Financial Planning

YFP 384: Beyond Salary: Negotiating Your Value in the Workplace

Posted on by YFP Media

YFP Co-Founders Tim Baker and Tim Ulbrich discuss essential negotiation skills inspired by Chris Voss’s book, Never Split The Difference, covering key strategies to boost your financial plan, mindset, and confidence.

Episode Summary

In this episode, YFP Co-Founders Tim Baker and Tim Ulbrich have a valuable conversation on negotiation—an essential skill that impacts not only finances but also mindset and confidence. Inspired by Chris Voss’s book, Never Split The Difference, Tim and Tim explore negotiation techniques drawn from Voss’s experience as a former FBI hostage negotiator and break down why negotiation is vital for your financial plan, key goals, and practical strategies for navigating each step.

About Today’s Guests

Tim Baker is the Co-Founder and Director of Financial Planning at Your Financial Pharmacist. Founded in 2015, YFP is a fee-only financial planning firm and connects with the YFP community of 12,000+ pharmacy professionals via the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast podcast, blog, website resources and speaking engagements.

Tim attended the United States Military Academy majoring in International Relations and branching Armor. After his military career, he worked as a logistician with a major retailer and a construction company. After much deliberation, Tim decided to make a pivot in his career and joined a small independent financial planning firm in 2012. In 2016, he launched his own financial planning firm Script Financial and in 2019 merged with Your Financial Pharmacist. Tim now lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife (Shay), three kids (Olivia, Liam and Zoe), and dog (Benji).

Tim Ulbrich is the Co-Founder and CEO of Your Financial Pharmacist. Founded in 2015, YFP is a fee-only financial planning firm and connects with the YFP community of 15,000+ pharmacy professionals via the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast podcast, blog, website resources and speaking engagements. To date, YFP has partnered with 75+ organizations to provide personal finance education.

Tim received his Doctor of Pharmacy degree from Ohio Northern University and completed postgraduate residency training at The Ohio State University. He spent 9 years on faculty at Northeast Ohio Medical University prior to joining Ohio State University College of Pharmacy in 2019 as Clinical Professor and Director of the Master’s in Health-System Pharmacy Administration Program.

Tim is the host of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast which has more than 1 million downloads. Tim is also the co-author of Seven Figure Pharmacist: How to Maximize Your Income, Eliminate Debt and Create Wealth. Tim has presented to over 200 pharmacy associations, colleges, and groups on various personal finance topics including debt management, investing, retirement planning, and financial well-being.

Key Points from the Episode

Importance of Negotiation in Financial Planning [0:00]
Introduction to Negotiation and Its Role in Financial Planning [1:23]
The Process and Importance of Negotiation [6:45]
Employer Expectations and Employee Responsibilities in Negotiation [13:07]
Strategies for Effective Negotiation [17:09]
Counteroffers and Leveraging Non-Salary Terms [32:18]
Tools and Techniques for Negotiation [37:19]
Applying Negotiation Strategies in Financial Planning [46:54]
Conclusion and Final Thoughts [47:08]

Episode Highlights

“Negotiation is really a process of discovery. It really shouldn’t be viewed as a battle. It’s really a process of discovery.” – Tim Baker [5:58]

“I think there is often a sentiment and I know I’ve felt it myself, where, you know what, I’m glad to have a position. I’m glad to be making a good income. But that can be true, and you still can be a good person, and you still can negotiate and advocate for yourself and the value you bring to the organization.” – Tim Ulbrich [6:20]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich 00:00

Hey everybody. Tim Ulbrich here and thank you for listening to the Yfp Podcast, where each week, we strive to inspire and encourage you on your path towards achieving financial freedom. Negotiation. That’s what we’re talking about today, an important skill that many of us were not taught, and one that can move the needle significantly, yes, financially, but also in terms of mindset and confidence. One of my favorite resources on this topic is the book never split the difference by Chris Voss. I first heard this book on a podcast interview several years ago where Chris was demonstrating his quote late night DJ voice, which is one of the fun techniques he describes in that book. Now, if you haven’t read the book before. In addition to listening to today’s episode, check it out and make sure to do the audio version. It’s fantastic and really drives home the examples used throughout. Chris is a former FBI international hostage negotiator who took what he learned from high stakes negotiation and brought it to us for everyday use. Now, considering that effective negotiation can have a big impact on your financial plan. This week, we’re hitting replay on an episode that Tim and I recorded back in August of 2020 during the show, we discussed why negotiation is important your financial plan, the goals of negotiation and tips and strategies for different parts of the negotiation process that you can implement in your own negotiation. Make sure to listen all the way through as I’m confident in saying, there will be a positive return on your time investment. One last thing, unlike traditional financial planning firms, our team of certified financial planners at Yfp is experience in helping our clients through negotiations, whether that be negotiating within an organization for a new position or to increase salary or for someone looking for a new job, if we can help with your negotiation, head on over your financial pharmacist.com click on book a discovery call so that we can learn more about your situation and see whether or not our services are the right fit for You. All right, let’s jump into our conversation on effective negotiation. Tim Baker, welcome back to the show.

Tim Baker 02:08

Yeah, happy to be here. How’s it going?

Tim Ulbrich 02:09

Tim, it’s going excited to talk negotiation something we discuss a lot, a lot in presentations, a lot. I know that you discuss with clients as a part of the financial plan, but we haven’t addressed it directly on the show before. So I’m excited that we get a chance to dig into this topic. And we know that negotiation can carry a lot of power, and can be used across the board, really, in life, right? Could be negotiating terms for a new or existing job, position, buying a car, buying a house, negotiating with your kids or spouse, kidding, not not kidding, as we’ll talk about here in a little bit, so we’re going to focus predominantly on salary negotiation, but really, these techniques can be applied to many areas of the financial plan and really life as a whole. So Tim, I know that for you, negotiation is a key piece of the financial plan, and you and our CFPs over at Yfp talk about negotiation in the context of financial planning, which I would say is probably not the norm of the financial planning industry and services. So let’s start with this. Why is negotiation such an important piece of the financial plan?

Tim Baker 03:14

Yeah, so I think you know, if we, if we look at why, if peace mission, you know why? If he’s mission is to empower pharmacists to achieve financial freedom. So I think the building blocks of that really is kind of what we do day in and day out with with clients at Yfp plan. And what I what I typically, or the way that we typically approach a financial plan, is we really want to help the client grow and protect their income, which is the lifeblood of the financial plan. Without income, nothing moves. But we know that probably more importantly than that is grow and protect the balance sheet, the net worth, which means increase in assets efficiently and decrease in liabilities efficiently and ultimately moving the net worth number in the right direction. So those are, you know, both quantitative things, but then qualitatively, we want to make sure that we’re keeping all the goals in mind. So grow and protect income and net worth while keep the goals in mind. So to me, that’s, that’s our jam, you know. So you know when I when I say, you know, when somebody asked me a question, like we do the ask a wife, pcfp, and I’m like, I always say, Well, it depends. A lot of it depends, really, on those, those foundational like, where are we at with the balance sheet, and where do we want to go? Meaning, what? What are our goals? What’s our why? What’s a, what’s the life plan? You know, what’s a wealthy life for you? And how can we support that with the financial plan? So to go back to your question, you know, my belief is that the income is a is a big part of that. And you know, what I found with working with many, many pharmacists is sometimes, and sometimes pharmacists are not just, you know, not great at advocating for themselves. You know, most of the people that I talk to, you know, when we talk about salary negotiation, they’re like, um. You know, I just thankful I have a job, and I’m in agreement with that. But, you know, sometimes a little bit of negotiation and having some of the skills that we’ll talk about today to better advocate for yourself is is important, and it’s in a lot of this stuff is not necessarily just for salary. It can be for a lot of different things. But to me, what I what I saw as a need here. You know, same thing, like most financial planners don’t walk, walk you through kind of home purchase and what that looks like, because most financial planners are working with people in their 50s, 60s and 70s. So a lot that was a need for a lot of our clients were like, Hey, Tim, I’m buying this house. I don’t really know where to start. So we, we, you know, provide some education and some recommendations and advice around that. So same thing with salary. It’s like I kept seeing like, well, maybe, you know, maybe I, you know, I took the job too quickly, or, you know, I didn’t advocate for myself. So that’s really where we want to provide some education and advice, again, to have a better, better position from it, from an income, income perspective, yeah.

Tim Ulbrich 05:58

I think it’s a great tool to have in your tool bag, you know? And I think, as we’ll talk about here, you know, the goal is not to be an expert negotiator. There’s lots of resources that are out there that can help with this and make it tangible and practical, one of which will draw a lot of the information today. I know that you talk with clients, a resource I love, never split the difference by Chris Voss, but I’m glad you mentioned. You know, I think there is often a sentiment. I know I felt it myself, where, you know what, I’m glad to have a position. I’m glad to be making a good income. But that can be true, and you still can be a good person, and you still can negotiate and advocate for yourself and the value you bring to the organization. Yeah, so I hope folks will hear that and not, not necessarily think that negotiation is bad, and as we’ll talk about here in a moment, I think really can have a significant impact when you think about it as it relates to earnings over your career and what those additional earnings could mean. So Tim, break it down for us. What is negotiation? And really thinking further, why is it important?

Tim Baker 06:57

Yeah, so, so negotiation, you know, it’s really a process of discovery. You know, it really shouldn’t be viewed as as a battle. It’s really a process of discovery. It’s kind of that awkward conversation that you’re you should be obligated to have, because, you know, if you, you know, if you don’t want to advocate for yourself professionally, who will, and maybe you have a good mentor or something like that. But to me, the the negotiation again, is really to discover, you know, what, what you want, and kind of what you’re the counterpart you know, which might be a boss or a hiring manager or something like that. And it’s an it’s really important, because, you know, settling for a lower salary can have really major financial consequences, both both immediately and down the road. And you know, you you typically raises that you receive are typically based on a percentage of their salary. So we’re, hey, we’re going to give you a, you know, 3% raises here, a 5% raise if you start off with a salary that you’re not happy with. You know that then obviously, that’s, that’s a problem. Accrue less in retirement savings. So that TSP, that 401, K, 403, B, again, you typically are going to get some type of match in a lot of cases, and then you’re going to put a percent in. So again, that could potentially be lower, but it’s, it is. It’s not just about salary. It can be, you know, I think another mistake that sometimes people make is that they’ll say, oh, wow, I was making, you know, 125 and, you know, I’m taking a job that’s paying me 135 and they take a major step back on some of the non salary, things like benefits and flex scheduling and time off and things like that. But you know, you really want to make sure that the compensation package that you have, you know you’re happy with, because being overpaid, being underpaid, really can make you feel resentful over the long run. So you want to make sure that you’re, you know, again, you know, right now, we’re filming this in the midst of a pandemic, and you know the economy and the job market is tough, but you know, you still want to, you still want to advocate for yourself and make sure you’re getting the, you know, the best compensation package that that you can.

Tim Ulbrich 08:56

As we’ll talk about here in a little bit, I think If we frame this differently than maybe our understanding or preconceived beliefs. You know, you mentioned it’s not a battle, you know. I think the goal is that you’re trying to come to an agreement or an understanding. And as we’ll talk about here, many employers are likely expecting this, and that number, in terms of those that are expecting versus those that are actually engaging in the conversation, from an employee standpoint, is very different. So I think that might help give us confidence to be able to initiate some of those. And we’ll talk about strategies to do that. I do want to give one example, though. Tim, real quick, you mentioned, you know, obviously, if somebody earns less and they receive smaller raises, or they accrue less in retirement savings, that can have a significant impact. And and I went down the rabbit hole, prepping for this episode of just looking at a quick example of this, where you have two folks that, let’s say they both start working at the age of 28 they retire at their 65 so same starting point, same retirement age. Let’s assume they get a 3% cost of living adjustment every year for their career. Just to keep it simple, you. The only difference here is that one starts at 100k and one starts at 105k so because of either you know what, what they asked for negotiations, whatever be the case, one starts $5,000 greater than the other. And if you play this out, same starting age, same ending age, same cost of living adjustments, one starts at a higher point when it’s all said and done, one individual has about $300,000 more of earnings than the other. And this, of course, does not include differences that you’d also have, because a higher salary, if you have a match, that would increase, that would compound, that would grow, if you were to switch jobs, you’re at a better point of now negotiating from a higher salary. All other benefits that aren’t included. But the significance of the starting point, I think, is something to really look at those numbers that often where you start can inform where you’re going, not only from cost of living adjustments, but also future employment, right? So we know that where you start, if you get a 3% raise, it’s of course, gonna be based off that number. You decide to leave that employer and you go to another one, what do they ask you? How much did you make? You’re using that number. So that starting point is so critical, and I hope that new practitioners might even find some confidence in that, to be able to engage in discussions knowing how significant those numbers can be over a career. So in that one example, that starting point is a difference of about $300,000 Crazy, right?

