Why This Money Advice Has EXPIRED

Traditional financial advice isn't always wrong—but some money rules simply haven't kept up with today's economy. Brian and Bo break down 5 pieces of financial wisdom that may be expired, including whether you really need a college degree, if 10% savings is enough for retirement, why buying used cars isn't always the best move, when budgeting every dollar stops making sense, and whether homeownership is still the path to building wealth. If you're focused on financial independence, investing, retirement planning, wealth building, and making smarter money decisions in 2026, this episode is packed with data-driven insights to help you avoid costly mistakes and build a stronger financial future. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Jump start your journey with our FREE financial resources⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Reach your goals faster with our products⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Take the relationship to the next level: become a client⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe on YouTube for early access and go beyond the podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect with us on social media for more content⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bring confidence to your wealth building with simplified strategies from The Money Guy. Learn how to apply financial tactics that go beyond common sense and help you reach your money goals faster. Make your assets do the heavy lifting so you can quit worrying and start living a more fulfilled life. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:59Brian Preston?

  Expired. Like the old milk in your fridge? This money advice might have been good at one point, but now it's time to pour it down the drain.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  I am so excited because today we get to look at five pieces of financial wisdom that people traditionally considered to be true, and we're going to tell you why that might not be the case anymore.

• 1:19Brian Preston?

  I'm Brian, he's Bo, and we're financial advisors here to make sure you aren't working off of expired advice. With that, let's jump right in.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  All right, Brian, so the very first piece of advice that we think is expired, I think this is going to get a little bit, get us in a little bit of hot water, and that is the advice that you need a college degree.

• 1:48Brian Preston?

  Look, this might on surface seem spicy, but we got the numbers. We are actually showing up with the receipts without a doubt. Education is a ladder of opportunity. You crawl up this, become a better version of yourself. But somewhere along the way, we have turned the goodwill of education into something that is just, it's expensive. And if you need proof, here's the receipts.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Look at this, in 1978, the cost of one year of college was $2,142. At that time, minimum wage was $2.65 an hour. So if you just took the cost of college divided by the minimum wage, it would take you about 808 hours or about 16 hours a week, working part-time to be able to pay your way through school. That's what it looked like back in 1978. But if we fast forward to today, the average cost of one year of university is $22,178. You compare that with minimum wage, which is $7.25,

• 2:56Speaker 03

  now it would take you 3,059 hours or 59 hours a week just to be able to pay your way through school. These two are not the same.

• 3:08Brian Preston?

  Yeah, I mean, because look, and the first one is where all the movies and stuff, where you're working the part-time job, you're going to college part-time, and then you've still got a little time to go out there and make memories with your friends.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:21Brian Preston?

  The second one, not even close to being in reality, when you have to work 60 hours a week. And that doesn't even include school, doesn't include anything else you get to do with memory-making. It's just a bad deal. And if you, a lot of you probably watch this and be like, well,

• 3:37Speaker 03

  That's just inflation.

• 3:38Brian Preston?

  Inflation has been bad. Well, guys, let us go ahead and pull the curtain open on this. This is, you look into this and go, yeah, college has gone up. No, no, look at what this slide is actually showing you. This graph is saying the annual cost of college, inflation-adjusted, meaning that if it was just keeping up with inflation, this line would actually be flat.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:00Brian Preston?

  We went above and beyond. Cost of college has gone up way beyond what inflation.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, for those of you out there. Listening back in the early 1970s, the cost in real dollars of a public four year college was just under about $10,000 a year. Now inflation adjusted, even after accounting for normal increases in inflation, the price has gone up in real dollars to almost $25,000 a year. That's 150% increase over the last 50 years. And if you think that's bad for public institutions, private colleges is even worse. They went from a real dollar cost of about $20,000 per year up to over $50,000 per year. It's not just inflation, it's causing the cost of college to increase.

• 4:49Brian Preston?

