13 Personal Finance Cheat Codes That Can Change Your Life

Join the community built to help you master your money, stay accountable, and reach financial freedom. 👉 Join Master Money Academy today! Watch this episode on Youtube. In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, Andrew reveals 13 strategies the rich use to build wealth on autopilot—from the wealth gap formula that reverse engineers your path to freedom, to invisible multipliers that compound into six-figure advantages most people completely ignore. Here's what we're covering today: 💸 Strategy 1: Automate everything so wealth builds without willpower 🧠 Strategy 2: Prioritize high-leverage skills over penny-pinching 🏦 Strategy 3: Treat your savings rate like a game and level it up 🧰 Strategy 4: Use the tax code as a wealth-building tool 📊 Strategy 5: Build multiple income streams early (even small ones) 🪙 Strategy 6: Use debt as a wealth tool, not a trap 🪄 Strategy 7: Exploit invisible multipliers like credit scores and employer matches 📊 Strategy 8: Reverse engineer wealth with the "wealth gap formula" 🏠 Strategy 9: Hack housing—your biggest expense 🪙 Strategy 10: Play the long game with time arbitrage 🧠 Strategy 11: Think in net worth, not income 🧑‍💼 Strategy 12: Get the right team in your corner 🔑 Strategy 13: Optimize for freedom, not just money How Andrew Can Help You: Listen to The Business Show here. Don't let another year pass by without making significant strides toward your dreams. "Master Your Money Goals" is your pathway to a future where your aspirations are not just wishes but realities. Enroll now and make this year count! Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Learn to invest by joining Index Fund Pro! This is Andrew’s course teaching you how to invest! Watch The Master Money Youtube Channel! , Ask Andrew a question on Instagram or TikTok Learn how to get out of Debt by joining our Free Course Leave Feedback or Episode Requests here. Car buying Calculator here Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors for supporting The Personal Finance Podcast DELL: Get a new Dell AI PC starting at $749.99, at Dell.com/ai-pc Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Acorns: Start investing automatically with Acorns and get a $5 bonus at Acorns.com/PFP Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/ Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/pfp Go to https://joindeleteme.com/PFP20/ and Use Promo Code PFP for 20% off! Links Mentioned in This Episode: How to Open an HSA (and Why You Should Consider it!) - Money Q&A The Bucket Method For Managing Your Savings (Master Multiple Savings Goals) The Million Dollar Money Decisions You Should Be Focusing On  rental property calculator Connect With Andrew on Social Media: Instagram TikTok Twitter Master Money Website Master Money Youtube Channel Free Guides: The Stairway to Wealth: The Order of Operations for your Money How to Negotiate Your Salary The 75 Day Money Challenge Get out Of Debt Fast Take the Money Personality Quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Giancola?

  When I started the Personal Finance Podcast, I had no idea how big it could become. I just knew I had something I wanted to share, so I started putting it online. And looking back, I definitely wish I would have started a decade earlier. One of the horror parts about building something online, though, is making it look professional. A website used to mean hiring a developer, figuring out design, and potentially spending thousands of dollars. In fact, on my website, I spent tens of thousands of dollars. That's what impressed me when playing around with Hostinger's AI Website Builder. I told it what kind of website I wanted, and I built the first version in minutes. No coding, no designer or developer needed. And Hostinger doesn't stop at launch.

• 0:44Andrew Giancola?

  Their AI can help with SEO, website copy, email marketing, and more. Plus, your domain, website, email, and marketing can all live in one account with plans starting at just $3 every single month. Hostinger builds your vision step by step. Create your website today. Go to hostinger.com/pfp and use code PFP for 10% off now. Now, if you watch this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, you've probably noticed the wood slat walls behind us. We wanted this podcast set to look professional, but also not be a project that was overly complicated. And I found these slat walls on Wayfair, and it completely changed this space. And it's now basically the background that you see in every single podcast

• 1:29Andrew Giancola?

  or piece of content that we record. And that's one of the things that I love about Wayfair. You can shop thousands of products across different styles and budgets, use customer photos and reviews to see how things actually look in real homes, and find something that fits your space. They also have Wayfair Verified Products that are hand-vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. And with more than 20 million verified 5-star reviews, you can feel a lot more confident about what you're ordering. I've used Wayfair for this studio and our home, and I absolutely recommend them for your space. So transform your space with pieces that hold up to real life. Join Wayfair Rewards today and get 5% back on every single purchase.

• 2:14Andrew Giancola?

  Head to wayfair.com or shop the Wayfair app for all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair: Every Style, Every Home.

• 2:28Andrew Giancola?

  On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, 13 personal finance cheat codes that can change your life.

• 2:51Andrew Giancola?

