Entrepreneur and extreme athlete Kyle Maynard has lived a life of high achievement, so it came a shock, when a planned business venture stumbled, and he had to let 5 employees go and accept the limitations of his vision. 

In Kyle’s money story you will learn:

-How Kyle took a risk on a new venture that did not go as well as projected

-The tough decisions that he had to make to protect his assets

-Kyle's ability to come to terms with his missteps, and decision to cut his losses

-How he chose to pivot and re-think his venture

-The importance of protecting his own financial security while expanding his business

-What Kyle learned from a mentor about "the double bottom line”

-How he integrates his “no excuses” philosophy into his business ventures even when they are not living up to his expectations

In Kyle’s money lesson you will learn

-How to know when to cut your losses

-How to avoid making decisions in fear of what others will think

-Specific ways to evaluate whether or not to put more money into an investment or business ventures

In Kyle's every day money tip you will learn:

-How to prioritize the money you spend on fitness and health

-Whether supplements are worth the money

-How to get in shape when you have a low or no budget

-Why high quality food is better than supplements and shakes etc

-His take on organic foods

-If you need a $10,000 treadmill

-What Kyle was eating  (or not eating!) the day we taped the interview

In My Take you will learn:

-The importance of HOW you fail- because at some point we all do

-Why many entrepreneurs, like Kyle, and Perez Hilton do not invest all their own money in their businesses, in order to protect their assets and spread the risk.

-My tip on how to save money and eat healthier when buying fresh fruit

Episode Links

Kyle’s webpage: http://kyle-maynard.com/

Follow Kyle!

Instagram @kylemaynard

Facebook Kyle Maynard

Get a signed copy of Kyle’s book “No Excuses” !

Listen to the Perez Hilton episode where he talks about not risking your own capital that I reference in this episode! 

When should you pay up for organic fruit?

What not to buy organic- Insider

The Truth about organic produce and pesticides- The Washington Post

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Transcription

Kyle Maynard:
Just because you've put in a certain amount of money does not justify you continuing to go and put in more in the future for something that's not working so well, and so I did go in and let five of the people go on short notice.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebel, author of "How to be a financial grownup". But you know what? Being a grown-up is really hard, especially when it comes to money, but it's okay. We're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a Financial Grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, Financial Grownup friends. So losing a job is hard, but being the one to make those decisions and cause those job losses as a business owner is brutal. As you'll hear from the very raw sharing of an experience that is all too common for entrepreneurs, but rarely talked about so candidly, as it is by my guest, Kyle Maynard.

Bobbi Rebell:
I met him a little more than a year ago at a conference in San Francisco, and immediately needed to know more about this incredible man. I can't begin to tell you how much it means to me that I finally was able to get him on the podcast for everyone.

Bobbi Rebell:
So for those of you who don't know about Kyle Maynard. Kyle is an entrepreneur. He's a speaker. He's an author of the bestseller, "No excuses". Kyle is also an award-winning extreme athlete. He was the first man to bear crawl the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro. Now, why was he bear crawling? Because Kyle was born with a rare condition known as congenital amputation. It left him with arms that end at the elbows, and legs that end at his knees. So naturally in addition to climbing massive mountains, Kyle owns a gym, is a champion wrestler, teaches crossfit, and is a world record setting weightlifter.

Bobbi Rebell:
As you guys know, I try to keep the podcast short, so we're just going to cut off the bio there, but trust me, look him up. His accomplishments are endless. I'm so excited about this interview guys. Here is Kyle Maynard.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, Kyle Maynard. You're a Financial Grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Kyle Maynard:
Hey, thank you so much Bobbi. Appreciate you having me. I don't know about this whole grownup business, but I'll go with it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh, you're definitely a grownup. I've followed your adventures. So we met, we met over a year ago at a conference out in San Francisco where I got to interview you for the conference and then you were off. You've been traveling. I think you went to something like 14 countries since then, and now you've landed long enough to do this interview in San Diego where you are living a nomadic and minimalist lifestyle.

