Big cities have a lot to offer- but can be expensive. Co-host Grant Sabatier, creator of Millennnial Money and author of the new book “Financial Freedom. A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need” recently moved to New York City despite the costs. He shares his three biggest tips to making it work for your financial grownup money goals, and still live life to the fullest.

Here are 3 tips for expensive city living

• How you can plan for the big fixed expenses

• Why you should balance the convenience of prepped vs non-prepped items

• The importance of getting out of the city

Episode Links:

• Blinkist - The app I’m loving right now. Please use our link to support the show and get a free trial.

• Grant's book - Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need

• Check out the book trailer here

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Guest co-host and shopping expert Trae Bodge joins Bobbi with her three rules that practically guarantee you will avoid amateur spending mistakes this holiday season.

In Jerry’s money story you will learn:

-How Jerry learned the hard way that looking like you make money doesn't mean you do

-Three ways to deal with difficult people in the work places

-The benefits of having a career mentor

-Why Jerry sold all of his cars and his motorcycles and what it did for his budget

In Jerry’s money lesson you will learn:

-The simplest way to figure out financial assets and liabilities

-Jerry's two tips for figuring out where in the budget to cut down on spending

In Jerry’s everyday money tip you will learn:

-Where to buy luxury brands like Nike and Adidas for less

-The best athletic clothes that will last a long time

In My Take you will learn:

-Why it's important to keep an open mind and look past first impressions

-What T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and other retailers have to offer when it comes to workout clothes

Bobbi and Jerry also talk about: 

-Check out the luxury athletic clothing brands we mentioned, Nike and Adidas.

EPISODE LINKS:

Order Jerry's book "Guns, Drugs, or Wealth" here

Follow Jerry!

Instagram: @realJerryFord

Twitter: @realJerryFord

Facebook: @realJerryFord

On this Financial Grownup podcast episode Jerry Ford helps us to learn how we can get the best deals on work out clothes. #Podcast #MoneyTips

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.

Transcription

Jerry Ford:
I sold all of my cars, all of my motorcycles. I paid off my credit cards. I spend three hundred dollars a month on Uber pool and that's cheaper than any car note that you can get. And I set a seventy dollar budget for food per week.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grown-up, with me, Certified Financial Planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of “How to be a Financial Grown-up”, but you know what, being a grown up is really hard, especially when it comes to money. But it's okay, were gonna get there together. I'm gonna bring you one money story from a financial grown up, one lesson and then my take on how you can make it your own. We got this!

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey financial grown up friends! Love this guest because Jerry Ford, who you'll hear from in just a few minutes, is just a little bit different from the typical guest that we have on here, in that he is not from a money expert background. In fact, he's a celebrity fitness guy, and he came to being a financial grown up really after he had money. And then he realized that he wasn't actually using all that money and there was a good amount of money. He wasn't using the money in a very grown up way, and some really scary things could have happened but fortunately he found a mentor that took him under his wing and set him straight before things went really down hill.

Bobbi Rebell:
Welcome everyone. Thank you for investing your time in yourself and in learning from the high achievers that we have on the show. If you're enjoying it, remember the show is free. All we ask is that you help us grow the show by paying it forward and telling a friend that you think might enjoy the show.

Bobbi Rebell:
Let's go to our guest. Jerry Ford is a celebrity fitness trainer turned author. He overcame intercity poverty, violence, personal tragedy, to get where he is today, which is pretty incredible when you hear his story. His book and this title kind of threw me off when I heard it and then when I understood what it was about I had to have him on the show. His book, "Guns, Drugs or Wealth" is riveting. Its very candid and I'll bet its unlike anything you've read before. And I want you guys to stay till then the end, we have a big give away. Jerry sent me three signed copies of his book. I'm gonna share details after the interview about how you can win them. Here is "Guns, Drugs or Wealth" author, celebrity fitness trainer, Jerry Ford.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey Jerry Ford, you are a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Jerry Ford:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Bobbi Rebell:
Congratulations are in order. We are taping this before your book has even been released, by the time this is out, your book will be out. But, your book “Guns, Drugs or Wealth” the three income secret to success that took me from the streets of Detroit to the top of my game, is already a number one new release from Amazon and sure to have many more bestseller benchmarks in the weeks to come. So, congratulations.

Jerry Ford:
Thank you, I'm really excited.

Bobbi Rebell:
And were gonna talk more about the great information in the book, including different investing like real estate, stocks and the importance of earning and saving, after your money story, which is about, you're also a trainer I should say out there in L.A. where you are..

Jerry Ford:
Yes.

Bobbi Rebell:
It is about a client that you didn't start off great with, but ended up being a mentor. Maybe this is a little about not judging people on first impressions and being open to people that maybe are very different from you. Go for it.

Jerry Ford:
Yeah, you know what, that's true. So I was twenty-three years old. I was really young. I was working at a gym called The New York Health and Racket Club, and I was by far their superstar trainer. I was young. I had Rolexs, fancy cars. I thought I knew it all.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait, wait, wait. How are you buying this Jerry?

Jerry Ford:
You know what, I was top five in this company. This really luxury company called New York Health and Racket Club. And I was one of their top level trainers, I was training maybe two hundred and ten hours a month. Each session after you get bonus, after hitting a certain amount of hours that is unreal, I made maybe a hundred and ten dollars a session.

Bobbi Rebell:
And how many sessions a week?

Jerry Ford:
I was doing maybe two hundred and ten sessions a month.

Bobbi Rebell:
So they give you a new client and what happens?

Jerry Ford:
So now I'm thinking, you know, this client wants to work out six days a week. And he was calling two sessions, every session. So this guy was paying me double for every session.

Bobbi Rebell:
How old was he?

Jerry Ford:
This guy at the time was about fifty years old. This was maybe seven to ten years ago.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay

Jerry Ford:
And I said this is gonna be a breeze. This is nothing. All this guy wanted was abs. I said this is gonna be more luxury items for me, because at the time I thought that if you look like money that people would spend money on you, which is true but you can't take that too far. Right, so. So, I stared training this guy and little did I know he was the biggest jerk that I've ever met in my life. I mean, he would tell me to explain everything we were doing in two seconds and like snap his fingers and tell me to go as if he was timing me for my response. I mean I would drive to work in the morning time playing scenarios in my head, like literally cursing this old man out.

Jerry Ford:
And so six months later he tried to convince me that a chest press didn't work the chest. So, I kind of, you know, popped him on the shoulder and firmly explained, how a chest press worked your chest, you know. And he kind of stood there and shook his head and said, “Okay, fine.” But at that time, it was almost as if he was done testing me. You know from that day forward, we became best friends, mentor, kind of like a father/son relationship, it was strange. We talked every day about everything.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wait. So, basically, he was waiting for you to push back.

Jerry Ford:
He was waiting for me to push back in a professional strong sense. Because we argue every day but he always enjoyed the fact that he got under my skin. So, he was testing me, waiting for me to push back in a certain way.

Bobbi Rebell:
And tell me what you learned from him.

Jerry Ford:
Everything. So before I moved to Los Angeles, he helped me build my portfolio. I mean to a “T”. He helped me gain a lot of passive income, and he taught me just everyday life lessons about being a businessman. So, when I moved to LA I was still the same, I started working at another gym, but I was training even more high end clients, I was training royal family members, celebrities, other taste makers. And then I got fired from Equinox. And when I got fired from Equinox I think that shook me out of being a superstar trainer for a corporation, for a gym.

Bobbi Rebell:
Why were you fired?

Jerry Ford:
I was fired for working out with one of my clients, which, when I first came to Equinox, Equinox was the gym, when I first came to Equinox because I had so many taste makers and so many celebrities and so many models back in New York I was able to work out with a lot of those people because, you know, models are at a certain level to where sometimes they don't want to you to train them and stand over them. They want you to work out with them. And in this case, a lot of my models, they were just a lot more when I worked out with them. I called Bill and I said, “Okay, very few people, make, one percent of the world make what you make. So, how did you do it?” And it was kind of silence over the phone and he was kinda like, “Oh, you gotta be good looking and the rest would flow.” It was like a joke, it was a joke, he's always joking. I'm like dude I'm not laughing, like how did you do it?

Bobbi Rebell:
Right, you're ready.

Jerry Ford:
I'm like ready to go and he's like, “You know what, when you gonna be in New York next? Well talk about it.” And I'm a all or nothing guy so I said, “Dude I'm hopping on the next plane to New York tonight.” So I went to LAX literally with nothing, I went to LAX, I hopped on a plane and went to New York on the red eye. The next morning, I went to Bill's house or his estate, he opened the door and literally I said, “Let's get to work. I need to figure out how you did this.” So he was like, “Oh cool your jets, and you know well talk about it.” So we ate some breakfast, we sat at the table, and he looked at me. And this guy, right now he's like a best friend but, he's your classical Wall Street fast talking, New York [inaudible 00:08:35].

Jerry Ford:
He says, "What's the difference between us?" I said, "No liability." And I'm thinking, man we've been over this so many times. And he's like "No, what's the difference?" And I explained how assets put money in your pocket and liabilities are obligations that they take money out of your pocket. And he says, "Exactly!" So then he did something that was life changing. He handed me a pen and a piece of paper and he said, "Okay. Write your assets down in one column and write your liabilities downs in another column." And literally I remember to this day, it was liabilities, rent, BMW payment, Porsche payment, motorcycle payment, insurance for all cars, AMEX credit card payment a month, Capital One credit card payment per month, phone bill, utilities, clubbing all weekends with royalty clients, shoes, watches, restaurants. It was terrible. And asset column was stock portfolio and personal training.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow!

Jerry Ford:
And so he said, “I want you to reduce your liabilities and then come back to New York and we can get started.” So, I hopped on a plane back to LA. Bobbi, I sold all of my cars. I literally sold all of my cars, all of my motorcycles. I paid off my credits cards. I started to Uber pool, because I spend three dollars a month on Uber pool and that's cheaper than any car payment. I factor with car note and gas and occasional parking tickets, its cheaper than any car note that you can get. And I set a seventy dollar budget for food per week. After that I called Bill back, I said, "Okay, I sold everything. I'm ready to go". He thought I was nuts, but he could not deny that I was ready to build wealth. So he says, “Okay, are you gonna fly back.” I said, “No, due to the budget that I've set for myself, I'm calling you this time.”

Bobbi Rebell:
Alright, so what is the lesson for our listeners?

Jerry Ford:
So, the lesson for the listeners is, I suggest that everybody write down their liabilities and their assets. And, just you seeing them in the columns, you would then be able to say, okay I don't need this, I don't need that, I don't nee this. And I advise people to buy more assets and less liabilities. But, you have to see it on paper.

Bobbi Rebell:
Alright Jerry. What is your everyday money tip? Cause, you spend a lot of time in gym clothes. Is it really worth spending so much money on fancy gym clothes?

Jerry Ford:
Well you know what, you can go to some of these brands, so Nike and Adidas and all these luxury brands, places like Big Five have these same brands, but its just a lot cheaper. And, I wear gym clothes all day so I save a lot of money, right. And I wear gym clothes and then I throw on my luxury watch and luxury items and that makes me look a little more fancy.

