Building wealth does not happen by accident. It takes vigilance and making some good money decisions. In this video, Tasha describes some key life choices that help her to build wealth.
Hi i’m tasha cochrane from one big happy life and this is the lifestyle fix brought to you by curiosity stream in today’s video i’m gonna be talking to you about the six strategies that have set me on the path to building wealth my goal is to have an eight-figure net worth by the time i retire now this is an incredibly ambitious goal and by sharing my goal i’m not
Implying in any way that this should be anyone else’s goal or that you need to build that much wealth in order to be happy but i do think that it’s important that we’re able to talk openly about money both when we’re struggling with it and when it’s abundant as a woman and as a person of color groups that have not always had a seat at the table when it comes to
Building intergenerational wealth i know just how important it is to have these conversations publicly and without shame so i’ll be sharing some of the things that i’ve done and am doing to help me build wealth but first i want to talk a little bit about where i started i was born in south america and came to the united states when i was 2 years old with my parents
Neither of whom graduated from high school and my brother i grew up in brooklyn new york my father was shot on our street when i was 10 my parents separated when i was 12 i was kicked out of high school at 15 went to an alternative high school for a while and then graduated high school with a sub 3.0 gpa then i enlisted in the military as a non citizen at 18 became
A single mom at 19 making $20,000 a year by the time i was 30 i was divorced with over $200,000 worth of debt no savings and making $60,000 a year as a brand new lawyer so as you can see from this very short highlight reel i didn’t come from money i haven’t lived a picture-perfect life i didn’t have parents who supported me financially and i didn’t make a lot of
Money for most of my adult life despite all of that i am on the path to building substantial wealth over the course of my life and here are the things that are helping me get there number one i have a budget i left my mom’s house when i was 18 years old having zero idea how to manage money i’ve never even had a bank account i opened my first one when i was in boot
Camp training to be a marine for the first year or so of my working life i still didn’t have a budget money came in and i just spent it until it was gone being military was a double-edged sword when it came to money because if i ran out of cash i’d still have my home in the barracks so i’d have somewhere to sleep and i’d be able to eat at the chow hall three times
A day then i found out i was pregnant a few weeks before my 19th birthday and everything changed life got real suddenly i needed a car an apartment and baby things and i needed my money to stretch far enough to buy all of those things i needed a budget now most people budget by paycheck or month-to-month but i quickly found that those kinds of short-sighted budgets
Didn’t help me prepare for the things that i had coming months down the line like a baby so i started budgeting for an entire year at a time i created what i call a one-year spending plan planning for your whole year upfront is life-changing i hear this over and over from our audience over on one big happy life it helps you plan for things that are happening in
Your immediate future so that they don’t take you off guard and it helps you see how decisions that you’re making this month impacts the things that you’re doing later on down the line if you don’t have one you can grab a free spending plan at one big happy live.com forward slash budget my one year spending plan helped me plan for buying a car moving out on my own
And buying all the things that my baby would need after she was born later it helped me figure out how i could afford to leave the military and go to college and then law school a few years ago it helped us plan how we would pay off thirty thousand dollars worth of debt increase our nest egg by a hundred thousand and take a family trip to singapore all in the same
Year and now it helps me plan for paying for my daughter to go to college even while i tackle my own student loans and save for that eight figure nest egg i told you about earlier my spending plan helps me make sure that i’m planning for what matters to me that i’m not wasting money on things that don’t and that i’m aware of how much income i need in order to hit
My financial goals which brings me to my second point number two i have always worked to grow my income on my terms when i got pregnant at 18 i learned really fast just how hard and frustrating life could be when you don’t have enough money i realized that money brought freedom options and so i knew that i needed to figure out a way to make more if i was going to
Be able to provide for my daughter the way that i drink of now there are many different ways to make more money but not all of them align with our personal strengths and our goals and visions for our life when i decided to leave the military several people tried to talk me out of it they pointed out that i could climb the enlisted ranks or apply to be an officer that
Way i could make more money and keep all of the great benefits like a pension plan and the health insurance but i knew that the military wasn’t for me i loved learning and growing and trying new things but the military it was very much entrenched informality and doing things the way they’ve always been done i knew i’d never be able to thrive there even if i did get
Promotions that increased my income so i left similarly after graduating from law school i chose to work in public interest instead of going to a law firm where the starting salary was a whopping 160 thousand dollars a year i’d spent two summers at law firms and while i was making great money i rarely saw my family and i didn’t particularly enjoy the formality of
Corporate firm life so i decided i would find a way to do work that i enjoyed with ours that allowed me to have the work-life balance that i needed and would allow me to make a very good living within five years of starting my first job out of law school where i was making $60,000 a year i had more than doubled my salary all while doing public interest work that i
Loved and working a set 40 hours a week and i plan to continue that trajectory and increase my income another thirty thousand dollars in the next few years but then i discover an entrepreneurship in the past two and a half years i’ve grown one big happy life to a multi six-figure business that’s helping people all over the world build wealth and create lives that