Kyle Maynard:
Yeah, that's pretty accurate. You may have some ex-girlfriends that would disagree on the grownup part, but you know.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh no. We're just doing money. We're just going to talk about money and you're a businessman. Look, you have many accomplishments, and you were a bestselling author at a very young age. You were able to make some money early on, enough to be able to invest in a home. You invested in mutual funds that was up and down. You also founded a very successful gym and that venture has done well.

Bobbi Rebell:
But now for your money story, we're going to talk about what's been going on more recently. And first of all I just want to thank you in advance, because this was not the original story that you were going to share, but you have agreed to share it I believe here for the first time, so candidly. And you had to make some very tough decisions after something, a new venture hadn't gone as well as expected. And I think it's something a lot of people will relate to and get a lot out of this story. So go for it. Kyle.

Kyle Maynard:
So I guess to start with my current career has been, as you know, traveling around giving speeches, corporate events, and you know a variety of other types of events. Like you in sort of the motivations for starting this podcast, very similar motivations. I've been wanting to go and try to find a way to go and build a business and monetize things outside of just the constant travel, and feel like there is a place to be able to go and reach people in the digital world, you know.

Kyle Maynard:
I also do have access to some amazing human beings, and really wanted to be able to harness that and be able to help other people realize more of their potential in their lives and whatever that would mean for them.

Kyle Maynard:
And I made some really aggressive hires very quickly, so I'd hired five near full time people to kind of help build out the vision for what I had set out to do with this new program. And things got pretty dramatically behind schedule and I ultimately realized the amount that was going to go and take to be able to go and get the ship righted if it worked at all, potentially might eat away at the vast majority of the savings that I'd made over the last decade or more.

Kyle Maynard:
And I had to make a very tough decision to be able to analyze the whole idea of the sunk cost fallacy. It's probably one of my favorite financial concepts. But the idea that just because you've put in a certain amount of money does not justify you continuing to go and put in more in the future for something that's not working so well.

Kyle Maynard:
And so I did go and let five of the people go on short notice quickly and ended up, give them a month to figure out what they were going to go and do next, as I felt like that was something that needed to happen. The promises and the excitement that was there and was made, I just wanted to go and do right by them, but at the same time did not want to eat away at the savings that I'd built up entirely for something that wasn't going so great.

Bobbi Rebell:
That's hard. Can you tell us more about what your vision, what kind of venture it was, and what did not happen or did happen that was not aligned with your original vision?

Kyle Maynard:
One of my financial mentors taught me this. He's the vice chairman of AOL, and he said that everything that he goes and gets into, you know, has this double bottom line aspect of purpose and profitability. That theme and that concept is something that I wanted to go and teach people that purpose and profitability. Profitability not just in their business lives, but like in every aspect of their lives.

Kyle Maynard:
And through some of my best friends that are former Navy seals, professional athletes, people that have achieved great things, wanted to be able and go and pull together from their wisdom to be able to create a program to ultimately inspire other people to go and take on these dreams, these visions.

Kyle Maynard:
And it's not dissimilar from, you know, people who have done these types of things before. You know, like the Tony Robbins style events and things like that. We wanted to go and approach it from a different angle, which is still going to happen I know down the road at some point, so I'm not going to go into the details, the specifics of what makes that so different.

Kyle Maynard:
But at the same time holding true to that message, the achievement of that no excuses mentality, which is kind of, that's the core of my messaging is like finding a way. That could be really detrimental when we try to enforce things that are not happening.

Kyle Maynard:
Things were way behind on this project and in order to like kind of pull together and unravel it, like ultimately to realize that by forcing that to happen in the nature of this project, I was going to lose the essence of what it was too, and kind of create something that was just generic that was too similar to what other people had already done too. So it was even still protecting the project at the risk of looking like an idiot. And it's okay.

Bobbi Rebell:
And it's a very grownup decision because you're also number one, protecting your financial assets that you've built up over a decade and that's something very real. But Perez Hilton, of of all people said, when you're building a business, don't always risk all your money. It's okay to take other people's money. You have to protect your own money too, and that's okay.

Kyle Maynard:
Totally. Really, I think that what it comes down to is the idea of fear and ego and looking bad and all of those things should not keep us from making the decisions that we know we need to make. So many of us go through life attached to the image of who we think that we are.

