Blog

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    #174: Ask Paula – I’m 48 and Retiring Next Year. Should I Buy More Rentals?

    ByPaula Pant
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    Should a 48-year-old New Yorker who’s retiring next year buy more rental properties?

    Should a Michigan-based first-time homebuyer use an FHA loan to buy a duplex for $135,000 that rents for $1,800 per month?

    Should a 40-year-old music professor who owns a duplex transfer his property into an LLC?

    Should a New Jersey condo owner sell her unit as For Sale by Owner?

    And should a woman who’s anxious about owning her own rental properties dive into real estate crowdfunding deals instead?

    I answer these five rental property questions in today’s podcast episode.

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    #173: When a Child of Financial Chaos Stumbles into Adulthood – with Paulette Perhach

    ByPaula Pant

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    Paulette Perhach is a journalist who has been published in The New York Times, Slate, ELLE, Marie Claire, and Cosmo.

    She catapulted to fame as an accidental personal finance writer after she published an article called The Story of an F-Off Fund.

    This article tells the same narrative twice: in Scenario A, the protagonist in the story doesn’t have any emergency savings, and in Scenario B, she does. Paulette wrote this as a work of narrative fiction that vividly shows the power of an emergency fund, or as she rebrands it, an F-Off Fund.

    This story went viral. More than a million people read it, it was translated into multiple languages, and it landed her a book deal and a major profile in the Seattle Times.

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    #172: Ask Paula – Should I Buy a Nice Car or Save My Money?

    ByPaula Pant

    [smart_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/paulaandjaymoney/AA172.mp3" title="Ask Paula - Should I Buy a Nice Car or Save My Money?" artist="Paula Pant" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_gplus="true" social_linkedin="true" social_stumble="true" social_pinterest="true" social_email="true" ]
    Should a 25-year-old homeowner with healthy savings and no debt (other than his mortgage) upgrade his car? Should he make this choice if his current car is fine, and upgrading puts him into new debt?

    Should a couple without access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan put their savings into a taxable account, or should they save for a downpayment on a rental property?

    The market is fluctuating like mad; if someone has a lump-sum of cash, should they invest it now or should they slowly meter it in?

    Should someone without an emergency fund enroll in an HSA-qualified health insurance plan? Or should they stick with a plan that has a smaller deductible?

    How should a husband-and-wife team that’s self-employed and running a company together handle their health insurance?

    Former financial planner Joe Saul-Sehy and I answer these five questions on today’s podcast. Enjoy!

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    #171: The biggest study of everyday millionaires in 25 years – with Chris Hogan

    ByPaula Pant
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    Chris Hogan is a former football player and Georgetown alum who became the Vice President of a well-respected company. By all accounts, he seemed successful. Yet he felt there was something missing.

    He kept seeing families struggle with their personal finances, and he felt a calling to help. That’s when he met Dave Ramsey, who brought him into the Ramsey family to spread the word about smart money management and debt freedom. Chris has been a writer, speaker and influencer ever since.

    Chris organized a survey of 10,000 millionaires in the United States. The last time anyone conducted a large-scale study of American self-made millionaires was 25 years ago, and documented in the classic book The Millionaire Next Door. While that book is fantastic, it’s also 25 years old. Chris wanted to gather current data, to see what’s changed since then, and what’s remained the same.

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    #170: Ask Paula – When Should I NOT Use the One Percent Rule for a Rental Property?

    ByPaula Pant
    [smart_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/paulaandjaymoney/AA170.mp3" title="Ask Paula - When Should I NOT Use the One Percent Rule for a Rental Property?" artist="Paula Pant" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_gplus="true" social_linkedin="true" social_stumble="true" social_pinterest="true" social_email="true" ]

    When should you NOT use the one percent rule for rental property investing? In today’s episode, I encourage two callers to violate the One Percent Rule for real estate that they already own.

    WHAAATTTT? Why would I say that? Especially given that I’ve gained a bit of a reputation as The World’s Most Staunch Advocate of the One Percent Rule? (Long title, I know, but someone’s gotta wear it.)

    And if you’re not going to use the One Percent Rule, how should you make decisions about your real estate investments instead?

    Find out in this podcast episode. Enjoy!

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    #169: One Tweak a Week in 2019 — Easy Improvements to Your Financial Life in 2019

    ByPaula Pant
    [smart_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/paulaandjaymoney/AA169.mp3" title="One Tweak a Week in 2019 -- Easy Improvements to Your Financial Life in 2019" artist="Paula Pant" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_gplus="true" social_linkedin="true" social_stumble="true" social_pinterest="true" social_email="true" ]

    Happy New Years! To kickoff 2019, we’ve created a free book called One Tweak a Week, outlining 26 easy, actionable ways that you can improve your financial life.

    Today’s podcast episode covers these 26 tweaks, so you can listen in audio format, in addition to reading the book.

    If you put these into action for the first six months of 2019, you’ll be in a stronger position in June than you started in January.

    Each tweak takes less than one hour (some are as quick as five minutes), and taken together, these tweaks can accumulate into a serious impact.

    Improve your money management and get closer to financial independence with our free book, One Tweak a Week. You can download it here: https://affordanything.com/2019

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    #168: How to Optimize Your Time and Energy — with Mike Vardy, The Productivityist

    ByPaula Pant
    [smart_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/paulaandjaymoney/AA168.mp3" title="How to Optimize Your Time and Energy -- with Mike Vardy, The Productivityist" artist="Paula Pant" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_gplus="true" social_linkedin="true" social_stumble="true" social_pinterest="true" social_email="true" ]

    You can do anything, but not everything … and definitely not everything at the same time.

    How can you optimize your time and energy? How do you choose what’s worthwhile and what’s a waste of time?

    How can you eliminate small decisions so that your mind is free to focus on the few choices that make a massive 10x impact?

    How can you spend less time struggling with your Inbox, and more time on long-term projects that can boost your income?

  • We did it!! We raised $21,978 for charity

    ByPaula Pant

    A year and a half ago, I saw a speech that changed my life — and the lives of at least 600 other people in the developing world.

    I was at the World Domination Summit in Portland, where I’d later be speaking. I sat in the audience as Scott Harrison took the stage.

    Scott is a former nightclub promoter who, at age 28, had a crisis of conscience. His job was encouraging people to get drunk. He smoked two packs a day. He gambled. He felt like he wasn’t adding anything to the world. And he wasn’t sure if, or how, he could.

    “One day, I woke up and I realized I was the worst person I knew,” he wrote in an article on Medium.

    He quit his job, sold most of his possessions, and spent the next two years as a photojournalist on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia in west Africa. He saw diseases that were unlike anything he’d imagined.

    As WIRED describes: “Some of the patients were grotesquely deformed by grapefruit-sized tumors, while others were nearly blind from cataracts that turned their eyes opaque.” (Here are images.)

    He felt surprised — and then sad, then angry, then determined — when he realized that thousands of people die from preventable diseases, like cholera and dysentery, that are spread by drinking dirty water. More than 660 million people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, which is almost 1 out of every 10 people. That’s twice the population of the U.S.

    That’s unacceptable.