The Personal Finance Podcast - How Stressful is Home Ownership VS. Rental Properties! Money Q&A

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to do a Money Q&A about how stressful is homeownership vs. owning rental properties. Today we are going to answer these questions:  Question 1: How Stressful Is Home Ownership?  Question 2: How do I adjust my withholding?  Question 3: How to Negotiate a Flat Rate Salary?  Question 4: 10 Websites that List your Personal Information 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 PFP for 20% off!   Links Mentioned in This Episode:  How to Negotiate Your Salary Like a Pro How to Negotiate Your Salary and Get a Raise (The Step-By-Step System!) 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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What's popping, 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 doing a money Q&A with a bunch of your questions. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money Newsletter. You can do that by going to mastermoney.co slash newsletter, and you can respond to any of those newsletters that come out every single week, and we will take a look at those and maybe even get your question answered on the show.

And if you're getting value out of this show, consider following us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. Cannot thank you guys enough for following this show. It truly helps us spread this message. And if you're getting tremendous value out of this show, consider leaving a five-star rating review on Apple Podcast, Spotify. or your favorite podcast player. Now today, we're going to be diving into four very different questions, and we're going to

talk through some really, really great stuff today. So the first question is we're going to talk through how stressful is homeownership versus owning a rental property. The next one is, how do I adjust my tax withholding, specifically when it comes to things like commissions or things like that through the IRS, and how do I do some of the calculations myself? The next one is how to negotiate a flat rate salary. So this is something that I think a lot of people are having to deal with where their salaries at their current companies may have a flat rate and they don't have a meritocracy, meaning they don't have a place where you actually earn how much you can make and people at the same level earn different levels of income there. So we're going to look at that. And then lastly, it is just talking through another piece of information that's going to help you protect your financial information online. We're going to talk through some of the most popular websites that actually list your personal information and you want to.

to get that information removed from there so it's not as easy for folks like scammers to find your information. So these are the four things that we are going to be diving into today. So without further ado, let's get into it. All right. So the first question is, hey, Andrew, I'm a big fan of the podcast and specifically how you consider happiness in investing and saving decisions. Generally, how would you compare the workload slash stress of owning and maintaining a home you live in versus owning a rental property that a property manager maintains. So this is a fantastic question, and honestly, this is a huge consideration

for a lot of people who are thinking about investing in rental properties, because you have to assess how stressful this is going to be on your life. For some people, if you are worried about stress and workload, owning a rental property may not be the best thing for you, because especially your first couple properties, you're new to all of this stuff. So a lot of this stuff is going to seem kind of stressful

when things go wrong or something breaks and you have to figure out a way to actually build a team that is going to help you fix these issues. And so having a property manager and baking a property manager into your numbers when you evaluate rental properties is a really great idea for a lot of people because it helps especially new investors have the ability to, A, get more free time so they can look for more deals. But B, in addition, they handle a lot of the upfront workload. Now, your job then is to actually manage the property manager because when you get a property manager, you get a property manager within a rental property, you are going to have to make sure you stay on top of them.

Nobody is going to care about your property as much as you do. And so then your job just becomes managing the manager. And so you want to make sure you stay informed. You don't want to have a situation where you don't have a property manager who gives you updates every month and or who doesn't communicate with you at all. Instead, you want to make sure that you were on top of them. Now, most property managers want you to have a couple of properties under your belt for them to take them on.

But there's a lot of them that will take one off property. as well. So just kind of think through that as you start to think about investing. Now, owning a home versus owning a rental property, how stressful each one. So we're going to go through a couple different things. First is workload. So maintenance and repairs, obviously, for owning a home is all your responsibility in terms of finding the people to come and maintain your house and repair your house and or you go and do it. Same thing with upkeep and improvements. And so there's a lot more work in owning your own home than would be the rental property. Now, when it comes to the workload on the rental property. There's a couple of things that you can do. One of which is if you have

this property manager in place, and there are things like maintenance and repairs, what a lot of people I know do is any maintenance or repair under $300, you know, they say, go ahead and just take care of it. And a lot of times they have vendors there who are going to allow them to get some discounts because they utilize them so much. And so they use their own vendors. And then if it's any repair under $300, you know, if it happens once or twice a month, you give a minimum there. And then you you tell them, hey, if it happens twice a month, you know, you go ahead and take care of it. If there is repairs three, four, five times a month and I want to make sure I'm making a decision here, especially if you want to talk through maybe what your cash flow is.

