#235 – Saving Smarter With Anne Lester

Anna Sergunina: 00:00:00

Hey Money Bosses Welcome back to the money boss parent podcast, where we dive into the world of smart financial decisions, making personal finances accessible and teaching your kids the value of every dollar. I am your host Anna Sergunina and today I have a very special guest for you. We're joined by Anne Lester, a renowned retirement and personal finance expert author, and the beacon of wisdom in the financial world. And I spent her career demystifying the complex world of retirement planning and personal finances, guiding countless individuals towards achieving their dream, retirement and financial goals with her new book, your best financial life safe, smarter now for the future you want. Anna's here to share her insights on overcoming behavioral biases, understanding your money type, and much more to set you up for long term savings success. So grab your notebooks, my friends, because this episode is packed with actionable advice that will change the way you think about money savings and your financial planning life. Let's dive in. And welcome to the show.

Anne Lester: 00:01:16

Thanks so much for having me.

Anna Sergunina: 00:01:19

I am excited because today we're talking about, I think everyone's favorite topic to talk about. But for most of us, it's something that we need to be continually working on for the rest of our life. And we're focusing on how can we make save smarter?

Anne Lester: 00:01:36

You know, it's, on the one hand, it's like, well, I know how to do this, I just have to spend less than I make, and then I save money, right? Except it's not that easy, is it?

Anna Sergunina: 00:01:47

Yes. And that's I think, right? At that point, we all kind of like, Oh, forget it. That's not me. I'm just gonna continue on living my life and just do that do the things I know how to do. So it's like, I feel like our brain right away, dismisses that idea. Now, I don't know if it's everyone, but it's for most people like that. That is

Anne Lester: 00:02:06

certainly true. And I think it's very easy to indulge in some wishful thinking or magical thinking, you know, it'll work out you know, I'm sure it'll be fine. It'll get better tomorrow. Right? And it might, but it might not. So yeah, it's it's it's hard. It's it's something most people feel anxiety. I think some people feel fear. Some people feel shame about things when they think about money. And that also makes it harder to get our arms around it.

Anna Sergunina: 00:02:32

Yes, no, totally. All very true. Now, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story. And why this topic like why are you talking about saving to the world, you so

Anne Lester: 00:02:45

it's a combination of things. One, I spent about 30 years working at JP Morgan asset management, most recently at the head of as the head of retirement solutions. And that was my professional life was helping people save for retirement, I built investment funds, target date funds that helped you that I helped think about ways we could communicate more effectively with people. And what most people didn't know until this book was published a couple of weeks ago is that I really struggled with all of those things myself, and I grew up in a comfortable middle class household, but my parents who were both born in the early 1930s, you know, children of the Depression, never taught me or my brothers how to save money to them, it was so obvious, they didn't need to talk about it. And, you know, we grew up, like I said, fairly comfortable and didn't learn anything about budgeting. And didn't learn anything about how to manage credit. And, you know, there always seemed to be enough money to pay for the stuff that we thought was important. So that's kind of how I live my life. And it didn't work out so well for a few decades. So. So one of the things I really wanted to do in writing this book is help people understand in their 20s and 30s, the consequences of some choices that most people don't know they're making, right? When you choose to spend money when you doesn't feel like a choice, but when you don't save for your future. It's really hard to understand what those consequences will be in 30 or 40 years and you're many people are unaware that they're even making choices about not getting the match and their 401 K for instance, like Oh, well that's okay, I've got time later and they don't understand how helpful time is when you're young for investing and how not helpful it is when you're older. So that's why yes,

Anna Sergunina: 00:04:32

no, I love that I I am getting a little bit older. And then my 20s when these can't, you know, right? Like, like you're talking about when these concepts is something that you learned and especially, you know, for myself because I have to go to school to become a financial planner. So that's like all technical knowledge, right? And then it became practical and then and then from there, but yeah, but let's, let's dive on this topic of like, how, how do we start or how do we begin? again to think about, because begin to be more aware of these decisions that we make, we know we should be saving. We've heard this, you know, elsewhere, we may have seen our parents that did a really great job or grandparents. But yet, it's not quite happening for us. So like, where do we become more aware of this? So

