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This episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. We could all use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. I can see why they call it smart. Learn more@amazonbusiness.com.
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Welcome to the Candy Valentino show, the podcast for fun founders, investors and entrepreneurs where we have honest conversations about what it takes to grow your business, build more wealth and create financial freedom.
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Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Candy Valentino Show. Thanks for tuning in with me today. And today is going to be a little bit of a different segment because we listened to you. We we send out an interview through our email to our email list as well as on social media in my stories on Instagram to see what do you guys want to hear more of? You know, oftentimes we are sitting in pre production trying to think about who to interview, what to talk about and what type of topics that actually resonate. That is the biggest challenge with the podcast because this is a one way conversation. I can't sit across from you at the coffee shop and say what do you want to know more about? So we try to do our best to survey the audience to see what it is that they want to hear more of. And so we made it pretty simple, three main categories and I also threw in an extra for fun. But we said what exactly do you want to hear more about? Like entrepreneurial topics, business growth, do you want to hear. The second one was do you want to hear more finance money or do you want to hear more motivation and inspiration? And then just to be funny, I said do you want beauty and fitness tips? But obviously the predominant beauty people really voted for two big categories which was business and money, which we assumed. But the money category won a little bit slightly above. So we thought, all right, we're going to bring a new segment to the show straight from the Wealth Habits book, which I'm pointing to. If you are watching and if you're listening, don't worry, you're not missing anything. There's just a book with my face on it sitting on my shelf. And a lot of people really liked that book. It obviously was an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. It talked a little bit more about the personal side of finance. It did have a little bit of entrepreneurial and business in it about how to make more money, but a lot of it was just the personal finance side. So we are going to be doing a weekly segment that is the Wealth Habits segment. Maybe it'll be Wealth Habits Wednesday we'll turn it into a new episode. Who knows, Wednesday just kind of sounds nice with it, don't you think? But we can call it something else. Open to your suggestions. You can shoot me a DM if you think of a really creative name. Otherwise I'll probably end up on ChatGPT to see what should we name a financial segment for a show, which is always a great hack to go and do. But for today's episode, I want to talk about something that I think plagues a lot of people, especially if at one point you weren't very good with money or you made some bad decisions. And so I think this is something that hurts a lot of people. And it's also something that we don't necessarily think about. So I want to bring it to light. And that is how to improve your credit score and save money in just four simple steps. So the four A's to better credit. And the first one is always check your credit report. Now, if you are not in the habit of at least checking your credit report annually, you obviously don't want to do this too frequently. Also, and we'll talk a little bit later of why, but checking your credit report even annually is something you should really consider doing, maybe even twice a year. Why you don't know if it's accurate. That's really one of the most important part. But also you might have something on there that is from someone else. Right? There's a lot of credit card theft and a lot of identity theft that goes around. So you want to make sure that it's accurate and also that nothing has creeped on that isn't even from you. So this is a free thing you can do. If you have a credit card, say for example, Citibank, they have actually in their online app where you can check your credit report for free. If your app doesn't have that or the credit card company that you currently use doesn't have anything like that as a feature, you can go on to experian.com it's one of the big three credit reporting companies. You can go on and just pull it for free. So that is first, always check your credit report. The second A is always pay your bills on time. Your payment history makes up to over a third of your total Overall credit score, 35% to be exact. So you want to make sure that on top of staying on your credit report, making sure it's accurate, you want to make sure that you pay those bills on time. And the way that you can do that is making it simple so you can set it and forget it. Make sure that you are at least setting that minimum payment. If you are not actively tackling your debt, set that up to be automatic and you can always go on. Set a reminder in your phone to go on at a certain time during the month, maybe five days prior to your bill is due, and pay that extra principal balance, whether that's on a credit card or your obviously your home loan, car loan, whatever it is that you're trying to tackle. But make sure that