Smart Money Podcast: Expert Budgeting and Spending Tips from a Live Financial Planning Session (Video Episode)

Welcome to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast, where we answer your real-world money questions. In this episode:

Hear an actual financial planning session where a CFP advises a listener on transforming her budget and spending habits.

Magda Doemeny, a certified financial planner from the Nerdwallet Advisors platform, gives a listener specific advice to improve their finances (advice given on behalf of Nerdwallet Advisors, not NerdWallet). Brinker, the listener, is struggling with spending habits that she calls “irresponsible” and how to manage some of her debt. She discusses her upbringing, financial challenges, and goals while Magda offers insights and strategies to help her improve her finances. The episode delves into methods for tracking spending habits, setting financial goals, and developing better money management practices to achieve financial stability. Magda also guides Brinker on creating a budget, prioritizing debt repayment, and implementing behavioral changes to curb impulsive spending.

​​NerdWallet Advisory LLC (dba NerdWallet Advisors) is an SEC-registered investment advisor, and wholly owned subsidiary of NerdWallet, Inc. The advice provided in this episode of Smart Money was for illustrative purposes only and not intended as financial or investment advice specific to your personal facts or circumstances.

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NerdWallet stories related to this episode:

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Have a money question? Text or call us at 901-730-6373. Or you can email us at [email protected]. To hear previous episodes, go to the podcast homepage.

Episode transcript

This transcript was generated from podcast audio by an AI tool.

Sean Pyles:

Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you send us your money questions and we answer them with the help of our genius Nerds. I'm Sean Pyles. You've heard us say many times on this podcast, episode after episode, that we are not here to give you individualized personal finance advice, except this episode we're going to be doing exactly that. A few weeks ago, you may remember that we put out a call inviting you, dear listener, to contact us if you want a financial planning session and allow us to record that session. Lots of you contacted us, and today we're going to hear from one of you. We're coming to you from a studio in Chicago where our listener lives.

But before we get into that, I'd like to introduce you to Magda Doemeny. She's a certified financial planner from the NerdWallet Advisors platform. One thing I want to be clear about is that Magda and NerdWallet Advisors are a distinct platform from NerdWallet. Magda will give our listener some specific advice to improve their finances, and that advice will be given on behalf of NerdWallet Advisors, not NerdWallet. Also, we want to mention that in exchange for participating in this series, our listener is receiving a one-year membership to the NerdWallet Advisors platform. Magda, welcome to Smart Money.

Maga Doemeny:

Thanks, Sean.

Sean Pyles:

So tell us a bit about NerdWallet Advisors and your role there.

Maga Doemeny:

Sure. So I'm an advisor with NerdWallet Advisors, and what we offer is affordable financial planning memberships where you get access to a certified financial planner, like me, and that's for a low monthly fee. What we do is we'll do a review of your finances and we'll create a financial plan with some bite-sized action items that you can really start to take action on quickly. You'll get unlimited access to myself or your planner with calls or chat function in any capacity.

Sean Pyles:

Great. So how long have you been an advisor?

Maga Doemeny:

I've been in this industry for about 15 years now. I got my CFP certification back in 2016, but I've been advising clients for about 12 years now and I've considered myself a finance Nerd since I can remember.

Sean Pyles:

Love to hear it. Have you ever recorded one of your sessions for a podcast?

Maga Doemeny:

I have never done that, but I am very grateful to be here and excited that we can talk finance and folks might learn a thing or two.

Sean Pyles:

All right, well, I think it's time to get to some financial advising. In a moment, our conversation with a listener here in Chicago. Stay with us. Okay, let's get to our guest star for this episode. Brinker is a Smart Money listener here in Chicago. She's 30 and lives in an area of the city called South Loop. She's here with us now in the studio. Brinker, we are delighted to have you on Smart Money.

Brinker:

Hi, Sean. Thanks so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it today.

Sean Pyles:

Oh, we appreciate your time too. So tell us a bit about yourself. I mean, what do you do for work? What's your living situation like? What do you do for fun? All of those things.

