Pod Insights The Personal Finance Podcast How to Fix Your Finances If You Make $100,000 (and Still Feel Broke) About this episode You make six figures. You should feel ahead. So why does it still feel like you're barely getting by?
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What You'll Learn in This Episode
Why 44% of people earning over $100,000 still live paycheck to paycheck and what to do about it
How to run an honest income versus outflow audit in under an hour
The Block Method: a four-part budgeting framework that actually works for high earners
How to identify your "broke tax" and stop quietly bleeding money every month
Why your car and your house are probably the real problem, not your lattes
The exact order to fund your accounts so your money starts working for you automatically
How to set a 12-month net worth target and finally measure what actually matters
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Tool/s Mentioned
Automate Your Money Checklist
Episode/s Mentioned
How to Negotiate Your Bills (and SAVE 6-Figures!)
The Average Retirement Savings By AGE!
The Million Dollar Money Decisions You Should Be Focusing On
How to Negotiate Your Rent Like A Pro (and win the negotiation!)
10 Incredible Benefits of a Taxable Brokerage Account!
Watch Next
How to Plan Your Retirement (By Age!)
10 Reasons Smart People Are Bad With Money
The Money Plan for Couples: How to Build Wealth as a Team (Step-by-Step)
How to Invest in Real Estate (In ANY MARKET!)
The Best Financial Strategies (BY INCOME!)
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Question for you:
After hearing the Block Method today, which of the four blocks is most out of whack for you right now: Fixed, Foundation, Lifestyle, or Future You? Drop it in the comments.
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Transcript 12,261 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Andrew 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.
0:44 Andrew 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
1:29 Andrew 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.
2:14 Andrew 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.
2:28 Andrew Giancola? On this episode of the personal finance podcast, how to fix your finances if you make over six figures and still feel broke.
2:42 Andrew 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 diving into how to fix your finances. If you make six figures or more, 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 Apple podcasts, Spotify, 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. Now today, we're going to be diving into how to fix your finances.
3:26 Andrew Giancola? If you have a high income and still feel like you're broke, if you still feel like you're living paycheck to paycheck, I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do today. There are a lot of folks out there who are making over $100,000 per year, who are still struggling. I have talked to so many different folks in master money academy and in other places that are making these high incomes and still struggling to get by. Now your location is going to matter a lot on this, but there are still things that you can do no matter what to fix your finances. But I want to look at the data first because the data is shocking. So a 2025 lending club payment study found that 62% of US adults
4:06 Andrew Giancola? live paycheck to paycheck, including 44% of those people are earning more than $100,000 per year, who say they have little to no money left after expenses. Guys, for most of you out there, that should not be happening. You should be able to have some extra cash on hand. And I know how difficult it is right now. I understand the economy is tough. I understand the rising cost of inflation is a big deal. I understand wages are at their lowest in comparison to housing costs. Those are all things that are working. Those are all things of why this is happening. And so we need to continue to figure out exactly what we can do. A Goldman Sachs study cited a 2025 report that found that 25% of workers earning $100,000
4:50 Andrew Giancola? report living paycheck to paycheck, rising to 41% for those making $300,000 to $500,000 per year. And a 2025 Harris Poll on six-figure earners shows that 1 in 3 people making at least $100,000 describe themselves as financially distressed. Now, I don't want you to be stressed about money. I don't want you to feel anxious about money. I don't want you to get to the end of the month and be like, I don't know where my dollars are going. I'm making all this money. Where does my money go? No, we're going to fix this for you. We're going to fix it in this episode so that you can feel peace and calm when it comes to your money. And this is really, really important for any high earner because these are the times that when you start to earn over six figures, that you can really make progress when it comes to your financial freedom.
5:35 Andrew Giancola? And you could really make progress when it comes to financial independence. Your ultimate goal should be to buy your freedom. You are working so hard to get to exactly where you are. You don't need to spend more time wasting away these years. Instead, you feel as though, and I'm sure you feel this deep down into your core. I'm sure you feel this fire in your gut. You need to make sure that you're taking a portion of your income and that portion of that income is going towards wealth building. It's going towards your future because it is so stressful when you get to the end of every single month. And all of a sudden you look back and say, what did I just do all this for? Just to get by? Just to be able to pay my rent? Just to be able to pay my light bill? When I'm making over six figures a year, this can't be the right way to live. And I get how you feel.
6:20 Andrew Giancola? I understand that this is something that for most people, if you've never been taught this stuff, you feel as though you may just be getting screwed. Well, we're going to make sure that we fix this for you. Now, If we look across the broader population, the stats are shocking. Across all incomes, around 60 to 61% of adults who have reported living paycheck to paycheck show that high earners make up the majority slice of that group. And analysts are pointing to a number of different things. One, they're pointing to high housing costs. So we all know that housing costs have risen over the course of the last six years. Since 2020, since COVID, housing costs have risen at record rates.
7:01 Andrew Giancola? It is one of those areas where most people are still struggling to be able to afford housing. Two, childcare. I know most of you high earners out there, maybe you're in your 30s or your 40s, and you are paying for childcare right now. And most of us know, if you have ever paid for childcare before, that childcare is like having a separate mortgage. And if you have two kids in childcare, it's probably more expensive than your mortgage. This, I know, for a lot of you, is a big stressful event. And so we need to make sure we plan for this event, which is a short-term event, and then from there, we can decide exactly what we want to do with these dollars. Another big one that is out there is debt payments. For a lot of you out there, maybe you weren't financially educated yet. Maybe you took on a bunch of debt. Maybe you took on the mortgage and it's more than 30% of your income. Maybe you took on the car payments that are more than 7% of your income.