  What's up everybody and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of mastermoney.co. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking about 13 personal finance cheat codes that can change your life. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money Newsletter by going to mastermoney.co/newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And by the way, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure you hit that follow button and give me that thumbs up. I think that is one of the things that helps

• 3:35Andrew Giancola?

  us on YouTube. And for next year in 2026, we're going to do a lot of cool stuff on YouTube. So excited about that. And some of the bonus content that you guys are going to get there. So today, we're going to be diving into personal finance cheat codes that can change your life. And if you learn how to follow some of these cheat codes, you can dramatically improve your finances just by learning some of these things. And so we're going to go through 13 different things. And I want to bring you as much value as we possibly can. I want you to have idea generation when you go through this. And I want you to start taking action on some of these things when we go through this list. And so as we go and progress through this list, I want you to think through, well, how can I apply this to my life? How can I actually take action on some of these today? That's the way I want you to listen through on this episode. Now, some of these are going to be talking

• 4:19Andrew Giancola?

  through financial freedom. Some of these are going to be talking through tax situations, ways to actually optimize the way that you move your money around. So there's a lot of different cool stuff we'll be diving into today. So, action packed episodes. Without further ado, let's get into it. Number one, and if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know, this is probably going to be on this list. And this is because it is one of the ultimate cheat codes that are out there, which is to automate everything, making sure that you build systems that run without you when it comes to your finances. Now, why is this a cheat code? Why? Because willpower is finite. And so because willpower is finite, systems are the things that are going to help you build wealth.

• 5:02Andrew Giancola?

  And for everybody out there, if you are not currently automating your finances, if you are manually moving money around within your finances, you are doing it wrong, my friends. So it's really, really important to make sure that we set up automation systems that work really well. This is why we prioritize it so heavily in Master Money Academy is we talk through why it is important to ensure that you automate everything. Now, automatic transfers to things like your investments is going to be really, really important. You don't want to have to remember every single month, oh, I gotta move money over to those investments. Then I gotta remember to actually invest the money after I move it over to the investments. No, instead, you just want it to automatically go into that account and then it auto invests for you. The same thing goes for savings. When you set up savings buckets, if you have not heard our episode talking about the bucket

• 5:46Andrew Giancola?

  method, I highly encourage you to check that out. But when you set up savings buckets for your emergency fund, maybe your vacation fund, your down payment fund on the house, maybe it's a down payment fund on the car. You want to make sure that that money just automatically flows to the right locations. And so saving money is also a personal finance cheat code by automating it. And that's really important to know. Also bills, if you're still manually paying bills in 2025 or 2026, my friends, this is just going to be one of those things that we gotta make sure that we make a shift here. Okay? When it comes to your bills, those need to be automated. Then you can check your budget or whatever else to look at those transactions. But really, it needs to be automated so you don't have to remember to go in and pay bills. People who rely on their memory to go and pay their bills, usually they're going to

• 6:30Andrew Giancola?

  have late payments, they're going to be bogging down their brain with all these extra things they have to remember. So instead, I highly encourage you to automate that process and then check it on the backend. Now, here's what I would recommend is if you have never automated your finances before, Create what we call a default month. A default month is to try to get all of your money to move for an entire month without you touching it. So set up your automations and see if you can get your entire financial picture to move around without you actually having to touch it. 100% of your money is going to move automatically when you do this. So this includes investing, this includes savings, this includes paying off your bills. Now, one other thing that you can do is if you feel like, oh, I get to the end of the month. And if I try to automate my money, I'm not going to have enough money at the end of the month. Well, you can set up automations on a weekly basis as well.

• 7:15Andrew Giancola?

  This is going to be very helpful for a lot of folks. If you feel like you're living paycheck to paycheck, set it up on a weekly basis. And then you can monitor it over time as you begin to get ahead. Also, the beautiful thing about automation is that you can get your money to work for you sooner. So mentioning every single time you get paid, you can start to get those dollars invested every week or biweekly instead of just once a month. What does this do? This means your money is getting invested even sooner than it would have had before. And what do we want to do? We want to get those dollars working for us as soon as we possibly can. And so this is going to be a great way to get your dollars working early and often. So that's number one is automate everything. Number two is to prioritize high leverage skills over saving pennies.

• 7:59Andrew Giancola?

  I cannot recommend this enough. So why is this a cheat code? Because your income can solve way more problems than frugality or penny pinching ever will. So I want you to focus as much of your attention as possible on increasing your income if you're living paycheck to paycheck. Sure, we want to make sure that we are cutting back expenses. That is one side of the coin. But we want to focus the majority of our time on our income. Why? Because for most people who are living paycheck to paycheck, the biggest problem for them is they have an income problem. And so once you start to raise your income, then we can figure out, okay, well, where am I overspending? What are some of these areas that I need to come back on? Here's the real truth. You can only cut back so far, but your income growth is exponential. It can continuously grow over time and is truly infinite.

• 8:42Andrew Giancola?

  If you can figure out how to unlock growing your income. And so there's a bunch of different ways that I want you to do this. I want you to spend the majority of your time learning and mastering high income skills. So this could be sales. This could be negotiation, AI tools now, communication, money management. All of these are high leverage skills that you can learn. And then it's using that income leverage to really grow the gap, the gap between your income and your expenses. Once that gap begins to grow dramatically, all of a sudden you have so much more room to develop. Every $10,000 raise that you get is going to be worth so much more than you going out and clipping coupons or cutting back on a couple of subscriptions. Instead, we want to focus as much time as we possibly can on our income.

