This is a blog all about real-life, everyday financial topics. Stacey Powell provides not just expertise and insight from a CFO's point of view, but also real-life "been there, done that" lessons from lifting herself out of a financial mess.
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Video Transcription:
Do you ever feel like you aren't on top of your money like you should be? Like you just don't know what to do next? Do you ever get sick and tired of living paycheck to paycheck and all the struggles that come along with it? If any of that rings true for you, then The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life With Money is the book for you.
My name is Stacey Powell and I'm going to tell you a little bit about why I wrote this book for you. Be assured, if any of those statements ring true, you are not the only one, there are millions of other people just like you who struggle with their money walking around every day with this nagging little voice "hey! you can be better with your money" or that really not so nice voice saying "are you ever going to get your money shit together?"
For me, those voices came like the peaks and valleys of a roller coaster and they would never ever stop. If you're ready for your little voice to whisper "hey, you're good with your money" and "hey you handled that like a champ!" then I want you to start working on this book. You can make that happen, I did! In this book I walk you through every step that I took.
Why should you learn from me? Other people have degrees and credentials too, so what makes me different from other experts? I've been where you are. I've struggled to stop living paycheck to paycheck. I know what it feels like to have debt payments that you can't make. I've sworn off credit cards only to have a huge car repair bill that I didn't have any way to pay for! I let year after year go by saying "next year I'm going to start a savings account or a 401k" but next year never came.
The cycle became routine for me until the day that I got sick and tired of living the way I was living. On that day I chose to stop relying on my financial know how and start using a holistic approach to tackling my money issues and you know what happened? I began to breathe easier and I stopped feeling broke even though sometimes I still was. I started to feel like I was making good money decisions. My money got stronger and working on my money started to actually become fun.
To this book, I bring my life experiences of changing something that felt like it was completely unchangeable. I also bring the lessons of countless people that I've financially coached through highs and lows. For many people, money carries this huge emotional punch, it impacts our lives our hopes and our dreams. If you're ready to find yourself at peace in feeling strong about your money then take this journey with me. Get your copy of the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life With Money. Start here, start now. Don't just know better but do better.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and if you’re ready not just to know better but do better with your money, then you’ve come to the right place.
Have you ever heard that 70% of the people who win large lotteries, 5 years after they win, are in a significantly worse financial position than before they won the lottery?
It’s crazy! Willie Nelson, Cyndi Lauper, 50 Cent, MC Hammer all have bankruptcies. Wynonna Judd, and I love how she talks about it rather famously, had a ton of bad money habits!
So when she became popular and was making just a ton of money, it didn’t matter. Her problems got worse because she had exponentially more money to make problems with.
What really, really matters in our financial life is our habits. I had clients tell me before we started, “Oh when I make it, I’m really going to take what you’re teaching me and implement.” No! What you really need to do is implement now when you have nothing. The person that puts $5 in a savings account when they have nothing is the person who will then put $50 in his savings, $100, $500, $1000.
When you practice how to do something and create healthy habits, even when you feel like you have nothing, it has a huge impact and exponential growth on your financial life. You don’t need to wait to win the lottery. You don’t need to wait to get an inheritance, to start creating good habits.
I’ve had a number of clients over the years come to me, really disappointed in themselves and what they called frittering away an inheritance. I have this – one client, in particular, had a really sizable inheritance, and she specifically came to work with me because she wanted to honor the money that her mother left her.
She worried whether she was going to be able to honor the money her mom left her and that was the subject of our financial coaching. She looks back on the decisions she made and even though – I’m not saying that she didn’t fritter here and there. She did, but she did it mindfully and by using really good habits around her money.
So that’s what I’m going to leave you with today. A little more serious than the typical “I won the lottery” conversations might be but it’s true. Work on your habits and then when you get that next pocket of money, do something great with it.
If you want to talk about this anymore, come join us over on Facebook. We have a private group called Team Do Better. Ask to join. We'll let you in. Subscribe to these videos below right here on YouTube or sign up for our newsletter at TheFinanceGym.com. Thanks and have a great day.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and if you’re ready not just to know better but do better with your money, then you’ve come to the right place.
So lately we’ve been creating videos about our relationship with money. Today, we’re talking about teenagers and their relationship with money and how we can have an impact on it.
I have long been a proponent of “money date night”. It’s what I did to help myself pull myself out of the horrid financial mess I was in years ago. My last video talked about couples having money “date night”. So today we’re going to talk about this thing that I started doing with my daughter when she was a teenager called “teenage money date night”.
When she was young – I was in the midst of my financial nightmare – and because of that, I think I probably gave her a lot of mixed messages and wasn’t a great teacher about money.
By the time she became a teenager, I had come quite a long way in my own learning and doing. I felt like I had a lot of time, which I needed to make up for.
So we started doing teenage money date night. Part of it was to make up, and part of it was because I was writing a book and I wanted to test things out on her to see how they would work.
So we would get gelato, go to a coffee shop, and have teenage money date nights. I was honest. The dates weren’t all sunshine and roses. There were tears at some of them. But we did it. We created this conversation. I did my best to be non-judgmental about her financial decisions. I did my best to teach, but not lecture her. I did my best to listen to her fears and say, “Yeah, I have those fears,” and I did my best not to sound like a know-it-all even though I know a lot about money.
