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The Personal Finance Podcast
25 Things to Do With Your Money In 2025 Part 1
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In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk about 25 things to do with your money in 2025 Part 1.
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The Personal Finance Podcast, 25 things to do with your money in 2025 Part 1 what's up everybody? Welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of MasterMoney Co and today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking about 25 things to do with your money in 2025. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money newsletter by going to MasterMoney Co newsletter and you can ask your questions there. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or your favorite podcast player. And if you're getting value out of the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast, SP, Spotify or YouTube. And consider following us as well. We're going to bring you as much amazing content as we possibly can this year. Cannot thank you guys enough for those follows and to actually leave those ratings and reviews. They really do help us spread this message that anybody in this world can build wealth and that's truly what we believe. And we are trying to give you actionable free tips that are going to help you build wealth in your own life. So really, really excited. We want to bring you as much value as possible in 2025 and we are definitely going to be doing that here. We're working hard episode. So I am so excited for you to hear these episodes today. Now I'm going to be diving into 25 different things that you should be doing with your money in 2025. Now, do you need to do every single one of these things? No, you don't need to do every single one of these things. If you're a pure optimizer or a high level wealth builder, maybe you're going to want to. But these are things that I am looking at doing in 2025 and some of you may know some of your weaknesses when it comes to your finances and so you can pick and choose some of these and say, hey, these are things that I definitely want to make sure that I am doing in 20. So really, really pumped for this episode. If you're trying to hit some of your money goals this year, make sure you add some of these to your money goal list. And if you want to learn my exact system on how to set up money goals, we have Master your money Goals available for you. If you go to MasterMoney Co MasterYourMoney goals, you can see that course available there. Really excited for those who have started to take that already and really jumping and diving into that. So if you're interested in that, feel free to join Master your Money Goals if you want to have the best year ever. We have a very specific system on how to set money goals and hopefully some of these will trigger ide for you that will allow you to set goals in the future. So we have a ton to cover in this episode. This is going to be a two parter because there's so much to cover. So without further ado, let's get into it. All right, so number one, and this is one I'm going to tell everybody every single year to make sure that you are doing. This is one everybody needs to be doing is increase your investments by at least the inflation rate. Now, one big thing most people need to understand is if you are not investing your dollars, this needs to be the year that you start investing money.
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Why?
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Because investing allows you to grow your money over time. And the only way you're ever really going to be able to retire is if you invest your dollars. You cannot keep cash on hand and think that you're going to be able to retire. You need to be able to draw down on money and allow that money.
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To grow and preserve itself throughout retirement.
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And the only way to do that is to invest your dollars. Now you can invest in real estate. You can invest in stocks and index funds and ETFs. You can invest in a whole multitude of different things. Maybe it's small businesses, but you need to invest your money. And here we talk a lot about different ways to invest, but really when you want to increase your investments by at least the inflation rate, we want to make sure that we are doing that specifically when it comes to investing in our taxable brokerage account, into our Roth IRA, our 401K, all these different places, so that we can do a number of different things. Number one is we can do that so we can preserve our purchasing power. Inflation erodes away the value of money over time. And a lot of us have seen this over the course of the last couple of years, especially in 2020, 2021, when inflation was sky high, the purchasing Power of our dollar is eroded away every single year. My grandmother just passed away at the age of 100 about a year ago. And before she passed away, we used to have all these different conversations when I was a kid and growing up on what the cost of mov. She was born in 1923, so she used to be able to go to movies for a nickel. She used to be able to go to the movies and get a burger, a fries, and a Coke for 10 cents. And so this is something where, hey, if you tried to do that now, how much would it cost? It probably cost you $30 to $40 to get that same exact thing. This is because the purchasing power of our money erodes over time. And the way to combat against this is to invest our money. But if you increase your investments by at least at a minimum, the inflation rate every single year, you will still be continuously investing the same purchasing power year over year. And it will help you maintain that purchasing power year over year. So think about this for a second. Say you, for example, you got a 5% rate of return, but you had a 3% inflation rate. That means your real return is only right around 2%. And so you need to make sure that you keep up with that real return by aiming to outpace inflation. And this helps you just avoid falling behind. The number one thing we want to make sure we do not do with our money is fall behind. And so thinking through how we can avoid falling behind is going to be really, really important. Now some years the inflation rate rises pretty quickly. And in 2020 and 2021, we had really high inflation rates of 6, 7, 8%, depending on where you live and your personal inflation rate. And so you got to make sure that you are really thinking about those adjustments. Last year in 2024, the inflation rate nationally was about 2.7%. What I typ up on this kind of thing. And so you can increase it by 3%. I always try to increase it by way more than the inflation rate. And so that's my plan for this year as well. But if you are someone who is on a fine line, you're living paycheck to paycheck, and you just want to increase your investments by the inflation rate. That's fantastic. I would just round up a little bit because there are specific examples of inflation in your current geographic location. And so we want to make sure that we are covering all basis here. So I like to just round up just to make it easier in a flat number. So if you are investing $10,000 per year, then you want to make sure that you are increasing the amount that you're investing by $300 this year. The way I would do that is break that down so you can look at 300 divided by 12. I'll pull out the old trusty calculator. I don't do public math on podcasts. And so we got $25 more per month that you need to increase your investments by. And it's going to be something I think most people will be able to do to increase that purchasing power. Just make sure you're increasing that number every single year. Now, I also think about this when it comes to 529 plans. I think about this when it comes to investing for your kids. I think about this when my retirement accounts, my tax or brokerage, every single place you're investing, I try to increase that. Now, if you're maxing out your Roth ira, you can increase it if you're maxing that thing out. And so that's another situation where why they raise those limits over time is because inflation. And so they need to be able to raise those so people can outpace inflation and increase the amount that they are investing every single year. So that's the first thing I want everybody to do. Take out the old calculator, do the math on what the inflation increase needs to be for your personal situation, and let's get that one done. Now, if you've never invested before, we get a lot more content coming up on exactly how to do that. Number two is we are going to be hitting these big ticket things up front. Here is we want to set a meeting with your boss to see how you can be involved in projects that have a meaningful impact on the bottom line of the company. What does that mean? What I mean by that is we are setting up a situation for you to make more money in 2025. And I want you to set up a meeting with your direct report to see how you can be involved in more projects in 2025 that are going to allow you to make a on this company. Now, we have a very specific way to negotiate your salary here at the Personal Finance podcast, we have episodes on that that you can check out on how to negotiate your salary, specifically when it comes to your own job. But what I believe is that you need to come up with a collaboration with your superior when you want to make more money at your job. And so what you do is you set up a meeting with your boss at the beginning of every year or six months before your yearly review. And you say to them, what are some things that I can be doing in order to earn more money? You say it up front that you want to earn more money or you want to get promoted here at this company? What things do you need to be doing so that you can be involved in more important projects that are going to allow you to get to the next level at this company? And you're going to start to have a conversation, and this is going to happen six months in advance or a year in advance. This is not some thing where you walk into your boss's office when you have your yearly review and you say, I want to make more money and I want to make it now. That will never, ever work.
