Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - 2025 Goals: Invest Better, Budget Smarter

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Almost 70% of Americans have a financial resolution for the New Year. What’s yours? (00:14) Tim Beyers and Ricky Mulvey discuss: - How newer investors can get started. - Past market performance, pockets of speculation, and what matters for long-term investors. - Squid Game breaking records for Netflix. Then, (XX:XX) Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp discuss the tools that can help you become a better budgeter. Join Stock Advisor and get access to our premium podcast, Stock Advisor Roundtable: www.fool.com/signup Companies discussed: MSTR, NFLX Host: Ricky Mulvey Guests: Tim Beyers, Alison Southwick, Robert Brokamp Producer: Mary Long Engineer: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is this 2025 or 1999? You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined today by Tim Byers. Tim, we've been talking for about a half hour. It's still good to see you in a more recorded fashion. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Ricky. Fully caffeinated, ready to go. Let's get going. So for our first show of the year, I want to acknowledge that we get some newer listeners who are, you know, you want to get better about your finances as you start the new year. And in the latter half of the show, Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp are going to cover some budgeting tools that can help you get your budget on track and systematize things.

Tim, we're going to focus on the investing side. And to kick us off, the sister side of Motley Full Money, which does a lot of great research and surveys, found that almost 70% of Americans have some financial resolution this year. Here's the kicker, but just 7% of folks want to invest more. It's a lot of paying down debt, saving for big financial goals, not a ton of action on the investing side. Are you surprised by that drop off? Not even a little bit. Okay. Not even remotely. Next topic? No, not next topic. Reason why, investing is hard. Investing is really hard and it's unnatural. It is not something that people immediately gravitate to because even if I'll say, if you ask the question differently saying, in 2025, do I want to

invest? I think the answer would be very close to that 70%. Now, we get to 7% because people don't really know what to do to get started. And so it becomes intimidating. And they say, nah, I'm just going to save more money. I'll assume that there's some self-selection going on among the listeners of this show. So for the few who do want to invest more, become a better investor this year, I'm going to allow you to take a time machine. You go back in time to the Tim Byers who just became interested in stocks and investing. You cannot tell him to buy NVIDIA. You cannot tell him about individual companies, but what is something about investing you would tell that newly interested Tim Byers? I'm cheating a little bit here, but I would go back and do what I did,

which is I read two really important formative books, which still have stuck with me and remain the most important investing tomes I have ever read. And they really got me started. The first just one up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch. The second was the Motley Fool Investment Guide. Both of them just got their hooks into me. Ricky, it changed my life. I got really super engaged with wanting to learn how to invest better. I started engaging with the Motley Fool's tools about how to value stocks, how to open a brokerage account, all of these things. And it really was life-changing. So when I go on to say like Motley Fool Live and we do Asa Charma and I do a show called

Mindset, the reason that is so personal to me is it is because directly aimed at the kind of person this question of yours is aimed at, which is, I'm new. I don't know exactly what to do yet. I know this is hard. And I know I need to stay invested, but I'm finding it really difficult. We work through all of those issues because we know how difficult it can be. So number one advice, I would go and check out one up on Wall Street from the library, give it to my younger self and say, do not leave this table until you have read at least three chapters of this and keep reading three chapters every day until you are done. It will change your life. And one big theme from one up on Wall Street that I would invite newer investors to consider

is that your observations about the world are valuable to you as an investor. When you go into a store, are you getting good service or bad service? What do you notice about your friends and family, especially if you're not living on the East Coast where there's a lot of investment analysts still. We're in Colorado. If you're in the middle of America, you get intensely valuable insights that may be not as apparent to the folks doing equity coverage for large institutional investment firms. Absolutely. So those coming into this year are coming into an interesting stock market, Tim. CNBC article by Yun Li sort of makes the case that, quote, animal spirits are on the loose at the dawn of 2025 trading oh we're getting a groan she points