Kyle Maynard:
If we both throw in $50,000 into a business and I'm running the business, I come to you and I say, "Hey, we need to go and put in another $25,000 each". If you justify that in your head based off of the logic that you've already put in 50, it's a faulty logic.

Kyle Maynard:
The right way to make that decision would be as if I've made no investment whatsoever in that, like, would I make that $25,000 investment today. And if you answered yes, then do it and if not, then it's time to walk away from it. And ultimately what I had to go and realize is, if I were to go and make that investment for that payroll and kind of the extended runway and all that stuff, like I wouldn't make that investment today. So then ultimately I've got to make a hard choice now.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what is the lesson, the takeaway for our listeners from your experience?

Kyle Maynard:
I would say it's to look at whatever the situation, whether it's a financial thing, but it could be like I said, relationship thing, health thing, whatever. Look at where things are like out of order, and frankly are we clinging to something or some idea? Because you know, we think that we've already invested so much in it, like it's a dumb idea. Or like you continue on down that path, you know, whether it's ... I talk to my sisters about that all the time and like, you know, relationships too, it's this exact same way, you know. It's like you don't date somebody just because you dated them for two years. That's not the right way to go about that decision.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right. But people do, they feel they've invested in the person, the relationship. I should stick in and that is definitely not good to do.

Bobbi Rebell:
Let me ask you how. So so you are in the fitness business and that's your everyday money tip is how to save money. What to prioritize? What's worth spending money on when you're trying to get in shape? Because you climbed mountains, Kyle, like it's pretty insane what goes on.

Kyle Maynard:
You mentioned this, but I'd owned a gym for a long time too, and actually my first company right out of the gate was a supplement company and learned a tremendous amount about that and just the whole industry. And I think a ton of stuff that we spend money on in health and fitness goes unused and wasted. The biggest thing that you can do I think in the health and fitness journey is to drastically simplify it and spend time actually doing stuff. You know, spend time on, like if you're going to spend money, spend it on getting high quality food, instead of a ton of supplements and shakes and all of that stuff. Spend it on getting real foods, decent quality stuff. If you can eat organic, great. If not, then you can still get high quality food too that's not organic, that maybe it's not going to be as ideal, but like it's going to be pretty good.

Kyle Maynard:
It's going to get you a long ways and you don't need to go in and buy a ton of crazy fitness contraptions like you can make do with simple stuff. Like everyone has access to the gym of the outdoors like and if it's super cold or super hot where you're at, then you have your bedroom, you have a space at some point. You have your body. You have you know so many ways to go and move that don't require expensive $10,000 treadmills.

Kyle Maynard:
Is it an excuse? When it comes down to it, it actually is avoidant of the real issue at hand, which is putting in work and eating high quality food.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right. So what are you eating for dinner tonight, Kyle?

Kyle Maynard:
Today, I have yet to eat anything yet. I think I'm going to go on a fasting day, and then thrown in ...

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait a second, guys. Just so you know, we're taping this. It's after noon in San Diego where Kyle is. You haven't eaten till noon. Come on.

Kyle Maynard:
Most days I don't.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're one of those morning faster people.

Kyle Maynard:
Intermittent fasting. Yeah, and also like I'll throw in a periodic like two, three, five day fast every now and then. So ...

Bobbi Rebell:
Cool. That's also not, not the purpose of it.

Kyle Maynard:
Saves money.

Bobbi Rebell:
Save some money I guess. Anyway, so everyone. So Kyle has a bunch of projects going on. but they're top secret. So Kyle's not going to tell us. So I'm just going to have Kyle tell everyone where you can find out about all of his top secret next chapter of his business venture and life adventures. Go for it, Kyle.

Kyle Maynard:
All right. You can hit me up on Instagram is probably the place that I'm a more active, Instagram and Facebook, but Instagram's like pretty much where it's at. Like I've also taken the time to be able to spend the next few months to be able to go at a little slower pace and enjoy and then gear up for some exciting stuff in the fall and the winter.

Bobbi Rebell:
And your handle is Kyle Maynard, is it Kyle Maynard, right?

Kyle Maynard:
It's just KyleMaynard.com.

Bobbi Rebell:
Kylemayard.com. Cool. All right, everyone. Check him out. Thank you Kyle.