Brinker:

Yeah, so I'm an executive assistant. I work in affordable housing. It's really fun. I love helping people. When I'm not helping people just keep their day-to-day together, I have a lot of fun with my dog. She's a Yorkie, her name is Penny. She's the sweetest little peach in the world.

Sean Pyles:

What do you do for fun around the city? I mean, especially in the summertime like we're talking right now, there are a lot of things to do in Chicago.

Brinker:

I stay inside and rot. No, I love to be outside. Me and Penny go on very long walks and I love to spend time with my mom and my cousins, just family time overall and just enjoy the hot weather before it gets frigid and just unbearable.

Sean Pyles:

Coming from living in Chicago for years, yes, I totally understand that.

Brinker:

It's rough. The winters can be rough.

Sean Pyles:

Totally. Okay, so let's turn to money. I'd like to hear about what kind of money lessons you learned growing up. How are your family finances managed?

Brinker:

Oh gosh, I don't think I had any specific lessons, which is probably why I am here today. It was more like my dad was the breadwinner and my parents had a production company back in the early 2000s, '90s, so they were entrepreneurs and business owners. That was great until they got divorced in 2004. I was about nine. I saw my dad just exit the family and it was just my mom and I, she's a stay-at-home mom. It was just, "Well, how do we survive? If dad's not here, who's going to make money?" And it came down to essentially just being on food stamps a lot of the time. There's occasionally—

Sean Pyles:

Sorry.

Brinker:

Yeah, it's okay, it's character building, I guess. There were a couple of times when maybe the electricity was off. We didn't have the luxuries like being able to have cable TV back in the day and way before the streamers. So it was a weird childhood growing up because I also went to private school. It was like I'm seeing all of these children who are my age back in the day who are having these very luxurious experiences, going on these nice vacations and that kind of thing, and then I come home and like, "Ooh, we have food in the house," you know? It was a weird way to grow up, to be surrounded by people who came from wealthy families and then I myself was not. Things just really fell off once my parents got divorced.

Sean Pyles:

How do you think that upbringing, being around so much money in school and coming home and not having as much, affected the way that you view money now?

Brinker:

So it's definitely altered my little lizard brain, unfortunately. Some for the good, some for the bad. For the good it's set a bar of how I would like to live and how I feel comfortable living and that kind of thing and how I strive to, whether it's make money in my career or just maybe a lifestyle, maybe we see on social media, a lot of the glitz and glam, even though those are usually highlight reels, that's sometimes how people live. And that's kind of been the standard that I've set myself for.

Sean Pyles:

They're aspirational.

Brinker:

Yeah, it's very aspirational and I think it's helped me out a lot in terms of how I want to tackle my career and how much money I want to make. It's at the end of the day not been the best. I've been trying to live within my means. I don't own any real designer items. I mean, I've got a vintage Fendi bag from Poshmark, but it's never been like, going to buy one of the $10,000 Chanel bags. I don't go to vacation in Monaco or anything like that.

Sean Pyles:

But you wanted to have nicer things because you saw this growing up.

Brinker:

Exactly. Yep, exactly.

Sean Pyles:

Well, so how would you describe your finances now just broadly?

Brinker:

Ooh, irresponsible. I am so irresponsible. It actually angers me because I've tried to slow down on my spending and I've tried to adopt better habits, but for whatever reason it's just like, swipe the card, ching, whether it's just me just blindly shopping online, late night scrolls. I just realized, "Ooh, I probably shouldn't have bought a $50 item at two o'clock in the morning."

Sean Pyles:

So it seems like you are in conflict with yourself sometimes.

Brinker:

Absolutely.

Sean Pyles:

You know what you ought to be doing, the "responsible" thing to be doing, but then your actions are taking you in another direction.

Brinker:

Yeah, it totally contradicts everything I want to do. I hate it.

Sean Pyles:

Yeah. Well, you wrote to us about some challenging debt that you are working through right now. Talk with us about that.

