102 - The 2 Most Important Financial Moves to Survive 2025

In this episode, we get brutally real about two financial moves you NEED to have locked down right now: budgeting and emergency funds. Markets are shaky, inflation isn’t cooling, consumer sentiment is crashing — and the people who survive this chaos won't be the lucky ones; they’ll be the prepared ones.

We break down how to build a real budget that’s customized to YOU (none of that cookie-cutter garbage) — and why precision matters if you want to avoid panic spending when things get tight.

Budget like your future depends on it — because it does.

Then we get into emergency funds: why they aren’t just savings cushions — they’re silent wealth builders when used right. (Think 7% yields or more, not a dusty savings account.)

Your emergency fund should be making you money even when everything else is burning.

If you’ve ever wondered how to stay invested while others are panic-selling, this is the game plan.

You don’t need to be fearless — you need to be funded.

We’ll also cover:

• Why selling investments during a downturn is a guaranteed way to lose
• How to future-proof your finances for the recession most “experts” now admit is coming
• Where to actually stash your emergency fund for maximum safety and growth

This episode isn’t about doom and gloom — it’s about navigating the storm without getting swept out to sea.

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

Episode music was created using Loudly.

Transcript

Welcome to roaming returns a podcast about generating a passive income with dividend stocks so you can secure your finances and liberate your life. 

Markets are tanking, consumer sentiment is crashing, and inflation isn’t letting up —  so today, we’re getting brutally honest about two of your most powerful weapons in this economic mess: budgeting and emergency funds. 
If you want to survive — and thrive — through this downturn without selling your assets or panicking, this is the episode you can’t afford to miss.