Here’s how I did it. I was honest with her about the mistakes that I’ve made. It became more of a joint effort than me saying, “This is how you should take care of your money, and you aren’t doing this.”
Can you think about a time when you were teaching your kid to ride their bike and took the training wheels off their bike? They probably fell once, twice, maybe more. Did we yell at our little kids when they fell off their bike? Did we look disappointed? Did we try to act like we weren’t disappointed, but they could see through the fact that we were?
When it comes to money, we want so badly for our kids not to suffer the same things we suffered. So our judgment sometimes comes through, even if we’re trying not to show them. I think that’s one of the really important things about teaching your teenager about money.
Teenage date night changed a lot for my daughter and her money. I like to look at things still with training wheels. I have this deal with my daughter. She’s 21 right now, and I have what I call “training wheel savings” for her. I require her to give me a certain amount of money every month, and I put it in a separate savings account. It’s her money, but she doesn’t have control over it. I'll tell you what. Every time something goes wrong with her car, she’s so grateful for having those training wheels.
So when you think about your kids, no matter what age they are – she lets me call it “teenage money date night” even though she’s no longer a teenager. Think about what kind of things you could do to help your kids have a smoother path than maybe you had with money.
If you would like to talk about this more, come on over to our Facebook group Team Do Better. You’re welcome to ask me questions there, and I will answer, and everybody else will appreciate watching as well. Sign up for our newsletter at TheFinanceGym.com or subscribe to these videos right here. Now, have a talk with your teenager.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and if you’re ready not just to know better, but do better with your money, then you’ve come to the right place.
I don’t care if you’ve been married for 50 years, if you’re a newlywed or if you’re thinking about getting married. Having a money date night every month can make a huge impact on your financial life.
Here are a couple of reasons why:
1. The only time you talk about it is when you’re trying to solve a problem, a big enough problem that requires the both of you to talk about it. It’s usually frustrating, stressful, ugly. So that’s your framework for how you show up to any conversation about money because most of your conversations are kind of icky, and frustrating without any simple solutions.
If you consistently talk to your significant other about money, your goals, and your dreams, you’re laying a framework in your head that that’s your money conversations are good. Not just icky stuff.
Then when the icky stuff happens, you’re much better equipped with a shared language and know how to work together. So that’s reason number one.
2. It’s a stereotype, but I think it’s a true stereotype. In most couples, you’ve got the person that loves spreadsheets, loves accounting software, loves all that stuff and figuring out. Then you’ve got this person over here who wants absolutely nothing to do with any of it and is so happy that the other person is going to do it all. So there is one person making the vast majority of the decisions and actions around your money. While that might be convenient, it isn’t best. Here’s why.
I tell my clients all the time. Imagine I’m your accountant. I’m going to give you a ton of advice. I hope you’re going to take most of it. But I also hope you’re not going to take all of it because my framework – I’m conservative. I’m not always going to take risks. I’m not always going to go for the quick path. I’m going to spend 6 hours on a spreadsheet when I should have only spent 1 hour on a spreadsheet trying to make a decision. I should have followed my intuition more, right? That’s my framework.
Another person’s framework brings great value to your financial decisions and so bringing your two heads together is actually important and better. You might think you’re not good at money, but that’s not true. That’s the story you tell yourself. You have great value to balancing out your partner.
It’s not the end-all-be-all to fixing your money situation. It’s only part of the equation. So those are my top 2 reasons why it’s really important to have money date night with your honey. Keep your marriage together, going strong, and being fun.
So if you would like to join me and more of these conversations, you can Subscribe to these videos. You can join us over at Team Do Better on Facebook whenever you can come in and talk about money, and you can also sign up for our newsletter at TheFinanceGym.com. So I want you to sign off and schedule your first money date night.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and if you’re ready not just know better, but do better with your money, then you’ve come to the right place.
Lately in these videos, we’ve been talking about our relationship with money and so today, we’re going to talk about hobbies. In the book, I asked you, “OK, what if you’re really into fishing? What if you knew nothing about fishing but all of a sudden you got this great passion for it?”
So I scoped around. I have this friend Maya who is a bass fisher, not a fly fisher, bass fisher, and she watches bass fishing TV shows. She gets magazines. She has friends that are her peeps but then she has these bass fishing friends. She goes to tournaments, classes and bass stores.
I make fun of her because I come from a fly fishing family. But the thing is that she’s really good at fishing. And she loves it, and she enjoys it. So one of my points in the book is, “Wow, what if we approach money as if it was a hobby?” because you know how most of us are with money. And we’re like, OK, Saturday morning in between laundry and taking the kids to soccer, maybe I will get around to looking at my bank balances, filling out all my bills as fast as I can and then moving on, right?
We spend as little time as possible dealing with our money. So are we really good with it? Would we ever become great bass fishers or gardeners or cyclists or whatever it is you’re into? Think about your favorite hobby. What are the kinds of things that you would do to become really good at that hobby? What if you did that with money? What if you read a book, watched a video?
So you’re already doing something. You’re watching a video. What if you joined a group? What if you did the kinds of things one needs to do to become good at our hobby? Sit down and write a list of everything you did to become really good at your favorite hobby and then do the same thing around money.
Here’s my list in the book:
Who could you talk to?
What kind of equipment do you need?
Do you have the right equipment?
Are you using the right apps, the right software?
What friends would be into learning about this with you? So it would be fun.
Any TV shows or books? - There's my book. It’s called The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money that you could read.