Brinker:

Oh my gosh. This has been a long road of how I got here. I can pinpoint exactly where it started and why it's happened, why it's snowballed. But essentially a very long story short, I'll probably try to do the SparkNotes edition of it, I ended up moving into a complex called River City, one of Chicago's more famous architecture buildings, that kind of thing. I think my rent was like $1,995. And so I was fortunate enough to, during the heart of the pandemic, stay with my mom and save up a little bit, but the amount of money it cost me to get into that building, I used a company called The Guarantors, which is a lovely company, helps people who don't have maybe the 700 credit score that all the landlords really want you to have, or anything in collections, that kind of thing. I used them. So they charge a service fee, more or less. They want to hold this amount of rent.

Sean Pyles:

A security deposit?

Brinker:

For a security deposit, yes. Thank you. And then I had to also pay the additional building fees, which was another security deposit and dog fees, move-in fees, that kind of thing. So all of the money that I'd really saved over COVID just went down the drain there. I didn't think anything of it. I was like, "Oh, spend it back, get it right back, it'll be fine." It was not fine.

Sean Pyles:

How long has that been going on for, that you've been dwindling your savings and now you find yourself in a tough spot financially?

Brinker:

That was basically the start of it. I emptied out my savings and was never able to recover.

Sean Pyles:

So it's been a few years of this going on?

Brinker:

It's been some years, yeah.

Sean Pyles:

Well, let's talk about your financial goals. Do you have any specific financial goals right now besides resolving your debt? And how would you say you are making progress on them or not?

Brinker:

Sure. I would say some of my goals are savings, for sure. I would really like to just save in general. At some point in the near-ish future, maybe like five years, I'd love to make a move abroad, and so that costs money, whether that's finding a flat and paying whatever visa fees that need to be paid. I would like to save 30, maybe 40 grand, give myself a cushion. And then I would also like to save and get this debt out of the way because it's about 25K, but it's a monster when you have to pay it.

Sean Pyles:

Weighs on you financially, personally, emotionally.

Brinker:

It does, yes.

Sean Pyles:

Okay. Well, have you ever used a financial advisor before?

Brinker:

I have not, no. This will be a first.

Sean Pyles:

Okay, great. Well, Brinker, I know that you two have been sitting across from each other for a little while now, but let me officially introduce you. Brinker, Magda, Magda, Brinker.

Maga Doemeny:

Hello.

Brinker:

Hi.

Sean Pyles:

So Magda, I'm curious if you have any initial thoughts about Brinker's finances based on what we've just been discussing?

Maga Doemeny:

Yeah, I think initially your situation I've heard before in bits and pieces. It is so hard to come from an upbringing of not having a lot and being surrounded by people that do because it's always the, "Well, how did they do that? Why can't I have that?" And that really, A, can be really motivating and it sounds like it was for you in your career to be like, "I want to get that." Because looking at some of it, and we'll get into it, but your income is actually pretty good. It's great that you have a motivation to excel in your career and earn a high income because that's going to really help your finances. But ultimately, I think what also happens with that is what's called lifestyle creep. That is the first thing that I noticed that I think you are saying it in different words, right? You are making money and you deserve to spend it, and that is absolutely true. You do deserve to spend it. It's all about taking into consideration what you're trying to accomplish in conjunction with what you want to spend. So if you have goals like saving for a trip or one that will impose on everyone, which is retiring, we just need to figure out how we can still enjoy life. I don't ever want to be somebody who sits and says, "You just can't spend any of your money." That's no fun. It's just about figuring out how we can fit that lifestyle in and still accomplish your goals. And so I think we can talk about ways to do that.

Sean Pyles:

Yeah. So Brinker, how thoughtful or intentional or not are you around the lifestyle creep that you've been experiencing?

Brinker:

Ooh, it's been not thoughtful in the case that I've been just going full force into lifestyle creep, but then it's been thoughtful in a way of, Ooh, it's happening. How do I end up—

Maga Doemeny:

Right. Rearview mirror.

Sean Pyles:

Well, that's what I'm really interested in, that dynamic, this push and pull that you have internally where you know, okay, I probably shouldn't be swiping this day, but then you do it anyway. So what is that internal monologue like? How do you justify it when you're having a day where you're like, I just want to buy this thing?

