Ever wonder HOW to afford a house? Already own a home but hoping to save money through better financial habits and hacks? Today we delve into the intricacies of buying a house while maintaining financial stability and building wealth. Joining us is Kimberly Hamilton, a financial educator and FinTech pro, who not only bought one house, but who also now has turned that house into a rental home and is buying a second home now for her family to enjoy. She’ll not only help you develop better money skills, but also share tips on what NOT to do.
ON today’s Better Call Saul….Sehy & OG, we take a question from Stacker Chris who wants to continue making contributions to a Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA) but is uncertain if he can. How does he make a Roth IRA work? OG answers Chris’ question in what we all admit is the worst way possible, while still accurately helping Chris and our Stacker community know how to use a Roth IRA better.
But before all of that we cover a headline from the Wall Street Journal about the state of the economy. It seems that defaults on loans are going up, yet Wall Street believes there’s more room for Americans to borrow cash. But does this mean we should worry about the market? Worry about our own financial stability? Or should we worry at all?
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/stack-benjamins-on-a-dime-1471
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Rising Defaults May Give Misleading Picture on Consumer Health (Wall Street Journal)
Kimberly Hamilton
Big thanks to Kimberly Hamilton for joining us today. To learn more about Kimberly, visit Beworth Finance. Grab yourself a copy of the book Building Wealth on a Dime: Finding your Financial Freedom. Learn more about the book by visiting Kimberly’s page Building Wealth on a Dime — Beworth Finance.
Doug’s Trivia
- On a rare coin recently sold at auction for more than $1 million, what does the S in 1894-S stand for?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- A stacker wants to confirm that he would not be able to make a tax year 2024 Roth IRA contribution if he does not have any earned income in the calendar year 2024 (cannot contribute based on rental income, dividends, or other passive income).
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Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Tales From the Dirty Underbelly of Money Management – with Shannon McLay (SB1470)
Episode transcript
Can you fly this plane and land it?
Shirley, you can’t be serious. I
am
serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Chair.
I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Today you’ll learn how making small but powerful changes to your money. Can help you build wealth on a dime. With author and financial educator, Kimberly Hamilton, in our headlines, some disturbing signs from the debt market. Are we all collectively tapped out? Plus we’ll hear why another stacker.
Better call Saul. See hi and og. Of course. We’ll continue our 2024 math joke off and I’ll top it all off with the fireworks show. That is my trivia. And now two guys who are here to give you their 10 cents on personal finance. It’s Joe and oh G.
Hey everybody, I’ll jump in. 10 cents in, uh, og. We’ll give
a dime. And there we
go. We’re on the road. Welcome back to another Stacky Benjamin Show. We’re so happy you’re here, man. Man, man, man. We’re gonna have some fun today, og. How are you my friend?
Excellent day shoveling egg bites into my mouth. They’re so delicious.
If you’re not getting the egg, white egg bites from, from Costco, you are missing out those cost more than a dime.
They do,
but they’re so that’s only shoveling that OG likes to do. Shoveling into the trap.
I’m into fitness, fitness, egg biting in my mouth. That’s right.
There’s a guy who’s very funny that I follow on TikTok and he always has the, the Mexican word of the day. Oh yeah. And, uh, right after, uh, Dallas lost in the playoffs, did you guys see that one? He said the, the word of the day is Dallas the last game you’re going to play this, this year. What exactly is in those egg bites?
og? Well, first
they take egg whites,
but what if I wanna make ’em really special?
Key ingredient, I believe, especially when I make these at home, has to be. Co liver
oil. It’s great for the spleen. We’ve got a show that’s great for the spleen today.
That’s great ’cause I need to work out my spleen this month.
Kimberly Hamilton here to help you learn better money habits through the context of her buying her first house. And if you’re buying a house, even better for you. So let’s go.
Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.
First, our headline. This one comes from the Wall Street Journal and is written by.
Demos Rising defaults may give misleading picture on consumer health. Obsessing over vintage isn’t just for wine enthusiast or hipsters. It turns out og. This piece says it’s also a crucial part of understanding what’s happening in credit, and it may help tell a more constructive story about American spenders.
Many measures of credit performance for things such as credit card or auto loans are moving in the wrong direction, like the percentage of payments that are late or the share of debts being written off. For example, in Discover Financial Services latest quarterly report, the lender guided toward a jump in net charge offs from 3.42% in 2023 to listen to this, a range of 4.9 to 5.3% in 2024.
Ouch. Discover shares tumbled more than 10% right after, right after that happened. At the same time though, many other indicators suggesting strong consumer health like buoyant spending numbers and the biggest banks with detailed insight of the day-to-Day finances, millions people. Says that, uh, there’s no alarm bells going off.
I think it’s amazing. og. Let’s start here. Remember, remember back a few years ago when people were actively paying down their debt and they were hoarding money in case bad times got even worse, and we actually saw the health of the consumer go through the roof in a fairly short amount of time. What happened to that American, because now, now we’ve got quotes like this guy at Bank of America going, the consumer still has plenty of firepower and by firepower what they mean is they haven’t blown every dollar they got
yet.
There’s still time. Don’t give up. Yeah, I mean, look at a couple of things. A great resource if you’re just looking for information, they don’t actually tell you how to interpret it, but it’s great to kind of look at pictures and charts is a great quarterly, uh, output by JP Morgan called Guide to the Markets.
So you can just put into your browser, JP Morgan, guide to the markets and you’ll get right to it. So that’s kinda my go-to location for, for information like this. Household debt service ratio, which is a percentage of debt payments relative to personal income, is at about 10%, which is pretty consistent from where it was 2010 through present.
Exclusive of the Covid Drop, but it, they also charted all the way back to 1980 and we’re still at historic low numbers there. To put it in, in context, in the fourth quarter of 2007, you know, so right before the big, big, big recession, what we call the Great Recession, those household debt payments were as high as 13 and a third percent.
So it doesn’t seem like that big of a wiggle room, 10 to 13, but apparently that makes all the difference. What is kind of noticeable though, is the profound rise in credit card defaults, like you were talking about, uh, discover Card and their guidance auto loan defaults are as high as they’ve been since 2013.
Um, this chart also includes student loan defaults, which of course were pretty much non-existent because you couldn’t default on payments that weren’t due. So those are still super low, but those were, those were the highest over time. So yeah, we’re seeing quite an uptick in defaults and the consumer.
Lending side of things that kind of matter around credit cards and, and cars. Although cards you’d think would be a little bit further down the chain than a credit card and savings rates have, have gone in the toilet. Also, the average over the last 50 years, the average is about eight and a half percent is how much people save of their, uh, personal income got as high as 16% during covid and right now we’re hanging out at four.
