The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Master Your Money & Secure Financial Freedom Ft. Katy Song - Chief Financial Planner At Domain Money

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

#798: Join us as we sit down with Katy Song – Chief Financial Planner at Domain Money. With nearly two decades of experience helping families with children and young couples organize their finances, Katy has encountered a wide range of financial situations. In this episode, Katy shares practical tips on proactive planning & investing, taking control of your financial future, overcoming debt, & tackling other financial challenges. Katy also dives into strategies for short-term & long-term growth, weighs the pros & cons of renting vs. buying, & offers guidance on building a strong financial foundation – no matter where you are in life!   To connect with Domain Money click HERE   To connect with Katy Song click HERE   To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE   To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE   Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE   To Watch the Show click HERE   For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM   To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697)   This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential   Head to the HIM & HER Show ShopMy page HERE to find all of Michael and Lauryn’s favorite products mentioned on their latest episodes.   This episode is sponsored by Domain Money  Visit domainmoney.com/himandher to book a free 30 minute strategy session today.    Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Skinny Confident skinny confidential him and her show. Today we have Katie song on the podcast. She has been a certified financial planner since 2008. She has an MBA from UC Berkeley, a bachelor in global economics, a former investment banker

working with the world's largest tech companies, including Microsoft, Intel and Oracle. And now she's working with Domain Money. On this episode, we talk all about personal finances, how to work towards financial freedom, how to understand money better, things that you can do with your families right now so that you can put yourself in the best financial situation possible. Whether you love the topic of money or you hate it, it's a fact that personal finance touches everyone. It's one of the biggest sources of stress for people on all stages of life.

I hope this episode helps everyone reach their financial goals, get a better understanding of money, eliminate stress around money, and it helps you to create the financial freedom that you've been looking for. With that, Katie Song, welcome to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show. This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her. I am so happy that there's someone to take this conversation off my back. I carry this conversation on my back every morning. You don't carry it.

I open my eyes and Michael wants to talk about stocks and Bitcoin and all this shit. And I'm like, I need a coffee and a workout and like maybe talk to me after 10. So you guys will have so much to talk about. Well, Katie, I'm excited to have you on the show we met before. And I think, you know, whenever we, we don't talk about money and personal finance so often on this show, but whenever we do, people always want to know more. And I was saying, we haven't had someone with credentials like yours come on social, maybe to start a little bit of a brief background on you, your credentials, why you are the authority

to talk to us about this subject, and then we'll go from there. Absolutely. So I am a certified financial planner since 2008. Before that, I was an investment banker. I worked with some of the biggest tech companies in the world, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle. When I started my family, when I had my daughter,

in 2007, I realized it was time for a pivot. I wanted to have control over my calendar, my schedule. I wanted to be there for my kids. I know that you've talked, Lauren, about kind of that tug of, you know, mom needs to work, but mom also wants to be there. So I wanted to work for myself. So in 2011, I launched Katie's Song Financial Planning. My focus has always been on families

with young children and couples starting their lives together. Because in the financial services industry, no offense, Michael, about the investing, but it's all about investing. And that, to me, is just one little piece of the pie. There's a lot more storing that comes with talking about money. You know, what are your goals?

What are your aspirations? Why are you doing this? Like, why are you working so hard? Is it to provide financial security for your family? And what financial planning does is it puts the numbers to those goals and takes a lot of the stress out of even thinking about money and talking about money. When you look across the board with all the people that you've spoken to about money, what is the biggest mistake that you see people doing?

Like if you could just call it out right now. Shame and aversion. Like people, it seems to be there's this kind of bell curve. The more money you make, the more shame you feel for not feeling like you figured it out yet. So I have some clients that make like 150,000 and some that make $6 million a year. And as you kind of go up that food chain, the shame actually becomes even greater because you feel like you should have figured this shit out.

Yeah. I think when we first sat down, I don't even remember, I said, one of the things that I've figured out in life, and I don't say this to brag, I just said, I've had a skill that I've figured out how to make and generate an income. But for the first probably 10 years of my career, I had no understanding of saving and investing and making money. So I look back and I'm like, wow, I was doing well and making money, but I had nothing to

show for it at the end of every year. I had no discipline. I had no structure. And I think so many people get so frustrated and there's that meme that's on the internet where it's like, I'd like to learn how to file my tax returns. And the teacher's like, no, we're going to learn about magma today. And I think a lot of us are in that situation where you go through school and you don't necessarily dive into this subject as much as maybe we should. And so there's this, you know, there's this pressure to go out into the world and make an income and

make a living, but they don't really teach you how to keep it and what to do with it. And so even for me, I remember sitting at one point and telling Lauren like, shit, I don't know anything about personal finance. Right. And so I dove into like seven or eight books to try to figure it out for myself. Unfortunately have figured out a lot of it since then. But I think back on all of those years of the wasted potential on saving and investing, a lot of it when I was very young that I, and I could be much further now. So I think maybe to start, why do people struggle so much with this topic and why is it not taught more?

I think that there's not a whole lot of financial literacy, you know, definitely in high school, it's not taught. The financial components of your life aren't looked at holistically. So you guys talk a lot about lifestyle, everything from your mental health, your spiritual health, your physical health. The fourth leg of that table is your financial health. And what I find is that whatever your week are in,

you're going to avoid. And unlike your physical health, where you need consistency, you need consistency when it comes to your money, but it's not a daily practice. So I think it's very overwhelming to say, I'm going to dive in and I'm going to read 10 books, I'm going to figure it out myself. And that's where the whole financial planning profession

and what I do comes in to save the day. So instead of you having to spend 60 hours trying to self-learn and self-teach yourself and like figure it all out on your own, you outsource five hours of your time to me and we figure it all out together and set you on the right path. So that's where reaching out for financial planning help makes a ton of sense if you want to kind of get a leg up and kind of up level your game. What are some tweaks that you do that are pretty common

when you're financial planning with someone? I mean, there are really three things that you can control. You can control how much money you make, how much money you spend and tax planning. None of that's sexy, right? It's not, it's not like, you know. It's not sexy. Terrible, right?

I mean, maybe how much money you make. And it's amazing how many people I work with. So I've worked with 900 different families. So I've created that many plans in my career, which is a lot in the financial planning world. A lot of financial advisors will work with maybe 100 people in their entire career. So I'm already at 900.

