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“Never a borrower nor a lender be.” We’ll discuss the pitfalls of loaning or borrowing from family and friends. You know the old saying, only loan someone money if you can afford to lose it. It’s easier said than done. Money is already a fraught issue, throw family ties into the mix and it can become down right volatile. Sometimes you lend money to someone out of sheer awkwardness. It’s so surprising to be asked and so uncomfortable that sometimes we just agree to alleviate the tension. Then kick our selves immediately after. It doesn’t even necessarily matter if you’re mad about losing the money. Maybe it was negligible amount or maybe it was a lot but you had it to lose. The borrower who doesn’t pay it back might feel so awkward or so guilty that they avoid you. You aren’t mad and don’t want the money back, but the relationship is lost anyway. A loan doesn’t always mean money. Has someone ever asked you to co-sign something with them? It’s a slyer way of getting a loan from you than out right asking for money. If the borrower is not responsible, it’s your credit that gets tanked. Sometimes this works out. Usually it doesn’t. There is almost always a solution through a third party that does not involve you. Help them sell their stuff on eBay, steer them towards Lending Club. Is there a job you could hire them to do, mow your grass, watch your kids (well, maybe don’t offer your junkie friends the babysitting opportunity)? Coming to a friend or family member for a loan should be the last resort. Do you have any loan horror stories? Share in the comments. Show Notes Long Trail Imperial Pumpkin: September is here and that means pumpkin beer. Betterment: Start investing the easy way. LMM’s Tool Box: All the resources you need to manage your money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Active trading is buying securities and holding them for a short time before selling. We put the practice on trial and make a case against it. Remember, at LMM we advise you to stay in the market for the long con. Active trading, or day trading is the exact opposite of that and a bad practice to get into. Jim Kramer, the big mouthed yelling “financial guru” advocates active trading. Should you listen to him? He’s on TV after all. Let’s look at his record. Between 2005-2007 he underperformed the NASDAQ by 2%, the S&P by 4% and the Dow by 10%. But what if you hire the best money manager out there? Surely he or she can do it better than you. No, they can’t. Over a twenty year period, 80% of them underperformed the market. And remember, no one cares more about your money than you. What if you pick a MorningStar Five Star rated fund? It’s like Michelin stars, right? The more stars the better? In theory yes, in practice, the inverse is true. Vanguard tracked funds for the first thirty six months after they received the Five Star rating and they all performed worse than the One Star rated funds. There are an unlimited amount of variables that drive the market. More than anyone could ever account for. Even if you had the best data at your fingertips, the vast majority of the time, you still won’t beat the market. And unless it’s your hobby and passion, who wants to analyze all that data? The most, maybe the only important thing is that you put your money into the market. Show Notes Arabier: A pure malt beer. The 5 Mistakes Every Investor Makes and How to Avoid Them: Learn what not to do in order to grow your wealth. Betterment: The easiest way to invest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Five listener questions answered, establishing credit, monetary gifts, Betterment security, IRA migration, and the pros and cons of renting out a room. 1. What is the best way to establish credit? A secured credit card is a good start. You give the bank a set amount of money and that amount is the card limit. So it’s a bit like a debit card but it helps build credit. It’s no risk to the bank because they have your money. Getting a store credit card is usually pretty easy and will build credit. If your landlord uses something like Cozy.com to collect rent, you can build your credit by paying rent this way. 2. What is the best way to give my children financial gifts? You can still buy savings bonds but no one knows what the hell to do with them. A better idea might be to set up a trust account in something like Betterment. You can set parameters, like the beneficiary can’t withdraw the money until they reach a certain age or the money can only be used to pay for college. 3. How secure is your money in a Betterment account and how difficult is it to access the money in the account? As a broker dealer, Betterment is required to keep their money separate from yours. If they went under, the money would just move to another brokerage company. If they were doing something illegal and lost your money, the money is insured up to $500,000 per customer through SIPC. The money in the account is easily accessible. You could have it back within a few days with no transaction fee. 4. If I own securities in an on-line Roth IRA brokerage account and want to transfer them to Betterment is there a transfer fee? And because Betterment has less flexibility with securities would I pay a fee for each security transferred? If you move to Betterment, the securities don’t come with you. You’re buying into their strategy. You would sell the securities with the original holder, the transfer itself to Betterment does not have a fee. Betterment is recommended for those who want to be more hands off with their IRA’s. 5. Pros and cons of renting out a room in your big house? Extra money is a big pro. The con is that you have a stranger in your house. Just make sure to be safeguards in place if the situation goes south so you can get rid of the renter quickly. Maybe give Air B&B a try to see if you don’t mind having someone living with you or if you just hate it. This way you aren’t locked into anything. Keep sending in your questions and we’ll answer them during the show! Show Notes Build Credit without a Credit Card: Andrew’s article for those new to credit. What Happens to My Money if Betterment Closes: If you’re worried, read this and set your mind at ease. Tool Box: Everything you need to manage your money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Got too much stuff? Want to do a big purge before the cold weather sets in, maybe make a few bucks? Take the LMMs’ Sell Everything Challenge! Are you a hoarder? Not like the demented ones on those gross shows, but just a little bit of a hoarder. We challenge you to clean out your life, toss, sell, or donate all that stuff and see how much better you feel. First of all, round up all your stuff from where ever it has been banished to. Your parents attic, the back of your closet, the storage unit full of stuff you are paying to home. What you do with it next depends on a few things. Do you have sacks full of ripped, stained clothes that are not nice enough to donate? Recycle it! The Council for Textile Recycling site lets you enter your zip code and find a facility that recycles things like old clothes and bedding. Much better than filling up landfills. If your clothes are of a higher quality and still in good shape, maybe they just don’t fit anymore, donate them to an organization like Dress for Success. They accept women’s business clothing for women who need a nice outfit for interviews or a new job. If you want to make some extra cash, there are a few options, depending on how much time or inclination you have to go this route. A consignment shop is the least effort, you drop it off and get a percentage if it sells. Some cities have eBay consignors. The same principle, drop it off and they sell it on eBay which might bring in higher prices than a conventional consignment shop. Craigslist is good if you like dealing with weirdos and tons of people who will flake but I wouldn’t recommend it. If you want to keep all the money for yourself, you can DIY eBay. This will probably make you the most money but it’s the most labor intensive. Particularly if it’s a big item that has to be shipped. It might be yard sale time for things like that. If you just want the stuff the hell out of your house, you can use a service like 1-800-GOT-JUNK. You have to pay to have the stuff hauled off but it will be gone, gone gone. So are you up for the challenge? Sell as much as you can during the month of September, let us know how many items you should, how much money you made and what you plan to do with that money. Show Notes Mint: The easy to use budgeting tool. Betterment: Start investing your e-Bay gains today. LMM Tool Box: Everything you need to manage your money, recently updated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s Labor Day and most of us are not working. We’ll tell you the reason you have the day off and the story of those who sacrificed so you could sleep in. Labor Day celebrates the American Labor movement. It became an official holiday in 1887. If you think you’re job is oppressive now, imagine what it was like before the concept of organized labor. At least we get paid in money. At some points, workers were paid with “company chit” that could only be spent at places that were conveniently owned by their employer. Once upon a time, workers labored as apprentices under master workers. You then became a journeyman and eventually, a master yourself. By 1815, journeymen began to outnumber masters due to migration patterns. As a result, investors began building labor intensive businesses on a big scale. When the workers began to collude to raise wages, the practice was made illegal by the government. Commonwealth vs Hunt made collusion to raise wages a legal activity. That was the beginning of the modern labor movement. The 20th Century is when labor really gained ground as far as wages and hours were concerned. Between 1890-1914, unionized manufacturing wages rose from $17.63 a week to $21.37 and hours fell from 54.4 a week to 48.8. In 1933 as a response to the Great Depression, FDR instituted the National Recovery Act to protect collective bargaining rights. It created the minimum wage and regulated working hours. Unions are increasingly under fire today. Which company is notorious for it’s poor treatment of employees? If your answer was Walmart, good answer. Walmart employees are not unionized, in fact, it is actively discouraged and people have been fired for scurrilous reasons that were really to do with trying to organize fellow workers. Would a union fix everything? No, but it would go a long way to improving worker conditions in that shit hole. Does your job offer a pension? Probably not. If you were a union member, you would have one. You would probably have health insurance superior to what you have now as well. Fourth of July is honored as the holiday that exemplifies American sacrifice but as a Detroit girl, I think those who fought and died for the forty hour work week and a living wage are just as deserving of celebration, respect and gratitude. Remember that when you toast at your back yard barbecue. Show Notes Imperial Pumpkin Ale: It’s September and that means pumpkin beer! Facebook Beer Season: That magical time when the fall beers are in season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Money is the currency of living but gratitude is the currency of life. WTF does that mean? We’ll let Andrew explain it because we don’t know either. Practicing gratitude sounds like some trite thing Deepak Oprah tells her legion of house wife minions to do but there is something to it for those non-Kool Aid drinkers among us. Particularly when you tell someone you’re grateful for something they’ve contributed to your life, it makes you both feel good. Most of us don’t get enough gratitude in our lives. When was the last time some expressed gratitude for something you did at work? Maybe that’s never happened. When was the last time you told your significant other you were grateful for some small thing they did, emptying the dishwasher without being asked or picking up the dry cleaning? If you aren’t getting enough kudos, most people around you probably aren’t either. So instead of waiting for the gratitude to be bestowed, be the bestower. That sounds like something a wizard would say doesn’t it. You know what I mean though? Fake gratitude is not very, well, gratifying. Make sure that any expression of your appreciation is genuinely meant. Telling someone who demonstrably sucks at their job that they’re doing top notch work makes you feel like a liar and makes them think you’re a liar. Here is a little exercise, write a letter to someone you are grateful for, tell them why. And then send the letter. Imagine if you were on the receiving end of a letter like that. Wouldn’t you like to make someone feel like that? You can, just write the letter. Or if that is too corny for you, use the Lift App to make gratitude a habit. What or whom are you grateful for? Let us know in the comments. Show Notes DuClaw XX IPA: A double IPA with a big hop flavor. LMM Tool Box: What we use to get things done. Ted Talk: The happy secret to better work. The Happiness Project: Tear up as people show their gratitude. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite the dire warnings, it is possible to graduate college free of debt. Shanice Miller will tell us how to do it. Most people go the route of taking out massive student loans to pay for college but it’s possible to get all or at least some of your expenses covered through scholarships and grants. You don’t need a perfect GPA either. There is money available for everyone if you know where to look. The best time to start looking around is your junior year of high school and the best place to look is with your guidance and career counselor. Start early, the beginning of the school year is ideal because it allows you to make a strong application before the deadlines which are usually in late winter or early spring. The application process can be ponderous but you can use the same application or essay for multiple opportunities, just customizing each as you would with a job resume. The average award for a scholarship is $2000. So if you take three hours to apply, that is great value for time. Big, national scholarships that are open to everyone are harder to get and require a lot more work. The smaller ones local to your area will put you up against less competition. Your high school’s website may provide information for the smaller, less competitive scholarships. Graduating high school doesn’t mean the end of the road for scholarships. You can continue to apply in college, grad school, and professional school. You can also re-new some scholarships that were previously rewarded. They already know your worth and the process will be easier. Shanice’s biggest piece of advice is not to get hooked on your dream school. The bucolic, tree lined campus on the front of the brochure will be a distant memory if you’re living with your parents after graduating because you’re mired in debt. Remember, college is a business decision. Part of that decision should be how much free money you can get to pay for it all. Show Notes Space Walker American Belgo: A bold beer with spicy, fruity flavors. Debt Free College Graduate: Shanice helps you how to graduate debt free. Betterment: Start investing today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, what is an expat? Want to live and work abroad and reduce your tax burden? We talk to David McKeegan, an ex-pat tax expert to learn the tricks. Many people dream of leaving the US and it’s taxes behind to start a life and a business in a new, exotic place. It can give you a brand new life and reduce your taxes to near zero if you know how to play the game. Seven and a half million of your fellow Americans have done it so why not you? If you move abroad to live and work, you don’t have to renounce your US citizenship although increasingly some people are doing so for financial or political reasons. But to qualify to pay zero US taxes, you will have to reside outside the country for 330 days per year. If you meet this threshold, your first $99,200 in income, is US tax free! You may still have to pay