10. Everything I Wish I Knew About Money Sooner

For years, I avoided looking at my bank account, ignored my budget, and told myself I'd "figure out money stuff later." Sound familiar?

Today I'm pulling back the curtain on everything I wish someone had told me sooner about money.... the habits, the mindset shifts, and the small daily decisions that quietly separate the people who retire comfortably from the people stuck living paycheck to paycheck.

This isn't about complicated spreadsheets or restrictive budgets. It's about building a healthier relationship with money. One that starts with awareness and ends with confidence.

In this episode, we cover:

• The mindset shifts that completely changed my relationship with money 
• How to start budgeting, saving, and investing without feeling overwhelmed 
• Why building an emergency fund should be one of your first financial goals 
• Common investing mistakes to avoid (especially when emotions take over) 
• Simple habits that can help you build wealth consistently over time

Personal finance educators I love:

• Amanda Holden https://www.instagram.com/dumpster.doggy and the best course you'll ever buy https://amandaholden.podia.com/invested-development (also check out her book "How to Be A Rich Old Lady" https://www.amanda-holden.com/book)
• Vanessa Wachtmeister https://www.instagram.com/wanderonwards/
• Berna Anat https://www.instagram.com/heyberna/and her community https://www.instagram.com/new_dimes/
• Yanely Espinal https://www.instagram.com/missbehelpful/
• Kara Pérez https://www.instagram.com/karaexploresmoney
• Tiffany Aliche https://www.instagram.com/thebudgetnista

Sources:

• In the study, 186 people watched real life news stories that were expected to stimulate emotional reactions and were then asked to make risky financial decisions with real money at stake. After watching the news stories, men became significantly less willing to take financial risks even though the decisions were completely unrelated to the news. However, the decisions of women appeared completely unaffected by having watched the same news. (University of Essex study) 

Connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsallmost/
Visit my website: https://www.itsallmost.com
Join The Conversion Club: https://itsallmost.com/the-conversion-club

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello my lovely appers. Kieran here. Welcome back to the Conversation Club. Today we are celebrating 10. 10 episodes. Oh my goodness, how are we here? We did it. I know I'm gonna be down the line like a hundred episodes, two hundred episodes, whatever, and be like, oh my god, you're freaking out at ten. But I'm here. Consistency. That's key. I also did get a little bit of a request from some of y'all to see the nails a little bit better. I think I've had like three different sets, at least two, at least two different sets since we first started recording. So yeah, I wanted to, I got a new little set. I don't know if you can see it in the video very well. If you are listening to the audio, head over on Apple Podcast. You can also tune into the video on YouTube. You can tune into the video if you want to see the nails. So come through, come through and see the nails. It's a little bit of a like summery Zara Larson-esque inspired set. And yeah, we're trying to call in all the good things about summer. That's what we're trying to do. But anyway, I had a little bit of a request to show the nails. So with every new set that I get, which is usually about every four to five weeks, you guys will see a little bit of the preview before it goes out and gets featured in public. So, anyway, what are we talking about today? Episode 10. Here we are. We are talking about my Kieran's personal finance journey. We are well on our way to retiring early, which is the goal because nobody wants to work anymore, and that's very true. But I want to tell you a little bit about what I've been up to in terms of my personal finance journey, how I got here, how I got started, and maybe some takeaways that you all can either take and implement into your own lives or consider. Because I want all of us to achieve financial freedom. I want all of us to live whatever life they choose to have. And that's what we're here for. That's what this podcast is for. We talk about business, we talk about life, we talk about everything in between. And if I'm not here to share the nuggets that I've learned, what am I here to do? So, yappers, let's get into it. Where did I start with my personal finance journey? Well, before I actually ever took a step, before I actually told myself I was ready to learn about personal finance, I was very much in an avoidant relationship with my money, with my bank account. As I'm sure many of you either have experienced or are currently experiencing, I know it's hard. I am 100% not here to judge in any episode, but especially this episode. I know money is really, really hard to talk about. There are so many money blocks that we have learned over the course of our childhoods, over the course of our adulthoods, and it's really hard to unlearn these things. I get it. It took me 23 years to really even consider that I was at a point that I needed to. I kind of had to hit rock bottom. And that's kind of, I think, a pretty common experience with people who actually start taking their personal finances seriously, is that they're like, oh shit, what else am I gonna do? I have nowhere else to go. I'm at rock bottom. And so I'm not here to judge you, and I'm here to hopefully share a little bit of information that might help you get ready, get inspired, and start your own personal finance journeys. But yeah, for me, I didn't have an unhealthy relationship with money for most of my childhood. I definitely picked up some things that I'm sure I still have to like unpack and unlearn. But my relationship, quote unquote, with money started to get bad, again, quote unquote bad, around when I was 14, around the time that my mom died. And I very much, in a very I recognize privileged way, took the money that my family was sending me to essentially take care of myself, because I don't know how much of this part of the story that I've told all of y'all is that I from 14 on have been raising myself, which is probably a good explanation for why I am the way I am. But yeah, so I was in America alone, essentially taking care of myself, to getting myself to school, getting good grades, getting into college, keeping up