Anne Lester: 00:05:24

I think, you know, challenge number one is, and I'm sure nobody ever got their first job out of high school or college or whatever, and thought, My gosh, I have lots of disposable income, it'll be easy to say, right? Nobody ever feels like they have enough money. So like, let's just be honest, you know, our, our wants and desires, unless you're extraordinarily wealthy, generally outstrip our means, right. So everybody is in some process of figuring out how to manage their lives and how to manage what they want with what they can have, right. So that's a process that some of us get taught at home, some of us don't, right. So you have to start learning how to how to live within your means. It is also true that today, I think there are many more things that are easy to spend your money on than was true a generation or two ago. So international travel, right, there's a lot more stuff we can consume more easily. There are many more ways to consume than existed, you know, even when I graduated from college, in the 80s, there was no Internet, if you wanted to buy something without going to a store, you had to get a catalog in the mail, and flip through it, find the thing you want and either call a one 800 Number and hope the line wasn't busy and give your order to somebody or fill in a form and mail it it. I mean, it was a really slow, painful process. And it's so easy today just to go click. Right. So So I think it I do think it's actually harder today to save money than it was a generation or two ago. Both sort of logistically and and because there's just more easily available stuff, right, there's just more stuff out there. And I think one of the most powerful, they're two really powerful things you can do to help yourself become a more successful saver number one is to do this in small steps. You don't have to go from spending all your money to saving, you know, 10 or 20% of it overnight. And in fact, if you just make a commitment today, to saving half of your future pay raises, and half of your let's say you get a tax refund, right? You're going to be saving in a way that's not painful to you because you're not cutting into what you're spending today. So if you're young, that works really well, because you typically get frequent raises when you're young, it doesn't happen so often when you're older. And the second thing that is really powerful to realize when you're younger is the power of compound returns. And you might have heard that expression, it's really hard to kind of get in your gut until you see it work. But if your money earns a 7% return, which we can debate if that's a little conservative or not, but the math is easy. If you earn 7% return, your money will double every 10 years. So imagine that happening for 30 or 40 years, right, your money will grow and grow and grow. And so the dollars that you save early in your career in your 20s, or 30s will be worth more than 10 or 20 times that by the time you retire. And that's that's time that you can't get back if you start saving in your 40s.

Anna Sergunina: 00:08:53

Yeah, it's very, it's very interesting that when you actually start to dig in, and understanding these concepts and how it actually works, and I think you said it, right, that we don't really comprehend it until we start to feel it ourselves. And we realize it right, like, that's why like numbers right now. And I'm like, Wow, that's great. But it doesn't work for me because I don't even have a savings account or right. Or I haven't really started saving. I don't think that's the audience here. But now just in general have more focused, purposeful savings, then then it's a much harder kind of like that first initial step to get started. But yeah, I mean, if you can double your money in 10 years, I would take it of

Anne Lester: 00:09:37

course and again 7% Is is by historical standards, not a crazily you know, pie in the sky number so, you know, you can you will double even faster if you earn more than that, but like I don't I don't think for planning purposes, that's a very healthy thing to do. The good news is if you're a little conservative on what you think you'll get, and the market does a little better, then you'll just have more money. Yeah, that's not a bad outcome.

Anna Sergunina: 00:09:59

No Totally I mean, in comparison right now, savings accounts are paying 5%. So I mean, this is for the period we're in, but we'll take that too, right? Absolutely. I've been to, I've been tooting my horn about that, like, make sure at least you put your savings somewhere where it gets you a good return. One, one angle here, and I think you've talked about this in your book is understanding your money types, what is a money type? And how does this relate to like our behavior savers? In this context of our discussion today,

Anne Lester: 00:10:30

so there have been a whole bunch of different people have done all kinds of research on spending types, money types, this, you know, I'm gonna say mine isn't super scientific, it's really just a kind of gathering, I, you know, I did some focus groups, I've talked to a lot of people, and it seems like, sort of certain kinds of behaviors tend to resonate when you describe them, and then kind of coming up with some hacks that you can apply if you're struggling with some of these behaviors. And one of them that I think many people maybe most people, not everybody falls into every spending type. But it certainly I think a lot of people can recognize themselves in these types. And you can actually do a little quiz on my website, if you want to and lester.com. And with an E, and you can see maybe what kind of money type you are. One, one that's very common is being an over subscriber. And it's really easy to start subscribing to things and not understand how much money you're spending on subscriptions. There's been some studies done that, that say that the average American is spending $213 a month on subscriptions. So that's, that's, you know, I can do that math. That's, let's like $2,400, a year on subscriptions. And then Chase did a study last year, and apparently three out of four Americans have forgotten at least one subscription that they signed up for last year. I am sure. Out of the people listening to this podcast, almost everybody has subscribed to something if they're not using regularly, I'll talk to most definitely. I mean, I've got streaming services that are watching our show a year on why don't why am I paying for that streaming service? Now when I know that shows not coming out till you know, November, like why am I still paying for it? Whoa, what if I cancel it? And I want to watch it? Well then turn it back on, right? I mean, that's ridiculous. I, when I was writing this book, I was like, wait a minute, I should go look at my phone. And they were like five things in there. I had no idea I'd signed up for that I was paying for.

