Conversations... about Money

welcome her. No need for this long intro, and she can tell you all about herself. So with that being said, please welcome Nicole Lapping. Hi, Nicole, I'm good, Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me of Corals on the show. Thank you so much. Welcome to the Heart family. Thank you. I know I read that you're also a part of the family, which is really exciting. I know I'm not complaining. Um, I'm actually really excited for today's episode because I know absolutely nothing about the

topic in which we will be discussing. But before we jump right into it, do you want to give the listeners a background as to who you are, what you do your upbringing. Sure, I am Nicole Laughn and I wrote a book called Rich Fish. That was my first book. I am now on my fourth book with Miss Independent. And these are books that are about the typically boring

subject of finance and investing. But I try to at least make it fun or as fun as it can be and readable, because I think this is such an important topic, especially for women to talk about, and I really think it's the last taboo we have out there. Like we'll talk about basically everything before we talk about money. I'll go to dinner with my girlfriends and I'll be like, tell me about your sexy life and your bikini wax, and then I say, well, what's your bank account? And

all of a sudden, it's crickets. I'm like, girl, he just told me about your landown script and this is cricket. What's so true? What is this? But I didn't come from money. I figured out how to make my own money, how to make it grow for me in the school of hard knocks, and I realized that you know what, it's a It's a language, just like anything else. We just don't learn it growing up, and we don't learn

it in school, which is freaking bananas. It's crazy. If I were in charge of the world, it would totally be different. But I'm hoping to make it jargon free and understandable and accessible once and for all. Yeah, And I think, honestly, the main thing with this conversation is, at least for me, it's so intimidating because I don't know much about it, and because I wasn't taught at growing up that I don't even know where to start.

And I think a lot of people feel that way, Like where do you start either, even if you're not in your early stages anymore. I mean, it's never too late to learn about this. I think these are really good skills obviously to have under your belt, But what's a good starting point for somebody that's just like, I don't even know what any of this means. It is never too late. You're never as young as you are today. By the way, and I'm glad I didn't invest earlier,

said no one ever. I just had these man's made for my new book. It's true. No one has ever said to me, you know what, I'm so happy that I didn't invest earlier. I'm just so stoked that I didn't do this in my twenties. No, you know, you don't actually need a lot of money to make money. You just need the most time possible because then you get to take advantage of this amazing, beautiful, glorious force that is compound interest, where your money is literally working

for you while you're doing nothing. I mean, you work so hard for your money, it's time I think it returned the favor and the first step. All of my books are twelve step plans, and I truly think the first step to any recovery is admitting you have a problem. I mean, the only problem you can't fix is the one you don't admit you have in life and especially with your finance. So it's to be really really specific about them. Let your problems speak, and that's the best

way to tackle them. And I really like to give a combination of forgiveness for my former self for what she didn't know. It's okay, but now that you know more, it's not okay, moving forward like a little bit of tough love, and say we can do better. What's like an easy first step besides just obviously recognizing maybe if

you've been a little bit careless with your spending. But what's like a good first step that's achievable for most to be like, Okay, I'm gonna put away this much money and I'm gonna invest it in this place, and

how do you figure that out? So I would first come up with your spending plan, So instead of a budget, I call it a spending plan because like a regular diet, if you have an eating plan, you allow yourself small indulgences so you don't end up bingeing later on instead of something like a crash diet or a fat diet.

And so I break that down into the three ease Essentials, end game, and extras, where sevent of your overall spending plans, so what you have coming in goes to the essential so your food, you're housing, your transportation, all that stuff, and then no more than half of that so with three five percent of the whole shipping going to housing, which is oftentimes or people blow their spending plan if

they had one. And then to the extras, so whatever fun stuff does it for you, the latte, the manny petty, like, don't cut that stuff out cold turkey because you're just not going to stick to it. And then ideally to the end game. So that's your future self, your savings, your retirement, uh, anything you're saving up or if you're getting married, obviously that can be a separate sub savings account for your end game. Interesting. Okay, Well, A huge thing what I try to do with my podcast is

