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The Life of And podcast is for high-achieving women and working parents who are ready to stop living a life of “have to” and start designing a life they actually want. It’s a space where we talk honestly about the things we’re often afraid to admit — even to ourselves. The exhaustion. The ambition. The loneliness. The joy. The tension of wanting more without losing yourself in the process.
If you’re in the thick of it — feeling stretched, tired, hopeful, driven — this is your invitation to take a breath, get real, and find your way back to your own Life of And.
[00:00:00] Tiffany Sauder: Balance sheet thinking requires you for a time, to make choices that are invisible to the outside world.
[00:00:06] Tiffany Sauder: Nobody sees that you bought a business, that you have savings, that you decided to buy half the house than you could afford because you’re saving for a business you want to buy.
[00:00:16] Tiffany Sauder: Nobody sees these choices of not being in a place where you are constantly servicing debt so that you can actually have cash to invest and have other things than your job that are paying you.
[00:00:34] Tiffany Sauder: This is take two of this episode, actually. I recorded a version of this content a couple of weeks ago in the studio, perfectly lit, before school was out. but I, like, reflected back on the episode so many times over the last couple of weeks that I was like, I felt like I was just, like, kind of yelling and kind of bossy and just sort of, like, telling you what to do instead of teaching, and I just did not feel good about the content.
[00:01:03] Tiffany Sauder: So here we are with this crazy kind of setup in my new house with, you know, 78% of the furniture. Quincy did my makeup.
[00:01:12] Tiffany Sauder: Uh, right before I was- Hello. Oh, sh- maybe she’s on screen. Um, right before I pushed record. And so we’re just literally doing the Life Of And. We’re going hopefully for a content that is a 10, but maybe the video quality is not so amazing.
[00:01:27] Tiffany Sauder: So anyways, here we are. We’re doing the thing. You don’t really care. It’s just my style is I have to say what’s going on or I cannot get to the content. So what are we talking about?
[00:01:36] Tiffany Sauder: This is another episode in our financial series, and I think perhaps one of the most important conversations that we can have is the one that we’re gonna have on this episode today.
[00:01:49] Tiffany Sauder: We talk a lot about budgeting as women. We talk a lot about how much money we make and having courage to ask for more. But what we’re gonna talk about inside of this episode, I don’t think there’s a chance you’ve ever talked to someone in your life about this financial tool. So that’s what we’re gonna jump into before we get into anything today, I want you to do something for me. I want you to, if you have, if you’re, like, sitting at a place where you have a pen and paper, then great, do that. Grab something that you can write this down.
[00:02:19] Tiffany Sauder: If not, in your head, I want you to think of the last three things you purchased or the last three things you spent money on, maybe better said, the last three things you spent money on that were not a bill or groceries, or something that you, like something for your kids at school. So it was not one of those three things.
[00:02:40] Tiffany Sauder: Could be small, could be big, just let them come to mind.
[00:02:45] Tiffany Sauder: Now, I want you to ask yourself when you think about those things, take a second, was it something that made you money, saved you time, or was it helping you build something?
[00:02:56] Tiffany Sauder: Or was it just stuff that made you feel good in the moment? I don’t want you to judge it.
[00:03:03] Tiffany Sauder: I don’t want you to judge yourself. I don’t want you to, like, you know, come up with any great big thing. I just literally want you to think about it and ask yourself, “Was it something that was ma- just making me feel better in the moment or was it actually something that help- was helping me build, helping me save, helping me, like invest?”
[00:03:17] Tiffany Sauder: W- was anything like that. That question is, does it make me money, save me time, or build something, is the whole framework for today’s episode.
[00:03:25] Tiffany Sauder: And by the end of this, I want you to have these questions that you can ask yourself almost automatically, like a reflex, so that when there is something that we want or desire, we have a framework to ask ourselves questions of where is this actually fitting in my personal financial framework?
[00:03:46] Tiffany Sauder: Okay, the core– If you have listened to previous episodes that I have done with Nicole Lorch, um, with the president of First Internet Bank, we have talked about there being income statement and balance sheet parts of our lives. We talked about income statement thinking and balance sheet thinking. And I thought it might make sense to peel back a bit and talk about that vocabulary, where it comes from, and how do we think about it well in f-personal financial lives.
