How to Get Better at Money Without Overhauling Your Entire Life

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, how to Get Better at Money without overhauling your entire Life.

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 how to get better at money without overhauling your entire life. If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up on social.

At Master Money Co on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, apple Podcast or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast to. And if you wanna help out the show, leave a five star rating and review on app podcast, Spotify or your favorite player. And if you wanna watch this, you could check us out.

On YouTube at the Androgen Cola YouTube channel as well. Now, today we're gonna talk about how to get better at money without overhauling your entire life, because for most people it may seem like, Hey, I wanna get better at money, but I don't wanna have to do all these different things. For a lot of people it may seem like.

People who are good with money are just absolutely obsessed with it to the outside world. They may have these fancy spreadsheets. They may look at special pie charts when they're looking at their investments and talk about how they're always saving money or buying different assets. If you are the person listening to this and you're saying, Hey, this is not me.

I'm just trying to figure out how to get good enough with money so I can retire at a decent age, I wanna be able to maybe even retire early. I wanna learn how to manage my money properly so I don't have to feel guilty about my money. I'm gonna reduce the stress and anxiety around money. Then this is the perfect episode for you.

Maybe instead of having to serve money, you just want money to serve you, and so you don't have to spend all your time thinking about money. Instead, you could do the things that you enjoy and hey, I get it. Thinking about money all the time is not for everyone. So I'm creating this episode for three people.

Number one, if you're a regular listener, you most likely love money or love thinking about money, or maybe you're just trying to get your finances in order, and I want you to share this with someone who you care about who may not be financially going in the right direction. You can say, Hey, I just found this cool episode.

I thought it was really helpful for me, and you could share this with somebody. Number two, if you're brand new to money and do not know how to put together a financial system, this is a great system to start with for you. And then number three, if you want the simplest path to getting to wealth, being able to retire at retirement age and having all those sorts of things, then this is the step-by-step system for you.

So we're gonna go through the six steps today on how you can actually get better at your money without overhauling your financial life. Or if you just want this to be simple, if you just want money to be as simple as it possibly can, this is the simplistic system, the simple path to wealth, just like the book with j l Collins.

But we're not using all that stuff in this episode. We're gonna go through each and every single step. So if that's something you're into, then let's get into it. Alright, so step one, what we're gonna be looking at is how to track your money. So you know, all those money nerds with all those fancy spreadsheets out there who seem like they're just always trying to optimize those spreadsheets, guess what?

You don't gotta do all of that. Instead, you can simplify with something we call the reverse budget. Now, we've talked about the reverse budget a number of times on this podcast, but the reverse budget allows you to budget without having to spend. All of your time optimizing a budget. Now, if you hate the word budget, if you can't stick to a budget, this is the way to go for you.

Now, optimizing will obviously get you further with your money 'cause you can figure out little things on how you can save extra dollars, put those towards investments. But for you, that's not what you're looking for. You're just looking to get enough money into investment accounts, enough money into your emergency fund and enough money.

At the end of the month just to get by so that you can actually feel good about money once again. So here's how this works. Every single time you get paid, what you do is you save your money off the top, and then you spend what is left over. So you save your money off the top. Then you spend. What is leftover?

So let me give you an example of this. Say for example that you make $10,000 a month in your entire household. Maybe two of you work or just you alone, and you make $10,000 per month net and you want to save 20% of your income so that you can be able to retire at whatever age you wanna retire at. You did the math, you figured, hey, I wanna retire in a the next, you know, 30 years.

And so I wanna save 20% of my income. So what you would do in that situation, Your $10,000 a month would come in, you would put $2,000 aside towards your emergency fund and your investments, and then you just spend what is left over and the rest of it. That $8,000 goes towards all the rest of your bills, your groceries, your housing, your transportation, your fund money, where you wanna ball out at the club, all of these different things, all within that $8,000.

This allows you not to have some fancy manky spreadsheet. All you gotta do is just. Boom, 2000 over where it goes and the rest of it I can spend because I know it is there and available for me to spend. Now the key to this obviously, is you need to do a little bit of math at the front end so that you'd be able to do this.

So you can look at your bank statements for the last three months and say, Hey, how much money do I spend? 'cause you obviously gotta have enough money there that you can actually pay your bills, all those different things. But once you have that number in place, you can save off the top, then spend what is left over.

