How To Money

Let’s kick off the week with some fresh listener questions we have lined up for you! And don't just stand on the sidelines- if you have a question you’d like us to answer, toss your voice memo our way. It only takes about 90 seconds to record and you can find a step by step guide over at HowToMoney.com/ask . Regardless of how random or bizarre you might think it is, we want to hear it!   1 - Should I pay for Acorns to help me invest and what about real estate investing? 2 - How can I plan for the Social Security Trust Fund running out earlier than expected? 3 - Does it make sense to go with the financial advisor that my sister has recently hired? 4 - How long does a cash gift need to season in order for it to boost my credit score? 5 - FHA loan with a mortgage insurance premium vs waiting and saving up more?   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your person

Time for a Friday Flight- our little sampling of the week’s financial news and what it means for your personal finances. There are a lot of headlines out there, but we boil them down to specific takeaways that will allow you to kick off the weekend informed and help you to get ahead with your money. In this episode we explain some relevant and helpful stories like: autopay fees, school supplies and sloppy joes, Aldi item of the week, a recipe for mediocrity, digital nomad fatigue, treat culture, crowdfunded real estate investing flop, adjustable rates mortgage applications on the rise, retired renters, and lease purchase agreement attraction.   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here.  Sign up for the weekly HTM newsletter. It’s fun, free, & practical. Join a thriving community of fellow money in the HTM Facebook gr

The pace at which technology advances is straight up disorienting in our current age. So much so, that it’s likely digital natives and even our kids who can figure out new tech gadgets faster than we can! For those of you who are using apps and AI regularly but not feeling like a pro – you’re worried about your privacy, passwords, & data as you navigate the online world – this episode is for you. Nathan Bartram founded TheNewOil.org in 2018 to equip everyday folks with the resources, websites, and alternatives they need to navigate the online world with confidence. We discuss why to even be concerned about privacy at all, favorite password managers, why Nathan detests Amazon, basic steps that everyone should take, and plenty more!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here.  Sign up for the week

Let’s kick off the week with some fresh listener questions we have lined up for you! And don't just stand on the sidelines- if you have a question you’d like us to answer, toss your voice memo our way. It only takes about 90 seconds to record and you can find a step by step guide over at HowToMoney.com/ask . Regardless of how random or bizarre you might think it is, we want to hear it!   1 - How hard should I push to be a landlord if I’m able to buy our next house without selling the current house? 2 - Should I dial back my investing for the kids’ college given the recent market volatility? 3 - What should I do with a recent inheritance of six figures? 4 - My daughter is going to Europe for a high school trip- what’s the best way for her to spend while abroad? 5 - What’s the most affordable way for my 11 year old to text and call, without internet or social media access?   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your pe

Time for a Friday Flight- our little sampling of the week’s financial news and what it means for your personal finances. There are a lot of headlines out there, but we boil them down to specific takeaways that will allow you to kick off the weekend informed and help you to get ahead with your money. In this episode we explain some relevant and helpful stories like: ridic Peloton fee, housing boom bust, where home prices go from here, realtors slowly fading away, medical debt to be aware of, contagious financial habits, crypto and private equity in the 401k, crypto mortgage applications, AI-induced outrage, employer perceptions and success, hybrid workdays are out, & infinite workdays are in.   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here.  Sign up for the weekly HTM newsletter. It’s fun, free, & practical. Join a thr

We’re glad to have friend of the show and newly married, Nick Maggiulli back on the podcast! He’s been given the nickname Nicky Numbers because he has a special gift for conveying wonky money information in a straightforward and digestible way. We’ve been fans of his blog, Of Dollars & Data, for years now. This episode is for everyone out there who wants to grow their net worth while finding more spending freedom which is our focus today. We discuss plenty of great issues like investing as a couple, prenups, what level of net worth means Nick considers to be middle class, how a Jay-Z lyric provides spending freedom, Nick’s favorite flavor of FIRE, biggest reasons individuals fall down the wealth ladder, what skills it takes to get you to the different levels of the wealth ladder, and much more!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal

Let’s kick off the week with some fresh listener questions we have lined up for you! And don't just stand on the sidelines- if you have a question you’d like us to answer, toss your voice memo our way. It only takes about 90 seconds to record and you can find a step by step guide over at HowToMoney.com/ask . Regardless of how random or bizarre you might think it is, we want to hear it!   1 - How do I calculate whether it’s worth it to jump back into the work force? 2 - Should I take out a HELOC on my home in order to pay off other debts? 3 - Doesn’t it make sense to take Social Security early, even if the payout is smaller? 4 - Is the free life insurance offered to me through my local credit union legit? 5 - Can I utilize a “goodwill letter” in order to ask my student loan service to remove a late payment?   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a cruci

