026. Where Did My Money Go? Review Amber’s 2023 Spending & Get Set for a Profitable 2024

Lifestyle

Dec 19

If you reached the end of the year saying "Where did my money go…"

it's time to whip your financial life into shape to start the new year on the right foot. With six steps to scrub your money slate clean to start fresh in 2024, this wealth management masterclass is all about being intentional with your budget and increasing your net worth for the most profitable year yet.

As a bonus, get an example script on negotiating with your bank and hear an inspiring transformation story about an Old Money listener who completely changed their mindset on debt.

In today's episode, we cover the following:

Amber's philosophy on December and the end of the year (1:01)

Six high-level steps to review your finances over the year (2:40)

Step #1: This year's spending in review: a peek inside Amber's money-tracking spreadsheet (7:18)

Step #2: Paying off your debt: how to organize it, plus a success story (28:00)

Step #3: Planning for 2024 (33:51)

Step #4: Negotiation, plus scripts (35:29)

Step #5: New opportunities to create more revenue (39:40)

Step #6: Reassess your automations (43:36)

Stock tip: take your PTO in December (45:40)

TRANSCRIPT

Amber F. (00:05)
Happy holidays, rich girls. Welcome back to the Old Money podcast. You know where you are? It's the podcast for women building the trust fund they wish they were born with. And I'm your host, Amber Frankhuizen.

Amber F. (00:17)
This is an episode you are not going to want to miss. As Bethany Frankel would say. I'm going to mention it all. I am taking you through my 2023 breakdown of where I spent, what I did. I'm going to tell you what I did this year.

Amber F. (00:31)
I'm going to let you know where it went well, where it went really off the rails. And I also have a major success story I want to share today about somebody I know who has really changed their mindset around debt. And I really want to help you set up your 2024 for the most profitable year ever. So it's cozy. I have poppy sitting at my feet snoring.

Amber F. (00:50)
So if you hear a little cute little purr in the background, it's my dog snoring at my feet. And we're going to get into it today. So to start it off, I just want to tell you my philosophy on just December in general and the end of the year, because it's so crazy. Once we hit Thanksgiving, I feel like people just jump to 2024, and you've seen the memes, and I totally am guilty of this as well. It's like, is this a before the holidays problem or an after the holidays problem?

Amber F. (01:16)
And I am a big after the holidays problem. I don't let our agency start any new projects in December. Of course, I did break that rule this year, and it totally bit me in the ass. But that's a story for another day. But I really like to take the end of the year to wrap up, to reflect, to rewind.

Amber F. (01:32)
I'm a cancer, so I'm very nostalgic. I really enjoy looking backwards to look forwards. I talked about this in the last episode of if you want to know where you're going to be in ten years, just look at where you were ten years ago. Right? I love those types of exercises.

Amber F. (01:47)
And in this particular episode, we're going to talk a lot about money, reflection and looking at what happened so that we can make better plans for our future, for our future selves. I do have an episode coming up all about kind of a holistic look of envisioning your future self, setting yourself up for a great mindset in the next year. But today we're really going to talk about the financial nuts and bolts and managing a budget and doing all the things that I've done. And to be honest, I have struggled with this in the past, doing a wrap up, because it can be a lot of work when you're trying to get your financial life in order, it can feel like there's so many moving parts and there's so many different accounts to look at and bills to open and how do I get structured. And so I'm going to take really high level steps here to go through a few things that I do at the end of my year in December, to look back and then plan forward.

Amber F. (02:36)
So today I'm going to cover six steps. Number one, reviewing our 2023 spending report. Number two, planning for 2024. And this is good for any year, obviously can do this next year for 24, 25, we'll deal with debt, we're going to negotiate, we're going to identify new opportunities, and then we're going to do automation, set up or updates. And listen, like I said, I used to feel a lot of resistance to doing this as well because I didn't have the systems in place.

Amber F. (03:04)
But every single month I've been sitting down and doing my money dates and plugging my spending into my, I'll call it my spending plan. I call it wealth management. That's what my budget is called. I don't like the word budget. Budget feels very constricting to me.

Amber F. (03:17)
So I have a spreadsheet called wealth Management 2023, and I have everything listed out there. I'll walk you through it when we get to the budget of it all. But I wanted to share something with you about why it's important to do this. And as we've discussed before, I really believe that I am the CEO of my life. Like, there's no one else running the company of me, nobody else that cares more about my money than me, and nobody else who's going to come save me if shit goes wrong.

Amber F. (03:43)
So it's my responsibility to make sure that my business is healthy. And look, I have this perspective now because I do keep a business healthy. I am the CEO of my company, and every year and monthly I go through and create a budget. I'm looking at every single thing that we would be spending on, whether it's staffing and labor cost, whether it's insurance cost, the amount of money I expect to spend on postage for mailing stuff out throughout the year, it all gets put into a budget. And when I used to work in real estate development, and we would do this for all of the real estate development projects that we had going on, we would have budget meetings that were so incredibly painful.

Amber F. (04:24)
I'm talking like two to 3 hours in a conference room with all the finance team, all of the accounting team. Of course, I was always the only girl, 100%. And every single person in their discipline would have to come prepared with all the information they would need to put together a budget for building whatever this project was. I'm talking about building a 14 story tower, I'm talking about building a tracked home community. I'm talking about building condos or apartments or whatever.