[00:04:16] Tiffany Sauder: Because this is the conversation I think we never have as women in particular when it comes to our finances.
[00:04:23] Tiffany Sauder: We talk about our budgets, potentially. We talk about the things we want to buy, for certain. We talk about giving each other more confidence to ask for what it is that we deserve, what we, you know, what we’re earning so that we’re, keeping up with the market, and we’re n-we’re sort of advocating for ourselves and the amount of money that we’re making.
[00:04:42] Tiffany Sauder: But we don’t talk about are you building balance sheet wealth? Because that is actually where the complete difference is made in your financial future, is you knowing how to think about your finances through the lens of the balance sheet and not just your income statement. So if you are a leader in a business, I’ve been an entrepreneur for twenty years, so income statements and balance sheets are like super simple for my brain to think about.
[00:05:08] Tiffany Sauder: It’s like a vocabulary that I know about. When somebody says those words, I can picture it, I know exactly what it is, and I know what forces make it go up and down. But if that is not your background, like you don’t have a degree in finance like I do, if you haven’t been an entrepreneur forever, if you don’t have financial statements as part of the core thing that you’re responsible for in your job, then you may not have the same kind of familiarity with this vocabulary, and that is okay.
[00:05:37] Tiffany Sauder: In one of the last episodes I talked about with Nicole, we talked about how you cannot be intimidated by the vocabulary of the financial world because I promise you that you can learn it. But the words are sometimes weird.
[00:05:49] Tiffany Sauder: And when the words are weird, that can sometimes keep us, I think, from jumping into the deep end and really saying, “I am going to absolutely, positively gonna get a command of this content and this topic.”
[00:06:02] Tiffany Sauder: And so let’s not be afraid of the words. So income statement and balance sheet.
[00:06:06] Tiffany Sauder: I’m gonna talk about what they are in business, and then we’re gonna talk about the, the way that that looks in our personal lives, and then we’re gonna talk about a few tools about how you can think about, like how do your behaviors inform balance sheet thinking, which is what I want you to have, versus simply income statement thinking.
[00:06:25] Tiffany Sauder: Okay, so what is an income statement?
[00:06:27] Tiffany Sauder: Income statement is about flow. It is helping you understand what is coming in, what money’s coming in, and what money is coming out. So in business, what money is coming in is revenue, sales. What money is going out is expenses, things like your people, and rent, and potentially inventory, raw materials, technology fees, all those kinds of things.
[00:06:49] Tiffany Sauder: That is what an income statement is. It helps you know on a period of time, generally over the course of a month, is the money that’s coming in, is it paying? Is it covering all the expenses of the business? And at the end of the month or at the end of the year, end of the period, are you making or losing money?
[00:07:08] Tiffany Sauder: So that is really what our f- our personal budgets are, is they are income statements. We don’t use that vocabulary, but that’s generally what they are. Not generally. They’re always what they are. It is, here is the money that is coming in, our income. You might have rental income. Who knows what that looks like?
[00:07:24] Tiffany Sauder: Our income, the money we’re making. Here are all of the expenses.
[00:07:28] Tiffany Sauder: Our people, the things we own, the stuff we’re maintaining.
[00:07:31] Tiffany Sauder: And then at the end of the month, you’re asking yourself, “Am I making a profit? Like, do I have savings? Or am I at a deficit? Am I going into debt?” that’s an income statement, okay?
[00:07:42] Tiffany Sauder: Income statement is really your budget. Money coming in, money coming out, that is the flow. A balance sheet is different. The balance sheet is a snapshot at a point in time. It’s not about what flows in and out every single month. It’s what you actually own and what you actually owe. So what do you own?
[00:08:05] Tiffany Sauder: And then we net out, we subtract out what it is that you owe. So the answer to that question is, am I building anything? Do I have wealth? So again, let’s think about a business. A business might have assets. What do I own? They might have a building. They might have inventory. They might have intellectual property.
