Your Path to Financial Clarity w/ Anne Lester

Chromosomes. Little strands of nucleic acids and proteins are the fundamental genetic instructions that tell us who we are at birth. Most people are born with 46 chromosomes, but each year in the United States about 6,000 people are born with an extra chromosome, making them a person with Down syndrome. If you've ever encountered someone with Down syndrome, you know that they are some of the kindest, most joyful people you will ever meet. They truly have something extra. My name is Lisa Nichols, and for 30 years I have been both the CEO of Technology Partners and the mother to Allie. Allie has something extra in every sense of the word. I have been blessed to be by her side as she impacts everyone she meets. Through these two important roles as CEO and mother to Allie, I have witnessed countless life lessons that have fundamentally changed the way I look at the world. While you may not have an extra chromosome, every leader has something extra that defines who you are. Join me as I explore the something extra in leaders from all walks of life and discover how that difference in each of them has made a difference in their companies, their families, their communities, and in themselves. If you liked this episode today, please go to Apple Podcast or wear a view lesson and leave us a 5 star rating. Before we get started, I'm excited to share that my book Something Extra is now available. It is rooted in the remarkable spirit of our daughter Allie in the heartfelt conversations we've had on the podcast. You'll find wisdom and practical tools to ignite the leader within you and uncover your own something extra. Visit somethingextrabook.com or find it at Amazon or in all major bookstores to order your copy today. I'm delighted to have Ann Luster on the show today. Ann is a speaker, author, and money mentor. Ann, I am so excited about being with you today and thank you so much for agreeing to join me on the Something Extra podcast. Well, I'm thrilled to be here and I don't know that I have many extra things to talk about, so we'll see how this goes. It's gonna be great. It is gonna be great. Yeah, and our mutual friend, Josyn Koski, is the one that connected us and I'm really grateful to him for that. Yeah, but let's kind of go back because there's so much to you. I want to talk about your illustrious career, JP Morgan, and I especially want to talk about what you're doing today because you're very, very passionate about helping Gen Z and Gen Z's and the millennials, right? Yeah. And anyone truly, you and I just had an offline conversation and Ann's book, Your Best Financial Life, Safe Smart Now for the Future You Want. I love that subtitle. I love that subtitle. And I know you're just very passionate, but you and I were just talking offline and truly your principles and the things that you talk about in your book, really you said anyone over the age of 16. Absolutely. Absolutely. And even if you're older than a millennial, if you're Gen X or a boomer even, I think there are things you can always learn to do a better job of aligning what you want to be happening with your money, with what you're actually doing with your money. And that's, I think, one of the big slip happens for a lot of people. Yeah. Well, I can't wait. I mean, we're going to dig into all of that, but I know that you grew up in Hawaii. Yes. A terrible place to have to grow up, right? You know, it's funny people. I would just have this conversation with somebody a little while ago now, like, wasn't that amazing? And I'm like, you know, when you grow up somewhere, it's just, it's just where you grow up, right? I took for granted that we had papaya trees and banana trees in our backyard and our neighbors had a mango tree. And like that was just normal. And I was thinking about this today at lunch, because we're still getting really good Jersey peaches and I live in New Jersey now. And I had a gorgeous peach for lunch. And I ate my first ripe fresh peach when I was 16. I've never had one before they were exotic. Because when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, it all came over on in boats in a peach does not last across the Pacific Ocean in a container, you know, right? Oh, my goodness. But you did have coconuts and you did have pineapple. I had all of this. You know, I did. And I they're just normal. You don't, you know, when you're a kid, you just don't understand how special it is. You just think everybody around you is living and you know, maybe that's different today with social media. And, you know, we're also hyper aware of everybody else around us and standards of living. And actually, that's that's a problem for I think people, especially young people, because it's so easy to compare how you're doing to other people. But certainly when I was growing up, that that was our world. And I still remember seeing I don't know if you remember, I don't I don't know if they still do them or not the Budweiser commercials with the Clydesdale pulling like the Budweiser wagon through the snowy woods. And I just remember thinking that is the most exotic, magical snowy woods just, you know, just seemed incredibly exotic to me. So it's all that you grew up with. Right, right, right. Yeah, I'm thinking, what was it, Currier and Ives? Yes, yes, all those things just snowy. Yes. And maybe maybe kids in Arizona feel like this too, but just impossibly romantic and unimaginable. I never my I have cousins in in Vancouver, and we visited them when I was seven. And that's the only time I saw snow until I was 16, 17, on a high school trip. Yeah. Well, you know, there's good things about every place we grow up, right? That is so true. But do you think the island culture at all shaped your view towards money at all? I don't think so. I think, I think what you learn at home is really, as a child, you know, I talk about this in the book, we're all born with sort of a wiring. And we can talk about behavioral economics, right, but certain predispositions to being aware of delayed gratification or not. In the not category, I don't do that well. Really hating, you know, the fear of losing is really powerful for