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I mean, in an ideal world, we would all just be frolicking, eating berries, creating arts and not having to worry about the stock market, but if I’m being realistic in this capitalistic society, yes, I believe everybody should become an investor, and I’m in it for the long term.
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If you can’t invest because your income is too low, think again, because today’s guess is living proof that investing and building wealth at nearly every income level is possible. Welcome to Living so fabulously, where we talk about investing strategies at every incomelevel.
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Charlie Silver is the brainchild behind the Unicorn Millionaire podcast and blog, helping folks crush debt, grow their credit score, and start building a six-figure retirement, even if they don’t have a six figure income yet.
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And Charlie helps folks do this without shame or triggeringburnout.
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Charlie’s journey from stockbroker to digital nomad as a money coach has been highlighted in Cosmo, Lonely Planet, Bankrate, The Latina, and the Yo Kiro Dinero podcast, and now living not so fabulously by Yahoo Finance.Welcome to the show, Charlie.
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Oh, thank you for having me. I’m super excited.
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Definitely, we’re excited to have you here as well. You know, one of your tags taglines is a six figure retirement without a six figure salary. What does that mean and where did it come from?
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For me, it means making every single dollar work for you. Whenever I hear the word $1 I automatically think of, oh, a dollar invested equals $10 equals $100. And as somebody whoHas always been low income. I’ve never made more than 45K as a business owner. I still pay myself about that much. It’s all about really just prioritizing the money you make and investing it instead of constantly just living paycheck to paycheck, or chasing then the next raise or trying to earn more. It’s all about the money you have and putting it to work for you in all types of ways. And so I’m really passionate about helping folks do that and see the power of what a dollar can do for people so that they stop.Thinking that they’re poor and start thinking of themselves as rich with what they already have.
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That’s, that’s really powerful. So I’m curious, how did you break free from the consumer culture that we’ve all like literally being be been conditioned to sort of adopt, especially into adulthood and especially being a part of the LGBTQ plus community where it’s always kind of like we’re trying to prove ourselves by owning the more the the nicer stuff and going on the nicer vacations.
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So, I’m proud to say that I never bought into consumer culture in the first place. I’ve always been a saver, and that comes from my growing up first gen Mexican undocumented where I was raised to think that money was evil, and it was unexpected. Money comes and goes, and we can’t do anything about it. So, uh, yeah, I was raised with this very unempowering scarce mindset of of uh being fearful of money. So now I’ve totally transformed that.Because I spent my twenties being broke and underpaid and underemployed, I got a college degree from Wellesley College, and I assumed I’d just been making bank once I left, and then I ended up doing the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, all the cop, all the cults of the corps that don’t pay you well, just waiting to earn more money, but I was allIs a saver. I always had my emergency fund, but I’ve always been somebody who’s invested in, in world travel and experiences versus buying nice things, which is an interesting conundrum because it’s easy for me to lay in bed and invest $500 in index funds. But a $130 handmade leather harness. Whoa, that’s a lot of money. So that’s kind of where I’m at in terms of consumerism is trying to see everything as an investment.
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Yeah, so I just have a question then. Do you think that everyone should become an investor? And, and why are, why yes or why no?
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I mean in an ideal world we would all just be frolicking, eating berries, creating art, and not having to worry about the stock market, but if I’m being realistic in this capitalistic society, yes, I believe everybody should become an investor, and I’m in it for theLong term, I don’t like, I don’t ever tell people there’s anything ethical about this, because there’s not in order for any of these companies to become publicly traded, they have had to exploit employees, exploit resources, exploit people, get people to pay pay for things they might not need.Um, so there’s nothing ethical about this, but for me as a trans person, estranged from family who has no partner, no support system I can directly fall back on, it’s, it has been absolutely urgent for me to invest in the stock market so that I can at least make sure that 65.year old me is taken care of, and ideally, I would want to sell out of all my investments one day and just invest back into mutual aid or donate to campaigns I care about and nonprofits that I care about. So that’s just real talk. There’s nothing ethical about this, but yes, everybody should be.
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Uh it’s interesting. If you’re just tuning in, folks, this is living not so fabulously where we make real money talk with a dash of affordability. We’re speaking with Charlie Stover, host of the Unicorn Millionaire podcast, about how to start investing when you’re a low wage earner.So one of the things we know about you, Charlie, is that you started your career as a stock broker. How do you think that helped prepare you mentally, emotionally and financially to become an investor and a moneycoach?
