The Personal Finance Podcast - How I would Invest Large Sums of Cash - Money Q&A

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we are going to do a Money Q&A about how I would invest a large sum of cash.  Today we are going to answer these questions: Question 1: I am 50 and w...ant to Retire at 62. Can I retire?  Question 2: Should I keep my job? Question 3: How would you invest big sums of cash?  Question 4: New Package Scam to be aware of!  How Andrew Can Help You:  Don't let another year pass by without making significant strides toward your dreams. "Master Your Money Goals" is your pathway to a future where your aspirations are not just wishes but realities. Enroll now and make this year count! Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Learn to invest by joining  Index Fund Pro! This is Andrew’s course teaching you how to invest!  Watch The Master Money Youtube Channel!  Ask Andrew a question on Instagram or TikTok.  Learn how to get out of Debt by joining our Free Course  Leave Feedback or Episode Requests here.  Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors for supporting The Personal Finance Podcast. Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at  shopify.com/pfp Monarch Money: Get an extended 30 day free trial at monarchmoney/pfp Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate going to fundrise.com/pfp Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/ Delete Me: Use Promo Code PFP20 for 20% off! Go to UPLIFTDesk.com/PFP for 5% off your order.  Links Mentioned in This Episode:  How Much Should You Have Saved and Invested (By Age!) The Mega-Back Door Roth IRA (How to Get an Extra $43,500 in Your Roth!) What to Do If You Started Investing Late (Turn Your Retirement Around!) The Complete Breakdown of The 2-Fund Portfolio (The Warren Buffett Portfolio) Should You Max Out Your Roth IRA or HSA? (Money Q&A) How to Get Rich Buying Boring Businesses With Codie Sanchez How to Buy Then Build a Business with Walker Deibel  A Masterclass on Investing in Individual Stocks with Brian Feroldi Why YOU Have an Advantage as a Small Investor with Brian Feroldi Cryptocurrency 101: Should You Invest In Cryptocurrency? (Or is it a Horrible Investment!?) Connect With Andrew on Social Media:  Instagram  TikTok Twitter  Master Money Website  Master Money Youtube Channel   Free Guides:   The Stairway to Wealth: The Order of Operations for your Money  How to Negotiate Your Salary  The 75 Day Money Challenge  Get out Of Debt Fast  Take the Money Personality Quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:56 Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com. On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, how I would invest large sums of cash on this money Q&A. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of mastermoney.com. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking through how I would invest a large sum of cash. If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter,
Starting point is 00:01:43 at Master Money Co. and one of the best ways to get a response for me is if you're on the master money newsletter. And if you're on that newsletter, you can just reply to that email. And I will at least see all of those. And a lot of those end up on the show on these money Q&As like we have today. And if you get value out of the show, consider subscribing and leaving a five-star rating and review on your favorite podcast player. I cannot thank you guys enough for leaving those five-star ratings and reviews.
Starting point is 00:02:10 Now, today we're going to be going through three questions. And then I'm also going to be talking about a brand-new scam that a lot of people are susceptible to right now that we'll be going through in the fourth segment of this show today. So the first question is we're going to go through someone who is at the age of 50 and they want to retire at 62. How can they retire? We're going to put together a little mini plan for them and kind of talk through that. Number two is a question about should I keep my job and they go through their very specific situation and there's a lot of intricacies that we'll go through in that question. Number three is how would you invest big large lump sums of cash? And we're going to go
Starting point is 00:02:45 through how I would do that, especially if you get larger financial windfalls or maybe you make a lot of your money seasonally. That would be something that we're going to be talking through today. And then lastly, is we're going to talk through a brand new scam that is out there that we want to make sure that you all are aware of so that you do not fall prey to this financial scam. And it's really, really important that a lot of you hear about this one. So really excited for this episode. So without further ado, let's get into it. All right. So question number one is good morning, Andrew. I just watch your podcast and I have a show idea. And speaking of which, if anybody out there has a show idea or they want me to do a show on a specific topic,
Starting point is 00:03:21 you are always welcome to send me an email and respond to the Master Money newsletter. That is one of the best ways to get your show idea out there is just kind of reach out to me. And sometimes we have already done the show. If you haven't seen it, you know, we have 300 plus episodes now. So sometimes we have older episodes, but we are always willing to bring you as much value as possible. That's the entire goal of this podcast is to bring you all as much value as possible. I want to create the content that you need help with. I want to create and help you solve your money problems. That's the entire goal of this show. So if you have questions, make sure you reach out and just respond to the Master Money newsletter. We'll take a look at those
Starting point is 00:03:57 things and we'll put them on the list if there's stuff that we haven't covered yet. And if we have covered it, maybe the team will reach out and kind of show you which episode we covered that on. So just a quick break there to talk about that real quick. So thank you so much for sending this in. But will you please think about doing an episode on starting to invest at the age of 50 and wanting to retire at 62, maxing out both Roth IRA and solo Roth 401K. Love that combination. I don't quite understand how compound interest works. So if retirement can be done for me, will you please explain?