• 9:27Andrew Giancola?

  Cutting back that daily latte is not going to make a huge difference, like learning how to grow your income will. We've got to make sure that we are focusing in on the right things and identifying the right things. Now, as you start to grow your income and as you increase your income, take some of that extra money. The 50/50 rule is what we talk about here. Take 50% and put it towards wealth building activities. So, growing your investments in your emergency fund, those are the two places we want you to put it towards. Because this is going to help you build wealth over time. And so, growing your income is one of the most important things. Now, once you begin to grow your income, you still need to know how to manage your money. Because there are so many different high earners out there who do not know how to manage money. And so, they still live paycheck to paycheck, making $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 per year. They still can't get by. Why?

• 10:12Andrew Giancola?

  Because they never learned how to manage money. And so, once your money comes in, you need to also have the money management, high leverage skills that are going to allow you to put those dollars in the places they need to go. Automation helps solve this problem because if you leave money just sitting in your checking account, it is going to get commingled with everything else and you are going to spend it. So, instead, moving that money automatically every month is going to help you get those dollars invested sooner and help you manage money so much better. So, both of the first two are going to actually sync up together. And if you do both together, oh my goodness, your financial life is going to change dramatically. They are real personal finance cheat codes.

• 10:50Andrew Giancola?

  All right. Number three is going to help a lot of you out there who struggle with motivation. If you struggle with motivation or staying motivated long-term, this is going to help you tremendously. It is treating your savings rate like a game and keep leveling it up. So here's what I want you to do is wealth isn't about just how much you make. It's also about how much you keep and invest. So first, on number two, we talked about, you know, earning more, but you also have to keep a portion of that income and put it towards things that are wealth building activities. And so as your income rises, I want you to focus your time and energy on increasing your savings rate. So if you don't already track your savings rate, this is going to be something that is going to be new for you. And so what I want you to do is track the percentage of your income that you put towards investments and your emergency fund. You may be listening right now and saying, I don't think I put anything towards those two things.

• 11:34Andrew Giancola?

  Or you may be saying, well, I put 10, 15, 17%, whatever you do. Let's think about this for a second and let's move a portion of our income towards savings and investments. Now, how much should it be at a minimum here? We want you moving 20% of your income towards savings and investments. Why? Because that is the starting point that is going to help you start to progress towards retirement. And so what we want to do is try to get to that 20% number first. So this is level one is I want you to think through, okay, if I'm saving 5% right now, or I'm saving 10% right now, maybe I'm saving 12% right now. I am going to try to level up every single month to get closer to that 20% number. So maybe it is 1% every single month that you increase your savings rate.

• 12:17Andrew Giancola?

  So you're not just ripping off the Band-Aid really quickly and feeling the pain and then you quit. Instead, you're going to slowly increase the dial for your savings rate until you get to that 20% number. Then let's say your income increases and all of a sudden you get a raise. Amazing. Well, if you get that raise, let's dial it up to 21, 22%. And we're going to start to see this increase, trying to get to a point in time that we feel comfortable with our savings rate. Let me tell you right now, I know people who retired early. You can retire, if you didn't know this, your savings rate is the catapult to a lot of different things. You retire in 17 years with a 50% savings rate. Now you may be saying to yourself, a 50% savings rate? How does anybody do that? There are countless examples in the financial independence community.

• 12:59Andrew Giancola?

  Of people who are low earners and high earners who had a 50% savings rate. They made sacrifices for short periods of time so that they could get to that point in time. Now, I'm just telling you, it's possible to do something like that. There are people in the financial independence community who had 70% savings rate and retired in less than 10 years. Now, is it common? Absolutely not. Is it for everyone? Absolutely not. But if you really want to do it, your savings rate can dictate a huge difference maker in terms of how fast you can retire. And so, learning how to increase that savings rate and gamifying this system. Some of y'all just need some motivation and gamifying it is the motivation that you need. And so, really, every increase is going to accelerate your retirement by years if you just increase it by 5%.

• 13:44Andrew Giancola?

  Every 5% is years off of the amount of time that you have to work, especially if you have a long enough time horizon. And so, here's what I would say is you can increase it by monthly. Option two is you can increase it quarterly. Every quarter, every three months, you say to yourself, okay, I'm going to try to increase my savings rate another 3, 4, 5% until I can get to that 20% mark plus. And then every raise you get, every bonus you get, every windfall you get, use those to help increase your savings rate for the year. Let's see which year you can actually save the most in one given year. These challenges really work and they are something that you can really, really make a big difference on. And so, treating savings like a game and making a goal of where you want it to be is going to help you tremendously. Number four is to use the tax code as a tool.

• 14:30Andrew Giancola?