Tim Baker 11:24

When you look at over a long time period, yeah, it’s not, it’s nuts. And I’d pay the devil’s advocate, you know, on the other side of that is that, you know, again, so much, just like everything else with with the financial plan, you can’t look at it, you know, in a vacuum, we’ve had clients, yeah, take a lot less money, and really was because of the the student loans, and how that would affect their strategy in terms of forgiveness and things like that. So, yeah, it is multifactorial. It’s definitely something that it should really be examined. And I think again, when you look at the overall context of the financial plan, but it to your point, Tim, that that start in salary, and really you know how you negotiate throughout the course of your career is going to be utterly important. And you know, again, what we say is, with, you know, we, we kind of downplay the income, because I think, you know, so much of what’s kind of taught us, like, oh, six figure salary, you’re you’ll be okay. And that’s not true. But then, you know it is true that it is the lifeblood of the financial plan. So I think if you have a plan and you’re intentional with what you’re doing, that’s where you can really start, you know, making moves with regard to your financial outlook,

Tim Ulbrich 12:26

yeah, and I’m glad you know you said that about salary shouldn’t be looked at in a silo. I mean, just to further that point, you you’ve alluded to it already, these numbers don’t matter. If there’s other variables that are non monetary that matter more, right? Whether that be time off or satisfaction in the workplace, opportunities that you have feelings that will come. I mean, the whole list of things that you can’t necessarily put a number to. I mean, I would argue if, if those are really important, you’ve got to weigh those against, you know, whatever this number would be, and there’s a certain point where the difference in money is it worth it? You know, if there’s other variables that are involved, which, which, usually there are, hopefully we can get both right salary and and non salary items. Yes. So interesting stats about negotiation. I’ve heard you present before on this topic, but I’d like you to share with our audience in terms of managers that are expecting hires to negotiate, versus those that do talk us through some of those as I think it will help us frame and maybe change our perception on employers expecting it and our willingness to engage in these conversations.

Tim Baker 13:34

Yeah, and I really need to cite, to cite this one. And I believe, I believe this first stat comes from Sherm, which is the Society for Human Resource Management. So I think this is, like the biggest association for, like HR and human resource personnel in the country. And the stat that that I use is that, you know, 99% of hiring managers expect prospective hires to negotiate. So if you think about that, you know, and you know, the overwhelming majority expect, you know, you the perspective hire to negotiate, and they build their initial offers as such. So, you know, the example, you know, I did the clients, is like, hey, you know, we have, you know, we have a position that we could pay, you anywhere from you know, 110,000 to 130,000 knowing that you know, Tim, if I’m offering this job to you, knowing that you’re probably going to negotiate with me, I’m going to offer it to you for 110 knowing that I have a little bit of wiggle room if you kind of come back with a counter offer. But what a lot of a lot of my clients, you know, or people do that I talk with is they’ll just say, Yes, I found a job. Crappy, crappy job market, you know, happy to get started, ready to get started. And there’s and they’re, they’re either, you know, overly enthusiastic to accept a job, or they’re just afraid that a little bit of negotiation would would, you know, hurt their, yeah, you know, hurt their outlook. So. So with that in mind is that you, you know the the offers, I think, are built in a way that you know you should, you should be negotiating and trying to, again, advocate for yourself.

Tim Ulbrich 15:09

Yeah, and so if people are presenting positions often, you know, with with a range and salary, expecting negotiation, I hope that gives folks, you know, some confidence and okay, that’s probably expected, and maybe shift some of the perception away from this whole thing could fall apart, which it could right at any given point in time, especially depending on the way you conduct yourself in that negotiation, which I think is really, really important to consider. But I think what we want to try to avoid, Tim, back to a comment you made earlier, is any resentment, right as well. I mean, if we think about this from a relationship standpoint. We want the employee to feel valued, and we want the employer to have a shot at retaining this individual long term, right? So it’s a two way, two way relationship,

Tim Baker 15:50

And it kind of, it kind of comes up to where, you know, we were talking about, what is, you know, what is the goal of negotiation? And really, the goal of negotiation is, is to come to some type of agreement. Yeah, the problem, the problem with that is, is that people are involved in this, and we as people are emotional beings. So if we feel like that, we’re being, you know, we’re treated unfairly, or we don’t feel safe and secure, or if we’re not in control of the conversation, you know, our emotions can get the best of us. So that’s that’s that’s important. So there again, there’s some techniques that you can, you know, utilize to kind of mitigate that. But you know, to allude to your point about, you know, negotiating the fear to kind of, you know, potentially mess up the deal. You know, there’s a stat that says 32% don’t negotiate because they’re too worried about losing the job offer. Yeah, I know Tim, like we can attest to this, because, you know, with our growth at Yfp, we’ve, we’ve definitely done some, some human resource in use that as a verb, and hiring and things like that of late. And I gotta say that, you know, the I think that some of this can be unfounded, just because there’s, there’s just so much, you know, blood, sweat and tears that goes into fire, you know, to fight finding the right people, to kind of surround, you know, yourself with, and bring into an organization that, to me, a little bit of back and forth is not going to ultimately lose the job. So typically, most, most jobs, there’s, you know, interview, you know, obviously there’s, there’s an application process, there’s interviews, there’s second interviews, there’s maybe on site visits, there’s kind of, you know, looking at all the candidates and then extending offers. If you get to that, that offer stage, you’re, you’re you’re pretty, you know, they’ve identified you as they’re the, you’re the person that they want. So, you know, sometimes a little bit of back and forth is not going to, you know, derail any such deal. So that’s, it’s really, really important to understand that, yeah, and

Tim Ulbrich 17:45

As the employer, I mean, we’ve all heard about the costs and statistics around retention. So as an employer, when I find that person, I want to retain them. That’s my that’s my goal. Right now, I want to find good talent on a retain good talent. So I certainly don’t want somebody being resentful about, you know, the work that they’re doing, the pay that they have. And so I think if we can work some of that out before beginning and come to an agreement, it’s a good fit for us, good fit for them, I think it’s also going to help the benefit of the, hopefully the long term relationship of that engagement. So it’s one thing to say, we should be doing it. It’s another thing to say, Well, how do we actually do this? Well, you know, what are some tips and tricks for negotiation? So I thought it’d be helpful if we could walk through some of the stages of negotiation, and through those stages we can talk as well as beyond that, what are some actual strategies to negotiation? Again, another shout out to never split the difference by Chris Voss. I think he does an awesome job of teaching these strategies in a way that really helped them come alive and are in our memorable Yeah. So, Tim, let’s talk about the the first stage, the interview stage, and what are some strategies that that those listening can take when it comes to negotiation in this stage.

Tim Baker 18:56

Yeah? So, so I kind of, when I, when I present, you know, these concepts to a client. I kind of said that the, you know, the four stages of the of negotiation are fairly, are fairly vanilla, you know. And the first one is the, you know, that interview. So when you get that interview, you know, what I say is, you know, typically you want to talk, talk less, listen more and learn more. Typically, the person that is talking the most is, is, is not in control. The conversation, the one that’s listening and answering, asking good questions, is in control. And I kind of, I kind of think back to, you know, some of our recent hires, and, you know, the people that we identify as, like, top candidates, I’m like, Man, their interviews went really well. And when I actually think, think back and slow down, it’s, it’s really, I think that they went really well, because there’s, it’s really that person asking good questions, and then, and then me just talking, and and, and that’s, and that’s like the perception, so in that, in that case, like the, you know, the candidate was asking us good questions, and we’re like, yeah, these, this was a great interview, because I’d like to hear myself talk, or I just get really excited. About, you know, what we’re doing at Yfp. So I think if you can really, you know, focus on your counterpart, focus on the organization, you know, whether it’s the hospital or whatever, whatever it is, and learn, and then the, you know, and then really pivot to the value that you bring. I think that’s going to be important, you know, most important. So, you know, understanding, you know, what, what some of their maybe pain points are, whether it’s retention or, you know, maybe some type of, you know, care issue, or whatever that may be, you know, you can kind of use that to your advantage as you’re as you’re kind of going through the different, you know, stages of negotiation, but the more that the other person talks, you know, the better. I would say, you know, in the interview stage, you know, one of the things that often comes up, you know, that can come off fairly soon, is the question about salary. And, you know, sometimes that is, you know, it’s kind of like a time saving. So it’s a Hey, Tim, you know, what are you looking for in salary? If you throw out a number that’s way too high, like, I’m not even gonna, you know, waste my time. And what I tell clients is, like you typically, you want to, and we’ll talk about anchoring. You really want to, do? You really want to avoid, you know, throwing, throwing a number out and for a variety of reasons. So one of the deflections you could use is, hey, I appreciate the question, but I’m really trying to figure out if I’d be a good fit for your organization. You know, we let’s talk about, you know, negotiate, or let’s talk about salary when the time comes. Or the other, the other piece of it is, it’s just, you are not, you’re not in the business of offering yourself a job. And what I mean by that is it’s, it’s their job to basically provide an offer. So, you know, hey, my current employer, you know, doesn’t really allow me to kind of reveal that kind of information. What did you have in mind? Or we know that pharmacy is a small business, and I’m sure your budget is, you know, is reasonable. What did you have in mind? So at the end of the day, it’s, it’s their job to extend the offer, not you, to kind of negotiate your against yourself, which can happen, you know, I had a, I had a, we signed on a client here at Yfp planning yesterday, and we were talking about negotiation. I think it was kind of had to do with that tax issue. And, you know, he he basically said this is what he was looking for. And then when he got into the organization, I think he saw the number that was budgeted for, and it was a lot more so. Again, if you can deflect that, and I tell a story, when I first got out of the army, I kind of knew this. But when I first got out of the army, I was interviewing for jobs, you know, I was in an interview, and I deflect it. And I think the guy asked me again, and I deflect it. I think he asked me for, like, maybe that asked me for like, four times, and I just wound up giving him a range that was, like, obnoxious, 100 to 200,000 or something like that. But to me, you know, that in the interview didn’t go, go well after that. But to me, it was, like, it was more about, you know, clearing the slate instead of actually learning more about me and seeing if I was a good fit. So you never want to lie about your current style. If they ask about your current style, you never want to lie, but you definitely want to deflect and move to things of like, okay, can I potentially be a good fit for your organization? And then go from there? Yeah. And

Tim Ulbrich 22:55

I think deflection takes practice, right? I don’t think that comes down to many of us. Totally, yeah. Yeah, this, this reminds me. So, you know, talk less, listen more for for any Hamilton folks we have out there, which is playing 24/7 in my house these days, the soundtrack, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna sing right now, but talk less. Smile, smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for. So I think that’s a good, good connection there to the interview stage. So next, hopefully comes the good news. Company wants to hire you makes an offer. So Tim, talk us through this stage. What? What should we be remembering when we actually have an offer on the table? Yeah, so

Tim Baker 23:30

I think you definitely want to be appreciative and thankful again when, when a company gets to a point where they’re extending you an offer, that’s, that’s, that’s huge. I remember when I got, again, my first offer out of out of the Army, because, again, you don’t really have a choice when you’re in the army. Well, I guess you do have a choice, but you know, they’re not like, here’s a here’s a written offer for your employment in this platoon somewhere in Iraq. But I remember getting the first offer. I’m like, Man, this is awesome. Shows your salary and the benefits and things like that. So you want to be appreciable and thankful you don’t appreciative and thankful. You don’t want to be you want to be excited, but not too over excited. So you don’t want to appear to be desperate. What I tell clients, I think the biggest piece here is make sure you get it in, write in, yes, and I have a, you know, a story that I tell him, because if it’s not in writing and what essentially says it didn’t, didn’t happen. So again, using some personal experience here, you know, first job out of the army, I had negotiated, you know, basically an extra week of vacation because I didn’t want to take a step back in that regard. And I got the offer, and the extra week wasn’t there. So I talked to my, my, you know, my future boss, about it, and he said, You know what, I don’t want to go back to headquarters and, you know, in ruffle some feathers. So why don’t we just take care of that on site here, and this was the job I had in Columbus, Ohio. And I said, Yeah, okay, I don’t really want to, you know, ruffle feathers either. The problem with that was when he got replaced, when he was terminated, eight months later, that currency burned up fairly quickly. Be so I didn’t have that, you know, that that extra week of vacation. So, you know, if it’s not written down, it never happens. So you want to make sure that, you know, you get it in, right in, and really go over that written offer extensively. So some employers, they’ll, they’ll extend an offer, and they want to, you know, a decision right away. I would walk away from that, you know, to me, a job change, or, you know, something of that magnitude, you know, I think warrants a 24 if not a 48 probably a minimum of 48 hour, you know, time frame for for you to kind of mold over and this is typically where I kind of, I come in and help clients, because they’ll say, Hey, Tim, I got this offer. What do you think? And we go through it, and we look at benefits, and we look at, you know, the total compensation package and things like that. But, you know, you want to, you know, ask for, you know, ask for a time, you know, some time to review everything and then agreed, you know, definitely adhere to the agree, agreed upon deadline to basically provide, you know, an answer or counteroffer, or, you know, whatever, whatever the next step is for you.