7:46 Andrew Giancola? Maybe you realized, oh shoot, I have a luxury car, and this takes more than 5% of my income in maintenance and repairs. Maybe you are dealing with some of these stressful situations. You've got a lot of debt payments on hand. Or maybe the biggest one of all, that most people are struggling with in recent generations, is student loans. The rising cost of tuition has been something that has been honestly astronomical. And hopefully, at some point in time, we see this change. But right now, we are having to deal with student loan debt in addition to the rising cost of living and everything else. And our wages are not keeping up with the rising costs of living. So you're sitting there with your face in your hands, saying to yourself, "I don't know what to do next." My friends, there's things that you can do. There's ways to fix this, and we're going to talk through exactly how you can do this.
8:31 Andrew Giancola? And then the last thing is lifestyle inflation. We see this time and time again, where people think they are actually living lean, when in reality, they probably aren't living as lean as they want to be. I don't want you living lean. I want you to live your best life. I want you to enjoy life. And so we're going to show you how to balance both so that you can do both. You can do both of these things and it can absolutely change your life forever. And so I'm going to show you exactly how to do that today. So I'm really pumped for this episode. The statistics don't lie on why and how many people are struggling with this. So we are going to help you fix this step by step. So if that's something you're into, without further ado, let's get into it.
9:11 Andrew Giancola? So step number one is I want you to run an honest income verse outflow audit. What does that mean? Why would you even do that? We want to figure out where our cash flow is going. We want to figure where our dollars are going because you can figure anything out, but you need the real numbers and we can't fix this unless we have those real numbers. So we're going to dive in and we're going to pull some bank statements so that we can look exactly how much we're spending and what our burn rate is every single month. And we want to know exactly how much we are making as well. You would be shocked at how many people I ask, how much money do you spend every single month? They have no idea. That one is a little more reasonable. That one is a little more understandable. Obviously, spending is variable every single month. But then I ask them a second question. How much money do you make net every single month?
9:55 Andrew Giancola? And they have no idea. That is a little less reasonable because it's the same amount every single month. And whatever your household income is after taxes is what we are dealing with. And so we're going to run these numbers really quick. I'm going to show you how to find these numbers so that going forward, you don't have to worry as much anymore. Okay, so first, we're going to gather our statements. I want you to get all of your checking account statements. I want you to get all of your savings account statements. I want you to get every credit card statement that you have, even the ones that you barely use, that maybe you just have your Netflix subscription on, or maybe the other credit cards that you have out there that maybe you use every couple of times every single year. Every single one of those. And I want you to take the last 90 days. And if you can do this over the course of a year, if it's the same amount of work and you can pull those statements easily, I would highly recommend taking them over the course of the last year.
10:41 Andrew Giancola? Every PayPal account, every Venmo account, every Cash App account, wherever you are utilizing to spend money. If you are Venmoing people back and forth for bills or other payments, you need to gather every single one of those statements. And any buy now, pay later accounts, anything you owe money to or spending money on, all of those need to come together. Now, this may sound like a daunting task. It is not. Go ahead and go find these statements, set a timer, and I guarantee it's going to take you less than 20 minutes. It is 2026, we can pull everything off the line now, and it's not a big deal. That 20 minutes is going to change your life forever if you actually do what we're talking about here. So this is the reason why we want you to do this. Now, 90 days is the minimum I want you to pull. If you can pull a year, that's great. 90 days is the minimum because at least it won't hide, you know, those variable months, weeks, or years.
11:26 Andrew Giancola? Now, some of you may come to me and say, Andrew, I've got this, you know, birthday party next month where I'm spending extra money. Or Andrew, you know, in December, I spent a lot on Christmas, so I'm not going to really count them. No, I want you to even count the months that have the wacky variables. Why? Because that happens over and over and over again. And anybody in this life knows that you will never have a perfect month. You're never going to have a month that is just smooth sailing. And so we need to account for those months, even if you went on a random trip, or even if you went and spent extra money on your kid's birthday party. Those need to be accounted for every single time. And so I want you to gather those statements first, and then what we're going to do is the next step. Next, I want you to calculate your true income. So any source of income that hits your account, including your base pay after taxes,
12:10 Andrew Giancola? your side income, your rental income, all of your bonuses, and you need to use your actual deposited amount that comes into your bank account every single month. And your spouse's deposited amounts that comes in your bank account every single month if you're married. What is your household income? Because this is going to be the real financial reality of what we have to deal with every single month. This is after taxes. So a lot of you will know, hey, my base salary is $121,000 per year. My base salary is $210,000 per year. A lot of you will know that, but you don't know what you make after taxes. And depending on where you live, Uncle Sam is going to take either more or less than someone who makes less money than you. And so we need to understand exactly what your net income is,
12:54 Andrew Giancola? because it means a lot, state to state, or country to country even. And so you need to know what that bare bones minimum amount is. In reality, that's somewhere around 70. To seventy five thousand dollars per year because taxes are going to take about a quarter of it. And so we need to know what our income is and our expenses. Now, to do some quick math, once you get those first two numbers, you know how much you make net every single month. Then you know how much you burn every single month. We're going to get an understanding, okay, do we have a gap? Do we have a difference between our income and expenses? This is going to be a starting point because if you have zero gap whatsoever, or some of you may have a negative gap. If you have a lot of debt or you have a lot of expenses that you're dealing with. We need to figure out exactly how to solve that problem.