[00:08:24] Tiffany Sauder: They might have a patent. They might have, cash, right?
[00:08:28] Tiffany Sauder: What do you own? And then you subtract out what you owe. So what liabilities do you have? Again, kind of a big dumb word, but what– where do you owe other people money? So in a business, it might be I have creditors that I owe for raw materials. I have creditors that I owe or a bank that I owe for the building that I purchased.
[00:08:48] Tiffany Sauder: I don’t own all of it. That is an example of things that would show up on your balance sheet. So it is not about the ins and outs every single month. It is what do I own, what do I owe, and then the difference in those is your net worth. And we want a positive net worth. We want to own more than we owe So when we think about this in our personal world, it is also a scorecard of wealth.
[00:09:15] Tiffany Sauder: Our balance sheet is a scorecard of wealth, and I want you to ask yourself the question, do you have a look at your balance sheet?
[00:09:25] Tiffany Sauder: Have you built a personal balance sheet so that you can look at it every single quarter? It’s not something you look at every week usually. Quarter, I would say, is for me, that’s how often we look at ours.
[00:09:36] Tiffany Sauder: I think some people look at it monthly or even twice a year, looking at your balance sheet and saying, “Am I doing a good job of using the assets that I have well?”
[00:09:47] Tiffany Sauder: Those are things like your time, your cash, places where you’ve invested. Are the things I own higher than the places where I owe?
[00:09:58] Tiffany Sauder: And that is where we’re building individual wealth.
[00:10:00] Tiffany Sauder: So the plain English version of that is the state income statement is what flows in and out, and a balance sheet is what we’re actually building. Most of us optimize only for our income statement, which is smart. We also want to do that. We wanna make sure that we’re saving money every single month. We wanna make sure that we’re not spending more than we’re making.
[00:10:21] Tiffany Sauder: That is an important part of it, but that is not where wealth building is created.
[00:10:25] Tiffany Sauder: We can accidentally stay inside of bounds, and I’ll talk about an example of this, meaning we’re staying inside of our budget, but we are not giving ourselves the excess capital that it would take to invest in something that would really give us, sort of multiple earning potentials, income streams.
[00:10:44] Tiffany Sauder: And, we also aren’t thinking about the investment opportunity cost. What would happen if I took that money that I’m spending on something that I want, and I’ll give an example of this in just a second, versus investing it in something that can pay me maybe today or in the future.
[00:11:03] Tiffany Sauder: So that’s the big thing I want you to ask.
[00:11:05] Tiffany Sauder: Have you ever had a conversation with yourself, with your spouse, with your best friend, with somebody you respect, with somebody who mentors you about what your personal balance sheet looks like? Because I think we are woefully lacking in that vocabulary when it comes to our conversation around finances as women, and I think we’ve got to change that if we want to build real wealth and really help one another, our friends, the next generation, our daughters, really, really figure out how to excel in this world of financial literacy and of just, like, making money so that you can be financially stable, financially comfortable, financially generous, and support the people and communities around us.
[00:11:44] Tiffany Sauder: That is what it is all about for me personally.
[00:11:48] Tiffany Sauder: I want to tell you about an example my husband and I made seventeen years ago. It’s not an extravagant decision in and of itself, but we made the decision to have, um… Quincy’s putting her pens and pencils away, if you hear that in the background.
[00:12:04] Tiffany Sauder: She’s, she’s done with her homework, so. Um, a decision my husband and I made seventeen years ago that, you know, we were twenty-eight years old, I think, at the time, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. we were not at the height of our earning potential, for sure.
[00:12:21] Tiffany Sauder: And we made the decision to take a pretty massive chunk of our income and have a nanny be our uh, sort of childcare solution, um, of choice. And the reason we did that, we’ve had a nanny for seventeen years, and on average, about a thousand dollars a week, just like sort of rough math over the course of seventeen years.
[00:12:41] Tiffany Sauder: Do you know how much money that is, about a thousand dollars a week over the course of seventeen years? It’s three-quarters of a million dollars is how much money we have spent on childcare on a nanny inside of our home.
[00:12:53] Tiffany Sauder: Now, you could look at that and say, “That is just an income statement expense. That is just in and out, in and out, in and out.”
