Ask HTM - Vital Home Reno or Moving Factors, Dropping Credit Without Dinging Your Score, & Student Loan Forgiveness or Payoff #1063
How to Money
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Let’s kick off the week with some fresh listener questions we have lined up for you! And don't just stand on the sidelines- if you have a question you’d like us to answer, toss your voice memo our way. It only takes about 90 seconds to record and you can find a step by step guide over at HowToMoney.com/ask . Regardless of how random or bizarre you might think it is, we want to hear it!
1 - Home renovation: what factors did Matt consider when deciding to add on to his existing house?
2 - Credit cards: I want to cancel my oldest credit card, but how concerned should I be about dinging my credit score?
3 - Student loans: should I pay off my student loans or wait for forgiveness if I have the cash on hand to eliminate them?
4 - Medical expenses: could I fully subsidize my healthcare costs were I to aggressively invest my HSA dollars?
Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances:
- Converting your primary into an investment property is one of the easiest ways to create some semi-passive income.
- I’m not sure who needs to hear this but Health Savings Accounts, or HSAs, are the ultimate retirement accounts.
- Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here.
- Sign up for the weekly HTM newsletter. It’s fun, free, & practical.
- Join a thriving community of fellow money in the HTM Facebook group.
- Massively reduce your cell phone bill each month by switching to a discount provider like Mint Mobile.
During this episode we enjoyed a Jeremy’s Changed by Fonta Flora! And please help us to spread the word by letting friends and family know about How to Money! Hit the share button, subscribe if you’re not already a regular listener, and give us a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Help us to change the conversation around personal finance and get more people doing smart things with their money!
Best friends out!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:29.6 | Guaranteed Human. Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel. I'm Matt. And today, we're answering your listener questions. Okay. Thank you. There are so many flies in our office today. |
| 0:31.6 | You think they're going to get picked up on the microphone? |
| 0:32.3 | I don't know. |
| 0:32.7 | I hope not. |
| 0:37.7 | If listeners are wondering what they hear buzzing past our microphones, I want to throw attracted to the food that we had during lunch today. |
| 0:40.2 | It was me eating the Korean food today, not even. |
| 0:41.9 | I know. |
| 0:42.7 | I think it's like the sweet, yeah, like the, you reheated it on the cast iron, the sweet |
| 0:48.6 | mixed with the soy. |
| 0:49.8 | It gets, it's aromatic. |
| 0:51.2 | It gets in the air. |
| 0:52.3 | Everybody wants a piece. |
| 0:54.5 | Including me, quite the weird intro for today's episode. |
| 0:57.4 | This is our Ask How to Money episode. |
| 0:59.9 | We're going to hear from some listeners today, Joel. |
| 1:02.2 | A listener is considering a home renovation. |
| 1:05.1 | He wants to, he might add on is, I guess, where he's at. |
| 1:09.1 | He wants to hear how we have thought about it in the past. |
| 1:11.9 | The listener has a problem with his Discover card, and he's not getting treated well by them |
| 1:18.4 | as well, by the customer service. So we'll talk about that. And another listener is considering |
| 1:22.9 | a lump sum to pay off her student loans, or whether or not she should stretch that thing out, stretch those bad boys out. We'll get to that plus more during our episode today. No doubt. Chalk full of good stuff today. First off, I love getting listener emails. Love it when people reach out and they read them all. Want to tell us about their lives or tell us about something like, hey, I heard your episode on this, but here's why we do it slightly differently or here's why you're right. |
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