Jesse Mecham from YNAB on Target Shooting, Japanese Woodworking, & How to Budget If You Make A Million Dollars Per Year Military Money Manual Episode 58

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Jesse Mecham from the popular budgeting software You Need a Budget YNAB joins Spencer and Jamie today to talk about how pistol marksmanship is like personal finance, how many samauri swords Jesse would buy if he was stationed in Japan, and why you still need a spending plan if you make a $1,000,000 per year.

You can sign up for a 34 day risk free trial at militarymoneymanual.com/ynab , no credit card required to sign up.

Military Money Manual Podcast Episode 58 Links

• You Need A Budget YNAB- a free 34-day trial
• Achieving Financial Independence while in the military
• The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) 
• YNAB podcast 
• Beginning Balance podcast (for business owners)
• YNAB YouTube channel
• @YNAB for Twitter and @YouNeedABudget for Instagram
• The Military Money Manual book

Outline of Episode: 

• Jesse’s YNAB start-up story
• Marksmanship and finance and how the two are connected
• The 4 rules of the YNAB system
  • Give Every Dollar a Job
  • Embrace Your True Expenses
  • Roll With the Punches
  • Age Your Money
• Trade-offs in your finances
• How to not feel guilty about your spending by practicing value-aligned spending
• Why the founder of a budgeting app hates the word “budget”
• Budgeting and high-income families
• Don’t get too granular with your budgeting
• Money is meant to be spent!
• YNAB app for military families
• Advice for young military service members

Military Money Manual Podcast Episode 58 Transcript

[00:00:00] Jesse: You feel guilty when you're spending money. That's a signal. It means that you don't know. If what you just spent was good or not, if you spend it and you're right, you don't know you're right. And if you spend it and you're wrong, you don't know you're wrong, and you just did something horrible for your future self, potentially.

[00:00:40] Jamie: Hello, podcast listeners. I'm Jamie and I'm here with Spencer Reese, the founder of militarymoneymanual.com, and author of the book, The Military Money Manual. We are very excited about today's episode. We have a very special guest joining us. Jesse Mecham from YNAB, or You Need a Budget. The YNAB system of budgeting and personal finance that we really enjoy.

Hey, before we get into it, if you have a second to do please leave us a five-star review on Spotify or a rating and review on Apple Podcast. That helps us out a lot and spreads the word about our show and the good things we're talking about here on the podcast. We now have over 100 five-star reviews on Spotify.

Apple Podcast is lagging a little bit behind with 41 reviews total. 4.9 overall, that's not too shabby. So you Apple fans out there. Help us out a little bit and help bump up our numbers on the Apple side, please. 

So a little bit about Jesse. He's a personal finance expert and business leader. He's the founder of You Need a Budget or YNAB.

Jesse hosts a You Need A Budget podcast, The Beginning Balance Podcast, and is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of You Need a Budget. For the You Need a Budget podcast, Spencer and I really enjoyed the episode called “Ask Jesse, What should you do with a life-changing windfall? That's number 588. It was published on August 22nd, 2022. So check that out of his mini-episodes. We really enjoyed that one. 

Jesse is a self-proclaimed recovering CPA. He is deeply passionate about teaching individuals, families, and business owners YNAB’s 4 rules to help them gain total control of their money. Jesse first developed the YNAB method and original spreadsheet as a broke newly married college student who really needed a budget. In an attempt to make an additional $300 a month to help cover rent, he sold his spreadsheet online and YNAB was born. 

I love that story. Since 2004, the software has grown into a leading personal finance platform and it's helped hundreds of thousands of people break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, get out of debt, and save money. Today, YNAB has a growing team living and working all around the world, and has built a thriving remote culture that has earned recognition as Fortune's number one best company to work for.

That's pretty impressive. When not teaching people how to budget. Jesse loves gardening, woodworking, marksmanship, and travel. He also spends a lot of time with his wife and the seven small people living in their house. To learn more about Jesse and his team visit, Youneedabudget.com. 

A quick personal note. I've been using the YNAB software for over three years now, and I'm a huge fan. I'm very excited to have Jesse Mecham on the podcast today. 

Without further ado, here's our conversation with Jesse Mecham from YNAB. 

[00:03:08]Hey, Jesse, thanks for joining us on the show today. We're really excited to have you on the show to talk with our military officers, enlisted families, and military spouses.

[00:03:17] Jesse: I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:19] Jamie: Can you share a little bit about yourself, first of all, and how you got started in personal finance?

[00:03:24] Jesse: I wish it could be a glamorous start or something super romantic, but I was studying accounting and had three years left, married early, so my wife and I were just newlyweds.

She wanted to be able to step out of the workforce once our first baby came along, and I wanted to make some extra money to cover that shortfall. So we had been using a little spreadsheet that I had built using my newfound accounting skills. It had worked pretty well for us as far as getting on the same page with our money and I thought maybe I could sell this little spreadsheet, and this was back before phones were anything but phones, this was back when that was good technology.

I launched YNAB in 2004 while I was still in school and finished up with a master's degree in accountancy and worked in that field for less than a year, realizing that I do like tracking where the money goes, but not for big corporations. I like it for the people, so I didn't last long there but here we are almost 20 years later.

[00:04:21] Spencer: That's great. Jamie and I were actually stationed with your brother for one of our assignments in the Air Force and you've got another brother in the Air Force as well. That's a pretty cool military connection there. Another small connection is both my brother and my sister are certified public accountants or CPAs.

[00:04:37] Jesse: Oh man, I'm sorry. That must be super. Sorry.

[00:04:41] Spencer: I identify with your comment about being a recovering CPA. I think my brother is a recovering CPA and my sister is going to be there soon. Initially when you created the spreadsheet version what was the idea to start selling it? It was just to make the extra money to support the family.

Yeah. How did you set up the website and stuff to get that going?

[00:05:00] Jesse: Yeah, first of all, I have to come clean on this, like I'm the only son in the family that can't fly a jet, just to be clear, like where my skills lie. And so people are like, “Oh, what do you do? I'm like I'm not a pilot like those guys. I just sit in front of a computer.”

And then my brother the other day was like, “To be honest, I sit in front of a computer while I'm flying as well,” so it's maybe more the same thing. But no, I wish it was like this entrepreneurial thing where I'm like, Oh, I had this itch I had to scratch.

