Good Financial Reads: Spending Strategies

Imagine that your grandchildren or great grandchildren were able to access your credit card statements and spending history 100 years from now.  If they looked back to the year 2020 what would they see?  You and I both know that they would love to find supportive actions toward the many issues facing our society today.  The truth is that our credit card statements and the calendar never lie.  How we spend our money and our time says a lot about who we are. This is more relevant than ever before.

A key goal when you retire is to generate a steady level of spending and not run out of money too soon. For many, the retirement spending strategy involves a combination of social security, taxable accounts (T), tax-deferred accounts (TD) like 401(k)s or IRAs, and tax-exempt accounts (TE) like Roth accounts. Because of the different taxability across accounts, how you withdraw from them can make an important difference to the level and longevity of your retirement spending. Research shows large differences in ending account balances or the expected number of sustainable years across different strategies.

The majority of personal finance advice can be boiled down to some simple rules. The biggest two?

Spend less. Save more.

This is good advice, and certainly part of the fundamentals to master if you want to be financially successful.

But putting all of the focus on spending less and saving more means we’re telling people to avoid using money. We don’t devote nearly enough time educating people how to spend better, to use money wisely.

In this replay of our very first podcast episode, we revisit what it means to be able to enjoy your money today — while still taking the necessary steps to build your wealth and plan responsibly for the future.

If you want to learn how to create balance with your money and know exactly much is appropriate to spend right now to live your life fully, while also knowing how much you need to save for tomorrow so you can ensure you’re going to be secure in the future…

It’s extremely simple in theory — but could require a lifetime of experience to answer:

What is enough?

We are all for saving money — like, a lot of money. A few episodes back we talked about saving over 40% of gross income, in fact.

But that doesn’t mean we’re frugal. In fact, financial advice that promotes the idea that frugality is the ONLY path to wealth (through spending less so you can save more) is really frustrating.