I really want to incorporate the listeners into it. So I normally take it to social media and I get a little Q and A going. And when I announced that you were going to be on the podcast, I was flooded with questions because I think so many of my followers also relate to just not really knowing this basic or key information. And so I was wondering if you would mind if I could read some questions to you and we could help some people out of course

bring it. Yes, amazing. Okay. So somebody said, which I think is an interesting rule of them, and I'm curious your opinion on it. They said, my method is if you can't buy two, you can't afford it. Thoughts. Huh, if you can't buy two, you can't afford it. Interesting, I've never heard that either. Um. Generally, I think that if you have it within your spending plan, it's accounted

for and it's not something you're sneaking. If you have a company and you come up with a budget, right like my heart has a budget and they have Staplers in the budget for instance, they're not sneaking off and saying, m I wonder can I buy one stapler too? Stapl If I can't buy two, we can't buy any No,

there's none of that like story you're telling yourself. If you have it laid out and you don't have to do it all day long, you just have to do what I Deally in the beginning of the year is a good time to set up a system, set it and forget it. You don't need to be looking at stock charts all day long, and there shouldn't be guessing like if you can buy one or two And sometimes you know you just because something is on sale doesn't

mean it's free. This happens that target all the time, Like you go in and you try to just get a roll of toilet paper or whatever, and then you end up with a whole cart because stuff is like on sale, but it's not free. So I think we often get into that emotional shopping and spending. Have it where you know a lot of times we had a bad day and then we buy something to make ourselves feel better. And that's just, you know, an addiction that we have to confront. And retail therapy, yea real tail

therapy is real. It's so real. Take it from me. It's the realist thing. Um, how did you if you don't mind sharing, Like, when you first got into all of this, what was your journey kind of looking like? Or how did you start? What was the first thing you started with? So I grew up in an immigrant family, uh broken home. Nobody ever talked about money or anything like that. My boyfriend in high school said he wanted to be a hedge fund manager, and I thought the

dude wanted to be in gardening. So like, I was so clueless, Olivia, I am the least likely person to be a finance anything. I never imagined I would get my own financial life together, much less teach other people about it. So truly, if I could do it, anyone could do it. And then I just needed a job. When I was eighteen and I was offered a job on the floor of the Stock exchange, and I lied and I said that I knew about it and I didn't, and I faked it till I made it, and I

realized that it's the language like anything else. And you know, growing up in an immigrant family, I was only taught about cash, not mortgages or anything else. Um. And so I got a credit card for the very first time and got myself in a bunch of credit card debt, and then figured out how to get out of it the hard way. I mean, every book that I read or anytime I looked something up, it all sounded like gibberish.

I needed a definition for the definition, and I was like, gosh, there has to be a better way, because once you can actually speak it, it's not that complicated. It's like if you go to Japan and you don't speak Japanese, you'd be really confused. If you go to Wall Street and you don't speak the language of money, you'll be really confused until, of course, you speak it. So I figured out how to prioritize, to pulverize out of my debt. Again.

Love alliteration. It just makes things easier. And I, you know, did six dollars or seven dollars a day. It can be baby steps, especially with something overwhelming, breaking it down into baby steps and those little baby steps broken down into even smaller steps is the best way to tackle something that's overwhelming. And money is often that and where do you put that, like six or seven dollars at first?

So I there's two different kinds of methods that finance people talk about, the avalanche method and the snowball method for tackling your debt. So I like the avalanche method, which is the prioritize method. So you rank your highest interest rate first, and your highest interest rate is usually your credit card debt. So if you have a hundred bucks magically that you found, and you have a bunch of different kinds of debt, you have a car note or a car payment, you have a mortgage, you have

student loans. You don't just find the hundred dollar bill and then pay that and cut it up. And yes it feels cathartic, but you should pay a hundred bucks toward the highest interest rate first, So toward whatever that is that you have on your credit card, because you're gonna pay that down, because that's gonna snowball and be uh, you know, greater and get out of control the fastest.