people. That actually is like irrelevant for me. I just don't have that. That's what made me a good money manager. Like I just don't worry about losing doesn't make me anxious. But there are a lot of studies that that most people, it's so painful to think about losing that people will take odds that are like wildly terrible in order to protect something, right? And so, so when you think about how you react to money, some of it is just literally the way your brain is wired to respond to certain kinds of stimuli, right? And that's genetics. And then there's all the nurture stuff, right? So there's the nature, how are you wired? And there's the the nurture, what did you get taught at home or not? And you know, my dad was a professor and I would have put a squarely in the middle class, you know, there wasn't a ton of extra money, but there was certainly enough money for things my parents thought was important. And they never talked about budgeting. There was just, you know, I never gotten allowance. It was just if they thought something made sense, they'd say, yes, you can have the money. And if they didn't, they didn't. And that's a terrible way to grow up. Because I didn't learn any, the only boundary I learned was, is this something important and useful and good? Like that doesn't help you when you've got a finite amount of money and you got to stretch it so far, right? I made a whole bunch of terrible mistakes because of that. That wasn't the island culture. That was what I learned at home. Most kids learn about money and how it works by the age of eight. Oh, is that right? Wow, I did not realize it was that early. But just before we most of us start talking to our kids about money. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll talk about that because you talk about money, shame. Yeah. And I think you have a story, even, right? Oh, about the women. Oh, that one. Yeah. And this woman who told me this had started a lemonade stand and she was so excited and she was talking about like the business of running her lemonade stand and her father basically said, we don't talk about money and shut it down. And again, what a terrible thing to do. And there's a core of a good value there, which is we shouldn't be referring to money as a way of making somebody better than or less than, right? Which I think that's what I take away from this is money does not make you a better human being, not having it does not make you a worse human being. It's actually irrelevant. And when you keep score with money and feel better about yourself because you have more money, I think that's a terrible thing. And I think that's where this whole we don't talk about money thing came from. But we'll talk about the mechanics of running a business with a child like that's that's parental malpractice, I think. Yeah. Well, I and I think I don't I think you're probably right. I think it's probably not, you know, making sure that that money was not status, you know, or how you stacked up because I mean, my parents really, and it could have been that generation, my dad was born in the Great Depression. You know, really, money was not really talked about. But but you said when you were a little girl, you know, money burned a hole in your pocket. So you're not on the savings side. I'm terrible. I am terrible at savings. I don't know if you've heard of them. I write in the book about the marshmallow test, which was this test that researchers at Stanford did in the 60s, with a bunch of preschoolers, and they gave the need to marshmallow, and then they said, Okay, the adults are going to leave the room and we'll be back in 10 minutes. And if you don't eat the marshmallow before we come back, we'll give you a second marshmallow. Okay, there is no way I would eat the marshmallow, like I would have been 100% all and like, Oh, nobody's here. Let me eat my marshmallow. Do you want yours? Like you're not eating yours. I'd like to have your marshmallow. Yeah, I would totally like you. Oh, my goodness. Well, I remember reading that story. And do you remember how that came out? I mean, are there more intensity towards spending or saving? It's a little complicated, because of course, it's not just that simple. But the bottom line is the kids who passed write the marshmallow test to successfully delayed gratification and didn't eat the marshmallow tended to do better in school. They tended to be more, you know, air quote responsible. They tended to do better with money. They were better at delaying gratification. And as we know, delaying gratification, whether it's not eating the marshmallow, saving for the future, saving for a down payment, studying for your test, right, that's all flavors of delayed gratification. And when more research was done, it kind of, I won't say debunked, but turns out there's a lot more at work than just your own wiring. And it's also what lessons have you learned as a three or four year old about your ability to trust the world. And do you trust that adult to actually follow through on that promise? Or have you learned by the age of four that you know what, if there's a marshmallow, you better grab it because somebody else might take it from you, right? So it's a little overly simplistic, but the core of it, I think, is true. And that has been documented and supported. So good. Well, tell this story, because this was kind of a turning point for you. You have a degree in political economy from Princeton, Masters in International Relations from John Hopkins, but you were in Italy, and there is an airport baggage story that was really kind of a pivot for you. Tell that story. So it was actually moving to Italy. I'd been living in Japan and I got to the airport to check in and, you know, was living as a sort of starving graduate student as one does. And I checked in and, you know, heaved my two giant suitcases out of the scale. And I had this like enormous garment bag that was like, like, I don't know how large this thing was. It was as big as my carry-on, my checked luggage, right? And the guy at the check-in stand says, okay, that's going to be, you got to weigh that thing. It's too big to go as carry-on. And I'm like, oh, okay, all