That doesn’t bode very well for the future.
No, it certainly doesn’t. We can’t certainly solve everybody’s problem. Right. We, we’ve only, all of us that are just hanging out here together in mom’s basement is, I suppose, the only people whose issue we can solve. I think it’s probably a good reminder that at this point you’re seeing maybe your neighbors seeing your friends starting to buy more stuff, maybe, uh, take out more credit.
It’s easy to think that everybody’s doing it versus, uh, focusing on you, but it definitely a time to maybe swim upstream. And
just pay attention to the things that you can control if you’re getting impacted by consumer debt. Some of that has to do with rising interest rates. Call and ask for an interest rate adjustment.
You know, fine, I’m getting solicited like crazy for all these balance transfer things. And you know, you probably, you have this line of credit at Citibank for $30,000. You probably wanna take that as a loan, don’t ya. Just click here and we’ll send that 30 grand to your bank account at your, you know, at 10% or whatever.
It’s, you know, resist urge for those things. But if you do happen to have some consumer debt that’s a little high, call ’em and ask ’em for help. They’ll, a lot of times they’ll work with you and if you can’t find help there, you can find help by consolidating it or surf it over to a, a lower rate if possible.
That’ll help get, kind of get back on the right side of the cashflow statement, so to speak.
Kimberly Hamilton’s, uh, about to join us and talk about lots of techniques to, to save for a down payment or save any amount of money. But even just basically if, if you’re somebody that struggles with this stuff, like just making sure that your access to money OG is limited, that you limit yourself.
Like seriously set yourself up some hurdles to get at your own money so that at least you can pump the brakes before going on that spending spree.
I have implemented in our, and, and me personally, I can’t implement it for the whole household, but, but for me personally, the, the shopping cart rule on Amazon.
And it’s funny, uh, Doug, you were talking about a book the other day that you thought was really great, a local author. Yeah. And I was like, okay, I’m gonna get it. And I put it in my shopping cart and I was like, oh yeah. Shopping cart rule. I gotta, I gotta wait 24 hours before I buy it. And it was, I mean, what, 10 days ago when you brought this up?
And yesterday I logged back into Amazon too of high furnace filters of all things. And I was like, oh, that book, that’s right. It just, just enough pause there for me to go, do I, is this something I really wanna spend money on? And it was, you know, good answer. I went through with it. But my point is, is that I had completely forgotten about it.
You get the dopamine hit about putting it in the shopping cart, not actually getting it off the porch. Isn’t that funny? So pretend by it. Yeah, pretend by it. You know, be like, I got it on Amazon. Woo. And then just
close the browser. You don’t have a problem where you put it in the shopping cart, but then Lisa goes on Amazon and she just wants to buy that thing immediately and your thing gets sucked into the vortex of purchasing because she bought
something.
Well, it turns out there’s things like, uh, his and her accounts. Um, no kidding. You know, you can, you, you can have your own login to different things. Wow. Like you can stop stealing mine.
And they’re onto you. It’s like
my Netflix account. How come I always get these emails from Netflix? Did you log in from northern Michigan? Yes, I did.
Yeah, I did tell one of my adult children last week that, uh, I get one more shot with Hulu and before they just completely cut me off. Oh, yeah. Hulu’s tough on that.
Are you changing your home address back to your home address again? Yeah. Yes, please. Kids, stop stealing my Hulu. Yeah, because, uh, we’re all gonna get, you make more money than me.
Damnit.
I should be stealing your
Hulu. That’s horrible. That’s
right. Gravy train is, uh, is made the Hulu gravy train might be, might be done.
Kevin Bailey will have even more great tips where that comes from in our, in the 2 0 1, we’ll go through some of those, I guess they call ’em tactics and hacks that you can use, like hiding money from yourself. The 24 hour shopping cart rules some of these great little things that can make the big difference in your budget.
Hey, time for the. Next two games in our 2024 math joke off. These people are going to win their choice of several books, uh, from recent people that have visited Mom’s basement. And, man, do I have stacks here? So we’re gonna just give these people tons if they win this week’s round. Now, because of our recording schedule, I’m headed to a conference in Orlando.
So we’re recording this a day earlier than we usually do, which means we haven’t given the results enough time yet. Hmm. So we’re not gonna go over last week’s results. We’ll have a little bit longer episode next week to do two weeks results. So, players from last week, you gotta hang out just a little bit longer before we declare who the winner is.
But Doug, we got a couple identified here. We have our first number
one seed. Yeah. Which I’m sure you’re gonna steal. You’re gonna like, oh, you know, I’ll read the number one seed and see it coming. Oh, after
you, after you. We’ve got, uh, Zach with the number one seed, and Jonathan, with the number 16 seed. The number one seed is the one pre-seed is, is this truly the best joke?
I dunno. Doug
number 16. Why was, oh,
you’re, you’re gonna do number 16. I think you’re gonna do number
one. No, you, I think that’s the, I just assumed the way you oppress me constantly and squash me down that I was doing 16. I
literally just said, take it. Thank you. When the kids complain, this is the best thing to do.
Parents, when the kids start complaining, just go no after you. Just give them what they want. Show them what real gentlemanly behavior is like. Model what you’re hoping
for them. Give them the gummy worms for breakfast. Okay, number one seed. I just lost my job at the bank. Lady asked me to check her balance, so, uh, I pushed her over.
That
was Zach. That’s from Zack. Who had that one? Zach with a ch h.
That was number one. Yes. It was a criteria for ranking these. This, uh, you don’t like that one drew out of a hat. I didn’t say, I
didn’t like it exactly how the ranking happened. Joe’s sitting around the solo stove with three bottles of wine.
That’s what? That’s
Zack. I thought that was pretty damn funny. Z?
It’s Z by way. I don’t know that it’s number one if that, let me put it this way, if that one’s number one. Oh boy.
Jonathan sent us one that a couple other people, he claimed one that like five people sent us. It’s the number 16 joke. The last one in.
Why was six? Afraid of seven because 7, 8, 9. Yeah, that one’s
gone now. I don’t know that that gets the rim shot. No, you think it’s all the way
over? What can a 16 get a rim shot?
We both hit the trombone at the same time.
That was awesome. Like trombone. Had a little echo. All right, Zach. Against Jonathan.
Gotcha. We’ll put that in the, in, in the basement Facebook group for everybody to vote on. You’ll be able to vote on these along with we’ve got another week left of the last one. Oh, wait a minute. What am I doing? We’re not done yet. Done. We’re not. No. We got another one. Go down to the bottom half of the bracket where Jennifer has the number six seed against Melvin.
With the number 11. Which one do I get to say? Oh, whichever one you want.