13:35 Andrew Giancola? And if you're trying to reduce expenses in any way, shape or form, and feel as though it's central living paycheck to paycheck. We need to figure out a way to reduce expenses. Next is going to help you exactly how to do that. So number three, when we're trying to figure out what our cash flow is, is we need to categorize every single transaction. So I want you to go through the list of items of your expenses. The easiest way to do this is to go use a tool like Monarch Money, sponsor this podcast. It is literally four dollars a month if you use our code in the show notes. So I don't know why people don't use it. It's less than a cup of coffee to utilize a tool that is going to help you dramatically. When it comes to just organizing your money, okay? So as you start to look at this, housing is number one. Making sure you understand how much housing you spend. Transportation, you could do it into food. Subscriptions should be a category.
14:19 Andrew Giancola? Things like insurance should be a category. How much are you spending on insurance every single month? That's a great place where we can start to negotiate. Debt payments, let's look, take a look at our debt payments, how much we're paying in interest. Those types of things that have an understanding of that. Things like personal care and entertainment and shopping and kids and family. You're going to have all these different categories that are going to come into play with giving and charity and everything else. Okay, so all of these will come in. And the key is to separate these out. So we have an understanding of where our dollars are going to go. Okay, so we're categorizing these transactions just to figure out our inflow and outflow. Then we are going to use each category to figure out percentages. Because we're going to talk about the block method in a minute. And the block method is going to change your entire life if you start to utilize this. This sounds complicated. It's not going to get complicated.
15:03 Andrew Giancola? Once we get deeper around the rabbit hole, it's going to take a little bit of upfront work. You want to get your money right, right? Then we need to make sure we do a little bit of upfront work. It's going to take about an hour total to do all of this. Once you do this, it will set you up for the rest of your life if you maintain this. It'll take a couple of minutes every single week where you don't have a big issue going forward. Because now, once you have these categorized, I want you to identify some of the warning signs that we have here. You may be looking at this and saying, "Well, I cannot believe how much money I spend on subscriptions." That's a really easy way to fix a problem or reduce your overall spending very quickly, where it doesn't bring any pain to your household whatsoever. If you have fifteen different subscriptions where you are paying one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars per month on, you can go and take a look at these subscriptions and say to yourself,
15:47 Andrew Giancola? "Well, I can delete half of these and all of a sudden I get seventy-five dollars per month back." And that's a very small amount of money in the grand scheme of things, based on how much you are making currently. There's some bigger ticket items that we want to focus on that we will talk about here in a second. But another big thing that you can do is look at, okay, do I spend X amount of dollars on DoorDash? Do I spend X amount of dollars on Uber Eats or Eating Out? Food is a big area that people don't realize how much they spend. A lot of people will add up their groceries and realize, "Oh, shoot, I am spending way too much on these groceries." Those are all big deals that I want you to think through. Next, let's look for minimum payment traps. Minimum payment traps are things like you are taking on more debt because the minimum payment is something that you can afford.
16:27 Andrew Giancola? Way too many hires focus on the payment and not the total cost of ownership when it comes to taking on debt. You want to make sure that if you're looking at debt payments and these minimum payments are sitting there right there, and you take on a bunch of minimum payments, those traps are gonna really eat into your wealthability. And if you have no savings, or if you have no difference between your income and expenses, or the availability to save money, there's a real problem there. We're gonna have to make some drastic changes. Because next, we want to make sure that we are looking for the gap. Now, when you look at your income, your net income, that is household, and you look at your expenses, how much do you have left sitting there? This is gonna be your reality check. If you have nothing left over, or you have a negative balance left over, then we're gonna have to make some changes, and we're gonna have to make some drastic changes.
17:12 Andrew Giancola? Why do we have to make those drastic changes? Because if you continue on this path, and this is not to scare you, this is to motivate you. If you continue on this path, you will never, ever be able to retire. Never be able to separate yourself from having to go into a job every single day. And you may be saying to yourself right now, well, I love my job. I love going into my work and I like to spend money as well. And I want you to spend money. You're going to find a balance to spend money. But there's going to come a point in time in your life where you're not going to want to work anymore. You're going to be 65 years old and you're going to be sitting there saying, man, I wish I could spend more time with my grandkids. Or I wish I spent more time with my kids instead of having to go to work every single day. Or I wish I could go do the things that I want. I want to go hang out with my friends. I want to go play golf or pickleball or yoga or go to workout classes.
17:57 Andrew Giancola? But I can't because I'm driving into work and all my other peers are retired. And I want you to think about future you. Now you can't take it all with you. I understand. I hear all the skeptics on social media who say this all the time. And that's okay, because we want you to live that lavish life now. We want you to live the life that you want now in addition to also saving for your future. And you can absolutely do both. I am living proof that you can do both. Countless of Master Money Academy members are living proof that you can do both. But you got to make sure that first you are getting started by finding that gap. So how much is left over? You got to find that first. If you have a good amount left over, let's say you have 500, 1,000, 1,500. Some of you higherers maybe have five, seven, $10,000 left over.
18:40 Andrew Giancola? If you have that left over, then we can really make some money moves with that amount of money. And so we're trying to figure out exactly how much we have left and then we can make adjustments from there. So that's step one is to figure out how much we're burning every single month. Okay. Now, step two is I want to focus on this real take home pay section for a second. Because I want us to think about it and make sure that we really understand how much we're taking home. Now, 100K can sound like a lot. It can sound like something where most people are striving first. If you're making under 100K, most people are striving to get to 100K. But $100,000 earner can take home roughly 65,000 to 72,000 after federal, state, FICA taxes and everything else.
