The Childfree Wealth Podcast, hosted by Bri Conn and Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®, is a financial and lifestyle podcast that explores the unique perspectives and concerns of childfree individuals and couples. This week, Bri & Dr. Jay review Get Good with Money by Tiffany Aliche, the Budgetnista.
Bri appreciates that Aliche starts the book by pointing out that learning about money will come with growing pains. Together they highlight the book’s structured approach to financial wellness & appreciate the in-depth coverage of often overlooked topics. You’ll hear their differing views on the book's approach to saving and investing, particularly regarding getting out of debt while stressing the importance of a solid financial foundation. Meanwhile, they praise Aliche’s advice on building a team of financial professionals to help guide & assist you.
Listen in as they review Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? next month.
Resources:
Like the show? Leave us a rating & review. If you want to join the conversation, email us at podcast@childfreewealth.com, follow Childfree Wealth® on social media, or visit our website www.childfreewealth.com!
Stay up to date with Childfree Wealth® by signing up for our newsletter here! Schedule a meeting with a Childfree Wealth Specialist® here!
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Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational & entertainment purposes. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.
The Childfree Wealth Podcast, hosted by Bri Conn and Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®, is a financial and lifestyle podcast that explores the unique perspectives and concerns of childfree individuals and couples. This week, Bri & Dr. Jay review Get Good with Money by Tiffany Aliche, the Budgetnista.
Bri appreciates that Aliche starts the book by pointing out that learning about money will come with growing pains. Together they highlight the book’s structured approach to financial wellness & appreciate the in-depth coverage of often overlooked topics. You’ll hear their differing views on the book's approach to saving and investing, particularly regarding getting out of debt while stressing the importance of a solid financial foundation. Meanwhile, they praise Aliche’s advice on building a team of financial professionals to help guide & assist you.
Listen in as they review Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? next month.
Resources:
Like the show? Leave us a rating & review. If you want to join the conversation, email us at podcast@childfreewealth.com, follow Childfree Wealth® on social media, or visit our website www.childfreewealth.com!
Stay up to date with Childfree Wealth® by signing up for our newsletter here! Schedule a meeting with a Childfree Wealth Specialist® here!
Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn
Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational & entertainment purposes. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.
Dr Jay
Hey Childfree Wealth listeners, we are back in the book club, and if you have been following along, you know, our next book is Get Good with Money by Tiffany Aliche and it's an interesting spin on it. You know, she's The Budgetnista, which I don't know how to pronounce, but hopefully I got that right and Bri doesn't make fun of me too much.
Bri
I think you did well.
Dr Jay
Alright. And she's really talking about how to get financial wellness, get good with money. And every one of these is a little different. But what I like is you can pick out something like some way of thinking or something that helps that fits you. So we're going to go through this book, see what we liked, what we didn't bring before we dive into the specifics, what do you think in general?
Bri
I really like this book and I would for sure recommend it to people because it was, one very, it had a process to it, very process like. And then it also went in depth on topics that I think a lot of other books tend to skip over. And so this really brought in different things you need to consider and things to watch out for as you're going through and on your financial plan.
Dr Jay
Yeah, and she uses it as you know like 10% well or like an actual process I struggle a little bit when we're trying to give ourselves scores essentially and saying, well, I've got this checked off, so I'm 20% good or 40 good. Maybe it’s just like the overachiever in me. That doesn't like having us score because of then if I have a score and I don’t get perfect, like, like that bothers. actually set the tone for the book a little bit.
I was just a little pause-y on that. Like if felt it a little too scorecardy to me. Is that right or maybe I’m off.
Bri
I think that is valid and something to think about. To me, I just viewed it as, you know, step one, two, three. Like, as in our no baby steps, we have step one, Step two, all the way to step eight. And I don't think of it as, you know, you’re 10% whole or 20% whole if you do this.
It just this is what you do first. And I think it was a different way to word that.
Dr Jay
Well, I think that as you go through the book, though, they she does go into specific percentage, other things where I'm still challenging. Okay. If my savings rate is 25%, am I a better person than if my savings rate is at 24? No. So that's where like, I struggle with like the hard and fast numbers. I know we're in finance, so whatever. I got to give in on some of that. All right, Bri, walk me through kind of what did you take out of the book?
Bri
My first big takeaway was learning comes with growing pains. And I think this is often forgotten for a lot of people because you try something, it's hard. It's hard to budget, especially when you're first doing it, even as you've been doing it for a while, it can still struggle. Sometimes you have months that are just weird for whatever reason, and that can be difficult and we forget that growing pains are a part of life and they will lessen over time, but you have to get through that hard part. And this is a conversation I had with clients. They get really frustrated. They've been budgeting for a month or two. Well, yes, you've been budgeting for a month or two out of how many months you've been alive. Hundreds, if not thousands. We can't just say this is hard. I'm done. Nope, we have to keep going, keep trying. And as you go, it'll improve.
