Shinobu Hindert (02:24):

So when I went to college and I was studying economics, I’m like, well, how do you work with economics when you graduate? And I was kind of looking around like, I don’t know where I fit into the corporate world and got an internship at Smith Barney, which is now Morgan Stanley. And I loved it. I thought it was really cool. Every day was different. I actually worked for a commodities desk at a time. So I was taking orders from them and we’d get these certificates that smelled like coffee because it was from a coffee guy. And I just thought it was really interesting because even though my dad was careful in teaching me and my mom about money, I didn’t know anything about investing. So it was kind of this whole other world to me. And I was sitting there going, wait a minute, you can kind of figure out all of these things and to build wealth and do it on your own. And I just was drawn into it right away.

Shinobu Hindert (03:15):

So that’s really what got me started in the industry. And really from there, it just felt like… To be honest with you, I think I made a lot of those decisions out of fear of if I do lose my parents or what if I am in a tight crunch, am I going to be able to figure out how to get out of it? I think that kind of survival attitude that my dad had, he really passed it on to me. And I just wanted to be set for my life financially in the event of this disaster that my dad kind of had put in my mind was going to happen at any time.

Robert Leonard (03:50):

After leaving Smith Barney, you went to Fidelity. You had a very successful career as a financial advisor. What made you want to leave that successful career that you had built to branch out on your own?

Shinobu Hindert (04:02):

It wasn’t really my first choice to be completely honest. I had become a mother at the time and my husband was working a full workday schedule and I was traveling at least one week out of every month. And when we looked at getting care, essentially for my son, it was kind of ridiculous, where we were going to need to have someone come at 6:00 AM or 06:30, and then have someone there afterwards. You’re talking about a 14-hour day and it just didn’t feel good. So I was working, I tried it for, I think maybe about four months, and it just wasn’t working for our family. So I didn’t want to stop working, but when I looked at jobs that I could do part-time with companies, with my background as a certified financial planner, there really weren’t a lot of options. So I kind of did this because I needed to make this work for my life.

Shinobu Hindert (04:54):

And when I had stopped working, my phone blew up. I had friends from all over because I had grown up in the east coast, moved to the west coast and people knew I stopped working and they were just asking me personal questions about finances like, “Hey, I’m trying to buy this house. And this guy’s telling me this. Could you take a look at something for me? And I know you used to invest, what should I be investing in?” Just a lot of these questions were coming up. I was having these really fun conversations, well, fun for me. And then they would leave the conversation going, “Hey, where can I get more information about this?” And I would search around online and try to send them some articles.

Shinobu Hindert (05:29):

But I really looked at this like, gosh, this is kind of difficult because you’re asking people to do a ton of independent research, put the pieces together, and make decisions about their life. So that was really the genesis of my company. I wanted to provide step-by-step guidance and doing it in a way for people to take action and not just talk about theoretically, what a situation would look like.

Robert Leonard (05:51):

And one of those ways you’re doing that was through your book that you’ve written. And I want to talk about kind of your mindset and thought process on that book. And I don’t mean this in a way that it shouldn’t have been written or anything like that, but I just want to know how you approached it and how you were able to do something that people were already doing. And I think that’s helpful for people listening because a lot of times people aren’t willing to try something because they’re like, oh, 10 people are already doing it. There are already companies doing that. Maybe I shouldn’t do it too. So there were already a bunch of personal finance books written. So I want to know what made you want to write another one about money. Like when you sat down to write it, what was your guide to making it different from the rest?

Shinobu Hindert (06:32):

My guide was really taking clients that I was working with and trying to talk directly to them because that was the biggest hiccup when I’m talking about investing, I can go really, really deep and start talking about the economic cycle, talking about how to adjust your portfolio. But if I’m having a conversation with someone that’s like, I don’t know where to open a brokerage account or what company is good, there are these small steps that people really need guidance on so they can take action. And when I started in this industry, there were high minimums to open an account. There were fees to open an account. There were fees for trading. The industry has completely shifted over the last few years, but they haven’t provided levels of education to inform everybody of how to do that, which is really why Robinhood got into a lot of trouble because they’re providing the platform, providing easy access without the oversight, without the education. And then people were inadvertently making decisions that weren’t healthy for them financially.

