173: Your Business Bank Account Is a Liability

21:53Austin Hankwitz:And it all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and even lets you backtest it against the S &P 500, all with just a few clicks.

22:14Robert Croak:Generated assets are like your ETFs, but they've got infinite possibilities. They're completely customizable. They're based on your thesis, not someone else's. So go to public.com slash rich habits to transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash rich habits. And be sure to try generated assets when you're over there.

22:31Austin Hankwitz:Paid for by public investing, full disclosure in the podcast description.

22:35Robert Croak:All right, back to our interview with Ryan.

22:37Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, Ryan, I love this. And I want to linger for a minute, Austin, before you go to your next question, because I'm living this right now, every day, Ryan, I just launched a reg a platform for real estate called VestFunder. And we went through all of the last 16 months of compliance and everything through FINRA and the SEC. But one of the biggest uses we have found so far to create a ton of efficiency and lower the cost is in our underwriting for new deals by using Claude. We have built out this amazing system with Claude and some other tools to where now, instead of underwriting, taking two or three weeks and thousands of dollars, we can really underwrite a big project, even a 50, 60,$70 million project in the matter of a couple hours just by feeding that AI and really working with it.

23:28Austin Hankwitz:So I think you're really spot on here of what the future of entrepreneurship looks like for people and founders to be more efficient and not have to go out and hire all of this expensive labor right out of the gate. So it gives them a more efficient future. And when they're raising capital, it's going to mean that capital is just going to last longer as they get more efficient as founders. I have great reverence for regulation. And I think, you know, especially in the financial services sector, it's absolutely necessary. But much of compliance and regulatory overhead around, you know, reggae and capital raising, we, you know, I've used, in fact, almost every time I raise money, I sort of peel off a portion of it for retail or for, you know, individual investors, just because I like having them around.

24:12And I think more voices is better. But there's a lot of regulatory overhead starting a broker-dealer, starting an investment advisor, raising capital using either registered securities or exemptions that require some nuance. But the thing about it is they're repeatable. You're doing the same thing that other people have done many times over, and that's where AI shines is doing something again. I think reggae specifically is something that can be used much more effectively in a world where you can utilize the work that's been being done since the Jobs Act was written 15 years ago. Right. You know, have Claude or ChatGPT help you build a circular or a, you know, PPM.

24:52Austin Hankwitz:What a great conversation. So many nuances that I'm living with right now and I've lived with for the last few decades. You as well, Austin also. but you've spent your entire career in retail in that consumer facing world. Then you made a pretty big pivot to building Waldo just for businesses. What was the insight that pulled you out of the retail space and into this corporate cash management space and why? Towards the end of the Gatsby journey and during my time at eToro, every big fintech had raised huge amounts of money during the pandemic. You know, fintech was a really green category, really hot category for venture capital.

25:30And all of that money really went into customer acquisition. Right. And they were it was a feeding frenzy, fighting each other over the same users in many case. And the cost of acquiring a customer grew probably by a factor of 10. We saw those numbers. Of course, every fintech saw those numbers. But in my opinion, financial services is about finding ingress and finding where you can add some value. And so I looked, you know, when I made the decision to dive back into this, I looked around, you know, retail is saturated, it's very crowded, and spending years swimming upstream against Robinhood was difficult.

26:03You know, it's difficult to get to feature parody and find a reason for existence in a world where Robinhood is the competition. That's an extremely competent business that's done some great things. We were up against, you know, a lot of powerhouses, SoFi, Public, Weeble, you know, all businesses that were moving fast and driving a lot of customer value. And all the while, it coincided with this sort of new trend. As we left a zero interest rate environment, you were seeing these products pop up that were called Treasury. So all the neobanks like, you know, Mercury and Ramp and Meow were launching things that they called Treasury.

