We all like to have good style, and to be noticed. But sometimes, people are so eager to be cool and unique that they end up just revealing their own insecurities. It’s one thing to be interesting and have unique opinions. It’s another thing entirely to try so hard you just look desperate. We asked Redditors for the top things they’ve observed people doing to look cool that just don’t.
1. Unnecessarily Loud Cars
One user posted, “Loud *ss car/motorcycle. You’re not impressing anyone…”
Another commenter replied, “There’s a video by some YouTube guys satirizing this. They’re sitting at home when they hear a motorcycle start up, and they run to the window to cheer them on, saying how cool it is that it’s so loud and unnecessary. It’s very funny. Can’t find it, though.”
Another user shared, “I used to have a loud exhaust on my motorcycle, not to show off or anything but so that people could hear me. A lot of the time, people don’t see motorcyclists, and that’s how accidents happen. After I got into a close call on the highway (not speeding, someone just casually switching lanes on me), I decided to put on a loud exhaust.
“I don’t ride anymore, but when I drive my car around, if I hear a loud exhaust, I double check my mirror to see where the motorcycles are, and that’s the whole point. In the US, no driving school teaches you to watch for motorcycles. That’s something you will notice when you go to Europe, people constantly check their mirrors for motorcycles because they have been taught to do so.”
2. Disliking Trends Just to Be Unique
One Redditor posted, “Those who think hating anything popular just because it’s popular makes them special.”
A second user added, “I swear, this is such a child mentality. Like when you’re going through your ‘Not like the other kids’ phase and think you’re so cool bc you don’t like the popular thing, but eventually you grow out of it and realize it’s ok to like popular shit and enjoy things regardless of what other people think or like….. But, obviously, some people never grow up and grow out of it.”
One commenter replied, “And it’s ok to be an adult and like uncommon or unusual things. People also love to spit on people who like ‘alternative things.’ The goal is that you find intrinsic value and enjoyment in your choices. When people just slide into what’s popular because it’s what they’re fed, that seems insincere. But if they wear it because they see it and genuinely like it, then that’s good. and the same when flipped to ‘alternative’ styles.
But with strangers, that can be hard to read at first blush. With people you know or get to know, it’s easier. I do think it’s easier for people to swallow when other adults look more traditional than when they look unusual. But should that matter? Edit: And when I say ‘love to [spit] on,’ I mean to say they almost always believe some looks are only for attention or to convey a specific personality trait. Which is as ridiculous as believing someone only wears fancy branded clothes to be seen.”
“I used to be that person! Then I grew up and realized how obnoxious it was to just have an opinion about anything I didn’t enjoy that other people did, and it feels amaaaaazinnggg. I think people need to realize how cyclical that kind of attitude is. People who are super critical of other people are often paranoid about what people think of them, and it just goes round and round,” one user confirmed.
3. Calling Themselves Alpha
One user commented, “Calling themselves ‘alpha’. It just makes them just seem insecure imo.”
Another user added, “It’s like telling people you’re rich. If you have to tell people…you aren’t.”
One Redditor replied, “If you have to tell people you’re alpha, you’re not alpha.”
“If those kids could read, they’d be pretty upset by that statement,” another user exclaimed.
4. Modifying Your Car for Noise
One user posted, “Modifying your car to make it obnoxiously loud.”
Another user replied, “Add to this, all the guys that peel out in parking lots because they think their car is so cool and everyone is impressed. No… we just think you are an attention seeking dbag making annoying noises and making the air smell like burnt tires.”
Another user responded, “To be fair, the primary goal of modifying the exhaust is usually to add power. Added noise is a secondary consequence. That said, I agree that some people take it way too far. ”
5. Designer Things Covered in Logos
One user shared, “To me it’s designer stuff that just has some brand’s logo or name all over it. Why be a walking billboard for a company that isn’t even paying you? It’s weird. Being overly flashy is a big yuck to me.”
Another user added, “Same reasons kids today sh*t on Android users for not having an iPhone. It’s not about having a quality product, it’s about showing people that you have more money than them.”
One user replied, “iPhones and Androids are the same price? Flagship Android phones are actually more expensive, and iPhone budget options reach all the way down to $430 brand new. I know there are cheaper Androids far below that, but this statement is just stereotypical ‘Apples are bad and expensive.’ There’s nothing wrong with either phone, it’s great that people have options. The iPhone is not a status symbol, it’s a preference, and anyone who thinks otherwise has some insecurities they’re projecting onto others. Time to get over it.”
6. Education as a Status Symbol
One user commented, “People who look down on education.”
Another user shared, “Also educated people who look down on those who didn’t go to college or university. You’re not a more valuable human being just because you have a degree. [Jerks] are found at every level of education, and it works both ways.”
“It doesn’t matter if every human being on this planet has a PhD, somewhere there’s still gonna be a pile of sh*t that needs shoveling,” one Redditor responded.
One commenter added, “Exactly. It is simply not viable for everyone to be a business manager, doctor or lawyer. Society NEEDS truck drivers, construction workers, plumbers and cleaners too. Edit: And since this is the case, it’s only natural and fair that we pay those people enough to live a dignified life befitting a human being.”
7. Calling Yourself a Bad Girl
One Redditor posted, “Girls who call themselves certified bad b*tches.”
Another user added, “‘Queens.’ So ghetto and trashy.”
One user laughed, “Queens with no job, no skills and no responsibilities lol.”
Another user shared, “Women who try to be a ‘bro’ to fit in. I cringed at whatever her name was in ‘Love is Blind’ when she was like, ‘I’m one of the bros’…”
8. Revving at Red Lights
One user commented, “Idiots who stop at red lights and constantly rev their engines like they’re about to participate in a drag race.”
Another Redditor replied, “It must feel amazing to win a race no one else is participating in.”
One user shared, “That was me when I was young, but not for the usual reason. I had just earned my license and my friend gave me his rusted out [car] as a ‘gift.’ The problem was it needed a valve adjustment and I couldn’t afford to take it to the shop, nor did I know how to adjust it myself. The problem is it would stall at idle, so anytime I’d come to the lights, I’d put the car in neutral (it was a manual) and gently rev the engine until the lights turned green.
“I felt obnoxious doing it, it probably looked even more embarrassing to everyone else. It was particularly awkward when a cop would pull up beside me at the lights, and we’d make eye contact while gently [revving] the engine. I’m surprised I never got pulled over for it.”
9. Bragging about Intimate Encounters
One Redditor posted, “Bragging about how much s-x they’re supposedly having. It’s a clear sign of someone who peaked in high school.”
Another user shared, “That’s my dad perfectly described.”
“My uncle is almost 300lbs and married a woman he knew for 2 weeks and brags about their [intimate] life. It’s just gross man,” one user added.
“Back in high school my friends would do this. I was single at the time and I would tell them how shitty it felt that everyone around me was doing it but me. Then they kept bragging about it. That’s when I realized these guys weren’t really my friends,” one commenter shared.
Do you agree with the list above? Share us your thoughts and leave a comment!
Source: Reddit.
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Starting a Roth IRA is one of the easiest — and best — steps you can take to save for retirement. But you should understand the Roth IRA rules before investing in them.
I know I’ve written a lot about the Roth IRA in the past, but I still get questions all the time. People find them intimidating. For example, Lynn wrote last week:
I’m a 36-year-old single mother of two. I want to start investing for my future, but I am so overwhelmed by all the information. I was wondering if you could give me some advice on my best options for a Roth IRA. I am a school teacher and earn $41,000 per year.
I am going to do more research, but I would appreciate some advice from someone who already has expertise in this area. I am not sure what I need to start a Roth IRA, or who I should go with. I don’t know much about mutual funds or anything of that sort, so any help and advice would be appreciated.
Let’s clear things up: A Roth IRA does not need to be confusing. In fact, a Roth IRA is actually fairly easy to understand.
Note: This post is going to keep things basic. For more detailed info, see the resources at the end of this article, or consult a financial planner.
Roth IRA Basics
The Roth IRA is an individual retirement arrangement: It lets you save and invest for your future. An IRA is simply a holding account. It’s a label. When you own a Roth IRA, it contains nothing. It’s like a bucket, a place for you to put things. (Most people think of an IRA as an individual retirement account, which is fine, but it’s actually an “arrangement.”)
The things you put in your bucket are investments. You might, for example, buy a stock to put in your retirement account. Or maybe government bonds. Or certificates of deposit. The important thing to understand is that a Roth IRA is not an investment — it’s a place to put investments.
Related >> Best CD Rates | Certificate of Deposit Rates
With many retirement accounts — such as 401(k)s and traditional IRAs — you contribute pre-tax money and are taxed when you take the money out during retirement. Because they work with after-tax money, earnings from a Roth IRA can be withdrawn tax-free at retirement.
Roth IRA Rules and Requirements
Because Roth IRAs are meant to encourage ordinary people to save for retirement, not everyone qualifies for them. If you do qualify, you can contribute up to $5,000 to your Roth IRA every year. If you’re 50 or over, you can contribute $6,000.
Who qualifies? Nearly everyone. However:
If your tax filing status is single and you earn more than $105,000 per year, your contributions are restricted.
If you’re married filing jointly, your contributions are limited if your household earns more than $160,000 per year.
You can use a Roth IRA even if you have a 401(k) or other retirement plan, but you must make your contributions by the tax deadline each year.
The rules are a little more complex than that, but those are the basics. If you need more info, take a look at the resources listed at the end of this article.
Where to Open a Roth IRA
Deciding where to start your Roth IRA is the most difficult part of the process. Many financial institutions offer IRAs. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Don’t fret about finding the perfect match — find a good match and then get started.
To make things simple, here are four big companies that provide Roth IRAs (though these are by no means your only options):
Fidelity Investments offers a no-fee IRA. There’s a $2,500 minimum initial investment, but this is waived if you commit to $200/month automatic contributions. They offer 4,600 mutual funds, about a quarter of which have no transaction fee. In short, you can open a no-cost IRA at Fidelity with a $200 starting investment if you invest in mutual funds and you agree to contribute $200/month. Apply for a Roth IRA with Fidelity.
It’s also possible to open a no-cost Roth IRA at The Vanguard Groupif you elect to receive electronic statements. Otherwise, a $20 annual fee is charged until your Roth IRA balance is over $10,000. Your minimum to get started is $3,000 — except that you can start with just $1,000 in the company’s STAR fund. (The STAR fund is an mutual fund of mutual funds, a safe choice for beginners.) Additional contributions require a minimum of $100 unless you use their Automatic Investment Plan, in which case the minimum is $50. There are no fees to purchase the STAR fund. Start a Roth IRA at Vanguard.
T. Rowe Price charges $10/year for Roth IRA accounts until you have a balance above $5,000, after which there is no fee. You need $1,000 to open your IRA, but this minimum goes away if you sign up to contribute at least $50/month with the Automatic Asset Builder. There are no sales fees or commissions to invest this money in T. Rowe Price mutual funds. Open an IRA at T. Rowe Price.
Scottrade resists charging its customers set-up, annual or maintenance fees for its online trading services and also offers them the opportunity to get a refund of up to $100 in transfer fees from other brokers for bringing their Roth IRA to Scottrade. Scottrade’s pricing on trades is fairly simple: $7 for stocks $1 and above for online market and limit equity orders. You might also consider a Scottrade checking, savings or money market account. These can be joined with a trading account to help easily fund transactions.
Opening a Roth IRA is easy. You’ll need some minimal bank account info and about 30-60 minutes of free time. If you’ve ever filled out a job application or applied for a credit card, you can certainly open a Roth IRA. Once you’ve completed your application, you can transfer money to the account. It might have to sit in a money market fund until you have enough saved to buy your first mutual fund, but that’s okay. You’re developing the saving habit!
Note: I’m a big fan of automatic investment plans. Most of these companies offer some sort of program that will pull money from your bank account every month to invest in stocks or mutual funds that you designate. By setting aside $50 or $100 or $500 in this way, saving becomes a habit.
Which Investments to Choose
Here’s where I cop out. I’m not a financial adviser. I don’t know your goals or risk tolerance. I can’t tell you were to invest.
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And to be honest, where you invest doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you do invest. To get some ideas, browse through the investing archives here at Get Rich Slowly. (Maybe start with these “lazy portfolios.”)
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If you’re really stressed, pick a target-date fund that most closely matches the year you’ll retire. This probably isn’t the best option, but it’s fine. Just use it while you get in the habit of making contributions. You can always switch the money to something more appropriate later.
Related >> Choosing a Target-Date Fund
Learning More About the Roth IRA
In 2007, I ran a four-part series exploring the benefits of a Roth IRA. If you need more info about these accounts — or if you have questions — you should start here first:
I’ve revised these articles and compiled them into a free e-book called The Get Rich Slowly Guide to Roth IRAs (518kb PDF). (Note that this e-book was produced in April 2008, so some of the info is a little out of date, especially about Zecco.) And if you want the official word on the subject, check out IRS publication 590, which is all about IRAs.
