Scott Trench: All right, before we bring in today’s guest, I wanted to issue a quick apology and say a quick thank you to one of our Facebook group members, Carly Reichardt. Carly called Mindy and me out, rightly so, for spreading misinformation on last week’s episode of the BiggerPockets Money Show podcast. We stated that gains in a 529 plan would be forfeited if they’re not used for educational purposes, and that’s simply not true. The gains in a 529 plan are simply subject to tax and/or a 10% penalty when they’re withdrawn and used for things outside of educational expenses or qualified educational expenses. So they can be a powerful and flexible way to build wealth, save for college, pass money on to future generations, and be used for other educational purposes. And there’s lots of other interesting tidbits about 529 plans. They’re a useful tool in the tax-advantaged investment stack for some people. Personally, I don’t use them. I may use them in the future, but I wanted to correct the misinformation that we stated last week. Certainly, the gains are not forfeited. They’re just subject to tax and/or penalty if and only if they’re used for nonqualified expenses. So thank you, Carly, and thank you to the many members of our Facebook group for calling us out. I apologize. We apologize for the misinformation. We have a responsibility to share truth and the correct information on this show, and we appreciate when we do get that feedback. So please keep it coming. And we will link to some resources on 529 plans in the show notes here at biggerpockets.com/moneyshow308. Thank you so much.
Mindy Jensen: Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, show number 308, Finance Friday edition, where Carl and I sit down to talk about lifestyle creep, being financially conscious, the shockingly low percentage of Camp Mustache attendees who use a budget, and why tracking our spending in real time is the best choice for us.
Carl Jensen: The tracking is where the real value comes in for us, having to enter that and review it every once in a while to see where it goes. And I don’t know.
Mindy Jensen: Well, here’s where I’m gonna argue with you, because having it set up the way that it is, Mr. Waffles on Wednesday set that tracking spreadsheet up for me and the Excel sheet so that as soon as we go over whatever dollar figure we deemed was that category, it, the category turns red. And that is very helpful for me to see that in real time. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen, and joining me today is my husband Carl to talk about what a disaster our May finances were.
Carl Jensen: Wait, why were they a disaster?
Mindy Jensen: Because we got lazy. We stopped tracking our spending in real time. We just stacked up receipts and then said we were going to do it later, and then we never did it later. And then we had to scramble to do it at the end of the month, and that didn’t work for us.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, I don’t like that, because when you’re forced to be accountable to the app on your phone and manually enter it, you really think more about all of your purchases. Like, ah, do I really need this box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers from the grocery store? I guess they don’t make those anymore.
Mindy Jensen: You don’t need them.
Carl Jensen: But yeah, I don’t need them.
Mindy Jensen: They’re an unhealthy choice.
Carl Jensen: Even if they did have them, they are an unhealthy choice. But yeah, having to pull out the phone and enter every purchase, yeah, it changes things. And some stuff you can’t help, like gas is gas, you have to buy that. But I’m trying to think of a good example. Besides my poor example before, what’s an example of something that you would have to put in that you might reconsider because of the spending app?
Mindy Jensen: Just frivolous things. Like food is not something that I reconsider. Gas is not something that I even consider. I need gas, so I buy it. But frivolous things like clothes and shoes — like I have shoes, so I don’t need another pair of shoes. I want another pair of shoes. It’s needs versus wants.
Carl Jensen: Sure.
Mindy Jensen: That makes me think about it before I put it into the spending tracker. This is our real-life story. Yeah, so we didn’t track our spending. I think on, what, May 2nd, we’re like, oh, I’ll do it later. And then later turned into June 1st, which was— we make a lot of purchases during the month, and it can be a little bit tedious to grab your phone and open up the app and enter your spending into the tracker, but it’s so much more tedious to sit there at the end of the month and go through the credit card bills and be like, did I put that in? No. Okay, now I have to add it. And if you add it through the app, it’s way easier than if you add it through the computer, or it tracks it in a different way. I don’t know, Ray told me to do it that way. But it was a disaster. And you can tell if you look at our restaurant spending, it was way up, because I didn’t even go into our spending tracker this month. I didn’t even look at how much we were spending, because I knew I wasn’t tracking it. So there was nothing to compare to, as opposed to past months. I have it up on my computer all the time, and I could just pop in there. Oh, we’re getting close to our grocery spend this month. I’m going to try and really go through the pantry and shop at home instead of going to the grocery store, to try and make it under. But I have no idea how much I spent this month, so I’ll just go to the grocery store because it’s easier. It’s not easier. I have to get in my car and go to the grocery store, but the grocery store has all the things and my pantry doesn’t.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, I’m thinking about all this. I think the— so you called one thing out, and that was the restaurant spending. What do you think caused that? I have my own idea. I’m curious to know what your thought is, if it’s the same as mine.
