Posts

Financial Fluency Episode #21: Look good online with Laura Husson

/0 Comments/in /by

I’m talking to Laura Husson, and her infant son is here with us – listen in for cute baby noises (disclaimer, I take no responsibility for any ensuing broodiness).

Laura’s brand, Look Good Online encapsulates your website and social media in a holistic way that I just love. The sites she creates are full of personality – no one size fits all here.

I first encountered Laura in a Facebook Group but it was when she was on Periscope that I really felt like I got to know her.

We talked about her accidental journey into retail, how she’s passionate about helping other women find the freedom she has and an encounter with a school mum which left a not so nice taste in her mouth.

You can listen in below and Tweet it out here

If you enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to Financial Fluency here on iTunes.

Favourite Quotes

My job hasn’t been invented yet

Laura, as a child being asked what she wanted to be

In the first 3 months we raised about £10,000 – it was a lot.

Laura on her first charity venture

If I just listened to what people wanted from me, I was going to make a success of this.

Laura on going full time in her biz

I felt like I was part of an adventure, a movie!

Jen on watching Laura’s Periscoped journey to surprise her husband

I honestly feel like we’re very close to being best friends, just because I’ve seen so much of your life!

Jen after seeing Laura on Periscope

It’s 100% about hanging out online with the right people and really listening to them.

Laura on finding your audience and creating offers

My hair grows in a darker shade than it appears.

Jen, confessing to not being a natural blonde!

Laura Husson Laura Husson, is an online business architect.

She helps innovative entrepreneurs (just like you) look good online with irresistible websites & savvy business strategy.

After spending more than 10 years teaching, coaching and mentoring she started a business to help forward thinking business owners overcome their barriers to online success.

She shares her secrets with clients in two unique ways: Create the websites of their dreams and help showcase ’em to the world.

If you’re ready to shine in your own online journey, click here to get started.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

If you’re enjoying the podcasts and something has lit a fire for you, carry on the conversation over on the Financial Fluency Facebook Group.

See you there!

Jen x

Financial Fluency Episode #20: Making Changes in Your Financial System

/0 Comments/in /by

Today I want to talk about how to make changes in your financial life and your financial systems. The two main levers for making change in a system are changing what goes in and what comes out of that system.

In the case of your finances – especially your personal finances – that is the income that flows in and the expenses that flow out. Part of that is also looking at efficiencies, but I’m going to group that under expenses because those systems are about how to get more out of the money that you are spending right now.

You can listen in here or read below and Tweet it out here

Income

A lot of people in the personal finance world like to look first at the expenses because that seems like an easy thing that we have control over on a daily basis, but I’m going to go for the income first, because let’s be honest, in terms of long term changes, that system can make a greater change than anything else can.

If You’re Employed

If you work in a job for somebody else, the main way to get a change in your income is to ask for a raise. I’m not an expert in negotiating raises, but I know that in Tim Ferriss’s book and Ramit Sethi’s book, ‘I will Teach you to be Rich’, they both talk about some great ways to lead up to asking for that raise. I think they both talk about maybe three or even six months of steps you can take to start setting the stage to establish the value you bring to the company to show and track your progress over time, and to show that you really are bringing a lot more to the company that what you’re paid for right now. It’s then easier to ask for the raise.

Other ways you can interact with your boss ahead of time are to ask for feedback on projects you’re doing, ask for feedback on what you can do to be more valuable, to be more of a long term player and asking for educational opportunities, for the business to send you to trainings in different things to make you more valuable.

Other options for when you work in a job already are asking to take on a new project, to seek more customers for commission, if applicable, to ask to be involved in things that are at a higher level than what you’ve been doing before or just start doing more things. If you see things that need to be done, start doing them, and make sure people notice that you’re doing them.

If you’ve been doing the newsletter or something else on top of your regular job that you aren’t being paid for, make sure everyone knows and recognizes what effect that has on the company. If you’re doing the social media on top of your regular job, make sure you’re tracking all the Google Analytics that show how social media brings more traffic to the website, and how that has increased conversions. Whatever it is, really track it and make sure you can show your bosses just now much you’re doing to bring value to the company.

Another option, even if you have a job, is to start moonlighting or start a side gig to offer your services in some way. Maybe make a list of all the things that you could do for money, go out there and start brainstorming. Ask people if they need your help with different things, and those things can change your income if you are employed in a job.

If You’re Self Employed

If you’re self-employed, there are a number of things you can do as well.

The first and most obvious one is to raise your prices for current services, and let your clients know that prices will be going up in so many months. This obviously depends on whether you are a time based service provider or a product based service provider or a project based service provider.

