(Ep. 231) The $3 Mentality and Long-Term Financial Planning

Welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner podcast. I'm Lauren Williams, a consultant at Student Loan Planner, and I'm joined by my girl Megan McGuire today. We are going to be bringing you some really good tea. We've got some good information for you today. Tea as I'm sipping on my coffee. Okay, maybe it's not tea, but it's really, really some good, good, good information. It's not gossipy, but I mean, kind of, it is gossipy in the sense that I think we should start over. I'm like, I'm going down this rabbit hole. Welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner podcast. I'm Lauren Williams, and I'm joined today by my girl Megan McGuire, and we're going to be giving you guys some goody, goody, goodies. We've always got some goodies for you. Megan, what's up? How's your day going? It's good. Thanks. Thanks for joining in on this podcast with me. I always love doing them with you. Doing good. We're, gosh, sorry. I feel like I'm training a puppy. You're training a puppy. Okay, can we start back with that? Yeah. I'm actually training a puppy, so I'm actually kind of tired. Like, I feel like a new mom, and I think the human moms out there that just had a baby will want to punch me, but I do feel like I'm just overwhelmed with, like, the newness of having a puppy because we've never had one as, like, adults. We had family pets and everything, but it's a lot of work, isn't it? It is a lot of work, and I think that's why most parents don't want to get their kids a pet because, like you said, when you're a kid, you don't actually take care of your pet, and then you're an adult, and you're like, oh my goodness, this is so much work. Why did I do this? But they're so cute and cuddly. I know. Even when they're peeing all over the floor. Yeah, so that's the latest in my life. We're working on potty training. We got a Springer Spaniel. He kind of looks like a Bernice Mountain Dog, though. He's got the tri-color thing going on, black, white, and brown. Super fun. He's two months old now. His name is Boone, and yeah, just trying to work on some stuff, but outside of that, it's, you know, student loans all day for me, work-wise. All day, every day. I know you guys are wondering, what do you do? There's so much craziness happening right now. There's all these pauses. We have plenty going on. We've got tons and tons of people that are booking consultations, and really what's gone up recently is follow-up consultations because people are like, what's happening because of all the changes that are going on? How does that affect me and my plan, and I just kind of want to talk through it. Or they did their plan at the beginning of COVID, and now if we didn't expect it to be three years, they're like, uh, I kind of forgot what I was supposed to do because I didn't take any of the actions. So, yeah, we're busy as student loan planners. Oh, yeah. Follow-up consultations can be super valuable for sure because, I mean, just like financial planning, like, life is on a straight line. The student loan world is definitely not a straight line. Like, there's new stuff getting thrown at us all the time. So, your plan that we created for you three years ago, even two years ago, even one year ago, could have some adjustments to it because of just what's been going on and the potential new opportunities that could be coming up. So, we've been seeing a lot of things with follow-ups where, you know, we're just kind of revisiting the steps that we recommended initially, revisiting, like, recertification strategy, maybe life changes happened. So, talking about marital status and tax filing statuses, and then just kind of preparing for what could come down the pipeline with this new repay plan to figure out if someone should be considering switching to it and when, if it's supposed to come out, and then just how to get you in a good position for when payments eventually do kick back in, right? Absolutely. And I always say it's like planning with the ING because it's like an action that's always happening. Like you said, you're getting married, you're having kids, you're changing jobs, you're moving out of the country. I just talked to someone right before this podcast that was a consultation you did back in 2021, and I'm like, what could she be calling for? Like, I know, MeganIsTheBomb.com. What she says was, I had so much going on financially at the time that I talked to Megan, like, it was great. I just don't really remember what I was supposed to do. She was like, I'm supposed to get on this RE thingy, and I was like, you mean revised pay-as-you-earn? She's like, yeah, that sounds familiar. She just wasn't able to retain the information, but you also helped her get an emergency fund in place and put her in contact with someone because she was living abroad so that she could get her tax situation straightened out. So now she came back, she has savings, she's already putting money aside for investing, she's catching up on retirement, and she just feels in a better overall financial situation. And she's like, okay, I'm mentally ready to be able to tackle this student loan situation. Tell me all this stuff all over again. Yeah, and a better headspace to kind of absorb it because student loans are not fun topics. Like, you know, we, me and you, like, we love student loan conversations because it's our job, but we like the number crunching, we like the puzzle, but like, as a borrower, like, it's not a fun thing to be thinking about. It's, you know, if not as bad as taxes, maybe it's worse than taxes for you. And so, you know, having those conversations in the right headspace can be helpful to just make sure that, like, you're absorbing the information, you feel confident with your strategy, because that's always our goal, too, is to help you feel confident. And then ideally, like, know how to pivot if your situation changes, but sometimes you also need that assistance to know how to pivot and where to pivot and when to pivot. So, but that's cool. I'm glad you chatted with one of my original consultations recently. Yeah, yeah, she was such a pleasure to work with as well. And I think that's, like, a good segue into, like, what we're going to be talking about today. The idea that sometimes you kind of, you're not