Why We Went All in on Merging Our Finances
Episode Summary
Today we're featuring another Team Factora couple: podcast producer Caro and her husband Riley. Together they talk about why they decided to merge their finances completely, how they doubled their collective income in the last year, and how they plan to avoid lifestyle creep in the years to come.
Episode Notes
Today we're featuring another Team Factora couple: podcast producer Caro and her husband Riley. Together they talk about why they decided to merge their finances completely, how they doubled their collective income in the last year, and how they plan to avoid lifestyle creep in the years to come.
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Transcript
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I mean, yeah, as the kids say, I stan Factora. I'm a big fan.
This is Allegra Moet Brantley, and you're listening to the Coffee and Coin podcast where women talk wealth, I'm the founder and CEO of Factora, a company on a mission to lead 1 million women to 1 million in net worth. Because when women have more money, we'll have more power to be the change we want to see in the world. If you're ready to hear real women share their real numbers and investment journeys and have a sneaky feeling you should be doing a little more with your money, you are in the right place. Just sit back, relax and turn me up.
All opinions expressed by Team Factora and podcast guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Factora Incorporated. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be used as the basis for investment decisions. Team Factora and podcast guests may maintain positions in the securities or investments discussed in this podcast.
Okay, I'm Keroh. I am Factora, podcast editor and producer and you Riley are my whose, which is Swedish for husband. And we are talking today about our finances. And I'm really excited. We've been trying to find time to record this for a while and we are sitting in our Airstream which we renovated and we are in Trinidad, California on the coast.
Can I interrupt? Yeah, sure. This means that you're going to talk about our finances, and I'm gonna provide color commentary.
Yes, yeah. So I'm going to explain that we're going to talk about the structure and then we're going to do it. So this is how we're going to do this because we also we okay, there's the first plug for our own blog guests. So we basically did our own podcast about our relationship before and in the first half of that. Riley very much took the reins. And in the second half, I think we were kind of equals but this is the first time we're recording where like I feel like I'm in complete control. Feel Do you feel powerful feels incredible. Also, listen to our podcast. I think I love you on if you want way less actionable information, way, way more sex and bodily functions. Yeah, we could make this pretty sexy though. We can make I mean, I'm turned on. So let's do it.
Okay, so Julia and her boyfriend, her big boy, as she likes to call him. Oh, I like Julia and her big boy.
I want a nickname. That's that. Am I who you're who's? I don't think we use singular. It's who's with the two dots over the you? Yeah, but I don't think we use that as like a singular nickname. We rotate through a lot of nicknames we do, but most of them are sweater. Okay, I'm just I'm just saying I don't want to be limited to one nickname.
Okay. Okay, so Julia and Jeremy did this exercise. And they were pretty granular with like, how they spend their money, how much they're earning and where they allocate it. And I think that because you and I are in such flux, I would like to start by just talking about how our relationship to finance both individually. And as a couple has changed. And then at the end, we can talk about what our plan is, and kind of what we're doing because we definitely have an interesting setup. I don't even think it's unusual. I think a lot of people are doing interesting stuff with multiple jobs. And I'm gonna ask questions you're gonna answer.
This was this was teed up in a totally different way.
What was your relationship to finances before we started dating?
Okay, number one, I didn't realize that this was going to be an interview. Number two, there's a cat on the table. We're moving the cat off the table. What was my relationship to finances before we started dating?
For context? You were we were 24 and 25. When we started dating, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had no relationship, no money before we started dating, you know, came into my bank account. And then I left my bank account. Yeah, I treated my full time salaried position. Like I was like, it was cash from my bartending job. Yeah.
Well, you also you you had a career in advertising. And I think it's interesting. I feel like you were in a position of kind of like a scarcity mindset. And I was in an abundance mindset. And we were both wrong. Like, I thought I had more money than I did. And you sometimes thought you had maybe you didn't think you had less money than you did. But like you had experienced, having, like a very, very low paying salary and having to live off of that. Yeah,
I mean, do do numbers on the show. Yeah. Do all the numbers. Yeah. I mean, so my first job out of college? I mean, $32,000 Yeah. In Boston. Yeah. In Boston, which is, which is nuts. Yeah. And not to like, you know, Woe is me. But like, that's not a lot of money. Right. That could create a scarcity mindset. And just about anybody totally, you know, not just the number, but specifically the context of the number being in Boston and having the community that I did. Yeah. I think that my mindset and my relationship to money was always one of speculation, right? Where, you know, because of what I was trained to think in terms of the ambition that I should have for my career, it was an inevitability. And so it was just Well, one day I'll eventually climb this ladder high enough, where I'll make a sum of money, that it doesn't matter what I do today, you know, and so, and that's insane. And there's a lot to interrogate within that, right. But
that six foot five white guy. Yeah.
