Listen Money Matters - Free Your Inner Financial Badass. All The Stuff You Should Know About Personal Finance.

Financial issues are a leading cause of divorce.  Before you take the plunge, find out what you need to know so you don’t become a statistic. Our guest Jeff will share some things he learned about preparing your finances for marriage.  Because once the honey moon is over and life starts, having systems in place to deal with finances will be important to your life as a married couple. Some partners will bring an equal amount of financial knowledge into the marriage.  For many, one will know a lot more than the other.  For many people, this means managing money defaults to the more knowledgeable spouse.  This is not a good recipe for a happy marriage.  The partner dealing with the finances can feel resentful that such a big job isn’t being shared and the partner with less experience might feel left out of important decisions. Jeff was more knowledgeable about finance so he and his fiance took Dave Ramsey’s Peace University together to help get her up to speed. One of the most important things to discuss befo

Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to  trying to improve.  Dwelling too much on minutia hurts the overall result. Are you waiting for the perfect time to start investing?  Right job, $1000 to start with, after the holidays.  You know what would be better than that?  Investing. There is no more perfect time than right now.   We have too many choices and too many sources of information.  This can be paralyzing.  Should you invest with Betterment, ShareBuilder, E-Trade, Van Guard?  What do my co-workers think, my family, Reddit?  How can I decide anything before consulting /r/personalfinance? You can spend weeks researching all this and you know how much money that will make you, none.  If you just made the leap, you might already be up a few bucks.  We don’t advocate doing no research but there comes a point when too much is well, too much.  JUST PICK SOMETHING!  Ugh, like Krusty would say it. How do you overcome this quest for perfection when it comes to money and anything else in your life, reall

You ask and we answer!  Today we’ll discuss joint finances, joint credit cards, stock options, credit card debt, and money allocation. 1.  How do you update your fiscal strategy when combining finances with a partner?  Each person should be contributing but if one makes much more than the other, the contributions should be a percentage rather than split evenly.  Opening a joint checking account where each person contributes the agreed on percentage and use this  account to pay shared expenses. 2.  Should I add my partner who has no credit card to my account or should she get a separate card? If you open a joint card, you each take 50% of the risk.  If you add someone to your card, you take 100% of the risk.  A joint account also builds the credit score for each of you, important when it comes to one day taking out a mortgage together.  That said, unless you are 100% certain not only of staying together but also of the other person’s financial responsibility, keep it separate. 3.  My company is giving out m

We check in with Andrew’s Lending Club strategy to find out if he’s making any money and if it might be a good investment for the rest of us. Lending Club is a peer-to-peer lending company.  If you need a loan, rather than going through a bank, you make a pitch and a pool of hundreds of people will lend you the money.  Kind of like crowdsourcing for a loan.  The interest rate you’re charged will be lower than what most banks would offer. And the return for the lenders can be high. On Lending Club, your interest rate will range depending on the letter grade you are assigned which denotes how risky you are.  If you apply and are honest on your application, you are almost certain to get a loan.  For the lender, you can allow Lending Club to loan out your money based on your set criteria or you can hand pick the loans you want to make.  If you hand pick, you will be privy to a lot of information about the borrower, job, where they live, if they rent or own a home, etc. Andrew has $2700 invested and to date his

When should you put your money into the market? When should you pull it out? Is there a best and worst time? Are you timing the market? If you are timing the market according to headlines, you’re doing it wrong. We’ll show you the correct way to time the market. Put simply, timing the market is trying to figure out the best times to put your money into and pull it out of the stock market.  We’ve all heard, “buy low, sell high,” but when do you know the optimal time to do that?  You don’t, and neither do the talking heads trying to convince you that they do. Being conservative doesn’t sell newspapers or television advertising.  Jim Kramer ranting like a lunatic sells those things.  But screaming lunatics are seldom right.  Do you take advice from the “dirty ass unemployed gentleman” (call back!) screaming about end times outside the subway station?  Well, if he had a TV show, he could be Jim Kramer. The stock market offers a wonderful gift of an average of 7% returns.  There will be highs and lows, but in t