  Now, let me bring this into, because you guys know, you're like, when? When did these guys start hating education? We love education and I want to make sure everybody knows that, look, I even attribute a lot of my success to, I got an accounting degree in college that gave me the fundamentals, understanding of speaking the language of business. And I couldn't have done that without going to college and getting that education.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:12Brian Preston?

  But if you're going to college without understanding what you're there for and what your return on investment is going to be on this degree, then you are the product that is being sold to and being taken advantage of. And if you want proof of this, let us also share with you. We survey our millionaire clients and we say, hey, do you actually work in your field of study? Meaning you went to college and this, or you got training after high school? And do you work in that? We found out from our clients, 76% of them work in their same field of study. If you compare and contrast that now to the typical American, check this out. It's almost the inverse. Only 27% of Americans work in their field of study.

• 5:53Brian Preston?

  Guys, you're being sold a product that you're not beginning with the end in mind.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  And what's, what stinks now is that it's so expensive, that becomes a cost that you almost can't overcome. If you're going to college to get a degree that you're not even going to use, you are throwing money down the drain. So we want you to begin with the end in mind by one, figuring out what degree will actually align with the vocation that I'm going to pursue. And then two, we want you to follow the first year financing rule. When it comes to paying for higher education, we do not want the total amount of debt that you accumulate to be more than what you anticipate your first year starting salary to be. So if you're going to come out with this degree and that degree is going to start you with a salary of $60,000 per year, you need to make sure that you keep your total student loan debt below $60,000 a year.

• 6:40Brian Preston?

  Yeah, and a lot of people are starting to think, hey, get a college degree in the past. That meant I immediately was going to have a high paying job. That's just not what we're seeing in the stats anymore. Right now, if you look at the research from the Federal Reserve, 42% of recent college graduates are underemployed. I mean, I actually, my daughter just graduated college. It's not uncommon for people now to come out with degrees and then go back and work in food service.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Go back to the jobs they could have had while they were in college, even before college. But, okay, if we're going to poo poo this and we're going to say that college degrees are not required. We want to go a step beyond and say, okay, well, what are some vocations you can pursue? What are some ways you can still get a job and build financial independence without a college degree? Look at these top jobs that do not require a degree. Air traffic controller, median salary almost $150,000 a year. Commercial pilot, $123,000. Nuclear power reactor operator, $122,000. Elevator installer, $109,000, so on and so forth. Now, two of these do require an associate's degree, but by and large, these jobs do not require a four-year degree.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  So just because you want to get a good job, just because you want to have a high income, does not mean that you have to go to college to be able to achieve that.

• 7:58Brian Preston?

  We love education when it actually boosts your future earning potential. But there is a cost when you go to college and the fact that you know that instead of going out there and working and living on less than you make and letting your army of dollar bills start to build up at an even earlier age. You're actually going to defer that. So we thought it would be very powerful for people to see, what is that opportunity cost? We talk about the wealth multiplier all the time on what it's worth for a 20-year-old because we know 88 times over.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:29Brian Preston?

  But you realize for an 18-year-old, a wealth multiplier is close to 108. So that's why, guys, we're not picking on education saying that you shouldn't go to college. We are saying it, you, man, oh, man, you better take an active role in your life towards education to make sure that you're actually getting the return on investment. Is the value you're receiving connecting with what you're paying for this thing that's going to hopefully make you better?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  And if it is not, then we would say the idea that you have to have a college degree is expired. All right, Brian, let's go to the next piece of financial advice that we believe is expired. It's this idea that all I need to do is save 10% for the future. We think it's expired, that 10% is enough to save for retirement.

• 9:19Brian Preston?

  Yeah, when I came out of school in the mid-'90s, the two most popular books on kind of personal finance at that time was, one was saying 10%, and the other one was saying 15%. I'm here to tell you, I think that we have moved into a world now where there's more opportunity than ever, but there's also things working against you to where more and more of the responsibility falls on your shoulders.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  And look, we've actually done the math. If you go to moneyguide.com/resources, you can download our deliverable, how much should you save? And what it does show is that 10% is appropriate for some people. If you are someone who starts saving very early, 20, 21, 23, 24 years old, and you're planning on a normal retirement age, you're not going to retire until age 60 or 65, then yeah, 10% might be enough, and it might be the ticket to get you there. However, we know that most Americans don't fall into that category. We know that the average American doesn't actually begin saving and investing until they get to age 30.

