The Personal Finance Podcast - I have $1 Million Should I Sell Stocks and Go ALL IN on Index Funds

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to discuss about I have $1 million, should I sell stocks or go all in on index funds?  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.  Car buying Calculator 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 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/ Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate going to fundrise.com/pfp Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Go to joindeleteme.com/pfp20 for 20% off! Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Go to Acorns.com/pfp and start automating your investments and get a $5 bonus today!  Links Mentioned in This Episode:  Fund Overlap tool 12 Amazon Scams You Need to Watch Out For! 7 Financial Scams to Watch Out for in 2024 The 1-3-6 Method For Building & Managing Your Emergency Fund 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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If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.co slash newsletter and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now, today we have five of your questions that we are going to be going through and we're going to give you some updates today as well. So the first question is, should I ditch my individual stocks and go all in on index funds. This is someone who has a million dollar portfolio and they're trying to answer that question. Number two, is emergency fund versus company stock?

What's the smartest way to pay for a big expense? Number three, this person is sitting in cash and they want to know where they should invest for maximum growth and flexibility. We're going to go through the scam of the week after that question. Then we're going to go through I have a high income, but too much debt. Should I sell my ESPP to wipe it all out? And then number five is move now or wait. There's a tough tradeoff between their family, their salary, and their financial security. That's a tougher question to answer, but we're going to do our best to get into it. So we have an action-packed episode here.

So without further ado, let's get into it. All right. Question one is my husband is 49 and I am 47 and we have two kids 18 and 16. Our investment accounts are valued at $1.05 million in our mix of a brokerage account, IRAs, husband is self-employed, it has a SEP, and I have a Roth, and he has an IRA rollover from a previous job, 403B, and an UTMA for each kid, plus a Roth for the 18-year-old. Both kids have 529s that are currently or will cover college. The value of the 529s is not included in the 1.05 million.

And the majority of these assets are invested in V-O-O-Q-Q-Q-Q-V-I-I-X, and about a third invested in a few stocks, Home Depot, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon. Should we sell the individual stocks and put that money in V-O-O-O? Or just not contribute any more into individual stocks and leave what we have left in the portfolio? So this is a fantastic question. And one thing that I want to say, first of all, is congratulations, because this is absolutely amazing. The wealth that you have built thus far, first of all, you have a million-dollar portfolio, which is an amazing milestone to hit. people never hit that milestone throughout their entire life. And the other amazing part is you're not even including the 529s in here. So amazing that you have enough money in the 529 accounts so that your

kids do not have to go in debt for college. So absolutely amazing. That is incredible that you have done that so far. So congratulations. That is great. Now let's look at your current situation. So you have a million dollars invested in a bunch of different retirement accounts, UTMA, and some other accounts there. Now, most of your investments are in VOO, which is the S&P 500 ETF for those that are listening. QQQQ, which is the NASDAQ-100 ETF, which is the 100 biggest stocks in the stock market. The IIX, which is the S&P 500 and 403B. So that's typically one that comes with a lot of different government agency plans, which are strong and diversified funds. And then about one third of your investments are an individual stock. So Home Depot, Google, Apple,

Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon. So here's a lot of things that are happening here. I can't tell you exactly what to do because this is not a show that gives financial advice. But what I can do is tell you how I would think about this. Number one is a lot of these funds actually overlap. So if you go to, there's something called the fund overlap tool. And let me look at the exact URL for you here. Because on the fund overlap tool, this is one that we talk about a lot. We talk about this in index fund pro a lot too. But with the fund, Overlap tool. If you go to the ETF Research Center, we'll try to link this up down below in the show notes too. But the ETF Research Center has something called the fund overlap tool. So what you can do

is you can put in something like QQQ, let's do this right now, and VO, okay? And we're going to look at the fund overlap on QQQQ and VO. So if you look at that fund overlap, 84% of QQQ's holdings are also in VO. Whereas only 17% of VO's holdings. holdings are also in QQQ. So this actually has a 48% fund overlap between those two funds. Now, what that tells you is that, you know, how much of this fund is overlapping where I'm just being redundant here? Am I being redundant in this situation? Whereas anything above a 50% is where you really want to analyze it. If it gets up to 80% of the overlap by weight, that's where you really want to look further into that. So the first research you can do is some of the overlap.

Now, one thing you could look at, though, is if you look at, for example, QQQQ, and it's top 10 holdings. It is mostly the stocks that you hold. So it's Apple, Amazon, Costco, Netflix, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, T-Mobile, Cisco systems. Those are the top holdings by weight in QQQ. And if you look at VOO, the top 10 holdings are Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, meta, Tesla, Google, Broadcom, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway. And so what's happening here is that most of these investments that you hold, whether it's the single stocks, and Home Depot is usually pretty close because I saw you you own Home Depot too. Home Depot is pretty close in the top, usually like in the top 25. So when you own all of these stocks, really you just have a bunch of overlap going on here in terms of

all those companies are already owned inside a VOO, and you also own them individually. And so the question you have to ask yourself is, do I want to continue owning these individual stocks? And am I willing to make sure I stay on top of these individual stocks to understand, hey, when their earnings calls come out, what's happening? Am I willing to kind of read through some of their financial statements? Is this something that I'm going to make sure that I stay on top of the news to know what's going on in each of those individual stocks. The risk with individual stocks is that if one of them starts to underperform, you could lose at whatever net worth or percentage of your portfolio you have in there. And if you're not willing to do the work to kind of stay on top of it, that's the question.

