We’re back! and our meet up at Brewtorium was full of insighful conversations. Thanks to everyone who joined us in person and online!
I love seeing new faces and people bringing their friends to join in the chat. This club is about community and sharing knowledge through telling our stories, and I love your openness to do just that.
Welcoming first timers!
We started off speaking on our own experiences and why we came to the Money Moves conversation. As always, it’s awesome getting to chat with everyone about why they are here.
Know that you’re always welcome to pop into the club, we will always be talking about money and financial wellness. If you have any question at all about these topics please join us! We don’t have all the answers but we have conversations to demystify these problems we all encounter.
If you consider yourself financially savvy, please show up as well! We love to see confident strategic people sharing what they know with the community. You don’t have to worry about people giving you advice, we’re just sharing what we’ve been through and I for one love sharing all my stories if it will get rid of all the shame we feel when talking about these topics, and there are a lot of stories… 🙃
Not having a ‘roadmap’ to follow
Even though there are so many resources online we still feel like we are not getting the information we are looking for. That’s because there is no roadmap that fits for everyone all the same. We all know those people who who tells us they know ‘exactly what to do’, but we also know it’s really hard to replicate someone elses strategy, mostly when it comes to finances. The good thing is that there seem to be some key factors like paying off your debts first, saving, investing, getting ready for retirement etc, that have helped out a lot of people in the past with ‘tried and true’ small steps, and if we learn a little about each and how they can work for our own personal situation, we can get a little closer to our goals.
There is also a lot to be said about just having a community to see how others solved financial challenges in the past! I would say there is no roadmap for everyone, you have to figure it our for yourself which is hard and exhausting but when as we talked about “if you understand where your money goes that is the first step to take control”.
401k and investing in the stock market
This was an interesting discussion because everyone will always tell you to get ready for retirement YESTERDAY. But there is also a school of thought that is very skeptical about 401k accounts, and that’s okay! Some people might not be able to put away any money because they need it today. It’s not black and white but we talked about some people with 401k accounts that they manage themselves because they have a strategy. It all depends on what you know and what you can do. I have an employer who will match a percentage, which means more money in my account (free). The first corporate job I had offered money matching but I was not auto enrolled and because I had no idea what even a 401k account was, I missed out on the matching. These days some companies will auto enroll you with a small percentage which is better than nothing!
If you are a freelancer and don’t have access to a 401k account some ways to plan for retirement might be to build an emergency fun, save for taxes, and start a Traditional or ROTH IRA account.
Our freelancer members have talked about putting money away for retirement and I’d love to hear more of you share how you do this!
“I never learned anything about money other than it’s good to make more” & other topics we’ve had to relearn/unlearn.
There was a lot of talk about things we’ve learned from our parents that we’ve had to unlearn because we have grown up and realized it’s just not the same. Even when we come from the same family, our financial health and financial situation and appetite for risk is different than our parents, our grand parents and our siblings.
My father worked at a bank’s branch for a lot of his life but this didn’t mean he knew everything there is to know when it comes to money.
He taught me valuable lessons like ‘invest in yourself by learning’ or ‘start saving instead of spending’ but I’ve had to learn about taxes, stock market investments, compound interest (!!!) and and other topics myself through trial and error. I’ve had really scary situations with taxes, student loans and credit cards and I know from our club conversations that is true for a lot of us. The good thing is, you can negotiate, solve, creatively figure something out. Do not sit in shame!
Resources from our members
Multiple people mentioned the YNAB app ) as a way to track and learn more about how budgeting actually works. I thought this was a really cool resource because I use Mint which is good to track my expenses but YNAB (which stands for You Need A Budget) uses the envelope system where ‘the key idea is to prioritize cash income to meet separate categories of household expenses in physically separate envelopes’.
I had never heard of this and think it’s such a good way to actually visualize what you’re spending your money on to change the way you think about spending.
All and all it was a great meeting! Again, apologies for the folks who joined online because it was a bit loud at Brewtorium. I’d love to hear from anyone who has ideas about where we can host the next meeting!
Remember to take it one day at a time, I will let you all know more about our next meet up in the next couple of weeks.
Have a nice weekend!
~ Lina