Starting point is 00:04:27 I'm sure I'm not the only one starting late in life. You absolutely are not the only one starting late in life. In fact, we've done a couple of episodes on what you should do if you started investing late. And recently, we just did another money Q&A on some of the things that you can do if you started investing late. But what I want to talk about today is I'm going to show you the math on your exact situation, meaning you're starting out at the age of 50 and then you're wanting to retire by the age of 62. Now, the first thing I always say in these episodes, it is never too late to start investing.
Starting point is 00:04:57 It is never, ever, ever too late to start investing. And your motivation should be, I got 12 years here to allow compound interest to start working for me and allow these dollars to start to grow over time. The best time to start investing was obviously yesterday. But the second past time is today. And you need to start today so that you can have so much better of a retirement. And you can create that financial freedom for your life. Now, I'm going to talk through first some of the things on why these accounts are great.
Starting point is 00:05:26 So you have chosen the Roth IRA and the solo Roth 401K. Now, the Roth IRA, if you haven't heard in 2024, you can contribute $7,000 to a Roth IRA. And to a Roth 401K, you can contribute $20,000. $3,000 to your Roth 401k if you're under the age of 50. Now, the beautiful thing about this is if you're over the age of 50, there is something called a catch-up contribution. And with a catch-up contribution, specifically with the Roth 401K, for example, you can add an extra $7,500 per year into the Roth 401k, and you can add those dollars if you're over
Starting point is 00:06:08 the age of 50. This is called the ketchup contribution, the IRS gives. you this as a little bonus for trying to catch up for people in your situation. And also in the Roth IRA, you can add an additional $1,000 into the Roth IRA. Now, I would do everything in my power to max both of those out. And I'm going to show you why, because it's really, really powerful what you can do. And we'll go through the math here in a second on what's going to happen over the course of those 12 years just to show you how powerful your dollars can be just in 12 years by maxing out these two accounts. Now, the beautiful thing about the Roth accounts is that for both
Starting point is 00:06:41 of these, money goes in that's already been taxed. These are your dollars that have already been taxed. Your money grows. And when you pull the money out, you are not taxed again. So your money grows tax-free. And the cool thing about that is the majority of your dollars are going to be the growth. And we'll show you how much growth you will have over this timeframe as well as we go through this. But you definitely, number one, need to make sure that you have that catch-up contribution rolling. And number two is I would have an asset allocation. Personally, if I was in this situation, I would have an asset allocation that is a little more aggressive because you want this money to grow fast and you want it to grow in compound over time. Now, as you approach
Starting point is 00:07:16 retirement age, then you can start to reevaluate your asset allocation. And I would honestly reevaluate it every single year because then you want to start to preserve this money so that you can retire. And so this is something that you can definitely make a big, big impact on this over that time frame. Now, one big thing also that you want to make sure that you're controlling right now is your expenses. Because since you're starting late, you just need to control your expenses so that you have those extra dollars to max out these accounts. And if you go beyond these accounts, one thing you could consider is investing in real estate or putting those extra dollars in just a standard brokerage account so you have additional flexibility when you get to retirement that you can utilize those dollars for retirement as well. But investing as much as you possibly can every single year is imperative when you have a shorter timeline.
Starting point is 00:07:58 So this is really, really, really important. Now, you can also think through, hey, I'm going to have Social Security when I get to retirement age. And so that's something that's going to help supplement your income once you get to retirement age. And so just thinking through that and making sure you add that to your retirement plan is going to be really important. And also having cash on hand is another thing that I want you to think through as you go through this. But just making sure that you have that asset allocation, meaning the mix of stocks and bonds that you have, making sure that it's more aggressive. So what's more aggressive? Having something like the majority of your portfolio being stocks is going to be a more aggressive portfolio than having more of your portfolio in things like bonds. So for me personally, one of my favorite portfolios out there is I use the Warren Buffett.