The other cool thing about this is every time you get raises, for example, then you can allocate those extra dollars, maybe 50% of the raise towards your wealth building and 50% just goes back into your spending and you can start to accumulate a lot more wealth this way than you would if you did absolutely nothing.

So this allows you to a invest and allow those accounts to really, really build up if you do it this way. 'cause you could completely automate this. Number two, it allows you to save money for a rainy day, which is what we call an emergency fund. You save money in a high yield savings count. It allows you to save money for that rainy day.

And then number three, this also allows you to set money aside if you want for trips or your next car or a down payment on a house, or whatever you want to save up for. Maybe it's a wedding. This allows you to do that as well automatically, and you take the rest of your pay and then spend it on whatever you like to spend money on or whatever you have to spend money on.

Now you still need to get a little money routine going, so one thing you definitely wanna make sure that you do is at the end of every single month, you're just checking all your credit card transactions and or your checking account transactions just to make sure there's no fraud in there. But that should take you two to three minutes max.

And then everything else you can auto track through something like Allo or Rocket Money or any of these things that will alert you. On your transactions. That's one cool thing that you just automate it that way too if you want to, but the reverse budget is going to allow you to make sure that there's zero complication or friction when it comes to this, especially when you set this up automated.

Because when you get paid, boom, money hits your account, it hits your checking account, then automatically you're transferring a piece over your emergency fund in a high yield savings account. Then automatically you're transferring over to your IRAs, for example, if you're gonna invest there, your taxable brokerage account or your 4 0 1 k would automatically come out through your employer.

So all of this stuff is going to happen, and it's very, very simple. So this would take you five minutes a month and everything's gonna be automated, and then the five minutes are just there to make sure you're checking everything to make sure it's actually going through and it's automatically transferring over.

That's it. That's all you have to do for tracking. You don't have to worry about spreadsheets and spending two hours every single month. Instead, you can just do this and you could spend more time doing things that you love. So that's step one is tracking. Step two is accounts. What accounts do you actually need to have to simplify your money and be good with money?

A lot of people think, Hey, I need all these different accounts in different places. I need to try them all out so that I can figure out which one's the best, then optimize 'em, then put all the money in the ones that are the best, and then cut out everything else. That's absolutely not what you, I want you to do instead.

Let's make this really, really simple. Here's what you need. I'm gonna give you the list right now. One checking account, one high yield savings account for your savings. That allows you to budget inside one to three investment accounts depending on what you're investing in. 'cause we're gonna get those buckets in a second and two credit cards.

That's what I want you to have and that's the punchline here. So let's go through this checking account. All checking accounts are, is a pass through for your money. This is something, it is not a wealth building account whatsoever, and you should just think of it as a place where your money comes and then your money goes.

You should not be accumulating large checking accounts because you can put those dollars somewhere else, like a high yield savings account that's going to accumulate much more interest. It's a financial guest. You can think of this as your financial guest room. Nobody's staying long inside of your checking account.

So your checking account is just for spending and moving money around. Your direct deposit is gonna hit that checking account, and you're gonna move that money out into other locations. So what are the other locations? Let's look at the savings account. So you need one checking account. Now we're going to the savings account.

Your savings account should be a high yield savings account. I don't want you opening a savings account at your brick and mortar bank. Say for example, you bank at Chase. I don't want you opening a savings account at Chase because the interest at the Chase savings account is so much lower than you can get at a high yield savings account and you can't budget inside that savings account.

Why is budgeting important? I'll show you in a second. So this is just where you keep your savings for everything. So a high-yield savings account at the time recording this, most of them are like 4.9%, 5%. Some of 'em are even higher than 5% out there. And so it's really, really important to have this high yield savings account 'cause you earn more interest on that money.

Now, what is a high-yield savings account used for? This is not for your investments whatsoever. This is used for your saving for a rainy day. Your emergency fund, having money aside for your trips. So trips, next car down payment, whatever you're saving up for, short term wedding venue, all that kind of stuff.

And you can keep it all in one account. So I use Ally Bank and inside Ally Bank they have these things called savings buckets. So it's one account open, but you can budget and categories inside of that high yield savings account. So I have a category for travel. For example, I have a category for investment properties.

