Transcript
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once you sit down and actually look at where the money is going and you see it in black and white, you can't make excuses anymore and we'll get into this.
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But I was shocked that our average in the last six months has been that we're spending about $1,200 eating out.
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And again in my head I'm like where are we eating out Like this?
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This looks like we're living it up and that's not.
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Listen, we are not over here living it up.
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Okay, welcome to the Sugar Daddy podcast.
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I'm Jessica.
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And I'm Brandon.
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And we're the Norwoods, a married millennial couple here to help you build wealth so you can live the life you've always dreamed of.
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Brandon is an award-winning licensed financial planner with over 10 years of experience and millions of dollars managed for his clients all over the US.
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Don't worry, we leave all the intimidating finance mumbo jumbo at the door Stick with us as we demystify the realm of dollars.
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So it all makes sense.
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While giving you a glimpse into our relationship with money and each other, we are so glad you're here.
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Let's get started.
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Hey babe, what are we talking about today?
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Today we are going to talk about how to have a successful money meeting, and we just did this a week ago, so we are fresh with information and we wanted to share what happened in our latest money meeting.
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We hadn't had one in a while and it showed.
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And we want other people to have successful money meetings because they really are so important to help get people on the same page, working towards the same goals and finding the success that you want to find.
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So we wanted to share that with everybody today.
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Yeah, the purpose of the money meeting is to obviously one go through your finances.
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One of the things that you know we I'm a big proponent of is understanding your cash flow as far as how much money you have coming in and then how much money you have going out.
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And, in regards to the money that's going out, where is it going to.
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And you know, when you talk about the goals that you want to achieve, what are some of the things that maybe you know you can cut back on or reallocate your money so that they can better serve you in the you know the way that you're trying to achieve the goals you want to achieve.
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Yeah, and I think one of the things that I realized after our money meeting is that we I knew we were spending too much and I knew that we were not tracking and we're not lavish spenders, right.
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That's the thing here.
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We, you know, yes, we buy organic foods and we do like nice things, but we're not out here buying designer things, purchasing expensive cars, you know, but it's the little things that really do start adding up.
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And I think, especially people who are good earners, who make a good amount of money, the more you make, the easier it is to just swipe, swipe, swipe and get off track and not have a dedicated budget, not saying that's what you should do, but I felt like that's the boat that we were in, where, yes, we are doing fine, but we need to be doing better and we need to be looking at what we are actually spending our money on and does that align with our values and our goals and the things that we'd like to do in the future?
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So it was time for us to sit down and have this money meeting, and I actually asked for it for my birthday.
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I was like this is what I want.
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I said it at like the end of February, my birthday's at the end of April, and I said I want everything in the portal.
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I want everything uploaded, you know, upload all the cards, all the data.
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Let's pull our credit reports, make sure that those are looking good, let's see where these scores are sitting and let's really dive in.
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And I think our money meeting ended up being, you know, close to three hours.
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Um, again yeah, we didn't normally recommend going for three hours for most people, because it's probably too much time for it was a lot.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, Don't recommend.
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Don't recommend.
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I mean, if you're doing them more regularly, then 45 minutes to an hour is like the most that I would recommend.
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We kind of went full force because we hadn't had one in a while and life has been lifing.
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So don't recommend a three hour money meeting, but do recommend shorter, more frequent money meetings.
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And that's where we want to get to as well.
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But we shipped the kids off to the grandmother and so we had a quiet house and we were able to sit down and just run through the numbers.
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So we wanted to give you a high level overview of what that was like and what we would recommend if you are looking to have a money meeting with yourself right, Because we all got to check ourselves or with a partner.
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Yeah, I think the hardest thing for people is that, in this day and time where most people we don't use cash, you know, I feel as though when you're using cash, you can become a little bit more conscious of exactly how much money you're spending, as compared to when you're using, you know, a credit card.
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It's so much easier to swipe and, just like Jess said, you know, we're not spending it on large things.
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But when you keep swiping and swiping on multiple things, multiple things do add up over time.
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Especially in that Amazon cart.
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I know my save for later cart is sitting at like 2.3 million.
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But you know the daily things of like, oh, we need more toothbrushes, or you know, oh, I need some bug repellent for my garden, or I mean, it's little things, right, it's just boop Amazon, you know.
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Or let me do a target pickup and it just it adds up.