Bobbi Rebell:
So, is it worth paying up for the more expensive work out clothes brands? I mean, obviously, if you're gonna buy them, you wanna buy them somewhere you can get a discount if that's possible. But, are they better?

Jerry Ford:
You know what, I think they are better, because I've taken Nike pants, Nike outfits, I've had them, and they've lasted longer than workout clothes from Target. You know, its kinda like, Oh you wash these clothes, and you wonder why they ripping up so much. It's because those luxury brands have better material.

Bobbi Rebell:
So they really are better.

Jerry Ford:
They really are better.

Bobbi Rebell:
Alright, lets talk about your already bestselling book. Tell us more.

Jerry Ford:
So, this book is about building wealth through real estate, stocks and smart spending. But, I tell it as a personal trainer, but more importantly, I tell it in laments terms, as more of a porch casual conversation.

Jerry Ford:
Its kind of like if Jay-Z and Warren Buffet came out with a how-to guide on building wealth. "Guns, Drugs or Wealth" would be it.

Bobbi Rebell:
And its inspired by your actual life.

Jerry Ford:
It is inspired by my actual life. Its inspired by my actual life, which is coming from Detroit, the hard streets of Detroit, and starting to build wealth like I did.

Bobbi Rebell:
And where can people find you, find out more about you? You have a huge Instagram by the way. Love those videos. I'm ready to go workout right after this interview just from watching those videos. So, everybody, go put on your fancy expensive gym clothes, cause they're apparently worth it, and go work out.

Jerry Ford:
People can find my on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. And my handles are @realJerryFord.

Bobbi Rebell:
Jerry Ford, thank you so much!

Jerry Ford:
Thank you!

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey everyone, lets get right into it. Financial grown up tip number one. Be careful about judging people by first impressions. Sometimes even second, third impressions. Jerry basically wrote off his client because, okay the client was such a jerk but, sometimes relationships, including those with mentors or sponsors, they take time to develop. Because the two men spend a lot of time together and Jerry was willing to start listening instead of just putting up with his client the relationship changed. And Jerry came out a big winner.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grown up tip number two. Let's talk about the fancy gym clothes cause this is something I actually spend way too much time even thinking about. I go back and forth on this. I want to say its worth it to buy the clothes that will last for a decade or whatever. But at the moment that you are actually trying to purchase leggings that cost over a hundred dollars, that's just really hard to do.

Bobbi Rebell:
I recently finally bought one really expensive item, its actually a Lululemon jacket, but only because I had an expiring credit. And I still fell guilty about buying it even though literally I had to use the credit and it was a gift. Here's a work around if you want the best stuff but can't always get over the price. So, for most work out items, the only difference between the new stuff or last season's is the color or the pattern. So this goes for sneakers too. So, look for last seasons of whatever workout gear you want. Stores like T.J.Maxx, Marshalls and then all of these departments stores has these outlet versions, you have like Nordstrom Rack, Sax off Fifth, whatever is near you and they probably also have a lot of this stuff online, those places are great places to look. Also, the quote "We made too many of the fancy boutique brands", they often have last year's style, last season's style, usually just a different color that wasn't as popular. Go work out feeling like a million bucks and maybe be like Jerry and wear a fancy accessory with your workout gear, so you can feel fancy like Jerry.

Bobbi Rebell:
Alright giveaway time. So, friends what was your takeaway from Jerry? DM me your thoughts on this episode on the socials, BobbiRebell1@instagram, BobbiRebell on Twitter. And I'm going to be giving away the three signed copies of Jerry Ford's book, "Guns, Drugs or Wealth" to listeners. And, yes it is open to international fans. In fact our last giveaway winners, which were the Chris Hogan and the Rachel Cruze signed books, included one listener Barbara Olner in Austria. And don't forget that we are starting to do listener Q&A episodes with some of my money expert friends maybe making guest appearances. So DM me your questions as well or you can also email us at hello@financialgrownup.com, that's hello@financialgrownup.com. And that goes for the giveaways to. So, DMs or emailing hello@financialgrownup.com whatever is good for you is good for us.

Bobbi Rebell:
And thank you to Jerry Ford. Great motivation to get us all one step closer to being financial grownups.

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

Philip Taylor, aka PT Money was too cool to do any research, or any real negotiation when buying his first car. But the crushing payments, and having to call his dad for help, quickly brought him back to reality. 

In PT’s money story you will learn:

-Why PT felt guilty and went into a panic after buying his first car

-How he determined what car to buy and the budget

-The exact steps he used to buy his first car

-What his costs were relative to his financial resources

-His negotiation strategy

-What happened when he got home and made a huge decision

-How he tried to correct the mistake himself

-Why he reached out to his father for help, and how the situation was resolved

In PT’s money lesson you will learn:

-How to know what to pay for a car and how to negotiate it in advance

-The specific steps PT now uses to buy cars

-The best ways to finance a car purchase

-How you can avoid the pitfalls PT experienced

-The exact resources PT uses when buying a car

-Other skills PT now has to be a financial grownup

In PT’s everyday money tip you will learn:

-How PT and his wife have streamlined their grocery shopping

-How to balance saving money with saving time

-How to avoid buying things you don’t need when food shopping

-Strategies to get grocery shopping done with kids in tow

-When to pay fees for grocery related services

In My Take you will learn:

-Don’t let your pride get in the way of correcting a mistake

-When free is not the best value

-What to look for in a business where you are paying a fee for service to determine if it is worth paying the extra money

Episode Links:

PT’s website https://ptmoney.com/

Come to Fincon! Learn more here. 

Follow PT and Fincon!

Twitter: @PTMoney @Fincon

Instagram @PTMoney   @finconexpo  

Facebook PTMoneyblog   Finconexpo

 

Car resources PT mentioned

Edmunds

TrueCar

KellyBluebook

Craigslist

Grocery resources PT mentioned

WalMart

Kroger

Target

This episode was taped at Podcast Movement

---

Transcription

Philip Taylor:
I all of a sudden felt a rush of severe guilt and severe panic that I think I've actually put myself in a big hole here. I felt embarrassed that I couldn't have gone into the dealership and made us smarter choice. And I tried to call the dealership up and say, "Hey, would you guys take this car back?" And I think they got laughed at me over the phone.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me Certified Financial Planner, Bobbi Rebell. 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:
Hello my Financial Grownup friends. Making your first really big purchase, is a really exciting. But it's also a reality check. That is what you are hearing in the voice of Philip Taylor, known to many of his fans, as PT money. He later went on to start a huge money content conference called FinCon, which we'll talk about later. Welcome to the podcast to everyone. We keep it to about 15 minutes because you're busy. We're focused and intentional in bringing you a mini story and a lesson from that mini story, and then we'll always give you what I call an everyday money tip and specific ways that you can put it all to work in your life. All right, so let's get to PT's story. It is about buying his first car. But as you will hear, it is also about learning that even if you are legally an adult, you sometimes have to be humble and make that call to your dad. I was able to connect with PT at Podcast Movement in July. So you're going to hear a little bit of that in the background. Here is PT.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey Philip Taylor, aka PT aka PT Money. You're a Financial Grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Philip Taylor:
Thanks for having me on Bobbi. It's great to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
This is an honor for me because we are approaching year three for me of your venture FinCon, which is a big conference for money people. Tell us quickly about it, and then we're going to get your money story.

Philip Taylor:
Yeah. It's a digital marketing conference for people who talk to people about money. So if they're out there, whether they're the Dave Ramsey type or the Suze Orman type, they're reaching people with a financial message. We'd like to have them at the event and show them how to do it better.

Bobbi Rebell:
And you're going to show us how to do buying a car better. Tell us your money story.

Philip Taylor:
Yeah, my money story is this. When I was, let's see, 22, 23 left college. Thought it was a big time college graduate with my new career.

Bobbi Rebell:
What was your new career?

Philip Taylor:
In accounting. So I was going to go work for one of the big financial firms, big accounting firms. My salary was 33,000. And through college, my parents had most have helped me out with a lot of the financial expenses. I had took out some student loans to help me out with some of the college. So, for the most part, I hadn't really managed my own money yet.

Bobbi Rebell:
But you were in accounting just to be clear.

Philip Taylor:
But I was in accounting. Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay.

Philip Taylor:
And I knew some of the high finance stuff at that point. But I didn't know really how to handle my own money. And I was kind of naturally a spender. So, left for the new job that I had this big paycheck coming in, and the world was mine, right?

Bobbi Rebell:
And what were your other ... were you paying rent? What else was going on financially with you in terms of your overhead? Were you living with mom and dad?

Philip Taylor:
No, I moved into an apartment with some buddies. I was at least splitting I guess rent with some friends. But it was the nicest apartment in town because here we were big time college grads now, we could afford it all, right? And the next thing I wanted to do is run out and buy a brand new car, like a brand new SUV. I think it was the Mitsubishi Montero Sport had just come out. And it was this brand new SUV and it was 1999. So that dates me a bit. But it was like this beautiful vehicle that I thought now I had earned the right to go by.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay.

Philip Taylor:
And so I kind of just blindly went down to the dealership.

Bobbi Rebell:
Now did you bring your buddies? Did you bring a family member? Anyone?

Philip Taylor:
No. The ego was there and I was like, I'm an accountant. My dad's a CPA. I can go figure this thing out.

Bobbi Rebell:
So you did the research that you knew what car you wanted, but anything on pricing financing anything? [crosstalk 00:04:05] my young accountant.

Philip Taylor:
No. I did None of that. I literally went down to the dealership thinking, I'll just work it out when I get there. I think my buddies and I were going to go on a trip the next weekend. And so it was in my mind that I would have this SUV by the time we went on this trip. I left my old car there for whatever they were going to give me for.

Bobbi Rebell:
Did you negotiate that?

Philip Taylor:
I didn't even negotiate, no.

Bobbi Rebell:
So you negotiated nothing?

Philip Taylor:
No. I took what they were giving me on that. I took the interest rate that they were going to give me.

Bobbi Rebell:
Which was?

Philip Taylor:
Somewhere between 9% and 12%. So it was ridiculous. Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay.

Philip Taylor:
I was being taken to the cleaners totally.

Bobbi Rebell:
And what was the price of the car?

Philip Taylor:
I don't remember that. I think it was somewhere around 32,000. Something like that.

Bobbi Rebell:
So, your yearly salary, which you do remember-

Philip Taylor:
Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
Was 33,000. You went out and bought a $32,000 car, brand new. You don't really remember the actual price of the car. You don't remember the actual interest rate. You didn't negotiate anything. But you had a fancy car and you were in the nicest apartment in town.

Philip Taylor:
That's it. That's it.

Bobbi Rebell:
That's good. All right. And you're going on a trip?

Philip Taylor:
That's right.

Bobbi Rebell:
Continue.

Philip Taylor:
Yes. So I get home and I we're getting ready for a trip. And then I start realizing what insurance is going to be for me. And because I was a young guy, I guess and not married yet or not a homeowner yet, insurance on this new Montero Sport was going to be just absolutely through the roof. And so when I started putting it all together, the car payment, the insurance-

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, what's the car payment?