Now’s the part where you can tell Lynn how easy it is to set up a Roth IRA. (And share what sort of things you’ve invested in.) My own Roth IRA started with stupid stock picks (Countrywide, The Sharper Image) and has moved toward index funds. I’m all about making things easy right now!
I can’t believe I’m writing this (honestly had to triple-check), but it’s been almost 20 years since How I Met Your Mother aired its first episode. 18 years to be exact — but still, that’s almost two decades/six times as long as Barney and Robin were married!
Luckily for forever fans like myself who’ve sorely missed the show and watched every episode a hundred times (83% sure that’s a literal figure), the spin-off, How I Met Your Father, is now streaming with two almost as binge-able seasons to fill the void.
The best part? Whether you love the series, hate the series, or sit somewhere in between, there’s no denying it has a distinctly familiar vibe.
Perhaps it’s the combination of its gritty New York setting mixed with a quippy group of 30-somethings who somehow find ample amounts of free time to hang out in a bar every single day. Could be the continued direction from Pamela Fryman who directed 196 of the original 208 episodes.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s all thanks to the inclusion of one particularly special residence…
The ‘How I Met Your Father’ apartment is Marshall and Ted’s longtime abode from HIMYM
If you’ve found yourself wondering whether the How I Met Your Father apartment is the same one used in How I Met Your Mother, the answer is a resounding Yes! And that became clear from the very first episode of the new series.
Just a few minutes before the end of episode one, Sid and Jessie invite their new friends Sophie (Hilary Duff) and Valentina (Francia Raisa) back to their place for drinks where it’s revealed they live in Ted and Marshall’s (and Lily’s and Robin’s) old apartment.
Not that HIMYM fans really needed it, but we get further confirmation it’s the same old two-bed when Jessie brags how they scored the apartment from an ‘old married couple who posted it on the Wesleyan Alumni Group’ and that they ‘even got them to leave their swords’.
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Yep, the very same swords Ted and Marshall use in The Duel to decide who gets the apartment after Lily and Marshall get married.
Surprisingly enough, these swords are not a replica. HIMYM co-creator Carter Bays happened to have kept the swords in his home and has willingly lent them out for the re-boot.
Even more surprising? The set isn’t a replica either! It was kept in storage after the original show wrapped back in 2014 and has now been given a new lease of life with contemporary, navy blue walls and all-new furniture.
Speaking to The Los Angeles Times, co-showrunner Elizabeth Berger explained exactly why they decided to include the familiar apartment in the spin-off.
Despite it being a totally new story with all new characters bar a few cameos, they knew that bringing this set back would be a fitting tribute to the original series and its beloved central characters. It also guarantees something special for loyal fans from the get-go.
If you ask me, it was the perfect way to wrap up the first episode.
The moment Sid turned the key and walked through the door (that’s a lie, I actually guessed it as they walked down the hall!), I found myself letting out an audible “aww” feeling like I’d just bumped into a dear old friend from years passed.
Maybe it’s because, after nearly ten years since HIMYM ended, I’d given up hope that this spin-off would ever get made. When funnily enough, it’s (kind of) been made twice!
In 2014, the same year we bid the gang a reluctant farewell, Greta Gerwig of Ladybird, Frances Ha, and the highly anticipated Barbie movie fame wrote and starred in a pilot episode for a series named, How I Met Your Dad.
Obviously, it didn’t get picked up so the pilot never aired. And, whilst I’ll always wonder what might have been since Gerwig is undoubtedly a master screenwriter, I’m currently loving watching this new sixsome make new memories in the gang’s old digs.
Will we see any of the old gang in HIMYF?
While a third series is yet to be confirmed, fans of the show have already been treated to not one but two main-cast cameos. First Robin (Cobie Smulders) in series one, then Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) in series two. We’ve also seen The Captain, Becky, and Carl!
I won’t spoil any of their scenes for you but on the off chance you’re avoiding HIMYF due to a lack of familiar faces, tuning in means you will get to see your old faves again, even if only for a few minutes!
And who knows, if the show gets renewed beyond these two installments, maybe we’ll see Ted, Lily, or Marshall further down the road. Honestly? I’m really hoping the apartment connection means we will!
Frequently asked questions
Where do they live in How I Met Your Father?
Sophie, Jesse, Sid, Charlie, Val, and Ellen all live in Manhattan in New York City, NY, giving viewers a peek inside the lives of millennials living in the Big Apple.
Is the apartment in How I Met Your Father the same apartment in How I Met Your Mother?
Yes! During production, the How I Met Your Father crew reused the exact same set used to create Ted and Marshall’s apartment on HIMYM. It had been kept in storage after the original show wrapped back in 2014 and has now been given a new lease of life with contemporary navy blue walls and all-new furniture.
Where is the apartment building from How I Met Your Mother? / How I Met Your Father?
While the HIMYM apartment isn’t real and all scenes were filmed on set, the address is revealed in an older episode of the show (“Subway Wars”), placing Ted and Marshall’s apartment building at 150 W. 85th Street in New York City, on the Upper West Side.
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In this high-interest-rate environment, many prospective homebuyers are put off by high mortgage costs. Homes that might have been in your budget in the past might no longer be affordable when accounting for monthly interest payments.
But that doesn’t mean the situation is totally out of your control. While mortgage timing can be tricky, you might decide to wait to see if interest rates drop, as many experts predict will happen in the next year or so.
You can also take a number of steps to improve your financial situation and get a handle on the real estate market now as you’re figuring out when to buy a home.
See where today’s mortgage rates stand here.
What prospective homebuyers should do until interest rates drop
In particular, some action items to consider as you wait to see what happens with mortgage interest rates include the following expert-recommend tips:
Figure out what you want
If you’re waiting to see what happens with interest rates, use this time to do more research. That includes narrowing down what you want in a home and what you can realistically afford.
“Use this time to refine exactly what you’re looking for in your next home, including things like what your budget can buy you and what your ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ are,” says Merav Bloch, VP and GM of Opendoor Exclusives. “If you’re willing to trade a longer commute for your dream yard, but your partner wants to be within a 10-minute drive of their office, now is an opportune time to debate that trade-off.”
Even if you’re not necessarily ready to buy right away, you can still tour homes.
“I encourage buyers to see what’s out there and tour as many homes as possible to get a sense of what your budget will get you, what your non-negotiables are and what neighborhoods you’re open to,” Bloch says. “People typically don’t get married on the first date, and it’s usually better not to purchase the first home you tour.”
Start your mortgage search online now.
Talk to experts
As you figure out what you want in a home, it can help to talk to experts like mortgage consultants and real estate agents to narrow down what’s realistic for you.
Tanya Ball, home loans regional director at BOK Financial, suggests asking experts about down payment assistance options as well as “specialized loan programs if you are a veteran, Native American, first-time buyer or buying in a rural area.”
Plus, speaking with an expert like a mortgage professional “can let you know which items to focus on for better offers — for example, a higher down payment or paying off debt,” says Michael Merritt, mortgage servicing operations manager at BOK Financial. “The biggest benefit will vary based on your circumstances, so it is important to focus on the things that will help you the most.”
Improve your credit score
For some prospective homebuyers, improving your credit score can make a significant difference in the mortgage rate you qualify for.
“Lenders typically offer better interest rates and loan terms to borrowers with higher credit scores, so taking steps to improve your credit can help you get the best possible deal on your mortgage,” says Adie Kriegstein, licensed real estate salesperson at Compass Real Estate. “This might include paying down existing debt, making all of your payments on time and avoiding new credit inquiries or applications.”
Build up your down payment
Another way to take advantage of this time waiting for interest rates to stabilize or drop is to build up your down payment. The more you can put down, the less you have to borrow and therefore pay interest on. Plus, a higher down payment could potentially get you a lower interest rate.
“A strategy I recommend, especially for first-time home buyers, is to deposit the difference between your current housing payment and your projected payment into a high-yield account each month. This helps grow your down payment or the amount you can use to pay down debts and is a test for your expected budget to see if it is workable,” says Merritt.
Check out today’s mortgage offerings here.
Shop around
Don’t assume that what one lender offers you is the same as what all other banks and mortgage providers offer. Your borrowing limits, interest rates and terms can vary from lender to lender, so it pays to shop around.
You also might find that paying for mortgage points with some lenders (where you pay money upfront to lower your interest rate), or choosing adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed-rate loans, works out in your favor.
“It’s an interesting quirk of human nature that many of us would drive across town to save 30% on a sofa but not necessarily compare rates and financing options on a house-sized purchase,” says Bloch.
“If you’re waiting to buy, this is a great time to shop lenders and financing options, including lesser-known options like rate buydowns. In this market, buyers are acutely aware of interest rates, but they’re less aware of options to reduce their monthly payments,” Bloch says.
Improve your current home
Lastly, if you already own a home, you can use this time to improve your current home to try to get more money when you eventually sell. That can help offset the cost of high interest rates.
One idea is to get a home inspection now, says Jonathan Rundlett, a real estate agent and regional owner at EXIT Mid-Atlantic.
“This will allow you to take the time that you are waiting for interest rates to fall to make any repairs or updates that the inspector finds in your home,” Rundlett says. “Making any necessary repairs and updating your home so that it shows in move-in ready condition will allow you to get top dollar for your home when you are ready to sell.”
The bottom line
These action items can help many prospective homebuyers better position themselves as they wait to see what happens with interest rates. But it’s important to remember that the specific ways to improve your situation depend on personal factors
like your credit history, savings and income. And while you might try to time mortgage purchasing, it’s difficult to know when to buy a home, as it can be both a financial and emotional decision. Some people might be comfortable paying more for their dream home, while others might want to wait to get a good deal on a mortgage interest rate. Weigh the pros and cons, and consider speaking with experts for personalized advice.
Navigating income taxes during retirement can be complex and your golden years are a time to relax and enjoy your hard-earned cash. Your IRAs, pensions, taxable accounts and Social Security distributions create various tax implications. So, it’s vital to understand them and implement strategies to reduce your tax liability and maximize your retirement funds. You may want to speak with a financial advisor to get a more personal look at how your income will be taxed in retirement.
Federal Tax Rates for Different Types of Retirement Income
Federal tax rates vary by income type and level. It’s important to evaluate what each type of income you expect is going to look like so that you can plan for retirement. Here’s a breakdown of the most common taxes during retirement:
IRAs and 401(k)s
Traditional IRAs and 401(k)s offer tax-deferred growth, meaning you don’t pay taxes on the contributions or investment earnings until you withdraw the funds in retirement. Withdrawals from these accounts are generally taxable income. The tax rate depends on your total income, filing status and the federal income tax brackets in effect during the year of withdrawal.
On the other hand, you fund Roth IRAs and Roth 401(k)s with after-tax contributions, meaning you pay taxes on the money before it goes into the account. Qualified withdrawals from Roth accounts, including both contributions and earnings, are tax free.
Taxable Accounts
Taxable accounts, such as brokerage and savings accounts, use after-tax money. Therefore, you’ll pay taxes on any interest, dividends or capital gains earned from investments in these accounts. Specifically, interest income incurs regular income tax rates, while dividends and capital gains receive different rates depending on how long you hold the investments before selling (short-term vs. long-term).
Selling assets after holding them for less than a year creates short-term capital gains taxes, which the government treats as regular income. On the other hand, selling assets after holding them for a year or more creates long-term capital gains taxes, as seen below:
Pension Income
Monthly payments from your employer’s pension program or a private annuity will incur standard income taxes. In addition, if you opt for a one-time lump sum payment that empties your pension, you’ll owe income taxes for the entire amount.
Remember, employer pension payments come to you after having a specific amount of taxes subtracted. This feature means a large tax bill won’t wallop you when you file (provided you haven’t had an unexpected infusion of income from elsewhere that year).
Earned Income
Earned income receives standard tax rates, like many other types of income listed. However, wages from an employer or self-employment are subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes, also known as FICA. FICA taxes incur an additional 7.65% rate on income from a part-time job and 15.3% from self-employment income (you’ll receive half of that back when you file taxes).
Remember, earned income can run up against Social Security benefits if you make too much. Specifically, for 2023, earning more than $21,240 results in a $1 reduction for every $2 earned after the threshold if you’re under what the government considers full retirement age. Once you reach full retirement age, the limit changes to $56,520 and the penalty is a $1 reduction in benefits for every $3 earned.
Social Security
Social Security also receives taxation based on your income level and filing status. The Social Security Administration adds your adjusted gross income with nontaxable interest income and half of your Social Security benefits when calculating income thresholds for taxes. Then, the government charges federal income tax rates on 50% or 85% of your Social Security check.
The chart below outlines the different possible circumstances and tax rates:
Single Filers
Income
Percentage of Social Security Income Taxed
$0 – $24,999
0%
$25,000 – $34,000
50%
$34,001+
85%
Married Filing Jointly
Income
Percentage of Social Security Income Taxed
$0 – $31,999
0%
$32,000 – $44,000
50%
$44,001+
85%
Keep in mind, if you are married and choose to file a separate tax return, it is likely that you will be required to pay taxes on your benefits.