quite ready to tackle the big thing, so sometimes you focus on some of the smaller things. But in this case, you know, that was to her benefit. In this case, we're talking about to your detriment. So there's this guy, Ramit Sethi. He reads Sethi. I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing your name wrong, Ramit, Ramit. And he wrote the book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. So if you haven't read that one, it's a really popular classic. But he talks about this idea that a lot of people spend too many time asking $3 questions when they should be asking $30,000 questions. And I just really, like, kind of struck a nerve with me recently when I was, you know, going over some of his information, because I think that's exactly what happens in the student loan place, in the student loan space for a lot of people, when what's really important is that you focus on, like, big financial decisions that can cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and not overanalyzing minor decisions. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I think, you know, Lisa, we're going to go into a few different topics, but we always got to start with student loans. So let's talk about some of these kind of $3 mindset sort of things that people do with their student loans. How they actually should be thinking about these really big questions related to their student loans. What's some of the stuff that comes to mind for you, Megan? Yeah, well, I think, you know, first and foremost, I think one of the biggest mistakes we see in the financial planning space, the student loan planning space, is just not wanting to deal with your student loan situation. And if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably either already dealt with your student loan situation, you're just monitoring your plan, or you're starting to get into the space to start focusing on your plan and start getting your plan put together. And that's great. Welcome. Thank you for taking this step, because that's a big step to starting to really put the pieces together for, you know, of course, your student loan plan, but also the rest of your financial plan, because so many things tie to the student loan plan. So, again, the biggest mistake we see are kind of that, that, you know, initial, you know, misstep is just not focusing on your student loans, focusing on other things that aren't really bringing value to your financial plan, or yeah, your financial plan in general. But would you agree? Do you see that? Absolutely. 100%. You know, people sticking their heads and saying, like, nope, nope, this doesn't exist. And I think it's also kind of, you know, to the to the point of the $3 piece of it is like, you're not thinking about what it's not costing you what you're not thinking about what it is costing you, because you don't have any financial pain by ignoring it. You're like, oh, it's okay, it's fine. Like, I'm just gonna keep going like all of COVID for an example. Some people have not even thought about these loans, not one time, right? Because there's no financial, you know, pain, there's no payment that's coming up against them to make them think about like, uh, but what you don't realize, like I said, by not doing anything, it could actually be costing you, you know, you might be one of the very few people that needed to be paying their loans off during COVID and, and missed out on this 0% interest timeframe, because you didn't have a clear plan. And so, you know, you're probably not going to make a $300,000 payment right before the deadline, because you haven't been saving for it. When you could have been paying, you know, $5,000 a month, or whatever the case may be, in the situation where somebody should be paying the loans off. But, you know, not thinking about what's not costing you is kind of that $3 mindset. The other thing I think too, is like, you know, we're student loan planners, we get paid to do consultations. And sometimes people don't like our fee, I see it all the time in the inbox, we were just like, why do you guys charge so much? Like, what exactly am I going to get for this? Or, you know, they just say flat out, they're not in a position to be able to afford to pay for the consultation. And, you know, while I recognize that it's not a small amount of money that people might need to budget or save for it, I think that you're missing, you're thinking in a $3 mindset when you don't realize that there's $50,000 that you might be missing out on by what you don't know, what you don't learn from the consultation. Yep. Yeah, it's things that you could be learning on a consultation that could save you time, money, peace of mind, could save you in a lot of different ways, and also preventative, like it could be preventing mistakes. We see that a lot as well, where like, not only are we helping people save money, but we're also helping prevent big, like, mistakes that people might make, like someone who should be a forgiveness case, but are considering going and refinancing because their uncle told them that they need to go get a lower interest rate or something. You know, those are big mistakes that we try to help people avoid if that's in their best interest. So some examples, I think we made some examples of this, that we see commonly day to day that, you know, makes us think that, you know, having that $3 mindset can be really detrimental. Like, for example, recently at a consultation with someone who thought that they were on the right track, they wanted to just kind of check their plan with me, and then we pulled up their student loan file, and there were some FFEL loans, Family Federal Education loans. They were still federal loans, so they were part of the federal PAWS, but they weren't eligible for her existing repayment plan that she was on for the majority of her loans, so they were stuck on that IBR plan, and she wasn't aware that she had them. She, you know, it was kind of a shock that, oh, I thought I consolidated those back in the day, and very clearly they were not consolidated, so the recommendation was we needed to look at consolidation to make sure that she was maximizing her plan because then they could be on the lower income-driven plans to help her go towards forgiveness more efficiently, but also potentially eligible for this