Secondly, you need to have a plan in place. So like for me, for example, I am very bad at predicting the market. I am not good at, you know, when I have individual stocks, if I sell them, it's always too early, and it's just one of those things that I typically, all my individual stocks, I buy them with the intent of holding them long term, meaning I'm going to hold them for the next 30, 40, 50 years. So I buy companies that I think will have an impact for that time frame. Can you be wrong? Absolutely. It could be a top 10 holding in the S&P 500 and start to fall down the list pretty quickly as time goes on. But I think, you know, if you like holding individual stocks. If you enjoy, you know, the process of owning individual stocks, I enjoy owning some

individual stocks. I like owning some as a percentage of my portfolio. So if that's something that you enjoy as well, there's nothing wrong with keeping and holding those individual stocks. But if you want to simplify your portfolio, you can absolutely do that and just simplify into index funds. That's kind of the questions that you have to ask yourself up front, though, is am I willing to think through this? My risk is a little bit higher with individual stocks. My diversification is really not that different because I hold all of these in V-O-O. And so for you specifically, that could be the considerations. Now, another big one, and this is a huge one, is considering the tax situation. If these are in your Roth IRA and you want to sell them and move them, you're not going to pay taxes

on that money. That's the beautiful thing about the Roth IRA. If these are in a taxable brokerage and you decide to sell these and you want to move them over to VO or vice versa, then you're going to have a tax event that happens that you're going to have to make sure that you're going to have to make sure that you pay taxes on. So just thinking through that option as well, you got to make sure you understand the tax situation. If it's in a certain retirement account, you may be okay, but if it's not, that's the last consideration that I would make. So what you can do is if going forward, you're like, I don't want to own these individual stocks anymore. You do have those three options. One is you can just continue to buy index funds and not continue to buy those individual

stocks. That's one option that you can think through in research if you want to do that so you don't have that taxable event. But secondly, is you can also move them over if it's inside of a Roth or something like that and you don't care. So whichever way you decide, it's really not going to make a huge, huge impact, but the individual stocks do hold higher risk if one of those stocks starts to go down or if something is going to happen, whereas a basket of stocks is just more diversified and holds less risk. And so that's the way I look at all of these. But again, if you enjoy holding some individual stocks, you like just the research process of that. If you like to listen to earning call sometimes, be a part of that whole process. I get it. I like it too for certain

things. But if you want a more simplified portfolio, if you want to make sure your portfolio is easier manage as you start to progress past this million dollar mark, which again, congratulations. That is amazing. Then maybe you want to simplify it more. And index funds to me are just the simple format to do that. But that's the way I would think about it. I would do a little research into fund overlap. I would kind of see how much of these are overlapping. What are the top holdings by weight? And another way you can also do this is plugging this into a free tool called Portfolio Visualizer. That tool is pretty cool and can help you long term in terms of just kind of seeing your portfolios and how much by weight they hold of individual investments.

So I like that tool a lot too. And that's kind of how I think about this. So you're really well diversified already, but a lot of these funds are overlapping. You're going to have a lot of the same companies within those funds, but you're doing a great job. And I think that is amazing how you have this set up for your kids. and how you've built wealth thus far. The cool part is you're in your 40s now, and you're going to be in the part where it's really going to start to grow now. As you start to see this compound, you're going to see a huge, huge shift where you could get to your next

million in like a quarter of the time that it took you to even get to that first million. It's going to be really fast what happens next. So really excited for your progress there. And let me know if you have any other questions or you want us to dive deeper. The next question is, Andrew, I listened to a lot of financial podcasts while walking my dog. Yours is by far the best, most practical Well, thank you so much. I truly appreciate the kind words. And I love your take on most everything you cover as it pertains to my situation. I can't remember hearing anything to guide me with the question of how to pay for a large expense. I have some work on the house that is needed, and I got an interest-free loan for six months. I have the cash to cover in my emergency fund, which has three

months expenses. I also have $30,000 in stock that my company gave as a bonus a few years ago. Should I use the emergency fund to replenish that over the course of the next year? or cash in some of that stock to cover it. I value your opinion and you always offer a smart solution. Thanks. So this is really, really good question. And it's a tough question to answer without knowing kind of the rest of your financial situation. But we'll talk through kind of your options and I will kind of see what we think through. So option one is going to be the emergency fund and using your emergency fund to pay for this expense. Option two, though, is going to be utilizing your stock and your company stock options. So the first question I guess I would have is obviously the repair on this house or,

