The Personal Finance Podcast - The Million Dollar Money Decisions You Should Focus On (PFP VAULT)

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, we’re gonna talk about the 1 million dollar money decisions you should be focusing on.  How Andrew Can Help You:  Don't let another year pass by ...without making significant strides toward your dreams. "Master Your Money Goals" is your pathway to a future where your aspirations are not just wishes but realities. Enroll now and make this year count! Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Learn to invest by joining  Index Fund Pro! This is Andrew’s course teaching you how to invest!  Watch The Master Money Youtube Channel! , Ask Andrew a question on Instagram or TikTok.  Learn how to get out of Debt by joining our Free Course  Leave Feedback or Episode Requests here.  Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors for supporting The Personal Finance Podcast. Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at  shopify.com/pfp Monarch Money: Get an extended 30 day free trial at monarchmoney/pfp Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate going to fundrise.com/pfp Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/ Delete Me: Use Promo Code PFP for 20% off!  Checklist of relevant episodes:  5 Things You Need to Invest In to Build Wealth (That Aren't Stocks) with Jeff Rose The Great Wealth Transfer Has STARTED (Here is How to Take Advantage of It) How You Can Create Life Changing Money Routines (Copy Mine!) The 2 Things You Must to Know Before Making an Investment With David Meltzer How to Build Your Index Fund Portfolio (Choose The Best Asset Allocation for You) Connect With Andrew on Social Media:  Instagram  TikTok Twitter  Master Money Website  Master Money Youtube Channel   Free Guides:   The Stairway to Wealth: The Order of Operations for your Money  How to Negotiate Your Salary  The 75 Day Money Challenge  Get out Of Debt Fast  Take the Money Personality Quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:05 money decisions you should be focusing on. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of Mastermoney.com. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking about the $1 million money decisions you should be focusing on. If you have any questions, make sure you are on the Master Money newsletter. you can reply to the Master Money newsletter. In addition, you can hit me up on Instagram or TikTok at Master Money Co.
Starting point is 00:01:51 And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player, you love to listen to this podcast. If you want to help out this show, leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast. So we are so incredibly excited to be sharing that Master Money newsletter with you guys as well. So make sure you jump on there so that you can get as much details as possible. about our upcoming coaching and courses and all that stuff as well because that list will get to hear about that first. In addition, we're going to be sending out discounts up front for the course so that you can get those discounts to that email list. So I want to make sure that you
Starting point is 00:02:29 are on that Master Money newsletter so that you can get those discount codes as well. The link is in the show notes down below. So today we are going to be talking about one of the most important things out there. These are the million dollar money decisions you should be focusing on. And as I started to work on this episode, it was just astounding to me some of the numbers that were coming back. I was running the numbers two or three times to make sure I was correct. And yes, it was all correct. These are million dollar decisions and I have a bunch of them here today that we are going to be talking about. In fact, we are going to be talking about six million dollar decisions that are just everyday decisions that you don't even realize are million
Starting point is 00:03:07 decisions. This is absolutely life-changing. There is potentially $6 million on the table here by figuring out how to optimize some of this stuff. So making sure that you understand how some of this stuff works is how you can actually build wealth at a much faster rate. So we're going to go through some of these things, making sure that you have that understanding. And I'm going to basically teach you today how to 80-20 your money. I'm going to teach you how to accelerate your money path so that you can 80-20 year money. And you could focus on the 80% so that you can do whatever you want on the 20% that doesn't really matter. Meaning this 80% is going to build 80% of your wealth and the 20% is everything else.
Starting point is 00:03:43 It's all the noise and it's also way harder to have to figure out. So these are the things that you really should be focusing on so that you can really truly build well. Now what I'm going to do today is I'm going to unlock something for you. And if you haven't thought about money this way, maybe you're new to the show. This is how we think about money. But if you hadn't thought about money this way, what we're going to be talking about here today is how to think about million dollar problems instead of things.
