This is a subject I get asked about at least a couple times a month in conversation. I keep a really strict budget and still have some funds left over to do some fun activities. I LOVE personal finance blogs, books and videos, so I have taken a lot of nuggets from each source to put together a solid plan. Favorite Blogs: Mr. Money Mustache I Will Teach You to Be Rich Favorite YouTube Channels: Marko - WhiteBoard Finance Minority Mindset Two Cents Favorite Books: I Will Teach You to Be Rich The Millionaire Next Door Rich Dad Poor Dad First off, I keep a detailed monthly budget through Google Sheets. They have a template in-house that you can edit to best fit your lifestyle. Personally, my categories are described as "Needs", "Wants" and Investments. Textbook examples of this call for the 50/30/20 rule where 50% of your post-tax income goes to Needs, 30% to Wants and 20% to Investments. Mine actually breaks down closer to 50/20/30. How I manage my money is very automated, meaning all of my bills are paid for automatically and my investment and high-interest online savings account take money out of my brick-and-mortar bank monthly. Once I've paid those accounts what is left over first must address my needs. Needs (50% Of My Income) Groceries Rent Renter's Insurance Utilities Medical/Dental/Vision (through my employer) Laundry Car Insurance Car Maintenance Gas This list for all intents and purposes is my list of things I need to merely stay alive. My budget for groceries every month is about $200 and I rarely hit that mark. I buy almost exclusively generic brands and cook a lot of large batch meals such as soups. Next on this list is my rent, which is $850/month. This also includes all of my utilities with the exception of plug-in electric, which usually runs about $30/month. This is a pretty good deal in an out-of-whack State College market, where salaries and housing costs make it tough to find housing close to jobs that is less than 30% of your take home pay. Yes, I still use coin operated washers and dryers. It sucks trying to come up with 14 quarters to do a load of laundry in a building that doesn't have a change machine. Lastly, I drive a 2009 Subaru Forester with roughly 111,000 miles on it. The car is completely mine and I have no car payments on it. Growing up near the Great Lakes it is a basic necessity to have All-Wheel Drive. In State College, that isn't as bad where the winters are more mild. In my mind, there is no greater waste of money than buying a fancier luxury automobile or more car than you need, like a F-350 when you haul nothing consistently with it. I live within three miles of my office, so in a given year I only tack on between 8-10K miles. In a typical year, I'm only doing between $500-$700 in car maintenance. This also keeps my gas bill to a minimum. If I was even more ambitious I would ride my bike to work more often. However, I hate getting up early, much less working out within an hour of waking up early. Wants (19%) Cell Phone Haircuts Subscription Services Gym Gifts Charity Shopping/Eating Out Vacation Cell phone as a "Want"? Are you kidding me? Yes. If I lost my cell phone I wouldn't be living on the streets or dying of starvation. My phone is completely paid off and pretty old in the standard of smart phones. I have an iPhone SE, which isn't even given updates by many of the apps we most commonly use. Haircuts used to be a monthly necessity, but COVID-19 gave me the time to teach myself how to cut my own hair. Luckily, I've had a buzz cut for the majority of my life, so that was easy enough. I kindly lack the peacocking need for well maintained hair. Subscription services is rather boring in that I only have Netflix streaming and a membership with the Society of American Baseball Research. Both keep me entertained. My gym is hands down my biggest splurge. I pay $175/month to get group High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). I workout at the local F-45 gym in downtown State College. However, I see this investment in my health as more preventative maintenance than anything. Nothing gets between me and my 5:30 PM classes. Gifts and charity are what they are. It is important to give to others and causes that are near and dear. The next item I will break into two categories. When it comes to shopping, I don't tend to do a lot of it. Anyone that knows me is aware of my detest for clutter and rarely used items. I'm not quite a minimalist, but I also live in a 500 square foot apartment, which doesn't allow you to buy a whole lot of junk. I also happen to live right next to a Goodwill, where I get around 50-60% of my clothes. More often than not many of the clothes you buy still have the original sales tag on them. Let someone else pay the steep initial price, but you get the value out of it. Secondly, I probably go out to eat too much. However, this is a perk of living where I do. I can walk to many great restaurants from my front door. State College is pretty underrated when it comes to quality places to eat. As far as vacation goes, this gets decided at the end of the year. Whatever leftovers funds I have from each month go into a pool of funds to go places or buy things I don't really need. In 2019, I ended up with a surplus of about $900. With this money I flew down to Florida to visit my old neighborhood in Cocoa. I also bought a sleeper loveseat to quiet down my friends that visit for Penn State Football and don't want to pay for a hotel. Investments (31%) SEP-IRA (through work) Investment Account High-Interest Online Savings Account Before my money even gets to me, 10% of my gross earnings go to a SEP-IRA account through Merrill Lynch. This contribution level is pretty high, so I wouldn't suggest it for everyone. My employer contributes a 5% equivalent of my salary once a year to this account as well. I had to wait a full year before my employer started to contribute to my retirement fund. Was it a hit to lose that added income? Sure, but you adapt pretty quickly. I intend to pull this percentage back a bit once I hit particular goals in the account. All of the remaining funds from my paycheck go into a traditional brick-and-mortar bank through direct deposit. You know, the ones where you can get lollipops, a safety deposit box and almost dis-locate your wrist when you try to walk away with the latch to the counter pen? Yes, those. Since they don't pay anything in interest, because they seemingly must have an enormous overhead and/or aren't good at making money, I tend to keep the bare minimal amount of funds in this account. What has been recommended to me is keeping the equivalent of one month's worth of expenses. In addition to this, I keep $1,000 in a savings account in the rare occasion I ever overdraw my checking. In 18 years of having this account, this hasn't