25 Minutes of The BEST Financial Decisions of 2025

What are some of the best financial decisions you’ve ever made?

If you have extra cash instead of spending it put it in HYSA. You’ll get the same dopamine hit.

I was irresponsible before the age of 30, living almost paycheck to paycheck. When I got married everything changed, I paid off my student loans, cut down my spending, started investing and now on average I have saved 50% of my income since then.

Husband and I finally paid off our cars in 2018. Decided we didn’t want another car payment, we started saving and investing so we’d have money to replace our cars when the time came. What started as ‘the longer we drive the old cars the nicer a new car we can get’ to almost a game of how long will these old cars go. In 2025 at 245,000 km (hubby’s is closer to 300k) still going. When the time comes I’m getting a used (2-3 year old) car which I’ll buy outright!!

19:45 my parents moved in with us in 2023 I think it was.. my mom almost died and she needed help. But now it's just a better thing financially and my son loves having grandma and grandpa around!

Girls please don't fall into the "price per wear" trap. That only applies if you have absolutely nothing else to wear in your wardrobe. If you buy a 400€ bag and wear it 400 times the cost per wear of that bag is 1€, but if you own a lot more bags that you didn't get to wear because you were wearing that one other bag, you are still paying for them! Your cost per wear in the bag category may be super high. It's the total cost per wear of your entire wardrobe that counts. That is why you need to make wise purchases always. If you have bad quality clothes wear the hell out of them before making any expensive "investment". Or your total expenses on clothes will be astronomical. Boring.. I know. But that's how things work. If you want the nice bag, earn it! Wear your clothes until they can't be repaired, don't fit or you just hate them enough to throw them in the trash, then go spend 100€ on a nice cashmere sweater without remorse.

Sorry about your civic Zac 😢

There is a difference between spending money and spending money well. I buy high quality leather boots. Take care of them. $500 boots have lasted 8 to 10 years…..

People think they are being fruggle when buying $30 Costco sneakers that last a month and a half.

17:13 watch this,its wisdom

My piece of advice to PC gamers. Don't upgrade your PC, if a game can't run on a 10 or 20 series card, it's not optimized enough and isn't worth supporting

I stopped drinking soda and started my own Plex server allowing me to cancel all my subscriptions. So much money saved

Don't go broke to look rich.

Max out your ROTH Investments before your, “tax later” investments. You WILL NOT be in a lesser tax bracket when you retire!
Taxes will quickly eat up all those advantaged invest before taxed schemes we were/are sold.
Don’t put all your investments into one type of investment.
Develop multiple streams of income now and for your retirement.

Consolidating my money at one institution. I had checking and savings at my bank. An IRA at one financial place and my 401K at another. I consolidated them all to Fidelity Investments.

A good decision is to stop using ridiculous terms like "girl math," and "bro math." Those just encourage bad financial decisions because they serve as rationalizations.

I started planning at 25 I’m 26 now I’m currently cutting expenses as much as I can trying to cut my current debt down to zero and I’ve set my goals financially and I’m actively working towards them but I don’t regret taking this long because I had to take all the time I did to learn and understand and now practice it’s journey not a race

I have YouTube Premium and Amazon Prime (paid yearly) – Prime so that my kids have something to watch, YT Premium because I want to view as few ads as possible. Amazon pays for itself because I order staples online (and pay them immediately) and I save delivery fees that are higher than yearly fee. We don't have cable and are completely debt-free with a nice amount saved – all this while I'm disabled (50%, but no disability pay) and work part-time for minimal wage. It's always about spending less you make. If I can't afford it, I don't buy it. Never had credit card debt. This is how most of the people in my village live. I can't speak for big cities, but in the rural part of Austria this is standard.

That's honestly exactly what I do, however I have two streaming services, and I usually forget that I have the second one. For years I only had the one streaming services which was Netflix, it had got to the point that I had to cut back to only two, then doordash, I used to have it a lot but, I now cut back a lot because it takes a while for DD to come where I am living so I am like not worth the wait.

Other countries do generational living. Our pride and independence is sabotaging us. Older parents taking care of children for their working age kids and sharing household expenses.

If you had to go to the first guy for money, you wouldn’t. He’s scary to me and I have no debt

Supercars are a dumb investment. Pay 20x as much just to have a car that's louder so you can flex. Every alpha male YouTube guru has to have a fleet of Bugattis or whatever and it's really cringe. Some people even rent supercars so they can pretend to be wealthier than they actually are.

Wtf, 22 is so young to start

there is nothing wrong with moving back living with your parents assuming you do not spend all your money on junk

in our case we reduced our costs before retiring and can live well on just SS.
69 retired 1 1/2 years taking SS at 70 in 1 year.

When to take SS is a complex question with many factors to consider.

1. When will you stop working?

In my case I was planning to retire near my full retirement age at 67.