Starting point is 00:04:06 thinking about $6 problem. So what is an example of this? An example of this would be people who say don't buy Starbucks every single day. Starbucks is not what is absolutely killing your budget. What's absolutely killing your budget is all these other things that we're going to be talking about today, things like investment fees, for example. So if you're buying Starbucks every single day and you don't have investment fees, you're in a much better situation than the reverse. So focusing on these million dollar questions is what is absolutely going to help you build wealth. So you can ball out at Starbucks all day long, get those stars, get those points, whatever you want to do, drink your coffee, double fish your coffee if you want to do that. Because this is really, truly
Starting point is 00:04:44 the wealth building principles that you need to understand. This is where wealth is built, is in the million dollar decisions, not the $6 decisions, but what a lot of people will teach you is how to build wealth in the $6 decisions. And you've got to block out that noise and understand what actually makes an impact on your money. Sure, $6 added up every single day. will equal a couple hundred bucks every single month and investing that over time, the opportunity cost is there where you can invest it over time and make a very good amount of money. Sure, that's absolutely true. But at the same time, you only have so much time, you only have so much energy and you only have so much focus. You want to focus on the things that matter, not the small things
Starting point is 00:05:23 that don't matter that bring you simple pleasures every single day. So this is something where we are going to be helping you go through becoming a wealth builder. Because wealth builders, which is what I want you guys to be, which is what are our, audience is, everybody who listens to this podcast has become a wealth builder. See, what wealth builders do is they focus on those million dollar decisions and they block out all the other decisions that they have to make. And what a wealth builder does is they spin lavishly on the things that bring them value and they cut out everything else that does not.
Starting point is 00:05:52 And they focus on the things that actually matter every single day. So today we're going to be talking about those things that matter, the things that could save you six figures, million dollars somewhere in that range where it's going to absolutely be a life-changing decision. But I'm going to talk about why most of these are. million dollar decisions if you know how to handle them correctly. So without further ado, if that's something you're interested in, let's get into it. So the first one is investment fees. And investment fees can make or break your wealth building ability. I do not take saying this
Starting point is 00:06:22 lightly. Investment fees are something that you want to keep as low as you possibly can. I'm going to show you multiple examples. Why? Overall, just know this. Investment fees will absolutely stunt your wealth building. And the higher the fees, the less that you take home every single month. But what most people don't understand is that fees have layers. There's layers to these things that you really don't understand,
Starting point is 00:06:45 especially if you have something like a financial advisor who does not have your best interest at heart. And a lot of financial advisors out there are absolutely fantastic, but there are some who are in it to just make money for themselves. So we're going to do some examples here,
Starting point is 00:06:58 and I want you to go through some of this so you can understand exactly how much even a 1% fee will impact your money. So even if you have a 1% fee, a 1% fee on something like an investment. We know from Vanguard data that the S&P 500 from 1926 to 2019 in an 80-20 stock portfolio, meaning 80% percent stocks, 20% bonds returned 9.7% to investors. Since 1926 to 2019, 9.7% to investors.
Starting point is 00:07:25 So let's imagine that we invested $1,000 per month over a 40-year career. Well, if you make $5,000 a month in your household, that's only 20% of your income. So if you invest $1,000 a month, that's a 20% savings rate. So we're going to use a savings calculator that I am going to link up down below as well, the one we always use. And when we use that savings calculator, we come up with about $5.8 million at a 9.7% rate of return investing $1,000 per month over a 40-year career. $5.8 million.
Starting point is 00:07:56 Yes, compounding is an amazing thing. Now, let's assume instead we paid an advisor or we paid in a really high mutual fund or something along those lines for our investment or our services. And 1% is usually somewhere around the standard fee in the industry. You can sometimes see it up 1.5% to 2% somewhere in that range. But these fees have layers, which I'm going to explain to you here in a second. So say you have that 1% fee, what's going to happen here is your investment returns are going to drop from 9.7% to 8.7%. Now, we can factor in inflation, some of these other things as well. But if you factor in inflation, what I like to do is adjust my contribution to the inflation rate every single year
Starting point is 00:08:33 instead of factoring inflation and drawing down that way. So the result of the portfolio went from $5.8 million. If you had just a 1% fee, it went from $5.8 million to $4.3 million. What does that mean? That means you spent $1.5 million over the course of a 40-year investment career just by having a 1% fee. Let me explain to you. Fees absolutely matter.