• 10:23Brian Preston?

  Yeah, and we've done the math on this. And if you, actually, if you've put yourself in this situation, and you said, hey, What if I just saved 10%? You know, what you'll find is for a person who does start saving and investing at age 25 years of age, that's going to generate a little over $3 million.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you had a $50,000 starting salary at 25, just saving that 10%, it's going to get you that $3 million number. And that $3 million number, we believe, will replace almost 80% of your pre-retirement income.

• 10:55Brian Preston?

  That's pretty good. But we've already shared, the typical American doesn't even start saving and investing until they're 30 years of age. When you run the numbers for a 30-year-old, now it's generating $1.9 million. But if you adjust that back for inflation in today's dollars, that's only going to have a replacement ratio of about 48% of your income. That's decent, but man, oh, man, it's not enough to probably provide enough replacement of your living expenses in retirement.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  And then if you wait until age 35 to begin saving and you start saving 10%, well, you're only going to be able to accumulate about $1.2 million. And again, based on a $50,000 starting salary, that would only replace about 31% of your pre-retirement income. So obviously, if you're waiting till later and later ages, 10% might not cut it. So we wanted to reverse engineer the math is, okay, if 10% doesn't do it, what would your savings rate need to be if your goal were to replace 80% of your pre-retirement income? So for the 25-year-old, it's right there at 11%. So 10% works if you're 25 years old. But if you're a 30-year-old and you want to replace 80% of your pre-retirement income

• 12:05Speaker 03

  by the time you get to 65, your savings rate needs to be 17%. For the 35-year-old, where most average Americans fall when they start saving, you actually would need to save 27% starting at age 35 in order to have a normal retirement at age 65 that replaces 80% of your pre-retirement income.

• 12:25Brian Preston?

  Look, our goal for you, when you discover our content is, hopefully, it's early, but I want you to do it early and often because we always talk about this concept of wealth multiplier. And that's why, you know, for a 20-year-old, the wealth multiplier is Eight times over for a 30 year old, it's 23 for a 40 year old, it's seven. You see the, the, the steep decline so that earlier you can start and I want you to load it up because it gives you options. You might actually be able to change what your savings rate is over and throughout your career. We've actually experienced that even when we're doing making a millionaire.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had Danielle on the show and she said, Hey, I'm willing to do this cause fire thing. I want to have a really, really high savings rate early on. And by doing that, I'm going to give myself an opportunity, the flexibility to decrease my savings rate later on. That's okay. It's okay to be dynamic, but what you want to do is you want to be in control of that decision. You don't want to be that person that starts at 10% saying, oh, I'll save more later. And then you get to later and now you got to save 30, 40, 50% just to get to your financial goals. If you can start early and often and do it right, it's a whole lot easier than if you wait until later and try to make up for lost time.

• 13:37Brian Preston?

  Because of all the data we just shared, as well as the ever changing financial world and landscape that we live in, we think a 10% savings and investment rate is expired.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  All right, Brian. Next piece of advice that we think is expired. Now this one hits a little close to home because, because I was kind of raised on this advice, Brian. This was like, this was ingrained in me at a very early age and is the idea that when it comes time to buy a car, you should only buy used cars.

• 14:07Brian Preston?

  And on this one, I, I, I think this is a, a recent trend that we've noticed is that slightly used cars, especially slightly used cars of specific brands that hold their value well. And then why do they hold their value well? It's because these are the brands that typically people want to own because they're reliable. They're good transportation to get you to your J O B. And that's why you're seeing lightly used cars are only, you know,

• 14:37Brian Preston?

