The Personal Finance Podcast - The EXACT Money Plan for Your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s (Step-by-Step Blueprint)

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Join the Free Master Your Money Workshop on January 14, 2026 here!   Join the community built to help you master your money, stay accountable, and reach financial freedom. 👉 Join Master Money Academy today! In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, Andrew reveals the exact money plan for every decade—your 20s are about building the floor by controlling cash flow and starting to invest, your 30s focus on building the engine with a high savings rate and maximizing tax-advantaged accounts, your 40s build the moat through tax strategy and defining your FI number, and your 50s transition to the exit by shifting from accumulation to financial independence. Listen to The Business Show here. Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Partner Deals Go to http://acorns.com/pfp and start automating your investments and get a $5 bonus today! Get 50% Off Monarch, the all-in-one financial tool at www.monarch.com/PFP Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbilt.com/PFP  Go to http://policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at http://Indeed.com/personalfinance DeleteMe: Go to https://joindeleteme.com/PFP20/ and Use Promo Code PFP for 20% off!   Resources Mentioned Get the free Automate Your Money checklist here  Download the Wealth Builders Matrix here Link of the Episode Mentioned: The 1-3-6 Method For Building & Managing Your Emergency Fund How to Automate Your Finances (Money on Autopilot!)  The Insane Cost Of Childcare and Ways to Help Reduce That Cost!  Connect With Andrew on Social Media: Instagram TikTok Twitter Master Money Website Master Money Youtube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, the exact money plan for your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. Up everybody and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of MasterMoney.com. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to give you a step-by-step blueprint on how to build wealth by age. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Mastermoney newsletter by going to Mastermoney.com slash newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or whatever podcast player,

you love listening to this podcast on. And if you want to hop out the show, consider leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now today, we're going to be diving into a step-by-step blueprint for you to be able to build wealth by age. So in the last episode, we talked about how to set up your money goals and how to begin setting money goals. In today's episode, we're going to be diving into the step-by-step blueprint. Now, the purpose of this episode is that you can build on each of these things by decade. But if you haven't completed some of the things in the 20s or the 30s and you're in your 40s, then make sure you do those steps first prior to jumping into your own age range.

So this is going to set up for a lot of folks out there where if you follow these steps, you're going to build a tremendous amount of wealth. And in fact, you're going to be way better off than 99% of people out there. That is the entire goal. And so as we go through this, I want you to think through, well, have I accomplished this yet? Or do I need to make sure that I am doing these exact things? Because my goal is to give you the blueprint. My goal is to bring you as much value as we possibly can on this podcast.

And so we're trying to give you that blueprint as we go through this. Now, one thing I want you to note is when you are building wealth, we have five different stages that we talk about here where I want you to consider these five stages when you're thinking about wealth building. Stage one is stability. And so up front, we want you to just get your finances stable. We want you to feel comfortable with your money where you're not running around like a chicken with your head cut off, worrying and rushing and trying to think through, well, what do I need to do next? If you've been a type of person who has lived paycheck to paycheck your entire life, or if you're the type of person that makes a low salary, then we need to get to

stability as fast as we possibly can. So in that stability phase, we're going to be looking at things like your emergency fund, making sure there's no chaos within your financial life. My goal here, and if you haven't noticed, I talk about this a lot, is reducing your stress and anxiety around money. Why? Because you can make more informed decisions. You can make calmer decisions, and you can make better decisions overall. And so we're going to reduce and remove chaos in the stability stage. That is our entire goal. And then we're going to look at cash flow control. Because if you can control your cash flow, you have an emergency fund in place, then all of a sudden, stress just melts away because you are monitoring your spending and you know where those dollars are going.

Now, stage two is momentum. So now that we've got the stability there, we're stable with our finances, now all of a sudden it's time to build up momentum. This is where we're going to think about retirement accounts. This is where we're going to think about consistent investing. And this is where we're also going to make sure that we have our habits locked in. So in the last episode, we taught you how to master your money goals. And so making sure that you have these habits locked in is going to be very, very important so that you can start to invest consistently, starting to see your money grow over time and looking at things that are going to help you with your tax situation. So things like retirement accounts, that's going to be a big, big deal. Now, stage three is acceleration. And in

acceleration, we're going to do a number of different things. So we've got our foundation set up, and we have got that stability set up where we are getting the ball rolling. We are starting to build momentum by investing our dollars and getting them to grow because our money can work so much harder than we ever could. And now we're thinking through acceleration. Now, in acceleration, we're going to do things like focus on increasing our savings rate and focus on increasing our income so that we can invest more dollars into the markets. So we can watch that money grow. So we can watch our money compound over that time frame. We're going to be looking at things like tax optimization to make sure that we know where our dollars are going and how we can save more

and give less to Uncle Sam or get less to the government of where you live. And so this is going to be a thing that is really, really important for people who are looking to accelerate their path to wealth is understanding these different areas. Because once you have this locked in and you're increasing your income and you're taking a bigger chunk and putting it towards those investments, you're going to see how much faster you can start to accelerate your path to wealth. Have you ever seen those people who are on Instagram or TikTok and they're talking about their income and all of a sudden their income starts to go up over time. And you can see their net worth