Dr Jay
Yeah. This is where, by the way, the scorecard bothers me a little bit. I look at it, keep in mind, like, literally my PhD’s in adult learning is a learning is like I'm a I'm a nerd about this. If you worry too much about your evaluation, like, did I do good or did I do bad, you can lose the learning.
The question is, have I done better? Anyone that works for me, they… I talk about it this way, I said, look, you made a mistake, you learn from it. We're good. You made a mistake twice. We haven't learned from it. A third time you make the same mistake, we got a problem, you know, And I think it's giving yourself a little grace to say, yep, I don't want to make the same mistake over and over.
So you make a mistake on your budget, like learn from it next time. You shouldn't happen to get upset making the same mistakes over and over, we got a problem. So I think it's hard to find that balance.
Bri
Yeah. And there's always going to be, you know, a balance and different because our budget is not linear. It very much changes, you know, income changes, bills change. And so every time something changes, it's going to have a new growing pain that you have to learn to adjust to. And that's okay. But we can't say, well, I've just blown it. I'm done, because that's not going to help. And you are right, you know, you need to look back and see how far that you've come and not just how far you have to go, because you're not going to feel good if you're comparing yourself to what's left.
It's like anything fitness. If you're trying to run a marathon and you're just focusing on the fact that you've only ever run a 5K before, well, you still have, I hate to say it, but you still have 23 miles you have to work on running. And if that's what you focus on, instead of saying, you know, hey, I can run a 5k really well, let's keep building up so I can get that marathon. It's the same thing with money. It's just people don't… like fitness and finances are two things that people struggle with.
Dr Jay
Yeah, we're going to have to add to the book club at some point, the book The Gap and the Gain and really look at that gain. And she's getting into this kind of like, yep, make the improvements, hang around people that have good behaviors. Get good influences on your life and count the good, not the bad. We've all done stupid. actually.
Actually, she always outlines how she was actually frauded essentially by Jack the Thief. It talks about how he took her money. You know, we've all made those mistakes. It's just a matter of how big they are. And that's okay. You learn from it, move forward. She even shows in the book about, you know, she kind of kept her head in the sand for a little while.
Like I ignored that Jack the thief had stolen her money and started building up credit card debt other things. Then you got to, like, go, okay, I need to learn from this. I need to move forward, I need to grow. And it's hard. I think the other book, if you want to dive into it is Atomic Habits, it’s very popular right now and 1% change and make that change every day and they get those little improvements, it adds up.
Now we all want it to be fixed immediately, especially with finances. I’ve got people that come to me like, alright, my fans are a mess. I want to fix it immediately. I'm up and I'm like, cool, that's not going to happen. We're going to work together over the next year to fix this, not in the next month. And quick fixes of the finances just don’t work.
Bri
Yeah. You can't just snap your fingers and have it be done overnight. And if you try, you're going to get overwhelmed and then give up again. So that's why we talk about going slowly and we talk with clients. We say one or two things a month we’ll work on and people are like, no, I want to get more done faster.
Well, that's great. But with some people we’re like, okay, let's try it then, because you just have to let them try and they realize, I actually can't do that. It's too much. So let's go back to what you have.
Dr Jay
Yeah, I was just having a client meeting and I was talking about this and my general thought, this is not exact, but go with me. Changing your money, mindsets and behaviors takes about a year. Why? Because you got to two steps forward, one step back, stumble, you got to struggle, you got to work through it, like got to shift your way of thinking.
And the reality is if we change your money behaviors in a year, that's actually really fast because you had 30 or 40 years of experience before that that had something different. So I'm with you. I'm with Tiffanie on we got to learn how to do it. You're never going to get me to complain about learning how to handle money.
Alright, next up Bri.
Bri
The second point, she said in there, is that it's your younger self's job to take care of your older self. And I thought that was really important and helpful. And this whole idea of creating a persona and she has a name for her older self. Her older self name is Wanda, and it's her job to make sure that Wanda's taken care of in the future.
And I thought that was a clever way to kind of really envision yourself 20, 30 years down the road, because so often retirement can be far away that it's like, well, I'll worry about that later. When really thinking about that now and thinking about, do you really want to work forever? Do you want to work at this pace forever, or do you want to cut back and work longer?
Those questions should be asked now, so that way you do have those options later on.
