AAR59 - We Grade Each Other's Financial Decisions

31:07do you feel like that was the right reason to be behind it I'm not saying that that makes it a bad decision but was that the right reason to have behind it no it's not because we didn't talk about my other financial situation at the time probably like 10 grand in credit card debt probably 25 grand on student loan gotcha okay so 35 we'll say ballpark 35 grand debt um aside from the from the vehicle yeah okay and then how much uh how much was your loan on the vehicle 26 26 do you remember how much you put down on top of that i don't know if i put anything down maybe like a thousand dollars or something yeah gotcha gotcha okay so so it seems like again we're here to be judging it seems like Like the kind of situation where you just saw an opportunity to be able to get into something new and kind of made that happen, you know, regardless of what other decisions you could have made with it.

32:15Yeah. New state, new me, new you, you know. Same debt. Were you continuing to pay off the other debts while you were going through it? I mean, aside from minimum payments, were you paying anything above that? No, but I was planning to. Planning to based on what?

32:41I was really wanting to leave this around with a... I was wanting to give you a 99.49. The 99.49 is looking a little bit more difficult. Okay, so the car payment could have gone towards that. Are you confident that Durango would have lasted? I mean, with that amount of maintenance, not that that's necessarily sky high, but that's a good amount of maintenance, are you confident that it would have made the trek without picking up more issues? Because I don't know that that's a given necessarily, although I guess you could have just towed it across, maybe with the U-Haul or something. Yeah, so I've towed enough cars where...

33:27I realize that you can do that pretty cheaply. Like to have somebody ship it over, you know, thousand bucks or whatever. So I don't know if I, I don't think I would have driven it over. But it did feel like one of those situations where you're just like, is it going to survive this month? Is it going to, you know, at what point is that going to stop working? So there is a bit of that peace of mind when upgrading for sure. Okay. Well, if I'm honest, I don't think that the situation was that big or that bad of a decision. I mean, how much extra savings, just ballpark, did you have at this point?

34:08And I ask that to the point of, did you have enough savings on the side that you could have put a good down payment on it? Or could have put a good bit towards the debt or something? Or was it a situation where you didn't have a crap ton of savings? and so you know putting zero down on a car and not making extra payments towards debt was kind of what you just had to do yeah i was like on the dave ramsey plan mostly at that time so i had like a thousand bucks for an emergency fund and then if i would have extra money i'd try to pay down some of the debt or plan to pay it down and outside of that there was no extra savings gotcha gotcha okay well i think that that brings a score a block because we we all have to do what we have to do in our current situation and it doesn't sound to me like you had the um even even though when you get a new car and it was a used car time but new to you it seems like oh well you must have extra money to be able to put towards the debt instead but i really don't think that that was that wasn't the situation if we're being realistic and so you know leaving the debt as as it was and not paying it off faster i think that's reasonable getting getting a new car again new to you car i think was very reasonable considering the situation with the durango and getting a 400 a month car payment uh without putting anything down is not a crazy payment i mean that means if you put down a decent down payment your payment would have been to like you know 150 or 200 it would have been a very low payment so that kind of gives gives better um better context for how expensive the vehicle really was and so i don't think it was very a very unreasonable set of decisions whatsoever i think that the only change you could have made would have been getting something other than the truck did you did you have much use for it being a truck specifically or was it a truck because yeah i'm a cool kid i got a truck.

36:06Pretty much the latter. I did take it off-road once, which it's not an off-road vehicle, so I almost got stuck. You went on a median or something? I don't know. I was kind of dumb. There was like a hill next to the apartment complex where I was living at the time. Right. I don't blame you for that decision whatsoever. Thank you. I think that's a pretty reasonable situation. so I would say that we're easily at a 93 % on that decision I think that's like an A-minus decision there could have been some changes made but if we're looking at the whole of the situation I mean I think that in the beginning your score was a lot lower than that and the more and more context we got for the decision I think the higher and higher it went I think that's a fairly reasonable A-minus kind of decision which maybe hopefully is encouraging because one of the things that maybe we did last episode or a couple episodes ago and that I think personal finance kind of does a little bit too much is bash people on the cars that they purchase.