Mindy Jensen: Pure and simple laziness.
Carl Jensen: Well, it’s laziness, but we’ve been working on the house, as we have always been doing, and we were trying to wrap up a whole bunch of projects before the girls got out of school. And yeah, sometimes you’re going crazy for the whole day and you’re really trying to knock the stuff off. We try not to work on it when the girls are at home. We try to confine it to when they’re in class. So yeah, we just got super busy, and that’s an easy pressure release valve, I think. But it’s also kind of stupid and contradictory too, because we’re doing all this work on our house to save money, and then if we go out to eat, that kind of nixes some of our savings. So yeah, I put this on myself. I overdo it.
Mindy Jensen: I put it on you too.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, okay. So my fault. I’ll take the hit.
Mindy Jensen: I’ll blame you for everything. How about that?
Carl Jensen: But you also mentioned frivolous clothes spending. I don’t know if anyone can see my shorts here. They’re pretty—
Mindy Jensen: Stand up and show everybody your beautiful shorts.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, they’re in rough, rough shape. So I’m pinning the clothes spending on you, because clearly I don’t spend money on—
Mindy Jensen: Well, and that’s not even where we spent the money this month. Yeah, we spent it on restaurants. We spent it on groceries that we didn’t think about. And going out to eat is not a time save. You have to get in the car and drive to the restaurant. You have to wait for your table. You have to wait for your food. You could make all of your stuff at home. You could have some sort of meal plan in place, which takes time to do, but you plan your meals out, and then you’ve got food or all of the ingredients available so you can quickly make meals. You can prep ahead of time so you’ve got freezer meals where you just pull it out of the freezer in the morning and let it thaw all day and pop it into the oven at night and have a delicious home-cooked meal, but all of these things take planning ahead of time. And we have lived a very reactionary life instead of a proactive life, for the past several years, where we are just reacting to what’s going on instead of trying to plan ahead. And that’s not in every circumstance of our life, but in a lot of them. And I would like that to change.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, you are correct. We took on this huge house project, which I think is bigger than we ever thought it would be when we purchased it. I know our scope expanded. We did things that we didn’t initially plan for. The way I think about it is it’ll make us— it’s very good for the finances, not so good for the life. I had a clever saying around that, but now I forgot what it is. Like, money rich, life poor. I think that might have been it. So you have to have a— there has to be a trade-off there. You can’t just be hell-bent on trying to earn the next dollar. We have to live life in a— yeah, you said it perfect— a less reactionary manner. But yeah, we’re getting there.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, we have wrapped up our home projects on this house, and for the summer we are taking the summer off. We’re not doing any house projects.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, and we’re almost done with the house too. We have a master bath to do, and that’s pretty much it. One big major project left, the girls’ bath, but that’s pretty simple.
Mindy Jensen: Getting that stupid foil wallpaper off is gonna be a nightmare. I’m considering just re-drywalling that bathroom.
Carl Jensen: It might peel right off. Who knows? We’ll see.
Mindy Jensen: I know it won’t. That’s not how foil wallpaper works.
Carl Jensen: So if we live here long enough, it’ll come back in style. So I vote maybe we just leave it, and in five years that bathroom is going to look super nice and it’ll be in all those magazines and stuff. So yeah.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
Carl Jensen: We’ll just leave it.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so let’s talk about our challenges this month. We didn’t track our spending. That was a big challenge. Our restaurant spending was a big challenge. Our household spending was ridiculous. You can see all of the spending that we did do at biggerpockets.com/mindysbudget, and you can see that our household spending went crazy. We went to IKEA and Target a bunch of times. When your kids say, Mom, let’s go to Target, say no. That’s what you should do. And instead I said yes, and we went to Target a lot. We went to IKEA and bought big things. Those are one-time purchases. We redid our older daughter’s bedroom. She has a bed— we bought her a bed, we bought her bookshelves, we painted. So that was kind of a big undertaking, and that’s a one-time expense, but household expenses kind of went nuts.