19:22 Andrew Giancola? And so for most people out there, that's roughly 5,500 to $6,000 per month. And so all of a sudden you say to yourself, well, $100,000 per year sounds like a lot. But 6,000 a month at 2026, if you have a family and a bunch People who depend on you is a little bit more difficult to get by than it used to be. Now, you could definitely thrive with that amount of money still, but it is gonna make it a little bit harder. And so, everything in your life has to fit inside that number, including your savings and debt payments and everything else that you have to deal with. And so, most people are budgeting off the gross, but you need to make sure you understand that net. Now, once we look at that net income, we're gonna figure out, okay, are we okay with how much we're making as a household? Because we looked at our expenses and we looked at how much we are making. And if we don't have much money left over, we can either cut back some expenses, which we should do if you don't have much money left over. That's a quick thing to do.
20:07 Andrew Giancola? But then we also need to focus on how are we gonna make more money? How are we gonna increase our income? Because I wanna live my best life. I wanna go on my vacation, sip my champagne and do the things that I wanna do. And so, I wanna spend some time with friends. I wanna be able to go out and on weekends, you know, go out to eat and read a menu from left to right instead of right to left and be able to go out and do whatever I want when I want to. How do I balance both? Well, your income's gonna be the lever that's gonna help you do that. And your income is gonna be the lever where maybe you wanna spend a little more or maybe you wanna invest a lot more. You're like, man, I hate my job. I hate working. I don't wanna be working for the rest of my life. I don't wanna be sitting in this office anymore. I don't wanna be out on this job site anymore. Instead, I wanna make sure I can buy my freedom. Well, guess what? That's the ultimate thing that you could buy.
20:51 Andrew Giancola? And your income is gonna be the fastest way for you to buy that freedom. If you can increase your income over time, and you may already have a high income, but if you can increase your income over time and take the difference between those two, it is gonna be a big, big difference. Now, for a lot of my high earners, most of you, if you're making more than $200,000 per year, the likelihood of you needing to make more money is going to be less than the likelihood of you needing to slash out a couple of different things. But if you make more money, it's an easier path to get there if you are good at making money. And so, some of you, if you're already at that level where you had $150,000, $200,000 per year, you're probably pretty good at making money. And so, because of this, let's see if we can make more and solve the problem that way. But in addition, slowly cut back in some other areas. And then, all of a sudden, you're gonna see the difference between that income
21:36 Andrew Giancola? and your expenses start to grow over time. And that's exactly what we want to do. We wanna make sure that gap is growing over. Now step three is we want to find the broke tax that we are paying. We're sitting here saying to ourselves, well, okay, we don't have a lot of money left over at the end of the month. Maybe it's 500 bucks a month and that's not enough for you. Maybe it's a thousand bucks a month and you're like, I want to retire in 15 years. I need to make sure I'm getting 5,000 bucks a month. Well, if that's the case, let's figure out where our broke tax is. Where are we spending money that we most likely do not value? Because it all comes down to spending your dollars on things that you actually value. And if you do not value some of the areas where you're spending money, let's find that broke tax. Number one, for a lot of folks, especially high earners, it could be that high interest debt.
22:20 Andrew Giancola? So credit card debt is a huge one that I see time and time again. So any credit card debt that you have out there, that is a pants on fire emergency. We need to get rid of that as fast as possible. Credit card debt typically is a 20% or more interest rate that you are paying on that credit card debt. And so we need to either figure out a plan to get rid of it as fast as possible, consolidate it into a 0% interest loan or a very low interest rate loan, or figure out how we are going to pay this off with a debt snowball or a debt avalanche. And so that is number one, is we need to put together a debt paid down plan for any debt really above a 6% interest rate. Now, where do I get that 6% number? Well, if you look at the average market returns, you are much better off paying off high interest debt than you are investing those dollars.
23:05 Andrew Giancola? But if it's below that 6% interest rate, then I would much rather invest those dollars and just pay the minimum payments on that debt. That's how we come up with that, and that's why we talked through it that much. If you have no emergency fund in place, guess what, high earners? That means you also, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, you also have high expenses. And so if that's the case, and you have no emergency fund in place, how are you going to take care of bills if you lose your job? Or how are you going to take care of expenses if you have no cash on hand? You need to have cash on hand, and a lot of folks, the reason why they live paycheck to paycheck is because they don't have cash on hand for when emergencies pop up. Instead, they go backwards and have to play catch up all the time. You're on this hamster wheel over and over and over again because you are trying to play catch up. I don't want you to have to play catch up. Unexpected expenses should never be a stressor. Let me give you an example right now.
23:50 Andrew Giancola? This is painting me to even say, in 2020, I built a brand new pool at my house. Okay. Is it a good financial decision in terms of long-term wealth building? Absolutely not. Is it a good financial decision in terms of lifestyle and memories and all those different things? Absolutely. We use that thing. I live in Florida. We use that thing every single day in the summer. We use that thing every single day in the spring and we use it for most of fall. And in fact, there have been years we are swimming on Christmas in the middle of that pool. Okay? And so this is one of those things where I invested in this because I had three young kids. And so we put the pool in, spent a lot of money on the pool, way too much money, to be honest. And it was one of those areas that I was okay doing because it was a lifestyle decision. We planned for it. We saved for it. We did all the things that you should do. Okay?
24:36 Andrew Giancola? This month, at the time recording this, it actually happened seven days ago. My pool pump all of a sudden went out. It has been five years since that pool pump went in. So I said 2020, I guess it was 2021. So it's been five years since we put that pool pump in. Okay? $4,500 for the pool pump. But then I realized, oh, shoot, we got a heater. We have a little hot tub and we have a heater. And I realized the heater was not working either. And so I had them look at that. Then I had them look at the salt cell system because it's a saltwater pool. So I had them look at the salt cell system and that wasn't working properly either. I've got a bunch of different quotes on this and all of a sudden I realized, oh, my goodness. This is a $7,500 bill that I am going to have to pay to fix something that I literally just put in.