Starting point is 00:08:58 but sometimes there's layers. So say, for example, you're paying a financial advisor that 1% fee. And sometimes financial advisors will put you into something like a mutual fund. And mutual fund have much higher fees than an index fund does. So we talk about this in index fund pro, our premium course about investing for beginners, how much greater the fees are in mutual funds than they are in index funds. And that's why I love investing in index funds in ETS because the fees are so much lower. So say there's a 1% expense ratio on your mutual fund people.
Starting point is 00:09:28 which is not out of the ordinary. Now that same investment that was at $5.8 million is going down to $3.2 million. And investment fees are a major factor because they compound along with your investment returns. It's absolutely amazing what can happen there. So you went from $5.8 million to $3.2 million just because you had 2% worth of fees
Starting point is 00:09:53 or layered fees within your investment portfolio. You've got to make sure you understand what your fees are. There's nothing wrong with having a financial advisor. There's nothing wrong with having some fees in your portfolio, but I prefer to keep it as low as possible. So something like an index fund has 0.05% fees, which is a very small amount of fees over a long period of time. They will not cause the absolute crazy reduction in your returns that these will.
Starting point is 00:10:18 So you could think about it this way. If you look at those same exact numbers, just that 2% fee that you paid there wiped out 40% of your portfolio over that time because fees compound just as much as everything else does. That doesn't sound like it's so small anymore, now does it? So that's something where you've got to think through what do I need to do here. Now, Personal Capital, which is one of my favorite tools, it's linked up in the show notes always because I use it every single day.
Starting point is 00:10:42 Personal Capital has a free investment analysis tool. And so they can look at your fee structure and look at your fees and analyze your fees as well. They have a fee analyzer in that investment analysis. So it's really cool. They have that for free for you. So you can check that out as well. Now let's just look at these fees. If you had different wealth levels, how much would you pay every single year in fees?
Starting point is 00:11:01 I utilized a calculator, a fee calculator that nerd wallet has to come up with some of these numbers. So let's look at 1% total fees. If you had $100,000 that you had invested, it would be $1,000 per year. $500,000 would be $5,000 per year. The math on this is pretty simple. A million dollars would be $10,000 per year that you're paying in fees. $2 million, $20, and $10 million, $100,000 per year that are paying in fees. But remember, you're not just foregoing those fees.
Starting point is 00:11:26 In addition, you're foregoing the operating the operating. opportunity costs of those fees compounding over time. Fees matter and they're going to cost you well over a million dollars over the course of your investing career. We just showed it cost you multi-million dollars over the course of your investing career. Now let's just bring it down and say you have an extra 0.5% in mutual funds. So now you're at 1.5%. Will $100,000 be $1,500 in fees per year? $500,000 would be $7,500 in fees every single year. Two million dollars be $30,000 in fees every single year. And $10 million would be $150,000 in fees every single year. I think most of us aspired to get to at least a few million dollars. And so paying 30 to $75,000 in fees is something
Starting point is 00:12:10 we absolutely want to be avoiding at all costs because that's yearly amount. That's a whole salary if you have $5 million. That's a whole salary at $75,000 per year that you're paying in fees that you could be putting towards more investments, compounding, all these other things. Fees absolutely will kill you. Now, let's say you have 2%. fees, which a lot of people I have talked to have 2% fees within their portfolio. This is something where sometimes you're at a bank and they don't tell you all the fees. The fees have layers. Sometimes you're just in a bad investment account. Sometimes you have a mutual fund that has really high fees. Well, $100,000 a year is very simple math. That's $2,000.
Starting point is 00:12:44 At half a million dollars, you have $10,000 per year. At a million dollars, you're paying $20,000 per year in fees. At $2 million, $40,000 per year in fees. So at $2 million, you're paying the same amount that you can draw down on $1 million. with the 4% rule. Absolutely crazy to be able to be paying 2% fees. $5 million, $100,000 and at $10 million, $200,000 per year in fees. This is something that could absolutely cripple your wealth if you are not aware of this. So making sure you're paying a reduction in fees is absolutely imperative.
