All of Our Money Rules (And When to Break Them)

Here's the thing, the Money Guy rules exist for a reason. We want to give you financial guardrails to help you succeed. But what happens when life doesn't fit neatly into those guardrails? Brian, I am so excited because today we're going to cover all of our Money Guy rules, why they matter, and when it's okay to break them. Because as you guys know, personal finance is personal. I'm Brian. He's Beau, and we're financial advisors here to help you build wealth and break the rules. And with that, let's jump right in. All right, Brian. So the very first rule we're going to look at is one that I think a lot of people are familiar with, at least when they think about sort of the Money Guy ecosystem. And it's our rule around buying a car, the 23.8 car buying rule. We say, when you buy a car, whether it's new or used, we want you to put 20% down. We want you to not finance it for any more than 36 months or three years. And we want your total payments to not exceed 8% of your monthly gross income. The reason we came up with this is way too many Americans are literally driving around in their wealth. Cars are the biggest wealth killer. If you don't believe me, I want you to take into consideration that if you look at what the median income is, it's around $45,000 for individuals. That sounds fine. Nothing crazy there. Okay. That sounds fine. Until you take into consideration that the average new car is now $50,000. There's a lot of people out there that are driving around cars that cost more than they make in a year. And look, we know that a lot of financial influencers out there say, only pay cash, only pay cash, only pay cash. And that sounds wonderful. And it's great. And we actually agree and subscribe to that idea when you can. But if you're early in your journey or you're just starting out, or maybe you're in that messy middle, a lot of times paying cash is not an option. You have to have an automobile so that you can actually get to your J.O.B. So let's talk about when do you break our rules? When do you break 23.8? We just said it, Bo. Just, and we do echo this. If you're the season of life that you can pay cash for a car, pay cash for the car. But if you need to get to your J.O.B. to start the wealth building journey, we're A-okay as well with using 23.8. Another time when it might make sense to break 23.8 is if you decide you actually want to be more aggressive than 23.8. So perhaps you want to put more down than 20% so that that way you can buy a more expensive car or get a nicer car. Maybe you don't want to finance it for the full three years, or you don't want to use a full 8% of your monthly gross income. It's okay to break it if the numbers go down, not if the numbers go up. But remember, this is not to buy luxury cars. This is really so that if you think about a family trying to extend it out so they can now get that more expensive minivan or something that's more functional, we still want you to understand that you don't use 23.8 for luxury cars and you've got to make sure that your monthly investments still exceed that monthly car payment. All right, Brian, let's talk about rule number two. This one also has to do with consumption, but this is a much bigger purchase. This is our home buying rule. And we think that when it comes to buying your first home, we want you to follow 3.5.25, where you put down 3% as a down payment. You plan on being in the house for at least five years, and we want your total housing cost to not exceed 25% of your monthly gross income. And if you want to know, why does this even matter? Why are we focusing on this? The biggest financial decision that most people will make is their primary residence. So you've got to make sure you understand the ins and outs so that you don't wrangle yourself or your house rich, life poor, or you never build enough margin to even save for the future. Yeah, that's the whole idea. The reason that we have this rule is so that you don't allow your financial life to get out of whack. We don't want you to have so much money going towards housing, so much money going towards putting a shelter over your head that it begins to either one crowd out the other areas where your dollar should be going, or even worse, an unknown, unknown comes your way and you can't afford the place that you're living. So let's talk about when do you actually break this? Is it, and look, this one's a little in that gray zone, but we're okay because we understand that personal finance is definitely personal. And I think a lot of you guys, especially with housing right now, we just came from a post inflationary run up of housing where over three years it went up like 50%. Very much. So the affordability is a completely different equation now. So a lot of you, maybe you're on the up and up with your career and you're looking at your income and you say, hey, this is where my income is, but I know in two years, three years from now, my income will be here and you're pretty assured because maybe you're an engineer, maybe you're working the finance space, maybe you're an attorney or a doctor. We think it's okay to kind of spread that out and extend the budget a touch. Like I said, we're breaking rules here if you know that you're going where the ball is going, not where you're at currently. And again, the idea is if you go above 25% in the very near future, one, two, three, four years, it would be down below 25%. You need the income