Kyle Maynard:
Awesome. Thank you Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey friends. So if there is anyone whose adventures you really need to be following on Instagram, it is Kyle's. This was a serious interview, but he's a really fun guy to watch, so definitely follow him.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, let's get down to my take. Financial Grownup tip number one. Fail, but with grace and gratitude. I did not hear one bit of pity from Kyle, and I know he really put his all into this venture, so thankfully he did not put it in all his money. There was no finger pointing. He did not blame anyone. He kept his head up.

Bobbi Rebell:
This was not the story we had planned to share. Kyle mentioned it casually as we were setting up. We planned to share something else, so it is possible, even likely, that you guys are the first ones hearing this, and that's pretty brave for Kyle because Kyle's a pretty well known guy who is known for winning, and as he says, no excuses.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two. Kyle reminds us that we can get in shape at no cost, and that rather than supplements, we can just eat good quality food. My tip buy less precut fruit to save money. So just this week, I realized my family bought a $9 container of cut up organic cantaloupe, which by the way had already gone bad that day so it wasn't even fresh and I had to return it, but $9. Oh my gosh. So first of all, easy way to save money on healthy fruits and vegetables. Cut them up yourself at home.

Bobbi Rebell:
Second, be aware of where to pay up for organic. In general, if it has a skin or an outer layer that you're not eating in general, you don't need to pay up for organic. I'll leave some links with more info in the show notes. And by the way the show notes can always be found by going to bobbirebell.com/financialgrownuppodcast and scrolling down to the episode. You can also type in bobbirebell.com/podcast and the guest's name. So in this case it would be bobbirebell.com/podcast/kylemaynard.

Bobbi Rebell:
Friends, big thank you. The show is growing. More of you are subscribing, so thank you again. Please tell your friends and all that good stuff. Social media is great, DME. Be in touch on Instagram bobbirebell1, and on Twitter @bobbirebell.

Bobbi Rebell:
And thanks to the great Kyle Maynard for helping us all get one step closer to being Financial Grownups.

Speaker 1:
Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK Media production.

 

The Afford Anything podcast’s Paula Pant wanted to travel the world- but on her own financial terms. The Vegas-based real estate entrepreneur gamified her savings strategy to score enough money to live her DIY travel dreams. 

 

In Paula’s money story you will learn:

-How Paula saved money to travel on a $21,000 salary

-Paula’s strategies to travel on a budget- even when it is not budget travel

-Her side hustles that helped boost her incomes

-The behavioral games she would play to incentivize herself for saving money

-Paula’s strategy to avoid having to delay gratification

-Her specific ‘games’ to make saving fun and rewarding

-Her strategy to travel to places where the cost of living is lower to stick to a $1,000 a month budget. 

In Paula’s lesson you will learn

-How to have a more authentic experience when you travel.

-How to balance saving money with your travel interests

In Paula’s money tip you will learn:

-How to “gamify” saving money

-How to avoid feeling deprived when saving money

-the importance maxing out every retirement account

-How to buy individual stocks without a fee

-How to divert money from your bank account into savings automatically

-How to use Acorns to round up savings when you buy things. 

In my take you will learn:

-Specific resources to "gamify" your finances

-Specific resources to improve your travel experience

EPISODE LINKS

Robinhood

Acorns

Digit

SmartyPig

Qapital

The Points Guy

Scott’s Cheap Flights

Hotel Tonight

Paula’s podcast Afford Anything

Paula’s website Afford Anything

Follow Paula!

Twitter @affordanything

Instagram @paulapant

Facebook Afford Anything

The Afford Anything podcast’s Paula Pant wanted to travel the world- but on her own financial terms. The Vegas-based real estate entrepreneur gamified her savings strategy to score enough money to live her DIY travel dreams. In this Financial Grownup podcast episode you'll learn strategies to travel on a budget and how you can balance saving money with your travel interests. #Travel #TravelTips

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Transcription

Paula Pant:
Never delay gratification. I hate the concept of delayed gratification, because if you get into this mindset of, "Oh, my life is going to suck now so that it can be better later," well, later is just going to be disappointing.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, Certified Financial Planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How To Be a Financial Grownup. And you know what? Being a grownup is really hard, especially when it comes to money. But it's okay, we're going to get there together. I'm going to bring you one money story from a financial grownup, one lesson, and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey friends, let's talk about travel and seeing the world. Authentic travel within a budget, which is not the same as budget travel. One of the top reasons people want to have financial resources is to travel, and that is something a young Paula Pant, the force behind the Afford Anything website and podcast, wanted to do.

