BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 150: From Childhood Homelessness to Financially Confident with Cristina Livadary

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Cristina Livadary immigrated to the US when she was 6, and less than a year later, her father left, leaving her stranded with her mother and sister. She didn't speak the language, had no money, and lived in hotels until her mother was able to find steady work as a chef. She grew up without much in the way of financial education, but did secure a water polo scholarship to Bucknell. Until a rotator cuff injury lost her the funding at the beginning of her third year. She left college with $100,000 in student loans and a burning desire to find a high paying job to live out her Carrie Bradshaw dreams of living in NYC. She spent two years in New York, working hard and spending harder. She moved to LA to run a division covering California and Hawaii, and decided she needed to make a big change. Cristina stopped spending lavishly on things that didn't matter, started focusing on what made her happy, and now helps others manage their finances to get money out of the way and live their best lives. Links from the Show BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Money Podcast 55 with Kristy and Bryce BiggerPockets Money Podcast 55.5 with Kristy and Bryce Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/moneyshow150 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, show number 150, where we interview Christina Lividary and hear how she went from homeless to certified financial planner on her way to financial independence. I like spreading everything out, and I just want the highest probability to reach my highest goals. And how you do that is you stay diversified. You don't pay a lot of fees and you minimize taxes. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen. me as always is my amazing co-host Scott Trench. Oh, that was a corny intro, but we didn't coordinate at all, Mindy. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, and show you that by following the proven path, you can put yourself

on the road to early financial freedom and get money out of the way so you can lead your best life. That's right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big-time investments in assets like real estate or start your own business, or just go and buy that first home that's really important to you. It will help you build a position capable of launching yourself towards those dreams. Scott, I am super excited to have Christina on the show today because she came from a fairly tough background and had to work really hard to get where she is today. And, you know, there's a lot of people who start off with a position of weakness and are able to push themselves.

forward, really pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and everything that Christina has is because of her hard work, which just makes it even more valuable, in my opinion. Yeah, you can tell that she's just a really special person, you know, Division I athlete with college scholarship, you know, went to really, really good school there, really high income earner, learned lots of painful financial lessons, and it really seems to be coming together here. but it's just amazing to see what she's been capable of doing over the course of her career. And you have no doubt that she's going to be very successful with her new business and off to the races towards FI in a big way over the next couple of years.

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when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP Money. Christina Livideri from Mana Financial Life Design. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I'm so excited to have you with us today. Thank you both for having me. I first met Christina at the Mamas Talk Money. Summit, and the talk that you gave was just so inspiring. I was super excited to be able to get you on the show today.

Let's talk about your money journey, because it hasn't always been super smoothen roses, and I think that's where you learn the most is from people who have experiences that kind of sucked, frankly. Oh, spoiler alert. Thank you for putting it bluntly. No, I mean, I think that's a big part of my mind. money journey is my story around money. And it starts from a very early age. When I was just seven years old, I immigrated here from the Philippines. And I was within about nine months of being in the

Philippines, or being in the United States, rather, my biological father took off and took with him our security and stability. And he fled to his home country of Venezuela. And so he left my mom, my sister and I alone in this foreign country, you know, not really being able to speak, speak English, and just really without a, and also undocumented. So it was a very tough few years. And so for the first few years of our life here, we were living homeless and out of cheap motels. And so that was really the beginning of my money journey. So, you know, for the first few years, it was fraught with instability moving around. But luckily, my mom ended up finding a great job because she also happened to be an executive chef. So she was able to get some stability. She found her now husband,

my stepfather. And throughout my teenage years, I was able to work hard at school. And I was able to also get a scholarship to play water polo at Bucknell University, where I went to school. And so I went to college. I went to the East Coast, a completely strange and foreign land for me. And three years into my college water pole career, I tore my rotator cuff, which meant that I lost my scholarship. And I had these big dreams to become an international litigator at the international criminal court and to change the world and to fight the good fight. But unfortunately, I looked up the cost of law school. And I realized that after I graduated from undergrad, I'd have $100,000 student loan debt. That's what private liberal arts colleges cost back in 2006. So I had to face the

reality that for, you know, starting June of when I graduated, I owed my student loans a thousand dollars a month. Going back here a second, you tore your rotech, Tater Cuff, your third year in college. The beginning of my junior year. Yeah. Oh, and so your scholarship got revoked for that year? Correct. Yeah, because we were a spring. we were a spring sport and so fall was when I tore it. Oh, geez. Okay. So then you took on the two years of student loan debt, which equated to about 100,000 that expensive. Okay. And during that period where you're where this is coming, did you, you know, while you were in college here, did you work or how did you sustain other lifestyle expenses outside of the cost of education there? Great question. So I did work

study. And so, you know, my parents still, you know, they're restaurant owners. So, you know, very middle class. And so I definitely needed to find some pocket change any way I could. And so I did apply for the work study program when I was at school. And so I went to school, played water polo, and then I actually worked at a senior center in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Oh, okay. Awesome. I love that. I think it's a great creative option. And a lot of those work-study programs, I don't know about yours, allow you to actually just work on homework for most of the time, depending on it.