So I have a lot of experience and a lot of stories. I've literally seen everything. So getting back to the things that you can control. So how much money you earn, like your human capital, in my view, is your biggest asset. So if you're sitting in a dead end job and you're not getting pay raises for years, you've lost out on that power of compounding your biggest asset, which is you. So I help my clients talk about tweaking. We get to the point of what is your breakeven point?

Like, what do you need to be earning to live the life that you wanna lead? And when you figure, like when we come back with that number, let's say that you're making 150,000. And it turns out if you made 180, you could do everything you wanna do. There's so much more motivation for you to consider asking for a promotion,

doing a side hustle, starting your own business. If you don't have those numbers, you're never gonna have the motivation to make a change. If there are different... When you talk to people, is there different categories across the board of what people consider poor, rich, and wealthy? And what do you consider poor, rich, and wealthy? So, to me, the definition of wealth

is having complete control over my time. Yes, I agree with you. Okay. So it's not a number per se. That's why I started my business, because I wanted complete control over my time. It enabled me to have that balance of being present for my kid. My daughter is 17 and a half. She's applying to college. I thought you were going to say seven. About 17. And then my son's in eighth grade. He's 14. And you can see the power of compounding in their behaviors and the way that they are from kind of the example that you set for your kids.

So I definitely think that, you know, kind of owning, owning your journey and owning yourself and understanding kind of where you've been financially and setting that role model for your kids is really important. I want to spend almost no time on this episode talking about how to make money because there's so many episodes that we've done, right? Branding marketing, you know, like the side, like the whole podcast is like how to build a career, right? And how to take care of yourself. So I want to do this episode, Taylor, to say somebody now they've kind of figured out what

they're doing for a career or a job. They have a little bit of income, but they have no idea what to do with their money. You know, maybe they're not, they're not saving yet. They're not investing. Where do you get someone to start when you sit down to make a plan with them? And let's take the, like maybe the average person, maybe they have a little bit of credit card debt, maybe some student loans. Like, where do you say like, okay, we're going to look at your financial wellbeing and we're

going to make a plan. So the start for everybody is building the balance sheet, just like you would for your business. So like, what are all your liquid accounts? You're checking your savings. Then I moved down to kind of taxable brokerage, like stuff you can take out to buy a car, buy a house, and then move down to kind of taxable brokerage, like stuff you can take out to buy a car or buy a house, and then move down to retirement. If you have a house, if you have personal belongings like a motorcycle collection or

guitar collection or lots of handbags, potentially, add all those up and that's your assets. And then we have to add up all your liabilities. So do you have a mortgage? Do you have credit card debt? Do you have student debt? And so the mathematical equation is assets minus li up all your liabilities. So do you have a mortgage? Do you have credit card debt? Do you have student debt? And so the mathematical equation is assets minus liabilities equals your net worth. So that net worth is your starting position.

The goal of being in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and your 50s is to grow that number over time. We don't have a starting point. We don't know if you're making any progress. So I usually see that number go up between five and 10% per year. That's kind of like an organic cadence that you should be paying attention to. So, I usually see that number go up between 5 and 10% per year. That's kind of like an organic cadence that you should be paying attention to.

If you're not making that 5 to 10% number and improving your net worth year over year, you need to look to see why. There are three main reasons that I've seen people's net worth not increase at that rate. One would be what happened November, 2021, the market crashed 30% down. You can't do anything about that. You don't have control over it. The other is prolonged unemployment.

So I live in San Francisco, when tech companies lay off a ton of people, it's really hard to find your next job because you've got a lot of really qualified people vying for fewer positions. And then the third thing that I've seen really post-COVID has been we started a renovation project. It was supposed to be 300. It ended up being 600. So those are like the three main reasons I've seen in the last like eight years of why people's net worth wouldn't improve.

So that's like step one is like, where are you today? And how do you progress? And looking at that annually, I mean, Lauren, you don't have to look at this every day. You definitely don't. And you don't need to talk about it every day. But if somebody in the relationship is like, that's very common in relationships or somebody super gung ho. And somebody else is like, fucking talking to me about this like two times a year. Right? Like, that's good. And I talked to some of my clients, we do this annually. Lauren comes to me and says, I think someone stole my credit card every single month. I'm like, nope, every single month it was you, every single time. You know what I just saw? This is the perfect episode to announce this on. Michael got me a beautiful anniversary gift. Gorgeous. And I was just on the phone, Katie will be happy with the person that I go over my Amex spell

with. And at the top is the gift that Michael gave me. Michael used my credit card to get my anniversary gift. Yeah, I use it. I use one of these things. That is called someone stealing my credit card and then rebranding it as a gift for me. I don't know what you saw because I don't know if actually you saw the right thing. Now I'm worried that you saw the Christmas thing, but anyways. Oh, is it a joint card?

That's joint. Okay. I don't like claims to have joint cards. It's a joint card. I don't like claims to have joint cards because if he messes up and he screws up your credit score, so always have separate cards. I'm not worried about him messing up. He's not worried about me messing up, Katie.

At this point, we, I mean, we've been together so long. Yeah. What anniversary is it? What number? We actually, it's, it was number eight. No, we don't have any, I mean, at this point, it's funny because, and I'm not going to get into this topic either, because this is a heavy topic of pre-node, but we've basically, we've been together since we were 20 years old.

So like everything we have is together. It's both years. Yeah. We have managed though, to not make money an issue in our relationship, even when we had none in the beginning. Well, this is maybe we've talked about this with couples before too. This is, we decided just as a general thing for our relationship that like basically it's all yours, but that's what works for us. I mean, everybody's different and obviously we've been building together, but I think like, what's his is mine and what's mine is mine. Yeah. That's what works for us. Everyone's different. Yeah. I mean, everybody's different and obviously we've been building together, but I think like-

What's that quote? What's his is mine and what's mine is mine. Yeah. That's how I think about it. But anyways- As all women should. Yeah. I think like for us, for it to not be an issue, we just look at it as like, if I make a dollar,

it's our dollar. If she makes a dollar, it's our. It's easier that way. I know some people like kind of like divvy up the income. I mean, so even clients that I have that keep separate accounts and keep separate cards and keep it all separate, we still have to aggregate it as a family to be like, okay, so what does it really take to live your life? How much are you spending? So like getting to the next step of what I want. So it's construct your balance sheet.