Bobbi Rebell:
Rather than do it through her school, she decided to explore the world on her own terms and her own budget. Her plan, make it a game. Here is Paula Pant. Paula Pant, you are a financial grownup. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast.

Paula Pant:
I am excited to be here, and I don't think I've ever been called a grownup before.

Bobbi Rebell:
You are very much a grownup. Oh my gosh, you have a website and a podcast called Afford Anything, which is sort of everyone's financial fantasy, because we all wish we could afford anything. But as you say, not necessarily all at the same time, right?

Paula Pant:
Exactly. You can afford anything, but not everything.

Bobbi Rebell:
That's the best tagline, I love it. All right, so you brought with you a story that has to do with your love of travel, which makes total sense to me, because I love following your Instagram and all of your fantastic photos of you on all of your various adventures, but you didn't always have the money to fund those adventures.

Paula Pant:
That is totally true. Travel has always been a passion of mine. When I was in college, I really wanted to study abroad, but those programs were prohibitively expensive, like 15 to 20 grand for a single semester. I thought about it and I realized, "I don't really want to study, I just want to go abroad."

Paula Pant:
I realized that if I graduated, I worked, I saved up some money, and then I just went off on my own, if I DIY'd it, so to speak, I could do it for like a much cheaper price tag.

Bobbi Rebell:
Without the university as a middleman, basically.

Paula Pant:
Exactly. So that's exactly what I did. I graduated, I started working. Like you, I was a journalist. I became an entry level newspaper reporter at a very small paper.

Bobbi Rebell:
Where?

Paula Pant:
In Boulder, Colorado. The paper was called the Colorado Daily. It was owned by E.W. Scripps, so it was a part of the Scripps family, but it was the smallest paper, I think, in the Scripps family, and we had a circulation of 40,000. My salary, my starting salary, was $21,000 and this was in 2005.

Bobbi Rebell:
Ouch.

Paula Pant:
So adjusted for inflation, that's like still pretty close to 21,000. I think I did the inflation adjustment, and that's $26,000 per year in today's dollars.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah, we actually have not had that much inflation is the truth of it.

Paula Pant:
Yeah, exactly. Between 2005 and now-

Bobbi Rebell:
The last few years, we really didn't. Thank you, Fed. That's changing, but anyway.

Paula Pant:
So yeah, so I made a starting salary of 21,000 in 2005, and then in 2008, which was when I quit that job, I was earning 31,000 at the time, so that was the highest amount that I made during that three year period, and yet during those three years, I, because I was so interested in traveling, I was saving money as much as I could. In order to do that, I did a couple of things. Number one, was I had a side hustle, and I saved all of the money that came in from that side hustle.

Bobbi Rebell:
What was the side hustle?

Paula Pant:
Freelance writing. I freelance wrote for both websites and magazines.

Bobbi Rebell:
And they allowed you to do that? That's nice.

Paula Pant:
Oh yeah, yeah. There was no restriction.

Bobbi Rebell:
Nice.

Paula Pant:
My paper had no restriction against me taking on any outside work. I think they probably knew that we all had to.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah, I guess they got away with paying you so little because they knew that.

Paula Pant:
Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
So anyway, so okay. So you saved a lot from the side hustle, but still. What else did you do?

Paula Pant:
Because so much of finance is behavioral, so much of it is psychological, I would find ways to spend just a little bit less than I otherwise would. For example, I would go to the grocery store and I'd walk around the store, and I'd fill the cart with whatever was on my list, and then at that last moment before going to the checkout aisle, I would take a look at my cart, and I would find two or three things to put back.

Paula Pant:
Orange juice, for example, you know? Because we don't need, quote unquote, "need," orange juice. You can have water and fresh fruit. Or like potato chips, or Oreo cookies, or whatever. I would pick a couple of things, I'd put them back, and then I would figure out how much money I had shaved off my grocery bill by virtue of doing so, and I would literally pull that money out of my wallet and stick it into an envelope that I kept in the glove compartment of my car.