[00:13:02] Tiffany Sauder: Kind of true. It is an income statement expense, but the way I look at our choice in hiring a nanny is it was a balance sheet decision because what it gave me back was my time, and my time was the ability to earn. Because the more time I had, the more I had time to sell. The more time I had, the more time I had to recruit, people who could help me grow the business.
[00:13:29] Tiffany Sauder: The more time I had, the more time I could spend with mentors. The more time I had, the more time I could rest and be with my kids. The more time I had made me healthier, and it increased my ability to earn because it did not take away my flexibility to be able to have a breakfast at seven AM or have a dinner some evening and stay late.
[00:13:51] Tiffany Sauder: That decision to have a nanny was a balance sheet decision in our vocabulary as a family because what it did was it increased the asset of time for us.
[00:14:02] Tiffany Sauder: And we believed for seventeen years, but specifically when we were really young, that taking an outsized amount of our income, putting that towards the nanny, was gonna give us a steeper, earning trajectory because we had more flexibility over our primary asset, which was our time.
[00:14:20] Tiffany Sauder: So that is an example of not just looking at, how do I make this expense as little as possible? Sometimes that is the right question. How do I make this expense as little as possible? But for this one, it was how did we make our childcare solution as flexible as possible? Because the flexibility was going to give us both as entrepreneurs who had a lot of earning potential if we could figure out how to leverage our time well.
[00:14:50] Tiffany Sauder: If we had more of our time, we believed we could earn faster. So that is a way to even put balance sheet thinking on sometimes an income statement expense. So it gave us much more flexibility than a traditional daycare would have. Again, you have to pick what you want to do. I’m just simply sharing from my– our own life and, like, significant financial decisions that we have made, how we’ve thought about it.
[00:15:15] Tiffany Sauder: One finan- other financial decision is probably more about decision we didn’t make, and that was in not sending our kids to private school.
[00:15:24] Tiffany Sauder: We live in a school district where the public schools are great. There’s still an enormous number of people that send their kids to private school.
[00:15:32] Tiffany Sauder: And I was kind of on the train early on where it’s like, are we feeding our kids to the wolves if we just throw them on the bus and send them to school?
[00:15:41] Tiffany Sauder: But when I asked my husband this week, I said, “How much do you think it would have cost us to send our kids to school, to private school, kindergarten through twelfth grade, all four girls?” So all four kids to private school over the course of four years.
[00:15:58] Tiffany Sauder: and the answer he guessed was a million dollars. And do you want to know the real number? Guess it. $1.6 million is what it would have cost us to send all four girls to private school.
[00:16:13] Tiffany Sauder: That is, to me, an insane number.
[00:16:17] Tiffany Sauder: So again, for me, that is an income statement expense.
[00:16:21] Tiffany Sauder: We send our kids to public school, and so I don’t know, we probably haven’t even spent $16,000 on school.
[00:16:27] Tiffany Sauder: and they ride the bus. So again, I love the currency of time, and driving the girls to private school or paying someone to do that on top of their tuition for us was a financial step too far. So again, my point is not in making the same decisions we did, but in first knowing what is it gonna cost to actually make this choice.
[00:16:52] Tiffany Sauder: Go and do all of the math, both, but how much is it gonna cost in time, and how much is it gonna cost in money? And then ask yourself, “Is this an income statement decision?” Meaning it’s money in and money out, or is it a balance sheet decision, and it’s an asset that I’m leveraging more acutely.
[00:17:08] Tiffany Sauder: I’m putting it in a better place to be able to earn or give me something back if I make this financial decision.
[00:17:15] Tiffany Sauder: So that’s balance sheet versus income statement thinking.
[00:17:23] Tiffany Sauder: One of the things that is all the time on my Instagram feed right now, and it is gonna be on there even more because I’m gonna talk about it and I did a little bit, bit of research before this to do some math. But one of the things that, that the world is trying to sell me right now, is a designer bag, like handbag monthly rental So for $219 a month, you can subscribe to this service that will allow me to choose, you know, a Celine, a Gucci, a Chanel, a Hermès, like a high-end bag, and I can keep it or switch it in and out as much as I want, so that I can show, I can create the illusion for my friends and colleagues and people I’m trying to network, I can create the illusion that I have this massive designer handbag collection that is current in today’s designs.
