Welcome to Money Talks! New approaches to money have exploded. Yet, money remains taboo. Less than half of you share personal finance information with your friends and family.
But that’s all changing. Now more and more of you are talking about money because it leads to better outcomes.
In an effort to provide personal finance insights through transparency (and have a bit of fun), I’ve created a series titled Money Talks that showcases how real people in Charlotte approach money.
It’s an anonymous way for you to share your money experiences and insights with our city. Answers are lightly edited for clarity and privacy (ex, exact age). Want to participate? Take the Money Talks survey.
Living situation:
Own. We purchased a house in 2016 and then were able to refinance in 2020 at 2.875%. It’s our only debt. Given the rate, we’ll hold onto it for the next 25 years.
On your mind:
Schooling. We’ve got 3 kids, ages 6-10. Not only the expense, but the admissions competitiveness. If you don’t have connections, you get put on a waiting list that feels like a mile long.
Job and salary:
Manufacturing executive and partner owns a consulting business. We both bounced around for the first 10 years of our careers, but have settled in over the past 10 years.
My salary is $500K, plus bonus. Partner makes $300K. On average over the past 5 years, we have been in the $800K – $1M range… very, very fortunate.
Salary journey:
We both started under $50K. Worked long hours (80 hours/week, both) for 10+ years. Income slowly grew over time. There haven’t been any “major” jumps, just slow growth over 20 years.
There is a narrative out there (and some truth to it) that the only way to make considerable income jumps is to change companies often. I’ve always found those changes to cause short term happiness but long term issues. The grass is not always greener.
Other income:
Outside of traditional investment income, we did invest in a commercial real estate LLC run by a family member. The entity has positions in a few properties. 10 years and running. We receive around 11% on those investments quarterly.
Work-life balance:
I’ve always found the term “work-life balance” a bit misleading. There are phases of life. Some times we are focused on work, which may look like 80 hour weeks. While other phases are more focused on things outside of work, could be kids, could be older family members, etc.
Currently, we each work 50 hours per week. It is no doubt difficult with all 3 kids in extracurricular activities and 5 travel sports teams. We do have a “nanny” who picks the kids up from school, but other than that it’s all us.
Our nights and weekends are filled with activities. But as long as they are driven by our kids, we are more than happy to oblige. The minute they are no longer into them, we are out.
Credit cards:
We play the credit card game. We have the AmEx Platinum, Chase Sapphire, Citi AA. We use CardPointers to help us keep track of all the points and rewards.
We enjoy the game of it all and have found ways to easily cover all of the annual fees.
Budgeting:
We don’t budget. I can already hear people say it’s because we “make so much money” but in reality we’ve never done it, not even when we were making less than $80K combined.
We’ve always had a good sense of where our money is, where it’s going and have never liked the idea of locking ourselves into any specific categories.
We do use Monarch Money to keep track of net worth and spending, but that’s mostly for informational purposes.
Best expense:
Monthly concierge doctor. $250 per month. Can call or text at any time of the day and get answers and prescriptions. Highly recommend.
Splurge:
Travel. We love to experience new places and since our kids are getting older, we love to bring them along. We generally spend way too much on nice hotels and experiences, but looking back, we’ve never regretted it.
Restaurant pick:
Good Food. Always has been a top choice for us. There’s a bit of nostalgia here given all the new restaurants popping up.
Investment strategy:
Yes, we are fortunate to be able to put away a lot for savings. We save roughly 30% of our income across and invest it in multiple vehicles — Roth IRAs, 529s, taxable brokerage accounts, commercial real estate, venture capital.
We’re even beginning to start estate planning for our kids as well, which we never thought we’d do ten years ago. We are planning to fund our kids’ college, so building up the 529s is a priority for us.
We have never used a financial advisor as it’s something I enjoy doing and keeping track of. Most of our money is at Fidelity. We’ve even started using Fidelity as our bank for checking accounts (we can get ~4% interest on cash vs. 0.05% at a large consumer bank).
As for the taxable investment portion, we have broken it out into four buckets — 40% in individual stocks, 20% in index funds, 20% in bonds, and 20% in crypto. Again, this is something I enjoy, so we’ve back tested our portfolio under many different circumstances and our goal is to average 5% better than the market in down years and in-line with the market in up years. So far, so good.
My one piece of advice for new or uninterested investors, be extremely careful with financial advisors. Most are good people, with good intentions, but most provide very little value while charging you a decent percentage of your money. It is SO easy these days to buy low-cost index funds at 0.05% cost, it’s really difficult to justify paying any advisor more than 0.30%.
Savings goal:
We would love to buy a second home sometime in the next 10 years, as we prepare for kids off to college and retirement.
We need to find the right location and timing, but we’d like to pay mostly cash. I’m thinking we need to save ~$1M for this.
Net worth:
$5M. All through savings and investments. We haven’t been gifted anything from our parents (other than my college, my partner has student loans).
While we will have some inheritance, we are not budgeting or planning for this, as hopefully we are many years/decades away from that.
Very fortunate that we’ve been making >$500K combined for 7 years. We’ve really seen our net worth number sky rocket. I was very aggressive in COVID and bought a lot of distressed stocks, only to see them double or triple in short order. We do take a decent amount of risk in our investing, but it’s calculated, at least in my mind :).
Retirement:
Our retirement number is $20M. We are on track to hit that by the time we are 55.
We are not set on that number or age, but it helps us plan a bit. Our kids will be out of college by then and seems like a good time to make a transition.
That being said, we aren’t “working for retirement.” We could get to a number we feel comfortable with, much, much sooner, but we have chosen to enjoy life, spend more while we’re young and give our kids incredible experiences we never had as children.
Giving back financially to help our community will ramp up ever further than where it is today. We like to find very personalized, specific situations, where we can have direct impact on families.
Rich in Charlotte:
$10M. House in Myers Park, country club membership, and private school. It’s changed dramatically over the past 15 years we have been here. There is so much “new money” that it feels very dynamic.
Best financial decision:
Aggressively buying during COVID. Everything from stocks to crypto.
It’s easy to say “be greedy when others are fearful” but much harder to do. I remember sitting down with my partner and discussing what we wanted to do, and after a 2 hour conversation, we decided to double down in the market. We got lucky no doubt, but we’ll take it.
Financial goals:
- Provide an incredible childhood for our kids. This includes teaching how to give back, volunteer, creating unique experiences, high-level education.
- Support our parents. We’ve seen our grandparents struggle as they’ve gotten older, with little financial support, slowly dying under poor circumstances. We don’t want that for our parents. We want to be able to provide with above average care and lasting memories with their grandchildren.
- One of a kind experiences. Our family loves to travel and taking one big trip a year has been the best use of our money we can think of. Last year, we were able to spend 10 days at a dude ranch in Colorado. We disconnected and just enjoyed nature with our 3 kids. It was incredible.
Money Talks is a weekly series showcasing how real people in Charlotte approach money. Participate
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