The EXACT System I Use to Manage Every Paycheck

23:29Listen, this stuff isn't hard, but this stuff's not taught to you. So it's not like you're going to know this stuff unless somebody teaches you. That's why your boy is here. I'm here to teach you this stuff and teach you how to manage your money so you don't have to just look at spreadsheets all day and just... No. Instead, you can make sure that you're living your life and having a little bit of fun too. Now, I know my type A people, you like your spreadsheets. Nothing against that. But for my type B people, I want you to be able to look at this in a way that is helpful. Okay? Next is the emergency fund.

24:00So I still, even though I have a fully funded emergency fund, I still like to contribute a little bit more. I like to pour a little bit more pixie dust on my emergency fund. I like to throw a little extra cheddar there. And so a lot of times when I am managing my money now, the fourth thing I will do is make sure money is going to my emergency fund. Now, I don't actually physically do it. It's automated. Obviously, I have a high yield savings account where my emergency fund is automated. And if you want to see my favorites, by the way, we will link them up at the top of the show notes that you can check those out.

24:30But my favorite high yield savings accounts many times have buckets. So Ally is one place I have one. SoFi is another place I have one. There's a bunch of amazing ones out there. So this is a way for me to start to really be able to get some going. And so I like my emergency fund to progressively grow. Why? Well, there's two reasons. One is my plan long-term is to have a much larger emergency fund by the time I hit retirement age. I don't know when that's going to be. I love this too much. I love, you know, helping you guys with your money. And so many times I say to myself, I don't know if I'm ever going to retire.

25:03But as we begin to look at some of this stuff, it is really, really important to make sure that I am still growing my emergency fund because in retirement, I want to have a couple years of cash on hand. And so the only way to do that is to slowly fund your emergency fund. I have this big, hairy, audacious goal to have five years of cash on hand just in case that the market pulls back in my first couple of years of retirement. I got the cash just there or anything else happens in retirement. I got cash just there. And so for me, I continue to sprinkle a little cheddar every single month into my emergency fund.

25:36Think about your emergency fund as a big taco and you're just throwing a little extra cheese at that taco and that cheese is melting and it's getting all nice and gooey and I don't know where this example is going to go. I feel like I'm just getting lost in this example here. Throw some extra cheese on that emergency fund, even when it's fully funded, if you want to save it for retirement. That's enough weird examples for me today. That's one thing I keep doing. So it's automatically transferred and then my goals are there. I review it every single year to say, hey, am I putting too much in here?

26:05And sometimes I am. And then sometimes I'm like, no, I'd rather just get these dollars invested as well. So sometimes for the long-term dollars, I think to myself, okay, well, why don't we just get more of this in a brokerage? And because it's for the long-term. And so many times I will make adjustments like that. I will send it over to my taxable brokerage instead of just keeping it in a high yield savings account. And then at other times when I have to use my emergency fund, I want to make sure I'm peppering some extra cash there and adjusting that based on usage of emergency fund, which guess what?

26:34I've used my emergency fund a bunch of times this year because a lot of things have happened throughout the year that I did not anticipate. Like a great example of this was, I think I just talked about this on a recent episode, but we had like a thousand dollar sprinkler bill that just popped up. We had to replace a bunch of things in the house that popped up out of nowhere that were just needing repairs. We had to do some gutter moving and there's just all kinds of stuff that we had to do around the house that were just, you know, stupid stuff that I hate spending money on. But you have to use the emergency fund if you don't have the allocation there.

27:03So that is the thing to think through as you start to begin to do this. Now, what counts as an emergency? Things like job loss or medical expenses or essential home or car repairs. Those are all really important in our emergencies. What's not an emergency is the holidays or a concert or things that are on sale. Those are not emergencies. So make sure you understand what an emergency fund is and what it's not. When I get with people one-on-one, I make them create an emergency fund document that says exactly what an emergency fund is and their family agrees to this so they don't just spend their emergency fund on something that's ridiculous.