right. And he says, that's going to be, I forget the exact number now, but it was $400. Yeah, it was $400. $400. Yeah, it was like 80,000 yen or whatever the exchange rate was. And I just, I just looked at him and I gave him my credit card and it bounced, right? It wouldn't go through because I was totally maxed out. And I just, I didn't have the money. And I started to cry. I was so ashamed of myself. You know, here I was starting this brand new life. I was moving and, you know, flying to Italy, moving with my husband, when he got engaged, I was going to look for a job in finance. I didn't have a job at this point. And I couldn't afford to get on the plane. And the guy finally just looked at the line behind me and just said, just never mind, just go. Lucky for you that day, right? Well, so there's actually a little more information here, which makes it a slightly less good story, which is a, was it off that you're allowed to, I didn't embellish the story, but I did not reveal all of the information. So part of the reason he let me go was if back in the day, right, American Airlines still had all these rules, and it, one of the rules was if you were leaving to or from the continental US, you were allowed to check bags for free. And that was just a rule. So if you flew to or from the US or within the US, you got to check bags. The rest of the world was one check bag. And he's like, have you ever flown like from Japan to Italy before? And I was like, no. And he said, okay, well, there's a rule, you probably don't know that you're only allowed one check bag. And I was like, I didn't know that. And so he was like, all right, fine, never mind. So that was part of the reason he let me through. But most of it was, I think, being confronted by my, you know, teary eyes and wobbly chin and like the 75 angry people behind me. But yeah. Well, okay. So you said, again, you know, I remember reading in the book that you were maxed out on your credit cards, financial stress out the wazze. When do you think that there was that shift in you? And where that money really instead of becoming a source of stress, really became more of an empowerment for you? What was the shift? I don't know that I've ever hit the point where money is empowering. What I did was understand that I am not bad with, let's just call it delayed gratification and not spending money on stuff I want. Because I'm a weak person, or a stupid person, or a bad person. I'm bad at it because I'm not wired like that. And I actually discovered that in over the course of about a year when I was doing research in my job at JPMorgan, designing target date funds for JPMorgan, which I ended up launching. And, you know, if you have a 401k plan, you probably have been defaulted into or have a choice of having a target date fund. So I was in charge of JPMorgan's version of these. And as part of the research for these funds, I rolled around going to 401k plan sponsor meetings. So if you have a 401k plan, there's a group of something called a fiduciary who's legally obligated to act in the plan's best interests. And they have meetings every quarter and they review all this stuff about the 401k plan, including how the investments are doing, but also how participants are doing. Are they saving? Are they taking out loans? Who's starting? Who's stopping? What do the statistics of behavior look like? And I was sitting through these meetings listening as a portfolio manager, like, you know, explaining my fund and my performance and the choices we were making and why they should either not fire us or hire us or whatever the story was. And I was sitting through these meetings going, well, hang on, they're spending hours talking about loans and people dropping out. And I was like, wait a minute, people don't all just save. People are just as messed up as I am. I mean, that was a huge like, I'm, whoa, this isn't just me, I'm not, you know, this isn't just me being uniquely terrible. And then I started doing more academic research into this whole relatively new field of behavioral economics, which kind of goes into the fact that we're not rational economic actors, right? As a student in the, in the 80s in college when I was studying economics, we were all taught that, you know, people are rational economic actors. And, you know, they're not, they are absolutely 100% not rational economic actors. They're all these things that influence why we make the decisions we do with money, with jobs, with, with all kinds of things. And the combination of those two things happening at the same time with this massive just weight off my shoulders is like, oh, I'm just like everybody else. I'm not the only one. And it's, it's, it took the whole moral, like success, failure is all my fault because of the active decisions I'm making. And it's like, oh, wait a minute, I'm not making any active decisions here at all. I'm just like, grabbing the thing that's in front of me before the saber tooth taker eats me, which is why we're all wired like this, right? That saying a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush is literally the marshmallow test, right? If there's a marshmallow in front of you, you better grab it because you never know when the tiger is going to come and take it, right? So it's not bad to not necessarily trust or to get overridden by that impulse, right? And so to me, one of the keys in helping people navigate their own money choices better is to help them understand like, a, some of this, the stuff you do may not be as conscious as you think. There have been Nobel prizes one for this stuff, right? So this is not by any means anything I've figured out. But, but I think a, it may or may not be a conscious decision you're making. And therefore, if you want to change it, you need, if you don't like the results, right, you need to number one, understand it. And then number two, say, okay, well, how do I stop recreating the circumstances over and over again? Like, don't, if you struggle with not eating Oreos, I will also put myself in that camp, like, don't leave them on the counter. Right. Don't buy them in the first place, right? Exactly, right. Change the behavior. Change, change the, the circumstances that lead to the behavior. Yes. So that you're less likely to have that behavior happen. So, so, and that's, that's to me, just the root of starting to change your behavior. And then there's a lot of other stuff that you can really dig into about your relationship with money and the lessons you learned. And if you grew up, you know, financially insecure, there may be some other work you can do that's sort of a longer, slower, deeper path. And like, I encourage people to do that, but that may take a while. And in the meantime, maybe create some guardrails around yourself so you don't keep falling off. Right. And to me, that's, that's, that's the big lesson. You can forgive yourself, make space to do the work and set up some guardrails so that it's more easy for you to stay on the track that you want to be on. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Well, you know, I just, I wanted to say, I mean, there's just so much. I mean, you really have had, you had an illustrious career. You were the managing director for portfolio manager, head of retirement solutions at JP Morgan, and you were there for 30 years, which is awesome. You also like, you talked about Japan a little bit before you went to Italy, you had, you were awarded a Fulbright research fellowship to work in Japan. Did you, you know, have any, I mean, because you've been in Italy, you've been in, do you, did you see like commonalities between the different places that you lived, you know, in and in the relationship with money? Did you see that people generally are the same? I think, and I've done a lot of work in, I mean, I lived in Japan, I lived in Italy, I lived in Italy for five and a half years, Japan for one year, one and a half years. And then I've done a lot of work, you know, professionally in UK and Australia. And I think a lot of, you know, what I call the Anglo-Saxon world, like the US, UK, Australia, these native English speaking countries, not so sure about New Zealand, are more alike in some ways in that there's a culture of investing in equities and taking financial risk. And I think my observation is, you know, in Japan and in Italy, and in other European countries and other Asian countries, people are much less trusting of the equity markets in general, and they have much less historical reason to be, because historically they haven't performed so well. And there's much more of a savings culture and much less comfort with taking financial risk. So it was certainly true in Italy for a long time that country had many, many famous problems with its budget deficit, its governments, its exchange rate like the lure was constantly devaluing. And people would buy government bonds because they were paying 15, 18, 20% interest because they had crazy high inflation and they kept devaluing against everybody. So it wasn't necessarily a good economic decision to me, but on paper, it looked great. And it was probably better than investing in the Italian stock market at the time, right? I'm talking about the 70s and the 80s and maybe the early 80s. And in Japan, it's the same thing, very high historic savings rates, right? Massively higher than the US like 15, 20, 25% of income is just like what you do. And it's a cultural thing. A cultural thing, right? Well, tell me this and then I want to get into your book because that's where I want to spend the majority of our time, but you've got three patents, Ian. Tell me more about that. That's incredible. That's incredible. Good for you. The first couple were born out of total frustration. So, like I said, I helped develop and manage JP Morgan's Target Day Funds. And when I launched those Target Day Funds, and actually it's funny because it's coming up now a lot too in the press suddenly, we launched those with every single kind of investable asset that we could legally buy at the time. So not just US stocks and US bonds, which is kind of like, you know, meat and potatoes, but we had international stocks and small cap stocks and emerging market equity and emerging market debt and high yield bonds, which are getting a little crazier right now. We're getting into the fancy stuff. And we also, because my team had managed a lot of money for very large pension plans and endowments and foundations and universities and stuff, invested in what are called private assets that are not traded on a stock exchange. And we used real estate, we used private debt. We looked at but ended up not doing at the time for sort of technical reasons, private equity. So these are unlisted securities that you can't buy in a mutual fund. And our view at the time 20 plus years ago was, you know, we want to put all the good stuff in these funds. So we'd roll into these conversations with clients, we're trying to pick between us and somebody else. And the clients would be putting really different kinds of funds together to have kind of like a beauty pageant, like a beauty show, like who do you like better, who's shinier, who has prettier pictures in their slidebook, you know, who talks better. So there's always, you know, research and yadda yadda yadda. And they'd end up comparing us on things that were so different. It's like you're comparing it's it's not even apples and oranges, you're comparing like apples and screwdrivers, like we weren't even the same family, right? We were comparing our fund with all this crazy, exotic investing stuff with somebody who had like US stocks, US bonds, international equities, fixed income boom done for asset classes and like we had 13, like, you should think about that that decision is bigger than if you like us or them like make that decision first, right? Make make the decision about what kind of investment you want first and then pick the manager, right? So the first two patents were for a way to help clients understand basically what pond they wanted to be fishing when they were picking a manager. The last patent was for something really geeky and that was trying to help people figure out how they could retire with a pot of money and make sure it didn't run out before they died. So if you were, if you retire, right, and you have a 401k plan, maybe you don't have a financial