Starting point is 00:08:39 which is I put 90% in the S&P 500 and 10% in bonds. And so that's one way you can think through that. We have a whole entire episode talking through that in that asset allocation and how I have that set up. But that is one of my favorite portfolios if you're looking for some growth here and you're trying to grow your portfolio over time. Now let's go through the math on what would happen over the course of this 12 years if we took historical returns when it came to doing some of this.
Starting point is 00:09:02 So let's say, for example, that you maxed out both your Roth IRA and your Roth 401K. and you also got those catch-up contributions. So that'd be about $38,000 per year, and that'd be about $3,166 in some change per month that you are putting into these accounts. So monthly, you're putting a little over $3,000 into these accounts. Now, what would happen if you started to invest those dollars? Well, let's look at it with a different rate of return over time
Starting point is 00:09:27 to see how fast you can do this. So let's just look at the rate of return over the course of 12 years. So you are age 50. You want to retire at age 62. So if you did this and you maxed it out, over the course of the next 12 years, and you've got an 8% rate of return. The money that you contributed would grow to about $756,957.57.
Starting point is 00:09:49 So your total contributions in that situation would be $461,000, and the total growth would be another $300,000. So just choosing to invest your dollars in an 8% rate of return means that you're going to have an additional $300,000 in retirement over the course of this 12 years. Now, as we know, compound interest is really,
Starting point is 00:10:07 important when it comes to this, and I know you're new to compound interest, but one big thing you really need to understand when it comes to compound interest is that time is the biggest factor in order to help your money grow over this time frame. So I'm actually going to show you even a slight variation of years, even if you could wait three more years, how much bigger this account can grow over that time frame. Now, let's look at a different rate of return. I'm always all for planning conservatively, so I'm always all for planning with a 7 to 8% rate of return, but always thinking optimistically that the market has returned over 10% historically. So you want to think through optimistically, and this is going to help you kind of stay motivated over this time frame,
Starting point is 00:10:45 but let's just say you've got a 10% rate of return. So after those 12 years, if you're putting about $3,200, we'll just round up into this account, you would have $860,290 over the course of that 12 years, meaning that your total contributions to be about $461,000 and your money would have earned an additional $398,000. This is something where you can see, hey, I'm going to have $398,000 in additional retirement income because I decided, I made the decision over the course of this 12 years to invest my dollars. But here's the kicker is also that $398,000 is completely tax-free because you have it in
Starting point is 00:11:24 Roth accounts. Now, what would happen if you stretch this out an additional three years, just three years more? How can compound interest really help you start to roll down? and snowball because you've heard me talk about this possibly in the past where i say your first 100k is the hardest because you really have to grind and you really have to push to get to that first 100k but if you just waited three years longer at that 10% rate of return you would go from at year 12 you'd have 860,000 dollars in your 15 you'd have 1.278 million dollars in that account with a 10% rate of return
Starting point is 00:11:57 this is where it massively shifts because once you get to your first million all the sudden compound interest, this really starts to accelerate. The more dollars that you get invested in the longer the time horizon, that is really going to create a compounding machine, which is the beautiful thing about compound interest and why I love giving these examples so much to show you. Just that three-year differential is going to make a massive, massive impact. It's going to take you to $1.278 million where your money would have grown an additional $700,000 in that time frame. So really important just to kind of understand this stuff and the concept. And that's kind of how you want to think through this. And if you want to run these numbers yourself, you can go out and use an
Starting point is 00:12:40 investment calculator, for example, there's a bunch of them out there, a bunch of great ones that we use. And they're all pretty fantastic in terms of you can just Google, you know, investment calculator and just use one that's out there. But these are some of the best examples of how you do that. Now, you may be asking yourself, well, how do I know how much I need to live on? So say, for example, that you want to live on $60,000 a year. And so that's how much. you need in order to retire and that's how much you spend every single year with all your expenses added up, then what you would need is to think through the 4% rule. The 4% rule basically states that you can preserve your wealth over the course of 30 years if you draw down 4% now.