  So, not enough people out there think of the tax code as something that they can utilize to try to reduce their taxes. Even if you're a W-2 employee, there are a lot of different things that you can do to reduce your taxes. The number one thing that you can do is making sure that you use tax advantage accounts. So, things like your 401K, for example, if you max out your 401K in this given year, so $23,500 this year is what you could put in your 401K. Unless you're over the age of 50, then you can put even more into your 401K. So, let's say you put $23,500 into your 401K. That means you do not have to pay tax on that money right now and you've deferred that tax until a future date, until retirement, when you start to pull that money out. That's a great tax hack. Or let's say you want to open up a Roth IRA.

• 15:11Andrew Giancola?

  Well, with a Roth IRA, you pay taxes now, but then money goes in and grows tax-free and you could pull the money out tax-free. This is another fantastic option to reduce your taxable income long-term. Or the HSA, which has triple tax advantages, meaning money goes in tax-free, it grows tax-free in investments, and you can pull the money out tax-free as long as you have a qualified medical expense. It has those triple tax advantages. We have lots of episodes on the HSA if you want to check those out. All three of those are wonderful. Or maybe you want to save your kid's college and you want to get a tax deduction on your college savings and a 529 plan is another great one. So this is why we talk about these accounts so much, because these are tax hacks for everyday people, including W-2 earners.

• 15:52Andrew Giancola?

  Now, a second tax hack for a lot of folks out there is if you own a business, even if it's just a small LLC. Maybe you own an LLC for rental properties. Maybe you own one for a small side hustle that you have going on. Maybe you have a side hustle that you're trying to turn into a full-time business. There are a lot of different small business deductions that you can utilize. The tax code is written very favorably for people who own businesses, and that's just the way that it is right now. And so we want to focus on those things that we can control, even if you don't agree with that, or maybe you do agree with that. You want to focus on the things that you can control. So if you make money on the side in some way, shape, or form, having some sort of LLC could be beneficial. And so that is something too, that you want to make sure that you are taking advantage of those deductions. You can write off all sorts of different things. Number three is investing long-term is a tax benefit.

• 16:37Andrew Giancola?

  So long-term investors have way better tax benefits than people who day trade or getting in and out of stocks within a given year. Because if you hold a stock for less than a year, you are going to be paying a much higher rate in taxes than you would if you had long-term capital gains, which is holding a stock for over one year. So short-term capital gains, less than one year, long-term capital gains is over one year. And because of this, this is another way to help you, even if you're a W-2 employee, reduce your taxable income. And then there's a ton of other things as well, understanding depreciation of assets. And when you have a business, you can depreciate all different types of assets. 1031 exchanges for real estate investors, the step-up basis, or estate planning. All of this stuff is really, really important to note. And well, here's what I would say is if you don't have a CPA in your corner,

• 17:22Andrew Giancola?

  helping you through this process, and we have a list of questions to ask a CPA. But if you don't have a CPA in your corner, it is very, very important to have one that can actually help you. And having someone who does things like tax strategy to reduce your taxable income is very important. Now, if you're a W2 owner, you may still be taking the standard deduction, and that's okay. But there are other things that you can do to help reduce your taxable income in a given year. And that is going to be one of the best things that you can do is learning how to optimize for taxes. Now, you don't have to be a tax expert. That's what the CPA is for. What you do need to do, though, is making sure you're taking action on some of this stuff, because it is going to save you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, depending on how much money you're making. And so, learning this stuff is a multi-million

• 18:04Andrew Giancola?

  dollar decision. It is a true finance hack where you will have multi-million dollars in your pocket, more, if you just learn this stuff. So, really, really important to make sure you're taking advantage of that. Now, number five, and this may not apply to every single person, but learning how to build more than one income stream early, even if it's a small one. So, why is this a cheat code? Because we talked about how important income is. And if you are in some sort of job where your income is capped, maybe you're a teacher, or maybe you are a nurse, or maybe you are someone out there who really can't earn more money at your day job, because you can't go and get raises, there's not, you know, upper level management that really you can earn a lot more, then what we need to think about is, are there other ways to have other

• 18:45Andrew Giancola?

  income streams? Wealth is about taking your income and taking a portion of that income and putting into assets that will grow over time. And so, if you can increase that income through a number of different ways, then there can be other options for you. So, let's say, for example, that you have a stable W2 job. You're happy with that W2 job. Maybe you're a teacher. We'll use a teacher as an example today. If you're a teacher, well, obviously, your income is capped. There's only so much you can earn. Sure, you can become, you know, administration, you can become a vice principal, maybe a principal, maybe then go work for the county, but it's still only capped to a certain level. Getting to the top in education doesn't equal a ton more pay. Okay? That's just the reality of that. But there are countless examples of teachers who have started side businesses that have grown into

• 19:29Andrew Giancola?

  Full-time incomes and if you can start a side business, maybe you want to tutor on the side. That is a big one for a lot of teachers as they go and they can tutor. They can make $50 to $100 an hour by tutoring other students in a specific subject. Maybe you want to start a business that isn't even associated with education and you do it on nights. You do it on weekends, you do it during the summertime so that you can work on that business. There are lots of different options out there for you, but building that scalable side hustle income is really important. Then taking those profits, reinvesting them into assets so that your assets can grow over time. I think for me personally, one thing to talk about when it comes to income is if you have one income stream and you work for someone else, you are one other person's decision away from having zero income streams. And so it's very important to make sure that if you only have one income stream, you try to at least get the two.