trajectory of that. If you have an income trajectory that's just at the rate of inflation and it's not going to meaningfully move that needle on the 25%, then you might want to avoid it. Now, another time when you might want to break, and a lot of people fall in this category is if you live in a high cost of living area, it may literally be impossible to follow 3525. If you're trying to borrow on one of the coasts or in a major metropolitan city. So if you live in a high cost of living area, but there are other resources available to you, like public transportation or things like that that cause the cost of living to come down. In those scenarios, it might be okay to stretch slightly above the 25%. What I love is because we just gave you an essentially an asterisk and our exception to the rule where you can maybe take this 25 up to 30% because you don't have the 8% of your income car payment. But realize even if you break this rule, you have to create margin because this doesn't take away from the fact that you've still got to save for the future. So don't use this exception to the rule as a thing is just saying that you're going to be rosy days and rainbows and unicorns are here. No, you have to figure out how do you find margin in other areas of your life so that you can still save for the future. If you're someone who's out there thinking about buying a home and you want to make sure you're doing it the right way and you're really running the numbers, we have a great tool for you. Go to moneyguide.com slash resources and check out our home buying calculator. You can plug in your income. You can plug in what your down payment is going to be the interest rate you're assuming, the loan term, and it will tell you based on those factors, how much home can you afford. This is a huge financial decision. So you want to make sure that you make it wisely. The next rule, and I love this one because this is a trap that a lot of young people fall into, is rule number three, which is first year financing. If you're not familiar with this, what we'd like you to do is when you're choosing how much student loan debt that you can take, go out there and check yourself by saying, hey, what's my first year salary anticipated to be? Don't let your student loans exceed that number. All right. So why does this matter? Well, a lot of people are making one of their largest, most impactful financial decisions of their entire life when they are 18 years old. They are getting a lot of power to make a very big decision that can have a huge impact later on in their life. A matter of fact, right now, 44% of Gen Zers have an outstanding student loan balance. So it's almost half of the Gen Z population has student loans, and 14% of all student loan borrowers owe more than $50,000. We just told you that the median single income in this country is about $45,000. 14% of borrowers owe more than that, and maybe even the most saddening statistic related to student loans, 24% or one in four adults that are responsible for the student loans, either whether they're paying for themselves or paying for their children, don't actually believe that they're ever going to pay those student loans. Well, I mean, it makes sense if you actually go look at the research on how long the average student loan is hanging around, it's 20 years. It's unbelievable. I mean, you can see how- Selfish to mortgage. And these are decisions, like I said, that we bring in this full circle. People made when they were 18 years of age. So this is very scary stuff. It's okay to definitely be very strict and have guardrails, but all rules usually do have exceptions. So we can talk about why it matters, but also when do you break this? Yeah. And if you are someone who's starting off, you understand that starting off with this huge amount of debt, it can derail the other areas of your financial life. It's hard enough coming into adulthood. If you're starting on a level playing field, it's hard. You're having to adjust to all the new intricacies of independence and being on your own. And if you combine with that the idea that you have this huge burden of debt that you're dragging behind you, it just makes the journey that much more difficult. Well, I always, when I remember when we were coming up with this rule, I'm hoping that people will be a little more deliberate with what their major is and where they go to school so that they can actually not drag around this debt 20 years. That's why I spent a lot of time in Millionaire Mission talking about it does matter where you go to school. It matters what you major in because when we interview to our clients, our Millionaire clients, over 70% of our clients work in their field of study. Meanwhile, you compare and contrast that to the general population, 70% plus of the population don't even work in their field of study. So we have a huge disconnect in education. But so that's why we came up with this rule. But now it's probably a good time to talk about when do you break this rule? Well, I think one of the times that you can break this is if you're someone who is pursuing a specialized degree and that specialized degree has a high likelihood, a high probability of producing outsized income. So these are people like attorneys, doctors, medical professionals. If you're someone who's going to school for those, it might be necessary for you to rack up more student loan debt than what your starting salary will be or what your resident salary