We wanted to retire with no debt so the amount we need to live off of is low.

We also wanted a good amount in our retirement funds and some cash in a saving account to pay for big ticket items.

2. What will happen if you take SS at 62 while you are still working.

Taking SS at 62 and still working you need to think about the following

a. Your benefit is reduced by 30% so if you would get $3,000 a month at your full retirement age you will only get $2,100 a month at 62.

b. Your benefit will be reduced $1 for every $2 you earn over a limit of about $25,000

If you earn $100,000 ($70,000 above the limit) your benefit will be reduced my $35,000 but your benefit is only $25,200 ($2100*12) you end up with nothing.

So for me taking SS at 62 makes no sense at all.

3. If you retire at your full retirement age of 67 should you take SS or delay it to 70?

In my case since I retired at 67 1/2 I would only need to wait 2 1/2 years when my SS benefit increases 8% each year plus a cost of living increase.

So I decided to max out my SS and take it at 70.

Not only will I get the max benefit every year I will get more $ from the annual cost of living adjustment.

For example getting $2,100 month at 62 and you get a cost of living adjustment of 3% your new benefit is 2163 or $63 more per month ($756 more per year)

But if your benefit is $3,720 a month at 70 the cost of living adjustment of 3% is $3,831 or $111 more per month ($1,332 more per year).

The different will compound each year and after 10 years the amounts would be

Taking at 62 your benefit would be $2,822 per month or $33,866 per year

Taking at 70 your benefit would be $4,999 per month or $59,992 per year

4. If you delay 2 1/2 years and take SS at 70 where are you going to get the money to live?

In my case I had decided to spend from my retirment saving for 2 1/2 years.

The 6 months before I retired the market (my investments) where doing well so it was the perfect time to move money into cash.

This cash also protects me from a down market until I start collecting SS.

5. Is SS a safe investment?

People have been saying all my adult life that SS is going broke and I think it is very safe.

6. Do you think the stock market is safe?

Long term yes short term it can make big swings.

So having the max SS payment each month after 70 will help reduce our reliance on the stock market.

7. Do you think you will live long?

who knows taking ss at 70 will give me the max if i do live a long life and will protect my wife if i die early

Taking all of this in consideration I decided to take SS at 70.

Based on your situation you may come up with a different decision.

I drive part time for Door Dash and Grub Hub and while I am AMAZED at how many people order from the apps but also delivering to the same people people on the regular, I am grateful that there are people who waste so much money on food delivery because it helps me to pay down my debts

5 years ago I broke up with my ex husband and I got rid of cable and netflix. He left me one of our 65 inch screen tvs and I never turned it on except to occasionally watch a movie. When I moved in 2024 I got rid of the tv, I dont even have a couch in my apartment now. My small living room is a meditation room. I dont miss tv AT ALL. All I watch is youtube videos on my laptop. No need for streaming channels or cable. The only subscription I have is $2 a month for the car advise app to get discounts on oil changes and other car maintenance. I used the app for my last car but I got a new car that has a maintenance package so I dont even use the app at this time but I dont unsubscibe because when I want to go back to using it after my maintenance package expires…..the app subscription will probably be a few dollars more. Obviously $2 a month isnt going to break me at all.

I'm laughing at the skeleton mention because I see SO many people's front lawns during halloween and christmas just LITTERED with these giant and ugly "decorations" and I just feel disgusted with how much money people spend on that crap. They are ugly as hell and they make your property look like trash. I will never understand why Americans are so gaudy and love cheap looking ugly things. I'm tired of seeing the ugly all over the place, to be honest. Can you imagine if you were an American from say 1850 and you time traveled to now and saw all of that?

I'm almost 40. I have 20,000 + in a roth ira. I've got a fully funded emergency fund and a fully funded one for my dog. I have passive income via a rental property. My sister and I share a car and live together. We are on track to be net worth multi-millionaires before we are 60. We help each other and live well below our means. We live with our mother in a multi-generational home. We've been lucky but start now. Start now, that is the advice.

04:00 the problem with depending on Social Security,is that your lifestyle at 35 creeps more than what SS will pay you at 62. SS does grow with inflation but it doesn’t grow with your lifestyle. What you thought would be a good amount might cover half of what you want.

Homie, enjoy the videos but around 5:30 mark you read a comment about maxing Roth Ira then you said “high yield savings account” when the comment said hsa. I’m a retirement planner, hsa is a health savings account. Huge tax advantages there, just need to make sure you understand that.

I drive all my cars until they drop dead😅

I can't believe people pay $20+ for food delivery, and that doesn't even cover the food.

Personal question: bro are you okay after that car crash? Is the other driver okay? And what do you think you’ll be in next?

This was great, I think you should sprinkle more of these in maybe quarterly as a reminder to help people