Shinobu Hindert (07:30):

So the genesis of the book was really if I’m tasking someone and it’s really important to me that everyone gets invested, that people are leveraging the stock market to better their financial future, well, how are they going to do that? And I just really went from step one, what is the first thing they should be looking at all the way to, by the end of the book, they’re invested, their investments are automated, they know how to check up on them. And that’s really how I went about the book. So there’s definitely a lot of financial books out there. And I have not read all of them, but perusing some of the ones that I really liked, I thought they had great information, but not always a specific action step to take. And that’s what I wanted to create in this book.

Robert Leonard (08:09):

One of the things you do is specifically focus on money and women, which isn’t necessarily your only focus, but I know it’s a big focus for you. So I want to talk a bit about how you’re seeing the relationship between money and women change over the last few years and how you expect that trend to continue to evolve into the future.

Shinobu Hindert (08:27):

Yeah, right now, at least in my age group, I would say professional women in their thirties are really curious because this is a confusing time. Let’s say you’re 60 or you’re 55 years old. Maybe your one financial goal is retiring. If you’re 21, you just graduated. You have a lot of colleges that may be your one financial goal is to try to chip away at the student loan debt that you have. When you get to your late twenties, early thirties, life gets complicated. It could be buying houses, having children, maternity leaves, all of that. And a lot of the women that I’m working with, they’re really hungry for the knowledge, and they just didn’t know how to get it. And they’re getting more comfortable about talking about money. It’s just been really, really taboo in the past.

Shinobu Hindert (09:11):

So it’s changed in the sense where I think in a public setting, women are asking questions about it and opening up saying, I don’t know this information. I want this information or asking for it. And then when you look on a bigger scale, you have the baby boomer generation where the industry at least is looking at this huge transfer of wealth that’s going to happen over the next 15 years with women owning more of the wealth potentially in this country than men. So a lot of eyeballs have been on this from big financial firms and it’s kind of trickling down to our generation.

Robert Leonard (09:44):

You mentioned Robinhood and that kind of goes in line with my next question and my next few thoughts. And that’s that I see too many new investors jumping right into the stock market since that is the “sexy” part of personal finance without ever having built the foundation first. I consider the first step of personal finance, the foundation, and then investing, being like building the house on top of that foundation. And if you don’t tackle the foundation first, there might not be one there at all causing the house or what we call your investments to collapse. And then if there is a foundation there, but you don’t know anything about it, that could also lead to a collapse. So where should new investors start with their money journey?

Shinobu Hindert (10:25):

Well, that’s tricky because I put on my financial advisor hat, essentially and I’m like, yes, build a foundation, have your emergency fund, kind of get your spending in order. But what happens when your everyday person goes to do that is then they don’t get to the investing part because we’re busy and they’re trying to tackle that. And it’s a lot of gathering information about your spending, where your accounts are, maybe where your debt is. And when most people do that, they then stop because it took them a week to gather all this information. They’re looking at it on a Saturday morning and they’re like, all right, I got this. I’m going to take some next steps next weekend. And then life happens, you forget, and you don’t have time to do it. And then three months go by and you’re back at the same thing where you’re gathering all of this data.

Shinobu Hindert (11:07):

So I would encourage people to, yes, look at getting invested and look at it more holistically. So if you are investing, I don’t mean buy one stock because you’re relying on one company. So essentially what if someone in that company is fabricating information, you don’t have control over that. If that gets blown up, I use the example of Volkswagen in my book, where they cheated on an emissions test to get it passed in the United States. Well, it didn’t matter if everyone else at Volkswagen was good or their earnings were good. You had someone that did something bad or illegal and their whole company stock price dropped.

Shinobu Hindert (11:48):

And then there’s industry risks. So we saw that with COVID. If you were a travel/leisure type company, it didn’t matter how healthy your company was on the books, everyone was terrified. Like we’re going to get out of selling out of airlines, out of hotels. And they took a really big dip in the beginning. And then you have your market risk. So, that’s going to be like the financial crisis. Everyone suffered. It didn’t matter if the company was good. That was pretty much a negative year for everyone except for government bonds.

