The Quiet Part

How to Manage Your Family's Cashflow Without Losing Your Sanity

• Second Comma • Episode 4

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Are you tired of feeling like your family’s budget is a house of cards in front of an oscillating fan?

Do you wonder why your money seems to disappear before the month is over?

In this episode of The Quiet Part, Mark Hansen, financial advisor at Second Comma, breaks down the chaos of cashflow and offers practical, relatable strategies to help you take control of your finances.

Through the unique "banquet" metaphor, Mark teaches how to prioritize spending, handle unexpected expenses, and align your financial decisions with your family’s values and long-term goals. From overcoming the frustrations of failed budgets to understanding the balance between fixed and variable costs, this episode provides actionable insights tailored to single-income families with kids.

What sets this episode apart is Mark’s blend of humor, personal anecdotes, and step-by-step guidance designed to transform financial stress into confidence. Drawing from his experiences as a financial planner, Mark shows you how intentional decisions today can unlock financial freedom tomorrow.

Don’t miss this opportunity to take the first step toward mastering your cashflow and building the life you truly want.

Subscribe now, download Mark’s free ebook, and check the show notes for links to schedule your consultation.

It’s time to make your money work for you—start your journey today!

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About Second Comma
This podcast is hosted by Mark Hansen, founder of Second Comma, a financial planner specializing in helping six-figure single-income families with children. Mark holds the Series 66 – Uniform Combined State Law Exam and the Series 7 – General Securities Representative Exam, demonstrating his commitment to providing informed and reliable financial guidance.

Our Commitment to Trust
At Second Comma, we prioritize transparency, accuracy, and honesty. Every topic discussed in this podcast is grounded in reliable financial principles, with the goal of empowering families to make informed decisions with confidence, free from conflicts of interest.

Disclaimer
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Each family's financial situation is unique—consult with a qualified financial professional for advice specific to your needs. Topics discussed on this podcast are not a substitute for comprehensive, holistic financial planning.

Learn More
To discover how Second Comma can support your family’s financial goals, visit our website or contact us directly at contact@second-comma.com. We welcome your questions and feedback to help ensure our content meets your expectations.

Intro by Mark Hansen: [00:00:00] Hey there! Welcome to 'The Quiet Part', hosted by Mark Hansen, a financial advisor at Second Comma (that’s me, by the way). This podcast explores our often unspoken priorities and dreams. You know.. the things that shape our lives, even if we aren’t conscious of how it plays out. The reasons why we sometimes struggle to do what we know we should do.. and even.. continue to do the things we know we shouldn’t. Join me as we go through the everyday…. gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves, our decisions, and how we spend our time.. our money.. and ultimately.. our lives.

Wendy (00:01.448)

Hello and welcome to the Quiet Part podcast, hosted by Mark Hansen, where he explores the unspoken stories hidden in the quiet hours we spend at home. I'm Wendy McConnell. Hi, Mark, how are you?


Mark (00:15.47)

You're doing great, Wendy. I'm doing really great. How are you?


Wendy (00:18.476)

I'm good, I'm good. It's springtime, it's the chance, it's renewal, there's hope in the air, things are good.


Mark (00:27.05)

Yes. It's starting to warm up where I am too, but this is a really special time where it'll be 92 degrees one day and then 37 degrees the next day. And you just don't know what, you don't know what to wear when you go outside.


Wendy (00:38.804)

Exactly. So you keep the coat on the, uh, on the hook and you may have to grab it. Or if you're lucky, you won't. Right.


Mark (00:46.73)

Yeah. Jackets one day, shorts the next day. It just, we've got to get all of it ready.


Wendy (00:52.083)

Yes, it's definitely that time of year. So what are we going to be talking about today, Mark?


Mark (00:57.402)

Today, I've had meetings and conversations and what keeps coming up is cashflow. And so today I want to, I want to talk about cashflow. What do we think about when we think about cashflow? What do we do when we are quote unquote, taking care of our cashflow? How do we handle cashflow? I want to go through pretty much kind of, you know, the nuts and bolts of what does it mean to handle the money that comes into our home.


Wendy (01:23.168)

Okay, sounds good. So it's about how I can manage it responsibly.


