Ep 25 | Where to Start When You Have ZERO Background With Money
Think budgeting is the answer to your financial stress? Think again. If you're crushing it in your career but still whispering “I don’t know what the f*ck I’m doing” when it comes to money—you’re not alone. And you’re not behind.
In this episode, Priya Malani walks you through what actually moves the needle when you're starting from scratch with your finances. No budgeting apps, no shame—just a real conversation about where to begin, what to avoid, and how to start building wealth without feeling like you’re giving up your lifestyle.
Whether you’re sitting on savings but carrying credit card debt, or feeling stuck watching your friends buy homes while you scroll Zillow in sweatpants, this episode gives you the reset you need.
Tune Into This Episode to Hear:
Why awareness—not budgeting—is the real first step to building wealth
The debt mistake that could be costing you thousands (and how to fix it)
How to use reverse budgeting to save for the life you want, not the life you’re told to want
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THE STUFF OUR LAWYERS WANT US TO SAY: Stash Wealth is a Registered Investment Advisor. Content presented is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to make an offer or solicitation for any specific securities product, service, or strategy. Consult with a qualified investment adviser (that's us) before implementing any strategy. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. There…we said it.
Transcription
It might surprise you, but the very first step to build wealth—it's not about getting set up on a budgeting app. In fact, and I've said this before, I've never used a budgeting app. I don't believe in budgeting apps. I don't believe in budgeting.
So if you are feeling behind and you don't have a background with money and you think a budget is the solution to your problems—good news: it's not.
It's also not the first place to start. The first place to start when it comes to mastering your money is...
Hey guys, Priya here. Welcome back to The F Word.
Today we're talking about what to do when you feel completely behind with money.
If you're someone who's crushing it in your career and adulting in pretty much every other aspect of your life, but still feel like you missed the memo when it comes to money—you’re not alone. When I met Katie, she was stuffing her bartending savings in a tequila bottle.
Most of our clients didn't grow up learning about personal finance, and despite their six-figure incomes, they still whisper things like,
"I don't know what the fck I'm doing."*
This episode is for you if no one ever taught you about money growing up. You didn't learn it in school—because who did? You've tried Googling and following finance bros and ended up just feeling more overwhelmed.
I'm gonna walk you through what to focus on, where to start, and why being a total beginner does not mean you're behind. All right, let's get into it.
So going back to Katie—when I started working with her, she was literally taking extra cash and putting it into a Patrón bottle, which was the first time I'd ever seen that. But give her credit: at least she was stashing something away.
She had a great full-time job on top of her bartending gig. She was no dummy, but she felt really bad with money. And in just a matter of three months, I was able to take her from where she was to tripling her savings.
The thing about money is that no one is taught about it in school. It's probably the place we should start learning about the basics because money interacts with every aspect of our life—from the time we get our first job, to figuring out a place to live, to understanding how to pay our bills, to thinking about the future, stashing cash away for bigger financial priorities, or finding somebody who we can partner up with who has their financial shit together.
There are so many ways money impacts our life on a day-to-day basis. Did you know that the average person makes up to 20 money-related decisions a day?
Without a basic understanding of how money works and inflows and outflows? Of course we're gonna mess some of those up.
On top of the fact that we are never really formally taught about money—no one talks about it. It's literally something that we all deal with every single day, but do not talk to each other about.
I was having a conversation just a few minutes ago with a friend of mine who has had a really successful engineering career and he was in the middle of fundraising for his startup. And the one thing he told me is how happy he was to have had a runway to be able to start his company after leaving his job. He was like,
"I didn't even realize that I was stashing all this money away and I had all these different levers to pull."
And I was like, “Oh, you should come on the podcast, you should talk about this.” And he was like, “Oh no, I do not wanna put my personal finances out there.”
This man has success stories to share and actually has something to be proud of—and still, we don't want to talk about money. That's wild to me.
I can understand if you're a hot mess and don't wanna talk about your money, but more of us need to be talking about the things that we did to set ourselves up for success. Unfortunately, money is considered taboo, private—frankly, impolite conversation.
So lo and behold, you graduate from school and find yourself a few years later—now we’re 34, making great money—and still feel like we're winging it with our personal finances.
You've figured out your career, your relationship, your lifestyle. Money is that final frontier. So let's conquer it.
If You Have Zero Background With Money, What’s the First Step?
It might surprise you, but the very first step to starting to build wealth—nope, it's not investing.
It is also, surprise, not about getting set up on a budgeting app. In fact, and I've said this before, I've never used a budgeting app. I don't believe in budgeting apps. I don't believe in budgeting.
