J
[3:31] This is a not safe for work podcast. It is called Vaginance.

Becca:
[3:38] Yeah. Welcome to Vaginance, by the way.Maggie:
[3:41] It could have been vag-in-ance.Becca:
[3:44] What would vag-in-ance be about? Vagabonds? Van life?Maggie:
[3:50] One time my mom called. One time, my mom called me a fag-a-bond.

Jewels:
[3:50] Wow, that it’s actually really on point.

Becca:
[3:53] Mom, you can’t say that.

Maggie:
[3:59] Yeah, I was like, I actually really like that Mom. I’m gonna steal it. Thank you.

Becca:
[4:01] What a brand. That’s incredible.

Taylor:
[4:06] Can we start the episode with that?

Maggie:
[4:07] I looked it up. That URL is already taken its by like a gay cruise company.

Becca:
[4:15] Okay, so we should probably introduce ourselves. Um, no?

Maggie:
[4:24] I mean, yeah, let’s do it.Becca:
[4:24] We are nameless and we’re faceless.Maggie:
[4:28] You you give us the template of how one might introduce themselves for this podcast.Jewels:
[4:30] Becca will introduce all of us.

Becca:
[4:31] Yeah, I’m going to provide as little personal information…

Taylor:
[4:32] We should have come up with, like, pseudonyms.

Maggie:
[4:35] It’s like I live in Austin, Texas. I have zero kids like….

Taylor:
[4:39] This is now the bachelor.

Becca:
[4:41] I am very open to telling, like I’ll talk about any sexual experience ya’ll want, and my money, and all that…

Becca:
[4:47] But I will not tell people, like like where I live.

Jewels:
[4:52] Your address? That’s wise after telling about all of your sexual experience.

Maggie:
[4:54] It’s fair. That’s fair.

Becca:
[4:58] Yeah, here’s what I’m worth, and here’s what I’ll do in bed.

Maggie:
[5:01] Like negative 500,000 dollars and anything.

Becca:
[5:10] Yeah, yeah. It is weird to imagine introducing. Well, okay, so I guess like, the idea of this podcast is that we’re talking very openly about things that women or people might feel uncomfortable talking openly about, and so they have the opportunity to listen to four people who might be very relatable to them talk about these things openly. So we can talk about our personal financial situation if we want or if y’all wanna warm up to that we could do that. Or we can talk about… as long as, like, female anatomy is discussed regularly. I’ve got some things to talk about.

Taylor:
[5:48] It’s an important part of finance.

Becca:
[5:49] What? We’re breaking taboos.

Jewels:
[5:53] I prefer my portfolio have the shape of curves of a female body.

Becca:
[5:55] That’s exactly right. Do you all want to talk about net worth and specifics like that, or would you rather not do that?

Maggie:
[6:05] Net worth is the hard one because there’s, like, 20 different ways to calculate it.

Taylor:
[6:07] I don’t know my net worth.

Becca:
[6:07] Look at your Mint app.

Maggie:
[6:11] I mean, it would give me a general idea, but I also have my own spreadsheets and I think Julie and I were talking the other day that we each calculate our net worth in at least three different ways. Yeah, so who knows?

Taylor:
[6:24] I’m pretty sure my net worth is like negative 5000, at least.

Maggie:
[6:26] Well, no, that’s like one of them is, like, negative $300,000.

Becca:
[6:32] Yeah, well it’s up to you. Yeah, I just… How how open do you all want to be, I guess, is the question like, do we wanna lay everything out like our financial situation, or do we want to keep it more like conceptual?

Jewels:
[6:43] Oh, I’m an open book.

Taylor:
[6:44] I was going to talk about my…

Becca:
[6:44] I’m feeling very open. Cool. Okay.

Maggie:
[6:44] I am pretty open. Yeah.

Taylor:
[6:50] We can always decide later too if we want to take something out.

Becca:
[6:53] Take that fucking out.

Taylor:
[6:55] What were you going to say Mags?

Maggie:
[6:56] Well, I was going to say, part of the reason I feel good about being open is because we’re also not… it’s like not going to be a snapshot. We’re telling like our stories, too. So it’s like, you know, I might be here. It’ll be interesting to start this podcast now and then if we do keep doing it, look at it in, you know, revisit our net worth and our story in a year or two years and see how it’s changed. So that’s part of why I’m like, yeah, let’s just fucking go for it. Let’s dive in.

Becca:
[7:20] I love it. I love it. And it’s like if I learned anything from your money or your life, uh, it’s that you gotta be brutally fucking honest about your financial situation or nothing’s going to change.

Maggie:
[7:30] I definitely have some things I want to talk about in relation to that book.

Becca:
[7:36] Yeah.

Jewels:
[7:37] Also that was so smooth. Your transition.

Taylor:
[7:43] So not only did I not read the book, I started reading the wrong book.

Becca:
[7:43] No, she was listening to a summary of the wrong book.

Maggie:
[7:44] What did you start reading instead?

Taylor:
[7:59] Jesus.

Becca:
[8:04] She almost hacked the system. She almost did it.

Jewels:
[8:10] So what did you learn Taylor in your other book?

Maggie:
[8:12] Yeah fill us in.

Taylor:
[8:15] Okay. I started listening to a summary of The Simple Path to Wealth.

Jewels:
[8:22] Another of our favorites, but very different.

Taylor:
[8:28] And I thought I was like, “Yeah, I got this.” I listened to like the first three chapters, and I was like, “I get it. He said he laid it all out. I’m good.” And then Becca comes up and I was like, “yeah, I listened to the summary.” She’s like, “Wrong book.”

Becca:
[8:47] I believe I said that’s awesome, but just so you know… because, I mean, we do talk about both books a lot.

Maggie:
[8:58] That’s true. It was… That’s… It’s not like you went totally off genre.

Becca:
[9:02] Because there is, like, a crime fighting…

Taylor:
[9:04] You’re reading Princess Diary.

Becca:
[9:09] No, when I was looking up Your Money or Your Life, there’s, like, a mystery novel called that so that…

Maggie:
[9:16] That’s that’s my goal for the next podcast is to have read the mystery novel, Your Money or Your Life.

Jewels:
[9:19] I feel like it supposedly said really sinisterly, though, like “your money or your life.”

Becca:
[9:20] Available on the free library app.

Becca:
[9:28] Well, it was an audio book. We could find out how they say it.

Taylor:
[9:35] Just do a dramatic reading for the next episode.

Jewels:
[9:36] So you didn’t find a summary Taylor for the actual book?

Taylor:
[9:41] No, no, I did then listen to that hour long podcast where they interview her.

Becca:
[9:47] The Mad Fientist episode with Vicki Robin.

Taylor:
[9:47] I did types some main concepts and takeaways from that.

Becca:
[9:54] Yeah, because that gives you the feel of, like, her overall mission and like her view of money.

Taylor:
[10:01] Yeah.

Becca:
[10:01] But, like, really with the book, well.. The book just gets into, like, if you want to do anything about your finances, you have to do all these calculations that are going to make you feel pretty bad.

Taylor:
[10:11] Yeah. Like, I never want to actually know what I’m spending on a daily basis.

Becca:
[10:11] But you gotta do it. Oh, but you have to know every cent.

