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It's more than just a ticket. Radical Personal Finance, episode 26. Welcome to the show. No fancy music today because I am podcasting from the road and I don't have the equipment, so we're just going to get right into it. Today is episode 26 for Wednesday, July 23. And in today's show, we are going to continue our conversation on financial statements.

And before you groan and say, "Joshua, why do we have to talk about financial statements?" Let me take a moment and try to sell you on the concept of preparing financial statements. Today, we're going to focus on the statement of cash flows. And this will be a continuation from episode 22 in which I introduced the statement of financial condition or the balance sheet.

And a statement of cash flows basically says, "Here's where the cash is coming from and here's where it's going," and we track it. Now, most people when they come to talking about financial statements, most people are usually thinking more about creating a budget or something along those lines. But I promise you that building financial statements and proper financial statements, especially statement of financial condition and also a cash flow statement, this is where you have to start.

So whether you're doing it for yourself and you're coaching yourself through your financial situation or whether you're doing it for a client, whether you're a financial planner of some kind, this is where everything starts. Once you become skilled with understanding how to read financial statements, you will have the skills that you need to be able to look at any situation and immediately know where somebody is and where somebody is going.

Financial statements that are properly prepared, they don't lie about what you can expect from the future. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Hope you enjoyed the interview yesterday with Jacob Lund Fisker. I enjoyed it. I would love some feedback. I know that was a lengthy show and again, as I said in the intro to that show, that's the type of thing that I enjoy personally finding, but I don't want to just, you know, I do want to be sensitive to what other people enjoy.

So I'd love to know your feedback of that show to find out whether it was a format that you enjoyed, more of a conversational format to get to know someone a little bit deeper. To me, I find that more interesting than the typical interviewer format where you launch a list of questions at somebody and just sit back and wait for them, wait for them to answer.

So I'd be curious, I'd be very interested in your feedback. Thank you for those of you who are doing reviews. I'm traveling at the moment so I don't have those able to pull up and read, but those are super helpful. We are currently featured in the new and noteworthy section for the investing section.

I would love to be able to get over into the general business category as well and I couldn't, we wouldn't have been able to achieve that without your positive reviews and I want to thank each and every one of you for doing that. If you haven't done so, if you take a moment and just pull out your phone and leave us a review and a comment, that would be super helpful.

It's very easy if you just go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/iTunes on your computer or if you're on a mobile device, if you're on an iOS device, pull up the Radical Personal Finance podcast in the podcast listings and you'll see easily where you can leave a review and I want to thank you for that.

So financial statements, as I stated, you may want to listen prior to this show, you may want to listen to show number 22 which was about the statement of financial condition and this follows from show 19 where I tried to walk through for CFP certificates or students of CFP curriculum the overall financial planning process as part of the CFP exam.

And as I've said in previous shows, I'm not trying to make everyone into certified financial planners but I do think the CFP curriculum is a good overview. And I realized when I was recording show 19 that I probably did too much too fast and so that's why I'm trying to go back and slow down and record more information on these financial statements.

And ultimately, what I'd love to create out of this is a series of shows that could serve as a curriculum for somebody who is just getting serious about their finances and wanting to sit down and say okay where do I start? Because the conversation with Jacob yesterday, hopefully it was very inspiring but at the end of the day, we didn't really give anybody any action steps.

We didn't really say here's what you can do. We talked about philosophy and we talked about maybe some philosophies and ideas you've never heard but you don't have anything that you actually did, you know, I didn't leave you with okay do step one, step two. So I want to create a curriculum that somebody could follow where if you're inspired or you have financial goals laid out for yourself that you have the opportunity to sit back and say what kind of curriculum or what can I now do to change my situation?

And it starts with preparing good financial statements. Now statement of cash flows is basically we're going to track all of the money that comes into your life and all the money that goes out of your life and this is going to be basically tracking cash flows. If we were doing business accounting, we would need to account for things a little bit different because in business accounting, you may have accruals, you may have revenues, you may have cash, you have lots more accounts.