Like, sometimes you're supervising the library or whatever. It can depend on those types of things. Yeah, I definitely did work, but I also would help. I also like did fun activities with the seniors in there. It was awesome. Well, great. So, okay, so you graduate in this position of $100,000 in debt. It sounds like you didn't accumulate a lot of other personal debts like credit card debt,

or was there anything else that was layered in there? No, thankfully, that was all. all the debt for the time being. But one thing I talk about was kind of the lack of financial knowledge and literacy. So my parents were able to send me a couple hundred dollars a month to eat, you know, and that's about it. But I definitely had Lewisburg, Pennsylvania is a very small town. So there wasn't a lot of temptation outside of eating and like going to school, basically. Okay. And so you graduate from Bucknell and you've got $100,000 in debt. What happens next? How does your financial journey progress from there?

Yeah. So once I learned of that payment, so that $1,000, so basically we tell best all of our clients, for every $10,000 in debt that you take on, it's about $100 a month, you know, after school. And so once I learned that, I immediately stopped studying for the LSAT. And I started going to networking nights. So Bucknell, being a small liberal arts school, had a great alumni network. And so I went and I realized that I needed to find a job that was going to pay me the highest salary going out of school if I wanted to live in New York City and kind of do the things that I wanted to do. And so outside of law school, what I wanted to do was live in New York and kind of experience like the Carrie Bradshaw dream. So I went to the Bucknell networking nights for finance, knowing that finance at that time, so again, it was 2006 right before the crash of 2008.

And so there were plentiful finance jobs. And so I went there being a polysci and Spanish double major, not knowing anything about business and just going out and saying, you know, are there any companies that any sort of Wall Street firms that would hire someone like me? And so I did find one. So back in that time, there were, you know, there were the traditional trading shops. There were also the investment banks. But there were also asset managers at that networking night.

And so I found a firm that sold mutual funds to financial advisors. And they didn't require any sort of business background. They just wanted to make sure that you could make dials and make friends. So I found that job. And I actually was the individual that was hired out of Bucknell for that firm. Awesome. Okay. So you get hired out of Bucknell for this firm.

And how does your money story progress there? Are you able to begin making a dent on that? student loan debt or how do you begin managing your money? I would say that I'm very honest about my money journey. The 20s, by the time I was 30, I paid off all my student loan debt and I bought a house in Los Angeles. So at the very end, it was great. But throughout that, again, I know we talk about money mistakes later on.

I'll be happy to share that. But I had no idea what credit card debt was, right? And so for the first, you know, right after school, I got this job where I had, income all of a sudden. And so you get credit card offers. And those credit card offers say, you get this X amount of credit limit and go ahead and apply. So I applied for a couple. And six months into my stint in New York City, living the high life, buying cupcakes and buying shoes, I literally had wrapped up like $15,000 a debt. Had you paid off any of your student loan debts? Were you just paying the minimums on those? Or were you? I was paying the $1,000.

a month at that point. Okay. Yeah. So the credit card debt all of a sudden became this like looming thing. And for the first few years, because I was working on a, on a kind of like a bonus structure,

so I had traditional salary and then every quarter I'd get a bonus. What I started doing was I'd start paying off my credit card debt with every bonus, right? But then the cycle would start over again because I never learned that you should pay off credit card debt after every month, you know? And so this was a cycle for me for five years until I really started thinking about my future and what I wanted out of my future. So it sounds like you, from that point

to now, have done some sort of financial education, self-education. Where did you start learning about finances? Because like you said, you didn't really know about them growing up. Like, that's not taught, how did you start self-educating? I would say that I was never taught about finances as a child. My parents still mismanaged their finances despite my heavy hand. But for me, it came through reading books. And I actually, and it's not like, you know, a lot of people say rich dad, poor dad, those kind of books.

I read a book called Seven Stages of Money Maturity. And this is a book by my now mentor George Kinder. And the book was not about dollars and cents in managing finances, rather it was about truly deeply thinking about what you want out of life. And I found that in my late 20s, when I started thinking about what I wanted out of life, and for me, that was because of the burden that homelessness had placed on my shoulders from the very early age, I wanted to buy a home. And learning that that was my deepest need at that time, I had to get there as quickly as possible. And so that's when I started learning the dollars and cents

and what I call a mindful spending, creating a mindful spending plan and learning personal finance basics because I knew what I wanted. I think that's awesome. You know, when you think about, like, that is really the catalyst behind all of this. It's all about what do you want out of life and are you working towards that? And it's amazing how many people do not do that simple exercise. And that is the root of their money problems because once you're like, oh, here's what I want in life. Okay, now it becomes very clear how I need to use money as a tool to create that future reality, whether that's you want to be working this job or climbing the corporate ladder, whether that's you want to buy a home, you know, as simple as that,

or whether that's you want to be financially free and traveling the world like Bryce and Christy from Millennial Revolution or whatever. You know, that's the, it's whatever you, however you go about setting that up. So I think it's fantastic. You started with that. When did you read that book and make those choices about, or come to that understanding? I read that book in fits and starts towards my late 20s. Okay.