advisor or you retire, you got half a million bucks and they're like, good luck. And you're like, well, how much? A, how do I invest? It'd be how much, how much do I spend out of this every year? Like how much can I take? How much can I afford? How long am I going to live? You can't answer any of the questions. So we came up with a methodology to help provide guidance because we couldn't tell people what to do because then we get into all kinds of regulatory trouble. But to provide a sort of, you could withdraw between these two amounts and have a very high probability of having it last until you're 100. So that patent was, like I said, super geeky mathematically and had a whole bunch of inputs and I thought was, was a very interesting idea. We ended up not launching a product based off the back of it for a whole other bunch of reasons, but it was, it's a, it's a fun thing to do, you know, it's a fun thing to be creative and try to solve a problem nobody solved before. Yeah, for sure. I know it's not easy. I know it's not easy because I've got friends that have patents and I know it's not an easy process. But I want to get into this and then we do need to take a quick break and then we'll come right back. But why did you write this book? And you were so passionate, like I said, about millennials and Gen Z's, you know, millennials, 1981 to 1996, Gen Z 1997 to 2012. And you have, you have your own two kids, right? So this could have been part of it, you know, and why did you decide to write the book? So I guess three big reasons. And I'll start with the selfish one first. I wish I'd been able to read this book when I was that age. Like, I, I needed all this information and I had none of it, none of it. I got a little bit of it in my first job from some older co workers who were like explaining that it was important to save for retirement. And here's how you think about investing the money. But that that was it, like a couple of, Oh, by the way, did you sign up for the federal first savings plan? Because that's what I had in my first job, because I worked for a senator right out of college. So that was the first reason I said, I wish I had this book, it's the book I wanted. The second reason is for my kids, it's, it's the book I want them to have and I want their friends to have and, and that to me is super important. And then the third reason is kind of tied to the second one, when you're in your twenties and thirties and even early forties, time is on your side. And you can kind of fix most financial messes. Like if you've not started saving at all, you start saving in your thirties, you're going to have to save a little bit more than you wish you did if you want to be able to stop working in your mid to late sixties. But it's possible. So it's essentially a happy book with a single message, which is help you figure out how to save more money. And choices are there, you can live your best financial life. If you're 55 or 60 and have not started saving at all, this is not a happy story, right? This is a story about reading to make some really uncomfortable tradeoffs. And my book is stuffed full of advice that will help you live a better life. But I'm not going to say it's going to be your best life, because you're going to have to make some really uncomfortable changes where you live, what your house looks like, maybe the state you live in, how long you have to work, there are all kinds of unpleasant things that if you really want to shift things and give yourself more resources when you retire, you just have unpleasant choices to make that are going to be painful. And so the third reason is I didn't want to write that unhappy book. Yeah, I mean, you, I mean, and you're taking what you've learned, right? Personally, personally, I mean, you had to go through some things personally, you know, because you said I'm managing all, you know, all this money for JP Morgan, and then my own life, I wasn't managing so mess, you know, so I love it because I mean, I read somewhere where you said you feel like you're giving a gift, you're giving other people a gift. And, and we know, and it's financial stress. It does all kinds of things to us, right? It's stressful on our, if we're, if we're married, it's, it's stressful on our health. It makes us stupid too. And I think something I wish more employers understood is the amount of lost productivity that is going on in the workplace because of stress. And I've seen studies that say as much as 20% of productivity is lost because of financial stress for the average worker, that's one day a week. Right. I mean, and, and it may or may not be the case that an employer can say great, I'll give everybody a 20% raise like that might not be financially realistic. But, you know, to think about ways of helping them more successfully manage their day to day finances, a very simple thing that, that is now legally possible, and I think is now starting to gain some traction is helping workers set up emergency savings funds next to their 401k plans that automatically get deducted from their paycheck. So automation is king, right? Automation is the first step to solving this. And once I talk about it in the book, right? Once you get a little bit used to building that savings muscle, suddenly you're a saver. And suddenly that set of new tires that you haven't, you didn't know you needed, right? And then you get into a fender bender and they're like, Yeah, well, your tires are bald. And you're like, Oh, that's 1000 bucks. I don't have like, what do you do? Right? You gotta figure it out. Otherwise, you're not going to go to work. Like, I mean, that, that is the thing that tips people over into catastrophe, right? Something is seemingly naive is needing new tires, right? I mean, and so I just never want anybody to be losing sleep over needing to buy new tires. Yeah. Well, it is a gift. It is a gift. If people will take it and learn and dig in, right? And do the work, right? And well, we do need to take a quick break and we'll be right back on the Something Extra podcast with Ann Lester. In business, the tendency is to seek out partners who are bigger, faster, stronger. When it comes to it, you