The net's the clue. Of what? In the last podcast, I said I wasn't entirely sure what we were going to go over, and that's because everything's fluid, everything just keeps changing. And so I revisited the data, and it came to a conclusion that we need to revisit a couple points.
But we'll go over some of the most damning data off the top here, so you can see how I reached the conclusion that we need to address a couple things. The first point is the consumer sentiment is the worst it has been since COVID, at the very least. If you're not familiar with the Consumer Sentiment Survey, it's something that the University of Michigan takes every month, and it just basically asks, are you a consumer? If you are, then you proceed in the survey of, well, how do you feel about the economy? What do you think inflation's going to be? Blah, blah, blah.
It's just economic questions. Who isn't a consumer? So the Consumer Sentiment Survey is just an idea of where the consumer's mind's at, and it's dropped like 40% in 2025 already, from where it was at the end of 2024. So they say it's at the lowest it's been since COVID.
I actually think it's closer to how low it was during the Great Recession in 2008. Again, this survey is- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Go back a second.
You just said you think it's as low as the 2008 numbers. Yeah. People are really not happy with the current situation.
What the fuck is all of my pain? The Sentiment Survey itself is kind of irrelevant, other than just a snapshot into the consumer's mind, but where it becomes relevant is because if consumers feel that the economy's tanking, they're not going to spend money. If they don't spend money, they're actually going to cause the economy to tank because our economy's so consumer-driven. So that's just the top survey.
I just pay attention to that just to see where the average mojo's at. Then we'll get into some other relevant data here. Like I said, consumer sentiment has fallen 40% since April 2024, and it's fallen for the last four months.
From March to April, it dropped 11%. Like I said, it's super important because if the consumer perceives the economy as ick, then they're not going to spend, which then, in fact, makes the economy ick. Yep.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is what it is. The second data point that I want to look at is they have something called a PMI, which is manufacturing data.
That's fallen for three months in a row. I'm pretty sure the one that comes out, I think it's either at the end of this week or the beginning of next week, will show that it fell in April as well. Why that's important is because we've been told that, oh, the tariffs are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.
That may or may not occur, but the data's showing that it's not occurring. In fact, the problem that you have with that, though, is there's a couple of surveys out there where they ask people, so in the best case scenario, if the manufacturing jobs are brought back to America, will you work in a manufacturing job? Overwhelmingly, I think it's like 73% to 78% of people say no. Even if you bring the manufacturing jobs back, which we're not seeing with the data, people aren't going to work them, so it's pointless or irrelevant to have a manufacturing job if no one's going to work them.
My third point, now we're going to go into the inflation data. The CPI, which is the consumer price index, shows that we are not getting anywhere in inflation. The latest batch of data shows that inflation is still between 2.4% and 2.8%. If you compare that with the PCE, which is the prices of the consumers, the PCE, which is the prices the consumers are actually paying, whereas the PCI is the inflation rate.
The CPI is the inflation rate. The inflation rate is 2.4% to 2.8%. The prices that consumers are actually paying shows that outside of energy costs, because everyone can see that the cost of gas has been going down, but it's going sideways down. Outside of energy costs, the consumers are paying more for pretty much everything.
The biggest ones are cars and insurance and things of that nature, but the price of everything outside of energy has gone up the last three months. Those are two data points that the experts use when they're talking about inflation. If you talk to any people that are economically sound, or if you read any economists outside of the overlord regime, they've all said in pretty good detail that the tariffs are actually going to lead to higher inflation.
There are a few outliers that say, no, the tariffs won't lead to higher inflation, but the data that we're seeing is inflation is actually not going down. It's actually gone up for prices, and I do expect the CPI, which is the inflation rate for consumers, to actually start reflecting that. I think it's going to start ticking upwards a little bit.
Most of these economists, they don't agree on the total inflation gain. Some are saying between 0.5% and 1%, while others are saying 2% to 4%. But however you slice it up, the people that their whole lives deal with inflation and facts and numbers and everything are all saying inflation's going up, and it's going to keep going up because of the stupid tariffs.
This is not an anti-tariff rant. I'm just giving you the real world data that came out in April. And then the fifth point I want to say is the unemployment rate has actually ticked up from 4.0 at the end of 2024 to 4.2 in the last couple of months.
And they did a survey with business owners, and they actually are expecting job loss due to tariffs to increase to bring the unemployment figure up above 5%. Again, I'm not doing this to rail on anything. You guys all know I think the tariffs are the stupidest economic policy ever, but that's not what this is about.
I'm just giving you the current data points. Which brings us to what we're going to talk about is we're going to go back and we're going to revisit budgeting, and we're going to revisit emergency funds, so those two things. But the reason I think it's relevant to have the data is if you know what's going on, you can actually learn how to navigate it better.
If you don't have a clue what's going on, it's very difficult. It muddies the waters on how to actually navigate stuff. Yeah, you can't proceed if you don't understand what's going on.
And I think it's actually super relevant right now to actually get your budgeting under control because I'm not wishing job losses on anyone, but the job losses are coming for a portion of Americans. A large swath. Higher prices are coming for a lot of Americans.
There was a couple reports that came out that I just read on CNBC and Fox News actually because I like to read from both of them. But there's a concern that there's going to be empty shelves because the tariffs are causing a lot of ships to actually not ship things anymore. People just have empty ships.
They're forecasting that we could have a pretty shitty summer when it comes to going to Walmart or go to Target and the shelves will be empty because no one wants to ship things now because they're not entirely sure what they're going to be paying in tariff. Oh, so it's going to be like COVID but not for the same reasons. Very nice.
They're forecasting that we're going to have shortages. So if you have a higher unemployment, higher prices, less products, then you couple that with less manufacturing and an eroding consumer sentiment, you're going to have a pretty shitty summer. And with the backdrop of the summer could be shitty, the first thing that you need to address is budgeting.
You need to actually get your finances under control so that when the shit hits the fan, you're not in a bad shape. We touched on this. I forget what episode.
It was one of the first 20. I think it was like 22. But one thing that I've learned more through the years as I've gone through this is there are so many different budgeting ideas, budgeting theories out there.
And we even disagree ourselves. So it's one of those things. You need to, I guess, determine what works best for you.
I mean, I'll give you a few ideas like the most popular ones, but whatever works for you to get your finances under control, to get you situated so that you're actually saving money as opposed to spending money on frivolous things. Some people are going to need more than 60% of their income after taxes for the essentials. I mean, there's other people that are going to have like 35% of their essentials.
Essentials being mortgage, car insurance, things that you need to actually spend money on so that you can be a contributing member of society in the workforce. This is where our definitions differ because the major rule is the 50, 20, 30 or whatever the heck it is. And some of them say 60, but the numbers are all over the place.
We disagree on things, but the problem that I have when they bring up the essential expenditures is they try to lump certain things only into essential. Like they're like, okay, so mortgage or rent, that's essential. Okay, I get that.
Grocery bills, that's essential too, but within the grocery bills, there's a lot of caveats to it. There's a lot of extraneous stuff that can be discretionary funds. Because if you're shopping, say, at like farmer's markets or Whole Foods or stuff like that and you're bypassing like the discount grocers because it's just beneath you or it's something that you're not comfortable doing, well, you're leaving a lot of money out of your pocket by spending more at the Whole Foods than you would if you went to, say, Aldi.
We shop at Aldi pretty much exclusively except for when we go to Grocery Outlet, which is another- Very similar concept. Another discount grocer. Very rarely do we go to Wegmans or Giant.