37:16When we all, for most of us, need them unless you live in New York City or something. Yeah, in the US, a car is just required. Yeah, I mean, car payments can be big needle movers. If you're up at 700 plus or, you know, some, some very high car payment, then yeah, I would argue you could absolutely get a cheaper, still decent car and lower it. But if you're at, you know, like your situation is 400 a month with zero down that, I mean, yes, you can go lower, but getting, but even cutting that in half is not going to make a big decision or a big, uh, have a big impact on your financial situation. And so it'll move the needle a little bit, but is it even really worth moving the needle that far?

38:01I kind of don't think so. Yeah, makes sense. So go out there and get a truck, everybody. Amen. Everybody go get a truck. Zero down. Just go do it. All right. What is your next past decision that we can rip into here? So I think my first and third decisions are, I wouldn't say inarguably reasonable, but I think there's a lot of upsides to decisions. I think the number two is going to be where my score might lower. And I'm not, I'm not trying to bias you, you know, whatever you decide is what you decide. But my second decision, final decision is going to be the money that I have. We'll use the word invested in coffee gear.

38:45I am, as we've talked about before, before, but I am a, I'm a coffee snob. That is what my dad calls me. And that is a completely accurate description. I love, I love really nice coffee. I love exploring different coffees. I love trying different things. I love the routine of it as a ton of people or probably most people to drink coffee do. I love the routine of it. I love, I also love the experience of making the coffee. I love the, it sounds so silly to say, but like the tactile experience of it. You know, I mean, a lot of people love doing things with their hands, whatever that is. And for me, one of those things is making coffee.

39:20It's a, the way, the way that I make it, not that I'm special, but the way that I make it, it's all a very hands-on process. And so I really enjoy doing that every morning and I enjoy having very nice, you know, coffee equipment to look at. So overall, I've spent about$3 ,500 in coffee equipment, accoutrement. And I probably spend about 50 bucks a month on trying different coffee beans. It might be a little bit more than that, but it's probably about 50 to 60 a month on trying out different coffee beans. So where are you seeing this from, Andrew? did you go into debt to buy it? No, I did not go into debt for any of it.

40:02Okay. And you're probably not going into debt to pay 50 bucks a month for the coffee. Not quite. I guess I could. I could be paying for the coffee. I guarantee you Klarna is an option to check. Yeah, yeah. Probably I could be paying off in payments. Yeah, come on. Okay, so here's a question. Is there maintenance that goes with the coffee? How long have you had this equipment? and is it one of those things where now you're kind of have your eyes set on the next bigger, better equipment? So that's a good question. So for maintenance, there really isn't a lot of maintenance. Most of the maintenance is cleaning things out.

40:38With an espresso machine, there's what's called back flushing, where you basically run water back through the system.

40:46There's hands-on pieces of maintenance like that, but not anything that I'm really going to have to pay for. the only potential caveat there is descaling the machine every few years however number one the machine that i have which if anybody's curious or is into coffee as well it's a lilit bianca lilit is very picky about the descaling process with their machines and so they ideally want you to send it back to them in italy to get descaled and they'll send it back to you i haven't gone through that process partially because i and this is going to sound so freaking nerdy it feels normal to me until I start talking to somebody about it.

41:20I buy distilled water and remineralize it with separate mineral packets meant for coffee brewing. And so not only is that supposed to help flavor or whatever, but it's also good at keeping the machine healthy and scale-free because it's only including the minerals that you really need for the coffee and nothing else. So there's that. And then for upgrade path, I'm not really looking to do an upgrade any sooner than maybe within the next couple years. I'd like to get a higher-end grinder, but that wouldn't be something that I'm looking to get anytime particularly soon. And I've had the grinder that I have for about two and a half years now or so, which I guess I should also clarify this coffee equipment has been built up for probably about four years in total.

42:12I've been accumulating this stuff. So it wasn't$3 ,500 all lump sum, but yeah. And then did you have let's say $3 ,500 in credit card debt that this could have gone towards? To me credit card debt is like the ultimate personal finance killer. Let's get that out of the way kind of an idea. Right. No, I didn't. I try to carry absolutely no credit card debt so I pay it off constantly and I've been doing that through the through the whole time period that I've been accumulating the coffee, the only debt that's shown up during that time has been the car and then now the house. Those are the only pieces of debt that I've carried, um, on the side.

