162: Finance Friday: High Salary - But Nothing to Show For It. Cutting Unnecessary Expenses with Engineer Tracy

BiggerPockets Money Podcast

BiggerPockets

Investing, Education, Business

4.6 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2021

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As you go further along in your career, you should (hopefully) make more and more money, but does that justify spending more money? Most times, it doesn’t. We’re joined by Tracy, experienced engineer and retirement super saver to go through her budget, expenses, and investment portfolio.

Tracy has had a bit of a struggle with spending and expense tracking. A purchase here, some grocery shopping there, and by the time she added up her payments, she was consistently overspending by close to a thousand dollars, every month! Scott and Mindy have some great strategies to limit this type of random spending, and put your budget in the driver’s seat!

Tracy is also interested in acquiring a rental property in mid/late 2021, but she doesn’t have the cash savings she needs to do it. That doesn’t mean Tracy lacks money. Quite the contrary, Tracy has a very respectable amount of money stored between her different retirement accounts. She was lucky enough to take advantage of her company’s 15% 401(k) match (seriously, 15%)!

Now the question is: does she limit her contributions so she can save up for a rental property or does she continue to max out her retirement accounts so she has a big cushion when she decides to stop working?

This is a very common question we get from listeners and members of the BiggerPockets community. You may be in the exact same position, all we can suggest is to tune in to hear what Mindy and Scott have to say!

In This Episode We Cover

Why employee match programs are so valuable for retirement investing
Whether or not you should keep an expensive car loan (or sell and get a cheaper option)
How to fight lifestyle creep and focus on your spending and investing
The importance of manual expense tracking and budgeting
How bigger shopping runs can minimize your food budget every month
What type of savings you should have before buying a rental property
And So Much More!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/moneyshow162

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the bigger Puckett's Money Podcast,
0:02.1	show number 162, finance Friday edition,
0:06.1	where we interview Tracy and talk about raining and spending.
0:10.4	And honestly, guys, I did not just have this knock the ball out
0:15.6	of the park gear in terms of savings,
0:17.8	because every other day, the boxes are showing up
0:21.4	at the door from Amazon with something, you know,
0:23.7	from Target with something, you know,
0:26.2	so as much as I would like to have thought that this year
0:31.2	of any other years would have been the year that I could save,
0:37.2	it really put a mirror up to my spending habits,
0:42.0	because even sitting at home, I did not just pile up
0:47.5	and stack up, you know, lots of money and cash.
0:51.1	Hello, hello, hello, my name is Mindy Jensen,
0:53.0	and with me as always is my coming in with a record of 4 and 9,
0:57.0	definitely not the champion of the office fantasy football league,
1:00.8	co-host Scott Trent, who's going over,
1:03.9	you need to watch this on YouTube,
1:05.2	because he's going over to get his big world champion,
1:08.6	undisputed champion, except not of the bigger Puckett's fantasy football league,
1:13.7	Scott.
1:14.5	This is from 2019's fantasy football season,
	...

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