And then I read it again fully. in my early 30s. What was your, what was the, the turning point then? Do you have like a moment in time and a shift in your behavior in terms of spending and an income generation and money management that you can point to? I would say that it was actually like right about when I was like the like 29. It was so, so I was actually, so I got my dream job, my first iteration of my dream job at 24. So after two years of kind of, you know, I was dialing for dollars for two years.

I made 100 dials a day. I was in the office to 6 a.m. Out of the office by 7 p.m. just like I learned how to talk to anyone and everyone. And so I did that for two years. And after that time, I had built enough human capital that I was able to go out an interview for jobs where they were accepting people with 5 to 10 years plus of experience.

But I built that experience through that two years of hard work. So I got that job that I wanted covering Los Angeles in Hawaii. And that's the job that I stayed in for 10 years. And so for that 10-year period, I would be getting massive amounts of checks, you know, in terms of bonus checks. And again, the first couple of years, it was so silly. I mean, again, biggest money regret, right? Like not doing anything with that money.

But really around my late 20s, when I started reading about the seven stages of money maturity, I realized I wanted to buy a home. And so it really came, I remember because my birthday's on November 15. And that was the day every year that I'd get my biggest bonus check. And so it was basically my 29th birthday when I got that big bonus check. And I was like, I'm not going to spend this money. I am going to put this away in a savings account so that I can put a down payment on a house next year. And so I bought my first home at the age of 30.

A couple questions here. One is what was this job that you're working at for 10 years covering Hawaii and California? It's called a wholesaler. So it's a mutual fund wholesaler. Okay, so you're selling mutual funds to financial advisors who operate out of those states. Yes. Awesome. And so what and then when you say massive amounts of checks, what were these things going towards in terms of spending? Do you remember the specifics of what you're spending on? In my 20s, it was paying off credit cards.

card debt. So it was still that kind of rat race of I accrued the debt for a quarter and then I'd pay it off in one big chunk. And what it went to, I mean, cars, clothes, nice dinners out, treating my friends. Yeah, treating my friends to a lot of things. Being, you know, there is, you know, that I am a very generous person. And so I saw a lot of my friends struggling, making, you know, 50 grand a year. And I was making a lot more than that. And so I'd, you know, take them out to fancy dinners, that kind of thing. Okay. And then at 29, when you had that first one, you're like, this time I'm not spending it, where did you put it? How did you begin managing your money differently from that point? And so this was just a savings account. I just put the money into a savings account that I couldn't

see everything. And I mean, again, I was in asset management. And that's the kind of the big thing that I try to tell people. I was already at this point, I'd been working for even like six years. on Wall Street. And I still didn't know anything about brokerage accounts or about, you know, I maxed out my retirement every year. That's what I did, which I'm very glad that I did. But I didn't know how else to maximize my money. But also knowing that I wanted to buy a house in quick order within a year, I wanted to, the plan was basically to collect all of my bonuses to put a down payment on a house the year after. Okay. So again, we just had a good talk. And we had a great discussion about how, you know, it's just like amazing how smart people who work in the finance world or are, you know, heavily involved in math engineers, these types of folks, sometimes just completely miss the basics of personal finance and money management here.

So it's just kind of like, like, it's amazing to me that that happens. You know, if you listen to this, don't feel bad. If you've, please don't feel bad. haven't thought about these things in your life because like even folks who work in the industry specifically about wealth management selling the products that you know that to invest in to build this wealth sometimes don't put two and two together for years in a row even though they're smart making great incomes those types of things clearly solving problems in the market I don't know it's just like an interesting paradox that we get that we hear about frequently

It's also because also, as I learned in my 30s, that there are very different segments of finance. People think of finance as one big black box. But, you know, in fact, like investment bankers, I've seen them blow huge bonus checks, right? Because, again, they don't know the basics of personal finance or they're not masters of personal finance. They're masters in taking their own risks in a specific type of portfolio. So there's investment banking, there's asset management, which is what I was in, which is managing other people's money for different types of risk. But then personal finance, I mean, that's why certified financial planners exist, right? It's because we at CFPs are uniquely trained to figure out people's personal financial lives and put the puzzle pieces together.

Yeah. So it sounds like right at the point in your story at 29 where you're not quite a master yet, but you're learning some lessons and beginning to put some things together. Is that, is that right? That's right. That's right. Well, before she beats herself up too much, I've heard some pretty good gems here. I heard her in college say, unfortunately, and I don't agree with you, I think it's fortunately. You said, unfortunately, I looked up the cost of law school. There are people who go to law school without looking that up and incur all of those debts without perhaps having the passion to do this full time. Like, I went to school for fashion design. I have said multiple times that that was not the correct choice for me.