I will tell you though, there are a few items in those stores that are actually cheaper or you can't get them elsewhere. Like we'll go to Wegmans for hummus and peanut butter. And the hummus containers are like freaking huge.
Because I can't find any peanut butter in the discount grocery stores or at Walmart or anything that's not- Walmart has one brand. That's priced comparable to Wegmans, but like all the peanut butter has sugar in it. I don't want sugar in my peanut butter.
So I have to go to wherever they have the peanut butter that has no sugar in it. It's unbelievably hard to find non-sugar peanut butter. They would lump that, for me, peanut butter expenditure into the essentials when it's really not.
Like I could probably get peanut butter cheaper somewhere else. So it's almost discretionary at that point. So that's interesting you're considering that.
I like to do a two-phase tier where you just track your expenses and then you just put like categories next to it and then you just evaluate it by category and that's when you can determine. Because when we go grocery shopping, when I actually do a budget, I'll take Tim's chips. Tim's, what else do you got? Chocolate bars.
Corn chips. Corn chips, chocolate bars and a couple other things. We take that out and we stick it in like the stupid spending fund or I guess the indulgent fund.
Because they're not essential. It would be a discretionary expenditure at that point because it's not essential. Yeah.
Like rice and beans, obviously essential. Steaks and lobster. That's my problem with that is they try to lump things into like three categories when there should be.
They have essential expenditures, mortgage, car insurance. They have discretionary, which is pretty much everything outside of essentials and savings. I hate the models that do savings and bills or like your credit card debt in the same category.
It's like those two should not be lumped. So they're like, well, that's my biggest problem when it comes to like when I research in about budgeting is that they literally just break it into three categories. Like the 50-20-30 method, which is if you're not familiar, that's where 50% of your take home pay is allocated for your essential expenditures, 30% is allocated for your discretionary and 20% is allocated for your savings and investing.
Again, three categories. The pay yourself first method, that is where you basically take your investing out first. You're investing the savings come out first and then you then will pay your essential expenditures and then whatever's left is for your discretionary, but again, it only has three categories.
Yeah. I do like paying the investment thing first because then if you prioritize it, there's never like scraps left over and you just don't get to it. There's the zero-based budget where like every cent is allocated, but you know, say you get paid twice in May, two paychecks in May, well, at the beginning of May, you actually know where every cent of your paycheck's going, whether it's going to be your essentials, whether it's going to be your discretionary, whether it's going to be your savings.
That's what the zero-based is, is like you have nothing left over at the end of the month because you've already planned it out exactly where you're going to spend everything. And then my least favorite is the envelope-based budget where you basically, you divide the cash into envelopes and that's how you allocate your essential comes out of one envelope. Your discretionary comes out of another envelope and your savings comes out of another envelope, but again, it's only three categories.
So if I had time and an inclination and desire to do it, I would come up with the ideal budget thing where it would be like 10 categories. I think those that you're just talking about kind of are like a bare bones and everybody really should sit and figure out what their categories are based on them. And the one book, Your Money or Your Life does a really good job, I think, of creating categories specifically for the individual and then doing like basically real-time audits where you're plus and minusing and figuring out where you need to increase and decrease.
But I will say the one area where like anything that I read about budgeting is seriously lacking is what I consider the upfront portion. Upfront portion to me is where you tabulate for at least six months. I would say ideally it would be six months to 12 months where everything went.
So you're doing like a back audit of where all your money went like the past three months, the past six months, the past 12 months. I think six to 12 is a good spot. Anything above 12 would be the sweet spot where you can go back- You mean analyzing? Yeah, where you can go back 12 months and you say, okay, I spent in April of 2024, I spent 68% of my budget on this.
Whoa, you crazy. Because if you have 12 months' worth of data, but then whenever it comes to forecasting forward, you have – the more data you have, the better your forecast may be. Yeah, I'm not disagreeing that at all, but damn, like I don't like going backwards as much.
Like I'd be more inclined to doing maybe one month backwards and then I would analyze over the next three months. But then again, I guess there's like a cognitive bias that if you already know you're scrimping, like you're going to be good. But if you're – So I can see the benefit to what you're talking about.
Well, I'm just saying like the upfront portion, like it's like when it comes to investing, when you start researching a company, the upfront portion would be you're looking at the financials, looking at all that stuff. You're doing the same thing but with yourself. So if you know that like the last six months combined, you spent 52% of your money on your essentials and you have a pretty good idea going forward that in the month of May, you're going to spend about 52% of your money on your essential expenditures.
Like I'm a number nerd. So like the more data I have is better for me. Like other people obviously, they'll just wing it and be like, well, last month was like this.
That's fine. However, you need to do it. But you got to do like the – you got to do the legwork upfront to actually analyze where you've been spending money at.
Like I'm not saying – That's people's biggest reason to think. I'm not saying cutting – no, don't cut anything out. Don't think anything like lower of yourself but you just need to have the data of, OK, the data pool suggests that I'm spending this much on car insurance, this much on rent, this much on self-service and stuff like that.
So phones, subscriptions, groceries, whatever. If you know where every cent was spent, you're actually going to be able to create a better plan going forward and that's all I'm saying about the upfront portion. That's why I think it's super important that most of them don't really go into very much detail about it.
They just – they kind of just like if you read anything, they're just like, well, you just – you don't want to spend more than 50% on your mortgage and your car. It doesn't say anything about, well, you need to look at your numbers. But at the same time too, like that is so – what's the word? Absolutionist where they think everybody should be in that like little narrow thing and I don't think that's necessarily true.
So like I look at budgeting from the perspective of like what you really prioritize for yourself. Like again, I think we've talked about this ad nauseum where we don't really care how nice and luxurious where we're living is because we want to actually spend more money on experiences and sensations, stimulus, that kind of stuff. So like if we were doing like the absolute thing, we probably – we would probably have a 30, 30, 40 or something or a 30, 20, 50 or whatever situation where 30% is on essentials and the 50% is on discretionary and 20% is saved.
I mean I relabel my categories but yeah, it's basically the same concept. I would have a lot more fun money because I would be scrambling on myself. We have the ability to do that because we know what we're spending.
So we know that, hey, we're spending 45% on bills. We can cut that down to like 35% so we can afford 10% more on experiences. Well, and again, I will talk about Visible.
I think I called it the wrong name in the episode that we did. But when we got – when we switched our phone plan, we were paying – I think it was like $65 a line for Verizon for the two of us and then when Visible has like the $25 a month plan per phone line. So we saved 80.
Plus you get free hotspot, which is nice. It saved us $1,000 for the full year. That's a huge discount for the exact same service and that's what we do.
The stuff that is not – what's the word? Conditional? Like to me, essential means you can't actually exchange it out for something of equal like whatever. That's how I perceive essential. Other people would say the self-service is essential.
But even like – but again, even within the category of essential, there is like – the cell phone is a prime example. But this isn't like we have no other option. I will say for example like where my parents live, they are only able to have Verizon as their internet service.
Although now that Starlink is in the picture, they're thinking about switching because Comcast or Xfinity or whatever the heck is so freaking stupid. Within the category of essential, there is going to be – Flux. Dependent.
Flux on some stuff. Like even with like your – Well, it's your mental state too. Even your mortgage, you could refinance at a lower interest rate or you could do whatever you need to do.
But like your – for example, your mortgage and your rents probably – it's a pretty stationary figure for the full year. Your grocery bill obviously that which is essential, that's going to change month to month because sometimes you're going to go out and get vegetables and they're cheap because they're in season. So your grocery bill is actually going to go down.