Amber F. (04:51)
And so our vp of construction would have to come prepared with lumber futures. How much lumber, how much it's going to cost to hire the framers, how much it's going to cost to do the demo, the moving the land, the underground utilities, I don't know, the fixtures that go on your cabinets so that you can open the doors. I mean, every single piece has to be detailed out in order to create a budget that is what's required in business. So that you can take that to an investor and say, here's all the costs and this is what it's going to cost to build this project, and here's how I'm going to build it and give you money back. Right.

Amber F. (05:29)
And for the marketing side, for me, I would detail out everything from how much is the branding going to cost and assuming that it's going to increase from our creative agency, and then how much is it going to cost to hire a PR firm, how much is it going to cost to hire the sign spinners that stand on the corner with the sign to direct people to the community once it opens? I mean, you have to forecast everything. And that's what I do for my life as well. I forecast absolutely everything. And I'll run you through all of my categories and how I set up my budget when we get to that piece.

Amber F. (06:00)
But I get, if you're having resistance to it, it can feel so overwhelming. I totally understand. So I'm hopeful that this will help kind of alleviate the burden of it. And I just want to remind you that you, being the CEO of your life, it does take a little bit of work to get organized, it does take dedication and critical thinking skills, but you deserve it. This is your life and your business.

Amber F. (06:21)
And I want you to remember that money for you can be a resource to make the decisions that you want for yourself. I mean, the more of the resource that you have, the more of these choices become available to you, including when to work, where to work. I mean, if you want to work at all, it's how you spend your time. It's what time you wake up in the morning. It's how much support you can get, where you can go, who you can see.

Amber F. (06:45)
There are so many things that having money can influence, and I want you to have the most options available for you and your family forever. And so that's what having money really means to me. It means freedom, it means choice, it means opportunity. And it's also a fun game to play. Part of playing the game is being organized with it, because you're not going to win at the game if you refuse to open your bills, if you're behind on payments or you're not looking at the future.

Amber F. (07:10)
So again, we're going to go through the six different steps, starting with number one, my 2023 spending review. I'm going to break down how much I saved and spent, where it went, where I'm over budget, where I was under budget, the whole nine yards. So let's get into it. This is very naked for me to share this with you. I'm not going to share actual numbers.

Amber F. (07:33)
I'm going to share things in percentages, because everything is relative. And that's actually the best way to really plan out your spending guides for next year. So, first of all, I have a spreadsheet in my computer. I look at it every month during my money date, and it has, let's see here, one, two, three major sections. Incoming wealth building, which is my savings, monthly investments.

Amber F. (07:59)
And then at the bottom, it has a little bit of math, like totaling everything up. Okay, so in incoming, at the top, I have a budget, and then I have next to it, the actual. So what happens is, as I build this spreadsheet to look forward. So, like 2024, for example, I'm just building out my projections for the year. And I do those, like, in light gray.

Amber F. (08:20)
I'm just kind of making a best guess. And I'm going to say how much I project to have in my salary, how much I project to take as an owner's draw from my business, or a distribution, as it's called, extra income that I earned, anything that people owe me, like I manage all of the finances for our household. So if Justin owes me any money, it shows on that line. And then there's a line for any money that I'm going to take as income, that I'm basically just moving from my savings accounts to my income for the month to cover additional expenses. And I'll cover that again in a second, and then it totals it up.

Amber F. (08:53)
Okay, so onto wealth building, which is my savings category. I have every single saving or investing account listed here, except for the things that happen with my simple Ira, which is my retirement savings that's set up through my company that just gets scraped off of my paycheck every single month. So out of sight, out of mind, it's just going and doing its own thing. It is in another account, and I have money going there separately. So I track that on a different page of this document.

Amber F. (09:23)
But I'll tell you about that later. Wealth building the savings area I have my emergency fund. I have a line for my brokerage account in Schwab, and that is my non retirement investment account. I have one for my Roth Ira. I have all of my subcategories that are in capital one. If you listen to I think the episode is number five or six, it's afford everything you want. And I talk about setting up these individual accounts for all these different buckets in my savings. In Capital one. I have a fund for Poppy. I have a fund for designer splurges or bigger purchases. I have a fund for Botox, laser filler face. I have a fund for Christmas gifts. I have a fund for down payment. And I also have a line here for Coinbase, which would be my crypto investments or things that I'm making. Not as much this year, even though bitcoin is doing really great right now.

Amber F. (10:17)
But that's a line as well. So I have total projected savings all float out for 2024. And I had that float out for the beginning of 2023. Then when I go through my monthly investments, I call it. But it's really monthly expenses. I have rent, San Diego gas and electric, water, Netflix tv stuff, Spotify, Patreon, gym and insurance. And those are all my fixed costs. Those are all the things I know exactly what they're going to cost every single month. Beneath that, I have my variable costs. These are things that fluctuate month to month. Groceries, gas, parking, or ubers. I put like transportation in one little bucket there, eating out, coffee out. One category, hair. I have lash extensions. I have beauty or makeup or skincare products. I have beauty facial, manipetty services. I have botox, fillers, lasers. I have luxury items, clothes. I have Amazon target house supplies. I have house decor.