taxes in your new home. Or maybe you don’t. In Dubai for example, there is no personal income tax. So the lesson is, investigate the tax codes as part of choosing your new country. If you are able to work from anywhere you can get a Wifi connection, consider becoming a digital nomad. Many countries will not subject you to local taxes until you’ve been there for 180 days or more, so just pack your bags every few months and move to greener pastures. Imagine the pictures you can post on Facebook if you went this route, yourself lounging with your laptop in exotic locales, on a big pile of tax free money! Remember, if you choose to move abroad, the first consideration should be quality of life and if you can reduce your tax burden, that’s the icing on the cake. Show Notes Greenback Expat Tax Services: David’s company that will help you unravel ex-pat tax filing. Space Walker American Belgo: An American beer with spicy, fruity flavors. Betterment: Start investing today to fund your ex-pat dreams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The importance of budgeting can’t be overstated. Today we talk to the king of budgeting tools, Jesse Mecham the CEO of You Need a Budget and give you an honest YNAB review. We talk about budgeting with Mint a lot and it’s a great tool. But there is always talk of You Need A Budget within the personal finance community so we wanted to check it out. And because we provide only the best for you, we brought on the founder to discuss the tools so we can provide an in depth YNAB review. YNAB was originally a spreadsheet that Jesse and his wife used to budget their money when they were newly married and expecting a baby. He had just intended to sell it to make a little extra income on top of his accounting job, but it soon proved so successful that it become his career. Zero-Based Budgeting Zero-based budgeting forces you to “spend” every dollar. At the end of the month, the goal, as it is with any budget, is to have brought in more money than you spent. And that’s where most traditional methods of budgeting end. Great! You paid all of your bills and have an extra $600 left over. For a lot of people, that leftover money is “fun” money, to be spent on things like clothes, dinners out, movies. Zero-based budgeting gives those dollars a job, rule one of YNAB. It’s like the difference between your unemployed friends and your friends who have a job. The unemployed dollars are sitting around all day smoking weed while the dollars with a job are contributing. In this case, contributing to your financial goals. And that’s what YNAB is, zero-based budgeting. If you’ve tried budgeting before and not had success, it’s probably not you! It’s like dieting. Sometimes you just need to find a different method that will work for you. Four Principles There are four principles behind YNAB: Give Every Dollar A Job Not one dollar just gets to sit on its dead ass, not pulling its weight. Every dollar is working, working for you. Some jobs are more fun than others. Some jobs are paying your bills but some jobs are buying you drinks! Just because a dollar has a job, doesn’t mean it’s job is to be spent. Your holiday money might sit dormant for ten months of the year, but when the shopping season arrives, it leaps into action. Save For A Rainy Day If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you don’t have anything left over for a rainy day.This rule is for large but not regular expenses like holidays, vacations, school tuition. Look ahead to these large, less frequent expenses and break them down per month. That monthly amount is added into each month’s budget. Rule two makes sure that you are planning for these expenses well before they come due and budgeting for them each month. Roll With The Punches You’re going to make mistakes, the unexpected will happen. That’s okay. If you overspend in one area, you’ll find money from another and move it over to the category you came up short in. Live On Last Month’s Income When you use YNAB, you will save enough of last month’s income to pay for this month’s expenses. What you earn in January, you spend in February. Depending on your current bank balance, this might take a few months to achieve. That’s okay, you’ll get there. This rule is especially helpful for those who have variable incomes, freelancers, and realtors for instance. This system puts an end to living on money you don’t yet have. Getting Started Step One There is a free 34 day trial for YNAB. You download and install the program which runs on both Windows and Mac. Step Two You can choose to use Cloud Sync so your information is updated across your multiple devices and is backed up. To back the data up, you’ll need Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We should strive to be the best we can in all areas of life. One of the key areas to be the best is at work, the work you do for a boss or for yourself. If you feel like you aren’t doing the best you can at a job, it might be time to reevaluate what you’re doing for a living. Most people aren’t bad at things they like to do (singing maybe for some of us) so maybe you don’t like what you’re doing. If you don’t like it, you have no motivation to improve so it’s best to move on. Being good at your job gives you more job security, a rare thing these days for a lot of people. The company can’t fire the indispensable ones. You don’t have to be the CEO to make yourself invaluable. No job is unimportant or the company would have cut it by now. Ever been to a restaurant with so-so food but a great waiter? Or a restaurant with great food and a bad waiter? Which experience would you prefer? I can cook tasty food at home myself and I consider eating out to be a total experience so I prefer the place with the great waiter. Any person in a business can give you a great experience or a bad experience. They can make you come back or keep you away forever. Being really good at what you do can also help combat a lack of experience. If you’ve spent ten years designing pretty crummy websites and the new hire is doing great ones straight out of college, who do you think will advance more quickly? You don’t have to be a genius to be the best at work. You just have to have a good work ethic, be willing to learn new things, and to take on additional responsibilities. Spending some of your down time educating yourself about your industry goes a long way towards out-achieving your co-workers. We hope you found some inspiration in this episode and it made you think. You can even get something out of a job you hate so you can take that with you to the job you love. Show Notes LMM Tool Box: Everything you need to manage your money like a bad ass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Financial issues are a leading cause of divorce. Before you take the plunge, find out what you need to know so you don’t become a statistic. Our guest Jeff will share some things he learned about preparing your finances for marriage. Because once the honey moon is over and life starts, having systems in place to deal with finances will be important to your life as a married couple. Some partners will bring an equal amount of financial knowledge into the marriage. For many, one will know a lot more than the other. For many people, this means managing money defaults to the more knowledgeable spouse. This is not a good recipe for a happy marriage. The partner dealing with the finances can feel resentful that such a big job isn’t being shared and the partner with less experience might feel left out of important decisions. Jeff was more knowledgeable about finance so he and his fiance took Dave Ramsey’s Peace University together to help get her up to speed. One of the most important things to discuss before marriage is how much debt each of you have. And how will the debt be handled? Does it become a joint effort to pay off or is it still the responsibility of the individual partner? Sometimes love doesn’t conquer all. If the person you want to build a life with has what seems to you to be an insurmountable pile of debt, you may need to make some hard decisions. They didn’t get to that point because they make good choices and while anyone can change, mostly they don’t. Make sure each partner has some “fun money” that each can spend without justifying it to the other. No one likes to feel every penny is being scrutinized. Schedule regular meetings to reassess where you are and make any necessary tweeks. Being open with each other about finances is really the key to managing them successfully. That money causes so many families to break up is a travesty. Don’t let it come between you and your spouse, talk about it, plan it, and manage it so you can live happily ever after. Show Notes Unita Brewing MonkShine: Belgian style blonde ale. Ommegang Hop House: Belgian style pale ale. LMM Tool Box: All the resources you need to manage your finances in one place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to trying to improve. Dwelling too much on minutia hurts the overall result. Are you waiting for the perfect time to start investing? Right job, $1000 to start with, after the holidays. You know what would be better than that? Investing. There is no more perfect time than right now. We have too many choices and too many sources of information. This can be paralyzing. Should you invest with Betterment, ShareBuilder, E-Trade, Van Guard? What do my co-workers think, my family, Reddit? How can I decide anything before consulting /r/personalfinance? You can spend weeks researching all this and you know how much money that will make you, none. If you just made the leap, you might already be up a few bucks. We don’t advocate doing no research but there comes a point when too much is well, too much. JUST PICK SOMETHING! Ugh, like Krusty would say it. How do you overcome this quest for perfection when it comes to money and anything else in your life, really? Just start. Don’t go out and buy any supplies, you don’t need fancy graph paper to make a budget, you can do it on the bank of an envelope. You don’t need to research and hire a “financial adviser” to start investing. Open a Betterment account. You don’t need to be kitted out in Lululemon to start running. A good pair of shoes is all it takes. The perfect moment will never come and even if it does, it will come later than now. Show Notes Maine Root Blueberry Soda: If you’re a hipster, this is the soda for you, unless you prefer RC Cola in an ironic fashion. Superfuzz Blood Orange Pale: A fruity, summer beer. The Lean Startup: A book about getting the bare bones product out, listen to feedback and improve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You ask and we answer! Today we’ll discuss joint finances, joint credit cards, stock options, credit card debt, and money allocation. 1. How do you update your fiscal strategy when combining finances with a partner? Each person should be contributing but if one makes much more than the other, the contributions should be a percentage rather than split evenly. Opening a joint checking account where each person contributes the agreed on percentage and use this account to pay shared expenses. 2. Should I add my partner who has no credit card to my account or should she get a separate card? If you open a joint card, you each take 50% of the risk. If you add someone to your card, you take 100% of the risk. A joint account also builds the credit score for each of you, important when it comes to one day taking out a mortgage together. That said, unless you are 100% certain not only of staying together but also of the other person’s financial responsibility, keep it separate. 3. My company is giving out mid-year bonuses. Do I take stock options with three years vesting or the cash? Alice’s company is a small start up so it’s not possible to research it. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush but what if the company is the next Google? What if it’s not? The cash can be invested so in this scenario we say, take the cash. 4. I have credit card debt that I am managing aggressively at 0% interest but I have the cash to pay it off. Should I pay it off or use the cash to invest? As long as the debt is 0% APR, keep your cash in investments. Once the 0% runs out, pull out the cash and pay the debt. 5. My family owns several rental properties. I need help allocating an extra $2000 a month. Invest, put if toward a mortgage on one of the properties, a down payment on the next property, or safely invest in bonds? We suggest investing in bonds and then using that money for the next down payment. Thanks for the questions guys, keep them coming. Show Notes Unita Brewing Monkshine: A Belgian blonde ale. Ommegang Hop House: A Belgian style pale ale. Betterment: Start investing today. LMM Tool Box: Everything you need to manage your money like a bad ass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We check in with Andrew’s Lending Club strategy to find out if he’s making any money and if it might be a good investment for the rest of us. Lending Club is a peer-to-peer lending company. If you need a loan, rather than going through a bank, you make a pitch and a pool of hundreds of people will lend you the money. Kind of like crowdsourcing for a loan. The interest rate you’re charged will be lower than what most banks would offer. And the return for the lenders can be high. On Lending Club, your interest rate will range depending on the letter grade you are assigned which denotes how risky you are. If you apply and are honest on your application, you are almost certain to get a loan. For the lender, you can allow Lending Club to loan out your money based on your set criteria or you can hand pick the loans you want to make. If you hand pick, you will be privy to a lot of information about the borrower, job, where they live, if they rent or own a home, etc. Andrew has $2700 invested and to date his returns are 18.5%! He hand picks his borrowers and spends a lot of time choosing them. He considers it his high risk, high return investment. He mostly invests in small business loans and refinancing. In order to choose whom to lend to, he sorts it by people with the highest credit scores and highest interest rates. The key to succeeding in Lending Club is knowing how to sort, spending time researching the borrower and making as many investments as you can and being diversified so if one person defaults, you won’t feel it. To this point, Andrew has not lost a cent through Lending Club. Lending Club can be a great way to make money, but remember, there are no tricks. Andrew has done so well because he spends so much time analyzing the best people to borrow to. If you decide to try it yourself, let us know how you do. Show Notes Smuttynose Bouncy House: The all occasion ale. Lending Club: A crowd sourcing site for peer-to-peer loans. LMM Tool Box: Everything you need to get money savvy. Featured Image Photo Credit: “Black & White Handshake – Still from the film Colour Blind (2009)” by Pui Shan Chan on Wikipedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When should you put your money into the market? When should you pull it out? Is there a best and worst time? Are you timing the market? If you are timing the market according to headlines, you’re doing it wrong. We’ll show you the correct way to time the market. Put simply, timing the market is trying to figure out the best times to put your money into and pull it out of the stock market. We’ve all heard, “buy low, sell high,” but when do you know the optimal time to do that? You don’t, and neither do the talking heads trying to convince you that they do. Being conservative doesn’t sell newspapers or television advertising. Jim Kramer ranting like a lunatic sells those things. But screaming lunatics are seldom right. Do you take advice from the “dirty ass unemployed gentleman” (call back!) screaming about end times outside the subway station? Well, if he had a TV show, he could be Jim Kramer. The stock market offers a wonderful gift of an average of 7% returns. There will be highs and lows, but in the long term, the market goes up. It’s the short term that the prognosticators are trying to predict and they are usually wrong. There are just too many