Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast—a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast, you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to uplevel your money and your life. I'm your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.
BONNIE: Welcome to the show, Dr. Latifat.
- LATIFAT AKINTADE: Thanks, Bonnie.
BONNIE: For those who don't know you, why don't you give a brief introduction about yourself?
- LATIFAT: Absolutely. So, I’m Dr. Latifat. I'm a life coach. I'm a money and mindset coach. So I work with women physicians to help them declutter the finances so they can spend well, live well, and be happy.
BONNIE: Awesome. Yeah. So Dr. Latifat and I trained at the same coaching school. So I'm super excited that we have more women talking about money and money mindset. Tell us why you got interested in automation. I remember when we were just talking about what we could talk about on the show today, you brought this up. It's like, it makes sense that we should talk about it, but it's not a topic that usually people talk about in itself. So tell me why this lights you up.
- LATIFAT: Absolutely. So I'm a mom. I work as a GI doc. I have three kids. I'm married. I have a bunch of things in life that I enjoy doing and sitting down and thinking about my bills and my money isn't exactly how I want to spend my time. So when I speak with women physicians, we know none of them want to learn about money so that they can spend all their time on money. However, what I find is that people have all these amazing goals, amazing things they want to do with their money, but they never do it. And the reason why is because we get in the way life gets in the way.
So the advantage of automation is you can literally set things up and enjoy your life. You can set things up and never miss a payment. Set things up and your money is on auto investment, which is awesome. So that you can now spend a mental space thinking about ways of enjoying life, whatever it is you want to do, but not worrying about your money. So that's why automation makes a ton of sense.
BONNIE: So I do a lot, not a lot, but I'm doing more automation inside of my business. And so I love what you just said because many women physicians, we're busy people. We are making decisions all day long as part of our jobs, right? That's what we do. And we get what I call decision fatigue. And like you said, the last one I want to do when I come home is like make decisions about money or even other things. So I think this idea of automation is applicable to many areas of life, not just money, but I agree. I think it's weird when people don't have bills on auto payment.
- LATIFAT: A lot of people don't. And I try to remind people that, “Yeah, the bills are important, but also investment savings.” Those are also things that you can automate, right?
BONNIE: Why don't you tell us what you have automated money-wise for you?
- LATIFAT: Everything. It’s awesome. So what I have automated my bills, for example, I'm a huge proponent of using credit cards to pay for everything so I can get points, but I also don't ever want to pay interest ever. So things that are automated are my bills, almost all on my credit card, except for things like mortgage that cannot. So my bills are all automated. I never missed a payment ever. My savings are automated.
BONNIE: Oh, tell us more.
- LATIFAT: I know exactly what percentage I want to save every month or what dollar amount I want to save. So without even thinking about it, all I knew is that my savings account is increasing without me clicking any button every month or every day, which is amazing.
BONNIE: Okay. Let's talk about those for a second. So a lot of financial experts say that you need to pay yourself first. So this is a great way to automate that part. So do you just have this scheduled, like through your checking account?
- LATIFAT: Yes.
BONNIE: Like a scheduled transfer?
- LATIFAT: Exactly. A scheduled transfer, but since you brought up paying yourself first...Part of it is things like your 401K and your Roth IRA, whatever else you want to put your money into, you can automate those but absolutely savings. And if you have savings goals. So for example, if you want to travel to--I don’t know--Bora Bora in December. You're like, “Okay, I have a budget of 20,000 or 30,000 or $5k or whatever it is,” think about how much do I need to save every month to get to that point and automate that. So that by December, you’re going on that trip. Unless it’s the pandemic.
BONNIE: Unless it's 2020, yes. It's not a bad idea to just start saving because you just don't know when things will turn back to normal. I don't think it's going to be in 2020, unfortunately, but I think starting some sort of fun fund that you'll get to spend once things lighten up. If you're a traveler, I think a lot of us do love to travel. So I love that. Do you use YNAB? I'm just curious.
- LATIFAT: I don't use YNAB. I tried one of years ago for like two months and I just couldn't get on the wagon, but I'm a Mint girl. Simple, straightforward, no learning curve. Basic, gets it done.
BONNIE: Yeah. YNAB definitely has a learning curve. The reason why I asked is because YNAB cando the savings for you, although you can't tell if you just log into your checking account, but it can put money in buckets without you having to do that sort of manually. Okay. So what else do you automate?
- LATIFAT: My investments are automated too like I mentioned. So I talked about almost like the pretax part of it, but you can automate investments and you know. We all know about dollar cost saving and why that's recommended. So you can have that on auto cruise and every month, if it's 500 bucks, 5,000 bucks. It just walks out of your account and you're investing without doing anything.
BONNIE: So you're talking about a taxable brokerage account?
- LATIFAT: Yep.