Anna Sergunina: 00:12:33

Yeah, what are the others. So I liked this oversubscribed type of a money type. Most typically, and this is just maybe my experience. But some like clients would refer to like their money type or their behavior. And money's like, I'm a saver. I'm a spender. Or like I really don't do one or the other. So like that, in the same way.

Anne Lester: 00:12:57

So spenders and savers are like the two big categories. But so I kind of broke it down a little a little differently. So there are over subscribers, right? We've talked about those accidental spenders, right. And that's really people who let consumption creep take over their lives. And that's, that's, you know, you get a raise, and you start, instead of shopping at all these years, start shopping at Whole Foods, right? You when You need to get a new car, you get a nicer car, right? You get a new apartment and pay more in rent, and it none of it seems vague or outsized. But if you keep spending every time you get a raise, if you spend all of it, it's it's it's it, you can't ever increase your savings rate. Right. So again, the easiest way to increase your savings is to save half of every race. And that'll stop you from getting on this consumption treadmill. So accidental spenders, right? You don't really notice that you've increased this right? You take nicer vacations, maybe you take two trips a year instead of one, right? But none of it feels like a big deal. And then you look at you know, 20 years later, you're like, What just happened to all my money. And you've doubled or tripled the amount that you're spending every month and you haven't even noticed, right? That's accidental spending. Another type of person that I talk about are the crypto nodes, right? The people who are into meme stocks there, I went in my focus groups, there was very much a type. I called them the crypto bros but I mean, really into all the online Reddits chats. Maybe we're trading GameStop, right, really into crypto kind of geeking out on all this stuff and really risk seeking. Right, really, we're in it to make a big killing. And, you know, I think that's great if you want to take a little bit of money and maybe it's your entertainment budget, maybe it's like the 200 bucks, you'd let yourself lose it in Las Vegas, but like that's not what you should be doing with all your money. Another type are the ostriches, right. The people who would rather stick their head in the sand And then look at what they're doing. That's pretty typical, right? It's the most scary thing is what you don't understand or what you don't know. And the second you shine some light on that kind of is less scary. Another type of the people who are really focused on the fire movement, right financial independence, retire early, I call them fireflies. I think if people can successfully manage to save significant amounts of money, that is terrific, and you should do it, I think a lot of people find that they try to do that, and then really struggle with the very extreme amounts of saving that that lifestyle requires. And I've talked to several folks who are following that, who, I don't know that they really want to retire, I think they just hate their jobs. And I think saving and having choices is phenomenal. And if you do have robust savings that will let you make choices about changing jobs. And again, if you're not spending everything that you make, and have a huge mortgage to pay or a lot of debt that you're servicing, right, you do have a lot of choices when it comes to how you want to spend your time and making maybe taking some short breaks from work and things. But if you're following fire, just because you hate your job, I think that's maybe a misalignment of energy. Right? Right. And then last but not least, and this is these are people who are sort of spenders and savers splurge errs, right, you save crazily for something, and then you blow it all on one thing, and then you go back, and you kind of go whipsawing back and forth between saving and spending. So like I said, I think I think there are many ways to talk about savings and spending in money types. I think these a lot of people recognize different elements of themselves when they look through these descriptions. And then I've got a whole bunch of little things you can do if you recognize some of some of yourself and some of these things, you you know, hacks that you can do, specifically to help you manage those.