How much free time do you think that it would take to become really good with your money?
These are some ideas about making money one of your hobbies and becoming super good at it.
So as always, you can Subscribe to these videos below. You can join us on Facebook at Team Do Better. Great place to spend some time worrying about money and you can sign up for our newsletter over at TheFinanceGym.com. So go find yourself a new hobby.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series.
My name is Stacey Powell and if you’re ready to not just know better but do better with your money, then you’ve come to the right place.
And I'm really excited about today's video and the next few videos that are rolling out over the next two weeks. They're all about our relationship with money.
I'm an accountant, so I'm a huge believer that you can't just magically change your money mindset, and everything's magically going to be okay, like a lot of guru's say. You've got to do the work. You've got to roll up your sleeves; you've got to actually put money in a savings account. You actually have to pay down your debt. There's all this droll, boring, technical stuff you have to do. But, where I differ from a lot of accountants is that the money mindset piece, I think it's half the equation.
Part of what's wrong with money in this society is that we don't talk about it. I call it the big scary. Oh my gosh, do not make me talk about what's wrong with my money, about my debt. Admit to other people that I'm frustrated. Admit to other people that I've had points in my life that I couldn't put $5 of gas in my tank. We also don't like to brag about our money wins because that's just not done. So we end up not talking about money at all which is a huge mistake.
Back in 2008 when everything came crashing down, it was a horrible time. I know for some of you, it was a really horrible time. You might have lost your house. You might have had some family, friend that lost their house. Everybody knew somebody that was on the brink of losing their house or lost their house.
All of a sudden, keeping up with the Jones … We could see driving down our streets that a bunch of the Jones, there was nothing to keep up with because they were not on solid ground to begin with. They might have had a shiny new car. They might have gone to Europe on vacation. But the truth is, they were underwater in their house, and, unfortunately, lost it. It was a horrible time.
The silver lining? We started talking about real money issues, together. Together with friends, family our nation, the media. And I think there was a lot of benefit from that. It gets us out of our own head and working as a community together.
So my big point of today's video is, talk about your money with your kids, your family, your parents, your friends, your mentors. Get a financial coach. We've got great financial coaches at CreatingAnswers.com. Join a money Mastermind group, which we have at TheFinanceGym.com.
If you really want to impact change in your money find someone to talk to. Join a group. Get a coach. Make a difference with your money. And if you're really, really struggling, and you don't have any money, I have some free stuff to help you too.
Subscribe to these videos below. Come to Facebook we have a group called Team Do Better where we talk about money on a weekly basis, join there; it's free. You can sign up for our free newsletter at TheFinanceGym.com. And whatever you do what I will leave you with is, find somebody to talk to about your money. Don't be scared. It won't kill you, it will help you. Have a great day.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name is Stacey Powell and if you’re ready to not just know better but do better, you’ve come to the right place.
Today we’re going to be talking about how we all spend money. Are you frugal or are you a spendthrift? I am always fascinated by the spending decisions that we all make. I have lots of clients over the years that it doesn’t matter what they buy. They’re going to buy the most expensive thing they can possibly afford.
I also have a lot of clients that it doesn’t matter what they buy. They’re going to buy the cheapest or the best deal and just be frugal about all of their spending decisions. Then there are some people right in the middle. It just depends on what they’re buying. Some things are really important to them. So they buy the best. Other things aren’t really so important. So that’s where they go and find the best deal.
I illustrate this on page 81 in the book, if you’re following me along. It’s two shopping carts full of the same six things – a couch, a watch, a TV, a necklace, a vacation and a car. These people over here, they have to have the best of, $311,000 price tag. These people over here, $16,000 price tag. It’s the same six things. When you sit on a couch, maybe it makes a little bit of a difference what kind of couch you’re sitting on. But in the end, you just need a place to sit.
So if you’re buying a $4000 couch or a $300 couch, why are you making that decision? I’m not placing the judgment on either decision. If you can afford a $4000 couch and you’re fully funding your reserves and your retirement and taking care of everything else, then by all means go buy that $4000 couch. But I also know there are a lot of people that buy that $4000 couch on credit and pay for it over many years and then they pay more for it. Why are you making those decisions? So in this video, I’m really just asking you to spend some time thinking about which side you’re on. I’m going to ask you to spend some time writing about some of your spending decisions.
In the book, page 78 and 79, I ask you to talk through your spending habits. There’s a worksheet that has a bunch of questions for you to fill in. You can go to TheFinanceGym.com and in the store, there’s a whole area of free pages of the book and we’re going to put these up there for you to go and download and fill them out even if you don’t have the book. I’m going to help you, so head on over there.
While you’re there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter. You can also go to Facebook and join our Team Do Better group, a great place to talk about your spending habits on there, you can chat with me. And also you can sign up for our video series down below so that you can catch every single one of these as they come out. Now go do some thinking about what kind of spender you are.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name is Stacey Powell, and if you’re ready to not just know better with your money but do better, you’ve come to the right place. Today I’m going to teach you about how to teach your kids about buying stuff.
If you watched the last video, we were talking about how we would probably make better spending decisions as adults if our parents had spent more time on how to better plan for teaching us how to buy stuff when we were kids. I don’t want to make that same mistake. So I didn’t always do it right, but I was very mindful about teaching my daughter when she was growing up, and I want to teach you three of the things that you can do to help teach your kids about buying stuff.