grows over time because they actually know how to manage their money. And so when we have this stability phase and we have this momentum phase, those two phases are making sure that you can actually handle the money that's coming in. Once you know that you can handle your money, you're putting it in the right places, then we can start to accelerate that money and start to grow your wealth over time. Now, stage four is one of my favorites because we can look at independence. And our entire goal is to make work optional. And so we've started to accelerate our path to wealth. We now have the opportunity to focus on making work optional by looking at our retirement number and looking at some of these other areas. We want some income flexibility where

we can start to make income from different parts or different businesses that we may have or just different income streams that are available there. We're not relying on just one income anymore. We're looking at the market. We maybe have some rental properties. We maybe have some notes in place or some investments that we have set up. And so we have money coming in from all directions. And that is a really cool place to be. And then you have that portfolio income available to you where a lot of us, if you wanted this simple path to wealth,

it's just building up a portfolio that's large enough so that it can pay down enough at the 4% rule to be able to fund your lifestyle. And so that's where independence comes in. The first three stages are the stages that you can rapidly go through stage one and stage two. Then you get to stage three and you're working on accelerating your income

and a lot of people who are in the middle of their life, maybe working through that, then we're looking at independence where we all of a sudden have the opportunity to make work optional. You've got FU money. You can walk out of a job that you hate. You can take some time off.

You could take a sabbatical if you wanted to. You have flexibility and you have freedom with your time. And every single person listening to this podcast, guess what you want? You want freedom with your time. Because really, that's why we're building wealth. It's not to have the money. It's not the stuff.

It's not the stuff that money can buy. sure, some of us may really value things like cars or jewelry or clothes. But at the same time, what you really want is you want freedom with your time. And that is why we talk about this so much here on this podcast. Now, stage five is the fun one because this is the legacy planning. And I truly believe that every single person in this world should focus or at least think about their legacy and what legacy you are going to leave. So this is going to be things like protecting your finances. This is going to be things like estate planning. This is going to be things. This is going to be things like giving back to your family or your community. All of these are different areas that you

can start to think about once you have this wealth built up. And so very, very important to think through all five of these stages and every decade moves you forward towards the same path. We all want to be wealth builders. And when you're on your wealth building journey, this is something that I think most people need to note is that we all go through these stages. And once you get to stage five, then you have the opportunity to decide what you want to do in life. And stage four is what a lot of us are pursuing. And so as we start to think about this, I really, really want you to also think through those stages because I'm going to build this up for you step by step, decade by decade.

So if that's something you're into, let's get into it. All right. So first, let's talk to people in their 20s. Now, if you're in your 20s right now, listen to this podcast. Boy, oh boy, you hit a gold mine because if you follow these steps, and you actually set this up in the right order, you can set yourself up for life. Where a lot of people who are in their 40s maybe thinking to themselves,

man, I wish I did some of this stuff earlier in my 20s. You actually have the opportunity to do it. You have no idea the gold mine that you're sitting on. The gold mine that you're sitting on is time. And you either can screw up everything right now and have to work so much harder than everybody else to make up for time, or you can get it done right now. So this is the point.

time where you can say, I'm going to make this happen. So a couple of mistakes that people in the 20s make is number one is they choose lifestyle over leverage. And what I mean by that is they choose to spend more on the fancy car, spend more on the nice apartment, spend more on going out with friends and the vacations every single month instead of choosing to go out and investing their extra dollars. Number two is ignoring investing until later. I'm going to put this off and I'm going to do it later when I actually make more money. No, even if you start with small amounts of money over time, investing is really, really important in this decade to get started right now.

The earlier you start, the more your dollars can get started compounding, and it's going to make a massive difference. And then the third one is thinking small mistakes don't matter, especially when it comes to investing, because they do matter here, and we want to make sure that we are avoiding those mistakes. Now, you don't have to make mistakes. You can just learn from other people's mistakes. That's the best way to learn.

and that's the best way to become wise is to understand that other people can make mistakes and you can learn from those so that you never make those mistakes. So step number one is if you're in your 20s, I want you to think about controlling your cash flow. Well, how do you control your cash flow? There's a couple of different ways. Number one is we need to know what our burn rate is every single month. We talk about this a lot, but you need to understand how much you are spending every single month. And so first, it comes down to what your baseline expenses are.

What are your needs? those expenses that come up that you absolutely need to make sure that you take care of every single month. So this is going to be your rent or mortgage. This is going to be your utilities. This is going to be your debt payments. This is going to be making sure child care is covered if you have kids. This is going to be making sure all of your necessities like food and water and all those big things are taken care of. Those are your needs. And you want to make sure that your needs are between 50 to 60 percent of your income. they can be less than 50%, and that is A-OK. But if they're above 60%, then we need to take a look at what's happening here.

Either you don't make enough money, your income isn't high enough, and or you're overspending on your needs, where a lot of people, maybe they buy too much car, maybe they buy too much house, and that is why they are overspending in this specific area. And so we want to make sure that we examine that first. Then we can look at the area like our wants. And when we look at our wants, we want to make sure that we are spending somewhere between 20 to 30% on our wants. You want to enjoy your money, and I want you to spend more on the things that you love in life. And so making sure that you have that in place is going to be important.