25:20 Andrew Giancola? It feels like I just put it in, but all of it broke. And guess why? Two of the things broke because a sprinkler was pointed right at him and just beaten up against these pool systems. And actually broke some of the systems. Is that my fault? Sure, it is my fault for not checking my sprinklers. They go off in the middle of the night. I just don't check.
25:36 Andrew Giancola? But it is a $7,500 bill. Would you be able to take care of a $7,500 bill if you got in a car accident? Would you be able to take care of a $7,500 bill? If you had a water leak in your house and all of a sudden you had to replace a bunch of drywall? Would you have be able to take care of a $7,500 bill? If all of a sudden you had three different things that happened to you? Maybe you had a medical emergency and then your car needed new brakes? And then you needed to make sure that you took care of a couple of other things? Would you be able to take care of that? Because if the answer is no, well, now we need to make sure that we have cash on hand and cash in place. That is what the emergency fund is for and why we need to take care of that. And I tell you that story as a cautionary story because I thought to myself, if I didn't have an emergency fund here, this would stress me out so bad.
26:20 Andrew Giancola? This is already an expense that is not a good financial decision. It's a lifestyle choice, but not a good financial decision. So that drives me up the wall no matter what. It's just my psychology and I'm working on it. But it's also one of those things where it's really, really hard to get past if you have no cash on you. The third brotax I want you to look for is if you are not making retirement contributions or if you're not saving for future you, you need to start doing that now. There are no loans for retirement. Nobody's going to come and save you. Social Security may not even be there by the time you retire. It should be. They've been saying that for decades and decades. But if that's the case, you need to take care and focus on the things that you control, put on your boots and get to work for saving for retirement. Because if you have no retirement savings and you're sitting here and I talk to high
27:04 Andrew Giancola? earners who make a lot of money, who have no retirement savings, and I am just in shock because in reality, they were never taught this stuff. They were never taught to understand this stuff. Maybe you're really good at making money, but just because you're really good at making money does not mean you're good with your finances. And this is one of those areas where you need to learn that buying your freedom is the ultimate thing that you could do. Why? Because we're buying your time and we don't get more of this time. Here's a great example of this. Would you trade places right now with Warren Buffett? Warren Buffett is, what is he, 96, 97 years old right now? And he is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. I'm 37 years old. Would I trade places with Warren Buffett for hundreds of billions of dollars who is 96? No. So what does that tell me?
27:46 Andrew Giancola? My youth is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And that means time is my most valuable asset. Because there are a lot of things out there that I would trade for hundreds of billions of dollars, but time is not one of it. Time is not one that I would be willing to forego for hundreds of billions of dollars. You can even look at it another way. Would you trade places with Richard Branson, who I think is in his 70s for billions of dollars? And you can keep going down the line and realize, oh. I'm in a really valuable position because I've got my entire life ahead of me. Even if you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, you have your entire life ahead of you. You have so much time left and having the ability to think through life this way and realize, oh, if I buy my time, if I put my extra dollars towards my time so I can get that time back
28:29 Andrew Giancola? and spend it doing what I want, that is going to help you realize that your life will be changed. If you actually take action on this, okay? So that is number three is being able to take action on this, okay? Because that is one of those areas that are really, really important. Also, overpaying on insurance, if you haven't shopped it in years, that is a broke tax that you're most likely paying. You got to make sure that you are shopping your insurance. We just had an episode on negotiating your bills. If you haven't heard that one, the comments on Spotify are really cool on there where people are negotiating their bills and they're talking about some of the stuff they're doing there. If you haven't heard that one, make sure you go check that one out. Also, we talked about how to reduce your car insurance on our recent episodes. So check that one out as well. If you haven't done that, people are saving hundreds of dollars just by doing this. And I think it's one of the most important things that you could do.
29:14 Andrew Giancola? For most 100K earners, it is 5,000 to 15,000 per year in avoidable costs. If you actually do this right and shop insurance and do all of these other broke tax things to make sure that you are not overpaying in some of these areas. Now, there were some other areas that you could be overpaying on. We'll talk about those later on because there's million dollar money decisions that we need to be focusing on. But this is just one of the quick ways that you could figure out where you're paying broke tax. So step four is I want you to implement the block method. So we're going to introduce a new method that I'm going to be talking about. We're going to do an entire episode on this, but we're going to introduce a new methodology of a way to budget. And I started to think through, well, what is the easiest way for people to understand this and be able to visualize the way they're spending their dollars? And we came up with something called the block method.
29:59 Andrew Giancola? Now, the block method has four different squares and I want you to visualize a square with four squares inside, like when you play four square in middle school or high school, or like when you play four square in elementary school. I want you to visualize four squares inside of a block, okay? Block one, this is going to be your fixed expenses. This is going to be your baseline expenses, what we've talked about in the past. Your fixed expenses go into block one. In this area, this is where, depending on your situation, you should be spending anywhere from 50 to 60% of your income on this fixed income. Now, what is the fixed income expenses? Or what are the fixed expenses? This is going to be your housing, your utilities, your transportation, your insurance, your medical payments, those types of things, okay? Block number two, which is going to be just below this fixed expenses,
30:44 Andrew Giancola? is going to be your foundation block. This is going to be your emergency fund, any high interest debt, any sinking funds for big predictable expenses that are going to keep you out of debt. That is going to be your foundation. This builds out your foundation so you have this spot to be in order to be able to build wealth. You need to have that foundation block in order to make sure that your wealth and your net worth is growing over time, okay? Block number three is your lifestyle block. This is your fun money, your ability to go on vacations, to blow money on, you know, if you want some brand new clothes or you want to buy a designer bag and you want to go out and get something cool. This is where it is. Your lifestyle block is the money that I really want you growing this block. This is the block we want to focus on because this is where dividends are going to get paid. This is where our memories and our cores are going to happen.