Number one, have a plan for when they ask for something when you’re out shopping. Don’t just buy something right then when they want it. Take them back home. Talk to them about where the money is going to come from. Can they earn it? Do they have an allowance? Do they have a plan for their spending allowance? How much does it cost? Look at some of those kinds of questions that I’ve taught you to ask yourself and have them think about it.
If they weren’t going to buy that one thing with their money, what else would they buy? Go over some of those decisions and even if it’s a $5 toy and I’m completely serious. Talk to them about this $5 toy because what you’re doing is laying the groundwork for when they want to buy a $60 computer game or a $400 smartphone or their first starter car or when they want to buy their college education which they’re probably going to buy partly with you. You want them to have that groundwork of practicing with small things.
The second thing you want to teach your kid is how to put together a spending plan. If you’ve got a vacation coming up, sit down on a family night over ice cream and talk about that vacation and what you’re going to do, where you’re going to go and where you’re going to have to spend money.
If they’re teenagers, they’re old enough to do a bunch of the internet research probably better than you and put that spending plan together. Have them do it. If they’re younger than teenagers, then sit with them and go through parts of it, the simple stuff. How much are tickets to Disneyland? Make it fun. Include your kids in this. Don’t make it dull.
The third thing is there are parts of your spending plan that have everything to do with your kids. I want you to incorporate them in those decisions. If they have a clothing budget every month, let them know how much it is. What I did with my daughter when she was young was around summer camps. We had a set amount of money and summer camps is the kind of thing that you can send thousands of dollars on, and so she had a budget, and she looked at the thing she wanted to do and made some balanced decisions about whether it was going to be horse camp year or tennis year or swimming year. She would choose. We made her an active participant in that, and hopefully she learned something from it.
So those are a few ways that you can teach your kids how to buy stuff. If you want to come chat with me about ideas you have with teaching your kids, come join our Facebook group Team Do Better. It’s a private group where only people that are working on doing better with their money are at. You can also join our weekly newsletter list at www.TheFinanceGym.com and don’t forget to subscribe below to our video series, so you will know when they come out. Now go have a conversation with your kid.
Hi. Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and if you’re ready to not just know better about your money but do better, then you’ve come to the right place.
Today we’re going to be talking about the golden rule of buying, and it comes out of the chapter of the book called Buying Stuff. In that chapter of course at some point, I get around to talking about buying a home, buying a car, buying a college education.
But at the beginning of the chapter, I take us all the way back to what we should have learned when we were kids, what hopefully some of our parents taught us. But we know most of our parents, they didn’t teach us this stuff. So now it’s time to start learning, and I start by teaching you about how to buy a bike.
Maybe it’s a $500 bike, $100 bike. You could spend $1000, $3000 on a bike and so what I ask you to do in the chapter is practice some mindfulness techniques when you’re buying. My golden rule of buying is ask how much and get 3 quotes. That’s not just when you’re buying a car, but that’s also when you’re buying a $200 piece of electronics or when you’re getting a root canal from your dentist.
When you are buying anything, just practice asking how much and that way, when you’re buying a house or a car or a really big ticket item, you’ve practiced what you should have practiced when you were kids so that it became easier.
Can you imagine asking how much? Something that the doctor’s office is going to cost. I found for many people it’s uncomfortable and becomes more comfortable when we just practice. So here’s what I would like you to do. The next thing you’re going to buy that is in that kind of mid-range couple of hundred dollars, several hundred dollars, I want you to do these 4 things.
I want you to get paper and pencil out, and I want you to do a little journaling about how important is it that you have the best of this thing you’re buying.
What would make a difference if you bought a new one or a used one?
How many years do you plan on having this thing you’re going to buy?
Then the last and most important question. If you bought the less expensive one if you’re going to buy a bike and you’re going to buy an inexpensive used bike or a really expensive brand new one, what are you going to do?
If you choose the less expensive one and you’re going to save all that money, what would you do with that extra money if you chose the less expensive one?
So I encourage you just to practice the mindfulness around your buying and practice on smaller stuff where the stakes aren’t quite so high as they are when you’re buying a house or a car. Let me know how it goes.
If you want to know where to let me know how it goes, come into our Facebook group Team Do Better and you can chat with me in our private group. You can also sign up for our newsletter at www.TheFinanceGym.com and subscribe for our YouTube video series. Now go out there and practice some mindful buying.
Hi! Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name's Stacey Powell. I'm here on a mission to make you and your money stronger.
Today we're going to be talking about, you. Not you right now, but you when you're 75-year-old. We're going to do a little thing that makes you stop, sit and think about what it would be like if you were able to time travel. Forward yourself ahead, for me it would be 25 years from now, what would it be like if I could sit and have a conversation with my 75-year-old self. What would your 75-year-old self have to say to you about what you're doing with your retirement savings right now, for her or him? What would you say to your 75-year-old self when they ask, were you putting money aside when you were in your 20's? In your 30's? In your 40's?
I thought a lot about today's video because I wanted to make it just right. I think a lot about what would somebody have said to me when I was in my 20's that would have actually made me start saving for retirement. Because I didn't. And I wonder what somebody could've said to me when I was in my 30's that would have actually gotten me to start saving for my retirement. But I didn't. And when I hit 40 I still wasn't saving for retirement, and I know so many people in their 30's, 40's, 50's, I even talk to people in their 60's who still haven't started saving for retirement.