The next thing is really cash flow. So we're not going to talk about earning more money, right? But what we need to see is what's going out the door and what does it cost to live your life? I mean when you've got two kids under the age of five, it is the cash hemorrhaging years. Like these are the years that childcare is really expensive. You're also supposed to be buying a house, renovating a bathroom, taking a vacation to Nantucket, you know, like doing some fun stuff like that.

And so I helped my clients, so I focused on this area, is I helped my clients figure out how do we do it all and how do we still save for college, get debt free, all those things. So I want to talk though, and I would, and listen, I know what people are going to say, Lauren and I have been fortunate that we've been working and we've now been successful for a while. I mean, we've been building this show for a decade and before that, so it's, we've learned a lot, but I, I, but I think back on the early years, when she was bartending and when she was putting herself through college and doing the blog.

When I was starting out and we didn't have anything and we were trying to figure it out, for somebody who's just getting going, if you could coach them and say, listen, I want to set you up with some foundational pillars that you can carry forward year after year so that you can save, invest, put something like, how do you coach those kinds of people and structure their financial planning? Well, so for example, we stayed at the Fairmont while we were here in Austin.

And the guy who, the bellhop guy, or helping us get into the car, he said, I'm studying finance. What are some tips that you give me? I'm 24. All right, so maybe a little bit younger than my general audience. And I said, you know, know your cashflow,

know how much money you're spending and open up a Roth IRA. All right, just start putting in money. And he kind of knew the amounts. He's like, yeah, I think I can put in 6,000. I'm like, well, that's actually seven, but you wanna try to put in as much as you can. You're 24, time is on your side.

So I think that it was in your episode with your personal trainer, who I thought was brilliant, but it's kind of that consistency and the power of compounding. So like if you start working out in your 20s, you have a lot of time to build muscle memory and to make sure that you can stay fit throughout your life.

It's the same thing with money, right? So if you're in your 20s and you're just starting out, you don't have to devour seven books and become a master of day trading but even if you open up a Schwab fidelity of Vanguard account and you start putting in ten bucks and just start investing in the S&P You will witness the power of compounding and you don't even have to work for it. So like one of the things that You know makes rich people richer is their money's making the money. But if you don't ever start and you don't ever start the power of compounding you're never going to get to that point. I try to look at everything in my life as reps like you just said and it's like reading.

People are like how do you have time to read? You have 10 minutes a day. If you read for 10 minutes a day, every single day, you read more than 90% of people. I think, and money's the same way. It's like reps, reps, reps. It's the little things that really add up. I have very few regrets in my life. I just don't, I try to be someone that looks forward and not back, but one of the only regrets I have is that I didn't learn about this and compounding earlier. Because like I said, there was 10 years wasted in income producing years that I was not investing or saving anything.

So I tell anyone that will listen, and especially our sisters and our family members that are younger, like even if it's a hundred bucks a month or 50 bucks a month or something. $10 a week. Whatever it is, because, and I was telling our younger sister, Mimi, Lauren's sister, like if you're 20 years old and you can even figure a way to squirrel away

500 to a thousand bucks extra, you know, a quarter, and you do that for the next 30 years, like you'll be a millionaire by the time you're 60. You'll never have to think about money. That's the way the math works. Yes. It's crazy when you hear those numbers and you just say like, Hey, a thousand dollars.

I mean, if you could do a thousand dollars a quarter or two thousand dollars a quarter and you do that for 35 years, you're set for life. So some of my clients that when we first start out, they're starting with like a hundred bucks a week, you know, like they're trying to pay down their student loan debt. They're wanting to save for a house, but also balance out, you know, living in an expensive, you know, if they live in New York or LA or wherever they might live. And then when they get to their thirties, they're in this cash hemorrhaging phase, you know, living in an expensive, you know, if they live in New York or LA or, you know, wherever they might live. And then when they get to their 30s, they're in this cash hemorrhaging phase, you know, where they're spending all this money on childcare.

And then you get to a point where that goes down, like your kids go to hopefully public school if you're going to be in a nice neighborhood and have that happen. And then you start setting aside the thousand bucks, the seven. I mean, like I bought some clients, they net cash flows seven grand a month. And watching the flexibility and opportunity that gives them later in life. I mean, I can't tell you how many people in their mid-40s come to me and they're asking, what is enough? How long do I have to do this for?

Like I'm tired. I don't want to do this anymore. And if you're starting in your 40s, it's never too late to start. It's just like working out. But it's a lot harder to find flexibility and opportunities. And you just like, if you can do that in your 20s and 30s and set it on autopilot. And I mean, I'm a financial planner. I talk about money all day long. Do you know how often I look at my stuff? I look at my cash flow once a month. I mean, I know what I spent, right? I've been doing this a long time. I look at my investments once a year.

That sounds fun. Yeah, I like that. Why are there so many 60 plus year olds that are broke? Because this is, I've talked to a lot of different walks of life, and there's something about 60 plus in this climate right now. They're broke. And I've noticed it. What is that from? So I think that there are kind of two things. Like a lot of my clients come to me and they're first generation professionals. So like their parents who were in their 60s don't know anything about money. They may not even have a savings account. Like they've got a checking account.

Maybe they live, most of them will, not most of them, but some of my clients' parents are living paycheck to paycheck. And then my client, this generation, is petrified about having to support their parents. Am I going to have to pay my mom's mortgage? Is she gonna have to come live with us? Like, am I gonna have to pay for her health insurance? So these are the kind of worries that people have.

So why are they broke? I mean, some people, you know, they just didn't ever have the financial acumen or even their parents' generation to teach them how to take care of themselves this way. So if you were 60 plus and you were broke in this, like right now, what are you doing? Well, it gives me heart palpitations, first of all. Like I was saying before, like you will have to keep working.