27:36Okay. Next. So the next thing I do is I go and set up my savings buckets. Now my savings buckets, this is for fun stuff. Okay. So for enjoyable stuff, for stuff I want to spend money on. So like this also falls into play of like spending money, stuff I want to just blow money on, that type of thing, because I've got my wealth building stuff taken care of. I've got my debt stuff taken care of. My bills are taken care of. So now it's time for Andrew to have a little bit of fun. Now it's time for Andrew to go out there and maybe he wants to buy himself a brand new driver so that he can, you know, hit the ball right in the water.

28:15Maybe he wants to buy a brand new putter, which I recently just bought that I three pot every single time on the green. Or maybe he wants to go and, you know, buy himself a boat. Shout out to Master Money Academy for our boat reference here. But there's a lot of different things that we could be doing. There's a lot of different things that you could spend money on that you enjoy. Maybe you like to go out to eat more often. Maybe you want to buy a new pair of shoes. Maybe you want to buy the new iPhone. And by the way, if you are not debt-free and you go and buy that folding iPhone, I'm going to come through that iPhone and I'm going to tell you, bad choice, my friend.

28:46So I think that's one of the things that we need to consider as we go through this. So my savings buckets, the way that these work is I have these savings buckets set up for like longer term fun goals. So one is for vacation. One is for, you know, if my wife and I want to do something cool, like we have all these different savings buckets for things we want to do. I have one set up in a brokerage account that I talked about recently on an episode for my vacation fund brokerage account that I have set up. I have one for like a boat fund. I have one for a watch fund. I want to get a couple of nice watches that I can hand down to my kids when I pass away as like a keepsake, a family heirloom type thing.

29:22So there's a lot of things like that that I've been saving in. And so that's where my savings buckets goes is right after I make sure I take care of everything else. Those are some of the things that I do. But this is also the time where like I spend money on stuff that I want. You know, if I want to buy the random stuff that I like to buy, this is the timing where I do that as well. And so it's spending money, guilt-free spending, that whatever you want to call it, that's exactly where it comes out of. All right, step six. This is the next thing I do. When it comes to step six, now I set up these savings buckets, these additional savings buckets for repairs.

29:54So what I've been doing lately, and I've really enjoyed this, is I have set up, and I've done this for years, not lately, but I've set up these savings buckets for specific repairs that I know are going to come up all the time. So things, for example, like car repair. I built a car repair fund. Over the course of a year or two, I put about$5 ,000 in a car repair fund, just so when any car has an issue, I don't really have to think about it, and I don't have to decide, oh, I got to recalculate my emergency fund and do all this stuff. No, it's in the car repair fund. You know, I just send money to that car repair fund every single month so that I have it available.

30:26Secondly, is a car replacement fund. That's the other thing that I like to have on hand there where I have this money going into my savings bucket that's going to allow me to replace a car and pay cash for the next car when the time comes. Then I have another bucket for home repairs. And that's for, you know, anytime a home repair pops up, this started because of the last couple of months where I've I've needed more home repair funds. And so I've actually increased the amount needed for that home repair fund because there's just a lot of things that happened over the course of the last year that I feel as though I need.

30:59If you're trying to decide how much to put in your home repair fund, look at how much you paid for the home. Do 1 % to 2%. That's kind of the easiest route to take there. And then you can kind of adjust based on how much you have in there. If you get like$10 ,000 into a home repair fund, that's pretty good unless you feel as though you got a roof coming up or painting or some big CapEx thing, capital expenditure that could be coming up later on in the line. Another one that I like to do is like a medical or deductible bucket that just allows me to have that cash on hand too, just sitting there just in case like I need it for, if I need to use my whole deductible.

31:30At some point in time, I would like to have that whole thing funded where I just have the cash on hand there that I can utilize. You could also put this in your HSA if you're not maxing it out. That's another place that you could put these dollars. If you have pets, that's another great place to have a pet bucket, making sure that you are taking care of that or kids things, you know, If you have kids, making sure you have a kid's bucket that allows you to kind of get a cushion there. Because all of these different buckets allow you to make sure you're not just paying a bunch of cash out of pocket that you don't anticipate.