will be with the understanding that the income is going to increase, that you will be able to extinguish that at some point in the future. Yeah, but I still, I like that we put this little footnote on there is I still want you to keep an aim to keep the student loan as low as possible because I don't want you, you're already naturally going to have a much larger student loan debt because of how long you're in school. Let's not exasperate that problem by loading up on expensive housing because you can, that's the bad thing about student loans. They let you pay for anything. They'll let you do anything. I mean, you can go buy a case of beer. How about a student loan? You can go do rental. I mean, there's a Greek life, sorority. Do not fall into these traps guys. Keep that student loan as low and small as possible. Your future self will thank you. All right, Brian. Let's talk about our next rule. This is rule number four and this is one that we absolutely love. And the rule is simply this, always be buying no matter what the market's doing. If the market's going up, you should be buying. If the market's going down, you should be buying. If the market is going sideways, you should be buying. We always want you putting your dollars to work. Well, I mean, while this matters to me is that I'm trying to create systems that take the emotion out of the process. A lot of people say, well, what good is a financial advisor? Well, big thing that we do for clients is we talk them off the ledge because you got to have a system so that when the stock market gets beat up, the two out of every 10 years, you're not looking for the exits. And then also I want you to have the fortitude that when things are cheap, and you get the best opportunities to buy when you can get the biggest discounts and the biggest growth factors, I want you to have a way to run in when everybody else is running out. And you know how you do that? Always be buying, baby, because if you have a system to wear automatic for the people, everything is happening every month, you don't get to outsmart yourself with your emotions. So if you're supposed to always be buying, when does it make sense to break this rule? Well, it's okay to break this rule if you're not at that stage of your financial journey. Now, we hold the thing up for you. We have a nine step process that will tell you what to do with your next dollar. So if you're someone who has not got your deductibles coverage, you're not getting your full employer match, you have high interest debt, you've not built your emergency fund, you might not be at the place where your dollar should be buying, they should be doing those other parts of the financial order of operations. But once you get through step four, then we want you to always be buying. Well, and also when you retire, I mean, this is the thing is that, well, you do get to a point, we're so good, what's weird is we live in a consumption society. So the majority of Americans are actually really good at consuming and using their assets. But a lot of you financial mutants, we're great at saving and investing. I want you to know it's a okay to when you get to that point, celebrate that you now have reached the threshold to where it's okay to use the resources to consume like your peers because you did all the hard work in the years earlier. All right, Brian, let's talk about our next rule. This is rule number five. And this is actually sort of a rule that encompasses a number of different things. And these are our high interest guidelines. We get asked all the time, Brian. All right, I love the financial order of operations, but I see that they're sort of like these two different categories. There's step three, which is pay off all the high interest debt. And then there's step nine, which says pay off all the low interest debt. Well, how do I decide what's low interest and what's high interest? And why should I attack the high interest first? Yeah, we look, we tried to put some math to this in a process. I laid that out once again, a millionaire mission on risk-free rates of return and, you know, and getting and taking, getting a return for the risk that you're taking. But at the end of the day, we still want you to pay off these debts. We want you to own your life. So that's why as student loans, we do, we base it down by age. And we want you, obviously when you're in your 20s, you can take more risk. We're okay that you might have a 6% student loan that you're, you know, you're making sure you're doing your Roth IRA and other things. Car loans, a lot of you, you have to get to your J-O-B to start building wealth. Of course, we want you to be paying cash. We'll talk about the exceptions to the rule or when to break it. But it's understandable in the beginning, you might have to take for a very short period of time an interest rate higher than you'd want to, just so you can get to your job. And then credit cards, a lot of people are shocked because we just have zeros all the way down. We'll talk about that in a minute because I think a lot of financial mutants are looking at this. They're falling into the dope trap that the credit card companies have laid out for them. So why does this matter? Why does discerning what counts as high interest debt and low interest matter? Because we want you to be able to strike that balance and recognize that there is an efficient and an effective way to deploy your dollars. And we're not only doing two things, we want you to pay off debt and knock that out and get your liabilities knocked down. But we also want you to be building up the asset side of your equation. So understanding what counts as high interest and what counts as low interest allows you to discern how much to be going to each one of those buckets. So when can we break this? As we already kind of shared with you, car loans, look, 23.8, but that's why we put a little bit higher rate in there. 