Taylor:
[10:16] So one thing I’m sorry. No, no.

Becca:
[10:18] Oh, no, no, please.

Taylor:
[10:22] One thing I did write down that I really liked that she said was she said watching your pennies is a spiritual practice for living in a material world. I thought that was very profound.

Jewels:
[10:35] Sounds like a Madonna song.

Taylor:
[10:36] I’m not gonna do it. We’ll workshop that later. Yeah, she’s very much like you have to look at what you’re spending like there is no, like, cheat or way around it like you have to know what you’re spending every day all the time and is that is that money equate equal what your energy is that you’re putting out to earn it. Like all of this energy that I’m putting into working is this thing that I’m buying worth that energy and my time, which I hate looking at. I don’t want to know. I want to separate that in my mind, because it’s just not fun otherwise but yeah.

Maggie:
[11:20] That was your second read through the book, right? So have you started any of those actual uh, tasks? Homework. Homeworks?

Jewels:
[11:29] I have my chart and because this was my favorite week of the month, which is the new month, it’s end of month finances.

Maggie:
[11:34] The beginning of the month?

Jewels:
[11:39] So I got to do my end of month finances, and you all got to see my chart when I first created it last month, but it is even more it’s more beautiful now. It has my projections for next month too, so it’s more dramatic than it really is, but.

Becca:
[11:50] Wow.

Taylor:
[11:57] Julie likes to be better than all of us and makes extremely beautiful fancy charts.

Maggie:
[11:59] Julie, I feel like I feel like this is something that I could really relate to you with is the evolution of a spreadsheet because you like you get you start it out and you’re like, oh, that’s pretty good. And then you’re like, oh, but there’s these new formulas and other things I want to calculate and like, I don’t know, the evolution of spreadsheets. Very beautiful. It just happened to me with my paid time off tracker just got very much more detailed and complex, and it just felt it struck me somewhere today, and I was like, that felt nice.

Taylor:
[12:29] And for a low subscription cost of 3.99 a month, you could have access to these trackers.

Jewels:
[12:35] I did write down. I don’t remember if we talked about this or not. We talked about potential podcast episodes, but for the love of spreadsheets should be an episode. And then whatever the opposite of that is.

Becca:
[12:48] Yes, 100% as a non spreadsheet-er myself except when it comes to my movie watching, I’ll happily spear do the do the other one the opposite.

Jewels:

[12:56] To be fair, I think your movie spreadsheet maybe makes you like the queen of spreadsheets because that’s like the longest running, consistently updated spreadsheet. Probably any one of us has.

Becca:
[13:09] I don’t know if that’s true. It is over five years old, though.

Jewels:
[13:13] I think it’s probably true. Maggie, do you have a spreadsheet? Same spreadsheet that you’ve been using for five years?

Maggie:
[13:19] Minds about three years old.

Becca:
[13:21] That does make me feel superior. So appreciate that.

Maggie:
[13:28] I had to zoom out and read all of the… I had to figure out what all the lines meant.

Jewels:
[13:28] Like, don’t don’t zoom in and read the things.

Becca:
[13:30] Look at all these colors.

Jewels:
[13:37] The important part to notices that everything went like this, and then they converged, and now they have crossed over.

Becca:
[13:43] Net worth minus more… I see what we’re doing here.

Jewels:
[13:47] Yeah, you can see all of the ways I am calculating net worth.

Becca:
[13:51] No, that’s so amazing.Taylor:
[13:52] So what are the ways you calculate your net worth?Jewels:
[13:54] So it’s like the net worth, including my mortgage debt, and then with the estimated equity of our house added back in, that’s a second way. Then there’s net worth completely disregarding that. I think I can’t remember what was on there.Maggie:
[14:11] Disregarding the house at all? Yeah. So those are the three ways I do mine too.

Jewels:
[14:15] And then I started the new line I added this week was my like investment, cash on hand. So this is cash in excessive, like because each month I set aside our personal budget for the month, and then each of our businesses has a reserve that we try to keep in the account, and then whatever the excess is gets moved into savings and we have, like, a savings emergency reserve and then an account looks like the savings we’re putting aside to pay off any 0% interest credit cards. And now, there’s gonna be one for the cash above and beyond that. So, like this is actual investment money.

Taylor:
[14:58] So you what percentage of your income are you putting into your cash on hand?

Jewels:
[15:02] It changes every month because our income changes every month.

Jewels:
[15:06] I can show you guys the spreadsheet at some point if you want, but I also have it calculating our savings rate each month based on how much gets moved over.

Taylor:
[15:14] Do you try to, like, have a certain percentage of your paycheck that you put in, like, 20%? Are you just kind of look at how much you earn that month and then decide?

Jewels:
[15:27] Yeah, it’s too hard, because over the course of the year like right now it’s a really good earning season for both Zach and I, and the winter usually is much lower, at least for his, although with the way that real estate is this year, who knows? Because everything just kind of got pushed. Nothing slowed down yet. So it’s like at least if we can clear every month, the reserve, and always keep that in there, then just everything else moves over.

Maggie:
[15:57] I have a lot of similar but slightly different ways of doing my spreadsheet as you do, Julie. I don’t have a projection and graphed out like that, but I do track my like easily, so I don’t keep my cash on hand in cash, I keep it in an investment, but one that I can easily like within a few days, turn into cash.

Becca:
[16:18] You have to tell me more about whatever that because that’s where I was hung up these past two weeks is like, where? Where? What? Oh, I see. Well, get me in there.

Maggie:
[16:24] Mine is company stocks. So but Betterment… We talked about betterment, though, right?

Becca:
[16:32] Yeah, I made an account with Betterment and with Vanguard because I can’t figure out which one’s better because Betterment charges a fee that’s much, much higher than Vanguard.

Maggie:
[16:39] Right, but if you do the tax loss harvesting.

Taylor:
[16:43] What? What? What? What? Tax harvesting? Okay, listen, like everyone listening to this, I don’t read. You’re gonna have to tell me.

Maggie:
[16:46] You gotta read. You got to read the articles we send Taylor. I’m gonna butcher the explanation and don’t wanna be recorded butchering the explanation of tax loss tax loss harvesting. But it’s, um.

Taylor:
[17:08] It sounds really graphic.

Maggie:
[17:10] Yeah, so whenever you’re… say you have two index funds and… all right.

Taylor:
[17:15] What are index funds?

Maggie:
[17:19] Say you have some stocks. So when you gain money on your stocks, you pay money on the gains, and then if you lose money, you can deduct the losses. So what tax loss harvesting does, is it find stocks within your portfolio and automatically moves them around for you to, like, maximize the efficiency of the taxes you pay.Taylor:
[17:37] To avoid that loss? Got it. Okay, that makes sense.Maggie:
[17:43] And Betterment does that automatically for you.Taylor:
[17:46] But you do you pay a fee?

Maggie:
[17:47] So there’s a fee, but most of the reading I’ve done on it, and I think there’s probably other articles I should read, but most people who do it are people who graph out this shit because they like are analretentive like me, and they’re all like, you make back more than what you would on the fees. So, yeah.

Becca:
[18:08] Yeah. Yeah, I was looking into it. I just wasn’t sure if I make I have enough money going into my investment account to make up for that fee loss. But I think it shakes out.

