Getting Comfortable with Money

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And we need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

What's going on guys? Chris Albert here with the Warrior Soul Podcast. And today, I wanna talk to you about a subject that... Well, it's brought a lot of pain in my life, and that's money. Money has always been a sore subject for me.

And, you know, when I was growing up, I didn't have a lot of money. Right? My family didn't have a lot of money. My mom, she went out. She worked three jobs.

She worked her butt off for me and my sister. We never really wanted for anything. But growing up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, when, you know, you're living in the same area as a lot of rich people. Right? And if you know anything about Fairfield County, there's a lot of, like, hedge fund managers, CEOs, people who make lots and lots of money a year.

I'm talking millions a year. They're in the same geographic area as a lot of poor people as well. Right? You have very rich zip codes right next to very poor zip codes. And we were not one of the rich people out there.

And, when you grow up like that in the midst of such wealth, when you don't have a whole heck of a lot for yourself, that tends to generate a lot of jealousy, a lot of mistrust of people with money. And you start to get these ideas in your head about how rich people became rich. You know, I used to think that rich people became rich by stepping on poor people. And that was a really, really horrible way to look at the world, and it was a non educated way to look at the world. And it was also a big reason why I think that throughout my life, I ran away from financial education.

Right? Whenever anybody would bring up the subject of money, I would say, you know, I don't don't really wanna talk about that right now, or I would avoid any kind of books about personal finance. And, you know, in my chosen professions, I went into the military. Obviously, that doesn't pay a lot of money. I went and worked for the government for a while as a bureaucrat.

That doesn't pay much money. And then I went off into academia because, you know, wanted to be a college professor because I thought that I was above trying to earn a lot of money. And it's a really, really ignorant way of looking at the world, because one of the things that you'll discover, if you're a young person, as you get older, or one of the things that you older people might have discovered is that money brings freedom. Money brings choice. Money brings, you know, the freedom to live your life the way you want to live.

Right? You live where you wanna live. You can choose what you want to do. And if you want to save the world, money brings more opportunities for saving the world. If you want to travel, money brings more opportunities to travel.

Right? And so it wasn't until I was older that I actually started to gain an interest in in understanding more about money. But first, had to get a lot of those preconceptions out of my head. I had to get rid of my fear. Right?

I had to get rid of the idea in my head that I had that all rich people got rich by stepping on poor people. I had to get rid of this idea that somehow investing in the stock market were evil. And I did that, you know, number one, by kind of venturing out there into the world. You know, when you discover that, you know, the same stock market that people call evil is also making it possible for a lot of people in the lower middle class and and in the middle class to have pensions that they can have on retirement. Well, you know, you can't just sit there and say that.

I mean, there's so many people out there who who are talking about the stock market like it's this evil thing that that this evil monster. But the truth is that, you know, if the stock market collapses, if we didn't have a stock market, there's a lot of people out there who wouldn't have a retirement. Right? Now, of course, there's a lot of shady characters who, you know, convince people to put their money into retirement investment accounts that didn't pay off and that were, you know, Ponzi schemes and things like that. But that shouldn't keep us away from trying to educate ourselves to the point so that we're actually able to make smarter decisions.

So one of the things I did this year was I made the decision that I was going to educate myself as much as possible about personal finance and about saving more and about investing. Because up until up until recently, I always thought, hey, I'm just gonna get rich off my business. And yes, my businesses have made me a lot of money, but here's the thing. If you're just trying to take your money and you're trying to put it into a savings account and you know, you're you're gonna let that money sit there, well, guess what? Number one, it leaves more opportunity for you to make really dumb decisions with that money.

Number two, when it comes to inflation, if your money is just saving in a... Sitting there in a savings account, interest rates are really, really low right now. Well, guess what? Inflation is going to make that money a lot less worthwhile. Right?

It's gonna make... It's gonna reduce the the buying power of that money. So I made a decision to start a retirement account, and I made a decision to start investing. And before I did that, I went out and got as many books as I could about this. Now, I'll put...

I'm not going to go into the details of every book because, again, I'm not a financial guru and nothing that I say here should be taken as financial advice. You guys should go out there and explore that for yourselves. But the first book I got was a book my girlfriend gave me, and it was called The Millionaire Teacher. And it was a really, really eye opening book because this guy was a teacher and was earning 40 to $50,000 a year like most teachers do, but he managed to turn himself into a millionaire by saving and investing and taking advantage of the power of compounding interest. Right?

So he'd set up retirement accounts and he saved everything he could. So the first thing I did was I took a look at the amount of money I was taking in every month, and I dedicated myself to putting in 10% of everything I earned into a retirement account every single month. And right now, I've got a Roth IRA, tax advantaged account where I'm paying taxes before and then when I take the money out, I don't have to pay taxes on it. But I'm also going to start a SEP IRA because I'm a business owner and that's an opportunity for me to do that. For you guys, if you've got a job, your 401(k), you should probably start an IRA too.

Again, that's up to you and your research and figuring out what's best for you. For a lot of you who are in the military, it creates an amazing opportunity for you to start saving. Right? Because when you're young, let's say you're 18, 19, 20 years old in the Marine Corps, well, guess what? You pretty much have your housing paid for.

