Avoiding Money Fights, with Andy Hill #102

He and his wife started out fifty thou dollars in debts, but in four years they became completely debt free after paying off their debt uh and two hundred thousand dollars of a home mortgage. Yeah. That's definitely unicorn territory right there. Um. And now eight years into it, they've grown their net

worth two over seven and fifty thousand dollars. Andy's podcast is called Marriage, Kids, and Money, and today we're excited to hear more about his journey and personal finance, and in particular to dive into some ways to avoid those money fights like you mentioned. Yeah, So all right, real quick, we need to mention the beer that we're having on

the show today. We're having a beer called Cream Weaver by Three Taverns Brewery local Atlanta brewery and your friend Tyler donated this right, yeah, and uh Andy, you're you're gonna have a beer on the episode as well. Up there in Detroit. What do you have it on this episode? I'm having Grand Rabbits from Black Rocks Brewery, which is actually my brother in law's brewery and they are located

in Marquette, Michigan. So if you're ever in Michigan or northern Wisconsin you want to grab a brew, support Black Rocks. It tastes really good and it just helps the family, so you know, go for that. Well, it is nice to have someone in the business, right in the brewery business in your family. It's like free beer on holidays, that's for sure. Absolutely. And he's you know, he's one

of those really exciting entrepreneurial stories. I won't go into all the details, but he essentially was a full time guy selling pharmaceutical sales and said, you know what, I just want to brew beer in my basement. And then he moved it to were Bruined Beer in the house, and then we're bruined beer in our own brewery, and then they started Canning going all around Michigan. It's a great that's a great story. I love talking about it. Yeah,

that's awesome. Alright, So any every episode we have a craft beer because for us, it's a sign of choosing to live intentionally now, even while we're saving for the future, and you're drinking a beer with us. Thank you for that. What is your craft beer? What is the thing that excites you about spending money on today while you're doing such a good job saving for the future. The thing that I that I end up splurging on, that I spend too much money on are the activities that my

kids sign up for. So if my kid even remotely has some sort of interest in dancing or swimming or tennis, I immediately sign them up for it. And it's actually to the detriment of our both our budget and our our marital sanity sometimes because we end up getting into too many activities. And it's kind of funny because now that I'm a parent, that's where I want to dump a lout of my money because I see how happy they get and I want to live vicariously through them.

Before they came along, it was concerts and I would buy roadbikes because I was at two triathlons, and that all's just sort of shifted towards my kids because I just I love seeing how happy they are and I love seeing them light up. So that's that's kind of where I'm dumping my money lately. All Right, I'm gonna start putting some fun things in their brains, like space camp exactly right. Only cost ten thousand dollars for two weeks,

so big right. Alright, andies, let's let's dive in. On a recent episode of your podcast, you mentioned that you've had a particularly bad day at work, right, and that made you work towards diversifying your income. Can you tell us basically what happened and then where did that take

you in your personal finance journey. Yeah. So I've been working in the corporate event marketing world for about fifteen years, and I am in my late thirties, and so I've been I've been doing this for a while, and you kind of get into a groove and you start doing well in your career, and you know, you start to get to a point where you're you know, enjoying things. You're in a managerial level, and then something's happened, you know. So one day our company purchased another company, and then

with that came a different management over. So when that management came over, they said, all right, Andy, you are not in this position anymore. You are now in this position, and those people you were managing, you're not managing them anymore, and we're changing your title. It's a demotion and this is what you're gonna have to deal with. And I've been working really hard up until that point with this

new company. I had been exceeding my goals every year and crushing them and you know, bringing in more sales and more clients. And at this point I realized there's really nothing that I could do I was in control of that really had anything to do with this this

decision that they were making. And at that point, I said, well, you know what, maybe I need to stop trying to care so much about my career and try to care about something that maybe I do have control on over, or at least something that brings me some joy or

some entrepreneurial spirit or creative spirit. So at that point I decided, well, why don't I try to start my own thing, my own little entrepreneurial adventure, and that's when I decided to start the podcast because I've listened to a lot of folks like you guys that are sharing these great stories and inspiring people on how to save money but also enjoy life. And I thought I had something to contribute. So that's where I started, at least

diversifying in the small business world. And then at that time too, I also wanted to diversify my income and other fashions as well. Yeah, and I think income diversification is something that we don't talk about a whole lot. There's there's all these ways to attack your frugality or start investing, and we've talked about side hustles on the show before, and that's something that people. I think, no is a way to increase your income, right, but specifically

the journey towards having a more diversified income. You I believe you said you wanted to have income from five different sources. Uh, coming in right, that's like your goal. So tell us kind of what those sources are and and what a diversification of where you get your income from means to you. Yeah, I would say, you know, so outside of the small business that we talked about that I'm slowly building, which brings me a lot of joy. For first and foremost, it brings me joy more than income.

The other thing is that my wife has started to pursue a side hustle per se. She's been doing stay at home mom duties over the past four or five years, and it's been a really important thing for our family that our kids were able to be at home with her and enjoy some great bonding time. But she also needs some sanity time for herself too, so she started to do a little side hustle for herself. She's really into organizing, so she started um working for a small

business locally where she does home organizing. So she goes into people's homes and creates order and helps them to declude their lives. So that brings her a lot of Maricondo Jr. Exactly, it's very I mean talk about you know, of the times, right, tidying up with Marie Condo. And she sort of laughs at at that a little bit, because you know, Mariekando kind of comes in and says, hey, here's all the things that you can do to spark joy.

All right, I'll see you later. And but really, when NICOLEA goes into here all the things you can do to declare your life, and I'm gonna help you do it right now. So it's, uh, it's a little bit a little TV magic where they walk away and come back. But so that's one of the avenues that we're doing to diverse fire income is where Nicole started to do

something that she's passionate about. The other area as we are saving up for our first rental property, which Joel, I know you are all about, my friend, and it's helped to make a big deal in your life. So we're saving up for our first rental property and hopefully get some some income that would be um coming in on a study basis, and then the fourth one would be investing in a taxable brokerage count. So we do it.