with all my extracurriculars, getting fed, which is another reason why your girl likes takeout more than she likes to cook. Oh, cooking journey. That's a good episode. I will make a little bit of a note of that. But anyway, I started retail therapy when my mom died. I truly just put myself into let me just buy things to feel better. And I got really avoidant with the money in the bank. I got really avoidant looking at how much I spent on my credit cards and I didn't plan out budgets. I spent willy-nilly. I just kind of hoped and prayed that there was enough money. I wasn't going wild, wild with like extravagant sort of designer stuff or anything like that. But like I bought so many pairs of shoes. I had like a whole room full of just shoes, just shoes everywhere. Quite literally, it covered the whole floor of the entire room, my shoes. And that was only a part of the number of shoes that I had. Anyway, so your girl was going kind of wild with the retail therapy, but that was kind of my relationship with money. I remember I had a friend who she, when I would go shopping, would come with me and she implemented a policy which I still kind of use to this day. She says, Is it worth a dollar for every spend? So are you going to, if it's a hundred dollars, are you going to wear this thing a hundred times? Are you going to use this item that you're about to buy however many times it costs? So if it's $300, will you use it 300 times? If it's $50, will you use it 50 times? That kind of thing. Which I always kind of thought was kind of a good policy. It did rein in my spending a little bit. But other than that, avoidance, spending, and hoping, hoping on a prayer. That was my relationship with money for a very long time. What actually started my personal finance journey was, I think I talk a little bit about this in episode one, maybe episode four as well. But I lost a really big anchor client back in 2018, which was the first year I had started my business in March 2018. And this was around October. Oh, yes, it was. It was on my birthday trip to Ireland in October of 2018. I vividly remember this. I lost my big anchor client, and I spent that whole trip over-drinking, over consuming, just freaking out. Freaking out. And so from the end of October, November, and December, I didn't have a plan. I didn't know what to do. I was basically just starting to dip into my savings. I didn't know where else I would go in terms of backup, in terms of extending credit and blah blah blah blah. So I had no money coming in as of January of 2019. And I knew, I knew for myself that I was like, I cannot be avoiding money anymore. I cannot be avoiding looking at my bank account. I cannot be doing what I'm doing and hoping just something else would miraculously save me from this money pit. And so I started looking into personal finance educators. I started looking into women that could teach me more about money and that could make it feel a little less scary. So yeah, women and women of color were the finance educators and creators that I was really looking into. For those of you that I'm sure know, and if you're on any level of your personal finance journey, I'm sure you've heard of her first 100k. Tori and I actually met in Seattle right around the time when she was starting that business, which is so wild, early 2019. And so I actually reached out to her and I was like, hey, I would love to like learn a little bit more from you about personal finance. And we were able to meet up. I'm actually in her book. If you ever pick up a copy of Financial Feminists by Tori Dunlap, I'm in that book. So I don't remember which page I'm on, but if you see me as you're flipping through and you find my name, I share a little bit more about exactly what I'm sharing here, my personal finance journey and where I got with that. So basically, we met up and she told me to start a money diary just to get an understanding of where your money is going and why and how it makes you feel. So you track how much you spend every day. You also write down how you feel about it. So that it's not just tracking how much you're spending, but what ties do you have to this, right? Does it make you happy? If it makes you happy, then it should probably be a part of your budget. If it stresses you out, maybe not. Maybe we don't want that in our budget. Or if I don't know, it makes you feel secure. So just understanding how you feel about the things you're spending money on, that was really helpful for me to understand how much I actually needed a month to live. I feel like this is kind of the start of my real serious tracking journey. If we're gonna trace it back. But yeah, it helps me understand sort of if I'm on feast mode versus famine mode, right? So famine mode is when you're just bare minimum, you're trying not to overspend, you're trying not to indulge too much, you're quite literally on the bare bones budget of like just the bills, just the essentials to live. And then the feast mode is more like, mmm, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling abundant, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna get omakase every single week, and I'm gonna get the premium upgrade, the VIP tickets, that's more feast mode. So doing this money diary helped me understand how much I needed for famine mode, which is like real bare bones essentials, and feast mode, which was me embodying my abundant future, wealthy self. And so, with that, after doing, I believe I did a month of that tracking at the very least, is recommended, starting with like a week, let's say, and then try tracking it for a month because it actually becomes really helpful, sort of to understand, and especially for us ladies, or just anybody who has periods and goes through cycles, just to understand, like with your cycle as well, how things feel, what you're spending your money on. And so having sort of a full month is a really great place to start in terms of tracking with that money diary. And then from there, understanding okay, a month, this is what I need to survive. And so building an emergency fund and starting to save money for like three to six months worth of this, like, I need this money to live money. I personally like to build an emergency fund that's like nine to 12 months, and nine to twelve months of not just famine mode, but like nine to twelve months of like medium towards feast mode because I just like to have, especially with the job market these days, like I know so many