I had built a spreadsheet for me and Julie before we even got married and before we had merged our finances. I was just like,  ‘Man, we're going to be really poor. We're not going to have a lot of money.” We were making 10 bucks an hour as students, and we lived on the cheap. I knew we'd have to watch what we were doing with the money pretty carefully, so I just built a spreadsheet for us that we used.

Just personally, no, no concept of how this will be a business. Then when our first baby was coming, I was doing some calculations. We'd started to accumulate some savings. It was really important to us that Julie be able to step out of the workforce and just focus on being the mom. So with her income disappearing, I was doing some calculations and I figured we would need about $350 a month in other income I needed to scrounge up in order to get the last two years finished out and get my master's degree wrapped up. Then it was off to the big accounting firm, become a partner. That was the end of that. But it really was that we had a shortfall. I thought I could make it up, and so I just learned how to build websites by googling.

Google was new back then figuring that out as I went along. And if anyone wants to feel good about whatever they're doing, feel really good about it, just go back, use the archive.org site and look at YNAB from 2004 until I found real design talent, And like you'll know when the design talent was hired and when I stepped back from that.

But yeah, I just made it up as I went along and the cool thing about that is you fail fast. You learn and you get better over time. So I wouldn't change anything except, hopefully, I could make those mistakes even quicker. At the end of the day, whatever mistakes you made brought you to where you are now.

And I don't know if I'd change much.

[00:07:14] Spencer: It kinda reminds me of the hundred-dollar startup idea, because I'm going to make an assumption here that initially you probably just bootstrapped it, right? With your own cash.

[00:07:22] Jesse: Yeah. Initially and forever. Yeah. It was 63 bucks. That was what Julie and I decided we could afford.

You're like, “Oh, that wasn't a lot of money,” but that was half of our grocery money. Not that we spent grocery money, but just the equivalent framing. It was like half of what we spent on groceries for a month we're going to fund this. And it was almost zero. Back then, You could buy clicks for 5 cents that try and test things out, which is how I could get some early traction and see is this landing, is it not? Things like that. 

[00:07:52] Spencer: Okay. The really important question now, Jesse, can you still do 31 pullups?

[00:07:57] Jesse: I cannot. I'm probably in the 25 range. I can still crank them out.

I've been hanging stuff off of my waist lately to try and change it up. I would rather do three really hard pull-ups than hang for 25. Do you know what I mean? So that's where I'm at. Yeah, I'll get a big kettlebell, I'll chain it up, waddle into position, and then bang out a couple of triples. It works.

I think I would impress a marine, if someone were to be like, Hey, do some, I'd be like, Oh Marine, I can do a few of those. I won't run, though. When they ask me to run, I'll say no.

[00:08:35] Spencer: Luckily you're talking to two Air Force officers, so I don't know how many pull-ups you're banging out, Jamie.

[00:08:39] Jesse: I don't, am I stepping on toes? I hope I'm not. May I might be, but no I probably can, I love it all. I have no favorites. 

[00:08:47] Spencer: And in your bio, you talked about marksmanship. Is that riflery or bow?

[00:08:52] Jesse: Handgun. Okay, Rifle, anyone can be a good marksman with a rifle. It's when you have that, I'm just kidding.

Like some snipers like, “Oh, you little, I can't believe you said that.” I would love to learn long gun stuff, honestly, because it's just all the math and everything. But yeah, specifically how fast you can get from holster to two shots down range. That was what I liked.

[00:09:16] Spencer: Were there any lessons that you've taken from your practice of marksmanship to apply to personal finance?

Or are the two disciplines just so separated that you don't see any connections? 

[00:09:27] Jesse: You're throwing me softball, Spencer. I can tie anything back to money management, Anything at all. When I first went and got the instruction, I have to frame it for everyone. I didn't grow up with guns. So I was sitting in our congregation, all the men were together and we were planning an activity and they were like, “Hey, let's do a shotgun activity.”

Who has a shotgun? And I was in Lehigh, Utah, which up until 15 years ago, had a hitching post at the high school. Like that kind of a place. And so everyone raises their hand except me that owns a shotgun. And I didn't own anything, And I felt like a fish out of water. And so I went home and told Julie, my wife, I said I need a gun if I'm going to fit in this new neighborhood we moved into.

And so for Christmas, she bought me this handgun and I opened it up and was genuinely mortified by it. Like totally scared, fully inept. Like I had no idea how to use it. I was scared by it. I just closed it up and stuck it up in the closet and so I knew it was something that I wanted to get comfortable with, but I was as newbie as you could get.

So I went and got some really good instruction and a couple things stuck out. The one line that this one instructor gave me as he was trying to get us faster and faster is he broke the presentation down into five steps, which you think like you watch someone who presents fast from concealment or not, it doesn't matter.

But there are five steps to that presentation. And I would've thought it was one step. Oh, you just grab the gun, and there you are. And it's Nope, it's five. And they're very discreet and you can become very fast as you break them down and focus on just one of the five at a time. So that kind of blew my mind.

And then as you're piecing together these five steps, he kept saying over and over, slow is smooth is fast. He would just chant that slow is smooth is fast. And that stuck with me because as you would just slowly work it, you would get there. But if you tried to be fast, it just would fall apart.

I always relate that back, not just in money management, but when someone's trying to fix their finances, we oftentimes, one is we don't appreciate being methodological. We just try and be haphazard. We pull a bunch of blog posts, we gather a bunch of things, and we start to get excited about this or that little thing.

And so I really try to get people to get down to the fundamentals. And that's those five steps. And then the next one is to be patient. Work it slowly, and you'll find that you get into this groove where you don't have to think about step two. It happens, but you got to work them piece by piece. So that's one tie-in, but I have a thousand more.

[00:12:04] Jamie: I'll stop you there because that's a great segue to my next question. That's not about guns directly, but it's about the four rules in the YNAB system. Yeah. And you have a book, your book came out in 2017, right? That kind of gets into all the details of this, but can we go into a kind of an overview of the four rules and however, if you want to break them down, then I'll probably have a couple of follow-up questions after that as well. 

[00:12:24] Jesse: I might just keep bringing it back to marksmanship for the rest of the time, but We'll see. But the idea is your spending has to be on target. You want to be able to make a good decision about your spending. That's all it is. We don't teach people how to invest, We don't teach people how to retire early.

What we're trying to do is get to the very first thing that matters. How are you managing your ins and outs? There's a framework that I stumbled upon, invented, or that we've just worked with long enough, we know really well. And it's these four rules, the four rules are there to help you make better spending decisions full stop.