42:59Okay. I mean, I see nothing wrong with this. Um, I don't know if you saw this when you were in grade school, but like there would be like a check and a check plus, like a check plus. I don't, I don't want to give you a hundred cause I don't want that to get to your ego, but I'll give you a check plus which is basically a plus so we're solid here I think it's a good example of just because it's a big dollar amount or it looks like a bigger dollar amount if you have the foundation in place if you're kind of have all the pieces moving forward and you're still putting down to retirement I assume still kind of doing all the things you should be doing then spending a lot on something that you really enjoy is not should not be something that people shame other people for when it comes to personal finances.

43:49And I think this is a good example of that. Okay, that's good to hear. Yeah, I think that... I feel like I've undone a lot of this, but there's still, for myself and I think most people, there's still a lot of shame in spending on completely unnecessary things for yourself. Again, I've undone a lot of that internal... internal shaming, I guess you could say, but there's still some of that, you know, when, when I look at, at spending$3 ,500 on coffee, I'm like, but why, you know, it's just, it's just things that aren't going to, you know, bring me anything back, so to speak. Um, but like you said, it's, it's something that I love and it's, it's a hobby basically.

44:30Um, so I don't, I don't really regret it, but what is your, uh, what's your second financial decision? Okay. So it's time for some real talk. I have a serious problem with shoes, like legitimate, like my wife has opinions about a type of a problem. So when I find a pair of shoes that I absolutely love and they're three or four hundred dollars, I don't just buy them outright. I always try to find them cheaper first, you know, to keep my wife happy. That's exactly what dupe.com is for. It's an AI powered shopping tool that finds cheaper alternatives to the expensive stuff that we want to buy. Not knockoffs.

45:05They're not counterfeits. They're the same manufacturers, just different branding and way lower prices. Let's be honest. The white label game is real and dupe is blowing it out of the water. And their brand new research for me tool is next level. Just describe what you're looking for. Type something like running shoes for trail running under$100 or workout gear that doesn't fall apart after three washes. And it pulls from real sources, cuts out all that sponsored garbage and just tells you what to buy and why. Straight answers, done. Be prepared to save yourself a ton of time and money. Just go to dupe.com, that's D-U-P-E dot com, and tell it what you're looking to buy.

45:45That's D-U-P-E dot com to finally feel confident about what to buy. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Okay, I'm curious your thoughts on this. using credit cards for business expenses.

46:28And in the context of business revenue starts going down the wrong way, so rather than rip the bandaid off and start letting go of part-time employees and things like that, running a loss and paying for some of the operating costs with a credit card. are you seeing a like i guess like kind of medium or long-term future where the income can go back up and start paying that off in a reasonable time period yeah okay well i think i think i think every business owner entrepreneur has that optimistic viewpoint of like true true it's just money i'll just make more of it in the future yeah yeah that's that's very fair um and i assume the interest rate on that i don't know much about uh business related debt or credit cards is that the same kind of interest rate as a personal credit card or is it any different yeah it's the same it's the same um and what what has that been being used on has that been being used on needs or has that been being used on you know the bottle service for the business you know like has it been used on like fun unnecessary stuff for the business or has it solely been used on getting the business by yeah it's a hundred percent like you know businesses have more software than you can imagine that supports the day-to-day vendors that help you earn revenue and do things and I don't know, you'd be surprised when you look at a website or things like that, how many different pieces go into creating the entire customer experience and they're all kind of subscriptions that you have to pay for.

48:22Yeah, that's really, really true. And how I guess, first question, how long have you been carrying any credit card debt for the business for? So at the time, it was one of those situations of like, I had heard businesses should have a line of credit to tap in case things go south. So I had always had this credit card and then used it to pay off the expenses and then just paid it off every month. So it was like a dual kind of justification of, all right, I am getting credit card rewards that can offset some of the expenses that the business is paying, plus building the business's credit score. And having that kind of backfall to go off of and be able to borrow if needed.

49:15So that was the context behind it. Okay, okay. And at what rate are you continuing to, or were you continuing to pile on to it? you know, I guess to mean, are you continuing to, or were you continuing to pile a bunch of money into it and continue building up a ton of debt or has it been kind of trickling in just kind of being that little bit to kind of, kind of keep you afloat? Oh, it was a, at any rate, what rate was it? At any rate? No, it's interesting because like there's a credit limit that the bank will give you. And then as the bank saw me starting to approach that credit limit, they gave me even more so they just raised their credit limit yeah that's interesting giving a just complete enabling but I remembered what the old credit limit was so in my mind I was like this is the actual limit like I can't go for whatever reason psychologically just emotionally I was like I can't go over this number and so when it reached that point I was like you know okay like now some really hard decisions need to be made um and that kind of thing so again we're here to be judging if there are things you could have done i'm not being mean i'm not being mean if if there are things you could do to keep it to that psychological limit instead of going to the max so there were things you could do to slow down the the debt addition basically are there if you're being honest with yourself, more things you could do to have slowed the rate even further or to start reversing the rate and start paying it back off?