And then we want to make sure that we're spending 20 to 30% on future you. At a minimum, we want to make sure that we're at least spending 20% on future you, which that means it's going towards things like your emergency fund and your investments. Those two specific areas are the things that we want to think about. And then you want to automate this as much as you possibly can. If you use something like Monarch Money, which you get 50% off, if you're us our code PFP, that is a great tool to just track your spending automatically because really what you do is you set up your budget and you can do a zero-based budget in there. You set it up and then it's going to automatically just track where your spending is going once you get through the

first month or two and you tell it exactly what these dollars are meant to do. And so this is something I think for most people out there, understanding where your money is going, very, very important. And if you get in this habit early and often, you're going to never wonder at the end of the month where all your money went. Most people, Have no clue where all their money went at the end of the month. If you get this habit going, I promise you it'll change your life. For me specifically, when I wasn't making a lot of money. And a lot of you in your 20s, you're not making as much money as you will in your 30s and 40s.

And so when I wasn't making much money, understanding where my dollars were going was the number one thing that absolutely changed my financial life. Then, once I got that down, I could start to take my foot off the gas a little bit when it came to tracking my spending. So I could just automate everything else. and this is where the key comes in, is you don't have to spend a lot of time on this. You can automate all of your finances and not have to worry as much. Now, we have an entire episode, and we have an automation checklist. If you want to check that out, we will link it up down below the show notes so that you can check out how to automate your money if you've never done it before.

Now, step two is we need to build that foundation. We need to make sure that we are reducing our stress and anxiety around money. And the way to do this is to build up an emergency fund. But we have a very specific way that you can build up. your emergency fund called the 136 method. Now, if you've never heard of the 136 method, here's how it works. You save up one month of expenses before you even get started. So you add up how much your expenses are, which is why we want to know what this is at the beginning. You add up what your expenses are every single month and you save up one month of expenses inside of a high

yield savings account. Once you have one month of expenses saved up, now we can look at paying off any high interest debt that we have. So if you have credit card debt that maybe you made a financial mistake and you regret it, but now you have this credit card debt in place. Well, we need to get that paid off. Or if you have a personal loan, all of you who took out buy now, pay later loans and didn't pay them off in time, guess what? We need to get those paid off as well. Or maybe you have a really high interest rate student loan or you took out a car loan with a really high interest rate. Anything above a 6% interest rate, we want to focus on trying to pay down outside of our mortgage. And so this is something where high interest debt can absolutely be killing our progress. And so we want to

look at this. And so once you get any of those debts above a 6% interest rate, then we can move on to the next step. Now, if you have debt below a 6% interest rate, you don't have to worry about that and paying it off as fast as you possibly can. Why? Because the money can be better served in the market. And so then what we can do is after we have that high interest debt paid off, we go to the next step, which is getting three months of expenses saved up. So you already have one month of expenses saved up. Now we need two more to protect ourselves going forward. And once you have two months of expenses saved up, That means now you have three months total of expenses, and so that's the three and the one-three-six method.

During this time frame, you have three months of expenses saved up, and now you can start splitting it off. So you can start investing a portion of your income and then saving another portion of your income to start building up that emergency fund again, because we want you to have a minimum of six months of expenses in your emergency fund. The reason why we say six months should be the minimum is because if you lose your job, it is going to take you three to six months to find another job. I don't care how in demand your industry is. For a lot of folks, if you want to land the right job that fits for you, you want to make sure you have ample time to choose that job.

Because what most people do is if they only have a one to two month of expenses in their emergency fund and they lose their job, all of a sudden they're going to take the first job that's offered to them and it may not be the right fit for you. You want to make sure you have ample time and runway there to allow you to do this. And so you're investing and you're building up towards six months. And then after six months, you can do whatever you feel comfortable with. We have something called the Swan. number, the sleep well at night number. For some people, it's six months. That's completely fine.

For some people, they want nine, some they want even longer. But what is your sleep well at night number? You need to figure out what that is, and that is going to be your final emergency fund number. But all during this time frame, you are investing your dollars after three months so that you can start to accelerate your path to financial independence. Which is step number three is starting to invest immediately. Because in your 20s, every single dollar you invest is so incredibly valuable that you want to make sure that you are getting your dollars working. So your money can work so much harder than you ever could. And so if you understand compound interest and you see how valuable this can be, it'll absolutely change your life. So an example is if you invested $1,000

a month over the course of 40 years and got a 10% rate of return, you'd have $5.5 million by the time that you were done with those 40 years. And so this is something where when you're in your 20s, you have the time value of money there. You have so much time for this money to compound, and so it'll absolutely change your life. Now, we have this thing called the wealth builders matrix. If you go to mastermoney.co slash resources, what this is going to do is show you for every single dollar you invest by age, how much will that money be worth by the time you turn age 65? And so it is absolutely fascinating to see what happens with your money over these timeframes. and when you're in your 20s, you will see every single dollar is worth so much more than someone

