In this video we'll share the top seven things we did to become millionaires at 35!
Hey guys, before we get started we want to introduce ourselves I'm Jerad and this is my
wife amber! We've been married for nine years and we have three crazy kids that you just met
in the beginning of the video. I majored in computer science and I've been working
in business development and been working for a small tech company for the last 15 years and I
have a degree in sports management I was a Public School Teacher for seven years in high school
and then i became a non-profit event manager for two years
and then after we had our first child I became a stay-home Mom!
Number 7 - Increase Credit Score
As we talk about increasing our credit scores i wanted to share a big mistake that i made when
i was younger i had a lot of great credit history and i had multiple cards and accounts i was taught
that what i needed to do was pay off the balances and then close the accounts and i thought that
was like the best thing i could do to build up my credit score and then i later found out in credit
karma that the reason for that was as soon as i closed those accounts though all that information
was essentially deleted from existence and it was as if i never had any of those credit cards or
accounts yeah so like jared said we actually used credit karma to track our credit scores we studied
the credit report that they sent to us and we followed their recommendations and their insights
that they gave us to really boost our credit back up credit karma actually gives you credit
card realization it shows you any derogatory remark it shows you your payment history your
total accounts that you have it shows you the age of your credit history and then it also shows you
the number of heart inquiries that you have so for us we used it and we looked at those and we saw in
the red it was like the age of the credit history was very red and like there was nothing there it
might have been like we have two years of credit history or something yeah it was it seemed really
odd to us that we were strong in all the other categories except for that so what we did is we
actually added Jerad as a authorized user to my card which was a Victoria secret card that i got
when i was 18 years old so it's a 17 year old card and that is our oldest card that we have for us
the big takeaway was don't cancel your cards and then make sure that you annually
kind of like purchase something on it to keep it in good standing so that you protect that
card and then you can continue having that age of credit make sure you stay tuned um we're
going to share some more videos about how we use credit karma to really benefit us and our family.
6 - Monthly Budget
So early on in our relationship we didn't have a budget. Here's some examples of how we managed our
money which i some of them are kind of funny um we bought two jet skis on a credit card
and i don't think i've never heard of anybody doing that and when we were there they thought
we were crazy we had a high mortgage payment on a lake house we spent over a thousand dollars a
month on restaurant and groceries really those numbers we didn't know at the time how much we
were spending we just found that out after the fact for at least for like six months
straight we were spending a thousand dollars oh yeah we were spending a thousand dollars at
uh michael's the arts and craft store if you guys are familiar with that we were spending that money
at like ten dollars at a time on on little tiny transactions that by themselves didn't seem like
a lot but they added up to a thousand dollars a month we had a car payment we didn't know what
an emergency fund was we didn't know how much to put in it and we didn't really have any savings at
the time we had two student loan payments bottom line we consistently spent more money than we had
right so what we did is we started using mint another app um and again this is not sponsored
we really just we love mint we you you really push that it's like it was really eye opening and it's
really nice to have it like straight on your phone so we use that to track our spending monthly daily
with that we created an annual budget plan you know it's been an evolution though you kind of
get better at it over time and you you set goals as to what you're going to spend and then you sort
of go back and you track it and see well how well did we do against that goal and then if you need
to adjust it then you do and we did that for years yeah and it's nice it you know it gives you it's
color-coded green red and yellow and so it kind of tells you like you're on track or you're not on
track so you can kind of dial back or kind of save that money so it's nice it's a nice visual what
we do is we actually also meet with each other and we try to do that on a monthly basis to talk
about our budget for that month that previous month and then looking forward into the next
month and then throughout the year too on this channel what we hope to do is we hope to share
how we use men to actually track our spending and then to transform our financial outlook
let's talk about our investment strategy in the stock market we do a combination of things so
we'll talk about just the highlights right now um one is that we do invest in index funds we
like those and we have several that we've we've researched and that we've invested in over a long
period of time we also do invest in individual companies and so individual stocks like apple
amazon netflix those types of things our strategy is is around value investing like what warren
buffett does and phil town people like that and we have a long-term perspective we also do
some swing trades so some of the kind of medium turn every now and then something comes up and
and we've taken advantage of it we made some pretty good profit another piece of our investment
strategy is making your own financial decisions we look at both the fundamentals of a company
and we also look at the technicals another thing that we do is we spend a lot of time
looking at the valuations of a company when we invest in individual stocks it's