Starting point is 00:13:16 A lot of people think it's pretty conservative. And I am one who would rather be conservative than not be conservative. But when you look at the 4% rule, that means every million dollars you can draw down $40,000 per year. And so if you wanted $60,000, you need a million and a half dollars invested in order to be able to draw that down. But if you add in social security and some of these other options that you may have, it may be able to supplement you enough to get to that point in time. So this is really, really important to think through this stuff. If you got to that year 15 or maybe even market even accelerated and you got lucky in the market did even better than 10% over the course in the next 12 years, for example, you may get there faster. But let's say you had that
Starting point is 00:13:53 $1.278 million there that you can utilize to go ahead and go out there and invest. then you could actually take that and you'd be able to have $50,000 per year roughly that you could draw down every single year just from that 12 years of work that you put in to max out those accounts. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing, or excuse me, 15 years that you utilize to max down those accounts. So it's a beautiful, beautiful thing that you are looking at here where you can start investing now and these examples are going to help you. Now, if you have more dollars to invest over time, maybe you want to add real estate to your portfolio. Or maybe you want to add in a taxable brokerage account where you can get more dollars invested over this
Starting point is 00:14:31 time frame. It's just going to help you get to that point faster and it's going to allow you to have that financial freedom faster. You can get to financial freedom in 10 years or less. There are countless examples of people who have done so. It is just having the discipline, increasing your income enough to get those extra dollars invested. That's the most important factor overall is your income when it comes to your personal finances is grow that income. Grow it as much as you possibly can So you can take those extra dollars and fuel the fire and grow the fire, which is your investment accounts. And so really important to think through that.
Starting point is 00:15:03 Again, never too late to get started. I am so proud that you are getting started now, even at the age of 50. You have time to do this. You can absolutely do this. And I truly believe in you. If you have any other questions, please reach out to me because I love helping people through these situations. The next one.
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Starting point is 00:16:03 Just go to Indeed.com slash personal finance right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash personal finance. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, indeed is all you need. So lately, I've been noticing how fast things are changing at home. Kids are growing like crazy. Clothes don't fit anymore and routines are changing. And it just hits you. Life is expanding. And when your life grows, your responsibility grows with it.
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Starting point is 00:17:22 you can save. That's policygenius.com. One is first of all, I just want to say I'm a huge fan of your podcast and started listening as of a few months ago. Well, thank you so much for listening. I really, really appreciate it. My entire life, nobody really taught me anything about finance. So I've been figuring most of it out myself. I feel you there on that one. That is one where I had to do the same exact thing. So it is one that we definitely want to get through and talk through as we do this. It first started about two years ago when I realized my credit score was in the mid-500s. Today, I now stand at a proud 750. I educated myself on credit scores and how I can build it back up fast, including some of your podcasts, which have helped so much. My issue now is that I'm 31 years old
Starting point is 00:18:03 and I'm starting to invest and learn everything there is to know about building my financial education. I still have so much to learn and don't know where to start. I have a few thousand in credit card debt, which I'm trying to pay off, and I currently rent and share my card with a girlfriend. I did not go to college right out of high school and I started working a sales job and that's all I've done since then. I've sold a variety of different products and services and the pay isn't anything amazing, but I'm just trying to get myself out of the rat race. Here's my question. Should I stick to a sales job since that's what I know? And I don't have the time to go back to school and I really want to focus on building wealth for myself and my 10 year old son. I want to teach him what I've learned and I wish
Starting point is 00:18:40 someone taught me at a younger age. Well, that's an amazing thing that you can gift to your children as well is to them the gift of financial education. If there's any tips or advice that you could give me, I'd greatly appreciate it. So first of all, congratulations on boosting your credit score. That's a great first step. That's going to save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your lifetime, depending on what you do with your money and how you borrow money and those types of things. So going from the mid-500s to a 750 is really, really important to do. So I think that's really, really helpful overall. Now, let's start here. is first continuing to build out your financial education.
Starting point is 00:19:16 I understand that you want to learn all this stuff all at once. And I think it's really, really important to understand this. Sometimes this takes time. And now you can read five to seven books and be able to have a really, really good financial education. Things like I will teach you to be rich is a great one. The simple path to wealth is another great one to go through. The Millionaire Next Store is a great one. Just Keep Buying by Nick Majuli is another great one.
Starting point is 00:19:37 Just kind of continuously learning over time. You're going to see a lot of overlap within a lot of. of these teachings and these books where you're going to see personal finance has somewhat of a path that you can follow. And so that is number one is kind of continuing to build out that financial education. Podcasts are an amazing way to do this. Continue to listen to this podcast. There's some other great ones on business and some other things out there as well. So podcasts are another great one. Audio books are another great one. Just continuously try to learn as much as you possibly can. And don't go down the wrong rabbit holes. Don't follow the crypto bros down there,
Starting point is 00:20:08 crypto pipeline. Don't follow all these people that are going the wrong way with MLMs and all these different things. Just make sure you beware who you're listening to out there. It's really, really important to kind of think through that stuff. Now, the first thing I would do in your situation is also tackle your credit card date. You said you have a few thousand dollars in credit card debt. Well, credit card debt is typically very high interest to debt. And so it's really, really important to make sure that you get rid of that high interest debt up front.