31:28 Andrew Giancola? And so that lifestyle block is really important. And then block four is for future you. So this is your investments, this is your wealth building, and this is all about buying back more time. And so in block four, that's where future you is going to happen. And so you're going to see this shift over time because the percentages in each of these blocks will shift as you start to build wealth. And it's going to get better and better and better as time goes on. Where at the beginning, phase one, you may be spending, you know, X amount of percentages on your 50 to 60% on your baseline expenses, these fixed expenses. And if it's less than that, then you're doing great and you can increase the amount in all the other blocks. But in block one, when you're doing this, you may be thinking through, okay, I'm spending 56% on housing and utilities. If it's above 60% and you're a high earner,
32:12 Andrew Giancola? then you are most likely overspending on fixed expenses and you're spending too much. The foundation block, number two, should be an area where if you're working on your emergency fund, or you're working on building wealth, or you're working on paying off debt, and you haven't done those areas yet, then 20% will most likely be coming out of that block. Then the lifestyle block, or the fun block, this is going to be the area where you are going to be spending, you know, 20 to 30% in that range at the beginning, and trying to figure out exactly where you need to be. Now, if you are trying to get a high interest debt or credit card debt, you're going to want to reduce that percentage based on that timeline, okay? And then future you, when you are done with the emergency fund or the high interest debt, then this is where 20% at a minimum should be going.
32:55 Andrew Giancola? If you're working on an emergency fund, for example, and you're in the 136 method, and you're looking at this and saying to yourself, okay, well, I've got 10% going towards my emergency fund and 10% towards investments, you may be doing that. It may be split 10 to 10. But at some point in time, we want this to gravitate towards at least a minimum of 20%. And that's where we're really going to start cranking. Why? Because if you save less than 20% towards future you and into investments, then you're going to be working for over 30 years. If you save 20%, you'll work 28 years, according to some of our savings rate data that we have shown you in past episodes. If you want to check out those episodes, you can check out the episode, why your savings rate is important. That is going to be one that'll help you dramatically. We can link it up down below in the show notes as well. So these are the four blocks that I want you to think about.
33:38 Andrew Giancola? And these are the four blocks that'll help you manage your money. And the reason why we broke these off into four, because you've heard something like the 50, 30, 20 rule, which is 50% fixed, 30% lifestyle, and 20% future you. The problem with that is if you are paying off debt, or you are building an emergency fund, all the 20% is not enough to honestly be able to do all of those things. And so in order to make sure that you split this off correctly, we need to have four different areas of four different sections in order to block this off properly. And so this is something I'm excited for each and every one of you to test out, so that we can think through this block method and make sure that you are going through this step by step. If you guys have questions on that, please let me know. We're going to be doing a lesson on it in Master Money Academy as well, and it's going to be one of those areas that can really, really help you, I think, moving forward.
34:21 Andrew Giancola? But it's a great way to think about the foundation of your finances and how to manage your money. Think about it in four different blocks. All right, we're going to jump into break, and we'll get right back to it.
34:32 Andrew Giancola? All right, so step five is now we kind of have an understanding of where our money is going. We have an idea with the block method of how we're going to manage our dollars. Now we need an attack plan. Now with this attack plan, I want us to focus on the biggest areas first because this is what's going to make the most impact when it comes to fixing our finances. Now, we have an episode talking about million dollar money decisions. If you haven't heard that episode yet, we will link it up down below in the show notes. Would love for you to check that out because this will change the way you think about money and the big decisions where it's not all about cutting out lattes and these small things and even the subscriptions. It is more so thinking through some of the biggest lifestyle things first, cutting those out, especially for you high earners. You most likely took on way too many big payments. And so because of this, we want to make sure that we are looking at this and reducing some
35:17 Andrew Giancola? of these areas. So I want you to rank your spending by size and think through the top three offenders. What are the ones that are really, really having a high impact on? For most people, it's going to be three things. Housing, food, transportation. For those of you with kids, most likely daycare or childcare is going to run into play as well. There's not much you can do with childcare, to be honest, right now, because if you are trying to price the lowest price daycare, you are going to do that most likely at the expense of your child's safety and at your child's care. And I don't want you to do that. That is not an area that is worth cutting back on whatsoever. And so for most of you, you may be stuck with paying a little more at childcare. Now, if there's a comparable place that has just as good childcare, just as good teachers,
36:01 Andrew Giancola? just as good folks in the area, you could definitely shop around and save a few hundred bucks a month. Absolutely, if that's the case. Maybe you're in some bougie daycare and you realize, oh, shoot, I could take my kids to the local church down the street and they're going to take really good care of my kids as well. Well, that could be a situation where maybe you want to change it out. But if you're at a, you know, stable daycare that is good, that is priced relatively the same as everybody else in the area, but you know that they're in like the class with the best teachers, for example, like my son right now is in the class with two of the best teachers that I have ever seen. And so even if it was more expensive, I wouldn't pull them out of that daycare. So that's one of those areas where when it comes to daycare, I would not do that at the expense of your child's safety or their care. But this is the area where housing, food, transportation. We can make a big difference here. So let's first look at cars.
36:46 Andrew Giancola? Too much car, paying too much in loans, means that you are overspending in that area and we may want to reduce that. That's something where we can make a change if we want to. Now, it's a lot harder to go backwards once we already took on an expense. If you already bought the nice fancy car and you realize, oh, shoot, I am overspending. And if I got... 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.