So for today we're just going to stay simple and focus on cash flows because that's all we need to worry about as individuals. Preparing a cash flow statement as a financial planner for a client is very challenging and the reason it's challenging is because most people don't track their money.

So there's almost like an elementary level, then there's a more advanced level. So the very first thing, if you're not tracking your money in some way, I would encourage you to track your money. And there are some really easy ways to do this. The easiest ones that I know of are using some sort of free online software such as the most popular one is Mint.com.

Another popular one right now is Personal Capital. There are several dozen of these that I have found that various apps, various websites that you can use. The big, the two big guns that I'm aware of are however, Personal Capital and Mint.com. Your bank or credit union also likely has some kind of built-in software and you can use that built-in software to track your expenses.

And if you've never tracked your expenses, I would encourage you to start there. Track your expenses for a month or two and then use that to try to extrapolate out to build your statement of cash flows. Now you could also build your statement of cash flows with an estimate, but you really are going to want to have some actual data to pull from to really understand what your actual situation is.

The biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges as a financial planner is to try to help people understand what they actually spend. Very few people that I have ever encountered actually know what they actually spend. Now I can, when I'm constructing financial statements and taking a look at their situation, I can usually predict almost exactly what someone is spending.

I take their income, I pull out the tax rates, I can calculate their tax rates based upon their income, based upon what they're doing, and then I look to see if they have any savings and to see if they're adding to their savings. And if I don't see any consistent savings, I just take their income, pull out their savings and that's what they're spending.

And for most people that's fairly simple. Very few people in this country, or at least few people that have become clients of mine over time, that I can show, okay, here's how much they're saving every month. Usually the only savings that get accrued over the long term are savings into things like retirement accounts, pension plans, things like that.

Those are mainly the savings that get accrued. Now some people do still save in a savings account, but generally people that are saving in a savings account often are earmarking that just for maybe once a year type of expenses. So you may be setting money aside in a savings account, but that's viewed as an account for a vacation fund or for a new car fund, things like that.

And that's fine, but that would be an expense. That's not technically going to be a long term savings, that's going to be an expense. So we want to build a statement of cash flows. So how do we do it? Well, there's a very simple formula. You have all of the income or inflows minus all of the outflows or outgo, income outgo, I like to play with the words, but you have all of the inflows of cash into your life minus all of the outflows, whether that's fixed outflows, variable outflows, or taxes, and that equals your savings.

So that equals the amount of money that you can save into your accounts. And then that's the money that you can deploy into other ways. So as far as inflows, the inflows would be if you were working at a job, the inflows would be your gross income. And so gross income, if you're not familiar with the accounting terms, gross income and net income, gross would be the number that is your actual salary prior to any deductions for taxes or prior to any deductions for benefits of any kind.

That would be your gross income. Net income is the amount of money that you would actually receive in your paycheck after the deductions for your employment taxes, after the deductions for your income taxes, and after the deductions for any kind of group benefits that you have established. So we just like to use the word inflows or gross income.

They are equivalent. I don't care which one you use. I like to use the fancy word because they make me feel cool, make me feel more like a business person, but you can use whichever one you want. So this would be any salaries that you have. So any salaries for the household, any investment income.

So this would be any capital gains that you've received, any interest income or dividend income. This would be any rental income if you have any rental portfolios or real estate that you are managing. Rental income, if you were divorced, it would be any alimony that you've received or any child support payments, any social security income if you're receiving any of that, any trust fund income if you were the beneficiary of a trust, any inheritance income, any gifts that you received, just any source of income, any winnings, lottery winnings, gambling winnings, any source of income that you have, that would be listed in the inflows.

And we want to make sure that we have a comprehensive list and we want to make sure that each of these things is properly itemized. And so we would list out on the cash flow statement. I've created a sample one in the show notes that you can reference as a Google doc so you can see it's very simple.