And that can mean you're spending more. It can mean you spend less, I don't even care, but they're better and better for you. You might say, I would never spend money, Jesse, on a joiner/planer combo machine, which I just did, and I'm super excited about it. Be like, I would never do that. I would, in a million years, I would never do that, but I could point to something you have and be like, I would never spend money on that.

It doesn't matter. It's just, was it a good spending decision for you? So with these four rules, if you think about them as a decision-making framework, it really helps. Our first rule is to give every dollar a job. The idea here is that you're wanting to experience trade-offs. If you do A, you can't do B. If you do B, you can't do C.

Too often, especially in the US where it's very consumer-driven, we don't feel tradeoffs. We can just swipe a credit card and be like, “Oh, I solved that problem. I don't have to deal with running out of money.” But we want you to feel like you are running out of money. And so the first thing we do is have you give every dollar a job that starts to introduce tradeoffs and that improves decisions.

The second thing we do is orient you forward, and so we want you to embrace your true expenses, meaning you're thinking ahead and you're looking at larger, less frequent expenses. You're breaking them up into monthly amounts and then you're introducing those back into the trade-offs. So now, instead of just being like, “Do I want to do this today or that today?” It's “Do I want to do this today or that tomorrow?”

Do I want to do this today or that in three months? And your decision-making has improved as you've oriented forward. 

The third rule and you guys would appreciate this as pilots or in any kind of military, any situation where it's at all dynamic, which is mostly life, we had to make a rule where you could change your mind, where you have a great plan, you've worked hard on the plan, you appreciate the 150 slides that you added to your slide deck for this plan.

Then as soon as it actually starts rolling, you change things. And so when we're talking about a spending plan, it's the same thing. You have a great plan, and you've done your best, but you don't have a crystal ball. So as soon as new things come in, you adapt. 

Our fourth rule is what we call aging your money. What it really means is that we want that guy or gal that just earned that dollar today or two grand today, we want that two grand to sit for a while in the system to age, to get a little older. Too often we earn the money and the money's a day old. It's like a little baby and you're sending it out and you're like, Do this, do that.

It's not ready yet. We want there to be a distance between when you earn money and when you spend money and with that distance, you get more time to be able to evaluate a decision and make the best call. So in that, Giving yourself time also improves your decision-making. 

So really it's experiencing trade-offs, being future-oriented, being flexible, call it “rolling with the punches”, and then finally giving yourself some time to really make the best decision.

And you can take that framework, you can be like, Man, that kind of sounds like it'd be a good framework for time management or for managing some dynamics. And you are right because we're really trying to just allocate resources at the end of the day. And this works really.

[00:15:58] Jamie: Yeah, I really love all of them.

Giving every dollar a job is meaningful. All these are principles that a lot of personal finance experts or books or podcasts talk about. I like the way that you guys broke it down into 4 easy to understand and easy-to-follow rules. The one I really want to call out is rule number three, which took me a little bit of getting used to, and I became a YNAB user in 2019 over three years ago because a lot of people in the military are very detail oriented and it leads to sometimes budgets not working because we said this was our plan and we're going to stick.

Yeah. And that can be a challenge. And you mentioned a couple of lines in your book that I'm going to, I'm going to just read real quick, because I think it'll really hit this point. 

“If you change your budget, you haven't failed at budgeting, You've adapted with the best of them. This flexibility isn't how most people imagine a budget, but it may be the key to making it work.”

And then you go on to say, “It's not a failure, but a reprioritization. You're not accountable for every line item in your budget. It would be like holding yourself to the hour-by-hour schedule you wrote a week ago. It just won't match reality. So changing my budget is not failing.” And I think when I read that line, my wife was like, Oh, sick burn, because that's exactly what so many of us struggle with being able to adapt to a plan because we spend so much time making the plan perfect.

And that's not just about money, but especially with money.

[00:17:10] Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. The plan is only as good as you can adapt to it. And I don't know where we get that. No one does it in real life in any other form. When you guys fly, you try to stick to the plan, there was one time my brother stuck me in a simulator and he was like, “Hey, just try and keep the plane steady.”

I think as he was getting his wings, I think it was part of this, and we were on base for that and he's Just keeping it level. I couldn't believe how hard it was to keep that stupid thing just level you. But he's like the simulators where they would throw everything possible at you. Like it would never happen in real-life kind of situations.

There's a lot to learn from that. The last thing you'd want to do is be like hey, that wasn't part of my plan, therefore, flying doesn't work. We would never make that conclusion. So anytime you're planning your son's football practice or you're planning a vacation you have to be adaptable.

it's just driving on a road that you always drive on. You see there's a detour and you just go around. No big deal.

[00:18:09] Spencer: Yeah, there were a couple of thoughts that I had when you were running through those lists, right? There was, as an economics major, giving every dollar a job and forcing people to choose, do I want A or do I want B?

That's just opportunity costs from economics, but it forces you to assess your values, right? And it forces you to decide what I actually want to do. Because money is a finite resource. Time is a finite resource, and most of life is made up of finite resources that you have to allocate in some way.

And if you don't have values that drive those decisions, then this is going to force you to either figure out those values, develop those values, or just to say, What are my values? And if you don't have values, I think a good life is made up of values, right? Whatever your definition of the good life is, you have to have some values behind it.

And if you're just floundering, if you're just flapping in the wind and going, whichever way, I think it would be a life not worth living.

[00:19:08] Jesse: Yeah, I agree. It's well put.

[00:19:11] Spencer: The other thing you said was, with rule three, they're rolling with the punches. And it reminded me of a couple of things. No plan survives first contact with the enemy or with reality.

And you have to continuously update. You got to iterate. And if you don't, and you're just like no, this is the plan. We're sticking to it. It's unrealistic and it's going to drive you crazy if you contact reality and you realize, okay, we spend a thousand dollars a month on groceries and that's what happened last month, and that's okay if that doesn't align with our values because we had to choose, $200 that we missed spending on something else.

Then you have to, you're forced to make that choice. It almost reminded me of mindfulness or meditation. When you're trying to be mindful or you're trying to meditate and focus on the breath, when you lose that concentration and your monkey mind runs off and you start thinking about something else and you're like, Oh, no, I'm thinking about something else.

Come back to the breath. And everyone's Oh, I failed. I failed to meditate. No That's the bicep curl right there. And paying attention. And so you rule three about rolling with the punches. That's budgeting, that's adapting. What you are trying to do and figuring out what your values are and then adjust your spending so that you match those values.