10% is a high car loan. I don't want to act like it's not. But if you have a 10% auto loan and it fits inside of 23.8, we would argue that's okay. That's acceptable for someone in their 20s. Continue paying that on the 23.8 and use your resources to do something else rather than extinguish that debt quickly. I know we didn't put it in here, but I did think it was worth at least highlighting is that 0% interest rates. I know all my financial mutants think that you're getting away with something. It really is a ropa dope is that they're trying to get you, the credit card companies are giving you that first shot, very low interest rates. So you'll fall into their trap. Don't do that. That's why, you know, I know that kind of goes counterintuitive to this when to break the rules, but I'm just telling you, don't fall into the trap that the credit cards and the banks have put out there for you. Alright, Brian, rule number six. This has to do with your emergency fund. We want you, if you're following the financial order of operations, Brian, hold the thing up for me. If you follow the financial order by the time that you get to step number four, we want you to have a fully funded emergency reserve. And we consider a fully funded emergency reserve likely somewhere between three months of living expenses or six months of living expenses. And there are a number of different factors to determine which one makes the most sense. Yeah. And I love that we've got it right here on the screen. You can see, you know, you can compare and contrast these. Obviously, if you have a good job with high job security, or you could go get another job really quickly, that lets you be more on the three month. Whereas if you got low job security, or you have to move across the country, you want to have a little more buffer. If you got multiple people counting on you for money, that's going to push you higher on the buffer. But if you and you have another spouse in the house that are making about the same amount of money, that's lower. So you could go through this list, you can figure out, are you three months or you're six months, but you're still probably trying to figure out, well, why does this matter? And then both kind of alluded to this, this is what's going to keep you that margin of protection. That's going to keep you from making the desperate decisions that like you go run up credit card debt, use payday loans, all the horrible stuff when you hit an emergency and you don't have the money in the bank, none of the options are good. So that's why we have emergency reserves to keep you safe from those bad decisions. All right. So now we're trying to think through, okay, well, when does it make sense to break this? And you may be thinking, okay, well, if you have high interest debt, well, if you have high interest debt, you're in step three, haven't made it to step four. So by paying off high interest debt, you're not actually breaking the rule. So what is an example? And we really need to think through this of when you might actually break the three to six month emergency fund rule. We said, if you're someone who has almost a full funded emergency fund, but you're not quite there yet, and maybe we're getting towards March, towards April, and you haven't maxed out last year's Roth IRA contribution, it's okay in our mind if you take some of that emergency fund for a moment, for a moment and use that to retroactively fill up how much you have left in that Roth IRA bucket so that you can make sure you get those dollars in. Cause if you miss the Roth window, you don't get to go back in time and make those contributions in the future. So, but get in there, use that. I want you to be scared if you do this so that you're not letting this break glass moment last for that long. The other one is, is that obviously when you reach financial independence, this has two folds to it. And the fact that you might be a person that when you get to step eight of the financial order operations, you want to expand cash so that you can play mini warm buffet and buy things when nobody else has cash. Like the next time we have a market downturn, the other side of this is retirement. I want when you reach to retirement, now you're going to be living off these resources and you're no longer working. This is a point where actually your cash reserves is going to go bigger. It's instead of it being three to six months, it might be 12 to 18 months. So you can see we have both extremes covered here on when to break this rule. Brian, I love being a business owner, but I think people underestimate how fast things move from, I've got an idea to, all right, now we actually have to build this thing. That's right. The idea is the fun part, but then you've got logistics, operations, marketing, all the stuff that actually makes the business run and work. And that part can really slow you down and it might even keep you from starting at all. Exactly. Which is why having the right tools and the right partner can make all the difference. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U S from startups to popular brands like Chubbies and Allbirds. And they really make it simple. You can create a clean, professional online store with ready to use templates and their AI tools help handle things like product descriptions and even improving your images. They make it easy to build your brand, but they can also help you grow. Their email and social media tools can help you get your brand in front of the right customers. And everything works together. So you're not bouncing between a bunch of tools on different platforms. You got inventory, payments, analytics, everything's all in one place, making your life easier and your business run smoother. That's huge because it means you can spend more time focusing on the big picture and less time getting stuck in the weeds. That's how you actually build something that lasts. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify and start hearing sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com Go to shopify.com slash money guy that shopify.com slash money guy. Alright, Brian, our next rule, rule number seven has to do when you have a large windfall come your way. Maybe you received a pension payout. Maybe you sold a capital asset. Maybe you received an inheritance, whatever that thing may be, one of the questions we often get asked is how do I think about deploying these dollars? What should I do? Should I invest them all at once or should I spread them out over time? And that's why we came up with a Goldilocks rule. And basically we said you should determine at what pace to invest those dollars based on how big those dollars are relative to your total portfolio. So if this windfall, this lump sum that's come your way is less than 10% of your total portfolio, maybe you consider just investing it all at once as a lump sum. But if this lump sum represents over half of your liquid portfolio and it's a really big chunk, then maybe you want a dollar cost average investing the same amount of money on a monthly schedule over the course of a full year, over the course of 12 months to smooth out that volatility. I'm always amazed because there's a big part of the financial community is that this is a debate between lump sum and dollar cost averaging. This is not a debate whatsoever is because I mean statistically lump sum is superior, but because personal finance is personal, it's exactly what you just covered about. Some of the times these windfalls are such large sums of money. There's a lot of emotional baggage as well as financial risk because what happens that you come into the windfall of your lifetime and then you invest into the 2008 market and you watch 30 to 50% of your assets evaporate within a six month period. You would be just destroyed. So that's why we were like, okay, yes, statistically it's better to lump sum, but sometimes decisions are so big, we have to come up with a way that we can make it systematic to protect us from the 2008 type of things. But also if we're very emotional people and we find ourselves as perfectionists, we're trying to figure out the right time to get in or that, you know, because we're just so worried that we got to do things right. You know what will work you through the emotional side of that? A good system. So our rule is going to combine to make sure you're not sitting on the sidelines too long, but also protect you from something really bad that could happen and derail your entire financial life. All right. So when should you break the Goldilocks rule? When is the time when maybe you don't follow these guidelines? Well, you have to know yourself and you have to understand what is true about you because it may be okay to break this rule if you know that no matter what you're a financial decision maker, maybe this lump sum, this windfall you came in, that came in is less than 10% of your portfolio, but maybe it's still a big chunk of money. If you have a $2 million portfolio and you have $200,000 come as a windfall or come as a bonus, the Goldilocks rule, it's like, go ahead and invest that right now lump sum all in one. But if you're someone who knows, if I invest that and over the course of the next few months, the market loses 5, 10, 15, 20%, I'm going to kick myself and I'm going to second guess myself and I'm going to have some angst. That's okay. Dollar cost average it. Allow yourself to remove the emotion from it. Know what kind of investor you are and you should implement the plan and the strategy that gives you the highest probability of staying the course. And then this next exception is really for my financial mutants out there. I couldn't help it. I was like, maybe this is two of the weeds, but I was like, you guys are going to love this. I have found when the stock market and the financial markets go into bear market status, meaning they are down greater than 20%, you have to look at the values of these investments and you have to go, holy cow, maybe this opportunity is good. So then I want you to understand, every time the market goes down below 20% and then every 5% down increment on top of that, you might want to accelerate another month in your dollar cost averaging plan to take advantage of the volatility. This is why, because I know you're sitting there thinking, well, Brian, this is exactly, but think about if you were in 2008 and the market lost 20 to 30% over that three month period, if you had a big lump sum and you know the