Getting Personal with Personal Finance: Meghan & Ginger | Ep 550

0:00Today I'm talking with Megan Combs, host of the Everyday Fi podcast. It's a show with a great mission to share the journeys of regular five people with us regular five people. I love this because I really can't get enough of other people's money stories. I'm inspired by Megan's guests, their smart choices, their creativity and courage, and I'm humbled by their willingness to share their mistakes. I wanted to talk to Megan because she's regular. She's one of us, but she's also fearless. Let's see if I can figure out why and how. You are all very welcome to listen in. And welcome to ChooseFI.

0:42Megan. Hey. Hey, welcome. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Did you just get married? I did. On February 22nd, which is actually my birthday too. And everybody's like, why did you get married on your birthday? But I don't know. Two presents. Congratulations. Thank you. How much was your wedding? So we eloped. Okay. And it's funny that you asked me that because I literally just recorded an episode with Mitch about paying for a wedding. Oh, and that should be coming out probably end of March. I'm not sure when this episode is coming out, but that one's coming out end of March.

1:22And so I'm having a reception in November and we're going to try to keep it under 10 grand, but I go into details with that episode. So sorry to like self promote right away, but literally we just recorded it last weekend. So we want to know hearing about people's wedding budgets is like one of those like guilty pleasures. I love, well, really, I love to judge them. You should get a house instead. Yeah. But it's always so fascinating to me how much people value value that experience. Like that is interesting judgments aside, right? Like just how differently we can value that experience. And I'm an experienced person, right?

2:06So I shouldn't be judgy about it. Where do you kind of fall on that continuum? Yeah, I guess lower end, you're like 10 ,000, which I think today is like, you know, extremely reasonable for a wedding or wedding reception. Well, it's funny, because Mitch was like, that's what we paid for our wedding. And I think they had 180 guests and we're only going to have like 55, but that's, he had his wedding like 10 years ago. So that's inflation and all that. So we want it to be less because we value other things outside of just having like the fancy everything. We knew we wanted to party with our friends.

2:41So we were like, okay, so let's have some good food, a nice venue and a DJ, but what's a way that we can get this, you know, under budget. it. And the venue was the easy part because there's like a botanical garden at UNC Chapel Hill that's super cheap. And it's like covered in beautiful plants and it's a huge space. And it was 1500 bucks for like six hours. It was super cheap. And then they already had a list of caterers that we had to use. So done. And the DJ Willie wasn't that much. And that was it. Like everything else we're going to DIY. I already got my dress because that's the same dress for the elopement, which wasn't very much.

3:18My mom actually paid for the dress, but it was under 200 bucks. It was not very expensive, but that's it. That's all we paid for. And yeah, it's going to stay under 10 grand. I think the way to keep it under 10 grand though, is to keep your guest list as tight as possible because the catering budget can get a little wild because it's around 80 to$90 a person. And so if you can get your guest list down, and you can get your costs down. But that's one thing that Mitch and I talked about. And like, I know in the FI community, we're all about budgeting and keeping things and, oh, we don't understand why people want big weddings.

3:52But we were talking about like family expectations, because there are a lot of people who have either family money going into the wedding. So the parents might have expectations about what the wedding needs to be. Or it's a very large traditional family that has like specific traditions. I'm thinking like Greek or, you know, Italian families who want every single cousin who's ever existed to come to the wedding. So we were trying to be a little bit more open-minded about why people might spend a lot on a wedding. But then of course, there's the other side of like keeping up with the Joneses. So the pictures, this is making me think of my wedding, which was a hundred years ago.

4:33and here's my big hack for cutting costs. My dress was a bridesmaid's dress that I had made in ivory because I just wanted a simple dress and it worked out great. And it was also like a hundred and some dollars. So hot tip. Yeah. Mine's not a wedding dress technically either. Yeah. I figured under the 200 dress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well done. Well done. Okay. Well, one of the many reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I think you are at an interesting place in your FI journey that we don't hear about very much. Like we hear about people who are just got on board and they're getting out of debt and sort of making a plan.

