Mrs. Dow Jones shares the biggest money mistakes and how to start investing

All right, looking forward to this conversation. Haley Sachs, better known as Mrs. Dow Jones, has spent her career trying to modernize financial literacy for the younger generations. Okay, that's good. She's got a new book out. It's called Future Rich Person. It offers some new rules for building wealth, and it became an instant New York Times bestseller. Mrs. Dow Jones, Haley, is here this morning. Nice to see you. So good to be here. So, you know, when we start talking to, like, the Gen Zers, yeah they they you hear the words american dream dead yeah why do they feel that way and is that true you know the reason they feel that way is because the economy has changed so much and this whole idea of the american dream where you're going to go to college and then you're going to get married and buy a house and be at your job for 40 years it just is out of reach for us we're all renting and we're moving jobs and it's very different world that we're in and so the reason I wrote future rich person was because we need new rules of building wealth for the economy that we are living in now. All right. Give us a rule. Give us a new rule. Okay. A new rule for building wealth is that you have to give every dollar a job. I don't know about you guys, but when you get a paycheck, sometimes you just hits your bank account. You don't know what any of those dollars are doing. So one of the new rules of building wealth is that you must create automations so that the moment that it hits your paycheck, you don't even have to do anything, but you know that you're contributing to all those important accounts, your retirement account, your investment account, your savings account. And it's happening on the back burner. We got to use tech to our advantage. What are some of the biggest mistakes that people are making right now? You know, I'd say the biggest mistake that people are making is thinking that there's no opportunity to grow wealth. I see a lot of learned financial helplessness where you, you know, that's where you start using buy now pay later and sort of you know thinking oh there's no no way for me to even get out of this situation that I'm in so I might as well just you know go to Coachella and put it on you know pay away you know yes and so I think that's really the biggest mistake and right now you know some people might say I'm living paycheck to paycheck it's hard for me to find a job for this dollar when I got to use it to buy some groceries I mean what's your advice for someone who is in a situation similar to that? Well, first of all, it's a very understandable situation. The new inflation reports just came out and just keeps going up. So you're not alone in feeling like that. But I would say the biggest thing that you need to do is have a money date, because a lot of times, even though we think that we are absolutely just there's no way for us to find any money to save. If you actually look at your finances and you take a second to sit down, you really can find little gaps that you can you know make some changes so um i'm curious about she's a big social media star besides being a financial guru um you started off you wanted to be a comedian yes and then how did you make the the turn you know i made the turn because i got my first full-time job with Laura Michaels who started SNL and that's amazing it was great and I was so excited. But on that first day of work, they asked me about 401ks and health insurance. And I just wanted to be good at the job. I didn't want them to think they'd made a mistake hiring me, but no one had ever taught me. And so then I went to go learn and I was so bored and just so disinterested in the content available to learn about money. And so I thought, everyone loves pop culture. No one likes dealing with their finances. What if I combine the two to teach myself and teach others and then it just sort of took off so i'm wondering these days is it better to buy real estate if you can get an apartment that's reasonable or is it better to buy stocks you know it really it's such a great question it depends on where you're at like in the world but we're on Good Day in New York and in New York it's better to buy stocks and the whole surrounding area oh yeah the whole surrounding yeah well i mean it really depends you have to run the numbers for your specific area. But like, you know, buying real estate in New York City specifically, you are better putting that money, you know, in the putting that down payment in the stock market versus putting it into real estate. You know, when we talk about this younger generation, I was just telling you off camera, I have kids who have birthdays, 11, 13. I've trying to explain to them the importance of possibly asking for that as a birthday present, as opposed to something else. And we did end up doing that. But how do you explain that to even kids who are who are that young 13 11 years old to explain like the importance of the stock market what it is and all that you know i love to use the snowball analogy for compound interest because kids obviously love playing in the snow and you know when you put money in the stock market and you let it sit it's going to compound and grow over time exponentially sort of the same way that a snowball rolling down a hill gets bigger and bigger and bigger so you know i think it's just about finding good analogies so if i give you a thousand dollars right now and for a lot of people that may be kind of close to what they can set aside yeah what would you do with it to kind of just try to start to do something i would set up an emergency fund i think that we are in such perilous times and you need to have money set aside in a high yield savings account just in case something happens because everything that can go wrong will go wrong yeah and outside of that just keep yeah yeah and then after if you have one of those pay off your high interest rate debt and then start investing Haley said Mrs Dale Jones the book is out now and by the way bestseller future rich person great advice this morning thank you so much thank you guys very much that was great advice all right mike so did you learn anything i mean you're not the gen z but no i kind of missed that boat but i bet i got thankfully i did a few things okay so but listen Haley, she's got it all, nonetheless.