How to Minimize Your Tax Liability in Retirement
Most people have the very similar goal of trying to reduce the potential tax liability during retirement. While the income you bring in and where you live are going to play a huge role in the taxes you pay, there are some things you can do to improve your situation. In fact, the tips below can help reduce your tax burden during retirement.
1. Remember To Withdraw Your Money From Your Retirement Accounts
Once you reach the age of 73 (or 70½ if you were born before July 1, 1949), you must begin taking required minimum distributions (RMDs) from most retirement accounts, such as traditional IRAs and 401(k)s. Failing to withdraw the RMD amount results in a 25% penalty on the neglected sum plus the income tax it would have incurred.
However, if you have multiple retirement accounts, you have some flexibility in choosing which account(s) to withdraw from. By strategically planning your withdrawals, you can control the timing and amount of taxable income and optimize your tax situation.
2. Understand Your Tax Bracket
Understanding your tax bracket is crucial for retirement planning. You can minimize your tax liability by managing your taxable income to stay within a lower tax bracket. So, it’s best to use the tables above and the federal income tax brackets for the year to calculate a comfortable amount of income without exposing your money to higher rates.
3. Make Withdrawals Before You Need To
You can plan your withdrawals strategically if you have a mix of taxable and tax-advantaged accounts, such as a 401(k) and a Roth IRA. Making withdrawals from taxable accounts or tax-free accounts like Roth IRAs before you need the funds can help reduce your future RMDs and potentially lower your overall tax burden in retirement.
4. Invest in Tax-Free Bonds
Tax-free bonds, such as municipal bonds, can be an attractive investment option for retirees seeking tax efficiency. Interest income from municipal bonds is usually exempt from federal income tax and sometimes from state and local taxes.
5. Invest for the Long-Term, Not the Short-Term
Holding investments for the long term, particularly in taxable accounts, can be advantageous from a tax perspective. Specifically, when you sell investments held for more than one year, you qualify for long-term capital gains tax rates, which are typically lower than ordinary income tax rates. By avoiding frequent buying and selling, you can minimize the realization of short-term capital gains, which receive the standard federal income tax rates.
For example, say you’re a single filer with a $44,000 income. Part of that income is from capital gains. However, if the capital gains are short-term, your marginal tax bracket is 12%, while your long-term capital gains bracket is 0%.
6. Move to a Tax-Friendly State
Some states have lower or no state income taxes, which can significantly impact your overall tax burden in retirement. If feasible, consider relocating to a tax-friendly state. However, before making such a decision, it’s essential to assess various factors like cost of living, healthcare and personal preferences. Remember, the states that don’t charge personal income taxes are Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.
The Bottom Line
The type of income that you receive in retirement could change the way that it is taxed. Many can avoid some of this by moving to a tax-friendly state, but most people can’t avoid it entirely. It’s important to understand what your personal tax liability could potentially become and to plan accordingly so that you’re prepared for retirement when it comes.
Tips for Being More Tax-Efficient
The road to financial stability in retirement looks different for everyone. Your investment account types, medical conditions and desired lifestyle can present unique challenges but a financial advisor can help. Finding a financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool matches you with up to three vetted financial advisors who serve your area, and you can have a free introductory call with your advisor matches to decide which one you feel is right for you. If you’re ready to find an advisor who can help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.
Today’s guest, Jordan Cohen, is the six-time top RE/MAX real estate agent in the world and has shattered sales records time and again in his 30+ year career. As an agent, he’s represented famous athletes and celebrities, including Sylvester Stallone. On this podcast, Jordan shares how the perfect real estate listing presentation wins him business from the world’s most notable figures. Tune in and learn how to wow luxury listing clients and how to build confidence as a real estate professional. Jordan also discusses his new book, The Agent’s Edge. Don’t miss it!
Listen to today’s show and learn:
Jordan Cohen’s start in real estate [3:00]
Jordan’s first luxury listing [3:05]
The most important tool a Realtor can have [4:22]
The trick to geographic farming [5:29]
Winning real estate listings from mailers [8:27]
How to compete and win with real estate listings [12:59]
Listing presentation tips [14:15]
How to build confidence in yourself as a real estate agent [17:01]
A better way to win real estate listings [23:40]
The best way to generate leads [25:41]
How to win real estate listings via Instagram [26:42]
Commissions on luxury listings [33:52]
How to convince sellers that they need you for a full commission [34:59
What real estate really is [37:54]
Jordan Cohen on knowing your strengths and weaknesses [39:06]
Jordan’s advice for new real estate agents [41:29]
About The Agent’s Edge by Jordan Cohen [43:10]
Jordan Cohen
Jordan Cohen is the #1 RE/MAX Agent Worldwide. He annually closes over $314,000,000 in sales. Jordan prefers to work alone with two assistants, Kristi Dougherty for 16 years, and Madison Adams for nearly 3 years. He does not employ a team or partners. When working with Jordan Cohen, you will work with him directly.
Jordan graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1990 with a Communications Degree with an emphasis in Sales and Marketing, and headed straight into Real Estate. He has worked as a full time luxury real estate agent for 30 years.
Jordan Cohen specializes in Luxury Estates and has been recognized in many publications including Unique Homes, Dream Homes International, DuPont Registry and the LA Times. Additionally, since a third of his clientele are celebrities and professional athletes, he has been featured on ESPN.com and his listings have been profiled on EXTRA and Access Hollywood. Jordan has represented over 100 professional athletes, as well as numerous actors, entertainers, and Hollywood executives. In addition, Jordan is extremely active and highly engaged in social media. Verified by both and, he is closely followed by nearly 600,000 people.
Jordan’s greatest pleasure is spending quality time with his family. He also enjoys sports and travel whenever possible. Jordan is happily married to Becky, his wife of 29 years. Together, they have two children, Cameron, age 26, and Cassidy, age 23.
Jordan Cohen prides himself on an aggressive approach to marketing! Jordan is not a discount agent but works with estate clientele who expect and demand superior representation. He can be contacted at (818) 435-5220 or reached via e-mail at [email protected].
Follow Jordan on Twitter @JordanCohen21 and Instagram @JordanCohen1.
Related Links and Resources:
It might go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: We really value listeners like you. We’re constantly working to improve the show, so why not leave us a review? If you love the content and can’t stand the thought of missing the nuggets our Rockstar guests share every week, please subscribe; it’ll get you instant access to our latest episodes and is the best way to support your favorite real estate podcast. Have questions? Suggestions? Want to say hi? Shoot me a message via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or Email.
The investing information provided on this page is for educational purposes only. NerdWallet, Inc. does not offer advisory or brokerage services, nor does it recommend or advise investors to buy or sell particular stocks, securities or other investments.
Welcome to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast, where we answer your real-world money questions. In this episode:
Learn how checking your bills can prevent you from overspending, how to manage a raise and how to build wealth early.
This Week in Your Money: Sean Pyles and Liz Weston discuss how you can prevent overspending by double-checking all your bills and share how doing so saved Sean more than $100 on just a single bill. They also discuss some surprising ways bills can demonstrate that you’re getting shortchanged.
Today’s First Money Question: Smart Money co-host Sara Rathner helps Sean and Liz answer a listener’s question about how to prioritize spending and saving after a significant salary increase. The hosts dive into the 50/30/20 budget, how to combat the temptation of “lifestyle creep” that comes with entering a new income bracket, and methods for setting financial goals and establishing a path to meet them. They also look at how to prioritize debt repayment and retirement savings when you’re in your 40s or 50s and your budget may be more stretched.
Today’s Second Money Question: Personal finance Nerd Kim Palmer joins Sean and Liz to answer a question from a 16-year-old listener about how to get an early start on setting up a bright financial future. Kim discusses options for starting to save early, the time value of money and when it may be worth considering switching banks.
Check out this episode on your favorite podcast platform, including:
NerdWallet stories related to this episode:
Episode transcript
Liz Weston: Hey, Sean. When you were 16, what were you doing to build wealth?
Sean Pyles: I can confidently say that I was doing nothing at all to build wealth.
Liz Weston: Well, today we’ll give a 16-year-old listener some ideas for how they can start to build wealth early. You’ll also learn why you should double-check all your bills and how to prioritize your spending and saving when your income increases from a pay bump.
Sean Pyles: Welcome to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast. I’m Sean Pyles.
Liz Weston: And I’m Liz Weston.
Sean Pyles: This month, we’re bringing back some of our most popular money tips from the last couple years, so if they sound familiar, no, it’s not just you.
Liz Weston: Today, you’ll actually hear two terrific money questions from listeners. The first one is how to manage a change in your income, and the second is about how to build wealth while you’re young. But first, here’s a story we did about why you should always double-check your bills. And, yes, that means all of them.
Sean Pyles: And listener, if you changed any of your money habits around checking your bills after you heard the story the first time we ran it, then please let us know. We’d love to hear your story. Leave us a voicemail or text us on the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373. That’s 901-730-NERD or email a voice memo to [email protected]
Liz Weston: OK, on with the show. For medical bills, restaurant tabs and even your insurance, it’s worth giving everything you’re expected to pay a little more scrutiny. Sean, this was inspired by a recent bill you received. You want to tell us about that?
Sean Pyles: I recently received a bill for $100 more than it should have been, and that inspired me to dig into what was going on and realize that I’m actually being charged for more things than I really should be. So let’s start with this bill. Basically, I have the same medical appointment every four months. It’s pretty standard. And every time I have it, it’s covered by my insurance even though I have a high-deductible health care plan.
For the latest appointment that I had, I received this bill that was for over $100, and I looked into it a little bit. I called the billing department, I called my insurance company. I had a lot of back and forth. It turns out that they coded the wrong appointment. The code that they used was one number off from what they typically use, and after talking with them for a long time, took over two hours to get this whole thing sorted out between all of the phone calls, they ended up reissuing the bill to my insurance company and it was covered. And if I hadn’t done that, if I had just accepted the bill and thought, “Oh, bummer, got to pay this bill,” I would’ve been out over 100 bucks that I really didn’t have to pay at all.
Liz Weston: Medical bills are notorious for being incorrect, for charging you things they shouldn’t have charged you.
Sean Pyles: It’s worth being pretty punctual about this as well. The moment I got the bill, I knew it was not right and so I called and I dug into it and it was resolved within a day, which is great, but it also can be a lot more of a lengthy process for those who aren’t as well-versed in how to do this. Anytime you get a bill for any sort of medical expense, it’s worth asking a couple questions, just making sure that the billing code is correct and that you are being charged what you’re supposed to be.
Liz Weston: And I’m a huge fan of automatic payments. I have almost everything on autopay, but the downside of that is you can let things slide. Cable bills, internet and satellite radio are really notorious for jacking up the price after they’ve given you some kind of teaser intro rates. That can wind up being hundreds of dollars that you don’t need to spend.
Sean Pyles: And somewhat similar to my experience with the medical bill, I also recently had a prescription that, because I’m on this high-deductible plan, was not covered by my insurance. So I talked with my medical office and they said, “Oh, just charge it through GoodRx. Here’s the price that I’m seeing.” I’ve talked about GoodRx before, but I’d never actually used it. So I finally signed up, and I was able to save half off what the pharmacy was originally asking me to pay.
Liz Weston: That’s something about those high-deductible plans. They really inspire you to look around for some savings.
Sean Pyles: But that’s where the health savings account comes in pretty handy. So I could have just expensed it, but again, I’m trying to have as much money in there as possible so I can invest it.
Liz Weston: One of the things you can do to make sure that you’re not overpaying is keep an eye on your transactions, whether you autopay or not, making sure that you review your transactions. I try to do it every month or so. And our app, the NerdWallet app, is a really good way to keep track of a bunch of different accounts at once and look at those transactions. Is that something you do or is that something you have to remind yourself to do?
Sean Pyles: So I am a big weirdo who pays off my credit card almost daily because I used to have credit card debt years ago and it’s something that has stuck with me, this almost hawkish approach to making sure I’m keeping my spending in check. So I look at it more than maybe I should or most people would even want to, but it helps me know that what I’m paying is what I should be paying.
I actually had another similar experience to this, touching on the whole aspect of making sure you’re getting billed correctly at restaurants and bars, where I was recently going through my credit card statement and I saw a charge for a bar that I went to. I only had one drink, but I was charged over $70. And I realized that my friend was trying to close out their tab. Everything they had been charging wound up on my credit card. So we had to sort it out. It was fine in the end, but it’s a reminder to double-check everything you’re being charged because that really stood out and if I hadn’t double-checked and looked at this closely, I would’ve been paying that.
Liz Weston: And that’s not something you want to do.