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Literally, it'll never work.
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You need to start having this conversation upfront and start to work the system a little bit. Meaning that you have to prove your worth to your boss after you have this conversation. If they have no idea that you're going to come in and you want to make 10 grand more per year, and then you walk in there and say you want to make ten grand more, and you list all of these reasons, and all of a sudden budgets were just cut, well, then neither one of you are going to be happy about that situation. Whereas if you start to have this conversation upfront and say, hey, in the next six to 12 months, I want to be making more money.
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How can I be able to do that?
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And you start to have this conversation, they give you the action items of what you need to be doing, and then you execute those action items with precision. And now every month thereafter, you try to set up some sort of meeting or some sort of conversation with them to see if you're on track, because you're going to list out the things that you did and go through this entire process. We have actually a free ebook on exactly how to do this step by step, if you want to check that out. If you go to MasterMoney Co resources, it's the how to Get a Raise ebook. It's completely free. I list out all these steps, I give you scripts on how to actually have these conversations so that you can make this a lot easier for yourself. So make sure you check that out if you want to learn more about this. And then eventually, once you get to your yearly review, you and your boss are not on different pages. You have been on the same page the whole time because you've continuously communicated with them. And so it becomes so much easier to get that raise when you go through this process. So make sure you check that out. A lot of people have gone through that process and it's been something that allows them to actually get a raise. And we've seen people get 20, 30, 40 and one person got $50,000 raise just from having these conversations and going through that process. So when you align yourself with impactful projects, this helps you align your work with the company goals. It also helps you build skills specifically within your network. If you're in corporate, you want to play the corporate politics game. And really, even if you're in a blue collar job, you also want to play the politics game, making sure that you are talking to the right people. You are working on the most impactful initiatives within your department that are going help the company bottom line or increase productivity or increase efficiency so that the company can make more money. It's also going to help you position yourself for career growth. If career growth is a huge, huge factor for you and you want to build wealth through your career, this is going to help you do that is making sure that you are part of some of these big projects. But in addition, guess what it also does? It makes you indispensable. Meaning that it's going to be a lot harder for someone to lay you off when layoffs come down the line at your company. If you are working on the big ticket projects, if you're going to doing the big deal things, it is going to be a lot more difficult for them to lay you off. Now that may still happen, but it's going to make you much more indispensable to them because you are making them more money. And so you are a person that could be involved in some of these projects. And if you get really, really good at that stuff, I guarantee you're going to be making more money and you could get some big promotions as well. But making sure you're involved in communicating with your boss. Now some of you may be an introvert and you may not want to have these conversations or these negotiations, but let me tell you, just by asking for a 3 to 5% raise, every single year is going to be a multimillion dollar difference in the long run over the course of your career. Is it worth a multimillion dollar difference for you to just get a little bit uncomfortable and have these conversations? And every single year that you do this, you're going to get better and better at having these conversations. So making sure that you're doing it is a really, really important thing. So set up that meeting with your boss, send them an email, let's get this thing Rolling. Check out the ebook. If you have not Again, go to MasterMoney Co Resources and you can get that completely free. Number three is we want to make sure that we know our financial baseline. There are numbers that you need to know off the top of your head. You need to know your savings rate, you need to know your net worth, but you also need to know what your baseline finances are. Meaning what is the bare minimum that you need to make every single month to live on so that you can cover your necessities? Housing, food, utilities, transportation. All of those are your core necessities and you need to know what that number is. Now this should be 50 to 60% of your income. Income that comes in every single month. Really, I'd like it closer to that 50 number, but some of you have to get to that 60 number. If you missed our paycheck to paycheck episode where we talked about how to get out of this paycheck to paycheck cycle, we go into great detail on how to find your financial baseline and then differentiate between all of your other expenses. I highly, highly recommend you listen to that episode. If you have not. That is an hour long episode that we worked pretty hard on. And I want you to be able to kind of see how we do this. But I'll give you some ways to calculate your financial baseline here. So what I really want you to do is I want you to take out the last three months of bank statements. If you want to go farther back and go to six months and start to open that up and review all your recurring expenses that you have every single month. Now if you're going to do this on paper, if you're going to print it off the old fashioned way, I want you to take out a highlighter that is a specific color and I want you to start highlighting all of the expenses that you think are something that you need. Their necessity expenses, debt payments, housing, food, transportation, health care. This kind of stuff is your baseline necessities that you need to make sure that you are including. Now exclude things. Do not start to highlight things like dining out or entertainment or stuff that does not meet these requirements. Okay? Number two is list your non negotiable expenses. So I want you to think through what is the stuff that improves my life significantly that I'm just never ever going to be willing to get rid of. Meaning that let's say you are looking at something like you got a brand new car and that car makes your life so much easier to make a commute. Are you realistically ever going to get rid of that car? Well, that car payment needs to be part of this scenario and it needs to be part of these necessities. And really all debt payments need to be part of these necessities. But if you're never willing to get rid of that car, then you need to make sure you're including the expenses surrounding that, including the insurance and all those different things in your non negotiable expenses. Now we're going to calculate an average. So I want you to at least do three months. If you could do six months, that's great as well. But add up all these expenses and let's figure out what the average is of all of these expenses. This will help us kind of weather some of the storms of fluctuations and we can see what the real number is. And if you really want to get technical with this, you can even go with the month that has the highest number of these expenses. Just if you want to get really, really safe and separate that out. Now what we're going to do is I don't want you to forget some of those semiannual expenses. If you pay your insurance semi annually or you pay other specific expenses annually. Like if you're never willing to get rid of your Amazon prime membership because you do most of your shopping there and you know, it's just really EAS and convenient for you. That's an annual subscription most likely. Some of you may pay monthly, but the annual subscription could be something I need you to factor into this number. And so making sure you're not leaving out those annual or semiannual expenses is going to be really, really important. Now why do you need to know this number? Why is this so important? Why is this guy harping on this so much on why you need to know your baseline expense?
