The BA Q&A: Save Or Invest?

see your grandmama, not us. I actually don't know why she encourages anyone to sue their grandma, but you know what, I'm just gonna go with it and love and big virtual hugs to Tiffany. As always, let's get into today's show. You know what, We're doing a lot of personal finance questions today. It's been a minute. I feel like I get so many career questions now, But let's get back

to business when it comes to money. Okay, y'all, Remember you can send us your questions at Ambition Podcast at gmail dot com or hit us up on Instagram and we are on Instagram at brand Ambition Podcast. You can also ping me directly. I'm at Mandy money on IG love getting your questions. Remember you can be anonymous, Okay, we don't have to put your entire business out there. You're already being so generous to ask your question publicly

or semi publicly with the show. So just let us know if you want us to change your name or you know, let you remain anonymous. I get it. Money is awkward, money is private. We're here for you. Okay, let's dive into these money questions for today. Our first question comes from IG from listener Elsa. Elsa says, which should be a priority when you have a limited focus?

Should you focus on your emergency fund or investing in a four to oh one k oh, Elsa, This is a great question, and I think this is so I mean, it's everything that it's something that so many workers go through when you feel like it's so important to invest, right, But isn't it also important to have cash savings on the side. I don't think it's an either or situation. I think it's a both. And so what I would do is this gets down to the basics, right, So sit down and come up with how much money do

you have leftover? After you pay all of your non negotiable expenses, your mortgage or your rent, your car payment, your daycare, whatever you need, food for the table, your your must have expenses, and then what money do you have leftover? Now, this is where you kind of want to divide and conquer. Hopefully you've got a little bit leftover of your budget. If you don't, then that's a bigger issue. But let's assume that you've got money left over.

I would say take about I don't know, whatever percentage you feel comfortable with. You can take fifty to fifty, So take fifty percent of whatever you have left over. You can put fifty percent of that money into your

savings account and then invest the rest. But don't forget when it comes to your four to one K. If you take advantage of the traditional four one K, which is when you're actually putting money in pre tax, it actually allows you to use money that otherwise would have been paid to Uncle Sam out of your paycheck and

put that money directly into your retirement funds. And so why I'm pointing that out is that, like let's say your tax rate is twenty five percent, if you were to, you know, take your paycheck and then put one hundred

dollars into your retirement account. If you went ahead, that's one hundred dollars after tax, right, But if you hadn't taken advantage of that pre tax four one K, that could be one hundred and twenty five dollars because you're doing that money, getting that money before Uncle Sam takes his little cut. Okay, now he's going to get his cut down the line when you start withdrawing those funds

in retirement. But that is one of the benefits of a traditional four to one K that you get to use money before those taxes are taken out, and then it can grow and yay, be happy, and compounding interest and all that magic will happen until you retire, and then you can plan your sort of tax saving strategy

with a financial advisor down the line. But going back to the central question, you know, is it an either or should I just be saving money in my savings or investing in a four to one K. I'm a fan of doing both, and I wouldn't overthink necessarily, like

maybe it doesn't feel like a lot. Let's say you only have one hundred dollars or a couple hundred dollars that you're able to part with each month, and you split that in half and it's fifty towards your savings and fifty towards your four to one K. It's still something, and at the end of the day, something is better

than nothing. When I was starting out, automation was such a huge, huge component, and I can look back at it now, you know, ten eleven, twelve years since I started to invest and really credit not how much I was investing, but how I was investing. With my success, it was the fact that I was investing automatically that helped me grow my net worth and ten x my net worth in just these past five years, from seventy

K to seven hundred K, as I've talked about. So when I go back to that automation, and what I mean by that is you go to your employer or your payroll, whatever it is. You can probably do it yourself or get in touch with someone from benefits and ask them how can I automatically contribute to my four to one K where I don't have to go in

and manually do it each month. So what I would do is I go into my paycheck online platform and I would say you know, after everything is taken out, I want this much in my four to one k automatically deducted, and then I would actually also automatically transfer money to my savings account. So you can tell your payroll department, here's my savings account routing number, here's where you can find it. Please make sure that fifty dollars or one hundred dollars or whatever it is, goes into

the savings account every paycheck. And what was so magical about this, the fact that I had my investing and my savings fund automatically deducted from my paycheck, is that when that paycheck actually hit my checking account, I knew it was money that I could spend, and I knew

it was money that I didn't have. I didn't have to feel guilty about spending it on, you know, whatever I want to to do, go to a show, buy myself a new outfit, get fancy coffee in the morning, like, do whatever I needed to do, because that was the money I had to play with. Of course, after my rent and all that other stuff was paid for. So automation, automation, automation.

And believe me, if you just start with a little bit and you automate it and you are consistent, you will see that investment grow over time, and also you'll have your emergency fund continually being reinforced with those additional funds. So I hope that was helpful. Please don't stop yourself thinking that you have to come up with the perfect recipe between savings or investing. Tweak it as you go.