new repay plan that could be coming out, which would have been a really big deal for her, so that was interesting where, like, that was a mistake, almost not even, like, I feel like I can't even call it a mistake. It's just like an oversight. Like, she thought she had the right game plan put together. She thought she was on track, but she wasn't, but we were able to fix it pretty quickly there. Yeah, and like you said, that's one thing that seems like, oh, not that big a deal, but five percent, you know, so IBR is 15 percent of discretionary income, whereas repay, pay, the new repay, pretty much everything else is 10 percent of discretionary income. Five percent on a monthly basis for the duration of 25 years is tens of thousands of dollars for sure, so you can see where, like, you're like, oh, I just got one question. It's like, no, I saved you tens of thousands of dollars, and I can only imagine, too, if this was, like, not the, you know, federally held FFEL, so the people with privately held FFEL loans now. Yeah, that's a bigger deal. Like, we're like, get in here, everybody, come on, hurry. The door is closing. Right, the door is closing. Was that in those, like, action movies where, like, there's this giant door closing and someone, like, scoots under at the last minute? That's what we're trying to do for you guys that have those commercial held FFEL loans. That is exactly what we're trying to do for you all, so come on, slide through the door. Don't be afraid. Don't be so focused on, like, I'm just gonna, I'm worried about it later, and then you missed the boat. You know, the other one for me is, like, people who missed the PSLF waiver recently, they're calling now, and they're like, yeah, heard about this thing, and just the one to see if maybe, and it's like, yeah, that was in October of last year. Like, you know, there's some options. There's some things that we can do, but also, like, you can't wait six months until after you hear about something to see if it's relevant to you. Exactly. Yeah, and so, and some other examples, like, just being on the wrong repayment plan. Like, we see this quite a bit where someone says, oh, yeah, I'm on repay, or, oh, I'm on pay, and then we pull out their file, and they're on income-based repayment, and then, like, talking through it, they're like, oh, I thought I just had to apply for IBR. That's what everyone says, you know, get on IBR for forgiveness, but what people don't realize sometimes is that IBR is a totally separate, I mean, it's one of the four different income-driven plans. So, if you choose IBR, you're going to be on one of the, hang on one second, let me just start that over. He likes to play with his food bowl every so often. He's like, everything's away. I'll just start that sentence over again. So, it was part of one of the four different income-driven plans, and they think, oh, I just thought I had to apply for IBR. That's what I've heard, but it is, it's more expensive. It's 15% of discretionary income. It's a 25-year timeline to forgiveness, so that's a big deal, too. If you're paying for five years longer, like, you know, especially in the later income years, like, later on in life, like, you're probably making more income than you're making today, and so those five extra years of going towards loan forgiveness, like, those are expensive years at the end of the day, potentially. Not always, but they could be expensive years. So, you know, making sure that you're on the right income-driven plan for when payments restart, that can save you a whole lot of money, and also just kind of riding that wrong thought process that IBR is just that one encompassing plan, and sometimes people say, oh, well, I thought if I just applied for IBR, they'd put me on the best one, and that's yes and no true. There is an option where you select that says put me on the best plan, but they're looking at it from a monthly payment perspective, maybe the interest subsidy perspective. It's not, it's a computer thing. Like, they're just, they're looking at it that way. They're not thinking about it from a planning perspective. Like, it might put you on repay, but your plan is to exclude your spouse's income, and the current repay plan doesn't allow you to do that. So, just choosing, like, that simple, like, you know, option could cost you a lot of money if you weren't sure, like, what the actual output of that would be for your specific situation. Absolutely. Like, they're giving you the best plan based on what the computer is saying is available as the cheapest option. They're not calling you and saying, like, hey, did you know that you had FFEL loans and you can consolidate them, and they would actually be eligible for repay, and then they would, they could get on another plan, and we could save you even more money. Like, that's not a thing. They're just like, okay, default here, 15%, default here, 10%, moving on to the next person. Yeah. Remember who these servicers work for. They work for the Department of Ed. They are not your advocates. They're there to answer questions, read from a script, you know, put numbers into a calculator. They're not there to help you maximize your plan. We say that all the time, but just a good refresher. Yeah, and to that point, you know, with the plans, like you said, IBR is one that allows you to do Merry filing separately. Pay as you earn is the one that allows you to do Merry filing separately as well, and maybe this new repay plan is also going to allow you to do it, but one of the big things that I see that is costing people, you know, tens of thousands of dollars is not filing separately because their CPA says, hmm, that doesn't make a lot of sense. That's going to cost you a lot of money to be able to do Merry filing separately, but they're not student loan experts, so they're not realizing what you're missing out on by not separating that income, or a CPA, God forbid, that doesn't really know how to do Merry filing separately, like in a community property state. We see that all the time, you know, so, you know, just because someone's a professional doesn't mean that they have expertise within that level of profession, like they do taxes all day every day, but there's people who specialize in taxes for stock options, specialize in taxes for student loans, specialize in taxes if you're, for people who are living abroad, you know, versus the accountant who's just going to know the basics, follow the rules, like they should probably only be working with a W-2 employee, so Merry filing separately can save tons, tons, tons of money, and just being like, looking at that $3 way is like, oh, my tax liability is going to be a little bit higher if I do this, whereas it's like, big, big, you know, scope here is tens of thousands of dollars over 20 or 25 years on your student loan. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point, because it, you know, that is the $3 mentality is, oh, well, my CPA said it would cost us like an extra $2,000 on taxes this year, and it's like, okay, but the next part of that is how much are you saving if you were to file separately, and is that more than what that $2,000 is costing you, so there's that crossover point we're always looking for there when we're talking to folks about filing taxes married separately. Some situations it may not make sense, but a lot of situations we've found that it does, because holistically looking at it, you know, from a bird's eye view, both student loans and taxes, it could save you money, so that's something that we bring a lot of value to when it comes to helping people kind of navigate that, and timing of when to file separately. That's a big part of what we've been doing a lot of during this COVID forbearance, where timing-wise, you know, does it make sense to file separate for 2022, because maybe you don't have to update your income until now 2024, so we could probably just get away with filing jointly for 2022, since 2022's taxes isn't going to be used. By the time you have to update income next time, maybe it's off of 2023's taxes, so a lot of those timing decisions and kind of, what is it, not a clawback suggestion, but also like a looking backwards conversation where we've had a lot of conversations with folks who did file separately for 2020, for 2021, maybe for 2022, where they didn't necessarily need to because we didn't have student loan payments, so they didn't have to update their income. So now, you know, you can, and we make this suggestion sometimes when this is the case, you can go back and amend those tax returns from separate to joint and recoup any of that tax savings loss that you lost out on initially. So that's a big deal, too. Like, if it does cost you a couple thousand dollars, maybe it's worth the effort to go back and amend that return from separate to joint, because you don't need it anymore. The student loan payment was never off of it. It won't be going forward because now there's a new tax return on file. So that's another thing, like, outside of the scope of just student loans that we can identify and find some savings on, if relevant to you. 100%. There's something else that I'm thinking of, but I feel like it's going to fire you up because I know how to push Megan's buttons, everybody. Oh, do you? Let's find out. How do you feel about manually completing the PSLF form? Oh, Lauren, that is one of my biggest hot buttons. No, just kidding. But like, this is one of the things that is so easy to do. They've made it very easy to do the online PSLF help tool if you're eligible for PSLF to complete your employment certification form. All you really need to have in advance is your employer EIN number, which you can grab from your W-2, and your employment start dates, like when you started, when you left, if you're filling it out for older employers. And then it pretty much fills out the form for you after that point. So that's like the biggest piece of information you need in advance. But what I see time and time again, and what you see too, and what all of us see, is people complete this form manually, or they'll print it out, just a blank form, write in everything, which is not a, it's not wrong. So that's what's kind of tricky or like kind of funny about it is like, that's not wrong. Like you can manually complete it. But we know for a fact that that manually completed employment certification form is going to create issues. And what I mean by that is when you get it submitted, they're gonna, I think what they do, I could be wrong. If there's someone listening to this, that's like a spy from Mojila or something, who processes these, email me, Megan at Student Loan Planner, and let me know if I'm wrong. But my assumption is that they've got this, like kind of like a Scantron reader. Like when you used to take tests back in the day, like you'd bubble in your answer on a Scantron, and then your teacher goes to grade it, they put it through a machine, and it grades it automatically. So then they don't have to spend an hour after school grading your papers, or grading your tests. They just, they put it through that Scantron machine. But they always tell you like bubble in, you know, don't bubble outside the bubble, because then the computer kicks it out, and it can't grade it. It like messes it up. That is, I think what's going on with this online PSLF help tool, where it puts it into the exact format that it wants to see it in. It has the date the way they want to see it. It has your employment listed, how they want to see it. The EIN number listed, how they want to see it. The boxes checked, how they want to see it. So it has it plugged in like that. If you do it through the online PSLF help tool, and you just have to get the signature, and when you submit it, there is a clear difference in processing time, and then just errors. Like there's almost never an error on a PSLF help tool completion. We just, we don't see it. At least I don't hear from clients that there are issues with it when they do it that way. But I commonly hear issues with the manually completed ones, where they don't even make sense. Like it'll say that the date is inaccurate, when maybe they just didn't write it in exactly how it wanted to see it. Like it didn't have, you know, April 07 dash or like slash 2023. It had four dash seven dash two. So something silly like that. So like that's the frustration with the manually completed applications, and that does take a lot of time to go back and correct, which is frustrating for everybody. So all that to say, man, did I like go on a rampage about that or what? I told you I know how to push your buttons. Don't moral it out manually