Tag: financial independence retire early plan
5 Easy Tips To 💰Save Money💰…Money Saving Hacks
Jason 0 Comments Tips for Retiree's
I’m going to do a video on 5 simple things you can do to help your financial situation and I realized that I need to do a follow-up to the retired at 40 story video because there’s a huge need for financial education in this country and really everywhere it pertains to every single person doesn’t matter what your financial status is you can always use help and there’s always little tip tips and tricks that and things that you can do to better your status it always amazes me how scared people are to talk about their finances to put something on paper to basically take a look at where their money is going what’s getting saved and how everything is getting spent and I’ve met people time and time again that are highly educated very smart people but they know nothing about finances and they are terrible with money management so before we get into the 5 tips I want to strongly urge you to make a financial statement for yourself figure out where your money is going currently and figure out how much you’re saving and basically figure out where you can trim the fat for so many people a financial statement or just finances in general is like a bad word they’re just terrified of it but the only way that you’re gonna be able to improve your finances is to face the music alright so now that you’ve had a chance to go through your financial statement you definitely know where your money is going but how can we save more and what you really need to aim for is about 6 months of reserves especially if you’re getting ready to invest money into something or if you’re doing some kind of career change or some life-changing thing and all of these five tips will more than likely be a line-item on your financial statement so let’s go to financial tip number one hey I’m going to have to call you back I’m shooting a video right now so this first thing is something that we’ve all become very very accustomed to in the last 10 to 15 years and that is a cell phone and people tend to spend absurd amounts on their cell phones whether it’s the bill or the cell phone itself mainly the cell phone itself so that’s my first financial tip is shop on eBay or Amazon for a cell phone that’s refurbished or used or one this may be just a couple years old I actually just purchased a cell phone on ebay because I’m having trouble with my current one and I got on to my cell phone providers website and the most expensive phone that’s like mine now is $1,200 that’s insane to me so I got on eBay I found one that’s similar to the one I have right now it’s new but it’s a couple years old and I got it for less than $200 another thing that you can do is ask for some kind of loyalty benefit from your cell phone provider cell phone providers are constantly trying to earn your business and if you’ve been with them for a long time and you can convince them to keep you around by offering you some kind of benefit they’ll jump on the chance just by going into my provider recently I have a cell phone bill that was about a hundred and ten dollars a month I told them that I’ve been with them for close to 15 years they knocked it down to sixty-seven dollars and I have unlimited everything now tip number two is what I call going to youtube University or getting a YouTube education we live in the most amazing time ever right now there is information everywhere and it’s so easily accessible don’t ever stop educating yourself it’s so easy to find out how to do things these days you’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you don’t take advantage of that so how does that pertain to saving money well you can save money by doing tons and tons of things yourself instead of paying someone else to do it just look at the platform that you’re watching right now for instance you’re watching a video on how to do something so that how-to can be anything from changing brake pads on your car to changing the oil on your car to fixing a leaky faucet or the toilet flapper not working on your toilet all the way to how to the meal which brings me to my next point number three so food is a necessity in life but is it a necessity to go out to eat or go to Starbucks once or twice or every day the amount of money that people spend on food and going out to eat fast food Starbucks McDonald’s it really adds up quick and I don’t think that people realize how much money they’re actually spending on it because it’s just five or six or seven dollars here and there but if you add that up over the course of a month or a year or five years or ten years I think the result would be pretty staggering cook your meals at home pack your lunch for work make that fancy coffee at home it’s not that tough to do there’s so many great ideas and resources on YouTube and Pinterest and vlogs and blogs this channel included if you need a place to start scroll through my channel I have lots of cooking videos if you want to take that a step farther you can start growing your own food and if you don’t have a big green house like this you can grow a lot of food just in five gallon buckets even on a little deck if you don’t know where to get started see tip two number four is something that really hits home for me because me and my wife are both self-employed and we have been for 15 plus years so number four is insurance and although I don’t like insurance companies because I think they’re a giant scam it’s a necessary evil and you can also use that to your advantage you can put them against each other insurance companies much like cell phone companies are begging for your business and they’re constantly trying to outdo each other with with certain benefits or promotions so make them put their money where their mouth is and put them up against each other constantly and not just insurance