Bobbi Rebell:
Brilliant, I love it.

Paula Pant:
Yeah, so just little things like that forced me to save money, and it kind of turned it into a game a little bit. If you think about a big goal like saving $25,000, that can seem daunting. But if you think about, "All right, I'm at the grocery store. How can I shave 10 bucks off of this trip?" and you do that consistently over time, A, it's fun, because it's a little bit of a game. It's a bit of almost like a detective ... not a detective, sleuth thing, that's not exactly the right analogy, but you know what I mean. It's like-

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah.

Paula Pant:
Yeah, it's a kind of challenge.

Bobbi Rebell:
How much did you save in those years, if you have kind of an estimate of how much you saved doing those kinds of things, and give us some travel highlights, where you went.

Paula Pant:
In total during those three years, I saved $25,000.

Bobbi Rebell:
On a salary of 31,000 at most.

Paula Pant:
Exactly. And again, I'll emphasize that I was freelancing during the evenings and weekends, and everything that I made from freelancing after taxes went into my travel savings, so that was where the bulk of those savings came from.

Bobbi Rebell:
And where did you travel?

Paula Pant:
I flew at first to Egypt, and I spent six weeks in Egypt. From there to Israel, and then from there I went to Southeast Asia where the dollar exchange rate really worked in my favor. Hanging out in places like Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, places that just have a much lower cost of living, and where the U.S. dollar goes a lot further. That was a big part of how I was able to travel.

Paula Pant:
During that time, I lived on a budget of $1,000 a month, which again, if you're traveling slowly, like if you're not moving around very often, so you're saving money on transit costs, and you're eating local food, you're not going to restaurants, like you're eating street cart food, or things like that, and you're not drinking much alcohol, if any, that's how you can really make your money stretch quite a ways.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is the lesson for our listeners? I mean, obviously we want to be traveling kind of like locals, I guess, is live like locals, don't just stick to the resorts and the resort food, and the hotels and all that stuff, right?

Paula Pant:
Yeah, exactly. Have a more authentic experience. If you're going to go to all of the trouble of going all the way out to Myanmar, then why would you stay at a four star hotel, if instead you could have a very authentic conversation with somebody there who has just a roadside, street side little ... I can't even call it a café, that's too fancy of a word. Just a little tin ... you know, a couple of pieces of corrugated tin under which they have a little stove through which they can cook you some food.

Paula Pant:
It's a much more real experience. It's just much more authentic, and the fact that it saves money is I think, also a bonus. But don't do everything for the sake of saving money, do it because it gives you an authentic experience.

Bobbi Rebell:
Give us a money tip, something that people can put to work right away. Maybe let's stick to the gamification theme, because that's fun. I like playing money games, because you don't even feel bad when you're saving money. It actually makes you feel good, like you're winning.

Paula Pant:
Exactly. A big part of my philosophy is never delay gratification. I hate the concept of delayed gratification, because if you get into this mindset of, "Oh, my life is going to suck now so that it can be better later," well, later is just going to be disappointing.

Paula Pant:
I'm a big fan of when you're saving money, gamify it, have fun with it. When I tell the story of going to a grocery store, and then right before checkout putting the orange juice back, that was not an act of deprivation, that was a fun challenge, like it was a game that allowed me to save. You could think of it as like scoring points on the leaderboard.

Paula Pant:
I continue to do the same thing today. I want to put as much money into investments today as I possibly can. My core investing strategy is of course, max out every retirement account that I'm eligible to contribute to. Those are like my core strategies, and through those, I put money in an index funds. On top of that, I have this app, it's called Robinhood, that allows you to buy individual stocks fee free.

Paula Pant:
Through Robinhood, I will put extra money into individual stock picking. Now, this is not my core investment strategy whatsoever. This is just extra money. It's money I otherwise would have spent on beer and shoes that instead, I kind of think of making it an in-app purchase in a game. I'm playing this game, and if my budget to play this game is $100 a month, that's the cost of like maybe a fun night out.