26:39But in reality, their Treasury products were, you know, mostly just money markets. They were just selling you a money market and they, you know, in many cases charged advisory fees. But the real sort of irritating part of it, maybe not irritating, but sort of prohibitive part of it, was that you had to switch to that bank in order to use these treasury products. And so you had to keep a minimum balance at the bank. Then when SVB had their weekend of chaos, everybody sort of all at once came to the realization that no startup, no funded startup is below the FDIC limit on their deposits. and you are at the mercy of your bank's balance sheet.

27:14And so those two, you know, leaving zero interest rate, interest rates rising, and then, you know, having this sort of SVB crisis brought this world sort of to the forefront of FinTech. And that's when I realized, you know, banks don't make good brokers, brokers don't make good banks. Somebody needed to step in here and build a brokerage product, an advisory product to do this. And so that meant, one, don't make them switch banks. Switching brokers is easy. Switching where you do all your payments from is annoying. It's really difficult. Two, more options and lower fees and higher yields. The things we buy on behalf of our clients are the things the bank buys or the money market buys when you give them their money after they take their fee.

27:56So the vast majority of our clients are in ultra short-term US treasuries. That's what ends up getting purchased in most cases. So giving people direct access to the products. And then we do a lot of other cool stuff. There's just a lot you can do. We help businesses hedge currency risk. If all your employees are in Mexico and all your customers are in the United States, you have a huge amount of exposure in today's environment where the U.S. dollar is fairly volatile. You have a huge amount of currency exposure. You could have interest rate exposure. A lot of businesses have commodity exposure.

28:25Businesses that make chocolate bars are very oil dependent or dependent on, you know, some food or other crops have exposure to the price of these commodities. And it's not sort of rocket science. This is what treasury teams or bankers have been doing for big companies for 100 years now. You know, if you're a big public company, you probably have a treasury manager. You may have a private banker at one of the big wire houses who does this for you. For, you know, over a decade now on the retail side, you've been able to have a robo-advisor manage your money without an expensive banker in the middle.

28:58That was never done on the corporate side. And so that's what we do. We basically offer everything that you would get from, you know, a late stage treasury manager at a 5 ,000 person company. And we bring that down market. We would say fixed income, which is, you know, the majority of what we do is generating yield. It's taking the cash you have and making sure that you're getting the most possible yield on that. It's not as exciting as options. It's not as volatile. It's not as salient, I would say. but it does offer us to do something that just isn't being done by competitors right out the gate as a small company, you know, raised a few million dollars and built a really cool product.

29:37And right out the gate, we can be at feature and beyond feature parity with some of our peers, you know, and that's a nice feeling. It was rough having to fight with public.com and Robin Hood over every feature.

29:47Robert Croak:They tend to move fast. So let's talk a little bit more plainly about what Waldo does, you're saying that the problem is, you know, Silicon Valley Bank and any venture backed company that's got tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of cash on or around their balance sheet here. FDIC insurance is not obviously millions and millions and millions of dollars like that. So what you're saying is Waldo solves this problem by taking their cash and putting it into short term treasuries. Absolutely. So this is why people don't keep their personal money in a bank, right? You don't want to be at the mercy of the bank's balance sheet.

30:23The bank can go under. Banks do go under routinely. Securities are custodied with DTC. We never lend them out. We SIPIC insure them through our custody firm up to$75 million. And even if, you know, your advisor goes out of business, even if your custody firm goes out of business, those securities are in street name in your beneficial ownership at DTC and they can't go anywhere. And that's the same exact reason why when you see your personal net worth go from, say five to six figures or six to seven figures, you stop leaving money in banks because it just simply isn't a safe place to leave large amounts of money.

30:58Robert Croak:Just so I understand this for the everyday listener that's got, I don't know, maybe they're running a business of 12 people and they've got$180 ,000 at any given time in their checking account. They're trying to make sure that they're getting the best yield possible. Are you saying that they open up a brokerage account on Waldo in their business's name and then deposit, let's call it. They keep in their checking account a month or a month and a half's worth of working capital and the rest then goes into Waldo and is then parked earning three or 4%. That's exactly right. That's actually what's happening when you open up a treasury account on one of the neobanks.