Brinker:

I think I just go for it and I see honestly that it's made a small dent in my account, but not so much where I'm going to be eating ramen noodles for the next 13, 14 days while I'm waiting for my next check. I'm in the mindset of unfortunately, again, spend a check, get it right back, and as long as my account's not at zero, I can afford it, theoretically.

Sean Pyles:

Yeah. Let's talk about that check. How much do you have coming in on a bi-weekly or monthly basis?

Brinker:

Yeah, so I get paid semi-monthly, so for me it's the 15th and about the 30th of every month, and it comes out to about $2,900.

Sean Pyles:

Okay, each paycheck?

Brinker:

Yes.

Sean Pyles:

And then what's your rent currently?

Brinker:

$1,895.

Sean Pyles:

And then at the end of the month, are you finding yourself left over with much or is a lot of it going toward your current debt payments?

Brinker:

So I do not have anything left over because of my egregious spending habits and shopping and whatnot and Uber Eats, etc. So besides the pre-arranged payment plan that I'm already on, I'm not really tackling the debt like I'd like to.

Sean Pyles:

So there's a lot to pick apart here. Have you ever used anything like a budgeting app or budgeting template, something to break down where your money is going on a monthly basis so you get that high level and also detailed view?

Brinker:

I just started using the Monarch app, which seems to be really great. There's a lot that I had to go in and toggle myself, but it gives me a really good kind of overall view of where my money's going. So I've spent a lot of money since January on Uber between Uber Eats and Uber itself, which is about $3,500, not awesome. So it says shopping is like the third-biggest group. It says, I've only spent $802 on shopping. I would say maybe—

Maga Doemeny:

This month?

Brinker:

You know what? Let me double-check. Oh yes, in the month of July.

Maga Doemeny:

Got you.

Brinker:

Yes.

Sean Pyles:

I just want to say year-to-date, that's pretty good.

Brinker:

No, no, no.

Sean Pyles:

It's a single month, yes.

Brinker:

No. Yeah, so for the month of July, it's been about $800 bucks. Travel and lifestyle for the month of July has been about $796. I mean, my goodness, we're only in the 15th. Food and dining, $367. I'm assuming they're counting Instacart or any type of Aldi's run I do. Health and wellness, which is $286. That includes my personal trainer and gym membership. Is a personal trainer necessary? Probably not. And then the rest is bills, utilities, it's got auto and transport in there. I don't drive.

Sean Pyles:

It's a pretty detailed breakdown though.

Brinker:

But yeah, it's very detailed.

Sean Pyles:

So Magda, hearing these numbers, let's think about these, chew on these numbers a bit and get to your analysis and advice. What is the first thing that comes to mind as you're hearing Brinker talk through these expenses and all of that?

Maga Doemeny:

So first when I just do a basic calculation, you're about $500 away from already spending your paycheck right now.

Brinker:

That's spot on.

Maga Doemeny:

Okay. Which is something that you're saying. So there are two things that we would want to think about with what you're describing. There's the debt and how do we handle it and what do we do with it? But for the beginning parts of this stage of really deciding, I want to make a change, I want to do something different, I actually want to prioritize your spending, because focusing on getting rid of your debt quickly or having a quick fix tends to not solve your long-term problem if we don't fix the habits that created the debt. And I find that if folks will cut out the debt for three or four of their 10 cards, then they go, "Oh, I have $5,000 I can spend," and we go right there. So it's not as though I don't want to tackle that and I want to talk about that in a moment, but the first thing I want to tackle is your spending and what's happening here.

So I'm super excited that you signed up for an app and that you can actually do the work and look at it because the first part of this process is actually understanding the dollars in and dollars out, and it is work. People think, oh, I'll just plug in my stuff and everything shows up and I can see everything. And that's not always true. You have to mentally go in there and categorize it and make sure it's accurate, which is what you're starting to do. For you though, depending on how this goes, I also want to talk about some behavioral changes that you can do that actually wouldn't require the app and it would be supplemental to that process.