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There's a number of different reasons.
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One is it helps you create a budget that actually works and a spending plan that actually works. Meaning that you're going to know how much money you have left over without going into the hole, without going into debt, and without living paycheck to paycheck. We need to know this number so we can get out of any paycheck to paycheck cycle or make sure that we can find more money to put it towards wealth building activities. But number two is it helps you build out your emergency fund. Because this is where you can start with your emergency fund is making sure your goal is at least at the first couple of months is I can start to get some of this cash on hand saved up so I can protect myself in the long run. But it also is going to help us prepare for life's changes. If you have a job loss, if you have a career switch, if you're going towards retirement, we need to know this number. It is very important. And then we can know how much flexibility we have on some of our variable expenses or expenses that are our wants. Another thing is it helps us avoid drastic lifestyle creep. Now, I am all for lifestyle creep. My lifestyle probably creeps up a little bit every single year. I think that's healthy. I think that's good. To have your lifestyle increase over time, especially if you start to increase your income over time, is I want you to spend some of that, I want you to make it rain on things that you love. But at the same time, you want to make sure that you are watching which direction your lifestyle is creeping and how much it is creeping. If your lifestyle creeps up 75% in one year, and it is something that is a huge, drastic change and you realize, whoa, I am spending way too much money. You need to be aware of that. You need to be aware of why that is. And is it partially because you got a new house and your mortgage went way higher? Is it partially because you got a brand new car and your car payment is now a thousand dollars per month? Month, and you are really overspending on your car? We need to understand our lifestyle creep. And knowing this number before you make any of those big financial changes is going to be huge to make informed financial decisions, which is another reason why we need to know this number. But it also helps us understand our financial independence number, which is really, really important and a huge portion to why we do this. Because if we know what our baseline expenses are, we can actually map out exactly how long it's going to take us to become become financially independent. And so that is something I think a lot of us need to understand as we want to become financially independent. We need to know what this number is. Because bare minimum, if you have a million dollars and your baseline expenses are $40,000 per year, then you can literally become financially independent today if you wanted to, because the 4% rule. And so because of this, we got to think through now, there's a lot of variables in between there. We can talk through those. But this is a rough outline of, yes, if you have a job where you are working and grinding, really, and then all of a sudden a new boss comes in and they're just absolutely miserable, you can actually leave that job if you wanted to and you want to be able to know this number. So knowing the number of what's your financial independence number is going to be really important. But you got to understand those baseline expenses. And so that's where I think most people need to do this. Number four is I want you to start to reduce some of those expenses that do not bring you value. And I want you to do this gradually. So let's give you a quick example is I want you to pick one to two expenses. For most of you, let's pick two, because we know there's two things you overspend on every single month. I know I have two things I overspend on every single month. Now let's pick two expenses and let's gradually reduce those over the course of the next six months. What do I mean by that? I mean that let's say eating out is your big problem. And you eat out all the time, and you're spending 8, $900 a month, maybe a thousand dollars a month on eating out. Maybe some of you, you're spending more. Maybe some of you, you're spending way less. It doesn't really matter. This is just an example. Okay? And let's say, for example, you want to reduce that from $1,000 a month eating out, and you want to reduce it down to $500 a month eating out. You have a big family and you eat out a lot to make it easier on your life. But you want to reduce that down. You want to save that extra $500 a month and put it towards your Roth IRA. Let's say that's your goal. And so what I want you to do is start to gradually reduce that number. If you do it all at once, this may become something where it's shocking for you and it's a huge change for you. And then all of a sudden you're not going to want to do it anymore. But if you gradually do this over the course, it's going to start to feel natural. You're going to get used to reducing it for the first month, a hundred bucks the second month, another hundred dollars the third month. Maybe you go backwards and you increase at 50 by accident. But then now the next month you're going to decrease it by another 150. And so you're reducing the amount that you're spending on this specific line item over the course of the next six months. This is how you reduce your expenses. If you try to reduce your expenses all at once, unless you're very disciplined, most people are going to fail. Fail. And the reason why they're going to fail, especially if it's a big number, if it's like canceling subscriptions, whatever. But if it's a big number like your grocery bill or eating out, or you want to reduce the amount that you're spending on very specific things, this is where you gradually reduce it over the course of the next six months. And as you start to gradually reduce it, it's going to feel painless because you reduced it a little bit the first month and a little more the second month, a little more the third month. And over time, you're just going to get gradually used to this. You know how they say if you boil water and you throw a frog in there, they're going to jump right back out. But if you put a frog the water and you start to boil it and slowly increase that temperature, then over time, they're going to sit in that boiling water until they die. This is kind of what you're doing with your psychology. You're reducing the amount that you're spending on specific things, and you're just slowly boiling that water until it gets to the number that is your goal. Now, your goal. I would set it up ahead of time and then gradually reduce it over time. Don't do this with more than two expenses at a time. I want you to try to focus on those two. Now, if you want to cut a bunch of subscriptions or you want to start negotiating bills, that's a different story. But I don't want you to just kind of gradually reduce your entire budget over time because it's kind of confusing. Instead, just do two big ones, the two biggest ones that are going to make a huge impact for you and start to reduce those over time. Number five is let's try to achieve our financial goals this year, actually achieve these financial goals. And so what I mean by that is there are very specific ways that you can achieve your financial goals. In master your money goals, we teach you my exact system on how I did it when I was living paycheck to paycheck and a decade later I was a millionaire just by following and setting up my specific goals. And so I teach you exactly how to do that and master your money goals again. You can join that if you want to. It's $99. And it is one of my favorite things to teach every single year. Because when we teach that, we teach you exactly how to achieve your financial goals in a system to do that. They say goals are for suckers, but systems are for winners. And we teach you how to set goals and then create a system around that goal so that you can actually achieve it. I love doing that. So the way that you do this, though, is you're going to look at your goals and actually achieve your goals and break them down into small chunks. And