So I think those four rules I don't know how you stumbled on them, but I really like how they encapsulate this framework and as you said, it doesn't just apply to money. It can apply to time and can apply to so many other factors of life.

[00:20:34] Jesse: I think I'm wired innately to care about resource allocation in the most general sense.

And so when I was building the spreadsheet that had these rules in it, I didn't know I was building something that enforced these rules, but it naturally enforced what I thought should be taken into consideration. I hate when I see people work so hard for a dollar and then as soon as all of their efforts are converted into a dollar, they're suddenly just “ah, whatever.”

I'm so surprised by that. You have these guys that have gone. Crazy training. They're experts in their field, and then they're just like, Oh, I don't do money. And you're like, What are you? What are you talking about? You don't do money? Like why are you so effortful and intentional and mindful and strategic about all of your career?

And then as soon as all of that career effort is converted to a doll, you're just like, Ah, whatever happens. It's such an incongruent thing that it bothers me to my core. That I see that happen, like energy is converted from time into a dollar and it's still energy. It's still valuable inherently, and so we want to make sure that we're deploying that energy.

It's just stored-up energy. We're just deploying that to where it lines up with our values. There's the contentment. It's not that you make more, it's not that you retire early. Those are all great things, but when your money is lined up with what you really value, it's a part of you that's lined up with what you really value.

It's just you and all of your past efforts, and so when those two are on the same track, we have people constantly tell us, I feel better. I'm not making more money. I'm not even really saving more money, but I just feel better. We're like, That's because there's some congruence now.

[00:22:12] Jamie: That's so good. I want to jump back to rule two for a second. Talk about embracing two expenses. I have two questions on this one. The first one is about the impact of inflation because we're expecting a relatively high military pay increase if it gets approved, but it still doesn't keep up with inflation.

So any tips or what do you recommend for military families that are struggling with the cost of living right now?

[00:22:32] Jesse: It's one of those things where if you go piece by piece, you could say, talk about rolling with the punches. You'd be looking ahead and you'd say we normally spend a thousand bucks on groceries and we were ready for that.

We've been used to that and suddenly it's $1200. And where does this come from? And companies and employers, military as well. They're trying to keep up with that, but it's lagging. Everything is delayed. There's not this instantaneous thing. The best thing you can do is revisit these rules.

Rule one where you're saying, Okay, we have trade-offs here to make, and I've actually entertained the idea of just telling people, “Hey, there's now an inflation category in your plan.” And it's meaningful. You can't just pretend it's not there. You'd mentioned Spencer, reality is knocking and inflation is one of those realities.

So the worst advice I could tell you is, “Oh, I think inflation will do this or that.” It doesn't matter what we think. What are you paying at the store? What's happening? And this is reality. So the worst thing you could do is just say, “I'll just wait for it to change.” You can't. You are dealing with a finite resource and you've got to make sure that you're adapting.

So you work the same system. You start to make trade-offs, you start to cut corners where you can, and there are corners that you will not cut. And those are also your values and that's totally appropriate, but it goes back to each their own in that way. There's no quick fix to this. If there were, man, I'd be on all the major news outlets letting everybody know how to handle it.

But at the end of the day, you cannot bury your head in the sand. You can't say, Oh, this will pass. It could be with us for a while. These things take a long time, and we're all, roughly the same age. We have not experienced this, the millennial generation that's now the largest members of the workforce, we have not experienced something like this.

We can ask our parents and they can tell us about 11% mortgage. We've grown up in a space where it's wait, what? Do savings accounts pay more than 0%? What is this? It's all new, so we have to be adaptable. We have to keep working on the plan. Yeah. Eyes wide open, facing forward.

[00:24:30] Jamie: I love that. Alright, the second question I have for embrace your true expenses is a little more practical tip. Let's say a military family, a young military family, just found out from the mechanic that they need four new tires on their minivan or their SUV. How does the YNAB system encourage them to set a goal for their tires being good for, let's say, four or five more months?

How do they embrace their true expenses and build that into their budgeting month by month so it doesn't just slam them with a credit card payment?

[00:24:57] Jesse: Yeah. But now a lot of times when you're first starting with the rules you're dealing with a lot of decisions that prior you have made, and so you have to dig yourself out of that to a degree.

If the tires, check the treads, first of all, like brass tacks, like anyone that sells tires is going to tell you, you probably should get into tires. Anyone that sells houses is going to tell you, you should either move or buy, whatever trust, but verify. So you do need new tires and you know that they're going to cost you $1,000 in five months. 

That means that you'll be setting aside $200 each month for the next five months, and you just build that up and our software helps you do that. But you can do that with a spreadsheet. You can do it with some auto transfer from an account. You can do it all kinds of different ways, but the idea is you're paying for that bill before it happens.

I'll say it this way, actually, Jamie, this is an interesting way to think about it. You're sitting there at the tire shop and it's almost like what we're trying to create is a situation where your current priorities and your future priorities are on an even playing field. And so you have like future Jamie and then current Jamie, and they're negotiating. “I want this money now,” and future

Jamie's like, “I want some of the money for later because I'm going to be on the side of a road and a tire will have blown out and that's going to be really expensive, so throw me a bone here.” And so what I try to have people imagine is you're at the tire place, you have $1,000 for the tire.

And then in walks, I don't know, the pizza delivery guy. And he's like, “Hey, you have a thousand bucks for the tire, but could I interest you in $80 of pizza right now? You won't have enough for the tires now, but you'll have this pizza now.” Nobody would be like, “Yeah, I'll take that deal. Like I want to not buy the tires. I'm going to buy the pizza.” 

So everyone makes good decisions. Once they're presented with good information, unfortunately, we rarely ask our future self, “Hey, do you need anything? Will you need something?” It's always just Hey, pizza guy. Pizza sounds good. Let's do pizza. I love pizza. I'm all about buying pizza, but I also know that I wouldn't give the pizza guy any money if I needed to buy new tires.

And so what we're trying to do is present that situation hypothetically for people all the time. It's like you're looking ahead and you're saying Christmas is coming up. Christmas is not far away now, so what are we going to do? You're buying tires and then you know, your daughter walks in Daddy and says, “I would like a Christmas present.”

No one actually is doing that, but am I going to buy sushi, or am I going to buy Faye a Christmas present? I don't actually do that mental math, but it's this idea of all things considered equal, because then the values, as Spencer mentioned, the values start to really be flushed out, and that's where the magic happens.