You'd want to list out all of the inflows that you receive. So if you have a two salary earning household, you put one salary, the other salary. If you have one person owns a business and one person has a job, then you would go ahead and schedule that out separately so you can reach the number of your total inflows.

And total inflows again should be your gross income prior to any taxes, prior to any deductions whatsoever. This is the biggest mistake that I see people make is that they're often trying to create these with net income. And you want to make sure you're using gross income. So if your salary is $100,000 a year or $50,000 a year, you want to make sure you use that number.

And the reason is that one of the areas that we want to focus on saving is on taxes. Well, if you're using a net income number, then you're ignoring your taxes. You're ignoring the employment taxes that you're paying. So if we were going to change some kind of business entity, let's say you were self-employed and we were going to change you from a sole proprietorship over to an S corporation with the goal of reducing your self-employment taxes.

Or if you are earning an income, but you're not deferring enough money into a retirement plan and let's say that we could arrange a plan to defer your income. We want to make sure that we have that listed so that we can have a separate tax category so we can show that savings.

Good tax planning is probably going to be a very primary way that we can save a substantial amount of money. So then we're going to go to outflows. So inflows minus outflows minus taxes equals savings or investments. So we're going to divide our outflows into fixed outflows and variable outflows.

Fixed outflows are those that are predictable. They're set. We know them in advance. Now, remember that these can all be changed. So the first thing if we were talking and you had high fixed outflows, you had a high mortgage payment or a high rent payment, the first thing you said, "I want to save money," I would say, "Well, can we cut this mortgage payment?

Can we cut this rent payment?" But for the purpose of a statement of cash flows, we're just going to go ahead and designate it as a fixed outflow. So the fixed outflow would be any debt payments that you have. Do you have payments on any student loans that are set at a set amount?

Do you have any car payments? This would be any mortgage payments or any rent payments for your housing. Do you have property taxes on any property that you own? Do you have any insurance premiums that are set, that are established, that are not going to be changing? Any other fixed outflows in your budget that are not really going to change from month to month or year to year.

That would all go under your fixed outflow category. Now, if you have any note payments or debt payments such as a mortgage payment or student loan payments or things like that under the fixed outflow category, one additional layer that you can go to if you're interested, and this would be a little bit deeper than I would suggest for just the average person, but you're probably not the average person if you're listening to this podcast, is I like to break out what percentage of the payment is going towards principal of the debt versus what percentage of the payment is going towards interest of the debt.

Because if you have, let's say you have a mortgage payment and you have $1,000 a month principal and interest mortgage payment and you're very early in the loan, so it's $12,000 a year, let's say that $2,000 a year is going towards principal reduction and $10,000 a year is going towards interest payments.

That's a very different scenario than later in the loan term where $2,000 is going to interest payments and $10,000 is going to principal. So I like to break that out and make a note of where you're at in the mortgage amortization schedule or where you're at in the student loan schedule.

This will help you with your planning because your mortgage interest may be a deductible expense, your student loan interest may be a deductible expense, so it's good to have that noted there. And it will also help you to really get a good sense of what's actually going on. Again, if you're early in a mortgage and you're paying $12,000 a year, all of that's going to interest.

Doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it means you need to be aware of it so that you can consider it as you are comparing all of your options. And this is where, back to the constant discussion that we have of should I buy a house or should I rent a house, this needs to be a major discussion because many people say, "Well, I'm better off if I buy a house, but I'm only going to live there for a few years." Well, remember, all of your payments in those first few years, essentially, almost all of your payments are going to interest.

So it's really no more than a rental expense is you're paying interest payments. Now, are they deductible interest payments? They might be, versus a rental expense? They might be. But it's a very different scenario to say, "I'm going to buy a house and I'm going to live there for 30 years," versus "I'm going to buy a house and I'm going to live there for 3 years." And so you want to take that into account, what percentage of your mortgage payments are actually going to principal versus going to interest.