Anna Sergunina: 00:16:54

Yeah, well, the one thing I wanted to clarify is that I don't think anyone listening should feel like bad. Like if you're describing these types or like, well, I am you know, I don't know, the split the vaccine with an accidental spender, right? Like it's not, there's not a one category that's best, or the one that's worth it. Your behavior falls into those. Thank

Anne Lester: 00:17:18

you so much for saying that. Right? This? These are not value judgments. These are not descriptions of of your worth. These are Wow, do I find myself resonating with some of these descriptions? And if so, it's a really good place to become curious about your own habits and curious if you don't like something in your financial life to say, well, maybe there's something I can dig into here. But absolutely, it's there's no good or bad here. I will say write out the way I start. The chapter is, you know, are you a spender? Or a saver? How about I go first? Hi, my name is Anne. And I'm a spender because I am. Right. So this is, you know, and actually, you know, I talk about savers, too, right? People, people who are compulsive savers also have challenges, right? Because often they don't like taking risks. And that often, often people who are compulsive savers don't invest their money appropriately and aggressively enough. So like, it's there's no good or bad here. It's just understanding who you are, and how you react to money and how you spend money and what your relationship is with money. Lets you get more control over it. Yeah,

Anna Sergunina: 00:18:24

no, I like that a lot, too. So no one category to blame for?

Anne Lester: 00:18:28

Oh, no, absolutely not. However, there are

Anna Sergunina: 00:18:33

probably ways and I'm really looking for your insights on this is how we can train ourselves like if other tricks or Hacks is a better term for how can we you know, if we find ourselves being more in this spender category, right? Or where our behaviors that way? What can we do? Because we know that we we, we need to be focusing on savings, what can we do to shift that behavior? So

Anne Lester: 00:19:01

So Each type has some very specific suggestions, but sort of broadly speaking, I think the single most powerful thing we can do to sort of at a very high level, think about managing our savings differently is to try to figure out how to create guardrails around our spending. So a key one is to automate savings decisions and investing decisions and don't let yourself make a decision do I want to save this money? Or do I want to spend this money because the second you ask yourself that question you're already in trouble right? If if your goal is saving more, right because it's very easy to say well just this one I'll do X or Y and uh, you know, dieting and food managing managing impulse control around food is a is a useful analogy. I think sometimes and I think, you know, for me, certainly if if somebody leaves a box of Oreos on the counter, I'm going to eat them, right? Put them in the cupboard or better yet, don't put them in the house. And the same thing is true with money, right? Don't create situations that you know, you struggle with. If you've got money lying around, and this is certainly true for me, I'm like, Oh, goody, what can I spend it on? If it's not in my account? I don't think about it. So I think that high yield savings account you mentioned earlier, right is a great place to put your short term savings. Don't leave it in the savings account that's connected to your checking account, because you see it every time you open up your app. It's just sitting there looking at you like it's asking to be spent, like get it out of there. But it's somewhere else. So you don't see it. Don't tempt yourself, right. So automating savings is huge. Another thing I like to think about, and there's some specific tips for subscriptions here is how do you create more friction for your spending? Right, I said earlier, you know, when I was a kid, right, you had to pay in the grocery store with cash, or write a check, because they wouldn't take credit cards in the grocery store. So I remember my mom pulling out a checkbook, and it was really slow in the grocery store, because people were writing checks, or you had to go to the bank and get money because ATMs were just being introduced to so think about that, like think about how much friction there is in slowing you down, you had to drive to the store, right? I mean, there were all these ways that would interrupt an impulse purchase, right. And now literally tap app, right? There's nothing slowing us down. So when you think about your subscriptions, for instance, one of the things, if you don't already have two credit cards, please do not get a second credit card just for this. But I always when I sign up for a new subscription and look at my credit card that's got the closest expiration date, because it's going to ideally like within 12 months, because then it's going to not automatically keep renewing, it's going to ask me to put my credit card in again. And then it's a wonderful chance to say am I still using that? No, I don't need that anymore. Right. So I think some companies are now getting better about asking us if we want to renew but like a lot of companies don't. So just little things like that. How can you slow yourself down? Yes,