Amber F. (11:16)
I have a little bucket for float and fun. There's travel, there's therapy, there's doctor visits and healthcare expenses, car maintenance and registration. And the last line is Christmas, plus gifts for others. So again, my categories are incoming money. I have my savings, I have my fixed expenses, and I have my variable expenses. Now the way that it broke out for me was pretty on point where I thought it was going to be. Now, there's a whole bunch of different guidelines out there of people that are financial experts that say, here's where you should have your fixed costs at, your investments, at, your savings at. But I'm a big believer that based on the season of your life that you're in, your guidelines are going to change drastically. My dog is snoring beneath me right now. So, Berta, literally, you can leave this in.

Amber F. (12:05)
If you hear this in the editing, leave it in. It's just a little bit of cozy vibes for our listeners. Okay. Anyway, she's really cute, and I just can't move her. So anyway, as it relates to the guidelines. So one of the people that I respect the most in the financial space is Ramit Saiti. I've recommended his book before. It's called I will teach you to be rich. I read it in 2008 when it first came out, and it was such a helpful guide for me. I recommend it again for you.

Amber F. (12:29)
If you're starting out in finance, I want to get a great, easy to read overview, but he has some guidelines here for where he's at with his recommendations for where you should be on your fixed cost investments, savings, and what he calls guilt free spending. So that means your life, like the variable expenses, like my guilt free spending is my botox and my beauty treatments or whatever it might be, my new purse or whatever. So the thing I like about this concept is that you really should be spending guilt free some of your money. What I don't like about this concept are the numbers that he suggests, because he says that your fixed cost should be between 50 and 60% of your income. And I'm talking take home, I'm not talking gross.

Amber F. (13:13)
So when you make $100,000 a year after taxes, you probably make closer to, like, 70 or something. So you got to look at what you're actually bringing home. That's why I track my income here very specifically to make sure I know how much is coming in and then what percentage I should allocate to each of these things. When I'm planning my budget. However, my fixed cost for this year, they ended up at 27%, and I've always wanted to stay between 30 and 40% of my income for fixed expenses. Again, that's rent, utilities. I put my tv and Spotify and gym in there because those are all things that I know I'm going to do every single month, and they're fixed. That means they don't change. And the reason that I've always tried to keep that very low is because I've always been in a massive saving and investing push. Ever since I've literally had a big girl income, that's been my focus.

Amber F. (14:04)
So I want to allocate more money towards savings than the 10% that he recommends. That's right, he recommends 10%. I've always been really intentional about keeping my fixed cost low. So here's some of the things that I've done to keep them low. Number one, I've been driving the same car for the last nine years. About, yes, nine years. It's an eleven year old car. I maintain her very, very well, but I haven't added a car payment or excess insurance to my monthly nut because I'd rather have the money to go towards savings, invest things and things that I actually really want to. Also, when I knew that I was going to be eventually moving out of my corporate job and doing something else, I didn't know I was going to start a business. I thought I was just going to take a break and try to save money.

Amber F. (14:46)
I got a roommate and I lived in a tiny, tiny, tiny little apartment by the beach in Carlsbad. And I loved that apartment so much. It was super uncomfortable for me to have a roommate. I'm also an only child and I loved my alone time and independent space. And I got really lucky with my second roommate who I just absolutely love and adore to this day. She's just the coolest chick ever. The first roommate that I lived with was hell on earth. She was so annoying. She wanted to be doing whatever I was doing all the time. She wanted to cuddle on the couch. It was just so much. And I was so blessed to have a reprieve with such a cool independent check. Allie, I love you. Always will. My point is that if you have to make adjustments to get your fixed costs down, I know they will be uncomfortable, but it is necessary.

Amber F. (15:33)
So I see a lot of stuff on Reddit with people saying like, oh, I can't afford to live here, or this is my income and my husband's income, how can we afford to have a kid? And the reality is you are not stuck in one place and it is up to you to be finding cheaper housing, maybe moving if you need to, getting roommates, getting more income. And that's a whole nother podcast topic. But I just saw a post on Reddit from somebody who lived in a low cost of living area. They made a combined salary with their husband of $85,000, and that was gross. And they were trying to plan for a kid and they were just scared because they couldn't afford daycare and they were both college educated and in professional areas. And everybody's feedback I agreed with, which was, you both need to get new jobs. And they said, we can't get new jobs. My husband has great benefits and I get three months maternity leave. And it's like, who's to say you're not going to get great benefits somewhere else?

Amber F. (16:28)
You have to be going after the next best thing, as opposed to just staying where you are if you want things to change. I think that's so important. From a mindset perspective, there is always something else available for you. And the more comfortable or complacent you get with what you have, you're going to stop identifying opportunities. And I want you to be looking out there for how you can grow. And I'm not just talking about earning more income, but like, trying a new job, working with different people, up, leveling your skills, impacting more. All of that ties into this together. Anyway, where was I? Okay, we were talking about fixed costs. And it's definitely, there's opportunities out there, whether you're going to house hack, as they call it, and rent out a room in your house, or maybe you live in a busy area and you can rent a parking spot or sell a parking spot on a busy day.