Philip Taylor:
It was somewhere around $400 I think. $400, $500.

Bobbi Rebell:
What was your monthly take home pay?

Philip Taylor:
33,000 divided by 12, whatever that is. I don't know. It was not much.

Bobbi Rebell:
I hope you paid taxes too. So it wasn't [inaudible 00:05:36].

Philip Taylor:
Exactly. Yeah. So all in all-

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah.

Philip Taylor:
I was going to be probably spending close to at least a third of my take home pay on this whole car experience, if not more. So, overburdening myself for sure.

Bobbi Rebell:
How did you feel?

Philip Taylor:
I all of a sudden felt a rush of severe guilt and severe panic that, "Okay, I think I've actually put myself in a big hole here." I felt embarrassed that I couldn't have gone into the dealership and made a smarter choice and negotiated it a little better. And so, yeah, I felt, I guess a sense of the immediacy of owning this thing was now fading. And I was feeling bad.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what did you do?

Philip Taylor:
At that point, I tried to call the dealership up and say, "Hey, would you guys take this car back?" And I think the guy laughed at me over the phone. And I didn't even then attempt to go down there. I was like, "Well, what can I do now? Can't really afford this thing. So should I try to sell it on the secondary market? And that would be foolish." I knew enough to know that. And so I just felt, I was at the end of my rope. So I called my dad.

Philip Taylor:
And here I am this 22 year old, big ego, new college grad, at the end of the day calling dad for a bailout. And I said, "Dad, what do I do in this situation?" And luckily, dad is able to call up the dealership and somehow spin his magic and convince them to take the car back from me. I do remember one thing about this is that it was $1,000 down payment that I put down because that's pretty much what I lost in this whole process. So they took the car back and I didn't owe any payments anymore, but I did lose my $1,000. And they gave me my old Saturn back that was paid for. And I drove my Saturn for the next five years, proudly. I swore going forward that I would own my financial life going forward. And I wouldn't ever rely on someone else to kind of help me out.

Philip Taylor:
But then I also studied up on actually how to buy a car. And I actually learned how to do it right. And so the next one I bought, I used some smarter tactics there.

Bobbi Rebell:
So, give us a lesson for our listeners, what is the takeaway from that?

Philip Taylor:
Yeah, number one, you need to absolutely have the price of the car pretty much nailed down before you even walk into the dealership.

Bobbi Rebell:
The retail price of the price that you are willing to pay?

Philip Taylor:
The price that you are willing to pay.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay.

Philip Taylor:
And what other people are buying that car for. So we have all kinds of tools out there these days that will let you research that. Whether it's in edmunds.com or truecar.com. Those services will allow you to kind of research what people are actually buying cars for on the public market. And so you really need to kind of nail that down before you go to a dealership.

Philip Taylor:
The second thing I like to do is to actually take a step further and start communicating with dealerships about a potential offer and saying, "This is what I'm looking for. What's kind of your best offer to get me down there?" And so I have these conversations over email with these dealerships to let them put their best foot forward. Dealerships are used to this now. They are very used to consumers who want to just communicate beforehand. And so nail down that price as much as possible before you walk into the dealership. With financing, go to other sources. Go to your bank go to other vendors who could provide a good rate for you and have that loan secured before you walk into that dealership.

Philip Taylor:
Secondly, know what your car's worth. Look it up on Blue Book. Understand what your trade in value is going to be. At the end of the day, we're going to take this to Craigslist with and sell it on the open market. So know those numbers. And then once you're going in, and once you go to the actual dealership, bring someone with you. So I made that mistake the first time. And this is a chance for you to rely on someone else. Negotiate each of those factors separately. So start with the price get that nailed down. They're going to want to talk to you about payments. They're going to want to talk to you about interest rates.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, let's talk about why they want. They want to talk about payments, because most people just think, can I afford the payment rather ... And that's a way for them to charge a higher price because you can manipulate the payments.

Philip Taylor:
Yeah.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. Let's talk about your everyday money tip. Because this is one that is near and dear to my heart as a busy mom and someone that doesn't want to get suckered into buying stuff that I don't want. Do tell.

Philip Taylor:
Yeah, so my wife's the frugal one. Mrs. PT is super frugal. I'm the spender. So, she's got all the cool money saving ideas. And so one of the things she does is buy her groceries every week or every other week. And in the past it's always been good advice to make a grocery list before you go the grocery store, right? Because that way you won't pick up anything extra, you'll get exactly what you need. You'll be able to maybe even price some things out beforehand. That's good advice.

Philip Taylor:
But I find that through the years, it's like we made the event in January for a couple weeks, and then it kind of falls off, right? You're less diligent about that. So you end up just buying sort of random things at the grocery store every time you go. So one of the things we started doing is taking advantage of grocery pickup, right? So many folks are familiar with this. But this allows us to beforehand, before we go the grocery store, use the online portals of Walmart, of Target, of Kroger, whoever, and pre select our items we want to buy. Walmart is free for this service. Some other grocery stores will charge you these days. It's a small fee, though. And to me, it's worth it because you're selecting beforehand, before you're hungry before you're walking the aisle, seeing the tempting things. You're seeing exactly what you need.

Philip Taylor:
And then you pop in your car. At the scheduled time you show up, and you don't even have to go in the store keep your kids in the car, which is really cool for my wife, we have three kids. And then you pay your fee if you're going to the one of the places that pay a fee, or you go to Walmart, you pick it up free, and then you head home knowing that you didn't buy anything extra that you didn't need. And you saved some time because you're not wandering the stores picking random things.

Bobbi Rebell:
Tell me more about FinCon because this is your how much?

Philip Taylor:
This is our eighth one.

Bobbi Rebell:
Eighth one. Wow.

Philip Taylor:
Yeah. And so it's an annual event and community. And our event will be this September 26 to 29 in Orlando, Florida. Be 2,000 money nerds like us sitting around talking about money but also how we talk about money. So talking shop. Whether it's how to create better content, promote it better or make money on our efforts.

Bobbi Rebell:
How has the business evolved, because you've really grown. You've got a big ... we're here by the way, recording a Podcast Movement. You've got a lot of people here on your team which is really impressive.

Philip Taylor:
About the third year I decided I wanted to take it a little more seriously. And so I started looking for ways to add value to the attendees. Things I'd held off on before because I wanted to keep the pricing low on the tickets. So, I just said, "Well, I can still have a low ticket but then now I can have a premium ticket. And I even have a premium above that." So I look for ways to add value for attendees that we could kind of build some margin in and charge a higher price for.

Philip Taylor:
Secondly, was to create more of a true marketplace at the event where people were coming together to do business and to do deals. And so for the ROI of the experience being face to face. You for instance, meeting with brands at the event can turn into a podcast sponsorship. And so, that's kind of what we want to create. A marketplace for that to happen at the event. And so the more we leaned into our expo hall experience, which we call FinCon Central now, to make that a bigger part of the event. The more value that sponsors and exhibitors saw and being a part of it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Where can people find you and learn more about FinCon and about you. Because you also have your own stuff going on.

Philip Taylor:
Sure. We're on the socials @FinCon or @FinConExpo. And then our website is finconexpo.com. And then me personally, I have my own blog and some podcasts I've done in the past. All at ptmoney.com.

Bobbi Rebell:
Awesome. Thank you PT.

Philip Taylor:
Thanks Bobbi.

Bobbi Rebell:
There is a lot in what PT had to share with us. So much that we can all relate to. Financial grownup tip number one. If you get into a bad situation, do not let your pride get in the way of fixing it. PT could have just accepted defeat and been under a mess of payments for years. But he did the hard thing and called his dad, and his dad was there for him.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grownup tip number two. You may have noticed that in PT's money tip, some of the grocery services were free and some had a payment. There are times when free is not the best value. Not saying it isn't in that case. But a well run business is profitable. So they must make money somewhere. Give your business to the stores that work the best for your life. The store that executes better. That has delivery done on time for example and correctly. May cost more, but be worth it. That cost may be in a fee or it may be in slightly higher prices. But look at the total picture.

Bobbi Rebell:
A quick word about PT's business, FinCon, it is happening in Orlando on September 26th to the 29th. If you are interested in coming, please come hear me speak on Wednesday at 1:30. I will be doing a joint presentation with my editor and producer, Steve Stewart. We'll be sharing the behind the scenes look into what went on when we launched the Financial Grownup podcast and where we have come from those first episodes back in February of 2018. And we'll also have a lot of information about how you can get started podcasting if that is something that interests you.

Bobbi Rebell:
Make sure to let me know if you are coming so that we can connect in person. I'm going to leave a link to sign up for FinCon and learn more about it in the show notes. Those show notes are at bobbirebell.com calm/podcast/ptmoney. Or you can just DM me on any of the social media channel and I will make sure that you get the right information. On Instagram, I am @BobbiRebell1 and on Twitter @BobbiRebell and thank you to PT for helping us all get one step closer to being financial grown ups.

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

John Schneider and David Auten went 40 percent over budget at their recent wedding- including a couple thousand dollars on a very fancy portable restroom known as the Lavish Loo. Looking back, they would have said I don’t to many of their expenses.

In John and David’s money story you will learn:

-How their wedding went 40% over budget

-Why they spent $2,000 on a fancy portable bathroom called the Lavish Loo

-Why they regret not waiting a little bit longer to get married

-The choices they would make differently in hindsight

In John and David’s money lesson you will learn:

-The importance of focusing on your own priorities for your wedding or special event not what is expected by friends and family

-How they leveraged their wedding spending to pay for their a good portion of their  honeymoon

In John and David’s every day money tip you will learn:

-How to use the strategy they call money chunking to make your budget feel larger

In my take you will learn:

-How to get things for free from vendors and party planners

-How better communication about expectations for sharing expenses can avoid misunderstandings. 

Episode Links

The Debt Free Guys website

Queer Money podcast

Follow the Debt Free Guys!

Instagram @debtfreeguys

Facebook DebtFree Guys

Twitter @DebtFreeGuys

The Lavish Loo

The Posh Potty

Come see the Debt Free Guys at The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce Business and leadership conference in Philadelphia

Come see the Debt Free Guys at FinCon in Orlando!

---

Transcription

David Auten:
We had to pay a little bit extra to have some nice, they were called the Posh Potty, no the Lavish Loo. So we had some pretty fancy toilets at our wedding.

John Schneider:
The Lavish Loo was just under $2,000 for the one night.

David Auten:
We had it for three nights.

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 Financial Grownups, so everyone wants their weddings, their birthdays, special occasions to be remembered especially when they throw a big party. In the case of John Schneider and David Auten, also known as the Debt Free Guys, the big buzz at their wedding in addition to the overall joy of them tying the knot, was actually about the fancy porta potty. Which by the way was technically called The Lavish Loo.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, just a minute here. A special welcome to our new listeners and welcome back to our regulars. We keep the episodes to about 15 minutes to fit your schedule. So if you have more time, we hear binging a few for a long drive or a commute works well. Think of it like flextime for podcast listeners.