And if it's anything above your cash flow, that would be a good decision to maybe have a conversation about that each time it happened. So any time of maintenance item or repair comes in, they're going to contact your property manager and then you give your property manager the directions as to when they need to contact you prior to making that repair. and a lot of times, if you can, try to make it to where they make those repairs as frequently as possible without calling you unless it's a high ticket item. That is kind of the goal overall for most people and how they need to think about this. Now, when it comes to regular upkeep, the property manager should be maintaining that as well, but you've got to stay on top of them when it comes to this because a lot of times they will forego or forget or maybe they don't have good systems into place if you don't have a good property manager. So you got to make sure that you give them that upkeep and they think through that. And then tenant management. So this is a big one where the property manager will deal with tenant issues, rent collection, and leasing, which alleviates a lot of the typical landlord responsibility.

So one of the biggest headaches when it comes to owning a rental property is honestly turnover. And turnover is a big, big deal because it can take you one, two, three months to find a new tenant who actually qualifies for your property, especially if you're vetting tenants properly. You really take a lot of time showing the house, going to the property, making sure that the tenant actually qualifies, they fill out the application, you process the application, you do the background check, you do the financial check. And if you're doing everything properly, it should take you some time before you actually sign a lease with a tenant, meaning you're going to actually

have to go to that property at least three times per tenant in order to make sure that you find the correct tenant. And usually what I used to do was when I was managing on my own, I would just hold an open house and let a bunch of tenants come through, give them applications. They'd fill out the application there, hand it back to me. So I didn't have to make a bunch of different trips each and every time and it also creates a little bit of competition as well. So the psychology behind it is actually something that is pretty interesting. So that's how I would do it, but your property manager would handle all that stuff. Now, if they're not doing a good job and you see consistently they're not getting good tenants in there, that's another reason to go through their process.

And you need to do that up front anyway is figure out what their tenant process is and how they screen tenants prior to actually signing on with them. So it should be less stressful than it seems here because the property manager should be handling that. So when it comes to that piece, that for sure should be less stressful. Now, a lot of times, though, you may have to go through a couple property managers to find the right one. And so that part is somewhat of a headache as well. Now, when it comes to stress owning a rental property, there are a couple of main factors here. One is, you know, financial oversight. You need to make sure that you are profitable within that property. There are some people out there who are okay with taking a small loss

on rental properties. I am not one of them whatsoever. I don't think that's a business. I think that's just an appreciation play. And if you're doing appreciation play, you're gambling a little bit. So I would not be interested in that whatsoever. And so you need to make sure that this property is profitable. So the financial oversight there is very different from owning your own personal residence. You just got to make sure that you can afford your personal residence. It's less than 30% of your gross income is what you're spending on your personal residence. When it comes to a rental property, it can go south pretty quickly if you have a lot of different repairs that you did not expect to have. And so that might increase your stress a little bit is that financial

oversight. The other side of it is cost of property managers. So property managers typically charge a fee. It's anywhere from 8 to 12 percent typically to manage your property. Sometimes it's one month's rent. It just depends on what you have going on there. And sometimes there's additional fees for placement of tenants, things like that. So you got to think through that. And then investment risk, you know, some people worry about the investment risk and the long term risk. When there is a downside or rents downturn. That could be some sort of stress point as well. And so overall, maybe the workload is a little more stressful on the investment property unless you bought a house that you couldn't afford. Now, anybody who buys a house they can't afford, that's a stressful

situation. You want to make sure that you're staying within the parameters that we talk about here and or less than those parameters, typically when you buy a house. So overall, what I truly think is I do think it is slightly more stressful to own a rental property because you are now responsible for your own life and your own living situation, but you're also now responsible for somebody else's living situation. Now, is the tradeoff of that stress level worth it? Absolutely. For me, it absolutely is. For some people, it's not going to be. You would much rather just invest your dollars into something like an index fund or an ETF and just call it a day. And you really got to make sure that the rental property makes a ton of sense for what you're trying to do. Maybe you're trying