Amber F. (17:13)
We talk about that as a joke every year for December nights in Balboa park. It's like, gosh, we should just sell our parking spots so people would be happy to park close. The point is, fixed costs are your number one thing that you need to control by making the biggest life changes. The second thing after that is going to be your investments. You should be saving at least 10% of your income. And I saved this year a total of 24% of my income, 14% of which was for long term savings and 10% of which was for short term savings. Now, this is a really big savings number. Again, my fixed costs are low on purpose so that I can achieve these savings goals, and a 14% long term savings goal that does not include my simple IRA, which is my employer sponsored retirement. I feel really, really good about this. I did not invest so aggressively when I was in my twenty s and I wish I would have.

Amber F. (18:10)
I mean, that's everybody's regret I feel. But this gives me a lot of comfort knowing that the way that the compounding interest will work on my investments, I will be very comfortable in retirement. Justin and I will be able to buy the homes that we want and travel the way that we want. So that's what my priority is right now. It's taking care of my future self. So the 10% short term savings, that is the money that I'm setting aside every month on an automatic savings plan. Again, that's all set up through Capital one, where I dump a couple hundred bucks a month into each of these accounts. And sometimes it's not a lot, because with the poppy fund, I've already reached my quote unquote target. For that. I've saved a lot of money for her already, so I don't need to be putting a huge amount in there every month.

Amber F. (18:52)
But Poppy's fund, the travel fund, the designer fund, the Botox fund, the Christmas gift fund, all of that kind of stuff sits to control irregular spending. So that ensures that if I have a big purchase month or we go on vacation, I've got a couple of grand in a bank account that I can pull from to pay off my credit card right away. So it really alleviates the worry about having irregular spending while I'm consciously deciding what is going to be important for me for the year of what I want to save. You know, interestingly enough, this designer splurges account, we just went to Las Vegas a couple weeks ago, and we went in and out of every single store, like, shopping around, and there's just, like, nothing in there that I am really dying to have anymore. I don't like, not even the Chanel flap bag or the andiamo bag from Bottega Veneta.

Amber F. (19:45)
Every time I get in real life with it, I think online, I really want it. And then I hold it and I'm like, this bag is kind of flimsy. I don't know. I've just really changed my priorities recently, and maybe it'll cycle back around, or maybe I'm just not seeing the esthetic that I like. But I've decided next year I'm going to put a little bit less into my designer splurges fund and more into the travel fund because we have some big trips coming up in 2024, and I'd really love to do everything and anything without worrying about the cost. So again, that's my wealth building savings bucket here. Now, as we look at fixed expenses, my total fixed expenses for the year were 27%, including utilities, rent, and gym, like I said. And then this variable spending here is at 46%. Now, as I'm looking back at this last year at where I overspend the number one place that I overspent on was clothes, like disgustingly. And my closet is in no better shape last year than it is this year.

Amber F. (20:45)
I still wear the same thing all the time, yet my clothing number here is two and a half times more than it was projected for. So oops, I did something majorly wrong there. I'm not stoked about that at all. The other thing that I spent a lot of money on that I think is no better off, was my hair. Well, I take that back, kind of. I was spending a lot of money on extensions and moving up my extensions. So purchasing the hair and then maintaining the hair and all I was trying to do, I've been trying to grow my hair since I chopped it off to my shoulders in 2016. And this year, instead of just sewing in the hair, I'm like, I'm going to get my hair to grow. I'm on a hair growth mission. So I've been trying all the things and I just took my extensions out last month.

Amber F. (21:29)
And just to tell you, the weight that's lit off my literal head is so refreshing and combing my hair with, like, a pointy comb is the best feeling in the world. After having extensions for nearly six years, seven years, 2016. I'm not great at arithmetic, but I think that's seven years. Anyway, my point is that was something that I wasn't getting the best value out of. I was really dreading the appointments. I feel like the cost to do the move up was incredibly expensive. I thought the hair was incredibly expensive and didn't last that long. So I decided that's not something I'm going to be investing in for 2024. However, one of the things that I want to do more of is this higher end skincare. So like the lasers, the dermatology appointments, instead of just going to a random spa, going to a med spa for all of my skincare needs, I've got my skincare dialed.

Amber F. (22:20)
I will tell you all about that on another episode. My point is that tracking this helps give me so much visibility into where my money went this year. I actually also spent a ton of money on gifts this year, like double what I had projected, but I never paid out of Pocket or out of cycle for it. I was just drawing off of my Christmas gift fund account all year long, so it led me to be a lot more generous, I feel, because I just had that money available to spend on others, I knew I was going to do it eventually, so I did it all year long. So that was really cool. The other thing, let's see on my budget here, I'm literally looking at it as I'm recording this Poppy's expenses through the freaking roof. I mean, my girl is so expensive and she deserves it. She is an absolute princess. But I didn't budget for it correctly because I didn't incorporate when we travel and when we have our pet sitters come to stay with us and what that cost actually is. So for next year, I'm actually going to incorporate Poppy's, like pet sitters, if you will.