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41:49 Andrew Giancola? and sensitive information is automatically redacted and never leaves your firewall. To see optimize in 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. A reasonable use car, I could save myself $500 to $1,000 every single month. It's very hard to make that choice and actually do it, though. If you're serious about this, you will do it. But if you're not as serious about this, or you just think maybe I'll downgrade slightly and you want to save a few hundred bucks, you can absolutely do that. The cars are the first place I want you to look at. Go outside, look at your driveway, take a good hard look at those two fancy vehicles in your driveway. And if you're looking at two vehicles that are costing you two grand a month
42:33 Andrew Giancola? or $1,500 per month in car payments, we most likely need to start there. And take a look at those and decide what you want to do. Number two is housing. Housing is one of those areas that most people really get themselves into sticky situations. And in 2026, housing is more expensive than it ever has been in the past. And so that is one where if we reduce our housing expenses and make sure it's below 30% of your income, that is going to help you tremendously. Because if you're, if it's above 30% of your income, you are most likely house poor. And you guys are bickering about, you know, eating out or who's spending on Amazon packages. When in reality, the problem is the roof over your head. You need to make sure that you are looking at your housing. Number three is food.
43:16 Andrew Giancola? Food is one of those areas that is the easiest to cut back upfront. Groceries and dining out. You can look at those two specific areas and realize very, very quickly that, oh, shoot, I am spending way more than I ever thought they would. So a lot of people out there, like they'll have a family, for example, and they'll say, okay, I spent $800 a month on groceries. We do the math, we run the numbers. All of a sudden, it comes back at $1,600. It's double the amount that they thought it was. I see this happen time and time and time again. But then we run the numbers on eating out and they're spending another $500. And they realize very quickly, I'm spending over $2,000 per month just on food. So this is a very easy one. If you're not putting any dollars towards future you, you can look at and you can reduce the overall expense. Also, take in a look at your insurances.
44:01 Andrew Giancola? Take in a look at your bills and negotiating those bills is the next thing you can do. Because when it comes to housing, if you're renting right now and negotiating with your landlord and say, hey, I'll sign a longer lease to stay in this location. If you give me a reduced rate, you can save yourself hundreds of dollars a month just by going through that. We actually have an entire episode to talk about how to negotiate your rent. If you haven't checked out that episode, I highly recommend it. We will put it down below in the show notes as well. Now, step six, once we identify those leaks, we've saved some of this money. Now we need to make sure that we are maxing out our tax advantage accounts. So things like our 401K. We need to make sure we are getting dollars in there, specifically your 401K match first. So we're going to go 401K match and make sure we get money in our employer match first. Then let's look at an HSA, a health savings account. If you have a high deductible health plan,
44:46 Andrew Giancola? you can get after that HSA, get money into there with some tax advantages. Then we want to look at Roth IRA. But what I highly recommend is for you to run the numbers. Go get an investment calculator and say to yourself, okay, if I put $500 per month into my Roth IRA, what would it grow to over the course of 30 years? And once you run those numbers, we're going to run it right now. Let's pull up one. So to max out a Roth IRA every single year, it's $7,500 in 2026 is $625 per month. Okay, so if you started at zero, you had $0 in your Roth IRA. Okay, and let's say you had a lot of time and you had a lot of time to be able to do this. And we did $625 every single month.
45:27 Andrew Giancola? Okay, all of a sudden, over the course of 30 years at a 10% rate of return, you would have $1.2 million in your Roth IRA. But let's say you kept investing a little longer. You had a big timeline, you're young, you had a longer timeline that you can handle this. You'd have $3.4 million. Of that $3.4 million, your contributions would be $300,000. But of those contributions, the amount of money that your money made would be $3.1 million. And guess what? You pay $0 in taxes on that $3.1 million, which is why the Roth IRA is so powerful. Because the growth of your money is not taxed. It's only your contributions have been taxed, but the growth of your money has not been taxed. And this is why it is so powerful. But let's think about this another way.
46:10 Andrew Giancola? What if you did a Roth 401k? And you found a Roth 401k out there where you did $24,500 per month at a Roth 401k. You're a high earner, you can handle this. That means it's $2,041 every single month. Okay, so $2,041 at the end of every single month means that in a Roth 401k, at the end of 30 years, you'd have $4.2 million in a Roth 401k if you did that over the course of 30 years and maxed it out. Your total contributions would be $734,000. And you would have $3.4 million inside of that Roth 401k. If you did it over the course of 40 years, you'd have $11.3 million in that Roth 401k. And 10.3 of that would be completely tax-free.
46:53 Andrew Giancola? Unbelievable stuff when you think about this on a long-term time horizon, which is why you want to get to investing as early as you possibly can, because this shifts dramatically on the last 10 years when you are investing your money. This is why you want to get the ball rolling, no matter how much it is. Just get money invested into these accounts. The longer you wait and the longer you are prioritizing your lifestyle over future you, the less wealth you will have the ability to build, because time is your greatest asset when it comes to it. To wealth building. Another one is to look at a taxable brokerage account. If you're going to retire early, a taxable brokerage account is the really an account that you want to be prioritizing pretty highly. Because if you want to retire in your 40s or your 50s, it'll make a huge, huge impact on your bottom line. We have episodes on all these different accounts. So if you want to check those out, I highly, highly recommend.