ever come close to happening. Using the old principle of paying yourself first, 10% of my net income goes to my E-Trade investment platform every month. I didn't pick E-Trade for any particular reason. What happened is I opened an ING Direct account in college, which got bought out by Capital One and then was pawned off onto E-Trade. My personal investment account is the equivalent to a man floating down a lazy river. In that account I buy almost exclusively index funds, because I don't pretend like I am smarter than the market. Another 10% goes to my high-interest online savings account through Barclays. As of writing this I am get a 1.15% interest on this account. This is roughly 12x what I get in my typical brick-and-mortar account. I use this particular account for my emergency fund (totaling 6x your monthly expenses), my new car fund and my house down payment fund. Of note is that every single month I pay my credit card bill in full. I never let my balance move to the next month where I will gain interest. I will sure as heck take their rewards and Cash Back programs though. When people say you should let it carry to build credit history I get a laugh. My FICO score as of this article is a 818, so that is de-bunked. Life is a lot easier when you don't have debt breathing down your neck, so avoid it if at all possible. Things shouldn't cost more than the sticker price.
It is always wise to understand and calculate your net worth to see where you stand. To get this number it is simply add up your assets (bank accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, car and home values, etc.) and subtract it by your liabilities (debt you have accrued or still owe). According to the book The Millionaire Next Door your number be your age multiplied times your annual salary. For example: Jim makes $40,000 a year and is 31 years of age. His net worth goal should be: $124,000 Through a lot of discipline in my day-to-day life I'm comfortably above my net worth goal, even with a very steep decline in the market this spring. Hopefully that continues and I can keep working towards my next goal of home ownership. Below is a look at my personal income distribution and how it is automated.
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I was always a huge Lamar Odom fan even though he at no time ever played for my favorite team: the Indiana Pacers. I just had such a respect for his game because he was such a smooth player in such a large frame. He was really one of the modern innovators of the point forward position. I loved that he could guard four positions and was a stat sheet filler. In my mind, the type of player you build a team around. This book made me both happy that Lamar could overcome some big obstacles, but also get frustrated with how much talent he didn't get to show from his own selfishness. I guess putting all of your skeletons out there along with your triumphs was the point of the book. Personally, my memories of Lamar are his early Clipper days and reaching the peak of the sport with the Lakers. I'm sure there are people out there that remember him more from the Kardashian show and his near death experience at a brothel in Nevada. This is unfortunate. All in all, throughout this read I respect Lamar Odom for putting all of it out there. That took a lot of courage and I really hope he continues to be the best father and mentor he can be. His life experiences and skills would be super valuable to kids in vulnerable situations. My question is: If he wasn't fighting the partying and substance abuse his whole career would he be a Top 10-20 player of all-time? We'll never know, but his talent was undeniable. What I Learned Reading "Darkness to Light":
1. Lamar struggled with A LOT of demons throughout his time. From an absentee father to a mother who was taken by cancer to addictions of his own. Everyone wanted a piece of his talent and the money and lifestyle that came with it. 2. I learned a lot about the greasy behind the scenes world of youth and college basketball. Specifically Lamar's time playing with Adidas teams in his youth, only to later spur Adidas for Nike. I knew about this culture from my time working in sports and other reads, but what made this different was it was more of one player's micro-view vs. the system as a whole. 3. The person I was most drawn to was Lamar's grandmother Mildred. She was part of the great migration north for work after being born to sharecroppers in Georgia. She must have seen real poverty as a child and wanted better for herself. She made it happen by moving to NYC and finding work to build a life for her and her children. In many ways I view her as this book's hero. Make no bones about it, I've never been a St. Louis Cardinals fan. Having grown up about 90 minutes north of Pittsburgh the Redbirds have broken Pirate fan hearts plenty of times. I was a bit skeptical with a bias opinion going into this read. However, I do enjoy a good coaching book. Right off the bat, no pun intended, I liked Mike's approach to handling parents when he went into youth baseball coaching. He asked the kids to play the right way and to have fun learning the game through repetition. Youth baseball simply isn'y about winning or losing, it is about learning to play baseball the right way. Having grown up playing baseball you find out pretty quickly that baseball isn't for the easily distracted or the easily frustrated. Matheny sat the youth player's parents down and handed out his "manifesto" that among other things that parents shouldn't be overbearing. They should support their children, but not constantly yell out their frustrations or cheers. I can speak first hand that as a youth player you often are on pins and needles about what other people think. It takes a long time to go out there not really caring what people in the stands think. Mike grew up in a hard-nose baseball program and learned to play the game the right way. As much as anything Matheny wanted to teach the mental part of the game to his players. In many ways, that is the most challenging aspect of learning the game. There are so many different scenarios and possibilities to think through, but Matheny wanted his players to be mentally prepared. With proper time and buy-in from not only the players, but the parents to work with their kids at home, the team started to win a lot of games. When Matheny got the opportunity to manage the St. Louis Cardinals he brought much of that same philosophy to be the big league club. Obviously, you're working with professionals, so there was a certain level of golden rule influence brought to the clubhouse. If you're a veteran player, make the young guys feel welcome. If you're a young guy, keep quiet but ask questions to better prepare yourself. What did I learn reading this book?