Carl Jensen: It’s interesting. One thought about the IKEA thing is you can always find that stuff on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace if you look long enough. And sometimes it’s a little bit beat up, or the people smoked or something like that. So I thought about that when she’s like, I want this specific item. I’m like, well, we could wait, but then we’re going to be on Facebook Marketplace every day when it does come up. We gotta go borrow our friend’s pickup truck. It might not be close. When we get there, it might not be what we thought it was. So in that case, I just decided to bite the bullet and go for it. We could ask her to be a little bit more flexible, but I don’t know. How do you feel about that?
Mindy Jensen: It’s a one-time purchase, and I didn’t feel bad about making it.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, it was a bookshelf. And our other purchase was a solar pool cover. We have a pool in the backyard, which we did not want, but we got a great price on the house because people in Colorado do not want a house with a pool. And we actually like the pool. It’s not that bad. It doesn’t take up our time. But if we don’t have the pool cover, it stays very, very cool. So unless you’re—
Mindy Jensen: Freezing cold.
Carl Jensen: Unless you like Wim Hof, or you’re a polar bear and like swimming in very cool water, you have to buy this pool cover. And that thing was almost $300. So that was a one-time expense that we did not previously think about when we planned our spending.
Mindy Jensen: That’s an interesting point. We didn’t think about it when we were planning our spending. And this goes back to the reactionary— we don’t really do a lot of forward planning, but we also don’t have the historical spending data to go off of, because we haven’t been tracking our spending. So I think if we had been tracking our spending and knew that the previous pool cover would only last two years, we could have predicted this. And some of this is going to be really, really granular, like how much time do we want to spend thinking about how much money we’re spending versus just, oh, okay, well, now we need a pool cover, so we’re going to do it. The pool cover is $300 and we get one every two years. So $150 a year for a pool cover. We can just budget for that in the future.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, and actually, I have two thoughts. Theoretically, this could have gone into the slush fund, because that’s how I see that category — stuff like this that we forgot about, but that we still have to buy on a routine basis. It’s like an error in our thinking. But the other thing with this pool cover, you mentioned every two years. The previous one only lasted two years, but I got a cheaper one, like a lower quality one, but it was still like almost $200. This one was almost $300, but this one has an eight-year warranty. And you could tell, like, you could tell this one is much better.
Mindy Jensen: Oh yeah, it is, it is much thicker. Okay, eight years. Three hundred divided by eight is much less than 300 divided by two.
Carl Jensen: What is 300 divided by eight?
Mindy Jensen: Shut up. I don’t know.
Carl Jensen: It’s like a little bit less than 40. Eight times 40 is 320. I don’t know. 30. High 30s.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so $30 a year is way better than $150 a year.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, it’s going to be worth it. Our friends have a pool and they have a natural gas pool heater. It takes a lot of natural gas to heat up 10,000 gallons. And they’re like, why is our natural gas bill like $300 in May, more than it used to be? I’m like, well, it’s in your backyard. There’s the answer. So yeah, this is a better solution.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so I just mentioned the B word, the budget word. And in my introduction, I said the shockingly low number of people who attended Camp Mustache who use a budget. We just got back from Camp Mustache last weekend, and there was— we were talking about budgeting, because that’s what you do at these camps, and it’s a lot of fun. And we just, show of hands, who uses a budget? And two people raised their hand out of what, 40 attendees?
Carl Jensen: Yeah.
Mindy Jensen: And I thought that was very interesting, that only two people out of all 40 people sit down and write out— I guess three, I didn’t count myself. So three. Okay, well, that just went up. But sit down and write out every month how much they are going to spend in each category. And then we were talking about how many people— I think, didn’t they ask afterwards how many people reconcile their spending afterwards or track it after the fact? And a lot more people, almost everybody, raised their hand there. So I think that there’s a high percentage of people in the personal finance space who are conscious of their spending, but few people are sitting down and making the actual budget. And I thought that was very interesting, because this exercise has shown me that when I am actively tracking my spending, I am actively spending less. I’m thinking about how much I’m spending. I’m looking at what I have spent, what I’ve entered into this spending tracker already for that month. And it’s not an obsessive amount. I have several tabs open on my computer and I just go to this tab and peek at it. Oh, grocery spending is— we’re really doing great on grocery spending this month. Or, ooh, we’re not. Because we have basically five categories that we mess up every month: household, which is ridiculous, groceries, restaurant, gas. I think we may have figured out gasoline lately. But yeah, there’s just— I need to track my spending in order to be conscious of where my money’s going.
