Frugality is a muscle but luckily it’s a muscle that fills your life with meaning and purpose. By choosing to focus on things that make you happy and only adding items to your life that bring meaning you reduce the amount of money you spend while increasing your overall happiness. It takes a while to change your mindset but once you do it’s a really powerful lesson that continue to reap benefits for years to come.
Episode 105 - Fear of Taking the First Step
On today’s episode we chat about how to get started with personal finance. It can be intimidating to take an inventory of where you currently stand and compare it against where you want to go but as they say “A Journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step” - today we talk about how to take the first step.and begin learning about personal finances.
A couple good books I would recommend for those interested in reading more about personal finance:
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter
The Simple Path to Wealth by by JL Collins
Episode 104 - Decoding Mutual Fund Information
Most of us that have 401k’s or IRA’s or even a taxable account will have something called a mutual fund. This is essentially just a collection of stock, which takes the guess work out of picking choosing stocks and sets us up on a path to success. However, if you ever take a step back and click on your 5-character ticker symbol your head might start spinning as you try to make sense of it all. On this weeks episode we open up a Fidelity fund and walk through what all the different information means - you’ll find similar information no matter who your service provider is, but if you want to follow along with us, here’s the fund we were looking at: https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/analysis/315911693?documentType=QFR
Episode 103 - Sinking Fund Strategy
What do you do when you have a large expense in a month? For most people this might have to go on a credit card - but today we chat about sinking funds and how setting them up can help absorb large expenses. While emergency funds help to cover unplanned expenses, sinking funds are a great idea for semi-annual tax bills, annual insurance payments, and things that you might not know the exact dollar amount of but can save for anyway like car repair. Tune in to hear how we’ve used sinking funds and how they might benefit you.
Episode 102 - Emotions of Spending Money
We chat through the various emotions of budgeting and prioritizing savings goals. So much of how we manage our finances becomes emotional but if we step back and think about things logically it's typically easier to find a solution.
Episode 101 - Moving to a Big City
We took a break from the podcast recently since we were moving. On today's episode we chat through our thought process of moving and the choices we made such as hiring movers, buying instead of renting, how we unpack our house and more!
Episode 100 - Debunking 10 Financial Myths
There's a lot of financial advice out on the internet that is both good and bad. Today we discuss some of the common financial myths we hear and why they aren't super reliable to believe. Tune in to hear our opinions on credit cards, buying a house, and more....
Episode 99 - Buying Your First Rental Unit
Okay guys get ready for one of our longest episodes ever. We’ve been landlords for a few years now and we’ve learned a lot along that way that we wanted to share with you in this episode. From how we got started in real estate to tips on marketing your property or figuring out if your property will cashflow we cover all of the basics on this episode.
Episode 98 - Retirement in US vs EU vs Australia
On this weeks episode we finally pull in some information for our international listeners and chat about the different tax rates in different countries as well as how retirement programs work. We compare pension programs to hybrid programs to 401k style savings plans in this episode and talk about what is best for long-term retirement success.
Episode 97 - Learn to Entertain Yourself
When I was a kid if I complained about being bored my parents always told me to “use my imagination”. As adults it seems like we have lost our ability to use our imagination. I recently saw an article talking about how the average American spends $2,500 a year on entertainment and several people in the comments mentioned they couldn’t imagine cutting their spending in this category. So the challenge this week is to think about ways to be entertained that cost absolutely nothing (or very little). From free content you can stream on your TV to free apps that teach you how to plan an instrument and much more there is something for everybody to explore. You can have a good time, and save some extra dough!
Episode 96 - Budget with an Open Mind
This episode is a bit different than our usual so buckle in and get ready for a rant. We discuss various spending categories and why it’s important to keep an open mind when you are starting to make budget cuts. Instead of immediately thinking it would be impossible to spend a lower amount each month why not set a goal to spend 5% less in a category than the month before? All these baby steps add up and after all, a Millionaire is Made $10 at a time.
Episode 95 - Buying a House: How Much Do I Need For a Down Payment?
In this weeks episode we talk about the big decision of buying a house. How to make sure you save enough for the down payment, those pesky closing costs, as well as setting up a maintenance fund because if there’s anything we’ve learned in our years of home ownership it’s that you will always need a rainy day fun!
Episode 94 - Investing 401
The fourth part of our investing series is here! This one covers some more advanced topics such as timing the market with dividends and TLH. If you haven’t listened to our other three episodes on investing I highly recommend checking those out before jumping into this one!
Episode 93 - What You Wish You Learned in High School
One of the reasons I started the podcast was every time I talked about personal finance with my friends people often remarked "I wish they taught this in school". We pulled together a list of the things every body should learn about personal finance before graduating high school in this weeks episode.
Episode 92 - Content Creators
In a world with so much free content how will the payment system change in the future? Patreon has done a lot to help smaller creators make a living but at the same time that passes the burden onto the listeners to support their favorite producers. It’s a fast-changing industry so on this weeks episode we talk about the various models and discuss why we personally haven’t tried to monetize just yet.
Episode 91 - Guilt-Free Spending
In this weeks episode we chat about the things we actually spend money on and when we do spend money we don’t have any guilt about it! We chatted last week about how we don’t follow a strict budget so while we don’t go overboard in any of these categories we’ve learned to be at peace with our spending levels.
Episode 90 - The No-Budget Budget
Join us as we chat about how we try to optimize each financial decision we make in lieu of a super formal budget. It’s worked well for us for many years so we wanted to share our thought process!
Episode 89 - How Much Should You Save for College?
A large goal for many of our listeners is to help pay for their childs college education. With college costs increasing by 4% each year this can quickly inflate to a large amount. In this episode we tackle how much you need to save per month if you want to pitch in $20k each year for your childs education, this information can be found in the table below. We also chat about how to offset that cost with scholarships, community college programs and even exploring other options to education.
Episode 88 - Thinking Outside of the Box
In this weeks episode we continue the discussion on thinking outside of the box and being willing to try to approach life differently. By changing up simple quirks here and there you can start to save more money.
Episode 87 - Regretting Your Home Purchase
Buyers remorse is more common in home purchases than we thought! From feeling pressured into buying the wrong home to not realizing just how expensive homes can be people have various regrets. Tune in this week to hear about some common regrets and how to avoid them!