or the improve, maybe it's an improvement, I don't know, but the repair in this house is most likely needed. So you most likely need to do this. And I do like the idea of getting a six-month interest-free loan, as long as you plan on kind of paying that back before the interest rate hits. My second question, though, is maybe what is the interest rate kind of when that loan comes through and when it hits in the future? You can also look into, if it's a low-interest loan, it may be something where you don't have to pay it back immediately. But if it's a high-interest loan, then obviously anything above a 6% interest rate, we want to get rid of. Now, here's how I would think about this. is you have six months to try to save some cash up in order to pay a portion of this loan. So what I would

do first is start to get some cash together to start to pay back over the course of six months as much as you possibly can. Maybe it's only a couple thousand bucks. Maybe it's $6,000, maybe it's $10,000. Maybe it's $15. I don't know how much you make. But I would first think through that process. Maybe it's only $3,000 to $5,000. It doesn't matter what the final number is, but trying to get as much as you possibly can towards that loan to pay down. So your second decision becomes easier. So you have this six months runway, and so you could kind of start to look at this. But then secondly, let's look at these two options. Number one is your emergency fund. Now, your emergency fund is in place in order to protect you against life. So it's there to protect

you so that you do not have any other issues in life. And so that three months there is a good spot to be in so that you can continue to invest. And then I want you to kind of grow that three months over time once all of this situation is resolved. So utilizing your emergency fund would be a good solution if this was an emergency, meaning if this repair needed to be done. Maybe you need a new roof, for example, and it's going to cause issues with your house. If you do not need a new roof, then you can use your emergency fund for that situation. That's a great use of funds for an emergency fund. Or maybe you need a new air conditioner.

Yours is about to go out and summertime's coming down the line and you live in a hot climate and so you need that new AC. And so that's one of the repairs that you're doing to the house. Those are very reasonable reasons to utilize an emergency fund. In fact, most people don't want to use their emergency fund, but it's there for emergencies. So that's the first situation, is you can use it for emergency situations. I like to preserve mine in case I need it if I have other options. So let's look at your second option here.

Your second option is to go and utilize company stock options. I have questions on that. First is, do you believe in the company long term? Like, sure, you work there, but do you believe in the company in a stock market sense? Like, is this a company that is a really great company, that long term? Like, do you work for Apple or Amazon or Google and you think this stock is going to go up long term more and more every single year? Or do you work for a smaller company?

You're not really sure what direction you're going to go in. They tell you internally everything is great, but do you actually think that that stop is going to be performing well long term? Because if not, then the way I see this is it's just a forced emergency fund and you can utilize those funds for that. But you have to do your research into what you think that stock is going to do long term. And then the second question is like, what are your other investments? Do you have investments for your future?

in other spots. If so, then that's great. You could probably utilize this one if it's just extra funds that you have and it was just a bonus that was given to you. I would just treat that as cash that was given to you and you can utilize those funds to pay that down. But to minimize the amount that you have to use, I would probably save up as much cash as possible over the course of the next six months. Then my second option, if I do not believe in the company going forward or if it's not some huge company that I think is going to be a sure thing, then what I would do is probably consider the stock options if I was in your shoes. Now, this is not financial advice, but it's just me saying, if I was in your shoes, that's what I would do. And then thirdly, I would consider the

emergency fund. But I would also not hesitate to utilize the emergency fund if it's for an emergency. If it's a roof thing, like you have to put a brand new roof on or if there's some repairs that you're doing, that is definitely one thing that I would consider as well. If it's remodeling like a kitchen or something like that, then I'd probably be less likely to use the emergency fund because it's not a true emergency. And so we just got to think through what that remodel is. And so we just got to think through what that remodel is, and then we can kind of go from there. So this is a great question, though, and kind of how I would think through this process. The other option, though, is if you do use your emergency fund, you could use it over the course of the next six months, you could try to

replenish it as much as possible and try to build up that emergency fund and then use some of the funds when you get closer to the six month mark and go through that process. But I would use that six month interest-free period since you've already got the loan. I would use that as at least a runway to give you some more options over the course the next six months. And then from there, then you can kind of decide exactly what you want to do. So great, great question. Hope this helps you. But preserving your safety net is a great option and then utilizing those stock options. If you don't believe long term in the company. And if you do, then you can kind of consider, you know, what that situation looks like. You can also do a hybrid approach

would be the third option. Probably not exactly what I would do. But you could do a hybrid approach if you believe in both. So that's how I would think about that. And from there, then I would kind of make my decision. And if I was in your shoes, it'd probably be company stock options if I don't believe in them. One, I would wait to six months, then company stock options, then emergency fund. Just because your emergency fund is at that three months, it's probably going to take some time to build a backup.

So six months, get as much cash ready for it, then go to stock options, then emergency fund is my thought process personally, but you've got to weigh out the options for your personal situation. So awesome question. And congrats on being in this position where you have some options there so you don't have to go into debt. but the last thing I would do, again, is going to debt. So awesome, awesome question.