companies you can do this with all kinds of different companies you should always be price checking these companies the ball is in your court make them earn your business all right I’d saved the best for last tip number five is taking advantage of bank account and credit card bonuses and this tip is begging for a separate video all on its own because I could go on about this for a long time but if you’re not taking advantage of credit card bonuses for sign ups or credit card cash back or travel miles or if you sign up for a bank account a lot of them will give you a large sum just for putting your money with them now I want to be clear I’m not promoting just going out and spending a bunch of money on a credit card but more putting the things that you already spend money on into the credit card it’s money that you’re spending anyways put your mortgage on a credit card if you can insurance is a good one it’s not super expensive but at least we’ll get you a couple hundred bucks on your credit card unless of course it’s health insurance and then you’re talking in my case thousand to twelve hundred dollars a month here’s another good one groceries it’s something that you always have to have and depending on how much you go to the grocery store it could add up to three or four hundred bucks a month sometimes six hundred maybe even more no-brainer here put your gas on a credit card you can always put your utilities on your credit card too if your utility company will allow it next from tip one your cell phone bill now depending on how much some of these are and if you are allowed to actually put them on your credit card you’re talking some pretty major money that you can get a bonus from if you’re getting two percent cashback that really adds up not only that but you’re increasing your credit score while you’re doing that so as long as you’re financially responsible and you pay this every month you’re reaping a large benefit a lot of credit cards will give you a 2% cashback they’ll give you a $500 signup bonus that’s free money in my opinion the free bank bonuses or even better than the credit card in my opinion because the bank account is something that you have to have anyway a lot of them will give you $500 for a small deposit as long as you put your direct deposit with them all the way up to I’ve seen $1,000 before and if you have a little bit more money to play with some of the online money market accounts like Capital One will pay you up to 2% or some even up to 2.5% just for keeping your money with them so some of these things may not seem like it’s saving you a ton of money but when you take up those extra fives and tens and occasional hundreds and you put them to work for you as opposed to something that you’re normally spending you’re not only saving the money because you’re not spending it but you’re putting it to work and doing something else with it and you’ll find that your your finances will start to collect very quickly so if you found the video helpful and you enjoyed the content take a second to give me a thumbs up it really helps out the channel and it helps the YouTube algorithm get this video out to people who actually need to see it also don’t forget to subscribe we do some gardening some frugal living some food preservation and cooking some gardening and you get to join me and my family on our retirement at the age of 40 after you’ve clicked subscribe click the bell notification also and it will notify you every time a new video comes out and it’ll keep you in the loop of the community all right I appreciate you sticking with me through this whole video so I’m gonna give you an extra bonus tip with an extra 100 or 200 or 300 or more dollars per month that you’re saving with just cutting back on a few things you take that extra money and you pay down debt with it the faster you get out of debt the closer you’re going to become to financial freedom and whenever you’re paying off debt always choose the smallest balance first because it gives you that extra little boost and if you can pay it off faster it gives you that extra bit of confidence to rock into the next one so once you’ve paid down your smallest debt move on to your next smallest debt take that money that you’re saving from the smallest debt that you’re not having to pay any more and add it to the money you’re saving from the 5 tips that I’m giving you and apply it to the next smallest debt and when that one’s paid off you roll it into the next one you roll that one into the next one and so on and so on in the meantime this is retired at 40 check out these other helpful videos if you have a minute remember to live a life simple and we’ll catch you next week oh hey I’m gonna have to call you back and shooting a video right now this is right my god get out of debt
As found on Youtube
Read MoreHow we Retired at 40..💰7 tips to succeed for Early Retirement💰
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy
Hey guys retired at 40 I’m going on a little road trip today just me and Murph and last week I reached a milestone on my channel and I hit a million views total and 10,000 subscribers in the same week since I’ve been getting requests for quite a long time about how I retired at 40 and I’m on a long road trip right now I figured what better time to share the story so without further ado here’s the retired at 40 story so before I get started I want to say that this is not in any way a brag story in fact I’m definitely not a showy type guy I enjoy very simple things in life and money to me is more of just a vehicle to be able to retire young and have my family live a comfortable and an easy life and to be able to enjoy lots of life experiences and be comfortable in life before I’m old and gray so really the journey began in about 2002 graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in marketing and business and by that point I have