Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues in facting you this week. Here's many Munyos and welcome to another edition of Iheartradios Communities. As you heard, I am Manny Muno's. It's always important for each and every one of us to take a look at our own personal finances. Our budgets are financial future retirement planning really on a regular basis, and these days
seems like it's more important than ever. So let's discuss it with financial guru Gen Chatsky, CEO of her money dot com and host of the podcast Her Money with Gene Chatsky. Gene, always a good time to speak with you. I appreciate it.
Oh nice to speak with you as well.
Let me start off with that, what is the best way to begin creating a personal budget?
I think that the best way to start budgeting is backward. I don't really think it's possible or very successful to budget in a vacuum, to try to take a list of categories and squeeze some numbers into it. I think instead you have to look at your life, and so the best way to do that is to track your spending for a month, what's coming in, what's going out, where is it going And once you have that category by category breakdown, then you have the ability to maneuver.
You can decide that you're going to spend a little bit less here and a little bit more there and eventually work your way toward a budget that works. The goal of any budget is to make room for saving, and so if it helps save, first get the money that you need to save off of the table out of your spending your checking account into four one ks emergency savings accounts, and then work with what's left.
I want to get into iras for one case. All of that in a second. How do you determine that what you should be saving? Is there a percentage on a monthly basis? Is it one hundred dollars? Is it one thousand dollars? Obviously different for everybody.
It really depends on your life. And I'll give you a number, but let me just say, if you're not hitting this number, the reaction should not be to do nothing. The reaction should be to try to nudge up your saving by a little bit every few months until you get there. So if we can get to the point where we're saving fifteen percent of whatever we make. That's
a pretty good number. That's a number that in general will get us to be able to replace with Social Security about eighty to eighty five percent of our income in retirement. But you've got to do it consistently through out a career. And if you start late or if you've been undersaving, you're gonna have to shoot a little bit higher if you want to, if you want to reach those goals.
In terms of budgeting, how do you balance you know, wanting to live and enjoy life? And I guess is budgeting all about your separating your needs and your wants and sometimes really knowing the difference between the two.
Sort of, I think it's separating one want from another, right. I mean the things I often will hear financial experts saying, well, you have to skip the latte. You have to skip the takeout. If the lacke is the thing that makes you happy every day, If the latte is you know, if you go and you meet a good friend for a cup of coffee, and this is this is an important thirty five minutes out of your day by all means, have the latte. Yeah, but understand that you can't have
that and everything else. Budgeting is a matter of realizing that money is a limited resource and we all have to prioritize what is important to us. Some of those things maybe needs, some of those things maybe wants. But something that is a need to me could be a want to you, and vice versa.
Yeah, one of the most common pitfalls you find that people encounter when creating a household budget.
I think the biggest pitfall is not paying attention, is just going through life unconsciously. It's very, very easy to spend money these days. You sit at your computer, you could spend your whole paycheck in ten minutes. Yeah, you know, we go into a store, we just wipe a credit card or tap a credit card or dip a cra We don't touch money.
It's not like the old days, right, you'd have to actually take a dollar bill out of your wallet. You'd be missing it. Now it doesn't even exist.
It's just in the air, and that makes it a lot harder to manage. So paying attention, although gedious, is really the only way to get the job done.
You talk about that fifteen percent is a good number to shoot for of your income of every paycheck at a time when so many of us are living paycheck to paycheck that you know that fifteen percent might be something to aspire to, but not that many people could do. So what do you do in that situation? If you're just barely scraping by, you don't have any emergency savings, how can you begin there?
Yes, you start where you are right. You can't start anywhere except for where you are. I run a budgeting course called Finance Fix. We spell it with two x's. If any of your listeners are interested in checking it
out online, it's finance fix dot com. It's a It's a six week course on Zoom led by professional coaches, trained accredited financial coaches, and we go through a process with people who sometimes have a lot of debt, sometimes are saving nothing, sometimes have no emergency cushion of looking at their resources in a really granular way and then making some choices about a few things we are not going to spend money on over the next week, and
that money that is not spent, we automatically move that into savings or into debt repayment, because if it sits at the bottom of your checking account, you're going to spend it. Right If you see a show up on the ATM receiter or on your app when you sign onto the bank, it's just saying I'm here to be spent, and we wanted to be giving you a very different message.