Anna Sergunina: 00:22:13

I was actually I was preparing for some of my content for the next couple of weeks. And one of the topics, you have to wait for a couple of days to come out on social media. But I was talking about how do you like clean up your subscriptions, right? And ones that are you like, not even sure you're you're using. So I mean, obviously the most, most typical, easiest ways to look at like what's on your credit card. But if there, there are applications out there, I think rocket money, it's one that does kind of like it scans all of your transactions and recognizes that that one is recurring. And it helps you make a decision whether that's something you want to continue doing. So there are tools, right, like, just like there are tools for you to, like, just have something and at the click of a button, there are tools to help you kind of unwind these things. Now, I I'm also curious, because I mean, this is a known concept right in, in this space, not just in, in financial management, but in any parts of our life is the daily habits that you practice, right? It's like just like exercising or eating a healthy diet or drinking your water or I don't know, whatever it is that you subscribe to. Same thing goes for personal finances. So how our behaviors and what we do on daily basis kind of impacts our long term success. And I know you have a really interesting example in your book, which I'm gonna probably butchered, but I'm still excited. It's that 1.2 million gyro, it's, I'd love for you to kind of explain that concept for everyone here, please. So

Anne Lester: 00:23:53

fun fact, the average 20 or 30, something today is spending about 44% of their food dollars, which is on average about $3,500 annually on eating out. And that's more expensive than eating in generally. And a lot of people get lunch, they they if they're working out of the home, they go out to eat or they get takeout or delivery and bring it into the house. I'm just going to say that that is a really big expense. And if you just took $5 a day out of your food budget and invested it in your retirement account, and it earned 7% $5 A day earning 7% You'd have $13,000 after five years. You'd have $400,000 After 40 years. That's a lot. Right. So and if you're getting lung Shout every day and spending 15 bucks a day on lunch out every day. Or maybe 20. Right? You could probably eat lunch for five bucks a day, if you ate at home, you're spending 20 out that's $15 a day. That's $1.2 million for two years.

Anna Sergunina: 00:25:15

I'm sure you've heard this probably when you explain this concept. I mean, the numbers blew up my mind for sure. But it's like, Well, so am I not gonna buy lunch ever again. They kind of we work that out. Right. So, again, I

Anne Lester: 00:25:29

think one of the things I really talk a lot about in my book, and I think it's really important to remember if none of this has to happen, you know, all at once. 100%. Like, if you're eating lunch out every day, see what happens to your month, actually somebody I was talking to, we read the books that I did this, they read a early draft of the book, and I met them for coffee, and they've been doing it for a couple of months. He said, I just stopped. I started brown bagging it three days a week, and I have hundreds of dollars more in my account at the end of the month, every month, hundreds of dollars. brown bagging three days a week. So it's not everything all the time. It's an something that I think is really important is is for people to think about what and I don't mean to sound to Marie Kondo ish, but like, what is bringing you joy in your life, somebody else I was talking to said, Are you telling me I can't get my coffee in the morning? And I was like, Well, I don't know. Tell me about your coffee. Like she said, Well, you know, it's really the best part of my day, I get up, I walk past this place on my way to work. And it's always the same barista, and they know me, and they smile, and they say, I got you. And it's like, this moment of joy in my life. And I said, Oh, my gosh, no, you should absolutely start your day like that. But maybe don't go there after lunch every day. Like, maybe you don't go out and get the lunch that you're that you're spending, you know, 20 bucks on but you bring lunch twice. So like figure, Figure it out, right? I'm not gonna lie to shame you, you you, you decide what's important to you. But in everybody's life, there are things that are relatively more important and relatively less important. And think about maybe trimming a little bit of the less important stuff, the stuff that doesn't really make you happy.

Anna Sergunina: 00:27:17

How if someone is listening to this conversation, like we're not talking anything like rocket science here today, like it isn't anything you've heard haven't heard before, I think because I think sometimes we confuse ourselves, or we like we look for this next big idea, or this next big investment we're gonna make or like this next big something, something, and we'll never really find it yet. Time go.

Anne Lester: 00:27:48

Here's what I want people to believe. And to know that you've got this, this is not hard, it's not complicated. It feels very scary, for a whole bunch of reasons, right? We don't know what the markets are going to do. There. There can be a lot of decisions to make, if you allow yourself to, if you don't figure out a way to simplify the decisions you have to make. And again, that's something I talk a lot about in my book, that's part of what I did as a target date manager was simplify decisions for people, the viewer decisions you ask yourself to make. And the simpler you make those decisions, the easier it is to do them. Right? And the easier it is to spend your energy, not thinking, Boy, do I want to buy this stock or that stock. I don't care. I'm gonna buy an index fund. I want to spend my energy thinking, Wow, do I want to buy that latte every morning? Or do I want to spend 10 minutes a day figuring out what I'm going to brown bag?