You could finish up current projects and let people know that prices will be going up on the next round of projects, or let them know that prices will be going up on a certain date or on the products at a certain time, or the next version of the products, or something like that.

You can also create some new offers you’ve never had before.

  • What is it your clients have been asking you about?
  • What are they interested in? Are there any burning pains they have that you haven’t addressed that you could now?
  • You can also bundle together old offers or even old content into a new product or service. I’ve seen a lot of people do this with blog content being bundled into an ebook that’s then sold, so that’s something to think about.
  • You can also have a limited time sale on products you already have. You can expand it to a new niche or market. If you are a website designer for tech companies, say, maybe you could start taking on smaller entrepreneurs or small businesses, people who’ve been on Etsy but have got too big and now need a new website. You could talk to people you know, people you like to work with, the kinds of people and kinds of projects you like to do, and see if that can be expanded into a new niche.
  • You can also reach out to people in similar niches for joint venture and collaboration type projects to reach clients that you don’t have access to right now, but you could by working with somebody else.
  • Another option is to be an affiliate for someone else’s products to your existing audience, so that’s where you find someone who has a product that you already like and use, and find out if they have some kind of affiliate program. You can then offer those products to your audience, and that is helping them reach a new audience, and it helps you by giving you some portion of those sales.
  • Or you could create an affiliate program for your own product, offer your own clients the opportunity to be affiliates for you, and they can share your products or services with their audience and network.

Expenses

Let’s switch over to the other lever for change which is the outflow, the expenses.

The first place it’s easiest to start is the low hanging fruit. Look at subscriptions, gym memberships, those sorts of things, how much are you using them and is it really worth what you’re paying per year?

A lot of us think we go to the gym enough, and if you’re taking a class or if your kids have swim lessons or whatever it is and you’re using it every single week, that’s totally legit. You can always try to negotiate for a different price, it’s worth asking, and you never know.

Think about things that are subscriptions where you can potentially pay for single uses instead, like a day pass for your gym if you’re only going now and then and not every single week. If you’re using cable, try downloading individual movies instead, or use one of the streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime. This serves the purpose that you’re using it for right now, but it costs less for the amount that you actually use it.

If You Don’t Want To Cut It, Reduce It

You can also negotiate the bills that you don’t want to cut, your cellphone bill, internet or cable, if you have it, and you can sometimes bundle those together and get savings for that, or you can call and ask them if there are any current promotions going on that they can apply to your account. A lot of the time they have promotions for new people who sign up, and if you call and say, I’ve been a customer for five years, I would like to take advantage of this promotion you’re offering to new people as I’m a loyal customer, a lot of times they’ll go ahead and apply it to your account.

Another option is to look at your car insurance, home insurance or rental insurance and if you can bundle those together for savings, and then you can call your credit cards and ask for lower interest rates, ask for promotions, ask if they have anything going, or if there’s any other card that would better suit your need.

Plan, Plan, Plan

Even for things like eating out, your variable spending, you can schedule when you’re going to eat out and you can even pick the restaurants to figure out how much you’re going to spend ahead of time, and then also schedule out those shopping trips. There are a lot of online meal plans with shopping list type services now that you can use, so you can really plan out how much you’re going to spend each week on your variable spending.

As long as you stick to it or close to it, you can really control some of that spending that gets out of control relatively frequently.

There are also some options for things that you use a lot like paper products, paper towels and toilet paper. You can set them on delivery order from Amazon using the Amazon subscription service which is a pretty great thing. We used to use it for things like diapers back in the day, and there was a while where I did put things like toilet paper, paper towels, wipes and diapers on there, because we could kind of predict how frequently we were going to run out, and I always had them arrive a little before we actually needed them, because with diapers you don’t want to run out!

That did save some time and money and trips to the store, and I was able to plan things out a little better when we had that going on. I haven’t done it for a while now because we no longer get diapers (phew!). That was a huge saving, that and having my kids both start full days of school have made such a massive difference in our personal finances.

That’s All, Folks!

So those are a few things that you can look at in terms of changing both the inflow and the outflow for your financial system. Setting up some of these things, especially the ones that you can put on autopay, or the ones that you can reduce the monthly amount, the effect of that really builds up month by month.

If you can save ten dollars per line on three family lines for your cellphone, that’s 30 dollars per month over the course of a year, and that really adds up. If you do that across a number of different categories in your spending, it can come to a significant amount of money that can really change how quickly you can pay off debt or build up savings.

So those are my tips for you for today, I hope that is helpful. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and listen every week, and I would love it if you would leave an awesome iTunes review too. Thank you so much. If you want to reach me, I’m jen@jenturrell.com, you can find me at the website, I read my own emails and answer them as much as I can. Talk to you soon.