Laurel Staples joins us to teach us how to forget the American dream and talk about her journey becoming an entrepreneur. Start living our own dreams on our own terms. In 2007 Laurel quit her job as a mechanical engineer to launch her popular blog, Go Fire Yourself.  In January she will publish her book about how to quit your day job and run your own business.  She is also a business coach and a photographer. Like many of us, Laurel followed the prescribed path, leave high school, go to college, get a job.  She worked for Lex Mark designing laser printers.  And she hated it.  She knew she would hate it buy hey, that’s what you do in America.  Fork out a fortune for college and slave away in a job you hate. She has always been interested in things like health and the environment and planned to open an eco-friendly clothing store. After spending about a year planning it, she quit her job and opened the store in December 2007. Unfortunately around the same time the economy crashed. After all the blood, sweat

Do you sometimes get into a slump, just a malaise that you can’t really pinpoint a reason for?  It happens to us all.  Together we’ll stay motivated! Sustained motivation can be tough, whether it’s motivation to stick to a budget, an eating plan, or an exercise routine.  There are ways to create a positive feed back loop that will help keep you motivated. Get back into your routine.  If you are a largely healthy person and you slip on the food and exercise, you will start to feel pretty crappy, you might even feel depressed.  Eating and exercising well are good for your physical and mental health.  Once you get back to normal, the feelings should clear up. Getting bad feedback can sap motivation, whether it’s bad I-tunes reviews :( or the Dow is down, it can make you feel helpless.  But those things are not in your control.  Don’t obsess over things you can do nothing about. Make a list of everything you need to do that day, even if it’s  really small things.  As you do them, check them off.  Even if you

Are you broke? Can you pinpoint why?  We’re going to give you twenty one reasons for your brokeness.  Listen hard and shape up! 1.  You think “budget’ is a bad word.  A budget doesn’t have to be a complicated spread sheet, just using Mint is a start. 2.  You try to keep up with the Jones’s.  All that stuff that you envy may be built of a house of cards made of credit card debt.  The feeling of having no debt is a better feeling than having a boat. 3.  You can’t say “no.”  You don’t have to accept every invitation that comes your way.  If your finances would be better served by saying no sometimes, that should decide it for you. 4.  You think the government will fix your problems.  Lol!  Whose government, ours?  Jeez, have you not be paying attention?  The cavalry is not coming.  They’re too busy over in the Middle East bombing stuff to give a shit about you. 5.  Finding someone to blame is more important than finding a solution.  This is an insidious practice and it will poison all aspects of your life.

Andrew has  $12,000 of debt!  And yes, I did mean Andrew and not Matt.  Has he forsaken his Listen Money Matters principles?  Find out the shocking details. It’s not as scandalous as it sounds. Half of this is on a zero APR Home Depot credit card and those were expenses to remodel the kitchen.  The other half is a series of things that all hit at once, conference tickets, a vacation, mortgage tax.  Life got in the way and he did end up with finance charges. This episode is one of the reasons I was a fan of LMM long before I started working here.  Andrew owns up to his mistake and talks about it so he can help other people avoid the same.  Because if it happens to someone like him, it can happen to any of us, no matter how together our shit. This is how Andrew plans to redeem himself, and as penance, he’s going to document it in an article for us all to judge, (getting a little Dave Ramsey up in here.) The first thing he did was to set up an account with our friends at Ready for Zero to make payments to ki

Are you still getting and paying bills by snail mail?  Grab a whip and a chair and we’ll teach you how to tame them.  Also learn about duck genitals! Do you open your mail box to a flood of bills?  I hate that, not so much because I mind bills but because it’s more paper to keep track of and they cram so much crap in the envelopes. Before I started paying bills on-line I would send all the extra paper they sent me back to them with the check, ha! There is no reason you have to be bothered with all those pieces of paper.  Most bills now allow you to opt out of getting a paper statement and will e-mail you a digital one.  You can pay these on-line.  It’s so much easier to keep track of digital “paper” than actual paper.  You probably don’t even need to make a folder for it, you can just log into your account and look at the back statements if you need to. You can automate some payments too so you don’t have to do anything.  Just set up auto pay and your bank will send the payment.  You sometimes can’t do thi