We've done a lot for our retirement over the past whatever ten years now, and we've built up a lot of funds in there, and it's starting to look a little outside and I'm like, all right, we're gonna be really great when we're sixty five, and I'm like, okay, well, we don't really have anything for thirty five or forty. So we're starting to diversify our investments there and see where we can go by by building that up a little bit. And then really the fifth one is I

don't I don't plan on really stopping working. Um. I enjoy you know, having a full time career and you know, providing benefits for my family. So I'll continue to grow my career and do really well at my job. And you know, if if things don't work out well there over time, I've got a great amount of skills that I can utilize in other places that will, you know,

keep you very employable. So so those five different sets I think will make me feel a little bit more comfortable than the vulnerable position that I found myself in a couple of years ago. So diversifying your income, that's one way you can handle your money well. Another way is to reduce the amount of money that you've got going out right your expenses. And so is this about the same time that you guys decided to go ahead and pay off your house so that you didn't have

that mortgage hanging over here. Yeah, I think it's sort of s elated us a little bit. We did have this pay off the mortgage plan when we bought our newest house, and that was sort of the agreement that my wife and I came to. I was very happy living in our thousand square foot bungalow home that we had my original bachelor pad. But she said, okay, well

we're having our second child. You know, maybe we can move into a little bit bigger home, into a nicer neighborhood with better schools, and like, okay, fine, but that mortgage seems so big. If we get this house, it's just gonna make me feel claustrophobic, like I always have to perform at work, and if I fail, then I'm failing my family and I'm failing me. It just made

me feel really stressed. So we made an agreement, said, okay, we'll get the house as long as we can pay it off in five years, and so you know, she'd get her dream home and I'd get my stress mortgage free life. And we agreed to that, and we worked hard on that together. In five years, that's the normal amount of payoff time, right that most people take the mortgage five years, thirty years, you know yours? Right? You can you can get a five year mortgage through UH

through Quicken loans, right right? Yeah? Well, and that, I mean, that's incredible, man, I mean that's truly rare. Right, Matt called Unicorn in the lead up to this episode, and I mean that is the Unicorn territory. You paid it off in four years. What was it feeling like when

you paid off the mortgage? It was great. I mean honestly, the grass in front of our house just felt different walking on it, because it was like, we own this place, this is ours, this is our home forever, and we've We've found a home because of my wife, because she really wanted to find a really great place to live and a great community and great schools that I think we're going to be in literally for another years. We're

happy where we are. That makes it even more exciting that this home is paid off and we're going to be in it for a long time. So to your point, originally, Matt, the expenses dropped dramatically. I mean we were making I think eighteen hundred dollar payments. Uh that's with taxes and insurance,

so thirteen hundred dollars with the principal and interest. So I mean every month being able to free up thirteen hundred dollars in our budget to do whatever we want, whether it's save up for rental, property, go on more vacations, uh, splurge on kids activities, you know, things that we could do together to make our our family happy. Has has just helped, uh not only me feel a lot less stressed in my day job, but also you know, give

us a lot more joy at our house. Yeah. You know, paying off your mortgage is kind of one of those hotly debated things in the personal finance community. It's one of those things that just kind of it's an argument that never dies. Uh. So when you guys were debating and that, and partly that's because rates are just incredibly low right now, and the fact that if you have an interest right in the threes, like, why wouldn't you

prioritize saving and investing for retirement? So take us through that thought process and the discussions that you guys had. Was peace of mind worth more to you and your family than even kind of that decision about the return

that you're going to get on the money. Yeah, Joel, If you look at the math from seventeen when we paid this more, when we paid this three percent interest payment off, the stock market did all or a lot better than three right, So if you're looking at the pure math of the thing you'd say, wow, that that

doesn't seem like a good you know, you see your money. Honestly, it was all emotional, stress based, and it just it was one of those decisions where it's like I I went through buying a home in two thousand four and bought it at the top of the market, and then two thousand my home was worth half of the value of it. I overbought. That was the exact opposite situation. I bought a home that took up seventy of my income from the mortgage. I never wanted to feel like

that again. I never wanted if you like that again. So with this new home buying process, we put almost fift down on the home and paid it off in four years so that we never have to even think about the mortgage ever again. And yes, it was a stress focused, emotional focused sort of decision, and I am so glad that we did. And even looking back at the numbers, Yeah, we could have made hundred thousand more

dollars or whatever whatever the number is. You know what I would have done with all of that money that I've made in the stock market as soon as as soon as I got to it, I would have paid off the mortgage just because that's the type of feeling that I have in my life and my wife too. It makes us feel great to not have any debt in our life whatsoever. It's yes, it is motional based. Absolutely.

I have to clarify one thing. You're not a professional athlete or anything like that, right, Like, I'm not making millions of dollars like this isn't you And you mentioned to your wife stays at home, so this isn't like you have to be making two four hundred thousand dollars a year. Now, we're we're in the one. We're in

the one hundred to two hundred thousand dollar range. To get everybody kind of a you know, a basis, but that's I mean for a lot of the conversations we're having with a lot of people, that's you know, when you've got a dual income household, that's probably not too far off from a war A lot of war people are. I mean, the average I know is like fifty sixty something like that. Um, but yeah, that's where we are

in our lives. So you know, while you're working on the mortgage, you mentioned how you guys pretended that you got paid less to pay off your mortgage more quickly. You know, it's an effect of kind of mental trick that you played on yourself. Um, why do you think that worked for you? And you know, are there other decisions that you made that kind of allowed you to stay focused on your goals? Yeah, that's a great question.