Tim Ulbrich 26:01

Yeah, and I think too, the advice to get it in writing helps buy you time. You know, I think you asked for it anyways. And I think the way you approach this conversation, you’re setting up the counter offer, right? So the tone that you’re using, it’s not about being arrogant here. It’s not about, you know, acting like you’re not excited at all. I think you can strike that balance between you’re appreciative, you’re thankful. You know, you’re continuing to assess if it’s a good fit for you and the organization you want. Some time you want it in writing, and you’re beginning to set the stage. And I think human behavior, right? Says if, if, if something is either on the table or pulled away slightly, the other party wants it a little bit more, right? So yes, if I’m the employer, and I really want someone, and I’m all excited about the offer, and I’m hoping they’re gonna say yes, and they say, Hey, I’m really, really thankful for the offer. I’m excited about what you guys are doing. I need some time to think about X, Y and Z, or, you know, I’m really thinking through X, Y or Z, like, all of a sudden, that makes me want them more, you know. So I think there’s, there’s value in in setting up, what is that, that counter offer? So talk to us about the counteroffer. Tim, break it down in some strategies to think about in this portion. Yeah.

Tim Baker 27:10

So, you know, the the counter offer is, I would say, you know, the majority of the time you should counter in some way. I think you’re expected to make a counter. And again, we kind of back that up with some stats. But you also, you need to know when, you know when not to kind of continue to go back to negotiating table, or when, when you’re asking or over asking. So, you know, I think research is going to be a good, you know, part of that, and I, what I tell clients is like, I can give them a very nice, non scientific I’ve worked with so many pharmacists that I can kind of say, oh, that sounds low, you know, in this for community pharmacy or industry, or whatever, you know, hospital in this area. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s your network, which could be someone like me, it could be a call, you know, colleagues. But it could also be things like Glassdoor, indeed, salary.com, so you want to make sure that your, you know, your offer, your counter offer, it is backed up in some type of, you know, fact, and really, you know knowing how to maximize your leverage. So if you are you know if you do receive more than one substantial offer, you know, you know from multiple employers, negotiating may be appropriate if the two positions are comparable and then, or if you have tangible evidence that the salary is too low, you know you have a strong position to negotiate. So I had a client that knew that new, newly hired pharmacists were being paid more than than she was, and she, you know, she had the evidence to show that. And basically they went back and did a nice adjustment. So, but again, I think as you go through the way that we kind of do this, you know, with clients, is we kind of go through the the entire letter, and, you know, the benefits and and I basically just highlight things and have questions about, you know, match or vacation time or salary and things like that. And then we start constructing it from there. So if you look at again, the thing where most people will start a salary is, you know, you really want to give. When you counter, you really want to give a salary range, rather than, like a number. So what I say is, if, a if, if, if, if you say, Hey, Tim, I really want to make $100,000 I kind of said it’s almost like the big bad wolf that blows the house down like all those zeros is, it’s not, it’s there’s no substance to that. But if you said, Hey, I really want to make $105,985 the the Journal of experimental social psychology says that using a precise number instead of a rounded number gives it a more potent anchor. So your homework, right? Yeah, you know, you know what you what, you know, what you’re worth, you know, what the positions worth? It’s given the appearance of research. So I kind of like, you know, it’s kind of like the gap the Zach Galifianakis, me, that has all the equations that are flowing. It’s kind of like that. But the the $100,000 you can just blow that house over. So, and I think so. So once you figure out that number, then you kind of want to. Change it so, you know, they say, if you give a range of, you know, you know, of a salary, then it opens up room for discussion, and shows the employer that you have flexibility, and it gives you some cushion. In case, you know, you think that you’re asking for a little bit too high so that’s, that’s going to be, that’s going to be really, really important is, is that to provide kind of precise numbers in in a range, and, oh, by the way, I want to be kind of paid at the upper, upper echelon of that. So

Tim Ulbrich 30:28

real quick on that you mentioned before, the concept of anchoring. I want to spend some time here as you’re talking about a range. So dig into that further. What that means in terms of, if I’m given a range, how does anchoring fit into that. Yeah.

Tim Baker 30:41

So, you know, we kind of talk about this more more when we kind of talk some about the tools and the behavior of negotiation, but the rain. So when we talk about, like anchoring, so anchoring is actually it’s a bias. So anchor and bias describes the common tendency to give too much weight to the first number. So again, if we’re, if we if we can, if I can, if can, have invite the listener to imagine an equation, and the equation is five times four times three times two times one, and that’s in your mind’s eye. And then you clear the slate, and now you imagine this equation one times two times three times four times five. Now, if I show the average person, and I just flash that number up, the first number that start, you know the first equation that starts with five and the second equation that starts with one, we know that those things equal, the same thing, but in the first equation, we see the five first. So it creates this anchor, creates this belief in us that that number is actually higher. Yeah. So, so the the idea of anchoring is typically that that number that we see really is a has a major influence. That first number is a major influence of where the negotiation goes. So you can kind of get into the whole idea of you know, factor in your knowledge of the zone of possible agreement, which is often called Zopa. So that’s the range of options that should be acceptable for both sides, and then kind of assessing, you know, your side of that, and then your your other parties anchor on that. So there’s, there’s lots of things that kind of going into anchoring, but you know, we, you know, we did this recently with a with a client, where I think they were offered somewhere in like the 110 112 area. And she’s like, you know, I really want to get paid closer to, like 117 118 so we, we basically in the counter offer. We said, hey, you know that, thanks for the offer. And we did something called an accusation on it, which we can talk about in a second. But thanks for the counter offer. But, you know, I’m really looking to make between, you know, I think we said something like 116 five, you know, 98 to, you know, all the way up into the 120s and it actually brought her up to, I think she was just 117 change actually brought her up closer to that 18. So using that range and kind of that, that range as an as a good anchoring position to help, help the negotiation. So there’s lots of different things that kind of go into anchor, in terms of extreme anchoring, and a lot of that stuff that they talk about in the book. But again, that’s kind of goes back to that first number being thrown out there can be really, really integral. And again, when you couple that on top of, hey, it’s, it’s their job to make you an offer, not the, not the other way around. You have to really learn how to deflect that and and know you know how to position, you know, position yourself in those negotiations. But that’s really the counteroffer. And what I would say to kind of just wrap up the counter offer is embrace the silence. Yeah, so Tim, there’s silence there. And I’m like, I want to, I want to feel the voice. And I do this with with clients, when we talk about, like mirroring and things like that, like people are uncomfortable with silence. And you know what he talks about in the book, which I would 100% this is really kind of a tip of the cat to Chris Voss in his book, which I love, I read probably at least once a year, where he talks about embracing the silence. We as people are conditioned to feel silences. So you know, he talks about sometimes people will, you know, negotiate against themselves. If you just sit there and you say, Uh huh, that’s interesting. And then in the in the counters, just be pleasantly persistent on the non salary terms, which can be both subjective and objective in terms of what you’re looking for in that position, yeah. And I

Tim Ulbrich 34:19

want to make sure we don’t lose that. You know, we’re talking a lot about salary. But again, as we mentioned at the beginning, really try to not only understand but but fit what’s the value of those non salary terms. So this could be everything from, you know, paid time off to, obviously, other benefits, whether that be health or retirement. This, of course, could be called culture of the organization, whether it’s that specific site, the broader organization, opportunities for mentorship.

Tim Baker 34:48

Yep, mentorship, yes, yes, all that.

Tim Ulbrich 34:51

I think what you hear from folks, I know I felt in my own personal career, with each year that goes on, I value salary, but salary means less than those other. Things mean more. And so as you’re looking at, let’s just say two offers is one example. Let’s say they’re 5000 apart. Like, I’m not saying you give on salary, but how do you factor in these other variables?

Tim Baker 35:10

Yeah, well, and I think too, and I’ll this is kind of, you know, kind of next level with this. And I’ll give you some examples to cite it. I think another, thing to potentially do when you when you are countering and when you’re shifting to some of the maybe the non salary stuff is really took a hard look at your potential employer, or even your current employer, if this is a you know, if you’re an incumbent and you’re and you’re being reviewed and you’re just advocated for a better compensation package, is look at the company’s mission and values. Yeah. So the example I give is like, when we, when we, when Shay and I got pregnant with Liam, you know, she didn’t, she didn’t have a, you know, a maternity leave benefit, and when she was being reviewed, we kind of, you know, invoked the company. And I think it’s like work life balance and things like that. And we’re like, Well, how can you say that and not back that up? And again, we do it. We did it tactfully. And because you’re almost like, you’re almost like, negotiating against yourself, right? So I present this to clients like the Spider Man meme, whether you know, two spider mans are pointing at each other, and she was able to negotiate a better you know, I’m attorney, and it actually, and you we look at us, you know? And I, you know, I give these, one of our values is encourage growth and development, you know. So if an employee says, Hey, and they make a case that I really want to do this, and, you know, it’s almost like we’re negotiating against ourselves. So I think, if you can one, I think it shows, again, the the research and that you’re really interested and plugged into what the organization is doing. But then I think you, you’re, you’re leveraging the the company against itself in some ways, because you’re almost, you know, negotiating against, well, yeah, we put these on the wall as something that we believe in, but we’re not going to support it. Or, you know, so or, you know, at the very least, it plants a seed, right? And that’s what I that’s what I say sometimes with clients, you know, we do strike out. We don’t, you know, it’s like, it’s, it is hard to move the needle and sometimes, but at least one, we’ve got an iteration under our belts where we are negotiation. And two, we’ve planted a seed with that employer, you know, assuming that they took the job anyway, that says, Okay, these are things that are kind of important to me that we’re going to talk about again when we get and things like that. So I think that’s huge.

Tim Ulbrich 37:18

Good stuff. So let’s talk about some tools that we can use for negotiation, and again, many of these are covered in more detail in the book and other resources, which we’ll link to in the show notes. I just want to hit on a few of these. Let’s talk about mirroring accusation audits and the importance of getting a that’s right while you’re in these conversations. And we’ll leave our listeners to dig deeper in some of the other areas. So talk to us about mirroring. What is it? And kind of give us the example and strategies of mirroring.