Would you rather have a nice Christmas? Or go to the bar a few more times and everyone's like, Hi, yeah, Christmas actually sounds right. Okay. But then sometimes you actually do want to go hang out and have a good time and not have guilt plague you afterward. That's what we want to have happen.

[00:27:49] Spencer: Yeah, and I think the YNAB system is great for that. Avoiding that, spending guilt where that dollar has a job and that job right now is to increase your fun time with your friends, and that's so important, right?

[00:28:04] Jesse: Absolutely. If you feel guilty when you're spending money, that's a signal.

It means that you don't know if what you just spent was good or not. If you spend it, and you're right, you don't know you're right. And if you spend it and you're wrong, you don't know you're wrong, and you just did something horrible for your future self, potentially. So either way, whether you can afford it or you can't afford it, the feeling is the same.

It's consternation, it's friction, it's guilt. It's just a little thing in the back of your head. I hope this is okay. Misplaced hope. But what we want to get is where you're swiping the card with joy. You know you're at Disneyland and you are buying the churro that hopefully is still the same price.

We'll see, they say that the best inflation indicator is the churro cost. I don't know, but that's what I heard.  

[00:28:53] Spencer: So Jamie, you and I got the churros didn’t we?

[00:28:54] Jamie: We did, and they were like eight, $8 or something. They were pretty expensive. Yeah. 

[00:28:56] Jesse: So maybe if Disney and if Costco gave up on the $1.50 situation with the hot dog, then we know we're really in a bad spot. Yeah, they're still holding the line at a buck 50, but my whole point, tangent city. But my whole point is that when you know you can afford something, it's so great. It's so great. That is the way you should operate, I can buy this happily. And then here's another signal.

When your spouse is spending money on that quirky hobby that you still don't understand after 10 years of marriage, and you're happy to see them do that, now you know you've arrived. 

[00:29:32] Spencer: I love that. We had a podcast episode number 47 about breaking the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. Personally, I was stuck in one when I was a young lieutenant, I was in pilot training and I would put all of my expenses on the credit card.

My paycheck would come in, I'd pay off the credit card, and I'd have about $15 to get to the next paycheck. And so I just put all the expenses back on the credit. It was after I got married and I had a spreadsheet. I showed my wife the spreadsheet and the money would come into the checking account.

She'd be like, “Oh, great, we have a thousand dollars.” I'd be like, “Oh no. I, There's a credit card we have to pay off.” And she's like, “Okay, so how much money do we actually have?” And I'm like, “probably about $15 or $30. So just put the expenses on the credit card.” And she said, “No, I'm not living like that. We have to, Yeah, we have to fix this. We're living paycheck to paycheck.”

She had made her own money previously. She was a well-paid pharmaceutical rep and she was much better at budgeting than I was. So once we broke that cycle and we basically froze our spending for 30 days until we could start getting ahead again and aging our money, but what are some other tips that you have for listeners on getting out of the terrible paycheck-to-paycheck cycle?

[00:30:43] Jesse: I don't like to give people, don't spend money on this, don't spend money on that kind of thing. I want them to discover it on their own and be able to become aware of where they're spending, become aware of their priorities, and then start to see where money is going toward things they don't really care about.

I will give you a shortcut though, just to save people the trouble. I have interviewed thousands of people at this point. We have so many data points. A lot of people get out of tons of debt because they realize, “Oh, I don't really care to be in all this debt. I don't care to pay all this interest. Would I rather not spend my money on those things?”

And the answer is always yes. So you have people that have just dug out of tens of thousands of dollars of debt fairly quickly, and I'm always like wait a minute. You were living paycheck to paycheck. You barely had nickels to rub together. You're 30 grand in debt and then nine months later you're out.

Or two years later you're out. What? Did you get a big raise? Which aunt died? What happened here to help you out? And they're like, “No, the aunt is still healthy.” Every time. Every time. And I try not to put words in people's mouths like, “Did you do this? Did you do that? Where did you find the money?”

Every time without fail, without exception, they have said, “We cut back on eating out.” So I hate to be like the bearer of boring, boring advice, but that is the first place people notice. Incongruent spending, they start to realize how much actually is going out the door for that. They start to realize that taking 20 minutes to make a quick meal is less time than driving 30 minutes to go and grab something “quick”.

There are all kinds of things they start to realize that money matters to them more than doing something else. And that's the point because I also interviewed someone one time who said I spent about three grand eating out and I fell out of my chair. That's not my jam. And they loved it. So I was like okay, I can get there.

But it was interesting to hear them still go through the same exercise of, “Wow, look how much I spend. Do I really love to do this?” And they straight up, I'm not, It's hard work to spend three grand eating out. You have to really choose your places carefully. You can't be doing Chick-fil-A, like you, No, that's too much Chick-fil-A. Like, you got to go to the spendy spots. I didn't ask him, Do you do wine? You must do wine. But whatever it was he loved it. So it's just cool to see that people come to conclusions where they're like, “I'm not going to spend money here,” and they don't feel like they've lost a thing. So that's one quick way to break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle is just to look there first.

There are other things you can do, but as you work the first rule and the second rule, you'll start to see where the money's going places and you're like, I'd rather have it do something else. No shame, no guilt, no like Uber frugalness, just to be frugal. None of that. Just priorities, money going out the door.

Let's make sure they line up.

[00:33:38] Jamie: So for a guy that has a company that has the word budget in the title, it's not a very popular word. 

[00:33:44] Jesse: I hate it. Yeah. Worse

[00:33:46] Jamie: Is there any income level or net worth where you tell people they don't need a budget anymore? Or how does that work?

[00:33:52] Jesse: Honestly, if we were to change our name to just YNAB and you never knew what it stood for, I'd be like, “Yeah, that's what we are like it was just YNAB. Just forget what I ever thought about you needing a budget because people think about it incorrectly and we spend 45 minutes being like no, It's not that you can't spend no. It's not that it's restrictive. No. It's not shackles by your spouse. Like we'd spend so much time unwinding all of the bad ideas that people have.

It'd be like if I said, “Hey, Jamie, let's go on a diet.” You're just like, “No, I don't think so.” There's just so much baggage attached to it, so I really hate the word. What we teach people is not budgeting. I'll just say that right now. We teach people a whole new way of making spending decisions.

So they love how they spend their money. That's what it is. We want you to love how you spend, love how your spouse spends, and love spending money on your kids. Love spending money on your hobbies, love spending money to get out of debt, budget, whatever. I just, I really, we don't do that. We don't even teach it.

