Announcer (00:00):

You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern. To decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now.

Dave (00:36):

All right, folks, we’ll welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 152 tonight we have a special guest with us. We have Andy Schuler with us tonight. Andy is a regular contributor to Andrew’s blog, einvesting for beginners. Andy has a lot of great articles on there, some fantastic ones that we’re going to talk a little bit about some of those tonight. So, Andrew, would you like to say hi to everybody?

Andrew (00:58):

Andrew or Andy? I mean, I guess we could go by both, right? We can go by with, Oh, welcome on Andy. I did want to ask you’ve had some great posts lately. Something that clicks with my passions. And it kind of relates not just to personal finances or investing but to a lot of different endeavors. And that’s this idea of the importance of tracking. So talk about that for a little bit and tell us your thoughts and why you’re so adamant about tracking things.

Andy (01:30):

Yeah. So tracking is, I think honestly, it’s the best way you’re probably ever going to get results just in anything. I’m a very firm believer in smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and sensitive. Like, and I feel like the tracking portion of actually being able to fact check how you’re doing and see your progress is the best way for you ever to make any sort of improvements in what you’re doing. So, I mean, my, I’ll say my, my introduction came to it actually when I was a kid. My dad got me an Excel at a very, very young age track and baseball stats or attracted strikeouts and singles RBIs, you know, just any, any stats that I could and just try to figure out, you know, it was more or less just for me just to see how I was doing. I could see how I did from one game to the next or at the beginning of the season to the end of the season.

Andy (02:32):

And I just liked identifying trends, and I think it picked out for me when when I was in college or ballooned to a pretty, pretty high weight in college. So I know a lot of people talk about the freshmen 15 I think I had like the freshmen 50, I don’t know if it was quite that high, but I mean it was, it was pretty obnoxious. So like if, if you’re ever looking for how to lose weight, I guarantee I can find your information that says one thing is good and doing that same thing is also bad. So I felt like the only way for me ever truly to find out what would be to track. So I mean, I would track my food and Excel.