Paula Pant:
So for me, instead of having that quote unquote, "Fun night out on the town," I put that money into a game that I'm playing on my phone, and I'm buying some individual stocks that I think are kind of fun. Well, that's a way to put more money into investments than I otherwise would. So that's my money tip, is gamify it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Are there other apps that you like to incorporate that are also kind of on the game theme?

Paula Pant:
Sure, yeah. There's an app called Digit, and that's more of an automated system, so you link it up to your bank account, and it will divert really small sums of money, like three bucks here, four bucks there, into a separate account that then accumulates into a pretty substantial amount of savings over time. That's kind of a fun little automated, gamey sort of way to save more, to hide some savings from yourself.

Paula Pant:
There's another one called Acorns that rounds up every purchase that you make, so if you buy something for $7.36, it will round that up to eight bucks, and put the change into a separate account. It's like another way to gamify it a little bit. Any way that you can take care of the margins in a way that's fun, it's a way to make compounding work in your favor.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh, great. Paula Pant, you are so much fun. Where can people find out more about you, and follow you, and of course, hear more about your podcast Afford Anything?

Paula Pant:
Sure, well as you mentioned, the podcast is called Afford Anything, and you can find it wherever finer podcasts are sold. So yeah, just head to your favorite podcast player, whether it's Apple, or Overcast, or Stitcher, and just search for the Afford Anything podcast. Then you can also find me on the web at affordanything.com.

Bobbi Rebell:
And your social media handles?

Paula Pant:
Oh, on Twitter I am @AffordAnything. On Facebook I am Afford Anything, and on Instagram I've broken the pattern. Instagram I'm @PaulaPant, so that's P-A-U-L-A P-A-N-T.

Bobbi Rebell:
Putting yourself out there, Paula Pant. Thank you so much. You're so wonderful, and thank you for coming on.

Paula Pant:
Oh, thank you for having me.

Bobbi Rebell:
What would you take out of your grocery cart to save a little money? I know I have a bad habit of throwing extra things into the cart that I was not originally planning on buying, except unlike Paula, I usually don't take them out.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, let's do Financial Grownup tip number one, listen to Paula. Gamification of good money habits works. Money is psychological, and little wins can inspire us to keep going when we get that positive reinforcement. You can go totally retro and just put your spare change in a jar and watch it add up, or you can use apps like Paula mentioned, including Acorns, Digit, and Robinhood.

Bobbi Rebell:
Other names to help you save and feel like you're playing a game and reward good money habits include Qapital, that's with a Q, Qapital. You get rewarded for things like working out. SmartyPig, which helps you set up little piggy banks for different things. By the way, just so you guys know, I have no financial affiliation at this time with any of those names, and I will always let you know if I do.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two, be strategic with your travel, and do what's right for you. I am not a big fan of street food the way that Paula is, and I don't want everyone to feel like they have to travel quite that lean, but if you do want to go the higher end route, put the time in to looking into what the right resources are before you put your money in.

Bobbi Rebell:
I love the Points Guy blog, for example. There are great travel deals, and ideas, and even things at the higher end to help you save money. Another website for deals is Scott's Cheap Flights. If you are willing to wait close to your trip, or in some cases, and I've done this, when you're already on your trip, I've had some great experiences with the app Hotel Tonight. I also think there is great value in literally asking friends, and neighbors, and even virtual friends in Facebook groups that have something in common with you, for their recommendations. Happy travels.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Financial Grownup. I truly appreciate everyone who has subscribed, rated, reviewed the podcast and all that good stuff, and thank you in advance to any of you who will now take the time to review it on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, as it is now known.

Bobbi Rebell:
I want to hear from you guys. Follow me on social media @BobbiRebell on Twitter, BobbiRebell1 on Instagram. Leave me comments as well. Go to my website, sign up for my newsletter, so I can keep you posted on everything going on with the show. Paula's story has inspired me to start traveling more, so maybe send me some suggestions.

Bobbi Rebell:
Where should I go? Not just for business. If she's inspired you, let me know that as well. Where are you guys traveling? I hope you got some great takeaways from Paula. I certainly did, as you heard, and that we all got one step closer to being financial grownups. Financial Grownup with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stewart, and is a BRK Media production.