Anna Sergunina: 00:28:50

Yeah. Is that a question for me? No. I

Anne Lester: 00:28:54

mean, it's it's a rhetorical question the individual should be asking them like, like if you can simplify some of the more some of the ways that we can get very complex very quickly with financial planning and saving and investing. I say this as someone who spent 30 years managing money professionally, right? If you're really good and have a really big team and are both lucky and smart, you can make a lot of money making investment decisions, but guess what, that's a lot of if if if most people are going to get just as good a results or almost as good a results simplifying things and they'll have a lot more energy to spend on what's really important, which is saving a little more money. That's the investment in yourself that will pay off more than anything else you can do with money.

Anna Sergunina: 00:29:40

Yeah, and any answer to your question and I as you said, I think I'm totally happy to bring my lunch just because you bright I don't have to I'm My office is located in a nice little downtown area. There are plenty of places to go. But I don't want to worry about that. Like I mean in any given day, right? I'd rather Have the food that I enjoy eating right? I know what goes in it. And I don't have to go out for my lunch. I mean, it's not every day, right? There's days when I do do go out and have to make that decision. But this decision fatigue and stress about all things that we're thinking about is so real.

Anne Lester: 00:30:17

I, I am a huge believer in simplifying every single decision I possibly can. Because that just makes me less tired at the end of the day. I mean, I can feel it like I Boston right now, I drove to the airport this morning, and I always parked my car in the same same place at the airport, it's a little farther to walk. But I almost always find a space there. And I never have to worry about where my car is because it's always in the same place. So I just never think about it right? And I don't ever have to worry about where my car is. It's It's really relaxing. No,

Anna Sergunina: 00:30:47

I love that I'm so I'm so relating to that, as well. And I can see how you can totally apply that to decisions you make, or systems, right? You mentioned automation systems you put into place so that it gets it like it's guaranteed for you to have. And it's like that subscription. We talked about right? Well,

Anne Lester: 00:31:06

so So here's interesting insight. So all of the behavioral economics and finance things that have gone into, you know, I book in the way that a lot of people have designed things like the 401k system that very successfully nudge people into better behavior, right. All the marketers and the app developers and you know, people who have created all these ways of interacting online have absolutely understood how to apply those to get you to spend your money without thinking. Right? Well, what I'm hoping is that we can get you to save and invest your money without thinking.

Anna Sergunina: 00:31:40

I love that. Yes, yes. Well, and you mentioned this already, but these are like the ideas of not having to make too many decisions about how to invest, you just pick it or not how but which investment to pick, you pick the target date fund, it aligns with, or as close as you can get to the date when you retire. So like done, you don't have to think about it. It's it's autopilot for you.

Anne Lester: 00:32:04

Another thing that I think really trips people up is wanting to do the get the right answer. Right. And I think people feel like saving and investing is some kind of there's, there's a right answer, there's an exam, right? And they're gonna get it right, or they're gonna get it wrong, and people are terrified of getting it wrong. So you want to make sure you get it right. And in that, trying to get it right. Often you don't do anything at all, which is actually the worst thing you can do that is failing. That's about the only way you can fail. But it's also important for people to understand that there isn't really any right answer here. Because we don't know what the markets will do. So you can't pick the perfect investment. You just can't get it right. Because the markets, we cannot predict what the you know, being invested in the inequity is good. Which equity will be the best if it's us large cap or you a small cap? I don't know. Nobody knows. Right. So you can't get too hung up on those decisions. So I think I think, you know, we have to let go of this notion of there being a perfect answer. And there are there are a whole range of pretty darn good answers. And one of those will be fine. If you're saving enough.