31:57Christmas bucket is another one, meaning that you take how much you spent on Christmas every single year. You divide it by 12, and that's how much you put in that bucket every single month to make sure that once you get to Christmas time or holiday time, then you just have the money there. And so these are just some of the buckets that I really like to use and really like to think about just to have extra cash on hand. Now, I know we're talking about a lot of different things here. Like everyone else is at different places in time. But if you're really trying to get ahead, this is the ultimate place you want to get to is doing the things that I'm talking about here so that you have the cash on hand to protect you against anything in life.

32:31You have your emergency fund, but you also have these additional buckets that allow you for additional protection if you want it. And so just sprinkle in a little bit more into those buckets. Even if it's$25, you're going to be amazed at how much these things grow over time. I usually put small amounts of money in these. It's not a lot at all. And over time, when I don't use them, they just grow to thousands of dollars. And it's really neat to see the growth. And it's really neat to see what happens here. Even if you have$300 in there and you have a$500 car repair, you're going to be so happy you had$300 to take care of the car repair.

33:01And now you only have to come up with the extra$200. It's not a big deal once you start to see stuff in small amounts of money growing. even in a high-yield savings account, can really start to add up over time. It just helps protect you. Just putting it in these other little places after you have some fun, though. These are luxuries to have. But after you have a little bit of fun, it's great to do that. And you don't have to worry about money anymore once you start to do this kind of stuff. And I think it's really, really important to think about it.

33:28Next is kids' savings and future goals. So future goals are things that are going to be bigger ticket goals. Let's say you want a vacation home. or you want to make sure that you have a future goal when it comes to stuff like that. Maybe you want to take a sabbatical or you're saving for a wedding. These types of things you can start to put in future goals. This may be a little higher for you if it's like a high priority thing. Like if you're saving for a wedding and it's in nine months and you need to make sure you're prioritizing this, this may be jumping ahead of a lot of these different things.

33:57But this is the area where I do it currently is I just start to kind of pepper money here and add money to these funds when I see fit. And then kids savings, obviously, I automatically just save or invest my kids money into our systems that we talk about all the time. And so when I do kids investments or 529 plans or those types of things, we are doing those in a way that makes sense and is automated. We just had multiple masterclasses that are saved inside Master Money Academy. If you want to check out how to invest for your kids or how to save for a 529 plan, we have multiple classes talking about that.

34:31if you are thinking about that or are interested. Make sure you check that out. And then we have step eight. Now, step eight's a fun one because this is the area, once all of these things are done and once I've completed all these things, I put this in my invest more category. Meaning that, you know, once I've done all the things that I want to do and then I want to invest more dollars or get more dollars working, if you have extra cash on hand or if you've increased your income and worked really hard to increase your income to make sure you have extra cash on hand, then you can start to invest more.

35:06And maybe you can't do all these steps yet. That's okay. But I want you to see ultimately where this can take you and where this can go. Because in my invest more category, I've already hit my retirement goals and like the things I want to do in step one. And so in this category, you could do stuff like maybe you want to invest in crypto. Maybe you want to buy a little gold. Maybe you want to head on down to Costco and get one of those Kirkland gold bars or maybe those Kirkland silver bars. I'm thinking about doing that with my kids and kind of taking them down there and having them each buy a Kirkland silver bar.

35:34I'm not going to buy them gold, but silver bar because it's like 70 bucks. And it'd be a good lesson on just seeing commodities, feeling, touching, holding, tasting, you know, those types of things. Not tasting, but we'll get back to that later. But anything else that's out there that could be, you know, of interest to them. So I think there's just cool things that you can do like that. If you're interested in Pokemon cards, go for it. I don't care. If you're interested in buying more stocks like I am, that's mainly what I do, is I buy a lot more stocks and investments. That's something you could do.

36:02If you're interested in buying real estate, if you're interested in buying businesses, if you're interested in all these different things, this is the time to do it, is the invest more time and starting to put cash aside for stuff like that. Now, this could also fall into the category, if you're thinking about real estate, it could fall into the category of savings and future goals. Absolutely, nothing wrong with that whatsoever. And so I think for this, This could be an area where you think through exactly what your priorities are and then make adjustments based on those. But these are my priorities.