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And you know we have a four person household and even when you're thinking about laundry detergent and just those household items, I like to always have a backstock.
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You know I'm not like one of those obsessive bunker people who has a garage full of you know.
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Doomsday.
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Yeah, that's not what we're talking about, but like, yes, I always have an extra, you know?
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Container of dishwashing liquid.
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Right, you know I always talk about the zombie apocalypse and what we would do.
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Yeah, I don't think we're prepared for the zombie apocalypse, but that's not what this call is about.
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So, anyway, it's just to say that we're not out here spending, spending, spending.
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But once you sit down and actually look at where the money is going and you see it in black and white, you can't make excuses anymore and we'll get into this.
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But I was shocked that our average in the last six months has been that we're spending about $1,200 eating out.
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And again in my head I'm like where are we eating out?
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This looks like we're living it up and that's not.
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Listen, we are not over here living it up, okay, so I was confused.
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You were surprised.
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I'm not only, because this is part of what I do with my clients and I would say the number one thing that surprises people is when you actually go through all of your expenses in detail and see exactly where your money is going.
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Often people are surprised at one overall how much they're spending but then they're also very surprised on some of the miscellaneous things that they're spending it on, such as dining out out.
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Dining out is often one of the dining out slash shopping are the two areas that I see that most people are very surprised at how much they're spending, because most people think, believe that they are actually spending less than what they actually are.
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I was shook and I definitely if you would have said pick a range, you know, is it between three and 500, five and 800, 800 to 1200?
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I never would have said because of how we eat and how we cook and how you meal prep and all of that.
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I'm like $1,200, where we do once a week maybe we do Mexican from our local spot.
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That's $35.
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Maybe once a week we'll do cava for the both of us.
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We were doing it more than that we realized.
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Yeah, but that's like $30.
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Sometimes we'll go and grab a mod pizza for the kids for $10, you know, on a Friday night like, again, little things.
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These were not things where we're like, oh, I want this $3,400 purse and I want these designer shoes, and it's not that.
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It's literally just like we don't want to cook right now.
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So let's go grab something and man does it add up and there's just no denying it.
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Right?
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We went through all the categories.
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I was like, okay, let's look at it from the last three months, the last six months, the numbers didn't change.
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And so when it's right in front of your face, that's when you have a choice to make.
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Do we keep going the way we're going or do we look at these numbers in black and white and make a change and decide to pivot so that we can work towards our goals in a faster way?
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Because at the end of the day, if we're trying to be work optional as quickly as possible, then we do need to make a change.
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So that's, either increase our income or stop our spending Both.
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Yes the ideal scenario is both.
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So we are working on those things.
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But to get us started, I would say if you're looking to have a money meeting, first and foremost, set the right date and time right.
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If you have children at home, you know you cannot have a good and uninterrupted conversation when your kids are home, so can you plan for this money meeting when they're not there?
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Your kids are home, so can you plan for this money meeting when they're not there.
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Can you ask them, you know, to be with a babysitter or a family member so that you have an hour, maybe an hour and a half, interrupted, to sit down and look at your spending, your income, your retirement, your savings and then talk about your goals in relation to that.
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Also, one of the important things is, if it's on the calendar and you've set that date and time, you can work on getting your head in the right space, because you do need to be in the right mental space to have, I think, this kind of a meeting.
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Well, the idea is that you want the meeting to be as productive as possible.
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So if you are so, normally there's going to be some sort of preparation that you would need to do in order to have a productive meeting in the most efficient time frame.
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And if you don't do those things, then more than likely, when you show up to the meeting, you already know oh, I didn't do the work that I needed to beforehand, this is not going to be so.
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You're already starting off on a, you know, on the wrong foot.
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So I would say that, like, like she said, set a date time.
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If you have children, try to have coverage for them.
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If they're older or whatever, they can go someplace else.
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But the idea is that you want to have that one-on-one time with your spouse so that you guys can actually have a productive conversation.
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Yeah, and what you said, too, was actually my second point of there might need to be some prep work, right?
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Are you loading up all of your credit cards and your bills and your mortgage payments and your student loan payments into some sort of a portal where it's going to categorize it for you, make it nice and clean?
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Are you pulling things into an app?
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Whatever that looks like for you?
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You're probably going to have to do a little bit of initial legwork, even for us.
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We're using an electronic portal that Brandon uses for work.