I have one for my emergency fund. So this allows you to budget inside one account and you have your money compartmentalized. In addition, you can also automate this process, so when money hits your checking account, you can actually automatically transfer it to Ally inside of each of those savings buckets.

So not just into the account, but you can actually allocate those specific dollars every month. Two, that actual budgeted transaction. So the reverse budget works fantastic for this because now you don't have to think about it at all. Money's just automatically transferring into each of those areas that you want it to, and you just set the amount every single month and it goes boom right into those sections inside of the account.

I've heard Marcus does this as well. Capital One used to do it, they don't do it anymore. They use syncing funds. I don't like syncing funds 'cause you have to open up 25 different savings accounts to be able to go through that process. But I like it when you have one account open, simplifies it. And then you can budget inside.

So that's the high yield savings count. You want that for anything that you are saving up for. And then your emergency fund also needs to stay in there as well. Now credit cards, two credit cards is the simplest path to making sure that you can spend your money, though there's a ton of benefits to utilizing credit cards.

We are not anti credited cards here, and unless you've had problems with credit cards in the past where you've gone into credit card debt, if you've gone into credit card debt, then I would rather you just pay more cash for things. But if you've never been in credit card debt or you're responsible with your credit cards, Credit cards are an amazing way to A, accumulate points.

B, they're very safe in terms of if there's fraud happening whatsoever, you can get your money back pretty easily, and C, they have a ton of additional benefits as well. So, which credit cards should you go with? So if you've ever been on the personal finance podcast.com, we have a section called Credit Cards that we show you our favorite credit cards, but I'm gonna give you a couple of them that I really, really like.

Based on what you're looking for. So if you're brand new and you never had a credit card before, you don't have any credit. There's the Capital One Silver secured credit card, there's the Chime credit builder is also a great one. So between those two, what a secured credit card is is it works just like a debit card where you're putting money securely on this credit card, and then you can spend whatever that amount is, but you can also build credit at the same time.

So secured credit cards are great for people who are brand new to. Accumulating credit. Now, if you do have credit and you have established credit and your credit score is above a 700, then you could start looking at some other credit cards out there. So the Chase Sapphire is my daily driver for travel rewards, where I use the Chase Sapphire to accumulate travel points.

And there's also the Capital One venture, another great travel rewards card for beginners. So you never used it. Then if you're looking for back, there's the Capital One Quicksilver, or there's the Chase Freedom Flex. All those cards are great to look into depending on what you're looking for. So if you want cash back, maybe you wanna get one cash back and one travel.

'cause the cash back cards will give you a lot of cash back based on if you're dining out. For example. Some of them are great for groceries and so you can use those cards to get the maximum points wherever you're shopping at. And or if you would like to travel a lot and you wanna travel hack and you wanna travel the world for free, then travel rewards cards are amazing for that.

If you want to hear us talk about travel hacking, we have two episodes talking about that and we'll link 'em up both down below in the show notes. So, Two credit cards. If you just want the simplest form. If you're a travel hacker and you wanna open up other credit cards, fine, but I would not spend too much time optimizing it if you're just looking for the simplest path to actually getting there.

Alright, so the next thing we wanna look at is your debt. Now I want you to understand debt. If you're new to money, I want you to understand the impact of debt on your life. If you have what is called high interest debt, we want you to pay that off as fast as you possibly can. So I want you to look at your debt statements and see, hey, do you have credit card debt, for example?

Well, credit card debt is almost 100% of the time, high interest debt. So if you have credit card debt, you wanna get rid of that as fast as you possibly can. Why? Because credit card debt is really working against you, and your wealth building ability is robbing you of you being able to actually build wealth.

So you wanna get rid of that as fast as possible. 'cause then it usually has interest rates a. 15 to 30% when you have credit card debt. So you gotta make sure that you pay that off as fast as you possibly can, and we need to remove it from your life so that you can build wealth. Now we have a free debt course if you go to master money.co/debt course, or you can find it up there in courses.

This is going to show you step by step how to get out of your high interest debt. This is things like personal loans. A lot of student loans now are high interest debt. Anything that is not mortgage related, I want you to get rid of as fast as you possibly can when it's above a 6% interest rate. Now, interest rates are incredibly high right now, so if you've got a car, for example, a car loan with a 7.5% interest rate, I want you to get rid of that.