people have taken months, if not over a year or two, maybe two, to get a job. And so I personally just really wanted to build an emergency fund that was like at least a year long, and so it gave me a little bit more of a runway of breathing room. But anyway, those were all things that I learned from Tori. If you want to check out some more of that personal finance education, you can definitely head over there. There are so many amazing creators who are doing a lot of cool shit. I'm going to get into that later in the episode, but I will also make sure to link some of my favorite personal finance educators out there in the show notes so you can take a look and do a little bit of the homework that I'm about to sign you at the end of the episode. But yeah, so that's kind of where my personal finance journey started and where I started taking it seriously. And then it kind of, as I'm sure you will understand and recognize as a pattern on this podcast, as you learn more about me and how I operate, is that typically once a door is open, once the dam is broken, your girl's like full speed ahead. Let's go. Vamos lá. I'm gonna start incorporating a little more Portuguese on this podcast. I mean, I don't know that much, but I will be taking classes later this year. Probably will document that journey as well for all of you. But yeah, let's incorporate a little more Portuguese. Your girl has been here for almost a year. Next week, I'm recording this a week before my one-year anniversary in Portugal. This episode will release a little bit later than that, but oh my god, one year. Amazing. Anyway, back on track. Okay, I'm a little like super undiagnosed ADHD chaotic today. And so I appreciate you sticking with me as I try to rein it in. Okay, the next person. So once I was like, I'm ready to go, I'm ready to learn, I started looking into more people, more people I could learn from. And the most amazing personal finance educator, and I will say this until the day I die, Amanda Holden of Dumpster Doggy. She has been the premier, the principal, the most engaging and very deeply knowledgeable, but also can disseminate it in the most relatable, digestible way. She's just amazing. She's an amazing instructor. Go follow her. I will link her in the show notes. Dumpster doggy. I took her course, Invested Development, also amazing name, Invested Development. So good. But I took it back when she was still doing live cohorts. She now has a self-paced course, but she does go through all the lessons and teaches them live twice a year. So if you're kind of like me, not a super self-paced course girly, she does go through and teach the lessons live twice a year. So it's like truly the best investment you can make. I highly recommend enrolling in invest in development and learning about investing because she teaches you the terminology in like a very approachable way. She makes it really fun to learn and easy to understand. And once you learn the terminology, you realize that with money, with investing, with all this stuff, it's clearly being gatekeeped, right, by rich white men, as are so many things in this world. But one of the mechanisms of gatekeeping, this space and this wealth-building tool is to create scary terminology, right? Amanda does an amazing job of teaching it to you in a way that you realize it's not as scary once you realize what it means, once you know what these words mean, right? Words like asset allocation and mutual funds and distributions and ETFs and diversification, like all of those words I love to throw around now because I'm like, I actually know what these mean. And they're actually pretty easy to learn. I could break them down for you right now, but I think Amanda would do a much better job of it. So I will be sure to link that in the show notes and let you know that it is so worth it to invest in this course. Amanda breaks down the container and how to actually invest step by step because one of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they put money into the investing account, but they don't actually invest it in the stock market. And that's a crucial step because that's the one that's actually gonna grow, gonna grow your wealth and gonna make money for you while you sleep. So, anyway, by the way, I am a hundred percent not being paid for any of this. I don't even think I'm gonna be doing sponsorships ever on this podcast. I don't know. Maybe someday I will. And if I do, you know your girl will only do things she actually believes in. I will not be selling out for nothing. But for now, your girl is not sponsored. And so everything I share on here is truly from my own experience and my own recommendation. All the people that I mentioned on this podcast, I just want to help you. And I just want you to be able to have the information that I have. So, Invested Development. Amanda holds office hours once a month. So at the beginning, I believe it's the first of the month, every single month. And you do have access to office hours for the first year that you're enrolled in the course. And you can come and ask literally anything and everything. Once the first year is over, you can still tune in, which I do every once in a while. You can tune in for lifetime. It doesn't expire in terms of tuning in, but you just can't really ask questions, just to be fair to the other members and new students and things like that. So office hours, super valuable, such a valuable time to just go even and listen to other people's questions and hear what Amanda is sharing in inside those office hours. It's just amazing, so helpful. She also has investing parties where you all come together and she helps you click the buttons, click and buy, click and buy, click and sell, click in whatever. If you are nervous about actually going into your account and making these actual investments in the stock market and buying and selling, she has so many spaces for you to get support from her. She also talks about ethical investing, like screening out weapons and oil and AI from your investment portfolio and your ETFs and things like that. And so she is an amazing person to be able to do that. She teaches so many things like tax brackets, how HSAs work, ethical banking. She's an incredible instructor. And so I highly recommend all of you go and learn from her. She is single-handedly my best teacher when it comes to investing in personal finance. But yeah, I mean, I've learned quite a bit. We, so what, 2019 to now? That was seven