Stretching Your Dollar: Adequate Savings, Portfolio Building & Paying Credit Card Debt

<div class="block">Money management and financial literacy are truly paramount for success but knowing where to start can be daunting. Bobbi Rebell, certified financial planner, joined Cheddar to provide some insight into savings and portfolio building, particularly for people under the age of 25. She also talked about how to approach paying off credit card debt. </div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Well, speaking of hearing from you when we launched this show just about a month ago, to the date, we took to social media to ask what money questions you wanted answers to and you delivered some great questions. So to answer your questions, I sat down with certified financial planner, Bobby, take a look. My expert here, Bobby Shane asked on our first week when we premiered, how much money should I have in my savings at age 25? So first of all, Shane, thank you for thinking ahead. This is such a good question and I love that you're probably hopefully past paying off debt. If you aren't, you want to make sure your debt is paid off. Although you can save at the same time, I should say as well. Savings is tricky. You want to make sure your emergency savings that's probably going to be between 3 to 6 months of what it would cost if you were to lose your income stream. You also want to think about saving for short and long term goals. But what I do want to caution Shane about and everybody is not over saving and by over saving I mean, saving so much that you're not investing people sometimes confuse the two savings is great and these days you can get a nice return by just putting your money in the bank. But we want to make sure that we're investing, look what we've done. We're here at the New York Stock Exchange. Look what the market has done the first half of the year, right? So you would have earned maybe 20% if you had the money in the market. So make sure you're saving the right amount for you have comfortable emergency funds. But then shift to investing and really focus on building those investments all about balance. I like that. Bobby and the user of the rag merchant wants to know type in where do I start when it comes to paying off credit card debt? Such a good question. And again, kudos to you because it is important to be focusing not just on making the minimum payments but also on paying it off. The first thing though that I would do is call that credit card company and get your interest rate reduced because by calling, you can often save a lot of money instantly by getting a lower rate. Credit card rates are so high, especially the way that inflation has been. So that's going to be something that can really help you pay it down faster. And then of course, make sure you ask if you had a late fee or anything like that, that you get that waived. They'll usually work with you. They want you to be successful, they want you to pay down that credit card. And that's also of course, help you with your credit score. Bobby, thank you for answering our viewers most pressing questions. I hope our viewers will write in more and Bobby the expert, so we appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.