But it's still quote in the essential category. That's – But phone service could actually be high on your thing or your phone device like for people who need to have the new iPhone and stuff. Some people could determine that as essential and if you have a job that does require the latest technology for like you to operate properly, that would become an essential for you as a person.
But as somebody else – Rally cat. Rally cat. Somebody else who just uses it for screen tarting or whatever, like that's not necessarily an essential thing.
So it's like you have to look at your expenses and your desires from a really like analystic standpoint, like an audit standpoint and then you have to figure out what you're willing to compromise on and the stuff you are unwilling to compromise on and everybody is going to be different. This is why Tim always like – Rally cat. Rally cat.
Ah! Gives people crap for the whole coffee thing. But he wouldn't give up his Bobo. So like that – But I would give up other things so that I could afford the Bobo under the same budget.
Exactly. So like if coffee really is your jam – Like when we're on the road and we have like say $1,500 is all we're going to be living off of and I have $200 to spend on stuff, well Bobelo is going to be part of that and – High priority. Cinnamon Ons is going to be part of it and I'll actually stop doing corn chips and I'll stop doing chocolate and I'll just eat rice and beans so that I can afford that.
Oh my God! You're actually going to put that above it? So I got rid of seltzer water finally. I haven't had seltzer water or carbonated water in three or four months now. I got rid of that so I could afford more stuff.
Actually, we haven't even got into the budgeting. I'm just talking about the upfront portion. This is such a big, very subjective topic and it can get heated.
Some people are willing to scrimp but then you have like the excessive frugality component that makes people like literally frugality fatigue type deal. If you don't want to be in that, can't be there because then you course correct and overspend in later months. My biggest problem is when I talk to people, they half-ass it.
Like you need to know exactly what you make. They half-ass the data portion. What you spend and how much you have left at each month and the category of what you spend.
Like what you spend on mortgage, what you spend on credit card payments, what you spend on – it needs to be like detailed. If you don't have the data, this is going to be a very difficult process for you. But the credit cards are very nuanced too because you spend credit cards in a multitude of different places.
So like my example to them is if you make $3,450 each month after taxes, that's the number you use. You don't round up to $3,500. If you spend $577 on groceries, you use that number.
You don't round up to $600 or you don't round down to $550. It needs to be like precise. Because having precise data will actually be helpful for you to analyze and dissect your budget down the road.
Because if you round at every increment, you end up with bigger errors in the long run. Algebra. Because once you get the exact amount that you are spending, you can start to put the expenditures in the categories of the essentials and the discretionary, blah, blah, blah.
But then you can start to see, well, I'm spending $85 on – Corn chips? No. I'm spending $85 on my cell plan and I could get the same cell service for $25. So I could cut out $60.
We really should audit your chip usage as of right now. We all have our freaking thing. Trust me.
I just found out the other day that Tim is spending $50 a month on – what did you say? Gaming crap? Yeah. My video game. But I'm good.
I got emergency fund and everything set up. I'm good. We'll get to the emergency fund.
That's the absolute most important thing that you can do as a human. But we'll get to that in a few minutes. I think where we have a biggest disconnect, Carmel and I, is the discretionary income which is the wants versus the needs.
She thinks a lot of things are needs that I perceive as wants. But because I just stay out of it because it is what it is, that's what she needs to survive and that's what she needs. So I'm a very animalistic type person.
Tim is a lot more cerebral oriented so he can like basically overpower his stuff. But those of us who are human – Well, because some people, travel is essential. They absolutely need to travel to be a happy human being.
Whereas you could ask 10 people and like one or two would say, it's essential. I absolutely need to travel. And then eight of them will say, it's something that I want to do but I don't have the money for it.
Yeah. And that's where the desire component – and this is how I distinguish them. If it is something, if you withhold it, it jacks you up psychologically, that actually becomes a need in my opinion.
Even though it looks like a want. The way I describe it is if it affects your overall well-being, it's essential. Yeah.
So we can agree on that. So everybody's thing is going to be a little bit different. Again, if you take out coffee and you become psychologically destabilized, that ends up being a need in your freaking budget.
So that becomes essential at that point. So that's part of your – Exactly. And that's why I don't give Tim crap for his stupid num-nums and his bo-bo because he is not a pleasant person on – because then what happens is you end up redirecting that spending to something else that's usually more detrimental or like out of control.
So that's where it's like that course correcting thing hijacks you worse. So you got to figure those things out. Those are usually related to a deeper desire that you're not getting met and my big one is like stimulus.
I think it's a – Pleasure. A human condition that if you have to choose between essential expenditures and discretionary expenditures, they're going to cut the essentials normally and that's why I think I have a problem with it. You mean cut them out? Well, like if you have the basic equation is net income minus essentials minus discretionary equals remaining funds for emergency funds and savings and everything.
So what they'll start – what they'll do in that basic equation is they will – Tell you to cut your discretionary. They'll omit the emergency fund and the savings so they can keep their essentials and their discretionary at the same levels they're currently at with their net income. Once they exhaust the third part of that equation, then they'll actually have to choose between essential expenditures and discretionary and most humans won't cut the discretionary.
They'll find ways around the essential or they'll fall behind in the essential and that's what you don't want to do. But that to me says that those discretionaries are actually needs that are being – I understand but I'm just saying human after human after human, like study after study, like they don't cut their discretionary, and so the objective I think would be to, when you're doing the back data, would be to actually ponder, okay, I have a Bobelo addiction. Is it essential or is it discretionary? Could I cut my  Bobelo  fund down or omit it completely, or is it like an essential? And for me, it's essential. So my essential portion of that equation, whether it's the 50, 20, 30, or whether it's the pay yourself first, whatever budgeting plan works best for you, my essential is going to go up by like 2% so I can afford my  Bobelo.
So then I have to adjust the formula that I'm using for my budget. So basically the underlying premise of all of this is you have to actually categorize your expenses for you and your, whatever you got going on, nervous system, psychological. You have to be realistic about it.
Like if you're a coffee junkie, you couldn't cut coffee out. So it is essential at that point. But within the coffee junkie thing, there are two different camps.
There's the camp that goes to Starbucks every day, and there's the camp that brews their own coffee and takes their own coffee in cups. One's more responsible than the other one. Well, it depends on what you're willing to sacrifice, again.
Depends on what you're willing to sacrifice. If you're like $20,000 in debt and you're going to Starbucks every day because you're a coffee junkie, you have approached life wrong. You need an intervention.
Yeah, you need an intervention. Because you could get a coffee maker and bring coffee from home that's probably 60% cheaper. But if you're willing to sell your house or like rent a room out of somebody's house to afford your coffee addiction, like you can make shifts to make things work.
You just got to get creative about it, and that's why we're getting rid of our house to live in a van so that we can spend a crap ton of money on thrill-seeking adventures. So once you got the back data process, so this is how much I'm spending, and then you have your current expenditures, so like for the month of April, you can then say, well, my back data says this. My current month I'm doing this.
Once you have the data, you can then start looking at budgeting strategies that you can implement based on your current preferences. And I mentioned some of them. I think you just need to pick one, start with it, and then tweak it over like the course of maybe six months till it feels like it works for you.
And you need to monitor at the very least over a quarter because that's usually when you have random charges that you forget about. It's usually like the quarter. You know, the one thing I would say in the budgeting strategies is I think people underestimate the amount they need to save.