to the rise of bitcoin holding firm micro strategy trading platforms like coinbase and robin hood coming off very good runs in 2024 and there's more interest in whatever meme stock trader roaring kitty is doing do you agree with her or animal spirits on the loose right now do we need to rein them in, get some leashes? I guess. I mean, I loathe this term. And by the way, I did a rant on our daily Q&A program for members that we call Fool24, and I really railed against MicroStrategy, because I don't know what it is. What is it? It's not a software company. It was. It isn't anymore. It's a Bitcoin holding company that is valued at an extraordinary premium. So if animal spirits means, yes, there are sections

of the market that are crazily out of control, yes, that is absolutely correct. There are parts of the market that feel just utterly mad to me, and I stay as far away from those portions of the market as humanly possible. How about the broad market? Because you're going to see a lot of forecasts, which are historically very bad, but can give you certainty if you really need it. I can give you five decimal points about how I think the market will do this year, Tim, if you want that level of specificity. But broadly, the market has been enjoying a great run. The best two-year run since 1997 and 1998. What happened the last time is that you had a dot-com crash. Folks are worried about that now. And most market watchers are pretty optimistic about this year, which makes

me concerned, right? If everybody's happy, that's a time to get a little concerned. And you're a bottoms-up investor, focusing on individual businesses, but are we in a frothy market? If so, does that mean anything to you? I think the answer is yes, especially in certain pockets, but does it mean anything to me in terms of how I do equity analysis? No. But what it does do for me is it gives me something to think about and something to look at. Because my investing decisions, every investment I make, every recommendation I make is grounded in a belief that the underlying business can perform better for a longer period of time than the market price suggests. Now, having said all that, I do love the idea,

Ricky, of if a market crash is coming, for me, that is great. Thank God, finally. We need that because we need market cycles. I'm not kidding here. I know it sounds crazy and it sounds a little bit just strange to be saying that, but I need that because I am an investor in high growth stocks, a lot of high growth tech. And those companies tend to go to the moon and then fall precipitously. And I need moments where those stocks fall precipitously and reset. In order to successfully invest in the sectors that I invest in, you must have resets. You must. It cannot go up and to the right forever. I do not place a lot of stock in things like market sentiment and other things like that, but I do appreciate and want resets. Now, the one caution

I will say here is that if I were retired or if I was on fixed income, I would pay a lot more attention to market cycles. I would really be well prepared with like five years of cash so that if I had a three-year cycle where just everything fell apart, well, it doesn't matter. I don't have to draw down from any of those equities because I got five years of cash. Let's move on to some individual company chat because we had a winner, I would say, from the holiday break and that was netflix who just reported that squid game season two reached 68 million views in four days and tim that real number is higher because that's the number of folks that finished the series that's total viewing time divided by total runtime the previous one week record set by wednesday that

was at about 50 million views so we got about we'll call it 70 million to 50 million a huge increase for a number one show. Looking at these numbers of viewership, number one show on Netflix, what do these mean for the long-term investors in Netflix? Well, it's funny you mentioned that about the creator here, because this is something that Netflix has needed to contend with since the writer's strike. But let me get to that in a second here. I do love that this is a feature of Netflix where they can fund content in one territory and then run it globally, and any multi-territory content that they have is immediately generating returns for them. I find that so super interesting.

But when we look at the numbers, there are two things going on here. It is good for creators here that the writer's strike did unleash some new terms here. Those terms include Netflix having to report numbers like this. And so on the back end, things like residuals, bonuses, a gross involvement for the creators and actors in these productions is a thing that Netflix has largely avoided. That's not going to continue forever, especially with their biggest hits here. So, there's a bit of cost sharing that Netflix does have to deal with here. That's not necessarily a bad thing because if you are putting up those kinds of numbers, you're going to have global talent that's going to want to come to your platform. But for investors here, I really do

