IFB61: Personal Finance 102: Building Assets in the Adult World

 

Welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast this is episode 61. We’re going to go ahead and talk a little bit about personal finance today. Andrew has a disclaimer he wanted to discuss before we get started so Andrew why don’t you go ahead and chat a little bit.
Andrew: sure so real quick I know there’s like varying degrees of experience level with people who listen to us so I would say we’re going like super into the basics for the next couple of weeks. I would say if it’s stuff that’s going to kind of bore you or if it’s stuff that you already know I go through our archives and we get in swarmed the nitty-gritty in into the stocks and individual stocks and accounting and stuff like that in those.
But Dave and I had a lot of fun last week talking about some of the basics and personal finance and figured we’d turn it into a little bit of a series. So we’re going to do we’re going to call last week’s personal finance 101, and we’ll call this one 102 and make a couple of episodes that way.
There was a lot of fanfare when we did the back to the basics part 1 through 5 series, so this is going to be kind of similar but for personal finance and we’ll try to throw in some more advanced things, but I would say go through the archives. I know when I check out podcasts and some of the other ones there was a big one that I remember I listened through every single episode in the archive, and that helped me out, and I’ve done that for investing entrepreneurship and whenever there’s like a skill I wanted to learn.
I always thought the archives were like a valuable resource and we got stuff on their blogs and stuff like that too if you are dying for content. But for now that’s where we’re going to head and yeah let’s talk about last week we were talking about some things that we would do some things we would say there were five-year-olds and try to give them some concept of money and making money investing money all those sorts of things.
We talked about the importance of building the business building assets. But we didn’t say how to do that specifically, so I was going to say, Dave, what would you say is the first step if we do now want to take our discussion from last week and yep start building assets and how do we do that in the adult world.
Dave: Well I think the easiest thing is to start a savings account that’s probably rule number one is to start saving money. Learning how to save money, and we talked a little bit about that last week with what we’re going to do with our daughters, and I know that I’ve talked to my daughter Sadie about that numerous times and she’s starting to kind of take to it.
Last week when I gave her earnings she took two dollars of it and went ahead and set it aside and I’d even have to tell her that it was kind of cool. I think the first thing is setting up a savings account starting to save money and putting money aside whether you’re 14 years old or 24 years old I think that’s so critical to have extra money.
There was a tweet going around earlier this week where there was a study done that said I think it was seventy-five percent of Americans have less than four hundred dollars in a quote-unquote emergency fund. So if your car breaks tire blows out you have some medical emergency, you break a tooth or something like that that you that the average American doesn’t have any money saved.
And I can tell you from firsthand experience working in the banking world for those years that is right on the money there is lots and lots of people that have nothing they have no money saved that would have paycheck-to-paycheck.
Some of some of it’s their own doing they live above their means but some people they just aren’t earning enough money,