51:00Then or now? Then. I think in hindsight, yeah, I could have ripped the bandaid off for sure. One of the tricky things about this particular revenue drop, and I'm sure all businesses go through revenue drops, cyclicality, things like that. And maybe just being a newer business owner, I just wasn't used to it. But it kind of happened in stages and it kind of happened like month after month after month. So it wasn't like an immediate, like if it was just like an immediate crash, maybe it would have been easy to just rip Band-Aid off. But because it was like this gradual reduction, reduction, reduction, it wasn't immediately apparent that I needed to rip the band-aid off and I didn't realize how lean I could really make it until two years later what changed two years later nothing it's just you keep you keep like leaning and leaning and leaning and then I don't know.

52:08It's just you figure out how to do more with less, I guess. Yeah, that's very true. And what did you continue to lean down? Was it software subscriptions that were not unnecessary, but maybe more expensive than they needed to be? Or was it payroll? Or was it payroll to yourself? Or what were the real needle movers to continue leaning down? Yeah. I mean, what you said was kind of the order of operations. So you go for the software first. And it's always like, all right, what's not really bringing in revenue? That's kind of like the right or wrong. That's where my mind defaulted to as a business owner is like, what's generating revenue?

52:54And then what's really not generating revenue? And the things that are not generating revenue get kind of cut first. and then yeah eventually I did end up like selling some of retirement funds and cashing out some of my life savings to like keep the business afloat and cutting my income as well yeah gotcha and a kind of not necessarily financial question but something that is still very important I don't know exactly how to ask it but how much does the business mean to you? You know what I mean? I know that that's a very biased question inherently, of course. But if this is something that you just kind of do on the side for the heck of it, then I would say going into that much debt just isn't going to be worth it because you just don't need it, so to speak.

53:50But if it's something that you're really passionate about, which it probably is because you've stuck with it through all that, then that changes the equation a lot. So how do you kind of frame the business like that for yourself? Yeah, it is something you don't really think about, right? Until it kind of happens. So looking back kind of logically, it's like, well, it's just a source of income. If you look at it without emotions, it's like, well, it's just a source of income. You just go find another source of income. but you're kind of hitting the nail on the head that when you invest your entire life into something when you build all these skills related to it and you feel like you're going all into something then seeing that fail feels like losing so much and so yeah it does mean a lot for sure but it's weird how with hindsight things look more I start to see like again ripping the band-aid off might have been a better move because just logically source of income wise that would have been the best thing for the health of the business gotcha and I think one last question on it is how realistic would it have been or would it still be potentially to work part-time and say you know the business is going to cost what it's going to cost and I've gotten as lean as I could.

55:20Now the next best option is just to increase the income so that it can be covered, kind of no questions asked, so to speak, but you'd have less time for the business. Where did that stand as an option and where could that stand closer to the future? Yeah. I mean, it's more and more of an option now for sure. you just kind of look at when you get leaner then you also audit your own time and like really that's one of the things that when everything's going up like need won't necessarily look at how are you spending the different hours of your day on different parts of the business and so it's weird how like all of that adversity really forces you to look inward and think about things you never think about.

56:15And yeah, I mean, it's something transparently I'm looking into right now, actually, as we speak. That's totally fair. So I think that the grade that I'm going to give that, and the specific, because I feel like we haven't mentioned the context in a little bit, the specific context was using credit cards for expenses in business. I'm going to give that factoring in the previous decision, just this specific phase itself, probably a 95%, honestly. I would put that straight as a middle A. I know that that's high and that's not pandering whatsoever. I think, obviously the whole point of this podcast is to talk about money at the end of the day, 100%.