Starting point is 00:20:32 And in addition, make sure you're kind of budgeting out and tracking your money flow as you go through this. And you know where your dollars are going every single month. Now, when it comes to investing, I want you to kind of think through. and start small and start to build up that portfolio if you haven't started investing. And I think you've got some amazing work here that you're trying to teach your kids, you know how to invest and how to actually manage their money, which is so incredibly powerful. And then after you get that high interest debt done, then you can build up that emergency fund and some of those other pieces as well. So the emergency fund is going to be really,
Starting point is 00:21:00 really important. If you haven't seen the stairway to wealth that we have, the stairway to wealth will really, really help you with that order of trying to figure out where should I put my next dollars in those types of things. And getting on those different flights is going to be really, really important. So right now you're on flight one. And so getting through that flight is going to be really helpful by getting that high interest debt paid off and then getting that emergency fund built up. And I'm really a big proponent of six months in the emergency fund and going through that. Now, the big question here is, what should you do with your career? Well, the cool thing is you're in
Starting point is 00:21:29 sales. And sales is one of the most powerful and high income earning skills that you can have. So maybe you've been in sales for a very long time and you haven't gone through the process of maybe furthering your sales skills. Maybe you have, maybe you have it. But one of the biggest things that I would invest in is learning how to further your sales skills and become one of the best salespeople in the country. Because if you can do something like this and you can really, really hone in those sales skills, you can make a million dollars a year. You can make as much money as you want to if you enjoy sales. So if you don't have the time to go back to college, I would consider maybe going back and learning and taking courses and there's free courses out there. There are paid courses out there.
Starting point is 00:22:08 You don't have to go with the paid courses up front. You can learn as much free sales content as you possibly can to start. They're all going to try to sell you a course in the back end. But you take the free stuff first. Read sales books. Read sales material. Listen to sales podcast as well. And start to really hone your sales skills.
Starting point is 00:22:26 And you may be a good salesperson now. And so what I want you to do is if you're taking a low paying sales job, try to elevate yourself to look for these really high paying sales jobs. There's a bunch of them out there. there's medical sales where you can make a ton of money out there. There are other sales jobs out there where you can really just crush it and increase your income dramatically just by getting really good at sales. You've done it for a long time. Maybe you're working for a car dealership or something along those lines. Well, now let's take it up a notch and you can make even more money
Starting point is 00:22:56 in different avenues and try to look for those avenues and try to network with people in sales and kind of go through that process. I think this is really, really important to leverage that sales experience and look for as many ways to continue your education and sales. as you can. So I want you to continue education in personal finance and in sales. Those are the two areas I would really, really focus on. There's a bunch of great sales books out there. And I would also look at negotiation books, which are really, really helpful. Things like Never Split the Difference, getting to yes. Those are great negotiation books that you can look at. And there's just tons of great sales books out there that you can go in and look for as well. Now, when it comes to your kids,
Starting point is 00:23:33 I love that you're just starting off by teaching them this information and kind of teaching them how to handle money, that's going to be one of the most powerful things that you can do. And so continuously doing that is going to be really powerful. And then looking for maybe some folks in the sales world who you can maybe find a mentorship or something like that as well would be really, really powerful. If there's local meetups of people who are in sales, that would be really, really helpful to maintain motivation and all that kind of stuff. So I think that that is a really, really cool thing that you're doing is you're looking for different ways to actually increase your income. And that's going to be the number one thing is you can get out of the rat race pretty quickly if you get really, really
Starting point is 00:24:08 good at sales. And so I think that's going to be something where I definitely would focus a lot of my time on is really increasing the skills that I already know, increasing in leveraging that skill so that I can earn way more money. Because once you start to earn more money, you'll be able to reach financial independence 10x faster if you can take those extra dollars and invest them into things that will help you with your financial freedom. So congratulations on getting started on this journey. Congratulations on increasing your credit score. That takes a lot of guts to be able to do that. It takes a lot of financial education. So you are doing an amazing job, and I absolutely love that you're taking this initiative.