to get a tax break. Maybe you're trying to get some cash flow going on. Those are some of the best reasons to own a rental property, but if you don't want any additional stress in your life, you've got to think about it this way. You are dealing with someone else's life and someone else's living situation, and that is now partially your responsibility. Now, that tenant is going to get up every single day. They're going to go to work. They're going to drive through traffic or work from home, whatever they do, in order to be able to pay you. And so it is a rewarding experience, but still, at the same time, in the end of the day, the responsibility does fall on you if something happens to that property. So the stress level might be slightly higher, at least personally for me,

by owning a rental property over my personal residence. My personal residence doesn't really stress me out, but it's something where, you know, I can afford it. It's something that I bought at the right time and a lot of different factors factor into that. So overall, for me, rental properties are a little bit more stressful than homeownership, but if you can take that, you know, if you've been in business or if you don't get psyched out at all, it's not a big deal whatsoever. So your first one may be more stressful than the rest. Then you start to get used to. You start to build that stress muscle and it gets a lot easier over time. So that is one of the biggest factors overall. So I hope this helps and I hope this is kind of helping you through your thought process. I think if you're really interested in real estate,

it's always worth it trying it out one property or two properties and see if it's something that you want to continue to do. And if you don't, you can always eventually sell it. You may have to hang on to it for a while. If the market goes down, but you can always eventually sell those properties at some point in time so that you can move on and invest your dollars elsewhere. So hopefully that's helpful. and let me know if you have any other questions. Let's get the next one. So lately, I've been noticing how fast things are changing at home. The 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. That's something I've been thinking

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An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com. All right. Question number two. Hey, Andrew. Love the podcast and rated five out of five stars. First of all, thank you so much for doing that. And for anybody listening, if you rate the podcast five out of five stars and you send me a question,

your boy's going to answer your question because you know how much I love. getting those five-star reviews, and I truly appreciate it. I have implemented Delete Me, amazing, automated HSA monthly contributions, and started digging deeper into 401K options beyond what the company gives me, Roth 401K, etc. Question, the IRS has a calculator to adjust your withholding, but how do you account for monthly paychecks with commissions? Great question. Do I need to manually adjust my pre-tax 401k contribution before that monthly payment to

minimize tax hit. Right now, I'm seeing 37% on average taxes for those paychecks versus 25% on my normal salary paycheck. So I can see why you definitely want to make sure that you get this right, because if you're seeing 37% on average and your normal paycheck is 25%, we got to make sure that we're doing this calculation correctly. So one big thing I'll say off the top is in your situation, if you're hitting closer to 37%, I would absolutely make sure I have a CPA in my corner because it sounds like you're earning a decent amount if you're getting closer that 37%. So I would definitely, definitely, definitely have a CPA in my corner. It is worth every single penny.

They will help you on tax breaks for your specific personal situation. It is still one of the best, you know, dollars I have ever spent. They save me thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars every single year. And so if you can, even on a normal W-2 employee, I would definitely make sure that I went and did that overall. Because this can be a complex situation, depending on a lot of your personal stuff. But I'm going to give you a couple of steps that I would take if I were in your shoes without knowing everything about your personal situation to kind of see where you land. So you're doing the right thing. The first thing I would do is use that IRS withholding calculator because this helps

you estimate your tax liability for anybody listening who's never used this. It helps you estimate your tax liability and adjust your withholding. And so you can access it on the IRS website. You just search for IRS withholding calculator. It'll pop up for you so that you can check that out. And then what you want to do, though, with your commissions is when you utilize this calculator, you want to account for those commissions separately. So when you're using the calculator, ensure that you input commission income separately from your regular salary, because this is going to help the calculator provide a more accurate estimate of your total tax liability. And we want to make sure that we have the most accurate estimate possible. So separate the two. This is going to help you

significantly when you do this. And then what you do is typically you have to adjust your withholding. So based on that calculator's result, you may need to adjust your withholding. If you need to adjust your withholding, you can submit a new W4 form, and that's going to help you with the new updated information. So you submit the new W4 form to your employer to update some of that information. Now, let's talk about the pre-tax 401K contributions for a second, because if you need to adjust those contributions manually each month based on your commission, that may not be practical. And so what your CPA can help you do or what you can do if you really don't want to use a CPA, is you can consider setting a consistent contribution rate that aligns

with your overall income and tax strategy every single month to make it a lot easier when it comes to some of this stuff. Now, if you want to adjust your 401K contributions and you don't want to make it consistent whatsoever just because of, you know, income reasons or, you know, expense reasons, whatever else you have there, what you want to try to do is if you can predict high commission months. So if you know in advance which months will have higher commissions, maybe you have a seasonal employee, you're in sales, and you kind of know when you're going to have higher commissions, then you can consider increasing your 401k contributions for those months to reduce your taxable income, but also make sure that you can maintain flexibility, meaning you can keep your regular