And I think when you look at how to pay a mortgage off and you're like, oh, how did you pay it off? It's like if you ask the question, as soon as you think about it, you knew how it how it was paid off. You put a lot of money towards the principle every month, right, So but how do you do that? Then? How do you psychologically trick yourself or what are the hacks to get yourself

to do that. So one of the things that we did is that I get paid twenty six times per year, which is essentially every two weeks versus the twice a month, so paychecks versus twenty four paychecks. I just pretended like we got the twenty four. So every time we got those extra two, which would be twice a year, both of those would go towards the mortgage. Every time I get a bonus for kick and butt at work that

would go towards the mortgage. When we moved into our new home and we had different things and that we wanted to maybe be sell because we didn't use anymore because we have kids. My road bike that we talked about earlier that when on craigslist, I took that money and threw it to the mortgage. Things that I didn't use anymore. We moved to a new town and I've got little babies, I don't have time to, you know,

go road biking. I bought it. I had a moped back in my old play same sort of thing I'm not I'm I'm not using it, sell it go towards the mortgage. These types of things that didn't really steal a lot of our joy, that we weren't even using anyway, helped us to do that. My wife sold a couple of purses, things like that. Other things that we did

to help keep the consistency going. My wife and I met on a monthly basis for what we dubbed the budget party, where we'd get together and we talk about our spending from the previous month, our plans for the current month, and then how we are, how we're doing on our goals and we did that every month pretty much the entire portion of our marriage now for seven eight years, and that really helped us to stay consistent with our goals and pay off this mortgage on time.

So it was great. That's awesome. Yeah, and we want to talk more about specifically how you and your wife have handled money together there and we want to talk more about the budget parties, and we'll get to that in just a little bit in the show. I wanted to ask you too real quick while we're on the topic of real estate about rental properties, such awesome stuff about paying off your mortgage and kind of the ways that you can trick yourself into doing better with your

money so that you can get there more quickly. And I think money is so psychological. That's that's like a huge thing that a lot of people need to hear that there are ways that you can kind of accelerate that by by tricking the way that your brain actually works. So now you want to buy a rental property, and you want to buy it in cash, which is a big goal in and of itself, tell us, like why that's one of your goals, Why that's one of your income streams that you want to generate and kind of

how you're planning to get there. Yeah, So, since we paid off the mortgage and we're really enjoying this debt free life, we said, well, it kind of feels silly to go back and get a mortgage now if we're gonna get our first rental property. So my wife and I agreed, why don't we just keep on saving our money until we have enough to buy one in cash. So we've been doing that now for about two years and we have close to about a hundred thousand dollars.

And in Metro Detroit and some of the you know, suburb areas where a lot of the younger folks are living, you can get ah, you can get a thousand square foot home for about a hundred thousand bucks, and you can become a landlord. So that is our current plan, and the reason that we want to do it with you know, no debt whatsoever, is just there's a lot of perks to that. There's no mortgage payments, there's no

closing costs. You know, it helps when you're in a competitive market, right, I mean, who you gotta you get deal with people who are buying in cash. You can have a better opportunity, more of the money is coming back to you, more cash flow, right. And then again back to that first point that I keep making less stress less things that I have to worry about. If I have another mortgage, that really adds onto my stress level. As you can tell, there's a there's a theme going

on here. Well, I think that's huge because debt, money stresses looming over us, mortgage payments, all those sorts of things, they have a weight on our psyche. And so it's not just obviously the nuts and bolts, because like you said, if it were the uts and bolts, you wouldn't have paid off your mortgage in four years. You would have invested in the stock market. There's so much more that

goes into it. And I love that you're prioritizing the full range of how you can optimize your own life as opposed to just like what's the best number on a spreadsheet? Right, And and that's where a lot of our decisions come from. What's the least time consuming, least stressful way that we can go about creating financial decisions for our family. So a listener recently you mentioned Andy wrote to you and said, I know you're thinking about buying a rental of property, don't do it? And so

did did that give you a little bit of pause? Like, obviously, you know the market's kind of hot. And then you've got listeners reaching out saying, don't be a dumb you don't invest in real estate. Let did that make you think? Yeah, you know, I've really liked when my friend reached out to me, just shot me a text. Somebody who listens to the show is also a friend of a friend of mine is like, Hey, I've been doing this for a long time. I would not suggest it, and that

that did give me pause. But what it did do is essentially I have thought about it in a way where it's like, hey, I've only been researching, reading books, and talking to people like yourself, Joel, who've only had really great positive experiences about real estate. Why don't I also look at the con side, the negative side, so I can get a balanced view. Because this is a potentially multi six figure investment we're making that we're tying our names to, so we want to make sure that

we're doing it smart and we're doing it right. So, as we've done with a lot of the financial decisions in our family, want to do it smart and cautiously, and we're doing it together. We're making these decisions together. So yes, based on that, the comments that I've been receiving, as well as you know, text for friends and and just general interest in our story. Um yeah, definitely looking at both sides to make sure it's a smart decision. Andy,

that's awesome, so smart. We're gonna talk more with you, specifically about money in relationships right after the break. All right, we're back with our friend Adie Hill the most of the Marriage, Kids of Money podcast, and Andie like marriage, kids and money, like you're talking about things that affect all of us on your show. And so let's kind of start with you and your marriage. And so when you and your wife got married, how did you, guys

begin to handle your personal finances together? Were there need obstacles that you had to overcome early on? Oh? Yeah, there were. There were quite quite a few of them, and they were mostly started by me. So I got, uh, I got pretty geeked about personal finance and just kind of looking after our our financial situation overall. When I learned that I was gonna be a dad, something kind of sparked in my brain where I'm like, Okay, not

just living for me anymore. I'm literally gonna be raising a human and I am in charge of her existence and helping her to know, have a great life. So immediately when I thought, well what am I what am I going to do to kind of be in a

better situation, I turned to my finances. Obviously, you think about your health, you think about your finances, but immedia and wow, I've got you know, with my wife, now, we've got about fifty thousand dollars of debt and we should try to erase that before our daughter comes into the world. Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that make us feel really good? And then start our parenthood. So that's

sort of got me excited. And I started reading books, and I started watching Susie Orman Show and seeing her diagnose people, you know, giving them grades with their net worth and everything like that. And then I came across a book, The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, which I know a lot of people are aware of, and it it really hit, It hit hit a chord with me, and I was determined to see how we could pay off our debt before our daughter came into the world.