Yeah, no, totally. Absolutely. And, yeah, I think that that freed me from needing to really like, dig into what my actual present day relationship with money was, which was unhealthy or non existent or however you want to describe it.
Yeah. So when we I'm gonna use the timelines as when we met, and then the next one will be marriage, because I think that things really changed for us post marriage, just in terms of getting more serious about finances, frankly, because I took the wealth Circle class, and a lot changed after that. Yeah. But leading up to our relationship, and I think to our marriage, because I don't think anything changed between then where was your money going, like account wise?
Oh, just to like a Bank of America thing? Well, I also need a 401 K. So yeah, I maxed out my fidelity contributions, which also, like put me in the poor house as a kid. It was like, should I should I have been eating that instead? You know, but I'm happy that I did. Yeah. You know, so yeah, it was, it was basically just 401k and savings, because that's what I was told to do with money, but not 401 K in savings. It was 401k in a checking account, and then you would spend money and pay off your credit card bill. Right. You didn't have brokerage account? Well, so I didn't even have a credit card until about a year before we met. Right?
Yeah you and my sister to like, never had a credit card until she was like 31. Yeah.
So yeah, it was just me and my debit card. And the only reason that I got a credit card was because I felt stupid at dinner with my friends. And they would all pull out credit cards, and I would go, that's cool. And then I can feel how much it weighed. Yeah, no, totally. And then I got like, the coolest looking one I could. And then I was like, Oh, I just have free money now. Yeah, you know, yeah, there might be a lot more behind us because we are in an RV park. But we can't do anything about that. I was in the same position. So I had, I did mostly freelance work. And I didn't even really contribute to a 401k. I had a 401 K for the year that I worked full time. And it was basically in and out. So I had credit cards, I would earn money, and then I would spend it and I usually had money left over on my credit cards at the end of the month. So I was earning interest on that as well. I think both of our saving graces was that we didn't have any loans. So we were really kind of living kind of cavalierly, but I don't I actually don't think that it was luxurious. The way that we were behaving, I think was just a lack of information. Like I remember that when I signed up for my one full time job. The only conversation about putting money aside for the future was 401k. And now I'm like, that's insane. that at no point in college, or even my first job, was it? Yeah. And you might want to, you know, have a brokerage account or do whatever it was, yeah, you have your 401k. And that's for later, you know, it's like the 2030. What is it like the 3020 Something rule where it's like you spend this much on your housing. Yeah. And then you put this much aside for the future. It's like 10%, which I learned, by the way, about a month before graduating, because the business school at UVA had like a little webinar, and they were like, Hey, I know that we should have been doing this for about eight years, you know, through high school and college. But like, do you guys want a half an hour on this from a professor who like has a free lunch hour? And I went and she literally just told me that rule. And I was like, okay, which is not enough? It's like fundamentally not enough to live off of anymore. Yeah. So throughout, we dated for two years before we got married. And throughout that I think you and I, we did not keep a tally or Venmo each other. We just kind of I mean, we split rent, we split everything. And then we just kind of paid for each other. And I think that we very much behaved like we had joint accounts, but we did not. So for example, like I didn't know what was on your credit card, you didn't know what was on mine. We just kind of went back and forth. We didn't keep track of who was paying for what. And then after we got married, I guess within a year I took the Factora Wealth Circle. And after that we decided to go completely joint. So all of our money is shared. We don't have any separate accounts right now. Do you want to talk about that experience for you?