Starting point is 00:24:43 So please reach out to me with any other questions that you may have. All right. So the next question is, I am a small business owner who experiences seasonal windfalls. I work in the wedding industry, so spring and fall return heavy gains. You frequently encourage small investments that offer big returns over time. But I'm wondering if you might have a recommendation for how to best invest a large chunk of money. Currently, I have about $50,000 in cash, and I'm hoping for some guidance on my options. I have no debt.
Starting point is 00:25:11 I've maxed out my 401K, amazing, and I have a healthy emergency fund. Love it. And additionally, I have $175,000 in a CD, and I make monthly contributions to the stock market. That is a massive amount of CD. And I'm open to having a bit of fun with this chunk and can afford a bit of risk. Thank you for considering the question. So, first of all, amazing work thus far. congratulations on what you have there, and this is absolutely amazing. You have an emergency fund
Starting point is 00:25:37 that is healthy, and you have $175,000 in a CD. You have a ton of cash on hand. You are really well protected here in terms of protecting your personal finances as time goes on. And so if you're maxing out your 401k, if you are taking your extra dollars and you're putting them towards investments, and you want to think through, hey, what can I do with this additional income that can really help me over time? This is going to be really powerful. Now, one thing I want to note up front is that we've done an episode on this too. But if you get larger chunks of cash, we have talked through this an entire episode, but large lump sums of cash, just investing them all at once, historically has outperformed dollar cost averaging, meaning taking your dollars
Starting point is 00:26:16 every single month and investing them over time. So if you got a large sum of cash and you started to invest that large sum of cash monthly to try to dollar cost average it out, just investing the entire kit and caboodle, the whole thing has historically outperformed actually taking small chunks of that cash. Now, if you only have so much money coming in every month and you're taking those extra dollars and dollar cost averaging, that's a different story. What I'm talking about here is say, for example, you get $100,000 and you want to dollar cost average that and you invest $8,000 for an entire year per month, that historically has not performed as well as if you just invested the entire lump sum. So really important caveat there for sure is if you have a large lump sum
Starting point is 00:26:55 of cash and you know what you want to do with that cash, I would consider looking at some of the data here because the data shows just investing the lump sum all at once is going to be the best bet. Now, if your psychology gets nervous about that or you're just really, really worried about that, then you could dollar cost average. It's not a huge deal. But at the same time, I would most likely put the entire sum of cash. Now, if you're looking for some fun ideas for this, for sure, I would consider a number of different things. First is, are you interested in real estate investing? Because real estate investing is one fantastic way where you can invest your dollars. Now, there's a couple of ways to do this. You can do this with something like fund
Starting point is 00:27:27 rise, for example, or you could do this with something like physical real estate where you can buy single family houses, small multifamily houses, those types of things and get started with some cash flow in real estate. Now, if you're not interested in tenants and toilets and you don't want to go the real estate route just because you're not interested in that, you really do have to be interested to do this, then you can go a couple other routes. Another thing to look into is, are you interested in buying a business? Because you can buy businesses. If you have $50,000, you can definitely look and see if there's businesses out there where you have an addition. business that may be less seasonal than your wedding business where you can run the business and
Starting point is 00:28:02 hire employees. And if you haven't heard our two episodes, we have one with Cody Sanchez, and we have one with Walker Dybul who wrote buy them build. Both of those are about business buying. And they are really, really powerful episodes that I think really influenced me. And when I talk to both of them, I ended up starting to buy businesses. That's what I do with a lot of my extra cash now is we look to buy businesses because I think there's a ton of opportunity out there to go out and buy businesses. So that may be one option as well if you're interested in that. Now, if you have less time because you already are a business owner, then real estate may be the better option out of those two. And those are the two that I'm really bullish. Now, also, you can go look at like individual stocks. We just had an episode
Starting point is 00:28:40 talking to Brian Ferraldi and we talked through, you know, investing in individual stocks. That's another great way to do this if you're interested in that stuff. You can look at a very small portion of your portfolio into crypto. I would not bet the entire house on that or I, you know, for me, my rule is 5% or less on my portfolio can be in crypto. And I have a very small amount of my portfolio. I think it's less than that in crypto. For the most part, I'm an index fund investor through and through. We've done a crypto episode talking about that too. But that's another option for a small portion of that. If you want to go into that, I mean, it's really hot right now because crypto, when it flies up, everybody tries to get in. And then when it's down, nobody wants to
Starting point is 00:29:17 invest in crypto. I am not a big crypto proponent, as you can tell. But overall, there are a lot of different things that you can do when it comes to investing these dollars. And it really comes down to what types of things do you want to do. You can also invest in things like real estate notes. There's so many different ways that you can invest these dollars. So first you have to just ask yourself, what am I interested in? What seems very, very interesting to me? And how can I take these dollars and put them towards some very interesting concepts? And so for me, I light up when it comes to buying businesses, buying small businesses. And you can look through places like biz buy sell. And that's a great place to start looking at what businesses are out there. And then you can start to see, hey,