Bobbi Rebell:
It would mean the world to us if you would subscribe and then go into settings and make sure that you are set up for auto downloads. That way, you won't miss any upcoming episodes. Automate your podcast like you automate your retirement savings. There you go. All right, let's get to John and David.

Bobbi Rebell:
So they just got married and they did go over budget on their wedding, but it wasn't just splurging on things like fancy porta potties, which they'll explain by the way. They kind of got into a pickle where they really had no choice about that. It was also kind of about being too busy to make the effort to watch those expenses and not asking the right questions in time to control the costs. Here are the Debt Free Guys.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey Debt Free Guys. You guys are financial grownups. Welcome to the podcast.

John Schneider:
Thank you for having us. We're excited to be here.

David Auten:
Yes, thank you.

Bobbi Rebell:
Let me do one more formal introduction. First of all we have John Schneider. So say hello so people know your voice.

John Schneider:
Hello this is John Schneider.

Bobbi Rebell:
And David Auten.

David Auten:
Hi, this is David.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right and I am a huge fan of your website because so much of the advice applies to everyone even though you are out there talking about your sexual orientation. This is universal themes that you talk about, including the fact that you guys successfully paid and this is a big deal, $51,000 in credit card debt in just over two years. So first of all, congratulations on that.

John Schneider:
Thank you. That was very liberating. It was coming out of a closet with our finances.

David Auten:
Yes.

Bobbi Rebell:
And you also have been able to really leverage your successes into business opportunities and into productive ones that really help others to find a path that is right for them financially. So tell me about some of these partnerships that you've been able to put together that are spreading the word.

John Schneider:
Yeah exactly. We actually are excited to share that we just resigned with a Queer Money sponsor, which will be MassMutual. It'll be their second time sponsoring our podcast which is, not only does it help us put food on the table, but it helps us be able to promote and market our podcast and get it out to more people so we can help more people with the content that we create, both with ourselves and with our guests.

Bobbi Rebell:
I have to congratulate both of you. You both recently said, "I do." At your wedding.

John Schneider:
We did.

David Auten:
Absolutely.

Bobbi Rebell:
I saw amazingly beautiful photos. Everyone should go to your social media, which is all @debtfreeguys. We'll have more info at the end of the podcast on that. You said, "I do." But you also now wish you said, "I don't." To a bunch of stuff. Tell us your money story.

John Schneider:
Yeah. Hindsight's 20/20, right? And even though our entire life revolves around helping ourselves and other people with their money, we definitely have some big takeaways even just a month after our wedding.

David Auten:
Yeah.

John Schneider:
I think the biggest mistake that we made overall was that we have a lot going on in our lives. This year, we just sold our condo January 3rd of this year and then we had to move out, find a new apartment. We're trying to ramp up our business, we had the wedding, and then we've been planning for a couple of years to spend a month or so in Europe come the end of August. So we have just a lot going on right now and I don't know that it was the best time to plan a wedding because we weren't as focused and as diligent with the planning and most specifically, the expenses.

Bobbi Rebell:
So give us some examples.

John Schneider:
We first found the location that we wanted to have the wedding. It was a 40 acre ranch in the mountains of Colorado, kind of between Salida and Buena Vista. It was a beautiful ranch, beautiful location, the mountains were in the background. Wonderful. That's all we thought about when we saw the pictures on the website. Then we went and visited the ranch and it wasn't until after the fact that we realized all of the peripheral costs that came with having a wedding at that location.

John Schneider:
We had envisioned that we would be completely out in the open so that people could see the sky and the sunset and the moonrise. And we had learned that every now and then, they get some pretty heavy gusts of wind and that you ran a big risk of people eating dirt if you didn't have a tent there to protect yourselves in case there was some inclement weather.

David Auten:
Yeah.

David Auten:
I think one of the other things about having it at that ranch is we didn't realize, it being in a remote location, it's not on a sewer system that most people are familiar with using. So we actually had to have porta potties brought up, but of course we didn't want the kind of typical green or blue.

John Schneider:
That you see at the park.

David Auten:
Yeah the ones that everyone kind of their stomach turns when you think about them. So we had to pay a little bit extra to have some nice, they were called The Posh Potty or no, the Lavish Loo.

David Auten:
So we had some pretty fancy toilets at our wedding only because we needed to provide that and that did cost us a little extra.

Bobbi Rebell:
How much did they cost? How much does a posh potty cost?

John Schneider:
The Lavish Loo was just under $2,000 for the one night.

David Auten:
We had it for three nights.

Bobbi Rebell:
Which one did you go with? Did you go with The Lavish Loo or the Posh Potty?

John Schneider:
We went with The Lavish Loo and it was really fancy, in fact. We didn't realize how nice it was until after the wedding. That was one of the biggest talking points of the wedding. So we're like, "We have to check this out." There was a men's and women's side. They weren't gigantic, but they were big enough for one or two people they had air conditioning, there was music playing. They had plants inside. There was all sorts of air freshener and all the hand wash, soap. Everything that you could ever want.

John Schneider:
And one of the guys that was actually at the wedding he said he almost thought about sleeping in there that night because it was the coolest place to sleep in.

Bobbi Rebell:
So you did get good value at least from The Lavish Loo.

David Auten:
We did.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right things to everyone should make sure to put into your wedding budget. All right. What else surprised you? What about the traditional expenses? Were there things that you guys just didn't think ... Did you have a wedding planner or somebody guiding you? Did you make a budget in advance of the wedding? So you had a certain fixed amount that you were going to spend and kind of worked back from there and then had to drop things. What was going on here?

David Auten:
We did have a budget from the get go and we hired a wedding planner who was actually a friend of ours and specializes in doing same-sex weddings. And she was wonderful. She acted as a great resource. Not only as a guide to ... There were just things that we never thought of and would never have thought of had we tried to do this on our own. So that was very helpful. Plus she also had an inventory of resources like candle holders and plates and silverware and all that kind of stuff can really rack up your costs that she was willing to give us access to at no additional cost other than her fee.

David Auten:
So that was super helpful partly because we weren't paying enough attention to the management of the expenses. I think we maybe spent about 40% more than what we had originally budgeted.

Bobbi Rebell:
So 40% is a lot and it's clearly not just the $2,000 Lavish Loo.

John Schneider:
We specifically kept the size of the wedding down. So we invited mostly our very supportive friends.

Bobbi Rebell:
What was the guest list? How many people about?

David Auten:
We invited about 60, about 41 came I think was the final count.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. And what was your initial budget if you feel comfortable disclosing that?

David Auten:
My original in my mind was that this was going to cost us about $15,000. Like I said, we'd spent probably about 40% more so we did cross the $20,000 mark.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah and the $2,000 then I guess, as a portion of the wedding expense, you spent 10% of your budget on The Lavish Loo.

David Auten:
Right.

Bobbi Rebell:
That was a chunk.

John Schneider:
And I think another cost that we didn't manage appropriately was ... so we rented this ranch and it slept a total of 14 people, I believe. And only four of those were single beds. Our idea was that we would have our closest friends stay in the ranch with us and that they would help share in the cost of that. We were negligent at letting them know that in advance of making the offer to them and never asked for the money in advance or never asked for the money afterwards.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is the takeaway for our listeners?

David Auten:
I would definitely say give yourself the time to think about what it is that you truly want. What it is that you truly want, not what you want for your friends, not what you want for your family. What do you want your day to look like? That was one of the things that helped us save some money, but I think that having that extra amount of time to really think through all of the costs that are associated with it.

John Schneider:
In hindsight, even though it was more expensive than we expected it to be, I couldn't get over. I've been so excited about it. We only have so far half a dozen pictures from the wedding, but I look at them all the time. To me, it was just the most amazing week. And so, I think part of that was because we created what we wanted and not what everybody else wanted like David said.

David Auten:
We did find one way to actually get a benefit out of the amount of money that we spent. We opened up two new credit cards, used those credit cards exclusively for the wedding knowing we had the money to pay it off and because of that, we're getting five nights free hotel when we're on our honeymoon in Ireland.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well you guys are very good at budgeting and so let's move into your everyday money tip because that has to do with an interesting take you that I think will really help people get their heads wrapped around the different fluctuations in the cost of living.

David Auten:
Yeah so this is what I call money chunking. I kind of joke with John that this is something that he does regularly. He'll grab a pint of Ben & Jerry's and will eat the whole thing. And then throughout the week he's wishing he had ice cream.

Bobbi Rebell:
I can't imagine what that would be like.

John Schneider:
One pint is a serving. I don't care what anybody says. I don't believe [crosstalk 00:10:44].

Bobbi Rebell:
Or else it would be in two different containers, right?

John Schneider:
Thank you.

David Auten:
Right. So the idea with money chunking is I'm the kind of person who would eat a quarter of the pint and then put it back in the freezer, go and eat another quarter of the pint and put it back in the freezer. So that's kind of the idea with money chunking is that when you have an amount of money that you have set aside in your budget for something. Whether that's for the week or for a month, we often times have this tendency to think, "Okay I've got this amount of money." And then you go out and you blow it either the first day or maybe the second into your budget.

David Auten:
And then the rest of the time, whether it's the rest of the week or the rest of the month, you feel like you're sacrificing. You feel like you're not having fun. You feel like you're not able to actually do what it is that you enjoy in life.

David Auten:
When we money chunk, what we do is we'll take that amount of money. Let's say we have $50 for dining out for the week, we'll break that into a couple of pieces so that instead of just one time going out, we actually get to go out two or three times. So it allows us to spread our happiness over the whole budget rather than just those first two nights or first night.

Bobbi Rebell:
Love that. All right tell me what you guys are up to for the rest of 2018 and beyond.

John Schneider:
Right now we're super excited because we are joining a whole bunch of LGBT entrepreneurs in Philadelphia August 14th through the 17th at the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce Business & Leadership Conference. That's our next event. Then we're going out of the country. We'll be in Ireland for a week followed by three weeks in Spain and that's predominantly for fun. Lik David said, it's our honeymoon. It's also a little bit to celebrate my birthday. But it's also we've created our entire business for the most part, everything that we do with our business other than public speaking, we can do from anywhere in the world.

John Schneider:
So we're trying to test to see how good we are at actually being in Spain near a beach and being able to focus a little bit on the business, but also focus a little bit on having some fun while we're abroad. Shortly after that, we'll be joining you at FinCon in Orlando.

Bobbi Rebell:
Very fun. And where can people learn more about you, follow you on social, and so on?

David Auten:
Sure. On almost every platform, we are @debtfreeguys so that's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We are @debtfreeguys. Our website is debtfreeguys.com and then on iTunes, our podcast is called Queer Money.

Bobbi Rebell:
And it is climbing up the charts as we speak. So congratulations on all your success.

John Schneider:
Thank you so much for having us on. We appreciate it.