[00:18:19] Tiffany Sauder: That is what they’re trying to sell me, and it’s like, “Hey, have the latest Chanel. Have the latest Hermès. Have the latest Celine.” And it pisses me off every single time. Because this too often is what wealth looks like, and I’m using air quotes for those of you watching this on video can see that. If not…
[00:18:36] Tiffany Sauder: And it’s like, that we look wealthy as women, that is income statement thinking. “Let me go buy something expensive so other people think that I’m actually wealthy.”
[00:18:46] Tiffany Sauder: That is trash thinking, ladies. Trash thinking. What if instead Instagram was saying to us, as women, “Why don’t you invest that $220 a month for the next five years?”
[00:19:03] Tiffany Sauder: And at the end of that, instead of having a stupid handbag that you’re gonna carry into a room that nobody cares about, and you’re just, again, income statement decision, what if you made a balance sheet decision with that exact same money and invested it just at market rates, it doesn’t even have to be special.
[00:19:19] Tiffany Sauder: At the end of five years, you’re gonna have, let’s see, six grand more than if you would’ve just spent it on the handbags. In 20 years, you’re gonna have $136,000 if you would’ve just put that into the market and it got n- normal market returns.
[00:19:37] Tiffany Sauder: You have 136 grand instead of showing all of your friends and a bunch of people who don’t care that you have the latest and greatest handbag.
[00:19:44] Tiffany Sauder: Like, it makes me angry because this is the thing that we are being sold as women of what success looks like.
[00:19:51] Tiffany Sauder: That we look it, we have all of the stuff, but our balance sheets, we’ve never even put one together.
[00:19:57] Tiffany Sauder: We have no idea what it is that we are actually worth financially.
[00:20:02] Tiffany Sauder: And we create a very dangerous environment for ourselves when we spend the part, but we are not actually investing and learning and digging in and, and having conversations and investing the part. I have this picture, I will probably share it as part of promoting this episode, of I, I was, um, in the bank.
[00:20:26] Tiffany Sauder: I was at PNC Bank. I think Quincy’s around 16 months. I’d, like, kind of just had her. Maybe she’s not even a year. I need to go look. But she’s, like, not a tiny, tiny baby and not, not a toddler. but she’s in that, and she’s in this, I don’t know, sleeper.
[00:20:41] Tiffany Sauder: I have on this shirt from TJ Maxx. I remember so specifically buying it, and I was wiring $300,000 so that I could buy a company, buy the majority share of a company.
[00:20:52] Tiffany Sauder: Nobody in the bank knew what I was doing.
[00:20:54] Tiffany Sauder: I certainly did not look the part of somebody who was dripping with, logos and diamonds. I probably had a burp rag in my back pocket.
[00:21:04] Tiffany Sauder: But that is what it looks like, ladies, when we are building wealth, is sometimes in the short term, we have to be willing to say, “You know what?
[00:21:11] Tiffany Sauder: I am gonna, I’m gonna be scrappy, and I’m gonna do the hard work, and that is what it’s gonna take for me to build real wealth on my balance sheet.” So that then, yeah, have the nice stuff. I mean, I am not, like, poo-pooing. What a dumb word. I am not, like, saying we shouldn’t have nice things. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t want stuff that’s cool or trendy.
[00:21:37] Tiffany Sauder: Like, that’s all great.
[00:21:39] Tiffany Sauder: But when we are chasing that instead of the real things, the real knowledge, the real conversations, the real investments, the real wealth, then it becomes, like, this cloak of looking like, and we aren’t really owning it. We haven’t really earned it, and we’re trying to look the part, fake the part.
[00:22:01] Tiffany Sauder: You know, the whole, like, fake it til you make it. And I think that that is no good thinking. this is kind of adjacent, but my brain is going to this. Like, you do sort of need to dress the part, dress for the job you want. They say that. I think that’s true. But there are a lot of ways to do that without it being, current season Chanel.