Your social security when you take it will not be enough to live your life. And you better live in a low cost area. Like maybe you're moving to Alabama, but you're not going to be living in New York City, maybe if you have a rent control and it's really good. Part of it is lifestyle, lifestyle creep. Like people, it's the hedonic treadmill. Like I don't know if you've heard it, like think about the hamster wheel. So the hedonic treadmill is like the more money you make, the more money you spend,

the more money make, the more money you spend. But there's this like degree of happiness that if you make about a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars any dollar you make more than that Actually has diminishing returns of happiness. Yeah, and so those 60 year old road people have never gotten to the hundred and seventy five thousand Like they've never probably really realized their earning potential They probably you know, I Mean everybody has their own story, right? I know we have some 60 year old plus listeners and viewers, and I empathize with that situation,

but I do wanna keep this focused. And again, I just wanna stay like away from how to make money because we've talked about it so much. I do think those stories about people that get older and end up in those situations should be cautionary tales of younger people. I think there's this situation where there's delayed gratification

that people have a struggle with. And what I try to tell our siblings all the time, and I guess I would tell this any of our listeners that are interested in this topic is, you're not, it's not easy to do it later, but it's very easy to do it early, if that makes sense. Like you don't have, like we now have children and they're in school and we have to have childcare

and we have all these things into your point, like more money's going out the door than ever before at this point of our life, because we have to take care of them and we have a house and all these things. But when I was in my twenties and more, like all we had to do is like pay our rent and like our meals and entertainment and stuff that we're doing. But we had really no, like if we went broke, it was okay. We, you know, you're young. Go live at home for a little bit. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. But I would say like young people just think they have all the time in the world, but this is the time you should take those extra dollars and throw them

because the compounding adds up so much that you could completely avoid being broke later in life just by starting a little bit now. I find though that, you know, I'm 49. So I'm, you know, Gen X. I think that the younger generation has so much more access to content and information and shows like this, that they're actually savvier than those 60-year-olds were when they were 20, right?

Like, they just have tremendous more, and they're more mature. So I find that people are coming to me kind of with their shit already figured out, and they're like, hey, I already have my Better Man account opened up. I'm already figured out. And they're like, hey, I already have my betterment account opened up. I'm already automatically investing. I want you to teach me more, Katie. Teach me like why I should invest here, invest here. Should I buy a rental property? Should that be a goal of mine?

In your 30s, we're kind of more finely tuning. Like you're spending more money, like you said, but you also should be earning more. So we wanna make sure that your money is going into the right type of accounts because get back to the unsexy things like tax planning. I want to make sure that my clients are taking advantage of every opportunity to pay the least amount of taxes and make sure that things can defer and grow tax free as much as possible.

And again, that gets back to kind of time is on your side. And in your forties, that's when I really focus with my clients on making sure you're better diversified. Are you on track for your goals? If you're ahead of schedule, do you have other goals that you wanna do? Do you wanna try to retire early? Do you wanna buy an investment property?

Do you wanna buy a second house? Whatever it might be. And then in your 50s, I mean, if you haven't planned yet, it's never too late, like I was saying before, but you need to really put the pedal to the metal and really focus on optimizing how much you can save. Because if you don't do it in your fifties, you don't want to be fucked when you're 60 and realize that you're going to have to work till you're 80.

If you don't want to, there are some people that love working and they're going to work until they're 80. If you don't want to. There are some people that love working and they're going to work until they're 80. Yeah, I just look at you, I look at it at that age, hopefully you have the optionality to do it because you want to do it, not because you're forced to do it. Yeah. How did you teach your children about money?

Was there like a book, a piggy bank? Did you get monopoly money? What did you do? I think that when your kids see you working hard and they see you happy about working hard, they realize the value of working hard themselves. So if you're miserable at your job and you come back every day from work

and you are grumpy and you talk shit about your work, your kids are not gonna value that. They're gonna be like, that looks like a waste of time and like really unpleasant. So I think that first of all, it's kind of loving what you do, or at least liking what you do. I think that also the value of a dollar,

which is if you give your kids everything and don't teach them about the price know, the price of what things cost. I think you're doing them a disservice. I mean, I loved, I think it was Dr. Becky that you guys had on. She's great. Yeah, she was an, I felt like I learned so much about like what a boundary was.

I was like, ha! I never thought about it that way. I went back and listened to the episode again, even though I did the episode with her. I went back and listened. And I feel like even when she was talking about, like having the milkshake for breakfast, or having ice cream for breakfast, and kind of, you know, it's teaching your kids that,

you know, buying an Aviator Nation $200 sweatshirt, that costs $200. And you could buy one at Old Navy or go thrifting, and it costs you five. So let's think about where we want to spend our money. Although we are friends with Paige, and you should buy Aviator Nation. I know, it's beautiful stuff. It's absolutely beautiful stuff. Just kidding. Hi Paige.

I'm just not sure how many five-year-olds need a t-shirt. The most comfortable sweats I've ever worn. No, they're so pretty. Truly, those sweats are so comfortable. But I get the point. Yeah. So let's talk, okay, when it comes to- I should have picked a different brand, sorry.

That's okay. When it comes to debt, credit cards, student loans, say someone's mid-20s and they have some debt and they're trying to figure out how to tackle it, how do you coach people on how to think about debt? The first step is what's the source of the debt? Is it overspending? You have to live within your means. Even if you've accumulated debt because maybe you were unemployed for a while or there was

a medical issue or you were being stupid And you bought a car that was too expensive and now you've got $20,000 in debt and you're like fuck. How am I gonna pay for this? we have to address the source of it first so we can make sure it's not going to be a recurring pattern and Then we want to alleviate The high price of that debt. So like if you have a 21, 27% credit card, the interest in finance charges alone will make it so you will never get ahead.

So if you go on like a website like NerdWallet, you're gonna see there is 0% APR balance transfer offers. Consolidate your debt, like alleviate the pressure of that compounding interest in finance charges so that you can at least give yourself some breathing room. Explain that a little bit more, what someone can do. They could take, you know, say they have two credit cards that they're carrying, they're paying, you know, small payments every month

and they're carrying all that interest and they want to clear it. What would you tell them to do? Yeah, so I would find a 0% APR card, apply for it. They tend to lowball you with the credit limit they're gonna give you. They're like, okay, here's five grand, here's seven grand, here's a tip. Just call the credit card company and say, I want ten grand, I want fifteen grand. Try to get as much as you can to transfer your high interest debt to the 0% card. The goal is really if the promotional period of that card,

so you transfer it, there's always a transfer fee, there's going to be like a 3% charge, no matter what, it's going to be less than you're paying in finance charges and interest charges. So it's going to be worth it. So if you had $5,000 in credit card debt and you were carrying all this interest, you could essentially transfer this to a new credit lender, but they're going to charge you 0% and then you're not fighting against the interest that's being accrued against you. Yeah. And so let's say the promotional period is 15 months or 18 months, they're going to charge you 0% and then you're not fighting against the interest that's being accrued against you. Right. Yeah.