who starts in their 30s or their 40s. And so this is really the time for you to get this money going. Now, where do you invest your dollars? Starting with your employer match is number one, because that gets you a 100% rate of return. Just contact your HR department and say, hey, I want to look at our employer match and see what we have available. Number two is looking at something like a Roth IRA. This is a fantastic account because money goes in that's already been taxed from your paycheck. It grows tax-free and you can pull the money out tax-free. And why this is so powerful is because if you have a long time horizon, the growth of your money is going to be the majority. Then also, you can look into your 401Ks or your traditional IRAs if your company doesn't have a 401K. Those are

also fantastic accounts to look into. These are great areas to look. And then I like to invest in low-cost index funds. Do your own research, but that is my favorite place to invest my dollars. Now step four is when you're in your 20s, I want you to avoid the wealth killers. So what's a wealth killer? These are going to be things that can really set you back if you don't understand the impact of what they have on your finances. So a big one would be high interest debt. And so high interest debt is anything above that 6% interest rate. If you're taking on a credit card debt, for example, that is a true wealth killer. In fact, that is a pants on fire emergency that you need to take care of as fast as you possibly can when it comes to your finances. because most credit cards have a 20 to 30% interest rate.

And if that is the case, then you are just working backwards. You are going deeper and deeper into debt every single month. And we need to take care of that as fast as we possibly can. Now, another one is a silent wealth killer. And this is called lifestyle inflation. So for a lot of people, in your 20s, you start to make some progress. You're going to get some raises and you're going to get some promotions. And when that happens, what a lot of people will do is they will take all of the money

that they earn and they will increase their lifestyle. So maybe you started out by living like a college student because you were in an entry level job. Then you got a promotion two or three years into your career and you started to make $15,000 more per year. And so because you got this raise or this increase, now we're going to get rid of the roommates, we're going to go and live on our own and we're going to get the nicer apartment. And so when we get the nicer apartment, well, we got to have the car to go along with it. And so we go and buy the brand new car. But then two or three years down the line, you get another promotion. And so you increase your lifestyle again. You move to even nicer of an apartment. Maybe you get married, buy a house. And all of a sudden now, you are thinking about maybe

buying another car. And so you have this upgrade after upgrade after upgrade. We as a country are obsessed with upgrading. And so when this happens, that means that your lifestyle will increase over time and you will never save those extra dollars. So here is what I would do instead. think about every single raise as an opportunity to also buy more of your freedom. So every single time you take some of those extra dollars and put them towards your investment accounts, that means that money is going to compound and grow over time. And so when you do this, you're buying back your freedom every single month. And so we follow the 50-50 rule.

50% goes towards future you and 50% goes towards things that you can increase your lifestyle or spend more on the things that you love. this creates balance with your money. This creates a balance where some lifestyle inflation is okay. In fact, I think that's healthy. People who are frugal weirdos who never increase their lifestyle, they're not enjoying life as much. Maybe they are, but for most people out there,

they want to have a little bit of a nicer car, or they maybe want to have the nicer apartment. They want to have a better living situation. And so because of that, I highly encourage you to do that. I get it. I do too. And so that is one of the things for most people, the 50-50 rule can really, really help.

you. And then also the last thing I'll say is focusing on your mindset. Not the I'll fix this later type of mindset or I'll figure this out later on down the line and do not have the victim mentality. A lot of folks in their 20s, I understand it is really hard to live right now. It is really hard to get by your living paycheck to paycheck. Housing costs are elevated and it is much more difficult to just make ends meet. But guess what? We need to still focus on the things that we can control and we need to find a way to focus on those things that we can control so that we can get something going, getting something invested, getting some of that debt paid down, getting that emergency fund built up. It'll absolutely change your life. If you buckle down, get serious, and really, really dial in now,

it's going to change your life forever. I promise you, you will not regret it if you do this in your 20s. And instead, I am so happy I did this. So in my 20s, I was very frugal, and I really reduced my spending. And now I'm in my 30s. And I've increased my spending. I was able to do it in a healthy way and inflate my lifestyle in a healthy way, that is something that I'm still very happy that I went through that entire process. So my 20s, I was frugal, my 30s, I was able to increase my lifestyle because I started to make more money and I still continued to follow the 50-50 rule. So the outcome by the end of your 20s, here is your goal, and this is what I want you to think about, is one, you're investing automatically. You have automated your finances with investments,

maybe even paying bills, making sure that you're investing or automatically contributing to your emergency fund, all of those are important. Two, is if you follow this, your emergency fund will be done in your 20s, where then you can focus on some of these other big areas, and that is completely finished because emergency funds take some time to build up. And so if you had that completely done or out of the way, then each time you need to use it, you're protected, you can rebuild it back up, but you still have the majority of that job done. Three is you've developed a plan, you executed that plan, and so your money, anxiety is going to go down dramatically from someone who has no plan or has not executed a plan before. And then four, you've got compound interest working in your favor. You're

investing your money. Compound interest is growing your money over time. And so you've got that compounding clock working right in your favor, which is the ultimate goal. If you do those four things in your 20s, you're going to be way better off than 99% of your friends and 99% of your family ever was. And so really, just focusing on those can be really, really powerful. Now let's jump to the 30s. So in your 30s, there's going to be a lot of different changes that happen. One of the big ones that most people experience is their career is going to accelerate. Now, career acceleration is a wonderful thing for wealth building because all of a sudden, guess what? You're making a little bit more money. And so when you start to earn more money, we want to make sure that we are wise with how we handle

that money. We are prudent with where that money goes and we understand where our next dollar needs to be in order for us to achieve our financial goals. And so because of this, we want to make sure that our financial education is dialed in and we know what our plan is. But two, your 30s are also a time where you have the least amount of time ever. Because your career is accelerating, a lot of times that's going to suck away a lot of your time. But a lot of other people are also getting married in their 30s. Or they're having kids in their 30s. And between those three things, you're going to have no time left over to kind of focus on some of this other stuff.