  $5,778 less than a brand new car, just a slight discount.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was an analysis done by IC Cars, over 1.6 million new and lightly used cars. So this was a large population of automobiles they found, and they found that based on that cost savings, it was only about a 12-year discount. And we know that three-year-old used vehicles, vehicles that have been driven for the last three years, have actually reached an all-time near-record-high average price of $31,000. So lightly-used vehicles aren't all that much less expensive than brand-new vehicles, and moderately-used vehicles, three years old, have actually gotten more expensive than they've ever been before. So the automobile climate is changing a ton.

• 15:26Brian Preston?

  Well, I think it's, you know, we said that that's 12%, but for some other models out there, think about Toyotas, it can be as low as less than 5%.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Or even less.

• 15:35Brian Preston?

  And, and look, don't just take our word for it. I think about Clark Howard, y'all know Clark's a big hero of mine. Here's his quote, he says, "If you can buy that three-year-old vehicle for a third less than what a new one would be, then go ahead and buy the three-year-old used vehicle." On the other hand.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 16:22Speaker 04

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• 16:51Brian Preston?

  If the gap is less than that, that would push you more towards buying a new one.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  And so now let's talk about, okay, if you are going to be in this situation, what are some of the advantages of buying a new car? Why might you do this? Well, obviously, new car, lower mileage, if it's brand new and there's no unknown history. You don't know who was the previous owner and how bad did they treat the car? And how rough was it? You know exactly that you are the first person that's going to own and operate that vehicle.

• 17:20Brian Preston?

  Well, come on, we all know you had somebody you rode in the car with. When I was 16, we used to do these things called neutral drops.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  What's a neutral drop, Ryan?

• 17:27Brian Preston?

  Put the car in neutral, rev it up and then slam it into drive. You can imagine this might be entertaining for a 16-year-old, not great for the longevity of the vehicle. The other thing is, think about all the people, once again, 16-year-old behaviors or rental car behaviors, somebody who gets at an intersection and just balls out as soon as the light turns green over and over again. This stuff is tough on a vehicle. If you at least get a newer vehicle, you more than likely won't have some of these hidden behaviors that are going to take away the longevity of this vehicle.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Another reality related to new cars is that oftentimes when you're buying a brand-new automobile, you're going to have more attractive or better financing opportunities than if you were to go buy a used car.

• 18:11Brian Preston?

  Well, I mean, I think a lot of people, once you realize how the game has changed, it's going to probably shock you to realize that your car dealership, they don't make the money on selling you the car. If you look at the research out there, it shows that on average, front-end gross profit per vehicle is around $403. The average financing and insurance profits for a vehicle are right under $2,000. You quickly see your dealership is more of a bank than it is a car sales location. So you have to kind of understand how the game's played so you can hopefully turn the system to your advantage.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  And so they want you to finance. It's they're incentivized to do so. It's more profitable for them. So if you're going to do it, we want you to do it the right way. If you are going to buy money, to borrow money to buy a car, we want you to follow the 238 rule. That's 20%. Down, don't finance it for any more than 36 months or three years. We don't want your total payments to exceed 8% of your monthly gross income. So even if you are being encouraged, even being incentivized to finance the car, make sure that you're doing it in the right, responsible money guy way.

• 19:17Brian Preston?

  And after you take advantage of our 238, also, it's important to understand with a new car, one of the things I do like as a parent is the latest safety features and tech. So, you know, when your spouse is driving the car, you feel like the family's safer. But it is interesting. I think Clark said it best. If your car doesn't lose a third of its value in those first few years, it might make sense to buy new.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And when you buy new, you obviously get the full manufacturer's warranty and you're going to have likely lower maintenance costs in the first few years of owning a vehicle than if you buy a car later on in its life cycle. So if you are in the market to buy an automobile and you begin pricing used cars or someone else already paid for the depreciation, plus new cars, and you factor in all the advantages that new cars might have, you may be surprised to find that buying a new car actually makes more sense and buying a used car, well, that advice might be expired.