Starting point is 00:13:18 Now, number two is mortgage interest. Now mortgage interest has a major impact on your life as well. We have talked about this a little bit more or less of late because of the right. of interest rates when it comes to mortgage interest rates. In 2020, just two years ago, I locked in an interest rate at 2.7%. Now interest rates are climbing well past 6%, which we're going to show you the difference between the two and making sure you can lock in a mortgage rate as low as you possibly can because they can dramatically impact how much you're paying for a house. And then when I show you this opportunity cost, the differential and the opportunity cost
Starting point is 00:13:52 that you're losing out, and this is what I want you to remember. Everything has an opportunity cost. What do I mean by that? Every single time that you give money away to fees or to interest rates or things like that, you do not have an opportunity to allow that money to compound. You could take that money and you could be investing those dollars instead. So the lower this amount is, the greater your ability is to build wealth over time. This sounds simple. But when you see these numbers, when you see what actually can happen here and when I show you this, it's going to be eye-opening for a lot of people. So let's look at this real quick. So let's say, for example, We're going to run these good old fashioned numbers and you have a $500,000 house.
Starting point is 00:14:29 Now let's look at the difference in payments with various interest rates. So let's say, for example, you have a two and a half interest rate, which is pretty close to what I got in 2020. I think at the lowest, it got down to two and a half percent. So at a $500,000 house, I'm just trying to keep it in the kind of median range in the U.S. right now at the time I'm recording this. Obviously, some areas, it's much lower. Some areas that's much higher. We're just trying to keep it a well-balanced house here.
Starting point is 00:14:51 So let's say $500,000 house at 2.5 percent, you pay $1,000. $1,975 per month. At a 3% interest rate, you pay $2,108. At a 4% interest rate, you'd pay $2,387. At a 5% interest rate, you pay $2,6,6% interest rate, you'd be paying $29.97 per month. The total difference between 2.5% and just 6%, and there's a lot of interest rates right now that are higher than 6%, but I stopped it at 6%. just that 6% is $1,22 every single month,
Starting point is 00:15:29 just based on the interest rate that you got. This is absolutely astounding because what can you do with $1,000 a month? We know with compound interest how much $1,000 per month can grow. But think about this for a second. That means it's $12,265 per year more that you're paying an interest that's just going to the bank. That's the profit that the bank is making. That's why they love taking out these high interest loans.
Starting point is 00:15:51 Just at a standalone number for 30 years, If you have a 30-year mortgage, this is going to come out to $367,974 more that you're going to be paying for this house. This is absolutely incredible what is happening here because that is a massive amount of money. But you know, your boy cannot stop here. He's not just going to stop at that. What we're going to talk about here is the opportunity cost of what would happen if you actually invested those dollars instead. And boy, oh, boy, is this something else? I hope you're sitting down if you have a higher interest rate right now because what you want to do is be refinancing that interest rate as time goes on here.
Starting point is 00:16:28 So luckily for you, there's always an out. You can refinance your interest rate to get this number down. But if you invested that money at a 10% rate of return, if you invested that $1,022 over the course of 30 years at a 10% rate of return, you'd have $2.1 million. $2.1 million is the opportunity cost of just going from $2.5 to $2.5 to $2.4.2.2.2.2.2.2 million dollars is the opportunity cost of just going from $2. a 6% interest rate. Now, will interest rates ever go down to 2.5% again? I don't know. I never thought they would in the first place and they did. So this is obviously somewhere in the middle, but even at a 3% interest rate or a 4% interest rate, you're still spending $8,000, $1,000 more in those ranges just for that higher interest rate. In addition, if you got an 8% rate of return,
Starting point is 00:17:10 let's bring it down to 8%. Let's take inflation into play like most people want. We'll put inflation into the return rate. So if we put inflation into that return rate at 8% rate of return, we are at $1.439 million over the course of 30 years, over the entire course of that mortgage, if we were investing that $1,022 per month. This is one of the most impactful things that you can focus on when it comes to your money is the mortgage interest rate. Because you can see the numbers here and you can see the opportunity cost. You're going to be spending $367,000 more just by a few percentage points on that interest rate. But in addition, the opportunity cost is millions of dollars. And so changing your mindset right now, we just
Starting point is 00:17:48 made you a couple million bucks between keeping your investment fees low and keeping your interest rate low, you just made a couple million dollars. Congratulations, because that is what is the impact here if you invest those dollars in something like an S&P 500 index funder, in something simple where you can just set it and forget it. You don't even have to think about it. See, some of these concepts are really simple, keeping these rates low, and the investment philosophy is also very simple. So between these two things right here, we're already a couple million dollars richer by the time that we hit retirement age. So this is something just to think through on those two. On the next one, after we come back from this break, we're going to talk about how impactful
Starting point is 00:18:24 and amazingly impactful asset allocation is or what types of stocks and bonds you have. I remember when I needed to hire someone fast, but finding the right person quickly felt impossible. And if you've ever been there, you know how stressful this can be. That's where indeed comes in. When it comes to hiring, indeed is all you need. Instead of struggling to get your job post noticed Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire faster. Your post jumps up to the top of the page, making sure it reaches the right candidates. And it makes a huge difference. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored ones. And there's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75
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Starting point is 00:21:19 I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. So number three is asset allocation. Asset allocation is just a fancy way of saying what kind of investment do you have in your portfolio?