Doug. Okay. I’m taking the 11 seed.
Ah, number six. Jennifer’s is, what’d zero say to eight? og. I don’t know. What did zero say to eight? Nice belt. Nice belt. Okay.
Think about it. Okay. It’s respectable. That’s good. Think about it, Doug. All right.
Number 11 from Melvin College is the opposite of kidnapping. They may had a hundred thousand dollars from you where they’ll send your kid back. It’s
kind of true. It’s a hundred percent true. Is that comedy? I don’t know if that’s even comedy. All right. Melvin’s number 11. Jennifer number six. We got the number one.
It gets number 16. Uh, if you’re in, uh, hanging out with us in the Facebook group, you’ll see those appear at, uh, some point this morning. Karen our wonderful producer. We’ll add those into the basement chatter so you can vote. All right, coming up next. Kimberly Hamilton is a financial educator. She is somebody that, like a lot of us, has gone from knowing very little about how money works to becoming an accredited financial counselor and a FinTech pro.
She has, uh, worked with some major partners like the Capital One Cafe, and she’s been featured on Forbes and in Yahoo Finance, and of course. She now is with us. She actually very openly says that she is on track to be work optional by age 45. She’s a great mentor to her community, leads financial education at a sponsor of ours, which I found out after we booked her, uh, rocket Money.
So Kimberly is going to teach us basic money habits, but Mr. Basic himself Doug about to give us some trivia.
Wait, what? Where did that, how did I get roped into, okay. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Over the weekend while I was watching football, I finally rolled all the coins I’ve been collecting over the years.
You wouldn’t believe how much money you can fit into a bunch of empty peanut butter jars. All in, I got $349 and 3 cents. Looks like pizza’s on me for this year’s Super Bowl party. I hope the delivery driver’s strong enough to carry 30 pounds of change, though of course I’ll help ’em to their car with it, but then they’re on their own after that.
Unless it’s my old crush Linda, who worked at Pizza Hutt when we were in high school. I’d drive it to her house for her. Uh, but she’s probably the manager by now. I also found a bunch of old coins in the jars, which is odd because I’ve always kept those in a separate special place. I won’t even say where it is.
You know, just in, in case you never know who might overhear something like this. And then think they found their next get rich quick scheme. Next thing you know, they’re digging around 30 steps from the door in the northwest corner of my backyard. You know, I mean, um, uh, hypothetically, hypothe, hypothetically, today’s trivia question is the most expensive dime ever sold at auction is the 1894 s.
What does the S stand for? I’ll be back right after I find a special place for my safe deposit box. Keys.
Hey there, stackers. I’m Rare Coin collector and possible Millionaire Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug with only 24 having been minted and nine left in existence. The 1894 s is one of the rarest coins in the United States. One sold at auction in 2016 for over a million dollars. Today’s trivia question is, what does the S in 1894 s stand for?
The answer, although many people may have guessed that it doesn’t stand for anything like the S in Harry s Truman, it stands for the city. The coin was minted in, which is. San Francisco. That’s right. Jane from our Facebook group. Who said that? Nobody calls it San Fran. Well, I said it. Jane. San Fran. San Fran.
San Fran. San Fran. San Fran. For people not familiar with that term, that’s short for San Francisco, you know, for most of us, but not Jane. Nope. And now here to teach you how to build funds and maybe buy a house. It’s our mentor today, Kimberly Hamilton.
I am super happy she’s here with us today. It’s about time we got Kimberly Hamilton here.
How are you?
I’m doing great, Joe. How are you?
Well, I’m doing very well. But you’ve got some big news. You are about to buy another house.
Yes, that’s right. We’re back in the game this time. I’m not doing it by myself, so I will admit to that. That makes for a whole different ballgame. But yes, we recently got our inspection and signed all the paperwork and we closed in just a few weeks here.
So it’s an exciting time and kind of fun to. You know, think back to the first time as well that I went through the process. Yeah, let’s
go there in a minute. In a minute. But you know, you brought up a word that kind of triggers another discussion in my brain. We already talked about what a badass you are, your bio, you hear people all the time waving inspections, especially back when things were, you know, when the markets were even hotter.
Is that crazy or what to say? I don’t, I don’t want an inspection.
Yeah. I think, and I definitely say this in the book as well, the market now has been crazy. So people are waiving all different types of contingencies. And I think even in the event where you wanna waive an inspection contingency, you can also just get a pre-inspection.
So don’t not get the inspection because that’s really going to, you know, inform your decision and. Can really make the difference, especially when you’re making an investment like that in a home for, for the long run. I know quite a few people that have backed out after results from an in inspection.
Luckily we weren’t one of them, but, but that’s the reason to do
that. No, me too. Well, and all the things you find is a homeowner from the inspection are valuable. ’cause for me, like it gave me a good starting point on what I was gonna need to do maintenance on first. Stuff that I didn’t know was even out there.
Exactly. And props to the inspectors that are really incredible at their job. We had a great one this last time around, which was a little bit of a different experience because now we’re, we’re buying a home that’s older. It was built in 1957. So there’s lots to look at. When I first bought my first home, which was a condo, they kept the four walls of the condo building.
But everything within that was essentially a new build. So we still had an inspection, but just I. A lot of different things to look out for in a home is obviously, at least the home we’re buying is a lot bigger than my, you know, small one bedroom condo was. So there’s a lot more that could potentially go wrong, but luckily that wasn’t the case.
Well,
let’s walk through this. I mean, you and I are both seeing the headlines, Kimberly, of all of these people that are choosing to rent long term because interest rates are so much higher. The average cost of a, of a first home was in the 200,000 range. Now it’s in the 400 something range, like home ownership feels so beyond so many people and also it’s a very personal decision.
Let’s talk about this first. So in 2017, you decided in this very personal to you decision to be a homeowner. Why did you decide to buy versus rent?
I think there were a few reasons that I talk about in the book as well. First of all, I think I was a little bit more guilty of the cultural bias to like, I just wanted a home and I think that’s fine to.
Not just want that as an asset, you know, especially in my case, I was living with roommates, three of them, and that was a sort of a revolving door at times as as well. So living with multiple roommates for five years, I. I had reached a point where I wanted to be on my own. And so of course there was the option to rent a one bedroom apartment or studio or what have you.
Yeah. But the cost, because I had saved and invested enough for a down payment, and mortgage rates were so low at that time, which is another thing to call out, and then I refinanced later, which we’ll get into. But the mortgage rate being low certainly helped. So it was actually comparable. The cost of what the mortgage would be with, in my case, a 10% down payment was comparable to the cost of renting in and of itself.