And you knew that it was $1,000 a month student loan payment. Other people are just like, whatever, I'll figure out how to pay for it later. So don't beat yourself up too much. You were also maxing out your retirement plans. That's a good thing. there's a lot of people making your money, paycheck to paycheck, blowing every dime of it and not having enough money. I don't have enough money to save for retirement. Yeah, you do. If you're making this big, big, big money, just because you're living paycheck to paycheck doesn't mean that you don't have enough

to save for retirement. You're just choosing not to. So you're still doing a lot of really good things. Thank you, Mindy. Christina's killing it. And just so you know, I mean, I say, like I talk about the underbelly of my, my story for a purpose, right? I mean, again, it's, I do this because I want people to know, Scott, just as you said, if you're listening to this, everyone makes money mistakes. And especially because money has had been such a taboo topic and in many, in many families still is, to talk about and educate people about. And so this is something that I'm so passionate about today. And I think we're going to go, go through this in terms of my evolution. But the 30s, that 30, that 30,

year was really the turning point. Nice. So what happens in that 30th year? Oh man, what happened in the 30th year? Besides being broken up with and just realizing, wow, like, I'm, I'm just a whole different person. I went through a complete evolution. So, you know, I was broken up with on my 30th birthday. And my heart was broken. We'd been together for several years. And I just, I kind of, I went down into the deep hole that is sadness that I believe everyone should experience because that's when the greatest ahas in life happened. And I realized I need to do something about my life. What am I doing in my life? And I realized that selling mutual funds to financial advisors was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. There's many reasons what we can talk about

just on the technical side about mutual funds versus exchange created funds. But really for me, it was just I wanted to help people. I wanted to help individuals and really gain that path in life that I was starting to find for myself. And so I put myself on a path to do a couple of things. Number one was to get my CFP designation, certified financial planning designation. I knew that is the gold standard for personal financial planning. And so if you ever work with an advisor, I always say it has to be a CFP.

So I put myself through that because what it would take was a couple of years of work studying while working full time at my same job. Then I had to go past that rigorous test that is the CFP exam. And then I also simultaneously wanted to become a registered life planner, which is a designation. it's a subset of the CFP community that are really trained by George Kinder's Kinder Institute of Life Planning, meaning that I'm uniquely trained to really understand

people's most important values and aspirations in life and connect it with their money. And so I went through that from 30 to 35 was really my education while working full time. During that period, which I think it's a great,

painful but a great way to kind of figure out your vision for your life basically there. How are you handling your money during that period as you kind of were educating and moving towards that vision? I was saving money every single month. So I wanted to have a year and a half of living expenses because I also knew that by the end of my training, I'd be quitting my job and launching a firm. And so I knew that I needed at least a year's worth of runway and more because I also wanted to save for my wedding. So I became a master of squirling money away in different pots and giving each different pot a job description. So for the longer money, the money that I'd be pulling three to four to five years out went into a taxable brokerage account.

And for the money that I would be spending within a year, I kept it in a high-yield savings account. What was your kind of monthly spending, would you say, prior to this shift in thinking? And what did it kind of get whittled down to afterwards? Oh, highly variable is the answer to the first one. I remember looking at, I mean, it's embarrassing to say. I'm going to say it, though, because I think we should all talk about it. I mean, it went 13 to 20 grand as a single person in Los Angeles. And that was on cars, restaurants, treating friends, those kinds of things.

Money clothes. Yeah. Yeah. And what were you able to whittle it down to over those five years in terms of monthly spend? Seven. Seven thousand. Okay. Yeah.

And did that process of whittling it down from 13 to 20 grand to seven, did that happen overnight or was that a gradual process? Absolutely not. Yeah. It was a gradual process and whittling it down even today. I mean, my business partner and I, we, every single month, you know, we kind of just check in with each other like, how do you do last month, right? I mean, we call these with our partners, our money dates.

And so it's a continuous process because life is continuously changing. To say that you're going to spend seven grand every month for the rest of your life is just unrealistic. But through that time of whittling it down, it became just, it's all about mindfulness and understanding, okay, so what did I spend my money on? What did these, this excess brought me joy and what didn't? and then the next month what I tried to do was eliminate the things that didn't truly bring me joy. So clothes were one of the first things that went out the door. And then I slowly, you know, gave up taking all my friends to restaurants all the time. Split the check. Yeah. Exactly.

Okay. Well, that's fantastic. So was all of the cash you began to accumulate going into like investments or, you know, you said you said you're building up 18 months, of runway, was it really just kind of mostly cash accumulation in after-tax savings accounts and brokerage accounts? Or was there other investing going on as well? Yeah, no, it's ETFs. I wanted to put it into liquid tax-efficient vehicles so that I could take it out whenever I needed it. Okay, great. I want to clarify what an ETF is, or I want you to clarify what an ETF is, because we hear that that word bandied about are those, I guess it's an acronym bandied about, but I don't think we've really discussed it. Well, maybe on the Chelsea Brennan show, but happy to talk about it. We can talk about very quickly. So

you'll typically hear two types of investment vehicles. A ETF, which stands for an exchange traded fund, and a mutual fund. And so both of those are what you call pooled investment vehicles. And so a mutual fund, the way that you think about a mutual fund is there's basically some person who runs that mutual fund. So it's a It's an expert who goes and picks a pool of stocks and or bonds and or a mixture of both, and you buy shares into that investment vehicle.