Starting point is 00:21:45 It's a very fancy way of saying that it. But this is very important to understand because it has a major impact on your investment returns and it has an impact on if you're going to reach your financial goal or not. So understanding how to actually allocate your dollars when it comes to asset allocation is going to be absolutely life-changing if you've never done this before. We teach you exactly how to do this in Index Fund Pro,
Starting point is 00:22:04 but in addition, we talk about different asset allocations in our podcast episode where we go through this as well. We go through the three-fund portfolio. We go through a bunch of other ones as well. I'll talk about a few of them here so that you can get a better idea of exactly what your asset allocation should be. So say for example that you are in your 20s
Starting point is 00:22:21 and you have way too much bond exposure. So well, for most people. So if you're really risk-averse, obviously bond exposure is what you're going to want to have more of. But if you're in your 20s, a lot of people recommend and a lot of experts will recommend to you that you need to have more stock exposure than you do bond exposure.
Starting point is 00:22:37 Why? Because stocks grow faster. Sure, they're going to go up and down more. There's going to be more volatility is what that is called. But also, what's going to happen here is that you're going to be able to have your money grow more over time. So I love having stock exposure while you're young.
Starting point is 00:22:51 All of my assets for the majority of them that are in the stock market at least are all in stock. So that is something where I am more interested in being aggressive because I understand the history of stocks and how that works. So say you're in your 20s and you just have too much bond exposure.
Starting point is 00:23:05 And this bond exposure is going to be something that can impact your retirement because let's say you get an 8% rate of return and you put $1,000 per month, month in stocks. So in 30 years, you would have $1.4 million. And with a 10% rate of return, you'd have over $2 million. But let's say instead, you put this money into bonds and you had something like the Vanguard total bond market fund, which is a great fund. I owned a little bit of it until I went to a more aggressive approach to just add more index funds in like the S&P 500,
Starting point is 00:23:33 the total stock markets, emerging markets, those types of things. And the bond market fund has only returned 3.3%. So the S&P 500 since 1926, has returned over 10% and the bond market has returned 3.3% within the last couple of decades. So what you're seeing is if you invested in that for over 30 years, you'd only have $608,000. So the differential there is somewhere between $1.4 to $2 million, depending on what rate of return you think is going to happen. So you're leaving $800,000 to well over a million dollars on the table just because you had the wrong asset allocation.