31:31They're opening a brokerage account for you, usually with a custody firm, and they're purchasing a money market for you. And instead of a money market, we tend to purchase sort of higher yield, virtually identical securities that kind of lower the overall load on what you're purchasing and increase your yield. So, you know, we pride ourselves in making sure our clients are getting the lowest load and the highest yield and that we're passing as much of that through. And then what you do is you set up automated transfers to send your monthly requirements back to your checking account. But that's best practice.

32:03And we have no minimum. So, you know, again, a lot of these neobanks, you know, force you to keep a quarter million dollars with them in order to open a treasury account. That's great when you're big. And, you know, it's prohibitive when you're bootstrapped or very early stage company coming out of an accelerator. So we don't have any minimums. You don't, you can open an account with a thousand bucks, but this ends up being real money. And we live in a time where interest rates are at least flat and they might be going up. And, you know, this money is real per million dollars. There's, you know,$40 ,000 a year, whole people that you're missing out on if you're not generating yield.

32:39So we, you know, this is, this is best practice. This is what big companies do. And what we're trying to do is make it something that's really easy and approachable for startups.

32:47Robert Croak:Yeah, no, you're totally right. I remember when I worked at a Metasys, which I think at the time was a nine or$10 billion publicly traded healthcare company. I remember on our team was a guy that was in charge of the treasury, right? And so they had hundreds of millions of dollars of cash that they had to strategically move around and do, park in the right places to ensure that one, it was liquid and it wasn't just sitting in some sort of bank account, but two, it was earning as much as you possibly could. Now help me understand this part because this is what confuses me. FDIC insurance is$250 ,000 for me, right?

33:18Robert Croak:SIPC insurance is like half a million dollars. So how are you able to insure up to 75 million? It's done through our clearing firm. And to be clear, it's a policy through the custody firm. We use Alpaca. It's the, you know, sort of like most tech forward billion dollar custody firm. And they have a separate insurance policy. But the reason they're able to do that and the reason, you know, it seems almost too good to be true. Right. How can you insure something up to that level? But the reason is they don't really need to insure much at all. Those securities are in your name. And if they're not lent out and there's no leverage, then those securities are yours and they're yours at the DTC.

33:52You know, so the insurance itself doesn't actually have that much risk exposure. FDIC needs to step in if an entire bank fails and cover all the deposits. CIPIC insurance is there to cover things that are sort of leveraged, things that are, you know, kind of shortfall between, you know, cash in the account and securities. In our case, we don't hold any cash in customers' accounts. It all goes into yielding products. We don't lend anything out. And so at the end of the day, there's not a ton to insure. It's just a safer proposition, and it's the reason people have been doing it with their personal money for 100 years now.

34:26Robert Croak:Now, before we ask Ryan our final question, got to give a shout out to Neos Investments. Neos offers ETFs that seek high levels of monthly income with a keen focus on tax efficiency while providing core portfolio exposure across equities, fixed income, real estate, cryptocurrency, and cash alternatives like T-bills, something we're talking a lot about on this episode. Their ETFs may be especially interesting for investors looking to generate tax-efficient monthly income inside of their investment portfolios. Their funds may serve as a compelling income-focused alternative or even complement to many of the investments already in those investor portfolios.

35:08Austin Hankwitz:So if you're looking to add passive income-focused ETFs to your portfolio, consider learning more about NEOS ETFs at neosfunds.com. And as with all investments, investors should carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of NEOs exchange-traded funds before investing. To obtain a prospectus containing this and other important information, please visit neosfunds.com and please read the prospectus carefully before you invest. An investment in NEOs ETFs involve risk, including possible loss of principal. There is no guarantee the Nios ETFs will make monthly distributions and the amounts may fluctuate from month to month.

35:47Austin Hankwitz:Cryptocurrency is relatively new and the market has its own specific risks. Nios ETFs are distributed by Foresight Fund Services, LLC.