And so this is why it's very, very important to do time efficient things when it comes to wealth building and make sure that we are focusing on the areas that truly matter, which is family, which is increasing our income, which is spending time in relationships, all those different things are really, really important. Plus, you have less time and so everything becomes more complex. And so I want you to focus on some of the different things that we're going to talk about here. And I'm going to give you this step-by-step blueprint so that you can think about how we're going to handle this. Now, if you didn't do some of the stuff we talked about in the 20s, those need to happen first before you kind of think through some of these other areas.

This episode is meant for you to build on each other within each decade. but that's okay. We just stick them in those decades so that you know where to start wherever you are. So if you're in your 30s but you didn't build up in an emergency fund or you didn't start investing yet, then that's the key. You want to make sure you're doing that first. Then come back to this decade where we can start to really accelerate our path to wealth. All right. So step one for a lot of you out there is I want you to lock in that high savings rate. So in your 20s, maybe you're trying to increase your savings rate over time and you're slowly trying to turn up that dial to get to that 20 to 30 percent. But in your 30s, you need to be

saving that 20 to 30 percent of your income. because it is very, very important for your future self. Otherwise, you're going to be working until your 60s, and I don't want that for you. I want you to have the opportunity to retire early if you want to. Now, if you're saying to yourself, there is no way I can do this on 20 to 30% of my income. There's no way I can save 20 to 30% of my income.

I want you to focus your time, and I want you to focus your energy on thinking of ways to increase your income. Because the more you can increase your income, this is the catalyst, this is the fire to building wealth. It's going to help you dramatically. Also, during this, When we increase our income, I want you to use the 50-50 rule when it comes to raises.

And if you want to use more than that to put it towards future you and investing those dollars, you absolutely can. In fact, that's what I did early on in my 30s is I would take a larger portion, 75 to 85% of my raises and start to put them towards investments because this is really going to add extra fuel to the fire. I want you to think about it this way, is that every single time you invest your dollars, you're taking a shovel full of cash and you're throwing it into a furnace. Now, in that furnace is going to be a flame. And the larger that flame gets, once it gets to a certain size, all of a sudden you don't have to work anymore. And so while you're working, you're shoveling another pile of cash into that furnace. And if you accelerate the pace at which you are putting cash into that furnace,

all of the sudden, that fire grows way, way faster. And so this is what can happen in your 30s, especially when you are experiencing income and growth. And so this is what can happen in your 30s, especially when you are experiencing income increases. And so I want to make sure that you are doing that. Also, you need to be careful about lifestyle inflation within this decade. A lot of us have lifestyle inflation that can get out of hand because you get married and because you have kids. Those are two of the areas that can really cause your lifestyle to inflate. Why? Because we get the bigger house. We get the bigger car. We get the brand new SUV so that we can towed around three kids instead of two. We make sure that we have enough bedrooms for each and every single

but do not over extend yourself. We have episodes talking about how to buy a car or how to buy a house. We have people in Master Money Academy who have been following our rules and following our parameters surrounding buying a house in a car. They just feel so much better by doing that and making sure they are staying within their means. So that's the one. It's just locking in that higher savings rate and watching out for some of that lifestyle inflation. Number two is I want you to maximize those tax advantage accounts. So because we're increasing our savings rate in our 30s, we want to make sure that we're maxing out our 401k, in our Roth IRA, and our HSA if you're eligible. And if not, getting more dollars into your taxable brokerage account. These are all the different buckets that we want to make sure that we

are prioritizing so that A, we can reduce our taxable income, B, we can get some of that tax-free growth, and C, we get our dollars invested if we want to retire early, so we have that additional flexibility. And so making sure you have that plan in place and automatically investing is super important. Number three, is in your 30s making sure you have everything systematized, so nothing is relying on your willpower. Your willpower is feeble. It is not going to be something that you can rely on. So instead, we need to make sure that we automate our financial situation so we don't have to worry about that anymore. So have a weekly money check-in or have a monthly money check-in with your spouse and make sure you're having conversations surrounding money so that you can have an annual

optimization review every single year and you both are on the same page. We talked about this in the goals episode about making sure that you are having conversations surrounding money. and so you really need to have a healthy relationship about money and systematize all this stuff. So being on the same page is really, really important. Now, step four is making sure you're making smart decisions when it comes to the big stuff. So housing is the big one we just talked about, making sure you're spending 30% or less on housing costs in total of your gross income. The same thing goes for buying a car. So when you buy a car, we want you to put 20% down.