And what I tell everybody I can when they're a teenager or in their early 20's is, start now it's so much easier, it feels hard. And I wish I knew what it was that I could say to you that would inspire you to do it. And quite honestly, I don't know. I've never come up with the answer.
But I do know something ... I turned 50 this year, and I feel so much closer to that conversation with my 75-year-old self. And I know that I want to be able to look her in the eyes and say, I cared about her future. I cared about her ability to keep a roof over her head and take trips when she wants and putter around in the garden. I might still be working when I'm 75; I love what I do. But you know what ... I might just want to spend every day in the garden. That's what my Mom's doing right now at 82 years old, and she took pretty darn good care of her retirement.
So quite honestly I don't know what to say to you to get you to do this, but what I do know is that when you're talking to your 75-year-old self, he or she is really going to want you to have saved for retirement.
Do you remember back to the beginning of this year, a little less than a month ago? It was a fresh new year, and you made some goals, resolutions, or commitments. Or at the very least, you took a big breath and thought to yourself, “ok, this year is the year I’m going to XXXXX.”
Well, you know what? We’re in the last week of January already! We are 1/12 of the way through this fresh new year! Have you started on XXXXX? Are you 1/12 of the way toward that thing you said you’d accomplish this year?
If you’ve already slipped on that commitment that you whispered to yourself, then it’s time to anchor yourself again. We’ve been sending videos out one by one, and maybe you’ve noticed, they’re walking you through The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money. If you want to get yourself back on track, set aside some time today and rewatch some of the videos. Or if you’re really off track, get a cup of coffee, find a quiet place, and listen to them all. It just might be the best investment you could make for your money today.
And if you ARE tracking on your goals on this 1/12th of the way through the year point, congratulations! You must be proud of yourself. You might want to re-watch a few of the videos too. If you’ve really been working on your money, your context for watching the videos will already be different, so different points will jump out at you. You'll get a deeper, richer understanding of the concepts and practices in the videos. You'll see something completely different this time through because you're different.
Hi! Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name's Stacey Powell, and I'm here to help you and your money get stronger.
Today I'm going to be teaching you how to leave your savings alone.
In the last video, I talked about how many months it would take you to build up to 3 to 6 months of reserves. 3 to 6 months of reserves is kind of the amount that financial professionals recommend that we have set aside for real emergencies, things like job losses.
Well, you build 3 months to 6 months of reserves. In the last video, I was showing how I like to think about it as climbing up a mountain. But the thing happens is that emergencies happen and you kind of slide back down that mountain when you have to dip into them.
And so what I want to teach you is how to dip into your reserves less frequently. For me, oh my gosh, what would be this constant cycle was getting money set aside and then having an emergency. My emergencies were things like a $200 vet bill or a $400 car expense.
I'm actually filming these videos with my daughter in the room who's 21, and she says "Those always seem like emergencies to me." You know what's an emergency is relative, right? Like for me, a $1,000 car repair, that shouldn't be an emergency. I have a car it's going to need repairs. I should have that money set aside and ready to roll. But if I had a $5,000 car repair, well that is an emergency. That's a lot of money and not standard.
Those are kind of the ranges for somebody at my income level. For somebody at her income level, it's the difference between a $100 car repair and a $500 one. I would absolutely let her dip into her $500, into her reserves for a $500 repair. Cause I'm her accountability partner.
And that's the next thing that I'm going to talk about is some tools that I was taught that I teach other people to use to not get into your reserves except for true emergencies.
Tool #1 - Write out 6 other options that you have to deal with your "emergency" other than getting into your reserves.
Tool #2 - Wait a week. Let yourself sleep on it. Let yourself and your mind kind of work through deciding whether it's really an emergency or not.
Tool #3 - Call your accountability partner. Here's the way this went with me when I was going through this. I had friends I had called and whined and complained and commiserated with; it really wasn't very helpful. I did it to myself. When I started finding friends who I could call and all they would help me talk about was what the solution to the problem was, in a positive way and keep me out of that victim mode, that really changed for me, how many times I would go touch my reserves. And how hard I would try to think of other ways to solve my "emergencies".
So what I challenge you to do is create a rule of 3 for yourself. Find yourself an accountability partner who's going to support you and let them know what your rules around touching your emergency reserves are.
If you'd like support from our community, come join us over at the Facebook group, Team Do Better. And don't forget you can subscribe to these YouTube videos so you'll be sure to catch them when they come out. And you can also join our mailing list over at thefinancegym.com.
Hi! Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name's Stacey Powell, and I'm here to help you and your money get stronger.
And today we're going to be talking about climbing the emergency reserves mountain. The emergency reserves mountain is one of my favorite; it's not one of my favorites, my favorite picture in the entire book. I love this thing, and I'm going to tell you why I love this picture.
First, reason is because it shows that no matter who you are, whether you are able to climb a rope to the top of a mountain, or slowly walk up a winding path, even if you can't walk, you can make it up bit by bit by bit, to the top of 6 months reserves. And that's why I really like this picture, that if you just go step by step, you can get there.
The other reason that I like this illustration is that it also shows the reality of how long it takes. You can be the most in shape, financially fit person climbing at a 20% grade, putting 20% of your income away every month. And to get to the 6 months reserve that is recommended you have, it's going to take you 2 1/2 years. That's a long time and a big chunk of your income. But you'll get there.