is the point. Moral of the story. I will say in some people's defense, you know, that the PSLF help tool is relatively new. And so before the help tool existed, the only way to do it was this manual process. So some people have been doing that manual process for years and have just, you know, kind of kept on going. Like I know this works. This is how I've always done it. But like I said, we want the government to continue to upgrade their systems. They've done some things to improve. And then we kind of slow down and bog things up while, you know, if we keep doing the same old snail mail sort of way whenever there's something new out there. Yeah. Yeah. So that's another way that I think we could provide some value where we help people just know exactly how to complete the process, like not what you think you should be doing, but how to complete the process. It saves you time, money, emotional energy, saves you an email to us. So a couple other ways, you know, that things could be costing you and maybe you don't know it. So we talked a little bit about recertification of income for income driven plans. So recertifying income, we we commonly run into folks who are recertifying even during this covid pause when they don't need to be. So what they're doing is they're costing themselves a lot more money because compared to 2019 taxes or 2020 taxes, they're making more income now and they don't have to be recertifying their income. So if they are, they are willingly telling the Department of Ed that their income has changed. It's gone up. So their payments going to go up when it could have just stayed at that older payment. And then we'll get questions, too, about like, oh, I had I had a child, you know, do I need to update my my family size? And there's not really a way to update your family size without completely updating your payment, like doing a whole recertification process. So you have to weigh like mathematically, does that new family member with what your current income is make your payment less than what it would have been or not? And sometimes the family size isn't enough to to warrant like the the the earlier recertification, like it may not save you as much money as you think it will. Yeah, that three dollar mindset is let me just go online and try to kind of maybe estimate, even though I don't really get how this works, when I could just get the consultation, really get down to the numbers, like bring your, you know, tax document or your adjusted gross income. And let's really nail down on like what what's different by, you know, this family size having gone up. Because imagine, you know, 500 bucks a month as an example as a payment change based on your income having gone up drastically. 500 bucks a month is six thousand dollars a year. Like that's a pretty big difference. Like if I had six thousand dollars that I was just going to give away, I'm not giving it to the Department of Education. If anybody just like has money to send, I can put my address and he said, Lauren at Student Loan Planner. Just let me know. I can give you my cash app, my Venmo, my Zelle, whatever you want to do. You can pay for a lot of others Student Loan Planner consultations too. Maybe you set up a, you know, Student Loan Planner Consultation Scholarship Fund with that money you're wasting. I like the way you think. I like the way you think, Megan. Like sharing is sharing. All jokes. We're just having fun. All right, let's nail down a few more of these because believe it or not, we're just talking student loans right now. We actually have some other $3 versus $30,000 questions for you to be thinking about. All right, so paying on your student loans when you have credit card debt. Credit card debt comes at these double digit interest rates. So 30%, you know, oh, I got a really low one, 18%. It's like low. I mean, yeah, lower than the rest, but still. Right. Where your student loans have like maybe a 6% or 7% interest rate, maybe even 8%. We've seen some 8s out there. And like you said, right now in the middle of COVID, when everything's on pause, like what are we doing? You have to really know that you're one of those people that's trying to get your loans paid off to be paying on your student loans. Like I am not prioritizing the student loans over the credit card debt because the credit card debt also is revolving debt. So every month that you don't pay that, like you're paying, you're starting to pay interest on your interest. We don't want that for you. So don't be that person. Yeah. Rob, Rob, part of our team, he runs a practice on his own. Oh my gosh, let me just look it up real quick. The family budget expert. Exactly. He sends out a newsletter or like an e-blast every week or so, every couple weeks. But one of them was really good. It was about this topic, like credit card debt. Like if you have credit card debt, you know, why do you feel like you're not, you know, possible reasons for why you feel like you're not making any progress. And he listed out things that were just really efficient about how you were paying down your debt. And one of them was focusing on the wrong debts, like having money go towards debts that either are a lot lower in interest or with a student loan situation, there's no interest. So that is lowest on the totem pole if there's other higher interest debt out there. But also like, you know, paying more than the minimum on any other debt that does have an interest rate, except for the one that you're focusing on, kind of that snowball approach that you want to take. So like in just financial planning, budgeting conversations that I'll have with folks, I'll ask, you know, how much are you putting towards each of these cards? Are you just paying the minimum except for the one you're prioritizing? And a lot of times the answer is no, like I'm trying to throw as much as I can to all of them, like whenever I can. And mathematically, like you might think you're doing the right thing. That is better than not, you know, putting extra money towards the credit cards at all. But you want to get smart with how you're prioritizing the debts too, like focus on the highest interest debt card first, if you're doing the avalanche approach. If you're doing the snowball approach, that's technically focusing on the lowest balance first, and you pay the minimums