So for me, that made sense. But I think there’s certainly no shame, and I do think that’s changing in sort of the younger generation, that they are feeling more comfortable with renting. I think maybe, you know, my parents’ generation, for example, really felt like that’s something that they needed to own to feel, you know, maybe successful or something like that.
And I don’t think that that’s the case. I think another reason. Other generations might have looked at that. That way is because they think of real estate as this really safe asset that’s going to appreciate over time. But I think people aren’t always thinking about the opportunity of maybe just investing in the stock market instead, um, which the s and p 500 has grown over the last decade faster than real estate has in some cases.
And so I think that’s important to underscore. People also don’t often think about the fact that when it comes to maybe selling that home, selling that asset, you still need to live somewhere else, right? So you’re likely putting that money into a new home, which is a different scenario to think about as
well.
You know, and you bring up something else too. I think about like my parents, my dad never changed careers his entire career. He worked in the same plant for the vast majority of his career. They closed that plant, so he went to a different General Motors plant for the last, uh, six or seven years of his career.
So he had one move, you know? Then I look at me, I changed three times. I look at people, the statistic from a few years ago is the average person changes jobs now seven times. And then you look at somebody who’s just outta college now, I’m sure that number’s gonna go even higher, Kimberly. So this idea that I’m gonna be in one place is a lot different for older people than for somebody just outta college
today.
Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. Thinking about how long you’re going to be in a home, whether, whether you’ll wanna be tied down to that area. Some people, you know, that’s exactly what they want, and so I. Making an investment in, in a home that’s going to keep them in one place. Makes sense. But a lot of people are moving around or are still figuring out, you know, maybe where they want, wanna live or seizing on different opportunities that take them elsewhere.
And that’s definitely something to consider. Also, in my case, I knew that I wanted to be, I’m originally from New York and I’m a proud New Yorker, but I knew that I wanted to live in the DC area, so that’s another reason why I think when you consider that personal decision, why it made sense for
me. Yeah, and that is huge because the transaction costs of home purchases, I mean, you talked about real estate versus the stock market.
I mean, holy cow, the cost to buy and sell real estate way higher than to buy or sell your favorite mutual fund. Let’s go into the process of buying house. So you make this decision that you want to, I, I can’t believe that you didn’t wanna have three roommates forever, but that’s a whole different discussion.
The first step for me when I was reading your book, was that you negotiated higher salaries. You had negotiated to get your pay up to a place where you could sustain that you worked for the same place. How did you do that? What exactly did you do to negotiate a higher salary? Because I don’t think we talk about that enough, that raising your income is kind of a great place to be, to give you the confidence to be able to own a home.
Right. And and saving for that down payment, which was huge for me at the time. You know, certainly the most amount of money I’ve ever saved up or shelled out. Sure. When it comes, it comes to making that decision. I think you pointed this out earlier. You hear about job popping a lot now, and even for me, I think I was a bit of an outlier there because I did stay at the same company for almost nine years, which is now I feel like it’s like you don’t hear about it anymore.
Right, right. But I think in doing that, I still negotiated most years of, maybe there were a few where I didn’t, but, and I should preface that by saying I had felt personally that I had started with a low salary, so I had room to grow, but that doesn’t mean the conversation was any less nerve wracking for me.
How did you know that? Was it just a gut feeling that it was low? Did you go to Glassdoor? Did you talk to other people at work? Like how did you feel like you weren’t being paid enough?
Maybe not a gut, but there’s the expectation, right? I, I had a master’s degree and so there was a certain salary that I sort of expected coming out of grad school.
But there are websites like Glassdoor, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I’ve seen people use, use great tactics on LinkedIn to look at others that have similar titles that they’re interested in in their field. And maybe not ask what their salary is directly, but say, Hey, are you over or under this number?
And that’s a way to sort of, that doesn’t put the other person on the spot, but usually they might be more comfortable answering that question. And so when you do that enough times, you can sort of identify what the sweet spot is for what you’re looking for or what you maybe wanna negotiate towards in addition to, you know, preparing any research that you might be able to present to your manager, to your supervisor, and having that conversation so that you’re really prepared to say, not just, you know, these are.
The accomplishments or the, these are the efforts. Maybe you have indicators you’ve been tracking to justify the results of your work. But also having that, that research to back up, you know, and this is the level of income that’s commensurate or the compensation package that, you know, I’m interested in.
’cause it’s not always just about salary either.
Sure. No benefits is a huge thing I think that people forget about, but, so you go into your boss and you’re, you’re loaded then I guess with data and you said, I mean, you don’t open then Kimberly with she or he saying, Hey, I think I’m underpaid. Right,
right.
You don’t, you don’t open with that. I think ideally you’re setting the stage months in advance if, if you can, I mentioned in order to be able to really point to the contributions that you might’ve made to a company, figuring out what those indicators are that you’re trying to get towards in your position.
You know, in my case it was international development consulting, and I was. Managing a, a lot of projects so you can point to, you know, different budgets that you’ve made or, or sales calls that were successful or whatever your indicators are going to be. Having that conversation with your manager in advance to establish those, because I think a lot of companies maybe don’t have things set in stone in that way, and that can really be helpful actually.
While it might be scary to sort of set what those targets are, that can really be helpful in having that conversation later. If it’s not something that your manager brings up to say, Hey, you know, this is sort of the benchmarks that we were aiming for, I was able to meet or exceed. Those can be maybe talk about, you know, have a conversation about increasing compensation and in some cases they might say no, but that also sets the stage.
As an opportunity to talk about, okay, well what do I need to hit to be able to sort of reach that next level?
Yeah, what is the benchmark? Let’s at least put that out on the table in your own negotiation. Then, so what happened? Did you have to bring it up or did you seed this enough and say, Hey, I really think that along the way I’m providing these things and these are the benchmarks.
I think, did they offer it or did you have to go ask?
I am trying to jog my memory here, but I think it was a topic of conversation. There were smaller raises and then I tried to got it increase. What that, what that raise was going to be.
I wanted to start there specifically, because I think so many people forget that step, that study after study shows your boss wants to give you a raises.
You just gotta give them the proof, uh, Kimberly that you’re talking about. You wanted to do, initially when you bought your house, you didn’t wanna do a one bedroom, which is what you mentioned you ended up with. You wanted to do what a lot of people call a house act right by a two bedroom and rent out the other one.
Why did you decide. Ultimately the house hack roommate thing wasn’t gonna work for you.
Right. Yeah. So in my case, you know, I was, uh, I, I mentioned I ultimately put 10% down on a one bedroom condo. But, but to your point, you know, I think going from three roommates to one was, was still, you know, an interesting opportunity.