Starting point is 00:29:55 what am I interested in? Maybe if you have a wedding business, maybe you want to buy another portion of a wedding business where you can have two different arms. That's another great idea that you can actually look at. Maybe for example, if you're in the wedding business and you do wedding planning, okay? Maybe you want to buy a florist, for example, or someone who can actually handle all the flowers for a lot of these folks. Or maybe you want to go out and you can buy a business that, you know, rinse out those arches like the side hustle we were talking about, the wedding arches. Or maybe you want to go out and you can buy a business that, you know, runs a bunch of different DJs and photography, those types of things. There's all different
Starting point is 00:30:29 things that you can do. But just talking through this overall and kind of thinking, you know, what can I do to expand my current business is also a great idea. And I'd be an amazing investment because you can increase your cash flow drastically and you already know that business. So that's another great thing that you could be doing as well. Also looking at, you know, the traditional stuff that we talk about all the time here, do you have a high deductible health plan where you can go with an HSA. And so there's a bunch of options here that you can really think through. What am I personally most bullish on? A, I want you to do the traditional stairway to wealth route first. But then once you go through that route, I am really bullish on things like real
Starting point is 00:31:03 estate and small businesses. Those are the two things that I'm really, really bullish on. Real estate's harder to find now. Small businesses are way less difficult to find right now. And you can even find some passive ones out there like Cody Sanchez when she was on this podcast talked about her laundromats and how she has all these different laundromats that are much more passive and almost like a real estate play where you can get some nice cash flow on those, the recession resistant, those types of things. So there's a ton of different options that there and I could really go on about this stuff all day long that I think you have available to you. And so as you get this cash on hand, I love how protected you are with your wealth. I love
Starting point is 00:31:37 the cash that you have on hand. If it keeps you comfortable, if you're happy with how much you have on hand, I think that's great. But you can take these large lump sum of cash and you can really accelerate your path to wealth with some what we call wealth accelerators. And that can really, really help you overall as you go through this. So congratulations on what you're doing. I think it's amazing that you have all of this stuff and just decide what you're interested in and dive deeper into that is what I would say because I think that's really, really powerful. Now, if you don't have much time, the stock market's always your best friend. That is the easiest way to invest your dollars when you have no time. So just thinking through that is going to be
Starting point is 00:32:10 really, really powerful stuff. Amazing, amazing work. All right. And then the last thing I want to talk about is just a quick scam update. So you know a lot of times, on these money Q&As, we'll give you an update on different scams that are going on right now. And this segment is brought to you by Delete Me. So Delete Me is one of my favorite services that I have ever, ever utilized. And what Delete Me does is they go out there and they remove your personal information on the internet. So a lot of times, data brokers will get a hold of your personal information. And without your permission, they'll just throw it on the internet.
Starting point is 00:32:41 And they'll put it on the internet. And what this does is this allows for scammers or financial scammers to get access to your personal information. So if you Google your name or you Google your address and quotations or you Google things like your phone number in quotations, you're going to find all this information about you on all these weird websites that you've never heard of. Well, these are data brokers that have taken your data and put it on the internet. And when you remove this information off of the internet, it is less likely for you to be able to get scammed online financially because they can't find your information. So say, for example, a scammer goes out there and they get a hold of a piece
Starting point is 00:33:13 of your information. Maybe they get a hold of your email or your phone number or your address and they go online and they start to search for where's the rest of this person's information so I can start scamming them and putting their information online and start to open up credit cards in their name or I want to open up a student loan in their name. And so when they go out and do all this stuff, they look for your information online. Well, what delete me does is they go to those data brokers and they say, hey, this person never asked you to put this information online. You need to remove it and they go through the hoops to remove your personal information online. Sometimes they have to send a letter. Sometimes they have to do a bunch of other different things out there
Starting point is 00:33:46 that need to be done. And so it takes you a ton of time to remove your personal information online. Delete Me has this down to a T and they can do this really, really quickly in just a couple of days. They remove thousands of entries that I had online that I did not want. And so I think it's a really powerful service that a lot of people should be utilizing. And so if you are interested, just go to join deleteme.com slash pfp. It is one of the best services that I have used in a long time. and you need to really remove your personal information online if you want to protect your finances online. And this increasingly becomes more and more important every single year that we talk about this. So we are really, really huge proponents of getting together a financial protection plan.