I want you to create these small chunks where, hey, if I have a huge, big, audacious goal, I want to make sure that I am saving $10,000 every single year. Well, if you want to save $10,000 every single year, that means you need to save $833 per month, you need to save $192.31 per week, you need to save $27.40 per day. And when you start to break up these goals into smaller chunks, then you realize, oh, this is achievable, and can I save up 27 dol cents per day? I probably spend more than that just by doing my random shopping trips every single week. And so as you start to look at this, you say to yourself, is this achievable? I'm going to go backwards, and I am going to make sure that I have a system into place to make this achievable. So you first put it together in small chunks. Then you must have a plan. So let's say that you wanted to save that $10,000. Well, you would automate $833 per month into your high yield savings account, and you wanted to save $10,000. Maybe it's for a down payment on a house, or maybe it's to increase your down payment on a car, or maybe it's to save for a huge family vacation, or maybe you want to save $10,000 so you can put it towards an investment, or you want to buy a business. It doesn't matter what it is. You automate that money into your high yield savings account. Or if you're going to invest it, you automate it into your brokerage account. And every single month, you automate $833. Well, you say to yourself, well, I think I'm going to overspend that money by the time the month ends. Maybe I need to do it weekly, or maybe I need to do it bi weekly. And so you break that number down to make this goal achievable. If you think you're going to walk through life and you think you're just going to magically achieve goals because you wrote them down on a piece of paper, that will never, ever happen. Instead, you also have to see how long it's actually going to take by breaking it down into small actionable chunks. If you do not have these small actionable steps that you could take day in and day out, you will never be able to achieve that. This. And so we got to make sure that we have a plan in place and then it's got to be time bound. So if you want to save $10,000 by December 31, 2025, we need to make sure that this is time bound and we need to set up smaller goals in between here that we need to hit because it's really important to have smaller, shorter term goals that we can hit. So monthly we need to hit this $833 a month so that we can stay on track to hit that goal. And the next is it must be be in your schedule, meaning that you must put these goals into your schedule. It must be systematized and it must be understood that if you do not systematize these goals, you will not be able to achieve them. So I highly recommend you learn how to set goals this year. And we just had a master class showing exactly how to do this and really, really excited for that. We may do it again. But this is going to be something I think most of you need to be going through is learning how to set these goals and then setting the systems into place. Place setting goals is not some pie in the sky thing. It is something that is helping you set up a system for you to achieve what you want every year. And I want you to be able to achieve what you want every year. Again, check out master your money goals if you want the fast track to learn how to do this. And that will kind of take you through that step by step. All right, number six is we want to make sure that we are updating our net worth. And this is something that is very, very important for a lot of people. Now there are free tools that can help you do this automatically where you could be checking it anytime you want to. Something like a Monarch Money or something like a, you know, know. Empower is another place where you can do it for free. Both of those locations are fantastic for updating your net worth. But you need to be doing this for a number of different reasons. One is it tracks your financial progress, meaning that your net worth is going to show you how to move closer to your financial goals. And it is going to be looking at your very specific situation. Now if you don't know what your net worth is, it's your assets minus your liabilities and that's going to give you a number for some of you if your liabilities, like debt payments are much higher than your assets, then you may have a negative net worth. And that's okay. We've had plenty of people listening to this podcast who have had a negative net worth. And just by listening to the show, we got amazing emails that come in all the time that say, hey, listening to your show help me get my net worth positive. And now I have a six figure net worth just because we've gone through some of the steps that you talk about here. And so I love when people start listening to the show when they have a negative net worth. You can get out of this situation if you are looking at your net worth worth and it is negative. I promise you, you can take this step by step and gradually get yourself out of this situation. And so tracking your financial progress with your net worth is one of the most important things that you need to be doing. At a very minimum, do it at the beginning of every single year. Try to make sure you update your net worth or you can do it at the end of the year if you want to. It's part of our year end money checklist is take a look at your net worth so you can start to set up your goals for 2025. Both of those times are absolutely a great thing to look at now. It also identifies areas of improvement. So when you know what your net worth is, you know where you need to improve. For example, a couple years ago I was looking at my net worth and I didn't like the percentage of my net worth that was actually classified in my personal residence. I don't love a personal residence being a huge chunk of your net worth. And the reason for that is it's just not a great asset to have as a huge portion of your net worth. I'd rather have more stocks or real estate or rental properties or businesses. Those types of things would be the majority of my net worth. When it it was for personal preference is what I would like to have a lot bigger chunk. So I said, hey, I got to really get aggressive on some of these assets and buying more assets that we can grow our net worth in other areas. So it helps you identify areas of improvement. You may look at your net worth and say, wow, my debt pile is so much bigger than my asset pile. I need to start paying down some of this debt and I'm just really imbalanced. Or you may look at your net worth and say, man, oh man, I have a ton of cash. Cash. I need to invest some of this cash so that I can get some of these investments to rise up over time. And this is just going to help you identify areas of improvements and weaknesses. This is your scorecard. I mean, really, your net worth is the scoreboard for your financial situation. And so once you know what that number is, it really, really helps you. It also motivates you. And this is what I love about it, is it really helps me stay motivated. I want to increase that number every single year. I want to see that number grow every single year, and I want to see it grow a lot every year. And so you try to do things that it's going to help your net worth grow over time so that you can see where you land. Now, if you love gamifying things, if you're motivated by games and understanding, you know, this is something that needs to be increased over time, then the game is increase that net worth number or decrease the negative net worth number so that you can get to net worth zero and then start to build your wealth after that. It also helps inform you based on big decisions. So let's have an example here. Let's say that you have a $100,000 net worth, that you're in positive $100,000 net worth. And you pull up your net worth statement and you're trying to decide, hey, should I buy a brand new car? And you're trying to decide, should I finance this car? Should I pay cash for this car, or how should I handle this? And you pull up your net worth statement and realize, well, if I finance this entire car and I'm paying $60,000 for a car, all of a sudden my net worth is going to drop 60%, meaning that now it's going to be a $40,000 