Joe Saul-Sehy is the creator and co-host of the Stacking Benjamins and Money With Friends podcasts

Understanding Time Horizons with Justin Waring

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TRANSCRIPT:

ZAK: Today on the show, a few simple tweaks you can make to automate your financial picture.

JOE: That's one of my favorite things to talk about, Zak and I think it's the hidden thing that people don't think about. They think they need to make more money. They think that they need to pay attention to their budget a lot. Which, you know, both those things are great but, man, automated your financial picture so that money just goes to the right place I think is the best advice I've got.

ZAK: Heck yeah. So, I have been meaning to do that for, I don't know, five years and just haven't. So, how would you suggest folks get started?

JOE: Well, the cool thing about it is that you just do it once. The nice thing about automating your finances is you do it once and it's all done. And I think that the way we think about it is that our brains can only handle so much at one time. Here's where I'm coming from. Sherlock Holmes, the smartest guy who never lived, in A Study in Scarlet, he famously said, 'What the deuce is the solar system to me.' And what he's really saying is he only has so much room in his brain attic and he needs to just focus on the important stuff. And one of my favorite researchers about time management, a woman named, Laura Vanderkam. She talks about our brains being a battery and that battery during the course of a day, it runs out. So, I don't want my brain battery running out before I remember to build my net worth. So, this is where automation comes in and all these important things we need to do, like remember to save and pay the bills on time. If we automate that stuff, we can just focus on the most important thing in our financial life which is finding ways to be better at our job and maybe make more money or have a more fulfilling career.

ZAK: I love it. So, what do you use to automate?

JOE: So, the first thing I have is something that helps me track my money and I use a low-cost program called Tiller cause I don't like ads but there's plenty of free things. There's a great one called Clarity Money. There's another one called Mint. There's Money Lion. The bad news about those apps is that they will market to you at the same time as they're helping you but what I like about all of these is that you can set alerts that you tell you when you go over set numbers. So if I spend too much money at a restaurant. This happened to me just a few weeks ago. I go through a drive-thru to pick up some food and immediately my phone buzzes because I went over my restaurant budget for that week. I really like the fact that I don't have to pay attention to my money every minute. I just have to pay attention at critical times. The other thing, though. The one that most people have is if you have a job and you have direct deposit, almost everyone direct deposits to their checking account and this is a really easy, automation shift. So, you already have the automation, we just have to have it go to the right place. Have that go to you savings account instead. And all of a sudden your brain has flipped and now the money is automatically saved and instead of deciding how much of your paycheck you want to save, now your money is already saved and you have to decide how much you want to spend and now we're doing critical task, number one, I think, which is we're disassociating the amount of money that we make from the amount of money that we spend. And when I made that one switch, all of a sudden where I didn't think I could save money before, money started piling up in my savings account because I'd always leave a little there instead of taking every dime to spend on whatever I needed that walk.

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