56:59But as we always talk about what the heck is the point of money if you're not using it in a way that makes you happy or building something in this case, building something that makes you happy or helping others or whatever it is. Um, and I think that, that using our money or money you have access to in the, in the case of credit cards, um, to build something that you're genuinely passionate about and have stuck with for that long is, is a very reasonable thing. I mean, as, as many of us know, a ton of, if not actually, I'd be curious to know what the percent is but i would say probably most businesses are in a significant amount of debt at some point it takes it takes debt to especially get started up but even for a lot of companies it takes debt to continue operating uh into the future even even above and beyond what their actual income is and for a small business close to an individual business to be using debt to essentially get off the ground, but also continue operating as they have been is, I think, very realistic.

58:06I think that a lot of us on social media, on YouTube, online, whatever, see all the success stories of like, oh, well, somebody else just used their iPhone to film YouTube videos and they're making$200 ,000 a year. So why do you need to go into debt for anything? Those are far above and beyond the exceptions to the rule. And I would say more so the rule is a long-term healthy finding a long-term financially healthy business often if not usually takes debt to to to push themselves to uh to the next step up um so though it's not perfect because of course ideally you wouldn't be going into debt and i would say that the last five percent would have come from making some of those lean decisions more quickly ripping the bandaid off more quickly, potentially going part-time to kind of, uh, ease the pain a little bit.

58:59I think that could have gotten you the last five or so percent, but, but honestly, I don't think it's a, uh, I think that the using that money to, to build something you really feel passionate about is, is worthwhile. I'm surprised. And other people can get, can give a disagreeing grades in the comments or, uh, emailing us though. So if you have differing thoughts, um, Just let us know, which I guarantee you have different thoughts about at least some of these. So feel free to let us know. But I'll go ahead and move on to my last one, which is going to be emergency fund size. We've talked a ton about emergency funds in the past.

59:37I think that they're probably the most important thing that you can have. Probably close to tied with a budget or maybe budget slightly behind it. But an emergency fund is incredibly important to have. We've talked in the past about how maybe having three to six months is a good target. And then if you want to continue moving past that, then closer to eight to 12 months is a better, more sustainable target for you to look towards. I've talked about this eight to 12 in the past before. And full transparency, as I have been before, I make solid money. I'm not making buku bucks, but I make solid income.

1:00:14I keep my expenses relatively low. and so relative to my income and so the why couldn't i be building up you know that eight to twelve months worth of expenses in my emergency fund and for a while i was back when we were uh back when we were renting we just had lower overall expenses just kind of in general um not just the uh not just where we were living but also outside of that we just had in general lower expenses and so i was carrying i think at one point i was at like nine and a half or ten months, I think is where I kind of peaked in terms of emergency fund. And then around the time that we purchased the home, um, I would never use, you know, all of my emergency fund or anything for, for a purchase like a home or something.

1:00:59But when I was really working out all the numbers, I felt like having that much of an emergency fund sitting there was to some degree to be kind of blunt, pointless, kind of wasteful for myself and for the amount of risk that I feel like we're taking on as people. For example, you know, we have both of our cars are very reliable. We don't really have many concerns there. We purchased a new home, which of course does not, absolutely does not mean that nothing can go wrong, but it's far less likely to go wrong than if we were to buy a lived-in home. And so long story short, through the process of purchasing the home and since I've decided to pare down that emergency fund from the about 10 months it was to closer to five and a half, if you want to be specific, five and a half or six months worth of expenses saved up instead.

1:01:50So that's kind of the context of the situation. How are you feeling about that? I'm actually, so I wish I didn't give my eight pluses away so soon.

1:02:03I actually like this decision and I like that that you kind of toyed with doing more than six and then realized, okay, maybe that's pointless. Because obviously people take the advice of like, you only live once. They take that too far to justify a lot of bad behavior. Right, right. It really is true. At a certain point, you have to say, I have enough. And you have to start enjoying your life and trying to be present with everything you have and being grateful for that and enjoying that. because we all know it. We all see it. You can get stuck on this treadmill and never get off of it. And then one day you can just be gone.

1:02:45And then I was like, literally, what did I do all that work for? So I guess I'll give you two pluses. I give you the 0.5 that you lost earlier. Oh, okay. Okay. I like that. You can go home with your straight A's and put them on the refrigerator. I will be expecting a Word doc emailed to me with just three gigantic check marks or something like that. That would make me feel good. And I think Jen would be very proud of me if she heard about this. But no, I appreciate that. I completely agree with you about anything can happen to you at any point. And even if you look long-term, I mean, I think it's very important to keep your emergency fund somewhere that will grow.