think this is something investors should be super excited about because what it tells you is how easily a hit can scale on Netflix. It is fairly typical, Ricky, that if you have a hit, say like in the US, and you want to get it into other territories, you have to go through a vast distribution network. And that has costs, it has friction. None of that exists for Netflix. And so I think you could make a strong argument that Netflix is one of the world's most capital efficient entertainment businesses period and i am including disney in that conversation they are scarily good here you know those who think that streaming is going to kill netflix i think i've just got it wrong who says streaming's killing netflix i've not heard

meaning that streaming broadly like where everybody can stream and so there's just endless competition. I don't think that kills Netflix. I just think they are better at it than everybody. One way they're trying to get better at it is more live sports. So Netflix has said in the past, they're really only focused on the big eventized things. I talked to an entertainment reporter at Bloomberg, Lucas Shaw, a few weeks back. He said, that's what they're saying for now. We'll see if that actually remains to be true. It turns out he might be right about this. you know netflix had the sparring match between uh jake paul and mike tyson they had the nfl on christmas it was a sparring match it was not a boxing match yes a whole other discussion tip

and you know what it was for the best that it was a sparring match because that could have been more disturbing than squid games if it was a legit boxing match anyway let's get to the topic at hand which is that netflix secured the u.s rights going back to your global strategy discussion Netflix secured the U.S. rights for the FIFA Women's World Cup for 2027-2031. This is a pretty significant shift, this move into live sports entertainment. Do you think it's a smart strategy shift as they're getting into these bidding wars? Yeah, I think so. The Women's World Cup is going to be cheaper, but it's still going to be a big audience.

They won't have the global rights, so fair enough. But the U.S. rights should be interesting here. but as a global platform i think they're going to plug in quite nicely here i will say i think the women's game is getting better and better all the time so it's going to be good the thing that they're going to need to get right is you've got to get the commentary right fox is not very good i mean there there's it's not like they have bad commentators they've had some decent commentators here but i think you want to get people who are really plugged in and honestly i would love it if they had a spanish simulcast because you you if you've never heard andres cantor you know give

you the go lasso that is they're doing spanish yeah i love it i mean that is you've got to have that. No, I think this is really good, Ricky. It is a sport that is begging for more global engagement. Netflix can give them that. I think it's a very good partnership. I think you will see Netflix trying to occupy as many of these lower cost but still really interesting niches where the upside is potentially very significant. And I think that's true with the Women's World Cup. So we've thrown some flowers Netflix's way, deservedly so. I'm going to give you something I'm wary of.

Everyone loves Netflix again. Remember 2022, they had a subscriber slip. The stock had a huge sell-off. And this year, Netflix will no longer report subscriber numbers. The growth levers you're looking at now, if you're a long-term investor, you're looking at ad sales, the ability to increase prices with live events. something that I noticed is that there are no open market buys among Netflix insiders over the past 12 months. That gives me a little caution. But are these growth levers enough

for a maturing growth stock? I mean, it depends on what you are looking for here. If you are looking for significant growth, then no. However, I don't think that's what anyone expects from Netflix. What I think we expect from Netflix is an increasingly efficient, profitable platform that is growing strategically over time here and playing the game smartly, which I think they are doing put another way netflix has put themselves in position to get variable growth when really they were a fixed growth business by what i mean by fixed growth business here um ricky is that you have a certain number of subscribers paying a certain fixed rate and that and that was fixed there's no variability in that whatsoever now they have that fixed business and with that they

have a variable growth business in the ad platform. Let me give you an example of how this can work really well to their advantage. So over the holidays, I watched Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes 2. It was great. There were eight ad breaks in each of those films that I hardly noticed and I didn't care. They were perfectly fine. I could not shut them off like YouTube ads. They were decent. There's nothing wrong with them, but I was very happy to endure them. That speaks well for A, the content, and B, the strategy, because the more valuable, as you get those numbers, like Squid Game and Squid Game 2, guess how you can variabilize the value of that content? You can make the ad buys on that content more expensive and more expensive over time.