Mark (01:31.678)

Yeah, that's going to be an aspect of it. You know, what I hear from people is that a big piece of cashflow is going to be budgeting. And what I hear from people around budgeting is that budgeting feels like building a house of cards in front of an oscillating fan. You know, like you make a lot of progress and then here comes that fan and just blows it all over. And then you make a lot of progress and here comes that fan again, it just blows it all right over. And that makes it feel like a giant waste of time, but I really want to challenge that. I want us to think critically about.


For a podcast episode, what do we know about cashflow? What do we know about budgeting and what do we know about being intentional with our finances? Okay. And maybe, maybe you call it a budget. Maybe you call it a spending plan, but regardless, we're talking about your ability to handle your monthly household cashflow, to take the dollars that are coming into your bank account and be intentional with them and the first takeaway.


for all of our listeners is you need to hone your skill for handling your household cashflow and you need to hone it, hone the skill because it's the foundation of your financial life. Pretty much everything is built on top of this skill. And I would say this is the number one skill that I teach people. If you go back to episodes one and two, I talk about how bad I was at this specific skill and I talk about how it took an intentional outside viewpoint for me to start counter steering out of this tailspin that I was in.


when it came to me and my personal finances. So I'll encourage anybody head back and check out those episodes if you haven't already, but to help kick off our discussion, I thought we'd walk through. A mental exercise, but here are some, um, informal disclaimers for the, for the listening audience. Okay. So I'm about to use some percentages, uh, percentages. I said that weird, but I don't want them to be taken as prescriptive, right? I'm about to give some examples.


But I don't know enough about you and your financial situation to say that these are my recommendations for you and your family and the conundrum that I face as a professional in my realm of work, it's my licenses, the thing that shows I'm able to give the advice that I give prevent me from giving advice to situations that I just don't know the details of, and this is really important to me, this whole concept is really important and I want other people to know.


Mark (03:50.086)

And I even talk about it in my ebook, which is titled, What the hack are you thinking? Which you can find a link for in the show notes, but you might find that when, um, finance guru one, two, three from social media platform, XYZ gives out a bunch of recommendations, you have a really hard time squeezing your budget into their framework. And this is probably because they don't know anything about you. They gave advice to a situation that they didn't know well enough. And it's exactly why I pursue.


long lasting relationships with my clients so I can know their situations and give them advice while taking their specific life circumstances into account. There can be a huge difference between generic advice given online by an unlicensed professional and tailored advice that you can receive in an ongoing relationship with the financial advisor. If it's okay, I'm going to put my soap box away now and we can get back to the mental exercise. All right. So picture in your mind as you listen.


Wendy (04:43.862)

Okay, let's do it.


Mark (04:48.822)

You're hosting a banquet and you are in the back. You're in the prep kitchen, preparing to serve a pie to your guests at the banquet and you cut your pie up into eight pieces and you walk out to serve your banquet, which is when you discovered that there are five tables at your banquet laid out in front of you and like a semi-circle pattern. So starting at your left, the tables are numbered one, two, three, four, five. Okay. So you head to table one where you find two guests and you give them each a piece of pie, you find two more guests sitting at table two and you give them each a piece of pie.


And you repeat this at tables three. And as you approach table four, you see that there are two people sitting there, but also there's two more people sitting at table five and you look at your pie and you see that you only have two pieces remaining. So you serve table four and you walked to table five to apologize. You have no pie left. And this is what we would call a pie deficit. You didn't have enough pie. Okay. Now let's do another scenario. Same banquet, five tables. You're in the prep kitchen.


Wendy (05:40.957)

Right.


Mark (05:46.858)

And you're going to serve a pie to your guests. You cut your pie up into 12 pieces and you walk out to serve your banquet. You had to table one where you find two guests, you give them each a piece of pie. You do the same thing at tables two, three, and four, giving each guest a piece of pie, um, and then you give the final two pieces or you give two more pieces at table five and you have two pieces of pie leftover, and this is a pie surplus. Right. You have extra pie and we can imagine a third scenario.


Wendy (06:10.13)

Right.


Mark (06:12.714)

where you cut your pie up into 10 pieces while you're in the back, you walk out and you serve 10 pieces of pie to 10 guests and you have nothing remaining. And this is what we would call pie perfection, right? You had just enough pie. But my question, thinking back on these, what is the same problem with all three of these scenarios?


Wendy (06:25.332)

Okay.


Wendy (06:32.464)

Hmm, guessing the right amount that you need.