1:03:28That's the first thing to clarify. However, wherever you put it, if it's actually quickly accessible to you, it's certainly not going to grow as quickly as somewhere else it could if it wasn't as accessible to you you know in some in something like like bonds or something like stock market or real estate wherever somewhere else it can grow more quickly it can grow at a faster rate but there's going to be more risk it won't be as accessible to you and it felt like that piling up of money in a place that's not going to grow very quickly is not only stopping me from living my life like you said but even if i want to assume i'm going to live for quite a while then it's also not growing as much as it could in that long run.

1:04:05And this is definitely going to be a very personal decision. And even though I think that going by months is a great way to scale how big an emergency fund is for yourself, nothing's ever going to be perfect. And maybe some kind of a ratio related to your expenses or to your income might be helpful. But for a lot of people building up eight months worth of expenses, if they keep their expenses really low, it might still not be that much money or might not be a ton of money and it might be worth it to aim for those higher number of months. But if your expenses are either very high or just a reasonably significant, like we do live in a new home and I do have a new car that I'm paying off.

1:04:48And so my expenses aren't nearly as low as somebody who's renting way outside of town and driving a used car. So my expenses could be a lot lower for sure. And so keeping eight, 10, 12 months suddenly piles up to be a lot more money and potentially just way more money than needs to be sitting in one place accessible at any point. Um, but I definitely appreciate the, uh, the third day plus I'll take that. Yeah. Have it. He earned it. Beautiful. All right. What is your last, last thing to critique, Andrew? Well, I kind of want, uh, I want one that'll make me feel good now. I always want to change my answer.

1:05:26What was the cost of your last haircut? We'll do that last haircut. Yeah. It was less than 40 bucks. I'll give you a day plus.

1:05:39Oh, that's funny. I thought of one that was recent that I can brag on. Okay. Okay. All right. Have fun. And I didn't mean for this to tie into what I said earlier, but with laptop prices going crazy and it's triggered by that, the price of memory, right? It's memory. Yeah. I mean, you said that your memory's pretty full, so I guess... Right, exactly. It's low supply. We just have a supply shortage in this country and across the world. And so I felt really good about Prime Day, Amazon Prime Day. I got myself a MacBook Air. And by the way, I didn't know... Proud of you. So proud of you. If y 'all knew, Best Buy matched...

1:06:26So I wanted it. Amazon was going to give it to me like two weeks later. Really? Yeah. And I was like, I checked Best Buy. They had the exact same thing at the exact same price for Prime Day. And I bought it with the knowledge that Apple, because I'm a stock market guy, Apple is, they're increasing the prices of iPhones and MacBooks and all of those things very, very soon because of the crazy prices in memory. So that one I feel good about because I feel like I got a deal even before anything played out because I already know prices are about to increase by quite a bit. I know that you're trying to make this a very easy score, and it probably will be a very easy score.

1:07:15I'm very happy, overjoyed, that you've at least joined the app top. app top oh my gosh uh apple laptop situation uh that's fantastic here and i know steven will be very happy about that as well um so how much how much off from the from the normal price and how much off from what the likely higher price is going to be did you get i don't know what they normally go for so maybe now i just docked my grade again but yeah how do you know how much you how do you know you saved that much if you don't know because it said on the screen oh okay we're doing that did you use like uh well honey honey is a really bad company we don't trust honey around here but did you use like google price history or something to see what the uh no it used to be like it said on my shopping cart or like on the screen it said i'm saving god i thought this was going to be a slam dunk i really thought it's going to be easy oh man okay all right um we're gonna have to do some research for this how much did you pay for your macbook air a thousand bucks a thousand bucks on the dot i do think that that's below what the next what size was it um it was just the right size for when i want to take it to travel and everything.

1:08:40So 13 inches? How big is the perfect size to travel? I thought it was like 15, but maybe it's 14. I don't know. There's 13 and 15. Then I probably got the 13. Okay, so now it's 13. Man, this is not easy. Okay, all right. So we have pulled in some numbers here. Now, this is from an AI summary. So if this is incorrect, please feel free somebody to correct me. However, it appears that the starting price was$1 ,100. So you got$100 off, and the price is jumping to$1 ,300. So I think that we could arguably say that you saved$300 because that is already the new price. They probably just jumped it immediately after all the Prime Day set of discounts and everything like that.