And I mentioned this to my wife, she was kind of lukewarm to the idea. Sounds good, but what does that mean for us? What does that mean for me? Do I have to spend less money? Do I have to live on a budget? That does not sound like fun? And so as I was describing these things to her, it sounded like I was, you know, essentially bringing a toxic pill into the relationships, saying, hey, let's have no fun and you got to live on a budget and all those types of things that nobody wants to do. Right.

But once I learned that not only do I have this excitement about becoming debt free before our daughter is born, but she also has some dreams and goals herself. She wants to eventually become a stay at home mom, and with that comes the necessity of us paying off our debt, living on a budget, and talking about our expenses. So as we started to talk about those things and craft those goals together, that's when she's jumped on board and got excited about it. And that's kind of how we

kick things off in our relationship. And yes, we definitely did have some money disagreements and fights and things like that, but it came through a lot of trial and error together. M Yeah, I mean having that goal in aligning with each other, right, being able to have those discussions to figure out what both of you want, and then kind of aligning what her goal was, which was to stay

home with her kids. Eventually it meant taking action earlier on, you know, while you're pregnant, when once you find out that you're having a kid. And so, yeah, my wife and I have a similar sort of story, and investing in real estate was kind of that. I think for us it was like, Okay, if we buy a few rental houses, this becomes like a part time job that you don't have to have. This goal of you staying at home with our kids is then a possibility, it's

a reality, can become a reality. And so yeah, I love being able to have that discussion, get on the same page, and then you're both motivated to move. And it's not just like I want to have a no fund zone in this house, you know, right exactly. I mean it sounds like you and I kind of both geeked out about the numbers or the goals, you know, like, hey, I'm gonna get a rental property that will that will be great. Are for me, I'm gonna pay off the debt and that would be great, but for maybe for

your wife. For my wife, it was the emotional side of things, like, well, what does that mean for me? What's the payoff? Because I'll do that stuff, but why, I mean, give me the reason why I would do that? Because it's not easy. It's not easy to change what you're used to doing. Um, So yeah, absolutely, I completely agree. So Andy, you mentioned, you know, how you guys did have actual disagreements. So when those came up, did you

just keep talking about them? Like? Obviously eventually you got on the same page when it came to, you know, get out of debt. But have there been instances where you guys actually disagreed in fundamentally you just had to agree to disagree, right, Like did you just keep talking about it? How did you get past that? Yeah, that's a great question. I think what I've learned over the course of our marriage is that we have different views on money. Not one of them is right or not

one of them is wrong. They're just different and that's okay. Sometimes I like to spend more money on something and she likes to spend more money on other things. Does that mean that my mode of spending money is right or wrong? No, it's just different. So we both grew up in different fashions, you know. When we were younger, she had her parents had different views on money. Mine did too. But now we're together and we need to

figure out how that can work together. So we have a lot of conversations on what my thoughts are with regard to money and what her thoughts are with regard to money, and then we work together to find that middle ground on how we can make it work for both of us for both of our goals. And quite often, majority of the time our goals are in sync because we got married. We love each other. A lot of things that we do agree on. Right. We want to spend more time with our family, we want to do

some great vacations. We want to ensure that we're protected. These are all the high level goals that we all you know, have together as as a married couple. But it's how we get there, and those are some of the ways that we found by working together and having these conversations, we were able to find some harmony in our marriage. But yes, there are definitely times that we've run short on patients or run short on time, and that's when we that's when we end up getting an arguments. Yeah, yeah,

and so arguments. You talk very openly about how marriage counseling has really helped you guys, not just in your marriage being able to communicate with one another, but also being able to communicate well about money. And so what would you say to folks out there, whether they're just in a long term relationship, maybe in a new relationship like or or in a marriage where they haven't been

able to talk well about these things. Is marriage counseling a good solution for a lot of people blout there? Or how do they get the ball rolling? I think it's a great solution marriage counseling. But there's a lot of things that you can do at home to to

try to figure these things out. And in the beginning, so if you are just having money fights a lot and you don't understand why, maybe go back to the beginning and try to understand why did we get together, what are the goals for our marriage, what are our

long term goals together? And sit down with your spouse and try to figure those things out right, have a date, you know, sit down to the couch distractions aside, put the put the phone away, you know, go out where the kids aren't going to be there, Maybe get a babysitter. This is a serious conversation. Try to figure out what those goals are in your life. Do you want to stay at home with the kids. Do you want to open your own business? Do you want to become an entrepreneur?