Mark (06:37.622)

Guessing exactly right. The host of the banquet never knew how many guests were in attendance before cutting the pie. Okay. This is the financial equivalent of not having knowledge of your cashflow. And what does this look like in the real world? How does this play out in our lives? Have you ever logged into your bank account and not known what number you were going to see as the balance when you logged in or have you ever gotten to the end of the month and thought, where did all my money go?


Wendy (07:04.488)

like every time I log in.


Mark (07:07.774)

And even the inverse, right? We feel like that's a bad thing, but even if you invert that, have you ever logged in at the end of the month and thought, why do I have so much money? Right? Where you think, did I forget to pay a bill or something? You know, these are all symptoms of not having knowledge of your cashflow. So let's fix this and let's do a new scenario. You're hosting a banquet and you say to yourself, I'm gonna bring the knife with me and I'm gonna serve my guests as they desire. So you walk to table one and both of the guests that are sitting there say, thank you for the offer,


No, thanks. We don't need any pie. So you walk to table two with your whole pie and both guests ask for 10% of your pie, and then you walk to table three with 80% of your pie remaining and both guests ask for 10% of your pie. And so then you walk to table four, you've got 60% of your pie remaining and you're feeling really good. I mean, there's only two tables left, right? At table four, both guests ask for 30% of your pie. They want the rest of your pie.


Wendy (07:57.885)

Right.


Mark (08:05.362)

And you, you look past them, you see table five and there's two people sitting at table five. So you say, okay, table four, I'm happy to give you a quarter of what's left because there are four guests. Okay. And as you leave table four, you hear them grumbling about their pie. They're upset that they didn't get as much pie as you wanted to. So you get to table five and you've got your final 30% of your pie. And at table five, both of the guests each want 20% of your pie. They want more than the pie that you have left. And so you.


Fake your best smile and you serve them the pie that you have and you know it's less than they asked for, but at least they're getting something and hopefully they're grateful, right? And then with no pie remaining, you stand up to turn around and you bump into somebody from table two who's standing right behind you and they would like more pie. Okay. This whole scenario right here, right? All of that chaos. This is, um, the equivalent of having knowledge of your cashflow, but no control. You know how many pieces of pie you need.


Wendy (08:42.706)

Right.


Mark (09:02.678)

but you still struggle to get everybody served. Okay. And what does this look like in our real lives? Have you ever, uh, like gotten a bill in the mail and when you opened it, you saw that there's a, there's a total do, and you're like, how am I going to pay this or have you ever built a budget dollar for dollar, and then, uh, you just watch it all come crumbling down because something unexpected happens. Right. Which is again, that oscillating fan that comes right back by and just blows your whole budget over.


Wendy (09:15.46)

Mm-hmm.


Wendy (09:29.332)

Absolutely.


Mark (09:30.998)

Yeah. And so, okay, listener, you're thinking, okay, great, but what are we actually talking about here? Okay. The banquet is a representation of somebody's monthly spending. Each table at the banquet is a category of spending and the chairs at each table, they represent the individual expenses inside of that category. Okay. And if we start from the left, we have table one, which is a special table and it's optional. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to skip it for right now.


Table two is your saving table. This is the money that you're setting aside for your emergency fund for your, let's save a little bit each month for Christmas. We want to do the big Disney trip next year. So let's start saving for that. We've got our anniversary coming up. We want to make a down payment on a home purchase. All of that is sitting at table two. At table three, this is the money that you're investing. This is today you setting aside money for you of the future.


We're using this month's cashflow to create a future month's cashflow. And this is how we head towards retirement. However, we define that word. We're doing it with the investing table, table three. Okay. Table four, that's your fixed expenses. And at a high level, I call this things that they take away from you. If you stop paying and it would affect your desired lifestyle. So what would be sitting at table four, things like your mortgage payment, because we need a place to lay our heads.


And things like the utilities for the house, because when I flip the switch, I want the lights to come on. And when I turn the handle, I want the water to come out. Okay. Things like car payments, because we need to go from A to B. And then there's going to be groceries, right? If you don't buy more groceries, you eventually run out. And a lot of people are going to say, if these things were to disappear, that their lifestyle would be affected. Also sitting here, it's going to be your cell phone, right? It's 20, whatever cell phone's going to be here.


Wendy (11:15.516)

Mm-hmm.


Mark (11:20.978)

And all of our insurance types. So we've got car insurance, we've got home insurance, we've got medical insurance. The dog has an insurance policy. We've got an extra side policy for the jewelry that we have that grandma passed down. Right. That's, that's all sitting at table four and then table five. These are your variable expenses. Okay. And this is, these are hot button items, but this is where the magic happens. Right. Table five at a high level. These are things that they take away from you. If you stop paying.