• 20:13Andrew Giancola?

  Getting to two at least helps diversify income so that if something were to happen, then you still have something else to fall back on. Now here's a great example is a lot of folks out there, if you're married, you have two income streams. If both you and your spouse work, so that is two income streams where if one of you got laid off, at least you have a second income stream coming in. And so if you can come up with a third income stream, maybe it's a side business that you both work on together. That can be really important. Very early on for me, I realized quickly that when I was single, I was living paycheck to paycheck, got my finances together, but I realized I still have one income coming in. Then my wife and I got married, we had two incomes coming in, but then we would start these side businesses. One example that I've talked about in the past is we had a Christmas tree stand. So every year in December, we started this Christmas tree stand where we would sell Christmas trees on the side of the road.

• 20:55Andrew Giancola?

  Yes, one of those side of the road Christmas tree stands and it was a great little side income stream for us. And so it was something we'd work full-time, then we'd go to the Christmas tree stand at night before we had kids. And then we worked the Christmas tree stand on the weekend and we can make a few thousand dollars during the holiday season. Now there was other people out there who were much better at selling Christmas trees than I was, and they would make tens of thousands of dollars every time. But these are side hustles, that's a great seasonal option, for example, where we would do a sprint on these Christmas trees and we would work double time during that timeframe. But then it was a month and a half, we knew it was over and then we came back. But we had an extra income stream available there. So there is a ton of examples like that. Now this is why we do our episodes talking about side hustles that can turn into a full-time income, because we want to generate ideas for you that can help you in the long run.

• 21:40Andrew Giancola?

  All right, it's kind of amazing how much can change in just a single year. Every summer, the kids are a little bigger, a little more independent, and life looks a little different than it did the year before. And it reminds me that while we can't predict the future, we can prepare for it. That's one of the reasons I like PolicyGenius. See, PolicyGenius isn't an insurance company. They're an online marketplace that lets you compare life insurance quotes from some of America's top insurers, side by side, for free. And their licensed team helps you compare coverage, prices, and terms, answers your questions, and even handles the paperwork so you can get the right policy without the hassle. For me, having life insurance isn't about expecting something to happen. It's about knowing my family is protected

• 22:25Andrew Giancola?

  so I can actually enjoy these moments together instead of worrying about what comes next. And with PolicyGenius, you can find 20-year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million of coverage. Head to PolicyGenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you can save. That's PolicyGenius.com. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know it's not just me anymore. It takes a great team behind the scenes to make everything happen. And if I had to hire someone tomorrow, I'd want someone who could jump right in and make an impact. That's why I'd use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. When workplace chaos hits, Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you reach qualified candidates faster.

• 23:09Andrew Giancola?

  Your job gets boosted in search results so you're spending less time searching and more time interviewing the right people. Plus, you only pay for results, which I absolutely love. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored posts. That's a huge advantage when you're trying to grow your business. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all of your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job. Job, the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast.

• 23:54Andrew Giancola?

  Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast, indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. If you've heard any recent episode of Health Corner, you know that I have spent the last few years trying to optimize my sleep. I've tried sleep trackers, cooling my room, changing my nighttime routine, all the different things, but nothing really matters as much as having the right mattress. And that's one of the reasons I love Leesa. A great mattress is one of those things that you use every single night and you spend a third of your life sleeping and it can make a huge difference on how you feel the next day.

• 24:37Andrew Giancola?

  Leesa has mattresses designed for different sleep positions and comfort preferences and their sleep quiz can help you get matched in less than two minutes. Plus they're designed and they're assembled in the USA and they come with free shipping, easy returns and a 120 night free sleep trial. So go to leesa.com for up to 30% off mattress plus and get an extra $50 off with promo code PFP, exclusive for my listeners. That's L E E S A dot com, promo code PFP for 30% off mattresses plus an extra $50 off. Let them know we sent you in the survey after checkout. Leesa.com promo code PFP.

• 25:20Andrew Giancola?

  One thing I've learned from running multiple businesses is there's usually a gap between how you think work is getting done and how it's actually getting done. And we've had times where we thought we knew the bottleneck, only to realize later, the real issue was somewhere completely different. That's exactly what today's sponsor, Scribe, helps solve. Scribe is a workflow AI platform trusted by 94% of the Fortune 500 and Scribe Optimize turns real workflow data into decisions your AI strategy actually needs, automatically capturing how work happens across approved apps, surfacing inefficiency and opportunities with no interviews and No manual discovery and no extra work from your team, which is the key.

• 26:03Andrew Giancola?