Right? You don't really have to go out there and you don't have to buy a bunch of clothes. I mean, you're wearing uniforms and things like that. Your food pretty much gets taken for, taken care of. So if you're not out there spending tons and tons of time at the bar and spending all your money on libo, then you have a perfect opportunity to save, to start putting money into a retirement account or to put...

Start putting money into a savings or something like that. A perfect opportunity to start investing. Right? And if you do that, by the time you get out, well, guess what? You could have a good stack of money sitting there for you.

I have a friend out there who has a website. It's called, oh, man, activedutypassiveincome.com. And what he does is he teaches people in the military how to start investing in real estate while they're in. Alright? And if you do that, then, well, that's something that could potentially leave you with a stack of money by the time you get out.

Because, one of the big problems we run into with people in the military is that when they get out, they're scrambling for a job, they're scrambling to try to find something. But if you've got an opportunity to make some income and stack your money while you're in, you don't have to do that. So the first thing I did, starting to save now, was, you know, putting that money away. Right? Opening up a retirement account, starting to put 10% of my money away.

And then I started researching as much as possible about making investment decisions. Because, again, I'm one of these guys who when I wasn't educated, I'd be like, alright, what if I could just find the hottest stock? What if I could just find, you know, the perfect cryptocurrency? Right? And when you start to learn about things, a lot of the really bad investment decisions have come from people who start speculating on investments.

And so I went out that that book, The Millionaire Teacher. I read Tony Robbins, Money: Master the Game. I read Burton Malkiel's, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. I read...

Man, I'll get a complete list of these books out there for you guys. The Millionaire Next Door. There's a few other ones that I... But those are the big ones. One of the big things you start to understand from reading these books is that the best bet for investing, and I'm talking about your retirement, is through index funds.

Now index funds take away that need to try to pick stocks. You get to invest in the total stock market or the total bond market. You can diversify yourself. So I bought shares of a total stock market fund, I bought shares of a total bond market fund, a total international bond market fund, total international stock market fund all through Vanguard, which has very, very low fees, and I was completely diversified. I also invested a little bit in a real estate investment trust, which is another type of index fund that has a bunch of, real estate investments packaged up and you could buy shares of it.

So I've got a little bit of money into that and a little bit of money into some energy index funds. Right? But all of them are very low cost index funds. And when you do that, of course, you don't have that kind of excitement of saying, hey, I've got this hot stock or anything like that. But most of us don't have the ability to sit here and do, you know, fundamental analysis and sit there and look at all the financials for each company and try to pick 10 different stocks and things like that to try to become completely diversified.

Index funds give you the opportunity to do that. So that's one of the things I learned as well. And the biggest thing is that now that I'm investing and dedicating myself to putting a certain amount of income into that account every month, I look at purchases in a different way. So rather than going out and eating all the time, I choose to eat at home. That saved me a lot of money rather than trying to go to Starbucks, which by the way, I can't stand Starbucks anymore, and I'll leave it at that.

I just make my own coffee. Right? And it's a much better way of saving. You know, I'm not bleeding out through all these little purchases here and there and things like that. So, you know, this might be boring for a lot of you guys, but it's stuff you guys need to know and you need to understand.

And again, don't take anything I said here as advice. You need to go out there and you need to really research this stuff for you. Figure out what's best for you. But if you're young and you are out there and you're trying to set yourself for a bright future, start learning about this stuff as much as possible. Don't let yourself just sit there and try to be ignorant about it.

Because at the end of the day, by the time you get to be my age, it's going kill you. You don't need that stress. You don't need all that worry. You don't need that kind of pain. Alright?

And again, I hope this was valuable. I know some people probably turned it off because it... Because it's boring. But if you're interested in learning about the books that I read to increase my own financial literacy, I'm gonna put those up. And, if you've got any other suggestions about how to save more money, what to invest in, I know a lot of you wanna talk about cryptocurrencies probably.

I'll talk about that in another video. I started looking at those markets as well. I've got some ideas about where people are probably making a lot of mistakes. Cryptocurrency is... I love the technology, but the market is so unsophisticated right now.

It's basically a bunch of really tribal people who are rooting for their team and trying to sabotage everybody else. And I'll bring some of my insights to that in a... Like I said, I'm not saying you shouldn't invest in it. I'm just saying that the market out there is kinda crazy right now. So I'll I'll talk about that a little bit, maybe in a future video.

And thank you guys for listening. For those of you don't know, this is the Warrior Soul Podcast. What I try to do here is I try to bring up something of value for people, particularly The US military veteran community that will help them to make better decisions so that they're in a better place when they're my age. It's because over the past decade and a half, we've had a lot of issues in the veteran community with suicide, with homelessness and things like that. So I try to bring valuable information here that can help people to move forward with their own lives and to help them to to live their best lives.

So all we really ask in return is that you let us know how we're doing. Write us a review up on iTunes. And if you know somebody who can find value in what we've said here, share the episode out with them. That's probably the highest compliment you could give us. And, if you're interested in helping the show out financially, we do have an amazing gear shop over at warriorsoul.shop.

And I also want to say that this podcast would not be possible without the good people over at F Bomb Nutrition. They make delicious packets of fats, macadamia nut butters, you can carry them around with you. They mix them up with chocolate, with sea salt, with pecan butter. They're so delicious. Head over to www.dropanfbomb.com, use the code Warrior Soul at checkout, you'll get 20% off your first order.

Thank you guys so much for listening. I'll talk to you very soon.