Stretching Your Dollar: How to Make Better Money Moves

<div class="block">Bobbi, Rebell, CEO at Financial Wellness Strategies, joined Cheddar News to talk about common missteps people to with their finances. She offered up some advice on 401Ks, how to assess discounts and what to look out for on travel deals.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

We're all learning to be smarter with our money on this show. But sometimes there are invisible money mistakes that we might fall victim to. Well, certified financial planner, Bobby Rebel sat down with me to teach us what those common mistakes are and how we can avoid them. Take a look. Ok, so let's start with the 1st 141 K is such a popular topic. Oftentimes free money that you can get from your company. But what should you be wary of? Yeah. So the good advice is that you should at the minimum, put in enough money that you were getting the full company match. There's nothing bad about that. But the mistake there is that sometimes people limit themselves to that and they don't save as much as they can. The truth is that's the first step, but then maybe work backwards the limits for 2023 or $22,500. So take that divided by the number of paychecks and that should be your goal. We may not all reach it and by the way, it's higher, if you're over 50 we may not all reach it, but that should actually be what you aspire to in terms of how much you're putting money away. Yes. Get the match. But you can do better too. Ok, good. I like that. Is it true that not every discount we see is actually a good deal. I feel like I, no, I don't know. Did you ever work retail? I worked at a restaurant but I was actually in a, in a retail store. Yeah. So I worked, they fake price tags out there for real. Sometimes they even come pre printed with the price that it will never be sold that we have. It's called anchor pricing. You see a price on an item, let's say a pretty blouse that you want to get and it's crossed out and it says 30% off and has a new price you think? Oh, wow. This is such a great deal. But the truth is it never sold for that. You need to make sure you do your homework, comparison shop and make sure that the value is right for. You don't assume that that anchor price was ever a real price. I think. Good advice too because all of the deals, the discount holidays that you see out there. I mean, even at the end, the prices still seem expensive totally. And they'll say sale and sometimes it's like 5% off which of course is better than not, but it's sometimes not such a huge deal, especially when you factor in shipping and other expenses like taxes. Comparison shop and know what the real value is of an item before you jump at the sale. Yeah. Shop around. I like it. Ok. When it comes to travel, are there any hidden money mistakes that we should keep an eye out for? Yes. So this sort of follows the same idea that we want to be comparison shopping, but not all deals are presented equally. So for example, we talk about there's this whole thing about junk fees which are the resort fees and the extra baggage fees that they tack on to the things we buy when we travel, make sure you factor those in. So when you're comparing hotel prices, it may be buried in the fine print that there's actually a $50 a day fee or that you know, the discount airline. Yeah, but you can't even bring a carry on without an extra fee or they're going to charge you to have the seat that you are going to want to have. So make sure you see all the information before making your decision, read the footnotes and the fine print. I like it. What about those charming introductory offers that some services provide? What's an example? And is it worth it? So an example might be open up an investment account for as little as $5 which sounds great. And sure you should if you only have $5 open that account, but you're never going to really build a good portfolio. If you're only contributing, let's say $5 a month, you are going to need to up it. So the solution to that is really set up some kind of automated escalation. So if it's $5 the first month, make it 10 and so on and keep building bigger and bigger contributions to your investments because it is good to have a low bar to get started. We want to get in there, but realistically it doesn't add up unless you up it, you need to up the ante a little bit. It takes a lot of work. Bobby. I'm glad that you could join me because you always break it down in such an easy to understand way. Thank you. You're very good.