401K contributions consistent, but if you want to be prepared to make additional contributions during high commission months, that would be one way to go as well for flexibility. Now, here's an example calculation that you can kind of think through. So let's say, for example, you made a base salary of $50,000 per year. Let's make some amazing math here. And you had an average monthly commission of $2,000. And so your total estimated annual income is $50,000 plus $2,000 times 12 or an additional $24,000 for $74,000 total. So you can input $74,000 as your total income in the IRS calculator. And then you would follow those recommendations for adjusting your W-4 allowances. So that's the first couple steps I would take is kind of just putting in that

information. Then I would adjust the 401k contributions as, you know, maybe the regular contribution is 10 to 20 percent, whatever you have. So let's just say it's 10 percent of base salary. And for a high commission month, say you get $5,000 in commission one month, then you consider increasing the 401k contributions to 20 percent for that month. Okay. Now, one thing to note is commissions and other supplemental wages are often taxed at a flat rate. So it's typically around 22 So it's typically at a flat rate. I would check the current year to see what it is because it always is changing. But this rate might differ from your regular paycheck withholding, which is likely what

you're seeing now while you're seeing a big spike is maybe it's the combined income. So you want to check that flat rate. Make sure you have that available and you can adjust that W4 based on that. And then just regularly review this stuff, you know, your pay stubs and your tax withholding throughout the year to ensure you're on track. That's the hard thing with, you know, variable income is sometimes you just have to keep reviewing some of this stuff. And we'll try to maybe here in the future to create a spreadsheet for you to help you review all this stuff.

So you can make sure that you avoid underpayment penalties or a large tax bill at your end as well. So that's going to be something I would definitely do. But honestly, a CPA in your corner can solve all this because they can handle this for you. And for a W-2 employee, it can cost anywhere from like a thousand bucks somewhere around there, maybe two, three thousand bucks. But if you avoid, you know, a massive tax bill at the end of the year and some big massive tax surprise, this will help significantly. So I think that is one of the best things that you can do, especially if you're a high earner and you're earning more and more income, which, you know, it looks like you are. If you're getting, you know, feedback of 37 percent, then you're

probably earning a decent amount there. So I would absolutely consider having a tax professional to look at this for you as well. And again, they are amazing at this stuff. Just get some recommendations before you hire one. Make sure you get the right one for your specific situation. So hope this helps. And I'll keep everybody posted when we, work on that spreadsheet to get that rolling. All right, the third question. I'm trying to figure out the best way to negotiate a higher salary for a leadership position. I've been offered a promotion to. I currently work part-time at a nonprofit, but the full-time salary for my current position as a peer specialist is $40,000. It's an entry-level position, but I have six years' experience in my

field since my career change. For some reason, my employer, the CEO, doesn't like to pay employees in the same position, different salaries, even if they have different levels of experience, which for me, that is a slight red flag. But anyways, which I didn't realize until I was being hired about 1.5 years ago. My supervisor, the director of peer services, wants to promote me to assistant director and knows how hard I work. Unfortunately, it's the CEO who determines the salaries, and she only offered me $50,000. I know the salaries of several others in the organization, including my supervisor, who's at 80K, and the last time I had a full-time job in 2017 as a teacher, making 70K. I am not willing to accept less than 65K for this promotion, and I won't take the

position if I can't negotiate that. I just don't know how to go about it politely requesting this huge increase about upsetting the CEO. This is a fantastic question because I think a lot of people are in this situation, and you have to be strategic about this in order to make this work. And so most likely, you have heard some of our episodes talking about how to negotiate your salary. If you are listening to this podcast and you haven't heard that is one of the most important episodes that we put out because when we talk about this, this is the first place I want you to work on to increase your income. Learning how to negotiate your salary is a skill. And once you get the system down and you start to work this framework and work the system, oh my goodness,