they're paid on time. Even if it is just the minimum of amount. You can always go in and make sure to add more as you are tackling that debt. Which brings us to number three, always pay down bad debt. So what is bad debt? Any debt that is on depreciating assets, cars, boats, quads, off road vehicles, credit cards, payday loans, payday paycheck loans, you name it, those are all bad debt. Now we want to make sure that we are eradicating bad debt even before we start investing. Why? Because you can't out invest bad debt. You can't put money in the market and get 10% on a return if you're paying 24% on a credit card interest rate. So you always want to make sure that you get rid of bad debt on depreciating assets. And depreciating assets is just basically anything that you buy that it is at its highest value when you buy it. So you buy a boat and all of a sudden a year later it's going to be worth drastically less than what you paid for it. You buy a car, it's going to be worth less. We always want to look at acquiring appreciating assets, things that can make us money. That's why we want to invest our money, so at some point we can stop trading time for it. So always pay down your bad debt. And that brings us to number four, which I talked to a little bit in the beginning is don't open up too many new accounts. Opening up too many brand new accounts too often can actually hurt your credit score. So you want to check it, but you don't want to check it too often and you really don't want to open any new accounts. Now let's say you are at this place in your life and you have a lot of credit card debt or a lot of debt in general and you want to start tackling it. I always say personal finance is pretty simple. We either make more money or we spend less. And typically it's a lot faster if we do both, how do we increase our earnings and decrease our expenses? So I always talk about the State of the Union meeting, and we normally talk about it for business owners, something that you should be doing inside of your business. But this also works for personal finance. And if you have a business, this is something you should be doing twice. Doing it for your small business, for your company, and then also doing it for your personal finances, which would be your personal credit card or your personal loans or any expenses that you have going out. And I always say, regardless of who you're working with, having your personal expenses in QuickBooks or in Xero, whatever it is that you may be using for your bookkeeping software, but so that you can really see what you're spending, like how much is really going out to Starbucks or Doordash or your hair appointment, whatever it may be for you, right? Finding out how much money you've actually got going out, any subscriptions that you can eliminate. And by setting up a State of the Union meeting, it's just creating the habit that at least once a month you're going to spend an hour or two. I always say two hours, but an hour or two on your finances. You know, people will invest two hours in a movie, they'll invest two days in binging a Netflix show, but won't invest two hours in your financial future, which is one of the most important things that you can focus on, certainly more important than following up on whatever Diddy is going on in his trial. So it's a really important thing that I encourage everyone to do. Take out your phone block two hours. If you're doing this for the personal finance side, really look at what expenditures you're making, what income you've got coming in, analyzing if there's anything that you can cut or reduce, and also really getting honest with yourself to see, can you increase your earnings in any way? Can you add more income in? Can you pick up something on the side? Can you sell your skills or a service or your stuff, depending on what it is that you do. So there are a lot of ways. I actually have a whole podcast episode that we dropped a couple months back about six ways to make more money without quit quitting your day job. So there's a lot of ways that you can increase, and there's a lot of ways that you can decrease your expenses. But always remember that if you want to increase your credit score overall, the best thing to do is to not need it. Obviously, I have a great credit score, but I don't need it. I don't need to use it, but it's there. You know, I know that there's a lot of different schools of thought on this. Some people say you shouldn't have a credit score at all and get it down to zero and pay off everything. And I know that works for some people. For me, that makes me feel a little unsafe. I think having a credit score that you can always fall back on because life is long and messy and things happen is a really great thing to have Credit card debt is not a good thing to have bad debt on depreciating assets, not a good thing to have no wealthy people that truly have money and have created money have car loans and boat loans and quad loans and credit card debt. So you want to make sure that you apply some of these wealth habits to your own life so again, at some point you can stop trading time for money. What makes a leader? It's a tough question, but one thing's for sure, a true leader leads by example. 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Was on Newsmax this morning, early right when the market opened, and then was on Fox this afternoon and thought I, I should probably talk about what is going on. Obviously, Trump is talking about reciprocal tariffs. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody's also talking about the price of eggs and what that means and how that applies to inflation and the economy. And I think that a lot of this tariff talk is what is taking precedent in the news. And so that's what I wanted to talk about. That's what I was on Newsmax and Fox talking about, because really, it has been a core campaign promise from Trump to implement these reciprocal tariffs. And a lot of people are saying, you know, this is going to drive up inflation. This is going to hurt the American people. But I think what, what we're missing is that the tariff is just one part of the overall plan of how to stimulate, how to grow the economy and not just band aid fix, but actually solve it. And so I wanted to chat a little bit about that because we saw that the prime minister of India was in, we, we saw that President Trump was talking with him about, you know, India has basically skated by the tariffs. They are charging us tariffs. We have not been charging them tariffs. And I think having a fair bilateral trade deal with other countries is really the core of what it's going to take for us to solve our economy, our deficit. And obviously, we're seeing a lot coming across happening in a very, very short period of time, which is exciting to see. You know, India, on average charges us anywhere from 10 to 17% on goods, and the US is getting anywhere from 0 to maybe 2 or 3%. And overall countries are charging us anywhere on average, it's about 17% and our average is about 3%. So I think President Trump wanting to, you know, not just with India, because we are the largest trade partner of India, $129 billion in 2024. I think this is his way of making sure that the American people are taken care of. Now, why is this? Just one small part in the overall economic approach is because tariffs is what we need to get started. We need to collect money that is external from, not just from our citizens, where we are taxing our own people, but that we are then Claiming tax, if you will. Tariff is just a tax from other countries and bringing that revenue in. It's the way that our country operated prior to 1913, because before the IRS really started establishing this income tax, which, by the way, started at 1%, if you can believe it, now it's almost half of everything between state and all the other baked in taxes, indirect and direct taxes that we pay. So prior to 1913, this is how our government made money. Trump is really saying, how can we bring some of these tariffs back now? Remember, too, I think there's a misconception that tariffs are new. Not only are they not new in collecting revenue, but they already exist. Trump did this in 2018. Biden kept a lot of the tariffs that were in place. Some of them he rolled back, but there are some version of tariffs is the way that the trade agreements operate all throughout the world. All we are doing and all President Trump is doing for us, for Americans, is increasing some of these. So there is more of a bilateral, fair approach to the tariffs. So really what this is doing is it's just one small part of the overall approach of what it's going to take to get our country back to lower the deficit, to stop overspending, and so that American people have more money in their pocket. And so trade agreements is first. And really what this is going to do is we are going to be able to lower taxes so that Americans have more money in their pocket. And when we have more money here, when we are charging tariffs for products that are created in other countries, what's going to happen? Even if those tariffs are somewhat passed on to the consumer? Right. Even if for some reason the Canadian tariffs are in place and all of a sudden, you know, your crown royal that you buy at the store is 20% more. Well, maybe that's what it's going to do, is have you take a look and see if there is another alternative. And then those companies that are produced in America, that have American jobs and American focus, they're going to pay less taxes. Right now, what's happening is our own companies, our own businesses are paying absorbent amount of taxes to produce a product, but yet somebody else can produce a product overseas and ship it over here and maybe get 2, 3, 4, 5% depending on the industry. And at some point you have to say, this is just not fair. Shouldn't we reward the entrepreneurs, the companies and the workers inside of the United States who are producing products for our people? Shouldn't we reward them? Shouldn't they maybe pay at least the Same, if not less than what some other company is paying that brings their products over here and sells it to all of us customers, the American citizens, because we have the strongest economy in the world. I think that that is what we're trying to do. I think that's what the administration is trying to do. And again, it's only one small approach. We need to have these tariffs so we can increase revenue, so we can drive down taxes. And in doing so, what also is going to be happening simultaneously is if we can reduce the cost of oil and we can reduce the cost of fuel, we can reduce the cost of shipping and production, and that is going to overall lower the price of the goods that we produce here in our country. Now, this is not some overnight solution. And a lot of people are, you know, claiming, well, the eggs are going up and you know, prices aren't coming down. And he said the prices are going to be coming down. Well, the prices didn't go up overnight and