Maggie:
[18:23] Over time, compound interest.

Becca:
[18:25] Yeah, once I’m rich, but yeah. So I made a Betterment account. Sorry, I totally interrupted you. You have company stocks. You’re not interested in sharing that with me? Go on.

Maggie:
[18:36] I would love to share that with you if I could. But I was just saying that that’s my like, quote unquote cash on hand is.

Becca:
[18:43] So how much do you have like an emergency fund that’s just cash in a bank?

Maggie:
[18:48] Yes, but I keep that pretty low, which is like when we were talking about our emergency fund, like, fuck you money. I said three months, but that’s because I have the safety net of knowing that could have more.

Jewels:
[19:04] There’s a super emergency fund.

Maggie:
[19:06] Yeah, there’s an extra emergency fund, which is my investment potential investment money for new real estate, but if she goes down the drain, then that plan gets scratched and it’s my emergency fund.

Becca:
[19:19] Mhm. Cool, interesting.

Jewels:
[19:24] I haven’t had to think about where to put the investment cash on hand yet because it doesn’t exist until the projections that come through next month.

Maggie:
[19:30] It doesn’t come through until December 18th at 607pm.

Jewels:
[19:32] Well, and also because like, we’re probably going to move it into real estate so quickly once it builds that I’m probably not going to move it into anything that makes it harder to access.

Taylor:
[19:50] So is your main strategy, then going with real estate as your… profit.

Jewels:
[19:57] Yes, because yes, because of the tax advantages that yeah, that we get, like being able to write off a lot of my income taxes because of Zac’s work, there’s it makes no sense to do anything else with it once, once the portfolio is secured and then it starts just bringing in money once things were paid off, then all of that will go into retirement funds.

Maggie:
[20:20] So mine is, not entirely real estate, but that’s because I get work benefits like 401K and employee stocks and stuff like that, so since their contract workers and don’t get that stuff automatically like so I guess that’s just to say everyone’s situation would probably be different, but I love the idea of investing in real estate mine is just like a bit of a slower moving train, because I’m also moving stuff into other places.

Taylor:
[20:49] One thing I did write down for the like, main concepts for Your Money or Your Life, she talks about the different ways, like types of ways that people make money, like the three main ones, which is index funds, active investors, and real estate. I wrote that down, and I was like, Taylor, you should Google what index funds means later.

Jewels:
[21:11] So go back to The Simple Path to Wealth book summary that you are listening. It’s all about your index funds.

Taylor:
[21:16] He also said something about these index elements.

Maggie:
[21:19] They seem important.

Becca:
[21:21] Yeah, he’s very cool and, well, he’s very much my speed because index funds is his form of investing over real estate.

Taylor:
[21:21] They see they seem important to a lot of people.

Becca:
[21:33] And he doesn’t say, like, don’t do real estate, but he certainly doesn’t push it in any way.

Taylor:
[21:38] Yeah, he definitely seems more of an investor guy.

Becca:
[21:40] Yeah, but not an active investor. Like not don’t try to play the stocks.

Taylor:
[21:43] Right, Right. Which is the whole job on its own. Like when my dad was started that investment club, all of the guys that were in that club were just full time, like already millionaires and literally, their full time job was just sit around and watch stocks and talk about what stocks to invest.

Jewels:
[22:01] It was gambling. For them, it was like entertainment. It was low risk.

Taylor:
[22:02] Totally. Totally. Yeah, it’s interesting. Which seems like a lot of fun honestly, like that seems like the most fun is to be like, what stock can I buy that’s just gonna make me a billion dollars?

Maggie:
[22:16] Just go to Vegas. I actually, I gotta… I won a bunch of money in Vegas, I just so happened to spend it all.

Taylor:
[22:17] Yeah, that worked out so well for you.

Becca:
[22:26] So it was like a neutral experience overall.

Maggie:
[22:29] I thoroughly enjoyed. I would count it as a positive experience, because we, I mean, we spent some of my winnings on going to a show, buying dinner, got a bunch of fancy cocktails, gambled a bunch more like all of those things I wouldn’t have done had I not ever been up in the money, so I counted as a win double win.

Becca:
[22:47] Yeah, I mean it does sound fabulous.

Maggie:
[22:48] I didn’t come home with any cash, but I certainly had a good time.

Becca:
[22:51] Did you? But did you lose any cash?

Maggie:
[22:53] Well, I when I went, I was like, I’m gonna use $300 to gamble.

Becca:
[22:57] Yes. Nice. Yeah.

Maggie:
[22:59] And so once I was down $300 that was my cut off point, and I was there for a week, so I feel like that was pretty good.

Becca:
[23:08] That’s really impressive.

Jewels:
[23:09] Crazy. I can’t wait for the Maggie Goes to Vegas episode.

Maggie:
[23:13] No, you’re specifically not allowed to talk about the things that happened in Vegas on public podcasts.

Becca:
[23:20] There’s there’s a whole rule about it.

Maggie:
[23:21] No, actually, I was pretty tame. It was just me and Kitra. It was just like getting drunk and gambling pretty much it.

Jewels:
[23:27] We’ll just get the financial, you know, map of the track.

Maggie:
[23:30] Oh, I have not. Ooh, I have not done that math. I don’t think I want to go back and look at it.

Jewels:
[23:35] The opening is Maggie crying?

Maggie:
[23:35] I do know it was ah lot, but, uh, we stayed in some really nice places and went to think every show that we wanted to go to, and ate any food we wanted to eat. So it was just It was very expensive, but yes.

Becca:
[23:52] That sounds like a lovely vacation.

Taylor:
[23:59] I guess we could talk about our different, should we talk about, like are different, like, situations, like what our goals are because I know based off, like, our jobs and everything that affects it, you know, because, like, I were more freelance. Well, we’re more freelance based. Y’all are more like full time employee base so that I think also effects like how we look at our finances and things like that, but…

Becca:
[24:27] I can start if you want. Okay. Okay. So this is Becca talking. So okay, here’s my situation. I am a full time employee. I’m a massage therapist. I’m a full time employee, but then I’m also a contractor because I teach yoga part time, and I own my own massage business. So whatever. I’m a CEO. And so yeah, so my taxes I have yet to do them correctly. I’m still learning that. But also what makes me a little different from the other folks in this group is that I don’t have any assets. I don’t own a home. Yeah, I don’t have assets. And I also don’t have an investment portfolio, which is the big change I wanna make now. So what I do have is no debt and a positive net worth. My net worth is roughly I’ve got, like, 2700 in retirement. Uh, and then I’ve got about, uh, I’ve got about 87 grand cash.

Taylor:
[25:39] That is insane. I should be charging you way more for rent.

Maggie:
[25:45] My only comment on that is why cash?

Becca:
[25:48] Exactly. So my big financial mistake is that I have had a lot of fear around like a very scarcity mindset around money, which has been really positive in some ways, because it’s led to this like, big liquid cash asset, but really negative because all of that money could have been making money for the past decade, and instead, it’s been making, you know, $8 a month in my money market account in my bank. So I really want to make a big change as far as investment go, so that I could make that money work for me.