net worth instead of my $100,000 net worth. Should I actually be doing this? And your net worth is going to help you truly make informed decisions. And it's also going to help you measure financial independence. Because when you look at your net worth, once you have enough money invested in that net worth component, you can know when you can become financially independent. But also growing it over time is going to really help inform you how your progress is on financial independence. Now, if you want the step by step on how to update your net worth, if you're going to do it manually, if you're not going to use Empower, which is free, and or something like Monarch Money, which is a budgeting platform where you pay monthly, monthly, you can do it in a couple of different ways. One is you're going to list all of your assets so this is going to be things like your cash, this is going to be your stocks or bonds, this is going to be your real estate, this is going to be your personal properties and other assets like business equity or HSA balances or cryptocurrency. All that stuff is going to be your assets. And then you're going to determine the value of each asset. And so you want to get up to date statements and all that kind of stuff. Now what I like about a tool like Monarch Money is that on their net worth updates, they will actually like connect your house to Zillow, for example. Now that's not the most accurate number in the world, but they'll connect it to his estimate. They'll also connect your vehicles to whatever the blue book that current blue book value is of those vehicles. And it will kind of update all this stuff in real time. Like anytime you open up Monarch Money, it's going to adjust based on what some of those values are. So for some of those things on your network statement, it'll update them automatically. So you don't have to try to figure out what those values are. When it comes to some of these things though, it's just really important to make sure that you're realistic about this car values go down over time. They depreciate in value over time. They're depreciating assets. And so your net worth will go down based on your car, but they will go up based on your stocks or any other assets that you have over time. So just thinking through that is really, really important. Next, you're going to list all your liabilities. This is going to be like mortgage balances, student loans, credit card debt, car loans, personal loans, or any other outstanding debts. These are going to reduce your net worth. And every time you take a new one on, your net worth actually goes down. So you got to think about it in this way. Oh man, I just financed a brand new car. My net worth just went down $30,000. Oh man, I just took out a personal loan loan. My net worth just went down $20,000. Or I just took out a mortgage and I was mortgage free before. My net worth just went down $300,000. And so this is where you want to think through how you want to take on debt. Now it didn't fully go down 300,000. If you buy a house, for example, and there's some equity in there, then the equity is going to maybe offset some of that debt. But you just want to think through this process and understand how it works. And Then you're going to calculate your total assets. So once you do this, you're going to take your assets assets and you're going to add them up. Then you're going to calculate your total liabilities, you're going to add those up and you are going to subtract your assets from your liabilities to get your net worth number. And so this is really important for most people to do. And then you repeat this and update it over time. I like to regularly have this updated and I just do it automatically through tools. And so that is a great way to do this. But making sure you update your net worth this year and understand what it is, if you've never done it before, is really, really powerful because that is your financial score. I want you working on that. Let's jump to a break and then we'll get into the next one.
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All right. Number seven is to get a High Yield Savings Account account to bucket your finances. Now what do I mean by that? To bucket your finances. A High Yield Savings account is one of the best things that you can do when it comes to your cash savings. In your High Yield Savings Account, I want you to have all kinds of different savings goals from your emergency fund to your vacation fund. I want you to have your down payment fund in there for a car or a house or whatever else it's going to be. If you want to save up for a wedding or if you want to save up for any big ticket items that you need to save in cash, a High Yield Savings account is fantastic for this. But I want you to have a High Yield Savings account that has savings buckets or ways to actually compartmentalize what you are saving for inside that High Yield Savings account. Now, back in the day, people used to have to do things like sinking funds, meaning they would open a bunch of different bank accounts and each of these bank accounts would be for a different savings goal. Now you don't have to do that anymore because technology has advanced, obviously and you can actually budget inside of savings accounts. So there's a bunch of different companies out there that will do that. This. But I just love the opportunity to be able to save in buckets and to be able to automate into those buckets. So getting a High Yield Savings account in 2025, if you don't already have one, should be your goal. I cannot stress this enough that it should be your goal. You make way more money than you would at your brick and mortar bank. Do not have like a Bank of America savings account or do not have like a Chase bank savings account. Make sure you get a High Yield savings account because it will help you earn more money over time and it helps you organize your goals and it helps you have intentional savings. Now, if you haven't heard our episode where we talk about the bucket method, the bucket method will teach you how to utilize the High Yield Savings Account and maximize the way that you are saving your dollars. I want you automating your finances as much as you possibly can because it removes your willpower and allows you to save more money over time. The bucket method will teach you exactly how to do that. Which leads us into number eight. Number eight is I want you automating your finances. So when it comes to your money, we're going to have a lot of content coming out this year on how to automate your finances. And one of the biggest things is we have a course coming out called Money on Autopilot. We're actually filming the videos now. And I am so excited to introduce this to you because it is going to be the exact system on how to automate your entire financial situation. And so as we start to go through this, you're going to see that automation is life changing. I gave this example in the Paycheck to Paycheck cycle episode. But what I talked about was, was I was actually automating into Fidelity on a taxable brokerage that I quite frankly forgot about. And it was automating about $1,000 per month over the course of the last year into this taxable brokerage account. And it was just automating into an ETF that was investing into the S&P 500. And I was doing this every single month. And all of a sudden I went and looked at my statement and I had that invested over the course of the last year in addition to The S&P 500 increased 25% over the last year as well. And to my surprise, I had an amazing surprise there. Just from automating my month money, I built that much more wealth just by allowing automation to take place. What would I have done with that extra thousand dollars? Who knows? If I didn't have an intentional spot for it, it could have just got spent, but instead I automated it into this Fidelity account, this taxable brokerage account. And now I have that money in place. And I'm never going to say to myself, gee, I wish I wasn't automating money into my investments. I would never say that. Nobody has ever said that before unless they automate into something stupid like Enron for example. And so I am so happy that I had that automation set up because it just removes you from the situation. And the more you can remove