Starting point is 00:24:07 You had the wrong stocks and bonds and you had the wrong amount for your age. So understanding how this works is something that is really, really important. Now, one great way to do this without having to even lift a finger is look at something like target date, retirement, index funds. And what these are is these actually set up your asset allocation for you so you don't even have to think about it. It's going to give you some U.S. stock market exposure. It's going to give you some international stock market exposure. It's going to give you some bond market stock exposure. And when you're young, when you have a long time horizon and you select something like a 2060 fund, for example, it's going to give you a very minimal amount of bonds because you're young and it wants it to compound and grow over time. And as you age and overtime, what that fund will do is it will start adding more bonds to reduce that risk exposure as you get closer to retirement age. So thinking through this and understanding that you could be leaving up to a million bucks on the table just by your asset allocation is something that's incredibly important to understand. You can also look at some portfolios like the three fund portfolio. We talk about the simple path to wealth portfolio and index fund pro. And so some of these are ways where you can actually go out there and reduce your cost. and liability on some of these assets. But in addition, you'll be able to make sure that you're maximizing your potential depending on what your age is. Now the next one, we talk a lot about this one
Starting point is 00:25:22 because it relates to your income is negotiating your salary. If you don't know this, just understanding how to negotiate your salary has a million dollar impact on your career. So Business Insider actually did a study and they had two hypothetical employees. The first employee, they named Alex,
Starting point is 00:25:38 and the second employee they named Taylor. and Alex accepts a company's initial offer at $45,000 and gets a 1% raise every single year. Whereas Taylor negotiates up for the same job for $5,000 more and gets a starting salary at $50,000. Then gets a 1% raise each year and negotiates to a 4% raise every three years. Now, this sounds like a minimal impact. It sounds like it's not much over that time frame. But if you do the math, by the time they reach retirement age, Taylor is making $121,370,000, per year. Well, Alex is only earning $70,000 per year. And over the course of their careers,
Starting point is 00:26:14 Taylor has earned over a million dollars more, $1.06 million more than Alex has, just by understanding how to negotiate her salary. Now, negotiating your salary, these are small incremental increases. So what we try to teach you is how to get major, big, impactful increases. Because if you just only get a 4% raise every single year, you're just trying to keep up with inflation. So you're going to make a lot more than just a million dollars. If you understand how to negotiate your salary. We have a free ebook that teaches you how to negotiate your salary that we give to you guys. So if you're interested in that, make sure you check it out in the show notes below because this I wrote to really truly help you. This is going to have a major impact on your life.
Starting point is 00:26:52 Your income is going to solve a lot of money problems if you understand how to keep some of that income. So making sure that you do this and you go out there and you learn how to negotiate your salary because this is a skill. That's what it is. Negotiating your salary is a skill. So understanding how to do that and acquiring that e-book is going to be something where it's absolutely free to learn and we go through scripts and other things like that in that e-book. So make sure you check that out. It's down in the show notes below. The next one is student loan interest.
Starting point is 00:27:19 So student loan interest has probably the least impact because the loan and the debt here is not as large as some other things like your mortgage or some other large interest rates. But it still has a major impact, six figures of impact depending on how much your student loans are. Now, if you have six figure student loans, it's going to have a million dollar impact on your wealth as well. So making sure you know what the interest rate on your student loans. student loans is is something that you definitely want to focus on. So say if someone had a $50,000
Starting point is 00:27:44 student loan and they had 20 year time horizon to be able to pay off that loan, at a 3% interest rate, your payments are going to be $277 per month. At a 4% interest rate, your payments are going to be $303 per month. At a 5% interest rate, they're going to be $350 per month. At a 6% interest rate, it's going to be $358% $38 per month, and 9% is going to be $450 a month, and 9% is going to be $450. dollars per month. Why did I go all the way up to 9% because I've talked to a lot of people who have 9% interest rates on their student loans. So this is just that $50,000. But if you can see the impact of this, just the differential between the two, the 3% loan cost is $66,000 over the lifespan of the loan. And at a 9% interest rate, it's $107,000 over the interest rate
Starting point is 00:28:31 alone. So that's a $41,000 difference. But we know the opportunity cost over the course of that time frame is going to be well over six figures, just if you invested that. money instead of having to pay that to the bank. So this is a major impact as well. Make sure you're checking your student loan interest rate. Now, if you are on a federal loan, you want to make sure you get that forgiveness first before you try to refi out of anything. Make sure you get your student loan forgiveness first because that is the greatest return of all right now is getting that $10,000 student loan forgiveness or if you're qualified for more than getting more than that on that student loan forgiveness. But after that, once that ends, then it's something where
Starting point is 00:29:05 you want to maybe consider because a lot of people are saying this will not happen again. so maybe considering going through the process of ensuring that you can get that interest rate lower after that. That would be priority number two after getting that student loan forgiveness. So thinking through that as well. Number six is transportation costs. Now transportation is one of the big three. Housing, food transportation are the big three expenses in every single day that you should be trying to control. But the transportation cost numbers that I ran were absolutely jaw dropping to me.