We just teach people how not to do it, and it works really well. 

Back to your specific question, is there an income where someone just doesn't need to worry about careful spending or strategic spending? No, absolutely not. If you make a million dollars a year, you have, I would say this is as close as Jesse gets to morals.

I would say you have a moral imperative to allocate those resources well because you have a lot of them and you could do a lot of good and good the way you define it, right? Not the way I would. It is a moral imperative to have all of that useful resources at your disposal and not do good with it by your definition.

So that's why you still need a “budget”. You need the intention behind valuable resources. And if you were to say no at this point, I have so much I don't need intention. I would say, “Man, God is playing a trick on me right now.” That's not, I don't like this because I want to see people that have so many resources, so much discretion to be able to exercise that discretion and say, “Oh let's do something meaningful with it.”

So there is no income level where it's appropriate to waste. And I'll let waste be defined by the person.

[00:36:07] Spencer: Jesse, the anti-budget, is this some, a concept you're familiar with where you just set a high savings rate and then spend the rest? You've heard, Okay? Yeah.

[00:36:16] Jesse: So you've heard of. I think that's probably me, honestly.

[00:36:20] Spencer: I, yes, I know some high net worth, high-income individuals, usually dual income or dual military spouses, and they just set a ridiculously high savings rate.

Maybe they set, we're going to give 10% of our income to the church or to charity, and then they just spend the rest as they see fit and they don't really track it. They don't really worry about it. By doing that, they know that, oh it, within 10 or 15 years we'll be financially independent.

They probably did the hard yards in the beginning where they tracked all their spending early on. So do you see a fit with YNAB with kind of the anti-budget where, because maybe every dollar has a job, but the job is just general savings?

[00:37:02] Jesse: Yeah. You've built a situation where you know your main objective is being achieved.

And so you can really relax. Like you certainly don't need to be super granular. When Julie and I were first married, I could be like, Julie, how much did this can of corn cost? She'd be like, 65 cents, but I got it down to 42 because I did XYZ, and now if you're like, Julie, how much did you just spend 10 minutes ago at Costco?

Roughly plus or minus a hundred dollars she'd be like “I don't, I don't know.” Is she being wasteful? No, she's just buying food for the people that live with us, so her granularity has changed, and this person that's doing the anti-budget going for fire with lots of discretionary income, they're doing the same thing.

I'm going to dial back my granularity to a couple of buckets. And I've tested that. I tested that a couple of years ago where I had giving, I had savings, and then it was like this massive other category. I ended the year with a checking account balance of $15,000 less than what it normally is.

Wow. And I don't know where the money went. So it bugged me because I'm like, where did that go? I like all of our goals have been hit and we have a high checking account. We store like we're saving up for a car in eight years. It goes in the checking account like we put everything in there. So it's a big amount.

And I was just like, where did that go? It was during 2020. So maybe it was just like weird pandemic behavior. I don't know what happened, but I personally didn't like not knowing on a more specific level, but there are other people. That is totally okay, because they know the big stuff's being done. And if it's working, like if you're checking the boxes and you're hitting your goals, do not listen to me.

You're doing fine. Don't change a thing. Don't go check out the website, and don't adopt the software. Like why just you got it going, It's good. But for people that are like, I need to learn a little more. I need to change a little more behavior. I don't have this amount of discretionary income, they're going to need to be more careful.

If you guys are flying low to the ground, are like, what's your level of attention? It changes. And so that's what we're talking about here. But when you're cruising and you got it on autopilot and you're like, I'm going to go to the bathroom, literally. So in that sense, we can adjust appropriately and it would be inappropriate to fly the entire time as if you were making an approach, you would annoy everyone you were talking to, so it's appropriate to adjust our intensity, I guess I'll say that and let it sit. But money is still being allocated appropriately, and that's what we never want to lose.

[00:39:34] Spencer: I think if you are in that scenario where to let's say your mid-six-figures or high six figures income, and maybe you dial the granularity back a little bit, where you can go to a restaurant and you can, It doesn't matter if the bill is $60 or $120, but at the end of the year if look back and you're like, Man, we made, let's say $200,000 and I can't account for $10,000. Like $10,000 just vanished. It didn't go to something we wanted. That's a $10,000 opportunity. If maybe the next year you track and you figure out, okay, where did that money go? Or what are we spending money on that we don't know?

And that's an extra $10,000 you may be able to give to the charity of your choice or that you might be able to throw into a kid's 529.

[00:40:19] Jesse: Yeah, Or just spend it intentionally. Just be like, “Man I could have bought something really awesome. Who knows?” But yeah, if you don't know and it bothers you, that's your signal.

That's that little bit of friction we mentioned earlier. Whether it's guilt or an unknown or the back of your mind, how we could be doing better or I wish this then, take a closer look, but just go back and work the rules. 

You don't have to work them with the granularity of what our software provides, transaction by transaction. You can still work the rules and be like, “All right, What are our values? Is our money doing what we really want?”

And that's where the magic happens. And then when you're in a relationship, and you both can have that conversation instead of like, “Why did you spend this? Why did you spend that?” And finger-pointing. 

It's like suddenly you learn more about your significant other. The relationship gets deeper and richer, and instead of all that friction, there's just a lot to be gained by just working those rules, levels of granularity, depending on essentially how much discretionary income you enjoy.

[00:41:17] Spencer: Yeah. I love that, love that freedom to pay as much attention as you need on the subject. And then once you've reached that point where you want to focus your attention somewhere else, then you can do that because you have the system set up. It's running in the background, and it's automated, and your goals are being achieved, and you don't have to stress about it so much.

[00:41:36] Jesse: There are diminishing returns if you track and track and track. And it's like when people start saying, “Oh, I have a toothpaste category, so I'm ready for my next one,” You're just like, “Yeah, you've gone too far. You've taken it way too far. You can probably just swing the toothpaste when that thing runs out.”

And so that's the bit; there are diminishing returns to the effort and you want to make sure you're balancing that.

[00:41:54] Spencer: Jesse, you must encounter the same questions over and over. Have you hit a million users yet?

[00:42:01] Jesse: Oh, I wish. No, we have not hit a million. Well, all in all, if I were to look back and see who we've helped along the way, we're well above that. It's not enough though. Is that your question? Am I satisfied? No, I'm not. We need more people.