So like to me, like the 50, 20, 30s actually, well, it needs tweaked. It should be 50 at the most, 30, 20. If I had to use the numbers they have, it would be 50, 30, 20 until I had an emergency fund set up and then I could do the 50, 20, 30 or 50, 10, 40, however I want to break it up.
The reason that I don't think people save enough is because, dude, 78 or 84, I forget the exact percentage of Americans don't have any money, like they don't have an emergency fund of even like a month set up. And that's crazy because that means if you lose your job or the refrigerator breaks or the car needs to go into the shop, you don't have enough money in your emergency fund to actually afford it. Which means you put in a credit card and then you incur interest and then you just vicious spiral down the wrong direction.
And that interest could be working for you instead of against you and robbing you from your future. And that's where the investing component comes in with everything we talk about with dividends. You're building basically the inverse of a credit card.
But like, so you have the 50, 20, 30, I've seen a couple of 60, 20, 20, 75, 15, 10, like you can come up with whatever proportion that you need to to make your budget comfortable and make sure that you still have X percent going into savings and into investing and things of that nature. But like again, I can't tell what's good for you. You literally have to do the upfront work to find what you're spending to come up with a proportionate budget that works for you.
For us, when we're on the road, it's probably seriously it's going to be what, 25, 10? I was literally just trying to figure out what it was going to be. 65 or something like that? Because what would our essentials be? I guess it would be depending if we incorporate gas into that. Gas and groceries.
It would basically be gas and groceries. I guess insurance and. That kind of stuff.
Cats. Cat stuff. But I would again lump this stuff in.
So like, I don't know. I'd rather just have the individual categories and then figuring out and then because we're going to be like living in different cycles, like we'll be sitting in sedentary certain months where we're just kind of chilling out. So we'd have a very low discretionary.
And then others, it would be like balls to the wall. So our stuff's going to be all over the place. You just have to plan for your lifestyle choices.
But the key thing is planning, learning how to do it, and then making sure you're living below your income. When we're in the van, it's probably not going to be a proportionate budget. It's probably going to be pay yourself first, but it will actually kind of tweak it to where we're paying the mortgage of the gas and the groceries first.
And then whatever's left will actually divide up between investing and play. Well, I'm hoping to prioritize investing, but play is going to have a big, big aspect But I don't think the investing is going to be... Well, the dividends are re-compounding. We're actually, we're really blessed is that we have the investing already set up before we even get into the lifestyle that's... That was by choice and by design though.
Like I slaved for how many years that I voted. I know. I'm just saying, but we're blessed.
Like when we go on the road, we're going to have like $150,000 invested. But that's because of planning. But yeah, planning is the most important part.
And trust me, I am one of the most freaking instant gratification people. He will tell you. I have no discipline.
Right? But we wanted to go into the van since COVID and we haven't done it yet because we've been tweaking things and investing and just we plan like meticulous planning so that when we go, we don't ever have to come back. Because that's my biggest fear is getting a taste of that freedom and then having, like having to come back. So that is where... That would kill my soul.
We currently have. But there's the proportion of budget is one of the most popular. Like anywhere you read, it's going to be the 50, 20, 30.
Like that's the most brought up one. I think that's a good starting place. That's the most brought up one is the 50, 20, 30.
I personally don't like the proportionate ones because they lump it into three categories and the three categories are kind of, you can't really deviate from them in most of those plans. I kind of like the pay yourself first, where you just come up with like, okay, I'm going to do 10% investing and then I'm going to pay all my essentials and my bills. And then whatever's left is discretionary income.
I kind of like that one for most people because it makes the most sense. As long as you take out, automatically withdraw 10% of your paycheck and it goes straight into your brokerage account or straight into your worthy account or wherever. And then you have 90% of your money left and you pay all of your bills, you're up to date with your bills, you're paying down your credit cards and whatever, and then whatever's left you can spend on whatever you choose.
I think that is probably the one that makes sense to most humans. That's why what I like to do or when we actually get in the van and we don't have this weird situation we're in right now, I'm planning to have a double, a two bank account situation where everything that's like the planned expenses is going to automatically get withdrawn. Everything's going to automatically get withdrawn back into the investments and then you're left with basically your discretionary and that's the money that you have until your next pay comes in, which will be from the monthly dividends, which I like the monthly aspect personally.
That's the one I think like the most. I think you will be able to tweak it with one of the ones I mentioned here in a minute, but the zero base budget is where every single dollar of your income is labeled and spent accordingly each month. That seems way too constricting to me.
That doesn't really leave room for wiggle room. The envelope budgeting is where you actually put cash into envelopes or into app folders and that's how you spend it. If you have $3,000, you put $1,500 into your essential app or envelope that goes into that.
It doesn't deviate from that folder if you have it left over. If you miscalculated or whatever and you have $100 left over, then just leave it in that envelope and then you'll have $1,600 in the following month, whatever. I don't like that one either, but I do like the two bank budgeting is where your paycheck goes into one bank account and then you transfer money into a second bank account that will pay all your bills and your discretionary spending.
That's what I just talked about. But I think that goes back to the pay yourself first. Pay yourself first, so you get direct deposit and then 10% directly goes into a second bank for your investing purposes.
You can do a three bank budget too where then your 50% will go into another bank for your mortgage and your other bills and then you'll have whatever like 20 or 30% left in the original bank where your paycheck went that's discretionary spending. I like having the discretionary broken out. That way when you're at zero, you can't go use money that was for your mortgage or for your essential stuff.
You have that discretionary account. I think that one, if you combine the two bank system, the two bank budget with the pay yourself first, I think would probably be the ideal and easiest to maintain. It might take a little bit of effort to get set up, but I think once it's set up and you have it automated, it can definitely flow very nicely.
We each have multiple banks. That's super annoying. Well, because at Wells Fargo, they're the worst, if we had like a normal bank.
They're not the worst. Members for like our local federal credit union are one of the worst. They're pretty bad.
But we each have a two bank thing and so like- I have like four banks. We have multiple banks. I'm trying to actually like phase in, phase out and like clean up all of this stuff because it's a nuisance, but we have like business stuff.
So I have Wells Fargo, I have a SoFi, and I have a local credit union. The local credit union is where my retirement from when I worked at the turnpike goes into that every month. I really think we should move that.
That's my discretionary income. Like I can just spend that whenever the hell I want. Then I have money in SoFi, which is for my essentials, but my essentials, I don't have to pay for anything.
So then I have my Wells Fargo where I transfer money to her bank account that pays for everything. So I have money everywhere. I have so much money that I don't even understand where it all came from.
Because you don't have any bills. Because I don't pay attention to it. Because I pay everything.
I know people think we're like, oh, you guys are really skilled and articulate and knowledgeable about the topic. But if you actually saw the bank accounts, you'd be like, what the fuck? I have like 3,000 in Wells Fargo, I have like 600 in SoFi, I have like 600 in my credit union, and I don't even know what's in any of them most of the time. But we don't overspend anything.
So it's kind of why I'm frivolous. I don't really spend much on anything other than chips, Bobo, and num nums. Every now and then when I think we're going over on his ridiculous habits or some of my chocolate fits that I have, we definitely do a month where we calculate.
And then usually we're like, oh, we're not actually going over anything. I don't know if it's like an intuitive thing or whatever happens, but we end up being all right. So I'm like screw it.
Well, I think the part that is, there's two parts that most of the things, the budgeting things that I read about don't actually address. The first we already mentioned was the upfront where you have to do the legwork upfront to get all the data you need. The second is you literally, again, not an expert, but this is my opinion.