  And the live dashboard shows where work is happening, how much time it's taking and where the biggest opportunities are right now. It automatically discovers workflows across multiple tools, then highlights your biggest inefficiencies and gives AI-powered recommendations with estimated time-saving. You know, I love saving time. It's also built with privacy in mind. It only runs across approved business applications, user level data is anonymous by default, and sensitive information is automatically redacted and never leaves your firewall. To see optimized action, head describe.how/pfp and mention PFP for a 30-day risk-free trial. That's S C R I B E dot H O W slash P F P.

• 26:46Andrew Giancola?

  So number six is to use debt as a wealth building tool, not a trap. So when it comes to debt, this is a cheat code because what rich people do is they leverage debt intelligently. Now, I do not want a lot of people out there leveraging debt, broke people avoid it or misuse it. And so you don't want to leverage debt on credit cards or you don't want to utilize personal loans. But using, there is a difference between good debt and bad debt. So what is an example? An example of good debt would be you go out and you find a house that is in your neighborhood and you see it for sale. And you look at that house, you say, hey, this price looks pretty decent. Let me see what it would rent for. And so you go and you learn how to run the numbers on a rental property. We have a rental property calculator that can help you run the numbers if you want. I'll link it up down in the show notes below.

• 27:29Andrew Giancola?

  But you learn how to run the numbers on a rental property, okay? You take it step by step and you start to factor in, okay, well, the house is selling for $300,000. And right now rents in this area are right around $3,000 per month for a single-family house. Maybe it's a 3-2 or a 4-2, whatever else. I wonder if this will cash flow. You run the numbers, you realize, oh, this can make $300 per month and this could cash flow. You factor in a mortgage, you factor in insurance, you factor in taxes, you factor in everything. Maintenance, depreciation, all that stuff. And what you look at then is that you get to the end of this and you say to yourself, wow, this is going to cash flow. I am going to go ahead and buy this house, but how are you going to buy it? Well, A. You can go out and you can pay cash for it,

• 28:12Andrew Giancola?

  but you don't, most people don't have $300,000 worth of cash sitting around. So instead they go out and they get a mortgage on the house and it's still cash flows even after the mortgage is paid off, all the maintenance, everything else is put into place. And so now this is utilizing debt to buy an asset where a tenant, someone who is going to work every single day, coming home is paying off that mortgage for you and you are making $300 a month by owning that house. This is an example of utilizing debt in a positive way. Let me give you another example. Okay, we own six pick of all facilities right now. When we bought the first one, we went to the seller and we said, hey, let's work out a deal where we can buy this specific facility. And so we put a down payment down and he financed the rest of it.

• 28:53Andrew Giancola?

  So I had debt on the rest of it that he financed himself as the seller. And we utilize this to buy an asset. You can do the same thing by going out and finding a business that you want to buy and getting an SBA loan. You can do the same thing if you wanted to use debt to buy an apartment complex. If you are buying an asset with debt and you know what you're doing, here's the big key is you gotta know what you're doing because a lot of people don't know what they're doing. They don't do their homework and then all of a sudden they get themselves into trouble and they are in a worse situation than they were before. But if you know what you're doing, you can utilize good debt to help you leverage or increase your income over time and really increase your net worth. Now I am not someone who is a big proponent of you getting millions and millions and millions of dollars into debt. In fact, I don't like that at all.

• 29:37Andrew Giancola?

  But what I do like is for you to take small bets, get better, and then you can take bigger swings as time goes on, once you know what you're doing. So start small and then kind of scale it up from there. Now, bad debt is something that buys liabilities. So this is going to be credit card debt or car loans or consumer goods. These are all things that I consider bad debt. But there is good debt if you are going and buying an asset that is going to produce cash flow for you. And so using debt as a wealth tool, not a trap, is one of the key components to someone who wants to become wealthy. Number seven, is exploiting multimillion dollar decisions. So there are a lot of things that are invisible multipliers when it comes to money sheet codes, things like your credit score. Okay, so number one. Your credit score is something that if you have a good credit score,

• 30:22Andrew Giancola?

  it is going to reduce how much you have to pay in interest when you go and borrow for certain things. If you go and buy your house, your interest rate is going to be lower if you have a good credit score. If you go and buy a car, your interest rate is going to be lower if you have a good credit score. If you go out and get a bank loan for rental properties like we just talked about, your interest rate is going to be lower if you have a good credit score. And so all of these factors will become multimillion dollar decisions because over your lifetime, over the course of your entire life that you are borrowing money, 60, 70 years, you will pay significantly less on interest than you would if you had a poor credit score. And so your credit score is a big factor, a multimillion dollar factor that is an invisible multiplier. Another invisible multiplier is your employer match. Most people don't get their employer match. You absolutely should.

• 31:07Andrew Giancola?

  Meaning if you have a 401k, 403B, 457, Roth 401k, any of those options that your employer offers, if they offer an employer match, this is free money. And you need to take advantage of that free money. In fact, we've run the numbers a number of different times. Someone who actually maxes out their 401k but also gets that employer match up to a 6% for example, is hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, depending on what their time horizon is. And so really need to make sure that you're getting that employer match. Another one is stock options or employee stock purchase plans. I have seen so many people as of late really accelerating their path to wealth by using stock options and employee stock purchase plans. I've seen people with $5 million net worth and the reason for it is because those stock options. So making sure you take advantage of those is another one.