it's amazing what you can do and how much more money you can earn just by building up that skill. And so we're going to kind of use a hybrid method of this for people who have flat rates as we talk through this because I think this is a really, really powerful question that I'll think a lot of people are probably struggling with. So the first thing you want to do is, search and benchmark. So I want you to kind of go out there and say, gather some data, gather some industry standards, make sure they are within your state and within your area, and start to look at, you know, especially in the nonprofit sector and look at websites like pay scale, glass door, you know, some of those, the other ones that are out there. There's a bunch

of them out there now. And there's also, you know, industry specific salary surveys. Those can also be helpful. And I want you to kind of pull some data together because we need to make sure that we have some data backing us up. And then what we're going to do is also start to highlight experience and achievements. So I want you to emphasize, first of all, your six years of experience, and I want you to emphasize your achievements and how hard you work and how that's positively impacted the organization. I want you to highlight specific examples because this is where it really matters. You can't just say I work really hard because everybody says they work really hard. I want you to come up with very specific examples of your contributions and any metrics that

can show your success. So for example, you know, if you've raised capital for the nonprofit, or depending on whatever else you do, raise those examples and show those examples because technically what the nonprofit wants to see is that you are actually profitable for them as well. And so highlight those experiences, highlight those examples. You know there's going to be some sort of room here to show that experience. Then what you want to do is schedule a meeting. Now, this meeting might be part of an equation that may take a little longer than you want to. And so when you schedule this meeting, I want you to kind of request a formal meeting with

the CEO to discuss the promotion and the salary. Now, if you're more comfortable with your direct supervisor and maybe they can give you some good advice if they know the CEO well, your direct supervisor may be able to help you and say, what kind of things do I need to hear in order to kind of talk through this? And maybe they don't know that you're actually thinking through this process and you need to make $65,000 before you actually take on this promotion. And so what I would do, though, is I would try to have a conversation with them and see if they know some of the data that can help you back up this situation as well. And if they go up to bat for you, because they're going to have to go up to bat for you, and they're obviously wanting to offer you the position. And so that person is willing to go to bat for you.

And if they're willing to do so, then you guys kind of have to game plan and put some information together. So you can request a meeting first with your supervisor if you're comfortable with that. If not, if you just want to go directly in with your CEO, start having this conversation and saying, hey, this role is available. I would love to take this role. Here is some of the research I've done in the benchmarking. Here is some of my achievements. Here's what I want to make. okay and when you start to do this you want to frame this request obviously politely and you can express gratitude you can express your enthusiasm for this nonprofit how passionate you are about this and how passionate you want to see this grow and start to talk through some of that and your

opportunity and excitement for this leadership role and then start to frame your value proposition meaning that clearly articulate that experience those skills the hard work all the data that you kind of put together and your value to the organization and then present your case put that case together, start to frame it, then put the case together so that you can really talk through, you know, what needs to be done in order to get you there. Now, one thing you can do is you can start to present this case and start to say, hey, here's exactly where I want to get. And then you kind of let them start to talk. The CEO start to talk. And I would even ask for a little more than what you actually want so that you can set an anchor point. So when they come down a little bit,

because they're going to come down, they're going to negotiate. And so set an anchor point a little bit higher. and then start to have a conversation based on that. So I would definitely come in higher than the 65K, maybe 70, 75, somewhere in that range, get on the high end and then start to have that conversation. And then once you start to negotiate, you have to be firm but flexible. And you can say, hey, 65 is what it would take for me to take on this position. If you want me to stay in my current position, I can absolutely do so. But while I'm staying in my current position, what things need to be done

or what do I need to achieve in order to get to this next position and actually make this income because that is the amount that I am willing to accept. So you want to be firm, but you want to make sure that you're polite about it. And so you can say what items need to be done in order for me to be able to get this promotion. And that's one of the most important things that you can do there because you've got to stick to your guns when it comes to this stuff. Too many people cave and they'll take 55 or 50 or 45. You want to make sure that you just go through this. Now, if the CEO is unable to meet the salary request, discuss any alternative benefits that you may be interested in.