If you have a goal in mind, it makes it so much easier to budget. And I think that's actually where our thing is. Like we're basically in a mindset right now focused on scrimping because we're trying to get everything into investments as much as possible to give us that free month or that passive monthly income, get rid of the condo.
And then when we switch over to like living the life we truly want, I think I'm going to have like the Catholic school kid like rebound effect. Because I have like, when I think back to all of our budgeting, like, okay, we did the upfront. We knew we don't, we're not spending a lot, but then like we, like once we determined a goal of, Hey, I want to travel in a van, that was like the, I hate to use the stupid cliche North star for me.
So like, okay, I'm living in the van is the goal. So all my, all my budgeting is going to be to live in, to, to, to afford that lifestyle. And it made it so much easier to not spend money on dumb shit.
I mean, there's a couple of dumb things, but for the most part, like I really wanted the bicycle and it took me, I want to say 14 months to save for it because I didn't want to possibly affect moving into the van. So I was dumping money into bullet shares every month. What do you guys think that's crazy? If you're new or have missed that part where it was a $3,000, like what is it? Aluminum frame, carbon fiber frame, carbon fiber track bike.
Yeah. So, um, so I was dumping money into bullet shares when I had money left over from bills and other things. And like within like 14 months, I had $3,000 saved up in my emergency fund savings account where then I just bought a bike, but that's me.
It's just easier for me to have a goal in mind. So I had the goal of living in the van, but then I had the goal of saving money for my, my bike. And the next thing is the Jackery.
Yeah. I have a, I want to get off Jackery 5,000 cause I don't want to have like the solar problems and in the van that a lot of like people have, they put the solar panels on top of the van and they have to park in the sun and shit like that. I'm just going to get a Jackery with like a, you just move the solar panels to wherever the sun's at.
Fuck it. I think that'll work better for what we're trying to do anyway. Fuck it.
So that's just a few of the, there's like so many popular budgeting strategies out there. So many popular budgeting experts out there. So like if you, do you think I'm kidding? Just Google like budgeting ideas, budgeting strategies, it's insane.
But the one thing they all share is you have to track your expense, your expenses once you actually are in a budgeting thing. You have to know the current position that you're in. You have to know if you're underwater, over water and so many people are like underwater at the end of the month and they have no clue where it went.
That's because you aren't tracking and those little things are the stuff that add up. It's death by a thousand cuts. That's honestly most people's issue is death by a thousand cuts.
And that leads me into what I think is probably the most missed thing about investing, budgeting, financial well-being, life in general. It's just never discussed for whatever reason and that's the emergency fund. I don't know why it's not more prevalent in people's discussions.
The emergency fund is where everything kind of stems from that. It's insane to me that it's not discussed more. It's your safety net.
Emergency fund is just like it sounds. It's when the shit hits the fan and you need money, you tap your emergency fund. Rather than take money out of your investments or finagle with your current budgeting system.
Say you're in the 50-20-30 where you start moving the money so you have a 50-0-10 or something like that so that you can pay for the emergency. You don't want to mess with your whatever budgeting strategy you come up with. The best way around that is to have an emergency fund set up.
Yeah. And that's huge for what he just said with the investing component because the biggest reason people lose money in investing is because they don't have their emergency fund set up and they try to take money from their investments at a bad market time. We're in the prime territory right now where this is absolutely true.
If you had a bunch of money in your investments thinking you were going to need it in three months for a wedding or whatever the heck you had it in there for and the markets just imploded like they did, what happened to your fund? You make money in the market the longer you leave it in. To me, right now, that's where the emergency fund comes in. To actually invest more.
Exactly. But that's me. That's another discussion for another day.
But that's why the emergency fund is so important. Having an emergency fund is the most essential way to not tap money that you have in investments, not to touch your essential expenditures or your discretionary expenditures. I know I've been guilty of it before in my life where I had a problem.
I didn't have an emergency fund set up so I was taking money out of my discretionary expenditures and I was freaking miserable because I wasn't able to do what I wanted to do. It's that whiplash effect. I know.
So the way to actually avoid all of that is to literally just have an emergency fund. Yep. And again, since this is an investing podcast, that is how you don't lose money in the markets.
Because if I'm keeping it real with you people, a lot of people will say, well, if you're in a bad financial situation, just cut your discretionary expenditures. And I don't think it's feasible. That's what makes us happy in really shitty situations.
You may be able to do that for a month. Otherwise, you get literally Google frugality. If you look at all the things we were just talking about, like all the budgeting experts and the budgeting podcast and the budgeting articles, if you look at what the difficult area of budgeting for the average American is altering their discretionary spending.
For a good reason, obviously, because of the psychological component. People find it easier to cut back their essential expenditures and their savings in investing than they do their discretionary. For whatever reason, I think it's a psychological trauma trigger in their head.
Like, oh, I can't do what I want to do. That's why I said to me, it's actually deeper level. If you get into the behavioral component, it is based on an actual deeper need, existential needs, and not the ones that society tells us.
Like, seriously, we can live in a van. We don't need a house. Well, the reason is because like humans are able to actually justify probably almost unanimously 100% of the time how to get what they want.
They'll figure a way out to get, like, so say you had just had an engine you need to replace in your car. Okay, you're down $3,000, but you still want like a new TV. You will find a way 100% of the time to justify finagling with your budgeting and your finances to get the TV that you wanted, even though you just had a $3,000 expenditure that you weren't expecting.
Yeah, if you really want it. It's a human trait that has been happened since like we were like just fresh out of Neanderthals where we're like, well, I want that cave. You will find a way to make the cave yours.
And that's why your wants are so important in that North Star. Like when you want it, it happens. That's why like Tim and I can do what we do with the finances.
It's like we want to be in the van so hard that like we have no running sinks right now. We like sit around on camping chairs. Yeah, no sinks.
Let that sink in. We've had no running sinks for like, I think it's been like six months. It's been forever.
How do we do dishes? We don't. We just don't. We just eat on top.
It's like we have like had like vinegar, the cast iron, the cast iron theory where like it has more flavor if it has more flavor in it. And if they get really bad, I take them over my parents house and I wash them or I'll pop up the pop up sink outside and do it. But it is because, well, I mean, first of all, it's training us for like what's life's going to be like.
Like we're not going to have a sink. We're going to have water, like allegedly, but we're not going to have a sink. But it'll be scarce.
Yeah, so that's that. And then the camping chairs. We're not going to have like sofas and recliners and shit on the road.
So the camping chairs isn't a big deviation from what we're going to want to do. But we'll have a sauna blanket. We will have a sauna blanket.
We don't really have like a stationary bed. We just have pieces of foam crammed together and shit like we are heathens. Is that what they call us? Yep.
I think we end up we're in the heathen category. We've de-evolved. But again, $3,000 bike.
And then we have like falling apart chairs and stuff because we just don't care. We care about certain things. We don't care about others.
And that's literally like the essence of. And you see our clothes. Our clothes are all deformed.
I have a pair of glasses I've had for like three years. Look at this. This lens is out.
So I only that's why it looks like I'm looking funny because I don't even have a lens in this one here. And this this shit that hangs off the side of mine. This is rubber bands to keep it like bulged in so that it doesn't fall.
I actually do have an eye appointment on Thursday, though. This week, I actually do have an eye appointment where I'm going to get a new pair of glasses. And I already had my eye appointment.
I just have to order my contacts. But I will tell you, I didn't tap my emergency funds and I didn't tap my budget. I saved for it.