A car is a depreciating asset. It is not an asset that goes up in value over time. It goes down in value over time. So if that's something that you had to do and that's a pants on fire emergency, you need to get rid of that debt so that you can start to take those extra dollars and put them towards wealth building.

This is something that's really, really important. So if you haven't looked at your debt yet, go through your debts. Figure out which one have the highest interest rates, start paying those down first, and then just go down the list. Now step four is understanding retirement accounts. You hear people talk about these retirement accounts.

All the time, which one should you be allocating your dollars to so you can automate this process where you really don't have to think about it. With the reverse budget, you can just automatically contribute to these retirement accounts so that you are investing your dollars every single month. Now remember, when you contribute to a retirement account, you gotta make sure that the money is being invested because just putting your money into the retirement account is not investing the money.

That's just keeping it in cash there. You have to make sure that you also choose investments when you actually send money to your retirement accounts. So there's a bunch of different ones out there, and the order I would go with for most people is in what we call the Stairway to Wealth. If you've never heard of the Stairway to Wealth, you can go to Master money.co/stairway to Wealth, or you can go to master money.co/resources.

And we have the Stairway to Wealth in there. It's the step-by-step guide on how to allocate your dollars in order. So that's why we call it the Stairway to Wealth, because a step by step. So in the Stairway to Wealth, we talk about investment accounts. So we talk about make sure you pay off your debt first, get that emergency fund going, but then you can start investing your dollars once you get to this point in time.

So this is things like the Roth I r a and the H s A. Those are the first places I like to look at when I'm trying to invest my money. Then I go to the 4 0 1 K or the pre-tax accounts, whatever pre-tax account you have based on your job. Some of you may have 4 0 3 Bs, four 50 sevens. Depends on what you do for work, but I want you to look at those pre-tax accounts.

Then the taxable brokerage is also available to you. If you're looking to max, if you max out those retirement accounts, then you can also look at the taxable brokerage as well. Now, where should you do this? So my two favorite brokerages are Vanguard and Fidelity. Those are the two places that I love to have these types of accounts.

I just think they're the easiest. They have some of the best funds out there. Charles Schwab is also great, and if there's one out there that you love, a lot of people come back and say, well, what's wrong with this one? You only mentioned these three. Well, I just haven't used a lot of the other ones out there.

There, there are some that I have used like Robinhood, which I don't like, but there are some out there that I have not used, and that's just the reason why I don't mention 'em. These are my three favorites of what I've used. So, um, this is a, this is a great location to have these, if you're looking for your retirement accounts, Alright, so the next step is trying to figure out, hey, how much do I actually need to save?

So we want you here to work your way up to 20% of your net income. So this should be at least your ultimate goal as your baseline of where you should be starting. You're gonna hear a lot of people say 10% of your income or 12%, and if you do that, you'll be working for a very long time if you only save 10% of your income.

So we really want you to get it up to 20% of your income. Then you can start lower. Maybe you can't afford to invest 20% of your income yet, so you can start much, much lower. Maybe you start at 10% and just start working your way up as fast as you possibly can. So maybe you start at 10% and then in month three you start at 11%.

In month six, you go to 12%. You work your way up 1% at a time so that you can get to the point where you're at 20%. And then increasing it over time. So every time you get a raise, take 50% of that raise, put it towards your wealth building activities, towards your savings rate so that you can get that number up over time.

This is the way that it's definitely worth doing if you wanna do that. Now, what if you can't save yet? Maybe you're just starting out. You can't save money yet. That is a okay. All you have to do is make some teeny, tiny tweaks and you'll be on your way to financial Goodness, I get it. But it's also really important that you invest.

Early and often. So if you're really early on and you're trying to figure out, Hey, how can I find money to invest? Well, maybe you have an income problem. Maybe your income level is low, so maybe you can build up some skills to increase your income so that you can start investing. Because let me illustrate for you how important it's to invest early and often.

So let's say for example, a 25 year old wants to start investing and they figure out, Hey, I want $2 million in my investment accounts so that I can retire. So they get their first job and they invest $5,450 per year. Well, if they got a 9% rate of return, they would have $2 million in that account by the time they turned age 65.