47:37 Andrew Giancola? Also, step seven is to make sure we have that emergency fund in place. How do we build out that emergency fund? The 136 method is the way that we do this. So you're going to save one month of expenses, then you're going to pay off any high interest debt. Then you're going to get it to three months of expenses in a high yield savings account. Then you're going to split it off 50 50 and invest and get the other half going towards six months of expenses. Six months of expenses is the minimum amount you need in the emergency fund. And in the age of AI where it is taking jobs left and right, we want to make sure that we have a minimum of six months and maybe even seven, eight, nine months, depending on what your swan number is. What is a swan number? That is your sleep well at night number. If you lost your job today, how much would you need in the bank in order to feel okay and to sleep well at night?
48:22 Andrew Giancola? That you would be able to go and find another job. Is it six months, seven months, nine months, 12 months? Doesn't matter what it is, you need to make sure you have enough cash on hand to protect yourself based on this. And so we put this in a high yield savings account. It is one of those things that you can use ally, you can use so far, you can use betterment, you can use wealth front. There's so many different options out there, but you want to make sure that you're always, always, always doing this. Now you may be saying to yourself right now, Andrew, this is a lot of work. There's a lot of things moving parts right here. I don't know how I'm going to remember how to keep moving this money around and putting it in these different accounts and kind of understanding of where this money goes. Well, that's okay, because that's why we're going to create an automation system. See, willpower is not a financial strategy.
49:04 Andrew Giancola? Trying to rely on your memory or relying on your willpower to make sure that you get this stuff done. That's not a strategy whatsoever. Instead, we need to make sure that we are automating our finances. We want to automate our spending and automate, you know, how we pay our bills. So every single bill should be set on auto pay. If it's not already, as a higher earner, you need to make sure that you are doing that. Number two is every single time that we get paid. To start to set up automatic transfers to the places we want that money to go. So you could think about money as a flow. It flows into your checking account. Once money hits your checking account, then it's going to flow into all these other areas. So what are these other areas? One, you want to automate to your investments. That's the first place you want your money to go. You want to pay yourself first. So all the accounts we just talked about, getting your money invested, that's the first place.
49:49 Andrew Giancola? Two, we want to automate to our high yield savings account for our savings goals, for our emergency fund. And money can automatically flow from your checking account to these accounts without you having to lift a finger. It just happens. How many of you high earners out there have a 401k right now? And you have this 401k in place and you go back and look and you realize, oh, the company's been contributing to my 401k over the course of the last decade. And I have way more in that 401k than I ever thought I could. That's automation. That's what it's like to automate your money. And all of a sudden, your accounts are going to grow more and more and more every single month. And if you have a plan in place, this will change your life forever. Now we have a full automation checklist that you can download that we will link down below in the show notes. And in that automation checklist, that'll give you the ability to be able to know what you need to automate next.
50:34 Andrew Giancola? So I highly recommend that you check that out if you haven't done so already. Now, step nine is I want you to set a 12 month net worth target. When it comes to your net worth target, I want you to think through, okay, well, right now, my assets minus my liabilities. Maybe you have a negative net worth. Maybe you have a positive net worth, but it's not where you want it to be. Let's shift this metric from how much did we spend last month? That's what we want to get out of. And instead, we want to see how much did my net worth grow last month? We want to say, how much did my net worth grow last year? How much did it grow over the course of the last five years? Because this is our financial scorecard. And this is really what we want to be basing our thought process on. And so I want you to set this 12 month net worth target. So that over the course of the next 12 months, I want you to commit right now.
51:19 Andrew Giancola? And if you're committed, if you're in, I want you to comment down below YouTube, Spotify, wherever else you're watching this. I want you to comment down below that you are committed to doing this, that you want to make a transformation with your finances. And you're going to do this step by step. And over the course of next 12 months, you're going to see a positive impact on your net worth. And I want you to comment, what is your net worth goal over the next 12 months? What drastic change do you want to see? Because this is the time, you are 12 months away from absolutely transforming your finances. Where it's going to be a completely different financial picture from where it is today. You can be the person that absolutely changes your family's financial tree. If you have been the first person in your family to actually start to have a high earning job, and you're the first person in your family to actually get your finances right.
52:04 Andrew Giancola? What if you're the first person to actually become the first millionaire? Or the first person to actually build wealth? Or you were never taught this stuff and forever your family is well off, but they never taught you this stuff? What if you were the person who transformed your finances and you bought your freedom on your own? This is what I want for every single one of you. So if you're going to commit, I want you to commit, hey, I want to see my net worth grow by $12,000 in the next year. Or I want to see my net worth grow by $6,000 in the next year. Or maybe if you're a really high earner, you want it to grow in the next 20, 25, 50, $100,000 in one year. Because you're going to make these drastic changes. They're going to absolutely change your financial life. Tell me down below. I want you to commit publicly. What change are you going to make? And what is the difference in your net worth going to be? And let's do this and let's set up a goal and set up a plan.
52:48 Andrew Giancola? Because once you set up that goal, and once you set up a plan, it'll absolutely change your financial life forever. Listen, if you want help to transform your finances over the course of the next 12 months, we have something called Master Money Academy. In Master Money Academy, we give you the exact step-by-step system on what to do with your next dollar. And if you're a high earner, especially you need to have that step-by-step system to make sure that you know what to do with your next dollar. And when you get stuck, I am live on coaching calls every single week to answer any of your questions. So I would love to invite each and every single one of you to join Master Money Academy. It costs less than your latte every single week. And we're giving you a seven-day free trial for podcasts as there is down below, where you can see behind the curtain and see what it's all about. Would love to have you inside and really, really hope you join Master Money Academy.
53:31 Andrew Giancola? Listen, thank you guys so much for listening to this podcast episode. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you. I hope you got tons of value out of this. A lot of action steps here and really, really excited for every single one of you to go through this process and take control of your finances. If you guys have any questions, leave them down in the comments below and we'll see you on the next episode.
53:53 Speaker 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.
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