1:09:34So I think saving$300 on a$1 ,300 laptop, that's a good amount off. And I also think, anecdotally, so to speak, that$1 ,000 for a laptop of that quality nowadays, again, with how freaking expensive everything is, is not unreasonable. What computers did you have prior to this? so I had like two laptops one got smashed mysteriously I didn't see how it got smashed did it get smashed when you saw the Prime deal you just hit it with handlers you were like well it's gone now and then so I had another Mac so I got like an older MacBook used it's a whole other thing but that one actually died like it won't charge and then so I I brought back an old laptop I had just like collecting dust and I realized I needed a new one when I was on just like your average zoom call and it was like freezing like just to get on the zoom so I was like okay like if I can't get on zoom yeah I think it's time that's like when you when you wear like an old pair of shoes and like you have holes like multiple holes and you're like okay yeah yeah it's time yeah although I've had a hole in the top of one of my shoes it's not the main shoes that I wear but i've had a hole in that top of that shoe for five years now and i still remember how i or six years now maybe it's been a long long time and i just love those shoes so much but they don't make them anymore that's it so that's a that's another side story um okay so is that the uh the computer that we're recording on right now um it would have been but i've i don't know i screwed up the iphone connection somehow so okay um i'm working on it i'm not as i'm not as fluent as you and steven so what is what is this computer then this is just my desktop okay so what why did you need a laptop on top of the desktop for when i go like to the co-working space and things like that or if i go to a conference yeah yeah that's a fair reason and you got in there instead of you know you always could have gotten a pro and spent a ton more so you know you got a lower end model so to speak.

1:11:51You know, you always could have gone crazier with the money. Oh, shoot. I should have got a pro, huh? Oh, so now he has buyer's remorse. Not remorse, thanks. I would have been like blissfully unaware and thought I had like a great MacBook. But can I get extra credit because I want Apple? Yes. That's already factored in for sure.

1:12:17Yeah, I'm going to give this whole decision. I think this is a double check. I think this is a 99.9 decision. I'm not, I love MacBooks very much, so I wouldn't lean towards getting a Windows laptop. There's too much bloatware. There's too much instability. The updates are so inconsistent, frustrating, whatever. That's a whole other story, and I think a lot of people definitely have very strong feelings about that. But I love MacBooks as laptops. I think they make awesome laptops. I think it'll last you a long time. I mean, Jen's had her MacBook Air for, oh man,

1:12:56she's like seven or eight years or something like that. It's been a long time. And though it's obviously not the fastest thing in the world, of course, it still works just fine. It's not like every time you click on something, you wait a minute for it to do anything. It still functions just fine and you can still do stuff on it. Apple laptops just last a very, very long time. It always impresses me a ton. And then obviously getting a deal, I think 300 bucks off of an item of that kind of a price, you know, talking like 20 % off or something is really, really great to get as well. So yeah, I think that's a solid 99.9, which puts you, you definitely got that ego stroke like you wanted to get.

1:13:35And that raises your average for sure. So I'll give you your three check marks. Just give me mine back. And then I'm not going to tell my wife that it was graded out of three. I'm just going to say this is the grade I earned today. And I'll put that one checkmark. When you send me the Word docs, the Word doc with those checkmarks, I'll just forward it back to you. And then you can just keep that. But I didn't earn three. You have to delete two of them. Fine, I'll delete two of them, and then I'll send it back to you. And then I also have to change the name at the top of the certificate. So it's not mine.

1:14:10Which, this is a completely unnecessary detail, but it reminds me that the jen and i's diplomas i accidentally got the boxes mixed up when we moved and so jen's diploma has been hanging off screen since we moved here and i don't know if i'm ever gonna take it down oh whoops instead of mine yeah so it's easy to get name swapped on things yeah for sure yeah all right beautiful uh fantastic episode i know i know i know i know that a lot of people probably had some very strong feelings about some of the stuff that we brought up today. So if you have any strong feelings about any of that, feel free to yell at us below in the comments or yell at us over email at evan at einvestingforbeginners.com.

1:14:49We'd love to hear the screams either way. Either way is great. And as always, remember, financial freedom is built one smart move at a time. Keep it simple. Keep it steady. And at any rate, I'll see you next time. Peace. The information contained is for general information and educational purposes only. It is not intended for a substitute for legal, commercial, and or financial advice from a licensed professional. Review our full disclaimer at einvestingforbeginners.com.

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