For most people, their home is their most significant investment. As such, you not only want to protect your investment but increasing a property's value is important too. The right home improvements can do it.  Doubling your property’s value might be a little too ambitious for anyone who isn’t a professional real estate flipper or property developer, but some money spent in the right places will improve your property’s value.

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Show Notes

Oak and Orchard :A sour from Epic Brewing.

Hammertime Porter: A name Andrew and Matt made up in the absence of the actual name!

Simple Wealth:A tool Andrew built to help compare rental properties. 

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The whole reason LMM started was to give as many people as we could reach free financial help. And in the past seven years, we’ve done that. We know because we get emails daily from people telling us that the show has helped them.

We have dozens of shows and hundreds of articles that give free financial help to anyone who finds us. But not everyone can find us. There are millions of people who have no idea what a podcast even is.

And because LMM is a podcast and a website, we are naturally limited to what we can do to help people. Most of what say and write is broad and general, meant to help the most people possible. For those with specific circumstances, it can be hard to translate our general advice into actionable advice.

Some people are so lacking in personal finance education that even the material we create, especially for beginners is beyond them. And our content is only available in English which not everyone speaks or reads. Some people can absorb information through reading or listening, but not everyone learns the same way. Some people need intensive, tailored, one on one help.

We want to help everyone possible but can’t do it alone. But you can get free financial help, one on one support right in your community.

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Show Notes

KBS: A barrel aged stout

Space Clouds: An American wild ale.

Urbanupbound.org: Get or give free financial help.

[email protected]: How to reach our guest

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If you are interested in personal finance, you’ve probably heard the term timing the market. There is some debate about whether market timing is a good investment strategy or something impossible, or nearly impossible to do. You probably can't time the market. Unless you’re Warren Buffett which you are not.

Even if you’re just a casual observer of economic news, you hear a lot of questions about what’s happening with the stock market or the housing market. These questions create a lot of speculation, but what should the average investor which most of us are, should be doing with our investments based on all of this speculation and crystal ball gazing?

By not timing the market are we losing out on price movements that could net us significant market returns? If we’re on the brink of another Great Recession does the buy and hold strategy that LMM has been preaching from the beginning still stand? Should we stick to our index fund or should we all become day traders? It’s enough to make even the soberest long-term investors second guess themselves.

We’ve attempted to address some of these issues with our Golden Butterfly, Recession Fire Drill and Investing in the Age of Anxiety episodes. But those episodes have generated some additional questions from listeners about investment decisions and timing the market. We’ll tackle those questions for you.

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Show Notes

Alien Church: A New England style IPA.

Cheap Cologne: Matt's own Kolsch.

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If you run your own business, you go to great lengths to make sure that your business is a profitable one. Both Andrew and Matt run their own businesses. They regularly go over their accounting to see if the businesses are spending too much money and if they are, where? Do the profit margins need to be increased? How much money is being held in reserve in case of a period of lower cash flow?

But how many of us do these things and ask these questions when it comes to our personal finances? We watch every penny going into and out of the business’s bank accounts but we’re much more cavalier about our personal bank accounts. It’s the weird dichotomy where we will sometimes say mean or rude things to friends or loved ones that we wouldn’t dream of saying to a stranger.

Perhaps it’s because it’s easier to be objective about our business than our personal life. Ever how much you consider your business to be your baby, a part of you, it’s not you. Your life, which your personal finances are a big part of, is you. Your business is a thing but you’re a person and people have desires. You’ve never treated your business to a new pair of shoes or an expensive dinner out. How about yourself? Exactly!

The question we’re asking is if you looked at your personal finances as if you were running a business, would you still be in business? You already run a profitable business, let’s focus on becoming a profitable person.

There are seven principles to becoming a profitable person. We’ll explain each one.

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Show Notes

Ten Fiddy Barrel-aged Imperial Stout

Tor Triple Black IPA from Norway Black Ball or Bale

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Some people who are hesitant to invest in the stock market are willing to invest in gold. Why? Gold is tangible, you can see it, hold it, and keep it right in your own house (or bunker). You can buy it from some guy in a late night infomercial. You can buy it with images of the fallen Twin Towers on it. Or an American eagle.

You can’t say any of that about investing in the stock market! When you own stock, you don’t own a tangible thing. You have to deal with some slick stockbroker if you want to buy and sell it (you don’t). And stocks don’t come in a limited edition collector’s box.

LMM hasn’t discussed gold very much in the past and like a lot of you, thought it was something only Doomsday preppers were interested in so not really relevant to us or our audience. But while doing research for the Golden Butterfly episode, we learned some legitimate reasons for investing in gold and none of them are related to the zombie apocalypse that is surely coming.