Taylor:
[26:26] But just to like toot your horn a little more, you worked your ass off for decades and saved all of that and lived within your means which is extremely hard to do for most people like myself who have no financial knowledge or intelligence when it comes to what they spend.

Maggie:
[26:45] Yeah. I mean, I agree with Taylor, it is very impressive. I’m very impressed. Good job.

Jewels:
[26:50] And you didn’t live in a basement this whole time or deprive yourself. I mean, there was that Parisian dungeon you stayed in one.

Taylor:
[26:53] Yeah, like you. Yeah. You’ve been having a great life. Yeah, this thing, too, is that you’ve also managed it’s not like you’re just like, working and not living your life and not enjoying your life like you’ve saved that money, lived within your means and traveled the world. You just you’ve done it in a smart way where you’ve been able to plan financially for that and not spend too much so you’ve been able to do everything you’ve wanted to do.

Becca:
[27:18] Thank you. Very flattering. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It’s all possible, but a lot of that, like and I’m not saying this just to sound negative, but a lot of that did come from a scarcity mindset.

Taylor:
[27:19] It’s possible. Give the viewer… give the listeners hope.

Becca:
[27:32] Like I always behaved as if I had no money because I thought that was the only safe way to live so I didn’t, I mean, I didn’t totally deprive myself and I had a long history in my mid twenties of quitting jobs and traveling, which was lovely and I was able to do it because of this little nest egg. But now, in my thirties, I just want to be a little smarter. And I thought I was really planning to buy a house this yea and that didn’t happen so now that we’re learning now that we’ve started doing this, this is our third time to meet up to talk about finances the more I read and the more I learned, the more I think that investments in index funds is probably the right thing for me and a general investment portfolio to, like, hold all my cash assets, So, yeah, I also have an IUD. Uh, it’s the marina, and it is I have to get it replaced a week from today, and I’m not stoked about that, so we’ll hear all about that next time.Taylor:
[28:22] Yeah that’s gonna suck.Jewels:
[28:38] That is amazing. I cannot believe that is such a good a little nest egg you have there.Taylor:
[28:44] Yeah, that’s incredible. I did the opposite of Becca, where I lived like I had money.

Jewels:
[28:48] That’s my girl.

Taylor:
[28:53] Uh, definitely had a good time. Was making a lot of money living in New York and LA and spending more. Yeah. So I blew through that fat chunk of change and then spent more, and now I’m a slave to credit.. credit owners, whatever they’re called… banks. What are those overlords called that demand more for me every month. Yeah. So I’m, like, in pretty bad debt right now. I would say, like, somewhere above $20,000.

Becca:
[29:29] Well, she just bought a house as well.

Taylor:
[29:30] That has nothing to do with my debt for the record, it’s just all spending money on dumb shit.

Jewels:
[29:36] But net worth/

Taylor:
[29:37] Yeah. I don’t know what that is.

Maggie:
[29:42] Taylor’s going to calculate her net worth for the next podcast.

Taylor:
[29:44] Yeah. You know, I think I kind of calculated it, and it was just so minuscule that I didn’t even wanna bring it up.

Jewels:
[29:49] Here’s the deal. What you need to realize is that if you sold your house, don’t sell your house. If you sold your house, it would pay itself off and it would pay off all of your debt, so you actually probably have positive net worth.

Taylor:
[30:06] Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know if my house is actually gained.

Jewels:
[30:08] It doesn’t matter, you’d get the cash back out you put in, and that cash would flatten your.

Taylor:
[30:14] So I just bought a house in April, but, I mean, this is the thing, too is like, I’m not, I’m definitely nowhere near financial independent. That is my goal, and I it’s absolutely what I’m trying to work towards, and I’m actually looking at my finances seriously for the first time in my life, but I am super privileged and for the most part have, like, completely had help from my parents. Like many, you know, privileged white, middle class people.

Becca:
[30:43] Many millennials.

Taylor:
[30:44] My my dad died at the beginning year, and then I got he had, like, a fucking hoard of gold in his… literally gold that he was hiding in the house.

Maggie:
[30:56] Literal gold?

Taylor:
[30:57] Literal gold. I took photos of gold coins like me holding gold coins and doing, like, little like instagram videos of it.

Maggie:
[31:02] He should have left you a fucking treasure map.

Taylor:
[31:05] I know that would have been fucking amazing. He didn’t think he was going to die, so he didn’t make a map.

Maggie:
[31:09] Yeah, that’s that’s fair. That’s fair.

Taylor:
[31:11] He was a leprechaun. Yeah. So we used the money from that. I think it was like, 15 grand that he had in gold and silver and so cashed that bad boy in and and then my mom helped me make up what was my down payment? Like 35,000, I believe, because uh…

Jewels:
[31:40] 5% or 3.5%?

Taylor:
[31:42] No I think it was 37 because I did 10% in my house was 375. It was Yeah, 37,500, so my mom gave me the rest to put down towards the down payment. So yeah, that’s how about my house is I just moved off my dead dad and my mom and was able to do that. But I’m super thankful that I did, because now I have this asset that, at least like I have something to my name that I own that’s going to hopefully make me money.

Becca:
[32:14] And it’s a super dope house.

Jewels:
[32:15] I think you’re not giving yourself enough credit too because you made that decision when you were, you just recently up skilled for a new career, and you were not full time employed, and we’re in the middle of a global pandemic on you didn’t know exactly how the mortgage payments…

Taylor:
[32:29] Yeah, it was terrifying.

Jewels:
[32:35] were going to get paid once they get kicked, once they kicked in, and your mother was very clear she was not covering that.

Taylor:
[32:41] Yeah, Yeah. She was like, good luck.

Jewels:
[32:42] So you Yeah, you put that pedal down.

Maggie:
[32:44] Well, and you, like, also done work on the house and made it better all by yourself included up to and including building a chicken coop. Becca was a part of all that.

Taylor:
[32:54] Becca did also contribute quite a bit to building the coop.

Maggie:
[32:58] I feel like you’re being very responsible now that you have this house as far as the not living like you have a billion dollars because you still have roommates and, like you are on buy nothing and are responsible in those ways.

Taylor:
[33:13] Yeah, we’ll be giving giving away giveaways throughout the season, and they will all be from buy nothing. I do love a good deal, which is hilarious because I just never pay attention how much money I spend, but it part of what she what was her name again? The Your Money or Your Life? Vicki Robin, part of what she was saying was people are naturally very frugal, and I totally relate to that because I fucking love a good deal. Like, I think I tell everyone what something caught like what I bought costs if they show any interest, I’m like, “thank you, I got it at goodwill for $5.” Uh, but that doesn’t translate into the amount of debt that I have somehow.

Becca:
[33:54] Also, it’s worth saying, I like how we’re all just speaking up for each other. It’s worth saying that Taylor has lived and worked in film, uh, in New York City and LA like two of the most expensive cities in the country. So, like, I would love to interview people in those cities to see what their net worth is.

Taylor:
[34:11] It’s either very high or very low.

Maggie:
[34:13] Yeah, there’s like no middle ground there.

Becca:
[34:15] Yeah. It’s not built for financial success.

Taylor:
[34:17] LA and New York is definitely keeping up with the Jones’. You very much feel like you need to go out and experience… What’s the point of living in those cities if you’re just living like, you know, frugally? Is that a word? Frugally?