Tim Baker 37:49

Yeah. And I would actually, Tim, what I would do is I would actually back up, because I think one of the, I think probably one of the most important tools that that are there, I think, is, is the calibrated questions. That’s one of the first things that he talked Yeah. And the reason so, what is a calibrated question? So a calibrated question is a question with really no fixed answer that gives the illusion of control. So the answer, however, is kind of constrained by that question, and you, the person that’s asking the question, has control of the conversation. So I give the example. You know, when we, when we moved into our our house after we renovated it. So brand new house, I walk into my daughter’s room. I think it was four. She was four at the time, and she’s coloring on the the wall in red, red, red crown. And I’m from, I’m from Jersey. So I say crown, not crayon. So she’s, and I, and I look at her, and I say, Olivia, why are, why are you doing that? And she sees how, like, upset I am and mad, or, you know, and she just starts crying. And there’s no there’s no negotiation from there. There’s negotiation over if, there’s no exchange of information. So in an alternate reality, in an alternate reality, what I should have done instead. Olivia, what? What caused you to do that? So you’re basically blasting instead of why is, why is very accusatory. You’re like, you know, the how and the what questions are good so, and of course, she would say, well, Daddy, I ran out of paper, so the walls the next best thing. So the use of, the use of, and having these calibrated questions in your back pocket, I think, again, buys you some time. And really, I think, frames the conversation with your counterpart well. So using words like how and what, and avoiding things like why, when, who, so you know, what about this works. Doesn’t work for you. How can we make this better for us? How you know? How do you want to proceed? How can we solve this problem? What’s the biggest challenge you face? These are all how does this look to you? These are all calibrated questions that again, as you’re kind of going back and forth, you can kind of lean on so have good how and what questions to kind of answer the question about mirroring. As you’re asking these questions, you’re mirroring. Counterpart. So what mirror in the scientific term is called ISO praxism, but he defines this as the Real Life Jedi mind trick. This causes vomiting of information, is what he says. So you know, these are not the droids you’re looking for. So what, what you essentially do is you, you repeat back the last one to three words, or the critical words of your counterpart sentence, your counterpart sentence. So this is me mirroring myself. Yeah. Well, you want to repeat back because you want to, you want them to reveal more information, and you want to build rapport and have that curiosity of kind of what is, what is the other person thinking? So you can again, come to come to an agreement, come to an agreement. Yeah. So you at the end of the day, the purpose. So this is mirror, and so I’ll show you a funny story. The you know, I do. I practice this on my wife, sometimes who does not have a problem speaking, but sometimes with counterpoint listening, by the way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I’ll probably be in trouble. But so I basically just, you know, for the you know, for conversation, just just mirror back exactly what she’s saying. And you can do this physically. You can cross your legs or your arms, or, you know, whatever that looks like, but, but when he talks about more is with words, and, you know, I’ll basically just mirror back my wife and she, at the end of the conversation, she’ll say something like, Man, I feel like you really, like, listen to me. And I laugh about that, because I’m just really repeating back. But if you think about it, I did, because for you to be able to do that, you really do have to listen so, so mirroring again, if you’re just repeating back, you really start to uncover more of what your counterpart is thinking. Because often, like, what comes out of our mouth, you know, the first or even second time is just smoke, you know, so really uncovering that one of the things he talks about is, you know, is labeling where, you know, this is kind of described as the method of validating one’s emotion by acknowledging it. So it’s, it seems like you’re really concerned about patient care. It seems like you’re really concerned about the organization’s retention of talent. So what you’re doing is that you’re using neutral statements that don’t involve the use of I or we, so it’s not necessarily accusatory, and then you are, you know, same with the same with the mirror. You really want to not step on your mirror. You want to not step on your label and really invite the other person to say, Yeah, I’m just really frustrated by this or that. So labeling is really important to basically diffuse the power then the negative emotion and really allow you to remain neutral and kind of find out more about that. So that’s super important, yeah.

Tim Ulbrich 42:39

And I think with both of those, Tim, as you’re talking, it connects well back to what we, we mentioned earlier, of of talk less, listen more like you’re Yeah, you’re really getting more information out, right from from a situation that can be guarded. You know, people are trying to be guarded. And I think more information could lead, hopefully, to a more fruitful negotiation. What about the accusation audit?

Tim Baker 42:59

Yeah. So the accusation audit is, um, is it’s one of my favorites. Kind of same, same with calibrated questions. I typically will tell clients, I’m like, Hey, if you don’t, you know, if you don’t learn anything from this, I would say, have some calibrated questions in your back pocket and have a good accusation audit at the Reddit at the ready. And we typically would, typically will use the accusation audit to kind of frame up a counter offer. So, you know, it kind of, it kind of, so, so what? Before I give you the example, the accusation audit is a technique that’s used to identify and labor label, probably like, the worst thing that your counterpart could say about it. So these, this is all the, like, the head trash that’s kind of going on, yes, what of why? I don’t want, don’t want to negotiate. It’s like, Ah, they’re gonna think that, you know, I’m over asking, or I’m greedy, like all those things are that you’re, you’re thinking, so you’re really, you’re really just pointing to the elephant in the room, and you’re just trying to take this thing out and really let the air out of the room, you know, where a lot of people just get so nervous about this. So a good accusation audit is, Hey, Tim, I really appreciate the offer of, you know, $100,000 you know, to work, you know to work with your you know, with your organization. You’re probably gonna think that I’m the greediest person on planet Earth, but I was really looking for this to that, or great line, great. Or you’re, or you’re probably thinking that I’m gonna, I’m asking way too much, or you’re probably thinking that I’m way under qualified for this position, but here’s what I’m thinking. So you’re so again, like, no. Tim, right, right? So when someone says that to me, I’m like, No, I don’t think that. And what often happens, and again, this, this, clients have told me this, what often happens is that the person you know, the counterpart that they’re working with, like, they’re they, they’re recruited as, like, you know, one person said one client was like, Oh, we’re gonna find you more money. We’re gonna figure it out. So they like, you know. So when someone says that to you, you know, just think about how you would feel, you know, I don’t think that at all. And then it just kind of lets the the air out of the room. So you basically preface your counter offer with like, the. The worst things that they could say about about you, and then they typically say that’s not, that’s not true at all. So I love the accusation on it’s so simple, it’s kind of easy to remember. And I think it’s just, it just lays, I think, the groundwork for just great conversation and hopefully resolution.

Tim Ulbrich 45:16

That’s awesome. And then let’s wrap up with a goal of getting to a, that’s right. I remember when I was listening to interview with Chris Voss, this is a part that I heard, and I thought, Wow, that’s so powerful. If you can get in the midst of this negotiation, if we can get to a, yeah, that’s right, the impact that that could happen in the outcome.

Tim Baker 45:33

So, so he kind of talks about it like, you know, kind of put in all of these different tools together, so it’s, um, you know, mirroring and labeling and kind of, you know, using, I think, what he calls minimal encouragements of, uh huh, I see, kind of paraphrasing back what you hear from your from your counterpart, and then really wait for it’s like, Hey, did I get that? Did I get that right? Or am I tracking and what you’re really looking for is that that’s right. And he said, that’s even better than than a yes. So, like, one of the examples I give is, you know, when, when I speak with prospective clients, you know, we’re talking about, like my student loans and my investment portfolio and my, you know, I’m not doing real budgeting, and, you know, I got sold a life insurance policy that I think isn’t great for me. And so we go through all these different parts of the financial plan, and I basically am summarizing back what, you know, what they’re saying, and I say, you know, at the end of it. So I’m summarizing, you know, 30 minutes of conversation, and, you know, I’m saying that, did I? Did I get that right? And they’re like, Yeah, that’s right. You’re, you know, a great listener, which I have to record for my wife sometimes because she doesn’t agree with me. So that’s what you what you what you’re looking for is, is, yeah, that’s right. This person has heard, you know, message sent, heard, understands me. He says, if you get a, if you if you get a, you’re right. So sometimes, again, I keep talking about my wife. I’m like, Hey, Shay, we have to do a better job of saving for retirement. She’s like, you’re right. That’s really code for Shut up and go away. So it’s a, it’s a That’s right, is what, what really what we’re what we’re looking for. So that’s, that’s, yeah, very powerful.

Tim Ulbrich 47:08

That’s great stuff. And really just a great overall summary of some tips within the negotiation process, the steps of the negotiation process, how it fits into the financial plan. We hope folks walk away with that and just a good reminder of our comprehensive financial planning services that we do at yp planning. This is a great example of when we say comprehensive, we mean it so it’s not just investments, it’s not just student loans, it’s really every part of the financial plan, anything that has $1 sign on it. We want our clients to be in conversation and working with our financial planners to make sure we’re optimizing that and looking at all parts of one’s financial planning here, negotiation is a good example of that. So we reference lots of resources. Main one we talked about here today was never split the difference by Chris Voss. We will link to that in our show notes, and as a reminder to access the show notes, you can go to yourfinancialpharmacist.com/podcast, find this week’s episode. Click on that, you’ll be able to access a transcription of the episode as well as as the show notes and the resources. And last but not least, if you like what you heard on this week’s episode of the podcast, please leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, wherever you listen to the show. Each and every week, have a great rest of your day.

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As we conclude this week’s podcast, an important reminder that the content on this show is provided to you for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for investment or any other advice. Information in the podcast and corresponding materials should not be construed as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any investment or related financial products, we urge listeners to consult with a financial advisor with respect to any investment. Furthermore, the information contained in our archive, newsletters, blog posts and podcasts is not updated and may not be accurate at the time you listen to it on the podcast. Opinions and analyzes expressed herein are solely those of your financial pharmacists, unless otherwise noted, and constitute judgments as of the dates published such information may contain forward looking statements which are not intended to be guarantees of future events. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward looking statements. For more information, please visit your financial pharmacist.com/disclaimer. Thank you again for your support of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast. Have a great rest of your week.

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6 Financial Moves for Mid-Career Pharmacists

Posted on by Caitlin Boyle

Are you a mid-career pharmacist who’s tackled some of the financial planning basics but is left wondering, “What’s next?”

You’re not alone!

Whether you’re feeling confident in your current trajectory or are wondering if you need a financial tune-up, we’ve got you covered with six financial moves to make as a mid-career pharmacist.

1. Recast the Vision of Your Financial Plan

This point in your pharmacy career (10-30 years after graduation) is the perfect time to reflect on financial (and personal!) goals you previously set, take note of where you currently are with those goals, and reset the vision of them if needed.

The truth is that this phase of life often brings a lot of transition. Depending on your age and when or if you had children, you may be beginning to think about them moving out of the house. Maybe you have elderly parents that you’re trying to prioritize or plan for their future care. Perhaps you’re beginning to think about retirement and are wondering if you’re on track. Or maybe you’re still in the thick of trying to take care of yourself prioritizing the needs of your children.

No matter what you’re facing, this is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the vision and the goals for your financial plan, how those goals changed over time, and reset your goals and how you’re going to fund them if needed.

2. Savings, Savings, Savings

This step of the checklist includes your emergency fund and taking a pulse on your retirement savings.

Let’s dig in.

Emergency Funds

We recently released a podcast episode that took a deep dive into emergency funds, including how to determine if it’s adequately funded and optimized.

If you haven’t recently revisited your emergency fund and the reserves you have on hand, now is a good time to do so as there is a possibility that your needs have changed.

For an emergency fund, what we’re looking for is three to six months of non-discretionary monthly expenses. These are expenses that have to be paid whether you are working or not, including mortgage or rent payments, utilities, insurance premiums, and food. After you add up all of your non-discretionary expenses, multiply that by three if you have two household incomes or by six if you have one household income. This gives you the number that you should have saved in your emergency fund.

Typically for Your Financial Pharmacist planning clients, we see anywhere between $15,000-%50,000 that’s needed to be saved in an emergency fund.

Retirement

Have you recently wondered if you’re on track for retirement?

Pharmacists we talk to at this mid-career stage often feel like they are getting hit in every direction.

Between kids’ expenses, kids’ college needs, retirement savings, caring for elderly parents, and paying off remaining debt, there are a lot of financial and personal priorities. Because of all of these different pressures, sometimes the retirement piece falls to the side or wasn’t a top priority for a while, and now, as you get to a point of being able to visualize retirement more, you may be wondering if your retirement savings are on track.

Check out these podcast episodes in our retirement series that dig into retirement savings, how to determine how much is enough for retirement, nest egg calculations, and how to build a retirement paycheck:

Don’t miss downloading this free guide: Retirement Roadblocks – Identifying and Managing 10 Common Risks

3. Social Security

If you haven’t looked at ssa.gov to see what your social security statement or projected benefits look like, now is the time to do so.

Having an understanding of your projected social security benefits at retirement and how that fits into your nest egg calculation and overall financial plan is crucial.

To learn more about social security and mistakes to avoid making as a pharmacist, take a listen to these podcast episodes:

4. Estate Planning

Number four on our list of mid-career moves to consider making as a pharmacist is all about the estate plan.

We dug into this in detail on YFP 310: Dusing Off the Estate Plan.

Unfortunately, estate planning is a part of the financial plan that’s often ignored or isn’t given enough attention. Doing a beneficiary check and ensuring that you have estate planning documents in place so that your dependents and family are protected is so important.

The reality is, getting these documents in place isn’t fun to think about and it’s so easy to push this task to the side. This is your call to action to either update, take a fresh look at your estate planning documents, or get them created.

5. Conversations with Aging Parents

It’s not uncommon to see mid-career pharmacists entering a new stage of caring for their elderly parents. This is not only an emotional and time investment, but can also be a financial expense that you need to consider.

On top of that, knowing if your parents have the right estate planning documents in place or even having a deeper understanding and transparency of their financial situation can be valuable.

But how do you have these sometimes very hard and awkward conversations?

We had Cameron Huddleston, award-winning journalist and author of Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk, on YFP 321: Navigating Financial Conversations with Aging Parents. This one is a must-listen.