Thank you so much for sending it in. And if you have any other questions, please send them over. All right. So in this segment, I want to talk about a new scam that is currently going around right now. And I had a friend who this happened to recently who got a text message in that said, hey, you are way backdated on your tolls. You have a bunch of tolls that you have not paid. And you need to go ahead and pay those by tomorrow.

Otherwise, you're going to have a late fee. And so my friend, click the link. They went into the link and it looked just like the state's website that, you know, where you go and pay toll. So like in the state of Florida, for example, you know, you go through the toll booths and now the toll booths don't have gates anymore where you pay a person. You just kind of drive through. They take your license plate number and it is a really, really quick process. And so because of that, people, you know, start to rack up these toll bills that cost X amount

of dollars every single month if you drive on highways that have tolls. And so when that happens, you know, you'll get a letter in the mail that tells you, hey, you got to pay this toll in order to be able to be up to date and not get any late fees. And so my friend got this text message. This text message came through and said, hey, you owe on these tolls. Please pay this by tomorrow. Otherwise, you're going to have a late fee. And that's one of those bills.

Like a lot of people just kind of put to the waste side when they get it in the mail. And so you got to make sure that you are up to date on those a lot of times. And so people forget and they have to go in and get this going. So my friend clicks the link. It looks just like the state website, how it normally does. but something seemed a little off, and they realized pretty quickly and did a quick Google search and realized this is a scam that is going on right now, where there are text messages coming to people that look like government agencies saying, hey, you got to pay this bill or this fine, and if you

don't pay it by tomorrow, you're going to have late fees. And so they create this sense of urgency making you think you have to pay this. And so when you make this payment, all of a sudden they have your credit card information, they have some of your personal information, they have your address, and this will always complete the puzzle of usually what they're looking for. They're usually looking for the rest of your information so that they can start scamming you, opening loans in your name, accounts in your name, but also they have your credit card information and they can steal money from you as well. And so this is a huge scam that has been going around the country and it's been across the country

and I started to read some articles through this on how many millions of dollars have already been stolen from this specific scam. So I want all of you to make sure that if any messages come through, you understand where it came from and maybe you just log into your, if you get a toll message, for example, you log into your account online, make sure it is actually true and not just someone trying to scam you. Now, how do they get your information to even send you this text message? It's because of data brokers. So there's data brokers out there who have your name on lists who these scammers can go buy your information with your phone number, maybe it's your address, maybe it's some other stuff,

and they'll be able to access your information. And so to get your information removed from these data brokers. You can go to each one individually and you can ask to have your information removed, or you can just have a service remove it for you, which is exactly what I do. I use a service called delete me. And what delete me does is they remove your personal information from these data brokers so that you can get off of these lists. So when I initially did it and I signed up for delete me, they removed my name from thousands of different data brokers. And so it's something that I truly, truly believe in. And it's a really low cost service for what they do. They save you hours and hours every single month, and they will continuously remove your personal information from these data

brokers throughout the year. So if you want to save time, money, energy, and be less susceptible to these scammers, go to join delete me.com slash pfp, and they will be able to help you remove your personal information. I did it for myself. I did it for my wife. I'm having my family members do it now because everybody needs to get their personal information removed and keep their personal information off the internet. We don't need it on the internet. And so that's something where for sure or getting your information removed is going to be the key. So a lot of episodes and a lot of our Q&A episodes for sure we have segments talking about different scams going on. Last episode, we just talked about the scam of packages being delivered to your house where you have no

idea where they came from. You scan a QR code and they steal your information as well. So make sure you check that one out if you haven't heard it. But every Q&A we go through and talk through some of these scams. And that's another one to watch out for. These things are developing like crazy. And I'm seeing more and more of them. So that's why we talk about them. Let's jump in to the next question. All right, the next question is, I have a high-yield savings account that I have a large lump sum of money in, and I have no clue what to invest in. Should it be a Roth IRA or mutual funds or index funds or something shorter? We anticipate moving or adding to our current house and do not know if it's better to get a construction loan or pay cash or a mixture of both. The only thing we have

invested is my 401k and my husband's 401k and a small SEP IRA. How do we diversify our investments or invest in different places to maximize growth. Our current plan had only about $6,000 in interest from the high-yield savings plan through Discover. Okay, so this is a wonderful, wonderful question. And really, what you need to be doing is kind of developing an investment plan. Now, Index Fund Pro will actually teach you exactly how to do this kind of step by step. So if you've never checked that out, that's our course teaching you how to invest in index funds in ETF. So if you go to mastermoney.com slash courses, it takes you through this process.

