Season 4, Episode 13 Passive Money, Honey: How Passive Income Streams Can Help You Retire Early with Rachel Richards

[00:00:00] Eric Brotman: Welcome to Don’t Retire… Graduate!: The podcast that teaches you how to advance into retirement rather than retreating. I’m your host and valedictorian, Eric Brotman. We have a very special guest today. Best-selling author Rachel Richards is with us. She is the author of Money Honey: A Simple Seven-Step Guide for Getting Your Financial–yes, the S word– Getting Your Financial S*** Together. She’s also written Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement: The Secret to Freedom, Flexibility, and Financial Independence and How to Get Started. Both books are on my shelf. They’re both awesome. And I know we’re going to have fun chatting with Rachel today. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:39] Rachel Richards: Hey Eric. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:41] Eric Brotman: Rachel, your story is amazing. And by that I don’t just mean your books, which we’re going to talk about. Cause I thought they were really, really terrific, but your personal story, your financial journey is not typical necessarily, but it’s also clearly not impossible. Would you share with our audience a little bit about you and sort of what your journey has been and how you got to be a bestselling author on personal finance?

[00:01:06] Rachel Richards: Absolutely. I am a lot of things. So at a high level, I’m a former financial advisor, best-selling author, and what people find most intriguing about me is that at age 27, I was able to quit my job and retire and I’m now living off close to $20,000 a month in passive income. How I was able to do that: in 2017, my husband and I started investing in real estate.

We bought our first duplex in January, 2017 in Louisville, Kentucky. And then later that year I self published my first book Money Honey. So we had these two passive income streams, rental income and royalty income. And we focused on growing those as much as we possibly could. Fast forward to 2019. By then two years later, we had 38 rental units. My, I had two best-selling books and we’d grown our passive income streams to 10 K a month. So I was able to quit my job at age 27 and retire.

[00:02:04] Eric Brotman: That’s that takes fire to a whole new level. This idea of reaching financial independence early. You know, you were just getting off your parents’ health insurance, at least legally at a point in time where you were becoming financially independent, which is amazing. So we talk a lot about this idea of retirement not being the end but being the beginning. And that’s clearly true in your case where you “retired” and we should all put that in quotes. You retired from the grind but absolutely have continued to work and be busy and thrive. And I would like some tips from you on how to become a bestselling author, because I have books out that I at least was very proud of, but my gosh, yours are flying off the shelves.

And I guess I can see why, because they’re terrific. But what advice do you have for me on that front too? I’ll take any free therapy I can get. And this is now therapy.

[00:02:53] Rachel Richards: Yeah. My books I’ve been told are unicorns. And they’re very rare. There are exceptions to the rule, especially being self published books, but here’s some advice in terms of why I think my books have done so well.

First of all, I read the book Published by Chandler Bolt. And this was a book that teaches you how to outline, write, and market a self published book. He has programs and everything too, but I just read the book and I followed his blueprint. And I published Money Honey based off of what he said. So that was a huge help for me.

I also talk a lot about my self publishing journey in my second book and go into a lot of detail. So there’s a few ingredients I would say that helped me be successful. First of all, I thought about how can I solve a problem and how can I make my book stand out? Because as you know, there are thousands of books about personal finance, so why would somebody buy my book over the thousands that are already out there? If you can’t articulate that it’s going to be tough to sell it. And I say that for anybody, that’s looking to write a book, you really need to be able to articulate why somebody would want to buy your. Over anybody else says, you know, what’s your unique value proposition? What makes you stand out? So that’s the first piece. What hole in the market do you see? How can you solve somebody’s problems? That’s the first piece.

The second piece is having a launch team. This is advice that’s always given to self-published authors. And let me just say that in 2017, I didn’t have a platform. No one knew who I was. I was your average person. I didn’t have a huge following and I didn’t have any email lists. No TikTok. I had just started an Instagram, so I maybe had a hundred followers, so I didn’t have any platform. A launch team is critical. And for this first book, I didn’t have a formal launch team.