35:56Robert Croak:All right, Robert, back to our interview with Ryan for this final question. So let me just make sure before we wrap up this conversation, you have built a high yield savings account for corporations. And that high yield savings account, right, I think about it for myself. I've got a high yield savings account. I earn about three and a half percent on my emergency fund. Right. So let's say there's a corporation out there or maybe there's someone that's just like starting out that's listening right now. And they've got like 20 grand and they're seeding this business and they're trying to go do something cool with a food truck.

36:25Robert Croak:And instead of having it sit in the business Chase checking account, earning zero dollars and zero cents every month, they can put that same money in a Waldo SIPC 75 million insurance high yield savings account in the business's name. Then Waldo then takes that, parks it into yield bearing assets like short term treasury bills, which are T-bills, which are backed by the US government, right? These aren't corporate bonds. And then they earn their three and a half or 4 % or whatever the blended average there on that might be. And so you've essentially solved the problem of businesses going around and saying, I unfortunately have all this cash in my Chase checking account with my business that's not earning anything.

37:04And we love any business. I mean, we have late stage series D startups with 50 million in an account. We have law firms with 50 ,000 in accounts. We have restaurants with 5 ,000 in accounts. To us, it doesn't matter because it's the right thing to do with your money. It is not a savings account by the definition of a savings account at all. It's a brokerage account, but it is buying zero and very, very short duration U.S. treasuries, which is what ends up backing your savings account in many cases in your money market fund. So there is an element of this that's cutting the middleman out. And the cool thing about Waldo is if you want, a lot of businesses want to yield higher than just US treasuries, right?

37:43Say you're a marketplace business like Etsy, where you float cash. And so the money that comes in and the money that goes out, you hold for seven days, a huge portion of your revenue comes from yielding that cash. And so a lot of businesses say, I want exposure to either floating rate or investment grade, fixed income, or even some high yield credit a lot of times. And we like, we want to offer those to people too. We want to be able to cover businesses that want to increase their yield. Maybe they're very profitable. They're less concerned about extending their burn rate or their runway, but they're more concerned about actually generating yield from their cash and cash equivalents on their balance sheet.

38:19We love doing that. We have copy portfolios. If you want to just copy what Berkshire Hathaway does with their cash, you can subscribe to that portfolio and it'll do exactly what they do with their cash. Our belief is that none of these concepts are new in the robo advisory world, right? These have existed on the retail side forever. You could, you know, go on Betterment and pick from 20 strategies and do this, but this doesn't exist in the corporate world and it should. And so that's where, that's how we dove in here. But you are right that the vast, vast majority of what people hold on Waldo is very, very short-term U.S.

38:51treasuries. You know, the sort of like sweet spot today of no duration risk, no principal, very, very low principal risk to the U.S. government and high yield.

39:01Austin Hankwitz:Wow, Ryan, what a fantastic conversation. You've definitely built the better mousetrap. I can't wait to get VestFunder signed up because we're raising all this capital right now for multiple projects. And I want to make sure that we get as much return as we can. That yield you talk about while the money is sitting waiting to be deployed. So for the founders, the operators and the business owners listening, make sure you check it out. And Ryan, let them know where they can learn more about Waldo and follow along of what you're building. Yeah, you can go open an account anytime, waldo.ai. You can also send an email, hello at waldo.ai.

39:38We'll chat. A lot of people have questions. A lot of time we want to sort of help people understand what's going on. There's a big learning curve. There's elements of this that are sent real nice, but you've got to be comfortable with it. So both are a great way to get started, but waldo.ai, and you can open an account anytime.

39:52Robert Croak:This sounds super cool. I need to do this for rich habits, Robert. We got to put our money to work harder than what it's doing right now. I love this. And again, we'll have the link in the show notes below. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us on the Rich Habits podcast. I feel as if a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening right now that have a side hustle, own a restaurant, or have maybe a venture-backed startup that they're doing, they now have this light bulb moment of, wait a second, I'm earning yield on my emergency fund. Why am I not earning yield on my business checking, my business cash?