years ago, over seven years ago, that I started this journey. And I am absolutely thrilled with the progress that I've made so far. And I know I have somewhere, so much more to learn and so much longer to go. So, anyway, what have I learned? Budgeting. I used to hate budgeting. Budgeting used to terrify me. I was, like I said earlier, avoidant, just avoidant of looking at money, of planning where my money went. But the thing is, when every dollar has a job, when every dollar has a thing that it's doing, then it's not really just sitting there and purposeless, right? And so if we're gonna think about maybe a quote unquote traditional budgeting ratio, we're thinking about, and again, everyone's is different, but this is sort of I don't want to say standard because it's not necessarily standard for everyone, but a very basic, let's call it, budgeting ratio is like 50% of the income that you get goes to your needs, right? Food, water, rent, electricity, etc. Then 30% goes to things you want, right? Things that would be fun, going out with your friends, going on a trip, buying something that you don't necessarily need to live, but would look really fucking good wearing or using. And then about 20% you want to go towards savings or investing, right? So this is kind of a very basic ratio. Everyone's is going to change based on their needs and their wants and what their lives look like. But yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about how I actually implement budgeting later on. Those are the kind of the basics, okay? Now, with savings, one of the most crucial things that I've learned and I still use, of course, is to always put your money, your savings in a high yield savings account, okay? A high yield savings account is different than a regular bank savings account because its interest is higher. Okay, its interest is higher, which means that you save more money. You save more money. So let me talk about compound interest a little bit. I was gonna talk about it a little bit later, but I'm gonna talk about it now. Compound interest, how does it work? If you have a hundred dollars, let's say, in your bank account, in your savings account, and the interest is 10%. Okay, the interest is 10%. That means that you get $10 in interest of the $100, right? So now you get $10 plus $100, you get $110. Okay. Are you with me? I know this is an annoying math part, but I just want to explain how compound interest works. Now that you have the $110 that you got from that 10% interest, what's 10% of $110? It's $11. Okay, so now you're not just getting $10, you're getting $11 on top of that. But not just the $11 that you add on to what you started with, you add on to the $110. So now you have $121, right? What's 10% of $121? Anybody? $12 and 10 cents. Yes. So in that first year, you got. 10 right, you got the 10 dollars, but now in this third year you're getting 12.10. Okay, if we add that 12.10 to the 121 we already had, now we have 133 dollars and 10 cents, which 10% of that is $13.31. Yes, correct. So as you can see, initially we were only adding $10, and by now we are adding $13, right? And so that is how compound interest works. The money you gain from the interest that compounds, and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So imagine you're not working with $100. Imagine you're working with $1,000. You get $100, and eventually you get $110, $120, $130, right? Imagine you had $10,000. Now you're working with $1,000 in interest, $1,300 in interest, and so on and so forth, right? I know I just threw a lot of numbers at you, but the point is what I'm trying to tell you is that interest is going to compound, it's going to make you money. Okay, and that's why we want to be doing all of these things sooner rather than later, because time is your friend. Time will help make you more money than you can even imagine. So, with going back to our high yield savings accounts, a lot of normal regular bank savings accounts don't have very high interest rates. Their interest rates, I don't even know what the average is. I probably should have looked it up, but it's like less than 0.5% or something like that. Don't quote me on that. But it's like very, very low. Now, when the market is good, essentially, when the economy is good, interest rates increase, interest rates go up because our economy can handle it. So a high yield savings account is gonna be currently right now. I want to say the average high yield savings accounts, their percentages are like 2.5 to 4% APY per year, the amount you get per year. So with that, you're going to get, let's say, if it's 0.5% in a regular degular savings account at a bank, that's what, eight times as much. 4% is so much more, so so much more, right? Than what you're gonna save in a regular savings account. So highly recommend. I use Ally as my bank. I'm not saying you have to, but you can definitely look up sort of the best high-yield savings accounts and make the decision from there. For the most part, they're all fundamentally the same. It's just that some have higher interest rates than others. But like if the market, if the economy starts to not look so good, interest rates will go down. And so you kind of want to just pay attention to where things sit in terms of sort of the federal interest rate. But high-yield savings accounts are amazing because they help you grow your money a little bit faster without putting it into the stock market and risking losing it in the stock market, which we will get into in just a second. But yeah, so we just want to be saving our money somewhere where it's growing more than it normally would, but it's still sitting somewhere that's easily accessible that you can pull from without going in and buying stocks and selling stocks and worrying about it on the stock market. So, high yield savings accounts, you can create buckets, you should create buckets. Other people call them sinking funds, and you can start to take the money you saved and allocate it. Allocate it, give it jobs, right? There's this psychology behind giving these different buckets different names, because then you're not just gonna go in and be like, well, I guess this could account as an emergency. I'm gonna go ahead and go in and just pull a little money out, right? But if you label them, for example, one of my favorites is the shit hits the fan fund, which is quite literally when shit hits the fan, that's when we dip into this fund for no other reason. If we're just like