Shinobu Hindert (12:12):

So when you take a look at risk, I would say when people are getting started, have an honest conversation with yourself about risk. Do you want to bet on one person at a company doing that, do you want to bet on one specific industry, or are you looking at investing holistically that’s going to work for you? So I’m a huge believer in making sure that your foundation is set, because like you said, then your whole plan could collapse. But on top of that, maybe even simultaneously looking at investing from a more holistic point of view and really figure out what kind of risk you’re comfortable taking.

Robert Leonard (12:46):

Well, we’re building that foundation. One of those pieces is a budget. So how can a budget allow people to actually live a better, happier lifestyle rather than making it feel constricted?

Shinobu Hindert (12:58):

That’s a great question because I talk about this all the time in my book, in my courses with clients of budgeting. I look at it like your lifestyle guide rather than this restrictive budget. And the reason is most of the goals that we have in life, there’s a financial element that we need there to back it up, whatever it is that we want to do. If you meet someone and they’re like, it’s my dream to take 12 months and just travel all around the world, well, you need money to do that. If you want to own two homes, so you can have a mountain house and then one where you have a reception and service, again, there’s financial backing that needs to go underneath that.

Shinobu Hindert (13:34):

So I look at it like jot down, what kind of life do you want to have? What do you want to have in your life? And it’s completely okay to change that. But once you start to do that, you can back into that and say, okay, if I want to take an international trip, for me, that’s really important. All of my family lives overseas. So I have to budget for those things. If I’m looking at it like, I can’t go spend whatever it is, oh, I can’t go buy this at the grocery store, oh, I can’t go out to dinner with my friends another time because I’m spending too much money, that’s a sad boo-hoo story, right? That’s not exciting for me.

Shinobu Hindert (14:06):

If I look at it like, if I can find a little bit more money at the end of every month so I can take my entire family to go on a safari in Kenya, that gets me excited. And when you look at that lifestyle, it’s like, okay, I’ll save for that. And I’m not going to look at it like, oh, I can’t go shopping or I can’t go get my hair done because I got to save it. I’m just going to sit at my house and be a hermit. It’s like, nope, we’re going to do these things because I want to create this lifestyle of memories for my family, memories for my kids. So I’m really looking at the budgeting, like finding out what your drivers are in life, what your passions are, and then building your finances behind that.

Robert Leonard (14:41):

Connecting those to the budget, to the lifestyle is where I think a lot of people have the disconnect because a lot of people I know, whether it be friends, family, that aren’t interested in money, that’s what they’ll tell me. It’s, they’re just not interested in money. They don’t care about money. And I’m not one to push financial education or push any financial beliefs on somebody else, but when it comes up, I say, well, okay, I understand you don’t care about money, you’re not interested in learning all the nitty-gritty about it. That’s fine. But don’t you have X, Y, and Z things that you want to do? Don’t you want to go to…even as small as going to this concert or traveling to this place? You need money to do all of those things. And so you might not care about money and you might not want to know the nitty-gritty. That’s fine. But to get to do the things that you want to do, you need to have some sort of financial education, financial plan.

Shinobu Hindert (15:28):

Yeah, absolutely, because money is never the goal, right? I don’t meet a lot of people that you’re talking to them, what are your goals? And they’re like, “I just want to have a lot of money.” Right? That doesn’t excite anybody. I work in this field and I talk about money all the time and the stock market. I don’t really care about money either. It’s not like I want to sit in my house and who is it, Scrooge McDuck, where he’s like diving into his piles of gold. That’s not what I want to do with my life. And I don’t meet a lot of people that are like that.

Shinobu Hindert (15:55):

When people only care about money, maybe they’re going to buy a bunch of computer screens, sit in their house all day and trade. Right? That might be someone who’s like, my goal is just to have more money. Most people that I’m working with or talking to aren’t sitting in their house, trying to trade, just to make money. They want to have this lifestyle that they appreciate. And so whatever that is, if it’s experiences…So I just try to tell people whatever life goal you have, there is a financial goal behind it. And we can kind of reverse engineer it to make sure you can do all of the things that you want to do. We just want to build around it.