David Auten:
Definitely. We appreciate it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey friends, as the guys mentioned, they will see me in Orlando at FinCon. We'd love to see some of my Financial Grownup friends there as well. I'm going to leave a link on how to find out more about FinCon in the show notes. That is at bobbirebell.com/podcast/debtfreeguys and be sure to DM me if you be there so we can connect in Florida.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, here we go. Financial Grownup tip number one. Event planning on a budget 101. Ask for things that you might be able to get for free. So the guys, for example, got candle holders from their party planner. At my wedding, which was a Jewish wedding, the florist asked what we wanted on the chuppah. And the chuppah is basically a canopy that a couple stands under at a wedding and it represents a home.

Bobbi Rebell:
So many people have it constructed these days out of branches and flowers and they are beautiful and fantastic. And most ceremonies that this is used for run about half an hour. So you can spend thousands, you can spend infinite money on this. For me, it was just not that important. So I asked the synagogue if they had one that we could just borrow. And they did. They described it. It was a beautiful deep blue velvet with gold trim, Hebrew lettering and some other décor. It was simple, it was traditional. I loved it. And it was free.

Bobbi Rebell:
Also free basic linens for tables usually come with whoever you're working with, the place, the venue. Instead of going for a layer on top or bows on the chairs, just ask the florist to put aside the non-perfect flower petals or just extra flower petals that are falling off from whatever flower arrangement you have and then use those petals to sprinkle on those standard white tablecloths. And you can also do that, by the way, to dress up the cake. So those are some specific things that you can do.

Bobbi Rebell:
So pick something you're ambivalent about, not the things that you really care about, but the things that you're kind of like, "Eh, I don't care that much about the tablecloths." And see if someone can make that work for you for free.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup tip number two. The biggest budget buster for the guys was so easy to avoid. When you invite guests to stay at the hotel, include the cost and make sure that they are opting in. In their case, since they did not say anything, their well-intentioned friends probably assumed that it just came with the wedding package and there was no additional costs. That's what I would think.

Bobbi Rebell:
I get the awkwardness of asking after the fact. One possible idea; have a close friend, a very close friend delicately call the people that you've invited to stay at the ranch and explain that you're shy about asking for the cash, but that paying for everyone to stay is not in the wedding couple's budget. Honestly, very few people expect to have the wedding couple pay for their hotel. You could even have your friend say that their wedding gift to the wedding couple could be staying at the hotel and absorbing your own costs and that no further gift is necessary.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, let's connect. Please be in touch. DM me on social media. I want to hear from you guys and I want to hear what you think about the show, what you want to see more of. We're trying a lot of different things and we're getting great feedback. And I want your feedback.

Bobbi Rebell:
On Instagram, I am @bobbirebell1. On Twitter, @bobbirebell. And thanks to the Debt Free Guys for getting us all one step closer to being financial grownups.

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

When entrepreneurs Daniel Levine and Steven Pulver started their Fireside Conference in Canada 4 years ago, their ambition was so hot it burned through their budget, putting the conference in the red. 

In Dan and Steve’s money story you will learn:

-The backstory of their first Fireside Conference

-The key thing that they did not factor into their budget

-How they select who attends the Fireside conference, and how they believe that curation ties into their success

-The missing thing in the conference marketplace that they identified, and inspired them to create their own conference

-The personal connection they have to the location of the conference

-Where their funding came from at the start of the venture

-Why they were $30,000 in debt when the first conference ended

In Dan and Steve’s money lesson you will learn:

-Why they decided to stay on their original trajectory even though the conference lost money in year one. 

-What the data from the first conference showed them and how they leveraged the data for the future

-The role that social media played in their success, even though there was no cell phone reception (or use) at the conference

-How they monetized a very small audience by focusing on community curation

In Dan and Steve’s everyday money tip you will learn:

-Why they allocated a significant budget to in-person events to connect with their community

-The quick realization that they could have more impact on a lower budget by changing one key thing. 

-How you can apply that to your networking and marketing, or even just your friendships and personal relationships

-Why spending more money to impress people is often not effective and can sometimes dilute the potential impact

In My Take you will learn:

-How the new hit show Succession illustrated the same point as the Fireside guys- wealthy people are not impressed by expensive stuff. Just be real with them. 

-How I implement the same strategy, hosting friends and colleagues in my home, rather than taking them out for fancy impersonal dinners

-The significance of pro-actively choosing how you fund a startup

-How self-funding allows for a less painful failure, because while you lose your money, you maintain control and avoid pressure to cut losses from outside investors

Dan, Steven and Bobbi also talk about

-Dan and Steve’s entrepreneurial venture MinuteBox.com

-The next Fireside conference in September

-The speakers at the next conference will include Jordan Harbinger and Jason Calcanis

-How to get preferential consideration for the conference

 

Episode Links

Learn more about the Fireside Conference!

 

Follow them on social media!

-twitter @firesideconf, @daniellevine

-instagram @fireside_conf

 

Learn about their 2018 speakers:

Jordan Harbinger

Jason Calcanis

 

Learn more about the show I mentioned- HBO's Succession!

---

Transcription

Daniel Levine:
We didn't have a sense of when we told people that it was going to be all you can drink, what that meant on the bottom line, and we didn't really have a sense of when you do a conference in the middle of nowhere three and half hours from the closest big city, what that means when you have to start helping to arrange transportation for people.

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 gonna get there together. I'm gonna 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:
Yes my friends, the bar tab can get pretty expensive, especially when you offer it unlimited all weekend long, and that was just the beginning for entrepreneurs, Steven Pulver and Daniel Levine when they started the Fire Side Conference in Canada four years ago. The team wanted everything to be perfect for their first experience, but perfect does not come cheap. Lots of lessons and take aways here are Steven Pulver and Daniel Levine.

Bobbi Rebell:
Daniel Levine and Steven Pulver, you're financial grown ups, welcome to the podcast.

Steven Pulver:
Thanks so much for having us.

Daniel Levine:
Pleasure to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
You guys hold the honor of being the first team that I've had on. So this is going to be cool. We'll see how it goes.

Daniel Levine:
Thank you. We're looking forward to it.

Steven Pulver:
Hopefully no screw ups but we're looking forward to it.

Bobbi Rebell:
You guys are going to be great. Alright you are Canadian entrepreneurs and you are the brains behind a conference that I was very impressed by when I started learning about it, The Fireside Conference. It's happening for the fourth year in September, up in Canada. You're also entrepreneurs yourselves. This is a conference for entrepreneurs, you are entrepreneurs. Your company is MinuteBox, which is cloud based, software basically for law firms to help them be compliant with the various regulations in Canada but the conference is really the focus that I want to talk about here because your money story is about.

Bobbi Rebell:
So tell us what happened, this is year four. I want to hear what happened in the first year, because I think it's some that a lot of entrepreneurs and just people that have ideas about starting businesses or just managing their own finances will relate to and hopefully learn from

Steven Pulver:
For sure. It starts in 2014 when Fireside itself was born and just for your listeners to take just a 30 second overview of what Fireside is, and how it differs from a traditional conference. So Fireside at its core is an invite only retreat for entrepreneurs, founders, investors, influencers from all over the world that we invite up to a summer camp every September.

Steven Pulver:
We started our first official year in 2015. Daniel and I were looking around our community and saying there's a lot of great networking events, there's a lot of great events and things to bring the community together, but the biggest failure they all had was the inability to really bring people together on a way deeper level than just meeting in a conference hall.

Steven Pulver:
So we kind of said there's got to be a better venue that we can do a conference or an event at and we landed on this amazing summer camp where children are there all summer as a sleepover camp outside Bancroft, Ontario, Canada.

Bobbi Rebell:
And you have a personal connection, right? You have a personal connection to the camp.

Steven Pulver:
Yeah so I spent 24 years there both as a camper and staff and worked my way all the way up from counselor to head staff and eventually leadership team and helped a run a lot of the programming. So I was obviously incredibly biased. Daniel actually had attended camp Alden as well as a staff. So when we were looking at venues we were obviously both biased in knowing this was an amazing place to do this at.

Steven Pulver:
We had no video of photos of Fireside itself. When we were trying to market and spend money on ads and things like that, we literally had no real starting point. So because of that everything we were doing, we were fresh into. So we were throwing a lot of stuff at the wall, as we continue to do today, to see what would stick.

Bobbi Rebell:
Had you done any market research or anything? What was your background that made you qualified to do this?

Steven Pulver:
I think we would be completely foolish to say now that we had any form of subject matter expertise in running events, other than wanting to do something amazing.

Bobbi Rebell:
Where was you funding coming from, did you have budget, how did this come together from a financial perspective?

Daniel Levine:
So in our first year, from a financial perspective, it really came together very loosely and in an unstructured way, and hopefully not to ruin the story, but that's how we found ourselves about $30,000 in debt at the end of it. We looked at pricing and we weren't looking at pricing as a factor or breakeven. We weren't looking at it as a function necessarily of our cost. We really went into this with an, "if you build it they will come" attitude and really not having pedigrees in the areas of conferences or event management. We didn't have a sense of when we told people that it was going to be all you can drink, what that really meant on the bottom line, and we didn't really have a sense of when you do a conference in the middle of nowhere three and a half hours from the closest big city, what that means when you have start helping to arrange transportation for people.

Daniel Levine:
So it really was both a combination of not having a budget, but also really just, as you put it, not having any qualifications for doing something like this that had us at the end of a really magical two and half days turn to each other and realize that we really were not in a good financial position.

Bobbi Rebell:
So what did you spend? Give me some of the numbers, what did you spend on the conference and where, and was your revenue that you did have?

Steven Pulver:
Back then, I should say, our only revenue source was tickets. So our tickets were, Dan what was it, $300 to $500 range?

Daniel Levine:
Yeah.

Steven Pulver:
Let's say give or take $350 to $400 on average, in terms of ticket price. That was really our main source of revenue. We had a little bit of sponsorship at the time, but when we're talking about money coming in the door, we're really looking in the $20,000 to $30,000 range or just pure revenue. Now, there's a lot of costs involved, so of course things are completely dependent on the number of people that we have enter the gates of camp. So back then we were about 75 people, now we're around 400, so obviously that has changed quite a bit, but back then, alcohol was a huge cost.

Steven Pulver:
Swag, wanting to give people, for instance, under that swag category I would put whether they'd be water bottles, or [inaudible 00:06:28], or pieces like that. Food, obviously, is a huge piece. Those were the big, big, big costs, and when Dan and I looked at this and we said, "We want to create an amazing event," we didn't have budget in mind. That certainly doesn't mean we had an unlimited budget, but we were never going to sacrifice the quality of, say, the food, or the amount of food, or the amount of alcohol, or the amount of drinks, or whatever it might be, on account of our budget in that first year.

Steven Pulver:
We didn't really know where we were going with it, but kind of both said, "We're in, or we're not." And once we made that decision to go ahead, the budget, unfortunately looking back, it was really nonexistent.

Bobbi Rebell:
So where did you get the money from, the negative $30,000? Was it borrowed, were you putting it on credit cards?

Daniel Levine:
Yeah, so that was coming from our personal capital. Steven and I, we certainly didn't have $30,000 to blow away, but we were fortunate to have some savings, and we're very thankful for the support of our significant others, who saw that big bill come in at the end of the day and say that they had faith in us to really build something fantastic. And the only reason that we were able to swallow such a hit in our first year, was that we had a long term view. There's at least one component of that long term view, if not two, that were important to informing our decisions.

