and delete me, does it for you really, really quickly.

So if you want to get 20 percent off, just go to join delete me. com slash PFP, and they'll be able to help you out there. It is the best service that I have ever used and they save me. Hours and hours every single quarter. So I love delete me because of that. Now let's talk about this scam today that we are looking at.

And when it comes to this scam, this is one that I have gotten a number of times, and actually I almost fell for it once or twice, I actually sent a text message to my wife because of this scam saying, Hey, is this a real thing? Or do you know what this is? And so here's what it is, is they actually call it smishing.

Which, uh, the United States Postal Service and the post inspectors are now coming out with a bunch of information on this, uh, but they are mobile text messages that will come in and they'll say, Hey, your delivery requires a message from you. So sometimes it'll be UPS or FedEx or USPS. And they'll say, Hey, You need to respond to this, click this link to get your package essentially is what it really comes down to.

And a lot of times it is a way for them for you to click a link. And then they want you to put in some information. Sometimes it's your phone number. Sometimes it's an email. Sometimes it's just like, it looks like you're filling out a form for the USPS or FedEx or for UPS. And so all of these are really, really important.

To go through and make sure that you do not click this link. So if you have a text message come in, that says your package needs more information, it's really important not to click that link. And so this happened to me in January, I believe, and I screenshot it because we have a lot of stuff coming in for our business to our house, or we have a lot of things come in where your boys got too many Amazon packages.

That's on the hush hush. Uh, but anyways, so we have a lot of stuff coming in. So a lot of times I sent her a message and I said, Hey, is this something that you know anything about? And she said, no, I don't know what that is. So I just. As always, when it comes to this kind of stuff, I am very hesitant to click links.

So I didn't click it and then looked more into, is there any scams like this out there? And so I searched the internet and found a bunch of different scenarios where people were actually clicking this stuff and they click the link, they put in their information and all of a sudden they are out for good.

With thousands of dollars based on just giving that actual scammer your personal information. So this is one where it looks just like the UPS website. It looks just like the FedEx website. You have possibly have all these packages coming and they're just asking for some very simple information, but it's really the information that they need in order to finalize, you know, some of the scams they're trying to pull off.

So this is one definitely look out for when people are saying, Hey, they can also do this, trying to disguise themselves as a bank or anything else. Anything like that, just have your red flags flying. Make sure that you understand that this is really, really important. If you're ever rushed or in a situation where you just don't know what it is, just pause, wait a day or two, look at it again, and don't click any links unless you know for sure that link is something.

So now a lot of these suspicious phishing links are coming in via text message. So make sure you do not click those links, really, really important stuff. And the United States Postal Service has actually put out some of these PR things stating, this is really, really important that you don't click these links because a lot of people are getting scammed with this right now.

So if you ever get these messages, you can report it to the USPS, uh, by going to usps. com. And they have a system where you can actually put in the information with the number and all that kind of stuff as well. If you want to report it, uh, but this is really, really important not to click those links and I'm getting them more and more.

I think I've gotten at least one a month ever since that original one came in. So just make sure you're looking out for that. I just want to kind of inform you guys, as this stuff comes up to make sure that you don't fall to any of these financial scams and they are going to keep coming. Come in and they're going to get better and better with AI.

So we got to make sure that we are all on the same page here and we are trying to inform you as much as possible. So listen, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. And if you got value out of this episode, make sure to share it with the friends so that we can spread this message that anybody in this world can build wealth.

We truly believe that anybody in this world can build wealth. And our entire goal is to bring you all as much value as we possibly can. And thank you for investing in yourself. Cause that's exactly what you did today by listening to this show is you invested in yourself, which is the most valuable thing that you can do with your time and your energy.

Again, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We will see you on the next episode.