So if you are feeling behind and you don't have a background with money and you think a budget is the solution to your problems—good news: it's not.
It's also not the first place to start. The first place to start when it comes to mastering your money is awareness. And I don't mean to be patronizing about it, but you really do need to know what's coming in and what's going out. It is the absolute starting point.
It’s also the simplest thing to get ahold of—like, what is coming in and what is going out month over month?
Frankly, I recommend starting with a week-by-week deep dive into where your money went. It's much more manageable if you just take a week at a time and understand: what came in this week? What went out?
I know you're probably like, I hate that, but please sit down and look at your charges from the last week. If you use a debit card—one, stop and go listen to my other episodes.
But if you use a credit card, super easy. Just pull up your transaction report or your activity and take a look: where did your money go?
Once you know where your money went—are you happy about it?
If you could do it all over, is that where you would have it go again?
You'll pick out a couple charges where the answer for that is “no.” And the simple act of drumming up that awareness is going to be the incremental step you need towards better subconscious money decisions.
Because that’s the thing, right? We all act out of instinct—like we see something we like, we pull out our card. For the most part, I'm not suggesting that we're completely flying by the seat of our pants, but for most of us, we're out and about and we see something or we're hungry.
This is not about not spending on a latte. But transaction after transaction—it adds up. And just simply getting an understanding of your habits is a great starter point to deciding if you're okay with them or you wanna change them.
But how can you even decide to change them if you don't know there's anything to change?
Awareness Leads to Intention
Another point on this topic of awareness—by understanding where your money's going, you're gonna start thinking about where you wish it was going and what you want it to be doing for you.
That is also a very good initial step toward getting a handle on what your money plan might look like.
Reverse Budgeting: Flip the Script
Now, I've done full episodes on this next topic, which is the concept of the reverse budget.
But when you are getting started and you have zero background, this is my absolute favorite tactic to help people unwind their mindset of saving feeling restrictive.
Usually, I'll find that people don't wanna get started with saving or thinking about their money because it just feels like it's gonna impact their lifestyle.
If you flip the script—adopting the reverse budget mindset—saving is no longer about restricting your current lifestyle. It's about putting you on track for things that you are so excited to do.
One of the examples I like to give a lot is a trip to Portugal, because for a while that was a big one. I haven't been yet, but my cousin's there and I actually need to go visit him. So maybe that'll be one of the things I reverse budget for.
You figure out what you wanna save for—like a trip to Portugal—and maybe that's gonna cost me, I don't know, $2,000. I'm gonna go in the spring, that's seven, eight months away. Quick math—okay, I need to save $250 per month automatically into a Portugal sub-savings account.
What I mean by sub-savings account is a dedicated account at an online bank that you set up. It's high-yield. That’s why I said online bank—because they give the high-yield interest rates, right?
You want your money working harder for you until you use it.
Open up a separate account, have its own account number. One of the best things that online banks let you do is nickname the account.
If you're still saving into a general savings account, it's so easy to touch that money and use it to pay off your credit card bill or something random that pops up. But if it says Portugal trip—I've been doing this for a long time and I agree with the studies which say that when you have an account nicknamed with its intended purpose, you're just not gonna touch it.
Which means you will save successfully.
How do you save successfully? Give your money an intention. Give your money a purpose—like a cool trip to Portugal to visit your cousin.
Hey Amit, I'm gonna come see you soon.
Like I said, I've done much more in-depth dives on the concept of reverse budgeting and how it can get you started to really building wealth.
And secondarily, it helps you understand what kind of lifestyle you can actually afford—which might be more than you think.
A lot of times people think like, Oh, if money's going here and there and all these different places, there's nothing left over.
Promise you, I've done this a million times—there’s always money left over. You're just more intentional about your money now.
Common Money Traps
From there, let's talk about some of the most common traps I see people fall into.
So Patrick had like seven or eight thousand dollars sitting on his credit card—and it was from lifestyle stuff. His twenties. He hadn't paid it off. He took a trip.
He also had $12,000 sitting in his savings account, which is an awesome savings number. For him, it was actually three months’ worth of his fixed expenses—which is the target in our world.
So when he came to us, I was like, Why do you have this high-yield debt sitting on your credit card? Why haven’t you paid it off?
And he was like, Wait, no, that’s my savings. That’s my emergency fund. If shit hits the fan, I might need that money.
And I was like, okay, but…
For every dollar you have sitting in your high-yield savings account, it's earning you four cents a year—fine. Every dollar that you're not paying off on your credit card, you are losing 23 additional cents per year. His credit card rate was 23%.