36:32These are the ways that I am actually thinking about this and how I'm actually managing this. Now, let me give an example of this. So I did a walkthrough and put together an example of someone. Let's say someone had a$6 ,000 paycheck. Well, if you followed my system on how this would work, I want you to kind of think through exactly how you would do this. Okay? So my example is someone with a$6 ,000 net paycheck. They get it twice a month. They are a dual income household. with$8 ,000 in credit card debt and no emergency fund yet, okay? So one of the things that you could look at is, on day zero, you get your 401k match, and you take$300 to your Roth IRA.

37:06On day one,$1 ,200 goes right to the credit card. Day two,$2 ,800 goes and auto pays your bills. Day three,$500 to the emergency fund until it hits that initial emergency fund goal of having one month of expenses. And then you can start to spread out some of that money once the credit card is paid off. So like, for example, if you have the credit card paid off, then you go to day three, which is$200 across, you know, things like vacations and Christmas buckets or$150 towards your home and car repair buckets or$150 towards your 529 plan buckets. And the remainder of the money can stay in checking or it can add a buffer or you can just spend it on things that you actually enjoy.

37:43And so that's an example of something that you really could think about and how you could set this up in a way that makes sense for a lot of people. And so if you wanted to set this all up in a weekend, like if you wanted to have this system set up in one or two days, it doesn't have to be a week. It can be a weekday, obviously. What I would do is look at, okay, first, go look at the show notes down below, open a high yield savings account, because this is an important category that you need to think through. Then set the 401k contribution limit with your HR department. Making sure that you're contributing to your 401k is really important.

38:14Scheduling, transferring money to your IRA or your Roth IRA, making sure you schedule your debt transfers, your savings bucket transfers, and your payday transfers are all really, really important. Then you can move every single bill you have over to auto pay and then review it once a quarter. Making sure that you are on top of this is also important. And when you look at your paycheck routine, when you think about how this is going to work, one of the things that I would do is I would then ensure that this works for you. And if you need to move things around, you can. But spend 10 minutes a month just thinking about, okay, is this working?

38:45Is this working properly? Is everything automated? Is everything working the way that it should? Or should I adjust a few things? That's where you really need to think through this and reflect. Be introspective when it comes to some of this stuff and make sure this is hitting your values exactly where it needs to go. Again, we have the automate your money in one weekend challenge inside Master Money Academy if you're interested in that. But really, I just want you to work on this so you can really get to the point in time where you feel as though you're comfortable with managing your paycheck.

39:12Now, perfect. That is the exact system I use to manage every paycheck. Again, it's investing first, making sure you're taking care of your retirement and future you, then making sure you're taking care of debts and bills, funding that emergency fund, and then from there, getting to the point in time where you can start to spend money on things that you enjoy. So I really hope you enjoyed that breakdown. Now, I'm going to jump into a couple of your questions. My relationship with money has changed a lot over the years. Early on, I thought building wealth was about making more money. Now, I know it's really about having clarity.

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40:16I also love the AI Weekly Recap because it'll flag spending changes, upcoming expenses, or shifts in my net worth before they become a problem. Instead of reacting after the fact, I can make adjustments early. It really feels like having a financial advisor in your pocket. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code PFP at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with code PFP. It's kind of amazing how much can change in just a single year. Every summer, the kids are a little bigger, a little more independent, and life looks a little different than it did the year before.

40:57And it reminds me that while we can't predict the future, we can prepare for it. That's one of the reasons I like PolicyGenius. See, PolicyGenius isn't an insurance company. They're an online marketplace that lets you compare life insurance quotes from some of America's top insurers side by side for free. And their licensed team helps you compare coverage, prices and terms, answers your questions and even handles the paperwork so you can get the right policy without the hassle. For me, having life insurance isn't about expecting something to happen. It's about knowing my family is protected so I can actually enjoy these moments together instead of worrying about what comes next.