Jewels:
[34:32] Yes.

Taylor:
[34:35] Um, yeah. I don’t know. I I enjoyed it, but yeah, not to my benefit now financially, but we’re working on it..

Becca:
[34:43] No shame. No… What’s what does she say over and over again? In the book? No shame, no blame.

Taylor:
[34:46] Well, and my family too is very much like in the mindset of don’t ever get into debt. Like that’s the dumbest thing you do is get into debt, and none of them have debt, and so I very much feel like the failure of the group for getting into debt and being like, “I don’t know what happened.”

Jewels:
[35:09] This is the safe space for that.

Becca:
[35:10] 100%.

Taylor:
[35:11] Yeah. I mean, I even told my mom like, yesterday she was talking about… So another thing is, my mom every year is going to give me and my brother 15 grand as part of our inheritance instead of waiting till she dies, she’s going to give up to 15 year and every year because it’s tax free, and her financial advisor, like, suggested it basically, he was like, “Yeah, if you’re going to give them the money anyways and you have enough to live like comfortably for the next 30 years and you might as well just give it to them now.” And I was like, “great, that would be awesome because I could definitely use it now and hopefully not when I’m you know, 70 or 80 when you eventually…”

Maggie:
[35:48] It’s so much more useful now.

Taylor:
[35:50] Exactly. And that that’s a big argument I’ve been hearing, too, is like give your kids their inheritance in their twenties and thirties when they could actually use it, and hopefully they won’t need it in their forties and fifties and you can all just like, enjoy your lives and you can see them enjoy it. So luckily, my mom is very smart and good at her job and is a badass and makes she’s not like multimillion dollar rich, but she makes enough to comfortably, you know, share the wealth, but also she has a financial advisor, and she’s made like, a ton of money in the stock market just by like I think index funds and also active investing, but it’s like she paid someone else to do it for. But, you know, she paid like a…

Maggie:
[36:31] We should interview her.

Taylor:
[36:33] I told her I was like, “can you just tell me what to do?” And she was like, “I don’t have time for that.” God, Mom.

Jewels:
[36:41] I’m too busy rolling in the dough.

Becca:
[36:45] If we promise her wine she would.

Taylor:
[36:46] True. We should just bring, like, invite her over under the pretense of just having, like, a fun wine, and then we’re like putting a mic in her face being like, “what did you do tell us?”

Becca:
[36:55] Seriously, though she she has her shit together.

Taylor:
[36:58] Yeah, Yeah, she does. She’s she’swell, you know, like a lot of people that have the money, you hire someone to help you figure it out. No one has all the answers, that’s for sure. But yeah. Anyway, that’s my situation.

Becca:
[37:14] This side of the couch.

Taylor:
[37:15] Julie, how about you fill us in on your life story?

Jewels:
[37:19] We’re going to need a whole episode for that. Yeah, it was It was a cold and snowy night.

Becca:
[37:21] Take us back to Canada.

Taylor:
[37:25] I was a wee lad.

Maggie:
[37:34] I made my first dollar.

Jewels:
[37:34] Can we talk about how each of us made our first dollar, like, legitimate? Not from chores with your parents or something?

Becca:
[37:35] Yeah, yes. Well, you know.

Jewels:
[37:45] I believe my first paid job was working as a hockey referee, which won’t be surprising to anyone in Canada.

Becca:
[37:52] That is too Canadian.

Jewels:
[37:53] And it was such good money. It really spoils you for life because I think I was making about $20 an hour.

Taylor:
[38:01] What are they doing up there? That’s crazy. Canada’s a magical place. What? That’s even better. We’ll pay you more and you work less.

Jewels:
[38:05] You can Onley work so many hours in a week because they’re only… But it was an amazing pay rate for being 13.

Taylor:
[38:18] That’s more than most like 30 year olds make right now.

Becca:
[38:22] Seriously.

Jewels:
[38:25] That’s it. That’s what I got.

Maggie:
[38:28] I thought that what you were still doing your intro. I mean, I could talk about my first job, too, but I didn’t want to interrupt. I don’t want to interrupt your introduction to your financial story.

Jewels:
[38:32] Yes.
No. Now I just need to know how everyone made their first dollar.

Maggie:
[38:39] So I’m sure my first dollar was probably, like, a lemonade stand or something like that. But my first job that I got was I was a veterinary technician, which is a fancy way of saying I cleaned up shit at the little veterinarian’s office in the town we grew up in, and I loved it actually. I went before, it was in high school, I went before school every day and took all the dogs out for a walk and then gave them all their medicine and their food for the morning, and then all the rest of the staff of the vets office would show up.
And then when I got out of school, I would go back again and clean the whole office and then give all the animals their dinner and nighttime meds. I did that, Uh, most of high school.

Taylor:
[39:19] Why are you so much better than us, Maggie? We all went to high school together, and Maggie is somehow better than the rest of us because she is way smarter and does cool stuff. It’s not It’s not.

Becca:
[39:21] That’s just incredible work ethic. We all grew up together.

Maggie:
[39:29] Definitely an extreme over exaggeration of someone who has gotten a little bit lucky several times in a row. So Julie! Oh wait, no. Becca, Taylor. What were your first jobs?

Becca:
[39:41] I definitely babysat. I remember I was 11 and I babysat like a four year old and that’s like, isn’t that insane to think about?

Taylor:
[39:49] Someone just trusted an 11 year old with their child.

Becca:
[39:53] Yeah, and I remember distinctly and this is 11 year old Becca realized this you can… scarcity mindset. I babysat for seven hours and they gave me a $20 bill to pay for that, and even 11 year old me was like, “this is bullshit.” Like, this is, uh. First off, I had a lot of liability being 11 year old watching your toddler.

Taylor:
[40:15] What were they doing for, like, 17 hours?

Becca:
[40:21] They, like, went. So I think I went over there after school like 3PM and they were out to, like, 10 or something like that. But, like, can you imagine?

Taylor:
[40:32] They just seem to hate their child.

Becca:
[40:32] I cannot imagine leaving my teeny tiny baby with another baby.

Maggie:
[40:37] You know, with an 11 year old? No.

Becca:
[40:38] Yeah. Who, like, is afraid of the dark.

Taylor:
[40:38] But like, after four years of being a parent, I think you’re just like, yeah, whatever, like, please, just take it. Like, take the baby, please. Um, anyone can have this child.

Jewels:
[40:51] I think the cost benefit there almost would have had you in the street with, like, a protest sign like mother should get paid.

Becca:
[40:56] 100% and I also babysat three year old triplets when I was in junior high.

Taylor:
[41:00] That insane. You could not pay me to do that now.

Becca:
[41:06] No, you couldn’t know. That’s for sure.

Maggie:
[41:10] I just remembered a fun fact that you guys will appreciate about my first job, which will make you retract your previous statement. The entirety of the time that I worked that job I had given them the wrong Social Security number on accident, and they never checked it so I was paying taxes for someone else, presumably because, or whatever. I think I looked it up in like, that Social Security number just actually doesn’t exist, but I worked for many years with not a real Social Security number. And I never… They told me they were like, you need to write a letter to the IRS and like, correct the situation, and I was, like, 18, and I was like, fucking no. I’m never fixing that.