should be looking for smarter, faster, better. That's just what you'll find with the talented technologists at technology partners. Our experts develop custom solutions to tackle your most complex challenges, all to simplify your processes in the smartest, most efficient way possible. The time to be swift and nimble starts now. Go to technologypartners.net/solutions and see what's possible. Welcome back, everyone. This is Something Extra podcast with Ann Lester. I've been learning so much, Ann. Thank you so much. I feel like I've had a mini MBA course here. But, you know, what, I mean, we've been talking about, goodness gracious, if you're 55 in or 16, you have not started saving, it's going to be a hard road. It's probably going to be a really hard road. But what if somebody just feels really behind financially that they feel like, you know, I really have not managed my money well? What is one step, just that one thing that they can do, you know, to move the needle in the right direction? So to me, it starts with your cash flow, right? What's coming in? What's going out? And to start making a dent, you have to have a really hard conversation with yourself about what are your needs, what are your wants, and what are desires. And I remember doing this when I left my job at JP Morgan, because, you know, I'll just say this, we had not saved enough to continue living at the lifestyle to which I aspired. My husband's like, yeah, I'm good. We don't need to do that anymore. I'm like, no, I want to go do that. So, so it's definitely me pushing this one in our family. But I spent some time reflecting on what was my definition of failure, like absolute failure. And I remember great when I moved to Italy, we'd moved in together. I had not yet gotten a job. He had an entry level job. We had just no money. I mean, so little money that we'd sit down every week and we'd say, okay, do we want to buy meat? Or do we want to buy an English language newspaper, which costs like nine or 10 bucks? And we debate that. And so, you know, every once in a while we'd get a newspaper, but mostly we got food. And there was this is before the internet, by the way. There was no information flying around, right? We could not get English language news, right? So, we went to the grocery store, did our weekly shopping, and I got a chicken. And that chicken was going to turn into, you know, a roast chicken. And then it was going to, the bones were going to turn into chicken soup. And the extra meat was going to turn into chicken, you know, risotto and a chicken pasta sauce. And like this was going to be our food, that our meat for like, you know, five days. And we get the chicken home, we unwrap it out of the cellophane, right? It's a whole chicken. And I'm like, wait a minute, this chicken has a head and feet. And it hasn't been cleaned. It was a polo tradizionale, right? Traditional chicken. And it had been plucked. And I'm looking at this chicken, which we've now unwrapped and are certainly not going to take back the groceries towards this point, right? And we're just like, well, I guess we're going in, right? So take the head off, take the feet off, get out our, you know, old joy of cooking, which, thank goodness, had a section on how to clean game, because remember, no internet, no YouTube videos to watch. And I still remember the instructions are firmly grasping the neck of the chicken in your left hand with a very sharp knife, carefully reach inside and right. So we clean the chicken. Okay, I never want to be that poor again. I never ever want to be so poor that I think, right? Well, the only thing to do here is clean the chicken. Now any of your listeners who go hunting, like I'm going to sound like a totally spoiled brat, I can still hear my grandmother in my head saying, you don't know how to clean a chicken. I think she grew up in a farm in Kansas, right? Right. She, that was her job cleaning the chickens at the age of seven. I told her the story and she was like, you don't know how to clean the chicken. I was like, no. That's too poor. Like that's failure. Okay, so you're trying to find ways to save some money. Are you going out to eat? Are you buying food that's not on sale? Are you going to the discount grocery store? Are you going, I mean, sorry to throw whole foods onto the bus here, but like, are you going to the fancy grocery store, the Wegmans, whatever it is in your area? Are you going like, where can you start saving money? And if you've already done all of that, right, that's when this gets really hard. And you might need to think about trying to increase your income somehow. You probably already have been worried about that. But you got to find places to stop spending, reducing a car. If you're traveling, stop. Right? If you are buying new clothes, stop. If you're subscribing to cable and seven or eight streaming services, stop. Watch the commercials on commercial TV. It'll be okay for a little while, right? Like you can stop spending hundreds of dollars a month, hundreds of dollars a month, that typically are going on streaming services and cable and your cell phone, and you can really cut back. Painful, super painful. They are going to be unpleasant decreases in your lifestyle. And that's why I wanted to write the happy book, which is, you know, if you're young, you're still getting raises, you can save half of every raise and do a beautiful thing for yourself, which is significantly increase how much you're saving, but also not get used to spending all your money. Because when you get your 40s and your 50s, sadly, those raises tend to slow down or stop. And so if you've been riding that escalator up with your income and increasing your spending and your consumption, which is a pretty natural thing to do, ask me how I know, right? When you decide to spend less, you're suddenly feeling pain. Right. Yeah, I do think you're right, though. I mean, it's many times directly proportional. If your income goes up, then your spending goes up. You get a bigger house or you get a different car, right? Let's go to that 25-year-old, 35-year-old. So say a 25-year-old is just starting out. What is the, and I think I know what you're going