yourself and your willpower out of your financial situation and allow your automations to do the work for you, the more wealth you're going to be able to build. I promise you, you will build so much more wealth just by automating your dollar. So if you haven't done it yet, you really need to do it. It helps save you time, it helps you reduce your stress, it helps ensure consistency with your financial goals. Meaning that as long as you don't touch those automations, they are going to do their job and you just need to continuously be going to work and earning money so that you can increase that number over time. It helps you build financial discipline where if you're worried about your willpower and you're worried about having financial discipline, if you make sure you set up those automations when you get paid, guess what? You can't start spending money on other stuff unless you want to go into debt. So it helps you increase that financial discipline. It helps you avoid costly mistakes because you're not in there just trying to say, oh, the market just dipped, I'm not going to invest this month. It helps you avoid those big mistakes that a lot of people have when it comes to their psychology. But it also helps encourage long term wealth building. Meaning that as long as you set those automations up and you vow to yourself, I'm not going to touch those things unless I really, really have to, it's going to help you build long term wealth, it's going to help reduce some of those emotional decisions and it's going to make money management effortless. And this is the part I really want most people to get is that if you automate your money, you're going to be spending way less time on your finances. I cannot stress this enough. Most of us don't want to spend all day and all night on our finances. You don't want to spend three hours at the end of the month trying to figure out how much you budgeted and how your spending plan is working out. Instead, you want to make this effortless. And so this makes it effortless. It's just so incredibly important to automate your finances. And once you see how it works, it's going to be really, really powerful. Number nine is I want you to build on one skill in your skill stack. So if you didn't hear our recent episode talking about how you can actually invest in yourself and earn more money, one of the biggest things we talk about is your skill stack. And if you don't know what your skill stack is, it's the skills you possess that allow you to earn more money. And these are super, super important to have in your repertoire. Meaning that this could be sales, it could be networking, it could be understanding how to negotiate. All of these different types of skills are parts of your skill stack. And so what I want you to do in 2025 is you should always be working on one of these skills and trying to develop it over the course of the year is I want you to identify one skill to enhance. Now, if you haven't heard that last episode where we talked about how to do this, we talk about how to find gaps in your skill sets, how to Actually identify those gaps and then make sure that you are improving on those gaps. Make sure you check out that episode. But I want you to identify one of those skills and I want you to set a specific goal on how you're going to achieve that. Are you going to read the five best books on that skill? Are you going to take courses? Are you going to go out and get a coach or a mentor on that specific skill? How are you going to develop that skill over time to make sure that it is going to be getting better and better every single year? Because you got to look at your learning resources and figure, figure out what you want to do and develop the plan and put this into place. And then what I want you to do is I want you to put time on your calendar where every single day or five times a week or four times a week, whatever your cadence needs to be in order to work on that skill, I want you to work on that and put it on your calendar. Maybe it's early in the morning, you wake up and you get up before work and you start working on that skill. Maybe it's after work when you put the kids to bed and it's 8 o'clock at night. So from 8 to 9, 8:45, you're working on that skill set and trying to improve that skill set. Because once you have this and once you've acquired that skill, you can make money with that skill for the rest of your life. It is the best dollars that you will invest in is by putting money towards learning a specific skill set that is going to help add to your skill stack that you will earn money forever with. Investing in yourself this year is going to be huge. And I want you to try to do that as much as you possibly can. Then track your progress as you start to do this. Say you're doing 45 minutes a day, four days a week, track that progress and see where you're landing with this. Are you able to improve that skill set and or are you kind of falling behind? You need to increase the amount of time that you're spending on that. Invest your time, invest your energy on improving that. Number 10. This is something I think a lot of people need to hear and I think a lot of people need to start doing sooner rather than later. If you're someone who wants to go on a big vacation one day and you have a dream vacation that you want to go on, for example, you want to take your entire family to Hawaii, maybe it's 10 people and you want to go to Hawaii Start this year saving for your dream vacation. And now maybe you're not going to achieve it this year. Maybe it is a huge, massive, audacious goal and you want to achieve this thing, you know, you want to go to Ireland with your entire family for four weeks and you want to do it, you know, closer to when you're retired so you can actually take that time off. Start saving for it now because. Because what I want most people to do is I want them to know that your money is a tool that can allow you to do the things that you want. Maybe there's some other big thing you want to do. You want to take a bunch of cruises or you want to go travel every country in the world or whatever you want to do. You want to go to each and every continent and do a big old trip there. You want to go to Egypt and see the pyramids. I don't care what it is, but if you have a dream vacation that you want to take, I want you to start saving for it now. I don't care if it's five dollars, I don't care if it's ten dollars a month. I don't care if it's $25 a month, I don't care if it's a thousand dollars a month. Month. But this year I want you to start to use your money as a tool for the things that you love. And so if you love vacations, I want you to start saving for that and turning your dream into reality. Why do we want to do this now? One, is it a turns that dream into reality? But two, it helps us avoid debt. Too many people go into debt because they want to go on a vacation, but they did not plan out for it in the long run. Now, you may not even know what this vacation is yet, but I want you to just start a vacation fund and I want you to start funding it with small amounts of money. Over time you can make a large amounts of money if you really are going on one this year, but also just start saving for it. Then we'll reduce your financial stress and it will create motivation and excitement for you and your family. If you start to save for this stuff, make it a family experience. Tell them why you're starting to save for this vacation. If you know what destination you want to go to, start talking about it. Start mapping some of this stuff out and really thinking about how you want to spend these dollars. Because this is the fun part about saving money, is that as you start to progress, all of you can get in on this so that you can really be thinking about this dream vacation. And it's going to be a much better experience for you if you pay for this whole thing in cash and do not go into debt. I don't want anybody listening to this podcast going into debt for a vacation this year. I want you to be able to enjoy it and pay full in cash and be able to go and do what you want. Now, utilizing travel hacking is going to be another big thing that you can do in 2025 by, you know, putting your bills on a credit card, using those credit card points to pay for your