And again, I've seen this constantly working with clients that they say, "Well, look, I bought a house and it's a good deal." Well, you bought a house for $300,000 and you took out a $250,000 mortgage and you turned around and you sold the house 4 years later and your principal on the mortgage was $230,000.

You'd only had $20,000 of principal paid down. So when you're actually running your rent versus buy calculation, you would need to take into account what else could I have done with the $50,000 down payment that I put on my house and the interest payments. Would I have been better off if I had factored in that I had to just pay all those interest payments and the taxes and the insurance?

Would I have been better off renting an equivalent property and investing that $50,000 elsewhere? And very few people ever do that calculation. So I would encourage you to incorporate that into your life and say, "What would be my actual calculation?" So as with most things in financial planning, there's not one answer.

It's not that one answer is better than another. It's that you need to look at it. And this is one of the biggest fallacies. Remember, when you take a mortgage out, all of your money is not building equity. A very small percentage of your money is building equity in the beginning.

And now over the long term, yes, it will build equity, but it's not in the beginning. So continuing on, the next category that would be variable outflows. So here you would put anything that you spend money on that is flexible. So whether this is food, entertainment, clothes, gifts, whether this is car maintenance, car gas, whether this is home maintenance, utilities, electric bill, gas bill, water bill, vacations that you go on, charities that you support, any expenses whatsoever that may change from time to time.

You'd want to list these out because these are going to be the easiest to adjust if you need to adjust something. They're going to be easier to adjust than the fixed payments. And also you need to know that they're going to be changing over time so that you can just plan for that so that your statement of cash flows will reflect that.

The third category is taxes. So then you would list out any taxes that you have. So now this is very important. This is the one that again, that I, this is my pet peeve is that most people when they do a statement of cash flows, they don't include taxes.

So for taxes, include your actual income taxes. Now you may not know what your actual income taxes are for the current year. And there's a couple of ways to do this. If last year was similar to this year, then go ahead and use last year's number. Look up your tax return.

Look at the return to find your total tax paid. The line that shows your total income tax paid. Let me pause a second, go look that up so I can give you the exact line number. Okay, I just looked it up. I wasn't sure. I always get my numbers, line numbers mixed up.

You're going to look at your 1040 and you're going to look at line number 61. And line 61 is your total tax. That's the line that you want to pay attention to. So you want to include your total tax there as your income taxes. So that would be an important part.

So under taxes, put your income taxes again, estimate using last year if you don't know. And if you do know what your actual tax would be projected to be for this year, then go ahead and do that. The other aspect of your taxes that you want to make sure that you list out here are your employment taxes.

So this would be your Medicare and your social security taxes. This is fairly straightforward and fairly simple. The best way to do this is because you've started with your gross income is to apply the formula that's going to be applied to your paycheck. Now your employer is already withholding these numbers, but you want to go ahead and list them on here so that you're aware of them.

This is maybe a political thing for me, but it annoys me just as a political basis. It annoys me that people don't realize how much of their paycheck is actually being lost to go for taxes. So I think you need to be aware of it. Even though you're not going to be able to change it right now, especially if you're employed, although we could get to other planning ideas for how you could change it, you want to be aware of it.

So the current tax rate for 2014 for social security is 6.2% for the employer and 6.2% for the employee. So what you do is you would take your income and you would multiply that times 6.2%. If you're doing this in a spreadsheet for a formula, remember to convert that to a decimal so it would be .062.

So multiply your gross income times .062. Now this is only applicable for the first $117,000 of earnings. So the way social security taxes work is that there's a wage base and this wage base is changed every year. But only the first $117,000 of your earnings are taxed for the purposes of social security.

So if your salary is higher than $117,000, then fill in here for your social security taxes. Just multiply $117,000 times 6.2% and fill that in. The other aspect of social security tax, of employment taxes, are Medicare taxes. Medicare taxes are 1.45% for the employer and 1.45% for the employee.

