You’re so money baby, and you don’t even know it

My good buddy Matt Cheney reached out to me to do an interview with Ramit Sethi who runs the site iwillteachyoutoberich.com, who he has been working with on a financial bootcamp project.  I’d first heard about Ramit through Matt, who convinced me to buy Ramit’s book, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”.  I did so, ordering it through Amazon, and letting it sit on my shelf for a couple of months, as I was just recovering from all the books I  read for the Alt-MBA program that we were just wrapping up.  I figured I get to the book eventually.

 

So to prepare for the interview, I read the book.  Its a great book for what it is, which is a book guiding you through the basics of getting your financial life in order so that you don’t have to think/worry about money so much.  The contents are pretty much the same  as the advice that I received in my Personal Finance class I took in college, but then again, that was probably the most important class I took in college. 

 

If you know anyone in college, or graduating from college, please give them this book.  It’s written in assessable style, and its easy to follow.  It has all the basics around paying off debts, maxing out the 401k, putting things into savings etc.  Ramit writes with great anecdotes about growing up in an Indian-American family, and how that culture helped prepare him for dealing with financial institutions.  The advice is simple and straightforward, and you can literally follow the books examples when calling creditors and banks to waive fees as Ramit has scripts set up for those interactions.  I actually sat down with my fiance and had her call the creditor following the script, and it got us much further than if we just tried it on our own.   I’ll update once we have an outcome on the fees.

 

It also contains great deals like the Schwab Bank Investor Checking, which pays 3 to 5% interest, has no fees, no minimums, no-fee overdraft protection, and unlimited reimbursement of any ATM usage.  Which sounded great, but I was like, you know I can probably just stick with my college checking account, because the hassle can’t be worth it.  Then I looked at my Mint.com account and saw that I had paid $344.84 in fees since bringing my Wachovia account into Mint (about a year ago).  I understand paying for convenience, but this new account will be more convenient, and I’ll save 344.84 in fees.  Sweet!  I just set up the new account.

 

Ramit gives a lot of great basics around automating your accounts so you don’t have to think about them, and can relax knowing that you’re saving for all the things you want, and the money that you do spend on stuff is yours to spend.  He calls it conscious spending, and its one of the more valuable chapters for people who can get stuff automated, but struggle with staying within their budgets  All of this was great advice, and helped me to get engaged on some of this stuff, and I’m someone who already does a pretty decent job at saving for retirement. 

 

Having this background I went into the interview with Ramit, and I found him a great interview.  He’s clearly thought about the issues around money management quite a bit.  He understands that the biggest thing is just getting started enough to take care of all the details.  We discussed all kinds of topics from his take on Taleb’s barbell risk profile (Ramit: too difficult for most people to employ – keep it easy and get people started is much more important), to his take on the similarity between Pick-up artists and financial savings.  One of the things that kept coming out for me was the thought that we are not as unique as we think we are, so we should prepare for what is likely.  It’s likely that you’re going to get married, and that its going to cost a lot, so start saving for that if you’re young.  Hey, if you never get married, you can throw yourself a huge bash when you turn 50.