And I said, OK, I have enough money now where I can go to the eye doctor. So I made an eye appointment. Although I'm going to hold off my contacts because we have to do car overhauls before we hit the road.
But that's just how we're like once you will find out that once you actually figure it out. It's like gamified It's gamified life. I love it.
I love it It's like how much can you withstand or put up with because we don't know what you want We don't for the most part withhold things that we want Mm-hmm, we get like but we know we're pretty into and in tune with ourselves to know exactly what we want Like there's things that she's like, I want chocolate. Okay, that's something that she could probably do without But I'm stressed out and I want chocolate bigger things like I want a Jackery I've been saving up to get a Jackery 5,000. I want a new bike.
I save it to get a new bike I want I want a new pair of glasses Well, I didn't go out and get a new pair of glasses going to debt for it I just kept wearing the ones I have until I had enough money saved up to go to the eye doctor Mm-hmm, but that's us like I think we're pretty in tune. So I think that's why I'm kind of Experienced enough to speak on the subject matter Yeah And if you guys are struggling paycheck to paycheck like this is why we have a hundred thousand and we're gonna have another hundred Thousand in the brokerage account. Yeah, we're gonna be so but okay back to mercy funds If you look up mercy funding you find like deep The deets on it the data on it Generally speaking you're told to have three months to six months of income in your emergency fund This is a vast deviation for me compared to other people I think you should have it at least 12 months in your emergency fund the reason why 12 months is Because if you lose your job There's no guarantee that you're gonna find another job that you like within Three to six months you'll take a shitty job that you don't like where you get 12 months There's a higher probability you find a job that you like I think it depends on the individual spending situation and their willingness to basically go on like a ramen noodle budget As opposed to their continuous normal spending if they get laid off but because the Places you can stick your emergency fund make a lot of interest There really is no reason to push towards the 12 months that he's talking about I do believe in like that.
I will talk to anybody about this I think you have to have at least 12 months and the reason I say that is because if you have any money in your Checking account you're losing money So you might as well have your emergency fund in worthy or in THTA or in bullet shares because they're making seven eight nine ten Eleven twelve percent. So you're actually if you have all of your emergency fund in I'd say bullet shares and you're making 8% Well, you have the only need 92% of your 12 months if you're going to have it there for 12 months So it makes it easier and you make more and when you make more your Emergency fund just keeps growing and growing like I put throughout the course of like five years. I put $6,000 into worthy and I have $7,000 in there.
It's just been compounding like I literally have a thousand dollars I didn't have to put in there that's been compounding in my emergency fund in worthy and my bullet shares and I was doing the bike I took out $3,200 and I only put in 2,400 I saved up for the bike that long that I made eight hundred dollars in bullet shares nice And that's why like if you if you utilize these different ways of thinking about work where to store your emergency fund It's actually gonna grow pretty quickly where you're gonna be like, whoa, I got a lot of money Compounding is the seventh world wonder eighth world wonder But like it's the inverse of the credit card concept you pay credit cards interest you pay mortgage interest you pay all this other interest You could literally be earning and we're then we're we're constantly trying other ideas to Have even higher yielding emergency funds. One of those is the yield max experiment. We got going on with Coney.
I Believe that I'd call that an equivalent, but okay I believe it that like if you put $15,000 in the Coney you're gonna get like your your mercy fund will be $15,000 within like within two years you'll actually doubled your but that emergency fund is in case of things You can't guarantee you're not gonna have an emergency But like okay, if you put 15,000 in the Coney. Mm-hmm, and you have a worthy account So you don't have to tap your cutting. So your Coney's your Coney's generating cash You can just I think if you have Schwab, I know Schwab is 4.4% for what high yield savings Yeah So if you don't if you if so if you have your your mercy fund in County and you're getting The Coney dividend every month and you let us just sit in your brokerage account and don't like touch it.
It'll grow up 4.4 So within within probably 16 months you will have a full 15,000 plus whatever the 4.4 yield is and you'll have $15,000 worth of Coney shares your original emergency fund. So you will have actually More you have grown your mercy fund by a lot with the yield max I would say you probably should wait to do that until you have like your base Well, we have we have multiple like I have a worthy account that has 7,000 in it. Um, we have 2,500 in a yield max in Schwab we have another 15,000 in the yield max in Schwab we have $1,200 in Stewart, which if you're not familiar with Stewart, it's a really cool program.
It's where like they just invest in like Sustainable good eating stuff like they'll have organic corn farms and organic beef and things like that nature. It's a really cool Yeah, look it up. It's pretty cool.
It's really cool program. I have $1,700 in my brokerage in so fi and stuff that I could liquidate at any point and it's not really it's not really been affected too Much by all this tariff stuff So like I have like four or five different places where I have emergence emergency funds Just tucked away because we're trying and erring and figuring out what's best and I still have $2,500 in my Wells Fargo account That's because we have expenditures for rehab and stuff So if I didn't Nick if I didn't need to like at the wind like I need $500 so I have to send it over to her with the with the cash app or whatever I would have that in something else and it would be growing. Yep So once this condo is done I am gonna do if I will say the one thing of the whole point of that is do not keep your money in Your bank account because if you do you're actually losing money to inflation I think I think it's if you're not making at least 5% on your investments.
You're losing money to inflation I think that's a rule of thumb. I don't think people truly know how much inflation really is So it's it's it's annoying. Yeah, I will admit that.
It's annoying that every time I get money in my bank I'm like, well, where the hell am I gonna send this now? Because I don't want it to sit in Wells Fargo willful Wells Fargo pays you point one five That's all the yield you're getting on the money in Wells Fargo. Is it that high? I thought it was a point oh one one five, I believe Trash so I basically just divert it to worthy and Stewart and there's something called compact Compact bank where they give you a percent. I thought it was compound.
I don't forget what's compound or compact I can't remember. I think it's compound. It's basically they invest in real estate It's a lot like fund rise, but it's a more liquid and you get 8% yield on it So that's another option to where you could just dump money into and just let your emergency fund grow You but the liquidity is key with the HTA would be like because the THTA yields 12% and it's tied to S&P Options, so that would be a really good one to dump money into for right now for us emergency fund Right now, but it's a little tell you that that one I would put that as a more last resort if you really need that cash in a short period Oh, it shares yield between six and eight percent and they've been pretty they've been pretty level with everything going on I like the yield max approach like I like the weekly yield maxes.
I Like the weekly Rex funds that we talked about. What was that? I forget when we talked about Racks, are you talking about round Hill round Hill? That was last week I like the round hill of weekly ones because you're getting money back every week So like there's different places to park your money where you can actually grow your money pretty quickly that Now some are some are riskier like yield max and Rex's though The round hills are out for you a little bit more riskier than that's a that's an advance I would not start out there for sure but it's the most important thing that you will do in your financial well-being journey is to actually establish a Emergency fund it's and put it somewhere that's growing Like we were one of her friends talks to us and she doesn't have an emergency fund like you need emergency funds like well How am I gonna get there? Like I don't I don't know how to get her there Well, what we did was we actually figured out her whole debt situation and we are having her refinance her he lock so that she could pay off her higher interest debt and osmote that over and she's basically taking her money and she's saving $500 a month in payments that she can then build up an Emergency fund and then once she hits like $1,000 in her emergency fund She can start snowballing her debt down faster without the interest payments So there's a way to do things. It's just you got to get creative You have to think outside the box, but like if you go back up to the 50 20 30, that's the one you're gonna go with That's fine.
