Financially Naked Follow Up with Liana
Financially Naked Follow Up with Liana
At the Financial Gym, we call the first meeting you have with a trainer, the “financially naked session”. In this meeting, you share everything about yourself financially so the trainer knows where you’re starting so that he or she can make the plan for how you can get where you want to go. Above all other meetings, this one scares clients the most because they are afraid or ashamed of their financial situation. Over two years ago on this podcast, I shared my financially naked session and it led to a request for more. Now, this is a regular series on this podcast.
Getting in the hotseat today, for the second time, is Liana. When we last got Financially Naked with Liana, she was living in Vermont, working as a medical writer, and planning a wedding. She joins us today to share if she had a pandemic wedding and what her career and finances look like over a year later.
What are we drinking?
Liana - Vanilla Chai Tea
Shannon - Green Tea
Podcast Notes
Liana’s financially naked episode aired on the podcast in March 2020. At that time, Liana was engaged and saving for wedding. The episode was recorded in February, so COVID hadn’t happened yet.
She had student loan debt, a car loan, no credit card debt, and a mortgage payment. Her one- to three-year goal was to save for a wedding, and she was working toward financial independence. Liana was born in 1987.
Liana did get married in 2020. There are two camps of engaged people during COVID: the ones who really want the wedding they planned so they postponed their wedding and the ones who changed everything and got married. Liana and her fiancé were in the latter group. They pushed it off as long as they could, but they both just wanted to get married.
They were planning to be married in the church where Liana is a member and then there was going to be a party after. They decided to still get married on the original date in September, in the church, but postpone the party.
Liana lives in Vermont and their state did pretty well for COVID cases. Neither set of parents attended, because they lived out of state. Liana’s brother and sister-in-law live about 40 minutes away and they came and helped. Her sister-in-law took pictures and her brother works in IT so he videoed the event, and they sent the video out to family and friends. They didn’t livestream the wedding, because the church didn’t have good internet.
They came up with a list of very close friends and family and let them know they postponed and they would send them the video. To everyone else, they said they were postponing indefinitely.
Liana and her husband originally wanted to go to California for their honeymoon, but that wasn’t an option in September. They drove to the coast of Maine and they stopped for an outside visit with her parents in New Hampshire on the way.
They can do a lot in Vermont, because there are a lot of outside spaces, but winter was difficult. They spent their first Christmas together, without any family obligations.
In the midst of COVID, Liana got a new job. She wasn’t actively looking, but she made a goal for 2020 to make sure she stayed on LinkedIn and had an updated resume, in case the perfect job came along.
She took her last job to break into the medical writing field, but she was only editing and making $54,500 a year. She knew it was not a forever job and she set up alerts on LinkedIn.
Right around the wedding, Liana saw a posting through an alert she had set for a medical writer position. It looked like the perfect role and she hadn’t seen one like that in a long time. Remote work is important, being in Vermont, and that doesn’t come up very frequently for her level of experience.
Liana applied through a recruiter and the process was smooth.
Annual pay: $80,000; She didn’t negotiate, because the recruiter coached her on what to do.
Net Pay: $1,700 per paycheck, two times per month; previously it was $1,350 a pay; she is now contributing much more per pay to her 401(k).
USAA checking account: $1,500
USAA savings account: $1,800 received from the wedding
AmEx wedding/emergency savings: $29,900
Total bank savings was $23,000 and is up $10,000 in a year
Charles Schwab Roth IRA: $6,290 - was $5,500; Liana will roll this to a new Fidelity Rollover Roth IRA
Voya Roth 401(k): $40,000; was $19,650 a year ago; Liana will roll this to a new Fidelity Rollover Roth IRA and combine with her Schwab account
Fidelity Rollover IRA: $69,220; was $47,300 a year ago
Fidelity Brokerage account: $49,100; was $38,000
New 401(k): $2,041
Total investments: $166,651 and it was $110,450, for an increase of over $50,000 in a year. Most of this was growth.
Total assets: $199,851 and this was $133,450, for an increase of over $60,000 in one year. One of her three- to five-year goals last year was to have $420,000 in assets. You can expect your investments to double every seven to ten years without doing anything.
Student loan debt: paid off; she started with $25,000 and paid off the last $8,000 within the last two years
Car loan: $2,900 left; last year it was $7,000
Net worth: $196,000 - up over $70,501 in one year
Credit score: 800
Mortgage: $1,400; in the process of refinancing
Will: Not yet
Life Insurance: Not yet; $500,000 to $1,000,000 of term life insurance is typically around $30 a month for someone in their 30s.
Monthly expenses: combined $4,000; includes health insurance
FI goal: $1,100,000; if expenses decrease this number will decrease
Previous one- to three-year goals: wedding and financial independence
New goals: buy a bus within one to three years and spend more time to convert it into something they could travel in (approx $5,000 for the bus purchase); embrace a slow FI lifestyle (less work, more volunteering)
Sacred cows before: gym membership for the spinning class, health, and charitable giving
Sacred cows now: canceled gym membership and bought a spinning bike; health and charitable giving remain important
Shannon’s recommendations: too much cash on hand; emergency fund should be six to nine months of expenses ($36,000)
Takeaway: My biggest takeaway is the value of tracking your financial digits. I know it may cause anxiety from time to time, but you will never truly appreciate all of the hard work you put into your financial health, until you track your small changes and see how much they compound in the long run.
Random Three Questions
Where will you go when we can travel again?
What will be the first thing do on your first day of financial independence?
If this was your last meal on earth, what would it be?
If you have any topics you would like me to cover on this podcast, or if you’d like to get in the financially naked hot seat, I encourage you to email me to Shannon@fingyms.com, or join the private Martinis and Your Money Facebook group, and let me know what you want to hear.
2020 has been a challenging year and if money was one of those challenges for you, please don’t let 2021 be more of the same. Despite a global pandemic, we’ve witnessed Financial Gym clients, achieve amazing goals all year long. We’ve worked with over 6,000 clients at this point and we’ve literally seen it all. We would love to help you achieve your financial dreams in 2021. If you are ready to get started, head over to, or send friends to, financialgym.com to get set up today.