The Five Pillars of Personal Finance | A Live Financial Literacy Workshop

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Oh, there we go. There's a recording. I'm doing good, Troy. Thanks. I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Yeah, I find it very interesting. I want to cue up a basic question going everywhere you want to go with it. When you hear the word money, what's the first emotion you feel when you think of money?

SPEAKER_01 0:27

It's always security. And that's not really a feeling, but feeling protected, feeling that I have options, feeling that I'm not closed into one scenario. That's the feeling I have when I hear money.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

I love that. I'll speak for myself. I get anxious. That's never enough money. Always bills to pay, always things I want. Did y'all see Amazon Prime Days? I'm like, ooh, some people might be even more broke after this weekend. But I digress. I find it humbling and exciting to take this time to really educate on financial literacy. And wherever you are, whether you're a student, you're going into college, you're still in high school, you're joining, and you're a business, you're an entrepreneur, you're a professional, you're working a nine to five. We all can be better about our money. And dare I say, most of us hide away and don't want to think about the debt or the credit or knowing other things that we're supposed to do with our money and instead want to buy the new pair of Jordans or just spend money to spend money versus having a plan. So we are gracious to have you here to kind of remind us that this is a serious thing we need to learn and that wherever stage of our life is, we can be better about our finances. So with that said, Darren, the floor is yours to tell us a little more about yourself and how you became the money counselor.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