Shinobu Hindert (16:30):

So what happens to, I think in this age demographic is we try to hone in on one thing. It’s like if someone’s trying to save to buy a home… And in Southern California, your first home might be 800,000, might be a million dollars. That’s crazy. A lot of places, your first home is $350,000, 400,000. So when you want to buy a home in Southern California, you can’t just sit and go, oh, I want to buy a home. And then that’s the only thing you focus on because, well, what about, do you want to go on vacation? What about all of these other things that are happening? And it gets confusing.

Shinobu Hindert (17:02):

So as much as people could really lay out their wishlist of all the things they want to happen between now and 10 years from now, once you have those on paper, well, now let’s create financial goals to back it up. And then over time you can kind of tweak. And oftentimes people will do that to say, okay, wait a minute. I got to save this much. I got to invest to earn this amount of money so I can buy this house that I might not even like, because I can only afford a $600,000 home somewhere in Southern California. I don’t really want to do that. They shift their roles. They’re like, maybe I’m going to move out of California in five years, but I’m going to be able to save X amount of money, take all these really awesome adventures. That’s worth it to me.

Shinobu Hindert (17:41):

So it’s not just an exercise of looking at money. It’s an exercise of what kind of life do you want to live? And we now have the tools, the power to do it because the industry has become so friendly to get rid of all these nasty minimums and fees. I felt like before anything you did, it’s like, I want to open an account, we slapped you in the face. Like, well, pay this fee. I want to buy a fund. It was like you’re punched in the face. Okay. Pay us this fee. It was just like all the time, we’re nickel and diming everyone. That doesn’t happen anymore. So everyone has access now.

Robert Leonard (18:10):

And I’m speaking of this from personal experience. When I first got started in money, I had a very fixed mindset when it came to this, I didn’t have that connection between lifestyle and budget. And I also didn’t realize that a budget could be dynamic and flexible. I always thought that a budget was rigid. And if you spent a dollar more in one category than you budgeted, then you were wrong for the month. And then something that was really influential for me was Ramit Sethi’s book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. And he talks a lot about this kind of dynamic budget and how you can spend lavishly on the things you love and cut mercilessly on the things you don’t. And so that was really influential for me and really allowed me to connect my budget to my lifestyle and also realize that a budget is dynamic.

Robert Leonard (18:51):

And you and I, before this conversation started recording, we talked about how I raced dirt bikes and for a lot of people, if they looked at my line item on my budget for dirt bikes, they would think that that was absurd, that I spend that much money on that. And it probably isn’t all reality, but on the reverse side, that’s something that I’m super passionate about. So I’m okay to spend my money there. But then on the reverse side, something that I couldn’t really care about, and that’s where I would cut is food. I want healthy food, but I don’t really like to go out to eat that much. So I don’t go out to eat. My grocery bill is super cheap. I almost cook and eat everything at home. So I save a lot of money that way. So it’s this give and take and also a connection to my lifestyle that I think a lot of people are missing. And if you’re missing it right now, that doesn’t mean you can’t get there because I was there at one point and I’m not there anymore. So it’s something you can definitely get to.

Shinobu Hindert (19:38):

Yeah. And I kind of… The three why test and I have it in my book of like any goal that you have, just ask yourself why do you want it? Why is this important to me? And then you figure it out. So in this example, if someone I was working with were like, “I need $40,000,” and you’re like, “Okay, that’s what we’re working on your goal for 40,000.” Why do you need that? Well, I need to buy a van. It’s like, okay, well, why do you need to buy the van? So I can take trips. It’s like, well, why do you want to take trips? And they’re like, well, when I was younger, my parents didn’t have the money and we didn’t really go on vacation. And there are all these national parks that I was never able to see. And I want to be able to take my kids on these trips to go see these national parks. It’s like, that goal is actually really cool. It’s not just like I need $40,000.

Shinobu Hindert (20:21):

And when you’re thinking about that for yourself of like, okay, I can get this new motorbike or you know, that it costs X amount of money to maintain your bike because you’re putting a hurting on it every time you go out, it’s like, well, that’s exciting to save for. So I think that you’re absolutely right, just connecting those dots and not looking at them in a different silo of money versus the life you want to have.

Robert Leonard (20:43):

Once we’ve got our foundation built, meaning that we have our personal finances in order and we’re ready to start building our house or our investments, or whether we’re doing it simultaneously with building our foundation, how do people pick the right investment strategy for them?

