At The Financial Gym, we are often asked by current and future parents how to best save for their child’s future and education. A common vehicle for this is the 529 account, but you may have also heard of an UTMA. Let’s dive into both.

First things first: there are 51 separate 529 plans—one for each state plus the District of Columbia. 529s are also known as Qualified Tuition Programs (QTP). Each 529 has slightly different features or rules as it relates to their respective states, but their purpose is the same.

Besides housing, eating out is one of the biggest line items we see in a client's budget. From fast food to fine dining, eating out can quickly add up and prevent you from meeting your savings goals on time. While we can’t stop eating, planning ahead and having meals at home is the quickest way to cut back on your eating out/ordering in spend.

We’ve collected four tips to help ease the pain of meal planning without sacrificing flavor.

There are a few critical choices we make about our retirement accounts including how much to contribute and what to invest in. Due to the rise in popularity of Roth 401ks, you might have one other important decision: should you contribute pre-tax money to your traditional 401k, post-tax money to your Roth 401(k), or have a mix of both?

Spoiler alert: everyone’s situation is different and there may not be a clear best choice. To decide, you’ll need to make some educated guesses about your answers to the following questions.

While $10,000-$20,000 in federal student loan cancellation is welcome news for many borrowers, those with larger balances—particularly approaching or exceeding six figures—may feel underwhelmed by the assistance. Fortunately, the Biden administration’s announcement on student loans included provisions that have the potential to significantly ease the burden on borrowers with large amounts of federal student loan debt.

We frequently see clients who want to repay their student loans, but their high balances and unsustainable payments make it feel impossible.

During the summer, it’s easy to be liberal with your spending. After all, there are weekend getaways and impromptu rooftop happy hours, and you want to soak up as much summer fun as possible. By the end of the summer though, once you look at all you've spent that breezy summer attitude may start to fade.

But we are here to tell you it is okay! Although some mistakes in life can't be undone, financial ones usually can. All you have to do is put your summer spending behind you and turn those automatic deposits back on!

Have you ever received a notice from your credit card company informing you that your credit limit has been cut? It happens more often than you’d think. For some people, this is a minor inconvenience. For others, it makes a tough financial situation even more difficult. Either way, it’s important to know that this can happen to you and also be aware of strategies to avoid it and ways to address it if it does happen.

If you’ve never experienced an unexpected credit limit decrease, you may be thinking, “Is that even legal?” Yes, it is.

If your job gave you a raise next week, what would you do with the extra cash? Would you order the most expensive wine bottle in your celebratory dinner? Go on a shopping spree and buy things you never thought you could afford? For many people, the natural excitement that comes with additional income results in an innate desire to spend more.

This phenomenon is called “lifestyle creep”.

It happens when what you once considered as “enough”, like thrifting your entire wardrobe, is no longer satisfactory after your discretionary income increases. It makes former luxuries — like designer jeans — seem like new necessities. This is often what keeps people in what seems like a never-ending financial trap.

Most of us don’t doubt our need for health insurance, and since we don’t have access to universal healthcare, we do what we can to get insured. In lieu of a shift in sentiment that recognizes healthcare as a human right, we rely on health insurance to protect us from having to absorb the full cost of medical care that most people cannot afford on an individual basis.

Health insurance isn’t the only area where we need to focus on managing risks, and decisions about the other types of insurance that we need can feel much more daunting. Just like we want to protect ourselves from illness or injuries, we also want to protect ourselves against the loss of or damage to our homes, or the possibility of interruptions in our salaries if we cannot work for health reasons.

This week, President Joe Biden announced that his administration will cancel $10,000 of federal students for low-to-middle-income borrowers and up to $20,000 for Pell grant recipients. Naturally, borrowers (including Financial Trainers and TFG clients) are anxious to find out whether they will qualify for the cancellation and what they need to do to get it.

Federal student loan borrowers who earn less than $125,000 or $250,000 for couples will qualify for up to $10,000 in student loan cancellation. Pell grant recipients (lower-income students) are eligible for up to $20,000 in federal student loan cancellation as long as their income is below the threshold. Pell grant recipients who exceed the income limits will still be eligible for $10,000 of cancellation.

Let’s face it. It’s hard enough to manage finances as an individual. Balancing needs and wants, covering bills and non monthly expenses, and prioritizing which goals to save for first can take up some serious time and mental space. When you add another person into the mix, it can become even harder because there are two people’s perspectives to take into consideration.

As soon as we move past the most basic elements of our existence, figuring out how much to spend on what becomes much more complicated. We all need food and water, but even in those most elemental of categories we can disagree on what our needs are.