• 31:52Andrew Giancola?

  Another big one is the HSA with those triple tax benefits. So if you have a high deductible health plan, money goes in tax free. It can grow tax free. You can pull the money out tax free. And that triple tax advantage could be a huge invisible multiplier. There are tons of these out there over and over and over again that we need to make sure that we are taking advantage of them. And so learning about invisible multipliers can be really powerful. We have an episode talking through six multimillion dollar decisions that you need to make. That is a powerful episode about a bunch of other invisible multipliers that most people have never even thought about before. So I'd highly recommend that episode as well.

• 32:30Andrew Giancola?

  All right, number eight is to reverse engineer wealth with the wealth gap formula. So instead of just guessing your path to financial independence, you engineer it backwards so that every dollar you earn has a job. So here's how it works. The wealth gap is equal to the desired annual lifestyle minus passive income. So this is the single number that tells you exactly how far you are from financial independence. And so, once you know your wealth gap, you have two levers. Number one is you can increase your passive income if you want to, meaning that you add rental cash flow, dividends, royalties, business income, et cetera. Or you reduce or lower your lifestyle cost, meaning that you decide, okay, I'm going to reduce my fixed expenses to shrink this gap faster. So here's an example of this, okay?

• 33:14Andrew Giancola?

  Let's say, for example, you want a $100,000 per year lifestyle, and you already generate 25,000 in passive income. So your wealth gap is going to be $75,000 in this scenario. So you can focus your energy on a number of different things. Maybe you want to increase the amount that you're investing over time, and you want to max out those retirement accounts. Maybe you want to get some rental income that's going to eventually, hopefully, add up to $75,000 per year, once those houses start to get paid off. And as time goes on, the time value of money is really, really powerful. Maybe you're trying to start a business. You want to try to find a way to earn an extra $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 per month, so you can take it over the hump here. Every $1,000 of new passive incomes shortens your timeline and increases your chance to become financially independent.

• 33:55Andrew Giancola?

  And so, learning how to use this wealth gap formula to your advantage is really, really important. It starts to flip your thinking from how much should I save? And start thinking through what action should I do to shrink this number so that I can ensure that I'm getting there faster? Number nine, this is one for a lot of people out there that have done this in the past, is house hacking. One of your biggest expenses out there is your house. And for most people, their mortgage or their rent payments are going to be their biggest expense. So if you can reduce your housing costs, this can mean that you can have a massive increase in capital that you could put towards wealth building activities or your financial independence. So house hacking, if you've never heard of it, here's how it works. There's a couple of different ways to do this. One example is you go out and buy a duplex. You live in one unit.

• 34:39Andrew Giancola?

  You rent out the other units and so virtually either your housing costs are free. They are reduced and or you're even making money for living in a specific house. And you can do this over and over and over again with different rental properties. So if you're someone who is interested in real estate investing, maybe you're young and you are interested in doing something like this. The duplex strategy or triplex strategy is a great option. Secondly, though, you can do this with a house that has an in-law suite. So if you're single, you can live in the in-law suite and rent out of the house. Or if you have a family, you can live in the house and rent out the in-law suite. Third, you can do this with a traditional house if you have roommates. So you can also buy a house, live in the house and then put roommates in other rooms. And you can live virtually for free or with a reduced cost.

• 35:19Andrew Giancola?

  This is going to help you save a tremendous amount of money and is a cheat code for a lot of people, especially in your younger years. Listen, I know when you have a family, you don't want to have a bunch of roommates. Or if you have a family, you don't want to live in a duplex. So those two options are probably out, but this is something that when you're younger, it can help reduce your costs. And when you're younger, you get favorable terms if you're living in that unit. So let's say, for example, you want to go out and buy a duplex. Well, you can buy a duplex with an FHA loan at 3.5% down. And if the numbers work, the numbers work. Then after two years, you decide to move on to the next property and you can move on to that next property and do it again. Or you can get another duplex with a favorable loan term. Maybe you get put 5% down, 10%, 15, 20, whatever you want to do. But you can do this over and over and over again and built up a rental portfolio.

• 36:04Andrew Giancola?

  Just because you have favorable loan terms because you lived in that unit. And so there's a lot of cool things that you can do when it comes to house hacking. Because you want to keep your housing costs below 30%. If you want to become financially independent, I would keep it below 25 or 20%. But when you are someone who is just getting started, keeping your housing costs below 30% is really, really important. And so this can help you tremendously lower that cost. Number 10 is to play the long game with arbitrage. What do I mean by that? Wealth is a time game, okay? When it comes to building wealth, everything has to do with the amount of time that you have. It's not just a money game. So you need to start investing today if you haven't. Anybody listening right now, time is your greatest asset. If you are in your twenties and you're like, I can't even invest much money at all. No, time is your greatest asset.

• 36:49Andrew Giancola?