historically, every time it went down 20% and then went down every other 5% increment, if you lump summed in on those increments, you would be sitting pretty when you came out on the recovery. Because we all know the rubber band effect is that the sharpness of the decline typically is also the sharpness of the recovery and you need to come up with a system that can help you take advantage of that. But remember, this is for lump sums. This is for big chunks of cash that you have come in your way because we have another rule as it relates to your paycheck and the money that you have coming in on a systematic and consistent basis. And that rule is we want you investing 25% of your gross income for retirement. And these are dollars that are going into employer sponsored plans like 401Ks, 403Bs that are going into IRAs, both Roth and traditional, going into HSAs. This is money going into a pension or an ESOP or an employee stock purchase plan, or maybe this is even just money that's going into a taxable brokerage account. Now, it's supposed to be clear, these are for dollars that are for future financial independence. These are not dollars for the sinking fund for the car purchase or the seeking fund for the next vacation. It's just 25% going into future financial independence savings. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't realize if you make under, we have it down there in the fine print, 100,000 for single individuals, 200,000 for married couples, you can count your employer money. That's right. So because we take a lot of flak for this number, because I think a lot of people out there and there's other financial people are saying 10%, 15%, is all you need to save. And I have to remind people, look, a lot of these systems were designed back in the 90s when we had pensions, when we had more comfort that the social safety net of the government was going to be there for us. But then we now know that more on this falls on our current shoulders on our, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. And then you couple that with, we look at the statistical research and it shows that most people don't even start investing. And then until they're in their early 30s. That's right. So you couple those two things together, you're like, whoa, we need to get serious about saving and investing. So let's be honest with people. Let's not give them some false hope. Now look, if you're watching this and you're 23 years old, yeah, maybe that number is going to be less than 25%. But if you're like everybody else and you didn't start saving invest until you're 30, you need to lean into and understand that 25% is going to help you through this. Yeah. If we know that most people don't start until they're 30. And we also know that for most people, life happens in our savings rate. When we start, likely it doesn't stay that way forever. There are unknown unknowns and life changes. If you're investing 25% for retirement, starting at age 30, doing that, you would still have the ability to replace almost 120% of your pre retirement income. If you retire at 65, if we just assume a very conservative 6% rate of return, but really realistically things happen in your 30s. Messy middle comes along, kids come along, house comes along, other things happen that likely might take you off. So the earlier and sooner you can start saving 25%, the more of a head start you'll give yourself to figure out if there's times in the future where you need to course correct. So let's talk about when do you break this. And we've already alluded to the first one. And I'd encourage you go to money.com slash resources. How much should you be saving? If you're somebody who's watching this content and you're under 30 years of age, there's a good chance you're ahead of the curve and you can adjust your savings rate accordingly. Or maybe you're someone who just has a unique season of life. Oh man, I just had kids or I just moved or I just changed jobs or I just, those things happen and your savings rate might have to take a hit because of that. That's okay. Let it happen, pull back, shore yourself up, and then get back to saving 25% as quickly as you can and your future self will thank you. So the next one, look, and this is one that I've already alluded to a lot of this when we were talking about high interest debt and what is that by age? It's credit card rules. And you'll know the saying. I say it all the time is that credit card use, that's a okay, but credit card debt, no way are we going to let you pay those predatory rates that these banks are charging? Yeah, that's why it matters. If you look at the average annual rate on a credit card, it is not favorable. It is literally compound interest working against you. So that is the stick, but there's also a carrot to using credit cards. There are financial benefits, including rewards, security, credit building, purchase protection. There are a number of different reasons why a credit card can be useful if you're using it right, but be chainsaw dangerous if you're using it wrong. So when do you break it? Look, if you're like the 50 plus percent of Americans that are carrying a balance on your credit card, you're not a credit card person. So you don't use this. You fall more in the camp of some of the people who have to run a strict line and not even use credit cards. They use debit cards and other things. It's okay. Just know thyself. If you're not paying it off monthly, you're not getting ahead. And