Twelve years ago, I became a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch with the hopes of changing financial advisory. Before this, I met and worked with too many advisors at Merrill Lynch who seemed no better than a used car salesperson (and ironically many of them were car salespeople before they were advisors) and I just knew there was a better way to support people on their financial journeys. I set out to become the advisor I wanted in my life — someone trustworthy, someone who gave advice they would take themselves and someone who truly cared for their clients and took responsibility for their financial success.

At The Financial Gym, we have the good fortune to have seen a lot of people undergo huge financial transformations. When I see this happen, in an effort to offer the best support I can to future clients, I always ask what the top 3 tools were that helped move the financial journey forward. I almost always hear the same 3 answers: Tracking your spending, automating your savings, and meal prepping. We will go over the other two in later posts, but today we’re going to cover tracking because it is the one I get the most resistance to, but the one that I think has the most impact. The resistance comes because the job sounds tedious. Recording every transaction sounds hard, and it can be easy to forget, so people feel like they just can’t do it. However, much like any other habit, you can change this one, too.

Anyone who has done the math on how much they take home per year versus their salary has likely noticed a stark difference between their total earnings and the amount that gets deposited in their bank account. Of course, a good chunk of that difference goes to taxes and other required deductions that employees have little-to-no control over. But sometimes a significant portion of that difference is spent on benefits that they do have a say over. Because these benefits are deducted from employees’ paychecks, they tend to stay out-of-sight, out-of-mind, but if an employee is consistently coming up short on cash each month, it’s worth examining what they are paying for—and whether they should continue to pay for it.

We all love a discount, right? What if you could give yourself 5% off almost all of your purchases? With a selection of five different credit cards, you can. All of these cards have no annual fee so you won’t need to pay for the privilege of earning these cash back rewards.

To get 5% back on almost everything, these are the cards you should have in your wallet. Every three months, the Chase Freedom Flex offers 5% cash back in a category selected by the cardholder on the first $1,500 spent in that category. From July through September 2022, cardholders can choose to earn 5% back on purchases made at gas stations, rental cars, movie theaters, and some live entertainment.

Let’s be real: it’s been a tough few years and the events of the world have taken a toll on everyone’s mental health. Employers recognize this but wonder what they can do with limited resources. The good news is they employers can do a lot for their employee’s mental health and well-being by fostering more flexibility, connection, and support without spending a lot of money.

Providing additional paid time off for employees to use for their mental health goes a long way toward making them feel supported. Considering that employees are not likely to do their best work when they are feeling off, it’s not too much of a financial sacrifice for most employers (depending on the business they’re in).

When I heard the Gym was offering the chance to become a Certified Financial Trainer, I had already been a member for over 4 years. Joining the Gym was the first real investment I made in myself, and when my trainer asked me what my goals were I never imagined celebrating so many of them with the Financial Gym community. I celebrated my wildest goal of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail by stopping at one of the former physical locations in NYC because without my trainer clarifying my goals, I never would have thru-hiked. I traveled to Atlanta to meet and hike with other Gym members and have been delighted to hear their continued progress on podcast updates.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans have either no emergency savings or less than one month of expenses saved for emergencies, according to a report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Most employers recognize the value of helping their employees save for retirement—that’s why they offer 401(k)s and matching contributions. But what about helping employees prepare for their most basic financial needs such as affording unexpected expenses? Some employers are doing just that by offering emergency savings accounts to their employees.

Everything is getting more expensive, including your credit card debt. Last month, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.75%—the largest one-time increase in nearly three decades. Credit card companies factor the Fed’s rate into the annual percentage rates (APRs) they charge consumers, so if you are carrying credit card debt, you can expect to pay even more on interest in the coming months.

But luckily, you are not powerless in the face of rising interest rates.

When you’re designing your financial wellness benefits, it’s helpful to know what employees actually have on their minds financially so you can best address their needs. Our Certified Financial Trainers (CFTs) work with employees across the country and throughout various sectors, and the same topics come up again and again: budgeting, retirement, and debt management. We’ve all heard the advice “you need a budget,” but about 50% of people don’t use a budget or even know how much they spend last month. When employees are taking control of their finances, this is often where they start because cash flow affects all other areas of their finances.

We’ve all heard the advice before that if you want to eat healthy on a budget, you need to meal prep! My belief is that this is the most common advice because it really works. I personally am a huge fan of meal prepping as I’ve not only seen the benefits it has on my wallet, but also the time it saves me throughout the week. That being said, if I am being realistic, there are some weeks I just don’t get around to meal prepping! So, I’ve developed a number of backup plans, tips, and tricks for whipping together a cheap and easy meal that doesn’t need to be meal prepped.