on every other debt that you have. And that can really accelerate your debt pay down, save you a lot of money on interest, and it can help you feel like you're making a lot more movement. And there's some other things that he mentioned in there that I think were interesting too, like still saving, like putting money in savings or putting money in like your investment accounts while you still have credit card debt. That could be, while it feels wrong to turn those savings buckets off, that could be maybe the wrong mindset to have because you're not focusing on the biggest priority, which is that 18%, 20%, 30% credit card payment that are like debt that's charging you a lot more in the long run. So, you know, we got a little bit into financial planning stuff, but I thought that was relevant to bring up when it comes to student loans and just, you know, prioritizing other debt when you have credit card debt. That's the wrong approach, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong approach. And this next one is kind of my hot button, so I'm just going to preface that, but try not to go too long on it. But I'm just going to say that 50% of marriages end in divorce was like the last statistic or the most popular statistic I hear. And the majority of marriages end in divorce because of finances. Finances is like a key factor in people not being able to stay together. So the $30,000 mindset is working together on your finances, having similar goals, and marrying someone who you can trust to like say like, hey, this is what we want to accomplish financially. This is how we are going to stay. This is how we are going to govern ourselves as a household. This is not a popular thing. We get lots and lots of people who want to keep their finances separate, and I get it. Some people have been divorced before. They've been victims of various types of abuse. They come from backgrounds where there's lots of trauma, and their parents have told them like always make sure you got something in the closet or for yourself. And it's really led to like every person for themselves, even though I'm saying I love you and I want to be with you forever and ever. And this can be so detrimental to your student loan plan. And I mean, it's to the point where Megan and I frequently get people who will not even mention that their spouse exists. And we have to kind of like something comes up, and we kind of figure out that there's a spouse in the scenario. And like you not telling us does not mean that they don't exist. Like financially, when you get married, there's some legal things that are going to happen that you're going to have to account for. And from a student loan perspective, marry filing jointly versus marry filing separately matters for your student loan plan. And just because you're filing separately and pretending the person doesn't exist, doesn't mean that it's the best thing for your overall financial situation. And so as separate as you may think your finances are, one person will affect the other. And so you have to at least acknowledge that this person exists. Even if you decide not to work together on other aspects of your finances, don't come to your student loan consultation and tell me you're single or that you don't want to talk about your spouse. Preach. But it's also so that those are good points. And yes, like being married, there are going to be implications when it comes to your student loans and just other areas of your finances regardless. Like there's no getting around that. And so it is important for us to know. And it's also like aside from just tax filing status, if your spouse has student loans, that's going to affect your student loan situation too. So that's something we have to be aware of because the numbers we run thinking that you're single or thinking that your spouse doesn't have loans or whatever the situation, that's going to throw off our numbers. And reason being, so if you and your spouse have federal student loans, the federal student loan system recognizes that. And they proportionalize payments. If you, let's say you are filing jointly, you're both on an income-driven plan or just any plan for that matter, they take into account the other spouse's loans. And that affects the payment for better or for worse. It doesn't always have to be like for worse. Sometimes there are some really unique advantages to kind of taking advantage of the best plan for each spouse, but while also not hurting the other spouse, if that makes any sense. So there's a lot of strategy there that needs to be like teased out to make sure that we're giving the best advice. And you thinking that just leaving your spouse out of the situation is the best case scenario, that's not always the case. So that's the $3 mentality there is just assuming that marriage is maybe negative for your student loan situation, when maybe it's not. Maybe we could have like, you know, interestingly leveraged that in some way. 100%, 100%. All right, last but not least in the student loan bucket of $3 versus $30,000 mindset or questions, is these people who are out trying to do the double consolidation on their own. And I get frequently, Megan, I don't know about you, but like where it's like, I just have one question. So, you know, like I said, we're not going to pretend like they're cheap, but they are definitely valuable. And I think there's a difference, cost versus values are different. And so frequently, we get why I just have one question, I don't see why I should have to pay $500 for that. But one, we've got lots of certifications, we've got continuing education, we are trying to make a living. But on top of that, it's not just one question. It's just about to say that, yeah. It's like this is related to that, which is going to this or that. And the double consolidation is something that we found and we were super excited. Like, you know, that's our research that even led us down the rabbit hole to like, oh, this is something people can use. And then also implementing it as a thing. You know, we do have free information. Like you said, there's a whole blog on the website, Megan's made a whole video about it. And you get to go and follow those things. And then you're like, wait, but I still got a question like, oh, we gave you the information, like you should be able to do it