So one thing that came to mind when you were talking about shopping is that it sounds like right after you do it or shortly after you do it, you almost say, why did I do that? And so something that I would challenge you to do is create one day a week, that's your return day. Every Sunday you sit down, you look at what you bought and you return as much of whatever it is that you just bought that you said after you bought it, "Do I really need this?" Right there you could save maybe hundreds of dollars by actually taking action on what your internal body had already said, "Why did I do this?" Most of the things you purchase can be returned. If I had a dollar for every time I'm there handing that thing back to them, I'd be a lot wealthier. So that's one thing that you could try to implement is pick a day that you do returns.

Sean Pyles:

I have another question for you, Brinker. So going to the, why did I buy that question? What is your answer to that, usually?

Brinker:

I justify it by saying if it's a piece of clothing, I'm trying to keep my wardrobe updated. I'm a big furniture person as well, and I just constantly rotate things in and out of my space. And so I just usually think to myself, okay, well my current desk is ugly. Let me get a cute looking desk. Maybe something that's a little more functional, which the functional aspect of it is what trips me up because it's just a desk. I have two screens on it, my laptop, that’s it. I just need a surface. I don't need something that's hundreds of dollars.

Sean Pyles:

Yeah, you can rationalize this, but then you still have that impulse to make that purchase, right?

Brinker:

Correct. Yeah.

Sean Pyles:

Have you found any techniques to try to curb your spending?

Brinker:

Yes. So I implemented minimalism years ago. I mean, we're talking maybe like 2017, and back then I was working, and it wasn't my official big girl job, but minimalism really helped me curb all that to just keep me at the bare minimum of what do I actually need? Food, water. Okay, can I wear this T-shirt more than five times without it disintegrating? Okay, maybe instead of spending $7 on a T-shirt from fast fashion, maybe I just do $48 or $30 or something like that so that I can keep re-wearing the T-shirt over and over again. Minimalism really helped me just kind of honestly live better and make better choices, but when we—

Sean Pyles:

But then what happened?

Brinker:

When we get the lifestyle creep that I've been experiencing, especially with a big girl job and my own adult money and that kind of thing, then I'm like, okay, well, instead of just stereotypically sticking to maybe black, white, and gray for a minimalism aesthetic, I can get color and a lot of clothing comes in different colors and styles and patterns, and I'm like, "I need it all. Give me all of it."

Maga Doemeny:

Well, I want to ask you one question about what you said, which is that I need it all. That word is something that I think sometimes we say to ourselves so loosely, but we all know that, and you would say, you don't need it. What is the word that we actually are saying? We want it.

Brinker:

Want it?

Maga Doemeny:

Right. And so I do think if there's time at all during any exercise of purchasing, a funny story I tell a lot of clients is that when I was in high school, which tells you a lot about me, I would go to a store with my girlfriends, usually Target, and everyone would be ready to check out. And I would make everyone stop before we checked out and take one thing out of their cart because I said, "There's no way you made it through this whole store without putting in something there that either A, you didn't come for or B, you don't actually need." So the exercise of just pausing for one minute before you purchase anything to ask, really, need versus want.

Sean Pyles:

I'm also someone who loves to shop online and can find myself buying things that I don't need. Two things that I've worked for me are one, just remembering that I truly have enough and that word “enough” has been really beneficial. And when I forget that I have enough, sometimes I will go to where my enough is, which is my closet, and just looking at my stuff, I'll be like, oh yeah, I actually do not have space for anything more because my house is tiny and so is my closet. Have you ever tried anything like that just to curb yourself just physically from pressing the buy button?

Brinker:

No, but you know what? I resonate with the word “enough” because I think based on the way I grew up, I always felt like whether I wasn't enough or I didn't have enough, that kind of thing, it's translated into adulthood as I want it all, I need it all.