Amber F. (23:22)
That could be a name of a business, Poppy's pet sitters. It's going to be its own line item that flows with the travel budget. So I'm going to save extra money in travel also to pay for our poppy's petsitters when they come over and stay with her while we go out, so that I don't have that fluctuating cost. And my budget is more on point. Anyway, if you're keeping track, I've gone through 24% of my savings, 27% fixed expenses, 46% variable expenses, including groceries, gas, transportation, travel, et cetera. A lot of that expenditure is covered by my short term savings. And if you're adding it all up, you're like, Amber, that's only 97%. And that's because I have 3% left over that I just haven't allocated yet. So I'm just doing my best with what I have. But I work on what's called a zero dollar budget, meaning that every dollar that comes in gets allocated somewhere and that 3%, it's likely going to go to an investment fund or a savings fund, or maybe even just something fun that I want to spend on.

Amber F. (24:22)
My point is that I am planning out so that every dollar that comes in has a place to go. So that's kind of the breakdown of my 2023. And I ran through some of the things that happened in the last year or things that I wasn't prepared for, but overall, I kind of nailed it. I feel really good about it. Again, on my spreadsheet here, I plan this out for the whole year. So I create a budget where I have January through December, and I put in the cost for rent every month, the cost for estimated SDG and E, the cost for gas every month that I expect to spend. And I have that nailed now because I've done this for many years in the past. So I have historical data. So I know about, on average, when I look at my grocery bill for 2023, I divide that by twelve and I can say, okay, I can expect groceries to be seven to 15% more expensive in 2024. So I'm going to inflate that cost to go with inflation, and I'll have a better budget for next year.

Amber F. (25:17)
That's literally how I do it. And then my money date every month, I create an additional column next to January when it's January, and I plug in the actual numbers. Yes, I do do this manually because for me, that's how I get better control of really understanding the transactions where everything goes. I never have anything slip through my fingers. By the way, my credit card got hacked again. Somebody tried to buy a pair of jeans on forward for $1,090, but they fucking sent them to my house. Well, first of all, they didn't even get to send them because I saw the email come through. I got a fraud alert from Chase. Love, Chase. Thank you so much, Chase, for protecting me. And I canceled it, obviously, but how dumb can you be? Who is ordering $1,000 pair of jeans? Get out of here. That is not in my budget. Anyway, my point is, I create an extra column I go through every month by downloading my expenses, all my transactions, from all my credit cards and checking accounts.

Amber F. (26:12)
And then I organize them. I literally go through line by line and I say, this is what I spent on eating out. Eating out. Groceries. Groceries. And I go through and I organize it and I total it up and I plug it into my spreadsheet. I know that's a manual process. I would be happy to do a tutorial on this if it would be helpful for you guys. You just have to let me know. I have had requests for the budget. The budget is proprietary to me. It is customized to me. I will try to figure out a way that we can. Honest. I'm going to have to put a paywall behind it or something.

Amber F. (26:42)
Or put it behind a paywall. We'll have to figure it out in 2024. But if that's something that you guys want, please let me know. Anyway, the other thing that I love about this spreadsheet, you can have tabs on spreadsheets. So that's my annual kind of overview. But I also have my net worth page here. And I started tracking my net worth in February of 2016. And. Hold on, I'm going to pause really quick so I can do the math on this. Okay. I did the math on the percentage change calculator on Google because I don't know how to do this on my own. But from 2016 to now, well, the last time I updated this was October 2023. I have increased my net worth by 677% and my net worth page includes all the savings it has, all my investments it has. If I have any debt, it has my cash on hand. It has everything that is attributed to me.

Amber F. (27:31)
And to just have awareness on it has been the biggest thing. This is my pride and joy, the spreadsheet, because this is so much hard work that's gone into this and it's going in the right direction. Your net worth is so crucial to understand because if you have a positive net worth, you are building wealth. If you have debt, if you do not have assets, if you have a negative net worth, you have to get to baseline before you can even start to really build meaningful wealth. So speaking of that, I'm going to jump ahead really quickly because we need to talk about debt. And if you still have debt, we need to revisit your debt payoff plan. Okay. If you have debt, paying off your debt should be the most aggressive thing that you do. Save for your student loan debt, for your student loans. I say just pay the minimums, continue on, budget it in.

Amber F. (28:21)
But if you have consumer credit card debt, that's where I'm really having you focus because I want you to get rid of that. You cannot start playing with your points and traveling. You cannot start building wealth if you have consumer credit card debt hanging over your head. So you're going to want to look at your annual percentage rates. You want to look at your minimum payments. I want you to organize a list of all of the debts that you have and the amount that's due, the minimum monthly payments that's due, and then the APR. There's two ways to do this. You can do the snowball method, which is where you pay off the smallest balance first to get some momentum. We just talked about this again on the last episode, and I also have a whole episode on debt that you can go back and listen to. You can do the avalanche method where you pay off the one with the highest interest rate first.