Mastering Money Matters

What if managing your money and feeling wealthy was easy?

Imagine going from feeling sick to your stomach every time you have to pay a bill, to having a system that pays all of your bills on time, and shows you at a glance where all of your money is and where it is going.

Mastering Money Matters will show you a new way of looking at your finances so you can set up your systems, enjoy your money, and stop worrying about your next bill.

If you’ve been desperately avoiding looking at your finances and hoping it all just magically works out – money comes in, it doesn’t run out, and you have enough for a bit of extra spending – enroll in Mastering Money Matters today.

Financial Fluency Episode #14: Investing for Beginners

/0 Comments/in /by

Today is about investing for beginners, and I include myself in that, because although I have had investment accounts for my retirement for some time, I still consider myself a beginner when it comes to investing.

You can listen in or read below and Tweet it out here

Here’s how I see it. For the simple fact of interest rates and inflation, unless we’re investing something for the future in some way, we’re really losing our buying power year by year as we go through life. Because of that, I do think that having an amount of money in tax advantaged investment accounts of some kind is really important for everyone’s future.

I’ve never had the kinds of jobs that were attached to 401ks or included employee investment plans, so I didn’t actually start saving for my retirement until I was 30. When I was 30 I put on my list a ‘to do’ that said, “open IRA”. It sat there for most of a year because I just wasn’t sure what to do. I got on the internet, I read a few books, I searched around and I was overwhelmed with analysis paralysis.

I kept thinking,

I need to learn more!

The problem with that is while it is good to learn more and good to get an idea of

  • What you want to invest in
  • What’s important to you and
  • Why you want to do it

there’s also a point where you just need to get started. I’m so happy that nowadays we have some new platforms we can look at to do just that.

The truth is, with losing money over time to inflation and to interest in terms of credit cards and so on, we need to counteract that with getting some gains somewhere. My advice – and I am not a financial planner or a CPA, which means I’m not going to tell you to buy any particular stocks – is to open an IRA.

Your two basic kinds of IRA accounts are the traditional IRA and the Roth IRA. If you go to somewhere like Vanguard – which I do personally like and recommend – you can open either a Roth or a traditional IRA account.

OK, So What’s The Difference?

Short answer? The difference between the two is the way that tax is figured out and also the income cap.

Roth IRA

With a Roth IRA you use after tax dollars, meaning you pay taxes first, but you invest that after tax money and it goes completely tax free, and you can take out as much money as you need on the other end without paying any more taxes on that.

That’s really exciting when you look at the idea that taxes tend to go up rather than down, and also if you look at the idea that nowadays part of lot of people’s retirement plan is to continue to have some kind of ongoing income throughout their life, either through investment properties or ongoing residual income.

A lot of us look into the future and it looks a little grim in terms of being able to retire in the way that we used to think of retirement, and by that I mean sitting on a beach somewhere or golfing or just having enough money to not need any supplemental income in our old age.

Saving the amount of principal that we need to live off for the extended lifespan that we all now have is pretty daunting.

If you think you will have some kind of ongoing income, there will still be some income tax in your old age. If you can offset some of that with a Roth IRA, it’s a great idea.

Traditional IRA

The other kind of IRA is a traditional IRA which means that you save on taxes right now.

You put money in there and it saves you on your tax bill this year which is pretty exciting if you need those tax savings. What it also means is that on the other end you will be paying taxes as you take money out.

You’ll have taxes on your gains and because you put in money pre-tax, you will also have taxes on the money you originally put in. It’s a tax advantaged wrapper, and within that wrapper you can then invest in all kinds of different things.

Income Caps

Another difference between the two different types of IRAs is that Roth IRAs do have income caps both for individuals and couples, so it is worth checking out each year what that cap is. It changes year by year like the amount you can invest and I believe it was around $5500 last year.

We have actually switched to doing a solo 401k for ourselves now because we’re able to contribute both as employer and employee, but again that’s slightly more advanced once you’ve been doing it for a while and you are, like us, trying to make up for some lost time of not contributing when I was younger.

Where To Begin

For beginners, if you’ve done nothing in the past, I totally recommend looking at a low fee index fund which Vanguard has lots of. Other companies do as well, but I tend to recommend Vanguard because it’s very simple, they were the first passively managed index funds that existed, and they’ve continued to do a really good job. They also run the business as a non-profit, which means that they are not paying third party fees.

All of the funds that you buy from Vanguard are Vanguard funds, there are no kickbacks for them selling more expensive products and it’s very straightforward and simple. I like the interface, the website’s easy to understand and you can always call or chat and get information from somebody there.

However, in order to start with somewhere like Vanguard, you do usually need a thousand dollar minimum. It’s great if you can max out your contribution every year which will change slightly year by year.