40:23Robert Croak:and waldo.ai is that solution for them. So again, Ryan, thanks so much for joining us, my friend. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Robert, I'm jazzed. Waldo sounds really exciting. I'm so glad we had Ryan on the show here to talk about what he's been building because it's a problem that people have. It's a problem that, I mean, I just, I'm over here thinking about all the money I've left on the table over the years by not using a product like this. It's kind of, it makes my stomach hurt.

40:47Austin Hankwitz:Well, think about it this way. A business out there, let's say you own a roofing company or a law firm or whatever, and you have a million dollars in cash. You use Waldo and make 4%. That's$40 ,000 a year,$3 ,333 a month of free money for the capital that you still have access to and it's still very liquid. So what a cool product. I'm super excited to get more involved with Waldo and use the product.

41:11Robert Croak:Robert, this episode was a fun one, but it's not an episode until we actually do some Q &A. So we've got our Q &A questions here from Instagram. actually. All three are from Instagram. So if you want to ask us a question, DM us on Instagram at richhabitspodcast or email us at richhabitspodcast at gmail.com. Our first question comes from an anonymous listener. That anonymous listener says, hey, I'm 24 years old. I'll be 25 in September. I make$47.50 an hour and I live in California. I have a one-year-old son and a girlfriend. I've got$14 ,000 saved and I'm looking to buy a house or start investing or just do something.

41:51Robert Croak:I don't know where to start. Can you please help? Robert, I feel like these are some of the best questions to answer because it's kind of like a clean slate. I love where this person's head's at here. 24 turning 25, very young. They're making great money, right? They're making, call it$100 ,000,$120 ,000 a year, depending on how many hours they're working. Now, yeah, that's in California. So cost of living is high. Taxes are going to kill you. I get that. But we're talking about solid income here. And depending on how well you're able to keep your expenses as low as possible, which at 24, 25 years old, you can keep them very low.

42:23Robert Croak:I don't care how many roommates you have or how crappy your apartment is. And, you know, oh, my one-year-old son needs this perfect, nice, you know, white picket fence house. No, they don't. They're not going to remember anything until they're probably five years old at least. So you've got some time here to be flexible and really scrimp and save your money. Number one, first thing I would do is build that honest budget. Robert and I talk about this all the time. It's super, super important to understand every dollar that's entering your bank account on a monthly basis and every dollar that's leaving your bank account on a monthly basis.

42:51Robert Croak:You treat your budget like a business. You want to know exactly what that revenue is, exactly what those expenses are, and figure out what that profit margin is on a monthly basis on your budget. You then want to take that profit margin on your budget and start setting it aside in an emergency fund. Now, good news is you already have$14 ,000 in your emergency fund. That to me seems pretty good. I'd call that probably three or four months of expenses, depending on what's going on for you here in California. So check the box on that. Now that you've got that emergency fund, the next step is to ensure that you are investing toward your future, toward your girlfriend slash wife.

43:31Robert Croak:I'd make sure y 'all are married first before you start investing your money toward their future. But regardless, your future and your son's future. So Roth IRA, go to public.com, open up that Roth individual retirement account, and start contributing whatever you can afford. Hundreds of dollars a month up to I think it's$600 or$700 a month now to max it out at$7 ,500 a year. Invest all of that in VOO and QQQ. Don't try and get cute. Don't try and get fancy. The goal here is to get$100 ,000 in index funds and ETFs. And something else I would do, honestly, Robert, is I'd love to see our friend here go to Vanguard's website, open up a 529 account, seed it with$1 ,000 or$2 ,000.