All right, Troy, and thanks again. My name is Darren Harvey. I'm 36 years old. I'm out here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I'm obsessed about money. I have no problem telling you guys that. Now, when it comes to financial literacy, I know this is called Financial Literacy 101. There's five basic building blocks or pillars of personal finance that apply to everybody. It comes down to budgeting or keeping track of your money. It comes down to savings and having what is called an emergency fund. It comes down to knowing about how credit works, understanding debt and leveraging debt correctly. And the fifth one, my personal favorite and everyone's favorite typically is investing that money and making that money work for you while you're literally asleep. So those are the five basic pillars of personal finance. And I will talk about them in more depth, but first, try to answer your question a little bit about myself. So I like to explain about myself, but more importantly, why. Why am I dedicated to financial stability? Why am I dedicated to financial literacy and trying to educate everybody? Well, I'd like to tell you guys a story. So let's go all the way back to the also the years of the 90s. So I'm a 90s baby, and I grew up in a city called Hayward, California. It's about 15 minutes south of Oakland. Now, I grew up middle class, teetering on upper middle class. I was lucky enough to have both my mother and my father, and I have an older brother that's eight years my senior. And we did financially pretty well for ourselves. One thing that I knew is that one parent could pay for all the bills in the house. So I was a very lucky kid. You could say I was a little bit spoiled, but I wouldn't say that. I would just say I was well behaved. But I did get a lot of um luxuries, and I knew it even back then. But I want to talk about my relationship with my father in particular. Now, I don't know how many people in the room are sports fans, whether it's basketball, baseball, or football, but my father was a baseball coach. He was my baseball coach. But not only was he a great coach when it came to baseball, he was also a fantastic coach when it just came to life in general. And that includes finances. Now, what I do tell people is this I want to make it clear. My dad did not sit me down and go, hey Darren, let's have a conversation about how FICO works and how 35% of your credit score is made up by paying bills on time. Yeah, like that is that is didn't happen. I didn't have those conversations, Troy. Nor did my dad sit me down and go, hey Darren, if you can just save $300 a month and put it into the SP 500 index funds, you're gonna be a millionaire one day. And that's what you need to do. That was not the conversations I had with my father. Right, right. He mainly taught me the bare basics, but he was a heck of a role model and example. So I like to tell why. My dad was an avid newspaper reader every day. And for those who don't know, I know there's some younger people here, before social media came out, before you would pop open TikTok and you would see an ad after you scrolled just one or two times. You had to get all your news on something called a newspaper. And those would hit our porch every single day. My dad read it every single day. I did not. I read it one single day, and that was Sunday. Now, why did I read it on Sunday? Well, there's two reasons. Number one, it had comic strips and word puzzles, and I still love comic strips and word puzzles to this day, and I have my dad to thank for that. The second reason, though, was the store ads that would come in on Sundays. So again, before you would get the alerts on your smartphone or your Apple phone about the new deal on Amazon, because Amazon didn't exist back then, or the new deal at Best Buy, you would get in a news ad. So I would go through Target, I would go through Walmart, I would go through Best Buy, I would go through stores that are no longer here, like Toys R Us, KB Toys, and Circuit City. And I would look for all the stuff, but the stuff that only had a sales sign, had to add a sales sign, didn't even matter how much it was discounted, could be 10% off, 25% off, 50% off. But I would, as a little kid, look through and see if something was on sale that I wanted, I would ask my parents. They trained me, guys. Hey, you have a chance as long as you're well behaved and you get did good at school, we may get you whatever you ask for. As long as it was on sale. And I knew I did not ask my mom or dad for anything unless it was on sale. And if I asked the second time after they said no the first time, I might get popped a little bit because they knew that I knew better. So my dad just modeling showed me patience and showed me delayed gratification and the understanding of hey, you could get the things you want, but you gotta wait, and you gotta wait for a good deal. Now, again, I had a great childhood, but as both learn as we grow into adults, adulthood gets a little bit more challenging to say the least. So I am a college graduate. I went to a college called California State University East Bay, and I did get my degree in sociology. Now, my last year, my senior year, I took out grants, and I have taken out grants every single year, and I was blessed to get them. Except for that last year. For some reason, I just didn't get it, and I didn't know why. They didn't tell me why I didn't get it. I just didn't have the money in my account. And one day it was time to pay up. So I went up to the campus, went to the cashier, and I explained my situation. And he told me pretty clearly, Darren, it