But I'm going to give you kind of a broad thought process on how to do this. because what you really want to do is first figure out when you're going to need this money, how much you're going to need for the home addition. And that's going to be one big one that you definitely want to make sure that you have enough saved aside for that. And typically, that money I would keep in cash. So that would be money that is for a specific purpose. And if you have money set aside for a specific purpose, I always keep that in cash. I don't invest it so that I don't get my investments cut in half if there's a recession or something like that. And so if you have money set aside for that additional dwelling unit, then making sure you have that in cash

set aside is the best option. Now, if you are thinking, like, should I get a construction loan or should I pay for it in cash, you can look at either option. A lot of times construction loans are going to have higher interest rates. And so what you can do is if you want to get the loan short term, you can get a construction loan, have the additional dwelling unit built. And then you can either refinance on the back end and refinance the property so that you're going to have a larger mortgage, but you can refinance for whatever the value of the property is and just making sure that you can afford that new payment. That's option one is to set that up if you can get a low enough interest rate. The interest rate needs to be below a 6% interest rate in order for that to even make sense when you

refinance. So when you are setting up the construction loan, the construction loan's probably going to be pretty high. It can be anywhere from 8% all the way up to I've seen them 15, 16% before. And so it's going to be really high, but it's going to be a short-term loan. Once the construction is complete and you have that additional dwelling unit, then you can refinance the entire house, get that lower rate, but the rate needs to be low enough to kind of make sense and not mess up your current rate. So if you have like a 1 to 2% current rate, then I wouldn't do this. But if you have a current rate that is a little bit higher, then you could consider refinancing into that lower rate.

Another option is to utilize something like a HELOC if you wanted to go that route for that additional dwelling unit. If you did not want to utilize this cash because you wanted to grow it for investments in wealth building, then you can utilize something like a HELOC to build that. to build that additional dwelling units. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think, you know, as long as the interest rates are okay, you can definitely utilize a HELOC. So that's the first way I would think about this. Secondly, though, is to build out your investment plan, what I would consider here is I would definitely consider, you know, figuring out, hey, what's my time horizon? How long

do I have and what do I want to do with this money? So if you have a longer term time horizon, you can start to build out a plan where I would go step by step through growing my wealth. So first, the way we talk about this is we look at the Roth IRA as a great option for a lot of folks to be able to grow their wealth tax-free. The way that the Roth IRA works is you put money in that has already been taxed from your paycheck. The money grows tax-free and you can pull the money out tax-free. So that's a great option to look into to add to this portfolio since you already got the 401Ks. I would increase contributions to the 401Ks if you can as well and then start to invest

in areas that you're comfortable with. Index funds and ETFs are a great place to start looking in research. into that is my favorite place where most of my portfolio is and you just want to have a balanced portfolio. And so looking into, you know, how you want to construct that portfolio can be something that I think makes a ton of sense. So this would be, you know, something like having maybe a U.S. stock. Maybe you want an international stock. I don't invest much in international stocks because I think the U.S. stocks have enough international business, but some people say you need to have international stocks and then maybe having some bonds in there as well if you want to reduce the volatility.

And so putting together your portfolio is going to be really important. So we have some YouTube videos if you want to check these out too. We talk about the Warren Buffett portfolio is one that you can look into. We talk about the three fund portfolio. And we have some other two fund portfolios that we talk through. If you go to Andergen Kola, just Google my name. We have some YouTube videos on some of those. And we also break down a lot of like index funds and ETFs in those videos and why I like them. So that's going to be another one that you could definitely check out if you're interested. And then putting together that financial plan is just making sure you understand your time horizon. You consistently invest in some of those accounts so you can grow your money over time and you can build wealth that

way. Now secondly, those you need to maintain and keep some of this cash for an emergency fund. So if you don't have an emergency fund in place, you need to have at least six months of expenses is our minimum baseline what we talk about. And so putting that into your high yield savings account and keeping it there is a great option. And so that needs to come first. And then once you get to at least three months of expenses, then you can start investing and growing your wealth that way. So if you haven't heard us talk about the emergency fund, we have something called the 136 method. That is an episode that will kind of help you through that process too on exactly how to do that. But you are amazing, amazing progress here. And if you have a large amount in a high yield savings account,

you can do a lot of things that are going to help you build wealth. What I wouldn't do is hoard all the cash in the high yield savings account outside of the emergency fund. So the emergency fund and the additional dwelling unit fund, those two I would keep in the high yield savings count. And then everything else, I would start to move over to things that can actually help you grow your money. Because if you don't invest your money, you're never going to be able to retire. So we want to make sure we are working to grow our money over time. This is a very, very powerful way to build wealth long term. So again, I would look at maybe contributing to some Roths and researching those, maybe contributing more to the 401k. And then the SEP IRA, if your husband still

utilizes that. And then beyond that, then you can start to contribute to brokerage accounts and or HSAs, those types of accounts as well. So really, really good stuff. You are honestly on a great track here. a lot of opportunity to grow your wealth over time. And this is a wonderful question. So thank you so much for sending it in. And congrats so far on your wealth building journey. 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 about more this spring, making sure the safety net we have in place actually matches the life