But what we're seeing is that these people who have been budget challenged in the past, over the six week course are saving fifteen hundred dollars and they're doing it because they're paying attention for the first time in a long time. Many of us have subscriptions that we forgot, we sign up for months ago, years ago, we get rid of those things. Food tends to be a really wasteful category for a lot of people, and not just takeout, but forty percent of the food that we buy at
the grocery store gets thrown away. We have freezers and pantries that if we needed to, we could shop out of for a couple of weeks and probably, you know, with the exception of perishables, feed ourselves and our families. All of those things are opportunities, and you just have to make a commitment that you're going to pay attention and that you're gonna deal with it.
That's you. If you feel you are budget challenged. Great term the website is financefix dot com Finance Fix with two x's fi xx. Couple more minutes here with Gene Chatsky, the financial guru, CEO of her money dot com and host of the podcast Her Money with Gene Chatsky. Let me back up a little bit talking about teaching kids financial literacy. How do we go about that? What's a good age? I've always felt, as as a dad of two young kids, that I want to teach them by example.
It doesn't seem many people are good at that with their finances.
I think many people feel like they're not great examples, and so as a result, they don't even try to teach their kids, and that's that's a shame. Allowance can be a really great teaching tool. You can start your kids as young as you know, five or six when they go to school, and the way to do it is to come up with, when you first begin, a short list of items that you know that your kids want that you decide you're not going to buy anymore, that if they want them, they have to buy them
with their own money. So, when my kids were younger, this might have been Pokemon cards, right. My son had a thing for Pokemon cards when he was younger, it might be it might be candy in the in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, or wherever your kids
ask you for these things. You give them a sum of money once a week that is enough to buy not an unlimited quantity of these things, but a little bit of these things, so that they then have to look at their money as a limited resource and decide what they're going to choose to use their limited resource bonds. And as they go forward, the number of dollars per week that they get should grow. The number of things that you are no longer going to pay for should grow.
And the goal is that as you, as your children get older and are about to leave the nest, they they are able to handle a semester sort of money, right, a month's work of money without calling and saying I blew it in the first couple of days. Right.
Smart to open a bank account with maybe one of these you know, these debit cards, and you control the amount that's in there for them.
Yep. Absolutely, you can give them their allowance. That way, they can start to use plastic that way. That's I did that with my with my own kids.
It's a smart.
It's a very smart way to go. I think your kids should work. I think they should work not for you, but for for somebody outside of the family who is willing to pay them, whether it's babysitting or yard work or a job in a store where they get an actual paycheck. Because in my experience, only when kids work do they start to learn that their time has values, and then they become really, really conscious of that time.
We talked about budgeting really on a familial basis, on a daily basis, saving money, the importance of that. What about retirement planning you mentioned CD. There's so many different options, right see these iras for a one K and I imagine there's no one answer for every person.
There is no one answer for every person. But you want to maximize your matching dollars first. So if you have a work based retirement plan that offers you matching dollars, that's where you should be putting your money to start in a four oh one K, four three B four fifty seven. If you don't have a plan with a match then you want to look for the best tax advantages.
So that's when we get into iras roth iras, health savings accounts and and other uh there there are some some retirement accounts for the self employed as well.
CDs Is that something that somebody should ever look into? Is that a good investment generally?
Well, look, CDs fall into the category of very very safe investments. Right when you're when you're looking at a CD, you know you are not going to lose money on on uh on that you may there is an opportunity cost if you were to put your money in a CD instead of putting your money in the stock market. The money in the stock market has the potential to do better, but it's a riskier play. So in general, CDs, high yield savings accounts, shorter term treasuries are for money
that you need in a shorter period of time. Therefore there for money that you need to be safer.
How much of budgeting and saving and investing has to do with a mental state. You have to be disciplined and decide this is what you want to do, when you're going to do it?
Yeah, I think one hundred percent it is have it. Which is why automation is our best friend or a one case work, because the money comes out of your paycheck automatically and it goes into the account. You get to make a good decision one time, and then bank on that decison for a really long time. The goal needs to be to automate in other parts of your life. If you're trying to build an emergency savings account, then you want to automate transfers out of checking it into
savings every single time you get paid. If you're looking to put money into an IRA where there is no employer to pull money from your paycheck, you want to do it automatically yourself. Because humans are creatures of impulse, and if you give yourself the opportunity to spend money, you're very likely going to spend it. So you want to put put gargrails up to get yourself into a position where you know that it's going to do the work that you needed to do.