Do you want to quit your job that you hate? Do you wanna get a new job? And it's going to take some transition. What can you do to work together to to to solve those goals and become a team. Right, And then, like we talked about developing that budget, making sure you are understanding where the numbers are coming from so that you can then hit those goals. I know you eys are a big fan of Zeta. That's a really fun app to use to you know, have couples

work together on their money. And then yeah, I mean it's okay to go to marriage counseling if you're having trouble having these conversations. This is a professional that will help you communicate better. I mean, it's the same thing as going and getting a personal trainer. Right, you want to be more healthy, you want to be more fit, you bring in a third party to help you to

do that, right, And there's nothing wrong with that. So when we started about a year maybe a year and a half ago, there was a little bit something in my brain being like, man, I thought, only people who you know are having trouble in their marriage go to marriage counselors, right, And then as I went from my first session in the second session, I'm like, Wow, this is great. This is like a coach man, this is this person is helping us figure out how to communicate

better because we're busy parents. We've got two young kids under seven years old that take up a lot of our time, and we were running from place to place. I'm going to work, I'm doing my side hustle, and we're not spending the quality time and the function for our communication. And this person is going to help us do it. So it has been the best decision that we've made for our marriage and the last ten years

of our marriage. So yeah, no, I completely agree with it. Yeah, And I think there is that stigma, right that only people that are in rough marital times go to marriage counseling. But we have to break that because it's just not true, and it can help us, especially when things are kind of crazy or we've moved into a new life stage to be able to begin to communicate with one another where we're at. It might be easier in your early twenties or your mid twenties or whatever, when you're kind

of first falling in love and all that stuff. You have one set of issues to work through, and then you get into your mid thirties and then there's another set, especially when you have young kids running around, and so I think with every stage, maybe that's another call for people to consider talking to someone if they're having a communication issues, which is not abnormal. By the way, Oh,

there's no book. There's no book for being in marriage, man, there's no like, there's no handbook, Like nobody knows efically how to do this. But getting a coach to help you to do that is is a fantastic way to go absolutely And it makes me think of going to the doctor, right, Like, you don't only go to the doctor when you're sick or when something terrible is is actually happening in your body. You go hopefully regularly periodically just to make sure things are looking good and get

that check out. I think that's a great point too, And I think there's a there's a shift in our culture right now towards not only just thinking about physical health, but also thinking about mental health. With this wave of yoga and meditation and yes, therapy and counseling. I think it is so important for people to think about the importance of mental health, not only personally, but also for their marriage. So I think it's great if people go and work on the things that are most effective for

their health, and that's that's their mental health. And if we're specifically talking here too about preventing money fights, money arguments, then I think one thing that I've heard you mentioned before is that the marriage marriage counselor has helped you, guys, figure out the underlying concerns that you have when it

comes to money. And so it's not just that I want one thing and you want the other and we're at odds, but it's helping your marriage counselor has helped you understand the baseline feelings that you're coming into this with and it's not necessarily that you're at odds, right, So can you tell us a little more about that.

That's a great point. And I think the one of the arguments that keeps on coming back or has come back for us, and now we know how to you know, really deal with it is sometimes I will want to save for the future, right and you know, you know, we talk about these financial goals all the time, putting money in our wrath I ra or max and out the four oh one Katie's big goals, and that those things make me feel good because that helps me feel like I'm protecting our family and giving them a great

life for the future. And Nicole also likes to use our money for fun things to you know, to to go on vacations, to make our home look beautiful. And sometimes when I'm in a rut, you know, or I'm not thinking clearly, I'm thinking, Okay, she gets mad at me when I'm saving, and I get mad at her when she's spending. But really, if you break down the root of it, she's not spending just because it's it's

you know, wild and crazy. It's like she's spending money because she wants to create a beautiful home for us, and how could somebody get mad at that? And then for me, I'm I'm saving money on on this side because I really want to protect our family. And if you look at those those roots, those the purpose of those actions, neither one of us can really get upset with each other when you boil it down like that.

But when you're running around and your frantic, and I'm thinking, oh, she doesn't want me to save because she wants me to always you know, not be able to grow into a career or do my entrepreneurial thing, and and she's thinking about me always. He just wants to save. You just want to wants me to penny pinch. He doesn't want me to have fun. That's that's when you get

mad and upset. But if you really think about the root of the of the cause, or really very the root of the action, then you'll understand there's no evil motivation here. These are pure actions that people just your your spouse wants wants to do to make sure that you're having a great life. And our counselor definitely helped us to figure that out. And there's you know, I say, I say the spending and the saving thing. I also like spending on you know, like I said, kids activities.

She likes to save when it's worth regard to like going out on meals and things like that. So we're spenders and savers in different areas. So it's just kind of a different way of looking at things. But no, definitely has helped us out quite a bit. So what I'm hearing though, is that your counselor has allowed you, guys to basically refocus and realize that your goals are

actually the same and you're able to do that. It sounds like through communication, what are the tools has that counselor allows you, guys to you know, move forward in your relationship to grow. Yeah. I would love to hear some more of those. Yeah. Absolutely. Um. You know, a great activity that we've done through the marriage counseling is recognizing when our spouses do something incredible in our lives, and she calls it making time for appreciation and making

sure your spouse has time for that appreciation. So sometimes it feels a little funny, but being able to stop your spouse in their track as they've done something really great for you and asking do you have time for my appreciation? And if they are available, if the kid's not hanging on their leg or if they're not running to work or whatever like that, then you know, you say yes, and you sit down with them and you

look them in the eyes and you tell them. I would say exactly what my wife did did for me the other day. I said, sweetheart, I really appreciated as I was running and trying to make it to work that you made me breakfast. That just made me feel like you care about me and that you love me and I love you and just taking whatever that five to ten seconds to do that when those things happen, can go miles in your marriage. And she does that

for me too. Hey, I see you working really hard at work and it makes me feel like you really care about this family. Thank you. And I'm a words of affirmation guy. You know, five love five love languages, So that really fills me up when I hear things like that. But you know, little activities like that that you can insert in your marriage, your daily activity as being a you know, a married person can really make your relationship a great place to be in. That's cool, man,

That's really cool. And by the way, I think right now we need to stop and say Andy, you're being a really good podcast guest, so thank you for that. You know, the words of affirmation guy, all I got another question for you that you mentioned budget parties, which is such a cool concept when we can reframe something that is typically boring, mundane, something that people avoid altogether.