they're certainly not going to be reduced overnight as well. The eggs are a completely separate situation. The eggs have nothing to do with tariffs, nothing to do with the economy or inflation. Eggs have to do with a virus, a virus that killed and obviously caused the prior administration to slaughter hundreds of millions of chickens. So it's a simple supply and demand. We have less chickens, we have less eggs. And this didn't just affect the farms that had the virus infected chickens. This is well known. I'm originally from Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Amish in Pennsylvania. And this is something that they said themselves. They didn't even have sick chickens, but the farm down the road did. When the Department of Agriculture came in and tested, they said our chickens aren't even sick. But because they were in proximity to these other infected farms, they too had to euthanize all of their chickens. So once the chicken population is able to be increased again and this virus is under control, obviously there will be more egg production which is going to drive down the overall cost of eggs. That one item, eggs, in the overall report is really what's driving up, which we just saw a couple days ago, kind of created this little bit of a sell off in the market, all because of eggs and really having nothing to do with the tariffs, with inflation, with the economy. So I think what we're going to see over time is this is not going to be an overnight fix. It was not an overnight creation of the problem. So it's going to take a little bit of time, but we're already seeing country by country. President Trump having these discussions, finding out what is a fair deal, doing these reciprocal tariffs, whether they start March 1, April 1, whenever that may be, and just getting America into a better position so that we can start collecting revenue from outside, just our own tax basis in our country. And then of course, what also is going to drive down inflation? When we stop printing money, when we stop overspending. So now at the same approach, not only are we trying to get in better trade deals and better situations where we're increasing tariffs, we're going to drive down taxes so that our people are paying less. Our government is going to be more efficient and more responsible. So it is going to be spending less money. And really that less spending, reducing the deficit, reducing spending is also going to drive down inflation. And then if we can get Fed Chair Powell on board and he reduces interest rates, my gosh, the economy is going to be booming like the 1990s again. And I think so many of us, if you just use common sense approach, common sense economics, and you don't get into the politicalness of the person and you just look at the policies and the positions that are being taken, you can pretty clearly see in just a very common sense approach that all of this together, when it all pays off together, is obviously going to have a positive effect on the stock market. It's going to have a positive effect on the economy, and that is going to be a direct positive effect on every single hardworking American in our country. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people are talking about this or my cost of goods going to increase, Are all of my expenses going to increase? And if you're concerned about that, I actually just dropped a podcast over on the Candy Valentino show where you can listen on Apple or Spotify or YouTube and you can listen to all about how to overcome this. We actually talked about an approach that Coca Cola, Ford Motor Company and Elon Musk inside of Tesla and X implement. And this is something that has. It's really a financial method, a financial tool that entrepreneurs can use when they are coming against uncertain times or difficult economic times and they're unsure what to do. And maybe sales aren't as strong as they were, or maybe they don't have as much profit because staffing and expenses are increasing. I broke down. It's only about 15 minutes. So head over to Apple if you want, if you have a business, and if you don't, this is something you can apply in your personal finances, too. But again, it's the Candy Valentino show over on Apple. Or you can go to candy valentinoshow.com where we talk all about this and really what it is. It's zero based budgeting, how to extract everything out of your budget and make really intelligent decisions about what expense goes back in and over to achieve your overall goal. And again, this could be business or personal. So if that's of interest to you, there is about a 15 minute episode. Go check it out. All the tariff talk. It's going to be good. It's going to be great, I promise. Just stay the course. Don't worry about the eggs. That's going to come down too and we're going to get through this together. Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to this episode and if there was something that you loved or you had a specific takeaway, share it and tag me at Candy Valentino. And if you haven't already, grab a copy of my latest book, the 9% Edge Life Changing Secrets to create more revenue for your business and more freedom for yourself. You can pick it up anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or your local independent store. And once you do, head over to 9percentage.com and claim 1, $500 in preorder bonuses, including a chance to join me on this very show. Thanks so much for tuning in and spending this time with me today, guys. We'll see you next time.