We want you to have a loan for four years or less. We want you spending 7% or less of your income on the car. car payment and 5% or less of your income on the maintenance of that car. So if you have a luxury vehicle, that's going to throw that number way off, making sure you understand that. And then 10, which is driving that car for 10 years or longer. So we call this the 24, 12, 10 rule. And so we think about this in that way because driving your car for longer just means you don't have car payments as much. And so you can have six years of zero car payments and either save up cash for the next car and or put those extra dollars towards investments. And so making sure you are prioritizing this rule

is going to keep you within your means when it comes to car buying. Next is food. So a lot of us, as we start to see our lifestyle change, maybe more people live under our roof, we have a lot of different scenarios changing. We need to make sure we control the cost of food. This goes for groceries. This goes for eating out.

And all of this is something where a lot of folks can overspend if they are not careful. And so this is an area where I will have conversations with people and say, hey, how much do you spend on groceries? And they'll say something like, oh, I spend about $600. per month on groceries. Then we dive deeper and they're spending $1,300 a month on groceries. That's a $700 delta. It's a massive, massive difference. And so we want to make sure that we

understand what is going on there. So just watching out for those big three decisions. And then the other one for folks in their 30s is daycare. Daycare is not something you can control. And in fact, I would try to find the safest environment for my child. It is not something you skip out on. It is not something that you try to reduce or get as low as you possibly can. Your children are the most important things in your life, but we've actually done an entire episode that we will link up down below talking about daycare costs and how to think about those, how to optimize those. And we'll talk about that here. But that, for a lot of folks in their 30s, if you have kids and you have children in daycare, I know how expensive that can be. I understand how expensive that

can be. And if you have multiple kids in daycare, oh my goodness, I've been there and I've done that. And I understand how that feels and how difficult it can be. So for those of you out there who are working through that. Just know this is a season in your life. Once your kids get to elementary school, it is got to get a little easier. But at the same time, it is really, really tough right now. And so I get it. I understand it. And I think that's one of those areas that is, you know, you can't skip out on it. You can't skip out on the proper care for your children because you're not there. And so you need to make sure that you can entrust the people who are taking care of your kids day in and day out. And so our outcome here by the end of our 30s is making sure that we

understand A, that we can have a strong net worth momentum. We're making a huge swings in our net worth over the course of this decade where I want to see big movement. I want to see a big difference maker in your net worth in your 30s. That's where we're really going to get this momentum going. You're going to see huge swings. Two, is our investments feel inevitable. They are automatic. They are part of our monthly routine. We are investing our dollars no matter what. We're not second guessing those investments. We're making sure we have that plan in place. Three, we have no paycheck to paycheck stress because we set up our finances in the right way from the beginning. And so that is the big key. And the number four is options start

appearing. And this is the area where it's so incredibly valuable. Maybe you can take the lower paying job now, but you can work from home. There's this big debate going on right now. Would you take a $240,000 per year job? Or would you take a $120,000 per year job? But you get to work from home. And a lot of people are saying, I'd rather work from home, especially when I have kids or family members. So you may have the opportunity to weigh out those decisions and have more options. And have more options, have more freedom, have more flexibility. That's what we're trying to build towards, is to give you optionality in life. Money is not there to buy things. It is a tool to get you what you want out of life. So that's your 30s. Now, let's jump into the 40s. So lately, I've been

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their systems and making sure this thing is running on autopilot. This thing is a surefire system that they are confident in. And instead, if you're just getting started in your 40s, that's okay. It is never too late. but you got to make sure you do the things in your 20s and 30s first before you hit your decade, which is the 40s, and start working towards some of these different items. And so when we're thinking about this,

also a lot of folks will ignore tax strategy. And I think that's a big mistake for folks, especially in your 30s, 40s, 50s. You got to make sure that you have tax strategy in place as you start to make more money. A lot of folks in their 40s, they're getting some of those peak earning years in their 40s, and so we want to make sure we're optimizing our taxes

so we can keep as much as possible in our pocket. So step one, is I'm, want you to optimize and not overcomplicate. So a lot of people, once they get to their 40s, maybe they've opened up a bunch of different investment accounts or a bunch of different brokerage accounts. You got your crypto's accounts. Maybe you got your real estate accounts. You got your read accounts. You got your Fundrise accounts. You got all these different accounts all over the place. And we want to, as much as possible, consolidate like kind accounts. So if you are looking at something where you feel like your money is just in 20 different places, let's simplify. Let's

make this easier so that we can breathe again and not have so many different accounts. Two, and on that same tone, let's make sure we have a clear asset allocation, meaning the mix of stocks and bonds that you have in place. I've noticed that a lot of people, once they get to their 40s, they've tried a little bit of everything, and so they have this asset allocation that's a little bit messy. Instead, you say to yourself, hey, maybe I want to have 70% stocks, I want to have 20% international stocks, and I want to have 10% bonds. And by 70% stocks, I mean, U.S.-based stocks. And so when you're thinking about this, well, now you have a 70-2010 portfolio. And that is something that you can consider. Or maybe you know, hey, I just want to be all in