Starting point is 00:29:34 This one absolutely changed my perspective on just, car ownership in general. When I ran these numbers, I just could not believe even a responsible car owner how much they spend over time just on buying the car, not the maintenance of the car, not everything else that goes and is associated with car. Just buying the car, the opportunity cost as there is absolutely astounding. And I ran this opportunity cost with just 8% rate of return. So if you got an 8% rate of return, we're going to run through these opportunity costs. What I did was I ran a model basically for someone who started to buy a car at the age of 20. And what they did was they bought a car every 10 years.
Starting point is 00:30:11 They drove this car for 10 years ever since the age of 20. So at 20 they had their first car they bought. And then at 30 they bought their next car. And every five years, what they had was they started with $20,000. They bought the car for $20,000. And then by the time they sold the car after 10 years, the car was going to be worth about $5,000. And you can run calculations on a lot of cars that are $20,000. And that's right around where the car.
Starting point is 00:30:33 land after 10 years, maybe a little more depending on how you take care of it, the maintenance, what type of vehicle it is. But for a lot of folks, that's right around where you land. So if you crunch the numbers and you assume, okay, every 10 years, this person is buying a new car and they're spending $20,000 in that car is worth $5,000, so they get that trade in. So they're spending $15,000 after the initial 20. That's how we ran this model here. So car number one is going to cost them $20,000. Well, if they invested that $20,000 for 50 years from age 25 to age 70,000, for example, that $20,000 would go to $938,000 at an 8% rate of return. That is one extremely expensive car.
Starting point is 00:31:13 Okay? Let's look at car number two. Car number two, $15,000 invested for 40 years from age 35 to 75 would be $325,000 invested at an 8% rate of return. Car number three, $15,000 invested for 30 years from age 45 to 75 would be $150,000. Car number four, $15,000 invested for 20 years, it would be $69,000. And then car number five, $15,000 invested for 10 years
Starting point is 00:31:41 would be $32,000. Obviously, car number one is holding down the fork because we know after long periods of time, money just compounds and it grows over time. So these are amazing numbers, and it's obviously well over a million dollars. And if you do the math here, we're looking at well over $1.5 million,
Starting point is 00:31:59 even if you're responsible car owner and owning cars for 10 years. Most people buy cars much more frequently. Actually, the average they say right now is about three and a half to four years that people trade in their car. So if you're doing that, these numbers are sky high. You're going to be paying well over $2 million for your cars.
Starting point is 00:32:17 Now, obviously, most of us need transportation to get around. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying become Mr. Money Mustache and bike around town all day. But what I am saying is you got to understand what the cost here is and what you're getting into. Now imagine if you had two cars. If you're a two-car family and you're doing this twice every single 10 years, what could be happening here?
Starting point is 00:32:35 So thinking through some of this and how can you responsibly buy cars or how can you buy cars with assets so that you're not paying cash for those cars, which is the very best way to buy cars is going to be something that you can think through. We'll do an entire episode and I'm going to break it down from five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and all these different numbers. We'll do an entire episode on this so that you can see a full breakdown in the major impact. Then I'll talk about some things that you can do to optimize your car. buying as well. So this is something we are definitely so excited to share with you guys, these million dollar decisions. I was mind blown when I heard some of these.
Starting point is 00:33:08 And I hope this got you moving as well to think through, okay, how can I optimize some of these so I'm not spending so much money and I can make these million dollar decisions so that I could put these towards my future or things that bring me value, things that I actually want to be doing with this money. So thinking through how you can do this, how you can optimize your money is what is absolutely going to change your life. Listen, I hope you guys learn so much in this episode. If you got value out of this, share it with your family and friends.
Starting point is 00:33:32 Don't forget leave a five-star rating and review if you got that value as well. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you, and we will see you on the next episode. Frozen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time. Let's play. Feel the fun with Play-Ojo. The online casino with all the latest slot and live casino games. What you win is yours to keep with no wagering requirements, instant payouts, and no minimum withdraws.
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