41:36And with PolicyGenius, you can find 20-year life insurance policies starting at just$276 a year for$1 million of coverage. Head to PolicyGenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you can save. That's PolicyGenius.com. All right, so the first question comes up is from Daniel. So Daniel says, Andrew, one thing that I fight myself on is the fact that my emergency fund of six months is just sitting in a high yield savings account getting 3.75%. I know what you're supposed to do. I understand that. But what I would like to do and what I fight myself on is that that$45 ,000 I could put in a taxable brokerage account, invest it, and possibly get 7 % to 10 % a year.

42:22Because let's be honest, 3.75%. Yeah, you can see the interest build over the year. but by the time you pay taxes on that money at the end of the year and add an inflation, you're basically just breaking even. That's completely right, Daniel. You are breaking even for the most part. If I put it in a taxable brokerage account and it makes 7%, 10%, possibly 17%, now I feel like I'm getting somewhere. And you know as well as I know that if I have an emergency, I can still sell some of the stocks, transfer the money into a checking account, and pay for emergencies essentially at the same time and be able to utilize that money.

42:54and I have a credit card with the$20 ,000 limit that I use every month and pay off every month for the points. What emergency am I going to run into that I can't pay with$20 ,000, pay it off with my credit card and sell some stocks and transfer the money to pay off the card at the end of every single month? Now, I know the money invested could go down and I could have to sell when the market is down. I understand the risks, but we're talking about 16 years before I retire at$45 ,000. I can grow over to$154 ,000 in 16 years at a modest 8%. When I'm 62 and I retire, heck, I could sell all of my investments, leave it in SPACs, and use that money for my two and a half, three-year cash buffer because I also put 25 % in my Roth 401k and I max out two Roth IRAs every single year.

43:37This is my one dilemma that I do struggle with. Maybe this won't be talked about on your show, but I would like to know what you think about this. Daniel, welcome to the show. It's going to get talked on the show. All right. This is a really good point. And it's a really good question. And it's something that I think all of us wrestle with from time to time. And one of the things that we need to think about here is if we have a fully funded emergency fund, and it's sitting at that 3%, like right now it's like 3.1 % interest rate, and we're struggling on what to do with it because money is just sitting there.

44:09I get it. You want that money to grow. You put it in a compound interest calculator, and you're saying to yourself, this could grow to so much more. The potential here is here. And if I have all these other opportunities to protect my wealth, well, what could go wrong? Well, here is the worst case scenario. Here is what could happen. And the reason why we are protecting our finances is I don't like risk. I don't like risk whatsoever. And so when a risk comes up where you need to have your emergency fund on hand, this is some of the things that I want to talk about. Okay, number one is, as you stated in your message here, the market can have a pullback.

44:46But let's say, for example, we have a pullback like 2007, 2008, 2009. When that happened, we had a market pullback of 50%. So now your$45 ,000 is worth$22 ,500. Okay, so that market pullback happens. You have$22 ,500 currently sitting in your brokerage account. But also at the same exact time, what was happening during that recessionary event? Massive layoffs. Now, could you get laid off? Maybe. Could you not get laid off? Maybe. But your job is going to be an impact on if you want to keep all of this money in your high-yield savings account or not. If you have a job that you feel as though is secure and you want to invest a portion of this, I wouldn't do it.

45:33I'm not telling anybody else to do it, but it could be a consideration if you wanted to go that route, but I would never tell somebody to do this. Okay. Secondly, if you have dual incomes, meaning if one, you or your spouse lost a job, then maybe you have a little bit of additional diversification. Or third, if you have like rental properties or things like that that help diversify your income, then maybe you have some other optionality there. I still am a huge proponent of the six-month emergency fund in cash, even though it's breaking even, even though it's not really getting you anywhere because of job loss.

46:08because of this worst case scenario recessionary environment. Now you have to decide for yourself what you're comfortable with and what your risk tolerance is. Because if you are comfortable with taking a portion, investing those dollars and growing that money, I see where you're going with this. I understand the appeal. I don't do it. And the reason why I don't do it is because I want to protect my wealth. And at the expense of long-term, I have seen worst case scenarios happen to people. I have seen people who have had a ton of issues with their home, for example, their homeowners, and a natural disaster happened.