Taylor:
[41:43] You can cheat the system. Y’all This is a perfect example of liberals taking advantage of the system.

Maggie:
[41:55] So I under the table cleaned up shit for, like 3 years.

Becca:
[42:03] Taylor, what was your first dollar?

Taylor:
[42:05] My first dollar was also baby sitting when I lived in Belgium for three years, I babysat with two other girls. We made little flyers. We posted them up all over the schools and we had a little tear aways where you could call us, and I think we even had a name. I think we came up with, like, a baby sitting trio name and yeah, like a ton of people called us. We were, like, pretty good. Like, I felt like we had a little business going for a while. I don’t remember what we charged, though. I think it was like €10 an hour or something for all three of us. It was super cheap, but I think the added benefit was like even though we were, you know, 11 and 12, there was three of us, so it’s like, yeah, at least there’s three of them, right?

Becca:
[42:48] If a couple get taken.

Taylor:
[42:51] But it was really cool, though, because I went to international school, and there were a lot of, you know, ambassadors and people that went to school with us, and so we stayed in some really awesome houses, and we just like watch TV and, like, hang out in these rich people’s houses and felt very cool. But yeah, that was the I remember watching Butch Cassidy, The Sundance Kid and one of like they had the DVD of it, and that was the first time I watched that movie and it’s still great movie, but I have a very distinct memory of watching that when I should have been baby sitting.

Maggie:
[43:24] That sounds rad.

Taylor:
[43:25] Yeah, it was good times. Good times.

Becca:
[43:28] Julie, will you tell us about your financial situation?

Jewels:
[43:30] So I needed No, I needed that little break to try to figure out where I was at on that.

Taylor:
[43:31] She’s a she’s trying to avoid the question.

Jewels:
[43:37] So right now I’m feeling better about mine and my husband’s financial situation than we felt about it probably in five years so we managed to rack up quite a lot of credit card debt at a certain point a few years ago, and it got to the point where it was just so much that even just holding the monthly minimums was probably more than most people’s mortgage payments and luckily, we’re both relatively high income earners, but it’s just so so hard to dig yourself out of that. So we finally sort of hit that acceleration point where almost all the credit card debt is gone, we have no interest bearing credit card debt left. The last bit we have left is on 0% so that will all get paid off this next year as they come due and I think as of this month’s spreadsheet we have about, I think we’re only, like, $5000 short of having all the cash already set aside to pay all of the credit card debt that’s there.

Becca:
[44:40] Amazing.

Taylor:
[44:41] Truly insane. Considering like you, how… At what point did you sit dow and you’re like, “Okay, we need to do something about this,” and actually made a plan to the point where you’re like at now?

Maggie:
[44:54] I just want to say that I imagine that conversation just being both of them sitting next to each other just be like, “AHHHH!”

Jewels:
[45:05] Part of the reason it got that bad was by not having the conversation when it was happening, because we both knew it was happening and we didn’t want to have the conversation so we didn’t change our behavior fast enough. And then some of the income dropped there for a bit because of some career changes that we were going through and so then it was just like, hold on, and we’ve got enough going on. We don’t want to talk about it. And it took, like, the finances, like the income side just improving so much that all of a sudden we thought there was, like, hope on the horizon and that was last year sometime. So we started having those conversations started just funneling more cash to paying that off and then we didn’t really start REALLY START watching our finances and tracking everything until earlier this year.

Becca:
[45:55] That’s wild.

Taylor:
[45:57] That is crazy that you were able to do that in less than a year.

Jewels:
[46:01] It was more than a year, but for the last, like once, it had already started, but like how how quickly it accelerated the last, like 5 to 7 months is crazy, and then looking at it makes sense because if we were paying that much and minimums before, just be able to funnel that straight into principle and not minimums dropped the credit card debt a lot. So I’m very excited because my and my husband’s big goal the next five years is to really secure, like a four or five property investment portfolio, that we’re then going to develop in the future so hopefully have, like two properties on each one. 2 units on each property, and then that will basically be our retirement. So we want to secure that now while we have these high income years. It’s a little tricky for us with financing because we’re both self employed, but I think we’ll be able to manage it, and just having that done will feel so good.
So then we can just focus on keeping that going. That’s where we are at, and it finally seems possible. There’s another little disaster that sort of looming in the background that has to with taxes. Should I get into it?

Becca:
[47:12] Yeah, people the people want to know.

Maggie:
[47:13] People want to know about tax disasters for sure.

Jewels:
[47:14] So when you are self employed, you pay twice the amount of, well you pay self employment taxes…

Taylor:
[47:17] Everyone wants to know about.

Jewels:
[47:28] So it’s ah it’s a bit of extra tax on top of the income tax, and we got quite behind on those for a few years. Initially of our own fault because the credit card minimums were so high that we weren’t putting aside our money for taxes, but then also, our accountant, went through a divorce and then got flooded in Harvey and then, oh, the pandemic happened too and I think there was something else in there that happened to her that I can’t even remember and so she also just stopped getting to our stuff, and we kind of let that slide for a few years because we knew we didn’t have the money to pay for it. And so now we are so close to getting that remedied, but she’s having to fit, like doing four or five years of our taxes in with all of the rest of her clients. So once that’s done…

Becca:
[48:22] How does she tell you every year, like, “hey, I still didn’t do it.”

Maggie:
[48:28] Still still haven’t done it guys.

Taylor:
[48:31] I’m going through a really bad break up and I just can’t get… I can’t even look at your taxes. It’s just too depressing.

Jewels:
[48:36] Uh, yeah. Luckily, I’m not the one who corresponds with the account so that’s all Zach. I actually blame him a little on this front.

Jewels:
[48:47] In his effort to protect me from the stress of things, he just sometimes lets things slide and doesn’t tell me. Don’t worry we filed extensions.

Maggie:
[48:47] No, baby, we don’t pay taxes. Don’t worry about it.

Becca:
[48:57] We’re too rich.

Jewels:
[49:03] So, yes, I’m very excited. Big win this year is that we have already set aside all of our taxes for 2020 which is it’s a big win. It’s a big win.

Becca:
[49:11] That’s amazing.

Jewels:
[49:14] It is really sad to log into your bank account, though, and be like, oh, the biggest account in my bank, like I have the personal and the business accounts, and the one with the most cash, of course, is the one reserved for the government.

Maggie:
[49:28] I feel like that takes a significant amount of discipline. Like, I feel very lucky in that I have a W2 paying job and my taxes just automatically done because otherwise, if I saw that amount of money would be like let’s fucking spend it, I don’t know. Yeah, exactly.

Taylor:
[49:40] I’m still pretending that I don’t have to pay taxes next year on my freelance work. Can I get your financial advisor who just doesn’t do them, and then I could blame it on her. Oh, I can be like, it was just crazy. She’s not doing it.

Maggie:
[49:48] Learn from Julie, you do.

Jewels:
[49:49] We need to sit down. We definitely need to sit down and make a spreadsheet for you to get an idea of what it might be.

Taylor:
[50:01] That is that is step number one is to just figure out how much I’m even gonna owe because I’ve been too scared to even think about it.

Jewels:
[50:11] Learn from my mistakes.

