4 Takeaways from 3 Renowned Personal Finance Experts
We share four takeaways from our podcast interview series with three renowned personal finance experts. This show is made possible by FinancialFreedomTool.com.
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This is our wrap up show for Money Smart Week, a national public awareness campaign coordinated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, to help individuals and families better manage their personal finances.
To participate this year, we put together a special podcast series, featuring tips from three world-famous personal finance experts from their newest book:
- Broke Millennial, Erin Lowry, Broke Millennial Takes on Investing*
- NBC’s Today financial expert, Jean Chatzky, on Women with Money*
- 9-time New York Times best-selling author, David Bach, on The Latte Factor*
On The BIGG Success Show today, we shared three of our favorite moments from the series, as well as our key takeaway from each of the authors and the BIGG overall takeaway. Here’s a summary of that discussion…
Favorite BIGG Moments
Remember math class? Our favorite moment with Erin was when she compared math class to investing. And it doesn’t have anything to do with numbers! Here’s Erin:
I have this very vivid memory of sitting in algebra class, and just having no clue what was going on, because I didn’t know the language, you know, he threw out a term like coefficient. And I’m like, I don’t know what that means. So I feel like investing is exactly the same. And you don’t need to know complicated theories. You don’t have to be in the nitty gritty, in the weeds of all of that, to have a basic understanding.
Most personal finance experts scold us for spending. Our favorite moment with Jean was when we called her out for including a chapter in her wonderful book about the joy of spending. Here’s her reply:
We all work because there are things that we either want to do, or want to have, and nobody should make us feel guilty about that as long as you’re not sabotaging your current life or your future with your spending.
Our favorite moment with David was when George asked him a question and David said it gave him chills. George noted that we tend to compartmentalize our lives. He asked David if The Latte Factor is calling for us to think about our lives more holistically. Here’s David’s response:
What you just said just gave me chills like I wish you could see me because I’ve got hair standing up on my arm. Because here’s why it gave me chills – I’ve grown up in the financial services industry. I spent 26 years in this business. I was a financial advisor. My family’s been in the business for 50 years. I grew up going to my dad’s investment classes at the age of nine. When I look at what the financial services industry has done wrong – because there’s a lot of good that the industry has done, but there’s a lot that they’ve done wrong – what the financial services industry, I think, has done wrong is in focusing people so much on retirement.
By telling them, you’ve got to figure out what your number is that people when they’re in their 20s or the 30s or sometimes even in their 40s retirement is so far off that they can’t connect to it. And so they lose exactly what you just said – we lose touch with: “Why am I putting this money away?” “How is it going to even help me?” Who knows if I’ll be alive in 20 or 30 or 40 years?” So what I’ve been focusing on is teaching people – money is not just going into retirement accounts, it should be going into a dream account. You need to be clear on what it means for you today to live a rich life. It’s actually not about finishing rich; it’s about living rich.
This Podcast Series Sponsored by: FinancialFreedomTool.com
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3 + 1 BIGG Takeaways
You are an investor, even if you don’t own a penny of stocks.
Erin says:
So one woman that I interviewed for the book had this great line about how, when you invest your money, your money is doing some of the heavy lifting for you – in order to get you to your financial goals. But if investing just makes you feel completely nauseous, you have no risk tolerance for it, you absolutely cannot do it, it keeps you up at night. You kow what? You don’t have to. But that does mean you’re going to have to save that much more. And you really need to do the math on how much you’re going to have to save in order to get to your goals.
The two of us have talked about this before here on our podcast: see yourself as an investor, not a saver. Every dollar you spend is an investment in your current and/or future happiness.
Listen to the full interview with Erin Lowry.
Women need to ask for more pay.
Jean said:
My husband spent the last 18 years as a recruiter for a major corporation. The majority of whose employees were women. He told me that he always held something back. He was disappointed when the candidates didn’t ask for more. If you’re working for a small company, and you’re interviewing directly with the boss, they expect you to ask and asking. By the way, this shows a level of confidence that personally I want in my employees.
Ask and you shall receive. And if you don’t receive, it’s not personal. It just means the money isn’t there. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know what the answer was. You’ll never know if you could how much better a life you and your loved ones could have had.
Listen to the full interview with Jean Chatzky.
Even if you hate budgeting, you can still retire rich.
David said:
It’s so funny too, because I did this on The Oprah Show in Chicago – don’t budget because budgeting doesn’t work.
You know, I remember Oprah saying to me, “Well, everybody tells you to budget.
I’m like, “I know Oprah. They’re all wrong! The reality is that if budgeting worked, everybody would be rich. People hate budgets. It’s like going on a diet. If they go on a budget, they fall right off after two or three weeks. Most people are not wired to budget. And if you are wired to budget, chances are you’ll fall in love with somebody who’s not and so that just leads to a lot of fighting. So here’s the thing we know from research, from science, what works when it comes to money is automation.”
Here’s the dirty little secret in the financial world: Most financial experts don’t budget. Automate? Yes. Track? Yes. But for many, budgets suck the life right out of you. But you still have to find a way to regularly save and invest. Remember: your nest egg accumulates from consistent activity over time.
Listen to the full interview with David Bach.
Prepare for the future AND live in the present.
Here are our favorite quotes on this subject from each of the three personal finance experts we chatted with:
Erin: “I am saving and investing for x.”
Jean: “I like to say “personal finance” is more “personal” than “finance”.
David: “Money is a tool to free you to live your best life.”
This is our overall takeaway. Enjoy life now and later. Sound money management brings you life to its fullest. That’s BIGG success!
George “The Professor” & Mary-Lynn
Co-Founders, BIGG Success
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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file | podcast:
http://traffic.libsyn.com/biggsuccess/00969-040919.mp3
