Hey guys before we get started we want to introduce ourselves
I'm jared and this is my wife amber um 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
so as we talk about increasing our credit scores i wanted to share a big mistake that i made
that really set me back and 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
close 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 and if you guys don't know credit karma actually gives you do your credit card
utilization 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 jared 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 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 we also wanted to share this is not a sponsored video by
any means we just really like using credit karma to track our credit scores and we want you guys to
all use it and everybody i mean it's been such a such a blessing to us yeah we try to tell all of
our friends and family about it constantly that you know if they're not using it they need to
start using it and it's totally free so why not and it doesn't affect your credit score so yeah
might as well make sure you stay tuned we're going to share some more videos about how
we use credit karma to really benefit us and our family tits monkey budget
and monthly budget 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 uh 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 crafts store if you guys are familiar
with that we were spending that money at like ten dollars at a time on little tiny transactions that
you know 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 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 do 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 um 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 we did that for
years yeah it's nice 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
um 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
so on this channel what we hope to do is we hope to share how we use meant 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 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 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 recommend is do consult with professionals
and financial advisors and banks and then you you analyze it and you see if you want to work
that into your plan or not 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
oh how trip 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 and then like playing with a marble and rock we were just talking about this
thing 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 we really needed to
reduce our cost of living if we 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 and
shopping one of the next videos that we want to share is the story of how we saved three thousand
dollars a month and we paid off our mortgage at the time down to forty thousand dollars
early on in our journey uh we owed believe it or not we owed 30 000 um on high interest
credit cards uh so 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 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 um 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 35 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 it we weren't looking at it for a long time like it was just in there yeah
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
and the other thing was that we 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 so make sure 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 401k our portfolio to um over 700 000 in the last 15 years
and who are you in the middle i'm guinevere i'm
seven months old who are you i can't beat this and how old are you
hi everybody hi everybody 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 another thing is 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 so some other ways that it's impacted our life you know for us
um 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 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 holy
city family this channel make sure to subscribe to our channel and join us as we learn save and grow
together