Sean Pyles: No. As much as I love my friends, I don’t want to shell out $70 for their tater tots and beer. Another thing that I’ve been thinking about, I recently discovered that Target and Best Buy in particular have excellent price matching policies. So if you’re looking for something and you see that it’s a little bit more at Target, but it’s easier to shop at Target because it’s in your neighborhood and you don’t want to rely on shipping or something like that, you can say, “Hey, here’s what I’m seeing at this other retailer. Can you price match me?” And they pretty much will.
Another area folks should look into if they don’t want to be overcharged is their car insurance. While a lot of people will just be tempted to sit with their same car insurance company year after year, one analysis found that folks could save an average of $560 by shopping around for car insurance.
Liz Weston: OK, that’s some serious cash. And I know we’ve talked about this before, but again, it’s something that’s really easy to leave on autopay or leave on automatic and not realize that you can save a ton of money with just a little bit of effort.
Sean Pyles: Absolutely, and the Nerds on the insurance team found that the ideal cadence for shopping for car insurance is once a year.
Liz Weston: OK. I think I can manage to do that.
Sean Pyles: Yeah, just set aside an hour, maybe even less, on a Sunday afternoon and just knock it out. Liz, I know you recently had an experience not getting the credit you deserved for credit card purchases and points. What happened there?
Liz Weston: Yeah, well, the big one has to do with a voucher for a trip we had to cancel in 2020, and it’s a fairly substantial voucher. It’s for $2,500.
Sean Pyles: Oh, wow.
Liz Weston: Yeah, I can’t find it on the airline site and customer service is so backed up. I actually got an email when I inquired about it. It’s like, “Why isn’t this voucher on my account?” They say they’ll get back to me in 10 weeks. Excuse me?
Sean Pyles: OK.
Liz Weston: That’s kind of a outlier, but I’ve noticed when you sign up for, say, money-back offers on your credit card, you can get $50 off if you spend $250. Half the time I have to go to the customer service line and say, “Hey, I didn’t get credit for this particular purchase.” So again, the credits are inducing you, those offers are inducing you to spend money. If you do it, make sure you follow up and make sure you got that money.
Sean Pyles: Yeah, make sure they’re following through on their word.
Liz Weston: Because they don’t always do so, and again, we all get busy and it’s easy to let it slide, but this can add up to real cash.
Sean Pyles: All right, well, I think that about covers it. Let’s get on to this episode’s money question.
Liz Weston: This episode’s money question comes from a listener’s voicemail. Here it is.
Speaker 3: Hi, guys. Thank you for doing the podcast. I really appreciate it. I have a question about prioritizing. So I’m in my late 20s and I am about to have an over $200,000 pretax income after basically never having a salary before. I’m starting at a big law firm. And I have about $100,000 in debt from grad school, some of which has, I think, a 6.8% interest rate. And I just have no idea whether to start by putting any of that excess income into a 401(k), into a Roth IRA or going against my student loans. What’s the smart order to go in here? Thank you. Bye.
Sean Pyles: To help us answer our listener’s question, we are joined on this episode by our occasional Smart Money co-host Sara Rathner. Hey, Sara, welcome back on.
Sara Rathner: Thank you. It’s fun to be on the other side of the proverbial microphone today.
Sean Pyles: Yeah. Well, we are going to grill you, so I hope you’re ready for it.
Sara Rathner: Oh, boy.
Sean Pyles: Our listener is about to experience a sudden and dramatic change in their personal finances, and I think that they should probably take some steps to set themselves up for success and make sure they’re managing their money properly going into this new phase of their life and their career. And where do you think they should start?
Sara Rathner: Well, one, acknowledge that this is a very nice problem to have. Congratulations to our listener for getting this job offer coming out of law school. That’s a big deal, so you should be proud of yourself. Whenever you experience even a somewhat major life change, like an income increase or decrease or new job or relocation for work or anything like that, it’s a great time to ask all of these questions. All the questions that this listener is asking are great. And you never really want to go into these situations just thinking that “I can just keep managing my money the way I did before,” because things are different. So it is good to take stock of what you’re doing currently, if it’s working for you, what more could you be doing with your new situation? And earning $200,000 a year, even if you have substantial grad school debt, it’s the kind of thing that can give you a really nice head start in life if you play your cards right. That’s what we are here for. We’re here to help you with it.
Sean Pyles: Right. Well, one thing I was thinking is that it would be helpful for them to take stock of their income and expenses, basically getting a grip on their new budget. One tool that we like to recommend is the 50/30/20 budget, where half of your income goes to cover needs. That’s rent. Thirty percent goes towards wants. That’s kind of fun things like travel. And 20% goes towards debt payments and savings. And with a pretty hefty income that our listener has, I think they should be able to use this pretty well.
Sara Rathner: Something that’s a big adjustment when you’re new to working is figuring out how much you cost. Because your life might have been very different when you were a student. Maybe you were being supported financially by family or you were working part time while in school, living with roommates.
Sean Pyles: Living off of ramen noodles.
Sara Rathner: Living the student life, and now you are out into the world potentially taking the rein of your finances on your own for the first time possibly. And so figuring out how much do blueberries cost. You know what I mean? It’s the little things you need to know. And that’s going to take some time, but it’s OK to take a couple of months and just sort of observe your spending and formulate a budget based on where your money is going and then also where you wish it would go if it’s not going where you want it to go.
Liz Weston: Well, and if somebody is jumping from being a broke law school student to having $200,000, it’s going to be really hard not to go nuts. Buy a new car, get a great apartment, buy clothes, do everything.
Sara Rathner: Yeah. Listen, I know you want the Tesla. OK? We can talk for a second. You don’t need the Tesla yet. This is not Tesla time.
Sean Pyles: And also there are plenty of other great cars besides Teslas. Let’s say that, too.
Sara Rathner: Yeah, if you aspire to Tesla, do it. They’re beautiful. But it is just important to recognize where you are, especially when you’re going into big law. The lifestyle creep temptation has got to be significantly higher than it is in other industries because it’s one of those industries where depending on what firm you work for, what city you live in, how you look matters.
It matters to clients, it matters to the partners, and how you look is, it’s how you dress, it’s what you drive, it’s how you arrive. You know what I mean? Do you golf on weekends? That’s a very expensive hobby. Do you ski? I don’t know. These are people who do things like this. And you are entering this world. And if this was not part of the world that you grew up in, it could be a real adjustment, too.
Sean Pyles: Well, yeah, that also brings me to the point that I think our listener should think about their financial goals and they can set them for one, three, five years down the road and then actually establish a path toward meeting them.
Sara Rathner: Yeah, that’s really big. The listener in their question asked about retirement savings and they asked about student loan debt. But there’s a lot of other things you have to plan for in life. You’re not just paying off your student loans and retiring. I would hope that you do other things and those other things are going to cost you money, like potentially buying a house or traveling, or maybe you want to help family out financially. Maybe you want to have children eventually. If you are working in a big law firm, child care is definitely going to be something to budget for because you work long hours. There’s a lot of life that happens in between grad school and retirement, so it’s important to list out what those things are for you and then begin putting some numbers behind them and begin making some monthly savings goals for those things.
Liz Weston: We should also make the obvious observation that you don’t net $200,000. And when you’re up in that stratosphere, you might be a little shocked at how much comes out in taxes. So figuring out what your after-tax income is going to be will really help with the 50/30/20 budget, but it will also help you right-size some of your expectations, so about how much you have to spend for an apartment, how much you have to spend for a car.
Sean Pyles: One tool that might be helpful is having a savings bucket strategy that I’m super fond of. And, Liz, actually, you turned me onto this.
Liz Weston: Oh, cool.
Sean Pyles: For me, I have half a dozen different savings accounts with different goals attached to them, and I have a certain percentage of my income go into them each paycheck, so that way I am saving toward different goals. One of them is just fun money, and that is my general bucket of cash that I have for things like travel and gifts for friends and restaurant night outs, things like that. So you can have fun with this, but I think it’s important to give every dollar a purpose.
Sara Rathner: Yeah, that’s super helpful. And when you name your goals, I think there’s studies that back up the fact that if you have a named goal, you save more, more quickly than if it’s just, “This is my savings account. It’s for saving.”
Sean Pyles: It can help gamify it because you’re seeing how much more you’re getting each paycheck.
Sara Rathner: Right. Yeah. And that way you can say like, “Hey, in five years I’m celebrating a milestone birthday and I want to take a big vacation and I’m going to budget five grand to do that.” OK, so you have to save $1,000 a year towards your vacation. Divide that by 12, set that money aside, make an automated transfer into your vacation account, and when you’re ready to book, you have the money. You don’t have to take on debt to take that trip.
Liz Weston: And you’re doing more than one thing at a time. People can get really focused on, “I’m going to pay off all my debt and then I’ll save for retirement.” No, you do it at the same time because you want to take advantage of the time value of money and multitasking is the way to go.
Sean Pyles: But there is also a balance between multitasking and prioritizing where you put your money, which is the question that our listener had. So Sara, what are your thoughts on how to prioritize different financial goals and ways to direct money?
Sara Rathner: All right. There are the big goals like retirement, buying a house, getting married, things like that. Retirement is big. Everybody has a different vision of what they want their retirement to look like, but there will be a point in your life where you can no longer work. So even if you want to work until you’re 80, your body might have other ideas and you’ll have to quit earlier because of medical issues. That’s unfortunately really common.
You do need to plan for an eventual time period where you’re not working anymore where you might have higher medical expenses, things like that. And so you’re young, you’re just out of grad school, you’re just getting started, and Liz mentioned the time value of money. Getting started early means that you can save less every month and end up with more money when you’re in your 60s or 70s than if you wait until you’re in your 40s or 50s to try to catch up.
That’s how compound interest works. The more time you give it, the better off you’re going to be, and the less aggressively you’ll have to save. And when you’re in your 40s or 50s, you might not have the money in your budget to save that aggressively for retirement because by then you might have kids in college and your vacation home and your fleet of Teslas or whatever, and you’re just not going to have as much money every month to put into your retirement account. And so start early when your life is a little simpler and just save, save, save.
Sean Pyles: But prioritization can also be a matter of personal preference, too. Maybe our listener really doesn’t like having that six-figure student loan debt hanging over them, so that might be something they want to prioritize just because psychologically that would benefit them.
Sara Rathner: Honestly, that’s what I did with my student loans. I thankfully did not have $100,000 in debt, but I did have debt. And every year before tax time, you get a letter in the mail that tells you how much interest you paid over the year. And I remember I was making my minimum monthly payments every month, and then I get this letter and it tells me how much I paid in interest, and that letter made me mad. I was like, “I just spent this money to literally just have debt.” And I was upset. I took a hard look at my budget and I was like, “How much more can I put toward this every month?” And I put an extra $40 a month toward the principal for a while, and when I got down to the last thousand dollars, I paid it all off.
Sean Pyles: Nice.
Liz Weston: Sweet.
Sara Rathner: If having that number hanging over your head annoys you or makes you angry, that’s a good thing. That’s power. You can put that anger to work. Even if you can put an extra $25 to $50 a month into the principal, it’s something. It will chip away that debt that much faster. If you get an annual bonus, for example, from your law firm — a lot of law firms do that — it could be that you set aside a certain percentage of your annual bonus and put it toward the principal of your loan just to chip away at that faster, so that’s another way that you can prioritize that debt.
Liz Weston: The interest rate they’re paying makes me think that they probably got federal student loans. It was probably graduate PLUS loans, and if that’s the case, they’re probably going to get pitched to refinance those loans into private loans just to lower the interest rate. And I’d be really hesitant about doing that just because federal loans have a ton of protections, as we know from the pandemic pausing the payments for so long. If you lose your job, if you have any kind of economic setback, you’ve got some flexibility there, whereas private student loans don’t have that as much.
Sean Pyles: Mm-hmm.
Liz Weston: If they do happen to be private student loans, then refinancing can be a great idea because it just lowers your interest rate and you’re not losing anything. But you do lose something very substantial if you’re trying to refinance federal student loans. And this is relatively high rate debt, and I doubt that they’re getting any kind of tax break on it. Usually we say, “Don’t worry about your student loans, let them ride, you’ve got more important things to do with your money.” But in this case, I endorse paying some of that down.
Sean Pyles: That brings me to another question from our listener, which is, what is the quote “smart order” to do things in?
Sara Rathner: That’s a million dollar question, isn’t it?
Sean Pyles: Yeah. I think the answer is that there maybe isn’t one specific, perfect smart order to do things in.
Liz Weston: Yeah, I think it’s very individual. With most people, you’ve got to prioritize retirement because most of us are going to get there, most of us are going to need the money, and it takes a long time. That’s an expensive goal. But if this debt is bothering you and you want to pay it off faster, that would be the next thing for me.