Time for a Friday Flight- our little sampling of the week’s financial news and what it means for your personal finances. There are a lot of headlines out there, but we boil them down to specific takeaways that will allow you to kick off the weekend informed and help you to get ahead with your money. In this episode we explain some relevant and helpful stories like: a 100 year old’s purchasing power, passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, boosting SALT deductions, waning EV tax credits, bad RAPs, student loan advice on TikTok, $80 popcorn buckets, Target price match murder, rising Amazon prices, premium points credit cards, and what to do instead!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here.  Sign up for the weekly HTM newsletter. It’s fun, free, & practical. Join a thriving community of fellow money in the H

Finally… a freshie! We’re done with bestie episodes for the summer and are excited to sit down and fill everyone in on what we’ve been up to for the past six weeks. We recount how lucky and blessed we are to be able to take a break from our 9-5, share some of our favorite ways we saved money while traveling (somehow in our first episode back we managed to discuss Aldi and Costco for those playing HTM bingo at home), and we only begin to touch on some of the lessons and takeaways from our time off. Active volcanoes, beef tongue, regenerative braking, EVs, lunchables, and padcrashing all make an appearance!   Thank you for hanging in there and we are excited to get back to our regularly programmed money earning-saving-spending-investing content. Y’all are the best listeners!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Sta

We’re glad Ikea exists. The ability for a vast majority of the population to get their hands on some incredibly functional, well designed, and affordable furniture is a good thing. But, you’re also unlikely to pass Ikea furniture down to your kids or for that matter, use it for more than a handful of years. Compare that to a campaign dresser from the 1800s! It’s true that they don’t make them like they used to. The same is true when it comes to modern financial advice. There’s a lot of ‘wisdom’ floating around out there that is self-serving at best, and deceptive and predatory at worst. So in today’s episode we pull some ancient wisdom from the Bible, Stoicism, and other wisdom traditions from hundreds to thousands of years before our time. Then we connect that ancient wisdom to our modern times to help you to determine what you should be doing with your money.   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your perso

Have you ever renovated a home? If so, then you remember all of the decisions that you had to make that initially were a lot of fun. Paint colors, light fixtures, tile, even the kind of toilet you wanted… but eventually it gets old and you just want it done. If you can’t relate, even picking up a loaf of bread at the grocery store can be overwhelming- “Should I get honey wheat, 100% whole wheat, 13 grain, the stuff with flax?!” While it can be nice to have options, complicating things doesn’t always make them better. And when it comes to investing, the opposite is actually true. Decision fatigue is what we’re talking about and there can be so many distractions that keep us from reaching our financial goals. Lump sum vs dollar cost averaging, international stocks, ESG investing, real estate, hiring a financial advisor- these are just a few of the potential distractions that we discuss in today’s episode.   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additi

We’re stoked to be talking with our friend Chad Carson, aka Coach Carson, which is also where you can find him online: CoachCarson.com. We’ve known Chad for years now but just because this feels like a more casual conversation to us, that doesn’t mean that he’s not going to bring the heat! We tout the benefits of small-time real estate investing, but Chad has made it his mission, and it’s the focus of his new book: Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor. During our conversation today Chad describes his experience of living abroad for a year with his family and how investing in real estate made that possible, house hacking as a gateway drug to investing in real estate, the difference between building wealth and achieving freedom, the risk you run by discounting the ‘romance’ of a property, ways to get around the high cost of mortgage lending, why it makes sense to pay off a mortgage early, and much more!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some addition

Cinderella is such an absurd story! Seriously, when you stop and think- it’s pretty messed up: a prince dances with a girl he’s never met before for one night, and then he sends his goons around town to find her so they can get married. There’s a reason you go on dates for at least a few weeks before proposing. You’ve gotta kick the tires and perform some due diligence! Similarly, you might be completely obsessed with the idea of early retirement upon first hearing about it. And articles out there on the web sure do make it sound enticing. And it might be the right move for some folks, but not before thinking it through on a bunch of fronts. So we’re going to offer our thoughts on how to decide if retiring sooner than your peers is a good goal. We’re going to tackle a number of questions both financial in nature (like sequence of returns risk and ‘one more year syndrome’) but also some personal questions as well (like hobbies and how you’ll spend your days

Have you seen the meme of the guy on a bike who puts a stick in his spokes and then crashes? There are literally hundreds of different versions based on this goofy comic. For instance the first frame on one says “15 holes of good golf,” then followed by “my brain realizing I’m playing well,” as he puts the stick in the front wheel before writhing in pain on the ground. The truth is, it’s not all that hard for us to become our own worst enemy. And that reality is what makes those memes so hilarious and poignant at the exact same time. We understand the truth, we know how it is that math works, and what it is that we should do… but then we go and do the exact opposite thing. And that’s particularly true when we’re talking about money. Simply knowing how to invest won’t make you wealthy and having good intentions won’t get the job done. So today we want to talk about some of the common ways we’re conspiring against ourselves and offer an an