I mean, yeah as the kids say, I stan Factora. I'm a big fan. Yeah, no, because my brother texted me and was like, is Carolina involved in a pyramid scheme? Like, what is a wealth circle? And I think with anything, there's, like, when there's new language that's being introduced, I think that there was that perception? Yeah, me, but at the same time, now, I have a wife who is like intensely interested in finance. Yeah. And the reality is that you and I, like you say, didn't really have a real strategy or a real set of tools to use financially right. At most, I think we were going to basically combine our little lumps of, of cash and debt, you know, and then continue on the philosophy of like, well, eventually we'll make it you know, and then I think it's been really cool to see Do you kind of take the reins and say, look, it's, there are little things that we can do. And it's basically just taking the concept of compound interest. And then just exploring all the different tendrils of what that is, you know, exploring all the corners of that room. And it's been awesome, you know, so. So frankly, my financial strategy or knowledge has not necessarily changed, or if anything, it has just changed in relation to the change in your life. Yeah, I don't think that you have gained your own personal interest in finance through this journey. But yeah, I think what's been really interesting is that your willingness and excitement for me to run some stuff has been essential, and you have such a high level of trust. And the example of this I would give is that we went to we went to merge our joint accounts, during the pandemic. And through a series of reasons that I still don't explain. Basically, we would have had to come back a second time for Riley to get access to my account. So when I log on to Bank of America, I see all of our accounts, I see Riley's account, I see my account, I can transfer between the two I frequently do so that we can, you know, move money and invest it. Riley can't see any of this. And of course, they gave them all the passwords. But you have such a high level of trust in me that it allows us I think a lot more. It allows us to do this. And I think that that's the one question I've gotten from friends who don't aren't joint, which is like, well, what if you want to spend $500 on something? Or if you want to do this or that and do judge each other? And I think the honest answer is that we really don't go through credit card statements together. And I think we also aren't, we aren't buying a lot at this point in our lives that we don't both know about. Like we live in an Airstream we don't buy much clothing. But I think that there is a high level of trust and just enough disinterest to the extent that neither of us is interrogating the other. And I think that that's kind of because we're both type B people. So we we're trying to be type A in our lives, but our natural relationship to one another is not well, let's let's go through this and talk about everything left and right and kind of nitpick each other. It's more like you have really put your trust in me to have access to all of our brokerage accounts and to kind of map out a plan and then propose it to you. And that trust was hard won on your part, right? I mean, I think when you first took Factora, I was compelled by the concepts that you were coming back with, you know, but one of our long standing financial things isn't about like buying these shoes, or coming back and seeing a new, you know, tchotchke, my knit with you was that when it was a cost, we would slightly underreport and when and I still kind of thought it was an incoming amount of money, we would slightly over report and it would always be like round up or round down, like you'd like look at flights. And it would be like watching the screen. And it would be like a flight that was $600. And then a connecting flight that was another $700. And then for the two of us, and then you'd be like so basically all in all it. It's like $400. Or you'd be like, yeah, there's this new contract gig. And if you you know, Bill them these three months, and whatever, and it'd be like, you know, like three segments of like, 5000 6007 $1,000, at the end will come home with a net of like, you know, 55 $60,000, you know, so anyway, it all worked out that.
And so, like, so terrifying when you phrase it. And so at the beginning, like I would interrogate a lot of things that you said, because I had compelling concepts with not a lot of meat on the bone from you. And I'm not saying that that was your fault, or anything malicious or anything like that. But that was the source of some of our lack of trust in the beginning. Yeah. And again, keep in mind, like this is all you trying stuff and me just being like this approver of being like a bad idea. Good idea. So it's not that it's a bad thing on your part. Because you're the one who was at least trying, right? But over time, like I gave you that feedback, you responded to it. And you started to experiment with these little things. And then we get to sit down and map out and you're not sitting us down with concepts. You're sitting us down with numbers, right? And all of a sudden, I looked at that, and I was like, Oh, if she's really interested in this stuff, like we will be much more financially healthy. Right, right. And so then the little things of an interior point we don't really buy much stuff, but I don't feel the need to like you know talk about these like, like if you want to buy a new sweatsuit buy a new sweatsuit, or whatever, buy a new pair of shoes, because to me, the value of this is gonna sound so clinical, but like the value of what I'm getting here, there's value there, you know, you are, you're like generating wealth for our family by being more strategic about that stuff. Yeah. And so if you want to buy a fucking thing, buy a thing, you know, right.