variables, and no one can predict the future. The prognosticators are just loud and get a lot of attention, and they make really bold predictions all the time. Once in a while they get it right and suddenly they look like Nostradamus. The correct way to time the market is through dollar cost averaging, which we explained it Episode 99. This just means slow dripping your investing money into the market rather than throwing it in all at once. This is a good philosophy for new people who are nervous about investing. But you will make more, over the long term, if you lump sum it. Market corrections happen often. All kinds of things can effect this, domestic political events, world political events, natural disasters even. This doesn’t affect us long-term; you shouldn’t be checking your investment accounts daily and freaking out over the fluctuations. A bear market is when all the investors are “hibernating” and not putting money into the market. This is bad. But a bear market is always followed by a bull market when investors come “charging” into the market. If the knowledge that these gurus have, which they will generously bestow upon you in their newsletter for the low low price of $19.99 was so great, why aren’t they richer than Warren Buffett? Something to ponder. The takeaway is to get your money in the market. There is no one tip that will make Wall Street hate you. It’s not sexy, but it will get the job done. Show Notes Blue Coat Gin: A local Philly gin. The Five Mistakes Every Investor Makes: If you’re nervous about getting into the market, read this and learn to avoid mistakes. Betterment: Set it and forget it. LMM Tool Box: Everything you need to get good with your money in one place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laurel Staples joins us to teach us how to forget the American dream and talk about her journey becoming an entrepreneur. Start living our own dreams on our own terms. In 2007 Laurel quit her job as a mechanical engineer to launch her popular blog, Go Fire Yourself. In January she will publish her book about how to quit your day job and run your own business. She is also a business coach and a photographer. Like many of us, Laurel followed the prescribed path, leave high school, go to college, get a job. She worked for Lex Mark designing laser printers. And she hated it. She knew she would hate it buy hey, that’s what you do in America. Fork out a fortune for college and slave away in a job you hate. She has always been interested in things like health and the environment and planned to open an eco-friendly clothing store. After spending about a year planning it, she quit her job and opened the store in December 2007. Unfortunately around the same time the economy crashed. After all the blood, sweat and tears, Laurel soon found herself in the same 9-5 grind she had been trying to leave. She closed the shop and started working as first a health coach and then a business coach. That change is what finally put Laurel where she wanted to be. When coaching clients Laurel emphasized planning and doing things the right way. But there comes a point when you just have to make the leap, otherwise you’ll be stuck forever. There is no set amount of money you should have before quitting your job. Laurel has seen people make it work with very little saved and people fail with thousands saved. In fact, the people with less may succeed more often because they don’t have the option of failing. Don’t have a Plan B because if you do, you won’t work as hard on Plan A. It’s a scary thing but Laurel advises us to trust our instincts and to remember, you don’t have to make “forever decisions.” She didn’t like the retail world so she moved on to something different. Working with a coach or mentor can help keep you on track or show you new ways of doing things. It is important to get your side business set up while still working. There is a learning curve to being and entrepreneur and it’s easier to learn while a paycheck is still coming in. This is especially important if you have a family. You need to discuss your decision with them. Perhaps you can cut back enough to survive on one salary while the business is getting off the ground. If not, you will need to really ramp your side business up before jumping and show your partner that you are bringing some money in. When deciding to jump, put things into three columns, “must have,” “nice to have,” and “don’t need.” This will show where you can trim expenses before money starts coming in. Try want Andres is going to do, before you decide anything, try a thirty day challenge to live as minimally as possible. Chances are, it won’t be as hard as you imagine. When you make it through the month, you’ll see what life will be like until your venture starts succeeding. We all hear and read about people who quit a job they hated and created their own life and wonder what they have that we don’t. The biggest difference between them and us, is that they took the leap. Show Notes Smuttynose Bouncy House IPA: an all occasion American ale. Martini: made with Blue Coat gin and vermouth. Go Fire Yourself: Laurel’s blog dedicated to teaching small business owners to quit there day jobs and start living life on their terms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you sometimes get into a slump, just a malaise that you can’t really pinpoint a reason for? It happens to us all. Together we’ll stay motivated! Sustained motivation can be tough, whether it’s motivation to stick to a budget, an eating plan, or an exercise routine. There are ways to create a positive feed back loop that will help keep you motivated. Get back into your routine. If you are a largely healthy person and you slip on the food and exercise, you will start to feel pretty crappy, you might even feel depressed. Eating and exercising well are good for your physical and mental health. Once you get back to normal, the feelings should clear up. Getting bad feedback can sap motivation, whether it’s bad I-tunes reviews :( or the Dow is down, it can make you feel helpless. But those things are not in your control. Don’t obsess over things you can do nothing about. Make a list of everything you need to do that day, even if it’s really small things. As you do them, check them off. Even if you can’t finish everything, looking back at the list shows just how much you were able to do. Read something that you find inspirational for a few minutes in the morning and before bed. Listen to a podcast that is geared toward the goals you want to reach. I listen to health based pods when I run and it motivates me because the pod reinforces what I’m doing. Try a few things out, what works for one might now work for everyone. Let us know in the comments how you get out of a rut. Here are a few more tips on how to stay motivated. Show Notes Daily Rituals: The habits of creative people. Nerdist: The podcast Matt uses to get motivated. LMM Tool Box: All the things that will help you to succeed with your financial goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you broke? Can you pinpoint why? We’re going to give you twenty one reasons for your brokeness. Listen hard and shape up! 1. You think “budget’ is a bad word. A budget doesn’t have to be a complicated spread sheet, just using Mint is a start. 2. You try to keep up with the Jones’s. All that stuff that you envy may be built of a house of cards made of credit card debt. The feeling of having no debt is a better feeling than having a boat. 3. You can’t say “no.” You don’t have to accept every invitation that comes your way. If your finances would be better served by saying no sometimes, that should decide it for you. 4. You think the government will fix your problems. Lol! Whose government, ours? Jeez, have you not be paying attention? The cavalry is not coming. They’re too busy over in the Middle East bombing stuff to give a shit about you. 5. Finding someone to blame is more important than finding a solution. This is an insidious practice and it will poison all aspects of your life. Stop this immediately. 6. You love money too much. This was kind of unclear. We think it means, you love the jolt you get from spending money. 7. You think all rich people are evil. A lot of them are but there are some good ones out there, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have given billions of dollars to worthy causes. But for every one of them there are ten Koch brothers running around hatching diabolical plans so I see why you think this. 8. Holidays revolve around gifts. I like presents so I’m guilty of this. We all know it’s really about family etc etc, but come on, gifts! 9. You quit learning. You dear listener, have not because you’re reading and listening to LMM! You can skip to the next one. 10. You have bad habits. We all do, some are more expensive than others. You know what your’s are and you know you should stop. We aren’t going to belabor the point. 11. You impulse buy. You can fix this with the thirty day list. If what you want costs over X amount of dollars, you have to wait thirty days. If you still want it, you can have it. Usually what happens is that you forget or decide you can do without it. 12. You pay the minimum payments on your debts. Want to never pay off your credit cards? This is how you do that. 13. You play the lottery. Guys, we went through this in Episode 130. Come on! 14. You have no goals. You need to know what you’re working for and a plan to get there. Saying, “I want one million dollars!” is not a goal. 15. You hang out with the wrong crowd. This can mean negative people, people who don’t share your goals, people who pressure you to spend. Bad influences in other words. 16. You’re lazy. The occasional weekend spent on the couch watching a Nexflix marathon is one thing, but if this is how you spend every weekend, you are probably lazy in other areas of your life too and it’s hurting you. 17. You don’t value yourself enough. You don’t ask for a raise, you let people low bid you for jobs. You’re better than that. Demand what you’re worth. 18. You don’t invest or pay yourself first. Investing is how the rich get that way quickly. If you don’t pay yourself first, you won’t have anything to invest. 19. Your house is a mess. Clutter and disorder are distracting and a sign that you are disordered in other areas of your life, not least of which are finances. 20. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew has $12,000 of debt! And yes, I did mean Andrew and not Matt. Has he forsaken his Listen Money Matters principles? Find out the shocking details. It’s not as scandalous as it sounds. Half of this is on a zero APR Home Depot credit card and those were expenses to remodel the kitchen. The other half is a series of things that all hit at once, conference tickets, a vacation, mortgage tax. Life got in the way and he did end up with finance charges. This episode is one of the reasons I was a fan of LMM long before I started working here. Andrew owns up to his mistake and talks about it so he can help other people avoid the same. Because if it happens to someone like him, it can happen to any of us, no matter how together our shit. This is how Andrew plans to redeem himself, and as penance, he’s going to document it in an article for us all to judge, (getting a little Dave Ramsey up in here.) The first thing he did was to set up an account with our friends at Ready for Zero to make payments to kill the debt fast. He’s going to automate the payments and use the stack method. The next step is to take out a loan from Lending Club and refinance for less than 10% which will be less than half of the rate of the credit cards. Matt asks a good question, why not just pull money from investments to pay the debt? A few reasons, firstly, Andrew isn’t in dire straights. This is a temporary set back. The other reason is altruistic, for the love of his listeners, he’s going to take the hit because he doesn’t want to disrupt the Betterment Experiment. This is a learning experience for us all, Andrew included. He wants to show that one mistake doesn’t have to completely derail your personal financial plans and to show how using Ready for Zero and the stack method work. This can happen to anyone and Andrew is angry with himself like anyone would be. But he has a plan to right the ship. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. But by seeing him fix it, we see how we can fix our own situations. Feel free to use the comments to berate Andrew or to cheer him on! Show Notes Art of Flight: A cool snow boarding video. Betterment: Start today so when disaster hits, you can weather it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you still getting and paying bills by snail mail? Grab a whip and a chair and we’ll teach you how to tame them. Also learn about duck genitals! Do you open your mail box to a flood of bills? I hate that, not so much because I mind bills but because it’s more paper to keep track of and they cram so much crap in the envelopes. Before I started paying bills on-line I would send all the extra paper they sent me back to them with the check, ha! There is no reason you have to be bothered with all those pieces of paper. Most bills now allow you to opt out of getting a paper statement and will e-mail you a digital one. You can pay these on-line. It’s so much easier to keep track of digital “paper” than actual paper. You probably don’t even need to make a folder for it, you can just log into your account and look at the back statements if you need to. You can automate some payments too so you don’t have to do anything. Just set up auto pay and your bank will send the payment. You sometimes can’t do this with variable bills but for something like rent that doesn’t change often, you can automate it. If you can pay a bill on a credit card, do it. You will earn whatever reward your card offers, the credit card company will fight on your behalf if you dispute a charge, and it gives you fewer bills to pay. To make it even easier, call up your credit card companies and ask them all to change your billing date to the same day. That way when you sit down to pay it, you can do it all at once. At LMM we always advocate simplifying your financial life. Set up a system to automate your bill paying and spend the time saved doing something more fun than paying bills. Show Notes Stranger Pale Ale Left Hand Brewing: A pale ale with citrus, hop notes. Betterment: Start investing today. Mint: Set up your budget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The start of a new series! We teach you about finance, but we want to teach you some economics too so you can apply what you learn to decisions you make. We first met David Stein on our Better Know a Millionaire series. You loved him so much we brought him back! He joins us today answer the question what is sunk cost. Do you know what a sunk cost is? Even if you don’t, you’ve probably fallen victim to sunk cost fallacy at some point. Today we’ll explain what sunk costs are so you can avoid them. Abandon A Sinking Ship A sunk cost is a past cost that you can’t recover. The sunk cost fallacy is convincing you that you can’t give up because of all the time and money you’ve already spent. Here’s an example; you’ve spent $10,000 repairing your car over three years. That $10,000 is the sunk cost. Then the engine blows. What do you do? If you replace the engine, that’s, even more, money spent on a car that is unreliable and needs to be replaced. Good money after bad. But if you junk the car, you’ve wasted thousands of dollars. That’s the sunk cost fallacy. What should you do? There are two answers; one is the correct one. What kind of answer you get depends on the type of economist you ask. Old School Economists Traditional economists theorize in a bubble. They believe that people only allow future costs, not past ones, to affect decisions. To say nothing of experience, emotion, or psychology. A traditional economist uses hard numbers to create the ideal model of what a human should consider and decide when making an economic decision. They expect that human beings will always act rationally. Ha! I don’t know what kind of human being these economists are meeting, but I’ve never met a similar one. If you