based on that. And you're absolutely welcome to try that double consolidation on your own. But what does screwing up a double consolidation cost you if you don't get it right? Yeah, that's what's tough about it is it is kind of a sensitive process to where like you have to know how those things work and like how that process will unfold and what problems could arise so you could avoid them. And that's again, not to like scare people. It's just really the reality of it. And the reality of it is the double consolidation is a loophole, is not supposed to exist. It wasn't designed to exist. It is a linguistics error on Department of Ed's side. And so we could take advantage of it. It's legal to use. But it's tricky because and things change all the time. So that's also really important to know because I put out a video and an article in 2019 about this process. Things since then have changed. Servicers have left the business. There's now servicers that we can't use. Now we're in this COVID forbearance. Servicers again have changed. So I did another video, I think it was last year. Yeah, like I did an update to the video last year to kind of streamline the process a little bit more. And there's things that have changed since then. So I need to do another video update. But that's what's kind of tricky is the student loan system changes so frequently. The servicers change. The addresses change. We had somebody who sent their double consolidation paperwork to one of the older addresses. And it got returned, thankfully, because they sent it certified and they got it returned back to them. But that was kind of confusing for them. They were like, what? This was supposed to happen. They were trying to do it all on their own. Why did this get returned? And it was simply because the address had changed by the time they had put it in the mail. So there's a lot of nuance to that process. And like you said, one question is never one question. Because in our minds, we're like, well, that question means that you may not have been aware of this or it's going to affect this. So I need to ask this follow up question to that. Because I have to do my due diligence as a planner. This is what I also get at half hours. When people find out I'm a financial planner, they're like, so what stock should I pick right now? Or where do I invest my money? Where do I put my money? Literally 75 follow up questions before I would ever provide any advice like that. You're one question. And like I said, once again, that's a $3 question right there to that point. The $30,000 question is a lot more around the idea of like, let me think about how broad stroke investing process. All right, we're gonna wrap it fire. So I got eight minutes until my next call. Okay, we're gonna get this done. So these are some other areas in personal finance where we have a $3 mindset where we could be focusing on the bigger, better problems. All right, let's do it. Savings account interest. This is the $3 question I get all the time. Well, where should I be putting my money? What is the best high yield savings account that's out there right now? And why this is a problem is because a lot of people don't think about the idea that this is small percentages we're talking about. Your bank account was giving 0.01% before and now they are doing a lot better because of this market that we're in. 3.5% I've seen a good bit. But let's just say it's a 0.25% more interest that you're getting. Like on $100,000 in your savings account, that's $250 per year. You've got $100,000 cash laying around. Hopefully that's an emergency fund or something. It's already meant to be doing its job. It's like, I need this cash for some reason. You should have other money, hopefully more than $100,000 invested somewhere. But to get another $250,000, are you going to take your whole $100,000, open a new bank account to take that $250,000 from $250,000 to $350,000? We're talking $100,000. You had to say that. Not worth it. All right, what's the next one, Megan? Next one has to do with refinancing mortgages. That was a big thing that was going on in 2021 because interest rates got so low. That was a great opportunity for some folks that had those 5% interest rate mortgages, 4.5, maybe higher. Reduces the cost of their loan, but it starts to get into the $3 mindset when you're trying to fight for point something percent. When it's really at the end of the day, not going to make a huge difference, where maybe you should be focusing your time and efforts on other things. Other things that grow your money or other things that can help increase your income or those types of mentalities there. Yeah, and I think so often people don't take time to calculate the actual cost of their decision. They just say, oh, 5%? Oh, down to 4%. That must be better. You don't think about the fact that you've already had your mortgage for 10 years and you only had 20 years to go, and now you're signing up for 30 years all over again. Yes, it's a smaller interest rate, but it's 10 more years of paying at that smaller interest rate. So you might not actually be coming out ahead. That's something else to consider. The fees associated with everything with the refinance too. Refinancing student loans is super easy. There's no fees associated with refinancing student loans, but mortgages, that's a different equation. It's a whole process and takes a lot of time and money. A hundred percent. And I didn't say too, with the savings account, well, what should you be doing then? I really think you should be focusing on hitting your savings goals, consolidating accounts. Sometimes people end up paying a lot of money because they have things that you have five accounts with $3 in them, and then you're paying a monthly maintenance fee of $15. If it's cash, it's meant to be held for some short-term reason in the first place. So don't spend too much time thinking about how to get a 0.05% or whatever percent. Your money's meant to grow in the investment market. Another thing that gets under my skin is this is a $3 way of thinking. And Megan was actually telling me, she was like, back in college, this was my thing. I definitely did it. And I'll say too, if I know that I'm in a very busy intersection, I might go to a more rural neighborhood, but only if it's on my way. What is this? Running