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All right. The next question. I am 26 years old and have been in sales for three and a half years. I feel I do well for someone at my age, making between $125,000 a year to $1,500,000. $50,000 here. Amazing. That is a great job. I have been contributing 10% of each paycheck towards my ESP, my employee stock purchase plan that has an unrealized value of about 50,000 bucks. My savings account is around $1,000 and checking is usually around $500 at the end of every month after bills and living expenses. I'll be the first to admit I spend too much money on things I don't need, never act off about $7,000 worth of credit card debt. On top of that, I have about $35,000 of student

loans left and about 15,000 left until my car is paid off. If you were me, knowing I'd like to purchase a house ASAP, would you take the money out of the ESPP portfolio and pay down debt or continue to make monthly payments until all debt is paid off? Happy to share more if it would be helpful and look forward to hearing more. All right, so there's a lot of things happening here. And I hope you can take this because I'm going to be pretty real here in this scenario. So from based on what I know about you here is you have a really high income and what we're looking at here is we're racking up credit card debt, which should not be happening. So number one is your income is too high to be racking up this credit card debt. You know that. You've said it

here, which I appreciate you sitting in this question because this is a really, really good question. I think since you're in sales and you're probably a high performer, you're going to be willing to kind of hear this. But what we're looking at here is we are in a situation that is not a good financial foundation whatsoever. And you have the $50,000 that's only going to the ESPP, but really all of your value in every dollar that you're putting towards investments, unless you have investments other places and maybe that was just left out. But if this is the entire financial picture, then we are in a risky scenario because your job is associated with one company and all of your investments are also associated with that company. And so first of all, just making sure that you kind of do some

research and diversifying this investment is going to be really, really important. But secondly, we have zero financial foundation at all within our personal finances, meaning that we have no emergency fund in place and we have nothing set up in order to make sure that we can actually pay down this debt. So here's what I would suggest is first we need to make sure that we get rid of that credit card debt. The interest rate is way too high on credit cards to even carry any balance whatsoever. So yes, should some of this go towards the credit card debt, the credit card debt, boom, should be wiped out immediately. That's $7,000 needs to be wiped off. And using the ESPP to do that is 100% a yes from me in terms of how I would think about this. Now, you can

kind of do your research if you want to talk to some professionals. Definitely go for it, but that high interest debt needs to be eliminated immediately. That is one for sure. Secondly, is you're talking about you want to buy a house ASAP. We're not ready to buy a house yet. The way I look at this scenario is first, you need to build up that emergency fund. So the only way and the only reason why we tell people that they can buy a house is if you have a financial foundation set up. So this is six months of expenses in cash need to be saved in an emergency fund and you need to have some money going towards investments already before you can start to buy a house. The reason for this is because buying a house is not a great asset, meaning that if you go run total cost of ownership of a house,

you're going to see houses are going to appreciate over the course of the next year. You know, people have $400,000 in equity, and it's a great tool in your tool belt. But it is not a huge wealth building machine, meaning that when you go and buy a house, you need to run total cost of ownership. What a lot of people do is they make the mistake of not running the numbers on a house. So they will go out and they will purchase a home and instead of running the numbers on the biggest financial decision they ever make, they just go and buy the house. Right now, in this scenario, I would not buy a house until you get your financial house in order. So debt needs to go in terms of credit card debt first, okay? And then we need to build up the emergency fund immediately with six months of expenses in an emergency fund in a high yield savings account in cash.

Now you need to make sure the emergency fund does not get touched unless you actually have a financial emergency because right now we're spending extra dollars on a credit card. So we're going to need to cut back to spending some in order to make sure that we can start to have a sustainable lifestyle. You have a high income. You can definitely do this. There are areas you can cut. We got to reduce that spending in order to make sure that we are in a spot that's going to help us in the future. Because if we keep down this path, you're going to live paycheck to paycheck forever. So we just got to make sure that we are making these quick decisions. So first, goal number one, wipe out that credit card. Goal number two, six months in an emergency fund. Goal number three is let's take a look at this debt. So you have $35,000 left on student loan debt and $15,000 is left on your car before is paid off. Both of those, I would prioritize investing before those unless they are high interest debt. So I want to know what the interest rate on that debt is. If it's a 7 or 8% interest rate, I think we need to make sure that we are looking at paying those down a little quicker.

The ESPP could be an option for that for sure, but we've got to make sure that we are paying some of that debt down if it's a high interest rate. So like if you have a car loan and you're at a 10% interest rate, for example, that's going to be one that I want paid down, you know, as fast as possible. Whereas if you have a five or four or three percent interest rate, I'd be less likely to care about that paying it off as quick as possible. You can if it bothers you, but I'd be less likely to care about that as much as some of these other things. Credit card debt, yes, but those can come a little later. So option three is look at the interest rates. If it's a high interest debt and you think above a 6% interest rate, then let's get a little more aggressive on paying that down first. and if it's not, then we can go to the next step. Then once you have money going towards investments

automatically every month, outside of just your ESPP, I would try to diversify those investments in other areas. Once you are doing that, then we can consider buying a house. So I know you want to buy a house ASAP, but honestly, it's just not the time the way that this is currently set up. But you have the income to make a quick shift and have a big, big change that could really, really impact your bottom line and honestly make a big difference. So what I would do is kind of follow. through the on those steps first and then from there then we can kind of look at buying a house as time goes on and i really really appreciate you sending in this question i'm saying all this out of love but we're not ready to buy a house until we we can actually get our financial house in order first so

