What if I told you one of the biggest obstacles to fire isn't your income or expenses,

it's actually knowing where your money's going?

Today, I'm going to walk you through setting up a Monarch Money account live.

We talk about it all the time on the podcast, but we love this tool.

And if you're worried that it sounds too complicated, we're going to break it all down today.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen,

and with me as always is my tracking where his money is going. Co-host, Scott Trench.

Thanks, Mindy. Always great to be on top of the latest trends with you here at Bigger Pockets Money. All right, you said it, Mindy. We really love this tool. This is what I use to

personally track and manage my finances, track my net worth, track my spending, and build the

basic outline of a budget. Actually, is another tool to adhere to my budget, which we'll talk about

another time. But Monarch is the

beating heart of how I track my personal finances. And I think it sounds annoying to have another

thing to use potentially, but Monarch money really is this command center for your finances.

It takes a lot of guesswork out of the process for you. I will also say that we have been trying for years to get Monarch to sponsor bigger pockets

money.

We are working towards a future where we have a handful of really close net sponsors.

And you guessed it, we finally have got a partnership with Monarch.

They didn't ask for this episode.

We're giving it to them as part of a broader campaign sponsoring the show, but we just love the product so much. We thought we'd use it. We do have a discount for members that'll be following the entire video on the top right corner of your screen right there. If you want to check it out, it's like 100 bucks a year for this tool. It's not a break the bank. And I believe it saves me many, many, many, many, many, many times that amount in terms of time and then accuracy and understanding my financial position. Scott, what are some of the things that you feel are really important to be tracking when someone's looking at their net worth? I think it's everything, right? And it's how, do you have an understanding of where all your cash is? Do you have an understanding of what, where your debts are, what liabilities you have? Are these updating reasonably frequently, right? You can do this in a spreadsheet, all the stuff we're going to do today and talk about can be done in a spreadsheet or done in a piece of paper, even. It's just the automation is so important at this point. There's so many transactions,

little transactions that hit my credit cards or my bank account or changes in the, in investments

as money is added on a regular basis. Every day the market moves in my portfolio, it ticks up or

down. And just being able to look at those and just refresh things on an instantaneous basis is really important. It doesn't have to be it every day. It doesn't have to be every month. It doesn't have to be every quarter. But at some cadence, you've got to be checking these numbers. You cannot play the game of finance if you can't keep score. And while a spreadsheet's good, I think the new technology, and there are several apps out there like Empower, like personal capital, like Monarch money, that can solve this problem. Monarch just happens to be our favorite. And Scott, you said you didn't want to do this by hand every single day? Nope. I certainly do not want to do this by hand every single day. And I certainly like to kind of be able to check it. Yeah. And you said something I thought was interesting, Scott. You said whether you check it every day,

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