looks like you made an error filling out your FAFSA forms, and because of that, you were denied your school grants. You have until yesterday to pay the $3,000 it costs for the classes that you signed up for. If you don't, we're gonna kick you out and we're gonna kick you out. Oh, starting now, because kids were already getting kicked out at the time I was talking to this cashier. And they were getting kicked out in alphabetical order of last name. So they're at letter D at the time I was talking to this cashier. So I'm panicking because I'm a 21-year-old college student, and I'm pretty sure for those who went to college or who those who are just young, no, you don't have $3,000 just lying around randomly to pay for anything, let alone college tuition. So I freaked out, but I called my security blanket, my security choice, which was my father, my coach. So I called him, he calmed me down and said, Hey Darren, just come home, I'll have the money for you. So, you guys, and I hope there's no law enforcement or people who are willing to tell on me. Anyways, a statue limit is gone, anyways. You guys, I sped so fast, I broke every single speed law, traffic violation, whatever I needed to do to get home, so I can grab that check. I get home, and that's not even there. I just see on the table a check for $3,000. Grab that check, and guys, I broke even more speed laws going back to school as quickly as possible because I knew at any moment I could be out of access for my classes. I went back to that same cashier, gave her the check, blessed that it cleared. And the cashier told me that she didn't understand why I was still in the system because they moved on to the letter J. And if those who don't know their alphabet, the letter J comes after the letter H, which is for Harvey. So I have my dad to thank for literally me being able to graduate on time of college. Now, I graduate college, we're moving along in time, and the economy is not the best. My dad hasn't been able to consistently find work. And I had a moment with him. He came up to me one day and was like, Darren, I hate to ask this, but I'm gonna need help with the mortgage of the house. I cannot no longer pay it on my own. Now, Troy, let me tell you something. I know a lot of people deal with evictions. That felt like an eviction notice to me. The same way a person would feel when they get that 30-day notice when, hey, they got to figure out a way to pay all their rent or they're out of there, is the way I felt when my father told me that he needed support to pay for the mortgage of a house that I've been in for at that point, about 20 plus years. So I decided without really consulting my dad, we're gonna have tenants in the house. So I opened up the home that I grew up in to luckily friends or friends of friends, and that's when I had my first actual business, which is just being a landlord, a property manager, and renting out my own home. Now, moving along even further in time, as Troy mentioned, I'm legally blind, so I got diagnosed with glaucoma around when I was 24. So now I'm disabled, quote unquote, and I have my own challenges. But I didn't really have time to worry about that. Because around the same time that I stopped driving due to my disease, my father asked me to accompany him to a medical appointment. And I was like, sure, it's my dad, I'm there to support, like he would for me. But I did find it a little bit odd that he wanted me to come with him. So I went with him, and that's when we both got some devastating news that my dad was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. And for those who don't know what Alzheimer's disease is, it's a disease that literally destroys your mind slowly but surely to the point where you can no longer even eat or breathe. So I find myself in a situation where me, a blind person, needs to take care of his father, who's literally losing his mind. And as you guys can imagine, it wasn't easy. Now towards the end, I had this moment going back to the five pillars, first pillar being tracking, I followed my own advice. So I had been tracking all my expenses, all my bills on a spreadsheet at the time. And I was very blessed to say that between the income strings that me and my dad both brought in, we were bringing in a combined twelve thousand dollars a month after taxes. A lot of money. A lot of money. However, it wasn't enough because at a certain point, my dad got so sick and I could no longer care for him myself that I had to hire two round-the-clock caregivers. And I paid those two caregivers ten thousand dollars a month. It simply just wasn't enough. So $12,000 I'm making, but the total expenses were $17,000 a month. So simple math, I was gonna go into debt. And I was going into debt. Now, fortunately, because my father had good finances, paid all his bills on time, we were able to use the house to pay for all the expenses that he needed in order to have good care. But that moment never left me, you guys. That moment that, oh my gosh, even though we're making 12 grand a month, it still wasn't enough. It still wasn't enough. I was gonna go into debt. I had to borrow money against my parents' house to make sure my dad was taken care of. That was the moment, you guys, that I became obsessed with financial literacy. I became obsessed with financial stability. And unfortunately, during the pandemic, my dad would succumb to his disease and pass away September 29th, 2020, which is a day before his birthday, September 30th. He passed away before he turned 65 years old. I'll end it there. I'll end it there.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