And the reason I wanted to do that was because then obviously the income I would make from renting out that second bedroom could help pay down the mortgage. But two bedrooms are a lot more expensive than a one bedroom condo in the dc well probably anywhere, but especially in the DC area. And so what it actually came down to is the down payment that I needed to afford a two bedroom and still be comfortable with the monthly mortgage payment was not something I was able to do.
Now there’s an argument that I could have put a lower down payment on a two bedroom condo, but then that would’ve increased my monthly mortgage. And so ultimately I think I really just lucked out in finding the place that I did and, and being able to afford it with 10% down. But it’s. Definitely, you know, it’s always a give or take scenario sort of balance you’re trying to hit there when it comes to what down payment you wanna put on your home and the mortgage payment that you’re going to be comfortable with.
In addition to things like maintenance and property taxes and PMI, private mortgage insurance, if you’re paying that and all those things as well.
You bring up the fact that you could bring out a roommate. ’cause I think a lot of people that think that this is unaffordable. Well, if you look at the, the traditional way, yes, it’s a whole different game than it may have been 15 years ago.
But if you’re willing to have that roommate, then maybe, yeah, you had a bunch of must haves and you and I said this earlier, that this is an intensely personal decision, but if it’s personal, you’ve got some must haves, right? You write that it had to be above ground, had to have natural light in unit washing machine.
Why are the must-haves so critical to this home buying process?
I think they’re important because you’re probably going to see quite a few places, especially now, right? Especially with as hot as the market is and, and a shortage of supply, you’re probably going to be really excited and jump on seeing a few different places when you’re in the process of, of finding your home.
And so knowing what those three things were was sort of like an additional filter that I could use to sort of narrow my search a bit. And, you know, maybe the in unit washer dryer might not be a big deal to everyone, but as someone that used to live in New York and, you know, had to go to a laundromat, and even when I lived in DC we had a washer dryer break, and there was like a week when I was with my roommates where we had to go to one, and I was like, never, never again.
So it’s, so, it’s important to know what those things are are
for you. I love seeing everybody’s personal experience. My dad has 16 brothers and sisters. There’s 17 kids. Kimberly 16. Yeah. And get this, they had holy cow, one bathroom. And by the way, more sisters than brothers and I don’t, you know, no offense.
Yeah. But most women I know spend more time in the bathroom than most men I know. And so my dad, my dad always, every house we lived in had at least three bathrooms for five of us. Right.
We always
Right. See, that might not have been on my list, but if I had 16 brothers and sisters you that it sure would’ve.
And
I think we go back to this truly is, it’s an investment in your life and in your lifestyle and in your happiness. Because you know, a primary residence really is not an investment. I hate it when people call this an investment. And I think you probably do too.
Yeah, I think long term, sure there’s building equity and homes appreciate and all of that is great, but it’s, some people make it sound like it’s the only investment out there and it’s not true.
I think the financial industry has come such a long way, and luckily they’ve made it so easy for people to start investing and save more and, and automate their finances in all these different ways. And, and I talk about that in the book because money still happens to be in, in some places a taboo topic or at the very least because I think people are talking about it more, but it can still be really intimidating when it comes to something like investing and there are actually so many tools out there that make it easier now than ever before.
Yeah. To get started with very low amounts of money. As you know, you can literally start investing with $5, $10. You don’t even have to worry about picking what your investments are. You can use a robo, robo-advisor account that does it for you that. Studies show that they perform usually on par with a in-person, you know, financial advisor.
And the fact that you can do that with such a low amount in comparing that to a home where you need to save so much for, you know, a down payment and you’re still covering all these other costs, I think is something to consider. Now, all that said, obviously I still bought my condo and I’m buying a home now.
So it comes back to, you can say all that, but I think a lot of people are still going to want to save up for that home for themselves, for maybe a potential family for a variety of reasons. And so it’s not that anything’s out of reach, but I think what a lot of my book boils down to is I want people to understand and be able to have confidence in making an informed financial decision.
And so you really wanna weigh all those different pieces so you just feel confident in the decision you’re making for your lifestyle and your life.
I. You bought a condo. Some people buy into co-ops. This is an important thing. If you live in a city, there’s a difference between condos and co-ops. Can you briefly tell us, uh, about that for people in this
hunt?
Yeah, so a co-op, there’s quite a few of them. I live in DC they’re very prominent in New York and some other cities, um, across the country. And I think they can be enticing for people because in my experience, at least in DC they’re usually priced lower to a condo. And part of the reason that is, it’s almost like you’re buying a, a share as opposed to buying the condo.
Sort of the four walls that I did, in my case, you’re buying a share in a co-op. And so the structure there is a little bit different. They’re usually, often, you know, there would be a board and so they might be more community orientated and so are things like that, that people enjoy. It may also make it harder to sell because they’re usually approving whoever comes in to replace that shareholder,
if you will.
Yeah, the only thing I knew about co-ops was. All the TV shows and movies that show the board is a real pain in the ass. You know? Yeah. Just you got this person on the board that you gotta deal with who’s got these weird reasons why they don’t want you to live in it, or you gotta bake them brownies to try to get them to approve you to get the condo.
I don’t know if Right.
Any
of that’s real or not. And there are still condo boards, right? Like ho Sure. Yeah. That, that damage or H hoa and, and control what all those are, that can also be equally annoying. But they’re not known as to be a potentially gatekeeper in the same way. Right. Yeah.
Uh, just a pain after you buy the property.
We talked about the income side, which is important, but let’s talk about the expense side, because to be able to afford this house, you had had student debt. A lot of our stackers have student debt. You had paid that off. How much debt and how did you get it paid off?
Yeah, so I had a little under, a little under 45,000.
I was very fortunate, um, in that I did not have any student debt from undergrad. So very privileged position there. I had family support and scholarship and other things. Um, so my debt was from grad school, but again, it was sort of like a double whammy, like a slap in the face to get a master’s degree.
Think you’re gonna be making all this money. And then I had more student debt than my starting salary. And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s that uncommon of an experience for maybe those expectations not to line up there. And I wasn’t. Very knowledgeable about how student loans worked at the time.
Didn’t really have a solid understanding of how interest works or you know, interest that may have been deferred while I was going to school. And so there’s a grace period that comes before your student debt payments are actually due. But when they were, and I used an interest calculator in finding out how much.
If those student loans would really cost me over time, I was like truly blown away. And I don’t know if this is because, you know, I, I guess it’s lucky in a sense, I wasn’t really familiar with, with how debt worked Prior to that. I’d used credit cards, but I had always paid them off on time, so, you know, in fall every month.
And so I wasn’t really familiar with how quickly that could stack up. And so using that calculator and learning that my 40, you know, let’s call it $45,000 in student debt, was going to cost me an additional $16,000 in interest was super overwhelming. And that’s when I decided that, you know, I was limited by my salary at the time.