5:12And then we hear about people who are like, I need to know my drawdown strategy because I have so much money and the time is here, right? And you are not in one of those places. And I've heard you on your podcast, so I knew you would be open to it maybe. But I know you said you're an open book. So tell Tell us, Megan, what is your net worth? Yeah. So now that I got married, it's a lot higher, which is super nice. Yeah. So I just checked it today because we have Monarch. We just signed up for it as a couple. And my husband made me so much richer. It's so nice. And it's$527 ,000. So about half a million.

5:51And he was floored when he saw that. He was like, Megan, we have almost a million in assets. And I was like, yeah, honey, but do you see the liability? It's like, we're not at a million dollars. And he's like, oh, okay. What I like about Marnarch too, is that it does percentages of like, here's how much your cash is of your whole portfolio. And here's how much. So ours is like 70 % real estate. We both own homes and we both put quite a bit of down payment on it. So mine was 20%, his was like 10. So that's where the majority of it lies. So I think what's hard is like our investment balance, like our quote unquote liquid net worth, meaning something that we could sell and take the cash right now is more in the 300s.

6:36And I'm 38 and he's 36. So I'm here to make everybody feel better about their numbers. Your numbers are awesome. Because we're not all 30 year olds who have a million dollar net worth in this community, right? Yeah. So what percentage of your fine number is your net worth right now? It's so hard to know because we, it changes, right? So like, if you would have asked me, I don't know, five years ago, my fine number was probably around a million. And now we're like, moving on. I think what? Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm thinking about it. So it's not that our expenses have gone up, it's more that we're like, what kind of life do we want to live?

7:21And so I think a million or a million and a half would be awesome. But what we would do is do the coast thing and work part time. So our goal is by 2030 to quit corporate. So no longer have full time, high stress jobs. You know, he would love to work at like a rock climbing gym. And I would love to just do the barista thing because I used to be a barista back in the day, but still have the ability that like, if they ask us to work holidays that we don't want to work, we can still say no. And if they fire us, whatever. So that's the kind of life that we're aiming towards for 2030. Now, one problem with that, and I'm going to throw a little wrench in our conversation here, is the IVF that we're going through now.

8:04And the fact that like, my HSA was part of the plan for early retirement. Now the, you know, the balance wasn't huge, but it was around 40 grand between the two of us because we were maxing it out every year, both of us. But now we're going to have to use that for IVF and potentially donor egg. And it's very expensive. So it's funny how that goes. And then just kids in general are expensive. I had not planned to do that five years ago, have kids. And then when I met Chris and realized, oh, hey, here's a human being I would actually like to spend my life with and who I could parent a child with, we deviated and we're like, yeah, let's do kids.

8:42Yeah. So it changes. And I think that's okay. If your fine number changes. Yeah. It's so hard to know, like to guess how much your child is going to cost you. And it's so hard to know what you're going to want and need when you're in your fifties and sixties, when you're in your thirties too. Absolutely. I agree. Okay. I want to talk about that, but first I want to go back to, you're going to leave corporate. Like I am dying to know what you do, Megan. Yeah, I know. I know you work in tech. Yeah. All these people are like, I work in tech. What does that mean? Like, what literally what do you do?

9:21Coming from someone who I've always had jobs that like a five year old could understand, right? Like I'm a teacher. I'm a counselor, right? What are you guys doing all day? Okay, so everybody listening, take a shot of espresso because you're gonna get bored really fast. No, I'm a product manager, not a project manager. I just want to make that very clear. They are very distinct, different things. A product manager has so many duties that it's basically unsustainable as a job. But our biggest aim is to create products that serve customers and make money for the business. So we are there at the beginning of a product.

10:07We're doing all the market research. We're doing sometimes pricing. We're doing experiments. We're doing user interviews. We're talking to stakeholders, which are people who are in the company, marketing, sales, support, etc. to understand customer pain points. Then we take all of that information and we say, what kind of product or feature can we build now? And then we go to our engineering partners, our engineering lead, things like that, and say, hey, this is what we want to build. Also, I don't want to forget design. We also have design in there. They usually design it for us and do that if it's a visual product.

