Ask HTM - Gym Edition Frugal or Cheap, Blaming the Baby for Lifestyle Upgrades, and Dipping into Savings for a Camper #1087
How to Money
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re kicking off the week by answering your listener questions! And if you have a question that you’d like for us to answer on the show, we’d love for you to submit your own via HowToMoney.com/ask , send us your voice memo. Regardless of how random or bizarre you might think it is, we want to hear it!
1 - Camper purchase: should I use my HELOC to replenish my emergency fund that we used to buy a used camper?
2 - Baby wealth: what accounts do I prioritize for my twins future and how should I be thinking about generational wealth?
3 - Expensive gyms: is it frugal or cheap to not tell my gym that I’m still paying the old rates?
4 - Apartment hunting: how should I approach the conversation with my landlord about breaking my lease due to our growing family?
5 - Crypto: is it a good idea to invest in individual stocks and crypto if they’re already represented in my portfolio via an index?
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Best friends out!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.3 | Welcome to How to Money. |
| 0:05.7 | I'm Joel. |
| 0:06.3 | I'm Matt. |
| 0:07.3 | Today, we're answering your listener questions. |
| 0:10.4 | Okay. |
| 0:10.8 | Thank you. You know what, buddy, and it was very nice last week to have like a little special kick off the, the 2026. |
| 0:34.6 | We should have chosen a word of the year. |
| 0:37.1 | I was over at your house the other day, and you're like, 2026, it's the year of rum. I'm making rum cocktails this year. I read a book about rum. I don't know how many times you said that while. Okay, now row is. So many. It was funny. It's the year of rum, baby. And I enjoyed the rum cocktail that you made for us, which is a highly underrated cocktail, by the way. Rum cocktails. Anytime I've had a good rum cocktail. If people are interested in kind of like a history of the Americas through the eye of 10 different rum cocktails, it's written by a journalist who wrote for the Wall Street Journal called And a Bottle of Rum. And I just finished it. And this is why I'm on a rum kick right now. Such a great name for a book. |
| 1:11.5 | Yeah. I love it. Yeah. So it's like fascinating from the actual liquid alcohol perspective, |
| 1:16.5 | but it's also fascinating just from like a history in the Americas. Yeah. I'm totally going to pick |
| 1:21.0 | it up. Highly recommend. The reason I mentioned that, wait, what did I say? So last week, yeah, |
| 1:25.8 | it was like a kicking off 2026 episode. |
| 1:28.0 | But I'm so glad to get back to listener questions. We're going to hear from a listener who's got a frugal or cheap sort of dilemma. Jim edition, frugal or cheap, with it being the beginning of the year. A lot of people have that question going on right now. Looking forward to that. And they're couples, they're looking to move to a bigger place they're kind of blaming it on the |
| 1:44.7 | baby so we'll get to the bottom of that one and another couple or family they bought a camper |
| 1:50.4 | however like a camper van um like an RV but they dipped into their savings and so what to do |
| 1:57.6 | about that we'll get to those questions plus more speaking Speaking of RV, this has been an ongoing, not a joke, but our kids are like, what's RV stand for? They saw it somewhere. Oh, you know what it was. We saw one on the side of the road over the holidays that had like caught on fire or something. Oh, gosh. I think everyone was fine. But I was like, oh, yeah, we kept saying RV, RV. And they're like, what's RV stand for? I'm like, I'm not going to tell you. It's like, they don't know. |
| 2:21.2 | They're like, what's RV stand for? |
| 2:18.8 | I'm like, I'm not going to tell you. They don't know. They're making all these guesses. I was talking with Kate later. Do they not know the word? Recreation? Recreational? So we're giving them hints, but I literally, they still don't know. So it's kind of like an ongoing game that we play while we're in the car. |
| 2:36.0 | All right. |
| 2:36.3 | Because that's when they think of it. |
... |
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