2019 Financial Wins from the YFP Community
Happy Holidays from the YFP team! As we near the end of 2019, it’s important to celebrate the wins, big or small, that we’ve had over the past year. Take a listen to several YFP community members sharing their 2019 financial wins on this week’s episode.
Summary
On this week’s podcast episode, Tim Ulbrich reflects on 2019 by acknowledging wins and also the hard work it took to achieve them. To celebrate wins, several YFP community members share their financial victories.
Liz paid off her car in half of the time of the loan. Drew shares that he completely paid off his student loans and the strategy he used to make that happen. Sandy paid off all consumer debt except their mortgage by really sticking to a budget. William purchased his first investment property. Marika shares that she fully funded an HSA account and started a side hustle. This allowed her to save aggressively, pay off her debt and increase her net worth by $48,000. Sally paid off $25,000 of debt and started her own side hustle.
Tim shares other wins from the YFP community such as paying off a car, cash flowing a dishwasher, budgeting a trip, starting a real estate investment business, paying off student loans and paying off medical bills.
Tim reflects on his experience in 2019. His family moved to Columbus and they welcomed their fourth son, Bennett. They started investing in real estate and purchased their first property.
Tim asks what your financial wins for this year are and what your big and audacious 2020 goal is.
Mentioned on the Show
Episode Transcript
Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Tim Ulbrich here, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. And on behalf of the entire YFP team, happy holidays. We hope you’re enjoying some quality time with family and friends and getting recharged for the new year. So speaking of getting recharged, this week’s episode is about reflecting on this past year and taking a moment, just a moment, to acknowledge and celebrate the wins and all the hard work that you put in to get there. Yes, we’re soon going to be turning the page on the new year, where the conversation will naturally focus on setting and achieving goals, very important stuff. But we need to pause for a moment to acknowledge the path that we’ve taken over this past year. So in order to do this, we’re going to feature a handful of financial wins from the YFP community. We believe in developing a community that empowers one another on this path towards achieving financial freedom. And part of building community involves celebrating wins alongside one another. And we are going to do just that this week. So without further ado, here are some of the financial wins of 2019 from the Your Financial Pharmacist community.
Liz: Hi, my name is Liz. I’m from Lexington, Kentucky. And my financial win from 2019 was paying off my car in half the time of the loan. So I paid off my car in three years instead of six years by budgeting and talking with friends and realizing that this goal was achievable for me.
Drew: Hi, my name’s Drew Harmon from Cincinnati, Ohio. My financial win for 2019 was getting our student loans paid off between my wife and myself. We both went to private universities, so we had quite a bit when we started. But throughout the years since graduation, we’ve been really diligent on making sure that any extra windfalls or any extra money that we come into, be it bonuses or gifts or anything of that magnitude, go right to the loans. And by doing that, we’ve been able to steadily chip away at our student loans and get them paid off. Another opportunity that we had that some others might have is I was able to get student loan repayment through my employer. So the biggest advice I would have would be to make sure that you have a plan for any extra money that you do fall into, but as well as making sure you find your hidden paycheck when you’re working to make sure that you have all of your benefits, whether it be 401k matches or student loan repayment, just to make sure you take full advantage of all of those options.
Sandy: My name is Sandy Richey. I’m from Hillsboro, Kentucky. And my financial win for 2019 was that we paid off all of our consumer debt except for our house. I’ve been working on it for a couple of years now, and I kept a budget for the most part. My big thing was that I kept a spreadsheet because I’m a little bit of a nerd, and every month at the end of the month, I would put how much that I had paid off and how much I had left. So I always had an idea of where I was. This year, we paid off a vehicle and credit card debt and a few other little things. My goals are to continue to stay out of debt by budgeting a little better and planning for things that need to be replaced like vehicles and things like that.
William: Hi, my name is William Amarkwe, and I’m from Tampa, Florida. And my financial win for 2019 was my first purchase of an investment property. I’m super excited about this investment property. I can’t wait to begin my journey of financial freedom.
Marteeka: Hello, this is Marteeka Martin. I am a pharmacist in Owensboro, Kentucky. My financial wins for 2019 included fully funding my Health Savings Account and starting a side hustle that provided me with additional income. So these and other wins have allowed me to aggressively save and pay off my debt. So that increased my net worth by over $48,000 this year.