I didn’t have a formal group of people that were committed to buying the book and leaving a review and sharing the book so that other people could see it and buy it. I didn’t even have anything formal, but one thing I did is I was in Facebook groups. I was already engaged in Facebook groups giving advice.

And so when anyone would ask a financial question, even in a non-finance related Facebook group, I would jump on and I would say, Hey, I’m Rachel, I’m a former financial advisor. Here’s what I think. And I would type out a really detailed response. After doing that enough, people would start to tag me when someone would ask a finance question and they would say, “oh, you need to ask Rachel’ or, “Hey, Rachel is your girl.”

So I kind of had this clout or this, this credibility in these Facebook groups and became the go-to finance person. So after enough time, I was the person that people went to for financial advice and these groups of female millennials that had 10,000 female millennials. So in a way, once I had my idea to write a book, these served as my launch teams. And I went to these groups and I would say, “Hey, I have this idea. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing what do you all think?” And you know, they were all like, “oh my gosh, Rachel, this is amazing. You make finance so easy to understand. I want to buy this book from you. Please write this book.”

So I had these committed people who are already emotionally invested in the success of my book and who were excited for me to write a book. That was my launch team. That was a big reason why it did so. And the reason too, that I wrote money honey in the first place is because all my family and friends came to me for financial advice.

And I began to wonder why aren’t they reading? Why aren’t they listening to podcasts, learning on their own? And I had this aha moment where I realized, oh yeah, personal finance is boring. Right. For most people it’s intimidating. It’s complex. Overwhelming, no wonder people don’t like to learn about it. So I thought to myself, how can I make this topic sassy and fun and simple to understand.

And that’s where the idea for Money Honey came from. So I started writing it, engaging in these Facebook groups and nine months later it just took off and it. Better than I ever could’ve imagined.

[00:06:55] Eric Brotman: Well, let’s dig into the book because there’s, first of all, it it’s one of those books that I think it rather than creating new information, it’s much more about the delivery of information so that it is accessible and understandable. And there’s some really funny things in here. And, and I love when personal finance isn’t boring and your book is definitely not boring. So there’s a section here which talks about the four golden rules for investing.

And one of my favorites is this dialogue that you have with a fictional two people that says “the stock market is down” and the answer is “woo, big sale. Come on everybody.” And I just think that’s really cute because I used to say, when there’s a sale at Macy’s on towels, there’s a line at the door at 4:30 in the morning, but when there’s a sale on quality companies and their stock, people think something’s defective.

And it just such an easy way to grab that. I mean, this, this whole buy low sell high. This is not an epiphany, but you’ve put it in a way that’s really, it makes much more sense to folks who are just picking it up and saying, oh, “now, now I get it. Now I know why I wouldn’t want to necessarily be one of the lemmings off the cliff.”

How did you decide to do some of these sort of little mini conversations in the book that, that really feel real? Where some of them real? Were these real dialogues that you had?

[00:08:16] Rachel Richards: I don’t think they were. I just, you know, here’s what I did. I wrote the book as if I was writing the book from my best friend and they say, be really specific with your audience. I was really specific. I wrote it for one person. So I just kept thinking about how can I make this so easy for her? And think of such specific examples and how can I explain this in a way that would be so fun and simple to understand? So I thought of analogies and I thought of acronyms and things, and memes that millennials would get, so I thought of these different conversations and dialogues and broke it down that way.

And here’s the thing, I love your analogy with the pillows. That’s so good. That’s so clever. You make such a good point. And I think the difference and why it’s so much harder with the stock market is that it’s fear-based. Right because you stand to potentially lose money when you’re investing in the stock market.

That’s the difference. So it’s hard to kind of have your mind wrap your mind around that. When the market goes down, you feel like you’re losing money. But you’re only losing money theoretically. You don’t lose money until you actually sell when the market’s down. And then you really actually lock in that loss.