Maga Doemeny:

The one last thing that I'll say in this context, these are all just ideas of things for you to think about and what you think will ultimately help you potentially change some of these habits. But if we decide that your goal is to go abroad and that's really something that you're committed to, we can create a separate savings account for that. And the exercise every time you buy something could be, do I want to fund my trip or do I want to buy X? And what you could do if you can catch yourself is say, oh, $50 item or $50, I'll just transfer it from my bank account into my fund. And it sits there and you can slowly hopefully see it growing and you can really in real time see the trade-off between $50, $100 X, and your growth, your fund growing to go study abroad.

Brinker:

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Sean Pyles:

Let's turn to your debt. So talk us through what you have, how you got there. You have a few different forms. It's a little complicated.

Brinker:

Yes, definitely. Let me pull that up. So I have quite a few personal loans, credit card—

Sean Pyles:

What is quite a few?

Brinker:

Ooh, let's count them up. Let's see about three personal loans,

Sean Pyles:

And these are personal loans that are covering consumer purchases.

Brinker:

Yeah. And then I have about five credit cards that have gone into collections. And then—

Sean Pyles:

What are your balances?

Brinker:

So it looks like all of them are under $500. I have something from Mission Lane $460, Nordstrom $380, apparently $28 on a Capital One credit card, which I don't know how that slipped through, but it did unfortunately.

Maga Doemeny:

And I definitely think you may have heard there's two different ways to kind of think about your debt. The avalanche and snowball method are the two pretty common ways. One of them being where you could tackle some of these smaller debts, the $28, $59, and just get rid of them so that you just feel a little bit of weight, it consolidates it a little bit for you artificially. And then the other one would be to tackle just your highest interest rate debt regardless of its size. I think for you, I would definitely want to prioritize some of these smaller debts first. I think it would be a weight off your shoulders, and frankly, this seems attainable to me based on your income with just some tweaks to your lifestyle. I think there would be no problem in tackling maybe five of these in two months, because I know that if we're talking about behaviors of shopping, we could probably return five of the items you bought over the last two weeks and pay down three of these cards.

Brinker:

You would be correct. Yes. Right. I was just thinking of a HomeGoods purchase I made this weekend which was about $65 and well, there goes some of that.

Maga Doemeny:

Almost two cards right there. And so I think that's really encouraging to me and should be really encouraging to you, is that we could tackle a lot of these. My matter of fact here would be that if you even have access to these cards, those go bye-bye. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to close them per se, but just throw them in the drawer and lock them up. We just don't want to use them anymore. And then we would slowly start to tackle some of these higher balance ones after that.

Brinker:

Okay. Yeah.

Sean Pyles:

I mean, one of the challenges that you've been experiencing, Brinker, is knowing what you should be doing and then doing what you shouldn't be doing. And with debt payoff, it seems like that is still a hard thing to get over. So do you have any advice for Brinker, Magda, around how she could maybe readjust habits to actually make the progress, return the item, pay off the debt?

Maga Doemeny:

I think one strategy, at least for returning the items, would be a dedicated time, and it would be really exciting to have a spreadsheet and be delete, delete. So motivation to pick a day, do some returns. And then the other one that's a big one for a lot of people is Uber Eats and/or Uber. For Uber Eats especially, one suggestion I would have is that we can talk about how many times a week you usually get Uber Eats. How many times do you go out to eat or order in?

Brinker:

So order in, oh gosh, maybe twice a week. Depends on how busy my schedule is from work. Depends on how lazy and tired I am, not helping my health all the time, and I am super aware that I overspend it on Uber, so I definitely know that it needs to get cut way back.

Maga Doemeny:

So for an Uber, maybe we could come up with a number of rides per week and you get, we'd have to figure out what works for you, but three rides a week, you can decide when you want to use that, whether that's going out for fun, whether that's getting to the office, whatever it is. And when you hit your three, we’ve got to figure out public transportation or walking for the remainder of the week, and it's fairly easy to track. Maybe three is not the right one, but the number we want to pick is less, much less than what you're doing regularly. And then if you use your first two by Tuesday, it's a conscious decision you're making and you know all right, I only get one more for the rest of the week, so I have to plan. And that's really what this boils down to is making conscious decisions, even just on a weekly basis of how do we think through what I'm doing so that I can make the right financial decision. And that's using less of your brain to try and do it.