Sara Rathner: Obviously, if something’s a top priority and this listener mentioned retirement and debt, sounds like that’s on their mind. That could be a good place to start. Getting yourself set up so that you have your automated payments into your student loan so you know that money’s going out every month on time. Do you want to add to those payments and overpay your loan to some extent? Go ahead and do that. You also automate your retirement savings if it’s through your employer. That comes out of your paycheck automatically. When you start your job, there’ll be some paperwork to fill out, but get that going. Don’t delay. Get that money into your retirement account, select your investments and just let that money accumulate over time.
So once you automate all those things and you learn to live without that money in your bank account every month, that’s when you can really start thinking about, “OK, well this is what I have left. What do I want to do with it?” And that’s where that 50/30/20 budget comes in. And what you want to prioritize can change from year to year. You might prioritize living super cheaply so you can save up for travel, but then the next year you finish your trip and you’re like, “I hate my apartment. I don’t want to live with roommates anymore. Now I want to prioritize finding an apartment that’s just mine that maybe is a little bit nicer.” That’s going to cost you more money. Leave room in your plan for those changes because you’re at a point in your life where a lot’s going to change from year to year.
Sean Pyles: You kind of touched on getting things set up to begin with, and I think that’s something that is very smart to do first, if possible, because there’s a certain amount of administrative overhead involved in setting up your savings accounts. As you mentioned, getting your retirement savings and contributions and investments all organized. And that might take a good Sunday afternoon set aside to dive into, but then once that’s done, you pretty much have it going in the background and your money is going where you want it to.
Sara Rathner: Yeah, you revisit it every couple years, but for the most part, those things can run on autopilot for a while.
Sean Pyles: Right. All right, Sara, do you have any final thoughts for our listener?
Sara Rathner: Well, it’s just like we said, this is a huge change for you. You’re going from being a student to making a substantial annual salary, which is amazing, and this gives you options. Don’t sleep on how well you can set your life up with this income. This is a really great time to sit down and make a plan for yourself and really think about where you want your money to go, how hard you want it to work for you. You do work for clients as a lawyer, right? So think of it as if you are your money’s client, and it’s got to work for you or else you’re going to fire it. Well, you can’t fire it, but you know what I mean? We’re trying to make a metaphor here. Just go with it. But really the people I know who have made it to their mid-30s and later who are financially comfortable for where they are in life are people who didn’t ignore this stuff when they were in their 20s.
They’re the people that used that time to set a good foundation for themselves. The people who just kind of, well, winged it, they’re like, “I make money, I spend money, whatever, it’s all in my checking account. I don’t know,” they’re the ones who are hitting their mid-30s and they’re like, “Why can’t I afford a house? I don’t have a retirement account. Should I have a retirement account?” Yeah, yeah, you should. Because, yeah, we’re millennials. We’re not going to have any social safety net, right?
We do need to save for these things. That’s the advice I would give to you. As somebody who’s been out of school long enough and who has friends in the same boat to see all the different choose-your-own-adventure paths people have taken, I would say, “Use this time wisely.” You can still have fun. You can still do all the things you want to do, but you could do it because you know you’re also doing the things you have to do.
Liz Weston: That is an excellent point, Sara.
Sean Pyles: Well, thank you so much for talking with us.
Sara Rathner: Thanks for having me back, guys.
Sean Pyles: Before we get into the next money question, I wanted to mention that this is probably not the first time you’ve heard us suggest the 50/30/20 budget and it probably won’t be the last. The tool is a handy framework to get a grip on your spending so you can be more intentional about directing your income. If you haven’t already looked into it, then I hope you do now or maybe the next time we bring it up, and we definitely will. OK. Now let’s get on to the next money question.
This episode’s money question comes from Luca. Here it is. Hi, Wallet Nerds. I have used NerdWallet for quite some time and recently discovered your podcast, and I am a very big fan. I have a few questions I would like to ask of the show. I’m 16 and, as you can tell by me emailing you, a personal finance nerd. I want to know if there’s anything I can do now to help my financial future. I have a job, IRA, checking/savings account, and I am an authorized user on my parents’ credit card. Is there anything else I can do? Because I’m a personal finance nerd, I also like looking into various accounts. I am not very satisfied with my current bank and want to switch. Are there any cons to having multiple accounts? What about closing old accounts? I feel confident in my ability to manage them and keep track of my money. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Luca.
Liz Weston: I love Luca. Luca is our kind of nerd. Getting an early start with investing is always good, but getting started as a teenager, that is huge. Those extra years could more than double the amount that Luca can put aside for retirement. This is awesome. Anyway, to help us answer Luca’s question on this episode of the podcast, we’re joined by one of our own personal finance Nerds, Kim Palmer.
Sean Pyles: Welcome back to the podcast, Kim.
Kim Palmer: Thank you so much for having me.
Sean Pyles: Our listener, who is the youngest that we’ve ever heard from, is looking for some advice about how to jump-start their financial future. What do you think?
Kim Palmer: First, I think we have to acknowledge that they’re off to such a strong start because so many people aren’t even thinking about money yet. I think it’s really great that they’re already so far ahead. There’s one area actually that they didn’t mention and that is spending. I think it might make sense to take a deeper dive into how they’re currently spending money.
One thing I’ve noticed is that once you get in the habit of saving and of spending less than you’re earning, it’s easier to maintain. What a perfect time to start that habit when you’re a teenager. One tool we love at NerdWallet is the 50/30/20 budget, and that basically allots your take-home income into three different categories. You have 50% going toward needs, you have 30% going towards wants, and 20% going towards any debt payments and savings. Now, as a teenager, everything might not apply to you there. For example, you don’t probably have rent right now or a mortgage, but I still think it’s a useful tool just to start thinking about where your money is going.
Sean Pyles: I also think our listener should appreciate the really unique opportunity they have by starting building wealth so young. There’s the saying that youth is wasted on the young and for so many, so is their time horizon for saving for retirement and investing. But I think that Luca might be an exception to this, and as you nodded to, Kim, because they’re starting so young, they don’t have as many financial obligations. They probably don’t have student loans or a car payment or a rent, so they can maybe fudge the 50/30/20 to make it so that they can save a lot more right now.
Kim Palmer: I think that is a great idea. When it comes to investing, you do have to be 18 to actually go ahead and open up a brokerage account, but it can definitely be something that you do along with your parents and, as Liz mentioned, when you do start investing early, you have a head start. You have so much more time to grow your money.
One thing I like to do with my kids is go through a company like Stockpile and buy fractional shares of really big companies that you’re already familiar with. For example, with my kids, they can take $25 and buy Netflix or Disney and see how the stock fluctuates, and I think it can just be a way to get your head around what investing feels like, see if you like it.
Liz Weston: Yeah, because one of the problems with getting started with investing is that sometimes the buy-in is really high. Shares of companies that kids know and recognize might be $100 or more, and that’s not easy to get started with. Or if they’re looking at mutual funds, they can have an even higher minimum investment, so these fractional shares are a good way to get an early start.
Sean Pyles: But they will have to be 18 to open one of these accounts? How can they get around that? Is it that they’ll open one with their parents, and are there also any other limitations that Luca shouldn’t look out for because they are still under 18?
Kim Palmer: There is definitely a limitation in that you have to be 18 to open some of these accounts, but the easiest way around it is if you do have the help of your parent, then they can do it for you or you can do it jointly. Liz, do you think I’m missing anything else he should be thinking about?
Liz Weston: You’ve got to consider financial aid. If you think that you’re going to need financial aid to go to college, then you don’t want to have this money in the child’s name. Or you can do a workaround, which is to open a Roth IRA. Now, there are contribution limits to those, but Roth IRA and other retirement money is not counted in financial aid formulas, so that’s a way to get around that concern that your holdings could interfere with how much financial aid you get.
Sean Pyles: One thing I keep thinking about is how lucky Luca is to have parents that have encouraged their kid to start building a solid financial foundation really early on. Adding them as an authorized user on the credit card, for example, will give Luca an early start on building good credit. Kim and Liz, I’m wondering if you can share any other tips that you have as parents for how parents out there can help their kids get started like Luca’s parents did.
Liz Weston: Well, I think it’s like most things with parenting is that you start talking about it early and often so it’s not a subject that’s being brought up at the last possible minute. When you take your child shopping, you can talk about the cost of things and how you decide what to buy and what not to buy.
With our daughter, as soon as she was recognizing that money bought things, which was very early, like 3 years old, I want to say, that’s when we started her with an allowance. And that’s very early, but we had some good experiences with it. That’s something to consider.
Sean Pyles: And she seemed ready, right?
Liz Weston: Oh, yeah. Well, we’ve talked about this before. She was ready to save. She was ready to spend. She didn’t understand the sharing part. Why should she have to share her money? Then as she got older and she got jobs and started her own little business, we would match her earnings with Roth IRA contributions.
Sean Pyles: Oh, that’s cool.
Kim Palmer: That is very cool. My parents did the exact same thing, and I really think it helped me. I think it helped me learn how to save. One thing I’ve noticed with my kids is that from a very early age, like toddlerhood, they start asking for things, and they have no qualms about spending your money. The good thing about that is that it gives me a chance and parents a chance to say no and to explain the whole idea of scarcity. We can’t have everything we want. That’s really the basis of learning how to budget right there.
As they get older, it morphs into a more complex conversation. For example, with my 12-year-old, we can have a more nuanced discussion about saving and putting money aside so you can afford something bigger. And I think as the kids get older, you can start having those more nuanced conversations, but it really starts, I think, around age 2.
Liz Weston: Luca’s also wondering about switching banks. Kim, what do you think they should know when they’re shopping around?
Kim Palmer: It’s a really good question to look into switching banks. A lot of people are afraid to switch banks, and they just go with the flow of their current bank even though they’re not happy. I really encourage this line of thought to look at if another bank could serve your needs better. What you want to do when you start thinking about opening a new bank is first see what would be a good fit.
That starts with some online research. Where can we make sure we’re paying as few fees as possible? Where can we earn the highest APY? Where can we get the most for our money? Once you do that comparison and you choose a good fit with your new bank, you just go ahead and you transfer any money that you have into the new account, you close your old one. And it’s really not as complicated as I think a lot of people worry that it is.
Sean Pyles: Or as a lot of banks might want you to think it is to switch banks like that. I did this in the past year. I had had a goal for a while to go from the big national bank I’ve been using since high school to a local credit union in the Pacific Northwest, and it took me a while to actually muster up the energy to do it, and it took me five minutes. It was shockingly easy.
Liz Weston: Yeah, I think it’s more complicated when you have more bills to pay, especially if you’re autopaying through your bank account, so you may need to keep your old account open for a while for those to clear, but if you’re somebody like Luca who’s just starting out, you can choose whatever bank you’d like. And an online bank might be a good fit because they tend not to have minimums and a lot of fees. You can start with a small amount and build from there.
Sean Pyles: But, again, they’ll probably have to have their parents help to open any sort of account like this.
Liz Weston: Luca is obviously in pretty good shape today and is already saving for their future.
Kim, what else should Luca consider going forward?
Kim Palmer: Well, I think it really all goes back to getting in the habit of saving money. I think some of the habits that they’re establishing now really will last possibly their whole life. Of course, as a teenager, you might not have the same priorities that you will have in your 20s or 30s or beyond, so I think when you’re focused on saving and you have that savings cushion, it helps you have that flexibility. So wherever you turn, whatever priorities emerge over the next decade or two decades, if you have that savings habit, I think that gives you such a strong backbone to rely on.
Liz Weston: Yes. Absolutely. And I love the fact that you talked about the importance of saving while you’re young because a lot of people just keep putting it off thinking, “Well, in the future I’ll have more money. It’ll be easier in the future.” It is never easier in the future. Start now, do it now, and you’ll have a lot more flexibility down the road.
Sean Pyles: Well, Kim, thank you so much for talking with us.
Kim Palmer: Of course. Thanks for having me.
Liz Weston: So Luca gave us a chance to talk about the power of compounding, which is another of our favorite topics, and how an early start can make a huge difference in how much you can save over time. But we don’t want people to despair if they’re coming late to investing and wealth building. We want them to have some kind of hope.
Sean Pyles: Right. Because even small changes can make a big difference over time. Just getting a handle on your budget can be a great first step. And that’s all we have for this episode. Do you have a money question of your own? Turn to the Nerds and call or text us your questions at 901-730-6373. That’s 901-730-NERD. You can also email us at [email protected]
Liz Weston: Remember to follow our show on your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes. If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, then tap that five star button to rate the show. We really appreciate it.
Sean Pyles: This episode was produced by Liz Weston and Cody Gough with help from me. Kaely Monahan mixed this episode with additional audio editing by Cody. And a big thank you to the folks on the NerdWallet copy desk for all their help.
Liz Weston: And here’s our brief disclaimer. We are not financial or investment advisors. This nerdy info is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes and may not apply to your specific circumstances.
Sean Pyles: And with that said, until next time, turn to the Nerds.
High above the Las Vegas Strip, solar panels blanketed the roof of Mandalay Bay Convention Center — 26,000 of them, rippling across an area larger than 20 football fields.