The start of a new series!  We teach you about finance, but we want to teach you some economics too so you can apply what you learn to decisions you make. We first met David Stein on our Better Know a Millionaire series.  You loved him so much we brought him back! He joins us today answer the question what is sunk cost. Do you know what a sunk cost is? Even if you don’t, you’ve probably fallen victim to sunk cost fallacy at some point. Today we’ll explain what sunk costs are so you can avoid them. Abandon A Sinking Ship A sunk cost is a past cost that you can’t recover. The sunk cost fallacy is convincing you that you can’t give up because of all the time and money you’ve already spent. Here’s an example; you’ve spent $10,000 repairing your car over three years. That $10,000 is the sunk cost. Then the engine blows. What do you do? If you replace the engine, that’s, even more, money spent on a car that is unreliable and needs to be replaced. Good money after bad. But if you junk the car, you’ve wasted th

How do you define success?  For many it’s making a certain amount of money, driving a certain car, living in a big house.  But that is changing. The actual definition of success is “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”  That gives us a little more leeway than defining it solely based on making a lot of money. If your aim was to get to work on time today and you did, you’re successful!  Success can be measured in small things too, not just a big bank balance or fancy vacations. For some of us, success could be defined as freedom.  We talked about this is in Episode 34.  Matt defines success this way, he wakes up when he wants, starts work when he wants, takes a vacation when he wants.  Those of us doing the 9-5 office grind can’t say the same. Happiness is a good indicator of success.  And as a study showed, the sweet spot of happiness is earning between $50-75,000 a year.  Those making more did not show increased rates of happiness.  So as the cliche goes, money doesn’t buy happiness. For millennials

Do YOU need a life insurance policy?  Liran Hirschkorn from Best Life Quote will give us the criteria to answer that question. There are two reasons you should have life insurance.  Personal reasons and professional reasons.  If you have family who depend on you for income, you need it.  If you own a business, you need it.  But there must be an “insurable interest” on the insured.  So sorry, but you can’t take out a policy on the neighborhood junkie hoping to cash in when they cash out. If you’re a single person and you don’t have any dependents, you don’t really need a policy.  But if you are pretty young and healthy and plan to have a family eventually, you can lock in a low rate by buying now. Life insurance is meant to replace future income.  So if you’re twenty five and making $100,000 a year, you would want a policy worth a couple of million dollars.  This allows your family to continue paying the mortgage, day to day expenses, college fees, all the things the deceased would have paid for. If you’re

Student loans are expensive but they aren’t the only thing that costs money when you go to college.  Learn how to save money while in school. Thomas Frank of College Info Geek and Martin Boehme of Powlygot will teach us how to save money while still attending college. Textbooks are one of the biggest rackets going.  Thomas has a flow chart on Pinterest that shows you the cheapest way to get access to the information you need without walking into the overpriced campus bookstore and being robbed blind. If you have the option and the patience to live at home while attending college that will be the cheapest option.  But part of the college experience is moving out.  Look into joining a fraternity or sorority for cheap housing. Becoming a resident adviser usually means free room and board.   Meal plans can be crazy expensive.  If you can make it on two meals a day you’ll save a ton.  If you live off campus and have a kitchen, cooking at home rather than going out is much cheaper and healthier. A lot of colleg

Living in a city doesn’t mean there aren’t tasty things to eat, you just have to know where to look.  Steve Brill tells us what’s edible in the big city. Urban foraging means finding wild foods.  Things like berries, herbs, seeds, mushrooms, and roots.  These are things humans have been eating for thousands of years.  They are delicious and filled with anti-oxidants.   And they’re free for the foraging.  Steve has been teaching urban foraging in New York City and the larger New York area for thirty years. Surprisingly, urban parks have more foragables than less dense areas.  In the city they only have to worry about lawn mowers which don’t reach everywhere.  In other areas, they have to contend with deer. Mushrooms are the thing people are most leery of eating.  Some mushrooms can be eaten safely but you have to be able to identify the safe ones.  Mushrooms that grow on wood and look like shelves are generally safe to eat but some are not very tasty.  Always consult a guide before eating anything you forag