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So going from being underpaid, making 100 or 30K as a teacher, as a cross country tour guide driving a van up to 10 hours a day from New York to LA in 3 weeks, IAnd then going to finance, I immediately realized that I was just giving way too much of my time and precious energy for free. And then once I started getting exposed to all these casual millionaires’ accounts, they didn’t have a fancy financial advisor. They weren’t day trading, but my autistic pattern recognition quickly realized that these people just understood which of theAccounts to prioritize like your Roth IRA, Roth 401k. I quickly became a Roth freak. I was like, OK, I’m noticing that these rich white people prioritize the Roth and the post-tax life. And when they owe taxes, they sell stock from one account to pay for the taxes for last year. So it really just ingrained in me that you don’t have to work harder for more money. If anything, you want to work less.For your money, and there’s nothing more passive than investing in the stock market. Even people who want to invest in real estate, you still need to hire a real estate manager and and vet the tenants and all of this. So, being a stockbroker and being exposed to thousands of accounts of who, who knew what they were doing and who didn’t became very clear to me immediately. So, of course, I adopted the mindset of.OK, it’s, I’m gonna pay attention to not the amount of money that people have, but how they are treating the money and letting it flow from account to account and prioritizing retirement accounts, and then uh I call brokerage accounts the side hoe. It’s the side piece. So it has like a very sexy mindset when it comes to, oh, OK, this is your main squeeze, we’re gonna marry the wrath, and the brokerage account’s gonna be the side hoe, but it’s still gonna be in our life, uh, for 1 reasons, so we can all just build a wall.
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I love that analogies like that really bring, I think, finances to a level that a lot more people can understand, and I think it encourages a lot more people to learn more about them. But let’s go back to when you were first getting started investing. What was your budgeting like so that you could actually start investing? Because you mentioned that you’ve never earned more than $45,000.And for a lot of folks today, um, well, for some folks, $45,000 may be a lot of money, but for most folks who are earning $45,000 that is barely enough money to get by, let alone think about investing. So what was, what was going on with you and your mindset and, and how you were able to change from the before to the after as an investor?
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So when I first got into investing, I was 26, I had just moved to DC the week Trump got inaugurated, and there was a federal hiring freeze, and I had just completed the Peace Corps, I assumed I’d just roll up to DC and get a cushy government job with that sweet pension and the golden handcuffs, just like my other Peace Corps colleagues, but I ended up realizing that it was a lot more work than I thought to apply for a federal government job duringUh, hiring freeze, so I ended up doing a lot of different side hustles like dog walking through Roper. I, two months after I moved to DC or less, I became a bike tour guide on the National Mall. I was showing people around, showing both locals and tourists to see after I just moved there, um, but yeah, I was, I was burnt out. I was working a lot, constantly having to be in places, doing physical manual labor for not a lot of money.Um, and then I pet sat for a financial advisor friend who, uh, I asked her about this Roth IRA stuff, cause my rich or middle class, um, classmates in college would talk about Ross and something about taxes, and I was like, I don’t know about that. But then I asked her, and then she’s like, yes, you should open a Roth IRA. And I sat down with her in her office.Worked for Charles Schwab, and that hour changed my life where she made me feel less shame about not earning as much as my classmates. And she just said, you’re still young. You’re not very risk averse, because when you got laid off, you off to South Africa and Brazil and couched her for 3 months. So you are very tolerant to risk, but you still have your savings together. But she showed me a chart of the stock market, and she was like, this is all of the growth that you’re missing out on over decades if you just don’t get started now. So,Um, the beauty of talking with a finance professional is that they see the options that you don’t. Uh, she helped me realize that I had an annuity with maybe like 2 or 3K in it from an old teaching job that I had no idea what an annuity was, and then she helped me immediately roll it over and open a Roth IRA in front of me, and she set me up with a robo advisor, where she was like, oh, you just need 5K minimum in this account. And we managed to put 5K.In those accounts, and I just trusted her, and I immediately start, it was very cool to be able to log in and see money be green and shoot up, and that then go down, but I was, I was glad I was never alarmed because I was like, oh, this is the long term, I don’t make a lot, but we just need to stay in the stock market and keep dumping money in this shit, and that is basically the mentality that I teach my clients, so.Yeah, that moment changed my life, and it inspired me to coach other people on not fixating so much on their salaries, but I do make it a priority as somebody who makes more than 45K. As soon as January hits, I’m putting 7K in my Roth IRA, getting money somewhere somehow, and that’s the mentality I had when I was 27. I was like, OK, at least I have this target of maxing out the Roth IRA, which at the time I think was 5500.Um, and I just made that my goal, and it’s been a really nice goal because so many people just don’t know how much to invest, so they never do it. But for me, just knowing those limits is really, um, creates it like a fun goal for me to achieve instead of fixating on, oh, I just wish I made more, because there’s people making 300K who are more stressed about money than I am, but I just know where to put the money.