I think you sharing the context of your story, your lived experiences gives that colorful echoing of hey, these are real things. You know, we've navigated some real stuff. And if we can somewhat avoid some of these challenges, if you will, to have a better understanding of money. But more importantly, how it's gonna help you in the future is critical. I think you act leaning in on the benefit of what your dad instilled into you. And I think one of the most critical things when it comes to this whole money thing we're gonna talk about is having patience and persistence. Making real money is not a quick, easy game. Everybody wants to make the quick money, and legally, I'll amend it that way for those who understand, you understand. Um, that's not always the case. It's it's not the sexiest thing, you know, it's not the most glamorous thing. But putting money aside, stacking over time, does help make these impacts for moments like that you've experienced. We don't know how long these things will have. Our bodies are very temperamental to diseases and impact things. And so we need to be mindful of do we have a savings account? Do we have money set aside for these things? And just for context, when you're talking about $12,000 a month or $17,000 of expense, you're looking at over $150,000 a year. And for most people, they think you know, you're living a good life, but it with inflation and everything going on, you know, that's not real. It's not about how much money you make, it's how much money you keep. And you tell me that all the time. Well, good is how much money are you making? If you got too many credit cards, you're in too much in debt, you never you're spending too much stuff, you're going to too many restaurants, and you don't have your stuff fixed out. So we thank you for sharing those moments with us. And vulnerable, obviously. I would like to do a follow-up question, though, is what would you say screams out to you the most when you reflect like on your journey that you're proud of? That you can say, you know, I'm glad my dad taught me that. And I'm exemplifying that every day as a financial coach and advisor for people.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Well, I'm proud of really just following my dad's footstep and following his advice, never overspending. I was a college kid. I did go to college, I had a part-time job. And because of what my dad taught me and showed me, I was not a college student who blew his part-time money very often. I saved a good majority of it. So I'm glad that I just followed what he showed me. And that all added up. You know, there's a lot of things that I wanted in the short term, but because my father taught me delayed gratification, I was able to go, okay, let me wait for a little bit, or let me wait for it to go on sale so then I can save that money. And me doing that consistently, I mean, I still do it, but me doing that consistently doing that whole time, every dollar counted. Every dollar counted at that point when my dad was sick and needed caregiving. Didn't matter if I made $12,000, like I said, a month. Every dollar mattered because at the end my expenses were very high. So I'm glad that I did that because it was able to build me a net. It wasn't a net to cover everything, but it was enough of a net to buy time, to buy me time so I could get the best loan option. So I could research. So it was about buying time. That's really the main reason I'm obsessive about money, is because money is the closest physical thing we have to being able to buy our time back or buy a loved one's time back. So I was just very proud that I was able to do that. I was able to do that under those intense circumstances. That's what I'm proud about.