So I would say, not all debt is created equal, and so make sure you know exactly what your interest rates are for all of your different kinds of debt. And you know, creditors can take away your house, they can take away your car, they can't take away your brain. Um, so I say that student loans should go at the end. Interesting, I have so many questions from people saying, like, where do I start with paying off my student loans? Tips for paying off student loans, I mean I could find

like hundreds of them. Um, so you're saying do the other stuff first, and that should be last on the list. It should be. There's a lot of relief to coming out of Washington and a lot of forgiveness out there, which is great. Uh so definitely check what the latest is for when you listen to this. And just because there was a moratorium on student loan payments doesn't mean

you couldn't pay them. So, yes, you didn't have to, but actually, when the interest was paused on student loan payments over the pandemic, if you gave them a payment, it would be going towards your principle, which actually pays down your loan the fastest. So if you can still just what does that even mean? So you so you have a principle of what you're paying, and then you

have the interest on top of that. And so when you pay mortgage payment, you're oftentimes just paying the interests and you're not paying down the actual cost of the thing that you borrowed against. Because if you get like a hundred thousand dollar mortgage, you're often paying just as much in interest as you are for the actual house. So the interest on these types of loans really can get out of control depending on what the interest rate is.

And so when you had the opportunity over the pandemic to take a pause on your student loan payments, uh, if you did pay anyway, let's say you had a little bit of extra money, it was going towards knocking down the principle the base of what you actually borrowed and not the interest that's the stuff on top. Does

that make sense sort of? I think that you're saying that because of the pandemic, that was like a government that was like a government enabled situation where they said, because obviously I'm not in school, so I am unaware of this side of things. Um, will you just break it down for me, like as if you were talking to a first grader, so totally. So if you took out student loans, then there are federal and private student loans.

And so we've seen some relief that's come out of Washington around federal student loans um and there are a lot of different programs that you can look into to help pay those down now, because we saw over the pandemic there was a pause on them, like in some areas, there was also a pause on paying rent for instance. Um, this is different because when you take out a certain amount of money, Let's say you take out ten thousand dollars, that ten thousand dollars is not which you ultimately pay.

You ultimately pay much more with interest, right, And so when those payments were paused, uh, then you didn't have to pay any money toward paying them down. And so what I would suggest is that even if you didn't have to pay it, and you can pay it, you know, finance has been so hard for many people during the pandemic, but it would go towards the main ten dollars that you were paying, which actually in the long run will help you pay less over then then the extra interest

that you're paying on top. So as as much as you can get the principle down of what you're what you borrowed the better. Okay, this is another really great question, and it says the topic of money can be uncomfortable sometimes. If you are unhappy with your salary, what is an appropriate way to start this conversation with your boss? This is a great question. So everything is negotiable. The worst thing anyone can say is no. All these bills, by

the way, are negotiable. If you have credit card um, if you have credit cards and your a p R, your interest rate is negotiable. Your medical debt is negotiable. I love to argue with online bill collectors because you know, the worst thing they can say is no. So when you're going to your employer for a salary increase, as an employer myself, you know, I like to see evidence

that you are making me money. I'm not running a charity in my business, and so if you can show me like where you've actually contributed to the overall revenue of the company, then that's really helpful for me as

an employer. So I would go in with a document or some sort of presentation, just like you would for any other client, but then do it for yourself because your boss has their own things going on and likely their own boss, and so they're not watching all of the things that you're doing, so you really want to highlight that for them, and then go in with a salary bump increase option, a perks option, and then a

companyation of both. So the perks option could be something like a transportation stipend or an expense account or you know, working from home a certain day if you're back at the office, and then those things sometimes are more valuable

than a bump in your base salaries. So I would look at your overall compensation package and uh, and then co in with a couple of different options, but definitely show how you've been contributing, because a lot of times people will say, well I deserve a raise, my boss will just give me a raise. Like you know, your boss has things to do. Your boss has like a board if they're the boss of that. You know, everybody

has to report to somebody else. So really really don't be embarrassed about tuoting your own horn and spelling it out. Got it? How do you know when you are in a position to buy a house? Is there a formula that tells you how much you should spend if you have a certain amount saved. Yes, So this is one of the biggest questions I get, and I would before even getting into the nitty gritty here, stop and ask

yourself if housing is buying houses right for you. We've been told a lot of financial truisms that I like to call bs on, And just because you've been told that buying a house is the right financial move doesn't necessarily mean it's the right for you. So renting can be just fine, like if financial gods are not going

to come down and get you because you rent. And in fact, a lot of people who can afford to buy a house rent because otherwise you're tying up a lot of opportunity cost for what you could be doing with that money. So unfortunately, a lot of young people are house poor, where they put all of their money that they saved into a down payment for a house and then they have very little money for anything else. So if God forbid something happened, you can't go to