If you're walking, oh my gosh, it's going to take a lot longer. This is a 5% grade here; this person is putting away 5% of their income every month. That's still really a decent chunk. You'll feel it if you're putting 5% away. It's going to take you 10 years to get to 6 months.
I think that's why a lot of people just go "pfft, what's the point? It's going to take me forever." I think maybe that's what I felt like when I kept trying. Like why would I even bother putting $25 away? What good is that going to do?
But I started doing it and bit by bit by bit, I was no 5% grade I think I was kinda crawling up this mountain. But I crawled up the mountain. I'm not at the top, by any means. I'm not. But I'm somewhere that has brought me peace. Which is what I want for you.
And that's the final thing that I just love about this whole illustration. That if I can get you to just start on this path of walking just a little, I really believe that what happened for me, and a whole lot of clients that I've worked with, will happen with you.
It could change the entire rest of your life. Just stop and think what it would feel like to move through the rest of your life with 6 months of reserves, set aside for whatever emergency hits you.
That is a feeling of peace and wellbeing that you might not have ever experienced. So go out there and start climbing.
And you really don't want to do this one alone. So what I'd like you to do is come over to our Facebook group, Team Do Better where you can get support from others just like you and by me. You can join our mailing list at thefinancegym.com, or you can subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can be sure and catch every single one of these. Please come join us.
Hi, welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a better life with money video series. My name's Stacey Powell and I'm here to help you and your money get stronger.
And today we're here to talk about savings. But not just the singular savings, we're here to talk about the 6 different kinds of savings. One of the things that I certainly had a hard time with and I think many people also do is that we think of savings as a singular thing.
We keep it in 1 place and often that's in the "savings" account at our bank. Which is, of course, tied to our overdraft protection. Well, that's not really very useful when you're trying to keep savings as savings and not spend it on a monthly basis.
One of the other things is, we don't really have a structure around our savings. If it's all in one big pot, we don't have things that it is assigned to be for.
And so, one of the things that really shifted for me and I've seen shift incredibly for others is thinking about savings, not as one thing but as 6 different kinds.
The first kind, of course, most important emergency reserves. The second one is short term things that are not consistent, but predictable. Things like when your car breaks down or your cat has to go to the vet. Then there's long term things like putting a new roof on your house or saving for a car.
And then 4, 5 and 6 are separate long term savings that I've identified as 4, 5 and 6 because I think they're so important. And that is saving for a home, saving for your kids college education and then the third one is the big one, saving for retirement.
If you flip to page 47 in the book, and if you go to my website if you haven't bought the book I'm going to have up there for you page 47 so you can just take a look at it. You'll see all 6 of these areas with a list of what are these things and what's the purpose behind each one of them. How do you decide how much you should put in each one of these 6 accounts? And some suggestions about where you might keep it.
I want to give this roof as an example to show you how I work with people and how I think through where to put my savings. If I know I have to put a roof on my house sometime in the next 3 to 5 years and that roof is going to cost $15,000. Well, I need to be putting away between $300 to $500 a month, every single month to make that goal. And it better not be in an account tied to my checking.
I like to keep my reserves at Capital One 360. And this is not a sales pitch, this is really where I keep them. And here's why, Capital One lets you name every single savings account its own name. So for my roof account, I can name it something like "roof, dry roof, don't touch". Something funny to remind me when I get tempted to use all that roof money when it starts to grow, that what I really want is a dry roof. Separating out all of your savings like this, I know sounds a little bit overwhelming especially for those of you that are still struggling to put $25 aside.
And I assure you that if you go listen to my last video you'll know that I was once there. That I just couldn't put $25 a month aside. You can do it when you start practicing bit by bit. I promise. And the biggest thing you will get out of it is peace of mind for yourself and your money.
Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money Video Series. My name's Stacey Powell, and if you're ready to not just know better, but do better, you've come to the right place.
And today I'm going to get a little real and tell a couple of stories about myself. Today we're gonna be talking about savings. It's the third chapter in the book, and it's not called savings, it's called, "Building Peace of Mind". Because I've come to believe that that is what savings does for people, and it's certainly what savings has done for me.
In the first part of the book, I ask you to think about the first thing that you ever saved for. I love hearing those stories from people. A lot of times it's saving in a piggy bank and some little thing that you bought when you were 5 years old. Or maybe as a teenager, your first car.
I'm quite sure that my parents at some point "taught" me how to save or told me that I should, I honestly don 't remember. And when I think about the first thing I ever saved for I can't think of a single thing as a kid, a child, a teenager that I saved for.
In telling the story of the first thing that I saved for, it's a little bit embarrassing actually because I was pretty old. I'd already graduated from college. I already had a really good professional career. And I had never really saved for something that I wanted to buy.
So I did, like I've mentioned before, something that I was told to do, that I kinda thought maybe was a little bit ridiculous. I started setting small amounts of money aside for things. And one of the things that I started setting aside for was something that I'd always wanted and that was a really, really nice Native American flute.
Now we're not talking about anything worth a couple thousand dollars here, but we're it wasn't a cheap $50 flute either. It was in the low hundreds and at the time to me setting aside that money just felt irresponsible. I had a lot of other important obligations that I was trying to meet. So I took an amount of money. First it was $5 then it was $20. And I put it in this little envelope every single month, the cash, I got the cash, and I put it in this envelope until I had saved enough to buy it.