Carl Jensen: But I think the tracking is different from the budget. Like, after this year, our budget— I don’t really think we budget. I think I would call it like a loose estimate. Loose because it hasn’t been super accurate. But I think the track—
Mindy Jensen: I guess.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, the tracking is where the real value comes in for us, having to enter that and review it every once in a while to see where it goes. And I don’t know.
Mindy Jensen: Well, here’s where I’m going to argue with you, because having it set up the way that it is, Mr. Waffles on Wednesday set that tracking spreadsheet up for me and the Excel sheet, so that as soon as we go over whatever dollar figure we deemed was that category, it— the category turns red, and that is very helpful for me to see that in real time. So having the budget in there— I don’t want to spend $2,000 a month on groceries. I’m trying really hard to keep it under $750. I’m just not really doing a good job of that. I could try harder. I guess I’m not really trying really hard. I’m thinking about it sometimes, but I feel bad when I go over.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, we have an excessive amount of food waste in our household, which—
Mindy Jensen: We do. You know, Natalie Kolody said, take all of your produce, and instead of putting it in those drawers, put it front and center at the top of your refrigerator so you see it all the time, and then you will eat it all the time. And in our refrigerator, we have a bunch of like sauces and things up at the top. Yeah, we should get rid of— we should rearrange the refrigerator. Yeah, we need to be better at our food waste. That is true.
Carl Jensen: When I was a single male, I would make one big thing and eat it for like the next seven days. So I would have like four things in the entire refrigerator, and I— I don’t know, I’m not sure what the root cause of this is, but I wasted kind of like zero amount of food. Not—
Mindy Jensen: Wow, wow, that sounds like you’re blaming me.
Carl Jensen: Well, I guess the— we have a little bit of a difference of opinion, in that the rest of the members of my household do not enjoy leftovers. And if it was up to me, I would eat— I would cook once and then I’d eat leftovers. So like 99% of my meals would be leftovers. I think it’s a little bit more efficient and you get less waste that way. But no judgment. Well, I guess a little bit.
Mindy Jensen: That sounds like a whole lot of judgment. Yeah.
Carl Jensen: Well, you could judge me for wanting to eat leftovers every day. That’s not really great either.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, you were eating pasta.
Carl Jensen: I know.
Mindy Jensen: You would make a giant vat of pasta and then just eat pasta the whole time.
Carl Jensen: It was cheap. I had no money in college. You could eat for like $10 a week. It was amazing. Or not. Not for your body. Okay. There is a happy medium there that we will search for.
Mindy Jensen: There is. And we need to be more conscious about that. I think consciousness is like the whole theme of this episode. Be money conscious, be conscious of what you’re wasting, be conscious of where your money’s going and what you’re spending.
Carl Jensen: Yeah.
Mindy Jensen: Today. Okay, well, let’s talk about our wins.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, we have a huge win, which is pretty cool.
Mindy Jensen: Huge win. So we have not had umbrella insurance in the past, and I was talking to my friend Anna, and she said that she was getting an umbrella insurance policy. And at the same time, I was thinking we really need one. So I called up her insurance agent and I said, can you just give me a quote on this?
Carl Jensen: Hold on, back up one second. What is an umbrella insurance policy? Is that something that insures the umbrellas in your house, like those rain protection devices, or—
Mindy Jensen: An umbrella insurance policy is not for insuring your umbrellas, you big weirdo.
Carl Jensen: They break all the time though. We really should have that.
Mindy Jensen: We never even use umbrellas.
Carl Jensen: Because they break. The wind comes and that’s the end of that.
Mindy Jensen: We live in Colorado. It’s a desert.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, we don’t need them either. Okay, I hijacked the conversation.