Shinobu Hindert (20:58):

Typically, it’s three main categories, is number one, when do you need to spend the money? Do you need to spend the money in two years or do you have eight years before you need to spend your money? So, that’s your timeframe. The second thing is how comfortable are you with risk? If you’re a brand new investor and let’s say, you need this money in five years from now, you shouldn’t be going all into stocks. You want to take that into consideration of how upset are you going to be if the market drops by 10%? and play around with the numbers because 10% sounds very different than you losing $10,000, right? When someone’s like $10,000, oh my gosh, that’s upsetting to me. So you understand what your risk tolerance is.

Shinobu Hindert (21:36):

And then the third thing is your financial situation. What does that look like? And then this is really what you talked about before that foundation. If somebody has an emergency fund, let’s say it’s six months’ worth of their monthly expenses in cash, they’re not going to have to pull out of an investment strategy for an emergency. If someone is doing this simultaneously and they’re getting started with investing, but they don’t have any, or they’re in the middle of building an emergency fund, well, their investments should be more conservative, meaning having less stocks because they might have to tap this money if they wanted to in an emergency.

Shinobu Hindert (22:08):

So really piecing those three things together, when you need the money, how comfortable are you with risk, what’s your financial situation to understand how much stock exposure you should have. And I would lean on if someone’s getting started either mutual funds or exchange-traded funds that are already diversified, meaning their asset allocation funds, like having a portion of the fund in stocks, a portion of the fund in bonds. And every major company offers their own version of this. So I would just dig into that a little bit more. So you’re not placing a bet of saying, okay, I want to get started with investing. I haven’t done this before. I’m only buying one company. Let’s say I only want to buy Apple, or I’m only going to buy in one industry. You want to stay away from that if you’re getting started, just really having a more broad look at the overall market.

Robert Leonard (22:57):

Would you say target-date funds are a good option for a lot of new investors who are just getting started and might not know where to put their money?

Shinobu Hindert (23:04):

Yeah, absolutely. That’s why they were created. A lot of people when they were working for large corporations, these target-date funds didn’t exist. So people were going and let’s say you had an option of 30 different funds you could pick from, right? You might get someone that, and I see this all the time, where they buy a fund that says large-cap fund and they’re like, large-cap, okay. That sounds good. I’m going to buy some big US companies. And then they’re buying another fund that says growth fund. And they’re like, oh yeah, well, I want to grow my money. I want to buy it as a growth fund. And then they have a fund that says S&P 500. And they’re like, I’m familiar with that. They buy it.

Shinobu Hindert (23:36):

So what happened is that person is owning all of the same things, even though they’ve picked three different funds, but because they weren’t given necessarily financial education from their employer when you had the tech crisis crash, when you had the financial crash. These regular people went back to their companies going, well, wait a minute. I didn’t know I was buying something that was only like a risky asset in that sense. How come you weren’t helping me? So when that whole industry from a compliance level looked at it, it’s like, well, wait a minute. We shouldn’t just be throwing funds at people and telling them, shaking their hands, going, good luck, good luck with this. So the industry forced companies to make this an option. So if someone wanted to buy that target-date fund, they weren’t only buying US stocks in one sector of the market. They were having this broad diversified view.

Shinobu Hindert (24:21):

So yes, I would say you could even use those funds up until you have like half a million dollars to invest because it’s diversified. After you get to half a million dollars, maybe you want to have more diversification of thought behind just doing some of these target-date funds, but up until then yeah, why not? What are the chances you’re going to beat that on your own, the performance because of knowledgeable decisions you made? A lot of times, if you pick one stock and it happens to beat it, it’s like, that was luck and just pat yourself on the back and take the win. But if your process for earning money and essentially beating one of those funds is not repeatable, then I wouldn’t take on all that responsibility. I would just put it in one of those funds.

Robert Leonard (25:01):

Do you have a concern with those funds in regards to their fees? They’re typically a little bit higher fee than you could get in say an S&P 500 fund from Vanguard ETF maybe, or even just a Vanguard broad diversified bond fund or ETF. So do the fees with target-date funds concern you at all?