I could have bought it at any other point in time by just doing the machinations that I had been doing, really, my entire adult life. But it was, it was the action of saving for that and the gratitude of going out and searching for just the right flute that I wanted. It was that whole experience; I just hadn't done it before. You know, and I should have done it when I was 5. I should have done it when I was a teenager. I should have at least done it in my 20's. But that just wasn't my reality. I had never done it before. So when I was practicing, it felt kinda silly.
But we all have to learn to ride a bike somehow. If we don't learn to do it as a child, then we've got to learn to do it as an adult. So when you get to that question in the book or that question in the video, "What's the first thing you remember saving for?", if you can't remember saving for something, then I want you to do what I did. Because I learned something really important. It wasn't about the flute, because jump ahead years later, I have so many savings accounts. For prudent reserves, for vacations, for taxes, for all kinds of stuff, fun stuff.
I am now a savings master. And I think it's fun. And it all started with what felt like a silly little tiny itty bitty exercise. But in the end, it's what I needed to do. In some areas, I needed to just dial back and start again. And so for those of you that need to do that too, go do that.
Because the rest of the chapter we're going to talk about all kinds of savings. And it's kinda masters level savings that I'm going to be talking about, and I want you to be ready.
And as always I don't want you to do it alone. This stuff isn't necessarily meant to be done alone, head on over to Facebook and join our Team Do Better Group or sign up for our newsletter at thefinancegym.com or subscribe to our subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join us in learning how to build peace in our lives through savings. Thanks for watching.
Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with money. My name's Stacey Powell, and if you're ready to not just know better, but to do better with your money, then you've come to the right place.
The latest series of videos we've been doing is focusing on budgeting and today we're going to talk about zero based budget ideas.
I'm assuming a whole bunch of you that are watching these videos are probably having a little bit of a hard time shoving it all in to make it make sense.
I know that's where I was when I started out. Actually, it kinda still is where I am, it's just that the things I'm trying to shove in now are so much better than what I was trying to shove in years ago.
So zero-based budgeting ... have you ever heard of it before? We don't really talk about it with personal budgets, but in business zero-based budget, the concept is every year departments that roll up into a company-wide budget start fresh and look at what areas do they need to spend money on, how much do they need to have in office supplies, human resource expenses, what kind of marketing budget do they need. And it's really useful to just start fresh like that instead of just pull from last year and the year before and the year before that, (which is kind of how governments do it.)
Because what happens then is that you're spending money on things you think you have to spend money on. But if you start with a zero based concept, like what would your budget look like if none of the other things in your life, that were there last year had to roll into the next year?
And it's kind of a refreshing way of looking at it. Because it helps you think about, well, what if I lived in a different kind of house? What if I didn't have a car? What if I had a different kind of car? What if I decided I didn't need cable? There's a million what ifs.
So, if you turn to page 40 in the book, there's this the zero-based budget idea here that you can start to write down some things you might do to make your budget balance to 0 when you're done with it.
And I might have mentioned some crazy things like, what if you just stopped driving a car ... how much money would that save? When I encourage people to do "what ifs", it's not about jumping immediately and saying "oh my God, I could never do that, I could never sell my house, I could never not have a car, I could never, I could never, I could never. We all have a bunch of those. It's really about just throwing out a bunch of brainstorming ideas.
Look at the possibilities and see what you're willing to have stick. If you're the person that absolutely has to have a car, well that's fine. But if your budget isn't balancing, somewhere you're going to have to make some kind of choices.
I always like to give an example of Waren Buffet. He can live anywhere he wanted. He can live in any house he wanted. Waren Buffet and his wife and family have lived in the same suburban ranch house for decades.
He values living in that house. He doesn't need to spend a ton of money on a really big home. We get so tied into the things we had to do. I had a client once who, she had such high credit card payments. She could not fathom when I asked, "What would happen if you just stopped paying those?". She just couldn't fathom it.
You know the truth is, she needed to stop paying them for awhile. And she went through a bunch of machinations of getting beyond that with her budget. To the point that she's flourishing now. She is back in integrity. But the truth was that her credit card payments were more than her mortgage. She couldn't do it. She had to let go of a whole lot of things to get to where she is now. Which is a pretty happy, healthy budget.
And she got there by taking a hard look at zero based budgeting. So I'd like you to look at this. I'd like you to just throw caution to the wind, write down a bunch of crazy ideas and pick a few that you think will really stick, that you're really willing to live with for awhile.
And as always I don't want you to have to do this alone. Over on Facebook, we have a private group called Team Do Better. There's a bunch of other people that are working on doing better with their money. Come join us. We also have a newsletter that comes out at least once a week at thefinancegym.com is where you can sign up. And over on YouTube. Head over there and subscribe to our channel. Have a great day and thanks for watching.
Welcome to the Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name's Stacey Powell and if you're ready to not just know better about your money, but also do better then you've come to the right place.
And today we're going to be talking about the cold hard facts of budgeting.
If you've been following along in the series, hopefully, you first listened to a little bit more of the fun videos around budgeting; ways to kinda get around it a little easier, ways to be more inspired about it.
And today we're talking about rolling up your sleeves and just doing it. And if you've really never embraced budgeting before, I'm not going to lie to you, it's a little bit of work. But I promise you I've made as simple as possible, and I also promise you, you can do it.