BONNIE: You have that also scheduled to be autoinvested. So you don't have to manually log in wherever your money is.
- LATIFAT: I believe in keeping things extremely simple. And I think you kind of agree with that too. With investments, it can get extremely complicated, but I don't do complicated. I do simple. So it's simple. I know where exactly I'm investing my funds. I know the number of funds I'm going into and I just put my money there every month. That happens without me doing anything else. It's a dream come true.
BONNIE: I'm just sort of thinking how I can apply it to myself. I do have all of our bills automated. And so I think it's weird when people don't, because who has time to remember when everything's due? There's just so many bills to pay now. I mean, obviously like we're renting. And so our rent can't go through a credit card, but otherwise I'm on the same page as you. I want to get points, although I’m not using them for travel, obviously. But if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve, they are having a special--although by the time this podcast comes out, it might have expired--but since no one's traveling and using Chase points for traveling--at least I hope you're not--you can redeem like grocery and dining for cash at a pretty good exchange. So I've just been doing that, just kind of cashing end points to get grocery credits basically.
So I have that all automated, and it’s the same thing. I don't want to pay interest. So I always pay my credit card bills in full, and then I don't have our savings automated, but that's because the Roth IRA will do a lump sum at the beginning of the year. So that is like a manual process. Cause I don't do it piece by piece cause we're doing a backdoor Roth IRA. We do invest in real estate. So I'm just wondering, I know you invest in real estate too. So I'm curious, how have you figured out ways to sort of automate that?
So here are my thoughts. We're doing both passive and active real estate investing. So for the passive stuff like syndications, what I'm thinking is, I could still autosave the amount and once I have a certain amount, then I can pop it into a syndication is what I'm thinking. What do you think?
- LATIFAT: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, right? Because for you, it's the same as a savings goal. You're just deciding how much you want to do to what's a syndication. So yeah, absolutely.
BONNIE: And then what about for direct real estate? How do you automate that?
- LATIFAT: Yeah, that is harder to automate. The only things you can automate is if you know, you're trying to raise a down payment, right? You can automate that even. You can automate your bills. So we do that with our real estate investments, with the utilities would pay on those. We have them automated to our business credit cards, but actually our real estate is essentially very, very manual. There's some tenants that we actually go get their cash every month, physically ourselves.
So definitely that process is not automated in that regard, but in my mind it doesn't have to be perfect. But if your life could be a hundred percent manual, but if you could buy 70% of your time back, what would that translate into? Like what difference would that make is that one hour or more of spending time with your family or one hour more swimming or one hour thinking about the content you want to create and not all those little things that wake people up in the middle of the night when they're like, “Oh snap, did I pay that one bill?” That should not be happening. You should be sleeping.
BONNIE: Well, that's not a good use of our brain time.
- LATIFAT: Absolutely.
BONNIE: I mean, I think what's also akin to automating is delegating. Although actually this is an interesting thing. I don't know if you've heard about this. A fellow position actually told me about this and I'm going to look into this more, but there are people who--and these aren't financial advisors, they're, I don't know what their official title is, but I think it's some sort of money manager or bill manager--but they handle like your cashflow and someone actually pays the bills for you. Although I feel like, why do you need that person for that? Because you can automate things, but it seems like they just help you manage your cashflow. So you don't have to do it yourself at all. I don't know exactly what they do. So I want to find out more, but I have a feeling you might be interested just to learn what they do.
- LATIFAT: Yeah. That'd be interesting to hear. I found out about this program that helps people with almost like auto-payment of their credit card, but it's a little bit more complex. I think it's called Tally or something. It's more complicated than that, but yeah, people are getting extremely creative, but it's always that balance. I mean, hands off and losing complete track of everything. Right? And that's one of the downsides of automation, if you're not conscious about it. I always remind people that you just don't set everything up and then completely ignore it. You still have to think about looking at it. So you make sure there's no mistakes in your bills, right? So still a need to assign time during the month, say one day a month where you look at your bills and your statements to make sure there's no errors, no charges. We did find that recently actually that our credit card charged us two different fees and we don't do fees. So yeah, we caught it ourselves and they got it taken care of. But if we were not looking, those are ways you can absolutely lose money and leave money.
BONNIE: Such a good point. I think the bill pay for sure makes sense. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't look at your bill ever. I look at my finances pretty often just in terms of monitoring transactions, just because fraud is unfortunately a thing that happens a lot. And so I have actually set up alerts and this is another way to automate. I think if it's over a certain amount, I'll get an alert on my phone. Things like that.
- LATIFAT: That's awesome. Yeah. We also, you know, credit reporting and credit monitoring. So if there's any changes, you get out of an email notifying me that there was a change or yeah, absolutely. Those are in 2020, right. With technology. It's great. But there's some things we have to put in place to protect ourselves. So I agree with you a hundred percent.