Now, their best friend also wants to invest now, but it's just not the right time. They haven't saved enough money. Maybe they don't earn enough money, so they wait and they wait for the perfect time, which there's no such thing as a perfect time to start investing. And they start investing at age 35.

Instead of age 25. Well, there's a problem here because if you start investing just 10 years later, they have to invest $13,450 to get the exact same result outta the exact same return, where if they started 10 years earlier, they'd only have to invest $5,450. This is an $8,000 difference to get the exact same result.

So sometimes it's worth it to just make some financial tweaks so that you can start investing early and make it so much easier on yourself. The earlier you start, the easier it's gonna get. Now, if you're in your thirties, don't get discouraged. There's a lot of cool things that you can do. You still have a ton of time to build wealth.

Do not worry about that. I definitely don't want you to worry about that whatsoever. But if you can learn how to build some skills, and maybe you can even do something on the side that earns extra couple hundred dollars a month, and you put that extra money towards investments, you're gonna be able to live really, really comfortably in retirement by doing so.

So small amounts of money over time grow to very large amounts of money. So I want you guys to understand this, the power of investing, because the more dollars that you can get into these investment accounts, The larger your snowball will grow and the sooner you can become financially free, which is the ultimate goal for each and every single one of you.

That's why we created this podcast. We want you to be financially free as soon as you possibly can so that you can have freedom with your time, spend more time with your family, do the things that you love every single day. So that is the goal of this podcast. Why we talk about this so much, and so. Every time you get a raise, just take 50% of that, put it towards your wealth building so that you can get there even faster, and it's really, really gonna help you along your wealth building journey.

Take 50% for yourself, 50% for your wealth building. It's the perfect combo for a lot of people so they can get there even faster. And then step six, the last step we wanna talk through here is reducing your spending. Now, what a lot of people do is they do this all wrong. They reduce their spending by doing it the wrong way.

I'm gonna show you the simplest way to do this if you wanna reduce your spending so that you can get some extra dollars towards your investments early. So let's shift your mindset here instead. Here are the three rules to reducing your spending. Rule number one, spend money only on things that bring you value.

When it comes to discretionary spending, discretionary spending is spending. That is not your needs, but it's your wants. So only the things that bring you value when it comes to discretionary spending. Rule two, focus on cutting back only one to two areas at a time. Let's make this as easy as possible, so only one to two areas at a time.

We're not gonna rip the entire bandaid off across our entire budget. Instead just one to two areas of spending and then three, when we cut back on something that does not bring us value. We do it gradually over time. So lemme give you an example of this. Say for example, you spend $800 per month eating out.

You wanna get all the way down to $200 per month eating out because you feel like, Hey, I don't really value eating out. I just do it 'cause it's easier, but I can cook at home. There's a lot of cool things that I can do here. Instead of going from 800 to 200 in month one, here's how I would do it. I would go from 800 to 700 month one.

I. To 600 in month two, and maybe your friends come in town, so you jump back up to 800 in month three. That's okay. Then in month four, you jump back down to five 50. In month five, you go down to 400. In month six, you go down to 300. And then month seven, now you're down to 200. Gradually reducing your spending is gonna lead to a much more successful reduction of that line item instead of have actually just ripping the bandaid off and then just going back to it in a couple of months.

That's actually what happens for most people, and the psychology is very clear on that. So just gradually reducing your spending in one to two areas at a time, it's gonna allow you to get those extra dollars outta your budget, put them towards wealth building if you wanna do that, if you're not investing your money and really is gonna be the best way to help you reduce your spending.

So listen, I hope you guys learned a ton in this episode about how to get better with money without having to overhaul your entire life. This is a very simple system. All this can be automated where you don't have to lift a finger and you can only spend five minutes every single month looking at your money.

And I think that is the most optimal way to do this if you don't wanna spend time. Now, if you're an optimizer, you want to get every extra dollar squeeze, every extra dollar out, more power to you. I get it, I'm one of those people most of the time. But at the same time, not everybody's like that. I want you to be able to be successful with your money, and this is exactly how.

I would do it. If you guys have any questions, make sure to reach out on socials at Master Money Co. And don't forget to leave a five star rating and review on this podcast. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you doing that. And if you know somebody who can get benefit outta this episode, share this episode with them.

Can I thank you guys enough for investing in yourself by listening to this podcast, and we will see you on the next episode.