look, don't assume that zero percent offers are some amazing thing that they're not. They are not a reason to break this. They're not a reason to carry a credit card balance. If you're not paying your balance off in full every single month, no matter what the interest rate is, you're likely doing it wrong. I'll echo what I said earlier. Don't fall into the dope trap. That can mean multiple things. It can mean rope a dope, because that's what the banks are trying to do by giving you this zero percent. So you can follow this trap or it could be about, and I'm going to say it, it's just as dangerous as bad drugs. If you think about it, the drug dealers give you that first hit for free because they're trying to get you addicted to be just like all the other consumption people of society don't fall into that rope of dope. All right, Brian. Let's talk about our next rule. And this one centers around, how do I decide when it comes to 401k or retirement plan contributions, how do I decide between doing pre-tax or Roth? And we have a little test you can do. If you take your marginal federal tax rate and your marginal state tax rate and you add them together. And if you find that the combination of those two is below 25%, you may want to prioritize Roth contributions. If however you find that your combined marginal rate is greater than 30%, you may want to focus on pre-tax contributions because every dollar that you put into the pre-tax bucket can save you like 30 cents in taxes. It's a huge imputed rate of return to those tax rates. And if you're between 25 and 30%, then you want to factor in other things like your unique age, your tax rate assumptions, and your current account structure. I mean, look, I come from a public accounting background, I've practically turned bow into a CPA with how much I've harped on taxes. Taxes are a big part of what's going to impact your financial life. So we're always trying to find that tax arbitrage moment is how do we pay the least amount of taxes but leave the most amount of your army of dollar bills working. And you've got to be proactive with looking at the way you're handling your taxes. That's why when you're young, yeah, we love tax-free growth because you're also probably not in your peak earning years, but you're crazy if you don't want you're in those peak earning years, if you're paying close to 50%, think about that. If you've got 37% federal taxes and then you've got state income taxes, you know, 6% to 10% depend on which state you live in, you can quickly see that close to half of your money is going to taxes. And if you're part of this fire movement or fine movement and you think you're going to be leaving the workforce before you're 75, there might be a moment in time when you can, from an arbitrage standpoint, pay a lower tax rate to convert some of these money into Roth. We want to take advantage of those low tax rates, but ultimately it's so you keep more money working in your army of dollar bills. Yeah, and we don't know what future tax policy is going to hold. So if you can have some tax diversification, no matter what future tax policy holds, you can remain in control. Literally, you can get to financial independence and you can pick and choose what tax rates you pay based on what you count you're pulling out of. Now, and when to break it, Bo just came to me recently and I was like, you know, he's like, Brian, I've been thinking about it. Yes, you're in the highest tax rate, but you're also getting to the age and you have a disabled daughter that will be able to use this money and actually stretch that money beyond. You want to consider maybe using Roth in your retirement account instead of doing the traditional for the tax savings. That's okay because I'm building legacy and I think a lot of you will reach that point. This is when it's okay to break the rules. All right, Brian, let's talk about our next rule. This is one again, if you listen to our show for any amount of time, you hear us say this all the time, we want you to follow the financial order of operation. Brian, hold the thing up. The financial order of operation is a nine step process to help you know exactly what you should be doing with your next dollar. So here's the thing and I love this because we have come up with the financial order of operations is affectionately known as the food. That's right. Do you know what happens if you get the food out of order? Oof, oof. Did you hear that? Oof. That is the best dead joke I've heard all week and I would encourage you because look, we don't want you trying to do the financial order out of order doing missteps because that is going to work against simplifying, making your money work harder than you can. So don't fall into the oof. Reaching financial goals is difficult enough on its own, but if you're all scattered in your goals, it's really, really hard to stay laser focused and move in the right direction. So what the financial order of operations allows you to do is it allows you to compartmentalize what the next goal is. Okay, I know I want to get my high interest debt knocked out. Okay, great. Did it. Now I want to get my emergency fund. Okay, great. Now max out my Roth. Great. Max out my, it gives you these small, tangible, attainable goals that will not only help you stay optimized, but will serve as a mechanism to make sure that you stay on track. Yeah. And if you're trying to figure out when to break, when to break it, personal finance is