1. I really enjoyed how Mike Matheny focused on fundamentals. I feel the American culture focuses on winning way too early in youth sports. It was refreshing to see a perspective that prioritizes getting reps and learning new position. 2. The idea of setting a good example for kids is brought up in the text. Even if you don't agree with an umpire or referee's call you should still respect that they are out their doing their best. Personally, I spent a summer as an umpire and it made me respect the gig. It can be difficult to not only get the proper angle, but also see 2 or 3 things going on at the same time and make the right call. 3. Games are really about the kids. I think in many instances a parent's ego gets in the way with youth sports. They want their kid to have every opportunity from Day 1 rather than letting them earn it. As an undersized player at every level I hit in baseball in year 1, each level should be humbling. If my parents pulled me out because I wasn't starting from Day 1 I probably would have stopped playing baseball by age 10. If you missed Part 1: Click Here Having graduated with my BA in Journalism from Penn State in May of 2008, there was a dark cloud over kids leaving school. That cloud was the impending housing bubble, that we knew was going to burst but not know when. With this in mind I quickly applied to graduate schools in the hope that I could better myself and the financial ruins would be recovered once I was finished in 2009 or 2010. Hopefully, I could kick the can down the road and I’d be more marketable when I got out. I felt worried when professors set our class down to tell us about the upcoming economic turmoil that was just shortly coming down the road. There were a lot of nervous eyes in that room and rightfully so. After almost four years of time invested in your education, it was quite possible you’d have to move home to live with your parents and work a minimal wage job you could have had in high school. Try paying back a student loan with minimum wage or an unpaid internship. Journalism, particularly traditional journalism, has taken a beating over the last 15-20 years. As newspapers get thinner and thinner, the newsrooms that make up a community’s watchdog get more sparse. Now, many people turn to social media for their news and can’t distinguish real news from horribly slanted news from questionable, at best, sources. These questionable online platforms really erode the quality of journalism in the name of timeliness. So many great local stories now go unnoticed, because there aren't enough local journalists to cover them all. I tested above-average on the GRE score and was a 3.3 student at Penn State. Probably what you would describe as a solid student, but nothing extraordinary. I always felt like I was playing a bit of catch-up to other students throughout all four years. However, I did well enough to scrape together a decent resume for schools. The worst part about the whole thing is that Penn State didn't even offer the GRE's on campus. I didn't have a car, so my parents came down from near Erie to take me to Indiana, PA and the IUP campus to take my test. Talk about inconvenient. What I always joke about is that I might be the only journalism graduate who tested significantly higher in math than I did on the verbal section of both the SAT's and GRE's. However, I always loved the great story tellers and is why I went into journalism. Personally, I just enjoyed telling stories using numbers. In my time working in tourism, it has been fun to use the numbers to determine what subjects your audience wants you to write on, creating the content and then pushing it out through all of your channels. Once again you return to the numbers to maximize your reach and audience. If I remember correctly I got in everywhere I applied for a master’s degree in Sport Management: Middle Tennessee State, Southern Miss, Georgia Southern and Old Dominion. I even got recruited to apply by departments at other schools like Tiffin (OH), University of Maryland-Baltimore County and a handful of others. All I knew was I wanted to go somewhere that was warmer than Central Pennsylvania where winters seemingly last for six months. If I had a little more confidence in myself going in I found out I had a good enough resume to attend places like Florida, Texas, Alabama, etc. Looking back on it I should have been more aggressive. With an impending economic problem on the horizon I was nervous of the prospect of going into student debt. This weighed on me pretty heavily throughout the timeline leading up to leaving for school. I kept in constant contact with all of the departments where I had been accepted that I was very, I mean VERY, open to working as a graduate assistant. This meant my tuition would be paid for me and I’d get a stipend to cover things like books, housing and food. I spent the summer after my Penn State graduation in May of 2008 living in State College. No offense to my hometown of 400, but State College has much more to do and also stop lights. I had tested the job market a bit, but ultimately a lot of companies had hiring freezes or were laying employees off. What chance did I have as a new graduate with limited experience? Hey, there's always unpaid