BONNIE: Absolutely. So it sounds like we both have Chase credit cards.
- LATIFAT: Yes. I love chase.
BONNIE: Yeah. They've done a great job in terms of I've gotten emails or even text messages saying like, “Did you buy this thing?” Because if it's something a little unusual in terms of my normal range of spending. It is nice. Obviously, that’s automated. It's not like some guy’s checking.
- LATIFAT: They want you to think some guy's checking, right?
BONNIE: Some algorithm obviously spitting out an alert. Okay. For people who are just starting out and have nothing automated, what do you think is the first sort of thing they should do?
- LATIFAT :Number one is, I recommend that they actually look at their bank account and see what they're spending money on. The other thing we didn't talk about with automation is it's not a budgeting strategy, but it kind of helps you. It's a spending plan strategy. So it forces people to actually look at what they've been spending on historically.
So if you've never automated before, this is a good time to actually look at where your money is going. So you can automate and say, “Okay, this is just how much I know that I'm paying on utility bills. Automate that. This is how much am I spending on my credit card. Automate that.” So just start by looking at what you've been spending, automate the process of paying those every month, so you don't have to do those. And definitely the retirement fund is so important. And so to do so those are the two places that I definitely recommend that they start from.
BONNIE: It’s so funny. My first thought was bill pay because initially I was like, “Well, everyone does that. Doesn't it.?” And even like the 401k. When I had an employer, like, I guess people don't have that stuff set up, especially if you have a match. Like, I always just set it as every two weeks depending on how I was paid. And I would just kind of divide it up over the whole year and do dollar cost averaging. But I guess there are people who don't even set that up. Huh?
- LATIFAT: Yeah. That was me in residency. You know, I didn't care about all that. I didn't think about my money or how, what my money was doing at all. I didn't set anything up, whatever HR did when I signed up was what I ended up with when I was done. So whether that was 1% or 0% or whatever, I didn't really pay attention to it. But obviously that's changed now.
BONNIE: Yeah. Well I think in residency, we're not really thinking about it. We're just trying to get through the day, right?
- LATIFAT: Yeah. But hopefully now though, with your podcast and the work that all of us are doing, more residents will start thinking about this stuff. Cause it's so important and it'll help them in the future.
BONNIE: Okay. Well, I did something even worse than what you just described when I was in residency at UC Irvine, they did automatically enroll us for like a really small percentage. And I actually logged in and put up to zero. I was like, “I need all the money I can get.”
- LATIFAT: I wasn't paying attention enough to do that.
BONNIE: And then I did fund a Roth IRA, like partially in my last year, I think like a thousand bucks that was like the most I ever did, but I was just learning about money towards the end of my residency. But like I said, I literally logged in to actually undo what they were trying to do good for me. Anyway, just one of the many mistakes I made.
- LATIFAT: You were intentional about actually doing it. So you're paying attention to an extent.
BONNIE: So I guess so.
- LATIFAT: Yeah, you chose not to, so that's good.
BONNIE: All right. So any other automation tips you have for us?
- LATIFAT: What I mentioned early absolutely is important. The other thing is automating your credit card. So I don't think I mentioned that. Once you're using your credit cards to pay your bills, automate to have it paid off before it's due so you don't have to pay any interest. Some people do that twice a month. If their income is by monthly, somebody could do it once a month. But definitely, you don't want to miss the payment of your credit card. So you can automate that as well.
And I know I shared with you that I made a video that may be useful if people want to check it out, that can provide information on the steps on how to go through the process of automation.
BONNIE: Awesome. We’ll be sure to link it in the show notes. So where can people find you and learn more about you?
- LATIFAT: Absolutely. They can find me on my website. It's http://moneyfitmd.com/ or on Facebook. I blog at Money Fit MD or they can just come to Bonnie’s podcast from today and click on it!
Bonnie: I think you do a weekly video on your Facebook page, right?
- LATIFAT: Yeah. I do one to two videos every week. It's so much fun. Yeah. Just talking about money and how to help. Just bring clarity to money. I think it's so needed right now.
BONNIE: Absolutely. Well, I'm so glad to have you as part of the movement.
- LATIFAT: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to have you on. And I'm really proud of all the work you're doing. We need our women to be free. We need to have choices, make choices, and the more voices we have in the space, the better it's going to be. So I’m excited that we're all doing this together.
BONNIE: I absolutely agree with you as well. Awesome. Well thank you so much for being on the show.
- LATIFAT: Thank you, Doctor.
Hey, if you're a woman physician who is ready to take control of your money, you've got to check out my program Money for Women Physicians. It's part course and part group coaching and a hundred percent guaranteed to put more money in your pocket. Go to wealthymommd.com/money to learn more.
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