VTSAX and follow the simple path to wealth fund. That is something you consider. Or maybe you're saying to yourself, man, I just want to make sure that I am good to go. So I'm going to follow the Warren Buffett portfolio. There's tons of different portfolios out there to look into or maybe you want to have real estate as a big portion of your portfolio. Or maybe you want to have 5% in crypto or 5% and gold. And so you're trying to think through exactly what you want to do. Let's make sure that we are clear on this asset allocation in our 40s because we are starting to approach retirement age, and we want to make sure we have this nailed down. And then if you need to rebalance, if you're someone who rebalances, you can rebalance annually based on that asset allocation. But that is

a whole different topic that we can talk about in another episode. Now step two is your tax strategy, if you don't already have one in place, now it becomes critical. Where every single year, you should be evaluating your Roth first traditional strategy, meaning when you're looking at those two investments, you want to review this with your CPA. If you don't have one in place, then you need to get one and making sure you have conversations surrounding this. Also, you need to have awareness around capital gains. And if you have a lot of money in taxable brokerage accounts, you need to look at those taxable brokerage accounts and figure out where you are landing when it comes to capital gains. And then tax diversification. So the three tax

brackets are pre-tax, post-tax, and also taxable. And so we want to look at that tax diversification when it comes to our investments. Now, step three is we want to lock in our lifestyle. We don't want to have these crazy, huge, lavish upgrades if we are really on the fine line of building wealth. If you're making a lot of money, sure, you can absolutely do that if you can afford it. But we don't want to have some crazy permanent upgrades that are going to derail our retirement.

As we start to approach retirement age, we want to make sure we kind of stabilize some of our lifestyles, stabilize our expenses so that we can take those big extra chunks of cash if we are earning them and putting them towards investments. if you're not earning big extra chunks of cash yet, we also want to focus on our income and making sure we're growing that income so that we could take that extra money and put it towards wealth-building activities.

And then prioritizing flexibility over flash is a big thing that I want you to do. Flexibility is going to be so much more valuable to you over the course of the next decade than would be being flashy, having the Mercedes, having the brand-new handbag, having the expensive clothes. Those are going to be fleeting things that you are chasing.

But instead, if you pursue flexibility, with your time so you can do what you want, when you want, with who you want, whenever you want. That, my friends, is the ultimate goal that most of us want to achieve. Now, four, if you don't know it already, make sure you understand what your financial independence number is. And so you should be tracking this every single year. And if you're younger and your 20s or your 30s, then making sure you're tracking this early is very, very important.

But I want you to figure out, okay, how much do I spend every single year right now? Multiply that number by 25. once you have that amount invested in the market and you have it saved up and invested in your retirement accounts across all of those accounts, you are financially independent. So if you spend 80 grand per year, multiply that by 25, you're going to have $2 million. And so $2 million invested means you could run on 4% every single year. That's the safe withdrawal rate. If you haven't looked into the Trinity study ever yet, you can go read that study if you're interested to figure out why we're talking about 4%. But basically, what it is is you can withdraw 4% every single year and

preserve your portfolio or your portfolio will not run out of money historically. And so our goal by the end of our 40s is to make sure that work becomes optional or earlier than expecting. That anxiety is going to completely drop out and freedom feels real, not theoretical. Now one thing I'll note before we wrap up the 40s is a lot of you may be dealing with a couple of different expenses that are pulling you in two directions. You may have kid stuff like kids are entering into sports or you have kids going to college or a lot of different things are happening, but in addition, you also have aging parents. And so you're having to deal with both sides of the coin. That can get very expensive in your 40s. And so making sure that we are prioritizing our

savings and having enough set aside for some of this stuff is really, really important as well. This is why we don't want to see our expenses on the fixed things like houses, transportation, all that other stuff, rise too rapidly. Because if it does, it could be a detriment to some of these other areas. And we want to make sure we never, ever go into debt in our 40s and deeper into debt. that is very, very important, especially high interest debt. You know, low interest debt is a different story, but high interest debt is something we want to make sure we're avoiding at all cost. Now, let's get into the 50s.

So your 50s is going to be a really fun decade because we're building out our exit plan or some of you who may have prepared early on in life might already be financially independent or entering the decade where you're going to be financially independent maybe halfway through. And so this is a really fun decade for a lot of people to work on because we want to build our independence and we want to enter into our legacy phase as well. And so for a lot of people out there, I want you to think through a lot of different areas. Number one is I want you to first understand what most people fear. They fear running out of money. They fear market crashes. They fear things like messing all of this up. But never fear because we're going to talk through all of those

different areas and how you can avoid those at all costs. So step one is I want you to transition from accumulation to use. So when it comes to thinking about our retirement plan and building up that retirement plan, there are two phases to invest in. One is rapid accumulation. We're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, and part of your 50s, you're thinking about accumulating your wealth and trying to grow your wealth as fast as you possibly can. Then once we get to the point in time where we are retired, then we switch our portfolio on to preservation mode because you're going to be living on that portfolio. And so you're trying to preserve. that portfolio as much as you possibly can. So your working years, always accumulation,

then your retirement years, that's the preservation portfolio. And so maybe as you start to think about your 50s, you start to take on less work and you're starting to reduce your hours if you are considering that. And if you start to do that, your income could drop. And so you just want to make sure that you have this flexibility built in that is going to allow you to do that. And so I highly encourage you some people, and a lot of people I know now work into their 60s, but that's A-OK. hey, there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. In fact, continually working throughout retirement is something I plan on doing. Why, I want to keep my mind sharp. I want to have something to do. I want to continue to do some specific things in life that really, really bring me value and they involve work. And so because of that, I plan on working for a very long period of time. But for some of you out there, if your income is going to drop or you are planning on working less, this is something you want to plan for.