Amber F. (29:06)
And by the way, how are you paying this off? You are adjusting down your fixed expenses and your variable expenses as much as possible so that you can get rid of this debt or you can do what I do, which is the snowstorm flurry. I don't even know what to call it. And you get extra income. You throw everything you have at it. You ruthlessly cut all of your extra expenses. You get a roommate, you do whatever it takes. And I wanted to share a really quick, what I believe to be a huge success story with somebody that I love and respect so much. And I was so flattered because this person had asked if they could pick my brain for some financial advice. And now I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not your personal banker. I'm not a lawyer. I can't give financial advice, but I can give some opinions. I'm great at giving opinions. This person came to me and they said, and they own their own business.

Amber F. (29:53)
And they said, I am thinking about declaring bankruptcy. What do you know about that? And quite frankly, I know fuck all about bankruptcy. I don't know anything about it, except it's not great. What I do know about bankruptcy is this, is that if you file for bankruptcy, it's going to take you a long time to build up your credit again. So if you have goals for your future, your family, of getting rates for insurance and for a home and for a new car and all these other types of things, you really need to take that into consideration. But what I asked this person was if you file for bankruptcy, because what it sounded like was that they might have been living above their means. If you file for bankruptcy, what's going to change? And they said, well, we're not going to have that debt hanging over our head. I mean, not most of it anyway.

Amber F. (30:37)
And it's going to feel so much more like, relaxed. And I said, okay, but what's going to change with your habits or your lifestyle or how you're living? Because if you accumulated debt, doing what you're doing right now and you file for bankruptcy, but you continue to live the way that you live, you're going to get into debt again, and you're not going to be able to file bankruptcy again. So what's going to change? And that was a pretty hard answer. And that person was running their business and doing very well for themselves, might I add. But there was a lot of resistance in the conversation around, well, I don't want to get a job again, or I can't find somebody to help me with this part of my business. And over the course of just like an hour conversation, that person, it wasn't me. That person was like, oh, wait a minute, I could get a job. Maybe I'll just look and see, and then maybe I could find somebody to contribute to this part of my business.

Amber F. (31:29)
Or maybe I would be okay as having my business now as a side hustle an extra income and building a career somewhere else as well. Because what they were doing with their business right now wasn't cutting it. They had too high of overhead, expenses, and not enough revenue, and the market has kind of reached, I mean, what they could charge for their services in the market, they were near the top. So unless they were going to work for 100 hours a week, it was going to be really hard to climb out of that. And so this person, in the end of it all, found the best fucking job for them ever.

Amber F. (32:03)
Like, brand new job, super stoked. Great company, great opportunity, has consolidated their hours for their services, and they now have a lot of control over their schedule. They're still using their business to create more revenue. They've been looking at other alternatives for cutting costs and being mindful of money. And honestly, just the mindset and the blossoming of this person over the last few weeks that I've been seeing them has just been beautiful for me to watch.

Amber F. (32:31)
And it's literally nothing that I did at all. It's all them and their mindset and the opportunities that they see. And that is the type of thing that I love to see. That is an old money way, that is a rich girl doing it, like, getting after it. And all of us have been there. Most of us have been there. I've been there. I guess I could say I've been in massive debt. I've climbed out of it, too, and now I've grown my net worth by 677% and it's going to keep going up. So my point is that if you haven't yet dealt with your debt, now is the time to do so. So go back and listen to the getting out of debt episode. I think it's episode 18 again. If you're qualified to do a balance transfer to a 0% APR card, do that, go through your debt, and I want you to light yourself a candle, say yourself a prayer, open all the bills, open the emails, and at least understand what it's going to take. And you can do this with confidence in crafting your conscious spending plan. That's what Ramit Sethi calls it.

Amber F. (33:31)
I love it. I got to come up with my own tagline for that. If you guys have an idea. It's like my wealth management plan because I really want you to get into the mindset shift of getting out of debt ASAP. Because when you get out of debt, you have more money to play with and then you get plan for what you want your 2024 to look like. So that's where I'm at. And back to step two, planning for 2024. As I mentioned, some of the things that are coming up for us in 2024 are traveling. So I'm looking again at using my credit card points, I am putting more money in my savings account. I know that I want to.

Amber F. (34:01)
Like I said about my closet and my clothes, I'm setting some money aside to work with a personal shopper or stylist to help me put better looks together that are easy and capsule with better quality pieces. So that's something that I'm saving for this year. I don't know if you're looking to get married, even if you're single and you're not saving for your wedding now, what are you doing before you get engaged? If you are a man or a woman, you need to be saving for your wedding. If that's something that's important to you, if you're having a honeymoon, if you need a new car, I have news about buying cars in 2024, by the way.

Amber F.(34:35)
I'm going to do, I think, like a headlines episode or maybe I'll just bake it into another episode, something like that. But anything like that, if you're planning on getting pregnant, getting ready for a baby, starting to put money aside for that child's investments, for a beautiful nursery, all of these things, you get to dream big about what's coming up for you in 2024 and beyond. And I want you to build that into your budget. I want you to build that into your savings goals, your short term savings goals, your long term savings goal and design, where every dollar that comes through you gets to be invested. Whether that's in your utility bills or it's through your savings accounts, or it's through the way that you adorn your body with Botox, jewelry, makeup, whatever it might be, you are responsible for flowing that money into the right direction so it serves the life you want to live. Okay. Step number three was debt. We already talked about that. Step number four is an interesting one, and it's called negotiation. And when I was in a lot of debt, I had to call and negotiate a lot of things.