the grocery store with your mortgage. Um. And so instead of that uh using that lump sum like a hundred grand towards uh, you know, a five d a thousand dollar home, then I would say, think about the opportunity costs that you might be missing out on and putting your money in the market, which will ultimately get you about ten percent over time. Um. And I think the reason people think renting is throwing away money is because

they forget about this thing called inflation. So then they're like, Grandma bought a house for fifty grand and now it's two d and fifty grand and housing is the best investment ever. Housing is not the best investment ever. It's not if you look at inflation adjusted prices over time. It actually has barely kept pace with inflation if adjusted for what the returns would be if you put your money in the market. Uh. So, I would say that get the idea of housing being a good investment out

of your mind. If you want a house, cool, If you want to nest your face off cool. If you don't want to leave that particular area great. But that's a different reason than it being a good investment. I could think of a bunch of different things that would be much better and smith because remember, like a lot of things, you don't get back from buying a house to closing costs. You know, if the roof breaks, if the attic floods or what if the basement flood would be?

That would be a whole different problem. So what would you recommend or like what you just said that you would suggest a million other things before a home. So I like to index funds and chill um. A lot of people have slipped into my d m s. This is these are the fun, sexy kind of d ms that I get about finance questions um over the pandemic, like should I buy Zoom? Should I buy Peloton? You know, should I buy Crypto? What's gonna be uh, what's gonna be most lucrative? And I think that you can have

excitement and fun other places. I really like to keep it boring and basic with money and your money strategies. And so index funds. Do you know what index fends? No idea? Okay, So sometimes if you hear on the new is like the Dow is up for something like that, then the Dow and the SMP five funder those are indexes. And so those like for the Dow, for instance, those are the biggest thirty stocks that we have UM, and so an index fund will buy a little piece of

all of those companies within that particular index. So you're buying a lot of different things that will essentially diversify what you have exposure too. So if one of those things fails, then you have something else to prop it up. Otherwise, if you're putting all of your money in one thing like Zoom stock or Peloton stock, and that goes down, then then so does your money. And so I like to I like to suggest what Warren Buffett suggested for

his wife to do in his will. So Warren Buffett is one of the greatest investors of our time, and he said to his wife, put most of our money into low cost SMP five hundred index funds, which you know is basically just tracking the market. Not a lot of investors can beat what the market does. So when you hear the market is doing this, that generally means like the SMP five hundred, which are five hundred stocks

that that would be tracking. Okay, that makes sense. Something new every day I would say, I'm so nervous about this because, as I said, it's so intimidating when you don't know anything. And I feel fortunate that I have somebody on my team that handles and helps me with my money. So I have somebody to go to. But I know so many people don't that it's like very overwhelming. When it comes to relationships, what do you think is the appropriate way to handle money? Should you keep finances separate?

This is a great question. So money is one of the greatest causes of fights and divorce within couples. Um I think you have to start talking about money the earlier the better, and think about timing, tone and turf. So it doesn't have to be this hardcore conversation with all of your spreadsheets across the kitchen table and like some contentious conversation. You could be like, hey, what do you want to do in five years or ten years?

Because goals have price tex. So if you have a conversation about what your goals and your dreams are, that's a much better way to approach it than something that feels scary and intense. And so when you're moving in with somebody, that's a different talk than when you get married and have kids because then you have more money talks like wills and advanced directives and not super fun

things shock about that that's what grown ups do. Um. So when you're putting your money together, or if you're getting married, I would say, have a yours mind and hours account, so and have your the money that goes into the hours account you waited. So if some ultimately it's going to make more money and somebody is going to make less, it's it's very uncommon that people make

exactly the same amount of money. So if one person makes a hundred thousand dollars in one person makes a million dollars, ten percent of that is going to feel similar to each person, but it's not going to be the exact same dollar amount. So you know, ten thousand dollars to person it makes a hundred thousand dollars a year is going to feel like a lot more than somebody that makes a million dollars a year, for instance.