SPEAKER_02 19:59

I appreciate you sharing that. I think he would be proud. I think he's still proud now to this day, and if I can mirror for him. To that point, though, about buying time, and I know we're gonna get into the five pillars. I wanna kind of lean into this one point of how do we stop people from having the bit massive influx of just wanting to open up a new credit card, get a loan? Like, there should be some blockers. Like, do you really need this money? How much money should you get out? Should we not just go into more debt and people treat credit cards like it's debit cards? Like, you ain't gotta pay that back with interest when we all know we have to. Let's take a deep breath and think about just the mindset of how do we go about how should we prep our minds before we go into things like credit cards, loans, or anything that we have to now at some point pay back to help leverage them by our time for what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Yeah, so that's a perfect segue into the five pillars of personal finance, and I'll get into them, and and that will answer your question. So, as I mentioned at the top of this, there's five pillars. So let's just get right into them. The first one I mentioned was budgeting or tracking. So everybody starts here. It doesn't matter how much or how little money you have, it doesn't matter how old or how young you are, it starts with simply budgeting, or really just tracking, being aware, knowing how much money you have, knowing how much money you make, knowing where that money is being spent. That's really all budgeting is tracking and being aware. So, how do we make a solid budget? It's really simple. First, you have to know how much money you make per month. And I do all my budgets on a monthly basis. So we do monthly income, whether it's one, two, or four in my story, and then we do expenses. And really, the expenses is where the vast majority of information is going to be. So expenses is well, what you spend your money on. And again, because we're doing it monthly, we want to try to do it on a monthly basis. So your monthly bills. We have the expenses. Now we break them up into two categories, Troy. It's going to be your needs, and it's going to be your wants. Now, examples of needs is everything you need to survive. So that is the place you stay. That's your rent and your mortgage. The utilities that go with it. So your water, your gas, your electricity. We obviously need internet nowadays. For those of us who still can drive, you're going to need a car or some form of transportation. And then you're going to need all the insurances that you need, which is medical, which is dental, which is vision, definitely for me, which is renters or mortgage insurance. Any insurance you need in order to basically survive. And then of course, I didn't forget gas. I know gas is a big one. That's why I say that gas. Gas is a big one right now. And groceries, food. You know, obviously we all need to eat. Give or take a few other ones that I've missed. Oh, cell phone bill, of course, is one. But giving a few other ones that I've missed, those are generally all the needs that we all need to survive. Pretty much at this point, whether you're in a kid or adult at this point, you need those. Wants is everything else. Everything else. So we're going out to eat. So if you want your Mickey D's, you want your McDonald's, that's a want. You don't need McDonald's to survive. If you want to go to movies and see Toy Story 5 or another movie that's out right now, that's a want. That's not a need. You don't need to see Toy Story 5 to survive. If you wanted to get that $500 pair of retro Jordans that they just dropped randomly, yeah, I don't think you really need that. You just want it. So the purpose, though, is that you're breaking up your expenses into these two categories, and then you're just listing them. And after that, that's pretty much it. You have a great basis and general idea on a monthly standpoint how much money is you're making or coming in and how much money is being spent or leaving. I call this an income and expense sheet. In business, they call it a profit and loss statement. The point is, though, is awareness. You're now aware of where your money is going. And most of us generally actually don't even know that. They don't know where the money is being spent. So that's the first pillar is your budgeting and your tracking. The second pillar, Troy, is going to be savings, particularly an emergency fund. Now I know PNC Bank was here. I'm sure they talk to you guys a lot about banking. So I'm not going to go into specifics about banking accounts. All I'm going to talk about is an emergency fund. Now, an emergency fund, for those who don't know, is when you have in a savings account that you can access immediately, three to six months of expenses, at least your needs. Three to six months worth, all in a savings account ready to be accessed immediately at a moment's notice. Now, why do I say we need three to six months? Well, it's because it usually doesn't take more than six months to find a new job, just in case you find yourself in an unfortunate situation where you've lost your job, whether for any reason, it's happening all the time now, especially this year. There's a bunch of job playoffs. So having that breathing room, having that cushion, having that security blanket of knowing that, hey, even if I lose my source of income, I have three to six months to find a new way to make some more money is essential. It's not only essential when it comes to your finances, it's essential when it comes to your mental health. You're not over here stretch, having panic attacks, going to sleep with super major anxiety because you don't know how you're going to pay the rent for next month because you've lost a job. So having an emergency fund is the second pillar. The third pillar or the third ability block is credit. Now, credit can be its own big seminar in itself. I can talk about credit for the remainder of the time. But instead of talking about credit cards and all that stuff, I want to focus on what credit actually means. What does the word credit mean? Because I bet you most of those who are listening have never thought about what credit means? We know what a credit card is. Most of the adults have one. But what does credit mean? Credit just means trust. It means the trust that you have or the trust level that you may have from somebody who's potentially going to lend you money. That's where a credit history or your credit profile comes in. A credit profile is simply your history of credit or the history of trust. How good have you been at paying anything back? Whether it's a credit card, your student loan, a car loan, it doesn't matter. That's what your credit history is. And a credit score, which we know can be anywhere from as low as 450 to as high as 850, is just a number that represents that history. So obviously, the nobler the number, the less likely people think or the lenders think you're going to pay back. That's credit in a nutshell. If we just talk specifically about credit. Now, that's the third pillar. Moving on to the fourth pillar, we're going to talk about debt. Now, what is debt? Well, debt is actually not negative 100% of the time, even though that's what most people think of it. Debt in itself is neutral. Debt is just when you owe somebody money for something that you have that you haven't fully paid off. That's all debt is. If you start at putting around $200, maybe $300 at most, and you start at 18, you start at 20, and you do that month after month, you're going to become a millionaire by the time you retire at 65. If you're 30 years old, it's going to be a little bit more money. Probably around $600, $700. Same concept though. You do that month after month, year after year, you're going to be a millionaire by the time you're 65. And even 40, yeah, it's more difficult. Yes, you're going to have to put more money away. It's going to be around $1,000 a month. And I understand that's a lot. But if you can do that, yes, even you can become a millionaire by the time you're 65. The power of investing is that money is working for you without you doing much of anything, in some cases, absolutely nothing, after you made the initial investment. And you're doing that over a span of time. You're putting in repeatedly over a span of time, and you're giving time to let that money grow and compound over time. And that's what I want everybody to finish at. Everybody who's listening right now, I want you to be an investor. I want you to inspire to be an investor. I don't care, like I said earlier, what it is. You can be buying houses, you can be buying Amazon stocks or Apple stocks. Doesn't matter. So long as you're investing, you're definitely headed to the right direction of the ultimate goal, which to me is financial stability and financial freedom.