Mindy Jensen: You sure did. So an umbrella insurance policy covers you, your household, your assets. It’s over and above your auto policy, your homeowner’s policy. Let’s say you get in a car accident, and I am at fault, and you Google Mindy Jensen, and you’re like, oh, Mindy Jensen is a personality, she’s known in the personal finance space, so I’m not going to settle for her auto insurance policy, I’m going to go after her. And I now have an umbrella insurance policy that covers me in addition to my auto insurance policy or my homeowner’s insurance policy, should my pit bull bite you. But I don’t have a pit bull, so they’re not going to bite you. It’s just an extra level of insurance.
Carl Jensen: With that said, again, please don’t sue us.
Mindy Jensen: Yes, don’t sue me. But I have an insurance policy, so they will take care of me now. But anyway, I called up the insurance agent and she said, well, let’s look at your auto policy. And we had the bare bones auto policy because we are very safe drivers, and auto insurance covers you when you are at fault. We had a homeowner’s insurance policy, and she looked at both of them and said, oh, okay, so our company can increase your coverage on your car insurance policy because you really don’t have enough coverage. And she explained several things to me, and I said, okay, fine, what you’re saying makes sense. The homeowner’s insurance policy was for when we bought this house a couple of years ago. And despite having an episode with Steve Longnecker about homeowner’s insurance policies and making sure you have enough coverage, I did not have enough coverage. We increased our coverage almost twofold on the home and got an umbrella insurance policy, and we are paying less for all three policies with more coverage than we were paying for just the auto and the homeowner’s insurance. So that is a huge win. I now have far more coverage than I used to, and it’s costing me less. So I like that more. If you have not requoted your car insurance, your homeowner’s insurance, or if you don’t have an umbrella policy, you need to reach out to several insurance companies, get quotes, and see how much money you can save, because you probably can. Unfortunately, insurance companies do not have any loyalty to you, and they will increase your rates every year. So you don’t need to feel any sort of loyalty to them by staying with them if they are not going to give you the same respect.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, there’s a saying around that insurance is the only business where loyalty is punished.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, that’s a really good saying.
Carl Jensen: Yeah. But I want to emphasize, we did increase our insurance, but we still don’t have like, our cars— we have old, ancient cars, they have 200,000 miles on them, both of them, and we don’t have the— I don’t even know the terms— we don’t have the insurance that covers our cars. So we elevated the insurance that covers other people should we cause an accident, but if we get into an accident with our cars, they’re worth nothing, they’re probably worth like a negative amount, we’d have to pay someone to take our cars, they’re so old, ugly. If you have kids, kids are little savages. Oh, yeah, don’t allow food in your cars if you’re a—
Mindy Jensen: Or crayons.
Carl Jensen: Yeah. Oh, crayons, they melt. Window stickers. Our cars are like rolling biological experiments. We probably have— we’ll either die younger or we’ll live infinitely because of genetic mutations caused by what’s going on in our cars. So I still like to have the minimal insurance, because what’s the whole point of insurance? It’s to cover something you can’t afford to replace on your own. And if one of our cars was lost, well, number one, we wouldn’t have to replace it because we have two, we barely need one. But if we did need to buy a car, we could do that. So I prefer keeping the smallest amount of insurance we need.
Mindy Jensen: Yes, but we increased the amount of medical coverage.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, and that was very— I agree with you there, because if you get into an accident and we injure someone else, it was small, and yeah, that did need to be increased.
Mindy Jensen: And the umbrella insurance policy has minimums on your other policies. So you can’t have the bare minimum on your auto policy and have an umbrella policy. So we had to increase the auto policy and the homeowner’s policy a little bit just to be able to get the umbrella policy. But again, we’re still paying less for now three insurance policies than we were paying for two insurance policies with less coverage.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, I think all of this is under $2,000 a year.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah.
Carl Jensen: Homeowner’s insurance for a nice house, two cars, and the umbrella policy. So that’s great.
Mindy Jensen: It was like $1,100 for homeowners and $560 for— yeah, it was like $1,500 or $1,600.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, and that’s— I know, I know people will pay like over $2,000 just for insurance on one car, and that’s why we have not-nice cars.
Mindy Jensen: Beaters. Okay. Hey, did we make any big purchases that aren’t on our spending tracker this month?
Carl Jensen: We did make a big purchase.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, oh, we didn’t do it in May though, we did it in June.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, should we? That could be a cliffhanger where we announce the big purchase.
Mindy Jensen: We bought a house, another house. Yay! And it’s a dump, because that’s so on brand for us. We live in a neighborhood that is— how would you describe our neighborhood?