So you'll need to take your total income, and there is no cap on Medicare taxes. So if you have $500,000 of wages, you would need to multiply $500,000 times 1.45%. We'll ignore the Obamacare 3.8% Medicare tax for the purpose of this conversation. So let's just stay simple and apply the 1.45% Medicare tax.

Multiply that times your wages and list that out as a separate line item. Just by listing it, you will start to see, that will make you aware of it and it will make you aware of some of the planning opportunities. So you can see that if social security has a wage base of $117,000, if you're a high income earner, then it's much less onerous to you to have wages if you're already exceeding that wage base and you don't need to worry so much about saving that 6.2%.

But if you're right in that middle income scenario, that's a heavy amount. That's $100,000 income. That's $6,200 a year that is out of your pocket. And that's another $6,200 a year that's out of your employer's pocket. So I would like everybody to include these taxes on their base because I think it would help people to pay attention to how they vote and to pay attention to what that money is being spent on.

If you have a business, you would list out any self-employment taxes that you have here. So let's say that you are self-employed. Well, the way self-employment taxes work is you pay the 6.2% for the employer rate plus the 6.2% for the employee rate plus the 1.45% for the employer rate and then plus the 1.45% for the employee rate.

And I think if my math is right, that comes out to, what is it, 15.3. I think that's right. I'd have to check the math. I won't bother right now. But if you add all that up, that comes out to your self-employment taxes. So you'd want to list that here and you want to have that as a separate line item.

So by having each of these as a separate line item, now you have your statement of cash flows. And now you would look at it and whatever's left over at the end of that, all inflows minus fixed outflows minus variable outflows equals taxes. And that equals, at the end, you're left with either a surplus or a deficit.

So if you have a surplus, now you have savings and investments that you can use. And now you have savings and investments that you can use. Or if you have a deficit, well, you know you've got a problem because you're going into debt. Now, this may be fine on a short-term basis or it may not be fine on a longer-term basis.

This statement will tell you a lot. And now you can go ahead. And if you have any kind of fixed investments that you're making, go ahead and construct a separate savings and investment category. And so a simple one here would be if you were saying, "Okay, I'm going to add in a 401(k) contribution at my job.

Well, let's say we're going to put in $10,000 of 401(k) contribution." Now, if you have the ability or if you have the ability to use a piece of software to run the tax tables, now you would notice that you could go ahead and reduce off the amount of income taxes you're going to be paying because that amount of income taxes, that money is not going to be taxed for income.

Your FICA taxes are going to stay consistent. So the 401(k) contributions are still going to have FICA taxes, which is an interesting little tidbit in case you're not aware. It wasn't originally that way. Originally, when the 401(k) was discovered as an option and when some of these deferred programs were developed, that by putting money into the account, you could avoid the employment taxes on the money.

But there was such a dramatic shortfall of money in the first, I don't remember, the first year, couple years, there was such a dramatic decrease in the government's revenues based upon that people avoiding that tax that they quickly, Congress quickly passed a new law that reversed that. At the moment, the only retirement account that I'm aware of under which, off the top of my head, under which you can avoid completely the taxes would be the HSA account.

So if you were going to, let's say that you were going to contribute to a health savings account and you were going to put $3,000 in there, then you would put a line item, savings and investments, $3,000, and that's going to reduce your income taxes, so you would recalculate your income tax rate.

And then that's also going to reduce your employment taxes. So that would save you the 6.2% on the $3,000 and that would save you the 1.45% on the $3,000. So I don't want to get bogged down completely in an audio podcast here, but the thing I want to show you is that all of these are, that this is how you look at it and this is how you look at it in totality.

Because at the end of the day, this financial statement will determine your financial future. There is nothing, if this financial statement, if you see that we have low inflows and high outflows, it's not going to be possible to build wealth. If you see that we have high inflows and low outflows, it's going to be possible to build wealth.