But you've created budgets, uh, and talking about budgets as a family to be something that's cool and fun and different. Tell us kind of how how you do budget parties and how maybe people can incorporate something like that into their lives. Sounds good. Yeah. So originally I created the name almost ingest because I knew that she was not excited about doing the budget. So I essentially just put the word party at the end to try to trick

her to show up. And it works. But you know, in the beginning, we were doing pizza and beer and you know, wine, and you know, setting aside some evening for us to have fun and do it sometimes. Ah well we did. We did do a piniata when we paid off the page. Okay, okay, oh nice. We we actually made a paper machee pinata out of the out of the mortgage papers, which was a lot of fun.

Oh that's awesome. But you know, so we um we get together once a month and the goal of it really is to review our spending from the previous month, our current spending. And then also we take advantage of this as sort of a marriage meeting, so it's not just about money. It's sort of veiled in this budget party meeting, but we also talk about what are our plans for the month, you know, what are our vacations that are coming up, what school activities do the kids

have that you know, we want to be at. This is sort of our monthly check in because we have such a crazy life that we need this time to sit down for two or three hours and really talk about what our month's going to be about and how we want to direct our money so that we're hitting those goals that we're really excited about in our life. So we've been doing this for yeah, we've been married

nine years now. We've been doing it for at least eight and it's really helped us every month for the past eight years to get together and make sure we're in sync. And uh, you know, if we can't find time to do it at home because the kids are are wild and crazy, sometimes we'll take it to like a kid play place where they've got the you know, the jungle gym and the slides and things like that. They'll run around while we're doing the budget, or we've even taken it to a restaurant on a date and

you know, get the laptop of the receipts. People look at us kind of funny, but exactly totally those nerds. But we're planning our plan in our month, and you know, we're really planning on how we want to you know, focus on our marriage. So it's it works. If my wife hears about the whole party thing, she might kind of find a way to convince me to do a shower cleaning party. There you go later on this week. So exactly, you just add party to anything and then

you're like, oh, well, what is it? Oh? Right here, I guess I have to do it. All right, lady, We've got a few more questions for you, and we'll get to those right after the break. All right, Andy, let's talk about podcasting for a second. You've been doing that for a couple of years now, you know, maybe a year longer than we've been doing it. Why did you start sort of the side hustle for yourself? You know,

how's it going for you? Oh? It is great. You know, it's sort of stemmed off of some of our original conversation about me looking for that that entrepreneurial drive or that creative thing to do. And it has been going great. You know, in the beginning, I started off, I just wanted to create something that that I would enjoy listening to and then maybe you know, a couple of people

would listen to. So in the beginning it was like, you know, my brother in law and my mom and my and my wife listening to it like that was really nice, honey, way to go, you know, good job. And then slowly but surely, then my uncle would listen, and then they didn't share it with people, and then it kind of started rolling from there, and then, you know,

three years later, now it's it's doing pretty well. It's gone from a fun hobby to side hustle that makes a little bit of money now to side hustle that makes a pretty good amount of money, and and like with the future of like, hey, could I just do this, you know, and it's it's pretty exciting. It's pretty wild, and mostly outside of the money side of things, the conversations I've been able to have have been life changing.

And I'm not putting a hyperbole out there. I have never been able to speak to so many incredible people with incredible stories that have motivated me in my life for the exact position that I'm in, and it's um it's something that is probably one of the best things I've ever done in my life. I'll be honest with you, so obviously, I mean, we have guests on occasionally, we're kind of getting more into that format. Andy, you have

guests on a good bit. Do you have a favorite episode where you have somebody on that you know, maybe you feel like impacted you the most personally? Wow, I guess a few things pop into my mind every every fifty episodes, I have my family on just to kind of remind me of why I'm doing this. And I've had some really great conversations not only with my kids but with my wife. And that's a fun tradition that I'm gonna continue doing. And I'm coming up on episode

D fifties, so I'll be doing that again. A segment that I started recently, which is also fun because you can just create segments when you when you have a podcast like now, I've got this segment, a segment that I or you can kill segments. Well, uh, something that I've been working on personally in our financial journey is giving more. And I know that's um, you know, something that's not always like the hottest topic when you're talking about personal finance, but it's something that I felt like

was lacking in our lives. In twenty seventeen, we only gave you know, one percent of our of our income to charity. And that's something that I wanted to grow. So I started a segment on the show called the Give Jar, and the purpose of that was to interview charities and organizations that I have a mission to help

kids have a better life. So every quarter now, I've been interviewing charities that have that mission and the purposes to help me become more charitable and to share with my audience about how there are great organizations out there that are doing incredible things that that really bring inspiration and can motivate you to be the change that you want to see in this world. So I've had those

interviews lately and they've really inspired me. I've had the representatives from Together We Rise, it's an organization that helps kids in foster care. I'm shortly going to have a thorn on my my show to talk about how they're defending children from uh sex trafficking on on digital with

their digital powers that they have. And then I'm also going to have Nicole Hockley from Sandy Hook promise to talk about how they're protecting kids in school from um, you know, from being in these horrible situations that they've been in, especially with the Sandy Hook tragedy that happened. So those have been the most inspiring conversations are the ones that I'm about to have to that really bring

me a lot of joy. Yes, it's a lot of fun to talk with the multimillionaires about how they became multimillionaires and the parents that are just became debt free and how they did that. Those are really inspiring stories, but a per sly in my mission right now, I'm trying to learn how to become a better giver and those uh conversations are really helping me to do that. Very cool. Yeah, that's cool, and thanks for that insight also in forming this podcast. In starting your own small business.