trying to go out and get a little martini with the girls, we are not dipping into this fund, okay? But you can name your buckets anything you want. So, like travel and fun or business expenses, taxes, house repairs, health, whatever it is that you want to name it, name it in a way that makes sense for you and your brain. And then make sure that you don't pull it out for any other reason than what you named it for. Because we just want to be able to understand not just where our money's going, but like that we can't just dip into the emergency fund whenever we want, right? That we want to be using it for whatever purpose we set it for. But really, at the end of the day, savings is about consistency, it's about discipline, right? I know that's a lot easier said than done, but take baby steps. Take baby steps, okay? Small, small steps are better than no steps. You know, some people are like, well, I don't really know where to start. Start with 1%, 1% more than you're doing now. Because 1% is better than 0%. And 1% now is gonna compound into more later, right? Making a decision now because time, especially with your personal finance, time will always be on your side. Time will always help. And so just start with like one dollar. One dollar, that's fine. That's a fine place to start. Five dollars, ten dollars. You don't have to start with like, oh, I have to put a thousand dollars in the account. You don't. You can just start with small, small baby steps. Okay, and the same thing with investing, right? Start small. $10 a month invested is better than nothing. It's better than nothing. We want to be thinking about using the time to increase the compound interest because if we're sitting on the sidelines waiting, waiting, waiting, we're not taking advantage of all the things that the market can be doing for us, all the things that the market can grow for us with our investments, with our stocks, with our bonds. Okay. Also making sure that we are rebalancing our asset allocations, okay. Some people are like, oh, you lost me there. That's okay. Go take invested development, come back. I got you. But thinking about what percentage in terms of asset allocation, what percentage of our investments are bonds, which are going to be a little more stable, a little more secure, domestic stocks. So for me, as someone in the US, domestic stocks means US stocks, and then international stocks, right? International stocks in other countries, in other markets, that kind of thing. And so for me personally, my current asset allocation is 10% bonds because I'm pretty young, I'm only 31, and so I have time. Well, if we make it that far as a global society, not gonna get into that right now, but it's 10% bonds, it's gonna increase as I get older and I don't have as much risk tolerance, but now it's 10%. And then my domestic, so my US stock sort of ratio is I believe it's 60. No, it's 55. It's 55% US stocks. And then with the remaining 35%, I invest in international stocks. Now, the reason why we distribute it sort of across different markets and across different types of investments is because we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket, right? People, bros, who put all their money, all their eggs into the crypto basket and then lost big. That's not what we're trying to do. Okay. We're trying to provide stability and a sensible, smart investing strategy. So when you're younger, obviously your risk tolerance is a little higher, right? Maybe I'm gonna risk investing in this one single business versus a package of businesses because I am younger and I have money and time to risk. Versus when we're older and closer to retirement age, we can't really be playing around with these dollars too much because we want to make sure we have enough to live off of, right? In retirement. And then thinking about diversification. So thinking about not just putting it all in the stock market, not just putting it all in the bond market, not just putting it all in this one container, but thinking about can I invest in art? Can I invest in gold? Can I invest in XYZ? So many other things. Real estate is one of those things, but I personally just don't ever want to think about investing in real estate. That's why I sold my house, is because I don't want to be a fucking landlord. The idea of that makes me want to puke, makes me want to punch a wall. And so that's the choice for me. May not be the choice for you, and I guess that's okay, but whatever. Landlords are fucking shitty. But anyway, that's a different episode. That's a conversation for another time. But for now, what we're talking about is diversifying your portfolio a little bit more so that it's not just again putting all our eggs in one basket. And then, so important, truly the most important thing in terms of investing is making sure we don't panic when stocks tumble. We don't panic when the market goes down, when the market crashes. Because, like I said, investing is a long-term strategy. Okay, time is on our side. We want to start early and we want to stick with our consistent strategy. I mean, you know, zhuzh a little bit here and there based on circumstances, but for the most part, we want to stick with our strategy because over the course of time, it's going to benefit us. Amanda does a much better job explaining this, so I'm going to let her do it. But essentially, the stock market goes up and down, right? But over the course of history, the US stock market and just stock markets in general have always trended upwards. Even with the ups and downs, the ups and downs of the year-to-year, over the course of 10 years, over the course of 20 years, we see a consistent upwards trajectory. And that's important because that's why time in the market is more important than timing the market, than being like, oh, I only want to buy at the perfect time and I'm not going to invest until it's the perfect time. You don't know when the perfect time is. Okay. We are not mind readers, we are not fortune tellers. Okay, even if I asked my tarot cards, even if I asked my crystals, even if I asked my ancestors, they would not be able to tell me exactly what's going to happen in the market. Okay. And we cannot predict that. If someone tells you they can read the market, they are lying and they are scamming you. Okay. So we're not here for scams. But when the market crashes, it is important not to panic. Okay. I know there's a lot easier said than done, but not panicking when stocks tumble is