[00:22:19] Tiffany Sauder: Let’s just say it like that. There are a lot of ways to get yourself to the place where you can look like you belong in the room without it being renting the latest handbag from Chanel. I think that’s so stupid.
[00:22:32] Tiffany Sauder: okay, also gonna say, this is not about me pooping on rental services because I love a Rent the Runway.
[00:22:38] Tiffany Sauder: To me, that is, like, really strategic.
[00:22:41] Tiffany Sauder: Why pay 700 bucks or 1,200 bucks for a dress that you’re gonna wear exactly one time? Go rent it, pay 70 bucks, you know, squeeze a night out of it, and send it back.
[00:22:52] Tiffany Sauder: That, to me, is smart, but it’s not a recurring expense month in and month out. It’s not that the rental service is a bad idea, it’s that don’t rent the logos every single month, making everybody around you think that you have a collection of 25 designer handbags, because I think that’s a joke, and I think we perpetuate this for one another as women, that you have to be all jacked up and looking like that to really be taken seriously, and I don’t think that’s the case at all.
[00:23:20] Tiffany Sauder: So that’s what I want to, like, dispel. okay, you guys know that I love this tip, but if you are not doing it, you are sleeping on the easiest thing that you can do. One of the simplest ways that we can be balance sheet thinkers is take the asset we should all have, which is some cash, and put that into a money market account, which is an interest-bearing checking account, so that you’re, you’re getting paid on your cash.
[00:23:45] Tiffany Sauder: Your time is an asset. Your cash is an asset. Your cash is an asset. If it is sitting in savings, it’s sitting, in your checking account… I even just did this with my Life Of And business.
[00:23:57] Tiffany Sauder: We have some cash sitting in our operating checking account, and I set up a money market account so that a certain threshold of money all goes into that money market account, and it’s getting, like, 3, 3.25% interest just sitting there.
[00:24:11] Tiffany Sauder: That’s balance sheet thinking. Every single dollar you have should be earning for you, and this is a very, very easy way for you to do that.
[00:24:19] Tiffany Sauder: So link in show notes. You can very quickly set up a money market account.
[00:24:24] Tiffany Sauder: I have done this twice now online.
[00:24:27] Tiffany Sauder: They are so helpful at First Internet Bank. They are a completely digital bank.
[00:24:31] Tiffany Sauder: That means they have no retail locations. That means they are experts at helping you over the phone. And I always try with the chat, but I’m a little bit more Gen X than I would like… Am I Gen X?
[00:24:44] Tiffany Sauder: I’m 45, whatever generation that is. I’m not a boomer and I’m not a millennial. I think you’re an elder millennial.
[00:24:50] Tiffany Sauder: An elder millennial she said. Oh, jeez, ow. Well anyways, Sam, whatever. Nobody invited you into the conversation except I just did. Um, but whatever I am, elder millennial, born in 1980, I should know, but it doesn’t really matter. My point is I try to use chat and I’m good at it like 40% of the time, but I mostly still like to talk to a human.
[00:25:08] Tiffany Sauder: And so at First Internet Bank, you talk to somebody stateside. They like literally helped me in two seconds. I was like, “I think I did all of it, but I didn’t get a confirmation email.” And she was like, “Oh yeah, no problem. We just have to do these two things.” So literally balance sheet thinking number one, get your cash working for you.
[00:25:25] Tiffany Sauder: Set up a money market account at whatever bank you are, um, banking at. And if you don’t know how to do that, literally my friends at First Internet Bank, it’s so simple, so easy. You can move money in and out. their president Nicole often says, “ Sometimes it’s nice to have money at a bank where you don’t see it every single day when you log in to see your balance It’s not always like front and center. You know? It’s like when the money’s not in your wallet, you don’t always spend it quite as fast. So I’m telling you, if you have $50,000, you’re gonna earn about $2,000 a year in interest, which is real money.
[00:25:58] Tiffany Sauder: That can be money you save, it can be money you invest, or it can be money that you spend on things like outsourcing so that you can get more time back so that you can either spend more time with people you love or invest in your job.
[00:26:09] Tiffany Sauder: Like ladies, balance sheet thinking. This is what I want from all of I think this is especially hard for us, and I sort of already talked about it, but I do want to hit the nail on the head with us, is balance sheet thinking requires you to, for a time, to make choices that are invisible to the outside world.
[00:26:29] Tiffany Sauder: Nobody sees, unless you’re gonna issue a press release, that you bought a business. Nobody sees that you have savings. Nobody sees that you decided to buy half the house that you could, than you could afford because you’re saving for a business you want to buy. Nobody sees that you decided your can,send your kids to public school instead of private school so that you can pay for their college tuition instead. nobody sees these choices of not being in a place where you are constantly servicing debt so that you can actually have cash to invest and have other things than your job that are paying you. Nobody sees that for a very long time until someday people are asking, “How is it that you make money?
[00:27:13] Tiffany Sauder: Because it doesn’t seem like you work anymore,” or, “It seems like you are able to take vacations that are, more extravagant than you used to,” or, “It seems like you’re more comfortable than I would ima-…” Like, it’s like happens slowly all of a sudden, just like, when you’re trying to be disciplined with your health.
[00:27:31] Tiffany Sauder: It’s like it happens slowly all of a sudden. It’s like one day you’re like, “Holy crap, I’m here.” But it happens very incrementally on the way, on the way down. So, we have to get clear about what we want our individual financial picture to look like, otherwise we will be a slave to the urgent. We will be a slave to having the, the best outfit at the next party.
[00:27:52] Tiffany Sauder: We will be a slave at saying yes to the next trend that’s coming through our Instagram feed. We will say, we will be a slave to saying yes to sending our kids on a trip we can’t afford. We will be a slave to putting a trip to Europe on our credit card. We will be a slave to these things when we don’t have real clearly defined goals And so it has to start with that. we have to get there, ladies. And it is, oh my word, I am not saying this at you. I’m saying it at me too, because I can get distracted with the urgent, with the right now, with the latest whatever, when I’m like, “No, I don’t really care.” All of that is disposable. That is not really what my life is about.
[00:28:32] Tiffany Sauder: That’s not what I’m trying to create for me, for the teams I’m leading, for the companies I’m leading. That is not what it’s about.
[00:28:40] Tiffany Sauder: so I just, I guess would say that. It’s like, no, I’m talking to me as I’m talking, as much as I’m talking to you. But the choices will get easier when you know why you’re making them.
[00:28:51] Tiffany Sauder: Saying no is so much easier when you understand what you’re saying yes to behind it.
[00:28:55] Tiffany Sauder: So here’s what I’m gonna leave you with. The scoreboard that really matters is our balance sheet. It’s not how much money we’re making. That is simply a function of the job that we have today, but if your expenses are out of control, it doesn’t matter how much money you’re making.
[00:29:12] Tiffany Sauder: Nobody at the dinner party’s gonna ask about your money market account. Nobody’s gonna notice that you drove the same car for another year. Nobody’s gonna comment on the subscription that you canceled, but it, like, compounds steadily. Year after year after year, it compounds. And when we, when we make the right decisions over a long period of time, and I said this on a previous episode when we talk about finances, it does not have to be this massive overhaul.
[00:29:35] Tiffany Sauder: Nothing in our life really has to be like that. But when we make the right choices incrementally, we get there over time And the people who build real wealth are the ones that often don’t have the most impressive lives at the beginning because they said no to some instant gratification things so that they could have what they wanted in the future, and that’s what I want for you.
[00:29:59] Tiffany Sauder: So I wanna leave you with a couple of action items. You know what? Action, action. We love action.
[00:30:06] Tiffany Sauder: Actually, you guys love action. Anytime I’m just, like, giving you a motivational speech, you literally don’t listen to the whole episode . So here’s a little motivational speech with some to-dos at the end.
[00:30:17] Tiffany Sauder: Number one, do the math on one monthly subscription. So we’ll go look at one of your subscriptions, do the math on how much it’s costing you, and ask yourself again, “Do I still want to say yes to this?” I am not saying you need to go cancel one monthly subscription. I’m just saying is there one? Just go remind yourself how much it costs.