  Started now is really important. We have something called the Wealth Builders Matrix. If you go to mastermoney.co/resources, there's something there called the Wealth Builders Matrix. What this is, is this will help you look at your age and how much you're investing every month and tell you how much that money, every single dollar would be worth by the age of 65 if you invested it. It is absolutely amazing. So for someone who is 19 years old, for example, every single dollar they invest or spend is worth about a hundred dollars invested. And it is incredible to see the growth of that. Whereas someone in their 30s, maybe every single dollar they invest is worth $25. But you want to see how impactful those dollars can be. It's going to change the way you think about buying that next beer or buying those smaller things, because every dollar is so incredibly valuable over time. And so you've got to understand,

• 37:33Andrew Giancola?

  hey, one thing we're never going to do is we are never going to interrupt compound interest. And we're never going to interrupt it unnecessarily. So for those of you out there who have decided, okay, I'm going to actually pull money from my 401k. Well, first, you're going to pay taxes on that money. Then you're going to pay a 10% penalty, but you're also interrupting compound interest. All three of those things combined are absolutely terrible for your finances. And so you never want to sell assets to go buy lifestyle things. Making sure we never interrupt compound interest and let our money stay invested for the long run is the big key to building wealth. Time is your greatest asset. Number 11 is I want you to think in net worth, not just income. So obviously, we want to raise our income, but we want to take that income. And the purpose why we are raising our income is so that we can grow our net worth. Your net

• 38:17Andrew Giancola?

  worth is your scoreboard. It is what we are watching to ensure that we are making progress over time. Now, if you are just getting started, or if you're in debt, or you have a negative net worth, I recommend tracking your net worth monthly. If you are someone who has a lot of investments, tracking it monthly is going to be counterproductive. Reason for that is because investments go up and they go down. So if you have a really good month in investing, maybe you look at your net worth to stay motivated. If it's a bad month, maybe not check it that month. But your net worth is going to make sure that you focus on assets that grow over time and not liabilities. And you can make decisions on how they affect your net worth over the course of 10 years. It's going to help you become a better decision maker when it comes to your finances. We have an episode coming up on why you need to do a net worth audit and why that is so powerful. So get ready for that.

• 38:59Andrew Giancola?

  This is one people don't talk about enough is getting the right team in your corner. So this is a cheat code because the right experts can save you far more than they cost. So number one, I just talked about this is a CPA. Making sure you get the right CPA in your corner, who can also be a tax strategist is really, really important. Number two is if you don't know what you're doing and you want more help, a fiduciary advisor at an hourly rate can be very important. A financial advisor who can help you put together a financial plan at an hourly rate, not taking a percentage of your investments, but an hourly rate and fiduciary means they are working in your best interest. So making sure it's a fiduciary advisor that can keep you invested while others panic. That's a really important one, but you want to vet them very, very closely.

• 39:41Andrew Giancola?

  And then three is a good estate planner or someone who is in your corner, who can build out an estate plan or a will or a trust for you. If you are at the point in time where you want to make sure that your assets are going to the right people. Those three alone are worth their weight in gold. If you can find the right ones, there's a lot of bad ones out there. So I just want to put this caveat in right now. You need to find the good ones and you need to find the right ones. And that is one of the most important things. Now, number 13, the last one is optimizing for freedom, not just money. The reason why we all do this, the reason why we are trying to get our finances together. We work so hard to build wealth. We're working so hard at our day jobs so that we can take a portion of that income and put it towards wealth building so that we can buy our freedom.

• 40:22Andrew Giancola?

  You work way too hard to not keep a portion of your income to buy back your freedom. If you're going to work until 65, 70, 80, listen, you're working too hard to have to do that. We here want you to change your financial trajectory by going out and taking a portion of your income, putting it towards future you. And that's what I want for every single one of you. So I want you to automate so you can buy back your time. I want you to put money in your retirement account so you can buy back your time. I want you to invest so you can buy your future freedom. I want you to take every dollar you can so that you can have the option for freedom. Maybe you don't want to stop working, but having the option, boy, oh, boy, does that feel good. And I want every single person listening to this show to feel how good that can feel.

• 41:06Andrew Giancola?

  You want to be able to walk away when you want, not when you're allowed. And that's what the most powerful position to be in when it comes to your finances is buying that freedom. We're not doing this to buy stuff. We're not doing this to buy the next fancy car, or the new iPhone, or the next big thing. Sure, all that stuff is great. But we're doing this to buy our freedom, and that's what I want for every single one of you. Listen, thanks for listening to the Personal Finance Podcast today. I cannot thank you guys enough for being here. Again, we have Master Money Academy. If you want to get coached live by me, Master Money Academy is the place that you can do that. I appreciate every single one of you for being here today, and hope you got a ton of value out of this podcast, because that is exactly what our intent is, to bring you as much value as we possibly can.

• 41:51Andrew Giancola?

  Thanks again for being here. Hope you have a great rest of the week, and we'll see you on the next episode.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting, and completely delicious. Simply. Say yes to Simple.