i think it's really important that you know what a company is worth and to have a lot of different
valuation metrics that you look at and looking at the average of those numbers so that when
the stock market's going up and down you have some semblance of what that company is worth and
where you should buy it at and where you might want to sell it at so what we're going to do in
the next video is we're going to share some of our secrets about how we've grown our portfolio
to over a million dollars over the last 15 years number one oh how so we're here at our new house
it's gonna be finished in june and we actually signed the contract in april and now this house
is 170 000 more than what we signed the contract for and our last two houses that
we sold we made a hundred thousand in those and we did that by buying in a phase one development
we were able to also buy in a neighborhood that was in a good school district we also really
upgraded high impact areas of the house that made sense for ourselves and buyers potentially
did a pre-sale inspection for houses and then we also did professional staging and photography so
we want you guys to subscribe and we'll tell you more about this story and more about our
last house how we sold it for forty thousand dollars more than what we paid for in eight months
so this next one of all the things that we've talked about is probably probably
the most difficult yeah i agree in 2014 we went on a trip to nicaragua with a local non-profit
because we remember it was just like this water that was like green and i think you saw one that
was like the bucket of their water they were using and it was just nothing we'd ever seen
before in our life we couldn't imagine that people were actually living like that like
their houses were just these like shacks i mean literally like eight foot by eight foot
um made of anything that they could find there was like these little kids who just
like all they had was like one shirt or they didn't even have shoes with that though it
changed our mindset on how we were living and what we were doing um and that really helped us realize
we really needed to make a change sold our lake house and then we bought a house that was
half the cost of that lake house sold our jet skis we sold our boat we drove one car for a couple
years we actually started spending less hundreds of dollars less on dining out and groceries
early on in our journey we owed 30 000 um on high interest credit cards when we had
that you know that was a big a big hurdle that we had to overcome in order to get to
where we are today so we did some research on different methods to pay off that debt one of
the things that we came up with is to pay off the the card that has the highest interest rate
right and then once you pay that off you take that amount that you were paying the monthly payment on
and you pay that to the next credit card that you have with the next highest rate so once
we once we did that and we got the credit cards out of our lives we were able to then apply that
to savings and investments and things like that they could actually start building wealth for us
so make sure you subscribe to learn how you can actually pay off your high interest
debt quickly like we did and find the best credit cards
so the most impactful thing we did was to contribute to our 401k and not only contribute to
that but to actually max it out i was doing this actually when i was making thirty five thousand
dollars right out of college because as we were again while we were preparing for this video we
did some research and looked at our last 15 years of income and surprisingly the average
income was 75 000 so not a very high income but we were still able to max out our 401k and
become millionaires like we've talked about in this video so some of the pros to doing this
um were that first of all it's automatic you know it's something that came out of our paycheck
and we never saw the money and we didn't really think about it certain months we might have even
forgotten that we had we weren't looking at it for a long time like it was just in there there's also
limits on how frequently you can transfer funds so that was good because it kept me from trying to
time the market another pro was that we were able to invest in low cost index funds so we had
a lot of diversity and low cost versus some of the other mutual funds you could only invest it in low
risk assets so there really didn't have a lot of variety i think there were maybe 10
different either a mutual fund or an index fund to choose from in future videos what we hope to
do is we hope to share more detailed information on everything that jared's talked about the 401ks
the iras the index funds and reveal how we actually grew our portfolio to over 700 000
in the last 15 years okay so now that you've met our family seen our kids heard our story
we wanted to share how becoming millionaires at age 35 has affected our life how it's impacted
us we've had definitely less financial stress and anxiety less arguments related to money more
financial independence more freedom the ability to retire early and i say retire early but it's
not just retiring early it could be retiring to do something that you're really passionate about
it could be something that you want to maybe you want to go part-time instead of full-time some
other ways that it's impacted our life we're able to support our kids three kids maybe four
not pregnant right now but in the future four um and then we're able to homeschool our children
and give them that that experience and then pour into them that way we're able to spend money on
things that enhance our lives like for us we're thinking alaskan cruise african safari uh an rv
you know cross-country trip it's also given us more flexibility with our time and then also the
opportunity to pursue passions like this channel make sure to subscribe to our channel and join us
as we learn save and grow together i'm full and who are you in the middle i'm guinevere i'm seven
months old who are you i can't believe it and how old are you i'm two hi everybody hi everybody