So I did take on side gigs and was selling things on Craigslist and was doing pretty much whatever I could in addition to the salary negotiation to get my income up to make extra payments where possible.
That is fabulous. And I’m just thinking about between that, the fact that you had roommates at a time when you probably could have not had roommates.
You say that you didn’t own a car. You mentioned that in your book you kept your expenses as low as possible except for travel and holiday gifts, which you said were non-negotiables. For you, you wanted to make sure you travel ’cause that’s important to you. That stuff Kimberly is great, but I also gotta think there was an automation you had to make sure that you kind of had the blinders on to hide the money from yourself and put it in the right spot.
Tell me about that.
Yeah, so that’s, that’s something that I didn’t initially, so I can certainly speak, also speak to it being a game changer. I think part of the reason why money can be so overwhelming to people when you’re just talking about the day-to-Day management of money is because a lot of people have money in a lot of different places now, ex especially with, you know, uh, I work with one-on-one coaching clients where for those that might be taking advantage of high yield savings accounts, they’re always chasing the highest rate.
People have multiple credit cards, multiple types of debt. And so all of that can be really difficult to track. And so something that I found for me and now. And that I now speak to others about is just how powerful automating your finances, I think can be. Not just in making sure to your point, that your money’s sort of going where you want it to go and you know that you have everything covered.
But from a psychological point of view, just really reducing financial anxiety. The more you can automate, the less the responsibility’s on you to make sure you know that you made this transfer, that you paid this bill, that everything’s sort of working in a groove that you want it to. And so, so that was huge for me and.
In order to do that, developing what I call weekly spending cap in my book was really key to that because then you can sort of automate all the other pieces, your fixed expenses, any automatic bill pay transfers to high yield savings accounts or investment contributions. And then you’re really just focusing on what that last number is that that spending cap.
So automating all of that really helps with that. Well,
I love that because it gives you this last denominator, which is I can now guilt free spend this money. Like I don’t have to track every single penny. I’ve got this money that now I can be guilt free and go do live my life with
this. Right. And some people might want some element of being able to track it there, which is why when I’m working with clients, you could have a monthly spending cap.
You could have a weekly spending cap if you divided by 4.3, so at least you have something that you’re sort of monitoring. But yeah, it definitely
helps. So you separated the money from your other money for the down payment by using a high-yield savings account. You also write, and th this part’s funny that you opened a brokerage account, you, uh, made a bunch of money in the stock market.
You wouldn’t recommend that? Yes.
Not for saving for a home.
Yeah. How come by the way, I’m laughing and maybe some of our stackers don’t know why I am laughing and why this is funny. Why is that funny?
Right, and, and maybe I should preface it on timeline, but in my case, you know, I was trying to buy a home pretty soon and I’m lucky that it worked out well, especially because, you know, at, at the time I knew a lot less about personal finance than I do now, you know, years later.
And I think had the market turned, I would’ve been really screwed for that down payment. I would’ve, you know, been left with very little to work with. And so, given how the economy’s going now, I would recommend, you know, locking in a, a certificate of deposit, a cd because interest rates are expected to drop.
So I know a lot of people are using high yield savings account, which are great love, high yield savings accounts. I have them as well. But when you’re talking about something that you might be saving for, for, you know, a year, a few years, being able to lock that in with the, with the CD now, that, that’s what I would recommend instead of the investment route, unless you’re not planning to buy a home, you know?
10, 20 years, then that might be something to consider. Yeah. Then
financial markets might make sense. I like the idea of a saving for this for, for another reason too. And you talk a lot about behavior in your work and about how behavior really is a win. Well, heck, all of this stuff that we’ve talked about today is just behavior, right?
But having that money in a CD that you know that you’re gonna pay at least an interest penalty if you break. It makes people that might be think they’re bad with money, leave the money in that place and not touch
it. Absolutely. It’s, it’s similar to keeping, you know, even using a high yield savings account, sort of, you may be using a different financial institution than one that’s directly linked to your checking for the same reason, right?
Putting up not an impossible barrier, right? If you needed the money from the cd, you could still get it. To your point, you might pay, pay a fee, or who’s out on interest, but just setting up maybe a small fence for yourself to make it just a little bit more difficult to break that
habit. At what point during the home buying process did you apply for a loan?
Did you apply for the mortgage and tell me about thinking through the home loan process.
Yeah, so I definitely recommend look, looking at multiple lenders when you’re going through that process. My situation was a little bit different because I had put an earnest money deposit on my condo based on a model unit.
Before it was built, so I had actually had a little extra time because I had done that in April. Then I closed in July and there was also the inspection once the unit was actually built. So I actually had a little bit more time and a little bit more flexibility in terms that there were a few different points that I could have backed out if I wanted to, and that also gave me time to, to shop around for lenders.
So definitely something that I recommend doing. This time around, you know, same thing. Don’t just rely on, on one course or of action or you know, someone knows someone that they went through. There’s no harm in looking at a few quotes. Now you might get a hard credit check depending on where you are in the application process, but getting pre-qualified is also something that I talk about in my book as well, because you just wanna be prepared and have a solid understanding, um, of what your interest rate’s going to be.
What’s is your mortgage rate going to be? I’m sorry, your mortgage payment month to month. And so keeping all those factors in mind, I would definitely recommend seeking, you know, information from multiple sources. That doesn’t mean you need to go out and get 10, but three would be a great place to start.
You started off with this loan at this amazing, now 4% rate, but when it went down to 2.85%, you refinanced. Did you just do a complete refinance or did you try to take some time off the term of the loan? I. I
completely restarted the clock. Yeah, so 2.875, the incredible rate, you know, phenomenal. Probably never gonna see it again.
Was able to refinance at that point. It did restart. I originally had a 30 year mortgage, so it restarted the clock on that 30 years, but that worked for me and now I actually rent that condo out. So being able to, you know, cover that through rental income has been great. Also.
Yeah. Ultimately, it’s funny, when you moved outta the condo, you decided to keep it and make it a rental property.
Tell me about that process versus, you know, you probably with heck, the market’s in the DC area. I gotta imagine there’s now some nice equity in that house between 2017 and now. Tell me about the process of now using it to build wealth.
Yeah, something that I really didn’t think about when I bought it. I mean, maybe it was, I shouldn’t say that I didn’t think about it at all, but I certainly didn’t think that it would be happening in, in five years.
The reason I moved out of the condo, my boyfriend and I now husband, decided to move in together and so we both left our respective places. We both have full-time jobs, we both have side hustles as well. We needed an office, we needed a two bedroom, so we both moved out of our places and into one together.