ask this kind of economist what you should do with the car, they’ll tell you to get rid of it. You lost the money; it’s over, and you have to focus on the future. The lost money should not influence your decision. The economist would tell you to sell the car and buy a new one. Your Caveman Brain But human beings are not rational, and we don’t make decisions in a vacuum. We also have something known as loss aversion. Loss aversion means that people would much rather avoid a loss than acquiring a gain. Imagine if your boss said you were going to get a $500 a week raise. You would be psyched. Now imagine that your boss said you had to take a $250 a week pay cut. People are typically more upset at the thought of that pay cut than they are excited about the pay raise, even though the amount of the cut is smaller than the amount of the raise. Our lizard brain is not inclined to rationally evaluate sunk costs. Many people are likely to think, “I’ve put $10,000 into this car. If I walk away, I’ve wasted that money.” If you were operating in a vacuum, you would not spend any more money on this car and buy another. The money is gone and should not factor into what you do next. Behavioral Economists Behavioral economists interject human emotion into their study of economics. They study the effects of psychology, social, and emotional factors that on economic decisions, why people make seemingly irrational decisions and why their behavior doesn’t follow the predictions made by traditional economists. They realize that we do cry over spilled milk, and it influences our decision making. They understand why we would have a hard time walking away from that car. It’s hard to make a decision without thinking of the past and being influenced by it. You Can’t Have Your Cake And Eat it Too Some people confuse sunk costs with opportunity costs, but they aren’t the same. An opportunity cost is the cost incurred when you choose one thing over another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do you define success? For many it’s making a certain amount of money, driving a certain car, living in a big house. But that is changing. The actual definition of success is “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.” That gives us a little more leeway than defining it solely based on making a lot of money. If your aim was to get to work on time today and you did, you’re successful! Success can be measured in small things too, not just a big bank balance or fancy vacations. For some of us, success could be defined as freedom. We talked about this is in Episode 34. Matt defines success this way, he wakes up when he wants, starts work when he wants, takes a vacation when he wants. Those of us doing the 9-5 office grind can’t say the same. Happiness is a good indicator of success. And as a study showed, the sweet spot of happiness is earning between $50-75,000 a year. Those making more did not show increased rates of happiness. So as the cliche goes, money doesn’t buy happiness. For millennials, the definition has already changed. Much to the chagrin of marketers, real estate agents, and economists, they don’t care about things like home and car ownership the way their parents and grandparents did. They care less about society’s expectations and more about happiness, building community and creating sustainability. Not exactly music to the ears of the corporate overlords. The most important thing to remember about success is to not let anyone else define it for you. Success is not judged by those looking in from the outside but by what makes you happy. Challenge to you all. In one paragraph, tell us how you define success and e-mail it to [email protected]. We won’t use your last name. Show Notes Clown Shoes Clementine Beer: A Belgian style white ale. Back in Black IPA: An American IPA with rich, dark malts. Betterment: Be successful at investing. LMM Toolbox: Check out some of our recommendations! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do YOU need a life insurance policy? Liran Hirschkorn from Best Life Quote will give us the criteria to answer that question. There are two reasons you should have life insurance. Personal reasons and professional reasons. If you have family who depend on you for income, you need it. If you own a business, you need it. But there must be an “insurable interest” on the insured. So sorry, but you can’t take out a policy on the neighborhood junkie hoping to cash in when they cash out. If you’re a single person and you don’t have any dependents, you don’t really need a policy. But if you are pretty young and healthy and plan to have a family eventually, you can lock in a low rate by buying now. Life insurance is meant to replace future income. So if you’re twenty five and making $100,000 a year, you would want a policy worth a couple of million dollars. This allows your family to continue paying the mortgage, day to day expenses, college fees, all the things the deceased would have paid for. If you’re young, you can buy a cheap term policy. By the time you reach fifty five or sixty, you should have built up some assets. When the policy expires the rates will increase but if you’re healthy you can renew the policy and you’ll need less coverage than you originally bought. If you’re in poor health, it’s cheaper to convert the policy a few years before it expires to a permanent policy. Whole life insurance is much more expensive then term. If you buy term, you should use the difference to invest and you will come out ahead. A whole life policy is appropriate for people who have a lot of assets and whose family would be responsible for a lot of estate taxes. Whole life can also provide some yearly income. After about ten years, it breaks even so the money put in is equal to the value of the policy. After twenty or thirty years, you can arrange for a yearly distribution and withdraw money. The return isn’t huge, about 4-5%. It should be considered protection and not a large source of income. Liran says that for 95% of us, an inexpensive twenty or thirty year term policy is sufficient. If you are the bread winner for your family, life insurance is a good investment. Show Notes Best Life Quote: Compare quotes on life insurance. Betterment: Start investing today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Student loans are expensive but they aren’t the only thing that costs money when you go to college. Learn how to save money while in school. Thomas Frank of College Info Geek and Martin Boehme of Powlygot will teach us how to save money while still attending college. Textbooks are one of the biggest rackets going. Thomas has a flow chart on Pinterest that shows you the cheapest way to get access to the information you need without walking into the overpriced campus bookstore and being robbed blind. If you have the option and the patience to live at home while attending college that will be the cheapest option. But part of the college experience is moving out. Look into joining a fraternity or sorority for cheap housing. Becoming a resident adviser usually means free room and board. Meal plans can be crazy expensive. If you can make it on two meals a day you’ll save a ton. If you live off campus and have a kitchen, cooking at home rather than going out is much cheaper and healthier. A lot of college towns have great public transit and sometimes it’s free for students to use. Getting a bike will help you get around more quickly and cheaply too. And it’s good exercise. When choosing a college, it’s cheaper to go in state. But some states have reciprocity agreements. You will pay in state tuition or a rate reduced from the regular out of state tuition fees. Use your student discount! If you have a college ID, a lot of businesses or places like museums offer discounts. Student Rate is an aggregater for businesses offering discounts. If you’re unsure, it never hurts to ask. You can get access to a lot of free stuff too. You can use the fitness center and some health services are free or low cost. Some campuses offer free tax preparation. Graduating early is the best way to save money but it does require cutting through a lot of red tape. Not only will you save on regular college expenses, you’ll start working and earning full time money sooner. College is a business decision. Don’t let parents, teachers, or advisers pressure you into a decision you don’t feel ready to make. College isn’t going anywhere if you take a gap year to travel or work. Show Notes Allagash Beer: Belgian style beers. Jack Daniel’s Watermelon Punch: A summertime malt beverage. Curious Traveler Shandy: A citrus accented beer. College Info Geek: Thomas Frank’s site devoted to getting the most from your college experience. College Info Geek: Don’t buy into the text book scam! Powlygot: Martin Boehme’s site that will teach you a new language. Thug Notes: Cliff Notes for thugs! Nerd Fitness: Thomas’s guide to eating cheap and healthy in college. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Living in a city doesn’t mean there aren’t tasty things to eat, you just have to know where to look. Steve Brill tells us what’s edible in the big city. Urban foraging means finding wild foods. Things like berries, herbs, seeds, mushrooms, and roots. These are things humans have been eating for thousands of years. They are delicious and filled with anti-oxidants. And they’re free for the foraging. Steve has been teaching urban foraging in New York City and the larger New York area for thirty years. Surprisingly, urban parks have more foragables than less dense areas. In the city they only have to worry about lawn mowers which don’t reach everywhere. In other areas, they have to contend with deer. Mushrooms are the thing people are most leery of eating. Some mushrooms can be eaten safely but you have to be able to identify the safe ones. Mushrooms that grow on wood and look like shelves are generally safe to eat but some are not very tasty. Always consult a guide before eating anything you forage. Some of the things available right now in the North East are blackberries, carnelian cherries, lamb’s quarter, sorrel, and chicken mushrooms. I’ve seen the berries and cherries in the park this week and I wasn’t even really looking. I ate some too! If you wanted to get started on your own, begin with easily identifiable things like mulberries, dandelions, and cat tails. You can eat cat tails! You can’t buy mulberries because they are so perishable so the only way to get them is to find your own. There is a park full of free food just waiting for you to harvest it. Free and healthy, food doesn’t get much better than that. Show Notes Wildman Steve Brill: Steve’s site devoted to urban foraging, includes his tour schedule. Wild Edibles App: Steve’s app to help you identify things in the field. ReAnimator Coffee: A locally roasted Philly coffee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at Listen, Money Matters? Trust me. It’s as glamorous as you probably imagine it to be! No, it’s really not. Andrew started the LMM website while he was displaced by Hurricane Sandy. He wanted to share what he had learned about personal finance with others and one day make some money through sharing that knowledge. Matt and Andrew met in late 2013 on Fizzle, an online business training service and community. The two of them started out by advising each other on their respective projects, LMM and Swim University. It was a marriage made in heaven because each brought to the other, something that had been lacking. Andrew is the business guy and Matt is the creative guy. The two of them spent a lot of time on Skype. Andrew’s wife overheard all this discussion and said they should start a podcast. That’s how this podcast was born in November 2013! In the beginning there was a podcast a week. But you demanded more! So in May, LMM launched Money May, a podcast every single day. It was so successful that we decided to continue with a new episode daily. How do we manage to get out that many episodes when both your hosts have full time jobs? They discuss the topics on Tuesday evenings and batch record on Wednesdays. Andrew’s wife Laura or I contact and schedule guests that we find or that you all suggest. On Thursdays Matt edits each episode and creates the images that you see at the top of the posts. Matt sends them to me. I listen and write the show notes, what you’re reading now, insert relevant links and the Tweetables, schedule them to go live and there you go! What does the future hold for LMM? We would like to be your ultimate personal finance resource. If you need to know it, we want you to be able to find it on the site or in the podcast. If you feel intimidated or left out of the conversation on other personal finance sites, podcasts, or books, we want you to find a home here. A lot of that stuff is geared to a much older, already pretty savvy audience and we want to fill the gap for younger people or people just starting their personal finance journey no matter what their age. How do you make money? Well, we don’t really yet. How we don’t want to make money is from you. People who need help with their finances shouldn’t be put in a position to pay for that help. We feel that help should be made available to you at no cost. We want affiliates and sponsors to fund what we do for our listeners. A good example of an affiliate is Amazon. On Swim University, when Matt recommends a product with a link and a reader uses that link to buy that product, he gets a cut. That cut does not cost the buyer anything, Amazon pays that cut. A sponsorship is a company that pays to advertise on an episode. So we would ask a company like Mint or Ready for Zero to buy advertising on the podcast. The hope is to get enough of these sponsors to fund the show and allow Matt and Andrew to do LMM full time. What we can promise is that we won’t take the easy money. If you hear an ad for something, it’s something that we believe in and something that will help you. So that’s what really goes on behind the scenes and what we hope to do going forward. Thank you to all of you. We wouldn’t be able to do any of this without you. Show Notes Boulevard Brewing The Sixth Glass: A dark ale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The job market is still pretty bad and wages are stagnant. It might be time to create your own opportunity. We’ll discuss ways to do just that. If you can’t find a job, just start your own business! Well, it’s not as easy as that. And that isn’t an option for everyone. Creating an opportunity is also about being able to see an opportunity and being ready to take advantage of it. This podcast was created because Matt saw the website that Andrew started and reached out to him. They talked and worked together and the podcast was born. I got involved in a similar way. I started out as a listener to the show. They asked for topic ideas and I e-mailed with mine. The three of us began a dialogue and within a few days, I was hired! I didn’t send that e-mail with the intent of landing a job but, I was ready when the opportunity was made available to me. The opportunity might not always be apparent. Practice saying “yes.” Invited to a party you’d rather not attend? Say yes. Old college roommate in town and wants to get together? Say yes. The more people you meet, the more opportunities you will find. Maybe the old roommate is in town interviewing for a job at a company you’d like to work for. If they get the job, now you have a connection there. You have to put yourself out there to make things happen. Opportunity can be found in your current job. Offer to take on additional responsibilities. Offer to do the things everyone else hates to do. You may not get a promotion or a raise immediately, but being willing to do more gets you noticed and can pay off down the line. Just ask! No one is going to offer you anything if they think you’ll work for less. We gave some more specifics on getting a raise in Episode 52. You might be amazed at the results if you ask for a raise or a promotion. Take the initiative, put yourself out there, step out of your comfort zone and see what happens. A lot can happen in a life, especially nothing. Show Notes Boulevard Brewing The Sixth Glass: A strong, dark ale. Things a Little Bird Told Me: Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, on the power of creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We answer your questions about saving for a home, credit cards, multiple checking accounts, teacher’s pay, and college expenses. 