Maybe it's additional vacation days or professional development opportunities or performance-based bonuses. Some of that stuff can be really, really helpful so that you can have these alternative benefits and maybe the bonus route would get you to that 65K or maybe they won't budge at 60. Well, you can say, can I do a performance-based bonus

with that could give me to 80? And that would maybe help you get to that 65 because a lot of times people underpay on bonuses. And so you want to make sure it's clearly outlined what that bonus would be and what you would have to do in order to hit that bonus. And then I want you to kind of practice this pitch before you have this meeting.

You know, have this conversation. This meeting may need to happen a couple of different ways and a couple of different times for you to actually get the point across and ensure that, you know, this is really going well. It's harder to do a one-off meeting. So you almost want to say, hey, if they say no initially, then you want to say, hey, can we revisit this in a month or two? And tell me what I need to do between that time in order to show you that I need to

make this amount in order to be able to show. you that I need to make this amount going forward and you can ask them what you need to do. You need an action list from them and you don't want to walk out of that meeting without an action list. And then after the meeting, just follow up and thank them for that meeting. And if you got it, congratulations. But if not, then you want to say, hey, here's the action items and I'm going to be hitting over the next two months in my current role. And then if you want to revisit this in two months, then we can absolutely do that. After reading your question, I put together a little script because I really believe in scripts. And so one thing that I, I, you know,

I did was just put together a script to make this a little easier for you to show you how I would present this. And so I'm going to just read this off technically how I wrote this. And you can kind of tweak this if you want in any way, shape or form. But what I would say is, hey, thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I'm excited about this opportunity to take on the assistant director role and continue contributing to our organization's mission. With six years of experience in the field and one and a half years of dedicated service here, I successfully and then mention all your specific achievements, go through all of them, as many as you possibly can. I'm confident that my experience and skills will bring even greater value to our team in this leadership position.

Based on my research and industry standards, the average salary for an assistant director with similar experience is around $65,000. Additionally, my previous salary at different roles was at $70,000, which reflects my professional background and expertise. I believe that a salary of 65, I would even come in at 70. I believe a salary of 70,000 is fair and aligns with the value I bring to the organization. I understand budget constraints, but I hope we can reach an agreement that reflects my contributions and experience. And then if you are open to flexibility, you can say if $70,000 is impossible, I'm open to discussing alternative benefits that could help bridge the gap after they actually talk through and have some additional conversation there. But don't give them that

opening unless you have to. So that's how I would kind of approach it. And that's just a quick little script there that you can utilize if you want. And if you want me to send you that script, just shoot me a quick email. I'll shoot it over to you and be able to get you that information as well. So listen, great question and good luck on this negotiation strategy. Practice makes perfect. So practice with your friends and family. It's truly going to help as you go forward with this. All right. Now the last segment on this episode, we are going to be talking about some of the top 10 websites that list your personal information. And if you haven't heard any of our content on protecting your finances online. One of the big things is to make sure you get your personal

information removed from pretty standard websites, but specifically from data brokers. Now, I'm going to talk through the top 10 that are very common on this list that will pop up on Google with any easy search so that this can help you, you know, at least get your personal information removed from those 10 websites. But if you want it removed from all data brokers across online, you can utilize a surface like Delete Me. And Delete Me has been a sponsor of this podcast for a while. It is one of my favorite services out there. And the reason why it is one of my favorite services is they make it so incredibly easy to get your personal information removed. Now, if you Google your name or you Google your address or your phone number in quotations, you're going to see your information popping

up a lot of different places. And so what Delete Me does is they go in and they remove your data from the web to avoid scams, spam, stalkers, all those different things. And they have 100 million plus successful opt-out removals. And what Delete Me will do, is they will, you know, you give them some of your information, you fill out a couple of forms, then they go in online and they get your personal information removed from all these different data brokers. Now, why this is powerful is because if someone gets a piece of your information and they want to find the rest of your information in order to scam you online, they can do so very easily if you don't get your personal information removed. And so getting that removed

makes it so much more difficult for scammers out there to be able to actually find you and find your information. Now, you can also choose a different plan so delete me and they also will do continuous monitoring throughout the year. But it is by far one of my favorite services. So if you want to get your personal information removed online, we actually got you 20% off. If you go to join delete me.com slash pfp 20. That's personal finance podcast, PFP 20. We'll get you 20% off there. And it is honestly just one of the best services that I have utilized over the last couple of years. But if you want to remove your personal information or you want to see some of the websites that have personal information. One great place to look is some of these top websites here. So the first one is