actually going to save your portfolio. Because what's that big quote that everyone says when it comes to investing? I know you're probably like, oh fucking no. Why are you asking me? The big thing to remember is that you want to buy low and you want to sell high, right? You want to buy when it's the cheapest and you want to sell when it's the most expensive, right? Because that's when you make the most profit. And so when we panic sell, when stocks start to tumble, are we buying when it's high? No, we're buying when it's low. We're buying when everyone else is freaking out because ultimately, at the end of the day, the stock market is just like an emotional meter. It's like an emotional temperature check of the nation, of the world. When people start to panic, the perceived value of a company tumbles, right? Or when people all start to like rally behind a company or rally behind whatever, that's when the perceived value of that stock increases. Okay, so it really is all about perception, reputation, all of that stuff is what makes a stock more valuable or less valuable. And so if we are going to panic when everyone's starting to sell the stock, and then we're like, oh, let me get on board, let me also sell my stock. You are selling at a low point. You are not selling high, you are selling low, right? And same deal. When everyone, everyone is buying the same stock from the same company, the perceived value is going to increase. So you're not buying when it's low, you're buying when it's high. Okay. And that is not what we want to do. So for me personally, when stocks start to go down, when the stock market starts to look a little downward trajectory, I get excited. I mean, I'm not excited about my money being lost, sure, but I am excited about the fact that I can buy up a lot of stocks now at a very, very good cheap price. It's almost like a fire sale, basically. So when the stocks start to go down, I'm like, ooh, sale time, get the girlies, and let's go fucking shopping. Get in, loser, we're going shopping. And so when the stocks tumble, just having to remember that this is a long-term strategy. Okay, if I panic every time stocks start to go down, I am going to be losing money, more money, more money, more money. So we want to just invest, let it sit, and trust that over time it's going to grow because it is. It is going to grow over time. It's going to look scary some years and it's going to look scary during some administrations, you know, but for the most part, it's going to go up. It has always gone up. I mean, can't guarantee 100% that it's always going to go up, but that has been over the history of the existence of the stock market. That's what the overall trend has looked like. So don't sell when bad news comes. Okay. When bad news comes, I mean, obviously, if it makes sense to sell and get out of there, sure, do that. But do not panic buy and do not panic sell. Don't just sell when bad news comes and don't just buy when shit is hot and when good news and all of that is coming in. Okay. I'm going to say something. It's going to be controversial. I don't know how many men listen to this podcast. I don't think a lot because I think most of my audience is non-men. But what I will say is that women are actually, in general, I think we all know this, but especially when it comes to money and when it comes to investing, women are much less emotional than men. They do not make their decisions from an emotional basis as much as men do. Because women know, we know we're in it for the long term, right? And I know people are gonna hear me say that and they're gonna be like, what proof do you have that that's true? You can't just say that. You can't just say that women are better than men, because I mean it's true, but I do have some evidence for you, and I will be sure to link it in the show notes so you know I'm not making this shit up. But the University of Essex did a study, okay? They actually did a study where 186 people watched real life news stories that were expected to sort of stimulate some kind of emotional reaction. And then they were asked to make risky financial decisions with real money at stake. So after watching the news, men became significantly less willing to take financial risks, even though the decisions were completely unrelated to the news that they were hearing. But their emotions took over and they weren't willing to take those risks. However, the decisions of women appeared completely unaffected by having watched the same news. Okay, this is a summary again of this study, but I will link it in the show notes and you can go take a look at the entire study, how it was conducted. But the results show that while women self-report similar and sometimes even stronger emotional reactions to the news, their decisions in settings unrelated to the news appear much more stable. They challenge the stereotype that women are emotionally driven in their actions, right? Compared to men. So there you have it. There you have it. Women are better investors than men are. Sorry, not sorry. I said what I fucking said. Women are better investors because we don't use our emotions to drive our decisions. Sure, we're gonna have emotions and we're gonna feel them, but we're not gonna let it dictate our strategy. We're not gonna let it stray from the path we know is the right one for us, right? So, what point am I trying to make with that? I'm trying to tell all of you out there who are not men that you are capable of investing. You are capable of making these decisions. I know you are, you know you are. Okay. So go out there and learn. Go out there and learn and start taking the steps towards investing, towards growing your money, towards building that generational wealth, because we can't just sit around and hope and pray that things are gonna change and things are gonna get better, because we got to get out there and we got to take action, okay? And this is me telling you that you are more capable than most of learning this and of implementing it and of sticking to your strategy, okay? So get out there and do it. Okay, so what are some things that are a little bit helpful that I use that you can also use, and that all of these personal finance educators are also going to teach you? Paying off debt. Let's start with paying off debt. So, when we're paying off debt, what do we want to start with? Some people are like, Oh, I don't know what to do. Do I start here? Do I focus on this? Do I just pay all this