10:46And then we oversee delivery. So we make sure that timelines are being met. We make sure that the business logic is understood by all of the developers. And we make sure that the approach is going to fit within the roadmap and things like that. And sometimes we have to prioritize and deprioritize things as a quarter goes on. And then once the product launches, we have to set the sales and support and customer success teams up for success and give them all of the details about the product. We have to tell them what it does. we have to tell them if there's any bugs being launched with it that we decided not to fix and how to do a workaround for them.

11:25We have to help create support articles and sales pitches and things like that. And then even after that, we have to track what are called KPIs or success metrics. And so we have to measure the product and make sure that it is actually doing what it's supposed to be doing. And if it's not, then we need to iterate. And that is the entire job of a product manager. And it's a lot. It's a lot. You're virtual, right? You're working online. Okay. You get up in the morning, you log on. How do you know what to do? Like you just told me like 40 things. Yeah. There's 40 things you do every day. It really depends on the priority of the day of the week of the month.

12:08So like for instance, today, seriously, if everybody's bored, just, you know, come back later in 10 minutes. But so right now we're running some betas and some pilot programs because we have a product at my company that's not fully generally available. We call it GA. So we are beta testing it with some customers. And so I am in charge of one of the customers setting them up and working with our onboarding team to get them onboarded onto our product. And so I have to look at, okay, what are the processes they have? What can we provide? And what are the gaps? And I have to document all of those gaps.

12:40And then I had to create a phase document of like, okay, this is the first phase, the pilot program. What's the second phase? What other features will they need down the road? What's the third phase? What can they wait for, but we need to put it in our backlog. So I did that. And then I also worked on the Q2 planning because Q2 is coming up. And so we have a roadmap. And so it was me and the group product manager, who's my boss, who worked on that today. And then I also wrote some requirements for another feature that I own. So it's, there's a lot, but I, you know, I just knew that's what I needed to do because it's what's the most urgent right now.

13:16So one more question and then we can move on. Which is like other people in your industry talk this way, like what is with the product? Like the general, is that like industry standard? We can't say what we're actually working on. Oh, I can tell you. Yeah. I mean, but the thing is, what they do in my industry is they put acronyms on everything. So you're not even going to necessarily know what it means. And it's also very industry specific. So we work for property managers in real estate. And so we are creating a product called resident onboarding that helps property managers create leases, send them to the residents, and then the residents can sign them.

14:02And then the residents can also sign up for our actual available product, the resident benefits package, which is how we're making money. And so the resident onboarding side is the side that's not available yet. So feel free to cut all that out. If you want to cut all that out, that's fine. But that's what the product is. No, like now you're saying words that give me an idea of what you're talking about. I just feel like when people talk about this, it's like so general that I'm like, I don't, I still don't know. I still have no idea. So that's really helpful. Like, okay, I can kind of get... And I can tell you why.

14:35It's because every single company is different. So like the way that I talk about this current company and this current product is totally different than how I would have talked about it at my other jobs because it was a different product. It was a different problem set. But I mean, if people are listening to this and they want to get into tech, but they don't want to be a developer and they want to make really good money, be a product manager. But just know you're going to work nights. And so how would they do that? Like, how did you learn how to do those things? And how did you kind of get your foot in the door?

15:07Yeah, I talked a little bit about this on one of my episodes called Career Transitions. But I used to be an art historian in New York City, and that was not working out. And so I pivoted, which is an industry term that we use pivot all the time. And I pivoted to tech by taking a coding bootcamp in 2017. And I will say that I'm not sure if that's a viable way to do it anymore. I mean, it was eight years ago. And the trend that I'm seeing for developers and programmers is that it's being outsourced to cheaper countries. So almost all of our developers are either in Eastern Europe or the Philippines or South America.