6. Insurance Check-Up

We often talk about term-life and long-term disability insurance at the front end of someone’s pharmacy career, but it’s important to re-evaluate these policies in your 30s, 40s, and 50s.

For example, if you bought a 20-year term life policy in your early 20s or 30s and now you are in your 40s or 50s, does it still provide adequate coverage for your family if something were to happen to you? Do you need to supplement your policy in any way because your earnings have continued to climb?

Other items to consider is looking into long-term care insurance, especially in your 40s or 50s, and property and casualty insurance.

We dig into long-term care insurance in this podcast episode:

5 Key Decisions for Long-Term Care Insurance (YFP 296)

Conclusion

If you’re a mid-career pharmacist interested in how working with our team of CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS™ at Your Financial Pharmacist can support you on your personal financial plan, which would touch on these six areas as well as many more, click here to learn more.

If you’re ready to take the next step, click here to book a free discovery call with our team.

Credit Card Rewards: The Ultimate Guide

Posted on by Caitlin Boyle

By Dr. Jeffrey Keimer

The following post contains affiliate links through with YFP or its team members may receive compensation.

This is a guest post from Dr. Jeffrey Keimer. Dr. Keimer is a 2011 graduate of Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and pharmacy manager for a regional drugstore chain in Vermont. He and his wife Alex have been pursuing financial independence since 2016. Check out Jeff’s book, FIRE Rx: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Financial Independence to learn how to create an actionable plan to reach financial independence.

When you buy something, would you rather pay full price or get it at a discount?

Well, unless you wear paying full retail as some sort of weird badge of honor, I’m willing to bet you’d rather go with the latter; and to be sure, there are many ways to get stuff for less. You could shop the clearance rack, buy in bulk, and maybe even haggle.

But what if, after you’ve tried all those things, you’d still like to pay less? Enter the credit card reward point. Ever since the concept was introduced back in the mid 1980s, consumers have been able to get reimbursed for bits of their purchases and do just that, get what’s effectively an additional discount. And, if you play your cards right (pun fully intended), that discount can be incredible.

In this post, I’ll teach you how to play the credit card rewards game, and make no mistake, it is a game and the prizes get better as you get more advanced. At its basic level, credit card rewards can help you pay a bit less overall for the things you buy on a daily basis. But at the game’s highest level of play, so-called travel hacking, you can exploit these programs to travel the world in luxury for free.

Interested?

Cool.

In a nutshell, the rewards game comes down to two things: earning and redeeming. For each, I’ll cover some of the common strategies, broken down by difficulty, that you can use to maximize rewards in a way that works for you. Don’t want to go down the full travel hacking rabbit hole and start a Tik Tok about free first-class travel? Then don’t. The rewards game can be lucrative even at the beginner level with minimal effort.

Before we get into all that though, we need to talk about the ways you can lose the game.

Ways to Lose

First and foremost, when dealing with credit cards and the reward programs surrounding them, don’t think for a second that the companies offering these benefits are losing money with them. Just the opposite. Credit cards represent one of, if not the, most profitable parts of the banking industry and rewards cards are no exception. And while rewards give us the opportunity to take back some of those profits for ourselves, the way you lose here is the same way everybody else loses.

How?

First and foremost, credit cards charge people exorbitant interest when they carry a balance. This is even more so with rewards cards since they generally charge higher APR’s and fees than non-rewards cards. Because of that, it is extremely important that if you plan on playing the rewards game you’re in a position to pay your balance off in full each and every month.

Have trouble with that or are you currently in credit card debt? DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME!

Second, people tend to spend more when using credit cards than they do when using cash alone. Why? While the jury is still out on the exact cause, recent research suggests that the dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain are involved. Yeah, those pathways! Turns out the old phrase “shopaholic” might be pretty spot on.

Once you add in the prospect of other rewards to your shopping, it’s not hard to see why banks push rewards cards. Rewards cards generally charge merchants a higher fee when you use them and finding ways to get you to spend more is insanely profitable. Your job, if you decide to play the rewards game, is to resist. Remember, the point here is to get a discount on your normal spending so you can free up money for other goals, not inflate your lifestyle. Rewards can be great, but not if they come at the expense of blowing up your budget.

Finally, I wouldn’t recommend playing (at least not aggressively) if you plan on getting a serious loan, like a mortgage in the near future. Opening up a number of credit cards in a short period of time, as many travel hackers do, might spook a loan officer resulting in a denial of your loan application.

Earning Rewards

As I said before, the game involves two parts: earning and redeeming. In this section, I’m going to talk about some of the most common ways people earn points, miles, cash back, even crypto (all of which I’ll refer to as “points” for simplicity’s sake for the rest of the article) and break down each strategy by its relative difficulty in practice. What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but should help you get started and decide how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

Beginner

Points/Cash Back on Purchases (One Card)

This is probably what most people who dip their toes into the realm of credit card rewards do. You open a card that earns points on every purchase and put pretty much all your spending on that card.

Simple, right?

It is. The only complexity here comes down to what card you choose to use. First, you need to decide if you want your points to pay for travel or act as cash back (typically in the form of a statement credit). In terms of overall redemption value, travel tends to come out on top here, but like anything, there can be nuance. Sometimes going for the cash-back card can make more sense depending on your lifestyle.

Second, you need to decide whether or not you’re open to a card with an annual fee. If your plan is to use the points for travel redemptions, it’s almost certain that you’re going to need one with an annual fee since many of the most lucrative redemption options will be closed off to you in the no-fee tier of cards. If, on the other hand, you’re going to redeem your points for cash back then a no-fee card can work just fine.

Third, you need to decide what kind of points you’re looking for. That’s going to depend on how you see yourself redeeming them. Many points limit what you can do, only letting you use them for cash back or with a particular business. On the other hand, some points, such as those issued by the various card issuers themselves, can offer a wider range of flexibility. That flexibility often comes at the cost of an annual fee though, so bear that in mind.

Finally, you need to pick an individual card. The choice here simply needs to line up the points you want and their earning rates with what you actually spend money on in your budget. Like to eat out and order food? Make sure to look for a high earning rate on dining expenses. Fly a lot? Find a card that offers a high rate on travel or consider a card with your favorite airline. It’s not rocket science. And if nothing in your budget really sticks out as a “bonus category” for you, then look for a card with a high base earnings rate. These days, there are a number of cards that offer 1.5-2% back on all purchases, usually without an annual fee.

Once you’ve done all this and picked a card, you’re good to go. You won’t be writing a travel hacking blog, but you’ve gone from zero to something in the rewards game. And while you may decide to go no further (nothing wrong with that), following these steps to evaluate new cards is fundamental to the higher levels of play.

Sign-Up Bonus (SUB) Targeting

Out of all the point-earning opportunities, the most lucrative BY FAR is the SUB.

And just how lucrative can a SUB be?

Well, as I’m writing this, I’m finishing up one that offers 80,000 points on $4,000 worth of spending in the first 3 months. Given my history with these points, I generally get around 2.5 cents worth of value from each of them bringing the total value of the SUB to $2,000. That’s a 50% return on that spending!

When it comes to the rewards game, SUBs offer the greatest chance to generate value. Therefore, any strategy approaching the rewards game should take them into account; even if you only plan on opening a single card.

At the beginner level, interacting with SUBs is a little different than the more advanced levels and, paradoxically, requires a lot more thought up front. This is because you’ll be targeting a SUB on a card you plan to keep versus one you’ll likely close. As such, when thinking about SUBs at this level, you want to target a specific type of card first, then target the best SUB within the list of cards meeting your criteria.

The benefit to approaching SUBs this way is that you don’t really have to worry about all the other little (and often unsaid) rules that come along with SUBs. Just open the card you want, meet the SUB criteria (if there are any), then enjoy keeping and using the card. That’s it.

Intermediate

Got your feet wet with a new card and want more? Cool. Personally, this is the level where I operate for the most part. If you like to travel, success at this level can help cover a significant portion of that part of your budget.

Before getting into that, a disclaimer. At the intermediate level, we’re going to start getting into the weeds regarding some of the “rules” surrounding credit card openings. I’m going to be a little vague here, and that’s intentional. Many of these so-called rules are based on guidelines used by credit card companies (often not published publicly) to determine whether or not you’ve run afoul of their terms of service; prompting them to take away all your points and cease doing business with you. Those terms of service (particularly in areas such as program misuse) tend to be intentionally vague themselves, so I’m going to follow suit here.

Multi-Card Optimization

Let’s say you started off your rewards journey with a single card. Maybe that first card gave you a dope 6% back on groceries. Sweet! But when it comes to dining out, you get a measly 1% back. Meanwhile, there are cards out there offering at least triple that in the category with no annual fee! Using one card for all your spending certainly has the perk of simplicity, but I can guarantee you that you won’t be able to maximize your point earnings with just one card.

Cards are typically good for covering one or two spending categories, but not much more than that. This is where a strategy of using multiple cards to cover the gaps can come into play, especially if those additional cards don’t carry an annual fee.

In practice, this might mean you have four or so cards, each with a different role to play. Going out to eat? Use the card that gets triple points on dining. Filling up the car? Pull out the one that gets 5% back at the pump. You get the picture.

Depending on what cards you use, there can also be some additional synergies here too. For example, Chase Bank’s in-house reward point, the Ultimate Reward (UR) point, can be earned on a number of their no-fee Freedom cash back cards. However, the UR point you’d earn with those is the same UR point you’d earn with their premium tier Sapphire cards. When paired with one of the Sapphire cards, the value of those points can go up significantly. Given the fact that those no-fee cards can earn significantly higher rates than the Sapphire card in certain places, the multi-card strategy can really bump up your earning potential.

The only real difficulty with a multi-card strategy (and my wife likes to remind me of this) is that it can be tough to juggle multiple cards and remember what to do with all of them at any given time. This is especially true if you (like me) incorporate one of those cards that have quarterly rotating bonus categories into the mix. If you are considering this strategy, make yourself a spreadsheet or get a label maker so that it’s easier to keep track of what card pays for what.

SUB Farming (2-4 per year)

In a nutshell, SUB farming is all about getting those sweet SUBs and then saying “thank u, next.” This can be insanely lucrative for the level of work you’ve got to put in. Those people blogging about how they travel the world in luxury for free all the time? Yeah, this is how they do it. The only difference between this level and that one is the degree to which you’re farming bonuses. At this level, we’re going relatively slow but still looking to cover the expense of flights and/or lodging for a few family vacations a year.

Once you’ve decided that you’d like to farm some SUBs, the first thing you need to do is start a spreadsheet that’s going to detail three things: the card you open, the date you opened it, and the date you received the SUB. This is important because when it comes to SUBs, the different card issuers have different rules surrounding how often they’ll give you one for a given card or family of cards. For example, American Express makes it easy, they’ll give you one SUB per card per lifetime. On the other hand, a bank like Chase might let you get another SUB on a card you’ve previously had after a specified length of time. How will you know when you’re up for round 2 on a card? The spreadsheet!

In addition to telling you when you might be up for another go at a card, having a spreadsheet can also inform you when you might be reaching your limit with certain card issuers. Going back to Chase (just because their rules are better known) you can only open up a certain number of cards in a given time period before they start rejecting your applications. Currently (it can always change) they have a rule that if you’ve opened up 5 personal cards with any bank in the last 24 months, they’ll generally reject any new credit applications you make with them.

And that’s just one of the more famous examples. Each bank or card issuer is going to have its own rules that they generally don’t publish. The only way to navigate the waters here is to keep tabs on what your activity’s been and use forums to keep up to date with what other people have discovered regarding the various limits issuers impose.

Finally, when SUB farming, you need to consider whether the card you’re opening for the SUB is a keeper or one that’ll become dead weight in your wallet. This is all the more important when considering a card with an annual fee. Some cards have cool ongoing benefits that can even make them worth the fee, others not so much. Your job is to separate the wheat from the chaff and come up with an exit strategy for the ones that don’t make the cut.

If you decide the card needs to go, there are a couple of ways to go about it. The first, and obvious one, is to simply close the account, and, believe it or not, there’s a possible downside to this. If the card is an old one, it can negatively impact your credit score by decreasing the average age of your lines of credit. Dumb? Yes, but it’s still a thing. In addition, if you close that card “too soon” (which is not really defined) after you got the SUB, the card issuer might flag the account for misuse and claw back the SUB.

On the upside though, if this is a card you’ve had for a while you might be able to milk another bonus out of it called a “retention bonus.” You will need to actually talk to a human being about this, but it’s possible that in lieu of closing the account, you can get offered the chance for some extra points, a fee waiver, or a statement credit.