off and then go here and then pay all this off? Or do I like spread it out across? Here is an amazing strategy that I love, that I have used, that you can use as well. Okay, that I've learned from the amazing personal finance educators. I'm going to link in the show notes. It's called the debt snowball. Okay, some of you might have heard this, but essentially the debt snowball is where we pay the minimum on all the pieces of debt that we have, right? Because we don't want to increase our owable amount, our debt. We don't want to add more debt to our debt. Because there's interest on debt as well, compound interest works on debt too. Okay. It just works in the opposite direction. Instead of making you more money, it makes you owe more money. It takes away more from you. So avoiding your debt is not the way to go. What we want to do is we want to start paying the minimums across all our forms of debt. And then if we have any left over, any amount left over, we use that extra amount and we pay off the smallest amount of debt. Okay, the smallest little size that we owe versus the biggest size. So we start with the smallest and then we keep doing that each month until the smallest goes away, right? And then we continue to pay the minimum across all, and then we start going towards the second smallest because the smallest is done, the smallest has been paid for, and then so on and so forth. We continue to not avoid, we continue to pay, we continue to decrease the amount of debt that we have and increase our confidence in our ability to pay off debt, in our ability to grow our wealth, right? It's all about baby steps, all about baby steps. It's okay to start small. You don't have to be this like Warren Buffett. You don't have to be any of those people. You just have to be one percent better, do one percent more than you did yesterday. Okay, that's all we're trying to do. And I know, I know I can't convince anyone to start this work until they're ready to do it themselves, right? Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom until you're ready. And I hope you don't have to. I hope you want to start now, and I hope you want to use time as your advantage and get in earlier, right? Rather than later. I really hope that what I've shared in this episode is going to help, help you get closer to being ready. And remember, ready is not a feeling, right? Ready is a choice. It's a choice that you can make for yourself and say, I am going to do this for the benefit of future me. Something I also super love to do every single month is I love a money party. I used to dread going in, looking at the numbers, looking at what was going on with my bank accounts, looking at where my money went and where I overspent or where I, you know, yada, yada, yada. But you just have to find what works for you, right? So I found a personal system that works for me. I have sort of a spreadsheet, and I just have rows for each category like health insurance, takeout and delivery, groceries, Jeremy, my cat, weed, nail care, hair care, flights, whatever it is. And so I have all these rows and I put my monthly spending in. And I go in and I just kind of see like, okay. Here's where my money went last month. And then I can go in at the end of each year and year after year and look at okay, hmm, February. Your girl spends a lot on takeout in February. Why might that be? Or you know, whatever it is. And so just having a good understanding and pulse on what exactly is going on with your money is gonna be super helpful. But the thing is, is you can have a money party however you feel like. You can make it fun for you. So is it setting up some candles, lighting the mood, right? Is it putting on some of your favorite music? Is it giving yourself a glass of wine or a brownie or an edible or whatever it is that makes you happy? You just want to create sort of this like psychologically pleasing and positive setting that you are gonna start to look forward to, right? I love my money parties each month. Some months I truly am like, when is it gonna be the end of the month? Because I want to be doing my money party and I wanna see where my money has gone. And I personally look forward to them every month because I have created an environment where it's fun for me. And I like to go in and look at the yearly averages, monthly spending habits, all the patterns. You know your girl loves a good pattern. And so I encourage you to like set a date for yourself, like literally block it off in your calendar, set a money date for yourself. Go out, get a bottle of wine, get some chocolate covered strawberries. I mean, it could quite literally be a date night with money, right? You're sitting down, you're saying, hey money, good to see you. What have you been up to? Let's catch up, let's recalibrate this relationship a little bit more, right? That's what we're trying to do here is we're trying to establish our relationship with money, strengthen that relationship with money. But also, it's really important to, as you go out there, I'm gonna share some of my recommendations for people to follow, people that I've learned from, people that I love. But like you should go out there and you should find the right people for you to follow. So I'm not a parent, right? I don't have kids. And so if you are looking for personal finance educators as a parent, as someone with children, it might make sense to look for someone who's teaching about personal finance as a parent, right? With that experience. Some people are business owners and others aren't. So I like to follow creators that are also business owners because they have an understanding that someone who isn't a business owner might not. I like to look for women of color, right? They might have, especially with Chinese culture, for example, there are just a lot of cultural differences in understanding our relationship with money, in establishing it, in setting boundaries with our families, that kind of thing. And so I like to find women that look like me, that have similar lives to me, that are around my age, that are single, that like to travel. Those are the people that I'm following. So you want to find the people that look like you, that have lives similar to yours. And those are the best, truly, in my opinion, people to learn from. And also making sure that they have the same values as you, right? So for me, like I like people who are into ethical investing and ethical banking. I mean, obviously, it's hard with