Brinker:

Yeah, that makes sense.

Sean Pyles:

So how do you track habits that you have in your life, whether it's around shopping, going out?

Brinker:

I wing it. Yeah. I don't track habits probably as much as I should.

Maga Doemeny:

I do think one, we should write them down. So I think the start would be a budgeting app, and we can see how that goes. Some people find them overwhelming and then they just turn it down and say like, "All right, forget it. This isn't working for me." That is some people, some people thrive off of that stuff. You get super excited, they'll send you a note like you're about to overspend and you say oh, great, this notified me. So I would say I would want to start there. The second one would be we would come up with your set goals and track them for a month. Just like you said, you had a personal trainer, that takes a lot of commitment, right? You going in there and you putting in that hard work, you’ve got to get your butt up, you got to go there, you’ve got to work out and all that. It's not any dissimilar from this, it’s that you’ve got to create a plan and start executing on it.

Brinker:

Yeah, makes sense.

Sean Pyles:

So I want to get into some specific recommendations that you have. Magda, if you could list maybe the top three things that you would recommend Brinker do, as specific as you can get. Let's hear them.

Maga Doemeny:

So I think we touched on a little bit of it, but the very first thing that I would want to tackle is to do a deep dive as you've done with your budgeting app, and actually confirm exactly how much you are spending on average per month. Figure out your top spending categories and come up with the right strategy for you on how to bring that down. The second one would be any dollars that we save after that first month, make sure we chip away at a handful of those small credit cards and just get rid of them. And at the same time, I would want to set up at minimum an auto payment from your checking account into a high yield savings account that goes in maybe $25 a month, is what we would start with. The point is to build a habit because while we have debt, we're never going to get out of the cycle if we also don't start saving some of our money. So getting a separate savings account so we can start to build an emergency fund.

Sean Pyles:

Do you have a high yield savings account currently for you?

Maga Doemeny:

I do not.

Sean Pyles:

Okay. Well, it is my obligation as a Nerd to direct you to Nerdwallet.com. We have plenty of pages where you can shop around for the best ones, we update these pages monthly. They're super easy to open and they'll earn you a lot more interest on your cash. That's just growing as you make these auto deposits over time versus a standard savings account. So I do highly recommend checking that out.

Brinker:

All right, will do. Yeah. Thank you.

Sean Pyles:

Well, Brinker, as we wrap up, do you feel like you have maybe more of a handle on what you want to do with your finances?

Brinker:

I do. Absolutely. You know what? I feel like I have a really good roadmap so far and I'm ready to tackle it. I've been feeling like I've needed help for a very long time and haven't been sure where to start, etc. So now we've got hopefully a game plan so that I can stick to it and tackle some of these goals.

Sean Pyles:

Great. Well, one thing I want to emphasize too is that this is just your first conversation with Magda. You'll be working together as you have this year-long membership in NerdWallet Advisors. So reach out to her. She's a great resource for you, and you don't have to go through this alone. So that's one great thing too.

Brinker:

Yeah, sounds good. Well, thanks, Sean. Thanks, Magda. I really appreciate it.

Sean Pyles:

And that's all we have for this episode. Remember, listener, that we are here for you and your money questions. So turn to the Nerds and call or text us on the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373. That's 901-730-N-E-R-D. You can also email us at [email protected]. Also visit nerdwallet.com/podcast for more info on this episode. And remember that you can follow the show on your favorite podcast app, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and iHeartRadio to automatically download new episodes.

To learn more about NerdWallet Advisors, go to nerdwalletadvisors.com/smart-money. Here's our brief disclaimer. I am not a financial or investment advisor. This nerdy info is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes and may not apply to your specific circumstances. This episode was produced by Tess Vigeland, Cody Gough, and myself. A special thanks to Magda Doemeny, Georgia McIntyre, and Emily Canedo, and a big thank you to NerdWallet’s editors for all their help. And with that said, until next time, turn to the Nerds.