Dr Jay
Yeah, and I'm not sure I want another name and another persona. I mean, just my style. But my question, I ask clients to be like, okay, Bri, what is the 40 year old Bri want you to do? Or what your self in that position, whatever works for you. But really, the question is, all right, what would the future you be happy if you did and how would you take care of it?
And I think the hard part is you can go too far. They're like almost you can put too much to the future. So it's like, how do you find that balance between.
Bri
Yeah. And it's really important to be mindful of that and say, you know, I do want to do things down the line, but I also want to do things now and there's a way to balance that. But you have to actually sit down and be willing to put in the work in order for those results to come. We can't just say, I want to do everything now or I want to do everything down the road with you, if you have never taken the time to figure out what that looks like.
Dr Jay
Yeah. And when I read books like this, once you read a couple dozen financial books, they're all the same. We're just shuffling things around in a different way of thinking about it. So I'm always looking for what we call mental models, ways of thinking or ways of shifting it. You know, this younger and older self. I like that. I think the one that hit me was she talked about it saying there's two jobs for saving, there's one for saving to invest, and the other one is saving to spend.
And I like that mental model or that structure of going. There are two different purposes. Saving for your future self. Cool. We're saving for the house you want to buy the car or the trip or the other is a different type of saving and it just splits it in a nice way. It's kind of like, what are my goals?
Which is the question we ask and no baby step four. Saving towards your goals. But I like that separation. Did that hit you the same way?
Bri
Yeah, I really like that because they are different. There's one thing to say even help for your future and to sustain things, but also to go do whatever you want. Like let's say you want to go and something I love to do is travel Europe and go back and do some of the things that I didn't get to do before because it is quite large. Saving & investing to get me there versus just so I can live and hang around where I currently am, those are two very different goals and they require different amounts of money.
Dr Jay
It's very one of the things I am going to take a bit of an issue with this book is she's not as hardcore on getting out of debt as I like. Let's be real on that. And she's like, well, if you really what fancy stuff in the future, you may have to invest now and not pay off your debt.
And I'm like, hold up the math on that. The behaviors on that. I just can't buy in on that. She's like, well, if you want more, you need to take more risk and invest more. And I'm like, yeah, but if you got high interest credit cards or student loans, you're not going to beat it by investing. And Bri, I know you and I have had these debates before about saving versus investing and when we do what but man she kind of gave like a wishy washy answer on that.
It was like do a little bit of both.
Bri
Yeah. And mean if you listen you know that you and I disagree. It’s just a different way of thinking and there does need to be some boundaries like at a certain point you got to get that debt gone and just be done with it. And I've talked about before the debt that we have right now, I would be comfortable paying off at a slower pace.
But that's not the reality of like the mindset that works for my wife and I. So we're paying it off faster because that works. And that's that behavior side you're talking about that wasn't really written into this book.
Dr Jay
Yeah, I believe that there is something to getting the basic foundation set first before you do fancy stuff, essentially. Getting out of debt, getting an emergency fund, just that's the basic foundation. And she's like, well, you know, get a starter emergency fund. I'm okay, you know, should say three months and we could find three months, six months. We can debate that.
I don't care. Not a big deal like this to be in the book about investing. That's the one area of this book. I'm like, yeah, nope, I'm not doing it.
Bri
Yeah. They're just different ways of looking at things. But you can't... There is no good outcome if you sit with 20% credit card debt or I know people love the 0% credit cards, but they are not helping your behaviors. Stop.
Dr Jay
Yeah, she even talks about doing balance transfers and I'm like, we're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We're still going down, but we feel like we're doing something, but we're not. Ahh, alright. I got to get past that. Up next on your list, you had insurance?
Bri
Yeah. This book, I thought, went into a lot more detail about insurance than any of the other books that I read so far. And it really talked about getting to know your insurance, making sure that you have the correct coverage. And one question I've gotten recently is, well, should I call and up my deductible for my car insurance so I can save some money?
That, while it sounds like a good idea, just means that you're going to have more you're responsible for in the event something happens. And if you're trying to do this, raising your deductible so you can lower your premiums in order to save your emergency fund, all you're doing is rearranging the catastrophe that is not going to help you. Leave it alone.
Just keep working and saving for your emergency fund. Don't try and add more risk on one side to help you get an emergency fund faster. Because I mean, I've looked at it before and it's maybe $15, $20 difference most months. It's not enough to be a huge factor.
Dr Jay
Yeah, I'm with you. I like what she did on the insurance. She gave a great argument on life insurance and then was like, yeah, just go with term insurance in the end, which I was good with that. I've seen way too many people that did get taken advantage of by buying insurance policies they don't need.