Carl Jensen: It’s pretty nice. It’s an old school neighborhood. It was built 40 years ago, so we’ve got big trees. It’s kind of— it’s built on a golf course, which I never really wanted to— saying we live in a golf course neighborhood seems kind of off-brand and not in line with our values. But we’ve got a lot of good friends here who share the same values. So we’ve got a really good community here, which is the whole reason we moved here. Yeah, but it happens to be on a golf course too, which is strange. We’re not golfers. We don’t even play tennis. What is another fancy sport? Polo? You did that for a while, right?
Mindy Jensen: Oh, shut up.
Carl Jensen: What was your horse’s name? Yeah, no horses.
Mindy Jensen: So we had an opportunity to buy a house, another house in this same neighborhood. And it is outdated, it needs some work, but it doesn’t need a ton of work. What we like about that house is it has no stairs. Well, it’s got a basement, but you don’t need to ever go down to the basement. So it’s a ranch house, and we could potentially retire in that house. The house that we’re in currently is a split level and has stairs everywhere. So as we get into our 90s and 100s, stairs may become a little bit more difficult to navigate, and this house will be a really great home to retire in. And until we move in there, it’s not a great home to move into right now because our children are still at home. They are 15 and 12, and there’s not all that much space. So it’s a smaller house than this one.
Carl Jensen: Um.
Mindy Jensen: And this house that we’re in currently really fits our needs. So we closed on June 2nd. We are getting ready to do some rehab to it starting in September, which will be documented on BiggerPockets so you can see what a real rehab looks like, not these frivolous rehabs where everything is neatly wrapped up in 30 minutes. I anticipate some problems just because that’s how it goes with every other rehab. This one’s not going to be smooth as silk either. So we need to redo the kitchen, because the kitchen is like this big. It’s the dumbest kitchen ever. And the doors to all of the bedrooms are currently sliding glass doors instead of actual solid doors. What are some other quirks on this house?
Carl Jensen: Quirks. It has floors that need to be refinished. That’s not really a quirk. It’s got skylights that have issues.
Mindy Jensen: Leaks.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, they did a weird skylight design, which you’ll see when we do the video series. But yeah, it’s a quirky house. The layout is also a bit strange, but we knew this house has upside too, and we have multiple exit strategies. We might move in there. In the meantime, we might do a furnished rental, and if something changes in the fall, I think we could turn around and sell it and probably make a pretty good profit with probably a month of intense work, a month of 40-hour work weeks with you and I and maybe another person. Eric with an A might help us, a friend. And if any of you audience members are local to Longmont and have some skills, we might hire a couple other people, because we’ve lived in our current house—
Mindy Jensen: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I’m sorry. We will hire other people, not might.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, we want to get through this one fast. This current house that we’re sitting in right now— we’re, what, two and a half years into this, and we’re still not done. It has monopolized much of my life, and I do not want that. So this one is going to be like a targeted strike. We’re going to go in there, tear everything out, we’re going to have everything ready to go, and we’ll get this one flipped around fast. So yeah, if anyone wants to help, send us an email. Do they know how to get ahold of you or me, Mindy? Yeah, if you don’t have any skills, you can do demolition. There’s a need for everyone. We want— what’s the Uncle Sam thing? We want you.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, I want you to come work on my house.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, fun.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, it’ll be super awesome fun. It’s the best thing ever. You could learn how to say bad words.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, I think we’ll have more to say on that. Maybe we should do an episode. Well, I guess that’s what the video series is for.
Mindy Jensen: That’s what the video series is for. But I think that it’s disingenuous to buy a house and then not mention it. We are taking the summer off. That is still true. It is June— what’s today, June 5th, that we are recording this episode. Yeah. And we are getting ready to go to Germany in two days. We’re going to Munich and Berlin for 10 days, and this episode will air while we are out. Thank you for listening. We’re having a great time in Berlin, probably.
Carl Jensen: Ooh, maybe we should look at some German design aesthetics to inform us for how we should do this house. We could be all pretentious and have like a minimalist thing with stainless steel and white everywhere. The house will have like one color in the whole thing.
Mindy Jensen: No.
Carl Jensen: Or even less than that.
Mindy Jensen: It still has that stupid fireplace.
Carl Jensen: I really want a cuckoo clock. I’m not a souvenir person, but I don’t know, there’s a special place in my heart for cuckoo clocks.
