Podcast Episode - Dollar Of The Decades

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In this podcast, Suze talks about how our financial needs change as we age.  She explains and why every dollar counts and why we need to count every dollar in each of our decades.

Podcast Transcript:

December 6th, 2020 Suze O. here in Welcome to the Women and Money Podcast, as well as the men smart enough to listen. Do you know what yesterday was? Mhm Yesterday was December 5th. Do you know what December 5th is? Well, besides, the fact that it's one of my best friend Leslie Lin's birthday and Leslie's one of my grammar school friends, there were like four of us that hung out all the time together. But Leslie really, and I still talk all the time, and Leslie turned 69 yesterday, which means that I turned 69 a half because my birthday is June 5th and so forever I have celebrated my birthday and then I celebrate Leslie's birthday, and I always celebrate my half birthday because I'm celebrating Leslie's birthday, if that makes any sense. But that also means that I'm six months from turning 70 and I have to tell you, and I've talked about this before. That's a big deal. Now, do I feel like I'm 70? No. Do I look like I'm 70? I I don't know. I guess I do look like I'm gonna be 70 because I'm gonna be 70. So I could only hope that I look as good as I can possibly look. So you know what's interesting, though, is that decades mean a lot, not just emotionally speaking. Not just how does it feel that you're going to be 70 but it also has a true repercussion on your financial state of being. I personally call it the dollar of the decades because there's always something that goes on financially where there is a difference when you turn 20 to 30. Now, we have a decade there where you're going from being out of college or whatever you're doing. And you're trying to get a little bit more serious. Maybe you've got married and you're gonna have kids or you're by yourself, but now you think all right the dollars of the decade when your thirties is I want to buy a home, I want to start saving for my future. That's when retirement accounts usually start to come into your life, even though they should have come in when you were in your twenties. And then you turn into your forties and now the dollar of the decades there is Am I saving enough? Oh, my God. Have I saved enough for my kids college education? Why aren't I saving enough in my retirement accounts? Look how much debt I've accumulated. Oh, my God. Maybe I need a bigger house now because my kids are growing up, whatever it is. But now you're attending to spend more money in your forties. Then comes the fifties and the 50 start to become intense because, you know, you are just 10 years away from turning 60. And 60 is a big number. So in the fifties, you're like, Oh, God, Now you're afraid because you realize you haven't saved enough. You don't have enough money. You've refinanced your house. You're not going to have that house paid for by the time you retire. Oh, your parents are in trouble. Your parents start to need money. You're going to start to have to help them. Possibly Your kids now have graduated college, and they don't have enough money. So Now you're in the situation when you're in your fifties that your money is going for your parents, for your kids, for everybody but you. Maybe you're a business owner and your employees, especially this year, they need money or your business is shut down. But now you are really starting to panic. And then you turn 60. And the dollar of the decades at 60 can be really intense if you have not prepared for it, because now you are thinking, Oh my God, I am just five years away from qualifying for Medicare. I'm just seven years away from qualifying for Social Security. And when you start hearing about Medicare and Social Security and you're watching all of these ads on TV and you're thinking, Oh my God, they're talking to me. I remember when I was young and I used to watch these ads and they didn't have anything to do with me. And now they're all about me. And then the seventies come, which is what's coming for me. And then things do start to happen. Unless you're really one of the unusual ones. Your body starts to really fail in certain ways. Your aches and pains are really noticeable. Unless you were one of the smart ones who all the decades before did yoga state athletic always stretched. Ate great thought about that. Yeah, it matters. If you're going to eat that pizza every single day, it matters. You should be eating fruits and vegetables and all these things, those things matter. But you don't know that they matter until you get to be about 70. When things really start to change in your body because you are getting older. And then where did the dollars come in there? Oh, do I have the right kind of insurance? Oh, do I have enough money to last me through my retirement? Oh, maybe now I really need to think about telling my kids I can't afford to pay for them anymore because I'm all out of money. I still have credit card debt, and now you are riddled with fear. Now you don't know what to do. If you've been in a relationship now you're getting afraid that maybe your spouse is getting ill or you're getting older. And if something happened to one of you and it's not if something's going to happen, it's when something's going to happen. Do you know what you need to know about the money? Do you have a will? Do you have a trust? You're starting to think about all those things seriously, even though you should have been thinking about those things years and years ago. Now you're starting to pay attention, and then something happens and you find out, Oh, your spouse really didn't know what they were doing with the money anyway. And you don't have what you think and it goes on and on and then the eighties come and more fear sets in. And either you feel secure at that point in time or you don't. And when you don't, there's not a lot. You think there's not a lot at that point that you can really do about it if you hadn't paid attention to your money earlier on. So this is about the dollar of the decades and how you have got to count every dollar and you have got to make every dollar count. You know, when I was seeing clients and they would work so hard to get out of debt to save money, they would spend all year to get out of $700 a debt or to save just $1000 do you know that? It used to be that only 50% of the people in the United States had more than $1000 in savings. I doubt highly right now, highly, that more than 10% have more than two or $300 in savings right now. So it's gotten really bad. But anyway, back to my story and they would work so hard to save money and get out of debt, and then December would come and the holidays would come. And before you know it, the temptation was so, so strong that people would spend that money all over again just to please their relatives, their Children, everybody. This is not to happen to you this year. This is the year that whatever you have, you have got to resist that temptation. You know what's interesting is that right now all of us are in serious danger of spending more money than normal, and the reason that is, is because many of us have gotten