• 20:19Brian Preston?

  Expired.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  All right, Brian. So now, the next piece of advice that we think is expired. Again, this is, this is counter-cultural. I think a lot of people are going to struggle with this one, but we think that the idea that you need to budget every single month and watch every single penny and do it forever, we think that advice is expired.

• 20:40Brian Preston?

  Now, now, look, to be clear, there is definitely a season in life when you're just starting out where you'll need to be tracking every dollar you spend and a budget is going to be your friend. But don't we know people that are kind of the, that they've, they've started creating success, they've been budgeting, and maybe it's your spouse. You look at this and be like, are they mutants or are they misers? Because they are tracking every dollar, even though we already have our savings set up, we already have what we're going, paying over. Bills, what are we doing? Is this even worth it? It seems like it's creating more turmoil versus building a benefit in my relationship.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  I love what you said. Is it, is it even worth it? Cause we recognize that our time has some value associated with it. And while maybe early on that time spent budgeting and tracking makes a lot of sense, it is not uncommon to rapidly grow out of that. I think the envelope system is a great example of that. For those of you that aren't familiar, the envelope system's idea that I'm gonna have all these different budgetary categories and I'm gonna have an envelope for each thing. Here's my envelope for groceries. There's my envelope for eating out. There's my envelope for mortgage, home repairs, all these things. And it's a great tool for understanding exactly where every dollar is going. You almost, if you're, if you're physically doing actual envelopes, you can't screw it up. But in doing that, in carrying this out and practicing this,

• 22:02Speaker 03

  you begin to understand that it is very, very rigid. Meaning once an envelope is empty, it's empty. And it is not sensitive to your time. It takes a lot of time to figure out, okay, which envelope does this expense come out of? And how do I replenish that? And where do I focus? It's not an easy, thoughtless thing to do.

• 22:20Brian Preston?

  Well, I think that these are, these are great systems for creating muscle memory. But if after you develop the talent and the skillset, it's not reasonable to think that you're gonna do this forever. And if you're, I'm so sorry for you because what's funny is that before we even started doing Making a Millionaire, I have a, a story where a marriage, a person came to me that their marriage was about to dissolve because he was being so rigid with every transaction his spouse made. She had to bring the receipts to him so he could make sure he, he locked it into the system. And it was that rigorous, even though they already started having financial success. We saw the exact same thing when we were doing Making a Millionaire,

• 23:05Brian Preston?

  where we had this couple that he was, in all intensive purposes, trying to do the right thing, but his wife was feeling so restricted that you could tell that it was definitely taking and making the relationship pay a price.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Well, I think it just, it wore her down. It wore her down to the Point to where they were no longer on the same page. So what is the better answer? What's the better solution? We think that budgeting and tracking makes tons of sense early on. But as you develop that muscle memory, we want you to graduate to what we call a cash management plan. And what exactly is a cash management plan? It is an intentional plan with more flexibility. You are trying to structure your financial life so that the dollars are going into the places that you know you want them to go. You're having all your savings, all of your investments, all of that stuff flowing out. And so now it becomes much less important how much you're spending on eating out, or much less important how much you're spending on personal care,

• 24:03Speaker 03

  because you know you funded the things and funded the obligations that you're supposed to fund, and you can spend with more flexibility outside of those things.

• 24:12Brian Preston?

  Well, let's go ahead and talk about what this, let me preview what the dream can be for you. If you've been a person that's been living this rigid budget life, what if the better plan was you had your savings and investment automatically set up? It was automated. You also have all of your bills set up to where they're automatically paying. You know you're saving and investing 20% to 25%. You know that you're paying your bills. And then if you have leftover money, guess what, guys? Our system with a cash management plan, go and make memories, live your best life. It allows you to live outside of strict budget categories, because this is what the hard work in the beginning was supposed to do. You had the heavy discipline

• 24:57Brian Preston?