Yeah, and as you mentioned earlier, it's never been easier to spend money. Last thing for you constantly see stories about how so few Americans are saving for retire are those that are aren't saving nearly as much? The idea that it's never too late to begin, How how important is that to get through to people so important?
The best time to begin of courseless years ago. The second best time to begin is today, Gene.
Chatsky, CEO of her money dot com. And if you are budget challenged, as Gene mentioned earlier, you could check out the website financefix dot com. That's finance fixx dot com. Gene, always appreciated for your time. Thanks so much for the advice and the conversation.
Thank you so much.
Autism autism spectrum disorders have been increasingly top of mind in our country. Let's discuss how far we've come with the diagnosis, treatment, and understanding of these disorders. So we're joined by Kristin Roth, chief marketing officer at the Autism Society of America. Christin, I appreciate you sharing some time.
Yes, thank you for having me.
Let's get right into it. One in thirty one kids in our country are diagnosed with autism somewhere on the spectrum by the time they're eight years old, according to the CDC's latest figures.
Yeah, so we've seen that increase from the twenty twenty feet which was one in thirty six, and now we're seeing that number of one in thirty one eight year old's diagnose. A lot of this can be attributed to increase in understanding of autismsm better screening and diagnosis, access to that type of care, as well as a broadening of the definition of autism and the criteria that is used to diagnose someone.
Yeah, so just awareness really is a big deal in these numbers, increasing right that and and expanding what is considered to be on the autism spectrum. Is it not?
Yeah? Absolutely, and the report itself cites that that is likely a significant contributing factor. However, it is important to note that we need more research to better understand autism because it is a combination of genetic, biological, and environmental factor.
Let's back up a little bit. What exactly is autism?
So, autism is a lifelong developmental disability that typically impacts someone's social skills, communication relationships, and self regulation. However, it is incredibly diverse and truly affects everybody differently. That's why the spectrum is so large. So some individuals may need complex life long twenty four to seven care to really live fully in a supported environment, while others may achieve significant independence with fewer supports.
And it goes from that extreme of being completely nonverbal and needing constant care to somebody that you would interact with and have no clue that they're even on the spectrum.
Yeah, and I think it's important how we speak about people's experiences, and we always encourage everyone to presume confidence. So just because someone's non speaking does not mean that they do not have significant strength and skill sets. Then they may have IQs and others who have good communication skills may have an intellectual disability. So it's really hard to end and uninformed for people to generalize an entire community that has brought.
As this one, right, I think a lot of people for the first time, and it's been thirty seven, thirty eight years, however long it's been since the movie Rainman came out, and for many people in our country, I think that's the first time they'd ever heard of autism. And although that may be one example of someone on the autism spectrum, as you mentioned, everybody who is diagnosed is different and every case is different.
Yeah. Absolutely, And I do think that media has really made significant progress in terms of authentically representing more experiences
and more individuals and their journeys across the spectrum. However, there still is a lot of room for improvement in terms of showing individuals with higher support needs, as well as acknowledging some of those more challenging and hard moments, and also celebrating the progress and wins that people have overcome with barriers set by systemics, barriers in society.
Well, to that point, what do you think of the biggest misconceptions about autism.
I think it goes back to what we've been talking about so far, is that I think it's easy to generalize an entire community, and we have to be really careful with the rhetoric and narrative that is being discussed at a higher level in our current society, and we have to acknowledge that everyone's experience is different and valid. So some people are feeling isolated and like their journey is not being acknowledged or supported, or something that they
see represented on TV or media. That does not make it any less valid or real. And I think that at the root of it all, what we're all seeking is more services and quality supports to live a more full life for our loved ones, for ourselves, and for the greater community.
Well, I want to get into that a little bit more. In just a second, you mentioned genetics. We don't really know exactly what causes autism?
Do we So we understand a little bit, but we don't know. There's no known singular cause for autism. We do know it is a combination of those three factors, with genetics playing a significant role. However, it is incredibly important that we have more targeted funding to really understand in a science based way what those contributing factors and underlying contributors are.
Additional attention that's being brought to the subject recently might not necessarily be a bad thing. And more research even there's been previous research in one area to find out if this could be a contributing factor. If this is an issue, I imagine everybody in the community supports looking into it and more study.
I think that the disability and autism community in general agrees that, of course we need more funding to better understand autism as a complex disability. However, it needs to be rooted in science facts and not perpetuating stigmas.
