Jean Chatzky
speaker
96 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jean Chatzky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
equivalent to the interest rate. So if you're paying off a student loan debt at 6%, that's like getting a 6% return on your money. If you're getting 50 cents on the dollar as a match in your 401k, that's a 50% return on your money. And you can't not get that because you want to pay off the debt at 6%. You just pay off the debt at 6% a little bit slower.
You should be using your personal credit cards and you should be paying them off every month.
Pay them off to zero. Interest rates are way too high. The average credit card interest rate, I just looked this up yesterday, is 28%. insane. It's insane. You don't want to be paying interest on a credit card. So the way to do this is to understand that there are a couple of factors that go into your credit score and you need to simultaneously manage all of them.
Number one, you got to pay your bills on time. If you pay late, especially if you pay late more than once, that's really going to hurt your score. The second, and this is where you got in trouble, is credit utilization. That's the percentage of credit that you have available to you that you're actually using. We want to keep that number below 30% at all times.
So if you have a heavy spending month, sometimes when I go on vacation, I have a heavy spending month that I spend more than 30% of my credit limit on a card. If you do that, the thing to do is just pay the bill now. Pay it twice a month rather than once a month to bring the utilization down. The problem that you got into by closing those credit cards is that you shrunk
the pool of available credit that you had, and that hurt your score. The other thing that you did, another factor, it's not as big as the first two, but it's something called length of credit or credit history. The longer your credit relationships, the more beneficial it is to your score. When you close those cards, if they were the cards that you had had the longest, you hurt that factor too.
So that's how you do it.
What I'm doing with that kind of money right now is... splitting it up and buying the stocks that we've been picking for our investing club, right? I have a diversified portfolio that is set up to get me to the retirement that I want to get to. I am on track. I have met my savings goals.
So if this is quite literally free money, I'm going to put it into the picks that we're picking for our investing club. And so recently we've been looking at stocks like Lululemon. We've got JPMorgan Chase. We've got a bunch of stocks in the portfolio, but we add one about every month. And sometimes we sell one and I would do that.
It's called Investing Fix. If anybody wants to try it out, you can do it free for a month. But the way it works is that every month we present four different investing options. We look at them on four different dimensions. How do they make their money? What do we like about them? What don't we like about them? And would we buy them at the current price? And then the club votes.
on what we add to the portfolio and what we take away from the portfolio. It's a democracy, democracy rules. And it's been a lot of fun. Some of the women in our club have stepped up and presented stocks that they're interested in. And some of those have been purchased for the club. One of our members suggested United Rentals and we bought that. It's been a huge win.
So we're all learning from each other, which is just so amazing.
We're not. We run a group portfolio that the club itself runs and is invested by the votes that the club decides. But a lot of members like me are buying the picks for our own portfolios.
Yeah, if you don't know where it's going, then you have no control over what it's doing for you, whether it's a business expense or a personal expense. And I know it's tedious and I know it's boring, but sometimes boring is better.
My secret to profiting, and I got to tell you, I lost my mom recently and my lifelong friends came out of the woodwork and haven't left me alone in a good way, in the best way. And my secret is to invest as much energy as absolutely possible in those friends.
So I'm on social pretty much everywhere at Jean Chatzky and you can find us at hermoney.com.
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