Many of our listeners wanted to know more about it too, why and how to invest in gold. We got a lot of emails asking questions. You asked and we answered. This is all things gold.

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Show Notes

Northwestern University CFP Program - Prepare for a career as a financial planner 

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We know that none of you likes to think about death, but it’s inevitable, and you have no idea when.

For the majority of us, the most important thing in our life is the well being of our family. We work hard for them; we take care of them. But how can you do that when you’re no longer here? By establishing a trust fund and a will.

Don’t wait; there’s no reason to. You can finish reading this, spend a few minutes and a few hundred dollars and make sure your family is taken care of. Because what else is there?

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Show Notes

18 Watt Session IPA: An IPA from SingleCut.

Fruh Kolsch: A German-style beer

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We love getting listener questions and we’ve had a lot recently so it’s time for 5 awesome questions from you. We’ll cover bond ETFs, the books we love, transitioning investments, long term investing, and retirement planning.

Thanks, Everyone!

We really appreciate your questions. After nearly seven years of episodes, we sometimes feel like we've covered everything but you all always throw something new at us. And if you're wondering about it, lots of other listeners are too. That's why we do these 5 questions episodes, so we can address your questions to a wider audience. Keep them coming!

Show Notes

Little Sal: A sour aged with blueberries.

Fruh Kolsch:A fermented beer.

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Fear and anxiety are two different things. Some of us fear investing because we don’t know how to invest and that’s understandable. Investing can be intimidating. It has a language all its own which seems foreign to beginners.

There are plenty of people who have a vested interest in making it seem more complicated than it is. If you don’t think you can possibly understand how investing works and how to invest successfully, you are more willing to pay someone else to do it for you.

And perhaps the reason we fear investing most, it’s our money on the line. If you get it completely wrong, you can lose money, a lot of it. People who are anxious about investing don’t necessarily fear it. They speak the language, they’ve educated themselves on how to invest well, and they understand that while you can lose money, over the long haul, you make money when you invest.

The anxiety is tied to the things going on around us that we can’t control. A recession is coming and probably sooner rather than later. Many investors in their 30s and 40s remember the impact of the last big recession all too well. Jobs lost, homes lost, retirement savings decimated.

Automation is going to eliminate not only jobs but entire industries. And wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. When you put all of these things in a big pile, well, you can see why people might feel anxious.

But we have to overcome our anxieties just as we have to overcome our fears. Investing in the age of anxiety is tough, but we can do it.

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Show Notes

Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout: Aged in Bourbon barrels

Aun Mas Cafe Jesus: Evil Twin Brewing

Broke Millennial: Where you can find all things, Erin

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Marie Kondo and her brand of decluttering and organizing are everywhere right now so we thought we’d hop on the bandwagon. And it’s not really much of a stretch. Our finances can become as cluttered and chaotic as our homes.

But the consequences of disorganized finances can be much worse than those of a disorganized house (unless we’re talking Hoarders level of disorganized). When your finances are a mess, it can cost you money. Late fees, returned payment fees, deposits for utilities.

Organizing your home and your finances have another thing in common. Neither is a one time job. If you let it go for too long, the job becomes completely overwhelming. But if you just do a few little things every so often, a big job just becomes a series of small tasks many of which can be taken care of in just a few minutes.

Get ready to Marie Kondo your finances so they spark joy!

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Show Notes

Goose Island Bourbon Stout

Oak Aged Stout Vanilla Dogfish Head

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If you’ve ever heard of using your whole life insurance policy (whole life as opposed to term life insurance) like a savings account to borrow against for personal use, then you’ve heard of the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) - whether you realized it or not.

The idea behind it advocates becoming your own bank by leveraging your whole life policy for easy access to cash while sidestepping high-interest payments from lenders in the form of loans.

The main point of the IBC is that you lose money to creditors on the various loans you take out over your life. Things like:MortgagesCar loansCredit cardsCollege loansAll of the above examples will deplete your wealth over your lifetime in the form of interest payments.

What the IBC advocates is by aggressively saving your money in whole life insurance, you could use that money to fund big-ticket items like a house or college tuition with your policy and not lose money to interest payments. It’s like an interest-free loan.

In essence ~ Be your own bank.

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Show Notes

https://www.ommegang.com/beers/game-of-thrones/

https://infinitebanking.org/about/

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/a-twist-on-whole-life-insurance/

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/debunking-the-myths-of-whole-life-insurance/

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wholelife.asp

https://www.insuranceandestates.com/pros-and-cons-of-the-infinite-banking-concept/

https://www.m1finance.com/

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