And so let's say the promotional period is 15 months or 18 months. You're going to divide the 5,000 by whatever the promotional period is, and that's your goal to pay that off during that promotional period. So it just gives you a chance to, instead of your money just going to feed that high interest, you're actually paying back the principal. Okay. And now say that you've got to a place where, you know, fast forward 15 months or 12 months, or however long it takes, you've cleared your debt and you're saying, okay, I want to start saving.

Where do you start with saving and how do you coach people and how much to save? Yeah. So the first step is always to open the account. Like you can't start automatically saving or investing if you can't start automatically saving or investing if you don't have the vessel like sent out there into the universe for you to have the money transferred into. And like money, my feeling is money is supposed to flow. So a lot of times people are like, oh I'm gonna hold on to this like a squirrel. Like this is your nuts, I'm gonna keep in my savings account and they're not earning any interest. Like we want to do something

with your money. We want your money to earn you money. So the first step is to open the account. People get very paralyzed with indecision and fear even when it comes to that. So just so your listeners know, there's really no difference between Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, Betterment, Wealthfront. They're all the same. It is a commodity.

You open up a brokerage account. So it then gets confusing. Like, what kind of account do I open? So you want to open up an individual brokerage account. That's just a taxable brokerage account. So it then gets confusing. Like what kind of account do I open? So you want to open up an individual brokerage account. That's just a taxable brokerage account and you can take the money out at any time. That's the type of account I want most people to set up. And then all of these platforms have automatic investing for free. So you want to set up that automatic investing. It'll come out of your checking account or your

savings account. Again, $10 a month, $20, $50. Yep. What we've done and what we did in the early days, now it's a little different, but what I found useful is if you just take a certain percentage of it and you pretend you never get it, you never put it in your checking account, you don't put it even in your savings account, it just goes into that savings account, make it hard to access. Meaning like for us, the way that I would have to access that

is I would have to physically go into the bank and get a check. So like every time I would think about it, like, oh, that's a pain in the ass. And so you just leave it there. I think the easier access you have to it or the more that it hits your personal checking account, the more likely you are to spend it.

But if you just put it off to the side, that's 200 bucks, 300 bucks, whatever you can save, I found that to be useful. I agree. This is maybe a weird question, but I am someone that believes that your thoughts create your future. And I remember being really broke, like no money when I was bartending. And I remember deciding to, whenever I thought about money to

envision it growing on trees. So I remember being like 21 years old and anytime my brain would go to money I would automatically think about it growing on trees. Do you believe that there's something sort of behind that that your thought around money helps you make it? I'm a strong believer in energy like that's a big part of my life that's part of like my spirituality you know when we talk about the four table legs again. And I think that you have to have a positive mindset

when it comes to your money. And that's where a lot of people get stuck. They come into adulthood with these stories from their parents. These nights we're like, oh my God, we were poor, then we were rich, then we were poor, then we were rich. I have whiplash, I spend whatever I have because I don't know if I'm gonna have it anymore.

So as an adult, you can choose to change your story, to reframe it. And part of that is deciding, you know, like who do I wanna be when I grow up? Do I wanna be like the nervous person who's 60 and broke? Or do I wanna kind of manifest having that flexibility and those options? And even just to me, sending that message out to the universe

helps you take that first step forward. I also think what you talked about with Flow, I believe like what you give out comes back to you too. If you're constantly like stowing away your money like a squirrel, I mean, I knew someone, an ex-boyfriend of mine, his parents were so cheap. Everything was, the whole conversation around everything, from how much an onion was at the grocery store

to how much a car was, was about the money, that there was like this scarcity mentality, like there wasn't enough. And it really projected onto him. I mean, I remember going out to dinner and he was asking the waiter how much the amuse-bouche was. Like, it was just like very like it was free and I think like there was just like it does rub off on you so I think it is important to examine when money

comes into your head what are you thinking? Are you thinking there's not enough or are you thinking that there's so much abundance? Well the financial services industry is based off of fear like every marketing you say is about the mistakes you're gonna make and how you're gonna fuck it up and you better give your money for assets under management to some dude to like, you know, manage it for you. And you can't possibly, Lauren, know what you're doing. Right?

So I've always approached, I've always been a registered investment advisor, but I never have managed money. So I give investment advice as part of my flat fee. So I'm giving kind of holistic, like, here's everything from your balance sheet to your cash flow to how much insurance you should have, to how much you should put in your brokerage account, how much did you spend on a house,

what do you need to be saving for college and retirement? And I've always taken an approach from abundance. And I think that's why I attract the clients that I attract. Totally, because they're looking to change their lives. Like my whole goal, and I say this in the book that I wrote, which is like, your time is finite. And so we, your money isn't, you can always make more money. You can always spend less money, but we want to make the most of your time. So if, if working with a financial planner is going to save 60 hours of you

self-educating into this, then it's worth it, right? We want to make the most of the time that you have on this planet so that you can live the life that you truly want to live. And getting back to couples and how they... Everybody is different in a couple. There's no one couple I've met where they both are just like, yeah, I love talking about money. Let's do this all day long It just doesn't happen

but when you have Open communication about this you have better sex Like I mean it comes down to like you are able to be more intimate Because you don't have that friction and talking about this one topic and it's a huge cause of divorce Yeah I was gonna bring that up because I was reading the stat one time and they were saying one of the biggest reasons people get divorced is because of financial reasons, right? And the stress around money. And you nailed something there when you were just talking

about, like, and I think people should think about this, like, you can always make more money. There's always opportunity. And I'm not saying it's easy to make money, but that possibility is out there. You can't get back your time, right? And so that's fine. That's your point. But I think that there's this thing, like I have some friends that constantly are talking about how bad they are at dating and how bad their relationships and I'm like, yeah, you're terrible. Like they really are. And I'm like, but you also reinforcing that to yourself all the time. And so you're putting that out there. So every time you start to go on a date, you're starting it with, oh, I'm bad at this and I'm not good at being in a relationship. And then that's

exactly how that manifests. And I think the same thing around money is you will say, oh, I'm bad with money or I'm bad at saving or I don't understand. And like, you can change that. In my case, I went down the rabbit hole and read all the books, but you can work with someone like yourself and actually start to say, actually, I'm good with money or I'm improving. And I think when you make that flip, it's going to completely change the way that you view, have, save all the things around finances. If you keep telling yourself, I'm bad with this or I'm not good at it or nobody ever taught me, you're just going to stay that way.