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at Listen, Money Matters?  Trust me.  It’s as glamorous as you probably imagine it to be!  No, it’s really not. Andrew started the LMM website while he was displaced by Hurricane Sandy. He wanted to share what he had learned about personal finance with others and one day make some money through sharing that knowledge.  Matt and Andrew met in late 2013 on Fizzle, an online business training service and community. The two of them started out by advising each other on their respective projects, LMM and Swim University. It was a marriage made in heaven because each brought to the other, something that had been lacking.  Andrew is the business guy and Matt is the creative guy. The two of them spent a lot of time on Skype.  Andrew’s wife overheard all this discussion and said they should start a podcast.  That’s how this podcast was born in November 2013! In the beginning there was a podcast a week.  But you demanded more!  So in May, LMM launched Money May, a podcast e

The job market is still pretty bad and wages are stagnant.  It might be time to create your own opportunity.  We’ll discuss ways to do just that. If you can’t find a job, just start your own business!  Well, it’s not as easy as that.  And that isn’t an option for everyone.  Creating an opportunity is also about being able to see an opportunity and being ready to take advantage of it. This podcast was created because Matt saw the website that Andrew started and reached out to him.  They talked and worked together and the podcast was born.  I got involved in a similar way.  I started out as a listener to the show.  They asked for topic ideas and I e-mailed with mine.  The three of us began a dialogue and within a few days, I was hired!  I didn’t send that e-mail with the intent of landing a job but, I was ready when the opportunity was made available to me. The opportunity might not always be apparent.  Practice saying “yes.”  Invited to a party you’d rather not attend?  Say yes.  Old college roommate in tow

We answer your questions about saving for a home, credit cards, multiple checking accounts, teacher’s pay, and college expenses. 1.  Should I use a Roth IRA account to save for a home down payment?  No, a Roth IRA is a long term investment geared toward retirement.  You can withdraw the principle without penalty but cannot access any gains until you reach fifty nine and a half.  Just opening a standard Betterment account will be more useful to earn money towards a down palyment. 2.  Is it bad to open a credit card, get the promotion on offer, pay if off and then close it right away?  It’s not bad to open the account and can be beneficial.  The more available credit you have, the higher your score.  The more creditors you have, the higher the score.  More people have judged you a good risk.  Opening a new account does lower the average age of accounts which is one of the components of a credit score.  Closing the account is a bad thing though.  It lowers your available credit.  All of this advice with the ca

  With tuition costs rising, there is a new  debate over whether a degree is worth the expense.  We’ll discuss the pros and cons in a roundtable discussion. Thomas Frank of College Info Geek and Martin Boehme from Powlyglot join us to discuss who should go to college, how to skip pre-reqs, and why college vs not college is not the only question we should be asking. Thomas has been out of college for a little over a year.  While he believes the actual classes were not that helpful, college does give you a unique opportunity to make a lot of contacts that you can use for the rest of your life.  Contacts that can help you find things like a job, or a place to live in a new city.  While contacts can be made outside of college, you’ll likely never have access to so wide a variety again. Martin was  able to save some time and money by skipping  some prerequisites.  Speak to the professor and inquire if you can test out. A lot of these debates ignore that there are options that are not so black and white as goin

Think you can make money flipping houses? We talked to Justin Williams of House Flipping HQ about the art of making money remodeling houses. If you’re a fan of HGTV, flipping houses looks like a fast way to make some money.  But as is true of all reality based shows, things aren’t what they seem.  Justin flips houses off camera and lets us in on how it really works. Justin started as a real estate wholesaler.  He found owners who wanted to sell quickly and not be bothered with things like repairs or evicting a non-paying tenant.  He put the homes under contract and then sold the contract to to another buyer who was responsible for the repairs or evicting the tenant.  Justin then collected a fee from the actual buyer. Justin is now the final buyer in the equation and flips houses like a business.  This isn’t a little weekend DIY hobby.  He looks to make a 40-45% return on each house, purchased with money borrowed at 12-18%.  This makes his net return between 28-30% per house.  His goal is to flip each house