[00:42:14] Spencer: Hopefully we can send some of our listeners to youneedabudget.com or to the app, but what are some of the most common misconceptions or myths that you encounter about budgeting? You addressed this a little bit earlier, but what’s just the top one or two things that people come in and they say, “Man, I don't want to do this.” And you say, “No, you need a budget. It's the name of the program.”

[00:42:35] Jesse: Yeah, I was being totally sincere when I said that I hate the name You Need a Budget. I don't mind YNAB because it's just like some weird word, and that's totally fine. 

But the first misconception is it's the idea that it's not flexible, which just kills it out of the gate. You will fail. You will fail quickly, and you'll blame it on the process, and you'll just say, “I can't do money or whatever.” And that's a tragedy. 

The second one is that it means you can't spend money. Money is meant to be spent. That's the whole point. I want to spend all of it. And if I outlive Julie, then I'll make sure it's all spent. If she outlives me, she'll make sure it's all spent. It's an agreement we have. 

It's meant to be spent. It's meant to be enjoyed. You've worked so hard for it, so enjoy it. And people come in, and they think budgeting means austerity. It's just a plan. 

It really is just a plan. And it's your plan. You're the coach, you're the maestro, you're the boss, you're the captain, whatever. But it's all yours. And so just work the plan. 

Actually, we see more people tell us that it is liberating, and I find that interesting considering their initial conception is it will be restricting, but they're like, “It is so liberating to go out to eat with my girlfriends or whatever. And not give it a second thought.” And then what's cool is they tell other girlfriends at the table that are sweating like, “I shouldn't have gotten the extra nuts on the salad or whatever.” They tell them, “No, actually I'm using this app. And they flash it to everyone. We love when that happens.”

So I love that. But that idea of just guilt-free, value-aligned spending, that's the whole point. You're going to love how you spend your money. 

Spencer: Have you read the book, Die With Zero? 

Jesse: No, but I really like the title. 

[00:44:18] Spencer: Yeah, Okay. You need to read Die With Zero because it gets to exactly what you just talked about with the agreement you have with your wife, where if you outlive her, you're going to spend all the money. If she outlives you, she's going to spend all the money. 

And that's essentially why he argues in the book- don't wait. This is getting a little tangential here, but especially if you have kids and you want to give them an inheritance, the time to transfer assets to them is probably between ages of 24 and 35.

Because if you do it before, they're too young and they don't know what to do with it. If you do it after that, if you've raised them right, they'll know what to do. But when people receive these million-dollar inheritances when they're in their sixties or in their seventies, it's too late. Either their health has declined or they don't need the money because they went and made their own luck, or they have made poor choices throughout life and so they need the money and they're just going to waste it anyway.

I highly recommend you check out Die with Zero. It's a book we've talked about on the podcast before.

[00:45:13] Jesse: I'll buy five copies and just kinda leave it around the house for my kids to just notice and be like, “What is that? What is that? That's Dad’s book. Oh no. Oh no. What's going to happen? I was really banking on that.”

[00:45:28] Spencer: Classic Warren Buffet situation.

[00:45:30] Jamie: Okay, Jesse This might be a little bit of a trap for advice because it might conflict a little bit with your values-based spending, but a question we've asked a couple of other guests is this. Let's say that there's a young airman listening and they're stationed overseas in Japan.

They have $3,000 a month, call it after taxes. And they have pretty low expenses, call it $1500 a month, so pretty easy math, even for a history major. How would you help guide them to set up their budget with the remaining $1500 that they have?

[00:45:56] Jesse: I would just walk them through the exercises we do with people.

So one that you do is you don't think about the money at all, and you just start talking about what do you want? You live here in Japan. That would be a sweet place to live. If I lived there, I would try and learn Japanese. I tried one year for six months. I totally gave up. It was so unbelievably hard. But if I lived there, maybe I'd have a better shot.

So that's what I would do. I would seriously look at acquiring some sweet sword while I was over there. These are just Jesse drops in Japan, and I would go get tutored by a master Japanese woodworker and be like, “How do you do this?” So yeah, I would seize the day while I'm over there. 

You live in a spot that you won't live in again, probably. And it's unique in the world and awesome in a thousand ways. So that's where my mind goes. We have an opportunity here. So yeah, we're throwing money in the TSP, you're fine, you've got a housing allowance that lets you live in this crazy expensive place for a very subsidized situation. So all of this is working for you.

That's where I'd go. Woodworking, samurai stuff, the language. Yeah, you live in this spot. Enjoy it, and use it. Don't just sit in your apartment and jump on video games. That is a sweet opportunity. So yeah, I deploy the money that way. How's that for putting my will on someone else's money? That's what I would do, It's totally what I would do. 

I'm excited just talking about it, man. Like I want to move to Japan. I just have to find a really big spot to stick all the kids.

Jamie: I don't think they make cars big enough for your family in Japan. 

Jesse: I know. I'd be like, “Excuse us. Sorry. Sorry. We got to, sorry, excuse us.” I would just go down the road to be like, “Honey, we're at the end. We just have to leave this car here. We're stuck.”

So we were in Europe with a big Mercedes van one time, and the tiny little roads like in these tiny villages over in Germany, and Julie, man, I had lived there for a couple of years, so I was fine, but she did not like how narrow those roads were. It was awesome. 

Anyway, seize the moment while you're there. What a unique opportunity. Make sure the big stuff's still taken care of. Don't stop funding retirement. If you've got some debt that you don't like, get rid of it. But if you have some debt that's on a low rate and you're there for a few years, maybe you pause, maybe you like, go passive on the debt pay down and strike while the iron's hot, so to speak, while you're there, I don't know. 

But what's cool about it is, I got totally sidetracked with Samurai stuff, but what's cool about it is you don't talk about the money for a while. You just talk about what you want to do. You divorce it from the money, and you get the gears going, and then you impose reality, money, on it and start to actually prioritize.

But it's fun just to let your mind go for a bit. You really find out what moves the person. And then go from there. So yeah, I'd run them through that kind of an exercise. Hopefully, there's one person listening that's like, “Oh my gosh, I'm here. Yeah, I'm going to do this. I'm here. I need to be a samurai. Especially a woodworking one man.” Like those guys are next level.

[00:48:55] Spencer: No, I love that answer for little Airman, Jesse, stationed in Japan. I get that question on Instagram and via email sometimes where these guys, they're 19 or 20 years old, they're stationed in Japan, and they're contributing 20% to their TSP. They've got a lot of money left over and they're like, “Where else should I invest?” 