Well, the one good thing about stress that I think is that it causes pain. And when you're in pain, you're more likely to change. Right? So if you're stressed about money, that's okay. And if it's causing you pain, it's your opportunity to change. And usually by the time people call me, the decision's already been made. Like once you place the phone call, you book the consultation, you're ready for change. And those are the type of people that I like to work with because I can make the most impact. And the impact from financial planning is immediate. People feel an immediate sense of relief because somebody else is there to help carry the load

and understand them and listen to them. And that's really the first step. Again, once you get a plan, you know what your goals are, you start on that pathway to either financial literacy or just knowing that somebody's got your back and you meet with them annually to make sure you're making the progress you want to be making. Your life is better. Do you find when you sit down with people that they struggle to articulate exactly how much money they even think they should have or save? Meaning like, I talk to people, especially young people, and say, what do you want to do? Like, well, I want to make $10 million. And I say, well, why? For what? And it's like these people just pull numbers out of the air. What I found to be helpful

is like getting so specific with what your numbers are. Do you help people work through that? Oh, I am as delineated as you can possibly be. So when it comes to kind of what do you need for your financial independence? What do you need for retirement? A lot of people my age are looking for work optionality Like what does it take to get me to like where I don't have to work for somebody else anymore or I can just Consult if I want to so I tell them specifically what that number is in today's dollars and if they're there Congratulations, i'm so happy for you. You've achieved this and if're not, I tell them specifically how much they need to be saving every year.

And then get even more granular into, OK, which account should it go into? Which is the most tax effective? Do you need to start diversifying from your 401k into a backdoor Roth IRA so that when you are retired, you've got different pockets of money to pull from? So as you get older, it's even more important to start really looking at diversification, not just of investments, but of the types of accounts and pockets of money you have

to pull from. And is that number different for most like, I'm assuming your number, everyone's number is kind of different depending on what they want to do in life. It comes down to lifestyle, you know? So you know, what are you spending? What is your life going to look like? And what does it look like today? I mean, the big driver is what does it look like today? Hopefully you're not still paying a mortgage in 30 years.

Like the goal is to have that house paid off. And that's usually everybody's biggest expense is like mortgage, property taxes, not going anywhere. How do you feel about renting versus buying? This is a big debate that people have online. Yeah. I find that my millennial clients are less obsessed with the idea of homeownership.

I'm not obsessed with it. I want, I want fluidity and uncertainty in my life. I don't want to, I don't want to put my, I mean, it's just like, I don't want to live in a house for 30 years. That doesn't, but that's me. I want to be able to move around and be malleable. There's a huge flexibility in renting, but I would say that like, so I'm a homeowner, my husband and we've been married for 21 years.

We bought our house in 2005. In 2017, we moved to Bordeaux, France. Like how fun is that? It was great. By the way, I, I, I love buying. I'm just saying like to stay there forever. I'm with you. I can't stay in the same place. I mean, eight years to me is a fricking eternity.

Like that is so long. Yeah, it's a whole life. Yeah. So I like to kind of move around every four years. It's harder with kids, right? So my daughter was starting middle school. My son was in second grade and we moved to Bordeaux, France. How fun. I spoke French, nobody else did. Love it. So now my kids are fluent, my husband does pretty well, and

we loved it. It was the best three years. How long did it take for your kids to be fluent? I mean my daughter was in French school eight hours a day, so I mean by the end of the first year. We're moving to France. Yeah. I don't know their tax rates about 60% now, so I don't know about that. Well we didn't have to pay French taxes to get the long-stay, we didn't have to pay French taxes. To get the long stay visitor visa, you have to claim to like not take a job from a French person. So I just ran my business remotely. Yeah, Michael, take notes.

I do love France. I just don't love their tax rate. What I was getting at though, is that we rented our house out. I mean, it was, we rented out for $10,000 a month. So the three years that we were in Bordeaux, my husband didn't have to work. And I love my job, so I worked.

But we traveled and the kids learned a language and you meet other people who are looking for adventure. So we made these amazing friends. You know, we go, let's go run a castle. Let's go kayaking into Brovnik. Like, and it was COVID, eventually became COVID and there were no Americans and nobody from Asia. So we had like full reign of the continent. It was amazing. That sounds absolutely amazing. And how magical, that's a rich life to me. Like the fact that your husband didn't have to work,

you guys did the home situation where you went to- Just take me to France, Lauren, and let me just chill out for a while. I will, I'm ready to go. What's wrong with you? Financially though, do you have a strong perspective on renting versus buying? Cause people get up in arms about this topic.

And I would caveat by saying, Lauren and I rented for as long as possible. And then when we had kids and settled down, we bought because kids. Don't you think that people are projecting though, what, what they're doing? Meaning like if they're, if they bought a home, they're going to project about, about buying a home because they they're in a way scared that they bought the home. Does that make sense? I personally, and then you may disagree with this. I personally put my home as a liability and not an asset.

And I'll say why I believe that rent is the most you'll pay and a mortgage is the least you'll pay. Meaning like I've been a homeowner and I've got a great interest rate and all that, but there's always something breaking. There's always some maintenance thing. There's always some upkeep. There's the property tax, all this stuff. And the fact is-

There's always someone designing a different room. If you can sit in it for seven to ten to 15 years, likely you're going to get some appreciation and do well. But a lot of people, if they can't afford to sit in it for that long, a mortgage could be a real liability. Yeah. So from a time perspective, don't ever think about buying real estate if you're not going to stay in it for that long, a mortgage could be a real liability. Yeah. So from a time perspective, don't ever think about buying real estate if you're not going to stay in it for seven years. So in my opinion, the idea of the starter home is

dead. Like real estate is too expensive, mortgage rates suck, and it's just too much to get in. And from a real estate transaction cost, you're going to not make a single penny if you're not going to stay in that house five to seven years. So if your time horizon is less than that, don't make that mistake. Absolutely do not make that mistake. I've got clients and my husband's this way. He loves our house. He fiddles and fattles with all the things and he grows his garden and stuff like that.