Mindy Jensen: Is there a special place in the spending tracker for a cuckoo clock?
Carl Jensen: What would you have? Maybe the travel slush fund.
Mindy Jensen: Slush fund. If you look at our June projected spending, it is the highest of any month we have had so far. And a lot of it is the travel, most of it’s the travel. But that is again something that’s easily cut out, should the stock market tank like it has been for the last month.
Carl Jensen: Boo!
Mindy Jensen: Which is again why we’re tracking our spending in such a granular way, because when there are things that we need to cut, it’s easy to look at where the money’s going and say, oh well, we don’t have to do this going forward, we don’t have to do that going forward, we can cut out restaurants completely, we can cut out going to taprooms with our friends, and we can cut out parties, and we can cut out all these different things. So the categories that we put in our spending tracker may not make a lot of sense to you as you look at them, but that’s okay, they don’t have to make sense to you. That’s the beauty of the Waffles on Wednesday spending tracker, which we will link to in today’s show notes, which are found at biggerpockets.com/blog/money-308. We have a new way of doing our show notes. But the Waffles on Wednesday spending tracker is a customizable spending tracker, so you can do all of your spending in the ways that are important to you. So you can see what categories are easy to cut back on or cut out entirely when you start tracking your spending.
Carl Jensen: Cool. I have nothing to add. Wow, that’s channeling Charlie Munger. You’re a Warren Buffett. That’s a compliment.
Mindy Jensen: Oh yeah.
Carl Jensen: Wow, I have nothing further to add. If you know who Charlie Munger is.
Mindy Jensen: I have no comment. I have nothing. Is that what he says, “I have nothing to add”?
Carl Jensen: I think so.
Mindy Jensen: It’s been a couple of years since we’ve been to that. We just missed it. Did you even know?
Carl Jensen: Yeah, I knew. I read the letter. We’re talking about the Berkshire Hathaway conference, Omaha.
Mindy Jensen: The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, annual shareholders meeting. Yeah.
Carl Jensen: The Woodstock of capitalism. It’s pretty cool. You don’t look like Warren Buffett though, which is good.
Mindy Jensen: Well, thank you. What an amazing compliment that is. I really appreciate your kind words.
Carl Jensen: I look more like Charlie Munger than you look like Warren Buffett. This has gone off the rails.
Mindy Jensen: Boy, it has. Okay, well, that’s a good place to end.
Carl Jensen: All right.
Mindy Jensen: Well, we appreciate you listening. We would love to hear comments from you. Email me, mindy@biggerpockets.com. Email Carl at— what’s your good email address?
Carl Jensen: What is a good email address? Mr. 1500, the numbers, mr1500@1500days.com, 1500days.com, which is also the name of the blog. But yeah, seriously, if you’ve got construction skills, hit me up.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so I didn’t even say that you are the comedic genius behind the dinosaurs and fart jokes at 1500days.com and the comedic genius behind the dinosaurs and fart jokes at Mile High FI Podcast. Sorry, I should have said that in the beginning of the show.
Carl Jensen: It’s all right.
Mindy Jensen: And he’s my husband, and he does a lot of the work on this house that you can’t really see because we’re just aimed in here. But you will see— yeah, he put this shelf up. You will see him doing work on the new house, the strange house. I’m super excited to do this house. I get to help on this house too.
Carl Jensen: We should put a link to it. We have our Instagram post where we did the little movie. Can we put a link to that in here?
Mindy Jensen: Yes, we will put a link to that in the show notes. Again, show 308, biggerpockets.com/blog/money-308, so you can see this quirky new house.
Carl Jensen: Yeah, cool.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so thank you for listening from episode 308 of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He is Carl Jensen. I am Mindy Jensen, saying auf Wiedersehen.
Carl Jensen: How do you say goodbye in German? Was that it?
Mindy Jensen: That was it.
Carl Jensen: Oh, I thought it was danke. Oh, is that thank you?
Mindy Jensen: That’s thank you.
Carl Jensen: I’m gonna suck in Germany.
Mindy Jensen: You really are.
Carl Jensen: It’s gonna be.
Mindy Jensen: Pockets.
Carl Jensen: International incident. I’m going to say the wrong thing and—
Mindy Jensen: Okay, bye-bye.