An exchange traded fund is not professionally managed by a person. Instead, it's modeled after an exchange. So there are exchange traded funds for a lot of different things, but the most popular is the S&P 500. So when you own an exchange-traded fund for an S&P 500 ETF, you own portions of the 500 stocks in the S&P 500. Yeah. And an ETF can mean a lot of things as well, right? So, you know, when I say I invest in index funds, for example, what I'm really doing is I'm using, you know, I invest index funds through my retirement account.

But most of my excess cash is placed in after-tax brokerage vehicles. And I'm buying a SMP 500 ETF from Vanguard, right? For example. And that's kind of like, that's one way of investing in ETFs. There's a bazillion ETFs out there. And it sounded like you chose something that you said was tax efficient. What does that mean to you? I can do a whole podcast on this.

I just wrote a very lengthy blog post on it. So mutual funds and exchange traded funds are taxed very differently because mutual funds, the industry that I know so dearly because I worked on it in it for over a decade, they tend to be more tax inefficient because they have to pay out their capital gains at the end of every year. And those capital gains, whether you own the fund for the entire year or for a portion of the year, you have to pay those capital gains. Exchange traded funds, because you can buy and sell so quickly, they are much more liquid and they're more tax-efficient for you. So they have, you know, I'd probably say a quarter of the capital gains

payout at the end of the year, if anything. Okay. Here to a mutual fund. Great. So you're really getting control your spending and stocking away cash, both in the form of savings accounts and these ETFs. And then over this five-year period, getting ready for this next career. What happens next? So it was, I mean, the dreaming part was the most fun part. I did a lot of, you know, the registered life planning training that I went to was a five-day retreat in Hana Maui. And it was at George Kinder's home where we essentially spent five days being trained but also being planned. And it was all about this two-year transition from 2015 to 2018, actually, when I was. would be leaving the only job that I really knew, you know, as an adult human being, and jettisoning

myself into a whole new career as a registered investment advisor and a firm owner. And so that five-day retreat was really the beginning point of how it was all going to play out. And in that time as well, I found the love of my life. I got married. And so all of that happened within a very short amount, of time. And so just on the money side, so I saved up enough money so I didn't have to be paid in that first year of firm ownership. And I also saved up enough to pay for my own wedding in Mexico. Awesome. Wait, you didn't take out loans to pay for your wedding? No loans. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most

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It's good to know just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. So as a business owner with this, how did that first year go? Were you able to begin generating income and get the business off the ground? Or did it take a few years? Or how did that look? So we're about two and a half years in now.

So you're still speaking to me at the beginning stages. But we generated income very quickly. It was just a matter of what we did with that income. So we decided purposely not to pay ourselves. so that we could really build the firm. And so as of today, we have about 80 clients. And again, we started from zero. So a lot of financial advisors that start their businesses anew,

they transfer from, let's say, a big brokerage house, like a Wells Fargo, a Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, and they move to their own independent firm. They bring their clients with them, which enables them to have recurring revenue right away. But we didn't. So we were able to bring on 80 clients over the past two and a half years.

Not a lot of sleep, but at the beginning of this year, we started paying ourselves and we're making a living wage. Well, that's fantastic. And where are you living now? Still living in the house that I bought in 2014. Okay, awesome.

So now you have a living wage here. What's next? What's the future look like for you? What's going to happen over the next couple of years and how are you going to be managing your assets? it's there. Awesome question. I just did this visioning exercise last night instead of watching the election. And so, I mean, like the key features of my vision for the next few years. In five years, I want to be, you know, one of the pioneers in financial life planning. So our, our firms called

Mana Financial Life Design. And it's truly, you know, Scott, as you said it, we start with, what do you want out of life? And so there's so, there's so. so many advisors. I'd say 99% of financial advisors don't start conversations that way. So I want to be a leader and a pioneer in the space where that's how financial advisors begin conversations with their clients. We want to be a boutique firm, so we don't want to serve thousands of people in terms of clients, but we want to serve a, I'd probably say, a few with about 20 employees and really build a firm that's all about achieving people's highest vision in their life.

And then in terms of personal life, I'm also seven months pregnant. So I tend to do everything all at once. But yeah, I mean, my husband and I hope to keep this house as a rental property because we are two blocks from the beach here in L.A. and stuff is building up all over around us. But we actually want to move closer to his family in Pasadena and start kind of having a little bit more of a suburban lifestyle. How do you think about managing your assets as part of this?

So I'll tell you also in terms of books I've been reading lately. I've been kind of validated by some of that. I'm a boring investor. I believe in having my real estate as in hard, hard assets and then having a portfolio of retirement assets, qualified assets, as well as taxable assets. And on the taxable side, again, like a broad range of ETS, I want municipal bonds in there, you know, because we live in a very high tax state of California. And I want that to work for me consistently over time. I'm not a big risk taker. though, you know, a lot of the clients that we work with,

they have a portion of their wealth in their company stock, for example, right? I like spreading everything out, and I just want the highest probability to reach my highest goals. And how you do that is you stay diversified. You don't pay a lot of fees and you minimize taxes. Okay, I got to jump in here and say, Christina is a CFP saying, that she is a boring investor.