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It's called Right Capital, um, but we did have to upload all of our account information so that it can pull it in and sync.
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So he did his, I did mine.
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We did it over a couple of weeks because, again, we decided on this money meeting two months prior to having it and he needed to get stuff into the portal.
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I needed to get stuff in.
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We both needed to pull our credit reports.
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These things take time, and so we were gearing up for the meeting by doing a little bit each day, and I think that was really helpful, because by the time we had our meeting, we knew that everything was in and it's technology.
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Every now and then there's a little bit of a glitch or maybe an account doesn't pull in, that's fine, but make note of it so that if there's an account that's missing and maybe it's a loan of some sort, you want to make sure that that's accounted for as you're going through, looking at that cash flow, budgeting goals, retirement, et cetera.
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So, as Jess said, I have a planning software that I use for myself and with my clients.
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It's called RightCapital.
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It's not something that I would recommend for individuals to use, because it is a financial planning software, but the main thing that it has that we were utilizing is an account aggregator, so it allows you to link various accounts such as, like you know, your mortgage, your bank accounts, credit cards, any student loans, anything that you basically have an online portal for that you're paying from an expense standpoint.
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It allows you to link it in there and it brings all the information into one area, which is great because, instead of having to go to several different websites in order to see all this information, you're able to see it in one place.
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Now, for individuals, you might, you know, utilize Mint is no longer available.
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That has been phased out.
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However, there is Monarch, empower, ynab.
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Those are some of the ones that do have account aggregators, and I definitely recommend using that, because what it does is, when you link your credit card and your checking account, it allows it to pull in all your different transactions and then it categorizes it for you, and that's the big thing there is having it categorized, and that's the big thing there is having it categorized, so when we were going through all of our expenses, we could see the overall amount that we were spending.
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But then it also allowed us to easily select a category, such as dining out, and we could see specifically the transactions and the amounts that were for dining out.
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And I think it's much harder to go through if you just pull up your credit card statement or your checking account or whatever it may be.
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I think that's a much harder process because it's not really organized.
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So I definitely recommend using some form of an account aggregator to help you out with this.
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Yeah, and there were a couple of things that we had to go in and fix.
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There was a couple of transactions from a healthcare provider that were pulling in under dining and entertainment.
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You definitely have to go back through it and make sure that everything is categorized correctly.
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Right.
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But then once you do it, if that charge comes up again from that vendor, it'll go into the correct category.
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So again, it takes a little bit of legwork to get it where you need it to be, but it's totally worth it because it'll get easier over time.
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But the nice thing too is that, at least with the one that I use I'm not necessarily familiar with all the other account aggregators, but it pulled in all our information and I could go back like a year time frame.
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So it wasn't just oh, we connected it and we maybe get the most recent transactions.
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No, I could literally pull up the past year and factor that into our money meeting.
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Yeah, I think also, as you're prepping for the meeting, decide on what kind of meeting you're looking to have.
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Is this a meeting to talk about goals?
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Is that a meeting to talk about your savings, your retirement, your cash flow, your spend, where you have areas you know where you can cut back?
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You don't have to do all of that in one meeting.
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Again, we did do not recommend it was.
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It was a very long meeting and, frankly, I was a little bit drained afterwards because, even though we talk about money all the time and we do have shared goals and we're working towards those same goals, again seeing it in black and white and figuring out oh why are we double paying this?
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Or I thought you canceled that.
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Oh, that automatic really renewed and we forgot about it.
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I mean, there's so many different scenarios and the busier you are, the harder it is to stay organized, and so you really have to be intentional.
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But, moving forward, I think it would be great to have smaller money meetings where it's like, hey, today we're going to talk about how much we've increased our savings since the last meeting, right?
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Or maybe our next meeting because of the choices that we've decided to make in moving forward.
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Maybe it'll be.
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Let's look back at last month and did we hit our goals?
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Did we cut back like we said we would?
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Did we stay on our budget like we said we would?
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Brandon actually found something on his credit report that he needed to flag and, you know, follow up on that's something that I'm going to be asking him about in our next money meeting.
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Hey, is this now resolved?
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You know we were looking at a couple of bills where why is our electric payment now the same as our gas payment?
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That has never been the case.
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Okay, this is a little bit higher.
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Let's make sure that we're being charged correctly.