That is a really big lever for Netflix that others will have, maybe, depending upon how they break out their ad platform. But I like the position that Netflix is in and the fact that they can do that. They started with third-party help, and now they're building some of their own homegrown ad development platform. I think they're in a good position, Ricky. Good place to end it. Tim Byers, appreciate you being here. Thank you for your time and your insight. Thanks, Ricky. only available to premium Motley Fool members. It focuses on Foolish recommendations and takes

a deeper dive into the businesses we cover, featuring Fool analysts you already know from listening to Motley Fool Money. Tom appears regularly on bonus episodes of Stock Advisor Roundtable to discuss what's new in the Stock Advisor universe and to answer questions sent in from Motley Fool members. That's fool.com slash sign up, and I will include a link in the show minutes. All right, up next, Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp discuss the free and paid tools that can help you become a better budgeter in 2025. Happy New Year. If you're like many, now is the time when you ponder your waistline and your financial bottom line. According to Discover, just over half of Americans are planning to

make a financial resolution. 42% want to save more in general. About a third want to earn more or spend less. And other popular resolutions are to improve their credit score, build an emergency fund, and pay off or consolidate debt. Well, no matter your financial resolution, you're in luck. Ro and I are here to torture a metaphor because managing your money is just like riding a bike. Let's say you're just starting out. Maybe you need some training wheels. There are apps and online tools to help you. But what if you're ready to take the training wheels off? Or what if you're ready to turn managing your money into an all-consuming, lifelong obsession of tinkering and tooling? Well, today we're going to talk about a few of the best apps for managing your money,

no matter where you are on the bike path of life. Very nice. Very nice. Yeah, we're going to talk about a few specific tools to consider as you aim to be better with your money in 2025. And really, there are a lot of choices out there. It could seem overwhelming, but answering these five questions will help you identify the best tool for you. So number one, what do you want to keep an eye on? So some of these tools focus mostly or exclusively on budgeting, while others will also help track things like your assets, your debts, or maybe even your credit score. Number two, do you want account aggregation? So many of these tools will pull information in from your bank and investment accounts. Are you comfortable with that? If so, that's great. But make sure that

your account providers are supported because not every tool links with every firm. It's especially true when it comes to 401k providers and crypto platforms. Number three, are you flying solo or will this be a joint venture? So some apps do a better job of facilitating marital money management than others. And also you'll just have more success sticking with a new system if you make choosing the right tool a project with your partner. Number four, what tech will you mostly be using? So some tools are best used on a desktop or a laptop. Others are really best used as apps on phones or tablets. And then there's the whole PC versus Mac, iOS versus Android factor. Not every tool is available or at least fully functional on every device. And finally, number

five, how much are you willing to spend? Some of these tools are free, but then you're going to be served ads or encouraged to sign up for something like investment management. You might also want to wonder what they're doing with your data, right? So no tool can be completely free. The provider has to make money somehow in some ways of doing that by sharing your data. Many tools do provide sort of a bare bones free version, but you really kind of have to sign up for the premium version if you want to take full advantage of the most powerful benefits. And the costs are going to vary anywhere from $5 to $15 a month. And you usually get a discount if you sign up for the whole year. All right, well, let's start with some tools for beginning budgeters who maybe

still need some training wheels. Let's start with one that's been around for a long time and is really popular with folks who are just avid budgeters, and that is YNAB. YNAB starts for you need a budget. It's really kind of a system and a philosophy, and it encourages you to follow four rules when it comes to managing your cash flow. Number one, give every dollar a job, also known as zero-based budgeting. You're going to have a plan for every dollar that comes into your bank account. So you're just not looking at past expenses. You're having a plan for what's coming down the road. Number two, embrace your true expenses. Here, you're going to take larger, less frequent expenses like vacations and how are they spending as we all just went through.

And you break them into smaller amounts that you save for each month. Number three, roll with the punches. The life and spending don't go as planned. So when one expense is higher than expected, then you need to move money from another expense and then you spend accordingly. And then number four, age your money. And this is really all about building up savings and increasing the time between when you earn money and when you spend it. So YNAB has a lot of educational material, an active blog with a recent post about managing money with ADHD, which I appreciated. It has a podcast. So there's a lot of handholding and support as you set up a budgeting system. It's free for the first 34 days, but then it's $14 per month or $109 per year.