  so that you could actually have some fruit and dividends later and not have the rigor. This is what the whole purpose of using money as a tool and understanding when to graduate to the next system works.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  And one just additional aside on budgeting, it is incredibly valuable, incredibly useful, and cash management incredibly valuable and incredibly useful. Don't, as you've done it for a while, don't major the minor. So often you hear about the latte effect, the latte effect, the latte effect. And while, yes, there is some truth to that. What we know is that for most folks, this is according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, housing and transportation categories consume 50% of the average household budget. So it's not the small latte decisions that are eating up most people's capital. It's what they decide to do with housing and what they decide to do with cars or transportation. So if you can make those big decisions right, if you can make those well,

• 25:51Speaker 03

  it's going to create flexibility in all the other areas of your life.

• 25:55Brian Preston?

  Because of all we just shared about the big living expenses, that's what's really going to eat you up. And also showing how after you've developed the muscle memory, you don't have to budget every month. We're telling you monthly budgeting is expired.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  All right, Brian, this next one, this flies in the face of the American dream. And I think we're going to get, I think we're going to get some feedback on this one as well. But we believe that the advice has expired or the idea has expired that you need, you must, you have to own a home in order to build well.

• 26:28Brian Preston?

  Well, I think there's a trend on today's show is you have to understand the, the intersection of the value you're paying for things versus the price that you're being sold them, these items that we did it with education. We're going to do it now with housing. Is that when you go look at the research and look at the data, without a doubt, it's nice if you can own a home and you know, for, for, for decades, this is the American dream. But then when you overlay the data that nationally mortgage payments are 38% more than average rents, you have to ask yourself, am I getting value for the price I'm paying?

• 27:09Brian Preston?

  Or am I being dragged into a system that's going to absorb all of my resources just so I can fit into this box of the American dream?

• 27:18Speaker 03

  And what you have to see or have to recognize that this is a product of our recent environment. If you look at the data going all the way back to 2010, the spread or disparity between the cost of mortgage, the cost of owning a home and the cost of renting was not that great. But since we've seen, since the pandemic. Since 2020 and since the run up in housing prices post pandemic, now the chasm between what it costs for the average mortgage payment across this country versus the average asking rent, there is a substantial difference where it used to be in the hundreds of dollars of difference. Now it is almost into the multiple thousands of dollars of difference on a monthly basis.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  That makes the cost of owning a home substantially more than it has been previous.

• 28:07Brian Preston?

  Bo said something there that is a key point. This is a recent development, really in the last five years is when we've seen this huge run up. It's because the price of homes have gone up. And while the price of homes have gone up, the costs of interest on the interest rates have gone up as well. And that is really directly driven the affordability way down. And this does not mean that this stays this way forever. There were more than likely things will adjust, but we can't cover all the details. But we did a great job. If you want to go check it out and y'all showed us by how popular this show was. We did a deep dive on how things have changed. So you can do the analysis, should you buy or rent in 2026? Go check this show out if this is something that's on your decision matrix for 2026.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll give you, we'll give you the headlines. So we actually did a case study between Heather, the homeowner and Randy, the renter. And we used all the same variables to determine like after 12 years, which is the average, average amount of time a homeowner owns a home. How did their two financial situations differ? How were they similar and who came out on top? What we found is that over that 12 year period, Heather, the homeowner spent over $454,000, while Randy only spent about $357,000. But when you look at their net worth statements, Heather's was only worth about $166,000 because of the equity she built on her home.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Randy, by renting and then investing the difference, was actually able to build up $30,000 more at almost a $200,000 net worth. And he still had a lower monthly payment in terms of his rent payment than Heather's mortgage. So in this scenario, after 12 years. Randy was in a better position financially by renting than Heather was by actually purchasing and buying the home.

• 29:56Brian Preston?