So if you can just wait it out and even buy more because you, you are, you’re buying it at a discount. That’s the best move. So whenever the market goes down, I have money set aside in cash. I actually invest more in the stock market cause I’m getting those stocks at a discount and I’m getting a better deal on them. And historically the stock market has always gone up.

[00:09:48] Eric Brotman: The advice that you give in Money Honey is very aligned with my own philosophies on money. I think it’s very sound advice. Not because you agree with me because certainly there are lots of sound advices that don’t but one of your chapters is called Retirement: A New Definition.

As if we had been, you know, as if this was kismet, because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with calling retirement a graduation. And what I love about this is the way you described this. You said retirement is the moment in which your passive income exceeds your expenses. Now that is a cashflow definition of retirement whereas I use a bit more of a net worth definition of retirement, which is the debt that retirement is where work becomes optional. Are we saying the same thing in two different ways, do you think?

[00:10:33] Rachel Richards: Yes, I think so. And I love that. You’re asking me about this because it’s one of my favorite topics, but it is. It’s where your work becomes optional. And we’re defining it two different ways. When your passive income exceeds your living expenses, it just means you’re financially independent and you don’t have to actively trade your time for money anymore.

[00:10:52] Eric Brotman: So you, you talk about how to build a nest egg in your book. You talk about how to get to, in your example, $2 million, you say $2 million. Yes. That’s six zeros. I got to get to $2 million and then you’re like, well, how do I do that? And you use a, a simple example, you do some math and says, you need to put away $20,000 a year for X years and so forth. And you’re like, “that’s a lot of money, my sad little friend.” So I’m like picturing you lecture.

Did you use that approach when you were a professional financial advisor? Was that part of your do you, and, and a second question, I know I’m never supposed to ask two questions at once, but I’m doing it anyway because I know you’ll, forgive me. Do you miss being a financial advisor or do you love the fact that now you can impact folks without having that, that grind? That day to day?

[00:11:38] Rachel Richards: These are great questions. I did not use this approach. So Eric, you have to picture me as a financial advisor. I was 21 years old. I was advising clients who were 60 and 70 and had accumulated their life savings and were probably sitting on the other side of the desk wondering what a 21 year old was doing advising them.

And, you know, I don’t blame them. I knew what I was doing and I had a lot of knowledge and I was an am smart, but there’s definitely skepticism when it comes to taking advice from somebody who’s 50 years younger than you. And these people had worked their whole lives to save a nest egg so I don’t blame them.

So I didn’t feel I could speak to them that way. I couldn’t relate to them that way. It’s fun now because I can write stuff in my books and make videos on Tik TOK and Instagram content and just be myself and be genuine and speak, speak the way I want to speak. And it resonates with people my age in a way that’s a lot different.

So I love it. I don’t miss being a financial advisor because for me it felt like a sales job. And when you start out as a financial advisor, you really have to prospect and get clients and build your book of business and go really hard at that for the first few years. And then later on, you get to enjoy, you know, really helping clients.

So the part of the job where I was helping clients I loved, but the part of the job where I was cold calling and prospecting, I didn’t like. I’m an introvert, so they didn’t come naturally to me. So that’s why I only stayed in that job for a year. But the passion for helping people didn’t go away. I just had to find a different way to do it. And that’s, that’s where the book writing came in and now I’ve built a whole business around it. So it’s amazing.

[00:13:24] Eric Brotman: You’re an introvert?

[00:13:25] Rachel Richards: I am. And people don’t, people are surprised by that. I’ve had to learn how to be a good public speaker and socialize and all this stuff, but it can be very draining for me. So yes, I am naturally an introvert.

[00:13:38] Eric Brotman: That’s interesting because when we met, we were at, if you’ll recall, we were in Austin, Texas. We were at the book fair essentially. We were both sharing our books with the, the financial, the personal finance community where we were, and I would not have guessed for two seconds that you were an introvert either, either born or, or or grown into one. But it’s interesting that you say that. Are you, do you dislike public speaking or have you now embraced it?