But it's less of an effect on your lifestyle. Okay. And at this table, I'm going to be putting things like Amazon and target expenses that are outside above and beyond your grocery expenses. Right. And I get it. It is, it's so addicting. I think it's important to remember, um, some hundred years ago. Okay. I don't know exactly how I'm not a history buff, but some hundreds of years ago, a king of the largest nation would have waited months for a specialist to come back from a far off land.


who had gone to source an in-season berry. And now we just same day delivery that stuff from Amazon. Right. And we do it all the time. It, you don't even have to click anymore. You just like, they, they got the one click buy thing. You just like swipe your thumb and you just bought something. Right.


Wendy (12:27.081)

Yeah.


Wendy (12:36.946)

Yeah. Exactly. Too easy. And I got to tell you, Mark, as a little aside, you've heard of dry January. I've done dry Amazon March. I am not allowing myself to order from Amazon for the entire month.


Mark (12:45.096)

Oh, that's nice.


Mark (12:50.582)

That is, I have been talking to my clients about a concept very similar to that, where you, you maybe try to do that every month and then at the end of the month, you've got everything in your basket and then you say, okay, I've got X dollars to spend and then you start picking from the basket because like they give us that basket thing on the, on the Amazon website, it's not a basket. It's just a place that we park stuff for 45 seconds before we buy it. Right.


Wendy (12:57.236)

We'll see you next time.


Mark (13:16.394)

So I'm encouraging people to use the basket like a true basket, you know, like move around the store, hold it for a little bit, maybe put some stuff back on the shelves. Yeah. I could totally lean into that. That's going to be, that's amazing. Um, and these are some more of the hot button items here at table five. If I jump back into it, um, streaming services, right? You had Netflix, but then the office moved over to peacocks and now you have both.


Wendy (13:27.888)

Yeah!


Wendy (13:35.942)

No, no.


Mark (13:40.306)

And Hulu, well, they were streaming Seinfeld, but now that moved over to Netflix and you, you never went back and canceled Hulu. So now you've, you've got those two and friends. Well, that was on Netflix too. But then it went over to HBO max, which you didn't even know existed, but you, you signed up really fast because they had a special signup price. And through this continued insanity process, you now own like every streaming service that there is. You know, all of those things are, are sitting at table five. Also at table five is going to be eating out.


Wendy (14:02.547)

Yes.


Mark (14:08.33)

Right? Again, above and beyond your grocery purchases. Okay. And what really blows my mind, um, is at table five, and I don't mean to laugh. I don't mean to laugh, but at table five, we find things like DoorDash, which as a company needs a new slogan. Because whenever somebody says DoorDash, I think, Oh, you mean pay twice as much for you to deliver me my food cold or wrong or both. Right. It's, it's absolutely, absolutely crazy. I have an example of table.


Wendy (14:29.884)

Yes.


Mark (14:38.038)

Table five items being less of an effect on your lifestyle. Wendy, we've had a couple of meetings and we've spent some time together. Have you ever heard me talk about my steakhouse conundrum?


Wendy (14:48.776)

Your steakhouse conundrum. Yes, I believe I did.


Mark (14:51.438)

Okay, all right, I'm gonna dive into, I'm gonna share with the podcast audience here because for our anniversary, my wife and I, we would go and we'd have a recurring date night at the best steakhouse in town. So every year for our anniversary, we'd go, and we did it up, right? Appetizers, bottle of wine, steaks from the, you know, the top section of the menu, because that's where the best cuts are. Two sides, why not three, right? Oh, you can put crab meat on top of my steak? Let's do that. You know, we are here to celebrate our marriage.


Wendy (15:13.556)

Of course.


Mark (15:21.85)

And the conundrum starts right here, right? Because I like my steaks cooked medium rare, but more on the rare side than on the medium side. And you know, like I don't want my steak to still be mooing when they bring it out, but just like a blink past that, that is perfect for me. Okay. And my wife, she actually doesn't really enjoy steak. She likes to eat salmon, which most steak houses have amazing salmon, right? And she likes to typically get this on a salad. So what was happening is we'd sit down, we order our meal, they make it and it comes out.


Wendy (15:33.201)

Right.


Mark (15:50.986)

And the first thing that they ask you to do at the steak house is cut directly into the center of your steak to see if it's been cooked the right way. But as far as I know, that's like eating steak 101, right? Like you don't cut directly into the middle of the steak because that lets all the, all the juice comes out. The steak hasn't rested appropriately. Right. And secondly, I realized it actually, it didn't matter. It didn't, it didn't even make sense to get upset about the first thing because, okay, I cut into the steak and it's, it's cooked perfect. Well, then I've just.


Wendy (16:07.931)

Exactly!


Mark (16:20.222)

ruined my steak because all the juice has run out because I cut straight into the middle. The other option is I cut into my steak and it's too well done. Well, now they want to take it back because it's a nice steak from the nice part of the menu. They want to take it back and they want to cook me a new steak. And then what that really means is now for my anniversary, I get to watch my wife eat a salad and about the time she's done, they bring me my steak and then she can watch me eat my steak and just, oh, what a date night, right? What a date night.


Wendy (16:40.262)

No.


Wendy (16:47.01)

Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah.


Mark (16:49.238)

So I figured I'm just not gonna check. I'm just not gonna check the steak. I'm not gonna risk cutting into the steak. And then year after year, my steaks kept coming out overcooked. They were too done. And if you overcook my McBurger, whatever, it was a dollar in change. You start overcooking my nice steak from the nice section of the menu at the nice steakhouse in the nice part of town.


I mean, ouch, right? At that point, I'd rather just go to Chick-fil-A and chow down on a 12 count and a large fry, right? And, and this whole thing, that whole silly story is an example of how this is a less, a lesser effect on my lifestyle because I'm doing a more expensive thing or an expensive version of a thing. As in, if I go to the fancy steakhouse, I get a meal. If I go to Chick-fil-A, I get a meal. If I cook at home, I get a meal, but each of those three things costs.


Wendy (17:20.346)

Okay.


Mark (17:43.646)

a different amount of money. And that's really what Table 5 is. And that's how I want people to think about Table 5. There are a lot of things that can be seeded at Tables 4 and Table 5. The overall theme is that we're paying things in a specific order. And what I mean is at some point, you might be running out of money and what are you going to cut out? You might start cutting out doing the thing the more expensive way. Because the money that you save...


can't also be invested and the money that you invest can't also be spent on groceries and a car payment and the car payment money can't be spent on your streaming services, right? Through this process with this framework, we're trying to give every dollar a job sequentially and intentionally. Okay.


And if you want, I think we'll just dive into like what does that look like? Okay, so let's walk through a final, final scenario. You say to yourself, I'm gonna bring the knife with me and I'm gonna serve my guests as I desire. So you walk to table one and both guests are sitting there and they say, no thanks, no pie for us. And then now table one, that's your generosity table. This is your giving. And it is, it's optional. That's why I skipped it earlier. Some people have this table in their plan and some people don't.


But in this scenario, let's pretend like it's important to you and it is there. So you tell table one, I insist, and you slice off 10% of your pie. You've got 90% left. You walk to table two, your saving table. You slice off 10% of your pie. You've got 80% left. You walk to table three, your investing table, you slice off 15% of your pie. And you've got 65% left. You go to table four, your fixed expenses and you've got 50% of your pie. But at table four, those people that were grumbling.


A couple of scenarios ago, you asked them to see their way out the door. They are now happy guests sitting here and you are happy to serve them. You give table four 50% of your pie and you've got 15% left. And when you get to table five, you're about to slide table five, your variable expenses, the last 15% of your pie, when somebody walks up from table two and they would like more pie. And so you decide I'm going to, I'm going to cut this. I'm going to give 10% of my pie to table five and I'm going to give 5% more.


Mark (19:59.03)

to table two and this right here, this is control of your household cashflow. You're directing who to sit where, and you're asking people to leave if needed. Right. And maybe now, right. Maybe right now the thought is, okay, great. My banquet sounds really, really bad. How do I, how do I make it better? Right. Have any of those thoughts popped up?


Wendy (20:10.707)

Okay.


Wendy (20:21.02)

Yeah. You know, sometimes, you know, you just have to do trick-or-treat instead of the steakhouse. But yeah, how do we make this more manageable?


Mark (20:23.982)

It's a good thing.


Yeah. Okay. So if we have a situation and we're trying to make some improvements, these are loose rules of how I want the numbers to interact with each other. Okay. And the rules are loose because there's two components to this, to this whole exercise. There's the spreadsheet where I punch everything in into a big fancy calculator. And I deliver you the exact answer down to the fifth decimal point. And then there's the part where we close the laptop, we shut down the Excel and we talk like real people.


about what you want your life to be like today, tomorrow, in the near future, in the far future, you have to be bought in to your spending plan. I can't force mine on you. And just because a calculator gives a result or an influencer gives a scenario doesn't mean that's the right thing for you. Okay, so the loose rules that I have is the amount that you are saving at table two, it's going to oscillate up and down. And that depends on what your financial situation looks like.


Right. Do you have a fully funded emergency fund or are you just starting out? Are we trying to amortize upcoming big expenses by saving a little bit each month, or do we not have any big expenses that are coming up the amount headed towards investing depends on your overall strategy, which doesn't mean your actual investments, but this is more along the lines of, are you wanting to invest and save for retirement heavily upfront and hope that the effects of compound interest.


play out in your favor on the back end? Or do you want to save a similar amount every month, all the way up until retirement? Or do you need to, or want to delay investing altogether for one reason or another and play some version of catch-up in the coming years? These are all options that can be chosen. And these are all things that you can talk to your financial advisor about. As in how do I make this? How do I do this strategy? How do I pick option two? How do I pick option three? What does it look like? Right.


Mark (22:23.562)

Some more loose rules, try not to be putting more money into depreciating assets, right, your average car payment, than you are into investing accounts. Try to, try to have that kind of a balance. And a caveat is, well, if you've already saved sufficiently for retirement, then we might, we might be able to bring in a car payment and it wouldn't be detrimental to your financial situation. It, it, try to limit your total housing expenses to 30% of your monthly take home pay, but again, here's a caveat, right? Lives are different.


A family of five that needs a home office in a room to do homeschool and wants a few acres to live on because that's where they want to raise their family, they want to do have a garden. Well, that family of five might have to bend this rule a little bit as compared to a family of five where both parents leave the home to go do some work at office jobs while the kids head off to school somewhere. You know, if we lump debt together, right? So including your home total debt, I like that to be less than 40% of your take home pay. So again,


Wendy (23:12.496)

Right.


Mark (23:22.038)

The more you spend on the home, the less additional debt obligations you can take on and bear when it comes to your finances and your total fixed costs. I want that to max out between 55 and 60%. There's some flexibility here, but don't forget that we're cutting pieces of the same pie. And if you give the pie to table two, you can't give it to table three. And if table four gets it, table five can't get it. We got to remember that as we work through here and some frameworks for making these changes, right?


Wendy (23:48.692)

Okay.


Mark (23:52.554)

You might find it more helpful to fix the big issues than trying to tie together a couple dozen smaller ones. As in maybe you keep buying Starbucks, but we get real serious about your house and your cars. When you're thinking about your house, your mortgage, do you need your whole house? Do you need more house? Have a genuine conversation with your spouse around your needs to have air conditioned square feet around you. Okay. When we think about cars, right?


Wendy (24:18.004)

Okay.


Mark (24:20.382)

A car gets you from A to B. We call that transportation and reliable transportation can cost less than $10,000 if you shop around, it might not be pretty, but it will be transportation. Okay. If you are spending more than that, you are buying more than transportation. We have to be honest with ourselves about that, right? And that is an intentional reallocation of money. It is a decision that you've made and you need to remember that those dollars can only be spent one time. And that car.


Wendy (24:32.217)

Yes.


Mark (24:49.734)

We get swept up in these car payments and car purchases. I hear it all the time. Oh, this is a, this was an emotional car purchase, right? That, that car, that car isn't going to bring you anything. You might be all alone in your car, right? Just you and your car payment hanging out. We got to, we got to remember that the car doesn't deliver us anything above and beyond transportation. Okay. And then the larger category of debt, debt is it's a weight strapped around your ankle while you're trying to tread water.


Wendy (25:04.632)

Mmm.


Mark (25:19.338)

It's the toddler that keeps walking by and taking your stack of cards while you're trying to build your house. Okay. Some people have a small weight. Some people have a big weight. Some people are really good at treading water. Some people aren't, aren't good swimmers, right? These are all nuances and variables that we have to take into consideration because they're specific to you, the listener and you trying to put your budget together. You know, I'm, I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent aligned with Dave Ramsey.


Wendy (25:43.026)

right.