used to not going to a store to buy something, so we're buying things online now because we can't go into a store where it's too much trouble to go into a store. Were afraid to go into a store, whatever it may be. And it's almost as if it's easier to buy something online than ever before. You go on Amazon and you can go shopping like just the other day I needed to order food, and so I went on Amazon and I went to Whole Foods where we ordered online what I wanted. It was able to be shipped to this little plane that comes over to the island once a week with mail and everything, and they bring it to me just like that. Or you go to instacart and they go to Publix and they buy everything else and ship it to you so easy. It's not even funny. But it's not just food that people are shopping for. It's everything else. And I'm telling you, you just have to be careful. So I'm asking all of you for this decade, whatever decade you're in to make the most out of your dollars. You know, last week last Sunday, I did a podcast, and it was everybody thought it was gonna be really boring. It was called fees and patience matter. Even KT said to me, that sounds like a boring podcast. But what was interesting about that podcast is how many of you now have written me, and you said you loved that podcast. Can't believe it. You learn so much about real life there, I thought, Oh, well, that's good. But last week's podcast, I was telling you about how a friend of mine had texted me on Thanksgiving and said to me, Suze, it's so hard. It's so hard. I don't have enough money. I can't save money. And we went through all of her bills and she found out that she was paying money in fees to the bank because she didn't have enough money for their minimum and she was paying a significant amount of money and fees. All right, so today I get a text from her, which says you can't be so proud of me. I closed that account. I found another bank that has no fees, no minimum to open up. And she was so excited on I said, Oh, I'm so proud of you. I said, You know, you only have $20 to your name. You got to make sure that you make every dollar count and count every dollar. And then she sent me pictures off her daughters and her, and I noticed that her daughter had a nose ring and I wrote her back and I said, So how much did that cost to get the nose pierced like what is that about. And she said to me, Oh, Suze, that's a plastic little ring that we get it the dollar store, which is where we have to shop. We buy our food and everything there. And it was just a dollar. And I said, Oh, just a dollar. She said Yes, Suze. And that's when she said to me, You'll never understand. And I wrote her back and I said, It's not about if I understand or I don't understand, because my understanding is never going to change your situation. It's about, you don't understand. You don't understand how every dollar counts and you have to count every single dollar. And then she said to me, truth. Yeah, that's true. And then she says, But we're going to go to the store today, the dollar store with my girls and we're going to just look around. And I said, if you come back with one thing other than food because your refrigerator is empty, you have $20 to your name. And if you spend $1 that's like 5% of everything that she has if you think about it. $1 of $20 is 5%. If you spend $1 on one thing that you don't need, then you're gonna understand why when you come to me and asked me for help that I say no to you because you don't understand. So this is the time in our lives right here and right now, where all of us have to understand, we have to understand what everybody's going through. We have to understand what we're going through. We have to understand, and we have to do something about it. And what you do about it is you make every penny count every dollar count, and you count every penny and you count every dollar and you make sure that you make moves that absolutely make sense, not out of guilt, not out of shame, not out of wanting to please somebody. No. This is the decade now, 2020. The decade where we really have to stand in our truth and we really have to do that, which is best for every single one of us. Back to turning almost 70. When I think about almost turning 70 I have to say it makes me sad. Like today makes me sad a little bit because today KT and Colo are out fishing. They're out, Wahooing. And as many of you may know, one of the reasons that we love living on the island is because we love to fish, and we're really, really good at it. And last week there was a wahoo tournament here on the island and I got to go down and watch all the boats come in and see the wahoo's that they brought off of their boats and weigh them and somebody caught a wahoo. That was 78.9 pounds. That was the biggest wahoo I have ever seen in my life. The largest I've ever caught A 60 pounds. So this is almost 20 pounds more. It was like, Whoa! But I couldn't fish in the tournament and I couldn't fish in the tournament because I'm really not allowed on the boat or to do something like that for quite a few months yet because we don't want to push anything back in terms of my healing. But that makes me so sad. Makes me sad. Not that I'm not wahooing makes me sad that KT and Colo are out there without me. And I know I know that they really, really miss me. And it's hard for me because I really don't miss believe it or not being out there because I don't want to miss something that I can't do, so why miss it. I'm more celebrating the little things that I can do, but I'm sad that I know that KT misses me. So KT and Colo's experience isn't as great for them because one of their team members isn't there. Which is why now I go back and I say to all of you, if I could turn back the hands of time with my health anyway, I would have made sure that I took yoga. I would have stretched. I would have absolutely eaten healthy versus eating Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried and McDonald's almost all the time, which I love so much I can't even tell you. I would have made some serious changes in my life. And those changes wouldn’t just affect me right now, they would have affected KT, who is the love of my life, and Colo. I'm not going to say colo’s the love of my life because he's really not, but I sure love him. So that's what makes me sad. It makes me so sad, I can't tell you. And I know that there are people listening to this podcast right now that maybe that's how they feel about their health, and they're really paying attention to their health because they're younger. But the real question also comes down to Are you paying attention to what you're doing with your money as well? Are you feeding your money McDonald's and chicken and things like that from Kentucky Fried? Or are you feeding your money Roth IRAs and investing accounts and paying down debt and things like that? Did that even make sense when I just said maybe yes, maybe no. But I think you understand what I am talking about. So that's the podcast for today. I still don't know what I'm going to name it. We'll have to see. But it's just something that I kind of wanted to say and share with you, and I hope that you enjoyed it.

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