white pages. And if you go to white pages, it's a directory service that provides personal information on people and lets you look up individuals based on their name, their phone number, or their home address. That's one great place to kind of look and see if you can get an opt out of white pages. Spokio is the second one. So Spokio is an online search directory, aggregating personal data from various sources to provide a comprehensive view of individuals. So Spokio is the second one that I would look at. These are just. really easy ones where if you look at Spokio, for example, and you go to their homepage, it has, hey, you can search someone by name, by email, by phone number, by address, and all of a sudden

your information pops up. So a lot of people will use this for a bunch of different things. Say, for example, you want to find a company's email so that you can, you know, go try to find a job. Well, people use Spokio and things like that to try to gather some of that information, but scammers also gather this stuff. So you want to try to opt out there as well. And delete me actually has little guides on their website if you want to go there to. and they have a section on their website called DIY opt-out guides that you can definitely look at. Ben Verified is another one. So B-E-E-N-Verified is an online data broker that gives users access to people's personal information,

and anyone can use this site to perform reverse lookups using names, phone numbers, emails, addresses, and other information like that. Intellius, I-N-T-E-L-I-S is another one, and it's a background check service that consolidates data from various sources to provide detailed reports about individuals. And what you're going to notice here is that once you start knocking some of these out and getting your personal information off some of these websites, a lot of these websites have to pull from other websites to get your personal information. And so it starts to have a web effect that removes your information pretty quickly. That's why Delete Me did it in like 36 hours for me or less.

It might have been less than that now and I'm thinking about it. But they remove my personal information pretty quickly, and it was from thousands and thousands of websites. Another one to look at is PeopleFinders. And PeopleFinders is a People Search site that gathers personal information and makes it public. publicly available online. That's definitely one I wanted off of. And another one is Truth Finder. So you can look up Truth Finder and that's pretty much the same thing. You can input a username to find information about its owner. And so Truth Finder is definitely one you want it off because if people are looking up your information off your username, it's usually because they don't

have good intentions. Radaris, R-A-R-I-S, is another data broker that crawls the web and scrapes personal details. And once they compile the information, the platform creates a public profile for viewing. Some of this is just, it just feels like it's so incredibly invasive. And that's why you always want to get this stuff taken off. And profiles can include things like personal info, name, age, phone number, current home address, work experience, resumes, marriages, divorces, relatives names, social media accounts, criminal records, mugshots, photographs, and videos. Get it off there. It's not worth it. U.S. phone book is another one. It's a data broker for a free reverse phone number lookups. And so you want to get that off as fast as you possibly can.

Fast people search is another one. And that one is an online directory that offers free searches about individuals. Arrest.org is another one where if you have been arrested before and you don't want people to be able to figure that out, Arrest.org is going to help them figure it out and you can get that information removed from public information online. If that's something, for example, that you want to make sure that you get removed, I would do that as quickly as possible if you've been arrested for anything and you don't want that information out there. or especially if it was like a misdemeanor or something like that, maybe it was a mistake that you made in college or something like that, then definitely get that stuff removed. So these are the 10 websites

that I would look at just to get started. And like I said, Delete Me has guides that will show you how to remove your personal information if you want to do it manually, but it's worth paying them. They have, you know, three different plans. You know, the standard protection plan, one year, one person is $8.60 a month. The one year two people for you and your spouse maybe is $15.26 a month. two years two people is $11.63 per month if you want to do it monthly or they can bill you annually as well. And so you're going to save 20% by going to join delete me.com slash pfp20. So great, great option for a lot of people out there. Make sure you kind of look at some of those websites and make sure your information is not on there. Listen, hope you guys enjoyed this show. Thank you so much

for listening to this episode. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you. If you guys have any questions again, join the mastermine newsletter. Go to mastermoney.com slash newsletter. Join right there, and we'll be able to get your rolling. So thank you so much again for listening to this podcast, and 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 Playojo, the online casino with all the latest slot and live casino games. What you win is yours to keep with no wagering requirements, instant payouts, and no minimum withdraws. Hey, I just won. Woo-hoo. Feel the fun. Play. Play.

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