15:53And so I think we have maybe five in-house developers out of a company of 300. So I would just take that under consideration. But anyway, I did this bootcamp. I got a... Actually, this is kind of a fun story. So when I was done with the bootcamp, the hardest part is getting that first job, right? Because you don't have any experience. and some companies at that time were actually looking at bootcamp experience as experience and they wanted to bring on really green people so they could mold them into what they wanted and I was lucky enough that I was done with bootcamp and I was searching for jobs and I knew that there was a tech fair going on at NC State and at the time NC State was about two hours away from where I was living and it was kind of in the morning it started at eight and went about till about one.

16:45And, you know, I had that moment where I woke up in the morning and I was like, Oh, do I really want to go? I really want to stay in bed. And I was like, no, just go. You don't know what's going to happen. And I was right. I met people, recruiters from the company who was my first company, but that's not where the story ends. So they took my resume, which I was very lucky too, that my coding bootcamp brand colors were the exact same brand colors as this company. So they're super into that. So my resume was like this brand color. So they brought me into interview. And the thing is, is the coding bootcamp that I did, the tech stack, which basically just means the programming language that I learned was different than what they used in the company.

17:27And so at first they passed and said, nevermind. So I messaged all the people I interviewed with one of them being the head of quality assurance. And the funny thing there is I actually wasn't supposed to be interviewing with him. I was supposed to be interviewing with the CTO, but he had been out of town at the time. So it was kind of a turn of fate that I interviewed with this guy. He and I clicked really well. And I messaged him and one of the other people that I interviewed with. And I said, Hey, what about this? I really love this company. I'm really willing to learn. What if I came on as a volunteer or an unpaid intern?

18:04You don't even have to pay me. Let me just show you what I got. And they were like, you know what? We're going to take you up on that offer, but we are going to pay you$15 an hour. I was 31. So they did that and they paid me that and let me show them what I had for six months. And I realized that I was much better at quality assurance than developing. And so that's what I did. I did QA and they brought me on full time because I was working my butt off. I was a little scrappy youngin back then. And I noticed that the product managers had such a cool job because I was like, you guys get to do all the problem solving and the creative work.

18:44And the product managers there were actually technically part time. They worked three to four days a week. And so I saw a gap and I had a little bit of downtime sometimes. And so I was like, hey, can I fill in some of these gaps? Because I'd love to learn this side of the company. And they're like, yeah, sure. So I did that for about six months. And then they hired a new VP of product. And I told her, hey, I want to be a product manager. What do I need to do? And she was like, yes, okay, let's make that happen. And about a year later is when they brought me on as an associate product manager. And so it's just been that way ever since.

19:20So yeah, I don't know what people can learn out of that. But it's basically just like, if you see something you love, get into it. Ask if you can do it. And tell the people who matter what your goals are, because they might want to help you. Yeah, no, I think that is really helpful. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's go back to sort of where you are on your FI journey. What kind of got you interested in this community and got you interested in pursuing financial independence? Yeah. So I got into personal finance back in New York because I was a mess with my money. I had credit card debt like any young 20 something did.

19:59And I paid that off without even like getting into personal finance content. I just was like, I need to stop doing this. And yeah, I got my head on my shoulders. But then I don't I wish I remembered the catalyst to getting me to listening to finance podcasts. But I do remember the first one was Her Money with Jean Chaski. She's one of my favorites. I have kind of evolved from that one because it's still like that advice is really good for beginners. And sometimes I'll listen to it just because it's very nostalgic, but the advice is usually pretty similar to what she said over several years that she's been around.

20:35So I've been listening to her for several years and she brought on Brad and Jonathan from Choose a Fi to her show. and I was listening to them and I was like, wait a second, there's a way that you can just not have a job. That sounds awesome. Cause I, I'm one of those kind of weird people who has never really connected with work. You know, I've never really wanted to work and like, I don't count every day five, like that's fun, but going to a job and having to be at a certain place at a certain time or you don't get money. Like I hate it. So I was like, this is the answer. So I am one of those people who's like, yes, I want to actually quit, quit one day.