From this vantage point, the sun-dappled Mandalay Bay and Delano hotels dominated the horizon, emerging like comically large golden scepters from the glittering black panels.Snow-tipped mountains rose to the west.
It was a cold winter morning in the Mojave Desert. But there was plenty of sunlight to supply the solar array.
“This is really an ideal location,” said Michael Gulich, vice president of sustainability at MGM Resorts International.
The same goes for the rest of Las Vegas and its sprawling suburbs.
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Sin City already has more solar panels per person than any major U.S. metropolis outside Hawaii, according to one analysis. And the city is bursting with single-family homes, warehouses and parking lots untouched by solar.
L.A. Times energy reporter Sammy Roth heads to the Las Vegas Valley, where giant solar fields are beginning to carpet the desert. But what is the environmental cost? (Video by Jessica Q. Chen, Maggie Beidelman / Los Angeles Times)
There’s enormous opportunity to lower household utility bills and cut climate pollution — without damaging wildlife habitat or disrupting treasured landscapes.
But that hasn’t stopped corporations from making plans to carpet the desert surrounding Las Vegas with dozens of giant solar fields — some of them designed to supply power to California. The Biden administration has fueled that growth, taking steps to encourage solar and wind energy development across vast stretches of public lands in Nevada and other Western states.
Those energy generators could imperil rare plants and slow-footed tortoises already threatened by rising temperatures.
They could also lessen the death and suffering from the worsening heat waves, fires, droughts and storms of the climate crisis.
Researchers have found there’s not nearly enough space on rooftops to supply all U.S. electricity — especially as more people drive electric cars. Even an analysis funded by rooftop solar advocates and installers found that the most cost-effective route to phasing out fossil fuels involves six times more power from big solar and wind farms than from smaller local solar systems.
But the exact balance has yet to be determined. And Nevada is ground zero for figuring it out.
The outcome could be determined, in part, by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The so-called Oracle of Omaha owns NV Energy, the monopoly utility that supplies electricity to most Nevadans. NV Energy and its investor-owned utility brethren across the country can earn huge amounts of money paving over public lands with solar and wind farms and building long-distance transmission lines to cities.
But by regulatory design, those companies don’t profit off rooftop solar. And in many cases, they’ve fought to limit rooftop solar — which can reduce the need for large-scale infrastructure and result in lower returns for investors.
Mike Troncoso remembers the exact date of Nevada’s rooftop solar reckoning.
It was Dec. 23, 2015, and he was working for SolarCity. The rooftop installer abruptly ceased operations in the Silver State after NV Energy helped persuade officials to slash a program that pays solar customers for energy they send to the power grid.
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“I was out in the field working, and we got a call: ‘Stop everything you’re doing, don’t finish the project, come to the warehouse,’” Troncoso said. “It was right before Christmas, and they said, ‘Hey, guys, unfortunately we’re getting shut down.’”
After a public outcry, Nevada lawmakers partly reversed the reductions to rooftop solar incentives. Since then, NV Energy and the rooftop solar industry have maintained an uneasy political ceasefire. Installations now exceed pre-2015 levels.
Today, Troncoso is Nevada branch manager for Sunrun, the nation’s largest rooftop solar installer. The company has enough work in the state to support a dozen crews, each named for a different casino. On a chilly winter morning before sunrise, they prepared for the day ahead — laying out steel rails, hooking up microinverters and loading panels onto powder-blue trucks.
But even if Sunrun’s business continues to grow, it won’t eliminate the need for large solar farms in the desert.
Some habitat destruction is unavoidable — at least if we want to break our fossil fuel addiction. The key questions are: How many big solar farms are needed, and where should they be built? Can they be engineered to coexist with animals and plants?
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And if not, should Americans be willing to sacrifice a few endangered species in the name of tackling climate change?
To answer those questions, Los Angeles Times journalists spent a week in southern Nevada, touring solar construction sites, hiking up sand dunes and off-roading through the Mojave. We spoke with NV Energy executives, conservation activists battling Buffett’s company and desert rats who don’t want to see their favorite off-highway vehicle trails cut off by solar farms.
Odds are, no one will get everything they want.
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The tortoise in the coal mine
Biologist Bre Moyle easily spotted the small yellow flag affixed to a scraggly creosote bush — one of many hardy plants sprouting from the caliche soil, surrounded by rows of gleaming steel trusses that would soon hoist solar panels toward the sky.
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Moyle leaned down for a closer look, gently pulling aside branches to reveal a football-sized hole in the ground. It was the entrance to a desert tortoise burrow — one of thousands catalogued by her employer, Primergy Solar, during construction of one of the nation’s largest solar farms on public lands outside Las Vegas.
“I wouldn’t stand on this side of it,” Moyle advised us. “If you walk back there, you could collapse it, potentially.”
I’d seen plenty of solar construction sites in my decade reporting on energy. But none like this.
Instead of tearing out every cactus and other plant and leveling the land flat — the “blade and grade” method — Primergy had left much of the native vegetation in place and installed trusses of different heights to match the ground’s natural contours. The company had temporarily relocated more than 1,600 plants to an on-site nursery, with plans to put them back later.
The Oakland-based developer also went to great lengths to safeguard desert tortoises — an iconic reptile protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, and the biggest environmental roadblock to building solar in the Mojave.
Desert tortoises are sensitive to global warming, residential sprawl and other human encroachment on their habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has estimated tortoise populations fell by more than one-third between 2004 and 2014.
Scientists consider much of the Primergy site high-quality tortoise habitat. It also straddles a connectivity corridor that could help the reptiles seek safer haven as hotter weather and more extreme droughts make their current homes increasingly unlivable.
Before Primergy started building, the company scoured the site and removed 167 tortoises, with plans to let them return and live among the solar panels once the heavy lifting is over. Two-thirds of the project site will be repopulated with tortoises.
Workers removed more tortoises during construction. As of January, the company knew of just two tortoises killed — one that may have been hit by a car, and another that may have been entombed in its burrow by roadwork, then eaten by a kit fox.
Primergy Vice President Thomas Regenhard acknowledged the company can’t build solar here without doing any harm to the ecosystem — or spurring opposition from conservation activists. But as he watched union construction workers lift panels onto trusses, he said Primergy is “making the best of the worst-case situation” for solar opponents.
“What we’re trying to do is make it the least impactful on the environment and natural resources,” he said. “What we’re also doing is we’re sharing that knowledge, so that these projects can be built in a better way moving forward.”
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The company isn’t saving tortoises out of the goodness of its profit-seeking heart.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management conditioned its approval of the solar farm, called Gemini, on a long list of environmental protection measures — and only after some bureau staffers seemingly contemplated rejecting the project entirely.
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife show the bureau’s Las Vegas field office drafted several versions of a “record of decision” that would have denied the permit application for Gemini. The drafts listed several objections, including harm to desert tortoises, loss of space for off-road vehicle drivers and disturbance of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail, which runs through the project site.
Separately, Primergy reached a legal settlement with conservationists — who challenged the project’s federal approval in court — in which the company agreed to additional steps to protect tortoises and a plant known as the three-corner milkvetch.
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The company estimates just 2.5% of the project site will be permanently disturbed — far less than the 33% allowed by Primergy’s federal permit. Regenhard is hopeful the lessons learned here will inform future solar development on public lands.
“This is something new. So we’re refining a lot of the processes,” he said. “We’re not perfect. We’re still learning.”
By the time construction wraps this fall, 1.8 million panels will cover nearly 4,000 football fields’ worth of land, just off the 15 Freeway. They’ll be able to produce 690 megawatts of power — as much as 115,000 typical home solar systems. And they’ll be paired with batteries, to store energy and help NV Energy customers keep running their air conditioners after sundown.
Unlike many solar fields, Gemini is close to the population it will serve — just a few dozen miles from the Strip. And the affected landscape is far from visually stunning, with none of the red-rock majesty found at nearby Valley of Fire State Park.
But desert tortoises don’t care if a place looks cool to humans. They care if it’s good tortoise habitat.
Moyle, Primergy’s environmental services manager, pointed to a small black structure at the bottom of a fence along the site’s edge — a shade shelter for tortoises. Workers installed them every 800 feet, so that if any relocated reptiles try to return to the solar farm too early, they don’t die pacing along the fence in the heat.
“They have a really, really good sense of direction,” Moyle said. “They know where their homes are. They want to come back.”
Primergy will study what happens when tortoises do come back. Will they benefit from the shade of the solar panels? Or will they struggle to survive on the industrialized landscape?
And looming over those uncertainties, a more existential query: With global warming beginning to devastate human and animal life around the world, should we really be slowing or stopping solar development to save a single type of reptile?
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Moyle was ready with an answer: Tortoises are a keystone species. If they’re doing well, it’s a good sign of a healthy ecosystem in which other desert creatures — such as burrowing owls, kit foxes and American badgers — are positioned to thrive, too.
And as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, human survival is inextricably linked with a healthy natural world.
“We take one thing out, we don’t know what sort of disastrous effect it’s going to have on everything else,” Moyle said.
We do, however, know the consequences of relying on fossil fuels: entire towns burning to the ground, Lake Mead three-quarters empty, elderly Americans baking to death in their overheated homes. With worse to come.
The shifting sands of time
A few miles south, another solar project was rising in the desert. This one looked different.
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A fleet of bulldozers, scrapers, excavators and graders was nearly done flattening the land — a beige moonscape devoid of cacti and creosote. The solar panel support trusses were all the same height, forming an eerily rigid silver sea.
When I asked Carl Glass — construction manager for DEPCOM Power, the contractor building this project for Buffett’s NV Energy — why workers couldn’t leave vegetation in place like at Gemini, he offered a simple answer: drainage. Allowing the land to retain its natural contours, he said, would make it difficult to move stormwater off the site during summer monsoons.
Safety was another consideration, said Dani Strain, NV Energy’s senior manager for the project. Blading and grading the land meant workers wouldn’t have to carry solar panels and equipment across ground studded with tripping hazards.
“It’s nicer for the environment not to do it,” Strain said. “But it creates other problems. You can’t have everything.”
This kind of solar project has typified development in the Mojave Desert.
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And it helps explain why the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly has fought so hard to limit that development.
The morning after touring the solar construction sites, we joined Donnelly for a hike up Big Dune, a giant pile of sand covering five square miles and towering 500 feet above the desert floor, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The sun was just beginning its ascent over the Mojave, bathing the sand in a smooth umber glow beneath pockets of wispy cloud.
On weekends, Donnelly said, the dune can be overrun by thousands of off-road vehicles. But on this day, it was quiet.
Energy companies have proposed more than a dozen solar farms on public lands surrounding Big Dune — some with overlapping footprints. Donnelly doesn’t oppose all of them. But he thinks federal agencies should limit solar to the least ecologically sensitive parts of Nevada, instead of letting companies pitch projects almost anywhere they choose.
“Developers are looking at this as low-hanging fruit,” he said. “The idea is, this is where California can build all of its solar.”
We trekked slowly up the dune, our bodies casting long shadows in the early morning light. When we took a breather and looked back down, a trail of footprints marked our path. Donnelly assured us a windy day would wipe them away.
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“This is why I live here, man,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful place on Earth, in my mind.”
Donnelly broke his back in a rock-climbing accident, so he used a walking stick to scale the dune. He lives not far from here, at the edge of Death Valley National Park, and works as the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity’s Great Basin director.
As we resumed our journey, the wind blowing hard, I asked Donnelly to rank the top human threats to the Mojave. He was quick to answer: The climate crisis was No. 1, followed by housing sprawl, solar development and off-road vehicles.
“There’s no good solar project in the desert. But there’s less bad,” he said. “And we’re at a point now where we have to settle for less bad, because the alternatives are more bad: more coal, more gas, climate apocalypse.”
That hasn’t stopped Donnelly and his colleagues from fighting renewable energy projects they fear would wipe out entire species — even little-known plants and animals with tiny ranges, such as Tiehm’s buckwheat and the Dixie Valley toad.
“I’m not a religious guy,” Donnelly said. “But all God’s creatures great and small.”
After a steep stretch of sand, we stopped along a ridge with sweeping views. To our west were the Funeral Mountains, across the California state line in Death Valley National Park — and far beyond them Mt. Whitney, its snow-covered facade just barely visible. To our east was Highway 95, cutting across the Amargosa Valley en route from Las Vegas to Reno.
It’s along this highway that so many developers want to build.
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“We would be in a sea of solar right now,” Donnelly said.
Having heard plenty of rural residents say they don’t want to look at such a sea, I asked Donnelly if this was a bad spot for solar because it would ruin the glorious views. He told me he never makes that argument, “because honestly, views aren’t really the primary concern at this moment. The primary concern is stopping the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis.”
“There are certain places where we shouldn’t put solar because it’s a wild and undisturbed landscape,” he said.
As far as he’s concerned, though, the Amargosa Valley isn’t one of those landscapes, what with Highway 95 running through it. The same goes for Dry Lake Valley, where NV Energy’s solar construction site is already surrounded by energy infrastructure.