Yeah, I would say too. I think that I mean, one of the things that Factora talks about a lot is is value based spending. And I don't think you and I are perfect with that. But I do think and I want to talk about this a little bit later that you and I have over the past few years like developed a very clear vision for what we want our lives to be. And I mean for sample we bought this Airstream. So we bought this shelled out Airstream for $10,000. And then we put a ton of money into it. So we're living in this Airstream now and we never calculated into our net worth or anything even though we should. But that was where a lot of our money went last year,
we never calculated into our net worth, because I did all the electrical wiring and
stuff. We're planning on using it for the rest of our lives. We're living in it right now. And I think that that's kind of an interesting thing is that we never nitpicked each other for the expenses we were putting into this Airstream because it was implicit it was, well, we're building this thing together, and we aren't going to buy other things. Because we have to do this, we started this project, we have to finish it. And I think without much effort, or intentional thought that has happened with a lot of our plans, and that, you know, we want to buy land, we want to push both of our careers forward. Like we, we have a lot of, I guess, technically vague, but kind of specific long term goals for our lives. And I think that that has made it really fun for us to start mapping out like, Okay, this is how much we're going to save. And I want to again, get into the specifics in a second of what we want to what we're saving for what we're going to spend money on in the next few years, and what our plan is, but
I wonder if that's cheat and I don't want to say cheating. But I wonder if that limits the extent to which like, our learnings can be extrapolated, because it's not that we are getting really good at making space for our like individual tracks of what we want to spend on. It's that we've just paired and paired away until you and I basically our Venn diagram is a circle in terms of what we really want to spend money on, you know, and the rest is peanuts, right? Well, really quickly. You can edit this down. Okay. I gotta edit all your like, what do you think really? I'm like, Yep. No,
I love you. Like spliced together. And
we Mani Mani. Okay. When you asked me in when we were on vacation, what I would spend money on when we had fucking money. Oh, yeah. And I was like, oh, no, no. You don't I mean, you and I have like a small a very tight brief for what we want to spend money on. Yeah. And we're both aligned on it.
So okay, so I, okay, so here's how I want this to go. I want us each to spend like a minute 30 or less talking about the changes. We both gone through professionally in the last year and what's coming up for us like in our own voices. Yeah, our own voices. I want you talk about what you're doing. The transition you've made, what you're planning to do next year, and how much you're gonna be earning. Okay. And then we're going to talk about what our plans are to achieve. I like a normal speed. Yeah, at a normal speed. A lot more, a lot more. Alright, keep going. Okay, so go Riley.
So it's my plans for next year, and
how much money I'm gonna make. where you were last year, what your transition has been, how much money you're gonna make and what you're gonna be doing.
Got it? Yeah, so a year ago, I was strategy director for an advertising agency, essentially, based in Los Angeles, how much were you making? I was making $120,000 a year. And it sucked. And I was working on the Airstream. And I was pretty sure that I wanted to transition into architecture. And at that point, the vision was pretty cartoonish. Right? It was like I am advertising man, and I will become architecture man. And so that involves school, if you want to be an architect, you have to go get a master's degree at a licensed institution, and then work for a number of years long at that time, and then sit for the register architect exam. It's a long pathway. And then you essentially just like fight for scraps for the rest of your life. Like I've principals, and my wife took back Torah. Oh, my God, cats are freaking out. So yeah, then,
sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but
speed it up faster. Okay, now I'm into architecture school. And in the meantime, I found contract work that's really fulfilling, and it's probably going to transition into a full time job. So I'm going to transition that into a full time role that I'm gonna do while I'm at school, because creativity begets creativity. And I think I can do both at once and knock both out of the park. And basically, the way I'm going to pitch that full time role is taking, essentially what I charge for contract and then stretching that out to what a full time role would look like. And yeah, which would be how much? What's your hope? Because you haven't secured this yet, but just rough.
Yeah. Contract. If I stretch my contract, price tag out to a full year, it's $288,000 a year, you know, but obviously benefits factor into that. So maybe 50 To 40 to 50. And all of that is kind of pending negotiation. So and we can just say comfortably that it's brand consulting. Yeah, yeah, totally. We're talking about like, it's the military
And if you guys are listening, that's my number 260 heart. I'm not going ID rallies negotiations. Yeah.
So anyway, but I mean, there's something that there's someone else to talk about is like, what's that jump? Why did you double your salary? And I think the reality is that there's just a bunch of companies out there that value, you know, what you ever you do differently? You know?