Starting point is 00:34:29 And so this is one of the number one things that you should do is make sure that you are removing your personal information online and Delete Me does it for you really, really quickly. So if you want to get 20% off, just go to join Deleteme.com slash PFP, and they'll be able to help you out there. it is the best service that I've ever used, and they saved me hours and hours every single quarter. So I love to delete me because of that. Now, let's talk about this scam today that we are looking at. And when it comes to this scam, this is one that I have gotten a number of times. And actually, I almost fell for it once or twice. I actually sent a text message to my wife because of this scam saying, hey, is this a real thing? Or do you know what this is? And so here's what it is.
Starting point is 00:35:07 They actually call it smishing, which the United States Postal Service, and the post inspectors are now coming out with a bunch of information on this. But they are mobile text messages that will come in and they'll say, hey, your delivery requires a message from you. So sometimes it'll be UPS or FedEx or USPS and they'll say, hey, you need to respond to this, click this link to get your package,
Starting point is 00:35:30 essentially is what it really comes down to. And a lot of times it is a way for them for you to click a link and then they want you to put in some information. Sometimes it's your phone number, sometimes it's an email. Sometimes it's just like it looks like you're filling out a form for the USPS.
Starting point is 00:35:42 or FedEx or for UPS. And so all of these are really, really important to go through and make sure that you do not click this link. So if you have a text message come in that says your package needs more information, it's really important not to click that link. And so this happened to me in January, I believe, and I screenshot it because we have a lot of stuff coming in for our business to our house or we have a lot of things come in where your boys got too many Amazon packages. That's on the hush-hush. But anyways, so we have a lot of stuff come in. So a lot of times I sent her a message and I said, hey, is this something that you know anything about? And she said, no, I don't know what that is. So I just, as always, when it comes to this kind of stuff, I am very hesitant to
Starting point is 00:36:20 click links. So I didn't click it and then looked more into is there any scams like this out there? And so I searched the internet and found a bunch of different scenarios where people were actually clicking this stuff and they click the link. They put in their information and all of a sudden they are out with thousands of dollars based on just giving that actual scammer your personal information. So this is one where it looks just like the UPS website. It looks just like the FedEx website. You possibly have all these packages coming and they're just asking for some very simple information, but it's really the information that they need in order to finalize some of the scams they're trying to pull off. So this is one definitely look out for when people are saying, hey, they can also
Starting point is 00:36:56 do this trying to disguise themselves as a bank or anything else. Anything like that, just have your red flags flying. Make sure that you understand that this is really, really important. If you're ever rushed or in a situation where you just don't know what it is, just pause, wait a day or two, look at it again, and don't click any links unless you know for sure that link is something. So now a lot of these suspicious fishing links are coming in via text message. So make sure you do not click those links. Really, really important stuff. And the United States Postal Service has actually put out some of these PR things stating this is really, really important that you don't click these links because a lot of people are getting scammed with this right now. So if you ever get these messages,
Starting point is 00:37:34 you can report it to the USPS by going to USPS.com, and they have a system where you can actually put in the information with the number and all that kind of stuff as well if you want to report it. But this is really, really important not to click those links. And I'm getting them more and more. I think I've gotten at least one a month ever since that original one came in. So just make sure you're looking out for that. I just want to kind of inform you guys as this stuff comes up to make sure that you don't
Starting point is 00:37:55 fall to any of these financial scams. And they are going to keep coming and they're going to get better and better with AI. So we got to make sure that we are all on the same page here. and we are trying to inform you as much as possible. So listen, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. And if you got value out of this episode, make sure to share it with the friends so that we can spread this message
Starting point is 00:38:11 that anybody in this world can build wealth. We truly believe that anybody in this world can build wealth. And our entire goal is to bring you all as much value as we possibly can. And thank you for investing in yourself because that's exactly what you did today by listening to this show, is you invested in yourself,
Starting point is 00:38:25 which is the most valuable thing that you can do with your time and your energy. Again, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We will see you on the next episode. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time. Let's play. Feel the fun with Play Ojo.
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