What Donnelly would like to see is better planning.
He pointed to California, where state and federal officials spent eight years crafting a desert conservation plan that allows solar and wind farms across a few hundred thousand acres while setting aside millions more for protection. He thinks a similar process is crucial in Nevada, where four-fifths of the land area is owned by the federal government — more than any other state.
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If Donnelly had his way, regulators would put the kibosh on solar farms immediately adjacent to Big Dune. He’s worried they could alter the movement of sand across the desert floor, affecting several rare beetles that call the dune home.
But if the feds want to allow solar projects along the highway to the south, near the Area 51 Alien Center?
“Might not be the end the world,” Donnelly said.
He shot me a grin.
“You know, one thing I like to do …”
Without warning, he took off racing down the dune, carried by momentum and love for the desert. He laughed as he reached a natural stopping point, calling for us to join him. His voice sounded free and full of possibility.
Some solar panels on the horizon wouldn’t have changed that.
Shout it from the rooftops
Laura Cunningham and Kevin Emmerich were a match made in Mojave Desert heaven.
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Cunningham was a wildlife biologist, Emmerich a park ranger when they met nearly 30 years ago at Death Valley. She studied tortoises for government agencies and later a private contractor. He worked with bighorn sheep and gave interpretive talks. They got married, bought property along the Amargosa River and started their own conservation group, Basin and Range Watch.
And they’ve been fighting solar development ever since.
That’s how we ended up in the back of their SUV, pulling open a rickety cattle gate off Highway 95 and driving past wild burros on a dirt road through Nevada’s Bullfrog Hills, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
They had told us Sarcobatus Flat was stunning, but I was still surprised by how stunning. I got my first look as we crested a ridge. The gently sloping valley spilled down toward Death Valley National Park, whose snowy mountain peaks towered over a landscape dotted with thousands of Joshua trees.
“Everything we’re looking at is proposed for solar development,” Cunningham said.
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Most environmentalists agree we need at least some large solar farms. Cunningham and Emmerich are different. They’re at the vanguard of a harder-core desert protection movement that sees all large-scale solar farms on public lands as bad news.
Why had so many companies converged on Sarcobatus Flat?
The main answer is transmission. NV Energy is seeking federal approval to build the 358-mile Greenlink West electric line, which would carry thousands of megawatts of renewable power between Reno and Las Vegas along the Highway 95 corridor.
The dirt road curved around a small hill, and suddenly we found ourselves on the valley floor, surrounded by Joshua trees. Some looked healthy; others had bark that had been chewed by rodents seeking water, a sign of drought stress. Scientists estimate the Joshua tree’s western subspecies could lose 90% of its range as the world gets hotter and droughts get more intense.
But asked whether climate change or solar posed a bigger threat to Sarcobatus Flat, Cunningham didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, solar development hands down,” she said.
Nearly 20 years ago, she said, she helped relocate desert tortoises to make way for a test track in California. One of them tried to return home, walking 20 miles before hitting a fence. It paced back and forth and eventually died of heat exhaustion.
Solar farms, she said, pose a similar threat to tortoises. And at Sarcobatus Flat, they would cover a high-elevation area that could otherwise serve as a climate refuge for Joshua trees, giving them a relatively cool place to reproduce as the planet heats up.
“It makes no sense to me that we’re going to bulldoze them down and throw them into trash piles. It’s just crazy,” she said.
In Cunningham and Emmerich’s view, every sun-baked parking lot in L.A. and Vegas and Phoenix should have a solar canopy, every warehouse and single-family home a solar roof. It’s a common argument among desert defenders: Why sacrifice sensitive ecosystems when there’s an easy alternative for fighting climate change? Especially when rooftop solar can reduce strain on an overtaxed electric grid and — when paired with batteries — help people keep their lights on during blackouts?
The answer isn’t especially satisfying to conservationists.
For all the virtues of rooftop solar, it’s an expensive way to generate clean power — and keeping energy costs low is crucial to ensure that lower-income families can afford electric cars, another key climate solution. A recent report from investment bank Lazard pegged the cost of rooftop solar at 11.7 cents per kilowatt-hour on the low end, compared with 2.4 cents for utility solar.
Even when factoring in pricey long-distance electric lines, utility-scale solar is typically cheaper, several experts told me.
“It’s three to six times more expensive to put solar on your roof than to put it in a large-scale project,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University. “There may be some added value to having solar in the Los Angeles Basin instead of the middle of the Mojave Desert. But is it 300% to 600% more value? Probably not. It’s probably not even close.”
There’s a practical challenge, too.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated U.S. rooftops could generate 1,432 terawatt-hours of electricity per year — just 13% of the power America will need to replace most of its coal, oil and gas, according to research led by Jenkins.
Add in parking lots and other areas within cities, and urban solar systems might conceivably supply one-quarter or even one-third of U.S. power, several experts told The Times — in an unlikely scenario where they’re installed in every suitable spot.
Energy researcher Chris Clack’s consulting firm has found that dramatic growth in rooftop and other small-scale solar installations could reduce the costs of slashing climate pollution by half a trillion dollars. But even Clack said rooftops alone won’t cut it.
“Realistically, 80% is going to end up being utility grid no matter what,” he said.
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All those industrial renewable energy projects will have to go somewhere.
Sarcobatus Flat may not be the answer. Federal officials classified all three solar proposals there as “low priority,” citing their proximity to Death Valley and potential harm to tortoise habitat. One developer withdrew its application last year.
Before leaving the area, Cunningham pointed to a wooden marker, one of at least half a dozen stretching out in a line. I walked over to take a closer look and discovered it was a mining claim for lithium — a main ingredient in electric-car batteries.
If solar development didn’t upend this valley, lithium extraction might.
On the beaten track
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The four-wheeler jerked violently as Erica Muxlow pressed her foot to the gas, sending us flying down a rough dirt road with no end in sight but the distant mountains. Five-point safety straps were the only things stopping us from flying out of our seats, the vehicle leaping through the air as we reached speeds of 40 mph, then 50 mph, the wind whipping our faces.
It was like riding Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds — just without the Yeti.
Ahead of us, Muxlow’s neighbor Jimmy Lewis led the way on an electric blue motorcycle, kicking up a stream of sand. He wanted us to see thousands of acres of public lands outside his adopted hometown of Pahrump, in Nevada’s Nye County, that could soon be blocked by solar projects — cutting off access to off-highway vehicle enthusiasts such as himself.
“You could build an apartment complex or a shopping mall here, and it would be the same thing to me,” he said.
To progressive-minded Angelenos or San Franciscans, preserving large chunks of public land for gas-guzzling, environmentally destructive dirt bikes might sound like a terrible reason not to build solar farms that would lessen the climate crisis.
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But here’s the reality: Rural Westerners such as Lewis will play a key role in determining how much clean energy gets built.
Not long before our Nevada trip, Nye County placed a six-month pause on new renewable energy projects, citing local concerns about loss of off-road vehicle trails. Similar fears have stymied development across the U.S., with rural residents attacking solar and wind farms as industrial intrusions on their way of life — and local governments throwing up roadblocks.
For Lewis, the conflict is deeply personal.
He moved here from Southern California more than a decade ago, trading life by the beach for a five-acre plot where he runs an off-roading school and test-drives motorcycles for manufacturers. His warehouse was packed with dozens of dirt bikes.
“This is my life. Motorcycles, motorcycles, motorcycles,” he said, laughing.
Lewis has worked to stir up opposition to three local solar farm proposals. So far, his efforts have been in vain.
One project is already under construction. Peering through a fence, we saw row after row of trusses, waiting for their photovoltaic panels. It’s called Yellow Pine, and it’s being built by Florida-based NextEra Energy to supply power to California.
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Lewis learned about Yellow Pine when he was riding one of his favorite trails and was surprised to find it cut off. He compared the experience to riding the best roller-coaster at a theme park, only to have it grind to a halt three-quarters of the way through.
“I don’t want my playground taken away from me,” he said.
“Me neither!” a voice called out from behind us.
We turned and were greeted by Shannon Salter, an activist who had previously spent nine months camping near the Yellow Pine site to protest the habitat destruction. She and Lewis had never met, but they quickly realized they had common cause.
“It’s the opposite of green!” Salter said.
“On my roof, not my backyard,” Lewis agreed.
Never mind that conservationists have long decried the ecological damage from desert off-roading. Salter and Lewis both cared about these lands. Neither wanted to see the solar industry lay claim to them. They talked about staying in touch.
It’s easy to imagine similar alliances forming across the West, the clean energy transition bringing together environmentalists and rural residents in a battle to defend their lifestyles, their landscapes and animals that can’t fight for themselves.
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It’s also easy to imagine major cities that badly need lots of solar and wind power — Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix — brushing off those complaints as insignificant compared with the climate emergency, or as fueled by right-wing misinformation.
But many of concerns raised by critics are legitimate. And their voices are only getting louder.
As night fell over the Mojave, Lewis shared his idea that any city buying electricity from a desert solar farm should be required to install a certain amount of rooftop solar back home first — on government buildings, at least. It only seemed fair.
“Some people see the desert as just a wasteland,” Lewis said. “I think it’s beautiful.”
The view from Black Mountain
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So how do we build enough renewable energy to replace fossil fuels without destroying too many ecosystems, or stoking too much political opposition from rural towns, or moving too slowly to save the planet?
Few people could do more to ease those tensions than Buffett.
Our conversation kept returning to the legendary investor as we hiked Black Mountain, just outside Vegas, on our last morning in the Silver State. We were joined by Jaina Moan, director of external affairs for the Nature Conservancy’s Nevada chapter. She had promised a view of massive solar fields from the peak — but only after a 3.5-mile trek with 2,000 feet of elevation gain.
“It’ll be a little StairMaster at the end,” she warned us.
The homes and hotels and casinos of the Las Vegas Valley retreated behind us as we climbed, looking ever smaller and more insignificant against the vast open desert. It was an illusion that will prove increasingly difficult to maintain as Sin City and its suburbs continue their march into the Mojave. Nevada politicians from both parties are pushing for legislation that would let federal officials auction off additional public lands for residential and commercial development.
Vegas and other Western cities could limit the need for more suburbs — and sprawling solar farms — by growing smarter, Moan said. Urban areas could embrace density, to help people drive fewer miles and reduce the demand for new power supplies to fuel electric vehicles. They could invest in electric buses and trains — and use less water, which would save a lot of energy.
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“As our spaces become more crowded, we’re going to have to come up with more creative ideas,” Moan said.
That’s where Buffett could make things easier.
The billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway company owns electric utilities that serve millions of people, from California to Nevada to Illinois. Those utilities, Moan said, could buck the industry trend of urging policymakers to reduce financial incentives for rooftop solar and instead encourage the technology — along with other small-scale clean energy solutions, such as local microgrids.
That would limit the need for big solar farms — at least somewhat.
Berkshire and other energy giants could also build solar on lands already altered by humans, such as abandoned mines, toxic Superfund sites, reservoirs, landfills, agricultural areas, highway corridors and canals that carry water to farms and cities.
The costs are typically higher than building on undisturbed public lands. And in many cases there are technical challenges yet to be resolved. But those kinds of “creative solutions” could at least lessen the loss of biodiversity, Moan said.
“There’s money to be made there, and there’s good to be done,” she said.
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It’s hard to know what Buffett thinks. A Berkshire spokesperson declined my request to interview him.
Tony Sanchez, NV Energy’s executive vice president for business development and external relations, was more forthcoming.
“The problem for us with rooftop solar,” he said, is that it’s “not controlled at all by us.” As a result, NV Energy can’t decide when and how rooftop solar power is used — and can’t rely on that power to help balance supply and demand on the grid.
Over time, Sanchez predicted, a lot more rooftop solar will get built. But he couldn’t say how much.
Rooftop solar faces a similarly uncertain future in California, where state officials voted last year to slash incentive payments, calling them an unfair subsidy. Industry leaders have warned of a dramatic decline in installations.
As we neared the top of Black Mountain, the solar farms on the other side came into view. They stretched across the Eldorado Valley far below — black rectangles that could help save life on Earth while also destroying bits and pieces of it.
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Moan believes the key to balancing clean energy and conservation is “go slow to go fast.” Government agencies, she said, should work with conservation activists, small-town residents and Native American tribes to study and map out the best places for clean energy, then reward companies that agree to build in those areas with faster approvals. Solar and wind development would slow down in the short term but speed up in the long run, with quicker environmental reviews and less risk of lawsuits.
It’s a tantalizing concept — but I confessed to Moan that I worried it would backfire.
What if the sparring factions couldn’t agree on the best spots to build solar and wind farms, and instead wasted years arguing? Or what if they did manage to hammer out some compromises, only for a handful of unhappy people or groups to take them to court, gumming up the works? Couldn’t “go slow to go fast” end up becoming “go slow to go slow”?