[00:14:03] Rachel Richards: I try to embrace it, but I, I still prefer to do things like write books, do my courses, do things in a quieter way. And during that conference, Eric, I would go up to my hotel room maybe once or twice a day for 30 minutes to an hour to just be in the quiet and be alone because it was too much. Being around so many people was too much. So a lot of people don’t know that, but I had to take breaks.

[00:14:28] Eric Brotman: Really? All right. Well, you know, this was your you’re really bearing your soul for us, which I appreciate. And I had no idea and I would say your secret’s safe with me except you just put it out to the greater world.

So it’s no longer a secret. We now know. So let’s talk about Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement. This is, this is your latest book, correct?

[00:14:48] Rachel Richards: Yes.

[00:14:49] Eric Brotman: All right. And this is a little bit different. It’s actually a lot different than Money Honey, which is, this is more of a step-by-step guide, a way to do this. A way to become financially independent.

It’s kind of a blueprint. So talk a little bit about the Genesis of this, because it, I’m not going to say it’s a different voice. It’s still very authentically you, but it, it, I do think it serves a different purpose and maybe a different audience.

[00:15:16] Rachel Richards: Yeah, for sure. I wrote this book in 2019 and the reason I wrote it is because I was gearing up to leave my job, become financially independent. And I was starting to have a little bit of a platform by then, because I had the first book. So once I started sharing, you know, I’m going to quit my job. I have $10,000 a month in passive income. I’m going to retire. People were like, “what do you mean? You’re 27. How, how are you doing this? What’s passive income? How do you have passive income?”

I realized there was a lot of, there was a big need for this knowledge and people were really interested in how I was achieving this. I was also obsessed with passive income that year. I wanted to learn all of the different ways somebody could create passive income. And the more I learned, the more I realized it’s not just real estate investing.

When I started out, I thought investing in real estate was the only way to make passive income. In that book though, I outlined 28 different ways to create passive income. So trust me, if you don’t want to be a landlord, you don’t have to be a landlord. There is something out there for everybody. So that’s why I wrote the book. It’s intended to teach you how to create passive income streams and retire early.

[00:16:28] Eric Brotman: Of the 28 strategies, it looks to me like at least 24 of them are legal. So that’s exciting. I’m on, I’m on, I’m only kidding.

[00:16:36] Rachel Richards: Which ones are illegal?

[00:16:36] Eric Brotman: I’m not going to tell you. I want people to guess. In fact, if you can guess you win a copy of the book. No, I’m only kidding. But you do talk about the number one most valuable resource. And this is, I thought was the single most powerful statement maybe in the book itself, which was that the biggest resource you have going for you is time. And of all the equations, when you look at a, at a, at a financial equation about accumulating wealth, the variable that is most impactful in that equation, and now we’ll become math geeks for a minute, but it’s the exponent.

And the exponent is time. It’s not necessarily the interest rate, the rate of return. It’s not necessarily as much the input or the starting point as it is how long you have for that exponential curve to happen. Time is that, that is the variable that, that kicks every other variables rear end. So you’re speaking to folks in their twenties and thirties about passive income and they’re thinking I got 50 years plus at least hopefully to grow this thing into a real machine.

What do you say to folks who are 55 and at least by definition are a little late to fire, right? They’re a little late to retire early. Although 55 is still an early retirement by definition. What do you say to folks who are a little bit older, who may be, have been punching the clock for three decades and are now thinking I gotta do this another way there, there’s gotta be a better way than the grind?

[00:18:05] Rachel Richards: There is so much you can do regardless of your age. So time is a valuable resource in many ways. It’s valuable when it comes to compounding growth, right? You always say when it comes to investing in the market, start as early as possible. Time is on your side and time is an essential component if you’re trying to grow your investments in the stock market. So if you’re 55, you don’t have as much time to grow your investments.