all the money that goes around in this world that's touched by corrupt hands and touched by pedophiles and shitty people and racists and whatever, but as much as we can do, that's what I aim for. And so I like to learn about ethical investing. I like to learn from people who are anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-AI, anti-capitalist, that kind of thing. And so you have to go out and find the people that are aligned with your values as well. And just finding the people that are teaching what you want to know, right? So, do you want to learn about investing? Do you want to learn about budgeting? Do you want to learn about business finances? Do you want to learn about other types of investing, real estate, etc.? So what's next for me? I would definitely like to start learning about angel investing. Your girl is ready to get out there and invest in women-owned businesses, invest in non-sis men owned businesses, and get out there and lift all of us up because yeah, I just think it's time, right? We put our money back into our communities. And so for me, what's next is angel investing. I also want to continue learning more about ethical investing, especially with AI being so so pervasive as it is now. I want to learn how to make sure that I'm not investing in things that I personally don't believe in and that I personally don't align with. Two forms that I've always really wanted to look into, not real estate, fuck that shit. Teach their own or whatever. But for me, I want to invest in more gold, in jewelry, that kind of thing. I want to look into investing in gold. And I also want to look into investing in art because your girl loves her art and she loves art history, and I want my beautiful apartment. Not this one, because this is all my landlord's art, but I want to fill my home with art that I purchased, that's created by people of color, created by artists that I'm inspired by that I want to back, that I want to support. And so, yeah, gold and art are two areas that I'm definitely interested in looking into when it comes to investing. So that's a little bit about my personal finance journey. I know it was a little all over the place today. I appreciate y'all sticking with me, bearing with me. I do have a little homework for you before you go. So the first thing I'm hoping you can do is to follow. Go out there and look for three people, three personal finance educators whose lives look like yours, okay, who have similar aspects to their lives that you can relate to, that you can learn from, that you can niche down into when it comes to personal finance education. I'll link some people in the show notes that I love, but I want you to go out there and find three people to follow right now. And then I also want you to figure out maybe start doing a little money diary, but I want you to figure out how much it takes, if you haven't already, how much it takes in a month for you to survive. Okay, what are the bills? What are the things that I have to cover? What are the extra treats that I like to have, right? Calculate how much you would need in a month to survive, and then multiply that by three or multiply that by six and calculate how much you would need for a three to six month emergency fund. And then I want you to start setting a goal for monthly savings. So if you're like, it's gonna cost me $5,000 a month to survive, right? With all my bills, with paying taxes and blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I need to save, let's say, three months worth of $5,000, right? So I need to save $15,000. I might not just start with $1,000 a month, right? But let me start with $10 a month, let me start with $20 a month, $50 a month, or $10 a week, right? If that feels a little more approachable, $10 a week, which is $40 a month. Maybe that feels a little bit like, okay, I can manage that. Whatever you can manage, start there. And I would even encourage you to like push that envelope a little bit. Challenge yourself to save a little more, challenge yourself to start paying off that debt a little bit more. So understanding how much in a month it takes for you to live and starting to build that emergency fund are truly some of the best first steps that you can take. Okay, and then get out there, follow some of the people that you would find helpful to learn from and start learning from them. That is all I have for you today. I hope this episode was helpful for you. I know that personal finance and money and your relationship with money could be super scary, but I'm here to help. I'm here to direct you to the right people. I am not a personal finance educator. I'm quite literally just sharing my own experience. And so, yeah, there are some amazing educators out there. I hope all of you get inspired. I hope you go out and start taking some of those steps to get your money in order, get your house in order, and really start planning for your future and planning for retirement, planning for the day that we don't work anymore. And you know, your girl, I don't know if we're gonna make it to the end of the world. I don't know if I'm gonna make it to retirement age. I know that's being pessimistic, but my retirement fund is quite literally like a party fund. It's gonna be the fund for my end of the world party, which all of you are invited to. So, anyway, I really, really enjoyed sharing just a little bit more about where I came from when it comes to money and where I'm hoping to go. And I hope all of you are hoping to go some wonderful places with your money as well. I will be sure to bring Amanda on and more of my amazing financial educators and wealth mindset people because I know that that's something that we all want to be working on. And so we will bring some guests on down the line. But for now, here we are. Thank you so much for being here, for being a yapper, for sharing the podcast with your friends, for leaving reviews, for supporting me, because I would not be here without all of you. I truly appreciate my yappers out there. Thank you so much. I will see you all very soon next week. Ciao ciao. If this episode gave you something to think about, take it and do something with it. If you want more of this or you just want to see what my life actually looks like, come follow me on Instagram at it's almost with two L's. Be sure to link it in the show notes. You can also follow me at Almost Consulting for some juicier, spicier takes. 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