In this episode of Boldin Your Money, Steve Chen sits down with Jackie Cummings Koski, co-host of Catching Up to FI, to talk about her inspiring journey to financial independence after overcoming poverty, divorce, and single motherhood. Jackie shares practical advice for late starters, those in their 40s, 50s, and beyond who feel behind on saving for retirement. They cover the importance of mindset, overcoming the fear of investing, and how to build wealth even if you’re starting late. Whether you’re looking for guidance, motivation, or just the reassurance that it’s not too late, this episode has something for you.
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Callouts:
[14:40] Better Investing
[29:58] [48:00] Fire for Dummies
[24:18] [25:37] Simple Path to Wealth by J Collins
Catching Up to Fi Facebook group
[34:03] The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel
[45:56] Link to WSJ article
Transcription
Steve Chen (40:25):
That’s awesome. I mean, it’s pretty amazing. I think this whole podcasting and Zoom video stuff where we can bounce around and see each other, it’s amazing. Maybe you can share a couple stories from people you’ve helped great comeback stories or people that have done great like yourself.
Jackie Cummings Koski (40:41):
Oh gosh. Well, we have a whole lot of guests that we have on the podcast, so we don’t just have professionals and experts. We have some real life stories. And I think one of the most fun ones was Krista and Ed. They’re a younger couple, I think they’re in their thirties, maybe early forties with four boys, and they were actually the case study at Economy and we did a follow up with them. So it was just interesting how they shared their story and through working with them, one of the most important thing we saw was their love and connection with each other because she was a single mom for a long time and they met after she had two kids already, and the way that they worked together to figure this stuff out, they had student loans that they had to deal with trying to put the boys school.
(41:34):
And even though they haven’t reached financial independence or retired early, they have so much clarity now. She had a luxury vehicle and I drive a luxury vehicle, so there’s nothing wrong with that, and I didn’t want anybody to shame her over that. But she recently posted that she sold the vehicle, but at the time when we were working with her, it was something that we didn’t need to be judgmental about, but after taking a really close look at everything, she came to that decision herself. And that’s the beauty of it. We can’t be the ones to come in and say, oh, you need to cut this, this, and that. When you don’t even know their values, you don’t know the backstory of why they made this decision or what it means to them. My job and any financial professional that’s trying to help somebody is to help people arrive at their own decisions and for them to set up their own value system and we support it, and we could be a better professional by just listening to what they’re saying, and then we actually can get more buy-in when we understand what a certain item or something means that on the surface might look like they’re not being responsible.
(42:49):
So even though she hasn’t made it to financial independence or retire early, I love her realization that she came to on her own.
Steve Chen (42:58):
I think it’s powerful when people at least have a plan and kind of vision For one, they understand what’s happening and they’re taking action and they can see some progress, and then to know that they’re okay, like if you’re starting to save money and you start to have some reserves, then it takes a lot of the pressure off versus being like, I’m a paycheck to paycheck person. And there’s not a lot of financial shock absorbers to kind of pick up the slack if something goes sideways, which invariably it does in our lives. It’s like nothing’s ever perfect.
Jackie Cummings Koski (43:28):
I can say that every day we get feedback from our listeners in our community via the Facebook page. We have a speak pipe where they can leave a voice message and they can leave a message on any of the social media platforms or on the podcast player. So it just warms our hearts. Some of the messages that we get. We just had a 30-year-old woman, she was an immigrant that came to the us. She’s 38. She said, I have just listened to all 120 episodes of your podcast. This is where people should start. Everything has been so helpful. And it was just hearing her voice and the excitement that it’s like, wow, I’m finally making sense of it. And I guess one, I’ll mention an individual, but I do this all the time, but we have media people sometime that we talk to, that you talk to.
(44:24):
Obviously they’re asking us something about finances or investing or something like that. Well, in my mind, their regular people just like me and you, and they need to get their finances together too. So I always end up with a side conversation with the journalist or the writer or the interviewer. And there was one producer, I was lucky enough a few years ago where I had a segment on the Rachel Ratio and their producer. I helped her craft the segment and she wanted it to be about 4 0 1 ks and where people start investing. And she wanted to focus on target date funds. I told her, I said, the average person has no idea what they’re invested in. That’s something they want to look at. Some of these target date funds, they’re not all created equal, so probably one extra click will get you a one pager that will show you everything that’s in there.
(45:18):
If your intention at let’s say 26, is to be in an all stop index fund and you go to your target date fund and it says you’re only 80% in the stock market, that’s not consistent with what you want. I said, Hey, have you, I think her name was Kathy, and I said, have you looked at your 401k? Do you know what you have in there? She goes, actually, I haven’t. Well, the very next day she sends me an email, she goes, oh, I finally went into my 401k and I saw what I had, and I took all your advice. So I’m always happy when it happens sort of organically. Everyone needs a little financial education.
Steve Chen (45:56):
Yeah, it’s interesting. We were actually lucky enough, the Wall Street Journal covered us, and it was this guy, Jeremy Olsen, who’s the personal finance main kind of editor guy there, and he himself was getting into planning. He had just turned 50 and he turned into a 401k millionaire and he was sharing like, okay, this is interesting. They’ve been working and saving, building some wealth, and now they’re like, I got to really start paying attention because how I’m going to turn this money into these assets into income and make sure it lasts the rest of my life and be tax smart, benefit smart, think about healthcare and all the rest of it. But yeah, everybody, even if they’re in the business, there’s always lessons on how we can do better. All right. Well look, Jackie, this has been fantastic. So catching up to FI podcast and community and stuff, we’ll send folks there. Any other resources that you have found really helpful for your community that you think folks should know about?
Jackie Cummings Koski (46:50):
Yeah, I think the biggest things, we’ve talked a lot about community. So we have a Facebook group that’s very active. We’ve got 17,000 people in there now, and that’s with kicking the spammers and the scammers out of there every single day
Steve Chen (47:03):
All the time. Yeah, you got to place it.
Jackie Cummings Koski (47:04):
Yeah, it’s a warm, welcoming community and we often will have events, maybe we’ll do a webinar on a topic, or maybe we’ll have an in-person event at a conference, like an economy. We always do a little side get together. So that community part has been huge. And that is aside from the podcast, perhaps they listen to the podcast, we told ’em about the Facebook group. That’s where all the interaction, the activity, the education. We even have a lot of experts that were prior guests on our podcast that’s in that Facebook group answering questions. So that is probably the second most valuable resource I could turn them to. And of course, I wrote that little book called Fire for Dummies that if you want sort of a prescriptive type of thing or a guide, a lot of what I talk about on the show, it is in that book. And it takes you through step-by-step, starting with the psychological part, knowing where you’re at, and then hitting all those, that basic formula of building wealth to the point where you don’t have to be tied to a job and you reach that financial independence.
Steve Chen (48:12):
Awesome. Jackie, it’s awesome to hear your story and also kind of hear how you’re helping folks that feel like they didn’t get started on time and think that’s true for everybody. Now. Everyone wishes they could have started saving earlier and investing earlier, but it’s great that people are seeing success. So Jackie, thanks for your time and the work that you’re doing. It’s great to hear your story and hear about the impact.
Jackie Cummings Koski (48:36):
Alright, Steve, this has been great. So nice to talk to you.
Steve Chen (48:39):
Likewise. Okay, and then for folks listening, check out the podcast mentioned all feedback is welcome. All comments back are welcome, and if you want to lead either of us a review, that also is super helpful for us podcasters that are trying to grow the audience. All right, thank you.