What else can you do? Downgrade it! Oftentimes, cards are offered in different tiers, some with an annual fee and perks, others with no fee and fewer perks. Sometimes the better move is to keep the line of credit open with a card that doesn’t have a fee than shutter the account entirely.

2-Player Mode

Do you know what’s better than scoring a nice SUB on a new card? Having your spouse open the same card under their name and scoring yet another SUB. Even better than that? Getting a referral bonus for referring your spouse to the card. That’s 2-player mode.

If you’re married or otherwise financially entwined with another human being, 2-player mode can be a great way to rack up points while keeping either one of you out of trouble from a card opening point of view. Incorporating the rewards game into your financial plan can be great, but only if you steer clear of the dangers listed above and craft a strategy that’s sustainable. 2-player mode helps a lot with the latter.

In addition to helping you keep the party going, 2-player mode also has its own opportunity. Namely, the opportunity to easily take advantage of cardmember referral programs. Most cards offer these. Basically, they give you a link to share with others and if others use that link to open up the card themselves, you get paid. How much you get paid varies, but if the card in question is one of the more premium varieties, the payout is generally larger. For instance, with that SUB I’m finishing out now, my wife referred me to the card and got an extra 15,000 points (which we’ll use for ~$375 in travel expenses) just for emailing me a link. Not bad for a little cut and paste.

You can screw this up though. Ever hear of an “authorized user?” It’s when you add someone to your account, they get their own card to use, and all their purchases go on your bill. Heck, you might even get charged an additional fee every year for having them there.

Don’t do it.

There’s a time and place for making someone an authorized user on your account, but this isn’t it. When you make someone an authorized user on a card, you generally shut them out of getting SUBs on that card. Need to have the card in two places at once? Use a mobile wallet.

Stacking

When you make a purchase, are credit card points the only incentive out there to encourage your spending?

No!

Welcome to the wonderful world of stacking!

Aside from store loyalty programs (which can be part of the stack), there’s a whole cottage industry of commission-sharing companies whose business model is all about getting you to shop places in return for some additional cash or points back on your purchase. Online, these are typically known as shopping portals. Your card issuer might even have its own.

Points or cash back you earn through these sites always earn on top of whatever points your card earns, hence the term stacking. One level of earning through your card might be nice, but add in another (or maybe multiple as we’ll cover later on) and the total rebate you get on your purchases can approach SUB territory.

The way it works is simple. You go to the shopping portal site you have an account with, link to the store you want to shop at through their site, do your shopping, and a few days later some extra cash or points are deposited in your account with the shopping portal. All you have to do is pick the best portal you wish to do business with. And if you think that’s hard, don’t. The interweb has made it easy as a number of sites aggregate the top portals and you can search by store. Personally, I’m a fan of the site Cashback Monitor.

Advanced

Now we get to the more difficult ways to earn points. At this level, your rewards game is more of a side hustle than a hobby. To be successful here, you’ll need to consistently put in the effort to stay on top of new developments in the rewards space and have strong organizational skills.

SUB Farming (5+ Per Year)

While the overall process is pretty much the same as at the intermediate level, SUB farming at the advanced level requires some different considerations and an even greater need to keep tabs on your cards. Personally, I’m not a big fan of SUB farming at this level. But, if you’re wondering how those people with travel-hacking YouTube channels seem to score five-figure plane tickets for free, this is mainly how it’s done.

First off, as you get more aggressive with SUB farming, the closer you get to your business becoming a liability versus an asset for the credit card companies. And, as it turns out, they don’t care to do business with people who want to eat into their bottom line. While there’s no red line where your level of SUB farming activity will get you into trouble, it’s always a concern at this level. Being active in various forums, learning from other people’s experiences, and getting to know intuitively where those lines might have to be central to your strategy here.

Second, this level of SUB farming presents the challenge of picking good cards to target. More than likely, you’ll burn through the most desirable cards early on, leaving you with second and third-tier choices. At that point, you really need to think about what kind of redemption strategy you can use (more on that later) to squeeze value from cards you would’ve passed on otherwise.

Third, many cards (including most of the ones with juicy SUBs) require that you spend a certain amount of money in the first few months in order to qualify for the SUB. This usually isn’t a problem at the intermediate level but can be challenging at the advanced level, especially if you’re making it a point to not inflate your lifestyle. So what do you do once you’ve exhausted the parts of your budget you’d normally put on a card? Look into paying for things like your rent or mortgage with a card. Typically, those types of expenses don’t allow card payments, but there are services that will let you use a card to pay them, usually charging an extra fee to do so. Under normal circumstances, it’s totally not a good idea to pay bills this way. But in this instance, the “return on investment” you get from the SUB might make the juice worth the squeeze.

Finally, just like you need to consider at the intermediate level, determining exit strategies for the various cards you open is super important. If you don’t you’ll soon find yourself buried in annual fees charged by dozens of cards sitting in a drawer. In addition, those retention bonuses I mentioned earlier can play a much bigger role at this level of play as you may find that they’re the only way to squeeze any type of bonus out of a card past a certain point.

Multi-Stacking

How can you earn SUB level rebates on your purchases without having to farm another SUB? Stack a bunch of smaller reward rates and discounts on top of one another! Multi-stacking is kind of like the extreme couponing of the rewards game but you can get similar results without holding up the line at the grocery store.

In addition, multi-stacking doesn’t share many of the same types of risks that SUB farming can have. The primary risk here has to do with your data, as that’s what’s generally paying for all the rewards. Don’t want to share your data with third parties? Don’t play around with stacking.

So how does it work? Generally speaking, there are multiple avenues for stacking discounts outside actual coupons. They are:

Credit Card Offers
Shopping Portals
- Active
- Passive
Gift Card Marketplace
Brand Loyalty Programs

Each of these things can form part of your stack so let’s talk about each a little more in-depth and then put it together in an example.

When speaking about credit card offers in this context, I’m not talking about the ones that might promise a SUB. Offers in this context refer to various smaller promos you can take advantage of either with specific retailers or spending categories. In general, these offers are found on your credit card account’s online dashboard and you need to opt into them. If used, many of them will give you additional points or a percentage back as a statement credit.

Next, we come back to shopping portals, but this time, I want to break them down into what I call active and passive. Active portals are like the ones described earlier. You have to click a link and shop through that link in order to get the bonus. Passive portals don’t require that. With a passive portal, you supply the portal with read-only access to your card transaction data and when you make a purchase with an affiliate, the bonus gets deposited automatically. Make a purchase through an active portal with a passive affiliate? Yeah, you get both bonuses. And if you use multiple passive portals that don’t share the same network infrastructure, it’s possible to double, triple, or even quadruple dip on the rebates.

Online gift card marketplaces present yet another opportunity to shave some extra percent off your purchases. The premise is simple. People get gift cards that they don’t want all the time and need a place to offload them. However, a gift card is just a form of currency that can only be used in limited settings. Because of that, the market value for gift cards is always lower than that of actual, legal tender currency. So, if someone wants to sell a gift card for, say, dollars, they have to price it at a discount. And depending on the popularity of that gift card’s issuer, that discount might be small, or incredibly steep. In addition, many of these marketplaces often take on the role of new gift card retailers as well, offering cash back on their platforms as an incentive.

Finally, we have the individual retailer’s loyalty program. While many of these might not be worth your time (and data), especially if you don’t shop with them often, it never hurts to consider them. Sometimes, you might even get a welcome bonus just for signing up.

Here’s a personal example of this using a gas station near me, as I write this in July 2022, and how my thought process went.

Putting it all together, we get this as a total discount (expressed as a percentage) per gallon:

Not bad, right? That’s the power of multi-stacking.

Redeeming Rewards

Now that we’ve earned a crap ton of points, it’s time to do something with them. Mercifully, redeeming rewards tends to be a lot less complicated than earning them and it’s not difficult to extract a reasonable amount of value from them. Still, there are some things to look out for and some techniques you can use to amp up that value.

Beginner

Cash Back

Redeeming your points for cash back is the absolute easiest way to extract value from them, and depending on your card, it might be the only thing you can do with them. Typically, points redeem at a 1 cent per point value when cashing them out, which isn’t bad; but not great if you can possibly redeem them for travel expenses.

One word of warning here though. Oftentimes, retailers affiliated with card issuers will give you the option to “pay with points” which sounds nice, but it’s usually a trap meant for people who don’t bother to do the math. For example, a very popular online retailer will let me do this with my Chase UR points. But, when you do the math, you find that redeeming them in this way results in a per-point value of $0.008, 20% less than the value I’d get if I just cashed them out!

In addition, that same retailer offers a card giving 5 points back on purchases made with them and the option to pay for future purchases with those points. Sounds reasonable. But, if you pay with the points, you no longer get the 5 points per dollar from the card. Better to redeem those points for actual cash or a statement credit than pay with them once again.

Book Travel With Points

This is typically the only option available to you if you have a card earning airline miles or hotel points and a potential option if you carry one of the bank-issued (Chase, American Express, Citi, etc.) premium cards. For this section, I’m going to focus on the bank cards since there can be more advanced considerations with miles and hotel points.

Nowadays, most of the major card issuers operate their own online travel agencies, and to entice you to use those agencies, they tend to give you a guaranteed bump in the value of your points (typically in the 0.25-0.5 cent per point range) if you use your points to pay for your vacation. Unlike my previous warning about paying with points, in this context, it can be worth it, especially if you’re looking to keep things simple.

Intermediate

Transferring Points

One of the biggest benefits of having a card that earns bank points such as the Chase UR points or American Express Membership Rewards points is the ability to transfer those points to their travel partners. And while each bank has its own list of airlines and hotels that they partner with, the ability to transfer lets you shop around within that list to find the best redemption value when booking a trip.

For example, say you’re looking to book a trip and you don’t really care what airline or hotel you’re going to use. Once you find out how much it’ll cost in points and/or money from each of the options available to you as a transfer partner, you transfer the points to the partner offering the highest value and cost reduction for your trip. Oftentimes, the value you’ll be able to squeeze out of a point will be quite a bit more than the 1 cent per point you’d get from just cashing them out. For my family, we’ve gotten a lot of value from transferring our points out to hotels where we’ve averaged about 2.5 cents per point in value.

One word of warning here. When you transfer points, the process is typically irreversible. Found a better redemption after you transferred a bunch of points to that hotel chain? Guess what? You’re using the points at the hotel. Only transfer points once you are absolutely sure that you’re cool with redeeming them with a given travel partner.

Advanced

Gaming Award Charts

Finally, the last thing we’re going to talk about regarding the rewards game is how some of the pros actually land those ridiculous airline redemptions that seem to pepper social media. While yes, those people accumulate an ungodly amount of points through aggressive SUB farming and the like, they’re also incredibly conscious about squeezing every last cent of value from those points. To do that, they have to think out of the box when it comes to where points get sent.

For example, why might a travel hacker living in New York, with absolutely no interest in traveling to Europe, transfer their hard-earned points to British Airways?

Two reasons: airline alliances and award charts.

Most major airlines today operate in partnerships with other airlines known as alliances. If you’ve done any air travel at all, you’ve probably heard of the big three: Star Alliance, Skyteam, and Oneworld, each founded in part by a major US airline (United, Delta, and American respectively). Within each alliance, partner airlines share resources to help travelers get to their destinations and allow travelers with loyalty benefits on one partner, such as miles and elite status, to enjoy them across the alliance. That last bit is incredibly important to the discussion here.

Within an alliance, it’s possible to book award travel on airlines that you have no award miles with.

But why would you do that? First, maybe the airline you have the miles with just doesn’t go where you’re looking to go. That’s the obvious reason. The less obvious, and more interesting, reason is, maybe the airline you want to use has a crappy award chart.

What’s an award chart? It’s basically the pricing scheme an airline has when you’re looking to book award travel with them. Many of them use a pretty straightforward algorithm where the amount of miles you need to pay is based on the normal cost of the fare. Others are…well, complicated. But that’s where the value tends to be.

For instance, some airlines’ award charts charge a flat rate within a geographic area (like the lower 48 states) while others have a tiered scheme based on distance. Here, an opportunity might exist for the traveler flying from New York to Los Angeles when using the geographic chart. But, if the traveler isn’t going very far, say New York to Baltimore, then using the carrier with the distance-based chart might be the better bet. What’s more, the airline with the better award chart might have nothing to do with the actual flights involved, as long as they’re in an alliance with the carriers that are.