The downside to YNAB is that setting it up can be a bit of work and maintaining it takes time. And I know people who were never able to stick with a budget until they found YNAB, But there are plenty of others who just find it sort of unwieldy and cumbersome. So if you're looking for a more scaled-down budgeting tool, check out GoodBudget. It's basically a digital version of the old envelope system in which each month people would put actual cash in a different envelope for each spending category, such as groceries, entertainment, gas. And when that cash is gone, you couldn't spend more on that category until the next month. GoodBudget is built on the same philosophy. plan for how much you'll spend each month and don't go over, except that the amount is actually

tracked in digital envelopes. A good budget has a free and premium version, the latter costing $10 per month or $80 a year. The biggest difference between the free and premium version is that the premium version gives you more envelopes and it allows you to sync with your bank so you don't have to enter all the expenses manually. All right. Well, maybe the training wheels have come off and you're ready to level up your budgeting jujitsu. And yes, I realize I'm mixing metaphors here. But where do you go after you've got your budgeting all in check? So the tools in this category not only help you stay on top of your spending, that's still important, but will also track your investments, net worth, maybe even help

with some financial planning. And the first one is sort of the OG personal finance tool, and that's Quicken. It's been around since 1983, though it's had a few owners over the years. When you go to Quicken.com, you'll see three options, starting with Quicken Simplify. And that's actually something to consider if you're looking for a more introductory app-based tool. But for those who really want to level up, you should consider the classic Quicken options. Now, the classic Quicken is software that's actually downloaded onto your computer, which in itself is a differentiator since most of the other tools are either web-based or app-based. And this is the option for you if you want to run your finances like an accountant.

You can track and pay your bills through Quicken, keep tabs on your investments, create customized reports. That could be helpful for everything from monitoring your net worth to doing your taxes. I would strongly consider the business version of Classic Quicken if you're self-employed or if you have a side gig or maybe you own rental properties. The downside to Quicken is that its mobile app isn't really considered the best. Quicken really is designed to be a desktop solution. Classic Premier Quicken currently costs $5.99 a month and Classic Business costs $8.99 a month. Now, an alternative to Quicken, especially if you're looking for a free web-based service is Empower, formerly known as Personal Capital. While Empower helps you track your

spending like all the other tools, it's really best known for the information it provides about your investments. It can help track your portfolio and even gives you some insights into how it's allocated, which is helpful if you're aggregating all your accounts from various places. They're all in one place and you can see your overall asset allocation. On top of that, Empower can take all that information, as well as information about your spending and your debts, and put it into a calculator to estimate whether your retirement's on track. It also analyzes the fees you're paying on your investments and suggests a withdrawal strategy in retirement. And while Empower is free, you're going to get some marketing messages encouraging you to sign

up for its wealth management and financial planning services. And the third option in this category is Monarch Money. Now, if we were having this discussion a little more than a year ago, we would be mentioning Mint, which originally launched as its own service, but then eventually got bought by Intuit. And it was very popular. Unfortunately, last year in the fall, Intuit announced that it was closing down Mint and shuttling people over to their Credit Karma app. And this is just my anecdotal observation, but it seems that many, if not most, of the disgruntled Mint users jumped over to Monarch money. And it may not be just a coincidence since Monarch was co-founded in 2018 by the original project manager for Mint. So like Quicken and Empower Monarch

Money lets you track your spending, your goals, your investments, even has a suite of budgeting and planning tools that provide financial forecasts. It also gets really high marks for its sort of user interface, very sleek. Monarch Money costs $8.33 a month or a little under $100 a year, though new users get a 30% discount for the first year. Full disclosure, Monarch Money has advertised on this podcast. All right. I imagine because you're listening to the podcast, this next category may describe you, our dear listeners. So to extend the metaphor, you might be one of those amateur bike mechanics who loves to customize their ride or even build one from scratch. In other words,

you really want to nerd out with your money. Yeah. Personally, some of the most avid budgeters I know use spreadsheets. And here we're talking about either Excel or Google Sheets, right? And the reason are that spreadsheets are very customizable. You create everything yourself, including the categories, the charts, other graphics, how any other information is presented. You input the formulas so you can be confident in the math going on behind the scenes. Plus, you know, spreadsheets are generally free.