awesome awesome stuff and amazing that you learned how to increase your income at that level that is the hardest step now we just have to get the rest of it in order which i know you can so thank you so much for sending that in and if you have any other questions please let me know all right the last question. My wife and I luckily bought a small home at the perfect time coming out of college in 2021. Our interest rate is 2.99%. And the monthly mortgage payment, including everything, is $1,500. I currently make $99,000 a year and our current house to debt income ratio is about 15%. Incredible. That is a great home to income debt ratio, which I know is really low. But when first coming out of college, my salary was $60,000. And our house debt to income ratio was 34%. And we felt like we have

no breathing room in our budget during that time. We've always saved fairly aggressively for retirement, and I max out my employer contribution. We currently save $1,000 a month specifically for buying a new house, and we do not have any at all frivolous spending. And to reduce any of our current expenses would be hard. Again, we really don't have any frivolous spending and save substantially. Side note, I just had my annual review, and my salary will jump to $114,000 next month, and we plan to increase the house savings amount to $2,000 a month. is our dilemma. First of all, before I get into your dilemma, awesome job thus far. You're increasing your income every single year. You are in a great spot. And I love just the way that you even think

about money, where you are saving a good portion of it and you're making a big, big impact to your bottom line. Our dilemma is this. We don't like where we live and we want to move closer to family. I've been applying to jobs and I have been interviewing with a company in a smaller job market and am cautiously optimistic I'll get an offer where the advertised salary range is $61,000 to $92,000. I'm applying what you've taught about salary negotiations, and those obviously haven't started yet, although in my initial screening interview, I did tell them that I currently make towards the high end of the range, and the higher the salary, the more ideal. The job is in the perfect spot for my family proximity. Our major concern is housing cost. For the houses in that area, buying or renting, that we'd want to live in,

our monthly cost is at a minimum $2,500. But most options are $3,000 a month. Hypothetically, if I to take this job and my salary was $92,000 to pay for the housing, we'd need to use about $1,500 that we currently pay, plus our current allotted savings amount of $1,000 a month just to barely meet the bare minimum of housing. And then we'd have nothing left over to save for a future house until I get a raise. We both want my wife to continue to stay at home with the kids and don't want her to enter the workforce. Okay, so if I get an offer and can't get the company to go higher than $92,000, I feel like we're down to three options. lower our standards in housing to get cheaper housing. Obviously, this doesn't appeal to us.

Okay. Sacrifice our budget to pay for the more expensive housing doesn't feel possible for our goals and for saving as well as our limited amount of unnecessary spending. Number three is wait in our current situation, save aggressively while searching for higher paying jobs. Is there any options we're missing out on here? So, okay, so this is a great, great question. And honestly, I love the depth that you went into on this one as well. Um, and I would prioritize these three options in a number of different ways. What I don't want anybody to ever do is I don't want them to sacrifice their entire life and their happiness just to optimize their money. Now, I know that you're not doing that now. And I know that that's not exactly what you're asking. But what we want to

think about here is for a lot of people, if you are unhappy with your housing situation, you hear me talk about, you know, I just talked about it in the last question. A house is not the best investment in the world, but it is an investment in lifestyle, meaning that the reasons why you're talking about buying a new house are the reasons why you should want to buy a house. It's not for an investment. This is more so because you want to change your lifestyle. You want to be closer to family and friends, probably you want to be in a nicer living situations. Those are all reasons to spend money because you're utilizing money as a tool to improve your life. Now, the question then becomes is there's a huge tradeoff in terms of you can't save for the future, which I don't know

if it is sacrificing your investments. I don't see that it is. It looks like you're saving for future housing. So it's not sacrificing your investments per se. It's more so sacrificing for future house saving. So there's a couple of things that you can look at here. Number one is lowering your housing standards. So the only time I would do that if you're lowering your housing standards, because it's not ideal to you. You're not going to be happy. Your spouse is probably not going to be happy. And so you're just going to be in a situation that you don't really want to be in. And let's get real. If we're in that situation, we want to get ourselves out of that as fast as we possibly can. And so in that scenario, if you lower your housing standards, the only way that I would

do that is if you're renting a house. So you can lower your standards where it's a situation that you can get out of it. You don't have to sell the house later on. You're just renting a house for the short term. Maybe you're spending, you know, $2,500 to $3,000 a month. Now, when you rent a house, the thing about that is you could spend a little more. You could get closer to that $3,000, which is going to be closer to the 30% of your income or you'd probably need to get to if you get to $2,000, you'd probably need to be at $2,700 per month or less. And so to get to that number, since it's a short-term solution, you could rent a house and kind of be on the higher end. See, I like my housing expenses to be below 30%, but I like them to be, for me specifically, just like how you're living right now, you're able to make some of this

financial progress because your housing expenses are so low. And so because they're low in comparison to your debt to income ratio, you're able to take a larger chunk to put it towards house savings and in addition to max out some of those retirement accounts. And so because of this, I think that lowering your housing standards, if you went that route, it would have to be in order to rent. That's where I would kind of go with that. Long term, you're just not going to be happy. And I don't really want you sacrificing your happiness day in and day out, the place that you rest your head every single night for money.

