This Financial Life with Sylvain

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Listen Money Matters

Careers, Business, Investing, Education

4.4 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2015

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we break down listener Sylvain’s financial life. What is he doing right, what is he doing wrong, and what could he be doing better? Our This Financial Life series is back. One of our listeners lays out his financial picture for us and we critique it. Sylvain immigrated to the US from France in 2009. He does not have student loan debt because education is heavily subsidized in France. He’s now a permanent resident working for a private company. He currently lives in the Berkeley area which is expensive. Sylvain and his wife bring in about $7,000 a month and spend between $4-5,000. They share a credit card, split the bills, have $10,000 each in an emergency fund and are saving for a home. They expect to spend about $500,000 to buy a place. The money they are saving toward a home is invested currently. They discuss finances once a month. Sylvain was leery of getting a credit card but wanted to build credit in the US. He only uses it when he has the cash to pay it off immediately which is how we should all use our cards. He has a 401K which he plans to use to fund his retirement. Sylvain is doing well. His family has an emergency fund, they pay off their credit cards every month, have their savings invested and have a retirement account. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to start packing for France. A few of you probably had the thought too. Show Notes Patreon: Help support LMM Betterment: The easy way to invest. Mint: Start tracking your spending today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, welcome to Listen Money Matters. I'm not a business man. I'm a business man.
0:09.9	My name is Thomas. I'm here as always with Andrew. Andrew, how are you and what are you drinking
0:13.7	this morning? Good dude. I'm just drinking water from my camel back. It's 9.39. It's a little
0:20.4	too early to be a pirate. That is nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense. Where's your
0:26.4	beer with like 15 terms and like German hops and things like that. That's in an hour for me.
0:32.6	Okay. Well, you can keep making fun of me. I got my Fiji water today. They changed the
0:39.1	bottle design and I don't know if I like it. Is there still a parrot? There's not. Now it's
0:43.8	been a parrot for a long time. They would have changed it to where like the back, the little
0:47.4	back thing. There's no picture on the inside anymore. It's just blue. And I get that it highlights
0:52.1	this little flower on the outside. But I don't know man. Like I missed my little tropical paradise
0:58.7	inside my water bottle. Where is it? That's disappointing. Well, hey guys, today we are talking
1:06.0	to our friend Céline Vanc. And hopefully I said that correctly. I know I didn't probably
1:10.6	didn't say correctly. Céline. Céline. And we're going to talk about I guess this financial
1:18.1	life. It's an academic nature. Yes, this is this financial life episode for somebody who
1:22.7	well, I guess you can tell you came to the US as a PhD student and things went from there,
1:28.4	right? Yes, that's right. So I got a PhD in France. So yeah, I got a slight accent. So
1:35.5	that's why you might not see it. It's not very strong, but you might not see it during
1:40.1	the dinner view. I can't hear the accent. Yeah. You sound like it from Iowa.
1:45.2	I like corn. Hey, guys, right. Some people think it's like potatoes. So I'm 32. So I am
1:56.9	graded in the United States in 2009 after I got my PhD. So I wanted to get more training
2:04.7	after my I got my PhD in biology. And I got a job as a postdoc in basic research. So since
2:13.0	then I'm in the US. And now I am a permanent resident working in a private company. So
	...

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