Daniel Levine:
One was, we knew we wanted to go larger than 60 or 75 people, we always thought that we'd be in the 300 to 400 person range. Knowing that, we also knew that our fixed costs were high, and our variable costs were quite low. So that actually was a huge point of leverage for us to look towards in future years, knowing that if we were able to focus on growing our membership and attendee base, that would end up covering our fixed costs, and since our variable costs are quite low, it wouldn't be linear and proportional, such that a 60 person conference would see us lose a similar amount of money as we would see in a 400 person conference. We always knew that if we grew enough, in future years we would be able to cover that.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. So what did you do then in year two, and what is the lesson for our listeners?

Daniel Levine:
Yeah, so two key things. One was, stay on the trajectory that we were on with our original vision. So we had to have faith in the fact, and quite honestly we could look to the spreadsheets to prove it, but we had faith in the fact that if we grew from 60 or 70 to 285, which is what we were in our second year, we would exceed those fixed costs-

Bobbi Rebell:
Which is phenomenal growth, by the way, that's amazing.

Daniel Levine:
It was. And that was something that we really didn't expect, but because we made that huge investment in the first year and put on a fantastic program, what happened on the Sunday when we came back into the city and got cell phone reception again, is our emails were filled, not just with responses from attendees, but from friends and friends of attendees who saw them tweeting and Instagraming about it, and saying, "How do I get an invite? How do I get involved?" So we were able to leverage a really amazing product into a very big growth year into our second year. So that was a very large component of being able to recoup things in our second year. But the other big factor was, we need more revenue streams. Because we knew we were going to grow, we knew we could also go after revenue streams at 285 that we couldn't go after at 60 or 70 people.

Daniel Levine:
So, for example, sponsorship, that was a brand new door that opened for us, and even though 285 is, let's say relatively small in the conference business, where you might have conferences with 10,000 or 20,000 people, we could now go to major brands and major companies and say, "We have 285 highly curated people that are industry leaders, top entrepreneurs, top individuals, we are going to give you an opportunity to do very deep and impactful experiential marketing activations with them, and as a result, these brands saw a lot of value and in turn sponsorship dollars started coming in, which supplemented the revenue that we were receiving through ticket sales.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, I think that's an important lesson for our listeners, that you weren't just taking a check from anyone. Once you were in year two you were able to have that history of the content that people wanted, and the experience that people wanted, and you could select and curate, as you say, the 285 people. So it wasn't just any 285 people, it was people that really had value to the potential sponsors.

Daniel Levine:
Precisely, and that's magnetized quite a bit over the years, and we've really seen an exponential growth in the inbound requests to join us. Whereas in our first year, we were going out and selecting, each of us, 30 or so people from our networks to really beg to come up and experience this with us. We're now going to receive over 4000 applications from people all over the world to be one of 400 people to come and join us this September.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well that's amazing, congratulations. I want to move from there to our everyday money tip, because that also has to do with something that you do that other people can emulate, that was at first a misstep, and then you found the right way to do it and it's working for you.

Steven Pulver:
At the start of this new year, 2018, we said we would start doing dinners. So we basically hand selected both current attendees, who are attending for the first time this September in 2018, alumni, other people in the community that we wanted to join us, and we'd have dinners, and we would invite people to nice restaurants, certainly not over the top fancy restaurants, but nice restaurants here in Toronto, and we did a few in Boston, and Chicago, and other places. And we would basically bring people together for a night of eating and drinking, and just a good time connecting people.

Bobbi Rebell:
That's expensive though.

Steven Pulver:
Yeah. So we found out very quickly that that's very expensive, and that was built into our budget. We knew from the beginning we'd spend maybe $2000 at dinner, and we had built that in that we were going to do a few of these. So we'd earmarked that and we knew we were going to do it, but after a few dinners we realized that this was getting expensive, despite us being ready for that expense, but it wasn't really us. We loved the fact that we were connecting with people and having great meals and great conversation, but at one point Daniel actually turned to me and said, "Why don't we just do a few barbecues? Do you think maybe we could do it at your house?" And I said, "Absolutely we can so that."

Steven Pulver:
Next thing you know we got the barbecue all ready and went to our favorite butcher shop and got burgers, and basically created a barbecue that I'm actually staring at in my living room right now, we're about to host a barbecue in a hour or so from now, and we said, "We can do barbecues. We can so five or six of these a month, at a cost of maybe $200 a barbecue, max, and bring amazing people together and have the flexibility to not spend a lot of money, but actually get way more bang for our buck."

Bobbi Rebell:
And that's something a lot of people should take to heart, because we sometimes get so busy trying to impress other people, and in fact it's often more impressive to bring someone to your home. Certainly it creates a different kind of bond, a more special and more personal bond, and it is more budget friendly.

Steven Pulver:
Right, and I think it really does go to our core too, right? As both individuals and as a business where we want to connect with people in this kind of way, as opposed to some hoity-toity kind of restaurant that is just fundamental not us.

Bobbi Rebell:
Right. So it is on brand, as they say, and speaking of that, you've got conference number four this September.

Daniel Levine:
Yeah, we now have a hard cap at 400 attendees, particularly because for us community and authentic relationship is super important to us. We're going to have incredible folks like Jordan Harbinger, from The Jordan Harbinger Show, and Jason Calicanis, who is one of the most world renowned Angel investors, coming and joining us for the weekend. Disconnecting from technology up at summer camp, sitting around the fire pit, sharing stories about business and growth and leadership, and going water skiing and rock climbing while we're at it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Sounds amazing. Alright, where can people find out more, if you even have any spots, or get on the wait list for next year?

Steven Pulver:
So, we have just opened up our final 50 application spots, those are now officially open for application, so there is still room available to apply, and I would encourage any of your amazing listeners to visit firesideconf, C-O-N-F, .com, as in conference. We are always there as well, you'll see a little chat bubble, you can say hi to us and ask us any questions, or you can feel free to apply and just let us know that you're coming from this podcast and you'll immediately jump to the top of the line.

Bobbi Rebell:
Wonderful. Thank you both.

Daniel Levine:
Our pleasure, thank you.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey friends, so many lessons here. Financial grownup tip number one; let's start with the guys everyday money tip, because that hits close to home. Don't assume you have to spend a ton of money to impress wealthy and successful people. The thing is, fancy people aren't impressed with fancy. There's a scene in a new show called Succession that I've been watching, where a character is trying to impress his future father-in-law, who is very wealthy. So he spends a crazy amount of money on a watch, but when he gives it to the man as a gift, he's trying to impress him remember, the fact is he is barely acknowledged, and in fact, the very wealthy future father-in-law later gives it away without much of a thought. Watching it was pretty sad, unfortunately there is some reality to that.

Bobbi Rebell:
Rich people don't need another fancy meal. Once Steven and Daniel realized this and started hosting barbecues at their own homes, they had a much better time connecting with the people that they wanted to impress. I mean, the conference is at a camp, that's who they are. They're real, they're down to earth, and they want to connect to their people in that way. It's refreshing. Not everything has to be in a five star hotel or restaurant.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grownup tip number two. Well, the fireside conference lost about £30,000 the first year because it was self-financed. The founders remained in control and did not face pressure from outside investors. Early stage businesses that can avoid taking outside investors retain control, something Daniel and Steven seems very happy about.

Bobbi Rebell:
If you enjoyed the show, tell a friend, or share on social media. On Twitter, I am @BobbiRebell, on Instagram @BobbiRebell1, and on Facebook @BobbiRebell, and please subscribe if you have not already so you don't miss any upcoming episodes. Thank you to Steven and Daniel for your candor and openness about the challenges and rewards of starting such an ambitious conference. I'm looking forward to watching The Fireside Conference continue to grow. So thank you gentlemen for helping us all get one step closer to being financial grownups.

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

Retire Inspired’s Chris Hogan had a taste for expensive food at the grocery store- and it was was thinning out his bank account. But when he saw the true cost of his weekly habit he quickly hit the brakes and kept the change. 

 

In Chris’ money story you will learn

-How Chris Hogan had money wake up call

-Why his spending was spiraling out of control

-How he curbed his grocery spending bill from $1500 a month to close to nothing

-How routine and habit was hurting his wallet

-The specific strategy Chris and his wife used to get back on track with their spending

-The crazy meals the Hogans had while cleaning out their food stash!

In Chris’ lesson you will learn

-Chris’s strategy to avoid mixing up wants and needs

-The importance of being intentional with how you spend your money

-How to curb spending even when you think you can afford it

-Chris’ saying: interest you pay is a penalty but interest you earn is a reward

-How to get debt out of your life

In Chris’ money tip you will learn

-Why he believes cash is the best tool to control spending

-How electronic payments can confuse you and cause you to spend more than you intend

In my take you will learn:

-While eating out can be a budget killer, eating at home can be expensive as well

-Be deliberate at the grocery store- have a list and don’t buy those impulse items!

-Don’t shop hungry

-Use apps like Grocery IQ and Grocery pal to help stay on track in the store and to plan better

-Avoid routine spends. But on purpose, and with purpose!

EPISODE LINKS

Chris Hogan’s website https://www.chrishogan360.com/

Chris Hogan’s book Retire Inspired

Chris Hogan’s podcast Retire inspired https://www.chrishogan360.com/podcast/

Chris Hogan’s Retirement calculator https://www.chrishogan360.com/riq/

Follow Chris!

Instagram @ChrisHogan360

Twitter @ChrisHogan360

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/chrishogan360/

 

Grocery apps to check out:

Grocery IQ

Grocery Pal

 

Here are some stories about Grocery apps:

8 apps that will save you real Money on Food- from Money

http://time.com/money/5095326/8-apps-that-will-save-you-real-money-on-food/

10 Best apps to save money on groceries 2018 from Frugal for Less

https://www.frugalforless.com/apps-to-save-money-on-groceries/

Best Grocery List apps article from best products;

https://www.bestproducts.com/eats/food/g1505/grocery-shopping-list-apps/

6 best grocery shopping list apps for iphone and ipad 2018 from appsdose

http://www.appsdose.com/2015/04/6-best-grocery-shopping-list-apps-for-iphone-ipad.html

7 Grocery List apps for iPhone and Android for best shopping experience

https://mashtips.com/best-grocery-list-app-iphone-android/

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Transcription

Chris Hogan:
You would have thought I was getting ready for Y2K. I had food in the cupboards, the freezers. I had food everywhere, but yet I was still every Saturday morning going to the grocery store.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Financial Grownup with me, certified financial planner Bobbi Rebell, author of How to be a Financial Grownup. 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. We talk a lot these days in our society about being mindful. I'm working hard about bringing that into my life in a consistent and intentional way, but we also need to talk about mindlessness especially when it comes to our every day spending. I love the story that Retire Inspired author and podcast Chris Hogan is about to share with us because of its brilliant simplicity. We need to hear this stuff and know that even the people we look up to when it comes to money have not always been the role models for money mindfulness. He became aware, and once he saw the numbers, change came. Chris Hogan, you are a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Chris Hogan:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Bobbi Rebell:
It's an honor to have you. I am such a fan of all that you do for people from Retire Inspired, the book, to your podcast, to all of your good teachings and advice. It is truly a privilege, and we thank you.

