Money In The Bank

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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....

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.

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.

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!