hotels or your flights or whatever else you want to do. And so adding that in to your vacation plan can be a really powerful tool that most people just need to understand how to work through this. Now, if you want to start saving for a dream vacation now, and you know where you want to go is, I want you to start setting up a clear goal and deciding the destination, how long you want to go, all that kind of stuff, the type of experience you want. Some people want to go on a vacation and they don't care what hotels they stay in. Some people like luxury hotels, hotels. And so these are two different price points that you must make sure that you are kind of setting up and estimating when you go through this. Now, number two is I want you to estimate costs, meaning that thinking through what that's going to cost, how much time you're going to be there is going to be a huge factor. The level of hotel, the level of flight that you want, all of this is fantastic. Now do not feel guilty. If you want to stay in a super nice hotel, it may take you longer to save up, but don't feel guilty for that. If you love that, if that is one of the big things that you love and is a true value to you, you, more power to you. Or if you want to take a first class flight, or you want to go to business class and you're flying to Thailand, for example, and you want to take business class over to Thailand, more power to you. This is your money, you get to decide how you spend it. It just may take you a little longer to save up for it, but you may have a better experience for you. Now you can work this backwards. Let's say, for example, you want to save up $5,000. You can take a big vacation, just work this backwards, see how long it's going to take you, how much you can actually afford to save every month after you hit your investment goal goals and then you can go from there and then automate the savings every single month into your high yield savings account. Now, if you have any windfalls that come in and you're like, hey, I want to invest half of this windfall, but the other half, I actually want to go to my vacation fund so I can get to this goal faster. Things like bonuses, things like extra cash that comes up, maybe get cash for Christmas, I don't know what happens, but if any of that stuff happens, that's a great place to look to put some of that stuff as well. And then utilizing again, cashback apps, credit card points, points, those are going to help you a lot to get that goal even faster. But I want you to start to use your money as a tool. Some of you are not treating yourself enough and I want you to treat yourself to a vacation, but you just need to gradually be saving over time. And this is exactly how you do it. Number 11 is I want you in 2025 to think about creating a giving plan. Now we're going to do an entire episode on giving plans and why they're so important to me. I gave away 10% of my money every single year. 10% of my income goes to giving away. And that was part of the reason why I wanted to originally build wealth. It brings me so much value to give money away. I am so happy that I do it. And it's like some of the best money that I spend every single month. I am so excited to do that now at Master Money, we are also in conversations in 2025. One of my big goals at Master Money is to also at least at a minimum, give away 10% of any revenue that comes into Master Money and any of my other businesses is we want to make sure that we are giving more money away to causes that we believe in and giving money to things that are going to help improve this world. And so for me, it really, really is important for me to do this. And why should you create a giving plan? I'm going to give you a little quick pitch on this. We're going to do an entire episode coming up down the line here in a couple of months. But why you should a is you can align giving with your values. We vote with our dollars with which what we value, meaning that your dollars are going to go to things that you value. If you truly value certain causes, causes, you'd put your dollars behind them. And it really does make a big difference. Two, it maximizes impact. If every single one of us gave to the causes we believe in Imagine how much progress we can make in this world just by putting our dollars behind this. Okay? So it helps maximize this impact. If it fits into your budget, that's absolutely fantastic because it helps ensure that generosity is sustainable. Also a nice throw in is it provides tax benefits, meaning that you're going to be paying taxes on those dollars. And so you actually get great tax benefits by giving more money away. But if you also want to instill generosity in your kids, this is a great way to do this is by leading by example, showing them how to do this. So one thing that we do with our kids is we have three separate jars when they get an allowance. My kids are 6, 3 and I have a baby, but she doesn't earn money yet. And so my six year old, my three year old, we started this when they were both very, very young. So my six year old, we started this when he was about two or three and we started talking about money when he was one. But when he was two or three we started to create this. And I'm actually going to create an exact way on how I teach my young kids about money and then how to teach kids as they progress in age over time. When we create our finance community, we're actually going to have some information in there on exactly how we do this. But with each of my kids, I have three separate jars. One is spend, one is save, and one is give. And so they put X amount of dollars into each of these jars and I'm teaching them as early as possible that we want to be a family of generosity. And so when they put it in the give jar, when it gets to fill all the way up, then we start to take some of that money and teach them, you know, ways that they want to give. Now we talk it through and they actually choose where they're going to give these dollars. And it's one of my favorite things to do, is to teach them that. And it is something that I think that they really love doing too. Even the smile on my kids faces when they help in specific scenarios is really, really cool to see. So for a lot of folks, if you've never given money before, it may feel kind of weird and it may feel kind of funky. And if your family never gave money away and they're really stingy with their dollars, then you may have been brought up in a way that you're saying to yourself, well, I earned this, I don't want to give it away. But I promise you, if you're someone who wants to make more impact, it Feels amazing to give money honestly, not even helping the causes you believe in. If you want to feel good about yourself, it is absolutely amazing what you can do. So here's just some quick steps on how to create a giving plan and we will dive way deeper in this on the episode. But I want you to identify your values and your priorities and think of the causes that really impact you. One big one for me is child trafficking, meaning that child trafficking is one that really bothers me. And so I give. The Tim Tebow foundation is a great example of one that is fighting against that. And so there's causes that I really do believe in that I want to give more money to that is impacting some of that stuff. So figure out what your values are and what your priorities are. Help fight back. Like for me, every time I think about that we're saving children, we're saving children from predators over and over and over again. It is something that I think we really, really want to make sure that we are supporting. Number two is then you can set a budget for giving. Like I said, Mine's 10%. I actually automate it. It's completely automated. I give it away to cause I believe in, give it away to my church, give it away to things that I really, truly, truly believe in. And that is something that we will definitely be doing. Like at Master Money, we're going to create a board of at least three individuals that will decide where this giving money goes so that we can make the biggest impact. And the goal is impact when it comes to giving money. With MasterCard money, then you want to define your goals and plan your contributions. Meaning that when you define these goals, you got to decide whether you want to