And then we're going to figure out how to do it in the most efficient way possible. So if I were answering, if I were doing financial consulting for somebody, if I could have just well constructed, a well constructed statement of cash flows and a well constructed statement of financial condition that were actually accurate, I could figure out every answer to every question and I can predict exactly how much their net worth is going to increase year to year.

I can predict the answer to almost every single question just by having these statements well in hand. So I would encourage you, if you've never done it, to construct these. Now, a couple of, a little bit of commentary and then we're done for the day. First of all, it's tough to get accurate numbers.

So most clients, if you're working with clients, most clients do not have accurate numbers. If you're working for yourself, most of you, most of you listening, probably don't have accurate numbers. So I would encourage you to start with tracking it. Track all the money in, track all the money out.

How to do it? There's various ways to do it. You can do it a free way. I personally just simply use a manual spreadsheet, although I am in the process of transitioning over. I just use a simple Excel spreadsheet, but I'm in the process of moving to a double entry system for my own personal accounting because I've out, I'm not able to do it with single entry accounting.

There's some stuff, there's some info that I want for my own life for all you accounting wonks that I'm not getting with a single entry spreadsheet system. But that's fine for most people. If you just chart it in the spreadsheet and chart out when you receive income, chart it out to show what the amounts are and break them into categories.

I don't have an easy solution for how to do this unless you're a bit of a nerd. Again, I do it in Excel, but I don't have an easy solution. This is my beef with a lot of the cash flow tracking systems that whether it's Mint or things like that is that when you put a paycheck in, it just says paycheck.

And so it doesn't, there's a way to track the expenses, but there's no way to track the amount that was deducted for taxes or the amount that was deducted for 401ks and things like that. And that's why my manual system that I use or some other kind of double entry system or an actual quick book, an actual accounting software is going to be far more powerful than is just an expense tracker.

However, there's no reason why we can't just simply create these statements manually. So if I know what someone's expenses are and I know what their income is, then I can go ahead and create this and can calculate everything manually and that's no problem at all. But we want to create it and we want to go ahead and calculate it because this will tell us everything that we need to know.

So with these two statements, plus we're going to get to a, we're going to talk about kind of having a debt schedule and figuring out how, how we should pay off the order that we should pay off debt. We really can see everything about our financial life that we need to see.

We can see what our income is. We can see what the outflow is. We can see all of the details of where our money's going. We can see what, what options we have for the money to grow. We can see what we're investing in. We can predict net worth.

We can predict it all and it's all based upon these numbers. I think that's all, really all I want to talk about for today. Budgeting. This cash flow statement is not necessarily from the perspective of budgeting, I guess would be the last thing, is that you'll generally hear, you'll generally hear people talking about making a budget, making a budget, making a budget.

Making a budget I think is valuable. In business you would have just a few accounting terms that you may find helpful. In business you would have a pro forma cash flow statement or a pro forma statement. Pro forma is just a fancy word that means an estimated, an estimated, what the estimated expected results are of the next accounting period.

This would be similar to what a budget would be. In personal finance usually people are just viewing a budget as what am I going to spend and what am I not going to spend. Now the budget is powerful because the budget is the forward looking thing. A budget is a really powerful thing.

I'm not too concerned in this section, in this statement about the budget because I figure, especially if you're working with clients, this is not for yourself. The difference is that I can't tell a client what they should or shouldn't do. I'm just concerned about what they are doing. So the cash flow statement is designed to tell me here's what they are doing, what they have done.

I personally feel that if you have a good handle on what you are doing and if you have a good handle on what your goals are and you understand what you're doing and how it's going to impact and affect going forward, then you'll be able to naturally make the course corrections.

And you may or may not use a budgeting process. And a budgeting process would be great. That would be simple. It could just create a simple, here's what I would like my cash flow statement to be step by step going forward. The value of having all these categories is that we can now address a plan of savings.