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That’s true. You know, hold that thought for a second, Charlie, we’ll be right back after this quick break.So welcome back to Living Now So Fabous. We were back talking with Charlie Stover about how to balance needs, wants, and investing. Um, one of the things that you mentioned earlier, Charlie, I wanna kind of revisit, um, and I, I will say, you know, your, uh, yourEarly career in the core and the types of jobs that you’re taking, um makes me uh understand why you made the comment that uh that um there’s nothing ethical about investing. Um, I am a little curious though, um, do you think that there are that a lot of people fear getting into investing because they think it’s so unethical and they don’t want to participate in it?
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Yeah, especially people in the queer community who are very anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal and anti-white supremacists, and the stock market is an embodiment of all of those things wrapped in one, so of course it’s hard for people to justify, but a lot of people just don’t understand.I understand that you’re not actually giving these companies money directly, we just have to invest in these companies, become company owners instead of just being consumers, cause that’s either you’re a company owner investing in the stock market, or you are a consumer, you need to buy groceries, you need to pay for gas, you need to exist, and that takes money and buying products.Anyway, so you might as well basically get your money back and get a refund by taking some ownership of these companies, but I just see it as you’re, you’re basically buying playing cards that you’re trading online with some other rando sitting in his mom’s basement day trading or some computer algorithm.You’re not directly giving this company money, those are the things that I have to tell myself, cause ideally I wouldn’t want to invest and become shareholders of these companies. I would rather become a shareholder of Planned Parenthood or a nonprofit, but that’s not the way it’s set up in this capitalistic um system.
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Yeah. So I’m curious with all that, what your take is on ESG investing, and if you think there’s more, if that’s a more ethical strategy, or if you think that’s sort of just, you know, whitewashing the problem.
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Yeah, I think it’s definitely greenwashing, because I’ve seen clients who sign up for the Betterment Robo advisors and they do the socially conscious option, and then we go in and we actually look at the holdings, and they’re the same tech companies, the same with the the Shi fund, which I invested in as well, cause I was like, well, I’m feminist, so let me buy into the she fund, and then I realized, oh, you can actually look at the companies that you’re investing in, and they’re all just big tech companies anyway.ESGV is another one. Same big companies that are exploitative anyway. So I really think it’s just up to people to do as much research as they want to, but you also want companies that that grow. It’d be great to just invest in companies that didn’t exploit anybody ever and grew and popped off, but unfortunately,I’ve not seen that. So I think it’s just important for people who do want to do their research, to do their research and see what these ethical green companies are actually invested in. But from what I’ve seen, you’re paying more fees for the same exploitative companies. So might as well just pay the least fees to invest in the same stuff and then sell off sooner when you have millions of dollars.
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Yeah. I, um, I, I appreciate everything that you just said. I, I think that a lot of, um, a lot of folks who are socially conscious, um, oftentimes are individuals who are, um, usually on the lower end of the income spectrum and struggle to even think about uh investing.So what would you say or how do you encourage someone who is in that space, um, they are stretched financially, they are concerned about what, where they put their money, whether that’s as a consumer or as an investor. How do you get them started along this idea of open that account, open that IRA, invest in, uh, even if it’s just $25. So what’s the script? Yeah.
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I basically I light a fire under their ass to see the short term urgency of moving money from their crappy Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank accounts into high yield savings, instead of focusing on the amount, just like, even if you got $5 in there, get it to a high interest earning account just to train your brain that the places you store your money matters and what’s better than breaking up with big banks and thenUh, investing in high yield savings accounts that are not publicly traded, they’re not in it to appease their shareholders, they’re in it to pass off the savings on to you because they’re not paying for physical branches or physical cashiers and and tellers. I have so many clients who are ethical and socially responsible who know they need to break up with Bank of America, but they don’t because they don’t see the urgency.So that’s the first step is really just focusing on the right accounts in the short term, but then also having the long term vision. If you are tired now and like, I have chronic health issues, eczema, pre-diabetes, hypothyroidism that led to the worst health crisis of my life where I felt like I was dying, but luckily I had money to hire a health coach and basicallyRebirth myself and become super healthy. And this just happened in my Jesus year at 33. So that’s why it’s urgent for me to take care of myself now with chronic health issues, with all these microplastics and chronic stress that just gets worse with social media. It’s really important to think, do you think you’re gonna be able to do this at 65, 80 years old?