1. Should I use a Roth IRA account to save for a home down payment? No, a Roth IRA is a long term investment geared toward retirement. You can withdraw the principle without penalty but cannot access any gains until you reach fifty nine and a half. Just opening a standard Betterment account will be more useful to earn money towards a down palyment. 2. Is it bad to open a credit card, get the promotion on offer, pay if off and then close it right away? It’s not bad to open the account and can be beneficial. The more available credit you have, the higher your score. The more creditors you have, the higher the score. More people have judged you a good risk. Opening a new account does lower the average age of accounts which is one of the components of a credit score. Closing the account is a bad thing though. It lowers your available credit. All of this advice with the caveat that all cards should be paid in full each month. 3. I have four checking accounts, all with different purposes. None of them have fees. Should I have less? Having multiple accounts makes things more complicated. If you were to need a large sum of money for something, you may have enough but you have to transfer money around so that it can be covered from a single account. 4. I’m a teacher with the option to receive my salary over the nine months I work or over the entire year. I currently spread it out over the year, is this the right decision? This depends on your ability to do the right thing. If you’ll take the extra money from getting paid for nine months and invest it, then that’s the right thing. More time and money to grow the investment. But if you tell yourself you’ll do it and don’t follow up, then you’re going to be mowing lawns over the summer. 5. I have two years of high school before college. What can I do now to cut down on college expenses? Choosing whether or not to got to college is a business decision. Will going cost you more money than you can ever pay back? A state school will be more affordable than a private one. Going to a community college for the first two years and then moving on to get your bachelor’s is also much less expensive. Get a part time job now and while in college and use the money for expenses, not dinners out. Apply for scholarships before and during school. See if you can test out of some classes to save time and money. We love to answer listener questions. Keep sending them in! Show Notes Boulevard Brewing The Sixth Glass: A dark, full bodied ale. Betterment: An investing tool to help grow your money for anything from retirement to buying a home. College Info Geek: The real cost of student loans. College Info Geek: Saving money on text books. College Info Geek: Tips I learned my sophomore year. LMM Episode 32: Our interview with Adam Carroll discussing the college loan debt crisis. LMM Episode 58: Money mindfulness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With tuition costs rising, there is a new debate over whether a degree is worth the expense. We’ll discuss the pros and cons in a roundtable discussion. Thomas Frank of College Info Geek and Martin Boehme from Powlyglot join us to discuss who should go to college, how to skip pre-reqs, and why college vs not college is not the only question we should be asking. Thomas has been out of college for a little over a year. While he believes the actual classes were not that helpful, college does give you a unique opportunity to make a lot of contacts that you can use for the rest of your life. Contacts that can help you find things like a job, or a place to live in a new city. While contacts can be made outside of college, you’ll likely never have access to so wide a variety again. Martin was able to save some time and money by skipping some prerequisites. Speak to the professor and inquire if you can test out. A lot of these debates ignore that there are options that are not so black and white as going to college or not. You don’t have to go to the most expensive or prestigious college that will have you. According to CNN, nearly 30% of people with associate’s degrees are out earning those with bachelor’s degrees. The associate’s can also be tens of thousands of dollars less expensive than a bachelor’s. College should not be the default immediately after high school. There are many options out there so spend some time researching them before you take the plunge. Show Notes College Info Geek: Thomas Frank’s site to help you get the most from your college experience. Powlyglot: Martin Boehme’s website that will teach you a new language. Uncollege.org: An alternative to college. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think you can make money flipping houses? We talked to Justin Williams of House Flipping HQ about the art of making money remodeling houses. If you’re a fan of HGTV, flipping houses looks like a fast way to make some money. But as is true of all reality based shows, things aren’t what they seem. Justin flips houses off camera and lets us in on how it really works. Justin started as a real estate wholesaler. He found owners who wanted to sell quickly and not be bothered with things like repairs or evicting a non-paying tenant. He put the homes under contract and then sold the contract to to another buyer who was responsible for the repairs or evicting the tenant. Justin then collected a fee from the actual buyer. Justin is now the final buyer in the equation and flips houses like a business. This isn’t a little weekend DIY hobby. He looks to make a 40-45% return on each house, purchased with money borrowed at 12-18%. This makes his net return between 28-30% per house. His goal is to flip each house in three to four months. Justin doesn’t use a bank to purchase the homes. He uses private investors and hard money investors. The investors are not taking a great deal of risk because the house itself is collateral on the investment. You can make money in this game but for most people who become successful, it takes six months to a year. The hardest and most important aspect of flipping is knowing what data to analyze and how to analyze it. How much the property is worth, the closing and holding costs, how much of a return you want on the investment. If you decide flipping is something you’re interested in, be careful out there. There are a lot of scam artists charging thousands of dollars to teach you this business. Check out Justin’s site and podcast before jumping in. Show Notes House Flipping HQ: Justin’s website and podcast that will teach you the business of house flipping. Betterment: Start investing today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of the reasons people are fearful of investing are myths. Let us help you separate fact from fiction so you can feel confident investing. Investing Myths Don’t believe everything you hear. 1. It’s Overly Risky Too many people are not investing because they think it’s too risky. They’ll hand their money over to this thing they don’t understand and poof, X bad thing (they’re not really sure what a bad thing is, they’re just sure there are lots of them) happens and their money is wiped out. So instead, they leave it where it’s nice and safe, in a checking or savings account or stuffed under the proverbial mattress. What they don’t realize is that those things are even riskier than investing. When money is in a low yield account where it’s making less than 1% interest or under the mattress where it’s making no interest, inflation is eroding the value of that money slowly but surely. If your house burns down, the money under the mattress is ashes. Yes there are risks to investing but an investor can choose how much risk to take and there are ways to minimize risk There are places to invest money like dividend stocks or bonds that allow money to grow with limited risk. You can further reduce risk by having a properly diversified portfolio meaning your investments are spread out between different market sectors and different asset classes so if one area is doing poorly, you have other areas doing well to make up for it. And while the stock market can quickly plunge, historically it has always rebounded. In the nearly 100 years since the Great Depression, there have been fewer than two dozen losing years for the stock market. That means the best way to keep your investments safe is to be in it for the long haul, set it and forget it which is what LMM has long advocated and what investing in index funds accomplishes. You don’t put money in and pull it out based on screaming pundits or scary headlines, you don’t try to time the market. You put your money in and leave it alone. Stocks become less risky the longer you hold them. 2. Investing is Only for Rich People In the old days you needed a stock broker if you wanted to invest in the stock market and often they wouldn’t even take your call unless you had thousands of dollars you were ready to invest. But now that companies like Betterment are on the scene, investing has become democratized. Many investment platforms have no minimum to get started so if you have five bucks (or less) you can invest. You also need almost no knowledge of how the market works or even what it is to get started. You don’t have to be a rich person who pays another rich person to invest for you. The fees for companies like Betterment are very low and it’s passive investing. You aren’t paying a fund manager and there is no reason to as they almost never beat the market. If your employer offers a 401k you can get started there. It’s easy to start investing this way because almost everything is decided and done for you and the money is taken out of your check before you even see it; seamless investing. 3. You Need a Lot of Money to Make a Lot of Money I think this is the one that holds a lot of people back even more so than fear of risk or lack of knowledge about investing. People think, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you a materialist or a minimalist? Let us help you find a happy middle ground so you can have nice things and still afford nice things. A materialist is defined as “someone who puts an unhealthy priority on things.” A minimalist prioritizes living with less to achieve freedom. Freedom can be defined in lots of ways, financial freedom, freedom from “stuff,” even freedom from a place. We all like stuff, shiny stuff, new stuff, pretty stuff, cool stuff. Not all of us can see the connection between our love of stuff and our lack of money. We all know people with closets full of new clothes or all the newest gadgets who constantly moan that they don’t have any money. And we know people who want to move across the country or pull up stakes and start travelling. But they can’t because they have so much stuff. How will they move all that stuff, where can they store all that stuff? Stuff weighs you down, psychologically and geographically. If we can stop buying and stop holding onto all that stuff, what benefits are there to be had? You’ll spend less, duh. You’ll have less stuff to worry about cleaning, moving, finding a place for. It’s better for the environment. How much packaging is in the Amazon box that you have delivered to you a few times a month? It doesn’t evaporate you know. Getting rid of stuff can help you cut ties with the past. Don’t keep a collection of t-shirts you “borrowed” from ex-boyfriends. If he was worth remembering, you’d still be together! A study was done to find the dollar amount “sweet spot.” How much money it took to provide day to day happiness and emotional well being. Any guesses? It was $75,000 a year. More than that amount did not provide greater happiness. We don’t advocate living in a tent out of a back pack and dumpster diving for your food but we can all be happy with less and in fact, happier with less. Show Notes Boulevard The Sixth Glass: A dark Belgian ale. The Obstacle is the Way: An easy to understand philosophy book Matt recommends. Maxed Out: A documentary about debt in America. The Happy Movie: A documentary that finds the happiest people in the world. The Queen of Versailles: If you want to see vomit inducing materialism, watch this. I’m Fine Thanks: A documentary about people who decided to change their lives to find more happiness. Stumbling on Happiness: What you think makes you happy, might not in reality. Books on Happiness: A list of books on happiness from Brain Pickings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever heard the lottery referred to as “the fool’s tax?” Learn why the lottery is for idiots and why the odds are always in the house’s favor in a casino. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery are more than one in one hundred and seventy five million. That’s a lot of zeros. If lightening struck (you actually have much better odds of this happening, one in 700,000) and you did win, one in three lotto winners are in serious financial trouble or bankrupt within five years. In fact, the odds of you being struck by lightening FIVE THOUSAND TIMES is higher than the odds of you winning the lottery once. One of the most annoying things about working in an office is being pressured to join the lottery pool. That and to sponsor “charity walks.” The argument that if you buy more tickets, as you would in a pool, you’re much more likely to win is crap too. Your odds don’t go up much until you start buying thousands of tickets. Then your co-workers tell you it’s just good fun and you’re missing out. Take Matt’s advice and offer them the same five dollars to do a little dance for you. That sounds more fun than getting nothing back for the lottery five bucks. If you spend twenty dollars a month on lotto from the ages of 25-65, you’ll likely earn nothing. If you put the same amount into a mutual fund, you’ll earn $93,000 after taxes. Want to waste your money and get nominated for a Darwin Award? Go play with fireworks. You’re 146 times more likely to die in a fireworks related accident than win the lottery. No one ever said, “Here, hold my beer,” before buying a lottery ticket. The next time your redneck cousin is bitching about having to pay taxes while holding up the line at the gas station while he scratches off lottery tickets, remind him of this. A very small portion of collected revenue is actually used for payouts. Most of it goes back to the government. Hence the term, “idiot’s tax.” Gambling doesn’t get a pass either. If you spend $100 an hour playing roulette, you lose on average, $5.26 per hour. Gambling brings in more revenue than movies, sporting events, theme parks, cruises, and recorded music combined. The house always wins. If you’re a really good black jack player, the house still has odds of .5% on you. Like the slots? The house does too. They have the edge on you there to the tune of 35%. There are plenty of ways to grow your money but playing the lottery and hitting the casino are not among them. Going to Vegas or Atlantic City can be fun. Gambling can be fun too but don’t go in expecting to walk away with some winnings. If you have a handle on your finances, take a set amount of money and have a blast gambling that. But you don’t want to be the sad case pawning your grandmother’s wedding ring in a last ditch effort to win back what you couldn’t afford it lose. As for lotto pressuring co-workers, tell them to stay the hell away from you unless they have Girl Scout cookies. Show Notes Boulevard The Sixth Glass: A dark Belgian ale. Business Insider: Some stats about winning the lottery. Kiplingers: Five better investments than the lottery. Betterment: Take what you would have spent on lott... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Student loan refinancing can save you money but it’s a confusing process. Today we get some guidance from Mike Cagney, co-founder of SoFi.com. SoFi started in 2011 by raising two million dollars from Stanford Graduate School of Business alums to loan to students. One hundred students were loaned $20,000 each. The idea being that the students would be more responsible with money borrowed from their own community and the lenders would have a vested interest in seeing students succeed from within that community. SoFi has evolved into a company that consolidates and refinances loans. They refinanced one hundred million dollars worth this June and save former students an average of $11,000 over the life of a loan. SoFi also help graduates who are unemployed by freezing their loans and helping them to find new jobs and help former students to start their own businesses by freezing loans and helping to raise capital. SoFi can refinance loans with interest rates over 6% and can work with state, federal, and private loans. A big benefit of consolidating is that rather than dealing with several servicers, you’re dealing with one. If you have a job loss and need help, dealing with one servicer means things are much less likely to fall through the cracks. You can lose some protections that you have with federal loans like loan forgiveness after public service but SoFi does offer unemployment protection. State loans offer less protections more akin to private loans than federal. SoFi offers five, ten, and fifteen year terms. If for instance you have six years left and opt for the five year term, your monthly payments will be higher but the interest rate will be lower. Student loans are so confusing but Mike gives us some information on how to make them less so. First, before you borrow, understand the amount and why you’re borrowing. Take a look at your major and choice of university and see what the earnings are for graduates. If you take out $100,000 in loans for a field that pays $30,000, that’s not a good decision. While in school take out federal loans so that you are afforded the protections they offer. After graduating, consider consolidation so you are dealing with one entity rather than several. After consolidation, you can consider refinancing to lower your interest rate. Mike’s final advice is that if you’re struggling, reach out to your servicer. It’s in no one’s interest for the borrower to default. Show Notes SoFi.com: SoFi has a great site that will help you decide if consolidation or refinancing are a smart choice for you. Betterment: The easy way to start investing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just like produce, a lot of what you buy has a season. If you know what’s “in season” you can save a lot of money. We’ll find out when to buy what. Kitchen Appliances: According to Money Crashers, September and October because that’s when new models come out. Last year’s version will be reduced. This point will be a recurring theme in the episode. And it’s not like from year to year there are great innovations in refrigerators. Getting last year’s model doesn’t mean you won’t have the new fridge that makes you toast or anything. You aren’t missing much but overpaying. Automobiles: From Auto Trader, the end of each year and the end of every day. Sales people are hustling to get that last sale in before the numbers come out so they’re more flexible. Also late summer/early fall when the new models come out. Computers: PC World suggests buying around the holidays and back to school time. Gaming Systems: Since everyone wants these as holiday presents, lifehacker suggests January. Your disappointed kid will hate you but you have more to add to his college fund! Airline Tickets: There are a lot of theories about this, buy on Tuesdays, buy last minute, but CheapAir ran the numbers and found that buying fifty four days before the trip is optimal. They monitored four million trips to cull this data! Concert or Event Tickets: Thanks to lifehacker again, see movies during the day, for things like concerts or sporting events, the closer to the date the better to go on Craigslist to find people who really need to unload them. Televisions: From Popular Mechanics, the usual suspects, holidays, January, but interestingly, March. Know why? Andrew and Matt hate sports but I’m a fan so March Madness Baby! July also because sales are typically slow. Furniture: According to Go Simple Finance, January and July. New furniture is released in February and August. No one knew that but LMM found out for you! Engagement Ring: US News tells us when not to buy, between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day. Unlike most of our other examples, rings are not cheaper when everyone is buying them. Gas: According to Time Magazine, Wednesday morning. Station owners price check each other between 8-10 am. If competitors are increasing prices, owners will raise their own between 10-12. Weird, but that’s Time’s take on it. House: From Realtor.com, for more choices, April-July because that’s when a lot of homes are being listed. If you want the lowest price, between Thanksgiving and the New Year. No one wants to move in the winter so that makes sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s time for listener questions. We’ll discuss stock earnings, home renovations, side hustles, emergency funds, and money for freelancers. 1. How does a company’s quarterly earnings report affect my stock? Yes, but it’s not just about whether the company made or lost money. The report also contains information about what is going on inside the company. So just because the company made money doesn’t necessarily guarantee a positive report. It’s more important to read the report and get a sense of what’s happening within the company than to just make decisions based strictly on numbers. 2. How do you do home improvement and landscaping on a budget? Plan and budget! Before you go crazy at the plant store, how many will you need, how much sun does your yard get? Repurpose things, good for your wallet and the environment. The most important thing is to do some of it yourself. Potting plants isn’t something you need a professional for. Re-wiring your home, you probably do. See what you can borrow from friends or neighbors. Don’t buy a tool that you’ll only use once. And you can be proud of the work you did to make your home nicer. 3. Are podcasting and blogging actually good side hustles to make extra money? They can be. LMM’s makes some money through affiliate links on our blog. So if you sign up for Zip Car through this link, we get a small cut of it. Making money via a podcast is possible too. Marc Maron makes $14,000 per episode of his WTF podcast. Does LMM make money? Not just yet. We bring in some money but it doesn’t yet cover expenses like me, hosting the site, hosting the podcast, equipment. You can make money but it takes time. Matt’s “day job” is Swim University. He’s had the site for four years, has been working on it full time for two years and has made $40,000 so far this year, mainly through affiliate links. The end goal for a podcast is to have companies sponsor you, to sell advertising on the podcast. If podcasting isn’t your thing, there are plenty of ways to make extra cash. 4. A listener has recently had to put a $3300 air conditioner on her credit card. Should she pay if off over time at 21% interest or use some cash in her Fidelity account to pay it off more quickly? There are a few ways to do this. Open a new credit card with limited time 0% interest and transfer the balance so you can pay it off over time without interest. If the money in the Fidelity account is your emergency fund, no AC in Georgia constitutes and emergency. If that would completely wipe out the emergency fund, look into Lending Tree to get a low interest rate loan. 5. What advice do you have for a freelancer in a physical job that can’t be done forever, who’s income varies month to month and needs to kick investing into high gear? Do what Matt calls the “freelance sprint.” Take on as many jobs as possible in a short amount of time to earn a lot of money quickly. The goal is to create a big cushion to see you through until the income is more steady. One way would be to have someone film you doing your job and put it on Youtube as a tutorial. A lot of people don’t know how to change the oil in their car or unclog their drain so there’s an audience out there and you make money from the ads on Youtube. Thanks for the questions everyone! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Betterment CEO Jon Stein gives us a behind the scenes look at how the company operates and makes your money work for you. Betterment is an automated way to invest your money based on your goals and time frame. Answer a few simple questions and Betterment will set up a diversified portfolio that is managed for you. After studying economics and human behavior, Jon started his career consulting for banks. He saw that they didn’t care about customers and their products were almost designed to help people fail. He experimented with several brokerage companies and couldn’t find what he was looking for. So like all good entrepreneurs, he decided to make what he couldn’t find elsewhere himself. A company that made it easy to invest and served the client, not the bottom line. That’s how Betterment was born. A listener asked why Betterment is better than Vanguard given that Vanguard has better fees. Betterment does some things that Vanguard does not. Betterment invests in fractional shares, each time you deposit money into Betterment, your account is automatically rebalanced in order to lower taxes, and Betterment does tax loss harvesting. We advocate keeping your emergency fund in an investment account. In Betterment, short term money will be invested more conservatively. If you leave an employer who provided a 401K, roll it over into a Betterment IRA. Many times, once you leave an employer, you will be charged a higher fee for the management of the 401K. It takes about seven days to do a roll over with Betterment, the industry average is thirty days. Jon sees Betterment moving into the same league as companies like Vanguard and Fidelity in the next ten years and managing over one trillion dollars. And when that day comes, we’ll be able to say we knew him when. The Betterment Experiment Check out our experience using Betterment with our own money: Show Notes Betterment: See for yourself what we discussed today. Use this link and your first six month of investing are free. Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat Beer: A lively, refreshing ale sent to LMM from listener Drew! Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness: A new look at how we make decisions. The Winner’s Curse: A look at the difference between how people should act economically and how the actually act. Thinking, Fast and Slow: The hidden things that influence the way we think and make decisons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to storing your cash, you have three choices, under the mattress, a credit union, or a bank. Don’t do the first one. That leaves us with credit union vs. bank, which one is better for your money? If you’ve contemplated ditching your bank and joining a credit union, we’ll lay out the differences between the two so you can make the best decision for your money. Banks Suck Banks have almost always had bad press, and much of it they have earned. We all remember 2008 when they nearly collapsed the world economy or more recently, Wells Fargo underhanded little scheme that involved opening accounts without customer’s knowledge or permission. After all the recent bad press, it’s not surprising that people want an alternative to traditional banks. Credit unions provide that alternative. What is a Credit Union? A credit union is a non-profit money making cooperative where members can borrow from pooled deposits at lower interest rates. They exist to serve their members rather than maximize corporate profits. Credit unions range from small, volunteer-run organizations to quite large with thousands of members run by a professional board. Credit unions are started by corporations or organizations to serve their employees or members. Arkansas AM&N College Federal Credit Union is an example of a small credit union. It was started by and for the employees of the university in 1952 and serves fewer than 1,000 members made up of university employees, alumni, and their family members. The largest credit union in the U.S. is Navy Federal Credit Union with more than seven million members. It started in 1933 with just seven members! Members are made up of all Department of Defense and Coast Guard active duty, veterans, civilian and contractor employees and family members of all those groups. When you join a credit union, you become part owner just as you own part of a company when you buy its stock. Members vote to select the board of directors and for decisions that will affect the credit union. Each member has an equal vote without regard to how little or how much money he or she has in their account. Currently, about one-third of Americans belong to a credit union. But Do They Have Lollipops? Credit unions offer the same core products that banks offer; checking and savings accounts, home, auto, and personal loans, debit cards, online bill paying, paper checks, CDs, certified and cashier’s checks, money orders, and safety deposit boxes. How Credit Unions Differ From Banks Investors own banks and banks have a responsibility to make money for them.. That might be through legitimate means like loaning money and earning interest or illegitimate means like opening fraudulent accounts. It can also mean earning money by charging customers outrageous fees. That isn’t illegal, but something doesn’t have to be unlawful to be ethically questionable. Credit unions exist to serve their customers/owners. Looking after the bottom line for a credit union means operating in the best interests of their customers/owners. That means that credit unions often offer better interest rates both on checking and savings accounts and on loans than do traditional banks. Credit unions charge fewer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Moving is third on a list of life stressors behind the death of a partner and divorce. Learn how to save money during the process to help reduce the stress. 1. Don’t pay for boxes. There are lots of sources of free boxed, but Matt knows a tip to get extra sturdy boxes for free. Ask at a hospital, lab, or pool store. The reason is that all of those places are shipped chemicals so the boxes are thicker and more durable. 2. Move less stuff. We don’t recommend Andrew’s method of having all of your belongings swept away by a hurricane but there are ways to reduce how much you take to the new place. We discussed several in Episode 96. Sell some stuff to get some extra cash and that will save you money because there is less stuff to move. Less to pack and unpack too so you can’t go wrong with this one. 3. Screw bubble wrap. Fun for the cat but expensive for moving and unnecessary. Use clothes, towels, sheets, newspaper to wrap and cushion your breakables. 4. Keep track of all your moving expenses. Moving expenses can sometimes be deducted on your taxes. Find out if you meet the criteria here. 5. Pack your own stuff. Now that you sold the stuff you don’t need, you don’t have enough to justify paying someone to pack it for you. Order some pizzas, buy some beer and find out who your real friends are. 6. Let the post office help you. If you have a lot of books, the post office has special shipping rates for them that might be cheaper than moving them yourself. 7. Use a pod. If you don’t have a lot to move, you can use something like this. It’s like a portable storage unit the company drops off and picks up. 8. Move at off times. Move during the middle of the month, some companies have lower rates because the first and last of the month are busier for them. Time of year can make a price different too. Moving between October and May can be cheaper than warmer weather months. 9. Get money for your move. If your move is tied to your job, you may be able to get relocation expenses covered. 10. Moving trucks. If you are moving a long distance, make sure the company you rent the truck from allows you to drop it off at a different location from where you picked it up. Make sure you use the smallest truck possible because larger ones are more expensive. Booking in advance may get you a discount. 