And I think that is so powerful because having all of these exciting investments leads to a lot of sleepless nights. Everybody that we interview, who is successful in their investment strategy, is boring. And that's the best. Boring is the best.

You said diversification. Love that. You said bonds. I don't really like bonds, but we'll agree to disagree. we're in different places in our lives right now. And I... I only have 10% bonds.

Okay. As it breaks to my gas pedal, don't worry. I just don't love bonds. And we should really bring somebody on who can talk intelligently about bonds because I know that I can't speak intelligently about them. I just know that they don't make a lot of money. So I want to make a lot of money in my investments. But I love that you don't like risk.

Nobody wants to lose their money. be boring in your investments, stay the course, put in, you know, on a consistent basis, and just set it and forget it. Are you actively trading a lot of your ETFs, or do you kind of just throw it in there and you're done? So to be clear, there is risk in stock market investing. Yes, yes. I'm sorry. Past performance is not a ticket of a future game. But again, the way that I think about it, again, it's the law of averages, right? So with a high-yield savings account today, what are you making?

0.7%. If you're lucky. Right? Like maybe. When we run long-term projections, you know, the stock market on average, on average a year is like 7% going back in time, right? 7% annualized. If I can do 6.5% a year, my financial plan works until I'm 90 years old.

I'm good with that. That's kind of what I'm looking for, right? is, you know, anywhere from five and a half to six and a half percent, anything above that is graving. And sorry, what did you ask me? Fendii, I just wanted to, I got on a little bit of No, I was, I was complimenting you on your boring strategy because I think that's the best way to go. It's, you know, I see a lot of people talking about, you know, oh, I got this great stock tip. Hey, put a dollar in it, you know, see what a dollar does. But don't put everything in this hot stock tip, just because you have a hot stock tip, doesn't mean it's going to pan out. I mean,

have you ever had a hot stock tip that all of a sudden flopped? Yeah, lots of people have. And we have a lot of clients that actually love, you know, studying the stock market and making big bets. So what we tell them is 10% of your net worth, no more than 10% of your net worth can go to that, what we call like the Robin Hood bucket. You get to do that. We'll take care of the serious money. The widows and orphans money, we call it. You need to make sure that we take care of that. Well, you can have fun with 10% of your network. Okay, you just said two things that were very important.

You said, I have clients who like to study the stock market. They don't just get some weird whim hot stock tip. And you said they make bets. That is when you are getting off on a wild hair, it can be a bet. and 10% of your total net worth is not the same as throwing it all in on red. So I just, I love that. So I just want to reiterate that part. Thank you.

People who come to the place where, oh, I need to get my finances in order, always seem to feel like what they're doing isn't right or I should have known this and I'm so embarrassed that I don't. And you said it so perfectly, everybody makes me. money mistakes. Every single person makes the money mistakes. Even me. Even Scott. Sorry, I'm trying, I'm not trying not to laugh. Scott didn't want to participate in credit card hacking because he got like 2% cash back on his credit card or something. And now he makes significantly more by just opening up credit cards for the bonuses and things like that.

But that's still, I mean, that's a great money mistake to have. Oh, I just. didn't take advantage of something. But, you know, there's lots of people, everybody makes money mistakes. And to hear from somebody who is in the space now who also made money mistakes and learned from them is so powerful. It helps people really figure out that, you know, I'm not doing such a bad job. At least I'm paying attention to my finances. Yeah, we do this with our clients all the time because they think that we're some wise. I'm like, I'm like 36 years old, you know? I'm still figuring this out, you know. But I happen to read a lot. I surround myself with very smart people. You know, we're all going to make mistakes, but what we can do is make the most educated

decisions based on what we know. And because we spend all day, every day living and breathing in this space, we can help you make the most educated decisions. The one thing I was just going to say was, and I can weave this into the famous four or whatever. So the idea, of financial confidence because I think that's kind of what Mindy's getting at is the idea like I say that financial confidence is more important than financial literacy and that's especially what women lack is financial confidence that's why so many you know it's like 50 I posted something about a UBS study that just came out in July that 54% of millennial women say that that live with a partner defer their decisions their financial

planning decisions to their husbands. And that's millennial women. And so like this, like we're here to say that financial confidence is what is the most important thing to truly embody because financial confidence will give you the ability to go out and research and find the resources versus thinking you need to do it all yourself. What is financial confidence? How do you define it?

I think it's the innate knowing that you don't need to know everything. Oh, then I don't have financial confidence. I want to know everything. How do you get financial confidence? I am starting to realize that. I think it's the journey that we're all talking about here. It's the revisiting your past

and understanding that everyone makes mistakes and that you too have made mistakes, but instead of criticizing yourself for it, learning from it. and saying, what else can I do? What's the best next step? And so for a lot of people, the best next step is to find an expert that they can trust. Right.

And sometimes it's finding a podcast they can trust or finding a blog that they can trust. It doesn't matter which, you know, where on the spectrum the services lie. But truly being able to understand that there are resources out there that can aid them on their journey instead of having to do it all themselves. I love that. I love that. Yeah, you, if you're going to do it all yourself, you should be prepared to do a lot of research. And some people love that. My husband is crazy about research. I'm sick of hearing about Tesla. I'm sick of hearing about all of his favorite things. That sounds mean. I'm sick of hearing about all his favorite things, but seriously, he talks about Tesla like every single day.

Oh, do you want to watch self-driving car videos? No, not even a little bit. We're good. I've seen cars drive all the time. It doesn't matter to me who's driving behind the wheel. But he is confident in his research. He loves doing the research. If you want to, you know, do all of this stock picking. And, you know, if you really want to do this all by yourself, you have to be prepared to embrace the research or be prepared to embrace losing a lot of money. Well, and so let's let's add one more part of that definition. of financial confidence then. So the financial confidence to talk about money. Love that. Oh, I love that. Yes. Have the financial confidence to talk about money and not be ashamed. Everybody has made money mistakes. Come in our Facebook group and talk about your money mistakes. Share what you've learned from your money mistakes because that's kind of the whole reason the

bigger pockets exists because we want to share with people how to invest in real estate more specifically. real estate, but how to invest in real estate? And you don't need to learn all of these mistakes from the School of Hard Knocks. Learn from me. Learn from what I did wrong in my last flip. Learn from what I did wrong when I screen my tenants. Learn that, you know, this is a really good indicator that this person is going to be a terrible tenant and then don't rent to that person. Or learn that this is a really good indicator that this person is going to be a great tenant and pursue people who fit that need. You don't need to learn all of this from scratch. Learn from other people's mistakes. Talk about money. I'll get off my soapbox now. But yes, I love that. Okay. Well, I think this has been

super fantastic. Christina, thank you so much for sharing your journey with us, but we're not done. We want to look into your, we've kind of talked about your investments. You've got a little bit in real estate. Well, I live in LA, so it's a lot of bit in real. And you bought six years ago, so you have a lot, a lot of bit in real estate. And then you've got ETFs and retirement accounts. And retirement accounts are also invested in ETS. Okay. To my business partner who actually manages my money because I, you know, she's the CFA and she, we run an impact portfolio. And so, so we actually eliminate fossil fuels at which this year has been amazing for our portfolio, as well as promote gender equity in our in our Mana's impact portfolios.

So all of my additional retirement assets are in our impact portfolios. Okay. And then currently, in terms of annual spending, how much do you keep on hand? Like in months, I'm not looking for a dollar amount. In months, six months, from my husband and I, yeah. Okay. And he has a full-time job. He's also a business owner.

Okay. Yeah. So full-time, yes, but also, you know, it's kind of that freelance LA lifestyle. And how much cash do you keep on hand for your business in terms of month? So that's a little bit more of a complicated, a complicated thing because we also have investors that we're going to be paying off next year. So we have much more than we typically keep. But for us, it's a year of like operating in terms of, cash, but we're also, you know, in the, we have a little bit more cash than that right now at this

moment because we are planning to pay down the investors to gain more equity in our business. Okay. Great. I think that we have covered everything about your story. Would you like to share anything else before we move on to The Famous Four? I think we've covered it. Thank you both. Okay. It's time for the Famous Four. These are the same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Christina, are you ready? So ready. What is your favorite finance book?

I think I know. Well, so because I already gave anon to my mentor, George Kinder, I'm going to throw a new one in there. Oh, okay. This book just came out. And I'm literally obsessed. And Mindy, I know that you subscribe to our newsletter,

so you probably saw my homage to it. But Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money. I need to get Morgan on the show. That book is amazing. Please get Morgan on the show. Oh, my God. I haven't read it off to check it out. Oh my goodness, Scott.

It is amazing. You know, so I came into the personal finance space in like 2013. And at that time, you already had your money or your life and the richest man, the millionaire next door and the richest man in Babylon and like all of the, like the core books. And when I was reading Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money, I'm looking through and I'm like, this is one of those books that's going to become. the core personal finance books. And it's like, I'm excited that I'm able to read it when it came out as opposed to like, oh, it's 10 years old. I already know everything in there.

Like, it's so, oh, it's such a good book. I'm sorry, I'm going on and on about it. That's awesome. I look forward to reading it. It's a really awesome book. Morgan, hit me up. Okay. What was your biggest money mistake?

So the biggest money mistake, I'd say it's, it's, it's, what we were talking about in my 20s, spending a lot of what I made, right, and not thinking forward to what I wanted in the future. And not just three years in the future, but five years in the future, 10 years in the future. So if I could do it all over again, which I can't, that's what I would do, but I would just urge,

I hope that money mistake teaches everyone that you should dare to dream and think about what you want in the future and then construct an element structure to managing your money around that dream. Awesome. I love that. Well, that kind of tags into the next question. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out? You should save. So, you know, if you're just starting out, max out retirement. I mean, we've started coming up with just kind of just one-liners that help people. But if you spend

more than $100,000 a year, you're going to need to save more. than the max retirement contribution, which this year is 19,500. So, you know, Scott, it sounds like your listeners know how much they spend each month, which is amazing. A lot of our clients when they first come have no idea. So understand how much you spend, spend each month. And if it's more than 100,000, you need to at least max out your 401k. And if you're a solopreneur, if you own your own business, don't just contribute to an IRA, look into a solo 401k or different retirement accounts that are specifically designed for people who own their own businesses. Yeah, I'll go a step beyond that and say, if you spend $100,000 per year and you buy into

that 4% rule thing that we've been talking about at all, that means you're going to have to accumulate $2.5 million in order to withdraw 4% of that, $100,000 per year on a regular basis. remember that's only a 30-year retirement. Yeah. So if you retire earlier, that 4% rule doesn't even make sense. Well, we've had a lot of discussions about that. I'll polite you disagree with that. I think the 4% rule is appropriate for the early retiree, but there's a lot of different things going on with that. And you have a 96% per, you know, anyways, we're going on with that. But if the point is, if you can drop that to $50,000 per year, now you only need one. Now you're accumulating $50,000 more per year. after tax that you can then, because $100,000 is spending after tax for most of us, right?

That's if you're doing that math. Now I'm accumulating $50,000 more after tax. And I only need $1.25 billion. I'm going to that math, right? Yeah, about $1.25 million to sustain that indefinitely, right? So that spending, if you track your spending and can get it down, it increases the amount that you're accumulating and reduces the amount that you're going to need downstream. And look, you can always go back. And once you've reached that one point, you know, that financial freedom number or whatever it is, then begin layering back in items to your lifestyle as your wealth continues to grow. And you read, you know, hey, I've got $2 million in wealth. I only spend $50,000 a year. Now I can bump that spending up to $60,000 a year. And I'm still in this state of perpetual freedom,

those types of things. So I love that concept. of the, hey, track your spending, know how much it's going to be, and understand how that's going to have, how that's going to have big mathematical implications on your ability to retire. All right, what is your favorite joke to tell at parties? I'm not a funny person. I have a joke that had me howling the other day. That is the dumbest joke, but I'm just going to say it.

What did the zeros say to the? I don't know nice belt that's a great you've got our number that's great that's great and it's a number joke okay

Christina tell people where they can find out more about you so we are we have a website mana M-A-N-A-F-L-D dot com and we have the same tag on Instagram, ManaFLD. Those are the two places we spend most of our time on the internet. So we run

a blog on our website and once you get to the blog page, you can subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter. That's fantastic. Yeah, I subscribe to your bi-weekly newsletter and I really like it. There's a lot of great information in there.

Christina, thank you so much for your time today. I think this is going to be hugely helpful for people from a variety of different viewpoints. First of all, you made mistakes and you're still doing great. You know what you're doing and you still made mistakes. Like, it's okay to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. I think a lot of people are like, oh, it's too late for me. It's not too late for you. It's never too late for you. You can do it too. Just be financially conscious. Okay. And we will talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.

soon. Bye. Okay, that was Christina Livideri. Scott, what did you think? I think it was great. I think there's a lot of really good lessons to be learned here. I think that, you know, there's, in working with a lot of folks that come from, you know, and I think it's fair to say she did, a disadvantaged background, you know, being homeless as a young child and those types of things, you know, it can be difficult in some cases for some personal finance lessons to come through. And what I mean by that is that sometimes when folks get money for the first time,

their first inclination is to spend it before they lose it or to treat their friends who have always been there for them and helping them out through the tough times in their local community or those types of things. And you wonder if that's kind of like something that's difficult to break out of in some ways. Yeah. And sometimes I think it can be difficult to break out of that mentality over time. It sounds like what really happened for Christ,

Christina today was she had that real reckoning on her 30th birthday, that crazy milestone of, you know, where her heart was broken, all those things changed. And that was when she really began to, you know, say, look, I'm going to, I'm going to take care of myself and bring financial discipline and get my vision and life goals very clear and begin working towards those with a discipline, you know, discipline and rigor. And it's been amazing to see the progress that she's been able to accomplish since that change in mindset, I think. Yeah, and I can see huge things for her future, just because she is now confident about her finances. She is conscious about them, and she is purposely striving towards the goal. She hit the goal of homeownership, and now she's moving

forward with other goals. And, you know, I just love that she wants to help people who are, five years ago, Christina, get to current Christina and beyond. Her giving spirit is super, super inspirational. Absolutely. Love it. The show notes, this never came up during the show today. The show notes for today's episode can be found at biggerpockets.com slash money show 150.

And near the end of the show, Scott, we started talking. I started ranting, let's be honest, about talking about money. We have a Facebook group that we would love for you to join to come in and speak with other frugal weirdos, other finance nerds, other people who are just like you. And talk about the issues that you're facing with your finances. Talk about some of the wins, some of the things that you've learned. You can join our group at facebook.com slash groups slash BP money. Okay, Scott, should we get out of here? Let's do it. From episode 100. I can't believe, Scott, it's been 150 episodes.

Yeah, thank you, everyone, for listening to us for 150 episodes. Yeah. So, wow, that's an amazing thing there. So here's the next 150. Here's to the next 550 episode. 550, that's right. From episode 150 of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, he is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen, saying, may the force be with you always.