Besides these great conversations, what would you say is maybe the top one or two things that you've learned in getting a side hustle off the ground? Great question. This was the first time that I really did anything that was a non you know, employee specific work, right, So that was brand new to it. So trying to get yourself out there creating an interesting content. There are so many legs to the stool of trying to build a business, and I took those for granted. You know, when you're

at work, you get the paycheck. Uh, there's a sales department, there's a marketing department, there's an HR department. Now, when you're doing your own little small business, you are everything, right. So some of the things that I've learned throughout the process is take the skills that you've already learned in your life, Andy, and then bring those to your small business. So I have a back ground in sales and account management.

So take advantage of your strength. If you want to bring sponsors on the show, or if you want to entice a really interesting guest to come on, use those sales and communication skills, because that is the best way you're gonna be able to move forward. I mean, it's not gonna be with Hey, You're you're magically gonna be great at s c O. Andy, No, you don't even know what s C O stands for like so so

so so focus on where your skills are. And that's what I've been trying to do from the beginning, and a big part of that is trying to create friends and community. And I think um by bringing people on the show, talking to them about their story and really providing my true attention and having a great conversation with them, I think that's helped me to create an interesting podcast that people like listening to. So ay, so your shore. Let's take a step back. Obviously, marriage and kids are

hugely important to you. For folks who maybe are not married and don't have kids, like, how would you recommend to them to discover their why? Like we talked about the why behind our money, it sounds like for for your family, like, those are two huge goals, two huge

things that you consider when you're saving your money. But for those who don't have those, Yeah, how do you recommend to folks to sort of do some soul searching basically and for them to figure out what it is that they're actually you know, saving and investing their money towards. I think that's a that's an awesome question, and I think it starts by asking yourself some questions, right, So some of these very big esoteric questions that you could

ask yourself. Essentially, if you had all the money in the world, what would you do with your day? You start asking yourself big questions like that, you start to find out what your internal motivation is. Right, I would volunteer with X organization because it brings me joy. I would start my own business doing this. I would I would buy ten rental properties and manage them because that would make me feel great, and I would have a business.

So if you're if you're taking a big question like that when money is completely aside, and say how you would like to spend your day. Answering that question back marriage and kids aside, right, helps you to figure out what you want to do with your life. And then now that you know that it takes money to get there, that's the reason you start building up your savings, investing, saving, getting rid of debt. Those types of things will help

you kind of drive towards it. So if you're answering that question and saying I wanna be a photographer and take pictures all around the world, then what are you now doing financially to help you to get to that goal because we only get one life, so let's let's do it right. Yeah, and I completely agree. So one of those main goals for you is spending more time with your kids and having more autonomy. But I'm curious what kind of conversations have you had with your kids.

I love that you bring them on the podcast, you know, every fifty episodes. What kind of conversations have you had with them? And how are you teaching them really to to start knowing the value of a dollar right now too, even though they're still young. Yeah, they are pretty young. So I've got a seven year old and a five

year old. For the past couple of years, we've been doing a program am like a chore and reward program around the house, and that's a way that we're helping to teach teach them that you know, with hard work comes reward, right. So Zoe and Calvin come down every Saturday morning. They get three chores each and they help by emptying the garbage, emptying the silverware, putting the clothes into the dryer, things like that simple task that I

do with them. And every time they complete their chores, they get a dollar for however old they are, so seven dollars for Zoe, five dollars for Calvin. We separate the money into three different jars, spend, save, and give on These are conversations that we can have together about what all all those things are, why savings important, why spending is also important, and how you can make smart, conscious decisions with your purchases, and then giving why that's important.

And like I said earlier, giving is something that I'm trying to work on, and that was the epiphany moment for me. I'm telling my kids to save and give, Andy, make sure you give money to to charity because that's really important. And then I would ask myself, am I doing that? Am I actually giving money to charity? And so those conversations that I'm having with my kids are actually also inspiring me on my personal finance journey to

make some changes and try to figure things out. So besides the chur and reward program, honestly, the main thing that we're doing is just trying to model good personal finance behavior, right, not overspending when we don't have the money, talking to them in person about why we make conscious financial decisions, talking to them when we're when we're in the store about the things that we're buying and why we're buying them, and why we're not buying certain things,

why we choose not to. And then we also freely talk about our budget and how things are laid out and why we're purchasing something this month or why we're not purchasing it at all. So I think if you have open conversations with your kids, or at least for our family, that's how we're hoping that they will grow

up to be smart, financially savvy little ones. Well, obviously your husband and your dad, and you've got a lot of stuff going on, right, You've got a lot of irons in the fire, You've got your full time job, the different side hustles, other investing strategies for you, Like how are you able to do all this and basically not go crazy? You know, like how do you how are you able to keep your sanity? That's a great question.

I am doing my best with time management. So something that's very important to me and my wife is the ability for us to be good parents but also maintain a good marriage. And there's there's a reason that I called it marriage kids in money, because our marriage comes first. So something that we started to do about three or four months ago, which she said was the best invention that I've ever come up with, is dedicating two nights during the week to mama, so we call him Mama's nights.

Monday and Tuesday our Mama's nights. So essentially, on those nights at seven o'clock sharp, Mama gets to a vacate the premises, not have to do any dishes, not put any kids to bed. She gets to go whatever she wants to do, go out with girls for lunch, or go out for dinner, drinks, or go up to the room, watch some Netflix, painter nails, whatever she wants to do. That's her time to chill and do nothing. So that's Monday and Tuesday, and then the same happens for me

on Wednesday and Thursday, so as daddy's nights. So seven o'clock, I get to go off and I get to do my side hustle, I get to go play board games with my friends. I get to whatever I want to do, exercise. Those are our special times to have our sanity because

when you're a young parent, you need that. You need that time for for yourself, You need that time for sanity because if you're only working full time at your side hustle, your job and then being parent all the time, then you have no time for yourself, right, and that's where you kind of lose things. So I'm very happy to separate that time. So really Wednesdays and Thursday nights, I spent a lot of time on the side hustle.