internships where we pay you in experience. You just have to move to a new city and pay for it. Thanks, but no thanks. Throughout that summer I worked two jobs: the first being a tour guide at Beaver Stadium at the Penn State All-Sports Museum making $8.50/hour and the second working as an intern at a company called Pro Player Video. I discovered the internship with PPV in Penn State’s Career Services job listings. It was run by a former Penn State Basketball player Tyler Smith. This was a thrill for me, because it was professional sports and Tyler was a starter on one of my all-time favorite teams in all of Penn State sports (2000-2001 PSU Basketball). Over the years I got to meet several of the players from that team. Although the income from the PPV position was limited, it gave me a good view at the business of sports. I even got a chance to go up to Fordham University to a professional basketball exposure camp offered by EuroBasket. I slept on a couch in Harlem the night before and woke up to spend 10 hours recording basketball games in the dead of summer in a gym that wasn't air conditioned. I drank seven 20 oz bottles of water and never went to the bathroom until that evening. My clothes were soaked through and I didn't even play a second of basketball. I loved every minute of it. My daily schedule that summer was working at the Penn State All-Sports Museum from 10 AM-4 PM. Most of the time I walked the two miles in each direction to and from work. I can’t tell you how many times I was late because I was stopped by a family for directions or to ask questions about the school. Once I got home from work at about 5 PM I would eat dinner and settle in to edit game film for potential or current professional basketball players from 6-9 or 10 PM. This was pretty much my life as graduate school crept closer and closer. There was still no word on whether I would get a graduate assistant position, but as my Mom says “The squeaky wheel gets the oil”. I would let the programs know what I was working on and that I was still interested in coming. A few kind of dropped off the map and I was down to Southern Miss, Middle Tennessee State and Old Dominion that were all checking into what was available for me. Finally, halfway through the summer and only a handful of weeks before I would have to move out of my State College apartment I got a call from Southern Miss. On the line was one of my future professors and ultimately a mentor in Dr. Dennis Phillips. He was offering me a graduate assistant position working with a new professor focused in athletic training. I would also be teaching a couple of classes to earn my keep. That was fine by me, because I finally had a home for the next year and could quit worrying about the future. Shoot, I probably would have mopped the floors, polished the doorknobs and walked their dogs. They probably came up on the short end of the deal. I really have to thank some mentors and people that helped me out with some letter of recommendation to graduate schools. Chris Ritchie in Penn State's Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State was really patient with me. I was far from a natural writer and was playing catch up in a lot of ways academically. Chris is a really fun guy to learn from and everyone loves his Hawaiian shirt days. Dave Baker from Penn State Athletics served as a professor in Sports Information while I was in the newly formed John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. Dave has a wealth of experiences working in sports and it was a joy to talk with him about behind-the-scenes topics. I also have to thank my boss from the Penn State All-Sports Museum Ken Hickman. It was a lot of fun working there and creating special experiences for fans of Penn State. Something that was just every day to me turned into family or wedding photos that went on family mantles, even if what I did to make those moments might be against company policy. Even after I had a couple more prestigious schools reach out to me about helping fill out their program class, most notably Stanford, I stuck with Southern Miss. I was headed for the sunny pine belt.
The lessons I took from this period of my life are: 1. Don't assume that there will be a job waiting for you when you graduate. Economic times ebb and flow. Yes, I was dealt a crappy hand in timing, but I went out and created my own breaks. 2. Maximize the opportunities that you have in your current location. That was something I didn't do a good enough job of at Penn State. Yes, it was enough to get me to my next step, but I should have done a better job padding my resume and making connections for down the road. 3. Be open to new locations and opportunities. I had never even been to the state of Mississippi when I applied to the school. That leap of faith paid off. 4. Be willing to put yourself out there with people of all ages and backgrounds. You never know when they'll need someone and you're fresh in their minds. |
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About the AuthorAndy Rupert is a Penn State (B.A. John Curley Center for Sports Journalism 08') and a Southern Miss (M.S. Sport Management 09'). He has spent his whole career working in sports and tourism digital marketing and metrics. |