46:41They didn't have enough insurance on hand, and so they had to come up with enough cash on hand out of pocket to do this. This just happened to my mother-in-law, for example. We had a hurricane come in. She had insurance. It didn't cover everything, and so she had to come up with tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket just to replace things to get her house back to normal again. I saw somebody else that we've coached that had a tornado go through their house, and they had to figure out a way to get enough cash on hand to make sure they can actually cover all those expenses. Or let's say, for example, you get into an accident and somebody gets hurt and you get sued and you don't have enough umbrella insurance.

47:16Those types of things could happen. And so there's way more emergencies than just like the obvious that could pop up that we are not thinking about. I own businesses. If one of those businesses begins to struggle, I've had this happen in the past before. I've had to take my emergency fund and actually help put it into the business. I've done this at$50 ,000 at a time before where I've had a business struggling and to make payroll, I had to take $50 ,000 out of my emergency fund and put it into that business. That's not fun. And so there's all these different reasons why you would have an emergency fund with more medical emergencies.

47:47There's a lot of different things. And so that's why I keep it in cash, but it depends on your risk tolerance. I have a very high risk tolerance for investing. And so every extra dollar I try to invest. I try to invest every extra dollar I can, but I keep that six, seven, eight, nine, whatever you want to have on hand. Six months is my minimum for everybody, but I keep that six months on hand for those reasons. Many times, I feel as though you are correct. You can do this. There are people out there who have said, hey, why don't you invest some of your emergency fund? It's going to be okay. You can still pull it out.

48:19The worst that could happen is it goes down 50, 60, 70 percentage, you still have cash there. And if you're comfortable with that, then you can make a choice based on how comfortable you are with that. But I'm personally just not going to do it. But I think this is a wonderful question. I'm so glad you brought this up. I think this is a great conversation. And I think it's something that is worth debating. It's worth having the conversation about. Because long term, the person who invests those dollars most likely will have more money in that account. They most likely will. But we don't have this cash on hand for that purpose.

48:52It's not for the opportunity cost. It's for the protection. It's building the economic moat around our personal finances so that they can't get derailed. Because if they do get derailed, then all of a sudden you're missing out on the opportunity cost of being able to invest every single month. You're missing out on the opportunity cost of being completely debt-free. You're missing out on the opportunity cost of being stress-free. You're missing out on the opportunity cost of so many different areas. And so that's why I have the emergency fund is for those big pillars. Those are most important to me.

49:20Those are most important to most people. They need to have six months on hand. And I think when you think about your SWAN number, your sleep well at night number, that's the most important number for most people. But don't get caught not funding enough in your emergency fund because you don't see some of the risks that could come down the pipe, okay? So that's the way I would think about that is thinking through it in that way. But again, awesome question. I love this conversation and I think this should be talked about more. All right, the next one is from JR. So JR says, truly enjoy the podcast and find a lot of really good, interesting points in your work.

49:56My question is, what is the budgeting strategy for those of us already in the thick of it with our family lives? We have an established mortgage, student loans, and down to one car payment. Still need room for other parts of life like gas, bills, etc. I work two jobs, so my wife is home with the three kids. One just having started preschool. And every time we drop an expense example, the car payment of$250, then preschool payment starts at$280. This will only go up next year when the second child goes. And then the second child goes, the other car payment will be gone in the same month. I imagine it will be the full$470 for both of them.

50:31We do save about 10 % every single year for retirement. That's a plus. And we always want to do more. But the where and the how is the feasibility issue. Our debt is all low interest under 5%. Thanks for all the info and resources you provide. And P.S., why do you never recommend 0 % balance transfers on consumer debt? Well, on the P.S., we do have a full episode on that, on 0 % balance transfers on consumer debt, as long as someone is going to pay it off. If you have a plan and enough cash on hand and you make enough money and have enough delta to pay it off, I have no issue with that whatsoever.