11. Moving additional vehicles. If you have something can be towed or hauled, check out the cheaper option. 12. Insurance. A bit like trip insurance, do some research and decide if you can live without it. If you’re moving across town, it’s less necessary than a cross country move. 13. Do an inventory and figure out what moving accessories you need. Things like dollies, ropes, blankets. If they have to be rented, it can add up. See what you have or can borrow to make do. If you know someone moving soon, share this with them and maybe you can consider that your contribution and won’t have to help with the actual move! Show Notes Unita Brewing Sum’r Ale: A refreshing, summer golden ale. MSN Real Estate: Where we found some of the tips. About.com: More moving tips. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all want to be successful and college used to be a route to success. But with college costs so high, it’s out of reach for some so we’ll explore alternatives to college. The cost of college tuition has risen 1,120% since 1978. There is $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt in the US. Even if you do go to college, a degree is no longer the almost guaranteed ticket to the upper middle class it once was. But not going to college, or not going via traditional routes, doesn’t mean you are destined for a life of low wage jobs and poverty. There are many paths to success and they don’t all require higher education. Invest Most of us are not going to get rich simply from our 9-5 jobs and even if we do, it’s still important to have at least one form of passive income, something that makes us money with very little effort on our part. The best form of passive income is investing and the most important way to make a lot of money through investing is to start early. The more time your money has to grow, the better and there is no substitute for time when it comes to investing. If at 18 years of age, you started with $1,000 and invested an additional $100 every week for 30 years at 7%, at the end of the 30 years, when you are 48, you would have more than half a million dollars, $539,643. You would have contributed just $156,000, the other $382,643 you made just from interest, from doing literally nothing. If you don’t start until you’re 28 but start with double the amount, $2,000 and invest double the amount, $200 a week at the same 7% for 20 years, at the end of the 20 years when you are 48, you would have $461,451. You contributed $208,000 and the other $251,451 you made just from interest. You can see what a difference time makes. We started with and contributed twice the amount but we still ended up with nearly $80,000 less because of the additional ten years our money had to grow in the first example. I’ll say it again, there is no substitute for time when it comes to investing. Our favorite gateway drug to investing is Betterment. The fees are low, there is no minimum, and you don’t have to know anything about investing to get started. Rental property is another great form of passive income. You might not think it’s passive if you think you have to be a hand’s on landlord and you would be right. And if you’re a hand’s on landlord, you’re restricted to buying property in an area close enough to where you live to attend to the property which is limiting if their isn’t a lot of stock or the area is very expensive. But, when you partner with Roofstock, all of those problems are gone! They are a turnkey real estate investment property and do everything from find you a home to collecting the rent and taking care of repairs and maintenance. Not only do they do the work for you, but they greatly expand the areas where you can own property since they do the day to day stuff for you. We did a full review of Roofstock. If you can’t afford to buy a rental property, you can still invest in real estate. Fundrise is crowd funded real estate. It allows individuals to invest in commercial property through an eREIT. We did a full Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What exactly are dividends and how do they work? When you invest in a company you get paid a portion of a company’s profits as a way to compensate you for your investment. These payments are called dividends and they are a form of passive income. What are Dividends? When you own stock in a company directly or through a fund you may receive dividends. A dividend is a distribution of a portion of a company’s profits. They are decided by the board of directors and can be issued as cash payments, as shares of stock or other property. It’s an opportunity for a company to reward shareholder loyalty. The amount you receive depends on how much stock you own and how much profit there was to divide. Why Buy Dividend Stocks? Investors, particularly retired investors, like the steady income that dividend stocks provide and also like the option of reinvesting dividends to buy more shares of stock. Not All Companies Offer Dividends Most companies don’t offer dividends, and if they do, they can cancel them if it’s a bad time to make a payout. Companies can increase dividends if times are good. Startups and some high-growth companies in certain sectors like tech and biotech usually don’t pay dividends because all of the profits are plowed back into the company so they can maintain higher than average expansion and growth. If a company wants to increase it value (which increases the share price) it may opt to reinvest earnings rather than pay out dividends. Some companies choose to use that money to fund new projects, buy new assets, buy back some of its shares or acquire another company. What Kind of Companies Pay Dividends? Bigger well-established companies are more likely to pay out dividends regularly. Companies in certain sectors including oil and gas, financial, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, historically have had some of the highest dividend yields. Why Pay Them? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Investors are less sure that they’ll receive capital gains at a later date when earnings are reinvested as retained earnings than they are of receiving current dividend payments. In other words, better the sure thing now. There are tax reasons too. In some countries income derived from dividends is taxed at a lower rate than regular income. This is particularly an incentive for investors in high tax brackets. We’ll cover taxes below. If a company has a long track record of paying dividends, eliminating them or reducing the amount might be taken as a sign by investors that the company is in trouble. The reliable income that dividends can provide is appealing to many investors, so they’ll be more tempted to buy stock in a company that pays them. Paying dividends is also typically a sign that a company is healthy and that management expects future earnings. When Should You Buy? Should you buy before or after the dividend payment goes out? Bird in hand theory means you buy before the payment goes out while the stock is more expensive because you can expect a payment soon. Once the payment goes out, the stock will, in the short term, be worthless. For a bigger yield, buy after the payment has gone out. Cum Dividend And for your daily dose of the sophomoric, a share is said to be “cum dividend” when it is offered for sale with an entitlement to the next dividend payment attached. See also, “jizz dividend.” Don’t google that, Matt just made that up. When are Dividends Paid? If a company is going to pay dividends, shareholders are notified by a press release sent to the big stock quoting services. A record date is set. All investors who own stock as of that date will receive dividends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest, the Mad Fientist delves deep into advanced IRA strategies. Find out why you should have one and which one will best fit your needs. Brandon shares the same goal as many of us, to retire at a young age and avoid paying as much tax as is legal! How you handle your IRA’s can be a big part of achieving both goals. Traditional IRA A Traditional IRA is not taxed upfront but at the point of withdrawal. The money grows tax-deferred. Upon withdrawal after age 59 1/2, the money is taxed as income. For 2016, you can contribute up to $5,500, $6,500 if you are aged 50 or older. Roth IRA A Roth IRA is taxed upfront and not upon withdrawal after age 59 1/2. For 2016, the contribution limits are the same as for a Traditional IRA. 401k Many people have a 401k through their employer. A 401k is similar to a Traditional IRA. The money goes in tax-free. When you leave your job, whether it’s to take a new one or to retire, roll that account into a Traditional IRA. This simplifies things so you aren’t trying to keep track of several accounts, and it gives you more control over fees. You may not even know how much you’re paying in fees for your 401k, and if you take the time to find out by reading the prospectus, there isn’t much you can do about it anyway because your options are selected by your employer. And investment account fees can cost you a lot of money. Americans pay over $6 billion dollars in investment fees per year. Vanguard makes rolling over your 401k easy, and they have very low fees. Why Traditional Over Roth? When you’re in the prime of your career, you’re being taxed at a higher than you are likely to be in the future. You want the tax advantage of the Traditional IRA during your highest earning years because once you give up those tax advantages, they’re gone forever. Will tax rates be raised in the coming years? Yes, probably. But new loopholes will be added too and as long as there are people like Brandon around, we will know ways to take advantage of them. Is it a risk? It is, but it’s a calculated one. Roth IRA Conversion Ladder Both types of IRA’s are used at different stages of life to reap the most tax benefits possible. Brandon has a method for this, the Roth IRA Conversion Ladder. You contribute to a Traditional IRA during your working life because it’s likely that your tax rate is higher now than it will be after retirement. After you leave your job, you will have less taxable income. During this time, you slowly roll the Traditional IRA to a Roth. This rollover counts as ordinary income so to do this tax-free, convert a dollar amount equal to your tax deductions and exemptions. During this time, you live off your capital gains and dividends because they are taxed at 0% so long as you’re in the 10 or 15% tax bracket. For 2016, anyone making less than $9,225 is in the 10% bracket, and anyone making between $9,226-$37,450 is in the 15% bracket. LLC As we learned in our Natali Morris episode, it’s the people who earn salaries from an employer who take the hardest tax hit. The reason a bunch of LMM listeners are rushing out to start LLC’s! Unsurprisingly, Brandon has a way to super hack your LLC to mine even more tax benefits. We did a little calculating during the episode, and if you paid yourself $80,000 a year via dividends from your LLC, you would only be liable for $5,000 in taxes! If you were making $80,000 from a salaried job, you would pay over $19,000 in taxes! What To do With $3, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Social security is a decisive topic but we’ll give you the facts while leaving the politics aside so you can draw your own conclusions. Social security was established by FDR in 1935 as part of The New Deal. It was intended to alleviate poverty for the elderly, unemployed, and fatherless children. Workers pay in during their working lives and draw from it once retired, each generation funding the previous one. Since 1983, the cash flow has been positive, more coming in than going out. By 2021, just seven years from now, it’s forecast to be paying out money faster than it comes in. Some experts think this is not apocalyptic and the money will be diverted from somewhere else to continue the program. The surest way for a politician in America not to get elected or re-elected is to try to mess with Social Security so the government will always find a way to fund it. One way to save the program is to privatize it. It would be less like a tax and more like a 401K. This way the money could be left to family after death, the money could be invested in the market, and it would reduce the role of government as they would not longer manage this enormous pool of money. The problem with this plan is that during the transition, it would add one trillion dollars of debt to the economy. There is also no way to know exactly how much you will receive as there is with the program as it stands. Two more realistic plans are to raise payroll tax by 2%. This would ensure solvency for the next seventy five years. Another option is to decrease the benefit by 13.3%. This would ensure solvency indefinitely. The takeaway is that people of working age now will probably collect social security but it is not something that should be depended on for the entirety of your retirement income. Keep investing, continue maxing your 401K, those are things you can control unlike the future of social security. Show Notes Betterment: Our favorite investing tool. Use this link to get six months without fees. SSA Calculations: See an estimate of what you will collect from Social Security in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re breaking down Listen Money Matter’s Twelve Financial Philosophies. Think and meditate on them and then live by them. 1. You are responsible for your own wealth. Don’t expect to marry rich, inherit a fortune or win the lottery. Don’t blame your back ground, the economy, or any other excuse you can come up with. If you want to build wealth, the onus is on you. 2. Getting out of debt is an emergency. If you have debt, use the stack method to pay it off. 3. Always take free money. If your employer offers matching 401K, take it. Even if you have debt, contribute to the 401K. 4. Super frugality is a waste of time and money. We’re all for frugal but if it takes two hours to make your own laundry soap, that’s perhaps not the best use of your time. You would save more batch cooking for two hours so you don’t have to buy lunch at work for the week. 5. Credit cards make spending cheaper when correctly used. A good cash back card will save you a small percent on your purchases. 6. Avoid bank fees and find low investing fees. Seek out a bank that doesn’t charge crazy fees for things like checks, automatic payments, and minimum balances. Choose an investment tool that has low transaction fees. We discussed bank fees in Episode 9 and Vanguard, a low fee investment company in Episode 109. 7. Automate your finances. Set it and forget it. Use auto pay, use Mint, use auto transfers. Andrew explained how in this article. 8. Savings accounts are stupid. In episode 107 we explained where your emergency fund should be kept and it’s not in a savings account. 9. Materialism inhibits wealth building and leads to debt. A house full of stuff you don’t use costs you money when you buy it and money in the future because you didn’t invest it. 10. Budgeting makes smart people smart with money. You’ve got to know what you have to work with and where it’s going otherwise you’re navigating blind. 11. Health is always more important than wealth. The money you spend on your health whether it’s good food, a gym membership, or regular check-ups, will more than come back to you in the future. Being sick is expensive, especially in America. 12. Investing is a long-term strategy. Once you start investing, remember you’re in it for the long haul. Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. That’s it, LMM’s raison d’etre in twelve simple ideas. Let us know in the comments what your philosophies are. Check out this fun little money-saving tip video I did over the weekend: Show Notes The Obstacle is the Way: A modern philosophy book. Betterment: An investing tool that let’s you set it and forget it. Use this link and get six months of fees waived. Mastering Mint: Our book on how to get the most from Mint. Listen to the episode and find out how to get it for free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Debt affects your credit score and makes life more expensive. We’ll show you the cost of debt and reasons you need a kick ass credit score. A good credit score saves you money in many ways. You don’t have to achieve the “perfect” score but having a score above 760 will go a long way towards making life cheaper. What is a Credit Score? A credit score is a number calculated using a number of factors to show how creditworthy you are. Lenders use this number to decide whether or not to lend you money, what rate of interest you will pay on that loan and in the case of credit card companies, whether or not to issue you a card and what your limit will be. Card interest rates are pre-set so your score doesn’t affect that. What Makes Up a Credit Score? There are six major components that make up your credit score. We did an in-depth article on it but to quickly re-cap, these are the factors; * Payment History: If you pay your bills on time. * Credit Utilization: How much of your available credit is being used. * Derogatory Marks: Do you have delinquent accounts, past bankruptcies, judgments against you etc * Length of Credit History: How long you have had a credit file. * Total Accounts: How many credit accounts you have open and how many types (credit card, mortgage, student loan, personal loan, auto loan, etc) * Credit Inquiries: How many times has your credit been checked because you’ve applied for a new card or loan. What is a Good Score? There is a credit score range you will can into. Each credit bureau has their own credit scoring models but in general, the Fico score ranges are as follows: * 300-630 is bad. * 630-689 is fair. * 690-719 is good. * 720-850 is excellent. Either end of those is pretty hard to achieve and some people obsess over their credit score way more than necessary. There are lots of reasons you need a score but kick ass can be achieved at 760. So if you are there, you’re set. The most well-known types of credit score are FICO Scores, created by the Fair Isaac Corporation. The 3 major credit bureaus that run your FICO score are Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion and it should be done once a year. Remember, with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) you are entitled to get a free credit report once a year. You can get your free credit score on the Government website www.annualcreditreport.com. If you use a different service lookout for any extra charges. sometimes they will charge you extra for monthly credit monitoring services, or fraud alert plans. You need to know what your score is before you improve it so, go on, take the band-aid off. Reasons You Need a Kick-Ass Credit Score If you don’t have a good score, here are some reasons to get one. Interest Rates This is the big one. The two most expensive things in life are taxes and interest and if you can avoid them, you will reach financial independence much faster. If you want to buy a home, a new car, or borrow money for anything from starting a business to renovating your house, a good credit score will determine the rate of interest the lender sets for the loan. What’s a point here and a point there? A lot when we’re talking about interest rates. If you buy a $300,000 house with 20% ($60,000) down payment with a 30 year fixed rate mortgage at 4.5% rather than 5.5%, over the life of that loan, you will save $52,794. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As demonstrated in Vimes’ theory of boots, sometimes it saves money long term to spend more up front. What items are worth the splurge and which are not? Quality versus cost is not about being fancy and always buying the most expensive version of everything or being cheap and always buying the least expensive version of things. It’s about making sure what you buy lasts as long as possible so you don’t have to spend more money constantly replacing the same item. Technology is a great example. Apple products are less vulnerable to viruses than pcs. A virus will cost you money either having to pay for repairs or replace the computer entirely. A good rule of thumb on where to spend the extra money is “anything that comes between you and the ground.” So shoes, mattresses, and tires. You spend a third of your life in bed so mattresses are not the place to save some money. Anything that needs to last a long time is worth the extra money. Things like cushioned furniture and appliances. What you put into your body. You don’t have to buy only the most pure, organic vegetables harvested at the light of the full moon by Buddhist monks, but thinking you’re getting a deal by eating from the dollar menu everyday is a costly mistake in the future. Where can you choose the less expensive option? Matt says clothes. I would say you can spend less on casual, around the house clothes but a little more in dress and office clothes. Wood furniture will last a long time without spending a fortune. The only caveat would be weight bearing furniture like book cases which can bow if they’re the ultra cheap press board ones. Let’s hear from you in the comments. What do you spend more on and where do you save? Show Notes Terrapin Mosaic Red Rye India Pale Ale: “A liquid art form.” Sierra Nevada Blindfold Black IPA: Bright hops and roasty darkness. Betterment: Our favorite investing tool. Use this link and get six months free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A shopping sniper knows what they want, gets it, and gets out. We’ll teach you a few tricks to become the shopping sniper with the most confirmed kills. Welcome to your training. I hope you enjoyed the video. But now it’s time to begin. It’s time to know all the secrets on how to spend less money. This is a 2,000-word training manual that will walk you through becoming a Shopping Sniper, and in turn, teach you how to spend less, save more money and allow you to focus on what’s really important. Why Are Americans Addicted to Shopping? You’d think because of the economic crash in 2008 that Americans would be a lot more conscious of their spending. You’d also think Americans would have toned down their shopping just a little bit, but instead, shopping totals have increased. In April of 2013, retail shopping sales increased by 0.1%. Not a huge increase, but an increase nonetheless. We are a culture of consumerism. It’s been ingrained in our DNA to want stuff, to keep up with the Joneses, to “shop till you drop.” It’s no wonder why American’s have trouble saving their money — they’re spending it while they shop. Shopping is so popular that we have TV shows based on it, including: * My Shopping Addiction * Supermarket Sweep * HSN & QVC * Million Dollar Shoppers * Extreme Couponing * The Entire Style Network * Guy’s Grocery Games We are being brainwashed into shopping. Shopping has become a skill and a sport in our country. In fact, the only way to avoid being sold to is to go to sleep. That is until dream TV is invented. Exposing 5 Retail Store Marketing Secrets I’ve been working in retail stores since I was 13 years old. I’ve also spent time as the head of marketing for a chain of retail stores. My job was to make people buy more stuff, and I learned these secrets from the best and the biggest stores in the country. As a former marketing director, I know what goes into making people buy more and buy often. My job was to create colorful circulars (newspaper ads), packed to the brim with coupons. I filmed funny TV commercials, created ads for magazines and spots for radio. I did whatever it took to get my brand in front of your face, over and over again. I’ve learned a lot during my time, and I think it’s time I expose myself…I mean my secrets to retail marketing. Having this knowledge will give you power and make you a better Shopping Sniper Secret #1: No Clocks, No Windows The simple reason for the this is because the stores don’t want you to pay attention to the time. They also don’t want you to realize how nice it is outside. By denying you insights to the outside world, they hope to keep you in the store and shopping longer. They also play very easy-to-listen music throughout the store. This music is meant to put you in a good mood to increase your shopping time. Oh, and they always crank the AC in the summer. Feels so good to shop in the mall during the summer, doesn’t it? Secret #2: Loss Leaders Walmart is well known for this marketing tactic, especially during the holiday season. Loss Leaders are products that are very popular and desirable, so the stores will sell these items at the lowest possible price without losing any money — however, Walmart is known for actually losing money on these items. The trick is to get you into the store by pricing these desirable items so low that you can’t pass up that kind of deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does the ideal financially responsible person look like? Is it you? We’ll discuss achieving financial perfection. See how you stack up. The ideal person will have no student loan, credit card, or car debt. Their housing expenses will be no more than 30% of their income, total expenses no more than 50%. They will devote 20% of their salary to investing. The other 30% is discretionary income. Andrew wrote a detailed post about how you should be investing that 20%. You get $25,000 in an investment account as your emergency fund first and then can branch out to riskier options. Age is important too. In our book, Mastering Mint there is a graph on page 92 showing what percentage of your income you need to save to retire in X number of years. Credit cards can be a tool for the financially responsible. As long as you pay the entire balance each month. You can leverage credit cards for travel discounts, cash back, and purchase protection. The ideal person has a budget. No matter how few expenses you have, they are hard to keep track of unless you have a system in place. Use Mint, use You Need A Budget, the envelope method, whatever works for you but you have to use a budget. Financially responsible people spend money on experiences rather than things. A great vacation, a nice dinner, a concert. These are things worth spending money on and will make you happier than a closet full of new shoes or a giant TV. Less stuff takes up less space in your home and in your head. If you have too much stuff, find out how to get rid of it and make some extra money in Episode 96. The ideal financial person starts young. Your money is so much more powerful when it has thirty years to marinate in investments rather than ten years. Putting a lot of work in the front end means less work when you’re older. How did you do? Don’t worry if you fell short. This is the perfect person and you don’t see them much in the wild. But practice makes perfect. You know what to do so keep at it. Show Notes 1792 Ridgemont Reserve: Small batch Kentucky Bourbon. Betterment: Get 20% in here. Use this link and get six months free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re answering listener questions about gold, stock options, coupons, investing, and how to avoid student loan debt. 1. Should I invest in gold and silver? The short answer is no. It’s risky and speculative. Gold and silver prices fluctuate wildly from ridiculous highs to tremendous lows. To make money this way you would have to time the market and we’ve discussed before that it is inadvisable to do so. 2. Should I buy company stock at a 15% discount or continue with Betterment? This question was detailed but at the end of the day, the company was getting a year long loan and the money was not accessible. It’s also the problem of too many eggs in one basket. Having your income and investments coming from the same place is risky. Continue putting the money into Betterment. 3. Are coupons worth your time? Coupons are to get you into the store knowing that once you’re there, you’ll buy more than what you came in for. If you have a lot of self control and are using the coupon to buy something you normally buy, than they can be a good thing. 4. I have an $8000 loan with 3.45% interest. Should I pay it off before investing or invest and make a lower monthly loan payment? Andrew calculated this out. If you put $1000 into investing every year for eight years and got a return of 7%, you would make $410.90 more than if you did the same with the $1000 by buying off the loan. But that was on paper and actual life is variable so you can’t count on 7%. Also, the interest rate on this loan is very low. So in a vacuum, you would invest the money rather than pay down the loan but in the real world, pay off the loan before investing. 5. How do I avoid going deep into debt during my two year graduate program? If you have to take out loans, take out federal loans over private when possible. The interest rate is lower and there are programs for debt forgiveness for federal loans. Put any savings into an investment account. The day you graduate, pull it out and pay on your loans. They don’t accrue interest while in school. Even if your program is full time, find a few hours a week for a side hustle. An Uber driver sets their own hours and has clients seek them out. Take everything you just learned in class and create a blog or a Youtube video. It’s tutoring but to a potentially huge audience. I’ve added our student loan episodes to the show notes. Thanks guys, we love these episodes so keep sending in your questions. Show Notes LMM Episode 32: Adam Carrol educates us about student loans. LMM Episode 70: Student loan expert Heather Jarvis talks about student loan repayment and forgiveness programs. Smart Passive Income: Pat Flynn’s site that teaches ways to make passive income. Betterment: The easy to use investment tool. Use this link and get six months free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all have the same 24 hours to work with. But there are lots of ways to get more out of those hours. We’ll give you some tips to make the job easier. Whether you work from home, work in an office, work for yourself, or for someone else, there is a tip out there that will organize, streamline, or enhance your process. 1. Stay away from social media. Don’t get sucked into a Twitter hole when you’re supposed to be working. Stay off Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, all of those while you’re supposed to be working. 2. Figure out when you best work. Some of us are larks and some are owls. Forcing yourself to get up an hour earlier to get things done is useless if you’re nodding off. Structure your day so the most important tasks get tackled when you’re at your peek. 3. Learn how to say no. Whether it’s an invitation, a phone call, or taking on a project when you already have too much on your plate, say no. Once you’ve finished, then you’re free to accept those things. 4. Exercise, eat and sleep properly. You’re brain and body can’t function if you’re poorly nourished, tired, and immobile. 5. Get organized. Clutter and mess are distracting. Tidy your work area. Our personal tips: 1. Drink coffee. Or your stimulant of choice. 2. Wear headphones. Especially if you work in a loud office, get some noise cancelling headphones to block out the distracting noise. Music or podcast optional. 3. Mailbox. Manage your e-mail faster and more effectively. 4. To do list. It should be short but detailed with everything you need to accomplish each task to hand. 5. Set time constraints. Set a timer and when it goes off, you’re done. The limited window will force you to get things done. 30/30 is an app designed for this. 6. Rescue Time. The Mint for your time. See how much time you’re wasting on Reddit. We’ll put a lot more ideas into the show notes for you. Even using one of our tips or tools will make your day easier. Show Notes Wise Bread: A great resource for personal finance information and frugal tips. College Info Geek: Our buddy Thomas’s guide to getting the most from your college experience. Four Hour Work Week: Productivity Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic Depressive, and Crazy Like Me. Trello: Organization for groups. Getting Things Done: Learn the concept of “brain dumping.” Understanding the Value of Time: LMM’s episode 76. Evernote: Lose the sticky notes with this digital app. Lift: The habit building app. Learn more at Episode 66 where we interview founder Tony Stubblebine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices