Why This Money Advice Has EXPIRED

Why This Money Advice Has Expired (0:00)

Brian: Expired. Like the old milk in your fridge, this money advice might have been good at one point, but now it’s time to pour it down the drain.

Bo: Brian, I am so excited because today we get to look at five pieces of financial wisdom that people traditionally considered to be true, and we’re going to tell you why that might not be the case anymore. I’m Brian. He’s Bo. And we’re financial advisers here to make sure you aren’t working off of expired advice. With that, let’s jump right in.

Claim #1: You Need a College Degree (0:35)

Bo: All right, Brian. So, the very first piece of advice that we think is expired, I think this is going to get us in a little bit of hot water, and that is the advice that you need a college degree.

Brian: Look, this might on surface seem spicy, but we got the numbers. We are actually showing up with the receipts. Without a doubt, education is a ladder of opportunity. You crawl up this, become a better version of yourself. But somewhere along the way, we have turned the goodwill of education into something that is just expensive. And if you need proof, here’s the receipts.

Bo: Look at this. In 1978, the cost of one year of college was $2,142. At that time, minimum wage was $2.65 an hour. So, if you just took the cost of college divided by the minimum wage, it would take you about 888 hours or about 16 hours a week working part-time to be able to pay your way through school. That’s what it looked like back in 1978. But if we fast forward to today, the average cost of one year of university is $22,178. You compare that with minimum wage, which is $7.25. Now, it would take you 3,059 hours or 59 hours a week just to be able to pay your way through school. These two are not the same.

Brian: I mean, because look, in the first one is where all the movies and stuff where you’re working the part-time job, you’re going to college part-time, and then you still got a little time to go out there and make memories with your friends. The second one, not even close to being a reality when you have to work 60 hours a week. And that doesn’t even include school, doesn’t include anything else you get to do with memory making. It’s just a bad deal. And a lot of you probably watch this and go, “Well, that’s just inflation has been bad.” Well, guys, let us go ahead and pull the curtain open on this. Look at what this slide is actually showing you. This graph is saying the annual cost of college inflation adjusted. Meaning that if it was just keeping up with inflation, this line would actually be flat. Yeah, we went above and beyond. The cost of college has gone up way beyond what inflation is.

Bo: For those of you out there listening, back in the early 1970s, the cost in real dollars of a public 4-year college was just under about $10,000 a year. Now, inflation adjusted, even after accounting for normal increases in inflation, the price has gone up in real dollars to almost $25,000 a year. That’s a 150% increase over the last 50 years. And if you think that’s bad for public institutions, private colleges is even worse. They went from a real dollar cost of about $20,000 per year up to over $50,000 per year. It’s not just inflation that’s causing the cost of college to increase.

Brian: Now, let me bring this into perspective because you guys know you’re like, man, when did these guys start hating education? We love education and I want to make sure everybody knows that. Look, I even attribute a lot of my success to getting an accounting degree in college that gave me the fundamentals of understanding and speaking the language of business. And I couldn’t have done that without going to college and getting that education. But if you’re going to college without understanding what you’re there for and what your return on investment is going to be on this degree, then you are the product that is being sold to and being taken advantage of. And if you want proof of this, we survey our millionaire clients and we say, “Hey, do you actually work in your field of study?” We found out from our clients, 76% of them work in their same field of study. If you compare and contrast that now to the typical American, check this out. It’s almost the inverse. Only 27% of Americans work in their field of study. Guys, you’re being sold a product that you’re not beginning with the end in mind.

Bo: And what stinks now is that it’s so expensive that it becomes a cost you almost can’t overcome. If you’re going to college to get a degree that you’re not even going to use, you are throwing money down the drain. So, we want you to begin with the end in mind by, one, figuring out what degree will actually align with the vocation that you’re going to pursue. And then two, we want you to follow the first year financing rule. When it comes to paying for higher education, we do not want the total amount of debt that you accumulate to be more than what you anticipate your first year starting salary to be. So, if you’re going to come out with this degree and that degree is going to start you with a salary of $60,000 per year, you need to make sure that you keep your total student loan debt below $60,000.

Brian: Yeah. And a lot of people are starting to think, hey, I get a college degree, and in the past that meant I immediately was going to have a high-paying job. That’s just not what we’re seeing in the stats anymore. Right now, if you look at the research from the Federal Reserve, 42% of recent college graduates are underemployed. I mean, my daughter just graduated college. It’s not uncommon for people now to come out with degrees and then go back and work in food service.

Bo: Go back to the jobs they could have had while they were in college, even before college. But okay, if we’re going to say that college degrees are not required, we want to go a step beyond and say, okay, well, what are some vocations you can pursue or what are some ways you can still get a job and build financial independence without a college degree? Look at these top jobs that do not require a degree. Air traffic controller, median salary almost $150,000 a year. Commercial pilot, $123,000. Nuclear power reactor operator, $122,000. Elevator installer, $109,000, and so on and so forth. Now, two of these do require an associate’s degree, but by and large, these jobs do not require a four-year degree. So, just because you want to get a good job, just because you want to have a high income, does not mean that you have to go to college to be able to achieve that.

Brian: Look, we love education when it actually boosts your future earning potential. But there is a cost when you go to college. And the fact is that instead of going out there and working and living on less than you make and letting your army of dollar bills start to build up at an even earlier age, you’re actually going to defer that. So we thought it would be very powerful for people to see what that opportunity cost is. We talk about the Wealth Multiplier all the time on what it’s worth for a 20-year-old because we know it’s 88 times over. But you realize for an 18-year-old, the Wealth Multiplier is close to 108. That’s why, guys, we’re not picking on education saying that you shouldn’t go to college. We are saying you better take an active role in your life towards education to make sure that you’re actually getting the return on investment. Is the value you’re receiving connecting with what you’re paying for this thing that’s going to hopefully make you better? And if it is not, then we would say the idea that you have to have a college degree is expired.

Claim #2: Saving 10% Is Enough for Retirement (8:06)

Bo: All right, Brian, let’s go to the next piece of financial advice that we believe is expired. It’s this idea that all I need to do is save 10% for the future. We think it’s expired, that 10% is enough to save for retirement.

Brian: Yeah. When I came out of school in the mid-90s, the two most popular books on kind of personal finance at that time, one was saying 10% and the other one was saying 15%. I’m here to tell you I think that we have moved into a world now where there’s more opportunity than ever, but there’s also things working against you to where more and more of the responsibility falls on your shoulders.

Bo: And look, we’ve actually done the math. If you go to moneyguy.com/resources, you can download our deliverable, How Much Should You Save? And what it does show is that 10% is appropriate for some people. If you are someone who starts saving very early, 20, 21, 23, 24 years old, and you’re planning on a normal retirement age, you’re not going to retire until age 60 or 65, then yeah, 10% might be enough and it might be the ticket to get you there. However, we know that most Americans don’t fall into that category. We know that the average American doesn’t actually begin saving and investing until they get to age 30.

Brian: Yeah. And we’ve done the math on this. If you’ve put yourself in this situation and you said, “Hey, what if I just saved 10%?” You know what you’ll find is for a person who does start saving and investing at age 25, that’s going to generate a little over $3 million.

Bo: If you had a $50,000 starting salary at 25, just saving that 10% is going to get you that $3 million number. And that $3 million number we believe will replace almost 80% of your pre-retirement income.

Brian: Now, that’s pretty good. But we’ve already shared the typical American doesn’t even start saving and investing until they’re 30 years of age. When you run the numbers for a 30-year-old, now it’s generating $1.9 million. But if you adjust that back for inflation in today’s dollars, that’s only going to have a replacement ratio of about 48% of your income. That’s decent, but man oh man, it’s not enough to probably provide enough replacement of your living expenses in retirement.

Bo: And then if you wait until age 35 to begin saving and you start saving 10%, well, you’re only going to be able to accumulate about $1.2 million. And again, based on a $50,000 starting salary, that would only replace about 31% of your pre-retirement income. So obviously, if you’re waiting till later and later ages, 10% might not cut it. And so we wanted to reverse engineer the math. Okay, if 10% doesn’t do it, what would your savings rate need to be if your goal were to replace 80% of your pre-retirement income? So for the 25-year-old, it’s right there at 11%. So 10% works if you’re 25 years old. But if you’re a 30-year-old and you want to replace 80% of your pre-retirement income by the time you get to 65, your savings rate needs to be 17%. For the 35-year-old, where most average Americans fall when they start saving, you actually would need to save 27% starting at age 35 in order to have a normal retirement at age 65 that replaces 80% of your pre-retirement income.

Brian: Look, our goal for you when you discover our content is hopefully it’s early, but I want you to do it early and often because we always talk about this concept of the Wealth Multiplier. And that’s why for a 20-year-old, the Wealth Multiplier is 88 times over. For a 30-year-old, it’s 23. For a 40-year-old, it’s seven. You see the steep decline. So, the earlier you can start, and I want you to load it up because it gives you options. You might actually be able to change what your savings rate is over and throughout your career. We’ve actually experienced that even when we are doing Making a Millionaire.

Bo: Yeah. We had Danielle on the show and she said, “Hey, I’m willing to do this coast FIRE thing. I want to have a really, really high savings rate early on and by doing that, I’m going to give myself an opportunity, the flexibility to decrease my savings rate later on.” That’s okay. It’s okay to be dynamic. But what you want to do is you want to be in control of that decision. You don’t want to be that person that starts at 10% saying, “Oh, I’ll save more later.” And then you get to later and now you’ve got to save 30, 40, 50% just to get to your financial goals. If you can start early and often and do it right, it’s a whole lot easier than if you wait until later and try to make up for lost time.

Brian: Because of all the data we just shared, as well as the ever-changing financial world and landscape that we live in, we think a 10% savings and investment rate is expired.

Claim #3: Only Buy Used Cars (12:48)

Bo: All right, Brian. Next piece of advice that we think is expired. Now, this one hits a little close to home because I was kind of raised on this advice, Brian. This was ingrained in me at a very early age, and it’s the idea that when it comes time to buy a car, you should only buy used cars.

Brian: And now this one, I think this is a recent trend that we’ve noticed, is that slightly used cars, especially slightly used cars of specific brands that hold their value well, and why do they hold their value well? It’s because these are the brands that typically people want to own because they’re reliable. They’re good transportation to get you to your job. And that’s why you’re seeing lightly used cars are only $5,778 less than a brand new car. Just a slight discount.

Bo: Yeah. This was an analysis done by iSeeCars over 1.6 million new and lightly used cars. So, this was a large population of automobiles they found. And they found that based on that cost savings, it was only about a 12% discount. And we know that three-year-old used vehicles, vehicles that have been driven for the last three years, have actually reached an all-time near record high average price of $31,000. So, lightly used vehicles aren’t all that much less expensive than brand new vehicles. And moderately used vehicles, 3 years old, have actually gotten more expensive than they’ve ever been before. So, the automobile climate is changing a ton.

Brian: Well, I think, you know, we said that it’s 12%, but for some other models out there, think about Toyotas, it can be as low as less than 5%. So even less. And look, don’t just take our word for it. I think about Clark Howard. Y’all know Clark’s a big hero of mine. Here’s his quote. He says, “If you can buy that three-year-old vehicle for a third less than what a new one would be, then go ahead and buy the three-year-old used vehicle. On the other hand, if the gap is less than that, that would push you more towards buying a new one.”

Bo: And so now let’s talk about, okay, if you are going to be in the situation, what are some of the advantages of buying a new car? Why might you do this? Well, obviously new car, lower mileage if it’s brand new, and there’s no unknown history. You don’t know who was the previous owner and how bad did they treat the car and how rough was it. You know exactly that you were the first person that’s going to own and operate that vehicle.

Brian: Well, come on. We all know you had somebody you rode in the car with. When I was 16, we used to do these things called neutral drops where you put the car in neutral, rev it up, and then slam it into drive. You can imagine this might be entertaining for a 16-year-old. Not great for the longevity of the vehicle. The other thing is, think about all the people that once again, 16-year-old behaviors or rental car behaviors, somebody who gets at an intersection and just balls out as soon as the light turns green over and over again. This stuff is tough on a vehicle. If you at least get a newer vehicle, you more than likely won’t have some of these hidden behaviors that are going to take away the longevity of this vehicle.

Bo: Now, another reality related to new cars is that oftentimes when you’re buying a brand new automobile, you’re going to have more attractive or better financing opportunities than if you were to go buy a used car.

Brian: Well, I think a lot of people, once you realize how the game has changed, it’s going to probably shock you to realize that your car dealership doesn’t make the money on selling you the car. If you look at the research out there, it shows that on average front-end gross profit per vehicle is around $43. The average financing and insurance profits for a vehicle are right under $2,000. You quickly see your dealership is more of a bank than it is a car sales location. So, you have to understand how the game’s played so you can hopefully turn the system to your advantage.

Bo: And so, they want you to finance. They’re incentivized to do so. It’s more profitable for them. So, if you’re going to do it, we want you to do it the right way. If you are going to borrow money to buy a car, we want you to follow the 20/3/8 rule. That’s 20% down. Don’t finance it for any more than 36 months or 3 years. We don’t want your total payments to exceed 8% of your monthly gross income. So, even if you are being encouraged, even being incentivized to finance the car, make sure that you’re doing it in the right, responsible Money Guy way.

Brian: And after you take advantage of our 20/3/8, also it’s important to understand with a new car, one of the things I do like as a parent is the latest safety features and tech. So, when your spouse is driving the car, you feel like the family’s safer. But it is interesting. I think Clark said it best. If your car doesn’t lose a third of its value in those first few years, it might make sense to buy new.

Bo: Yeah. And when you buy new, you obviously get the full manufacturer’s warranty, and you’re going to have likely lower maintenance costs in the first few years of owning a vehicle than if you buy a car later on in its life cycle. So, if you are in the market to buy an automobile and you begin pricing used cars, or someone else already paid for the depreciation plus new cars, and you factor in all the advantages that new cars might have, you may be surprised to find that buying a new car actually makes more sense and buying a used car, well, that advice might be expired.

Claim #4: You Need to Budget Every Month (18:22)

Bo: Expired. All right, Brian. So, now the next piece of advice that we think is expired. Now again, this is countercultural. I think a lot of people are going to struggle with this one, but we think that the idea that you need to budget every single month and watch every single penny and do it forever, we think that advice is expired.

Brian: Now, look, to be clear, there is definitely a season in life when you’re just starting out where you’ll need to be tracking every dollar you spend and a budget is going to be your friend. But don’t we know people that are kind of, they’ve started creating success, they’ve been budgeting, and maybe it’s your spouse, and you look at this and be like, are they mutants or are they misers? Because they are tracking every dollar even though we already have our savings set up, we already have what we’re paying for all of our main bills. What are we doing? Is this even worth it? It seems like it’s creating more turmoil versus building a benefit in my relationship.

Bo: I love what you said. Is it even worth it? Because we recognize that our time has some value associated with it. And while maybe early on that time spent budgeting and tracking makes a lot of sense, it is not uncommon to rapidly grow out of that. I think the envelope system is a great example of that. For those of you that aren’t familiar, the envelope system is the idea that I’m going to have all these different budgetary categories and I’m going to have an envelope for each thing. Here’s my envelope for groceries. Here’s my envelope for eating out. Here’s my envelope for mortgage, home repairs, all these things. And it’s a great tool for understanding exactly where every dollar is going. You almost, if you’re physically doing actual envelopes, you can’t screw it up. But in doing that, in carrying this out and practicing this, you begin to understand that it is very, very rigid. Meaning once an envelope is empty, it’s empty. And it is not sensitive to your time. It takes a lot of time to figure out, okay, which envelope does this expense come out of and how do I replenish that and where do I focus? It’s not an easy, thoughtless thing to do.

Brian: Well, I think these are great systems for creating muscle memory, but it’s not reasonable to think that you’re going to do this forever after you develop the talent and the skill set. And if you’re still doing it, I am so sorry for you. Because what’s funny is that before we even started doing Making a Millionaire, I have a story where a person came to me whose marriage was about to dissolve because he was being so rigid with every transaction his spouse made. She had to bring the receipts to him so he could make sure he locked it into the system. And it was that rigorous even though they already started having financial success. We saw the exact same thing when we were doing Making a Millionaire where we had this couple and he was in all intents and purposes trying to do the right thing, but his wife was feeling so restricted that you could tell that it was definitely taking a toll and making the relationship pay a price.

Bo: Well, I think it just wore her down. It wore her down to the point to where they were no longer on the same page. So, what is the better answer? What’s the better solution? We think that budgeting and tracking makes tons of sense early on, but as you develop that muscle memory, we want you to graduate to what we call a cash management plan. And what exactly is a cash management plan? It is an intentional plan with more flexibility. You are trying to structure your financial life so that the dollars are going into the places that you know you want them to go. You’re having all your savings, all of your investments, all of that stuff flowing out. So now it becomes much less important how much you’re spending on eating out or how much you’re spending on personal care, because you know you’ve funded the things and funded the obligations that you’re supposed to fund and you can spend with more flexibility outside of those things.

Brian: Let’s go ahead and talk about what the dream can be for you if you’ve been a person that’s been living this rigid budget life. What if the better plan was you had your savings and investment automatically set up? It was automated. You also have all of your bills set up to where they’re automatically paying. You know you’re saving and investing 20 to 25%. You know that you’re paying your bills. And then if you have leftover money, guess what, guys? Our system with a cash management plan, go and make memories. Live your best life. It allows you to live outside of strict budget categories because this is what the hard work in the beginning was supposed to do. You had the heavy discipline so that you could actually have some fruit and dividends later and not have the rigor. This is what the whole purpose of using money as a tool and understanding when to graduate to the next system works.

Bo: And one just additional aside on budgeting: it is incredibly valuable and incredibly useful, and cash management is incredibly valuable and incredibly useful. But don’t, as you’ve done it for a while, major the minor. So often you hear about the latte effect, the latte effect, the latte effect. And while yes, there is some truth to that, what we know is that for most folks, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, housing and transportation categories consume 50% of the average household budget. So it’s not the small latte decisions that are eating up most people’s capital. It’s what they decide to do with housing and what they decide to do with cars or transportation. So, if you can make those big decisions right, if you can make those well, it’s going to create flexibility in all the other areas of your life.

Brian: Because of all we just shared about the big living expenses, that’s what’s really going to eat you up. And also showing how after you’ve developed the muscle memory, you don’t have to budget every month. We’re telling you monthly budgeting is expired.

Claim #5: You Need to Buy a House to Build Wealth (24:11)

Bo: All right, Brian. This next one flies in the face of the American dream. And I think we’re going to get some feedback on this one as well, but we believe that the advice is expired, the idea that you need to, you must, you have to own a home in order to build wealth.

Brian: Well, I think there’s a trend on today’s show, which is you have to understand the intersection of the value you’re paying for things versus the price that you’re being sold these items at. We did it with education. We’re going to do it now with housing. When you go look at the research and look at the data, without a doubt, it’s nice if you can own a home, and for decades this has been the American dream. But then when you overlay the data that nationally mortgage payments are 38% more than average rents, you have to ask yourself, am I getting value for the price I’m paying? Or am I being dragged into a system that’s going to absorb all of my resources just so I can fit into this box of the American dream?

Bo: And what you have to recognize is that this is a product of our recent environment. If you look at the data going all the way back to 2010, the spread or disparity between the cost of mortgage, the cost of owning a home, and the cost of renting was not that great. But since the pandemic, since 2020 and the runup in housing prices post-pandemic, now the chasm between what it costs for the average mortgage payment across this country versus the average asking rent, there is a substantial difference. Where it used to be in the hundreds of dollars of difference, now it is almost into the multiple thousands of dollars of difference on a monthly basis. That makes the cost of owning a home substantially more than it has been previously.

Brian: Bo said something there that is a key point. This is a recent development. Really in the last 5 years is when we’ve seen this huge runup, because the price of homes have gone up and while the price of homes have gone up, the cost of interest on the interest rates have gone up as well, and that has really directly driven affordability way down. Now this does not mean that this stays this way forever. More than likely things will adjust. But we can’t cover all the details. We did a deep dive on this, and y’all showed us by how popular that show was. If you want to go check it out, we did a deep dive on how things have changed so you can do the analysis. Should you buy or rent in 2026? Go check that show out if this is something that’s on your decision matrix for 2026.

Bo: Yeah, we’ll give you the headlines. We actually did a case study between Heather the homeowner and Randy the renter. And we used all the same variables to determine, after 12 years, which is the average amount of time a homeowner owns a home, how did their two financial situations differ? How were they similar and who came out on top? What we found is that over that 12-year period, Heather the homeowner spent over $454,000 while Randy only spent about $357,000. But when you look at their net worth statements, Heather’s was only worth about $166,000 because of the equity she had built on her home. Randy, by renting and then investing the difference, was actually able to build up $30,000 more at almost a $200,000 net worth. And he still had a lower monthly payment in terms of his rent payment than Heather’s mortgage. So in this scenario after 12 years, Randy was in a better position financially by renting than Heather was by actually purchasing and buying the home.

Brian: So does that mean we’re always against buying a home now? Not necessarily. Look, I just think you once again have to go through the exercise of what is the value of what you’re getting for the price paid. And now you have to do even more research. You can’t just go under the umbrella that buying homes is going to universally be good for everyone. What we found in our research is some metro areas have wide gaps between rent and home ownership. In those areas you probably want to pay rent and then save in the background so that when the market adjusts or when you retire and move to a different geographic location, you will be ready to capture that moment. But other areas, you’re going to find that rent versus home ownership is actually trading in a very narrow range. If that’s the case, then that probably moves the needle closer. Go ahead and buy that house.

Bo: If you’re curious about what some of those areas are, the areas with the widest gaps: San Francisco, California; Bridgeport, Connecticut; New York, New York; San Jose, California; Los Angeles, California; Honolulu, Hawaii; Houston, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Providence, Rhode Island; Boston, Massachusetts. These are all very high cost of living areas. In high cost of living areas, it may very well make sense to rent instead of buy. But if you live somewhere with a narrower gap, somewhere like Phoenix, Arizona; Orlando, Florida; Columbia, South Carolina; Deltona, Florida; Cape Coral, Florida; Greensboro, North Carolina; or Charlotte, North Carolina, then yeah, home ownership might make more sense than renting because you can build equity at a reasonable price. So, you have to determine for yourself, am I at the stage where it makes sense for me to buy a home? We have a great checklist. You can go to moneyguy.com/resources and check out our home buying checklist. You can even check out our home buying calculator to determine if it makes sense. And then once you’ve determined if it makes sense for you where you are financially, then you can say, okay, geographically, based on where I live and based on where I see myself over the next 5 to 7 years, is home ownership something that makes the most sense for me? And if it’s not, that’s okay.

Brian: We don’t think that renting is a recipe for disaster because there are so many variables. Geography, location, your personal situation, your earning potential, how much you’ve saved and invested. It’s a very personal personal finance decision. Because of that, we can no longer give universal advice that homeownership is necessary to build wealth. Because of that, it’s expired.

The Real Lesson: Personal Finance Advice Evolves (30:30)

Bo: I hope what you’ve seen is that a lot of conventional financial wisdom can change and a lot of circumstances and variables can change. And that’s why we love that we get to sit right here and do what we do by delivering sound financial information to you so that you can make informed decisions and do money better.

Brian: Look, we try to load you up with all the free advice we can. Go to moneyguy.com/resources and I want you to focus on what you can control because the world is ever evolving, ever changing. And we’re going to keep educating you, keep sharing, but focus on what you can control and keep your life as simple as possible as you’re saving and building your army of dollar bills. But I promise you, if you do this, because even with these hurdles, we heard about the cost of education going up, we’ve heard about the cost of housing going up, but I’m here to tell you it’s still a great wealth-building time. Because in the background there is innovation, there’s technology, there’s great returns that are out there building in the background that you can take advantage of by just buying into index investing. And if you do all the things we’re sharing, focus on what you can control, these simple decisions will create success. And when you create that success, all of a sudden you’re going to find your life gets a little more complex. Actually, a lot more complex. Once you have that million-dollar portfolio, you’re going to start thinking about, what do I not know? What am I not maximizing from a tax planning standpoint? Do I have enough to retire? And that’s when that complexity is going to bring you to the abundance cycle. You’ll remember us. We planted these seeds. We shared with you the truth of how money works. We shared the rules that have changed. And we’re going to leave the porch light on for you. And we’re going to help you live your best financial life and own your time that much sooner. Come become a client.. I’m your host Brian joined by Mr. Bo. Money Guy Team, out!