So now we can look at a cash flow statement and we can break it down into categories and we can say, "What can I do this month to try to figure out how to save in this specific category?" Which by the way, I just created a video that I'd like to plug and I'll put a link in the show notes if you'd like to see a video that I created for a contest leading up to the FinCon conference that I'll be going to in September which is a conference of financial bloggers.

I'm interested in meeting some of the other people in the online financial space. But my tip that I created the video on was each month pick one category of your life and then look to optimize it and figure out what can I do in this category. Well, if you have an accurate cash flow statement, now you know your categories.

So one month you may be looking at the homeowner's insurance and you say, "Well, this month I'm going to work on homeowner's insurance. I'm going to review my coverages. I'm going to call around. I'm going to get different quotes from different people. I'm going to see what I can do in this category to really improve things." The next month it may be car gas.

You say, "What could I do?" Well, maybe look at me, look around and see if there's some way I could get a rebate system. If there's some credit card system I could sign up for that would give me a 5% cash back on gas expenses at this certain place.

Maybe I could learn and understand some hyper-miling techniques. Maybe I could figure out a better route to work that's going to save me money. Maybe I could figure out a public transportation route instead of the car, etc., etc., etc. So by having them listed here you can make a note of them and you can make a note of some of the things that you can change to do.

So hopefully this is helpful. Again, this is Financial Planning 101. I would love to see every person have constructed for themselves a current cash flow statement. This is really, especially if you're going to work with a financial planner, this is step one. Because every change and every optimization that you're going to make, you need to see it reflected on the cash flow statement to be able to show the difference and to show how the savings work.

If you implement a retirement plan, you want to see the income taxes go down. If you implement a cost saving measure and you cut insurance, you want to see the savings go up. If you pay off principal on a debt, you want to see the net worth go up.

So the net worth will go up any time someone makes a mortgage payment. You'll see the net worth go up by the amount of the principal reduction amount of that payment. So the interplay between these two statements, the statement of financial condition and the statement of cash flows, will illustrate everything that's going on in somebody's financial life and everything that can happen in the future in their financial life.

So this will give you a really professional way to start. And I think if you start to learn these and start to implement them, it can make a dramatic difference. Thank you for listening today. I have enjoyed doing this. I hope this again, this is kind of down on the meat and potatoes side of financial planning.

I'm really trying to strike a balance here with not doing, with doing enough inspirational, you know, interesting interviews, but then also giving the nut and bolts tactics. And I hope that we're achieving that. I hope to get better at it as time goes on. This is one of my big beefs and that's why I'm trying to correct it, is that it doesn't do me any good to give you a list of tips and tactics, some of which may or may not apply to your situation.

And it doesn't give me any, do any good to just give constant inspiration, inspiration, inspiration without giving, okay, what do I do to get from here to there? And so what I'd like to do is create these shows that will serve as a, as a basis for you to say, for me not to say, here's how you can cut or here's what you should do, but rather to say, here's how you can create your own financial statements.

Here's how you can analyze them. And here are lots of neat ideas for solutions that you could potentially implement in your life that would help you to, to really further your objectives. So that's it for today. No fancy ending music again, I'm podcasting from the road and I haven't, don't have the equipment set up to be able to do this, but I figured I'd rather bring you a show than no show at all.

So no fancy ending music, ending announcements. If you haven't, please consider leaving me a review. Love to hear any feedback that you had. Hope you enjoyed the interview yesterday. As far as the rest of this week, I don't have an interview lined up for tomorrow, so it'll probably be bringing you another aspect of, another aspect of a financial planning lesson.

And then Friday we'll be doing a Q and A show again on Friday and next week we will hope to have more interviews lined up, working hard as I can to get those done. Just busy and challenging to get it all done. So have an awesome Wednesday, today's Wednesday, have an awesome Wednesday and I hope you enjoyed it and peace out.

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