Yeah. And I Yeah, well, first of all, I do want to highlight that, because that's a huge deal for us that you have not only left a job that you weren't happy at, but by doing so you opened yourself up to contract work, and you were able to meet a bunch of different people find like a really good fit with people who really valued your brain. And because you started at contract work, you were able to negotiate your rate more so than if you would have just immediately applied for a full time job. And it's a lot of factors that, you know, not everyone can control. But I do think that that's like a really relevant piece of information. It's, this is gonna sound extreme. And I don't mean it to sound so extreme, but it's all about leveraging fear. You know, like when you come in with contract work, it's, I can walk away at any time right now. Like, I'm not, this is not my career, my career has other stuff.
Okay. So to summarize, you were in the advertising industry, for just under six years, you decided that you want to transition for architecture, you apply to grad school in the fall, in the meantime, you were doing contract work, that contract work ended up being something that you're really interested in, and you plan in the fall on going to grad school and also doing this job. Yeah, and more than six years, but yeah, and the context, too, is that we are planning on paying for his grad school ourselves. And we will get back to that in a second. So I will also do a quick summary on myself. I was doing a ton of freelance work over the last six years, a lot of editorial writing contract work. And I've started doing podcasts work for Factora. And what I'm making now is between 2020 500 a month, depending on how many podcasts we produce, each month, it can be four or five. And I also just recently landed a full time editing job, which is my first full time job since I was 23. I will be making $85,000. With that. And that will give us benefits and all that stuff, which is really exciting, fully remote. And I also have my story writing, which I'm not doing right now, but which I made about $12,000 doing last year. So and I hope to I'm a fiction writer, and I hope sell book, but right now, I'm earning like 110,000 estimated between Factora work, and this whole time editing job. And then you are earning Oh, 85 plus 25,000. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm worth something. Sure. Big surprise. I know. And you are earning 200. Yeah, sure. Okay. So you plan to be earning next year around, let's say anywhere between 220 and 250?
Yeah, 200 to 250. Yeah, sure.
And so now I just want to talk about like our short, mid and long term goals, and it's gonna just be like shouting it out. And then we're going to talk about what our current plan is. Okay, so short term goal Old English Sheepdog. That's gonna be a few $1,000. Yeah, I want to get an old English Sheepdog in the summer. Cool. Midterm goal? Paying for your grad school? Yeah. So Riley got into a few different programs, and we don't know how much it's gonna cost. It could range from $20,000 a year to $60,000 a year, we are definitely trying to pick the most economically efficient program that also offers him the best education. Yeah. And along with those midterm goals, is us potentially buying a house somewhere, because some of the places where you got in are places where we think we could, you know, invest in real estate and rent it out and do all that pick the $20,000 a year one, you have a much easier time of doing the house. Yeah, the $60,000 year one, and then long term goals. For us, yeah. Having the freedom to do our own creative work, fund our own creative work, you know, and I think that that means, you know, the classic millennial thing of passive income, right? So if we ended up with a couple of houses or something like that, or just different, different ways to monetize our time very efficiently, so that we're freed up to, you know, spend time thinking about the things that we want to do. Yeah. And also not just free ourselves to think about the things want to do but have cash on hand. You know, if I want to go fight some local bureaucrat about zoning restriction, I'm gonna do that. Yeah. And if you want to sell fun to film you want to direct and you're gonna do that. Yeah. So just want to add passive income is a generational thing that has applied to every generation except for millennials. We very rarely have passive income, though. Yeah. All right.
How did people get passive income? Like way back in the day? Think about like the oil barons? What do you mean? Just as a stock market?
Is there a version of passive income in the past that feels good? Well, yeah, I mean, I think or is this just the latest evolution of oil barons? No, I mean, I Think that passive income has always been a thing that I mean, I guess it was traditionally white men, but like renting out land, renting out houses, investing in the stock market, like that's always been traditionally how people get wealthy. Yeah, it's just been that it's been for a very limited group of people. Right. Okay. So I just also want us to talk briefly about, I mean, I know this is changing all the time, because we have both technically been earning like contract work that's been kind of it's come at different times. And so we don't have automatic deposit set for anything. But we do have a loose plan for what we're going to do while you're in grad school. And that's kind of as far as we've thought in terms of our like, structured plan, because we don't know what's going to come after that. But assuming that you're doing some kind of work, whether it's full time or you stay contract, our hope is to live off of my salary and save everything you make. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I feel like that's kind of all. I know, it was kind of structured by just want to make sure we got through everything.