SPEAKER_02 33:45

One thing I like to echo is, and I call myself when I was a little bit younger. I hear people say invest X amount of money. And when you're 65, you know, you're gonna be a millionaire. To me, that seems so far away. And I'm like, at the time, I'm like, I just made a little extra money. I'm gonna buy the shoes, I'm gonna go take a trip. What's the point of me putting that money away if it's gonna take till 65 for me to have a benefit? But the context I think I think sometimes people forget about is the same situation where we're going year and year out, I'm barely making any money. I'm waiting for tax season to come around so I can get a little bit extra money. I'm gonna blow all this money on Christmas, I'm gonna do all things and we go through these seasons, these phases of got a little bit extra. I'm broke. I use debit, I mean credit, credit, I'm using loans, all this stuff, just to play this cycle back. Versus if we're just more proactive about how we're spending and putting money to the side and saving and building those habits up, we're actually gonna probably establish a way better off and maybe even achieve the millionaire-esque status much quicker than we could even imagine if we just learn how to be more disciplined with money and with surplus of money if I can be in particular. Darren, do you feel that depending on your environment impacts how well you navigate money, or it's not as important as just kind of your own willpower with money?

SPEAKER_01 35:18

So to say that your environment is not a major factor would be a flat out lie. It is absolutely a factor. Um, the truth is that because of my environment, I had an advantage. My best friend grew up in East Oakland. He didn't have spare money, he didn't have a two-parent household where one parent paid for all the bills. So the environment, and I don't mean just the environment in a sense of the city, the environment could be your own family dynamic. It's gonna affect you, is it's gonna advantage you or disadvantage you. If you grow up in a household where you see your parents stressing and scrambling over money and worrying about money, you in turn are more likely going to learn that's how you treat money. If you're in a household that teaches you, hey, if you don't have the money or you want something, you can't afford it, take out a credit card and worry about it later. That's what you're gonna think to do. And that's what it's gonna be normal to do. Your environment is a huge, huge factor on your ability to be financially free, your ability to be financially secure and independent. However, but it is not the only factor. And I actually would argue it's not the biggest factor. The biggest factor, like you said, Troy, is your willpower, is yourself. That same friend that I mentioned that grew up in East Oakland, he lives in a nice old neighborhood in a $1 million house and earns a quarter million dollars doing cybersecurity. He could have easily gone down a different route growing up in East Oakland, but he made choices, and that leads perfectly to the last thing I'll say. Everybody's financial situation, Troy, is different. In everybody's financial situation, we got there for different reasons. A lot of times, and like you mentioned, it's not even your fault, you had nothing to do with it. You just had either a good hand dealt to you or a bad hand dealt to you. But I will say for everybody listening, I understand you may not be in the best financial situation, period. You may need more money, whatever your situation is. Or maybe you want more money, you're aspiring to. The point is that your financial situation is your responsibility, it's up to you. And that's why I wanted to share my story. People who are there to make you feel secure, they may not be there forever. They may not be there forever. I was not expecting my father to pass away at 65 years old, and I was only 30 at the time. I thought I had him for at least another 30 plus years, but I wasn't fortunate enough to have that. Now I'm just by myself. So I am obsessed about the security element of finances, and it all starts with just choices, and everybody has choices that can make your situation better or worse. And I'll give two quick examples. The first one a lot of college students are about to face this choice very soon as the college season starts to um start in a couple of months. I'm gonna make up two college students. College student number one, let's call him John. He goes to a college and he takes out $20,000 in student loans. And he decides to get his degree in the same degree I got, sociology. And his first job out of college, he makes, we'll say $50,000 in a year. Now, let's take college student number two. Let's call him Daniel. Now, Daniel, he goes to the exact same college, takes out the exact same amount of money, $20,000, but he decides to get a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering. Now, engineering, you can easily get an entry-level job starting at $80,000, $90,000 plus. Now, both students went to college, both of them took out student loans, so they took out debt. One of them is making almost double the money of the other one simply because he chose a different major, which sends him down a different career path. That is the choice that I talk to with a lot of students who are thinking about or gonna go to college, making sure they make the best decision on what they're gonna do with their college experience. Now, don't worry, adults have some decisions too. So you've been following Darren's advice, you've been tracking, you have a decent paying job. So you know you have a budget, you created a budget for a new car, and you know you can afford a $30,000 car, you can afford that with monthly payments. So you go to the car shop and you see that brand new Mercedes Benz, $30,000, and you're like, oh, I can get that. It looks real nice. If I'm a young man, I'm gonna be getting all the girls with that car. Or you can decide to get a nice used Prius for $10,000. 10 years old, has a hundred, has a hundred thousand dollars, has a hundred thousand miles on it, but it still works perfectly fine. Let's go back to John and Daniel. John with his sociology job gets the Mercedes-Benz. And Daniel gets the $10,000 Prius. But because Daniel decides to get the Prius, he has $20,000 left in a year. Or let's just say that comes down to a few thousand dollars left over in a month. He now chooses to invest that money that otherwise would have gone to the car, and that's how he's investing his $300, $400 a month. Because he made that simple decision. What I find, Troy, is that most people who are financially successful, they just make good financial decisions over a long period of time. They're not always the smartest. Heck, they're not even always the hardest working people, though those two tend to coincide, I admit. With money, that's what I noticed between the people who are financially successful and the people who are not. If you notice, I didn't say financially successful people make the most money. I didn't say they're all there making millions of dollars. No. I didn't say the person who was super successful got a doctor's degree or anything like that, had the highest form of education. I know plenty of financially sound people who didn't even graduate college. All the commonality I found with all the clients that I've worked with, all the successful people, is that the people who really need help, they didn't make the best decisions for one reason or another. Or they just had unfortunate circumstances. That's also a real thing I want to acknowledge. And those who did make good decisions, who didn't make good choices. So that's what I want people to think about as they leave today is how can you be intentional with money? How can you be strategic with money? How can you make the best choices with money? And like I talked about in my story, that's what my father showed me. How to make the smart choices with money.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