And so in doing that, I decided to rent the other property and so now it’s an additional source of relatively passive income. I was telling you the other day that I just had to go over there to, to make a home repair, which is never fun, but it’s a learning experience and you know, ultimately makes sense for me because I am able to cover not just the mortgage, but you know, the HOA that’s increased and some, every once in a while we have a special assessment, which is, you know, when the.
Condo board decides that they either need to build up the reserves and the fund that they have to repair things in the building or paint the stairwells or whatever it’s going to be.
The Airbnb thing is interesting because we’ve seen the rules change over the years. Have you, have you seen short-term rental rules change where you are?
So I actually rent mine now. Uh, I have tenants that are on a leased basis. I have done Airbnb before, when I lived in the condo, I used to do Airbnb all the time. Oh, cool. Yeah, when I lived in it, it would essentially pay for my vacations wherever I was going. There’s even a time during covid in like the heat of the pandemic when I decided that I needed to get out of my one bedroom condo and
well, I think we all can really remember that feeling, right?
Unfortunately, I gotta get the hell outta
here. Yeah. So what I did was, and because I think commercial residential buildings were in a tough spot as well, some of them were offering like three months, six month leases, which usually is unheard of. So I left my condo, rented that out, and moved to a waterfront property for three months, which a lot of people thought I was crazy, but one, I had the funds to do it.
Through Airbnb to cover my mortgage payments. I rented, you know, furniture for the three months and it was great for my mental health. So having that flexibility was amazing, quite frankly. And I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t bought the condo and if it wasn’t for, you know, short-term rental platforms like that,
we just went over stackers.
A ton of concepts, amalgamated really, these are presented not around buying a house, but around actually getting your money together. And it’s called building wealth on a dime, finding your financial freedom and you go over Kimberly, not just buying a house, which is later in this, but really setting up a money management system.
Absolutely. I think systems, to me, again, that automation has been really helpful. Not just in reaching financial goals, but reducing financial stress. And so the book, I wanted it to be as relatable as possible because I think a lot of topics can feel intimidating or out of reach. The titles, you know, building wealth on a dime for a reason.
I think you can do a lot starting small. And so in addition to certain areas of the book that focus more on behavior and mindset, I wanted to be able to demonstrate those strategies in that system through the stories of other people. So the home buying chapters are, are about my own story. There’s also one on debt pay down, but I also introduced characters and people and their finances and their lives and their dogs’ names and things like that to try and make it, you know, something that’s a bit, a bit less dry, a lot more digestible.
Do you know
what my favorite part is, Kimberly? My favorite part is when you get very vulnerable and you’re like, yeah, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Like, you’re like, here’s what I did and I shouldn’t have done that, and here’s how it either worked out or it didn’t work out like those, I don’t know why, but those stories always resonate with me when somebody’s brave enough to tell me, yeah, IF that up.
Right, right. Listen, no one’s perfect. And you, you live, you learn. So why not share those lessons with other people?
Well, thank you for taking a chunk of the book, a little piece of it, and mentoring our stackers today, uh, and how to buy a house. I really appreciate
it. Yeah, you got it, Joe. Thanks for having me on the show.
Hi, I’m Mitchell Walker and when I’m not teaching people how to find hidden money, I’m out. Stacking
Benjamins. Big thanks to Kimberly for joining us. You know what, og? I love the idea of taking something like a home buying. Process and looking at the basics like Kimberly just did and thinking about, okay, if this works for buying a home, this also works for just putting money aside.
It works for buying a vacation property. It works for your next vacation. Just look at when you handle money well and extrapolate. It’s
almost like you just have to find what works and do that repeatedly over and over and over again. Wasn’t there a famous, uh, philosopher who said like, something like excellence is doing or something like that, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. What was the name? Arista. Aris Do something. I don’t know. I think it’s
pronounced Aristo.
Aris Total. Like totally
Aris. Total Aris. Total. Aris Total. Yes. Yes. Aristo. Anyways, somebody will find it. Yeah.
What a great teacher Kimberly is. I’m so glad she could join us. Hey, time for one stacker. Who’d better call Saul.
See hi and OG Today we are going to help a stacker with their money situation and because they’re brave, we are gonna give them some Stacky Benjamin swag as well. How do you get into that? Goodness. Head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail like Chris did right here. Hey Chris, what’s up?
Please leave your message.
Hello, Joe Doug
and og. This feels like a first world problem question, but figured it’s right up your alley. I left my job last year after 30 years and I just made my 2023 Roth IRA contribution. As of now, I have no plans for doing any paid work this year, but, and as I understand the IRS rules, this would mean I would not be able to make a 2024 IRA Roth IRA contribution next January.
Since passive income like rental, dividend, capital gains, et cetera, do not count as income in regard to making a Roth IRA contribution.
Is this
correct? I would love to be wrong on this, uh, since I want to make one next year, but not enough to want to actually get a job appreci feedback and enjoy the show.
Thanks for that. It’s a first world problem when you’re like, uh, not sure if it’s worth getting a job for that, but nothing OG likes better than first world problems like, um. Where to park the Bentley. What?
What was incorrect in that whole thing was the pronunciation of Ira. Yes. Uh, IRA. Yes. Come on. It’s not three times.
It’s not a person. I’m like, now he’s just trying to get on our nerves.
Yeah. It’s an abbreviation. It’s not, we don’t have to sound out all of our abbreviations. We just use the letters. It’s okay.
Oh, he can call it what he wants. He can call it an individual retirement account if you’d
like. That would be acceptable.
You know, so that was the only wrong thing in his statement, honestly. Hey, Chris. Uh,
sorry about, uh, triggering og, right? Yes. I got the shakes now. How about
leave? Leave the ostracizing the callers to me and you just answer the question, og Answer the
question clown.
Do your magic clown boy
make me a balloon.
Uh, come on, finance. Boy, dance monkey. The, in order to contribute to a retirement account, you have to have earned income. So this is true, whether it’s a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA or a workplace f or a. Or a whatever else a saw are. All those other places you can put money or a ssep. That one I would accept, honestly, the exception
that proves the rule.
Just let’s move on, come
on. Uh, either get a job, make seven grand or whatever, and, uh, dump it in your Roth or not so you can contribute. And this, this applies to also kids too. This is kind of a, the opposite effect of this. If you have a child who’s working, they’re 15, they’re working at McDonald’s, 16, 17, whatever you can contribute at, they can contribute up to their earned income into a retirement account, a Roth IRA for example.
And, um, the profound. Nature of how much money that turns into if you’re able to set aside money for your kid or your kid’s able to set aside money for themselves early on is so amazing in terms of the compounding na nature of that, that you wouldn’t have to worry about it when you’re, you know, 30 years retired and wondering if you should stuff another contribution in by that time, because you would’ve put so much money in, it would’ve grown so much.