Invest in yourself. Go travel, man. Buy a $50 ticket to Korea and go see Korea for two weeks. Or hop on a bullet train and get down to Tokyo. The world is literally your oyster when you're 20 years old, you're making too much money, and maybe not too much, but some money in your TSP, as you said, and then get out there and see the world. Get some stories.

[00:49:36] Jesse: Yeah. Make some stories.

[00:49:38] Spencer: Nobody's going to care I maxed out my TSP when I was 20 years old. It's like, okay, good for you kid. Nobody cares. Get out there and definitely contribute to your TSP and then get some stories. 

Speaking of stories, you've got, I think two podcasts. Is that right?

[00:49:51] Jesse: Yeah. One of them's the good one, and that's the budgeting podcast that I hate to say is budget. It's just me ranting about trying to work the four rules. And you can find that, it's YNAB. 

But the other podcast that I started recently with a good buddy of mine is for business owners, where we, it's called Beginning Balance.

We talk a lot about, well we go on serious tangents over there, but we do try and apply this decision-making framework around spending in the small business arena, because there's a lot more money flowing through business than there is in personal. So if you can redirect that flow, You have an even bigger impact. So it's been a fun spot to jump into pretty new. The same rules apply, but just in the business sphere.

[00:50:33] Spencer: Are there any episodes that you'd recommend listeners to go listen to off the top of your head on either of those shows?

[00:50:39] Jesse: The first few of the Beginning Balance, where we go through the rules for business owners, they are solid.

Some of the others, you can look at the topics and be like, “Oh, they talk about hiring. I don't care. They talk about process improvement. I don't care.” 

But those first, that is just applying the method to business thinking and strategic thinking. Those are fantastic. 

And then on the other podcast, I have no idea, it's probably almost 600 episodes at this point. They're all 4 or 5 minutes long. They're just a quick little hit. I think it's weird when people listen to all of them from the beginning. That's super creepy. I don't like that. I've been doing this for 10 years. So they're like, “Oh, I loved the episode…” And I'm like, “What did I say? Did I even say that?” 

It's scary to think, 10 years ago you were saying stuff, but they're all there and people just get a little quick hit and it's really just to stay on track. Okay, yeah, I'm going to keep working the rules, but you don't need to listen to this voice for hours at a time, that'd be horrible.

[00:51:34] Jamie: But Jesse, our time is coming quickly to an end. I want to give you one quick shout-out on your podcast, the YNAB podcast because I'm continuously impressed that you can cover a complex situation like any personal finance or budgeting topic in 4 or 7 minutes.

Anyone that's been listening to Spencer and me for a while knows that we are more like 45 or 60 minutes, and we tend to ramble and go on tangents like you mentioned with your other podcast as well, so I'm very impressed by that and applaud your short and concise episodes there.

[00:52:01] Jesse: It's a gift. No, you'll be like, “Man, your answers here were longer than every one of your podcast episodes. That's quite something.” But yeah, there it is.

[00:52:10] Jamie: We really appreciate your time today. Does YNAB offer a free trial period or how can users get started with if they want to learn more about YNAB or connect with you and your team, where should they go find you?

[00:52:20] Jesse: So ynab.com, and you can find us there. The software's got a 34-day trial and then see how it works from one month to the next. It's important that you see that transition from month to month. But also we have online classes that people can take that are live if they want to learn more.

We have a fun YouTube channel that people can subscribe to between subscribing to all the other random stuff on YouTube. You've got that. So every once in a while on your feed, it'll pop up something useful about, spending a little better. 

But honestly, if people just work the rules, you don't have to use our software, I would love for people to, it's built to do the rules really well. But two things. If you're already hitting all your goals, just see this as entertainment. Number two is if you like the four rules, and you want to implement them, you can use our software to do it. 

But the rules are free. It's just good thinking. So I don't want anyone to feel like they have to disrupt their whole flow just to use this software, but I am proud of it, and I'm proud of the team that puts it out there. It's top-notch. So yeah, that's a little bit of my pitch on that, but hopefully, people pulled some extract out of this and can get some value from it.

[00:53:27] Jamie: What about social media, Instagram page, or Twitter, or anything else where people can find you?

[00:53:32] Jesse: Yeah, @YNAB for Twitter and @YouNeedABudget for Instagram as well.

I got off Twitter in 2016, so you can't find me, but people can email me personally if they want to, especially if you're deployed in Japan and you are a young Airman, let's chat. Email me, let's figure this out. But that's jesse@ynab.com to shoot me an email. But I'm off social stuff just so I can stay focused on things that matter. No knock on anyone on social, but let's be honest.

[00:54:01] Jamie: I mentioned to you before we start recording it a little bit throughout the episode, I personally have been using the YNAB software and app since 2019, over three years now. And I'm really enjoying what you guys are doing.

I really appreciate all the work your team does, and how it's helped my wife and me communicate better about money and have that values-based spending that you talked about. It's been really powerful for us personally. So thank you so much to you and the team.

[00:54:23] Jesse: Thank you. That's awesome to hear.

[00:54:25] Spencer: Jesse, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Again, people can find you at youneedabudget.com. You also mentioned your socials there as well if they want to reach out. 

And again, I think this was an awesome episode. Hopefully, there's some young Airman in Japan that takes up Japanese woodworking and gets a samurai sword. And thank you for the lessons you imparted today.

[00:54:47] Jesse: Thank you for having me.

[00:54:49] Jamie: Wow. What a great episode. Hopefully, you all enjoyed it too. Huge thanks to Jesse and the YNAB team for coming on with us. That was a blast to hang out with him for a little bit. 

Our top three takeaways from today's episode are values-based spending. Spend more, spend less. It doesn't matter. Just ensure it's a good decision for you and your family. 

Number two, changing your budget is not failing. You have to adjust the plan sometimes, and number three, if you feel guilty when you're spending, you're doing it wrong. Money is meant to be spent guilt-free and aligned with your values. 

As always, thanks for joining us on the Military Money Manual Podcast.

If you have any questions or feedback for Spencer or me, hit us up on Instagram @militarymoneymanual or email us two at podcast@militarymoneymanual.com. We continue to get great questions and discussions there, and we really love the conversations we get to have with our listeners. Don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe with that plus button or the bell so you'll see each new episode as we release them. 

Apple Podcast listeners, let's see if we can get our numbers up over there. Huge thanks again to YNAB and Jessie. Remember, you can find them on youneedabudget.com or the YNAB app in your app store for more information.