met my wife Kelly she had already graduated from school and she was kind of waiting for me and we wanted to move west out of the Midwest to move west see some new territory and get closer to the outdoors so I grabbed my degree ran out the door packed up my 1987 Ranger fully equipped with eight foot hay racks full of all of my personal belongings and we drove to Littleton Colorado and at this point in my life I had $200 in my pocket and Kelly had about the same so being completely naive and basically completely broke but with a degree I was on the search for the best suit and tie job that I could possibly find so I bounced around for a couple months just working some kind of halfway jobs and I quickly realized that I did not want to wear a suit and tie and I wanted nothing to do with the man and working a nine-to-five job well Kelly had found a job in a real estate office working the front desk and she had become friends with a couple of the big-time Realtors there one of which you caught wind that I had some handyman type skills but he made me a deal that if he paid cash for a house and I fixed it up that he would split the profit with us 50/50 and at this point in my life all I saw was dollar signs if I was completely blown away that there was someone that could pay cash for a house this is coming from a guy who had less than $200 in his pocket at this point it was pretty much scraping by I tried to hold back my excitement to him but naturally I said yes please let’s do that I was working the graveyard shift at Target stocking shelves I’d worked for 10 hours I would go home grab a little bit of breakfast and I’d head over to the property and work on it for another five or six hours I try and catch a few hours of sleep and then I would rinse and repeat it was at this point in my life that I learned a few different things one you really have to dig deep to reach your goals in life because I was not getting paid by the hour and at this point I didn’t know how much money I was gonna make I didn’t know if I would make $500 when this was all done or if I was going to make $5,000 when this is all done so I learned that a lot of things that can benefit you financially you have to put in the work upfront without knowing what your final outcome is going to be after about three months which seemed like an eternity of working seven days a week for sometimes 15 sometimes 20 hours a day on this house the house was ready to go on the market and it was all finished it looked great and then before you knew it it’s sold and then the house closed and at this point I still didn’t know what we were gonna make off it but for me it didn’t matter the hard part was done I didn’t have any of my own money into it I just had my time basically so the guy we were doing the investment with hands me an envelope and I opened it up and at $8,000 being twenty-two years old and having $8,000 I might as well have hit the lottery and that brings me to my second valuable lesson that I learned and that is being responsible with money so when you have $8,000 and you’re 22 years old a lot of people would go buy a new car they’d go buy some flashy things some pretty things but to me I had realized that if I can make $8,000 once I can make $8,000 again and again and again and again so I can either go p*&% the $8,000 away that I had worked my a#* off for or I can take that $8,000 and do exactly what he did but do it myself and potentially make twice or three times as much money so my wife being in a real estate office we became acquainted with quite a few smart people financially smart people we learned a lot about real estate very quickly because we were willing to learn which is my next valuable life lesson is that you never stop learning so we took our $8,000 we put a small down payment on a condo in Littleton because we realized that giving someone else our money was you might as well be throwing it away we wanted to be working towards something and it own something on our own so we took our other four or five thousand dollars and we started our search for a real estate investment that we could do all of our all on her own and get a hundred percent of the profits so after some searching we did find a place we found a small town home it was not in as nice of area as we were living it was smaller it needed lots of work but that takes us to our next light life lesson that we learned and that is to sacrifice for a greater payoff in the future so we had only lived in our condo for a very short time but we realized that if we moved into the real estate investment that we could rent out the place that we are living at and move into the place that we were fixing up that we’d have to be paying a mortgage on anyway we had our first real estate investment and we had our first rental so being 22 years old and owning two properties and carrying two mortgages and at this point I’m still working at Target was a pretty scary proposition in life but all I could see was that $8,000 check they had started to change our lives I also want to point out and kind of give a shout-out to my parents and to my wife’s parents because neither one of our parents ever handed us anything in life they always made us work for what we achieved in fact when we move we tried to convince my parents to co-sign on our mortgage for the condo that we bought and they said no way at the time I was very very mad at them and I thought I would never forgive them in hindsight it was one of the best things they’ve ever done for me because it just made me have that fire in my belly and really just want to work to get what I wanted so back to having two mortgages that was a completely scary thing in my life I was making something like 10 dollars an hour at Target I think Kelly was making $13 an hour at the real estate office she was working at we could barely afford the condo we had but now he had two.