Mark (25:47.646)

I think that the emergency fund should be prioritized a little higher than he does. I think like fully paying off your consumer debt happens alongside building your emergency fund. It's small differences, right? I'm not saying there's nothing good coming out of his platform, but something that he says that I want people to think about is what if you free up a seat at table four because your car payment no longer sits there, what if you free up a seat at table four because your mortgage is paid off?


Wendy (26:10.696)

Hmm


Mark (26:14.538)

What if you free up seats at your banquet because your student loans, your credit cards, your buy now pay later. What if all of that stuff is paid off and those seats are no longer full? What if, what if you walk out to serve your banquet and table four is pretty much empty? How much less pie do you need to serve at your banquet? And what would you be able to do with the time that you gain back now that you don't have to make so much pie? You know, when you, when you think about your banquet,


Wendy (26:38.876)

Mmm.


Mark (26:41.41)

Who do you need to ask to leave your banquet so that somebody else can sit down? And who is at your banquet eating more pie than you want them to? Who do you need to leave your banquet so you have enough pie to serve everyone else? And this isn't a, I think we maybe default to like, oh, I'll just go to the store and I'll get more pie. But then you're breaking the framework of this, right? We can't just go to the store and get more pie. We have to make choices.


And these choices are taking us along a spectrum from, um, I call it like financial folly to financial maturity. We are maturing in our decision making process as it pertains to our finances. And so those are some frameworks. And then I've got a couple hard truths. Okay. Hard truths. When you sit down to do this, you can't have a victim mentality. Maybe you have made some mistakes. That is okay.


Wendy (27:35.953)

Yeah.


Mark (27:37.814)

But let's stop making mistakes. Let's fix up the boo-boos that we already have before we start giving ourselves more. And sometimes we get to a moment like this and people are really excited, but they don't know what do I do next? And it just stop, stop. You're going too far. Taking control of your cashflow is like getting in the pool. It does not matter what side you jump in. Right? All you need to do is get in the pool. If you're super nervous, yes, you can use the steps, but get in the pool, start somewhere, take some action.


Okay. And then this is maybe a warning. When you, when you start this journey, it can feel like a daunting project to take control of your cashflow and it can feel like a daunting project to get everything figured out only to realize you solved 80% of the problem, not 100%. And then to get it all figured out in a new problem arises, and then you get it all figured out and six months later, something changes and you get it all figured out and 12 months later, you realize you forgot to plan for an upcoming expense and that right there. That. I just heard it, right?


Wendy (28:33.802)

Ugh.


Wendy (28:37.876)

I'm sorry.


Mark (28:37.962)

You know what just happened when you made that noise? You know what that was? That was the oscillating fan just came right back by and blew over your house of cards. Okay. We don't have perfect control and we cannot plan for every single instance. Even if you're, even if your budgeting software lets you make sinking funds for your sinking funds, we don't have perfect control.


Wendy (28:41.498)

It was despair!


Wendy (28:48.077)

Yes!


Wendy (29:06.833)

Mm, okay. So what you've basically done is made me very hungry for pie, Mark.


Mark (29:15.359)

Yeah. So I think what, what do we do with all this information, right? Maybe you're hungry for pie, but what do we do with all of this information? This is, this is your homework. If you're listening to this, this is your homework. Do this for your finances, draw it out, label the tables, draw some chairs, label the chairs, the hard part can be sitting down and going through the exercise. But part of why it feels hard is because you might not realize the full extent of the exercise.


Wendy (29:21.95)

Yeah.


Mark (29:42.142)

What you will come across is you will, you will maybe sequentially realize you're not only serving pie. You're not only cutting the pie into pieces. You're not only cutting the pie into appropriately sized pieces. You are not only prioritizing the tables. You are cutting intentionally sized pieces out of a finite pie as you serve individual prioritized chairs at overall prioritized tables. And you can't copy someone else's homework. Your life is yours.


And if you want to try to be in control of your finances, you have to do your homework. Okay. And let's look, let's be honest. Okay. Let's be really honest. Do I want to do this stuff sitting here today? Do I want to put money away for the future? Probably not. Do I want to make smart decisions with my money? Probably not. Do I want to eat this really healthy chicken dish that we cooked at home while we meal prepped on a Sunday afternoon? No.


No, I want to go to Chick-fil-A. I want to spend some money. I want to have fun. I want to take my wife to the beach. And when we get back, I want to take her to the beach again. I want a 72 Chevy C-10 short bed, right? But I got three very specific, very in case you missed it. I want a 72 Chevy C-10 short bed. It is a truck. OK, here's the problem. I got three kids.