However, there is another way to retire early. That’s where passive income comes in. If you focus on creating income streams, instead of, or in addition to growing your investments and saving up a nest egg, you can also retire early, no matter your age.

So if you look at what I did, I started creating passive income streams when I was 24. I grew them to $10,000 a month by the time I was 27. I retired in a span of three years. And by the way, I’m not a trust fund baby. And I never made six figures from a job or a career. I started off making $36,000 a year and I had $10,000 in savings.

So if I can do it, you can do it, too, no matter your age or your income. I think passive income is a more attainable way to achieve retirement because in my opinion, creating five or six or $8,000 a month in income is a lot easier than trying to save $2 million by age 65. So I definitely encourage you. Don’t count yourself out of the game. It’s not too late to get started and you can absolutely do this, too.

[00:19:38] Eric Brotman: So you talk a lot about designing your dream life. And I love that because again, retirement is not the end. It is a beginning. It is a springboard to a rich portion, and I don’t mean rich financially. I mean, a, a rewarding phase of your life, whether you’re 27 or 77.

So what are the steps that you encourage people to take or, or maybe what did you do to try and make your dream life come come true? Was there a, was there an end in mind when you, when you started on that journey or was the journey the end itself for awhile?

[00:20:15] Rachel Richards: Well, here’s the point I make Eric and one of the people I interview in the book is David Osborne. And he is a real estate mogul, multimillionaire, and he, he’s kind of the one who made, who made this point. He said, “don’t be so focused on escaping the rat race and the getting away from something that you don’t focus on what you’re going towards and what you’re moving towards.” With early retirees there can be a lot of struggle and this, this really can happen anytime you retire. It can happen if you’re tired at 30 50, or if you retire at a more normal retirement age of 65 or 70, you can lose your sense of purpose, your sense of direction, your sense of fulfillment.

A lot of us have our identity wrapped up in our careers and in our jobs. This is something that traditionally we spent 40 hours of our week on. When that goes away, what do you do? What do you do with your time? So it’s really important that before you retire, no matter what age you retire, you think about what am I going to do for the rest of my life?

It doesn’t matter if you’re 70 when you retire or you’re 30 when you retire, you have the rest of your life ahead of you. And if you retire and you’re financially independent and you don’t have a plan for what you’re going to do for the rest of your life, I promise you, it will be a struggle. You need to make sure you have projects. You have a sense of purpose and a sense of fulfillment. Otherwise, you’re going to be sitting on your couch, twiddling your thumbs, wondering what now? What, you know, what did I do this for? Because now I have no idea what to do with my time. That’s a lot of time you suddenly have to fill. So when it comes to designing your dream life, there are some questions you can ask yourself right now to think about this and brainstorm this.

 You can ask yourself, if I won the lottery. If I won $20 million in the lottery, what would I do first? Because I’m sure you just live it up first. And then what would I do later? What would I do after a year? Or if money were no object, what would I do?

What are my passions and my hobbies? If I were to give a Ted talk about something, what would it be about? Because that can really tell you what are your passions and your hobbies. Those are some questions that can inform how you might want to spend the rest of your life. So that’s what I suggest before you ever get close to retiring.

[00:22:37] Eric Brotman: How important is it in your opinion to write this down? Even if you don’t have a blueprint to get there, how important is it? Not just to dream this up, but to put pen to paper? Does that matter?

[00:22:50] Rachel Richards: It absolutely matters. I don’t take anything in my life seriously, unless it’s written down. So I highly recommend you write this down. You get serious about those journaling questions I just put out there. You design your dream life. You think about what your passive income goal should be. You write out all of your current expenses and you make sure your passive income goal’s enough to cover your expenses. Maybe even have a little bit of a buffer and you really design over the next three or five or 10 years, how are you going to get from point A to point B. And it’s going to change, you know, every written plan can change over time and that’s fine. It might take longer. It might take shorter. Like for, for me, mine was a 15 year plan. I thought I was going to retire in my late thirties.