Sally: Hey, my name is Sally Brown from Macon, Georgia. And my win for 2019 was paying off $25,000 of debt. The year started with a big change for our family. I left a pharmacy manager position at a chain pharmacy for a position at a local independent pharmacy. It was definitely the best move for our growing family as far as work-life balance goes, but it came with a $30,000 pay cut. My husband and I were anxious about how we would make ends meet, let alone continue paying down our debt. We realized we would need outside help to keep us on track. We found a local financial advisor and began meeting with him. The first thing he had us do was actually track where our money was going. We had always made a monthly budget, but we’d never sat down to see where the money was going at the end of the month. We were surprised to find that our family of three was routinely spending $1,000 or more a month on groceries and eating out. We started making changes to our lifestyle and got our spending under control. Once we made it over that hurdle, we really started working on paying off our debt, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of $320,000. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t making the strides I wanted to be making on it, so I decided to create my own side hustle, Stress Less Vacations, which is a home-based travel agency. It’s a slow process growing a business, but I hope to see some real changes to our income this year from it. All in all, we managed to pay off about $25,000 in debt from credit cards, medical bills, and car loans. And we grew our emergency fund from $1,000 up to $5,000. We plan to keep the momentum up in 2020 and hopefully have both cars paid off as well as a chunk of my husband’s student loan debt.
Tim Ulbrich: Thank you to those that took time to submit a financial win from 2019. We appreciate you doing that. And again, we as the YFP community are excited to be able to celebrate that win alongside of you. And certainly exciting to see the progress that has been made in each one of your individual financial plans. We heard about, you know, cars being paid off, retirement accounts being fully funded, starting side hustles, paying off big chunks of debt, growing emergency funds, all key, important parts of a financial plan. Thank you again for taking time to submit those.
It’s interesting, as I listen to those, I hear some threads of keys that were allowing you to be successful in achieving those goals: things like budgeting, talking with friends and sharing some of these things, setting a vision, being intentional, something we talk a lot about on this podcast, and having a plan to be able to not only set that financial goal but ultimately to be able to achieve that goal. So in addition to those that were submitted that we just featured here, we had many others that shared their wins on the Your Financial Pharmacist Facebook page. Let me take a minute to read a few of those as well.
“Buying my first real estate property for a future rental.” What an awesome win for 2019.
“Paid off my car. Cash flowed a dishwasher. Budgeted for a trip.”
“Started my own real estate investment business. That business part-time is generating more revenue than full-time pharmacist salary. Looking forward to working full-time with others in this area that are doing real estate investing.”
“Paid my last ever student loan payment.”
“Paying off two small loans. Ten more to go, then I’m debt-free.”
“Didn’t pay off student loans but making huge strides. Also paid off some unexpected medical bills. Thrilled to not be carrying those into the new year.”
Awesome, awesome, awesome wins by all of those that I just mentioned. So for those that are not yet a part of the Your Financial Pharmacist Facebook group, I hope you’ll join us. We have more than 4,000 — might be 5,000 pharmacy professionals that are in that group, committed to empowering one another. And as I mentioned, part of that community is sharing wins. Part of that community is sharing challenges and asking questions and getting support. And I hope you’ll join us in that group and community if you’re not already a part of that.
So what was your financial win for 2019? And what will be your big, audacious goal for 2020? You know, for Jess and I, 2019 was a year that was marked by change where we adjusted to our new home here in Columbus and welcomed our fourth son, Bennett Michael Ulbrich. And he has been an incredible, incredible joy in our life. But certainly this has been significant time of change for us. And as many of you know, times of change present challenges financially. And we handled this at times I would say with grace, and at times, we could have done better. And that’s just reality, right? And on one hand, we can look back and reflect on 2019 and say, “You know, we should have done this,” or, “We could have done this.” Or, or we can choose to say, “Wow. That was a lot of change at once. And you know what? We handled it pretty well overall. And we’re on a solid path heading towards 2020.” Same situation, different mindset and approach. And so for us in 2019, you know, we said we really want to start investing in real estate as a couple of you mentioned as well in your win. And that was at the time, early 2019, really a big goal for us and somewhat scary. I’ve been listening to a lot and reading a lot on real estate investing but didn’t really know where to get started. And thankful for colleagues and friends and those that have been doing this and doing it well, was able to partner up and learn from others. And that became a reality for us in 2019. So in 2020, we’re hoping to hopefully look at two investment properties and potentially even more as we look at what success will look like for us financially in 2020.
So again, for 2019, what was your financial win? And for 2020, what will be your big, audacious goal for next year? So as a reminder, if you want to share a win or you have a question that we can tackle on a future episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, please send that over to us. And you can do that by going to YourFinancialPharmacist.com/askYFP. Again, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/askYFP. I hope you will join me next week, the first episode of 2020, where we cover five tangible ways to accelerate your financial plan in 2020. So until then, happy holidays and wishing you a fantastic end to 2019 and a healthy and productive start to the new year.
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