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You know, now I've taken it on as a task to call these vendors, ask some questions, figure out why the charges are what they are.
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It gives you an opportunity to go through those expenses ask each other questions, flag things that need to be resolved and then, when you come back for the next money meeting, those are things that you could then sit down and talk about, but absolutely I think the best way to do it is to do small chunks.
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Are you going to talk about your goals, your savings, your retirement?
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Maybe it's the contributions you're making to your 401k?
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Whatever that might be be really clear on what you want to talk about in each money meeting, because it can get off the rails real quick.
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Yeah, I mean, this is honestly essentially how I work with clients.
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I max the max timeframe as far as one meeting goes as an hour.
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So I think once you get past an hour, most people are kind of tapped out and it becomes less productive and you just, like she said, you break it up into specific topics that you're going to speak about within each meeting.
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So, like I said, normally the first one is going to be the cashflow money coming in, money going out and, honestly, that's the hardest one, because you do have to account for all your expenses and that's one that you're going to continuously come back to, because that's going to be the foundation of where everything else that happens.
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Money coming in, how much money you have, is going to factor in every other goal that you want to achieve from a financial standpoint.
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Yeah, that's also a great time to talk about side hustles.
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Have you worked on your resume?
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Have you spoken to your manager about a raise?
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Have you looked at the market to see what other people in your roles are making?
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Are you talking to your friends about your income?
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These are all things you've heard us say before.
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But when you're looking at things in black and white and you're like, man, if I made an extra 10, 20, $30,000, these problems would go away Well then, how can you do that?
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How can you increase your income?
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Increasing your income is likely going to be much easier than decreasing your spending, especially if you're not out here just spending willy-nilly.
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You know, we recognize that, yes, we are just spending too much, but again, it's not on anything absolutely crazy.
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It's not like, oh, we shouldn't have bought that Lamborghini, right?
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It's like maybe I didn't need to buy that at Target, maybe the kids didn't need, you know, new pool toys.
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And it just adds up so quickly.
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Yeah, I think what ends up happening is is that, like I said, I think one of the categories that we were surprised about was ice coffees.
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Now, you always hear all these people talking about.
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Oh, it's not the ice coffees that's making you broke.
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I'm not saying that it's ice coffees that are making you broke or putting you into debt.
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That's not what I'm saying at all.
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However, they do cost more, and if you're just constantly doing over and over again, before you know it, when you actually tally up the amount that you maybe spent in one month, that could be $200.
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Yeah.
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And when you say that it sounds crazy, even if it's like the one thing during the day that brings you joy and it's like oh, my $5 iced coffee.
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I'm supporting local, all the things.
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You can justify it however you want.
00:18:54.288 --> 00:18:59.240
But yes, we all know that making your own coffee at home costs you less.
00:18:59.240 --> 00:19:00.803
There's no disputing that.
00:19:00.803 --> 00:19:06.963
But I do want to be clear yes, we were spending too much on iced coffee, but we were still saving.
00:19:06.963 --> 00:19:13.617
We are still contributing to our retirement accounts, we are still contributing to our children's retirement accounts.
00:19:13.617 --> 00:19:15.402
We always automate that first.
00:19:15.402 --> 00:19:22.284
We always always pay ourselves first, then we pay our bills and then there's money left over, right, like.
00:19:22.284 --> 00:19:23.587
That is how we operate.
00:19:23.587 --> 00:19:27.103
So even in times of man, we got to cut back on iced coffee.
00:19:27.103 --> 00:19:32.403
It's not because we stopped contributing to our retirement accounts because we're now sacrificing that for our iced coffee.
00:19:32.403 --> 00:19:35.030
It's not because we stopped contributing to our retirement accounts because we're now sacrificing that for our iced coffee.
00:19:35.030 --> 00:19:36.674
Let us be clear that is not the case.
00:19:37.174 --> 00:19:46.786
But yes, even in paying ourselves first, there are areas where now we are going to make a cut, and we sat there and we talked about it, as ridiculous as that sounds.
00:19:46.786 --> 00:19:54.721
We looked at the spend and we said, okay, we want to do, and for me that was I would like three iced coffees a week.
00:19:54.721 --> 00:19:56.388
That's going to cost me fifteen dollars.
00:19:56.388 --> 00:20:03.776
I have a bunch of gift cards and things that I can use for when I don't want to account for the actual spend, so that's fine.