And then the momentum just picked up a lot faster and it took me a lot less time, which was great. So this written plan can change. That’s fine, but have a plan and stick to it.

[00:23:46] Eric Brotman: I’m going to ask you a loaded question because it’s my show. And I get to do that. Rachel now that you’re not a financial advisor, but you are an influencer and you are spending time if not counseling people, at least providing them with resources and, and some educational content. How often, if at all, do you get asked by people, “how do I do this if I don’t want to do it myself? How do I find a legitimate financial resource or advisor or organization where I’m not being preyed upon?” Do you get asked that periodically?

[00:24:18] Rachel Richards: I do. And it’s a great question to ask because there’s a lot of online “gurus” in quotes, right? That, that present themselves as legitimate and really, they don’t know what they’re doing. They haven’t done it themselves. One of my followers just got scammed recently by a crypto investor.

This, this follower sent this person $14,000 and this person scammed them and ran off with their money. It happens all the time. It happens to young people in college. It happens to old people who are retired. And so you really have to be careful. The best way to find somebody legitimate is to be introduced to them by somebody you know and trust and who has already worked with them. You can also look up reviews. Look them up on the better business bureau. Make sure you find them through somebody you know, whether it’s a podcast, a mutual friend, somebody in your network and make sure they’ve done the things that they’re preaching that they’ve talked about.

I think there’s too many business coaches and life coaches who say “I can help you get to a million dollars in revenue. I can help you invest in the stock market.” Well, have they done those things themselves, because I wouldn’t want to learn from somebody who hasn’t done those things themselves. So there’s a lot of things you can check. You really need to do your due diligence on the person before you hire them in. Before you work with them.

[00:25:41] Eric Brotman: So a great answer, first of all, and thank you because I do think there’s so much garbage out there. I mean, not a day goes by that I don’t get an email that’s a phishing attempt or, or a hack attempt. I mean it literally every day and you have to be diligent about what’s coming in, but you know, the first thing you said was be introduced to someone by someone you trust.

And it’s interesting because that’s how Bernie Madoff made off with all of those people’s money because it was it was this trusted club, almost. Like, “Hey, I’m going to get you in with the, with the best.” So sometimes even being introduced by someone, if that person has been scammed too, you don’t necessarily know.

And the, the better business bureau is a, it’s certainly an option. But I look at and say, well, you can look somebody up on, on FINRA. You can look at their SEC reporting. You can look at these various things. But it’s extremely difficult to know when you’re getting good sound advice and when you’re being sold a bill of goods. It’s incredibly tough for the typical consumer.

So I think people owe it to themselves to begin with some financial literacy.

[00:26:48] Rachel Richards: Oh, absolutely.

[00:26:49] Eric Brotman: Because you can’t ask about these. If I, if I was trying to find the right mechanic and I knew nothing going on under the hood, I’d have to take somebody’s word for it.

[00:27:00] Rachel Richards: Yes. I was going to make the same analogy. When I, when I hired people to renovate my rental properties and I was working with contractors, checking over their work, I would try to look stuff up beforehand so that I could appear legitimate. And so that they didn’t think that they could take advantage of me in the first place. I could ask informed questions, smart questions. And they knew, oh, well, Rachel kind of knows so what she’s talking about, so we really can’t take advantage of her. So yeah, I do think it begins with financial literacy and you make an excellent point.

[00:27:34] Eric Brotman: So where can folks find you? Where can they get your books? Where can they learn more about the, the empire you’re building both financially and and socially?

[00:27:45] Rachel Richards: Thank you. So my books, Money Honey and Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement, are available on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and audiobook. I put out a ton of free content on my Instagram.

So that’s MoneyHoneyRachel. And what I’d love to do for your listeners, Eric, is give my free budgeting worksheets. So if anyone wants to download that, I will give those for free. And you can go to moneyhoneyrachel.com/worksheets to download those.