to say about this, but what's the single most important habit that you can establish right now? Have some savings automatically deducted from your paycheck. If you are fortunate enough to work for an employer who has a 401(k) plan or another kind of workplace pension, depending on where you work, there might be different, it might be a 403(b) or, you know, they're at 457. There are different names for these things, but basically they all work the same way. They, you can have some money deducted from your paycheck. Most employers will match that. You probably got signed up automatically when you went to work for them. It's probably going into a target date fund. Don't mess with it, leave it alone. Just leave it alone. Let it go. You also need to be, and this is maybe even more important, especially if you don't have a workplace savings program, you need to be simultaneously starting an emergency savings fund. That also needs to come out of your paycheck automatically. It isn't something that you think, "Do I have any money left over this month?" It's one of the first things you do. It's a bill putting that money into your savings account. Why? Because you need three to six months living expenses tucked away in a rainy day savings fund, hopefully earning high yield interest. Three to half, four percent would be great right now, because that's what you're going to use when you need the new set of time. Ideally, you know you're going to need new tires every once in a while and you're already budgeted, but if you have it, that comes out of your emergency savings. Medical expense, unexpected, comes out of that. God forbid you lose your job. You get your hours cut, right? You need something to tide you over. That's why you need that fund. It's the thing that's going to stop you from tipping over into catastrophe. Well, I mean, I think this is a big one too. Ann, let's think about millennials. What would you tell them if they feel so crushed by student debt? Yeah, student debt is such a burden for so many people. I think I've been reading stories in the newspapers now about people graduating who just the jobs that they assumed would be there that are going to, like the whole reason you went to college are just not there or not at the pay rate that they had all assumed they would get. And that is a massive societal problem. Again, it's not nice. You have to figure out what you need to do to try to live within your means. And it is not, I mean, I've been there, right? Like the chicken story, like yeah, you clean the chicken. You have roommates. You drive as beat up an old car as you can afford to drive because you don't want it to be so beat up that you're repairing it all the time, right? There's a fine line there between really old and a joker and falling apart versus like, yeah, you buy your first car that you buy should be three or four years old, right? New enough to be reliable, not brand new because it will depreciate right when you drive it off the lot. And there's just no point in doing that. You're just burning money when you do that, right? So buy a decent used car. You got to get comfortable for many kids who've been to college, certainly not for first gen kids who are like, you know, coming out of a much more insecure financial environment. But I think I see this with our own friends and their kids, like you're if you come from a nice upper middle class background, you're not going to have your parents lifestyle when you get out of school and you're paying your own way. You're just not. And yes, why do we think that that's not okay? Like that, of course, that's fine. Yeah, like maybe you don't have central air conditioning and you have to share a bathroom. Like, yeah, that's that's okay. Like, yes, that's what you do when you start out. That's kind of the whole getting used to getting, you know, so I do think it's all getting started. I do think that as a culture, we've become uncomfortable, right with this notion that we get uncomfortable sometimes, like it's okay to be a little bit uncomfortable. Like, I think a good analogy is, you don't want people to suffer or sacrifice, but a little bit of discomfort. I mean, it's something I consciously try to work on, especially with money, like, you know, a middle seat in the back of the plane, I'll still get you there. It's not comfortable. Do you want to spend 39 bucks on a, I don't know if you don't have it, don't spend the money on more leg room. I just don't. You don't need to. You can sit in the middle of the plane in the back. I just did it the other day. Yeah, you know, it happens. It's uncomfortable. It's not terrible. Yeah. Well, and Anne too, and I think, you know, in our generation, I mean, I know that my mom and dad wanted me to have it better than they had it. And I think we're kind of the same way. But there are lessons that I think sometimes you only learn in the struggle. I only learn in the struggle and don't remove, always remove the struggle, right? Because there are things you're going to learn there. Yeah, I could not agree with it more. And I think understanding how to live with discomfort and uncertainty is one of the most important things we can do. And one of the most important gifts we can give our children. And it's really hard as a parent to do that, right? It's one of the most difficult things you can do. But I think that's how we learn and become resilient. And like the impulse to make it all go away, because you can, is up to a certain point, not a healthy one. You got to resist that. You've got to resist that. So, well, okay, so there is a perspective out there called fire, financial independence, retiring early, there's a movement. I mean, what's your perspective on that, Ann? I think it's an incredibly laudable and admirable goal to try to accumulate enough assets to give yourself choices. And that is in fact what we do when we say for retirement, right? I want to be able to have some choice over when I leave the workforce and what I do afterwards. One of the things I think can be quite challenging about fire. And I don't think people are really doing it the way they were, you know, five years ago, seven years ago, 10 years ago, is