Something may come up and you may say, oh, I actually had a car repair, or I was out of work for a couple months, and my emergency fund is completely depleted, so let me ratchet it up and shift the balance more towards saving cash versus my four to one K for a while. It's okay. It's a living, breathing plan and you've got a bake and that flexibility so your financial plan or strategy like doesn't become something so rigid that it stops you from actually making progress. Okay,

thank you so much for your question, Elsa. Let's get back to the mail bag and see what we got here. Ooh I, okay, this one hits a little you know what, This question I bet will hit close to home for a lot of our listeners, because especially our listeners who are in relationships, because as you know, when you become partners with someone life partners. Now, I don't care if you're married or not married, but if you're a life

partner with someone you're committed to each other. It's not just the partner often who you're committing yourselves to, it's also their family. So that brings me to my second questions a day from a listener who would like to remain anonymous, and this listener asks, Nandy, do you believe that someone's son should constantly give his mother large amounts of money because he thinks that she doesn't make enough Anonymous.

Very short question, but so loaded and so complex. I'm going to make some assumptions here because we don't have a ton of information, but I'm going to assume that you are in a life partnership with this particular son in question, and that he has been giving his mother money, and I'm going to assume that maybe you would like this to stop now. Listen, I have been in this situation myself, not where I have a spouse or partner consistently giving money to his parents, but certainly there have

been times. I mean, my husband and I have been together for a decade now where once in a while, a family member may need help, and maybe it's someone who's asking for help from him or from me, But first and foremost, we always kind of tackle that question together as a unit. And that took me probably until I was had a ring on the finger and was married, married capital and married for me to actually bring him

into every financial decision I made. It was a little bit more difficult for me because you know, I'm an independent woman like so many of us are, and I have my own money, So do I need someone's permission? No, But when I had to recognize, or at least for our relationship, it worked better for me to recognize, like,

we are a unit. Even though this money technically came into my account, we are a team now and our goals we should all be on the same page about what we're doing with our money and how it's impacting our goals for example. So yeah, we tackle those decisions together. And there have been times where one of us hasn't felt comfortable with giving a certain amount of money to a family member. And I'm not going to name names here,

that's not what this is about. But the central issue was, like, oh, someone asked one of us for money, who we cared about and we would have liked to have been able to help them, but as a unit, we weren't on the same page. And there has been times on both sides where we had to accept that okay, well, and then we would kind of compromise. Okay, if it's not this amount of money, what do we as a unit feel comfortable with? And there are those family members y'all

know what I'm talking about. They are the ones who you know, it's a little bit then, and then it's a little bit more later, and then it becomes like it doesn't start, you know, as a situation where you know you're getting a question or request regularly, but it becomes more regular, and then there's a trend, and then there's a theme, and then it becomes an issue and then you have to kind of really revisit it as a partnership and ask yourselves like, are we what are

we signing up here for? And let's get real, these requests are going to keep coming, so what is our what's our decision here? Are we going to keep saying yes? And if it's having an impact on your ability to reach your financial goals as a unit as a family, then one thousand percent that that warrants a conversation. So I get it. I get what you're saying, anonymous. So it sounds like you're frustrated because your partner has been giving his mother money, you say, large amounts of money

because she doesn't make enough. This is a situation where you should talk to him, like sit down and say how much and how long are we comfortable continuing to financially support your mother? And if the answer is this is my which is very well, maybe this is my mom. I can't let my mom go hungry, et cetera. Like what's your response going to be and are you going to be able to make peace with that? It's really hard to tell someone that this family member, especially when

it's a parent. It's not always a parent. It's a lot easier to say no if it's like their second third cousin, right, But when it's a mom, his answer may be listen, this is really this is my mother. This is very important to me. I'm making I'm doing well,

so I feel responsible for assisting her. And it may take you some time to at least to broach this conversation and not have it ultimately, like not have it immediately go to that place of you're telling me I shouldn't give money to my own mother, like I can already hear the argument right, kind of got to explain to this person and what may work is reminding him of how his decision and how this money that he is giving to his mother is impacting you, guys and

your family your goals. You know, what are you unable to accomplish with the amount of money that he's been giving to his mother. You want to always bring it back to yourselves as a team. We are a team. Here's how this amount of money is impacting our capability as a family to reach these goals that I thought we were on the same page about. And it may not be an all or nothing situation. It may not be where you know, he has to stop giving everything right away. You may just be asking for can we

scale it back a little bit? Or you know, this is something that I've had to get better at, especially when it comes to family who's asking for money and it starts out as one time, but then it's a few times, and then it's a couple of times a year. It's like, what's the core issue here? How can I

actually be helpful besides just giving money. Is there a cash flow problem, has their rent gone up, has something else in their life, has something else in their personal finance has kind of fallen created an issue where they're not able to cover their expenses anymore, And how can we help solve that core issue? Maybe they could use some help around consolidating debt or looking for alternative ways to pay things, or decreasing their expenses in some way.