[00:28:15] Eric Brotman: That’s awesome. And I hope people will do that. And I hope that’ll, it’ll help a lot of folks. We’re at the point in our show where I need an extra credit assignment from you and there’s been so much already. There’s so many there’s, there’s about 15 takeaways of the 28 strategies we talked about. There’s like 15 takeaways already. If someone had to do one thing and one thing only right now as their, as their first step, their extra credit, what would it be today?

[00:28:41] Rachel Richards: Well, here’s the thing. I know that retiring early and passive income sounds glamorous and it is, but it really starts with having a strong financial foundation. I wouldn’t recommend that you invest in real estate if you have, you know, a lot of credit card debt, or if you don’t have a budget under control, or if you don’t have an emergency savings.

So let’s back up and make sure we have those things in place. With that in mind, I would recommend the very first step that you do for someone just starting out is to simply track your expenses for 30 months. So if you’re just starting out on your financial journey, you don’t know where to begin, track your expenses for 30 days. Don’t even worry about putting a budget into place because this activity alone will be very eyeopening.

I remember the first time my husband and I did this, and this is embarrassing to admit because I’m supposed to be a finance guru. Right. But we realized that we were spending close to $1,000 a month on groceries for two people. And that’s not even including eating out. That was just groceries, a thousand dollars a month.

I was horrified when I saw that, because I knew we could easily cut that in half, save $500 more a month. And I just knew if we just invested $500 more a month in the stock market, we could probably be millionaires in 30 years. So it was just such a tremendous eye-opener. And once you do this for 30 days, you’ll be able to easily see where to cut back.

It will be very obvious and you will naturally want to put a budget into place from there. So that’s the step that I would recommend that you do. And that’s the action plan that I’m going to give.

[00:30:21] Eric Brotman: I love your extra credit assignment for the record. It is 30 days, not 30 months, 30 days. You said 30 months first and I’m writing down, I wrote down 30 months. I’m like, oh my gosh. Like people have trouble, people have trouble keeping receipts from Monday to Friday. But, but tracking expenses, do you, do you recommend the use of some tool for that? Do you like mint or Quicken or, or just a spreadsheet or just a yellow pad? What is your, what is your preferred method to track expenses?

[00:30:46] Rachel Richards: There’s two things. Yeah. There’s two things that you could use. First of all, the budgeting sheets I gave is designed to do this. It has an expense tracker and a budget, so you can download the ones that I gave and use that for free. I’m a control freak. So I like to have, I like to do it kind of pen and paper on my own Excel spreadsheets or another great tool is mint.

Mint is a free app. It’s a free website. It links all of your credit cards, bank accounts, debit cards, and it’ll pull all of your transactions into one centralized location, which makes it very easy to see where your money is going.

[00:31:19] Eric Brotman: Solid solid, solid advice and a ton of fun talking to you. It was, it was nice. I hadn’t seen you since 2021 so a belated happy new year, and I hope I’ll be seeing you at, at one of the, one of the personal finance conferences in 2022, depending on on scheduling and COVID and all those things. But you’ve been an awesome guest. You’ve imparted, incredible wisdom. I hope our audience will check out your budget worksheets that are free. We’ll post that in the show notes. I also hope they’ll check out your books which are just terrific. And Rachel, thanks for being a guest. This was great.

[00:31:53] Rachel Richards: Thank you so much, Eric, for having me. I appreciate you.

[00:31:56] Eric Brotman: I’d like to thank all of you for listening today. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and rate our podcast on Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Please also check out our books, workbooks and online financial literacy resources at Brotmanmedia.com. We’ll be back next week with another installment of Office Hours and in two weeks with another engaging guest. For now, this is your host, Eric Brotman, reminding you don’t retire. Graduate!

[00:32:22] Narrator: From this day forward, let us begin changing the way we view retirement. Today, I implore you: don’t retire. Graduate. Visit our website brotmanmedia.com to subscribe and please like us and post comments on social media.

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