I'm going to live on $50,000 a year, and I'm going to save everything else. And I'm going to, maybe it's 65 now with inflation, whatever. But, and I am going to never let my lifestyle get any better. And I am going to just hunker down so that I can quit. So, much of the fire movement is built on the assumption that you can rely on something called the 4% rule, right? So, your whole goal is to save up a million bucks, you'll get $40,000, even just that for inflation going forward, and then you live on that for the rest of your life. Okay, I can tell you, and this is one of the patents we got, like that 4% rule doesn't work a lot of the time. Most of the time it doesn't work. Most of the time it doesn't work because you can actually afford to spend more than 4%. If you want your money to last 30 years, that's a really important thing. The 4% rule is designed to say, how much money can you afford to take out if you need your money to last 30 years? Okay, so A, if you're retiring at 65, that's already getting a little dicey these days, because a lot of people are going to live longer than 95. So, it's 30 years the right number. If you're doing this at 35 or 40, you've got 60 years to worry about, and that 4% rule starts feeling very scary to me. If we have another run of two or three or four bad years in the stock market, and you keep pulling money out, you're going to end up with zero really fast. If you don't pull money out, you're not going to have any money to live on. You're going to need to go back to work in an environment where the economy is terrible, and you haven't been working at a sort of W-2 paycheck-y job for a long time. That is not a good place to find yourself in the age of 50. That's not a good, right. So, to me, it's not so much that it's a terrible thing to do. I think anything that gets you motivated to save and think about the future and gives you choices is awesome. What I worry about is people that do it because they hate their job and want to quit. Yeah, that old adage, don't run from something. If you're going to be leaving something, make sure you're running to something, and that there's purpose there, right? And maybe you're wanting to pivot or something like that, but yeah, don't be running from something. You'll just take that same problem with you wherever you go, right? I love that. I love that. I love what you just said. And if your intention is to continue to work, but not in a formal job, and you've got skills that you keep maintaining, you just don't have a dependable 401(k) plan and paycheck health insurance. Let's not forget you got a paper health insurance. That's great, but then that's not really fire. That's having enough of a backstop that you feel confident enough to pivot, as you say, and embrace a different kind of career. Right, for sure, for sure. Oh my goodness, I've got so much more here that I want to talk about, but we're running out of time. And so I'm just going to ask you just a couple, let me just a little lightning round here, and then I want to talk about something extra. So for you, I mean, you're a brilliant woman. There's no doubt about that. How do you continue to grow? What do you read? What do you read? I mean, you write books, but what do you read? I just got this book today, called Joy Span. Joy Span. Yeah, from a woman that I had the privilege of doing a speaker's class with. She's brilliant, Dr. Carrie Burnight. And I can't wait to read it. I mean, I'm a voracious reader. I always want to be learning. I think the message in this book, which is that it's about your attitude as much as anything else, and you can approach, I mean, it is kind of like about making lemonade. So I mean, I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think there's going to be so many nuggets of wisdom I learn here. I keep doing new things. Like I'm still trying to learn how to ski. I go on long walks. I pick up new hobbies. I am a lifelong learner and I love taking lessons and taking classes and learning. And I think that just keeps me fresh. So that's a key. I love that. I love that. Well, let me ask you this. What do you believe is this something extra that every leader needs? And what is your something extra? It's hard to boil it down to one thing. I think mine is curiosity and humility. I think I'm always curious and I'm always, I think a kind and healthy skeptic. I think skepticism can be unhealthy and mean, but I'm always like, why is that true? Why do you say that? Why is it working this way? Why do you assume that's the right thing? And that translates for me into making sure I ask the right question. Right. Because if you ask the right question, you're going to get the wrong answer, right? That's right. Exactly. And I think, you know, for leaders, it's that can be a path to success. I guess when I look at successful leaders, most of them are pretty deeply humane, humble and empathetic. And I think it's the human that I think makes a success for the leader. That's so good. Well, and I told you that, you know, my book is coming out something extra. I can't wait. It explores 23 different traits. The very first trait is humility. Because I do, I think it's so, I think it's so imperative, right? Because that's, there's so much that we can go into there. But I love that that you said humility. Well, this has been so good. I appreciate you making the time. I cannot wait for our listeners to learn from you. Listeners, go pick up Ann's book, your best financial life. Give it to, I'm just thinking, make a great graduation present too. I mean, at any age, right? Absolutely. But let's get our kids starting young with good habits and good practices around money management. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been a fabulous conversation and I can't wait to read your book. So looking forward to it. Well, it was wonderful spending time with you. So thanks again. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today's show. Something extra with Lisa Nichols is a Technology Partners production. Copyright Technology Partners, Inc. 2019. For show notes or to reach Lisa, visit tpi.co/podcast. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you listen.