And remember a financial advisor, somebody can call themselves a financial advisor and just be an insurance agent just selling you insurance. And there's a couple of companies where their goal is actually to sell you the same amount of insurance per month as your mortgage payment, which is just crazy. I mean, life insurance in this case. We're going to do some more deep dives in the podcast.
We actually recorded one recently on long term care insurance. I think we have some special experts coming on to the other because they are hard to understand and because the people selling you is a problem. I think the other one in there was health insurance. And you know, we're recording this the end of the year and that's when people do open enrollment.
I know I probably look at 150 plans over the past few months, and I just finished one this morning and I was like, I don't know how you understand this stuff without some help because it's just hard to really understand do you have the right coverage & where it is. And I think the many other things we have a Financial Information form to collect all the information from clients and it's pretty rough. It takes a couple hours to fill through, but like, give us copies of all your policies. And every time when I do an insurance review, there's something that needs get tweaked or moved or whatever or oversold, overbought or too little. Like, you know, for example, car insurance frequently we see, they've got what I call kid car insurance.
You the $25,000 minimum state coverage because that's all they can afford when they were kid. But now they're 40. I'm like, well now you need better coverage. So like it's hard to find good help to help you on that insurance and kind of work your way through it.
Bri
Yeah, it's really in-depth and different parts cover different things. You know, I'm currently going through the insurance part of my CFP® education and my goodness, this is very in-depth. I have to like, sit down and draw out different things because every part is so different and there are different parts of coverages that will cover different things. And that is really hard, especially if you don't have any education or any knowledge in that you just call and say, hey, I have insurance and hopefully it's good enough, but that can be difficult to know.
Dr Jay
Yeah, and now with all the online insurance things where you can just like put in your info and get a card, you're making all the choices, you know. So when I started, when I was young, I actually had an insurance broker who I worked with locally. My family worked with them forever. This person had been like, he's like the insurance person for everybody, like one partners, like 70, the other is 65.
Like they've been doing it for 40 years. And I always call up and be like, What do I need? And he goes, you don't need this. You need this, you know? And I trusted them enough to do that. And I learned because like, why do I need this? Why do I do that? But if you're just doing your insurance dot com, I don't know if that's real, but I'm making up, you know, some insurance company online.
You're making those choices and you can customize the plan to a point where it may not cover you or it might overcome you. And that's where it becomes a balance.
Bri
Yeah. And if you don't know and don't have somebody that you trust to do that, that is hard. But there are resources and we still want to reach out to us. We can always help too with that because it is a lot and it's very overwhelming.
Dr Jay
Yeah, it actually Tiffany in her book, go to the next section, talk about building a money team, you know, really a pile of people to help you through this so you have to do it alone and the interesting thing is a lot of people try to like DIY, their finances, and at least recently I've had a lot of people come in.
I'm like, okay, this is going to take me a couple of months to just straighten out what's going on. Maybe this is a tax issue is an investment issue to invest in, to be really simple, but the rest gets complex and how do you provide support? So, Bri, what do you think about the section on money team?
Bri
I am all for a money team. I know that previous conversations that you have and I have had, I have talked about really wanting to have a good team of people. And in the book she says, you know, have your spouse on board or a peer groups for that accountability with your budget week to week. Somebody you can learn from, a good CPA to do your accounting and taxes, an attorney, a CFP.
And then she also talks about having a bookkeeper, an insurance broker. Those are great things to have. If you can have people in your corner who you really trust and can rely on to help you build wealth and build financial stability for yourself, that is fantastic. I'm never going to argue with that because I will openly admit that attorney fees every year for like doing business and stuff.
Those are always my highest bills simply because I trust them so much to look over contracts, look over everything, and I want to make sure that I'm protected whenever I enter any sort of contract to do work for people. I am never going to argue about paying one of those people to help.
Dr Jay
Yeah, and she talks about fee-only versus fee-based and how most structures around highly paid people. Yeah, you want people without conflicts as best again, you want people that you can trust building a network of people that you can work with across your life is important. And we're going to a podcast episode, it’s going to be recorded soon of working with one of my friends, Cody Garrett.
He works a lot with DIYers and FIRE folks. Now the discussion we're going to have is, okay, what do DIYers miss? You know, we're not trying to judge, we're just trying to say these are the things. And listen, I had somebody reach out to me. They've done very well on their financial plan, but they said, I don't know my unknown unknowns.
I'm like, that's great awareness. Kind of like, what haven’t I thought of. If you know what to Google, you can find the answers. I'm going to admit, I don't always have the answers. I’ve got to Google also, but I know what to look for and I know this impacts this and this is out to work through it all, all that. And it's interesting because people are like, well, you shouldn't pay people for X, Y, Z.
