WEBVTT 00:00:00.341 --> 00:00:05.732 Hi, I'm Stacey Hyde and I'm back for another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes or Less. 00:00:05.732 --> 00:00:20.734 And let's get real here there's been kind of a month or so that we haven't posted and part of the reason was I was out in Colorado enjoying the cooler weather out there. 00:00:20.734 --> 00:00:43.049 But it made me think about goals and about how, especially when you're younger, you know, just getting out of school or just starting your family, like thinking about retirement and what your goals should be, can be really hard because you don't know what you're going to be doing next year, much less 30 years from now. 00:00:43.049 --> 00:00:47.841 But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't start setting money aside. 00:00:47.841 --> 00:01:08.947 But, as I've said on here before, not everything you save for should necessarily be in a retirement account, because those retirement accounts have rules you have to be 59 and a half to get money out without a penalty, all of those types of things which they're great and there's huge benefits. 00:01:08.947 --> 00:01:31.430 We'll talk more about other subjects in the one big ditaful bill on our next episode, but I wanted to talk about that and because it did make me think about goals and because it did make me think about goals when I was starting my career, I had never I'd been to Colorado once. 00:01:31.430 --> 00:01:50.942 But as I got older and my kids got older and my husband and I started doing different things, we discovered that we loved the Mountain West and so that became one of our goals was to own property out in Colorado. 00:01:50.942 --> 00:02:02.087 But had we not and quite frankly that would have never occurred to us early on because we we would go on beach trips. 00:02:02.087 --> 00:02:18.895 We did take our kids skiing when they were younger, but we'd never been out there in the summertime, and so if we had waited to save for that until after we decided that that was a goal of ours, we never would have been able to do it. 00:02:19.540 --> 00:02:48.080 But early on we were diligent savers, really tried to live within our means, and a real hack to doing that and I share this with my daughter and the children of clients that we work with the real key to being a sort of a magnificent saver is when you start out your career you're usually not making a ton of money. 00:02:48.080 --> 00:03:06.812 But then if you really get in there and you start working hard and you work somewhere where they recognize you for what you do, you probably get some pretty big pay increases pretty quickly If you can maybe raise your standard of living a little bit. 00:03:06.812 --> 00:03:15.893 If you're not in the safest neighborhood, maybe move to a little bit safer neighborhood, maybe get a little more reliable car, but beyond that you don't really change what you do. 00:03:15.893 --> 00:03:27.685 And you start saving that money and setting it aside and investing it not just putting it in a savings account, earning, you know, maybe 4%, but actually investing it and letting it grow. 00:03:27.685 --> 00:03:33.989 Then, by the time you get to be old, like me in your middle 50s you have options. 00:03:33.989 --> 00:03:35.466 There's things that you can do. 00:03:35.466 --> 00:03:37.727 We work with a lot of people. 00:03:37.727 --> 00:03:43.348 The thing they want to do is leave the workforce early so it can open that as an option. 00:03:43.348 --> 00:03:52.462 Force early, so it can open that as an option. 00:03:52.462 --> 00:03:53.444 It can be like us wanting a second home. 00:03:53.444 --> 00:03:55.048 It could be helping your children buy their first home. 00:03:55.048 --> 00:03:57.774 It can be anything that you don't know now that. 00:03:57.774 --> 00:04:07.250 But by being diligent, setting that money aside, saving and investing it, you give yourself options. 00:04:07.250 --> 00:04:14.788 It also means that as you're going through, there'll be things that you may think, oh, I kind of want that. 00:04:14.788 --> 00:04:20.276 But then you look at it and you're like, but really, are we going to have time For us? 00:04:20.838 --> 00:04:28.168 The big purchase that we really thought hard about but ultimately said no to and oh, thank God we did was buying a boat. 00:04:28.168 --> 00:04:31.879 We literally own everything for a boat except the boat. 00:04:31.879 --> 00:04:33.562 But guess what? 00:04:33.562 --> 00:04:34.665 We can rent a boat. 00:04:34.665 --> 00:04:36.267 It doesn't cost that much money. 00:04:36.267 --> 00:04:46.504 But if we bought a boat, it would cost a ton of money, there's lots of costs associated with it, it would cost a ton of money, there's lots of costs associated with it, and we wouldn't have used it very much. 00:04:46.504 --> 00:04:53.129 And so we, thankfully, made the decision not to buy the boat. 00:04:53.310 --> 00:04:54.531 It could be anything. 00:04:54.531 --> 00:04:56.172 For some people that's a motorcycle. 00:04:56.172 --> 00:04:59.617 For some people, for a lot of people, it's an RV. 00:04:59.617 --> 00:05:08.259 You know, really, look at, is that something that I can rent and use and see if it's going to be something that we really, really want? 00:05:08.259 --> 00:05:28.857 For us, we kept going out to Colorado and we rented a place, and we really spent a week and then a couple of weeks and figured out, well, we really want to be here and we built a community there as well, and so for us, that became a yes, we really want to be here and we built a community there as well, and so for us, that became a yes, we absolutely want to do this On paper. 00:05:28.857 --> 00:05:31.904 Does it make great financial sense. 00:05:31.904 --> 00:05:38.223 It does, okay, I mean, if we continue to get appreciation, yes, but it's more about a lifestyle choice. 00:05:38.815 --> 00:05:47.663 And that's the thing about goals is you are saving just generally and then, as you go on, things get specific. 00:05:47.663 --> 00:05:55.548 You know, another thing that comes up for a lot of people is we decided we wanted our children to go to private school for middle and high school. 00:05:55.548 --> 00:06:01.925 That was not an inexpensive choice and we didn't know that that was going to be a goal. 00:06:01.925 --> 00:06:10.007 We kind of thought it might be, but we made the choice to send them to public school for elementary. 00:06:10.007 --> 00:06:22.605 Save the money that we would have spent and that funded their college and that was a good goal for us and that was something that was more immediate, that we could really see and kind of had a pretty good idea that was going to be a goal. 00:06:23.415 --> 00:06:29.855 So I think sometimes we get caught up in I don't know what my goals are, so therefore I'm not going to save. 00:06:29.855 --> 00:06:32.163 That's really the wrong approach. 00:06:32.163 --> 00:06:44.795 You really need to save generally because it's going to give you options and even if there is nothing big that you want to do, it can allow you to maybe make different career choices. 00:06:44.795 --> 00:06:46.439 It can give you peace of mind. 00:06:46.439 --> 00:06:49.646 The number one thing couples fight about is money. 00:06:49.646 --> 00:06:59.738 And if money is not an issue, if there's good savings, things are set aside, that's not going to cause issues with you and your partner. 00:06:59.738 --> 00:07:04.880 So you don't have to know what your goals are to start saving for them. 00:07:04.880 --> 00:07:11.223 The goal can just be saving as its own goal, because it has lots of virtues. 00:07:11.223 --> 00:07:25.884 And boy, if you've ever used a financial calculator and looked at the value of compounding over time, I promise you you will want to start as early as possible, because time is your best investment. 00:07:25.884 --> 00:07:27.447 Thanks for tuning in. 00:07:27.447 --> 00:07:31.665 This has been another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes or Less.