Shinobu Hindert (25:21):

No. I mean, if you’re staying under 1%, like let’s use Vanguard, for example, they have target-date funds based off of their index funds. So you could buy that and it’s fractional, so you’re not even paying half a percent to get into something like that. So again, the industry has just become really competitive from a fee standpoint that 15 years ago that wasn’t an option. Today, it is.

Robert Leonard (25:44):

I know this next question is difficult to answer, without any bias given your background, but when it comes to all aspects of money, personal finance, investing, insurance, all of it, where does a financial advisor come in? Is a traditional financial advisor really needed for everyone?

Shinobu Hindert (26:02):

I mean, I don’t think so. I mean, another reason I created this company is because not everybody has access to a financial advisor. So in my previous life, as a financial advisor, I couldn’t really take clients that didn’t have half a million and at one point a million dollars or more to invest. So even if I met someone that, let’s say they own two properties free and clear in Southern California and their net worth is two and a half million and they came in and they’re like, Shinobu, we need to talk about all these things, unless they were able to that day invest a million dollars or a half a million dollars or more, I couldn’t even work with them. Even if someone’s like, well, but I have all these assets like, well, great. I don’t get paid to talk to you about money over there. I get paid on assets that I’m managing that are under my management. That’s why we didn’t charge a fee for financial planning because it was kind of considered this all-inclusive fee of their financial plan.

Shinobu Hindert (26:57):

So it’s hard for people to get access to a financial advisor. If you are accessing it on your own and you don’t meet account minimums, then you might be paying. I met a lot of people that pay $5,000 for a financial plan or they’re paying $2,500 and they only get to meet with those financial planners twice. So I do think that financial advisors are a great avenue for people to go through if it includes a financial plan, but not everyone has access to it right now. So if you don’t have access to it, then you have the ability. And I really created this book for people to be able to do it on their own up until a certain point.

Shinobu Hindert (27:33):

I think it’s always important to look at your situation holistically, no matter how old or young you are because for me, for example, I have a hard time getting life insurance now. And when I started in this industry, I worked for a big company. Then I went for another big company and they give you these group life benefits. And so I never went out on my own to get separate insurance because I’m like, well, I have really good life insurance with this company. Now I have two kids and I actually cannot get life insurance. That’s not something I thought about when I was in my early twenties. Like I need to take out a separate life insurance policy. If somebody would have talked to me, to say like, are you sure you’re going to be working for this big company because you might not have access to this later? Maybe I would have done it. I don’t know if I would have at the time, but I didn’t have the option.

Shinobu Hindert (28:18):

So I think the more you can involve yourself with financial professionals, the more you can look at things and really set yourself up better in the future. And I think educating yourself more on what’s important to you makes the conversations with these financial professionals better because you feel like you’re in the driver’s seat, you’re driving the conversation. If someone’s recommending, like I have this great investment option for you and they throw it at you, you can be like, well, tell me why? How does this fit into my bigger picture? And you can ask better questions. I really think it’s important for people to work with financial planners. But again, if you don’t have maybe assets for it right now, it’s not something you need to do immediately, but just keep it on your radar, get more comfortable with investing so when it comes to that time that you want to kind of outsource some of that stuff, you know what questions to ask.

Robert Leonard (29:07):

If someone might not have access to a financial advisor, maybe they don’t have the assets for it, like you mentioned, maybe they’re just not interested in working with a financial professional, could robo-advisors be an option for them?

Shinobu Hindert (29:18):

Yeah. Robo-adviser, you’re more looking at the final solution, which is the investment or someone picking your investment. So, if you’ve done all the legwork of “I’ve built this financial foundation… I like to separate my accounts out.” So for every goal that I have, I have a different account. So if you were to look at my accounts, it’s like, holy moly, you got 15 accounts because I have 15 different goals for that. It’s an easy way for me to look at my investment strategy. So if you’ve kind of separated that out and you’re ready and you know, for this one bucket, I want to buy a house in the next six years, this other bucket, I need to keep that cash safe because I want to have a little bit more cash reserves, maybe you’re not going to invest that, another one might be retirement, then you can plug and play with these robo-advisors because you’re answering basic questions of when you need this money. And I think it’s a great option that you don’t have to go and pick all the investments yourself unless you want to.