The 20% is your investing and savings. You should not be investing until you have your mercy fund set up So it should be a 50% essentials 20% emergency fund 30% discretionary Once you have your emergency fund set up to whatever you're gonna get it It's gonna be you need it You need to start with a thousand and then you can if you really want to get into investing because right now is primed Brother I'd rather have emergency funded growing at 8% I understand but again, it depends a three-month minimum I wouldn't say there's always gonna be fluctuations in the market where you can get in a good time and get Pretty good yield on your dividends. I my biggest fear is My biggest fear with like a lot of them is because they're so interest rate sensitive that once they start cutting the interest rates I could see where they going down to like five and a half percent So if you get in now, you're getting seven percent I could see the the compound bank thing going from 8% down to 7% when they start cutting interest rates I can see bullet chairs going down because they're gonna cut interest rates So like that's why I think the mercy funds the most important thing investing You can always get in at different points to actually generate a high yield But the mercy fund right now the rates are fucking sick.
They really are with the lower risk stuff but that way I just wanted to revisit those two things get your budget in order and get your emergency fund set up because The shit's gonna hit the fan. It's already started to you mean it's gonna get worse. It's gonna get worse Yeah, I believe then right now is the time to just start sinking money into an emergency fund I wasn't sure we were gonna go worse.
I think it's gonna go worse Yeah, and then if you have that set up you can take your interest from that and buy when the markets sit around bottom destitute depression level Okay, so then how do you set it up? Like this is the biggest question that I receive when it comes to mercy fun So, how do you do it? Well, the first thing you have to determine is where you're going to go with your money. Yeah, where are you putting it? It's gonna be worthy brokerage account Bullet shares THTA whatever it's gonna be you have to determine that then you're good Then you'll highly recommend starting with worthy. Then you'll have to actually start to save the money Worthy's nice because it gives you daily compounding So if you determine that $15,000 is your emergency fund total needed then you have both the amount and where you will store the cash then it becomes how do you? reach the figure This is where you have to go That's why we went into so much detail about budgeting if you choose to 50 20 30 Then you're basically going to have to know you're gonna get $15,000 out of that 20% 20 number in the middle there.
So say that you're making $3,000 It's gonna take you 30 months to get to the $15,000 level at the 50 20 30 break down break down You could obviously you could cut some discretionary spending or you can do 50 4010 like whatever you want to do But like it's like I think if you can get your emergency fund set up within 12 to 24 months that that's really good But most the time it's gonna take you about 24 to 30 months and an easy way to do it guys since it is right around tax season for those of you who are like the procrastinators like me Your tax return and that's a good start but even like all the stuff that we were giving you about our personal finances We only have about Five months about in our emergency fund. So once the condo is sold We're gonna take a big chunk of that and put it into there So we actually get our 12 months of emergency funds set up in the worthy and and the bullet shares Yeah we're not we're in a really odd situation because it's like we're rehabbing to sell and then we're gonna get a lump cash settlement and Then we're gonna actually build our stuff up from there, which isn't the normal protocol but this is something we've been planning for and strategic and strategizing for and Then you'll see what the heck we're investing in and how I plan to actually build out our automated like budgeting and spending protocol because I'm I don't see a point in overhauling it right now until we actually get to a different situation because It's just it's a waste of time in my opinion I mean the way that suck sucks the most is if you want to make that 30 month period of time go down will be to Get like a side gig. I was gonna say side gig hustling, but you can get burned out there So you just gotta remind yourself some shit around your house because everyone has shit they could sell Yeah, and if you're looking for ways to find cash, we did do that episode I think it was like a two-part series where it's like ways to find more money ways to like where you can cut down to Your cell phone expenditures.
Yeah, five to twenty five and that's put all that money directly Same reason you have the death by a thousand cuts. You can literally save by pennies here and there Like people don't realize She mentioned it's roundups the tax return tax return roundups Is it like the biggest thing that I have problems with my talk to people as they use the tax return as an additional paycheck? And it's not That's literally money that should literally go straight into your savings or if you're investing if you have your bursary fund set up If you use it as an additional paycheck, you're living beyond your means Well, that's what that's why you have so much money. We haven't paid my tax lady yet.
Mm-hmm Much is that gonna be like she said between six and like nine hundred No, I still have over a thousand dollars just playing. I know myself to Bannister's and your I people and the car repairs Mm-hmm Yeah, so that five months of safety that we currently have in our emergency fund is actually gonna be about nine to ten months Once we get into the van So we only have to put in a little bit to get up to our 12 months ago But it's going to take people listening to this a little bit longer than then what we've maybe not really because it's been about 30 Months if I think about it for you. Yeah saving up on Tim's measly little.
Yeah, I don't make shit Like I that's how I go. We don't make a lot of money, but we have a lot of money Saved and invested And that's how I know that if we can do it. Anybody can do it.
What do we make we made? 40,000 combined last year. It was really low. Yeah, we made like $40,000 combined last year maybe 42,000 and we actually were able to sock away money for savings stock away money into our investments and Yeah, how afford a fucking rehab? So like it's just you have to Because we know like pretty much where every penny is going Is it a lot easier to say but that's it goes back to the budgeting port if you have all the data It's way easier to say when you have all the data, but I Disgrace I digress disgrace the biggest problem that I forget.
I think it was in I want to say CNN, but it might have been an SNBC or Fox News the biggest stress component for people in their relationships is Financial stress. Yep 50% of breakups. I would not be surprised So if you're married or have a girlfriend or a living girlfriend or whatever you are boyfriend, I mean, whatever you got a cat I don't know whatever you got going on relationship wise the Probability is the biggest Arguments and fights are gonna come from financial stress and it's a bit because it's all consuming like when you're when you're distressed Financially, it consumes everything that we think about everywhere And at that point like you can be like, oh we should go we should go for a hike But during the hike you're gonna be arguing about money or you're gonna be thinking about arguing about money You're like because it's never your fault.
It's always their fault and There's a psychological component to this There's a book called I think it's called scarcity where they talk about if you're below the $40,000 threshold And again, I think this fluctuates depending on like that that scarcity feeling that you have once you get into that mindset It does become all-consuming because it becomes life or death in your fight flight or freeze mechanism So everything ties back to that you spend so much time thinking about it like and then you stress yourself out further and just becomes this vicious like downward spiral What if you have any questions concerns or you want ideas comment email whatever you need to do I have a pretty good handle on this and I would be more than willing to talk If you just need to brainstorm because like my girl, like I said my girlfriend called she's like I'm drowning and stuff and when you're stressed out you don't have like mental clarity and She's like I wanted to talk to you because you would be able to give me numbers and this and that and like we ended Up being able to show her how to rearrange her stuff to save her $500 a month and payments Just by rearranging. I know like I know the biggest problem You're gonna have to get over is a lot of people are embarrassed when it comes to finances And I don't know why like it's a social stigma Yeah, it is what is but we don't know you like we're just nobody's on a mic. They create an alias Who cares nobody's on a microphone, but we know how to save money next week is gonna be another psychological of Doozy doozy that I think is very very haven't even told me yet relevant.
It's called the absolute bias I have no idea where that's going. So we will all find out next week. It's something that's very relevant right now Basically, the premise of it is that to have it to exhibit control you have to do something So the markets are fine to exhibit any control over your financial life You have to do something and most the time people just sell but that's next week.
We'll see you for some more psychology Oh Boy