I'm like you, Lauren. I'd be perfectly happy. Let's go spend the summer in Portugal. Let's go here. And he's like, oh, what about the garden? Who's going to tend to it? He likes being home. I think that taking it down from an emotional projection

standpoint, what are the numbers? So if you can rent a place for $3,600 and in order to buy that same house, it's going to cost you $7,000, which that's the case in San Francisco, then it makes more sense for you to rent, especially if you're not going to be able to afford the down payment, which takes a lot. And you're taxed on pulling all that down. It's a massive payment for young people.

And property taxes, Austin is not cheap either when it comes to property taxes. So there are certain areas where property taxes are not bad. Like if you live in, I've got some clients that live in Denver, like it's not that bad. It's bad in San Francisco, I mean all of California. It's pretty bad in Texas. It's not cheap in Washington. Like any place where you have no income tax, they're going to make it up by charging a lot more in property taxes.

That's interesting. You know our property taxes? Yeah, she has no idea. I think I do know our property taxes. Mmm. That's interesting. Do you know our property taxes? No, she has no idea. I think I do know our property taxes actually, Michael. When do they go? When do you pay? Well, I'm not going to say it on air, but I actually... Not the cost. Do you know when we pay it?

No. Okay. Why would I know that? You do that. I do other things. December and April. I do other things. January. What is a story that you've had with a client

where they've come to you feeling like they didn't have their finances together and you sort of helped change everything around and you're really proud of it? I mean, I feel that way about everybody that I work with. Is there someone in particular though, that you just like, you're just, this story just like rocks your world?

So there was, you know, always there's a recency bias, like the one that you worked with most recently is going to impact you the most. So there was a client that they just had their third baby. Okay. The baby's three weeks old. So the dad is still on paternity leave. He's like, we need to get this because I think I need to buy a house. I think we need we're renting their rents $8,000 a month, not insignificant.

But to buy the house he wants to buy was gonna cost him 12. So when I started doing their cash flow and looking at their spending, now that they've got three kids, they're spending $90,000 a year on childcare. Wow. All right.

So when I started showing them their cash flow, I'm like, you're in the hole $145,000 a year. Most of it's because of childcare. But the other part, he didn't realize he was spending two grand a month on Ubers, and they were spending over $3,000 a month on DoorDash, because they're tired, they've got little picky kids, they're not, they don't feel like cooking. So they knew they were spending more because their savings account, that down payment that they had, had been dwindling.

Not quite, you know, they just got a no pair. There's always a moving piece. So even just giving them the clarity of looking at their numbers, he was like, oh, my God, it's just laziness. I'm taking those Ubers because I'm waking up late and not getting my ass to the ferry in order to get to work. So immediate behavior changes happen

just from having clarity into what your numbers are. And then even me just telling them, like, listen, it does not make sense for you when you've got three kids with childcare, for you to be buying a house. It's going to cost you 12 grand instead of 8 grand. Just stay in your rental. It's bigger than a house that you're going to be able to afford to buy. And you're eating up your down payment because you're overspending. Isn't it sometimes, too, you're spending more on childcare than you're eating up your down payment because you're overspending. Isn't it sometimes too, you're spending more on childcare than you're even making? Well, in this case, they were making more.

Okay. Yeah. So like, there are cases where it's not. Yes. And in those cases, like I was on the- Are you just paying for a break from your kids? Well, the hardest job is to be a full-time mom. For sure. Right?

Like six weeks after my son was born, I was back at work. I mean, it's my company and I was like my baby. So, and you know, my office is behind my house. So I wasn't that far away from him. So for this couple, they had like immediate relief, knowing that like, you know, they could give up, not give up, but they could table the whole idea of buying a house. You know, these could give up, not give up, but they could table the whole idea of buying a house. You know, these are really big decisions.

Yeah, I think the biggest change, I think for us personally, was like I said earlier, we were, we started to struggle for a while and then we got decent at generating an income and then didn't know what to do with the income and then made it and lost it and then finally took hold of it. But one of the biggest changes was actually starting to pay attention to all these things. Like where's the money going? Where's it being saved?

Where's it being invested? And how's it being spent? All that. And it was like, I remember in the beginning it was looking at it a lot so that we could analyze what was happening, at least for me. Now I don't have to look at it as often because you kind of get a baseline over time.

But I remember in the beginning there was this huge feeling of anxiety, just like addressing the credit card bills and addressing the rent bill and all of those payments. I think that like for me, where the first step was just like looking at it in the face and saying like, oh, this is what's actually going on.

And these are where the dollars are going and lost or spent or whatever. Well, one of the things that is helpful of working with somebody like me is that I can kind of do some social benchmarking. So a lot of people come to me and they're like, we're spending, you know, the husband will be like, we're spending too much money on food. And she's like, well, now we're not.

And then, you know, the wife will be like, you're spending too much money, you know, on fantasy football. And so when I look at their numbers and I compare them to other families of four and I'm like, no, you're fine. You're absolutely fine. Let's talk about the fun stuff. What do you guys want to spend on travel next year? You know, let's talk about your trips. Let's plan this out. The holidays are coming up

I want people to be more mindful I mean it's really easy to get a caught up in the lights and the glamour and the smells of candles and all that kind of stuff and just like spend spend spend and then in January when you get that damn credit card bill you're Like you're stressed. Like how did this happen? How did we spend an extra $3,000? Someone stole my credit card. Could be. I'm a little worried about how much I just spent on the lights outside our house. You could see our- See, that's another thing, the cost of the house, and we got the lights on the house. It was a rental. I'm not putting the lights on the rental.

But I wanted to make it sparkly for my kids. But again, like I think, I just want to articulate, like we, a lot of these things that we did, I want for listeners that are not as farther along or especially young people, I want to articulate the things that I wish we did, which was have these kinds of conversations, understand finance, learn how to save, learn how to invest because it's so much harder now. I mean, fortunately we've, we've done okay, but as you start to have more responsibilities and maybe you do have a mortgage and you do have kids and the kids have to go to

school and they need clothes and all these things, it can get really challenging. But if you build that buffer zone early and that compounding takes effect, it just makes life so much easier. And as much as people maybe dislike to hear this, money is always going to be a huge part of living as a person being in society. It's how you transact. It's how you get things. It's how you take care of things.