That's just not the thing that I would probably consider. But you can lower those options and then you lower those options until you get an increase in salary. That's kind of how I would think about that. Secondly, since you can't cut other expenses to pay for more expensive housing because you don't have frivolous spending, so there's really no room to cut, you'd be relying kind of on those future raises. And so you kind of lose out on financial flexibility if you need those future raises for the future housing. So you may feel stuck in a job. I don't want you to have the golden handcuffs to feel stuck in a job based on that. Option three is to stay put and save aggressively

while searching for higher paying jobs. Now, this is one that if you're okay, If it's okay to stay where you are currently and you're kind of getting by, you're going to get this raise coming up, you can increase the contributions towards another house by saving up that raise. If you can stay put for a little bit longer, meaning that this is just a patience game when it comes to this so that you can stay in your specific location and you can start to look for other jobs in that area. It may take you a little longer. Let's say, for example, it takes you another year. But you find another job that pays you closer to the amount that you're making now and or it's going to pay even more. It's going to pay you $130, maybe $140,000, depending on what you're doing.

If you can get that increase in salary and just be a little bit more patience, you can put yourself in a much better financial situation. Because if you get an offer at 92 and it really is stretching your budget, it's not really where you want to be, but then you wait a little bit longer, you find a better job that's going to be paying you even more in that specific situation. That's probably the route I would go where I would stay put. Since your interest rate is really low and you have this debt to income ratio at 15%. You have a lot of room here, meaning you are in a cash building machine right now that is allowing you to actually put yourself in this situation to even think through these options. So if you can even wait a little bit longer, maybe it's just a year

longer, and you set the goal of, okay, we're going to wait one more year. You and your spouse get together and say, are we on the same page with this? Can we wait another year so that I can look for additional jobs in this area that may pay more based on what my experience is and my expertise? And then what I would do is spend a lot of my time trying to network and trying to find jobs in that area that pay more. That way, you have the time to then make a decision that makes more sense. Because right now, the decisions that you have to make seem like, and this is just for me reading this, but right now, the decisions that you have to make seem like you have to rush to make the decision that is not the best for you. But what you could do is stay put short term over the course of the next year,

find a higher paying job. And then once that higher paying job is found, then you can kind of make a decision based on what that new salary is. That's how I would probably think about it. Now, if you cannot wait anymore and you've got to move to that area, I'd go the rental route. But I would try to be a little bit more patient in terms of how long I wait because you are in such a great housing situation in terms of, you know, the interest rate and your debt to income ratio. Now, option four, I'm going to give you one extra option that maybe you haven't thought of is that, and maybe this is impossible. But if you work in an office or something like that, then maybe you can also, try to see if you can keep your current job and move. You can ask them, hey, can I keep my,

I just had a friend who just did this. He moved from Connecticut down to Florida again. And, you know, he asked his current employer, hey, can I just keep my job here and I'll just work remotely? And they let him. And so that was one option that he had as well. So maybe you can do something like that. But a second alternative is, but this one, it just doesn't guarantee is that you take the lower paying job in the short run. You rent while you have that lower paying job and then you try to find the higher paying job while you are in the lower paying job. Now, the only thing is you're going to be job hopping within the course of possibly a year, which doesn't look amazing on a resume sometimes. But, you know, this is one of those things where

if you really need to get out quickly and you really have that urgency to get out, that is another option is where you could take the lower paying job. It's just not guaranteed that you're going to find the higher paying job. And I really like guaranteed things for me specifically. I'm just risk averse when it comes to that kind of stuff. So that's another option is you can move, you could rent, you could take the $92,000 per year job, and then you can go out and try to find a higher paying job while living in the location that you like. So those are the options that I also see. The ones I wouldn't take probably are to try to save more. It doesn't sound like you can cutting up those other expenses. And then also just kind of lowering your housing standards. You're not going to be happy with that. And so overall, I think probably either staying put and saving aggressively or finding a hybrid option of a way for you to either remotely keep that job and move. and or the third option is to see if you can rent for the short term if you need to leave, and then go try to find a higher paying job while you're renting. So those are the options that I see. And if you have any other questions on this, thank you so much for sending this question. And you're

doing an amazing job at building wealth. And I really appreciate you sending this in. But if you have any other questions on that, please let me know and I can expand even further. And thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. We truly appreciate each and every single one of you being here. If you guys have any questions again, make sure you join the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.co slash newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on all the socials at MasterMoney Co. And if you're getting value to this episode, consider sharing with a family member or friend. That is the greatest gift that you can give us sharing these episodes with someone else. So thank you guys so much for being here and we'll see you on the next episode.

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