Yeah, is there? I mean, are there any, do you guys extrapolate out to learning was or is there any way that you want to put a bow on this?
I love you. I mean, I think that the thing that I never want to forget is, it's so much easier to save money when you're making more money. So like, if all goes to plan, you and I will be making 3x Next year, we have made last year. And so I think that that's super important. Because yes, you can yes, you can always increase your saving rate. But like, this has been the first year that we have really been able to project out, wow, we could save this amount of money. You know, like if you end up having a job where you're earning around $240,000, and we're living off of my salary, that's us saving around, you know, $15,000 a month. And so we're in a position where we can do that, because we don't have loans. And because we have started earning more money.
I'd also argue, by the way, like, you're hustling, yeah, like, you've got two gigs going, Yeah, and three, three, and even though that's only part of what we're talking about, that's a big part of what we're talking about. And I don't know, like we are living through a discontinuity, we're living through a big change in how things go. It doesn't necessarily have to be like, Hey, we have these opportunities to fuck these companies, you know, and like, cheat them out of labor doesn't always have to be that case. I think there are plenty of opportunities. Yeah, stupid companies. Yeah, where you should absolutely fleece them.
We're obsessed with the over employed community right now. Everyone should go check it out. It's employee.com is great.
I don't put my own employer in that category. I don't think you put your employers in that category is like, Well, no, but you can go the route of like fleecing, you know, bad employers, or you can realize that, like, the other side of this coin, is that the world is such that you can scale your earning potential in really interesting ways now, yeah, you know, and that, again, doesn't have to be a bad thing. It can be a great thing.
Yeah, learn more, but that's okay. Yeah, I also think that you and I have become very vocal and increasingly anti capitalist, in a lot of in realizing how many of these systems are structured, to really screw us. And I think one of those examples is how, you know, healthcare is exorbitant in the United States, it's insane the amount that we have to earn, just to get like basic access to medical care, education has become 10 acts as expensive as the growth actually read this this morning, the rising cost of education compared to the rising income that people received, has the growth rate of the cost of education has increased TEDx? Yeah, the growth rate? Yeah, exactly. So it didn't come, there are certain things that are happening where people aren't crazy, it is actually becoming more expensive and more unsustainable. And I think that what you and I are realizing is that you have to get on the hamster wheel in order to get off. And what you and I are so interested in is the idea of worlds that are built differently. Like what if we built this differently? What if there was another system? And I think again, what we're realizing is that the way that you can really start to impact change is to meet other people who want to do so and also to save your money so that you're in a position to take those risks and so that at 40, once you and I have like learned as much as we possibly can, we are in a position to say, Okay, we want to fund this vertical farm or, okay, we want to get this done. Yeah. And one thing I've learned while on this road trip is that we've been to so many state parks in California, and we also visited Hawaii. And when you travel to a lot of those state parks, what you find out is that they were purchased by private owners, and they were held on to for long enough that those owners then donated that land as a state park. And if someone had we're actually retained ownership, right, and partnered with public institutions to protect that land, because things that are specifically held by public institutions means that they're held by constituents that aren't well informed, right, who are being affected by lobbyists groups from malicious private actors, right. So the only thing to get around like malicious private actors is beneficial private actors, right? It's I literally am taking the logic of like the only thing to get around a bad guy with Gun is a good guy with a gun. But in terms of economics, I absolutely believe that right. And I think that that's we've realized is that previously, my thought would have been, this is so messed up that anyone owns this, this should be a public good. But I think what you realize is that people buy land, so that doesn't get destroyed. And then eventually they donate it. And a number of state parks in California, many around Big Sur, were donated that way, and that land wouldn't have been preserved if someone hadn't held on to it. And I think the interesting tension is, someone shouldn't have to buy that privately, like billionaires donating money, a billionaire shouldn't have that money to begin with, I think, and we shouldn't rely on billionaires to do the right thing. But at the same time, in order to enact that change, in order to elect the politicians that we want to see, changing those policies in order to fund the campaign's we want to see funded, you have to have your own capital. And I think that that's been a thing that has really excited you and I more than any one vision of any one house. And I think an example of that would be that we were driving through Big Sur, and we saw that there were 900 acres of land for sale for $6 million. And that was one of those moments where we don't have anywhere close to $6 million. We don't have anywhere close to a million dollars, would you by the way, you'd have to have in cash, what you have to have in cash, right. But what we do have is an investment plan. And if we stick to that investment plan, then we will have $6 million. And what would it look like if we could buy those 900 acres, you know, and maybe once you have that money, you realize that there are other ways to spend it. But like the ability to do something that other people might think is crazy. But that is actually squarely in line with your values, and with the way that you want to see the world run is really exciting and really motivating. Yeah.
