Jeff Rose is a Certified Financial Planner® and the founder of Good Financial Cents and author of Soldier of Finance. His financial education started when he was young, mostly by watching and learning what not to do. “I didn’t know anything about managing money, I didn’t know anything about saving, investing, budgeting,” he says. “By far, the best piece of advice I ever got was to study finance.” He served in the Army National Guard for nine years and has worked with clients as a planner for most of his life since then. Hear his story, and a few of the stories that educated and inspired him along the way.
Video Transcript:
By far, the best piece of advice I ever got was to study finance. I didn't know anything about managing money, I didn't know anything about saving, investing, budgeting, but by studying finance and just learning those basic money skills that I would need for my personal life, for my career, for my family, man, if I didn't have that, I wouldn't be where I am today.
My name is Jeff Rose. I'm a certified financial planner.
So my dad always wanted me to go to college, and-- because he was a college dropout. Turns out, I followed in his footsteps, and I dropped out of college. My mom got me a job, doing data-entry at her corporation, and I was doing that, eight hours a day, hating life. All my friends were going to college, doing amazing things, and here I was, stuck in a cubicle. That's when I realized that I needed to do something different, needed to change my life, so I joined the Army National Guard. Joining the Guard was something that helped me just realize, there's something bigger, better for me.
So joining the Army was good, because it got me to go to college to get my degree. What it didn't help me with was my finances. Turns out that I was taking on debt when I didn't need to, because the military was paying for my school. So, next thing I know, I'm $30,000 in debt, I haven't even graduated yet, and now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to dig myself out, when I haven't even started my first job.
So my dad struggled managing money, struggled with debt for all of his life, but the one thing that he did tell me, the best advice he gave me, was to study finance. And by doing that, all of the bad financial habits that he had passed down to me, I started understanding, those are bad financial habits, and I started turning them into good financial habits, and I started to learn how to manage money and to budget and to save and to invest.
I always tell people not to be complacent with their finances….You have to know what's going on. I'm not asking you to spend hours upon hours, deep-dive, you know, into every little thing, but just have a general understanding of what's going on with your money.
I remember meeting with this couple, they came in, they were in their early-60s, and they wanted to retire. …They had hard jobs, working overtime, and they came in and had all their statements, all their documents. And when I looked at everything that they had, it was hard to tell them, but they couldn't retire. …They just didn't have anything saved.
And I remember, clearly, them saying to me, the two regrets they had was that they didn't start saving earlier, and they didn't save enough…. and that became like my mission, of making sure that my family, my friends, any of my eventual blog readers, would- would not do that. That they would start saving earlier and start saving more, and just not be in denial about their finances.
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