44:12Robert Croak:dollars, go park that in your VOOs and your Vanguard growth funds, whatever you want to do, and just have that now going in the background as their one-year-old son continues to grow up. Because over the course of several years here, you're going to see that grow tremendously. Oh, and Robert, how did you forget the Trump account? Go get your Trump account set up. Go get that seed money. Maybe you can get some Michael Dell seed money, get a free couple hundred, couple thousand, whatever it is over there. Do some research on that. But look into that. Also make sure that you're taking advantage of whatever free money is out there coming here from the billionaires.

44:45Austin Hankwitz:I love that take. And the only thing I'm going to add is you crush the breakdown. I would park the thought process of taking the money now to buy the house. I think it should wait. You should get your base built. You should do everything Austin alluded to. Because the number one thing is we don't want to see people do is buy the forever home or the dream home first without having any investments making money while you sleep. So that's the only change. We like to see people have$100 ,000 saved and invested in the items that Austin mentioned. So that way you're rocking and rolling and you don't have to worry and then come back to the house idea in maybe two, three, four years when the base is built.

45:26Robert Croak:I love that breakdown. Our next question comes from Blue Collar Wealth on Instagram. Blue Collar Wealth says, Hey Austin and Robert, I have a question for both of you. I'm 27 and I have$100 ,000 invested in my brokerage account with$0 of debt. However, my wife has$7 ,000 of credit card debt,$10 ,000 of student loan debt, and$11 ,000 on her car. I didn't know about any of this until after we got married. Should I take a chunk out of our investments to help us become debt-free? Or do I keep paying it off little by little for the next several years? Robert, kick us off.

46:01Austin Hankwitz:First and foremost, for anyone thinking about getting married or getting engaged, have this conversation first. Get a notepad out, get a laptop out, get all of your bills and all of your debts on the table, because you should never be already married and not know about all of these debts. Now, this is manageable because it's only$30 ,000, roughly$28 ,000. But imagine if it was$100 ,000 and you didn't know that, then you got married. this could delay your ability to create financial freedom by years, maybe even a decade by not knowing that. So for anyone that's not married, make sure you have the conversation first.

46:37Austin Hankwitz:In this instance, I would first and foremost tackle the credit card debt. You're absolutely right. Wipe that out. You can't out-invest high interest debt. Number two, look at the student loan debt. I would start paying off the higher interest ones first. You don't have to knock them out all at once because you still want to make sure you have some money invested for the future and compounding while you sleep. So I would look at the student loan debt second. And then third, with the car payment, if she's working, let her keep paying her car payment, especially if it's not an egregious loan amount and the interest is maybe below 7%.

47:12Austin Hankwitz:Let her keep paying it. Let her ride that out so you're not continually reducing what you've already invested for yourself, I'm guessing, prior to the marriage in your brokerage account. That's the order of operations of what I would do rather than just taking$29 ,000 and wiping it all off because that's over 25 % of what you have spent years saving and investing for your future.

47:36Robert Croak:Yeah, I think the credit card debt, got to get rid of that, right? Got to throw that one out the window because you can't out-invest high interest debt. Despite the NASDAQ ripping 33 % in the last two months, that's not normal. So your 30 % interest rate on your credit card, definitely, I get it, right? The stock market's done pretty good comparatively, but that's not normal. You can't predict that. So we're getting rid of high interest credit card debt here. The student loans, it really depends on that interest rate on that. What we like to say as a rule of thumb is have at least that amount of money invested or more before you start paying off those student loans.

48:08Robert Croak:Obviously, you've done that. So if you want to pay off some student loans, do some action there, that's fine. But I agree on the car payment. It's like, I don't know. It all comes on these interest rates. Because if your student loan interest rate is like 3%, 4%, 5%, and then payment's $100,$150 a month. It's like, yeah, maybe keep that around for a little bit. Same thing with the car payment, depending on how big or small that is. Now, if it's a$786 car payment and you can take$11 ,000 to wipe it out, yeah, I would probably take that. I'd wipe it out. And now that$780 a month payment can go toward investing, right?