And so I would say, come up with a percentage instead of a fixed dollar amount to put in the hour's account. Interesting, and then also don't forget like where the bills are um, whose name the bills are under, because you want to be accumulating credit. Um. Credit is like your financial report card, and your credit score determines how much how much of an interest rate you're going

to get on any of the stuff. So your credit card, like the credit card interest rate that you have is not going to be the same as your friends because it's all based on your history. And I got a lot of questions about credit. Um, obviously it's really important to have good credit. I've seen a few things like how do you begin to build a like a good

credit in your early twenties? And then I've also seen like what if you still live with your parents and you're under all their financial uh kind of their financial tree, and you don't have you like, how do you start building that credit on your own? Yeah? I mean the few ways to increase your credit score. The first one is paying your bills on time, and if you haven't

set up automatic deposit for that, you definitely should. You know, stuff happens, you move, whatever, but that actually dings your score the most. And then your utilization rate, which is just a fancy word for how much credit you're using compared to how much credit you have. So if you have a five thousand dollar credit limit on one of your credit cards, um, you should not be spending five

dollars on that. Yeah, you should try to keep it to you know, a thousand dollars or less, because then you're showing creditors that responsible with credit, so try to keep that too, um as much of a minimum as possible if you are responsible. I never say no to a credit increase because then that just helps your that fancy utilization rate. Um, don't necessarily use it, but always

get higher credit increase if you can. And if you can't even get a credit card, a secured credit card is a great way to go or to become an authorized user on somebody else's card. So um, there are secure credit cards where essentially you would pay them off in full and that can just help build your credit

by showing good payment history. Okay, that makes sense actually, and I think one of the most daunting topics and also one that mind boggles me that we are not taught this in high school, Like genuinely, it's crazy to me. But taxes so important. If you have no idea, obviously it's not something they teach us in school, how do you even begin in figuring out your taxes? And you have tips for disimplifying them. So taxes are definitely abuse. Don't be upset if you don't know about them. You

don't actually necessarily need to know about them yourself. You just need to find the right resources to help you. So there are a lot of different online services like a turbo tax or something like that. You know, I'm not suggesting them particularly, but there are a lot of services that can help if you have very simple returns. UM. You can also if you make you know, less than fifty seven thousand dollars a year, you can get your taxes done for free depending on your state, like cal

E I T C for me. If you go to that in California, then you can get help in doing your taxes. And just because you made a little bit amount, you know it, Just because you might have made a little bit of money that year doesn't mean you don't file a tax return. You should UM and in fact, you could be getting money back to you that you don't even know about. Are a lot of different tax

credits that you could qualify for. But my suggestion is, depending on how much money you've made, UH use an online program, UH go to an organization like cal E I T C H for me, or find an accountant that is a certified accountant in your area. Green Flags for good investment Opportunities. I kind of liked how they phrase this because normally I always see like red Flag talking about like relationships, and I like that they said

green flag for good investing. Green flags are awesome. Um, you know, I think green flags around anything crypto related, and crypto is the most risky, one of the most risky assets out there, but it's something that you know is getting a lot of buzz right now. And so green flag for me there would be keeping it to less than one percent of your net worth. And anyone can have a net worth. It doesn't matter how much

money you have, it's just your assets. So tally up everything you have minus your liabilities, so everything that you owe, and then that's your net worth. But try to not uh try to not put in more than one percent of whatever that is because you can afford to lose one percent. You can't necessarily afford to miss out on if one percent becomes one percent though, uh So that is a good green flag. If you have boundaries and parameters, like a lot of this stuff is is similar to

how we get our own emotional lives together, right. You want boundaries around your money. You wanna you wanna make sure that you are delineating it in a way that you are intentional about. You don't want to just like randomly put money into UM. You know something that you see that's on you know, hot on the news or whatever. Now on doage coin UM. So the first step to any of the investments is to get a brokerage. So

do you need the difference between banks and brokerages. So banks would be like where you keep your savings account or get a CD which is a certificate of a deposit of deposit um at your bank and get kind of a low interest rate. A brokerage allows you to do any kind of investing beyond that, So those would be like E Trade or UM Charles Schwab or Vanguard or Fidelity, and those accounts would allow you to buy things like the index fund that I just mentioned to you,

UM or anything else. With crypto, it's a little bit different because then you would have coin based or something like that where you would actually buy right. I'm kind of familiar with crypto because my ex boyfriend was like obsessed with it for very long time, so I'd always hear about coin base and ethereum and all these different things that I don't know how I feel about it. Are you invested in crypto slash? Is that something you recommend to people? I have a very little bit of crypto.