And I think it's really important to put a finer point on the idea of as being anti capitalists. I think that's a it's a fine shorthand for it. But just given what we've followed up with, we're advocates of reform regulating the context of the current era of neoliberal capitalism, right that we live in currently, that makes space for billionaires. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So because I think it's important, right? Yes, if you're anti capitalist, it's burn the system down. And then there's no way for the good capitalists to fight the bad capitalists. Right. Right. And I think specifically, the things that we want to do with the money that we earn, would heighten awareness of the need for that reform. Right. So yeah, and just really quickly, just talking about how we plan to act this out, we do not have like a very complicated financial plan. But I do say, Julie and I talk about this all the time, we basically bought a mark maggiore painting and have like one bottle of wine held by another guy, I am going to become an a fine wine investor, we have just around $5,000 invested in fine wine, and it's only going to go up baby. But the simple thing for like our spending is that we have two primary cards. One is the Chase Sapphire reserve. One is the gold American Express. We also have platinum American Express, but we haven't started using that to a crazy amount. We put all of our food on the gold American Express all grocery purchases, anytime we got into a restaurant because it gives you 4x points. And we put everything else in the chase. And I say that just because it actually has been very helpful for me to look at our credit card statements throughout the month and be like, Alright, cool. We spent $1,000 on food, as opposed to having to track it meticulously. I know that almost everything on the Gold Card is food. It's drink, it's groceries. And so that helps just kind of be like, Oh, damn, we have $3,000 on our Chase Card. What have we been buying? Because I know it's just not our living expenses.
And this is what Caroline leads so that every time we're in a restaurant or a grocery store, I feel like a five year old boy because I look at Carol and I go like Mommy, which card should I use? Look, the person's like, Oh my god.
Credit Card Points rock. Yeah. Anyways, I just want to say that because I think it's actually super simple. And it's been really fun. And we've already seen the benefits of those credit card points. Yeah, we went to work in Hawaii. Yeah, we did. But it's just also a really easy way to divide. So ask me about my referral. DM me at Keroh clarify, and you will get 60,000 points in the first three years as a United flight.
Anyways, I'm excited for our future. I thank you for entrusting me with this journey we've been on and I'm so excited and proud of you that not only are you going to grad school, but you've made this huge career jump and you're finding ways to merge the two and you are earning I think what you're worth thank you and that's really exciting.
Whatever about me, you're a financial genius and you literally make my dreams come true. You are the wind beneath my wings. You are though in the neath
Do you even know the melody for that time?
Wait, ready? You Raise Me so how much was your Yeah, you're back down at five. Cut it, cut it. Okay, you're gonna do your really stopped. That's a performance that I'm saving. Okay, so if you love us, you should listen to her podcast. You should follow me on Instagram and you should also support factor RB Because for real well circle changed my life. I was so skeptical of it when I took it I even DM Julia we weren't like friends. Yeah. And I was like, how can you prove that this is going to work? And she was very kind and she convinced me to take one and I took a well circle and it's been two years and it has just, like, wildly transformed our lives.
Yeah, thought it was a cult. It's not a cult. If it is a cult, it's a cult.
I'm wearing the toga Yeah. All right. By the way, I would say see you in the next episode, but they're definitely not letting us come back.
We'll see you on season two of our I think I love you know, it's gonna be about don't don't tell the name yet. Don't tell anything yet. Follow me on Instagram at Carol Claire Burke to learn about everything that we're doing what's cool.
If you enjoyed this episode, come join us in a Wealth Circle. It's our live online 12 week course and community where we teach you how to create a personalized financial plan alongside hundreds of other women building wealth. It will change your life and your money for good. You can apply at factorawealth.com forward slash Wealth Circle. That's factorawealth.com forward slash Wealth Circle. See you in the next episode.