So I think that that's the next level of help that family can also use besides just kind of blindly writing checks, which can start to feel like to your point and probably what you're feeling right now, which is when is this ever going to stop? Is it ever going to stop? And those are super valid questions to have, and you need to ask those questions, and you need to get on the same page about the answers sooner rather than later, because otherwise it's going to be festering.

You're going to start to feel resentment. Those Thanksgiving dinners

are going to get a lot more awkward. Okay, it's going to get awkward around her birthday or Mother's Day when you're like, and now I got to buy her some flowers, like and a gift, like it's just better to have those conversations upfront with your partner, as awkward and painful as they may be, and just sort of say, I'm fine supporting family, but let's go on the same page about how much, how often, and what other resources can we provide them with to help solve the deeper

foundational issues that are here. And you know what, it may also be asking for support from other family members

who may also have something to contribute here. Right. I've talked to folks, especially when you have people who are the first generation, you know, first generation wealth owners or just owning, you know, having resources, having funds to give and for the first time, and there's there's a deep responsibility and a sense of debt that you feel like you owe to your family to help them, right, But you're not always the only one who can shoulder that burden.

And sometimes people put that burden on their own shoulders and tell themselves a story about how, oh, if it's not me, it's no one and they rely on me. But there may be other people who can support as well. And if you share that burden, it may it may make the load a lot easier to carry. I just know that it's an awkward, uncomfortable conversation, but it's one that is so so important to go ahead and have

sooner rather than later. You don't want this to fester and to cause cracks in the relationship because ultimately, you too are a unit. Right, I'm assuming that you're in a lifetime committed partnership. You two are in a unit together, So that's what you at its core. At its core, that's what you have to protect is your relationship as a couple, and transparency, honesty and hopefully being open with one another will help. All right, let me take a quick break. I will be right back with our third

and final question. All right, be a fam I am back with our third and final question. This one comes from Adrian. Adrian, who is a member of Tiffity's Dreamcatchers group, says Mandy, I'm hoping you can help me. I've searched the Dreamcatchers group and I can't see to find an answer to the best form of payment you should use when paying a settlement for a judgment. I appreciate any help you can provide. All right, Adrian, I think this is a pretty simple question. So it sounds like there's

been a judgment. So when she's talking about judgment, so basically, when you have let's say you have a debt that has been passed due and it's gone past collections and the creditor lender has actually sued in order to recoup its debt, then it can go to a judge and

the judge will issue a ruling. And for a lot of people, they may never even know that there's a lawsuit against them and may just kind of become another piece of mail that's in the pile that but anyway, it can happen, so a judge may ultimately issue a ruling and say, okay, yes you do owe this creditor this amount of money, and then it comes time to pay the piper, right. So from there, what you can

do is you can try to settle for less. So you could, you know, get your judgment of what you owe and then go to the creditor and say you know, or to the to the judge and say you know, I actually only have this amount of money. Is this okay? And then try to settle it for less, try to work out a payment plan. Unfortunately, what could happen is that your wages are actually garnished as part of a settlement,

part of a judgment settlement. Now that there's some exceptions, you know, for people who aren't a fixed income, so that's not a blanket statement by any means. But it can be possible that your wages can just be automatically garnished. That's one way of paying it back, which is not even in your control. But we'll add that to the list of possibilities. One is that your wages could be garnished. I think it's up to fifteen percent, but don't quote

me on that. It really will depend also on the states, the laws in your state, So your wages could be garnished. You could just make one lump sum payment, which can probably be done by check. I doubt it by cash, because who even uses cash anymore. Finding the contact for the lender and getting on the phone with them, with their debt collector's office or whatever who handles that kind of thing and making a payment over the phone can

be another way to make that payment. You've probably got a couple of options, but I think the best person to ask is going to be the whoever issued you the judgment, or the lender who has been awarded a judgment against you to find out what your next steps are at this point, though, you definitely don't want to let it go too long before making those payments because I think that's what actually triggers them to garnish your wages and that sucks. Okay, so you don't want to

get that bad all right, Thank you very much. Adrian also shout out to Dreamcatchers. If you're in Tiffany's Dreamcatchers Facebook group, it's an amazing resource. I know their dream Catchers are on there all the time, supporting one another and sharing their personal finance wins and challenges and questions. So if you're not a member, go check them out. All right. That is our BAQ and A for this week, y'all.

Thank you so much for your questions. Again. Hit us up at brandabissionpodcast dot com, or you can submit a question or go to ig we are at brand Ambition Podcast. You can also reach us by email Brand Ambition Podcast at gmail dot com