God bless the banks lending money to anyone at that point on the very plus side of that we learned that someone else can pay our mortgage and we’re basically getting that money for free and then later we figured out that there are many many many tax benefits and huge benefits of owning a rental property so we quickly learned that trying to pay for materials and the things needed to fix up an investment property on just barely over minimum wage is not easy to do the thing that happened next couldn’t have come at a more perfect time so all of a sudden I had money to spend to fix up this house and it would just get me to that next big paycheck that much quicker so that’s what we did we fixed up the house we doubled our money we rolled it into the next one so we kept bouncing from house to house quite a few times and that sacrifice of from going from a nice house to live in to going to a crappy house to live in to fix up to making it nice again to going to another crappy house to fix up it became pretty stressful but we always had our eyes on the prize “are you still with me Murph?” after doing this two or three times I remember getting a check for the last one and the check was forty one thousand dollars so at that point it didn’t make sense to work at Target anymore so I just started doing it full-time but we never took the big proceeds from the real estate and put it into our actual living we always rolled it into the next property and that kind of gave us the baseline of even how we live today we always live well below our means we take the money that we make and we put it into things that will make us an income not into something that will lose us money but you do have to treat yourself every once in a while otherwise there’s no reason to make the money in the first place Kelly saw many of the high producing Realtors making large amounts of money so she decided to get a real estate license and she created her own real estate business so now we really felt like we had the world by the balls because we were getting paid a commission to buy the property and then we were saving half of the Commission when we sold the property and I was fixing him up so we just get rolling our profits in rolling our profits in rolling our profits in until family we were able to buy a house and now that we could get a house we were playing with the big boys the profits were much larger but so was the risk and we really didn’t want to lose all the way it worked for for the last couple of years so we did a few houses and we made some great money but instead of selling them and pulling out our profits we kept them as rentals and it was at this point that we really started building up our rental inventory at this point it was about 2006 or 2007 and real estate was starting to slow down a little bit but we have purchased a large house I’m a courage that was really a big risk for us it was a large house to fix up it was our biggest project for sure it took us the most money to fix it up and we had the most money into it so we lived in this house for about 8 months while we were fixing it up and we kind of decided after doing about 12 properties that the moving all the time was starting to get kind of old and we were kind of getting older ourselves and we decided that we wanted to have kids and kind of settle down a little bit Murph are you with me? sometimes I feel like I’m just talking to myself so after the eight months was up we finished the house we sold it and shortly after the real estate market completely crashed the bubble had burst and Colorado was one of the hardest hit States we got out of the house just in the nick of time and not only did the real-estate market bubble burst we found out that we couldn’t have kids and it seemed like a real low point in our lives but around 2007 when all this happened we realized our next lesson with every negative there is a big positive that can be gained from it and you can just use it as fuel for your fire so the recession was tough we thought our great life had come to an end we thought we were gonna have to get regular jobs you know people were losing their jobs left and right people were losing their houses Colorado was hit very very hard one of the worst states during the recession and we learned that what goes up must come down and in this case it came down hard in many cases not just real estate when things are bad that’s the time to invest and if you’re smart with your money and you’ve been saving while everyone else spending that’s the time to benefit though from about 2008 to 2012 we were buying rentals so we were able to adapt I started doing contracting because that’s pretty much what I was doing before but now I had to be doing work for someone else and Kelly’s always been a mover and a shaker and even a bad real estate market she was able to keep her business moving we were buying things for pennies on a dollar and even though we were not making great money and in some cases losing a little bit of money on rentals we were able to stick it out and after lots of lots of years of lots of lots of heartache and lots of lots of doctors we were able to have two boys so about 2014/2015 real estate started creeping back up again prices kept going through the roof and just when he thought it was the peak they just kept going up stuff was flying off the shelves you could list a house and it would have multiple offers within 24 hours so we had about age 35 we were completely debt-free we had several rentals that we were cash flowing we didn’t owe any money on the rentals so all that money was just rolling into a bank account when you have no bills and you have an income coming in your net worth starts to grow very quickly so we rode out the storm Kelly’s business was doing great my contracting business was doing great we have liquidated a lot of our real estate in Colorado we had capital to play with we had two beautiful young boys and then I fell to my knees crying like a little baby I had herniated a disc in my back and I was on a walker for about a month contracting for me was out of the question I didn’t even want to think about picking something up so I took some time off and I raised our kids which at first I thought would just be for a few months and then a year passed and then another year passed and I decided that I kind of liked it we had rental income coming in Kelley’s business was doing better than it had ever been in fact she had started her own she had several people working for her and just as a little side income I got to do what I love to do which is antiques I was just buying and selling antiques so we were trying to be very strategic at this point because we owned a fair amount of property in Colorado but we knew that our ultimate goal was to retire at 40 and at the rate things were going up we didn’t want to sell too early because we didn’t want to miss out on that upside but we didn’t want to sell too late because we didn’t want to risk the chance of taking a step back so as some regret we sold the majority of our properties in around 2017 but this was a game-changer because we were able to make cash for every rental that we purchased so we loaded up on rentals in Iowa we actually purchased our property that we’re going to move into which is actually where I’m headed now and that kind of brings us up to speed to current date I take care of our 10 rentals which keep which keeps me pretty busy just in itself i buy and sell antiques i get to see my kids all the time we have a good rental income coming in now we do youtube oh yeah we also do a couple fix and flips every year Kelly has her real estate team with about 10 employees and in June of 2020 we’re going to retire at 40 so all in all life is great I have a wonderful family I have enough assets and passive income to live a comfortable life
As found on Youtube
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