Robert Leonard (30:09):

I’ve asked this next question of a few guests in the past, but longtime listeners of the show know, I love to get different viewpoints on the same topics so that we can all learn different points of view. So should millennials prioritize saving and investing over reducing debt or should they focus on their debt first?

Shinobu Hindert (30:30):

I would do both at the same time. So when you’re paying down your debt, whoever is the lien holder, let’s just use Chase Bank, for example, if they’re holding your debt, they’re compounding the interest behind the scenes. So you take out a debt of $10,000 and you kind of see that you’re slowly chipping away at that because they’re making money on that. Well, you want to do the same thing for yourself with investing. If you only focus on paying down your debt, what happens is let’s say it takes you 10 years to get rid of credit card debt or some student loan debt that you have, after those 10 years, when you should be feeling really proud and on top of the world, because you conquered it, you’re opening your statements going, I don’t really have anything to show for it. Yeah. I pay off my debt, but my account balances are really small. So it’s kind of this self-defeating thing.

Shinobu Hindert (31:18):

And also, the most important thing that you should be taking advantage of when you’re investing is time. The longer you have to have your money grow, the more money you will be able to have. So I like to do, like pay the minimums towards your debt that you have, prioritize the debt that’s over 7% of interest, and then any extra money you have at the end of the month, let’s say you have $300 extra, you can put it towards something. I would do 150 governed towards paying down your debt. And 150 going towards investing. That way, you’re doing a little bit at the same time. So when your debt journey is over, you’re looking at your accounts going great, I’m starting with $5,000 or $10,000 and they’re not, I got to start building this wealth and feeling behind.

Robert Leonard (32:00):

One of the mistakes that I personally made when I started getting educated on finances, listening to podcasts, reading books was that I was trying to just go through as much material as fast as I could. I was listening to every podcast and audiobook on two X speed. And I was trying to read through every book as fast as possible. And I was just churning through all of these different materials and I wasn’t taking action on anything that I was learning. Education is important. Having that knowledge is important, of course. You eventually hit a point where you know enough and you need to take action. And so what I really encourage listeners of the show to do is to take action on what we’ve learned in a given episode. So before the listeners turn on the next episode of their favorite podcast, or they get distracted with something else that they have to do, what is one action they should take after listening to this episode?

Shinobu Hindert (32:47):

If someone is a completely new investor, the first thing I would do is go open an investment account. It’s called a brokerage account at any large firm that you’re familiar with, just to see what that’s like to have that account open. Even if you can only put $10 in it, just do it because it’s much easier when you come into money that you can literally swipe on your phone or click a button to get started. If you wait and then you get this, let’s just say a bonus check or unforeseen money coming in, what are the chances that you’re going to stop what you’re doing, go online, open an account, move money over? You’re probably not because life just moves very fast. So just open the account, establish it. That is a huge first step. If someone’s already investing, I would encourage them just to increase how much they’re investing by like one to 3% by the end of the month. And just see what that feels like.

Robert Leonard (33:38):

I really liked that first point because it removes the friction and you’re right. If you get that little bonus or you get a gift from somebody or whatever the case is, and then you have to go open that account. Let’s just say, you’re super strong-willed and you’re able to do it, you go open the account, that can take a couple of days before the money’s actually out of your account. You might see that $1,000 sitting there with all the intentions of putting it in the investment account, but then you’re like, oh, those shoes look nice. That laptop looks nice. And now that 1,000 is only 700 to invest instead of the full 1,000 that you were going to invest. So I really liked that action tip. And of course, if you already are investing, increasing your investment is a great piece of advice as well. As we wrap up the show, I want to give you a chance to tell the audience where they can go to connect with you.

Shinobu Hindert (34:19):

Yeah. My website is www.empoweredplanning.com. I hang out a lot on Instagram. I try to give these educational videos based on people’s questions and that’s empowered_planning. And then my book, Investing Is Your Superpower, I would start there. Depending on if you like to read or watch videos, you can always start with the book just to get a feel for my style.

Robert Leonard (34:44):

I’ll be sure to put a link to all your different resources in the show notes below of your favorite podcast player for anybody that’s interested in checking that out. Thanks so much for joining me.

Shinobu Hindert (34:53):

Thank you.

Robert Leonard (34:55):

All right, guys. That’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week.

Outro (35:01):

Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets, to access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.