So here's the thing, if you go to page 36 in the book, that's where you're going to find the action plan. And there some very obvious things in there like electricity, car insurance, all the obvious stuff. But what you're going to find around all that is almost 100 spending areas. And I worked really hard to make it as few as possible, but the reality is when you look at all of the things most of us spend money on in a given month, in a given year or over a given 5 year period, easily it's around 80 to 100. And so you really need to take a look at all of them.
There's a multitude of areas that we spend money in. And we all know the obvious ones right, like duh, we all have electricity and all that. But then there's the ones that we don't. Kinda the quiet areas that are a surprise, like root canals and car repairs and summer camps. You know, but the truth is if you have teeth you're eventually probably going to have a root canal or some kind of expensive dental expense. If you have a car, you're going to have a car repair. Sometimes it's $200; you can squeeze that in a month no problem. But sometimes it's $2000, that's a lot harder to squeeze. And if you have kids ... Well don't even get me started on the summer camps and everything else that comes along with having kids that we don't need to spend in a given month, but oh my gosh, stuff comes up. Am I right?
So here's the importance of budgeting ... If you don't set your financial flow up to be able to handle that $1000 root canal or that $2000 car expense then you're going to be stealing from your future. You can pull a credit card out when it happens, sure, but you're going to be spending money on interest. You're stealing from your future every time you do that.
You can also just kinda shove it into the month you know; that's what I did a lot. Well, I just won't go out to eat this month. I won't have any fun this month. I'll spend less money at the grocery store.
That's no big deal to do that in a given month. But if you do that to yourself over and over and over. It's a different kind of stealing from yourself. It's kinda stealing from your happiness. It's stealing from where it is that the flow of energy of money that really keeps us happy.
The other thing that I think we often do is, we don't put money in our savings, and that is really stealing from our future.
When we are trying to shove "emergency expenses" that we probably should have had set aside ready to roll. We are not doing the things that create for us a peaceful financial life ... having enough in reserves, having enough in retirement.
The end result, in my experience, in my own personal experience and in lots of people I've worked with is; disappointment, fatigue and just even the loss of faith in ourselves that we can have a peaceful financial life.
So I'd like you to attack this budgeting with a bit of fervor. I want you to set aside a couple of hours. Sit down with a glass of wine or a nice cup of coffee and really embrace doing this. I think in the end you're going to find out that this work is really worth it.
Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. If you’re ready to not just know better but to do better with your money, you’ve come to the right place.
Today we’re going to be talking about the big picture again. In our last video we talked about the big picture but we wrote about it in sentences. Today we’re going to get those pencils out and put some numbers down. But for those of you that are number-phobic, I promise today we’re just going to do five simple numbers.
If you’re following along in the book, turn to chapter 1, page 11 and for those of you that haven’t gotten the book yet, just get a piece of paper and a pencil out and write these five rows down. You just start with “earning” and then we’re going to subtract “spending” and then the third row is going to be “difference”. The fourth row will be “debt” and the fifth row is “savings”.
What I want all of you to do is to think about your last year, either your last 12 months or the last calendar year, whichever is easiest and I want you to estimate. We’re not looking for exact here. What did you earn in the last year? That’s earning everywhere, in your businesses, in your job, in your investments.
Then I want you to write down what you spent in the last year and then of course the difference. Whatever that difference is, whether it’s positive or negative, I want you to divvy that up. Did you increase your savings with anything that was left over or if you had a negative amount, did you grow your debt? Was there some mix happening with both? So some of you, you’re like writing those numbers down right now. You guys are great. You’re all good. Some others of you are like, “How in the world would I know those numbers?”
So for some of you, you might need to pause this video and when you do that, I want you to set a timer for 15 minutes and spend no more than 15 minutes going and gathering that information to write those five numbers down.
Now again, estimate it. If 15 minutes ends and you still don’t have those numbers, then just do it to like the nearest 50,000. All of us can do it to the nearest 50,000. Well, most of us. But those people aren’t watching this video. Just do as close as you can and take a look at those numbers.
So here’s the thing. How much time did it take you to pull those four numbers and do that simple little calculation down? How much energy did it take and how comfortable are you with your final answers?
There’s a trick to this exercise. When I have an introductory meeting with potential financial coaching clients, they always want to know what information they can pull together to bring to that first meeting and I always tell them I would really rather you didn’t prepare and then I asked the questions that I just asked you and how readily someone can answer those questions tells me a lot about where they need to begin on their path to making their money life better.
So if this was a challenging exercise for you and you wanted to pull your hair out, you might not like my answer. My answer is you’re going to have to watch that next video on recordkeeping and you’re going to have to make a little bit of commitment to change your recordkeeping format.
I promise you I’m going to make it as painless and easy as you can possibly do. But you’re probably going to have to do something a little different and if you’re one of those people where those numbers just roll off of your head or they were at your fingertips, whatever recordkeeping you’re doing, even if it’s simply just recordkeeping in your head, you’re good enough. You don’t need to do anymore unless you really want to because you already know what your numbers are. You have your answers.
So thanks for walking through the first time of delving in, writing numbers down. I swear we’re not going to do this every time and as always, I don’t want you to do this alone. If you would like support, please join our community by signing up on our list at www.TheFinanceGym.com or head on over to Facebook and join our Finance Gym Action Group or head on over to Facebook and
join our Finance Gym Action Group, "Team Do Better". Have a great day.