Amber F. (35:36)
In fact, I negotiated my rent every single year. They would raise the rent, like, however much money, and I always negotiated at least half of that off because I was like, I'm such a good tenant and I keep the place clean and here's what I've done for the community or blah, blah, blah. So I've always negotiated my rent successfully. I have also negotiated successfully my cell phone bill. I have called and asked for any deals. I have asked for better rates. I had asked for more data for the same price. I have said, what specials are you running right now? What can you do for me, I've been doing this with our Internet. Our Internet has been out for the last week and a half. I will be calling to renegotiate our price for Internet and also get a refund because we haven't had any for the last week, which has been absolutely treacherous. If you have insurance, call and negotiate. And what that looks like from a scripting perspective is, hi, my name is blank. I've been a purchaser of your insurance know, whatever year. I'm a great customer.

Amber F. (36:34)
I always pay my bills on time. I'd like to know what other rates you have available for me. And they say, none. You say, great. Is there any way that you can ask a manager if you can make an exception since I've been such a good customer? And they say, please hold. And they come back and they say, no. And then you say, great, I'll call you again next month, and you put a reminder in your calendar, and you call back the next month. I have even done this with our Adobe subscription fees for our agency. Adobe is like Photoshop and all that kind of stuff. I call and renegotiate every single year from a $54 to a $30 subscription because I have to give it to so many people on our team. They all have to pay a fee for it, and I do that every single year, and it saves me money. It takes me ten minutes. It's sometimes not a big deal if I have the time. When you get to higher echelon, you know, the whole story of it cost Bill gates more to bend over and pick up a $20 bill than it does for him to keep walking.

Amber F. (37:27)
That can be argued a bit. But if you can save money, call and ask for it. Stop throwing money away. You can also call and negotiate with your bank. So if you ever get an overdraft fee, this is a hot ass tip. Never fucking pay it. Well, I mean, pay it if they make you, but get a bank that waives them. I have paid so many overdraft fees until I learned that you can call and say the exact same thing I just said. I am a great patron of your bank. I love your bank. I've been a member since blah, blah, blah, blah. I made a mistake. It won't happen again. Would you please waive that overdraft fee or that late fee or whatever it might be? They will do it.

Amber F. (38:01)
They have the ability to do that. You just have to call and ask. You can also call and ask your credit card company about what perks that are offered that you haven't utilized yet you can make sure you're not paying any unnecessary fees. If you are, you can negotiate them away. If you have credit cards that are on ice that have an annual fee, you're not going to be using them. You can call and ask for that to be waived. You should also be checking your credit report and your credit score. And you should be going in and negotiating with your credit card companies for lower aprs and higher credit limits. I think this is so so key. I always ask for a higher credit limit every time I get on the phone with my credit card company.

Amber F. (38:39)
And most of the time they grant it. And the reason that's important is because it helps your credit utilization score stay low. So just as a refresher and we talk about this in again, the healing debt episode or the credit card follow up, one of the two with your credit card utilization rate, the more credit you have available to you. What they do is they take a ratio of how much you owe, how much debt you have. So if you have $100,000 of a credit card limit and you owe $5,000, that's 5%. If you have $100,000 credit card limit, but you owe $50,000, you've used 50% of your credit utilization rate. You want to keep that number as low as possible to keep your credit score high. They don't want you to use a lot of your credit. That's why you want to pay it off every single month. So I always call and ask for lower aprs.

Amber F. (39:28)
If I see an introductory rate, I ask for that for a certain amount of time, ask for higher credit limit, things like that. Okay, so step number, what are we on? 12345. We are on new opportunities. This is a key, and this is something we're going to talk about a lot in 2024, because a lot of you have been writing me and asking me about starting businesses and how I did it. And I'm not saying the way that I did it is the best way. But there are definitely some rules of thumb you could follow and that I wish I would have to get yourself set up in business and create new revenue streams for yourself. So as we know, the average millionaire has seven revenue streams. If you are a w two employee and you only have one, it's time to get creative. So first and foremost, you're going to start exploring new opportunities to create more revenue.

Amber F. (40:13)
Asking yourself, what talents do I have? What would people pay for? Where can I add value? I met the nicest woman last night at an art show and she is a college admissions advisor, and she started by being a tutor and just helping a few kids get into private high schools and middle schools by helping them with their essays. She helped one kid who got into where they wanted to go, and so that kid's parents told three other parents, and then those three parents told three more people.

Amber F. (40:39)
And now she has a full on freaking badass side hustle where she's helping all of these kids get into, like Yale and Brown in Columbia. I think she said she's helping and impacting so many people, and that was something that she just did from starting to be as a tutor. So there are lots of things that you could do in this world to add value that you could be charging for. And we're going to talk more about this again in 2024 of pressure testing new business ideas, how to create revenue, how to create value. But that's something that I want you to start thinking of and dreaming of in this month of December. This is a quiet month as mammals. We are mammals. We're humans. We're mammals. Just like bears.

Amber F. (41:16)
The quiet months, December, January, these are our hibernation months. I really like to use December as the time to reflect and have a think week. I always take the week off between Christmas and New Year's off to just read and dream and think and sleep and whatever. And this is your opportunity to do that as well, of starting to dream about what you could be doing. Make a list, journal it, etc.