48:40Robert Croak:Now that compounds tremendously. Maybe that can go out to maxing out her Roth IRA or something of that nature. So there's a lot of different ways to kind of, you know, put this one together. The most obvious one is to call out that credit card debt and to really call out how important it is to be on the same page with money. It really bothers me that you didn't know about any of this until after you got married. Now, I'm not going to blame or, you know, fault anyone here. Maybe you never asked. Maybe she never felt comfortable. I have no idea. But for everyone who is listening right now that does want to get engaged or is engaged or is trying to figure out how do we work toward marriage could not agree more.

49:17Robert Croak:It's so important to what Robert said to sit down, get the notepad, get the laptop, do what you got to do and say, all right, here's my debt. Here are my bills. Here are my expenses. Here's what I got saved. Here are my investments. Here's how much I got going on here. Because after you all get married, you then become a unit. You become a household. It's not my debt. It's not her credit card. It's not this, whatever. It's our credit card debt. It's our student loan debt. It's our car payment. It's also our 401k, our IRA, because you can use whatever verbiage you want, but the courts, they say it's our, right?

49:56Robert Croak:The courts look at it as a unit there. And so if anything happens, that's what we're talking about, prenuptial agreements. Either you wrote the prenup and you've got this figured out, or the court writes it for you and it's called divorce law, and they've already got that figured out for you. So that's why it's just, it's so important to be on the same page of money. It's so important to have all this stuff spelled out ahead of time. Because what is it, Robert? Half of marriages ended in divorce. And the number one reason is money fights and money problems. And there's no better, easier way to prevent that than having it all on the table and saying, let's get past this and let's make sure that we're on the same page with money.

50:28Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, it really all comes down to compatibility. And if you don't know if you're financially compatible without having these hard conversations before an engagement or a marriage, it could cause you to spend years or decades struggling financially because one of you is going in one direction and the other is trying to save and build for the future. And you just don't want to be in that situation. And regardless if it's the male, the female, or who it is in the relationship, you need to make sure you're on the same page financially. Otherwise it will end that marriage more than anything you can imagine.

51:00Austin Hankwitz:because you just can't get on the same page. So, so incredibly important. And I'm glad you covered that, Austin.

51:06Robert Croak:Yeah, I just want to reiterate, you called that out. It's really smart, right? Because until you both are on the same page, to Robert's point, maybe you're locked in on investing and you want to go build some wealth and you want to get some index funds and you want to go rock and roll, do that. Where your wife, maybe she just keeps swiping the credit card. Maybe she wants a new car. Maybe she wants to borrow against the house to do the HELOC, to get the vacation, to do the new kitchen. like whatever. And you're over here looking like, oh my goodness, what's going on? We can't build wealth. This isn't how you build wealth.

51:36Robert Croak:And no one ever taught her, right? So like we're not tossing blame around. But what we are saying is it's very important to be on the same page about how you want to move forward as a household when it comes to your money. Now, our final question here comes from Lori. Lori says, my daughter's 29. She's living paycheck to paycheck. She moved back home with the intention of saving money, returning to school with distance learning for or a business degree while continuing to work full-time. If she makes$50 ,000 a year, it's a good year. How should she allocate her income in a foundational way while she prepares for a more lucrative career?

52:09Robert Croak:She currently works in a family-owned jewelry store where she does lots of books, backup for the accountant, and marketing as well as sales, which she's very good at but doesn't love. Let's break this one down a little bit here, Robert. So 29, and it seems to me like this daughter never went to college, so she's doing, or maybe she did a little bit of college, but she's doing the books for a family owned jewelry store, which is probably paying, you know, at 50 ,000 a year, maybe she's working. So call it maybe 20 bucks an hour, $25 an hour is probably what she's making here doing the books, also doing some marketing and some sales and whatever.