Absolutely. A couple more minutes here with Kristin Roth, chief marketing officer at the Autism Society of America. Let me ask you about you. What is your story, what brought you to the Autism Society of America.
So I've always been involved in the autism community. I grew up as a part of it. I have a loved one who is autistic and we are very close. He has really approached life with so much joy and perseverance, and I think it's incredibly important to acknowledge that everyone's journey, whether you're neurotypical or neurodiverse, has its ups and downs, and it has its challenges and happy moments and strengths
and weaknesses. And I think as a society, we see so much pressure for autistic individuals to conform and fit into a world that wasn't designed for them. And so my drive is really to help society in the greater communities meet autistic individuals and people with disabilities. Halfway. We have to be more inclusive, we have to acknowledge that people need different and individualized support needs, and we have
to approach things in an equitable manner. So that's what really drives my work and passion every single day.
I imagine, like so many things involving our health, early detection is a key with autism as well, because the sooner it's able to be diagnosed and treatment can begin right.
Absolutely, So what we do know is that when you receive an earlier diagnosis, you are significantly more likely to have long term outcomes when you begin support therapies and interventions before the age of four. Now, the challenge that we have in the US is that the average age of diagnosis is hovering right around forty seven months, and there are significant weightless lack of access to screening and diagnosis in quality care settings, so that diagnostic timeline still
has a long way to go to significantly shrink. In terms of the process itself. We encourage people to begin interventions and therapies when they may notice that something is offer there's been a regression or developmental delay. However, that's also incredibly challenging because you typically need a diagnosis in order to begin treatment or interventions with insurance coverage.
And then there's the other thing. And I didn't even hadn't even thought about this, but I was speaking with a friend and they pointed out to me that there are parents who might think that their children are somewhere on the spectrum and refuse to get them tested for fear of the stigma surrounding autism and being on the spectrum. And I guess that is still a big issue today, is it not.
Well.
I think we're seeing that stigma and stereotype narrative being perpetuated right now, and that's incredibly harmful not only to an individual self worth, but also how society views them. And when misinformation is being disseminated at a national standpoint, it creates further divide among the community. It creates fear
that people can't be their authentic and true self. And like I said earlier, at the root of this all everyone is just seeking the acknowledgement and the recognition that they are going through their own personal journey and need individualized support and services to live fully.
We've clearly come a long way in our country and I don't know the last twenty years and making sure that we have the tools to help parents, loved ones work with someone who's on the spectrum as a child. Have we come as far in helping those people on the spectrum when they become adults.
That's a wonderful question. I'm glad you asked it. So I think right now we're hearing a lot of rhetoric that this is a childhood disease. First of all, it's not a disease it's a developmental disability, and because it is lifelong, these kids grow up into teams and adults. And one of the most common issues that we hear for calls coming into our national helpline is around adult services.
They are few and far between. It is not something that is easily accessible for quality care, and there's significantly long wait lists, especially based on where you're located and living, and we still have a really long way to go. So I think that it's important to acknowledge that while it's wonderful we're having a more space, we're also seeing services and supports being cut with policy changes that are
occurring right now. So that's directly impacting the lives of so many people in our community at this very moment.
And there's one thing that a listener who might not know anybody with autism or not even really familiar with spectrum disorders could take away from our conversation that would have them have different view of it. For you, what would it be.
For me? I think it's incredibly important that we lead discussions with empathy and facts, and I strongly encourage everybody to visit Autismsociety dot org to better educate themselves to learn how to advocate, or get involved or give because it's really important to recognize that when federal systems are fractured or funding comes under attack, a lot of nonprofits in the private sector has to pick up the slack and to support our growing communities, we need to have the resources to do that.
How does the Autism Society of America help those on the spectrum, whether they be children, the parents of those children, or when they become adults.
There are so many ways that the Autism Society support people through their lifelong journey with autism because we are there from the point of diagnosis through a person's lifespan. We are really invested at every aspect at someone's lives. So the Autism Society primarily supports autistic individuals through advocacy, education, direct resources, and support, as well as community programming through our national network of seventy affiliates.
Kristin Roth, chief Marketing Officer at the Autism Society of America. The website is Autismsociety dot org. Autismsociety dot org. Kristin, thank you for what you're doing. Best of luck. I appreciate the time. Thank you, and that'll do it for another edition of iheartradios, communities. I'm Manny Muno's until next time.