Amber F. (41:38)
It might also be time to look at negotiating for a raise now at the end of the year, usually budgets for 2024 are set, but if you have a quarterly review system or a half year review system, you likely have a review coming up in either may or about March. So I want you to be starting to go back and track your success in your job so that you can argue to your bosses of why you should get a raise. If you look at the wealth at work episode episode eight, that will give you a lot of tips of how to go and approach that conversation with your boss. And I'd like you to start looking at that. If negotiating for a raise is not an option, go look for a better paying job. If your existing company doesn't give you more growth, you deserve growth. You do not deserve to be stuck. And there are so many fish in the sea. I think we get really trapped, especially when we're in toxic work environments, into thinking there's nowhere else we can go. I've been there.

Amber F. (42:36)
When I was at my last job, I was so beat down and I was so not confident that my boss at the time said, you should start a marketing agency. And I said, there's no way in hell I could do that. I could not even fathom how I would do that. There was no way. So I'm just letting you know that there are opportunities out there for you to go do something great. You just have to find them. LinkedIn is a great place to start, indeed, et cetera, et cetera. But start talking to people. Start figuring out what your dream is, and starting to have informational interviews. Ask questions, get curious. It's time to look for a better paying job. And of course, if you can create a side hustle. When I was starting my business, I also watched people's dogs a ton. I walked their dogs to make extra money. Like I said, I got a roommate.

Amber F. (43:20)
You can create more cash flow by renting out things that you own or driving for Uber or whatever it is. If you want to earn more, there are opportunities out there. You just have to be open to them. The last step in this process in getting ready for a successful 2024 or beyond is to reassess your automations. And so, again, going back to a previous episode, being the CEO of your life and the afford everything that's episode six and five, respectively, that's going to really help you.

Amber F. (43:53)
But a couple of things that you should be looking at doing are automating your savings, making sure that you have savings money going directly from your checking into your savings in your different buckets every single month. I would also make sure that you're looking at your investment accounts like, are you maxing out your 401K? Are you maxing out your Roth IRA? If you're qualified for that, I would be making sure that you have your brokerage accounts set up. So I like to have mine where I jump a certain amount of money in every month and then it automatically gets allocated to certain investments.

Amber F. (44:22)
That allows me to take advantage of dollar cost averaging. Go back to the investing 101 episode. That's number eleven if you need more help with that. But I think this is a great time to either set up your automations or to refine them. So just going through everything with a fine tooth comb and making sure the systems are set up to support you so that you can run around and Gallivant and have the best life ever while all the money is happening in the background. So that is it, my loves. That is the six financial steps that I am taking to wrap up 2023 and plan for the most profitable year yet that I've ever had. Again, the recap on this. There are six steps. The first one is the end of year evaluation. What did you spend? What went well? What went wrong? All that kind of stuff. The next one is reviewing your spending plan and designing it intentionally for 2024.

Amber F. (45:13)
Number three is revisiting your debt payoff. Number four is negotiating like crazy. Number five is finding new opportunities. And number six is fine tuning or setting up your automations. So I hope this was helpful to you. I hope that you have such an exciting end of your plan and you're taking care of yourself and planning for the future. You deserve to take the time. And here's my stock tip of the week. I would say, especially if you have PTO that's going to expire. Take some fucking PTO in December, y'all.

Amber F. (45:46)
Nothing's going to fall apart if you take off your Fridays or a Thursday Friday to dedicate to working on yourself. I think that's the best investment you can make, and you should be taking the time that's owed to you, because that's what it's there for. In fact, I think I'm going to take some PTo this December as well, just to really focus in on my own systems, myself, my journaling, all that kind of stuff. So coming up for the rest of the year, I do have a really great end of year journaling kind of overview I want to take you through of how I look holistically at my life to create the wealthiest life possible in every area, including relationships, family, friends, money, health, everything. So we'll go through that. And then starting out in 2024, we're going to hit the ground running and really talking about a lot of the letters that you guys have sent me, including most of the ones that I'm getting, which are, how do I start a business? So we're going to start talking about that soon as well. I love you guys so much. If you haven't yet left a review for the podcast, if you could be so very kind to do so, it would mean the world for me. That would be my best Christmas gift ever.

Amber F. (46:49)
I'm so excited about 2024 and everything that's to come with you all with my rich girls. We have lots in the works for you, so stay tuned and I'll talk to you on the next episode. Okay, bye bye.

Resources

I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi

Episode 025: Change your Identity & Change your Life: How to Set Goals & Achieve Them

Episode 018: Drowning in Credit Card Debt: Healing Habits & Personal Loans

Episode 011: The Hot Girl's Guide to Investing

Episode 008: Getting Wealthy at Work- 5 Tips to Succeed at a Start Up

Episode 006: CEO Systems for Ultimate Success

Episode 005: Afford Everything You Want

Connect with the Old Money Podcast:

The content presented in this podcast is intended to entertain, educate, inspire and support listeners in their personal and professional development and does not constitute business, financial, or legal advice. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services for which individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services related to the episode.

Produced by AFMEDIA, a division of AFMKTG.