They love today as obi hl grows so does our ability to contribute to philanthropic efforts around the world and i also get the added benefit of full control over the projects that i work on and i get to set my own schedule all things that are very important to me so from the very beginning i’ve always taken a position that i could make more money and that i could
Do it in ways that aligned with my values and with my vision of my day to day life and what that should look like because of that i’ve been able to continue to grow my income while also enjoying the work that i’m doing in order to make it that means that i’m happy to continue to work for decades which makes it possible for me to build wealth over the course of my
Lifetime number three i prioritize building wealth as a general rule i encourage people not to harbor life regrets because they just take up unnecessary mental space but i do have one and only one and it’s that i wish i had started saving earlier in my life i was thirty years old before i really started saving for retirement over the past seven years my nest egg
Has grown over $200,000 and between the two of us joseph and i have over four hundred thousand dollars saved for retirement between our monthly contributions and market growth our nest egg is now growing at an average rate of $100,000 or more each year given enough time continuing to save at our current rate and the magic of compounding we’re on track to have a 1
Million dollar nest egg within six years and a 10 million dollar nest egg in 29 years building wealth is the marathon of all marathons it’s gonna take us decades of work towards that goal to get there and it’s gonna take lots of our own money feeding into it year after year to get and stay on this path we’ve had to commit to making saving a priority in our personal
Finance community wealth builders academy we talked a lot about the importance of knowing your minimum savings rate it’s the amount that you need to save every month in order to retire when you want to with enough money to support the lifestyle that you want to have indefinitely so for us our number one financial goal is to make sure that we are hitting our minimum
Savings rate every single month everything else comes after that including paying off debt and saving for college or our kids number four my partner and i work together to reach our financial goals it’s a lot easier to build wealth when you have two incomes coming in but those two incomes won’t mean much if you and your partner aren’t on the same page when it comes
To your long term goals joseph and i started having money conversations very early on in our relationship we were both divorced and we both had six figures worth of debt that we were bringing to the table plus i had a nine year old child and we knew that we wanted to have more children now seven years later we’re still having these financial check-ins it’s really
Important that both partners also know what’s going on with the household finances on a monthly basis even if one partner is responsible for the day-to-day bill paying sending financial goals that were both committed to helps us stick to our budget from month to month and the regular money conversations gives us an opportunity to have a check in with each other
On what’s working and what’s not that way we can adjust our budget as our priorities change number five i have insurance no matter how well you plan life happens my financial goals are based on the assumption that i won’t become disabled or die in the next 30 years but that might not be the case that’s why i both joseph and i carry life insurance and short and
Long term disability insurance those policies won’t completely replace our incomes but they do provide financial resources for our loved ones that will minimize the impact of the cost of our care if we become disabled and will provide our children with substantial assets if one or both of us dies as the years pass these policies will become less important because
We’ll have enough assets to be able to self-insure but for now having insurance is an important part of our wealth building strategy number six i ballads enjoying life today and building my best financial future you’ve probably picked up on this by now but one big happy life is all about balancing building wealth while also enjoying life today the goal is to create
A plan that’s sustainable one that you can stick to day in and day out because you love your life there are many different paths to wealth for any given person so once you define what wells looks like for you you can then move on to charting the path to that goal in a way that matches with your overall vision for your life so i encourage you as you’re figuring
Out what your path to wealth looks like to look beyond the traditional life paths look beyond what other people are have done or are doing if those paths don’t seem like the right fit for you chart your own write down the things that you want and then spend some time brainstorming ask yourself okay how can i have this this and this or play the what-if game ask
Yourself what if i try this be creative remember that it’s your life and you only get one and now that we’ve talked about the key strategies that are helping me build wealth let’s talk about a great place to learn more about the world around you special thanks to curiosity stream for sponsoring today’s video are some of us hardwired in our dna for success that’s
The questions researchers were tackling in a recent documentary short that i watched on curiosity stream i’ll drop a link in the description box to the episode so you can check it out curiosity stream is a subscription streaming service made for those of you who have no shame in your nerd game with over 2400 documentaries and nonfiction titles from some of the
World’s best filmmakers including exclusive originals curiosity stream is the world’s first streaming service that focuses on our lifelong quest to learn explore and understand curiosity stream is offering a special promotion just for tfd viewers get your first 30 days completely free if you sign up using the link and promo code in the description box during the
Signup process thank you so much for watching and be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell and tune in here every single friday for another new episode of the lifestyle fit see you next week
Transcribed from video
The 6 Key Money Decisions That Allowed Me To Build A Better Life By The Financial Diet