In my experience, gaming the award chart system can be lucrative, but wins weren’t frequent enough for it to be a major part of my rewards game. If you live in/near a major city or airline hub and plan on international or luxury travel, it can produce a lot of return. But, if you live in the country like me, or if your travel is more run-of-the-mill, I wouldn’t expect a ton of value here.

Conclusion

Overall, the rewards game can be well worth playing, as long as you play it responsibly. Play it right, and you can significantly offset parts of your budget. Play it wrong, and there are legit consequences. After all, getting some free flights or vacations means nothing if it means getting yourself in credit card debt or derailing your financial plan with excessive spending.

But if you do think the rewards game can benefit you, I encourage you to try it out. Even at the beginner levels of play, it can help make a dent in your expenses. And, sure, as Dave Ramsey likes to point out “no one ever says they got rich off credit card points” (and he’s 100% correct on that), that’s not really what we’re getting at here either. The rewards game isn’t something that’s ever going to play the lead in your financial plan. But it can play a fun supporting role.

Interested in checking out some credit cards that offer rewards? Click on the links below!

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How Much You Need to Hang Up Your Coat: All About the Four Percent Rule

Posted on by yfpadmin

How Much You Need to Hang Up Your Coat: All About the Four Percent Rule

The following is a guest post from Dr. Jeffrey Keimer. Dr. Keimer is a 2011 graduate of Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and pharmacy manager for a regional drugstore chain in Vermont. He and his wife Alex have been pursuing financial independence since 2016. Check out Jeff’s book, FIRE Rx: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Financial Independence to learn how to create an actionable plan so you can retire early as a pharmacist.

By now, you’ve probably heard that it’s possible to retire not just early, but incredibly early; like in your 30s or 40s instead of in your 60s or 70s. As evidenced by the financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement, many people are doing just that. Now while that sounds awesome, the big question (as with most things) is always “how do you do it?”

In an earlier post, “The FIRE Prescription: How to Retire Early as a Pharmacist,” I gave a really broad overview of some of the basic tenets of the FIRE movement: the four percent rule, reducing expenses, investing, and drawdown of those investments. Having a good understanding of those concepts is crucial if you ever want to reach financial independence, but I didn’t go into much detail on any one of them in particular. Time to remedy that. So for this post, I wanted to take a deeper dive into that first concept: the four percent rule.

Why that one? Because it was the first one I listed. Duh.

On a more serious note though, the four percent rule (and by extension the concept of a safe withdrawal rate) should be the first thing to understand when drawing up a game plan for FIRE as a pharmacist. This is because it can help define the ever-elusive concept of “enough.” After all, what kind of journey do you set out on without a destination?

What is the Four Percent Rule?

When people in the FIRE community talk about the “four percent rule” what they’re referring to is a concept known as a safe withdrawal rate for early retirement. A safe withdrawal rate (SWR) can be defined as the annual amount (as a percentage) you can expect to withdraw from an investment portfolio without having to worry about the portfolio running out of money in the future; even as you adjust the initial amount for inflation year over year. Basically, you can look at your portfolio balance and figure out how much yearly income you can draw from it without worrying about the portfolio going to zero by assuming a safe withdrawal rate.

The “four percent” part comes in when we’re making assumptions about what kind of safe withdrawal rate our portfolio might support and it comes from a very important study published by financial planner, William Bengen, back in the early 1990s. In a nutshell, Bengen found that a diversified portfolio of US stocks and bonds could support at least a 4% safe withdrawal rate for retirees looking to tap their investments for retirement income over 30 years (more on that a little later).

Why it Matters

For those looking to join the FIRE movement, the four percent rule is probably the first major concept you get exposed to. Why? Because the whole idea of early retirement and the four percent rule do something incredibly important: it tells you where the endzone is. If you know how much you spend per year, you can use the four percent rule to define how much you need to save so that you can cover those expenses. Once you reach that number, sometimes called your FI number, you can probably declare yourself financially independent and consider early retirement.

So how do you calculate a FI number? Well, to borrow a phrase, it’s shockingly simple. Just take the inverse of 4% which is 25 and multiply your annual expenses by it.

For example, say your annual expenses (taxes included!) are $80,000. What’s your FI number?

$80,000 x 25 = $2,000,000

By using the four percent rule to help determine the amount you need to reach FI, not only do you set yourself apart from most Americans who frankly have no clue how much they need to retire, you give yourself a real number to work toward. With that in hand, you can measure your progress toward what many consider to be the ultimate goal in personal finance.

Given that, it’s no wonder that the four percent rule has become a chief cornerstone of the FIRE movement. What’s more, not only does it give you a concrete goal to work towards, it also puts that goal more firmly under your control.

Think about this for a second.

Many of us have been exposed to the advice that you need to save some multiple of your income by retirement to retire comfortably. But how much control do you really have over your income? As pharmacists, the answer to that question has to be “less than we’d like.” Many of us are all too aware of how much the market forces of supply and demand affect what we can expect in compensation.

That said, the four percent rule does something pretty spectacular. Instead of basing your retirement number on your income, it bases it off your expenses; something much, much more under your control. Cut out $500 a month from your budget? That translates to $150,000 less you’ll need to retire. The math is simple but incredibly powerful. What the four percent rule does, and I really can’t emphasize this enough, is that it gives you the knowledge to take control of your financial destiny!

Where Did it Come From?

Here’s where we’re going to get a little more technical and go over some of the research the four percent rule was born from, so buckle up. The four percent rule, as it’s come to be known, originally came out of the study “Determining Withdrawal Rates Using Historical Data” published in the Journal of Financial Planning by William Bengen in 1994. Bengen’s goal with the study was to shed some light on what kind of income a retiree could safely live on given a standard portfolio of stocks and bonds where the income produced came from the portfolio’s total return. And what did he find? By using historical return data on US stocks and US treasury notes, Bengen was able to conclude that the worst possible scenario for a retiree using a 50/50 stock and bond portfolio was that their money ran out after 33 years following a consistent 4% initial withdrawal strategy, indexing the withdrawal each year to inflation; a level Bengen referred to as SAFEMAX, and the rest of the world came to know as the four percent rule.

So how did that withdrawal strategy work? Like this. Say you have a $1,000,000 portfolio at the start of retirement. The first year, you’d draw $40,000 from it (4% of the initial balance). Next year, assuming a 3% rate of inflation, you’d increase the previous amount by 3% ($40,000 x 1.03 = $41,200) and that would be the amount withdrawn. In the years that come, just rinse and repeat. Slightly more complicated math than the FI number math, but still not too bad.

Bengen’s study was a watershed moment in the financial planning world. Before his study on withdrawal rates, retirement income planning either followed something akin to a reverse mortgage on the portfolio, reliance on pension income, or the old-school rentier model of only factoring in the income generated by the portfolio (i.e. not touching the principal). With Bengen, now the concept of a safe withdrawal rate could be incorporated into a retiree’s financial plan. His was just the first of many on the subject though.

Another piece of research that gets a lot of traction in the FIRE movement is one conducted by three finance professors from Trinity University dubbed, creatively, “The Trinity Study.” The Trinity Study more or less supported Bengen’s initial findings in that a 4% withdrawal rate tended to coincide with minimal risk of portfolio failure (i.e. going to zero) over a 30 year withdrawal period. The only real difference with the Trinity Study vs. Bengen’s was that the Trinity researchers presented their findings primarily in terms of probability of failure rather than just focusing on the lower bound results as Bengen did.

This was important to the whole safe withdrawal rate discussion because when making forecasts (as you do in the planning process) viewing things through the lens of probability is essential. In this case, the authors of the Trinity study placed the odds of success with a 4% withdrawal rate after 30 years at 95% using a 50/50 mix of stocks and bonds; a conclusion very much in line with Bengen’s and the notion of a 4% safe withdrawal rate.

So What’s the Catch?

So…despite the presence of studies and journals, finance isn’t what you’d call a hard science. Many would dispute the idea that it’s even a science at all. So here’s the tl;dr on how we should view the four percent rule: like the pirate’s code, it’s more of a guideline, not a rule.

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Why is that?

First, let’s talk a bit about the works that gave us the four percent rule. Just like any of the drug studies you get to look at in your professional life, there are limitations; the most obvious of which is the sample size. For the vast majority of studies that look at historical withdrawal rates, sample sizes are quite small. Take, for instance, Bengen’s study where he looked at the experience of retirees from 1926-1976. Now that sounds like a big time period, but it’s really not. Each year studied assumed a January 1st retirement, so that gives us only 50 data sets. Try bringing a blood pressure med to market with a 50 subject phase III trial. Not gonna happen. To add insult to injury, many of the data sets he used included extrapolated (i.e. made up) data to get to their 50-year endpoints.

Now while the Trinity Study suffered from the same problem as well, some subsequent research has tried to increase the sample size to what you’d expect from a large-scale drug trial. For instance, in a 2017 paper titled “Safe Withdrawal Rates: A Guide for Early Retirees” published for the Social Science Research Network, Dr. Karsten Jeske (who runs the incredible blog Early Retirement Now) was able to expand the data set to 6.5 million retiree scenarios going back to 1871 and retirement periods of up to 60 years! To date, I’m pretty sure that his study is the most comprehensive and one that specifically targets a safe withdrawal rate for early retirement. Surely with that in hand, we can settle on some withdrawal rate as law right?

Nope!

Even such an incredible sample size is still too small. This is because Karsten’s study, like much of the popular research surrounding the four percent rule, is somewhat myopic in scope regarding asset allocation. Very few studies look at the impact of including international stocks (a very common diversification recommendation) in the portfolio, let alone alternatives such as real estate or precious metals.

Secondly, the studies in question didn’t consider investment fees and expenses (like taxes) whatsoever when drawing their conclusions. Kind of like the scenarios you find on a Physics 101 exam where you get to ignore friction, the scenarios described by the aforementioned studies may lack real-world applicability.

The third problem, and in my opinion the biggest one, is that, unlike a drug where we can reliably predict an average response given enough past data, markets don’t work that way. The only thing predictable about markets is that they’re unpredictable. The next 140 years may look like the last 140 years, or completely different. Who knows? Past data can certainly give you an idea of how they may behave, but they tell you nothing about how they will behave.

Perhaps a better approach here as suggested by Dr. Wade Pfau, a professor at the American College of Financial Services, would be to take the past data and use Monte Carlo simulations (remember those from stats?) to present the idea of an SWR in a more probabilistic fashion. I find this approach to be more useful as it can help you picture the relative odds of success based on how a portfolio tends to behave.

Should We Still Use the Four Percent Rule?

Absolutely, but not in the absolute sense. As I said earlier, it needs to be viewed more as a guideline instead of a rule. What I like about it in this way is that you don’t need to be precise with your math. If you can ballpark your yearly expenses using the four percent rule you can: set a savings goal for yourself, track your progress as you go, and, if you reach it, you can probably declare yourself financially independent.

Once there, should you quit your job, lock yourself into an automated withdrawal scheme, and move to the beach?

I wouldn’t.

Can you take some serious liberties with your career at that point?

Oh yes!

Despite its shortcomings, the four percent rule is all about giving you that goalpost where you can take those liberties. And the best part is that you don’t even need to get to that magical number to enjoy the perks! Just knowing where you are on the path can be incredibly powerful and open the door to new options in life.

For instance, when our son was born and my wife Alex wanted to stay home to raise him, we knew that we could do that from an income standpoint. But what about our goal of FI, how would the decision affect that? Thanks to the four percent rule, we could safely say that it wouldn’t matter that much. We knew where we were relative to our goal and we could go down to one income without really setting us back.

Or you could use it the way Cory and Cassie Jenks from Episode 134 of the YFP podcast are, in the pursuit of Coast FI. The four percent rule tells them how much they eventually need to be financially independent, but they’re not in a hurry to get there. Instead, they can take a look at their current savings and, using an assumed rate of return, determine the point at which they no longer need to contribute to their retirement savings. Once there, the money that would’ve gone to savings can go elsewhere…or not be needed at all! They can scale back work and not worry about sinking their eventual retirement.

But what if early retirement or stepping back from work isn’t your thing? No worries, the four percent rule has something for you too. Knowledge is power, and that power can present itself in many ways. One of which is knowing whether you’re in a position of financial strength or not when considering a job change, entrepreneurship, or some other calculated risk with your career. If you’ve done the math and you’re nowhere near FI, you may want to take a more defensive posture. But if you’re well on your way to FI or close to it, that calculus can change dramatically. It may even give you the license to pursue work that can better advance the profession even if it doesn’t pay much (yet!).