  So does that mean we're always against buying a home now? Not necessarily. Look, I just think that, once again, you have to go through the exercise of what is the value of what you're getting for the price paid? And now you have to just do even more research. It's not, you can't just go under the umbrella that buying homes is going to universally be good for everyone. What we found in our research is, some metro areas, there are wide gaps between the rent and homeownership. And in those areas, probably want to pay rent and then save in the background so you, maybe when the market adjusts, or when you retire and move to a different geographic location, you will be ready to capture that moment. But other areas, you're gonna find that the rent versus homeownership is actually trading in a very narrow range.

• 30:41Brian Preston?

  If that's the case, then that probably moves the needle closer. Go ahead and buy that house.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  If you're curious about what some of those areas are, the areas with the widest gaps, San Francisco, California, Bridgeport, Connecticut, New York, San Jose, California, Los Angeles, California, Honolulu, Hawaii, Houston, Texas, Seattle, Washington, Providence, Rhode Island, Boston, Massachusetts, these are all very high cost of living areas. And high cost of living areas, it may very well make sense to rent instead of buy. But if you live somewhere with a narrower gap, somewhere like Phoenix, Arizona, Orlando, Florida, Columbia, South Carolina, Deltona, Florida, Cape Coral, Florida, Greensboro, North Carolina, Charlotte, North Carolina, one of those areas, then yeah, homeownership might make more sense than renting because you can build equity at a reasonable price.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  So you have to determine for yourself, am I at the stage where it makes sense for me to buy a home? We have a great checklist. You can go to moneyguide.com/resources, check out our home buying checklist, you can even check out our home buying calculator to determine if it makes sense. And then once you've determined if it makes sense for you where you are financially, then you can say, okay, geographically, based on where I live and based on where I see myself over the next five to seven years, is homeownership Something that makes the most sense for me. And if it's not, that's okay. We don't think that renting is a recipe for disaster.

• 32:07Brian Preston?

  Because there's so many variables, geography, location, your personal situation, your earning potential, how much you've saved and invested. It's a very personal impersonal finance decision. Because of that, we can no longer give universal advice that homeownership is necessary to build wealth. Because of that, it's expired.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  I hope what you've seen is that a lot of conventional financial wisdom can change and a lot of circumstances and variables can change. And that's why we love that we get to sit right here and do what we do by delivering sound financial information to you so that you can make informed decisions and that you can do money better.

• 32:48Brian Preston?

  Look, we've tried to load you up with all the free advice we can. Go to moneyguy.com/resources and I want you to focus on what you can control because the world is ever evolving, ever changing. We're going to keep educating you, keep sharing, but focus on what you can control and keep your life as simple as possible as you're saving and building your army of dollar bills. But I promise you, if you do this, because even with these hurdles, we heard about cost of education's gone up. We've heard about the cost of housing's gone up, but I'm here to tell you, it's still a great wealth building time because in the background, there is innovation, there's technology, there's great returns that are out there building in the background that you can take advantage of by just buying into index investing. And if you do all the things we're sharing,

• 33:32Brian Preston?

  focus on what you can control, these simple decisions will create success. And when you create that success, all of a sudden you go find your life gets a little more complex, actually a lot more complex. You're, I'm telling you, you're going to start thinking about, once you have that million dollar portfolio, what do I not know? What am I not maximizing from a tax planning? Do I have enough to retire? And that's when that complexity is going to bring you to the abundance cycle. You'll remember us. We planted these seeds. We shared with you the truth of how money works. We shared of the rules that have changed. And we're going to leave the porch light on for you and we're going to help you live your best financial life and own your time that much sooner. I'm your host, Brian, joined by Mr. Bo, Money Guy Team, out.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  The Money Guy Show is hosted by Brian Preston and Beau Hanson. Brian and Beau are partners with Abound Wealth Management. Abound Wealth Management is a registered investment advisory firm regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in accordance and compliance with the securities, laws, and regulations. Abound Wealth Management does not render or offer to render personalized investment or tax advice through The Money Guy Show. The information provided is for informational purposes only, may not be suitable for all investors, and does not constitute financial, tax, investment, or legal advice. All investments involve a degree of risk, including the risk of loss.

• 34:52Speaker 06

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