51:02Now, when it comes to managing money in an already established household, there's a couple of things that need to happen here. One is you need to evaluate how much you're spending in the major categories. So the baseline expenses are one. How much are you spending on your baseline expenses, your needs? If it's more than 60%, then you may be over leveraged in a couple of different areas. One is, since you have kids in preschool, I know how difficult that can be. I have been paying for preschools for the last, now, how old is it? For the last eight years. And it's crazy. So I am still paying. My youngest now goes to preschool.

51:36She absolutely loves it. And it's one of those things that I feel as though one of the biggest struggles for young families just like yours. And it's not talked about enough. It's basically like having another mortgage. And it's one of those frustrating things that we have to try to work through. Now, here's a couple of things I want to talk about this. This episode today about money management should be very helpful for you. If it's not, shoot me a message. But B, I want you to consider maybe something like the reverse budget. Where if you're not going to use a line-by-line on a budget, which I would use.

52:05but if you're a type B person when it comes to managing your money, then you can use the reverse budget. Now, the way that the reverse budget works, and we will link this up down below if you haven't checked it out, but what we're working on right now is the millionaire blueprint, okay? And in the millionaire blueprint, we're actually going to have a reverse budget calculator in there for you, completely for free. And what it is, is basically you save off the top, like we talk about the way I manage my money, and then you spend what is left over. Well, if you get your savings done first, or the stuff that you really need to get done, then you can spend whatever is left over on the things and the resources and the stuff that you have on hand.

52:41But if I were you, I would currently sit down and put together my budget of what are my needs and what's the percentage there, what are my wants, and then how much am I spending on other things like debt payments, things like that. And that's going to help you really get this nailed down so you know how much extra cash you have on hand. But this comes down to sometimes we have to do a spending and budget audit to understand where we are. then we can automate everything else and make adjustments. But sometimes when you're first starting out, you just got to do this. So when you're living paycheck to paycheck and trying to get by, you can just do this once.

53:12So sometimes this is just like spending an afternoon, like an hour or two, figuring out where you currently stand. Then you can make decisions based on that. Okay. So that's really, really important as you begin this journey. But I really appreciate you sending over this question. And I feel the pain of the daycare costs. It is not easy to get through that part. I am still going to be paying this for another couple of years. So in the end, I will have ended up having a daycare payment for over 10 years. And I think many of you, if you have two kids or three kids, you feel that struggle. You feel that pain of what that feels like.

53:46And I think it's really important for us to make sure we budget out for this. We plan our money out for this because that expense is no joke. So awesome, awesome question. I truly appreciate you sending that in. And for anybody out there who wants to get started investing, Even if you're starting from zero, you have$5 to invest,$10 a month to invest,$15,$20 a month to invest, or you have$10 ,000 a month to invest, I want you to join Master Money Academy. I want to invite you to join Master Money Academy. Master Money Academy, I teach you exactly how to build a portfolio for financial freedom so that you can become financially free one day.

54:22You have the ability to invest your dollars, have them grow, work on autopilot while you sleep. And that is the entire goal is to build wealth while you sleep. And so Master Money Academy teaches you exactly how to invest and exactly how to do that. So if you're interested in Master Money Academy, there's a seven-day free trial that we are offering right now. It is linked up down below in the show notes. So here's the cool thing is I also am on coaching calls with you on a weekly basis. We do group coaching calls every single week, and you can ask me questions when you get stuck. So join Master Money Academy.

54:57Would love to see each and every single one of you there. I get to know everybody in there. It's really fun. We've had a ton of different wins that we just went through. We just had a member who just realized she is$9 ,000 away from being a millionaire. So shout out Krista. That is absolutely amazing. So there's just so many cool things right now happening inside of Master Money Academy. And I would love, love, love to invite you to join. Also, if you want to do one-on-one coaching with me, shoot me an email, Andrew at mastermoney.co. And let me know that you're interested if you make over$100 ,000 per year, household income, or if you have$100 ,000 to invest, we can help you there as well.

55:35All right. Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you and we will see you on the next episode. Push your limits, train with precision, see the results. At Equinox, that's high performance loving. Iconic spaces that inspire personal training backed by real data, unlimited group fitness classes from yoga and Pilates to strength and conditioning. Elevate your post-performance ritual with saunas, steam rooms, cold plunges, and more. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.