Chris Hogan:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Bobbi Rebell:
You have brought with you a money story about spending and the grocery store, which is something that people don't always realize what's going on there. Do tell.

Chris Hogan:
Bobbi, I had an issue. I wasn't being a grownup at this time.

Bobbi Rebell:
Oh no.

Chris Hogan:
This is back before I had kids. I'm now the proud father of three boys, but no kids, double income household. We were just getting started getting serious about where we were financially and what we were doing. I sat down and was looking at bank statements. I wanted to add up, I wanted to know where was my money going? Where was our money heading? I started adding up the different categories, the eating out, but the grocery bill. This was one that was jumping out at me. I thought, this can't be correct. I went another month back, and yeah, $1,200 a month on groceries, a family of two.

Bobbi Rebell:
What were you buying?

Chris Hogan:
Anything and everything, meats, cheeses, anything and everything at any time. Again, we had the money. We weren't hurting anybody. I went back a third month and added it up. It was like $1,500. I was like, "Okay, let's go back to the $1,200," and it was just too much. Then I started realizing something. I was making the grocery store rich, instead of me building my own wealth. That became my financial wake up call, so to speak. Literally, looking at this, we got intentional. We got on a budget, and we set up a dollar amount that we were going to spend on groceries. That was the taking control. I'll never forget, we looked at all the food that I stockpiled. You would have thought I was getting ready for Y2K. I had food in the cupboards, the freezers. I had food everywhere, but yet I was still every Saturday morning going to the grocery store. I realized something. I was shopping out of habit, not out of necessity.

Bobbi Rebell:
It sounds like it was part of your routine. That was your weekend routine.

Chris Hogan:
That's exactly right. It was the routine. Regardless if we needed anything or not, I was going and buying things because I could. Stepping back and really looking at that, we put some parameters in place. We set up a dollar amount that we were going to spend on groceries, but before we did that we ate the food that we had. I'll never forget, that was a grownup moment for us, really starting to take a stand because the $1,200 to $1,500 that was normally being spent in that month, we didn't spend it that month. We actually sent it toward our debt.

Bobbi Rebell:
The entire amount?

Chris Hogan:
The entire amount. We had $100 for groceries. We built the milk, and eggs, and things like that. The other stuff, we ate the things that we had. Now I'm not going to lie to you, Bobbi, we had some interesting meals. It was interesting. Ramen noodles with corn. We did some stuff, but we made a stand at that point financially that we were going to be in charge, and our habits weren't going to take charge of us.

Bobbi Rebell:
I want to ask you something. Earlier you said you could afford it, but then you said you were putting that money towards debt. You could afford it in terms of cash flow, but yet maybe you should not have been spending that, clearly, because you could have put it towards debt, so your perception of afford has changed.

Chris Hogan:
Absolutely, it did, because my math changed. Looking at debt, it was one of those things that at that time we rationalized it, because why? Everybody had credit card debt, everybody had a car payment. As you start to look at it, and you start to run the numbers, you understand interest that you pay is a penalty. Interest that you earn is a reward. When you start to learn real math, as I call it, you start to see debt for what it is. It's a threat, and it's a thief. You want to get it out of your life.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is the lesson from this for our listeners?

Chris Hogan:
I'd say, "Be intentional." It's the lesson of wants versus needs, and we can get confused. We can want something so bad that we feel like we need it, but I want us to be clear. Set spending limits for yourself. Understand what you normally spend, but let's put some dollar amounts on there of hey, here's what we're going to spend on groceries. This is what we're going to spend eating out. Now you start to construct that budget. It puts you in control, and then you don't have to feel regret.

Bobbi Rebell:
Let's move on to your money tip because this is one, I know what you're going to say. It's so brilliantly simple.

Chris Hogan:
Yes.

Bobbi Rebell:
What is your money tip for everyone that they can use right away?

Chris Hogan:
Right away, my money tip is this. Use cash. I know it sounds crazy, but I'm telling you, when you have cash, and you go into the grocery store with that dollar amount, it helps you stay aware, and it helps you stay in control. Now when they say the total amount is $85, and you count out $85 you are feeling the spending of the money as you're counting out those bills as opposed to with a debit card, the swipe, we don't feel the pain there. It's just this swipe. Now there's a chip, and all these things going on. It doesn't become spending until you balance your checking account. Use cash in those areas that you struggle in, whether it's eating out. Get an envelope, write eating out on it. Put a dollar amount in there each and every pay period. When the money is gone, you're done. It's this great reminder, and it keeps us aware of where we stand financially.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right, Chris. Thank you so much. I want to hear more quickly about what is going on with you, and what you are working on at Dave Ramsey Solutions and at Retire Inspired. Do tell.

Chris Hogan:
Yes. We launched Retire Inspired in 2016. I'm working on my second book that we're going to have ready and available for the public in 2019, but I'm traveling all over the country doing smart money events where we walk people through the baby steps. I'm also doing corporate events where I'm talking about money and leadership. They can go check me out at ChrisHogan360.com, look at the events page, and they can find out where I'm at and where I'm going to be.

Bobbi Rebell:
One my favorite things about what you do in your books, and I hope you have this in your next book, is that you really as you travel you get so many unique stories that are relatable, or sometimes hopefully they won't be relatable because some of them can be pretty scary, but I look forward to hearing more of those stories. In terms of social media, always Chris Hogan 360?

Chris Hogan:
Always, everything, on Facebook as well as Twitter, Instagram. @chrishogan360 is where I'm at.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, there was a lot there that I could relate to and have definitely been guilty of. This is a case where I am right in it with you guys. Financial Grownup Tip Number 1: We think of eating out in restaurants as a big expense that has to be watched, and it does, but you can also buy quite expensive items at the grocery store, and have some very pricey home cooked meals, or even worse as in the case of the Hogan household, some expensive food just sitting in the pantry and the freezer. You have to watch that bill. It seems so simple, but make a list when you go shopping and stick to it.

Bobbi Rebell:
You've heard this before, but I'm going to remind you. Don't shop hungry. It happens, I do it. I always buy more than I should and fall for the impulse items. I'm working on it, and you should too. There are a ton of apps that can help you to be more organized and save money when you shop for groceries. I'm going to put links to a few articles with suggestions in the show notes, but a couple to check out just here, Grocery IQ and Grocery Pal. You make your list, and the app will sort out and show you discounts including those for other brands of the same item. While it may seem like it's okay if you can afford it to spend that extra money at the grocery store, it's not always as okay as it seems. For example, in the Hogan's case, they realized that they could be using that money to pay down debt. They thought that they could afford it, but maybe not so much. If you don't have debt, wouldn't it be more fun to do something else with the money, or more smarter, to invest the money? Savings is a good thing.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial Grownup Tip Number 2: Ditch the bad money habits that are just there because they're routine. Chris Hogan was shopping at the grocery every Saturday because it was Saturday. He did not need the food. In fact, he probably didn't have room for it at a certain point. This comes back to things like lattes. If you want one because you want one, and you can afford it, that's fine, but if you're just buying one every morning because that's your routine, think about it. Maybe you want to do something else some days.

Bobbi Rebell:
I want to thank all of you for your ratings and reviews on iTunes. It is making a huge difference in helping others discover our new podcast. I also want to thank Forbes for naming Financial Grownup one of the five podcasts that is getting it right. It was amazing to be getting that kind of recognition less than two months after we started this project. Keep spreading the word, friends, and keep in touch. I am on Twitter, @bobbirebell and on Instagram at bobbirebell1, on Facebook. Check me out under Bobbi Rebell and learn more about the show at, you're getting the theme here, bobbirebell.com/financialgrownuppodcast.

Bobbi Rebell:
Chris Hogan is pretty much as grown up as it gets. I loved his episode, and I hope you did too, and that it got us all one step closer to being financial grownups. Financial Grownup is edited and produced by Steve Stewart and is a BRK Media production.

 

After 148 rejections in the first funding round, Kathryn Minshew co-founder and CEO of the Muse took note of what she did wrong and upped her game when she went looking for new financing. Minshew scored close to $30 million thanks to the new approach. 

 

In Kathryn’s money story you will learn

-How Kathryn and the Muse team re-vamped their strategy the second time they raised money

-How Kathryn rebounded from the 148 rejections in the seed round of financing

-How The Muse raised $30 million from investors

-How they were able to ask for less money and come out with more than the original targets

-The way Kathryn structured her process when pitching investors

-How they organized their pitches and research to be more effective

-Kathryn’s investor prioritization strategy

-The specific thing Kathryn said to investors to get them to the table faster- and with more interest in her company

-How a second round of financing is different- and should be approached differently from a seed round

In Kathryn’s lesson you will learn:

-The advice Kathryn found most helpful from her networks and mentors

-How she got help from other entrepreneurs

-How to tell if the investors are wrong not to invest- or if your idea and pitch is missing the mark

-How to figure out who your end users are- and why it is important

-Strategies and specific things to ask in order to get honest input about your company

In Kathryn’s money tip you will learn:

-Negotiations can be about more than just cash

-How to ask for signing bonuses, signing bonuses, flextime, vacation time, better titles.

-Why budgets for professional training are essential and how to negotiate for them

In my take you will learn:

-How to learn lessons from rejection, and incorporate them in your next venture

-The importance of taking the time to throughtfully plan and customize presentations and pitches

-How to level the playing field even when the other party is clearly more powerful. 

Episode links:

TheMuse.com

Kathryn’s book with Muse co-founder Alexandra Cavoulacos The New Rules of Work

Follow Kathryn and The Muse!

Instagram @kminshew @themuse

Twitter: @Kmin and @TheMuse and @TheNewRules

Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/thedailymuse

https://www.facebook.com/minshew

Kathryn Minshew, Co-Founder and CEO of The Muse shares her rebound from 148 investor rejections to eventually raising $30 million for her startup. Listen to her episode of the Financial Grownup podcast at bobbirebell.com/financialgrownuppodcast-- Created using PowToon -- Free sign up at http://www.powtoon.com/youtube/ -- Create animated videos and animated presentations for free.

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Transcription

Kathryn Minshew:
If you tell someone you're the founder of a company and ask for their input, they are more likely to give you positive impact because they don't want to hurt your feelings. If you tell them that you're a consultant helping a company understand how its market positioning lands, or helping a company better understand what it's doing well and what it's not, people are much more likely to give you totally unfiltered feedback for the series A because I was running a process.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to "Financial Grownup" with me, Certified Financial Planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of "How to Be a Financial Grownup". 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, everybody. This is an episode about rejection, and what you would do differently the second time around. How to tell were they wrong to reject you? Maybe your message could be a little bit more on point. The Muse founder and CEO, Kathryn Minshew has told the story many times of how she and her colleagues were rejected 148 times when they when to raise money for their startup, The Muse. Once the company got off the ground, it has been a massive success, and many people would say, "Well, those 148 people, they must be so sorry that they rejected it." And of course, that is true to some extent. But also, Kathryn looks back and realizes she had a lot that she would do differently the next time. And in fact, she did do it differently when she went back for the next round of financing, and that's what we talked about. Here is Kathryn Minshew.