For self-employed people there are also a few other options like SEPs and solo Roth IRAs that you can look at as well.

For beginners I’m going to move onto these new platforms where you don’t need to have as much as a thousand dollars saved up to get started. Two of my favorites are Betterment and Acorns.

Betterment does allow you still to use this tax advantaged wrapper, so if you want to start an account and have it as an IRA, you can do that with very small amounts of money, such a ten dollar a month recurring transfer from your checking or savings account. The more you put in, the better and the more you’ll get set aside over time, but there is no minimum.

Acorns does not have IRAs at this time, however the Acorns strategy is to round up from your purchases. You hook up the Acorns account to a checking account that you’re already making purchases out of, and if you buy something for two dollars and 50 cents, it will grab that 50 cents leftover, make your purchase three dollars, and that 50 cents is going to go into the account where it can be invested. Cool, right?

Once it’s In, it’s In

With all of these options, these are not things that you want to put money into that you’re going to need in the short term, especially for the retirement accounts, the IRAs. Putting money in there means it’s staying in there. If you pull it out early, there are tax consequences, there are fees, it’s much worse than putting it into a savings account and pulling it back out.

So you need to be serious about your commitment to leaving this money alone, and even in Acorns – which does not have the tax advantages or the tax consequences for pulling it out – there are trading fees involved. This is investing, this is not just savings.

You will get the advantages of investing by having higher returns than a savings account, but it also means that there are some fees involved, particularly if you put money in and pull it out within a year.

There are slightly different tax consequences to different types of trading when it comes to investing. Because so many people do this sort of day trading where they’re really quickly buying and selling different things, that has different tax consequences than the buy and hold. If you buy and hold for more than a year, you’re taxed at a different year than if you buy and sell within the same year.

My Advice

My advice to anyone looking at all of these things is that this is money for your future.

This is you buying yourself some nice things and some security in your old age.

This is something your future self will definitely thank you for! Look into this really seriously. I’m going to leave it at just these first three companies that I talked about because I think that’s a really good start. Take a look at Vanguard, take a look at Betterment and take a look at Acorns and see what you think.

How You Can Get The Minimum Investment More Quickly

If you want some time to save up towards a Vanguard account and are having trouble getting that thousand dollars together, another great option that I want to bring up is Digit. I talked about this before in an episode on savings and I was just looking at my own Digit account again the other day and I am really impressed with how much they have been able to pull out of my accounts without really feeling much pain from it.

I can see the transfers go out, but it’s not been large amounts and it built up pretty quickly. I have about three thousand dollars in there from last summer and it’s worked really well.

If you want to save up enough to get a Vanguard account instead of going with Betterment or Acorns, you can open a Digit account (this is my invite a friend account, so if you use it and open an account we’ll both get a little gift!).

It studies your spending habits, and decides when to pull out these small amounts. It does have an overdraft guarantee, so there’s a little bit of extra added security, plus it can get you to that thousand dollars where you can start really investing more towards the future.

Over To You

I hope that this will encourage you to start saving towards the future, especially if you can do a tax advantaged account. Sometimes people are really surprised by how much they save in taxes by putting away money into their funds. It’s not a one for one, or anything, it’s not like you get ten thousand dollars off your tax bill by putting ten thousand dollars into a tax advantaged savings account, but it might be more like you get 7500 off your tax bill by putting ten or 11 thousand into this savings account.

You don’t have it to spend now, it’s money coming out of what you make this year, but you have it for the future, and you’re going to want that in the future.

I highly recommend that you sit down, take a look at this, think about your retirement accounts and think about what your goals are, how much you want to have. There are some great calculators for this at bankrate.com, and Vanguard has their own calculators as well.

You can put in how much you want to have available to you and see what kind of accumulation you’ll need to get in terms of principal to live off that amount in retirement. You can compare that with social security income, you can pair that with other streams of income if you have any or are planning any, but it’s great to take a look and think about what kind of lifestyle you want in your old age.

None of us want to be very old and very broke, so this is the time to think about it right now. Tweet That!

Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to Financial Fluency here at iTunes.

Mastering Money Matters

What if managing your money and feeling wealthy was easy?

Imagine going from feeling sick to your stomach every time you have to pay a bill, to having a system that pays all of your bills on time, and shows you at a glance where all of your money is and where it is going.

Mastering Money Matters will show you a new way of looking at your finances so you can set up your systems, enjoy your money, and stop worrying about your next bill.

If you’ve been desperately avoiding looking at your finances and hoping it all just magically works out – money comes in, it doesn’t run out, and you have enough for a bit of extra spending – enroll in Mastering Money Matters today.