personal. And if I'm being honest, I've always tried to have a no hypocrite policy. There were moments when I was thinking about going into the entrepreneur life and I had to build up cash reserves to make it for the first two to three years I was doing the business. I wasn't moving on to step five, like the financial order of operations was told me, because my life needed me to have a boosted up step four. So it's okay if you look at your personal life and you know, in this season, I've got to do things a little differently. I've also seen people who said, you know what, I've got a growing family. I'm in the messy middle. For the next few months, I'm going to come up with that 3% down payment. That's outside of the financial order of operations, but we understand that personal finance is personal and we want you to live your best, best life. But also you need to feel like there is a buzzer and a ticking clock in the background that if you don't get back to the foo that your money will start working against you. It's okay to kind of come off the path for a moment in time, but just don't find yourself taking a nap and letting the food not work for you in the long term. All right, Brian, let's move on to rule number 12. And this is one, we get asked this question on time. How do I know when it's the right time to consider taking the relationship to the next level or hiring a financial advisor? We think there's really three points in time where people either hit one of these points or maybe some combination of these. And it's one, when your life circumstance has gotten so complex, you don't know what you don't know. Two, your time has gotten so limited that you recognize a lot of the important financial aspects of your life keep falling on the back burner. Or three, the gravity of your decisions become so great that you don't feel comfortable navigating alone. It's when the $10 decision start turning into $100,000 decisions. If you find yourself in one of those three areas or some combination of those, that might be an indication that it's time to consider professional help. Well, and while this matters is, I think a lot of people have the wrong idea. They think we don't like do it yourself or is, are you kidding me? We have hearts of educators. We are literally on the front lines of making sure you know exactly what to do with your money. Cause we understand that if we load you up, you're going to have success and you're going to be rewarded. You don't need a financial advisor when you're starting out, but as complexity starts showing up, you're going to potentially need help to help you optimize and make sure you don't make big mistakes. But a lot of people end up saying, oh, you know what? I listened to the show. I've got the financial recovery. I'm just going to, I'll wait till the day before I retire and then I'll hire an advisor. I'll just wait and I'll wait and I'll wait. A lot of folks don't realize there's a lot of proactive planning that you can do early on. Yes. Even in your thirties, even in your forties, where if you make some small decisions, just a small one, two, three degree changes in your financial trajectory can have a huge impact later on in your financial life. So a lot of folks might actually benefit from hiring an advisor earlier, especially if they have something like a really high income or a complex income structure, or they have unique things going on in their financial life that a financial advisor might be able to speak directly to. So when to break this rule? Look, I'm okay that some of you will never graduate beyond do it yourself. That's right. One of my heroes is Clark Howard. And I'll never forget that one of my buddies who introduced us was his accountant at the time doing his taxes. And he always talked about how Clark wanted to know everything worked. And Clark would never, ever probably be a financial planning client because he's just going to be one of those guys, but he's also not going to become the biggest troll of financial advisors. Because I think he understands is that yes, there are going to be people who forever will be do it yourself first. And that's a okay, but there will be a moment in time that for a lot of you, you're going to recognize the complexity is going to get to a point that you just don't know what you don't know, or you're worried about if you leave this earth tomorrow, what's going to happen to your loved one and who actually thinks about things the way you do as a financial mutant who can do this on your own. And that's when we're going to leave the porch light on for you. And you can consider going to money.com. Look at the become a client section. And we help you answer the questions and we help you live your best financial life. I'm your host Brian joined by Mr. Boe, Money Guy team out. The Money Guy show is hosted by Brian Preston and Bo Hansen. Brian and Boe are partners with a Bound Wealth Management. A Bound Wealth Management is a registered investment advisory firm regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in accordance and compliance with the securities laws and regulations. A Bound Wealth Management does not render or offer to render personalized investment or tax advice through the Money Guy show. The information provided is for informational purposes only may not be suitable for all investors and does not constitute financial, tax, investment or legal advice. All investments involve a degree of risk, including the risk of loss.