In other words, should we really bet our collective future on human beings working together, rather than fighting?
Moan was sympathetic to my fears. She also didn’t see another way forward.
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“We really need to think holistically about saving everything,” she said.
The sad truth is, not everything can be saved. Not if we want to keep the world livable for people and animals alike.
Some beloved landscapes will be left unrecognizable. Some families will be stuck paying high energy bills to monopoly utilities, even as some utility investors make less money. Some tortoises will probably die, pacing along fences in the heat.
The alternative is worse.
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The latest figures put the average honeymoon cost at around $4,800, Brides.com reports, adding that the average honeymoon lasts eight days.
There are plenty of ways to save on or save for a honeymoon, though.
Here’s what you need to know about the average honeymoon cost and paying for a trip you’ll never forget.
The Honeymoon Tab
The Knot, a wedding-planning platform, cited a pre-pandemic average honeymoon cost of $5,000, based on an internal study of more than 27,000 couples who married in 2019. That is atop the average cost of a wedding, which The Knot put at nearly $30,000.
The average cost of a honeymoon has increased in the past few years, reflecting couples’ desire for more experiential travel, The Knot says, with more than 60% of American couples traveling outside the continental U.S. for their honeymoon.
Of course, the honeymoon outlay could be much higher if a couple goes on a luxury getaway or takes an extended trip.
Big-Ticket Honeymoon Items
The cost of a honeymoon can depend on location, amenities, and even the season couples decide to travel. Typically the cost will include:
• Plane, train, or automobile travel
• Accommodations
• Any excursions
• Food and beverages
• Taxes, tips, and fees
Essentially, it’s the same as any other big trip. The only extras may come because you want to make this trip the best it can be (and we don’t blame you).
Ways to Cut Honeymoon Expenses
There are still plenty of ways to save money on a honeymoon. As mentioned, location can play a major factor in the cost of the trip, but there is a secret a lot of travel insiders know and don’t share: Shoulder season.
Shoulder season is that awkward time between the high and low seasons of different destinations. It’s not necessarily that a place is less desirable to visit, but merely a less popular time to go.
The shoulder season in the Caribbean is the early fall (in the Northern Hemisphere, September to November), which is the midst of hurricane season, meaning fewer people tend to book during this time. Honeymooners could score great deals on flights and accommodations, and find more restaurant and excursion reservations available.
Hawaii, a perennial honeymoon destination favorite, has shoulder seasons of April through June, after all the school breaks end, and September to December, right before the holiday travel rush.
Check to see when your desired location’s shoulder season may fall, and if you wish, book in this window for the chance to save a little money.
Two other ideas:
Forage for great fares. Another way to cut back on typical honeymoon expenses is to hunt for the best flights possible if you’re traveling by air. This can be done by signing up for newsletter or alert services like Next Vacay, which sends daily emails with cheap flight deals, or similar services like Scott’s Cheap Flights and Skyscanner.
Use points or miles. One more way to lessen the financial strain of a honeymoon is to dig into credit card rewards such as points or miles. Check to see if your points can be used on flights, accommodations, or activities, and use them as you please. Don’t forget to check on any of those frequent flyer miles you’ve got hanging around either.
Paying for a Honeymoon
There are a number of ways couples can finance their honeymoon. Here are a few.
Join a honeymoon registry. The first, and perhaps most festive for a wedding, is to ask your friends and family to get involved with a honeymoon registry.
A honeymoon registry is a new twist on the wedding registry tradition. Rather than ask for gifts like china that comes out of the closet once every 10 years, couples can instead ask their guests to gift them money that they may use toward their honeymoon.
Some couples take the honeymoon registry a step further by registering at places like Honeyfund or Zola for specific honeymoon items rather than a blanket ask. This can include a specific hotel stay or merely an upgrade, scuba lessons or ski tickets, or dining at one special restaurant during the trip.
Carve out a honeymoon savings fund. Another way to finance your honeymoon is by starting your own honeymoon budget. Once you’ve decided as a couple where you’d like to travel on your first trip as the newly betrothed, you can estimate how much the trip will cost.
From there, you can start a fund where you put in a little each day, week, or a month from income or through any cutbacks you’re willing to make to your personal budgets to turn this dream trip into a reality.
Decide to camp out in Uncle Jeremy’s backyard. And grill hot dogs for days. It will be unforgettable. Just sayin’.
Take out a personal loan. A personal wedding or honeymoon loan can be used for just about anything you want. Yes, that means it can be used to cover any and all costs of a honeymoon.
The Takeaway
The average honeymoon costs around $4,800. But clearly, that number can vary greatly depending on when and where honeymooners travel, for how long, and the level of luxury. With more couples lusting for experiential travel, the average tab has grown.
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Whenever my siblings and I misbehaved growing up, my mom knew the perfect punishment for each of her children.
Josh, the social butterfly, would be grounded. Will, the gamer, would get no screen time. And whenever I disobeyed, mom was quick to announce my dreaded sentence. “No sweets.”
As an adult, I’d take a glass of wine with cheese and crackers over a bowl of ice cream any day, but the 12-year-old Kate was devastated every time my parents deprived me of sugar; and although my mom hasn’t punished me in years, my budget has assumed the role of disciplinarian in adulthood.
For the sake of our present and future, we, the grown-ups, must limit frivolous purchases to prioritize saving. Yes, it’s a challenge to monitor your own spending habits (especially when you’re the one to determine those habits), but I hope we can also agree it’s absolutely necessary.
With all this said, here’s the good news: budgeting doesn’t have to suck!
Next time you’re struggling to say “no” to dinner and drinks or that fancy new TV, revisit the following tips to keep your spending in check and stay focused on saving for tomorrow!
What’s Ahead:
1. Remember why you’re budgeting
If money wasn’t a limiting factor, I’d be quite the shopaholic. I’d buy some waterproof hiking boots, a new rug for my living room, a Patagonia sweater, an exercise ball and desk, and so on and so forth.
This is why my budget is essential. While spending money isn’t inherently bad, letting your spending habits run wild will come back to bite you in the long run.
Whenever you feel frustrated and limited by your budget, remember that it’s there to help you, not hurt you. It may not feel like it at the moment, but that’s why it’s imperative that you pause to remind yourself why you’re budgeting in the first place. The same can be said for eating one thin mint and not the whole box or watching one episode of Schitt’s Creek and not a whole season.
For the sake of your health and your wellbeing, you need to maintain a little restraint every once in a while. Your future self will thank you for it.
2. Accept all the help you can get
It’s not easy to decline dinner with friends or ignore a sale at your favorite retailer. It’s even harder to do it over and over again.
Luckily, there are a number of budgeting services available to help you manage your spending and keep up the healthy habits. PocketSmith integrates with more than 12,000 financial institutions so you can monitor all your money in one convenient location. You can break your budget down into manageable chunks of time, such as weekly or even daily, and categorize and organize your past transactions and upcoming bills.
With all this said, one of the best features PocketSmith has to offer is you can forecast your saving and spending habits up to 30 years in the future!
3. Set aside some “fun money”
A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to chat with a nutritionist. I asked her opinion on individual ingredients like eggs and tofu. We talked about multiple small meals versus breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But, there’s one statement she made I clearly remember.
“I don’t like diets,” she said.
Her reasoning wasn’t that diets are ineffective or unhealthy, but that they’re not sustainable. Sure, you can lose 15 pounds in a couple of months, but then what? If you want to keep the weight off, she said, you need to find a long-term solution.
The key to sustainable dieting is moderation, and personal finance fits this same rationale. If you deprive yourself of dinner out indefinitely, not only will you feel a little sour when your friends grab a drink without you, but your relationships may suffer too. Whether you enjoy splurging on clothes, food, experiences, travel, or something else entirely, cutting those joys from your life completely will probably do more harm than good.
The best long-term solution for your budget is to make “fun money” a priority. Evaluate your budget and set aside a little cash each month for a few pleasant purchases. When you want to spend on a new pair of boots or a weekend vacation with friends, you’ll have some money available to make the purchase.
4. Make a list of what you want to buy
About a year ago, I had a conversation with a former coworker about money.
He was preparing to transition to a new job, and I was getting ready to start freelance writing full-time. We both had some major modifications to make to our budgets, and he told me that one habit that has helped him and his wife monitor their spending was making a list of everything they wanted to buy. Every time they had extra cash to spend, they’d refer to their list and buy whatever item or experience sat at the top.
I went home that day and made my own list.
Instead of feeling like you don’t have enough money to buy the things you want, restructure your spending habits so it feels like a positive experience. Every time you have the money to buy something you want, checking that item off your list will feel like you’re accomplishing a goal rather than missing out on a new gadget or adventure.
5. Become a bargain hunter
One of my husband and my favorite activities is thrift shopping. In fact, many of our date nights include a quick trip to Goodwill before heading to the local brewery.
We certainly love the quirky paraphernalia, the surprise deals, and the one-of-a-kind finds; but, our appreciation for secondhand goods has also risen out of necessity. I really enjoy shopping, for instance, but if I shopped at Lululemon I’d run out of fun money in the first few days of the month.
Whether you opt for clearance racks or not, there are always ways to cut costs so you can save (or spend) more each month. If you’re like me and are prone to overspending on groceries, seek out budget-friendly meals and stock up on non-perishable items like pasta and dry beans. If trips are your kryptonite, try a hostel instead of an Airbnb, learn how to hack travel rewards, and make use of vacation packages on travel booking sites like Expedia and Kayak.
With just a little research, you’ll find there are a variety of sites and services available to help you put away a little extra money each month. Take some time to seek these out and start implementing some new, cost-cutting habits today!
6. Prioritize easy investing
I feel like investing is one of those tasks I’ve always been encouraged to do, but have never felt motivated to learn how and have even been intimidated to try.
Fortunately, investing doesn’t have to be a time-consuming, daunting to-do. There are a variety of financial services out there that have designed investing platforms uniquely for the folks who feel ill-equipped to jump right into the process.
With Acorns, for example, you can invest a little spare change whenever you make a purchase. They call the feature “Round-Ups,” and it’s designed to make investing automatic, so you don’t have to spend time thinking about it.
You can also schedule automatic “micro-investments” as often as daily. Acorns is a multi-function financial app, but the Acorns Invest service provides an easy, low-cost introduction to investing, so you can familiarize yourself with the process without committing too much money or time.
7. Make budgeting a pleasant experience
At the beginning of every month, my husband and I sit down to review our spending from the previous month. I won’t lie; it’s not my favorite to-do. It typically takes a couple of hours to make sure every transaction is categorized correctly, reassess our budget categories, and make sure we’re both prepared for the upcoming month’s expenses.
To help us stay focused and happy through those two hours, we’ve implemented a couple of things to make budget meetings something to look forward to. We’ll grab a couple of glasses of wine or tea, turn on some jazz, and maybe even pick up a couple of bars of dark chocolate. Sometimes those simple joys make the evening feel a little less like a meeting and a little more like a date.
When it’s time for you to sit down at the kitchen table with a stack of receipts and bills, grab a treat first. It’s a once-a-month occasion, so pick up something you’re craving. Make the environment a little more relaxing with some music and maybe a cozy fire or candles. Associate budgeting with positive things, so you’ll feel more motivated to keep up the habit and happier while you do it.
8. Give yourself grace
When I started dating my now-husband Steve, it was apparent immediately which one of us managed money best.
Not only had Steve paid down his student loans, but he’d also even purchased his own house. I, on the other hand, was still buying boxes of ramen and frozen pizzas. So when we got married, I told him to take the lead when it came to finances.
It’s been six years, and I’m sad to say I still end some months wondering where all my cash went. It’s a little embarrassing to review my “whatever I want” fund’s long list of iced coffees, shopping trips, and dinner out, next to Steve’s occasional purchase for outdoor equipment.
But, here’s the important detail to remember: I have improved.
It’s not always easy to see the progress you’re making, but don’t let that deter you! Every minor success is worth celebrating. Every step in the right direction deserves a little praise. And when you look back on the month and wonder where your money went, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, give yourself a little grace and keep trying. If you keep up the hard work, you’ll look back someday with pride at how far you’ve come.
Summary
For the vast majority of Americans, I think it’s safe to say spending is a little easier than saving. Unfortunately, spending too much is also pretty easy.
Budgets are incredibly helpful when it comes to keeping your finances in check, but they’re also a little depressing. It’s not fun to say “no” to a spontaneous trip to the movies or a sudden sale at your favorite online retailer — but it’s also not fun to run out of money.
Fortunately, there are ways you can get the best of both worlds! To stick to your budget and stay happy, take advantage of budgeting services like PocketSmith and learn how to cut costs by bargain hunting. In addition, be sure to check in with yourself every so often. Remind yourself why your budget matters and find ways to make the experience of budgeting a little more enjoyable.
Next time you’re feeling short on cash and down in the dumps, remember you are capable of taking charge of your finances and your mental wellbeing. You can do this, and your future self will thank you for it!