I have a low expo sure fancy Wall Street terminology for that to crypto UM. There's you know, so there are different kinds as you mentioned ethereum, ripple, are other types of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is obviously the greatest. In the same way as that you would have a lot of different kinds of fiat currencies. Fiat currency is just a fancy word for like normal currencies that we would have the dollar or the yen or the euro or whatever else.

And so you know, I would try, if you're just getting started in it, to keep it to some of the big ones that are UM like bitcoin, UM would be the largest one versus some of them more random ones because actually, anyone I've done shows on this can create a coin and it's not attached to any intrinsic value UM, and so it can be very volatile and it can be very risky. So I don't think it's

the first place to start with investing for sure. That's really good to know because a lot of people are asking, like, would you recommend I just go straight to stock market or do something a little bit more safe, or is it worth taking this risk because it's everywhere right now? Um, so you got your answer people, Yeah, I mean there's no like a fast, easy way to double your money. This is such a dad joke or a mom joke, but like the easiest way to do that is to

fold money and have truly anything else. Like, if it sounds stupid to be true, it probably is. Right. What's the number one misconception people have about money? Would you say? You see? I think that it is something only guys can do. Um, I think that. Um, you know a lot of women who are well educated and boss bitches in their own right still have this mentality that like

a guy is going to figure this out. And I think for me, I've always wanted to have my own back no matter what, to have the money, and that means freedom to eve a crappy relationship, which a lot of women stay in because they think they can't afford to financially support themselves or leave a crappy job. And

so I think changing our mindset around that. Even studies of showing that little boys associate power words with money and little girls associate scarcity or shame words with money, and so this has been socialized in US for a long time. It makes sense, and we see all these wrong coms and Disney movies where like the guys just figures out and like saves the day, and I, you know, I think that's the biggest misconception. It doesn't have to

be that way, right. I feel like that's also such a big reason not to blame my lack of knowledge on this topic on society and what's right versus wrong. But I do feel like it is obviously very apparent that this is like not this is not true. I'm not saying that's the fact, but that, you know, people say this is a man's job and they really know how to handle their money, and you kind of just

sit back and you do the other stuff. And so I feel like my whole life I have have been so intimidated to even try and learn about it because I'm like, well, I'm probably not smart enough to figure that out, Like it's probably so much more complicated than my brain can handle. And from talking to you, it it really does seem like it's not impossible to learn. It's definitely not impossible

to learn. And I somehow got into this world of Wall Street and I realized that these guys, and they're mostly all guys I was like one of a few women on the stock exchange, and they really don't know a lot more than everybody else. I used to feel like it was this exclusive club, but the people inside don't know a lot more than the people out by the curb. They just talk about it way more confidently. Right, all about confidence. We can wrap it up after this,

but this is the last and final question. And if you could give one just one piece of advice about money to the listeners, what would you tell them? I would say, take control today. Uh, you're never as young as you are today, and as far as I'm concerned, today is as good a day as any. I promise your future self will thank you. It's your hard earned money. You work hard as heck for your money, so it's

time that you fight for it. And it's time to allow this beautiful force of interest that's more often been used against people via credit cards and other things. Um I told you how much compound interests can grow when it's used against you, but it can actually you can use that very same force in your favor. So instead of being a customer upon in this system, you can it's so easy to be an owner in this system and you said you had three books out. This is

my fourth. For Independent is my fourth. So you list off in order one through four what the names are in case people want to buy and learn even more. That would be amazing. Yes, so rich Witch was my first book. Of boss Witch is my second book. Love Becoming Superwoman is my third book, which is about burnout and how mental health affects your career. Um. And then number four is Miss Independent, which is a simple twelve step planned to start investing and grow your own wealth.

There are more books. I can't believe that this is the first of a seven book. That is crazy. There's a lot of information to be to be aware of. Well, thank you so much, honestly, thank you so so much. I know this is going to be so like so helpful for so many people, And it was very helpful for me because before his conversation I knew basically nothing I would say confidently, So I really appreciate it. I

will definitely be ordering her books. I encourage you guys to do the same, and especially if you're a female, we gotta take over. Hell yeah, hell yeah, Thank you so much, Nicole, Thanks Olivia. All right by guys one