Conclusion

The four percent rule, despite its flaws, is a tremendously important tool in the FI toolbox. It allows you to create a concrete financial goal to strive for and one that you can track your progress towards. Once you have that, you can start down the path to FI.

On the path to FI, the four percent rule is just one of many concepts that you’ll want to learn to be successful. The four percent rule just tells you the destination, not how to actually get there; or perhaps equally important, what to do when you arrive. If you’d like to learn more about those things, I invite you to check out my new book FIRE Rx: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Financial Independence.

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How To Prepare Financially When Expecting

Posted on by yfpadmin

How To Prepare Financially When Expecting

The following is a guest post by Karen Berger, PharmD. Karen is a pharmacist and medical writer in Fair Lawn, NJ. Her husband has been trying unsuccessfully to put her on a budget for many years.

Congratulations – you’re expecting! In just a few short months, your life will change in a way you could never imagine. A precious baby will smile and coo at you all day, as you feel a powerful love like you never imagined. You will also never sleep, you will be up to your elbows in diapers, and you will have tons of new expenses.

If you are like me, you will also use one-click ordering to have Amazon packages delivered to your door daily, and you will have your credit card number memorized for all other websites. Having a baby can be a major life change and a financial wake-up call. Learning how to prepare financially when expecting is essential.

My husband and I had our kids pretty much back to back – 3 kids in 4 years. It all feels like a blur. Having a baby is like having your entire life as you know it turned upside down. At many times, you will feel that you have no control over this baby, who basically rules your life for the next 18 years. Although you cannot control your newborn, you can control your finances and take the steps of getting your finances in order when expecting.

According to Nerdwallet, raising a child costs at a minimum $260,000 from ages 0-18. This price includes basic (less expensive clothes and groceries) needs and does not include extras such as electronics, birthday parties, and vacations. Taking into account more expensive essentials plus all the extras, you are now looking at over $745,000 from birth to 18, and that is per child, and all before college.

When I was in high school, anytime I was asked what I wanted to be when I “grew up,” my answer of “a pharmacist” was frequently met with the same reply. “What a great career for a woman,” people would nod approvingly. At the age of 17, this made absolutely no sense to me. However, it makes a lot of sense now. A stable income with flexible options is a perfect job for a parent. A pharmacist salary puts you in a great place as you take on the task of financial planning for a baby.

Getting Your Finances in Order

When planning for a baby, there is a lot to do – you have to decorate the nursery, pick the perfect stroller – the list is endless. However, the biggest favor you can do for your family is to get your finances in order while expecting.

Knowledge and clarity about your current financial situation are of utmost importance. That means knowing exactly what it costs to run your household and your spending habits on nonessential items.

While the idea of having a monthly budget is not sexy or fun for most people, it’s a great way to help you organize your spending, eliminate or cut unnecessary expenses, and make adjustments to help you pay off debt and reach your other financial goals. You can learn more about budgeting by checking out this post.

Besides budgeting, knowing and tracking your net worth is a great way to get clarity on your current financial status. In short, your net worth is your total assets minus any outstanding debt. Many pharmacists, especially those starting out, will begin pretty far in the negative considering student loans. However, your progress and trajectory of your net worth is what’s really important.

Hopefully, you are making decisions to help grow your net worth in order to secure your financial future and achieve freedom from debt. But if that’s something you are struggling with, going back to the budget and optimizing is a great idea. If you want to determine and track your net worth we have a great tool through Right Capital you can use.

Besides getting clarity on your finances, it is really important to be on the same page as your spouse when it comes to budgeting and spending. There will be enough to argue about, such as who gets up with the baby and who does the laundry and cleaning (spoiler alert: it’s usually mom). If you can figure out money ahead of time, you are winning the game.

Insurance and Benefits

Now is the time to really understand your insurance benefits for your prenatal care, labor, and delivery. What is covered? Is there a maximum? Do you have a deductible or copays? What if your baby ends up in the NICU – how much will you have to pay? One of our children was in the NICU and the hospital billed over $100,000 – fortunately, we only had to pay a few hundred dollars.

It is also important to plan your leave; check with your company’s HR about sick pay and understand your state laws with disability/FMLA. You will want to predict how much money will be coming in while you (and possibly your spouse) are out of work.

Now is a great time to start an emergency fund, if you do not have one yet. You will want to save 3 to 6 months of expenses (not income), in a separate, accessible account such as a money market or savings account.

Once you establish your budget, taking into account newborn expenses, you want to ensure you have enough savings to cover any missing wages, in addition to the emergency fund. Depending on how tight your budget is, you may have to temporarily scale back on making extra debt payments or contributions to savings/investing accounts to build this up.

Take the time to research your benefits online, or call your insurance for more personalized service, and ask all your questions and write down the information because when you have a baby, you won’t even remember your own name.

Trust me. While on the topic of insurance, research pediatricians (and interview them!) and pick one that is in network, if possible. After the baby is born, be sure to call your insurance to notify them of your newest addition, so he/she can be added to your plan as quickly as possible.

Newborn Expenses

Last but certainly not least, you’ll want to have an idea of monthly costs after the baby is born. Diapers, diapers, and more diapers add up quickly. Also: pediatrician copays, formula if you choose to bottle feed, clothing, diaper bags, carriers, carseats, baby monitor, crib, strollers, baby swings, toys, books, and all of the adorable accessories at the baby store that you absolutely must have such as a squeaky giraffe, a pacifier attached to a stuffed animal, and those soft Muslin blankets. You may do a lot more take-out than cooking those first few months, which can really add up.

*These costs do not include insurance or medical expenses.

**Expect to need a new convertible car seat when baby is around one year old at an average cost of $80-$250 per carseat.

Pro Tip: Create a registry so that your friends and family can buy things that you need, rather than guessing what you want!

Childcare is another big cost. How long do you plan to take off? Are you going back to work part-time, full-time, or not quite yet? If you are going to work, do you have family to watch your little one or will you use daycare or a nanny? All have varying costs and they all have their own positives and negatives to explore, and now is a good time to interview possible candidates to care for your little one.

In our next segment, we will tackle some more must-do’s for after baby arrives, such as life and disability insurance, retirement planning, wills, and saving for college.

Financial planning for a baby, and in general, life events, can be overwhelming. Often it is best to bring in an experienced financial planner to help you plan and prepare. If you are looking for some extra help, you can book a free call with the YFP financial planning team.

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Baby Stepping Your Financial Plan – The 2 Things to Focus on First

Posted on by yfpadmin

By Tim Baker, CFP
YFP Team Member & Owner, Script Financial

For many, knowing where to begin in order to get their finances in order is half the battle. There is much to consider and putting together a financial plan can definitely be overwhelming. However, whenever I examine a client’s financial health, the first two things I review are their emergency fund and their consumer debt level. Let’s look at both of these in detail.

Emergency Fund

It might seem obvious to some why an emergency fund is important, but that might not be readily apparent to everyone. This fund is important for a variety of reasons. First, having cash in an account gives you peace of mind. You know in the event of an emergency, you can easily access it and use the money as needed. Second, an emergency fund allows you to avoid credit card debt, which can be extremely costly. We’ll get into greater detail in a bit. Finally, the emergency fund buffers your investments, so you can take intelligent risk in the market and keep that money working for you. So, now we know why an emergency fund is important, but how much do you need? Great question!

The answer is…well, it depends, which might very well be the worst answer ever. Hold your horses. The amount of your emergency fund depends on two things: your non-discretionary monthly expenses (heh?) and how many income earners there are in your household. Let’s break down each of these. First, what the heck are non-discretionary monthly expenses? Basically, these are expenses you pay in order to live or to keep the lights on, so to speak. These expenses go out the door whether you are employed or not. Examples include a rent or mortgage payment, utilities, food, debt service payments, etc. The second factor is the amount of income earners in your household. If you are a single income earner, you’ll want to save 6 months of your non-discretionary expense. If your household is dual income, you can lower that to 3 months of non-discretionary expenses. Why the difference? Well, if you have two incomes, it’s unlikely that both you and your partner would lose their job at the exact same time and the still-earning partner will help offset your loss of income.

If you are a single income earner, you could be up a creek for a while, so the 6-month reserve makes more sense. And you may be thinking, “Wow, Tim, I need $25,000 in my emergency fund. You want me to keep that in a savings account earning almost no interest?” My answer to that question is in the affirmative because we need to remember the purpose of our emergency fund. It’s for emergencies, not to make bank on investment returns or interest. Now we know the why and the how much, but what about the where? There are a few things to consider when deciding where you should house your emergency fund. It important that the fund be both liquid and be redeemable at a known price. Cash is the best example of this, but other examples include check and savings accounts, money markets, and CDs. If you’re using your brokerage account invested in common stock or mutual funds as your emergency, pump your breaks. You’re leaving yourself open to the possibility that you may need to redeem those shares at an inopportune time. Also, if you’re thinking your 401(k) or IRA is a good place to hold your emergency fund, think again. If you are under 59 ½ years old, you’ll pay a 10% on top of any taxes you may owe. Ouch.

Consumer Debt

Many Americans today live by the plastic. An age of consumerism, coupled with the need for instant gratifications does not bode well for the American saver. Plus, interest rates offer next to zero (literally!) help with regard to the amount of interest you earn, so there’s no incentive in that regard. As a society we spend first and ask questions later. I remember back in the day when I wanted the latest, greatest Nintendo game, I had to scrimp and save and do extra chores to get those precious $60 together. The prospect of not having Super Mario Brothers 3 was just something I could not handle (do you remember the raccoon and the frog you could turn into? So dope.). Today, for some, it is merely a swipe of the card with the promise to pay it back later. That’s cool and all…if you actually pay it back without accruing significant (or any) interest. Unfortunately, many people use their credit card as their emergency fund [insert horrified emoji here]! To put it mildly, this is a less than ideal emergency fund strategy. The cost of credit, particularly credit card credit, is off the charts. The average American household carries $15,762 in credit card debt (I recently heard it’s closer to $17,000) and pays $6,658 in interest. “Hey, I could really go for the latest iPhone, but I don’t really have any money saved to purchase it. Oh hello, Mr. Visa Card…you look lonely…let’s take you out for a spin.” If that sounds like you, re-think it. That $300 you spent on your new phone will be much more bloated if you’re carrying balances on your card. As an example, take a look at this chart below. This situation assumes you’re carrying a $2,000 balance and making the minimum payment. At 16% APR, you’ll pay close to $3,000 in interest alone before you pay it back. Have bad credit or miss a payment (causing that APR to jump to 29%)? The interest you pay back more than doubles compared to the 16% APR.

So what can you do? There are a few techniques that you can practice that wade into the realm of budgeting, but specifically with credit cards there are a few things you can try. First, don’t use credit cards and pay with cash instead. Some people feel that returning to the ol’ paper money system instead of using plastic is better for your spending habits. I personally feel that if I have cash in my pocket, I’ll spend it, but I know it works for some. If you’re like me, and plastic is more your style, then retire your credit card and reach for the debit card. The prospect of overdrafting your checking account may stymie spending more than running up your credit limit. Next, examine your credit card bill. It’s amazing the self-reflection that goes on after looking at all those transactions. You may even have recurring billings for things you don’t even use or forgot about. Been there. The idea here is that you can’t fix it if you don’t know about it, so inform yo’self and get to work.

The emergency fund and a healthy consumer debt level are cornerstones of a sound financial plan. The emergency fund provides that much needed buffer for the unexpected events in life and having one in place shields you from acting financially desperate (i.e. using a credit card) in a desperate situation. Consumer debt, aside from the cost of credit, is a behavioral indication that portrays your ability or inability to live within your means. If you are ready to take the steps to begin building your financial plan, start with these two areas and square them away.

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Episode Summary

Key Points from the Episode

Episode Highlights

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode

Episode Transcript

1. Recast the Vision of Your Financial Plan

2. Savings, Savings, Savings

3. Social Security

4. Estate Planning

5. Conversations with Aging Parents

6. Insurance Check-Up

Conclusion

By Dr. Jeffrey Keimer

Ways to Lose

Earning Rewards

Beginner

Intermediate

Multi-Card Optimization

Advanced

SUB Farming (5+ Per Year)

Redeeming Rewards

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced

Conclusion

How Much You Need to Hang Up Your Coat: All About the Four Percent Rule

What is the Four Percent Rule?

Why it Matters

Where Did it Come From?

So What’s the Catch?

Should We Still Use the Four Percent Rule?

Conclusion

How To Prepare Financially When Expecting

Getting Your Finances in Order

Insurance and Benefits

Newborn Expenses

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