So you have to have earned income. You can only contribute the amount of money up to your earned income or the contribution limit, whichever, uh, you get to first. So if you make 4,000 bucks this year, you’re a high school junior and you make four grand, you can put four grand in. If you’re a retiree who also makes four grand, you can put four grand in.
If you’re a worker bee and you make 150 k, you can put seven in. So those are the rules. Sorry, but it sounds like you’re okay. It sounds like you’re
okay. Thanks to the question, Chris, and uh, I apologize for my co-hosts
behavior. I think his name would be Tris. Isn’t that how you would say that? ’cause we sound everything out now.
Tris Tri.
Oh man. I’m gonna make sure that, uh, Chris, the code goes out immediately to you so that you can, uh, wash this all down with a very nice Stacking Benjamins. So soft greatest Money show. I love T-shirt, Doug 2024.
It’s super,
super soft. Hey, if you’re not here to sound out the letters, IRA, you are here because you really need better financial help in your quarter.
You know, financial help that will help you and maybe razz you a little at the same time. Maybe, maybe a little,
there’s a little bit of that. Maybe make you feel sorry for calling in. Maybe got a free T-shirt on the deal. og.
og. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was pretty easy. I don’t think that was difficult.
OG and his team are taking clients, so the first step is to get on their calendar. Schedule a meeting. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG gets you there. Our last segment of the day, we call the back porch. This is where we celebrate all of our stackers in the community. And, uh, today, Doug, what do we got?
Well,
first thing, uh, if you’re listening to us right now, make sure you also pick up your device and tune into, uh, Joe’s Instagram Live with Amy Minkley. That’s, ooh, that’s gonna be pretty sweet. She’s so amazing. Joe, when is that? That’s coming up on Thursday,
is that right? Yeah. What Amy and I are gonna do, we’re talking extensively about my trip to Bali because that’s where Amy lives, so it’ll be a, uh, Bali extraordinaire experience.
We can talk about the flights. We can talk about the beauty. We can talk about the food Doug. What, what would you like to talk about about Bali?
The food. Absolutely. The food. That’s all. I mean, how would, why else
do you travel? Yeah. What would you say og second that Yeah,
absolutely. Food for sure.
Yeah.
Deliciousness. But Amy Minkley, the Five Freedom Retreat. We just had, Amy on the Five Freedom Retreat, guys sold out this year in two and a half hours. Wow. She opened it up. It was Doug. Congratulations to Amy, but she’s, you’ll, you’ll hear why. If you missed our episode with Amy, uh, you can go back and listen to that.
That was episode 1465. Or just hang out with us tomorrow. The cool thing about hanging out with on Instagram is you can ask all your own questions. Uh, what else we got going on? Doug.
I wanna talk about a couple of reviews, uh, that we’ve gotten recently. We can never get enough. Thank you. Yeah. Can never get enough reviews.
Appreciate those of you who have done that. We got a review saying, best Money Show on Earth. Listen to this show at your own risk. I started reaching all of my financial goals after listening to Stacking Benjamins, but really Joe and og keep it simple and keep it real. You know who that’s from? Bill Clinton.
Nice.
Does it really say Bill
Clinton? Well, the guy, I mean, look, his handle is Willie C, but I mean, who else could that be?
Nice. Mr. President, thank you
for listening. Nice try, Mr.
President. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. Pretty sure the
CIA has a better code name for
you. It’s pretty thin disguise. Yeah,
pretty thin disguise. And here’s another one, uh, that I really like. Stacking Benjamins is my favorite podcast. I love the mix and humor of, excuse me, of humor and education that Joe Doug and the guest provide.
If you were into finance and
alright, then,
I don’t know, I don’t know what you’re laughing about. If you were into finance and fire, this is the show for you. That’s from Scott. Scott. Scott knows where it’s at.
Scott May, may have, uh, nice knowing you, Scott. You
know, that’s cool. Thanks. Thanks for the review, Scott.
I have been negligent on Spotify lately with the polls.
I will be getting back to the polls on Spotify, I promise everyone great. Joe’s getting on the
polls again. Everybody,
his mom’s so proud this, this
show’s gotta make money one way or another. She’s just doing it
for the core workout. Exactly.
Those legs aren’t gonna shake themselves. So Spotify fans, you’ll see us over there. Thanks to everybody who left it, by the way, for both of those reviews, Doug or anybody who leaves this a review and wants to email it to me, I, I got these books and if you’ve left one and I didn’t send you, I think I’ve sent them to everybody who left us a review.
But if for some reason wanna slip through the cracks, just uh, shoot me a quick email, Joe at stacky Benjamins dot com. And man, I’ve, I would love to get, uh, about 20 books off of the basement floor here. I. Definitely help me, uh, clean up the basement with all these books on the floor. Uh, stacky Benjamins dot com, Joe, off the pole.
That should be our next, our next shirt. It’s like a GoFundMe. I like it. It’s a good idea. We don’t want Joe up there anymore. Uh, Joe at stack Benjamins dot com send those to me. Uh uh, just take a screenshot and we’re good to go. Or just tell me that you did it. Alright, that is it for today, except for one thing.
Doug, what’s on our to-do list today? Well,
Joe, here’s what’s on our to-do list today. First, take some advice from Kimberly Hamilton While buying a house is a personal choice, you still need to follow some great financial strategies. Hide money from yourself to accumulate a down payment spend way less than you earn to accumulate cash and hold onto those non-negotiables.
Those will make the house a home, whether you Airbnb it like Kimberly did, or have it all to yourself. Second, remember when we had a cash cushion because we worried about the future and we paid down debt. If we could get those days back minus all the pandemic stuff, we’d be a lot better off. So what’s the biggest to do?
Go ahead and dig a hole in the northwest corner of my yard, 30 paces from the door because there ain’t nothing there. And now I got a big problem.
Thanks to Kimberly Hamilton for joining us today. You can find out more about her book, building Wealth on a Dime. Wherever books are sold. Wanna help the show, use our link in the show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. It won’t cost you more, and we receive a small amount from Amazon for referring you.
The show is the Property of SP podcasts, LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Our producer is Karen Rein. This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast With help from me, Joe Kate Youngen, Karen Rein, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast. Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are. Of course you do, but you’ll never know if you don’t. Check out our YouTube version of the show Engineered by Tina Eichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast.
Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude Stacey Doe, and Julia Garib. Are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.
So say hello. When you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement. For more interactive fun, join us on Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday for our Instagram lives. Kate Yakin and Joe Host those weekly. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Okay.
I’ve sat here trying to think of
something pleasant to say after that, and I can’t.
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