And again, if you're five years out from retirement, if you're in your 50s and listening to this episode right now, and you're five, years out from retirement, we need to start nailing down our retirement plan and making sure we dial it in. If you're three years out, you really need to dial it in. If you're a couple years out, you need to note your numbers like the back of your hand. So that's really what we want to make sure we're doing as we start to think about our 50s. Now, step two is we want to start to reduce our risk in life intentionally. So that's going to mean a couple of different things. Don't be overly conservative because it's fear driven. Fear is actually going to destroy a lot of people's retirement because they are so scared of what can happen in the market. But we want to make sure that we are

conservative in some areas. One is we want to start to see our portfolio shift over the course of our 50s as we start to approach that retirement age. And so as we start to think about this, you can say, okay, well now I'm getting closer to preservation mode. So I want to shift maybe adding a little more bonds, slightly more if you want to, and or maybe just shifting your portfolio into that preservation mode, whatever you think is best for your risk tolerance. Secondarily, though, we want to think about our cash positions. And we want to think about how much cash we want to have on hand. Is it one year? Is it two years? Is it five years? The more cash you have on hand, the more you can weather storms of downturns or any shifts over time. Now, I'm not saying

keep it in cash sitting under your mattress. You can put it into bonds or T-bills or all these other things that could be of interest to you. You can also layer it where a couple of years are maybe in bonds and then a couple of years go into a brokerage account. You can do a couple of different things like that that allows you to just make sure that you can weather any storm. And then making sure your portfolio actually matches your real spending needs is also the big thing. And so thinking about your portfolio is what I want you to do a lot over the course of this decade to make sure you dial it into exactly where you want it to be. And step three is I want you to lock in protection. What do I mean by locking in protection? One, we need to have our estate plan done. And so if you

are, do not have a will, making sure you have a will is so important. It's going to create way more headaches than you want to happen if you don't have a will. Two, is if you have a high net worth in your 50s and you have over a million bucks or you own a business or there's a bunch of other things happening, I highly encourage you to look at estate planning and think through a trust. A trust is a great option if you want to customize where your money's going or what you're going to be doing. And then three, making sure you have your beneficiaries assigned on all your investment accounts. Now, if you want your trust to own a lot of your investment accounts, you can absolutely do that. If you want to put other things that you own, other assets you own in that trust,

you can do that as well. But making sure you lock in that protection is going to be important. You don't want money going to probate. You don't want your assets going to probate. It is a headache for everybody involved. And those assets could go to someone that you did not want them to originally go to. So making sure you do this is very important in your 50s. Mine is done in my 30s. And so this is something where the earlier you do it, the better off you can be. My wife and I tweak our trust every couple of years and we make shifts. We have a very customized trust now that is something that I really, really enjoy. For folks in Master Money Academy, we're going to talk more about that and kind of go through

my exact trust and talk through why I did what I did. So if you want to join Master Money Academy, we go behind the scenes on stuff like this and we'll be talking through that going forward. Step four is I want you to think about your purpose. I want you to redefine your purpose because what I don't want you to do is get to retirement and have zero purpose whatsoever. So what does enough actually look like to you? Maybe you're already past that enough number and you're just continuing to

to work to have something to do. Or maybe you're the type of person who can't get the goalpost to stop moving and so you continue to keep working. I know a lot of people like this, where they're in their early 60s, they have more than enough cash on hand, but they still won't retire because they feel like they don't have enough. But they really do have enough to be able to cover their expenses. And so I want you to find what enough is if you're in your 50s because way too many people either work too long or they don't work long enough. And so those are very important. And so by the into your 50s, the outcome I want you to have is, A, financial independence. I want you to not have to work anymore if you're in your 50s. Two, confidence with spending money. You are confident. You don't

have this fear. You're not worried about everything. Instead, you have confidence with your money. And then three, your wealth supports your life and is not stressful. It is not a stressful thing that you have to deal with day in and day out, but it is actually supporting your lifestyle. That is the third thing I want to see. So these are the exact money plan for your 20, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s. Again, if you're in your 50s and you haven't gotten started yet, start in the 20s and work your way up all the way up into the 50s. This is something that's going to build on each and every single one of these areas. Now, if you want to get additional help for me, I highly encourage you to join Master Money Academy. Just check out the link down below.

That is where we help hundreds of people every single week master their money and focus on their finances. We have small groups of people meeting every single week. We keep you accountable. and we give you the exact roadmap step by step through all the stages that we talked about today and the exact order that you need to follow. It is a joy to meet every single member in Master Money Academy. So if you're looking to invest in your finances this year, you actually want to improve your money, join Master Money Academy today. The link will be down below in the show notes. Listen, thank you guys again so much for being here. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you and we will see you on the next episode.

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