[00:30:39] Tiffany Sauder: I just had one of these. It was in the nutrition category for me.
[00:30:42] Tiffany Sauder: and I realized I was paying, like, $120 a month, and I was like, “You know what? right now in this season, I don’t think that is where I wanna put that $120 a month.” And so I canceled it.
[00:30:52] Tiffany Sauder: You don’t need to cancel yours. I had forgotten how much I was paying for it.
[00:30:56] Tiffany Sauder: If you would’ve asked me, I would’ve thought it was more like $60. And when I went and looked, I was like, “Oh, crap. That’s 120 bucks. I don’t know that it’s worth, four bucks a day for me. So I just undid the decision.
[00:31:07] Tiffany Sauder: So again, I’m not saying cancel it. I’m just saying go bring into consciousness a subscription that you maybe said yes to a while ago that you forget how much it costs, and go say, “Is that still the right amount on the right thing in this season?” Okay? Number one.
[00:31:22] Tiffany Sauder: Number two, move your cash to a place where it is working for you.
[00:31:26] Tiffany Sauder: We have no excuses, ladies. If you have any cash at all, $4,000 is the minimum amount to be able to take full advantage of the product offerings at my f- at First Internet Bank. $4,000 or more, you’ll have no penalties, no account fees, and you will be able to earn their maximum interest. whatever the interest rate is today.
[00:31:44] Tiffany Sauder: It floats a little bit. So go look at that. But put your money to work. Again, I even put my operating cash inside of the business in a money market account, and I looked at one of my other businesses and saw that we were not doing that, and that’s on my to-do list in the next 30 days. Get your money, your cash to work for you.
[00:32:02] Tiffany Sauder: You should be getting paid for every dollar you have. and the third thing I want you to do, and we have built a template for you if you would like to use ours, that is to build your personal balance sheet.
[00:32:14] Tiffany Sauder: Get it on a piece of paper and get into the routine of updating it, I’m gonna say twice a year.
[00:32:19] Tiffany Sauder: Start with that. Make it easy. Have that be the minimum. Once in the summer, once at the end of the year, see where am I at and what is my net worth.
[00:32:28] Tiffany Sauder: It is not just billionaires who have net worths. We all have a net worth.
[00:32:33] Tiffany Sauder: And seeing that number change over time as a reward for productive investments, saving in your HSA, saving overall, putting your cash to work through things like your money market account, seeing those dollars grow, or your IRA, your investments, is very motivating, very, very exciting.
[00:32:53] Tiffany Sauder: And so getting that scorecard item in front of you, ’ cause I don’t just want you making more money, I also want you building real wealth. And the way that we do that is by keeping an eye not just on our income statement, not just on how much we’re making, not just on making sure our expenses are, quote, “as low as possible”, ‘cause I don’t always think that is actually the way that people build wealth.
[00:33:15] Tiffany Sauder: This is what I’m thinking about right now as we talk about income statement thinking versus balance sheet thinking. Income statement, again, is about paying attention to what is washing through, what are the ins and what are the outs. And we do have to make sure that we’re thoughtful about those being a certain ratio so that we aren’t getting ourselves in debt.
[00:33:36] Tiffany Sauder: But once you have some excess cash, I then want you balance sheet thinking. I want you thinking about, “How do I leverage my assets?” And that is not just cash, that is also your time. How do you set yourself up for your most incredible Life Of And? That is the gift that we’re trying to give you.
[00:33:54] Tiffany Sauder: Thank you for joining me in this episode.
[00:33:56] Tiffany Sauder: It’s another one of our series with First Internet Bank, where we are bringing the conversations about money to the forefront. I hope you listen to this episode with a best friend. I hope that you chew through awkwardly, you know, the conversation about what does it mean to talk about money in this way.
[00:34:13] Tiffany Sauder: Because until we get the conversation of money to the table for women, we will never be earning as much as we deserve. Thanks for listening on this week. Please send it to somebody who you know can benefit from it. It’s the best, fastest way that we grow the show. Thanks for joining me.