around town to pay a few cents less on gas. FYI, you're burning gas to get to the better gas station. It's not already on the way to where you're going. Think about that. How much time are you spending to go save a few cents on a gallon? And how much is the overall savings? Instead, thinking about what kind of car you purchase, how gas efficient it is, buying used instead of buying a car that has, buying new and having a $600, $700 a month car payment. If we're thinking $30,000 questions, it makes a much bigger difference, the type of car that you purchase, the cost of the maintenance for that car that you're going to purchase, versus you got a G-Wagon, you got G-Wagon maintenance costs, but you're also driving halfway across town to go get three cents less on gas. You can't make it make sense for me. That's a good one. Yeah. And I was guilty of that in college. I think starting to do the math on it started to make more sense to make better decisions on where I was going. Oh, just leave that out. Leave that part out. Okay. Yeah. Leave my comment out there if you could, please. Thank you. All right. Next one I really think is important because I think also when people talk about budgeting, they think about cutting out all, really a lot of things that aren't necessary, which can be the small things like getting coffee. So stressing about cutting out all those small purchases, like your morning coffee or whatever it is. If you like running into the gas station and getting gum every time you buy gas, whatever, you like that habit, you have that habit. Maybe you cut it out, but that was something that, that's maybe a silly example, but that's something that brought you joy. You know, that small thing that you're focusing on there, maybe draw back and think about the bigger picture. What are some of those bigger purchases each month that you could really have a bigger impact on? Like your housing situation. Could you have a lower rent obligation? Could you move in with roommates or just move to a different part of town in the future? You know, what about utilities? Like I think sometimes that could be nickeling and diming too, but just think about the bigger pictures. Also eating out. That is a big one, a big one that people kind of forget. They cut out all these little small things that really don't add up to much and they completely negate like the fact that they're going out to eat four times a week or they're going out, you know, with their friends for brunch every Sunday and it's always a $200 bill, whatever it is. Like those are the bigger, bigger ticket items to be focusing on. Not those small little things that bring you joy. 100%. Tell that guy who said stop with your cup of coffee to kick rocks, but think about that. You know, like you said, people are like, oh my goodness, I need to buy a new home because, you know, I'm throwing money away on rent. And then they go get a mortgage that's a thousand dollars more than what their rent was. Plus all the maintenance costs of a home. Like it's a huge deal for your overall finances and you feel the struggle of that. And we're seeing that now more than ever with, you know, all the COVID purchases. People bought homes, but they didn't have emergency funds. They still had credit card debt and now things in their home are falling apart and there's no landlord to call to say, help me. You know, those are the big expenses that you need to really, you know, make a good decision on, on the front end. And so you don't have to worry about like your coffee situation. And last but not least, when we're thinking $3 questions versus $30,000 question is, you know, running around chasing individual stocks and all these alternative investment strategies and trying to get the highest rate of return. Because you can't like pick the winning investment. Like the market is going to do what the market is going to do. There's tons and tons of studies on it. You know, we're huge believers at student loan planning on indexing. You, you, you cannot be, oh my goodness, let me buy this, sell this, do this, turn around upside down. Like and you probably, like I said, the people who sometimes are focusing on that have not done the basics. They're not maxing out their 401k. They're not, you know, doing a Roth IRA, like get the money in the investment account first. Like, can we get the whole 22,500 say, can we get the whole $6,000 saved? Like the way I like, we don't want to sit and be in cash. Absolutely not. But you know, spending time trying to like, oh, I saved $300. Let me see how fast I can flip it is the absolute wrong mindset. And there's so much chatter on social media now, so many different narratives out there where people are saying they can teach you to be rich, but it's like, pay them $500 for them to teach you a strategy. When the real basic strategy is start saving your money and use an investment account as the vehicle for the savings and get the money invested, period. And you'll be all right. Yep. Yeah. Focus not on the get rich quick strategies, but the tried and true consistent ways to build wealth. That's a key there. So, but those are, I think, kind of a list of just quick hitter topics that we had talked about. Any last words before I know you have to wrap up and get going. I know we hit a lot of stuff today, but if you take nothing else from this conversation, it is don't get bogged down by the weeds. It is focus on the big picture, focus on the areas where you can be, you can make big savings and big changes in your financial life. And don't be afraid to invest in yourself in order to be able to do the things that you want to do. So make sure you understand the questions that you have, why they're relevant. Don't follow that general advice. That's all over, you know, that's one size fits all because there's 8 billion people on the planet and none of us are the same. So there's 8 billion financial plans that need to be made as well. So make sure you're customizing to you and don't be afraid to get somebody who's going to give you customized advice, not general advice. Let us go through the weeds for you. We'll find the savings. We'll get nitty gritty with it. Absolutely. You know where to find us, studentloanplanner.com. We are happy to help, ready to rock and roll. Thanks for listening today. You guys have a great day.