Wendy (30:55.444)

fake mark.


Wendy (31:02.788)

truck. Okay.


Mark (31:08.758)

And they're all in car seats. There's only three seats in that truck. And I can't, I can't pick which two kids I take with me. Right. Yeah. All right. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for me to have that truck. Okay. Fine. I can set that aside. But here, okay. Here's what do I really want? What do I want more than the beach? What do I want more than endless Chick-fil-A? As good as that sounds. I'm 35.


Wendy (31:12.038)

Yeah.


Wendy (31:15.932)

Well, you could, but you wouldn't be a great dad.


Wendy (31:22.118)

It's that.


Mark (31:37.994)

sitting here right now recording this. And what I want more than all of that is I wanna play with my grandkids. Whenever they come, okay, our oldest is five right now. So I understand that I'm looking way down the road. I wanna get on the ground and I wanna play with my grandkids and I wanna read them stories and I want them to know me and I wanna know them and I wanna be a big part of their life. And the question is, this is what rattles around in my brain.


Wendy (31:50.321)

Right.


Mark (32:06.41)

when I feel compelled to go out and swipe some plastic or swipe my thumb. Can I do that? Can I do what I just said after making a lifetime of foolish decisions or a lifetime of intentional decisions? Okay. I think I know which one will at least get me a little bit closer to the thing that I want the most, but here's the question for you. What do you want the most? Do you want another new car? Do you want a bigger house?


Wendy (32:20.74)

Mmm.


Mark (32:36.022)

Do you want insert consumer trend right here? Or do you want something else more than that?


Wendy (32:44.668)

Yeah. Food for thought, pie for thought.


Mark (32:49.473)

Lots of pie, lots of food for thought, that's right.


Wendy (32:53.659)

Yeah, okay, and that's something that's part of the homework is something everybody has to decide for themselves


Mark (32:59.606)

Absolutely. Yes. I think that's a, that's a critical piece is, is you and you and your spouse, whoever's involved in the financial decisions, you have to make these decisions. You have to come to your own conclusions. You can't copy someone else's homework.


Wendy (33:13.78)

Okay. So Mark, if somebody wants to contact you about how they can make the right size pie for the banquet, how do they get in touch?


Mark (33:24.19)

All the contact info is going to be in the show notes. I encourage people to go to the website, read the website, download the ebook, read the ebook. Those are going to be great ways to educate yourself around who is Mark and what does he talk about and how does he talk about it? What does Mark think is important? And if you resonate with any of that, then on my website, you can also find a place to schedule a meeting with me. We can sit down. We can start having a conversation.


start having a conversation and that those are all things that you can do. They don't cost you a dime. You can get as far into this process as you want, but all of those links are going to be in the show notes.


Wendy (34:00.42)

Okay, great. Well, thank you so much, Mark. I appreciate the time.


Mark (34:04.787)

Absolutely. This is a lot of fun, Wendy. Thank you.


Wendy (34:06.652)

Yeah. Well, and thank you for listening today. Please like, follow, and share this podcast with your friends. Until next time, I'm Wendy McConnell.


Outro by Mark Hansen: Thank you for joining us on 'The Quiet Part.' If you found value in our journey today, please subscribe to stay updated on future episodes. Check the links in the show notes to learn more about Second Comma or to discuss working together. Remember, 'The Quiet Part' is more than a podcast; it's a journey towards understanding the deeper aspects of our lives. It’s about saying the quiet part out loud. Click the follow button and be part of this conversation about uncovering the unspoken.

Lastly, here’s some important information for our listening audience to know: The opinions voiced in this episode are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations to any individual or entity. Any depictions made in this podcast are hypothetical only. For a comprehensive review of your personal situation, consult with your financial or tax advisor before investing. Cetera does not provide any tax or legal advice. Securities and advisory services are offered through Cetera Advisor Networks LLC, member FINRA/SIPC, a broker/dealer and Registered Investment Adviser. Cetera is under separate ownership from any other named entity. Neither the co-host nor guests are affiliated with Cetera Advisor Networks LLC. Any information they provide is unrelated to Cetera Advisor Networks LLC or its registered representatives. Mark Hansen.. Financial Planner.. 2751 Teakwood Lane.. Plano Texas.. 75075



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