It's just a fact of life. And so I think some people kind of disregard and kind of push it off to the side, and then they suffer way longer than they need to. Well, we live in a hypercapitalistic society. So unless you have found some lala land to live where money doesn't exist, like you have to pay attention to this stuff or you're never going to be successful. Yeah.

Like, and I don't even mean successful, like as in having a lot of money, but really enjoying your life. Yeah. And, and you know, whenever I hear people say like, I don't care about money. I'm like, well, it's money. Care. Like money cares about you. Like it, it Like it matters because that's how you do everything. And I don't, not about how you get measured, but just again, how you eat, how you live,

how you take care of your kids, how you, where you, all of these things. Or how you give. Like you could become really charitable. You could decide that. I mean, I have a lot of clients whose stocks did really well this year and all, you know, everybody's like, should I do a donor advice fund? Should I get a big tax deduction for, you know, gifting my appreciated securities? I'm like, absolutely. If gifting is something that matters to you, there are really great ways to go about doing that. So sometimes even money just enables you to be the person that you want to be. You guys, for a limited time, Domain Money is offering a free 30-minute strategy session

to all show listeners. That is very, very generous, and you get to see which financial plan's right for you. Let's talk about Domain Money for a second. Yeah, that's amazing. Tell us the breakdown of that. So we offer three different planning services, but before I get into that, like the free strategy session gives us a chance to like hear about our clients, hear about like, what is your pain point? Like, what's going on in your life?

Are you 20, 30, 40? Like what's your situation? And giving even in that call, some real tactical advice. If it's the right fit, and we think that you would benefit from this and you feel like ecstatic, I'm like, okay, this is exactly what is going to make me feel better about 2025 or 2026 and going forward. We've got three different plans. So I've been doing this for 15 years and kind of the methodology here works really well for my clients. So like the first plan is kind of like our starter plan. It's it's called the one page plan I think we're changing the name to the essential plan because it's not really one page. It's multiple pages but that's really for like our clients that are Starting to figure out that you're wanting to figure out their financial life. They don't own a home yet

They probably don't have kids yet, but they want a framework for you know, what is my cash flow? What's my starting point? How should I be going about investing? How do I make sure that I have the right investments in my 401k or my IRA or whatever account? Do I need insurance? What kind of insurance should I have? Once you have kids or own a home, you move up to what we call a strategic plan. Your life is more complicated. There's usually a couple involved and it's not just like a single person. And we're focusing on three key areas. Most of those areas tend to be cash flow and retirement, always two of them. And then the third area tends to be like, how much house can I afford? Sometimes we need to upgrade, we had an extra kid.

Or we want to buy a rental property or we want to do a massive renovation. Should we move or should we renovate? Or we're looking at investments and education savings. How do we optimize that? The third plan is our comprehensive plan, and it is just what it sounds like. It's everything in your life with a dollar sign. Clients tend to self-select into that. My financial planner isn't, I don't push that because it's a lot of information. So like Lauren, for you, you'd be like, hell no. Like I do not want to hear about my homeowners insurance on my section 1A coverage and me having to increase my deductible. I like to delegate that to Michael. Exactly, exactly. So for my

clients that are like, I've been, they're usually in their 40s or 50s and they're like, I've been meaning to do this for 15 years. Why didn't I do this 10 years ago? They want to rip the band-aid and they want us to look at everything. Employee benefits, insurance, estate planning, all their investments. They probably have old retirement accounts that they've just been too lazy to move over or haven't known the process. So for us, it's really about teaching a woman to fish or a man to fish, eat for a lifetime. We want to hold our clients hands to get stuff done. So if you've got old 401k plans that you just haven't rolled over, we make sure it all gets done.

If you've got stuff that's sitting in cash and needs to be reinvested, we teach you how to do it. We have our clients share their screen with us. We walk you through how to place a trade. For some people, it's the first time they've ever done this stuff before. And then there are others that are really comfortable doing it. So it's kind of the full spectrum. I think this is really amazing for everyone

who's listening to take advantage of a free 30-minute situation. That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, listen, I can't stress enough how much personal stress we could have avoided in our life if we would have taken an interest in this earlier. And I think this topic, as we've talked about on this show, money stresses people out, especially if you'd have little or low understanding of it.

And so I think the earlier you can start, you're going to save yourself so much stress and so much hardship in your life, just being able to kind of get a plan in place and then stick to the plan. And then you kind of like what I realized as I've gone on, it actually kind of starts to become a little bit of a game. It starts to kind of become fun. You're like, oh, this goes in this bucket, this goes in this, and it gives you these kinds of parameters that you can operate in. And I just find it to be so helpful.

Well, you can see your progress. Like sometimes, like, you know, I like to lift weights and it is a slow going process. You know, I do it four times a week and now I'm like looking at my apps and I'm like, yeah, I like what I see see but it takes a long time. With money it can be fast like just putting in place some basic simple habit stacking type stuff will compound really quickly. Go to domainmoney.com slash him and her you guys can book today and also they should get your book which which is on Amazon, Financially Fearless, a Tech Mom's Guide to Money. That's a good one.

That was like my first real group of clients that kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. And I was a solo practitioner until I sold my business to Domain in December of 2023. And so I couldn't help everybody. So I finally, you know, I was meeting with my energy person and they were like, you need to write a book. And I wrote it in 30 days, hired an editor,

and it's out there and it's kind of, it's everything that was in my brain to help as many people as possible. And that's why I joined Domain, is I have a team of certified financial planners and our goal is to help as many people as possible and really level the playing field because the financial services industry

is really focused on the people who already have. So we wanna really help the people who have what they have now and help them live their best life. Thank you for doing this guys. I can't stress enough. The earlier you can start with this topic and understanding the more seamless your life is going to be.

I really think everyone should dive into this. DomainMoney.com slash him and her to check it out. Where can everyone find you if they want to come say hi in your DMs? Katie Song Money on Instagram. Love it. And at DomainMoney. And at DomainMoney. Thank you, Katie.

Thank you, Katie.