So if you've taken a gander at some of the available pre-manufactured tools that we've discussed or any others, and you find that you don't like the way they look, they're not flexible enough for you, then maybe just consider a regular old spreadsheet. And you don't have to start from scratch. There are plenty of free templates available on the internet

that you can just use or just customize for your situation. A good place to start is BudgetsAreSexy.com, which is also a fun and educational blog by friend of the fool, Jay Money. Once you're at the site, just click on Spreadsheets tab and you'll be taken to plenty of downloadable free tools. Now, if you like the idea of a spreadsheet and the idea of syncing information from your financial accounts, then consider Tiller, which connects banks and brokerages to your spreadsheet.

And the site also has free spreadsheet templates and an informative blog. You can try Tiller for free, but then it's $79 a year. And the final thought when it comes to using spreadsheets is that really they're not so easy to use on a phone. This is really the downside. Both Excel and Google Sheets have mobile apps, but they're a lot clunkier than the apps created by the other services we've mentioned so far.

All right, last but not least, let's say you've added a sidecar to your bike. Is that a thing? I don't know. But what we're talking about here is a spouse, a partner, kids. What are some of the best tools for managing money as a family?

So, a few of the tools we've discussed have good reputations for being easy to use as a couple or a family, particularly good budget and monarch money. But there's one that's specifically designed for couples, and that is HoneyDue. That's HoneyDue. It's an app for your phone, keeps a couple on the same page when it comes to bank accounts, loans, investments, as well as reminders about things like upcoming bills or really just anything else you need reminders about. You can even send each other messages and emojis. HoneyDue is free, though you'll be served ads. And then finally, if you have children, consider Greenlight, which is a debit card and an app for kids ages 8 to 22. It basically allows kids to manage their

bank and investment accounts, but with parental supervision, there are some controls on what the kids can do with the money. The older the kid, the fewer the controls, although the parents have some say over that. There's also a built-in financial literacy game, and if you so choose, monitoring of driving habits, including crash alerts. Greenlight has three plans ranging from $5.99 to $14.98 a month. All right, bro, let's bring it to some close with some final thoughts here. Yeah, so hopefully we piqued your interest in a tool or a few. And you'll find plenty of reviews out there on the internet about these tools and plenty of others that we didn't have time to mention. One place to start is Motley Fool Money, the Fool's website formerly known

as The Ascent. Just go to fool.com forward slash money forward slash personal dash finance and you'll find lots of helpful information there. Once you have a few tools in mind, find recent reviews and demonstrations on YouTube so you can get a sense of the look and the feel of the various options. I think that's important. When you see the tool, do you feel like that's something I want to engage with? And then try a few, right? Just the process of trying them will teach you something about your money, even if you end up going with another tool. And then finally, the best tool is the one you actually stick with. And that really comes down to the system, the time commitment and whether you'll look forward to using the tool on a regular basis. So if something

feels overwhelming, clunky, burdensome, look for a simpler option. On the other hand, if something feels too basic, look for a tool that provides more information, maybe more analysis, maybe even gets you excited about tracking the flow of your dough. Whatever you do, you'll end up with more information about where your money is going, and I'm certain it'll help you make better financial decisions in 2025 and beyond. All right. Before we leave today, just we're thinking about New Orleans as it recovers from a terror attack over the weekend. Right now, I'm thinking about the city's recovery and reminded that the freedoms we enjoy in America are rare and not to be taken for granted. All right. As

always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. The Motley Fool only picks products that I would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.