We’re joined today by Yanely Espinal, who is also known as MissBeHelpful in the online world of personal finance. Yanely was born in Brooklyn, she is a first generation daughter of immigrants, and even though she went to Brown University it didn’t take long for her to rack up over $20,000 in credit card debt. Academic performance doesn’t automatically mean that you know how to handle your money, and Yanely knew that she needed to make some changes! Before long she was sharing her experience online in order to help others and she parlayed her teaching career into serving as the Director of Educational Outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance. And now she’s recently published her first book: Mind Your Money. She is also currently on a political roller coaster ride across the country in order to convince lawmakers to make personal finance a high school graduation requirement. Listen as we talk about all of this and more today!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additio

“Spend less than you make.” This is a maxim that is not only true but, if followed, will allow you to accomplish so many other goals that you might have in life. It’s a foundational concept. Similarly, we also think the same can be said for biking. Get this one thing right in your life- pedal your way to wherever you need to go, and so many other aspects of life will automatically fall into place. And we’ve actually been able to put our commitment to biking to the test since we’ve moved out of the city- you might be surprised to hear the results! Listen as we discuss the many different reasons we believe biking is a money and life hack, the positive impacts on our health, communities, and environment. And we also touch on how you can make biking more accessible in your community as well as how you can get started, even if you haven’t ridden a bike since you were eleven!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal

Have you ever eaten so much dessert that you thought you might puke? Or maybe you find yourself at the end of a shopping spree with too many clothes in your closet than you could ever possibly wear? In both cases we’re talking about the diminishing marginal utility that we receive from each additional item we consume- the first cup of water after a run is wonderful, but the fifteenth... less so! Diminishing returns is a common way to describe this phenomenon, and we want you to know that this applies to frugality as well. There’s a certain subset of folks who think that the best way to handle their money is to be frugal to the max. And while we would even call ourselves a couple of frugal fellas, it’s important to point out that it’s not a financial tool that fixes everything. So while we’ll be the first to point out how frugality can make you wealthier due to how quickly you can implement it and it’s long-term implications, we’re also not shy about highlighting its d

We had the pleasure of sitting down with our friend Brandon Ganch, who is The Mad Fientist, while we were recently traveling in Scotland! Brandon started his career as a computer programmer but then quickly added blogger, podcaster, musician, and producer to his expanding list of pursuits and interests. This is a more casual conversation but listen as you’ll learn a lot about Brandon- life events that may have shaped his view of money, how he discovered and then became a leading voice in the Financial Independence Retire Early movement, working with his wife towards financial freedom, possible regrets from pursuing FIRE, and how having a kid and growing older has changed how he now spends his money. We were especially thankful for the Ganch’s hospitality considering they had just moved into their lovely home, with a new baby, just a week before us tourists arrived on the scene!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Know

You’ve gotta wait 30 minutes to get back in the pool if you’ve eaten! Don’t pee in the pool- it’ll turn red! There are a lot of things we learned in childhood that we’ve likely discarded as false or at least irrelevant at this point. But there are probably some things we still believe because they were ingrained in our brain at an impressionable age. Similarly, there are a lot of folks clinging to the ‘American Dream’ that they should have that house surrounded by that white picket fence, why? Well in large part because it’s the financially smart thing to do. “You’re throwing away money if you're still renting!” It’s a “money fact” lodged somewhere in the recesses of our brain that we can’t shake. We think that recency bias is leading a lot of folks astray in their quest for home ownership. And of course higher mortgage rates play a role as well. On top of that, it turns out that it’s MUCH more affordable to rent in most major metros today, but how much could you save every month? But at the end of the day, i

Whether you saw some crazies doing it on TikTok or read about it in a fitness magazine, it seems like a lot of folks are giving ice baths a try. Evidently it’s supposed to be good for your health, but regardless, there are hordes of people who are intentionally soaking in ice cold water around the 55 degree range. Of course this goes completely counter to what ‘normal’ people subject themselves to. Most folks like their showers warm or even hot, and in the rare instance when you run out of hot water, it can be incredibly frustrating. But just think if you had the perspective of those folks doing cold water therapy. Cold water wouldn’t be an inconvenience but rather something that you would embrace! Your outlook can impact a host of different aspects of life: your happiness, your health, and of course it can impact your money. And especially in our country, it seems that a malaise of pessimism is keeping folks from taking the most basic money moves that could benefit their future. So du