I think your emphasis on the decision-making part, influenced by your environment, influenced by history, influenced by your family, all plays a part in the bigger picture of how you understand money. And I don't want to blemish over the fact that you shared with us the vulnerability side of it, too, was that I found myself in a situation where I couldn't go to my parents. I couldn't go to anyone else at that point to bail me out. It was the situation where I had to lean on my own intuition, financial literacy, and forever learning these things to actually navigate that. Now, for those who are watching, listening, whether you're young, middle, older in of the spectrum, you know, imagine you're at that situation spark where you can't go ask your mom or dad for money to bail you out of a situation you put yourself in financially because you couldn't have the discipline to just say no or not yet. Yeah, I might have felt some type of way too about like, oh, do I really want to drop a priest? Can I get a Benz? Are you kidding me? The people are gonna make fun of me. Yeah, but you know what sucks even more? Going to those same people asking them for money till you pay for your car note that you can't do yourself trying to flex looking like you're somebody when you're not, versus taking that same energy, that same money, make the investment, make the money work for you to actually afford even better bins, like S class, off money you've invested that you don't have to pay any debt for. So I think what you're what we're leaning into and what we're grasping for is also understand the fact that we have to be a little more disciplined. And it's okay to wait that impulse because we live in a world where it's prime two-day shipping, we get immediacy now. We have to be disciplined and we if we can't afford it, and if we don't need it, we probably shouldn't go right to the credit card, right to the loan. We should probably wait, give it some time, breathe, and think about how do we strategically get the money to make those things happen. But we appreciate you for breaking this down. Again, this is the first of many. James, the floor is yours for any follow-up feedback or any other questions.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

We definitely appreciate you taking the time out, Darren, to give us some of your expertise and your experience and your life journeys that you've gone through as you've navigated. And some of those tips have been very, very, very good and beneficial, I know, for some of us adults that are on too. So we definitely appreciate you taking the time out. And we look forward to continuing these in the future and opening these up to some of our adults as we dive more into the specifics and more detailed versions of this financial study that we're gonna be doing. So definitely appreciate you, man.