Anna Sergunina: 00:33:22

Yes, I think that's the firt. Right? Like, it's the first half a step is like, let's start saving the next. The next half was like, Okay, how do we make money on that money that we just saved? One interesting part here that I think we should mention, because I think a lot of listeners, and even I'm just thinking about clients, right? In my private practice, like a lot of us have businesses or like don't have a traditional access to a retirement plan or a job that has those kinds of benefits. So how, and I think that and I've seen this often enough that it takes people some time to like, kind of catch up, right? And say, oh, my gosh, I you know, get this business going or have a consulting or side hustle in like a few years go by like, oh, my gosh, I haven't started saving like the retirement is like it that doesn't go away. Right? That's still an ultimate long term goal for most of us, for all of us. So what what some ideas or tricks you have for those people that don't have that retirement plan? So

Anne Lester: 00:34:21

I think one thing that's important, and I'm just talking to my younger son, who does not have an employer with a plan, and probably never will, because he's a musician, right? And it's like, you have to think about, you know, somebody says, Oh, I'm making x in my salary, right? They're actually getting a lot more than that. They're getting health insurance, they're getting retirement benefits, right? So there's a lot more embedded in that number than then what you're earning on the outside. So just understand you're you're not thinking apples to apples. It's like, well, if I'm earning $100,000 a year in my corporate job, and I earn $100,000 outside of it, then that's just as good. Well, no, not really, actually, because you're probably getting 20 or $30,000 of other benefits that are kind of invisible. for you. So just just as a rule of thumb, when you're thinking about if you're thinking about making that leap, like there's, there's more to it than just that the headline number. But all of that said, I think with retirement savings, specifically, one of the best things you can do is try to replicate what you might find inside of a 401 K plan. And by that, specifically, I mean, the automation of it. Now, this is harder to do if your income is volatile, if you don't know how much you're going to be making every month, you can't just say, well, I'll automatically have X deducted every month from my checking account, because that's harder. So you have to figure out a method to automate that as much as you possibly can. The second thing you can do, which I think is very powerful, and we've touched on this briefly, is automate the investing. The second it goes into the account, have it go straight into an investment, don't make it a two step process that you have to do if you can, and then I'm a huge fan of a target date fund. That's what I did for a living. There are also things called balanced accounts, which operate in a very similar way, right. But basically, you want one stop shopping, you don't want to have to make a bunch more decisions about where to put the money once you save it. So I think automating is key. But it is harder, right? You have to make more decisions. If you are self employed, you have to pick a financial provider, you have to open the account, you have to look at limits on your IRA, right, it's $7,000 or so you know, depending on how old you are. And if you have a single employer, you can set up a special kind of plan, like you have to do a little more homework, which is where a financial advisor comes very handy. But it's still possible once you set things up to automate a lot of it and that's to me the best way to do it once you've got it set up.

Anna Sergunina: 00:36:51

I love that no I and I think for the reason is that we have the flexibility. So it's like the new the new way of making money. There's there's the new way of saving money, right and, and investing as well. So just just a lot out of the traditional scope of what our generation before us, is used to right, because the generation before that was more focused on pensions than you had, right, somebody saving on your behalf. That isn't true for most of us anymore. So we got to take this into our hands. As we closing for today. I'd love for you to share a little bit about your book. And also where can our listeners connect with you? Well, thank

Anne Lester: 00:37:35

you. So my book is called your best financial life:Save smart now for the future you want. And you can find it on you know, Amazon, it's in local bookstores across the country, you can find it on Goodreads and independent bookstores online as well. And you can find me at my website annelester.com and that's a n n e l e s t e r.com. And I'd love it if you signed up for my newsletter or followed me on social media. And you can always ask me a question via email or on social media and my handles are saved smart W N on all the channels.

Anna Sergunina: 00:38:11

Thank you very much. And we'll include the URL, all of this information in the show notes. And any final thoughts before we actually really do close?

Anne Lester: 00:38:19

Just what I said. I think at some point during our conversation, you know, you got this right, it is totally possible to do this. It's small baby steps. And those steps will add up faster than you think. And you will you will find yourself being a successful saver and it will make all the rest of your life so much easier.

Anna Sergunina: 00:38:38

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Anne Lester: 00:38:42

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Anna Sergunina: 00:38:43

What an incredible conversation we had today with Anne Lester, about savings and how we can become a little bit more aware of what our behaviors our hacker brains for better savings habits that is just so amazing. And really making small. daily changes can double our money in 10 years. 20 years 30 years. What would it look like for you? Alright, my friends. Just a quick request. If you found real value in the show today, please share it with your friends and family. Don't forget to subscribe so that way you can be notified when the new episode comes out every week. And also I would love to hear from you on the Apple podcast if you can leave me a quick review. Those always make me smile every time I hear from you. Thank you so much for joining. Remember you are the bosses of your own money.