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Yeah, it is interesting when, when we oftentimes talk about investing, we talk about the um the choices and the freedoms that it gives people. Um, when it comes to choices and freedoms, for a lot of folks, it feels like in order to invest, they have to give up something, right? They have to make sacrifices. How do you balance that idea of ofChoosing to invest versus choosing over to uh doing other things. What goes on in your mind and how do you encourage other folks to think about that idea? And maybe, well, yeah, let’s go with that first.
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I just think of it as I’m making sacrifices now while I’m in the best health I will ever be, so that I don’t have to make sacrifices at the last minute in the future. I don’t want to regret not having gotten my shit together, emotionally, financially, physically, health wise together. So, I live out of a suitcase. I have been doing this for a year and a half because the rent is ghetto, especially as a single person who I love my space and autonomy, but I love the companionship of animals. It works out for.Me to pet sit and hop around and go from Alaska to Europe to Portland pet sitting, but it does get tiring, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make now, knowing that I will be very grateful. My future self will be so excited. I made these sacrifices now. And in the short term, I, I don’t buy a lot of I don’t ever do Uber Eats. I don’t order takeout. That’s not a priority to me. I don’t have kids that I need to feed at the last minute. I have a lot of time freedom.I work from home, so if anything, I need to get out of the house. I need excuses to not order takeout and go to the restaurants. I cook a lot of healthy meals, as somebody with chronic health issues, buying organic is more expensive, um, in immediacy, but I, I’m going to prolong my life span and my joy byInvesting in healthy food, I cook fresh at home, cause I have an ayurvedic approach, and a lot of that requires you cooking a lot of your meals fresh and not really eating leftovers, cause my, my body is just not good at processing waste, and that’s it for me. But I also invest in a $100 massage every week. That’s my non-negotiable. So I have my priorities very clear.And when the scarcity mindset creeps in of, oh, you could be investing $400 instead, I just say it’s OK, I’m enjoying my life now. I don’t want to just invest so future me can enjoy massages. It’s give and take to, to um keep myself motivated to make it sustainable.
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Yeah, I really appreciate that you, you, the comment that you made, um, that sometimes the choices that it’s easier to make the choice today than it would be for your future self to make that choice, and the reality is is that when you make that choice today, then you have compounding interest that can make not have it make make it easier to not have to make that choice in the future.I also appreciate that you said you have some splurges. You mentioned the massages, and I think that gives people a a balance in life when we decide that we’re going to make the choice to invest, but we also can maybe think back in the back of our mind, hey, I’ve got this going for me too, so I’m, I am finding some happiness, some joy, some excitement, some fulfillment in my life today while I’m planning for the future.
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Yeah, and it’s interesting. You have to be real with your priorities. I was talking over lunch with a friend and I showed off my, I got my gel nails done, and she’s like, how much was that? And I was like, oh, it’s $100 and she’s like, but it’s gonna last only 2 weeks. And then we started talking about her Uber Eats fiascos, and she’s like, yeah, I paid $40 for a sandwich, and I was like, I would have never. So we have very distinct.Priorities. So it’s just important to get real with your priorities in the now, but still squaring away some money, even if it’s $1.05 dollars, you can always look forward to doubling it and have the limits of these different retirement accounts, um, available to you, cause there’s nothing worse than not knowing how much to invest and thinking you have play money, but I don’t have play money. I’m like, I’ll have play money.When I own my own house outright, I’m maxing out the 300 in my retirement accounts, investing 50k a year in my brokerage account, and then I’ll have some extra play money. But I think too many people don’t understand where the money can go that they think they have play money and have random money in crypto or all these places. And I’m like, no, we, we don’t have play money at y’all.
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We live in a world where most things that are related to money are seen as a competition.But it was putting aside that competition and having a money conversation that changed Charlie’s life, and now Charlie is changing other people’s lives by having those same conversations.
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So our takeaway for you today is to live up to the point of the show, start having those uncomfortable money conversations with the people in your life, especially those who may not think that they have enough money to invest and have those conversations until they become comfortable.
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Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions or guest suggestions for us, just email YF podcast at yahoothink.com.
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If you like what you see, please scan the QR code to follow Yahoo Finance podcast for more videos and expert insights. And until next time, stay fabulous.
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This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.