Transcript
A (0:00)
Hey everyone and welcome back to the Rich Habits podcast, a top 10 business podcast on Spotify brought to you by public.com these are our Thursday episodes where we answer your questions as if we were in your shoes. This means you can email us questions at rich habits podcastmail.com you can ask us questions on Instagram via the DM feature there. Rich Habits Podcast is our Instagram account. If you're not already following us on Instagram and watching the clips and the stories and the replays like what are you doing? Go do that anyway, but these episodes are a blast. We've got seven awesome questions teed up for you and I'm ready to just dig right in.
B (0:37)
Robert yeah, let's get into it.
A (0:38)
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B (0:58)
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A (1:19)
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B (1:39)
Full disclosure in the podcast Description and Austin Public just keeps bringing the heat building such cool tools. So for everyone out there watching and listening, make sure you check out public.com
A (1:51)
so our first question comes from Jessica K. Via email. Jessica says Austin and Robert, I've recently started listening to your podcast and value the wisdom and insight you share with your audience. I'm writing to seek your advice on a strategy for my family as we attempt to rebuild our lives from a difficult financial financial position. My husband and I have worked hard to build a life for our two children, ages 5 and 9 months, but we face significant medical challenges. My husband is a type 1 diabetic and a below the knee amputee. He also suffered a near fatal heart attack at the age of 38. Due to his health, he's often unable to work for several months of the year after being denied short term disability insurance, we made the difficult decision for him to stay home and apply for Social Security disability while he attempts to reinvent himself professionally. To stabilize ourselves, we've been aggressively trimming our budget and currently live off grid with my mother to pay down debt. We have no savings, no mortgage, and a $15,000 car lease. We're also paying back a 401k loan. Our primary financial resource is my reliable income of $32,000 a year after taxes and premiums. We also expect a significant tax refund this year. We recognize that we're in a unique moment in time with the AI revolution and we're trying to learn as much as possible, but we feel like we're starting from scratch. What advice can you offer someone starting with only modest income and a tax refund? How should we prioritize this refund and our limited income to finally create a foundation for the American dream that we've been chasing? Thank you for your time and the guidance you provide. Best regards, Jessica K. Oh my goodness, Jessica, I am so sorry to hear about the ups and downs and deep downs that you've been experiencing as a family. Congratulations on the nine month old baby. It's very exciting to, to, to welcome new humans into the family. I cannot imagine though the terror and roller coaster of emotions that came with this near fatal heart attack. And now the, the below the knee amputee and just what's going on? You probably thought you were going to be a widow and the kids. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry to hear that. This has been your reality. Something that we really strive to do with the show is give people hope. And Jessica, Robert and I are gonna do our best to give you hope. And, and that hope is going to come in the form of a blueprint, right? A plan, a strategy, something to follow and clearly have actions on. So, so let's, let's dig into that. You're making $32,000 a year after taxes and premiums. You're expecting a significant tax refund this year, which is very exciting. The first thing I would do is I would create a little bit of buffer between you and life. This means a very small emergency fund to ensure that you do not have to go into high interest credit card debt if you find yourself in a pinch. This means 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, maybe $5,000 sitting in a high yield savings account. This can be on public, it can be on Wealthfront, it can be on Ally Financial. Sofi I don't care what you use. Make sure you're earning 3 to 4% on this high yield savings and it's a couple thousand dollars for you there. The goal with this is with your, I don't know what's going on with your mom and you got maybe the 5 year old has a unexpected or you gotta take em to the doctor and this is a, you know, $114 visit or needs a prescription for your husband with their, you know, with his diabetes. And that's a $400 something like you don't have to swipe a credit card to do that. You can pull that from your high yield savings account emergency fund. So that's the first thing I would do with this tax refund. To be quite honest. I'd probably put all of it, depending on how large it is, into a high yield savings account. So you're starting to have a little bit of predictability. Speaking of predictability, the best way to have predictability in your financial life is to have a budget. This honest budget Robert and I talk about all the time is going to allow you to begin to understand exactly down to the dollar, how much money is entering your bank accounts on a monthly basis and how much is leaving your bank accounts on a monthly basis, what that margin is. And once you figure out what that margin is then you can begin to put it to work. But you can't know the margin unless you got the honest budget and you are actually budgeting on a monthly basis. If you are really trying to, you know, trim down the budget here, get rid of those subscriptions, audit your spend spending, audit your bank accounts, audit your credit cards like any Netflix, any you know, at T95 bucks? Heck no. See you later. Visible wireless 25, right, like mint Mobile, like do whatever you can here to find that 250, 350 per month in your budget that's been hiding in the subscriptions and the other things that you can optimize, call your insurance companies and say hey you're you know, I'm paying X amount of dollars for car insurance. I'm gonna leave unless you give me a better rate. Everything you can do here to find that 2, 3, $400 extra per budget. Now once you've got that margin you talked about, like how do you guys kind of build here you're starting from scratch clarity into what you are spending and making on a monthly basis which means how much margin you have and then saying here's the goal I now have with this margin. In my opinion, you don't need to be worrying about retirement, investing. You don't need to be worrying about buying a home or do. No, none of that. You need to have three to six months of expenses in an emergency fund sitting for you because disaster is going to strike again, unfortunately. But it will strike just like it does for everybody. And when it does, you're going to have $15,000 between you and a terrible time. Right? So with that margin, I want you to then be adding it to this three or four thousand you got from your tax refund and use that to build up your emergency fund to three to six months of expenses. Maybe closer to six months. I don't know how much you're spending right now because you said you're off the grid, you don't have a mortgage or rent. Like pretend you've got those things and put that now into an emergency fund. I think 15 to 20,000 is probably going to be a good place to be here, but it's totally up to you. And then now you're like, cool, we are doing the right stuff here. We've got our plan. The next thing I want to encourage you guys to do. And then I'll let Robert chime in here. Think about this income. $32,000 a year after taxes and premiums, which means you're probably making 18 to $22 an hour, which, like, nice. That's not bad at all. But I'm thinking about your husband here. I would imagine your husband's a very capable man. He's just had life thrown at him in the wrong ways. And that to me means that perhaps there's a world where he can start doing, you know, some sort of customer support job with call center stuff or maybe something on his computer, or maybe there's something where he can do online sales for high ticket items. Or maybe there's something where I guess I'm trying to say is like, I understand that he's got a lot, you know, kind of pushing against him right now. And you mentioned the Social Security disability, which I think might have to do with income. So like make sure like you're not, you know, I don't, I'm not a lawyer here, so I don't know all the nuances of that. But if you are earning income in the disability, like maybe they go against each other. I don't know. But if you can earn money, if your husband can earn money, I would argue between like sales online, high ticket item sales or tech sales or, you know, customer support or, you know, there's A lot of things, in my opinion, that you can be doing in on just a laptop that you buy on Marketplace for 418 because you haggled them down from 650. That's going to put an extra 2, 3, 4, $600 a month in your bank account because your husband is. Is doing these things. I could be off base here. Those are the places I would start if I were in your shoes, Jessica. Praying for you guys, and thank you so much for listening to the show.