21:19And we'll do that whole barista thing for as long as sustainable. But if there's a point where I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm just going to be like, how can we make this work where I don't have to work anymore? So yeah, that's what attracted me to it. And I just binged all of their content for about a year. And I think I got caught up in about a year, maybe faster than that. But that was, I think, like around February 2019. And I only remember that because I think I set up like a payment plan for a student loan with my mom at the same time. And so I can just track it back to that like beginning of that loan.

21:55So yeah. So what changes did you make when you were listening? Did you start to save a lot more money? Did you start to track your savings? Or what did that look like for you? Yeah, I think I was already tracking my expenses through Mint at the time, but I definitely started doing the typical thing that we all do when we find the fire movement is just cut ruthlessly. And then I started feeling very deprived. And I did that for a few years, actually. I did it to the point where when I found their podcast, I was living in an apartment renting. And I listened to the house hacking stuff. And I was like, oh, I can do that.

22:34And I bought a condo that was literally the condo complex right next to my apartment. So I just bought a condo and got a roommate. My expenses were really, really low. But the problem was, is I hated both roommates that I chose. Oh, no. Yeah, I know. I'm terrible at choosing roommates. I am either a bad judge of character or I just trust that everybody's like a good person when not everybody is. So anyway, so that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. And then the condo is really not a good buy, in my opinion. I didn't like it. And so I was doing all this house hacking. But during all that, I met Chris.

23:12And Chris lives in a city that's maybe 20, 30 minutes from where I lived. And so I really wanted to be closer to him because we were only seeing each other on weekends. And then I got a job that was in Durham and I was living in Raleigh. And anybody who's from this area knows that it's kind of like Dallas, Fort Worth. They're next to each other, but they're still kind of far. So I was like, you know what? I hate this condo. Let's sell it. And so I started looking for a single family home and I found one in Durham and actually got to sell the condo for quite a bit of money. But that was the end of my frugal lifestyle because this house is definitely not cheap.

23:57So I did it for a little while. And then I started realizing, you know what, I think I want to live a life that makes me happy, you know, because I wasn't, I wasn't happy. I was saving a crap ton of money, but I wasn't happy, you know? I mean, I got my housing payment down to like$400 a month is crazy. But I just was not, I was not happy. You're such an actor. Like you like do things like I was trying to get it at the beginning, right about your fearlessness, even just heard from only talking to you for 20 minutes, right? You're like, I need a different job. So I'm gonna go do something totally different, right?

24:32I heard this podcast. So I'm gonna buy a condo. Wait, I'm gonna sell a condo. Like you do all of these things that I feel like other people will sit on for a really long time. Do you think that is like part of your personality? Or is that something you have cultivated? Because I think that's a thing that a lot of people wish that they had. Yeah, it's funny, because I sometimes see it as impetuousness. And so I don't always celebrate it. But I think I need to get away from that and say that, like, I'm a doer. Yeah, I do not like if I'm unhappy in a situation, I'm going to change it. and I'm going to change it pretty quickly.

25:11I think the only problem with that is when I'm letting my emotions drive a little more than I probably should. I could probably let the other side of my brain take a little bit of the reins and maybe wait a little bit. And I'm getting better as I get older. Now, just for an example, we are looking at, we do potentially want to upgrade, not upgrade, but just enlarge in the house because this house is quite small. It's a two bedroom, one bath, and the bathroom is so small. We elbow each other while we're brushing our teeth. I was like, can you imagine trying to bathe a baby in here? And he was like, no.

25:45So we are looking at that, but we are taking our time. We are being very firm with our real estate agent about timeline, about needs, about price. And we're being very thoughtful. Now I put that all towards Chris. He's a very, very thoughtful person. So we balance each other. I'm the impetuous one. He's the thoughtful one. So I don't know if I cultivated that. I think, like you said, that's just kind of who I am. I did move around a lot as a kid. So change is my normal. There we go. There it is. Can you tell I've been in therapy?