So net-net, you're actually losing 19 cents on the dollar.
And on $7,000 in credit card debt, you are losing north of $1,000 a year to interest.
I think of it this way: a lot of times when it comes to money, people feel like they're getting ahead—like you're on a treadmill—but you're actually staying in the same place. Or in Patrick’s case, going in reverse.
So doing the simple math—and not letting your psychology, the safety of having cash sitting in a savings account, impact your decision—but letting math actually dictate? You will come out ahead.
Once we had his credit card paid off with his savings, he was benefiting from the full force of his high-yield savings account.
Before that, not only was he not benefiting from the full force of his savings account, but he was losing almost four or five times that amount to interest on his credit card.
It is really important to make sure that you're not sitting on savings that could be used to pay off high-interest debt.
Good Debt, Bad Timing
Now, you also may have some good debt—student loan debt, maybe a mortgage. For most of our high earners, they're sitting on $80,000 in student debt on average.
If you wait to pay off your student loans before you start investing—let’s say that delays you five, maybe ten years—the difference in compounding, the opportunity cost, is not just tens of thousands of dollars. It's actually hundreds.
So it is imperative for you not to make this mistake.
You do not need to wait to pay that off in order to begin investing.
The same math applies—you need to look at how much you're losing against your opportunity cost of how much you could be gaining. And if net-net there's more positive than negative, then you might need to come up with an approach: paying down your good debt while simultaneously starting to invest.
Investing Is Not Gambling
When it comes to investing—this is like a whole podcast in and of itself. But I just wanna touch on the concept of investing and risk.
Some people might think like, Hell no, I'm not putting money in the market where I could lose it. It would be so much safer to keep it in a savings account.
That is true if you think of investing like gambling—which I've done a few episodes on.
When you're investing properly—which means you're investing in a diversified fashion for only mid- and long-term goals (no quick overnight wins)—you're not gambling. You're growing your money.
Don’t Wait to Seek Advice
Another mistake that I'll see a lot of newbies fall into is thinking, Oh, I need $100,000 or $200,000 before I can seek real true financial advice.
That's crap.
The sooner you get access to financial advice and guidance, the more successful you'll be.
If you're starting to have beyond your emergency fund saved up, you're ready to seek personalized financial advice.
Be Wary of "Old Rules"—Especially Around Homeownership
The next trap I see high earners fall into is defaulting to their parents’ financial advice. And the thing I'm thinking about here is home ownership.
There's a common misconception that if you look rich, you are financially secure.
You may own a home and own a car and have a lot of these traditional assets to your name—and not have financial security at all.
So looking at your friends who own a home and thinking they're financially secure? Absolutely not a given.
You can own a home and be less financially secure than someone who doesn’t.
So just because your friend owns property doesn’t mean they’re doing better than you.
Don’t get distracted. Focus on you—what your plans are—and put a strategy in place to accomplish them.
Start With Awareness
Where the hell's your money going?
Let’s talk about how people actually move the needle with their money.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: personal finance is not rocket science. Wall Street financial advisors—for job security—like to make it sound complicated, confusing, complex.
It is not.
It is about consistency.
Once you create a plan, stay consistent with it. The best way to achieve consistency is through automation. Use automation. Use calendar reminders.
Consistency is the key to success.
Yeah, it's not super sexy—but it works. And in the end, that’s really all that matters.
So don’t get distracted. Don’t feel like you’re missing out because you’re not part of Bitcoin, or you don’t own a home, or you don’t qualify to do alternative investments or participate in some private equity strategy.
Just stay consistent.
And you know—Warren Buffet—slow and steady wins the race.
God, I hate saying stuff like that. But it’s so true.
Final Thoughts
Automation is your friend.
Consistency is the most important.
And you don’t need to do this alone.
If you are still feeling very overwhelmed by the concept of managing your money or putting a plan in place—bring someone in.
If you were about to go learn tennis for the first time, are you gonna hop on the court with a racket and a ball? Maybe—and good for you—but you might get a coach. And that's okay too.
If this episode gave you a sigh of relief or made you feel like you're not the only one playing catch-up—share it with someone who that might resonate with.
We're trying to spread the word around here. Please share the love.
We want more people talking about money. So send it to a friend, share it with your family. Please send this episode around to people who you care about.
And if you're ready to stop winging it and feel in control of your money—hit follow. There’s a lot more good advice coming your way.
Thanks for listening to The F Word.
See you next time.