I'm like, I pay professionals for their expertise.
Bri
Yeah, you're not going to WebMD for to diagnose your sickness, or at least you shouldn't. So why would you do the finances?
Dr Jay
If you do WebMD, you always end up with cancer.
Bri
Yes, that is true.
Dr Jay
So there's got to be an equivalent. Or finally it's like if you do your own, you end up broke or something. I don't know. No. And by or yes, I know we make money by helping people, so we're biased also. But we're advice-only, fee-only. We just get paid for our time. We don’t sell any products. You know, we're trying to stay as pure as we can.
I just think she was talking in the book about when should you build a money team and accountability. I say you need that immediately. Yeah, know friend, family, whatever it is, you might not need a CPA or attorney. If it's not too fancy. You may not need a CFP® in the beginning, but at some point you do. And I will tell you that my answer, and she mentioned in the book is it's always earlier than you think it is.
For example, people love doing the backdoor Roth contributions, and I've had to unwind probably half a dozen or ten of those this year. Of problems & the tax forms are wrong and houses are put in there. Was it rollovered and did they have another? Like there's all these weird things that happen and then it's like, that's not going to work.
You might think you're doing the right steps, but you might have missed the step in the middle or a checkbox. Like for example, one of the weird ones on that backdoor roth is if you have any IRA, any, that can mess up the system. So you're like, well, I have a SEP IRA. That's still an IRA.
You know, and you find these things, but you wouldn't know to Google that. So that's where having a profession will kind of set you on a path works. So you don't need to always pay them. You don't need to always have one, but you need to know who you're to call.
Bri
But yeah, and it's there are a lot of people talking about Roth IRAs out there to just contributing that contributed Roth IRA every year. There are income limits for that. And there have been multiple cases this year where we've had people contributing into a Roth IRA who they are making too much money for that. And so we'll have to go back and fix all of that.
I am somebody who is definitely DIY in finance and I got into this as advice-only fee-only because I don't like paying unnecessary fees. But there's also a point where you need help with things and it's okay. You don't have to work with somebody forever, but just get some help and get some input to make sure you're on the right path.
Dr Jay
And watch out. By the way, we obviously have an episode coming up. We're actually going to dive into Bri and her wife and draw about their finances because I'm their financial planner. I have people I go to for stuff like that because I don't know, it's like I need a second look or something, you know, and I have experts that I go, hey, what about this? And where do I go with that? And fortunately, once you get into finances enough, you have friends where you like, you're the expert in this little corner. Help me with this. That's awesome. For those of you that aren’t in finance, you need to pay for the appropriate people do this. People are like oh I need to find a CPA to filed my taxes?
Finding one that's good and has space to take care of people? That's hard any time, like write a good CPA next year, when I go to refer people to them, they're full.
Bri
It is very, very hard to find a CPA I'm going through right now trying to find a new one after getting married. I have one before, but that's something people don't think about too. If you are single and then you get married, you can keep with your person. Before I’ve just chosen as a preference that we work with new people because it is new, we're not single anymore.
You need to find somebody both together. You don't have to keep with the same person if you don't want to. But finding those good people is very, very difficult.
Dr Jay
Yeah. And she outlines in the book, some great questions to ask, which is cool, but that's a good way to do that. Alright Bri, thumbs up, thumbs down, five stars, 42 stars? I mean, how are you doing the score on this one?
Bri
I gave this five stars. This is a really good one. I really enjoyed it. I thought she did a pretty good job of going through and talking through things in depth. And it's definitely like a resource manual to go through and have on your shelf to take out one need.
Dr Jay
Absolutely. Now, one thing I want to caution everybody, we're going to go through a whole bunch of financial books. If you start mixing recipes between them, you can cause trouble. Kind of pick a recipe and stick with it. I'm not saying I agree with everything Tiffany's got there, but if you're going to follow her recipe, follow her recipe, there's some spins we'll take cause it’s childfree.
But you need to kind of try things out from that perspective and follow it rather than mixing things. So just be careful. You can read things, take things out of it, but be careful picking and choosing from different recipes. Alright what's next on our book club?
Bri
Our next book is going to be Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner by Katrine Marcel. So I'm really excited to read this one to talk about women & economics, and I'm just looking forward to it. We'll be reading that for January.
Dr Jay
Yeah, I went to buy this book and it was a little too expensive. I’ve got to go to the used bookstore. No, no, go to library or something. But now I'm with you. We're going to dive into that. If you have other book ideas, you can always send them to us. We're happy to pick it up. We're trying to do a wide variety of books.
We hope you get to read them when we're working through it and hope you appreciate the book club.