00:20:03.776 --> 00:20:05.979
And then dining out with friends.
00:20:05.979 --> 00:20:15.064
I set a budget for myself and, and even with that budget, we should still be saving several hundred dollars a month compared to the 1200.
00:20:15.064 --> 00:20:16.106
So it wasn't.
00:20:16.106 --> 00:20:17.832
Let's eliminate the iced coffee.
00:20:17.832 --> 00:20:19.395
Let's not eat out ever again.
00:20:19.395 --> 00:20:20.740
We all know that.
00:20:20.740 --> 00:20:24.619
If you're saying I'm not going to eat fried chicken, what are you going to think about fried chicken?
00:20:24.619 --> 00:20:25.142
Right?
00:20:25.564 --> 00:20:40.371
So you need to be realistic and you don't say fried chicken, because we don't even I know we haven't eaten in years, but it's one of those things where it's like if you're restricting so much and you're just going to go cold turkey, I mean you have to also live your life and you need to be realistic, right?
00:20:40.371 --> 00:20:47.669
And if you're saying, hey, I don't need six iced coffees but I can do two or three, well then you're doing better and you are saving money.
00:20:47.669 --> 00:20:49.422
And then same with eating out.
00:20:49.422 --> 00:20:53.538
You know, I recharge when I go to lunch with girlfriends.
00:20:53.557 --> 00:20:55.462
Yeah, so it's not just the monetary aspect, right?
00:20:56.144 --> 00:20:57.615
It's an emotional thing, right Of like.
00:20:57.615 --> 00:21:08.686
I get time away from the house, I get to recharge, I get to give back to my girlfriends, we get to fill each other's cups, and so that was not something that I was willing to give up.
00:21:08.686 --> 00:21:15.865
However, let's talk about the frequency, even though, again, it's not like I have time to do this three, four times a week.
00:21:15.865 --> 00:21:17.838
But let's talk about the frequency.
00:21:17.838 --> 00:21:26.303
Let's set a weekly budget, and anything that does not get used can roll over into the next month or can go into savings.
00:21:26.303 --> 00:21:53.718
So we really took the approach of we're not going to just cut and blanket, zero out this category, because that's not realistic, that's not how we want to live life, but we are willing to make the sacrifices and cut back so that we can have motion towards our goals but also still get to live life that we want to enjoy still get to live life that we want to enjoy.
00:21:53.738 --> 00:21:57.496
I think what it boils down to is you having clear goals that you want to achieve and the actionable steps that are necessary in order to achieve those goals.
00:21:57.496 --> 00:22:05.361
Now, once you have that down, once you look through your finances, do they currently align with you being able to achieve those goals?
00:22:05.361 --> 00:22:12.041
If they don't, or you need to tweak a few things so maybe you can achieve them faster, or whatever it may be, are you willing to do that?
00:22:12.041 --> 00:22:13.424
That's what it boils down to.
00:22:13.424 --> 00:22:17.002
So if you were to look at you know your finances and you were like you know what?
00:22:17.002 --> 00:22:19.695
I'm not willing to give up my, you know, iced coffees.
00:22:19.695 --> 00:22:26.779
That's perfectly fine, and I've told people that, that's perfectly fine Then you just also need to be okay with the outcome of those decisions.
00:22:26.779 --> 00:22:30.065
So we're not telling you to make these drastic decisions and everything like that.
00:22:30.065 --> 00:22:31.607
You just need to own your decisions.
00:22:31.607 --> 00:22:32.930
That's what it's all about.
00:22:33.515 --> 00:22:39.256
Yeah, and again, one of the things that I kept telling myself was it doesn't have to be like this forever.
00:22:39.256 --> 00:22:44.808
Right, you can make temporary sacrifices to help hit your goals more quickly.
00:22:44.808 --> 00:22:51.208
You can increase your spend or, your excuse me, increase your earnings, decrease your spend.
00:22:51.208 --> 00:22:53.900
Increase your spend or, your excuse me, increase your earnings.
00:22:53.900 --> 00:22:58.455
Decrease your spend for a certain amount of time, and then maybe you don't need to track how much money you're spending on iced coffees.
00:22:58.455 --> 00:23:11.076
You know that's, that's the dream, but you know, what we decided is there needs to be more income coming in, we need to be more mindful of where our spending is, and let's continue to track towards our goals.