support one organization consistently or spread it across to a bunch of different organizations. And then when you plan your contributions, you set that giving schedule. Maybe it's quarterly, maybe it's monthly, maybe it is annually. For me it is bi weekly. And then I'll look at the year end, I'll also look to see if we want to give extra, which is just the way I do it. It just keeps it consistent for me and how I think through it. It's all automated though, which in money on autopilot we will teach you how to give automated too. And there are tax advantage ways to do this. So you could do it with like donor advised funds, which I'll dive deeper into. Or you can do on tax exempt organizations or you can do other things to maximize tax benefits. And if you want to, you can involve, you know, folks like your family to kind of think through this into organizations that they believe in. There's a cool one that I'm looking at with my kids called the Heifer Project. And the Heifer Project actually will buy cows for communities like in Africa who do not have access to food at all. And they will actually help supply a cow to them so that they can have milk, they can have meat. There's different things that they can do there. And so there's different organizations that you can help involve your family where they can completely understand how that works. And then you can track and evaluate your impact. If something seems like it's not giving the best of impact, then you can think through and how to track that. Now, there are sites like Charity Navigator or guidestar who can help you figure out which charities actually use most of this money. Money, because I don't want you giving your hard earned dollars away to charities and they're just paying their CEO with it. You got to make sure that you are vetting these charities and spending a lot of time doing that. And so there's a lot of good websites out there that help you do that, but make sure you're looking at the right ones when you go through this process. But a giving plan is going to be something I would highly, highly recommend for a lot of people if you have the extra dollars on hand. You know, this is not a requirement, but it is something that really does bring me joy. And I just want to talk about here in this episode because it makes a huge impact on my life. All right, number 12 is to open an HSA. Now, why would you open an HSA for retirement goals or why would you even consider doing this? An HSA stands for Health Savings Account. If you've never heard of it, and if you have a high deductible health plan, you can open an HSA and use that to save for health savings goals or for what I like to do with it, which is to save for retirement, which sounds crazy. So why would you save for retirement with an hsa? Well, an HSA has what we call triple tax benefits. Benefits, meaning money goes in and it has not been taxed to the hsa. You can grow the money in an HSA tax free by investing those dollars and you can pull the money out tax free as long as you have a qualified medical expense. But the beautiful thing about this is, is that even if you don't have a qualified medical expense by the time you turn age 65, it just turns into a traditional IRA, basically anyway. And so you can get some great tax savings with an hsa. It's my favorite account by far. And you can also use these funds completely tax free if you have a qualified medical expense expense. Now, here's the thing about the fund filled qualified medical expense is the IRS has no timeline on when that qualified medical expense needs to happen. So you could break your arm when you're 21 and make sure you save that receipt. And you can reimburse yourself at age 55 for that broken arm at 21 and not have to pay taxes on that money. And so the HSA is a really cool way to be able to invest and grow your money for a bunch of different things. And it provides flexibility if you're going to decide to retire early. It provides flexibility if you want to use it for healthcare expenses which are rising at 7% every single year. It is one of the biggest things that we have to worry about when we get to our retirement age is the cost of healthcare expenses. And this is going to set apart and compartmentalize some of that money for you if you wanted to use it for health care expenses down the line. But what I wouldn't do is I wouldn't open an HSA and just spend on my medical bills every single year. You can use an FSA for that or something else. But for me, the HSA I am using and building as a retirement account, you do with it what you want to do. But that is exactly how I'm using it. It's flexible and allows you to reduce your tax burden significantly. They're also pretty portable. So they're not just tied to your employer. Even if you change jobs or retire, you can kind of take them with you. And if you're trying to think through, well, where should I open an HSA if my employer doesn't offer it or all these other reasons, my favorite place is Fidelity. Fidelity has the cheapest fees, they have the best investments, and really that is the number one place. If you look at like ratings on Morning Star, for example, they have Fidelity rated as their number one place to keep your hsa. So check out, do your research on where to open them. But I like Fidelity personally. It is a great place to have that, but it also just helps future proof you against rising costs. If healthcare costs are rising at 7%, we need to grow our money at at least 7%. And you can do that in an HSA. Number 13. And this is going to be the last one for this episode. Then we'll go to part two is to get your employer Match. Now, what is an employer match, you may ask? Well, it is tied to your employer sponsor plan. So if you work at a company that has a 401k, maybe they have a Roth 401k or maybe they have a 403b or any of these other 457. See if your company has an employer match because what this means is that they will state, hey, if you contribute X amount of dollars towards your 401k, we will match it up to a certain percentage. And so like when I first started my first job in the corporate world, it was 4% is what they matched. And that's kind of like a pretty standard number for a lot of people. Meaning that they would put in 4%. If I put in 4% for some of you, you may have to put in 6% and they'll put in 3%. There's all these different ways that it could work. But you need to make sure that you are getting your employer match. Why? Number one, it's free money. Do you like free money? Because I absolutely love free money. And so your employer match is really the number one thing that you need to do with your finances every single year. If you are not taking advantage of your employer match, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you do because it is such a powerful thing that you can do. It helps accelerate your retirement savings. It has the compound growth benefits, it automatically invests your dollars, it's literally automated and it supports long term financial security. Let me just give you an example here. If you made a hundred thousand dollars per year and you got a 6% employer match, you would have an additional $566,000 in your retirement account. If you got a 7% rate of return on that money just by getting your employer match over half a million dollars and you'd be able to spend $20,000 more per year in retirement just by getting your employer match. It is money you are not going to miss, I promise you. You need to make sure that you are getting your employer match if it's offered to you. It is the number one thing you need to do. It is completely free money. Do this even before you pay off high interest debt. Do this even before you start your emergency fund. Your employer match is the number one one thing you need to be doing. Listen. Thank you guys so much for listening to this first part of this episode. We are so excited that you are here and investing in yourself because that's exactly what you're doing when you listen to this podcast is you are investing in yourself. I am really pumped for you. Listen to part two of this episode. We got so much more actionable tips for you and we can't wait to see you on that next episode. Thank you again for being here and we will see you on the next episode. Don't forget to follow us for part.