52:42Robert Croak:So she's just, she's an employee working in retail. Totally cool. We get that. But also here, she's trying to go and say, Hey, I want to go to school. I want to get a degree so I can go work in a more lucrative career. Now, where my kind of brain immediately goes, Robert, and I want to get your feedback on this, is for a business degree. What is a business degree? Is it management? And if that's the case, throw that out the window. If it's a marketing degree, who knows? AI is running marketing right now. It's like, I am really intimidated by this. I'm just going to go to school, get a broad business degree.

53:16Robert Croak:Either you're paying for her student loans, Lori, or she's going$60 ,000,$80 ,000,$100 ,000 into student loan debt. I don't know what's going on, but this situation isn't sitting right with me. Here is what I would do instead. She's 29. She's been working at this jewelry business for a while. She's been working retail. Maybe she's great at sales. Maybe it's time for her to go take that sales role at that high ticket sales, whatever that's out there for her that she's interested in. Or maybe it's time to take that marketing to the next level and go join an agency as a marketing coordinator. Or maybe it's time to take this to the next level to the jewelry store.

53:54Robert Croak:Say, hey, I've been here for seven years. I'm ready to rock and roll. I want to be part owner. I want to be part of the thing going on here. I just don't think the solution to the problem of living paycheck to paycheck here is going more in debt for student loans with a degree that's not going to probably matter in four to five years with AI. And then we could say, okay, well, now what do I do? I'm just going to blame other people because I'm so confused on what's going on. It's not your fault. AI is taking and doing some weird stuff here, Robert, but what's your take and what advice do you have for our friend, Lori and her daughter?

54:23Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, she's not going to like it. I feel like millions and millions of people are in this exact situation. They're taking this willy nilly approach to their lives and they're never drawing a line in the sand and say, okay, I'm living to paycheck to paycheck. I'm 29. I'm 39. I'm 49. I've never gotten ahead in life. And why? And it becomes a mindset thing, but also a lack of planning. I would stop everything, go back to the drawing board, get my budget in order. Okay, I don't have rent right now because I'm living at home. So I'm saving all this money. I'm not going to go further into debt to move ahead.

54:58Austin Hankwitz:Get the budget in order, figure out where you're lacking and where you're spending too much money. Because if you're living paycheck to paycheck and making 50k a year, an income problem and a spending problem, I would go back to the basics because I see this every single day in my DMs and in people that ask me what to do. And it always comes down to, well, I'm 34, I'm 39 years old and I'm starting over. Well, you're starting over because you never started correctly in the first place. So for me, I would figure it all out. I would not spend the money on the school. I would get really dialed in because you do have a decent job right now, get the budget figured out, get your life figured out and not spend money on going and get a college degree.

55:37Austin Hankwitz:Like Austin said, if you want to go take a sales program, so you can be an outside sales or an inside salesperson, great. Sales is not going to get replaced with AI, but you need to get it figured out instead of constantly kicking the can down the road for a future degree. That's probably going to be worthless. That's my take. I would have a really hard conversation with myself and say, all right, I'm 29 years old. I have to get my crap together and here's how I'm going to do it. And that's what I would do next.

56:07Robert Croak:Everybody, thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Rich Habits Podcast. Be sure to go check out waldo.ai. Hold breakdown on that one in the show notes below. We're super excited about it. It sounds really, really interesting to us. And shout out Ryan again for joining us here on the show. Do not forget wallstreetfavorites.com, the easiest way to see what Wall Street thinks about your portfolio. Price targets, historical valuations, technical analysis, hedge fund trades, price alerts, IPO alerts. All of it is inside of wallstreetfavorites.com and it is cheaper than your Netflix subscription.

56:44Robert Croak:So really, really cool stuff over at wallstreetfavorites.com. And don't forget to come back on Friday for our Friday episode of the Rich Habits podcast titled The Rich Habits Radar, where we talk about the biggest things impacting you and your money on a weekly basis.

56:58Austin Hankwitz:And always remember, share these episodes with a friend. Everyone has blind spots and issues with their finances and their mindset. We are here to help, and we'll see you guys next time.