Taylor:
[50:14] So I just started this, you know, doing design work as UX designer and it’s like, oh, it’s great money, look at all this money I have. And then I’m like, Okay, I’m gonna pay off my credit cards with it, and, uh, then I’m like, oh, but I have to pay taxes on all of this so really, it’s not as much as I think it is.

Becca:
[50:33] Yeah, but you write all that stuff off. Your new computer that you have to use for work.

Taylor:
[50:38] I know, but then I have to sit down and, like, go through every single thing I spend money on, which sounds just absolutely terrible.

Jewels:
[50:46] Your Money or Your Life.

Taylor:
[50:47] Uh, can it be my life? Can I just kill myself?

Jewels:
[50:51] It is your life. I know you haven’t read the book yet. That’s the punch line. It is your life.

Taylor:
[50:54] I listen, I listen to a one, our podcast about it. I’ve got the gist. Um, yeah. That is something that is on my to do list for this year is to actually figure out how much I’m gonna owe next year.

Maggie:
[51:12] I really thought you were going to say, read Your Money or Your Life. I was like, yeah, I’m sure you’ll get to it by January.

Taylor:
[51:16] No.You know what? I think it’s a great book. I’m probably never going to read it. I did buy the audiobook, though for A Simple Path to Wealth because I thought that was the book we were supposed to read.

Jewels:
[51:29] Just in case you’re wondering, you have exactly 60 days left in the year.

Taylor:
[51:37] God damn it. How is this happening?

Becca:
[51:40] I gotta learn how to do business… We need to talk about business taxes. I still don’t know how to do them.

Jewels:
[51:43] Think we’re going to just have a little weekend party. Saturday tax session.

Maggie:
[51:46] We could do a whole podcast about it, even though I don’t know much about it I would love to learn what you guys research.

Jewels:
[51:50] No, no, no. We’re definitely gonna have an expert on to talk about it. It’s not gonna be me.

Becca:
[51:56] We’re just going to all describe what we’ve done.

Taylor:
[51:57] What are taxes? Who knows?

Maggie:
[52:00] We’re just straight up reading off of Wikipedia. Well, it says here…

Jewels:
[52:00] Let me tell you the one thing not to do.

Taylor:
[52:06] Ooh, there should be like a taxipedia.

Jewels:
[52:10] Do not buy business stuff with your personal account. Do not buy personal stuff with your business account. Okay, Maggie.

Maggie:
[52:17] Yeah, I’ve been pondering, like, how to tell my story this whole time, and I’m not entirely sure. I got, ah, reasonable job at some point in my life that I had worked really hard to get, and then I worked that job 80 to 90 hours a week, and it was very hard and stressful and emotionally draining, and I did that for about 2.5 years and then decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore. So I had, I don’t know, maybe 15 to $20,000 that I had saved from my job, and then I quit and I took a year off and I was homeless, and I traveled Europe and I traveled Asia, and I didn’t care about money and I had a great time. And then I came home still homeless, back to my hometown, I guess, and was like, “man, I am never get a job again. This has been great. This has been such a good time. Screw it.” I tried really hard to do that and didn’t succeed with the no job plan.

Becca:
[53:21] It’s a hard plan.

Taylor:
[53:22] You can figure that out.

Jewels:
[53:24] You managed it for a while.

Maggie:
[53:26] I did manage for quite a while, I was crashing on friend’s couches and dog sitting. I guess I’d have no job. I was like, pet sitting, and I think I ubered, like, maybe one or two times just to see what that was like. And I was like, I don’t like talking to people this much, which is why I’m on this podcast. Um, uber I was, like, driving around.

Taylor:
[53:45] Oh, yeah. No, I would I would rather light my car on fire than drive for uber.

Maggie:
[53:47] Yeah, I didn’t like it. So, like, with the culmination of all of that, I had this thought where it was like, it was inevitable that I had had to go back to work and then I got thinking really hard, like, oh, if I have to go back to work, I’m just going to get in this cycle where I work for two or three years and then get burnt out and then take a year off and blow all my money, and then start back at zero over and over and over again, endless cycle for the rest of my life, and I don’t want to do that anymore. So I started researching about finances and reading about how to get out of that pattern. And then I started work again and I don’t work 90 hour weeks anymore and just sort of enjoyed my job a lot more, which makes having a job a lot better. And since then I’ve been saving money and my good friends sitting on the couch over there, Julie, reminded me that when you have a well paying job and a W2, that’s a good time to invest in property and investing in property is a good way to get out of the cycle I was trying to break. So I bought a house and sort of before even knew what the term house hacking was, house hacked it and live in the back. And most of my mortgage is paid for by my tenants, and now I just sort of ride that wave.
And as far as my goals go, is to, I guess make that wave as big as possible so that I can just travel the world for the rest of my life and not have to go back into the cycle of working and quitting and working quitting. But I definitely had some huge credit card debt at some point culminated in my year and a half of homelessness and…

Jewels:
[55:36] World travel.

Maggie:
[55:38] Yeah, and then once I started get caught up on my credit card debt is when I bought the house. And then I went back into credit card debt. Sort of. Because of that, I did a big remodel, which I didn’t have the cash to do, so I did it on credit, which don’t do that, but I did that. I actually just got out of credit card debt last month, actually, and now I’m saving. I don’t think you told us your net worth, Julie, but mine, if you calculate in my house mortgage have negative $200,000 in network.

Becca:
[56:17] I don’t think we are counting the house mortgage.

Jewels:
[56:19] Does that include the equity?

Maggie:
[56:21] That includes equity back in. Yeah. So you don’t account for my house at all? Probably closer to $80,000.

Jewels:
[56:33] So I think because I’ve had my house longer mine’s actually not too bad. Keep talking for a minute I’m gonna find it.

Maggie:
[56:42] Oh, yeah. So I accidentally house hacked, which was great, but it was just because I realized I couldn’t afford the mortgage without doing that, and then there’s, ah, real estate thing you could do called BRRR, which Julie will have to help me. It’s buy, remodel, rent, refinance and repeat.

Becca:
[57:07] It’s so it’s BRRRR.

Maggie:
[57:07] I haven’t done the last are just yet, but I also, without having any real estate knowledge, sort of accidentally just did that on my house because the house was so bad it had to be remodeled, and then I couldn’t afford it, so I had to rent it, and then, uh, my mortgage is still really high, so I had to refinance it. I, like, just sort of stumbled into that fun little trick of a real estate game by necessity.

Jewels:
[57:41] I’m going to need to recheck my spreadsheet, but I think that my net worth, including the equity we have in our house, is actually negative 15,000.

Maggie:
[57:49] What? That’s amazing.

Jewels:
[57:51] But this will change dramatically when the tax bill comes due because we’re gonna pay that out of refinancing our house. So I’m going to take some of the equity out of the house to clear all of the tax debt. I will lose some of that, but still to have enough equity to clear the credit card debt or the tax debt makes me very happy.

Becca:
[58:14] What did it? What’s that one’s birth control? Look, I don’t want to push this too hard, I just feel weird that I shared.

Taylor:
[58:22] On a related note. We gotta get to the vag part of Vaginance. True. We do have to talk about our vaginas. It is required. Our biggest moneymaker. If we’re being honest. I also have an IUD, which I don’t know when I got it put in, I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure it was…

Maggie:
[58:51] That’s a fucking blessing. I’ve heard that’s very traumatic.

Taylor:
[58:53] Uh it is. I do remember being very painful. I think it was… No, now I’m starting to remember that I’m talking about it.

Jewels:
[58:56] She blocked it out. That’s why she doesn’t remember the exact.

Taylor:
[59:02] It was about two years ago. I’m getting a flashback is about two years ago, I remember waking up in the middle of the night just like sobbing uncontrollably.

Maggie:
[59:03] Like PTSD.

Taylor:
[59:13] But it wasn’t like I didn’t want to cry, you know, I was trying to fight it, but I was just in so much pain. It felt like someone was literally stabbing me from the inside. That I was and then I was like, “why? Why should we put our, you know, like, why should we have to put our bodies through this is bullshit. Kind of.”

Jewels:
[59:32] It’s a great question.

Taylor:
[59:32] Yeah. Yeah. We’re the ones that are concerned about the children and not having them.

Jewels:
[59:39] Copper or hormonal.

Taylor:
[59:39] Men don’t seem to be too concerned. I have copper because hormonal I don’t like putting hormones in my body. It just fucks with me even more. And I just can’t control like how they’re going to affect me. Since then, it’s been fine. Like, I mean, I have heavy, heavier periods now, but it’s, and I have cramps now, which I never had is when I was younger but you know, as far as like horror stories go, it’s not as bad as other people’s. It’s pretty standard. Middle of the road IUD experience.

Jewels:
[1:00:18] I also have a copper IUD, which I landed on after three terrible years on Depo, which started out great because you know any of my ladies out there with the terrible, terrible periods, the only thing we dream of is for them to not exist.

Taylor:
[1:00:35] Depo, is that the shot? OK, I’ve heard it.

Jewels:
[1:00:36] And so I got on that. That’s the shot. So, like, every three months and unfortunately, I didn’t realize the side effects like it was a slow onset and then it came on so fast that I didn’t realize that’s what it was and so I spent three years on Depot. I had exceptional weight gain, like I think between like, month 6 and month 18 I put on almost like 90lbs and then also crazy depression that I didn’t realize I had until I had gone off of Depo. Terrible, terrible time for my husband. So I went to the copper IUD because of the hormones and unfortunately, mine is also probably do because I think it’s been about 10 years. So I also gonna have to have that lovely appointment Becca is not looking forward to next week.

Taylor:
[1:01:32] I could take both of y’all do a little duel IUD appointment.

Jewels:
[1:01:39] I just keep checking the studies to be like, can I keep it for 12 years?

Taylor:
[1:01:39] I also. You know scientific research has come out and it’s actually a little longer.

Maggie:
[1:01:50] My method of birth control is not sleeping with men.

Taylor:
[1:01:53] That is the best method.

Maggie:
[1:01:54] It really is, I don’t have. There’s no I was about to say there’s no hormones involved. There’s a lot of hormones involved.

Jewels:
[1:01:59] They’re just not necessarily yours.

Maggie:
[1:02:03] Uh, there’s no orally or injection hormones involved, which is nice. No, in plantations, which is nice.

Becca:
[1:02:09] There’s no uterine implantation.

Maggie:
[1:02:14] There’s a lot of monetary benefits to not having to pay for birth control.

Taylor:
[1:02:21] I will say it’s interesting. All of us don’t have Children so that is that is a big difference in our finances, but hopefully, some of the advice are the things we learn will still translate, no matter what your budget is or what your income is. One of the biggest things I realized kind of recently, which we’ve been talking about with these meetings we’ve been having, but just the kind of mindset of and I messaged y’all about this earlier last week. But the mindset of, like labor versus owning like capital, and I never thought about it that way before when it came to earning money. I feel like so much us just live in the society where we’re told to work, and that’s how you earn all your money is working and you’re labor. Your time for your labor. Which, when you actually look at the people that make the most money in our culture and around the world, that is not the case. They do not make most of their money through their labor. 90% of their income is coming from investments or capital owning businesses like those types of ventures, which, if you really think about that, like the way that we’ve been taught, to just work, work, work, work and then, you know, maybe you’ll be worth something is totally backwards. And it almost feels like a lie that they’re feeding us because they just want people. They don’t want people to know that there’s other ways to earn money and in The Simple Path to Wealth they talk about how they, uh, how they make it needlessly complicated to learn investing and thats designed that way on purpose, like it’s not that it’s actually complicated they’re they’re making it and they’re building the rules to appear complicated, too kind of prevent 90% of the people from even bothering to get involved. So to me, that’s just telling like there is this other way that is so much I don’t want a easier, but it just like so obvious and most of us kind of ignore it, because we we just, like, grow up assuming like, oh, that’s for smart people to figure out like we can’t figure that out. That’s like the Wall Street guys or that’s like for businessmen to worry about her to work on but we could totally do that. Anyone could do that. We’re all. If you have even a little bit of money, you can invest it. And you can look at other paths to wealth other than just working your ass off and then dying.

Maggie:
[1:04:54] Yeah. No, I don’t want to do that. That’s the whole point.

Taylor:
[1:04:55] Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Especially, as women like we do not… We’re not valued for our financial prowess.

Jewels:
[1:04:57] Don’t have the energy for it.

Taylor:
[1:05:09] Just our vaginas.

Becca:
[1:05:12] Just our vaginas.

Maggie:
[1:05:14] I guess I’ve seen in my lifetime as well, a lot of very, very hard working people who weren’t very educated on finance and I feel like deserve is maybe not the right word, but don’t deserve to be where they are now where they’re, like, still working, still don’t know how they’re going to retire and they’ve been working so hard this whole time just because they didn’t know.

Taylor:
[1:05:42] And that’s the lie right that we all believe is hardworking equates to more money and that’s not true. I always thought that that was the same thing. Especially when it comes to like, you know, financial independence and financial intelligence. Like knowing how to you know budget your balance and finances, I thought that hard work, being hardworking, equated to just naturally understanding more about money, and that is completely false. They’re completely different things. You could be extremely hard working and not know any. I have three jobs right now, and I don’t even have health insurance. You know what I mean? Like, I worked my ass off, and I don’t even have… I’m not… the way our system is set up right now I’m not qualified or I’m not good enough to have health insurance cause I don’t have the right kind of job. And also, I have crippling debt because I don’t know how to budget my finances even though I’m bringing in a decent amount of money. That’s what we’re trying to figure out how to get our shit together.

Maggie:
[1:06:39] How to work less, but make more.

Taylor:
[1:06:40] Work less, make more.

Becca:
[1:06:43] Put out cash in.

Taylor:
[1:06:45] Put out cash in.

Jewels:
[1:06:48] Did have some notes on that from last time, was it? Oh, it was literal that why put out when you can cash in?

Taylor:
[1:06:52] Yep. There you go, ladies.

Jewels:
[1:06:56] Dil do’s and dil don’t.

Taylor:
[1:06:59] We’re gonna make this as sexual as possible.

Maggie:
[1:07:00] Dill DO invest. Dil DO NOT work too hard.

Taylor:
[1:07:08] Dil do not?

Becca:
[1:07:10] Dil do not.