Bobbi Rebell:
Kathryn Minshew, you are a financial grownup. Welcome to the program.

Kathryn Minshew:
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

Bobbi Rebell:
And you are well known as the founder and CEO of The Muse, the amazing job site, and also well known for being rejected when you went to raise money. Tell me how many, 140 something times?

Kathryn Minshew:
148 times. It was like rejection for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a few meetings and noes inbetween for fun.

Bobbi Rebell:
And you are the queen of resilience, and one thing that you talk about in your book, "The New Rules of Work", which I should have mentioned to everybody. She is the author of a fabulous career book called "The New Rules of Work".

Bobbi Rebell:
You talk about your personal brand, and how important it is to define it. That fundraising and the lack of it for so long became your personal brand. So you brought with you a money story that has to do with what happened next, after you finally did get the initial funding and you went back for me. Tell us.

Kathryn Minshew:
Absolutely. Well, first of all, I'll say it's much easier as we all know to talk about failure once you've moved past it. So it became much easier to tell the story of the 148 noes after we had already successfully raised our series A and B rounds. So we've raised almost $30 million in venture capital so far for The Muse.

Bobbi Rebell:
Amazing.

Kathryn Minshew:
It's been a totally wild ride. So my financial story involves what I set out to do, or rather what I did in the series A to ensure that we had an outcome that was very different than the seed round. Because, obviously, I knew how important it was for that next round, to get it right from the go-ahead. And so to try and condense the story into something very quick, we wanted to go out and initially we were thinking about raising six to $7 million. But actually given the advice that I got while preparing for a fundraise, we were actually told to start out saying we were thinking five to six or five to seven, and then slowly let the demand build. So instead of us going out for a big number and being less sure if the market would respond, start out with a smaller number. And then, if the market is really excited about our business, let the negotiations and the demand push it up, which ended up working really well for us because we ended up raising 10 million after we had overwhelming demand.

Kathryn Minshew:
I also was incredibly structured about the process probably because I was a little bit paranoid after having such a difficult time with our seed round. So ahead of time, I really worked the story, got all of our metrics out there. I thought about how best to position them, which numbers to lead with, what to put first so that we could really grab people's attention. We were obviously lucky in that we had really great revenue growth and a lot of very strong metrics.

Kathryn Minshew:
And then, I actually created a spreadsheet. I took all of the investors that I was even remotely interested in talking to. I put them in a spreadsheet. Divided it up by location, so that when I was in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, DC, et cetera, I could meet with people who were there. Then, I included information about whether they had invested in any similar companies, any competitors. Any companies that might give them a better understanding into what we did at The Muse. I would include notes from different meetings. I actually would also rank how excited I was after each meeting to continue conversations, so I could prioritize the ones that I was most excited about. I would say that really helped to keep me on track, and so we were also able to run a pretty tight process, where we pinned all of our first meetings with investors to the same two-and-a-half or three-week period.

Kathryn Minshew:
It was really interesting because in the seed round, we had a lot of trouble with investors saying, "Oh, I'm busy, right now. But how about in a month?" I wasn't confident enough in the business, so we would just take whatever we could get for the series A because I was running a process. I would write back to people and be like, "You know I'd love to talk, but unfortunately, I need to get all of our first meetings done by X date. So I can push it a few days, but let me know if you're going to be able to make it work. And if not, I'm totally fine. We'll keep in touch and maybe there'll be another round that you can participate in." And what was fascinating is a lot of people would say, "Oh, let me move around my schedule. Absolutely, I can make it work." And suddenly, we were negotiating from a more even position. And the ones that weren't able to or the ones that said, "No, sorry. I can't do it," they probably would have never backed the company to begin with.

Bobbi Rebell:
True. Do you think looking back, obviously when you were going for the most money, the second round, you were a stronger situation to begin with. But had you used the techniques that you were now using that you just talked about, would you have had more success the first time?

Kathryn Minshew:
You know, maybe. It's so hard to know because the seed round for a startup is really different than later rounds because people aren't necessarily looking at your metrics. They are to some extent, but they're really betting on you. And I think the fact that it was my first proper company that I was fairly young at the time, this was six-and-a-half years ago, so it was very early in my career. And I think that plus the lack of knowledge or understanding about what we were trying to do in the business were some of the biggest concerns. So I do think we could have had a better time and controlled the process a bit more, but I also think there were just some fundamental and structural things that we had to get through and really prove on very limited capital before we could really go out and successfully fundraise from bigger investors.

Bobbi Rebell:
So now, what is your advice to listeners and especially want-to-be entrepreneurs that are looking to raise money, start businesses, and especially to young women?

Kathryn Minshew:
I would say, firstly, you can't understate the importance of perseverance because it is so hard in the early days. But I think that doesn't mean that you just keep doing the same thing without adjusting your tactics and thinking about how you could be more strategic. I found it to be so invaluable to get the advice from others, especially other female entrepreneurs. Because sometimes we have a lot of great friends who are entrepreneurs, who are men, but sometimes the tactics or the approaches or behaviors that would work for them, didn't work the same when I did them because of unintentional or unconscious bias or other things. And so I found that it was really helpful to surround myself with a network of entrepreneurs of both genders to get a lot of advice, to test out different approaches to see what felt natural and normal to me. Because if it feels too unnatural to you, investors will probably pick up on that, and it won't help you communicate that confidence that you are looking for when you're starting to talk to investors about your business.

Bobbi Rebell:
So one last question about this for our listeners, how do you know the difference between maybe your idea just isn't that good, and that's why you're not getting funding and you should stop, or you should persevere as you did because your idea just isn't hitting the right people at the right time with the right message?

Kathryn Minshew:
Absolutely. So you've just gotten to the crux of what makes this so hard, which is that there is no silver bullet, and you will never have 100% confidence or certainty either way, which is incredibly difficult. However, I think there are a few things you can use to help you directionally get that sense of whether your business is likely to be successful. The first, and I think the most important is to figure out who are your end users and do as much as possible to get unfiltered feedback from them.

Kathryn Minshew:
For example, if you tell someone you're the founder of a company and ask for their input, they're more likely to give you positive input because they don't want to hurt your feelings. If you tell them that you're a consultant helping a company understand how its marketing positioning lands or helping a company better understand what its doing well and what it's not, people are much more likely to give you totally unfiltered feedback, and you need that unfiltered feedback when you're trying to ascertain if you really need to keep pushing forward on your business.

Kathryn Minshew:
So in my case, even though we were getting rejection, after rejection, after rejection from a lot of investors, we were hearing things from our users and from people who were signing up to use The Muse that indicated we had tapped a nerve and we were on a path that people love. They wanted us to use the product. They'd say I love The Muse, but can you do these five things? Make it better here. Change this. That's all positive feedback because that shows you that there is a need. You just have to keep getting better, and I think that is what gave me the oomph to keep going. But I will just call out it's not like I knew the whole time, oh my gosh, this is a great idea. I just have to keep going. I definitely struggled with whether I should accept that these people that were much more experienced than I, that were successful investors, maybe they knew something I didn't, and I just had hubris.

Bobbi Rebell:
All right. Let's do a money tip. You are the career guru, and you have so many amazing ideas and tips in your book. I wanted to pull some out of there and get maybe your favorite tips that people can use in their careers, and their ventures that they could maybe put to work ASAP at their next job interview or their next negotiation, what have it.

Kathryn Minshew:
I thought through a lot of different things I could share here, and the one I came up with that I wanted to talk about today is the fact that when you negotiate, it is not just all about cash and I think it can be really empowering to realize that because so many of us have anxiety about negotiating a salary, negotiating a raise. Whether it's at the beginning of a job search, or when you're getting a promotion. But I would encourage people, remember that there are a lot of other things you can negotiate for.

Kathryn Minshew:
So obviously, base salary is the thing that people talk about most. But what about signing bonuses, performance bonuses if you achieve certain things? You can also negotiate for flex time, for vacation time, for a better title that might help you in your career. One of the most creative things that I've heard is people negotiating for a budget for professional development and training.

Bobbi Rebell:
Specific money. In other words, not just saying, "Will you send me," in theory. It's very specific.

Kathryn Minshew:
Oh, very specific. In fact, there was someone at an organization that had mandatory salary bans that the leadership wasn't able to go beyond, and so she said great. Why don't you dedicate ... I think it was five or $10,000 towards training development conference that will include my travel, and that will help level me up to be a better employee for you, to let me do my job better, and it won't invalidate the salary cap. This will just be another way that you're investing in my growth, and they said yes, and I think that is such a great example of creativity when it comes to negotiation.

Bobbi Rebell:
Amazing. That's such great advice. Thank you so much. Tell us quickly before we wrap up, what are you guys up to at The Muse these day, and where can people find you?

Kathryn Minshew:
Absolutely. So people can find me at The Muse or @kmin on Twitter. As a company, we are doing a lot right now, but we have been really focusing on we rolled out a new feature called Discussions on TheMuse.com, where people can ask and answer each other's questions. So if you have a career question or you want to learn more about negotiating a raise, we've got a way now to get advice from our community and hear other people's stories. And then, I'm also just kind of fascinated down the road by continuing to explore this idea of how people make the best career decisions, how they find the right fits, and how we help companies tell their stories in a more genuine and authentic way that isn't about just come work here, we're great, but really shares the information people need to know to decide do I want to be part of that organization, or be part of that company?

Bobbi Rebell:
Hey, friends. Here's my take on what Kathryn had to say.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grownup tip, number one. Like she did, do your homework, including learning what went wrong the first time. Even if you think the companies or whomever you were pitching to were wrong to reject your idea, we all have room for improvement. Kathryn went out and asked for advice, for example, about how much money to ask for. She actually went for a smaller number based on the advice as a strategy, and ended up raising more money, so it worked. She was also much more organized and structured in her preparations the second time around. She was specific to each company, and deliberate in her presentation. She planned geographically, so she could be efficient with her time. Kathryn even ranked how excited she was about prospects, so she could prioritize and focus on her resources and the best alow there.

Bobbi Rebell:
Financial grownup tip, number two. Stand up for yourself, even if you need them more than they need you. In Kathryn's second round, when prospects said they didn't have the time to meet with her any time soon, she pushed back and was not only able to get them to the table faster when they were interested, but also to level the playing field for a stronger negotiating position.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you for listening to this episode of financial grownup. Please subscribe if you have not already. Reviews are great if you have just a few minutes. You can follow me @bobbirebell on Twitter, @bobbirebell1 on Instagram, and learn more about the show at BobbiRebell.com/FinancialGrownupPodcast. I hope that you all enjoyed this episode of "Financial Grownups" with The Muse's Kathryn Minshew, and that we all got one step closer to being financial grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:
"Financial Grownup" with Bobbi Rebell is edited and produced by Steve Stuart, 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.