I also get up early in the morning to have a little bit of time for me for you know, fitness as well as doing a little bit on the on the podcast and things like that. And then during the day I'm working at my full time job, and then on the weekends I do my very very very best to not do any work whatsoever. Things happen, of course, you know, I gotta get a show out or sometimes I work for my full time job on the weekends.

But I do my very very best, you know, call it eight percent of the time where I do no work on the weekends. I do not go on social media starting Friday through Monday morning because that is a big distraction for me, and it takes me away from my family and also takes my my mental focus away.

So that's a big focus that I've been trying to do lately, probably for the past six months, no no social media Friday through Sunday and just trying to do these little things that helped me to control my time and put my priorities um where they need to be. My marriage is at the top of the list, my kids are at the top of the list, and then my personal goals too. So you know the challenge of

time management. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Like you've got to be intentional, You've got to you know, set those boundaries, create that structure, otherwise it just devolves into a big, unorganized time mess, right. Yeah. You know one thing that I talked to somebody on the show you said, interesting interviews. I talked to this gentleman. We talked about this practice

called minding the gap. So when he comes from from work, he talks to his wife and says, I need like ten minutes to just kind of have that bridge between employee guy and then family guy. So I'm gonna come in. I'm going to say hello to you, of course, but I'm gonna come right upstairs, splash some water in my face, you know, changing to some relaxing clothes, turn off my phone so I can go from employee mode to family

mode and I've been practicing that one as well. It's these little hacks that you could do as a young parent to kind of just separate yourself from all of the different hats you have to wear and to create a little sanity in your life. Dude, that's great stuff. And I think this interview for folks will probably create

some interesting discussion around different dining room tables. It will also, I think provide some inspiration for people that even without ridiculously insane income, Like the things that you've achieved Dandy, and you and your family have achieved for your family's well being are are just really impressive. So thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us today. Yeah, we really appreciate it. I appreciate it too. Thank you guys so much. It's been great to have

a beard with you. Yeah. Maybe next time we'll have that beer in person. Uh So, Joel, that was an awesome conversation we had with Andy. Let's talk about some big takeaways that we have. Yes, so we're gonna try to do this. At the end of every interview episode, give kind of one thing that resonated with us. In particular, Matt and the thing that stuck out to me that I'm going to start implementing into my life immediately from this conversation with Andy, which was I think full of

a lot of good stuff. Is to keep my wife a night off. I think, especially in this busy season. I love how they each get two nights off every week, and for us, I think maybe one night off might be a little more feasible. But just to know that one night a week when I come home, she can just be out the door doing whatever lights her up, I think would be just a huge win for her. So it's not even this a huge financial thing I learned from this episode. It's just a way that I

can relate to my wife better. So that's my big takeaway. Nice man, that's awesome. I yeah, I think she will definitely like that, right, I hope, so I think you will. Okay. For me, it was when Andy was taught about stress, and for him paying off that mortgage and now saving up to buy another home and investment property, he is finding ways to do that but to also decrease the

amount of stress in his life. You know, what he's looking at is not necessarily the numbers, but he's looking at what he wants his actual life to look like he's keeping his goals in mind, and it sounds like for them that's maintaining a certain kind of life at home that involves not being preoccupied with the different side hustles or the mortgage, just different things kind of hanging over his head when he's on as dad right, like when he's wearing that hat. So, yeah, that stood out

to me. Letting your goals sort of drive your financial actions and now it's not always about the numbers. That's a big confession from a self confessed numbers key. I'm I'm a nerd, and so you know, for me to make that switch and try to focus more on the lifestyle, I've kind of been going that direction more lately, honestly. But hearing Andy talk about it in a way that had a large impact on on what they did with their money just really spoke to me. So I love that. Yeah,

that was good stuff. All right, maw Let's get back to the beer that we had on the show today. Today we were drinking Cream Weaver by Three Taverns Brewery and this is a tart twist of the classic orange cream cicle made with tangerines and vanilla. Yeah, this is from a brewery just right down the street from us, and then they make some awesome stuff. They're actually opening up a second location walking distance from our house, which is really exciting. Exactly. Yeah, I can't wait for that

to happen. Yeah. And the only time I wear a hat, it's actually a through Tavern's hat, and it's because somebody gave it to me for free, and it's it's obviously that speaks to my cheapness, but you know, I do like their beer, so it's win win. It's not like I'm wearing a like a bush light hat or something. All right. So what were thoughts on this pier? Matt Man?

I loved it. It It was really good. You know, it didn't taste as much to me like an I p A. It kind of tasted more like a fruity orange beer, but it had a lot of orange flavor, and l I really like that tartness. It reminded me a lot of frozen yogurt, you know, like you get fro you and it's kind of got that tartness going on with the fruit kind of made it refreshing almost to drink.

I really enjoyed it. To me, this had like a sweet orangey flavor and the vanilla kind of smooth things out a touch of that tartness, and so it was super interest thing. I this style is kind of becoming sort of a thing. And we had a beer a while back from Arizona Wilderness that All That's Right had some similarities. This one definitely a little bit sweeter, maybe tasts it even more like an orange creamsicle because of that. And I loved that beer from Arizona Wilderness, but man,

this one was super soliditude. So yeah, both good representations of the style and a big thanks to your buddy Tyler for sending this one our way. Yeah, Tyler, thanks so much, man, So Joel, that's gonna be it for this episode. You can find our show notes up on our website at how to money dot com and uh in there as well, we will link to Andy's show, Marriage,

Kids and Money. Yeah, and if you think this is the best personal financial you've ever heard in your life, well we'd appreciate a five star review from you on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. And more than anything, we just appreciate you checking out the show. So Matt, until next time, Best friends out, Best Friends Out. Mmmm.