Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Welcome to Millennial Money Matters, the podcast where we dive into all things finance tailored for the millennial generation. I'm your host, Kelly Turner from Total Mortgage.

• Speaker #1

  And I'm Derek Mazzarella, Certified Financial Planner. Together, we'll be your guides through retirement, investing, mortgages, foreign case, and 529 plans.

• Speaker #0

  But don't worry, folks. We won't just be throwing around a bunch of financial jargon and leaving you in the dust. We're here to break it all down in a way that's relatable and easy to understand.

• Speaker #1

  Absolutely, Kelly. And hey, it's not all about numbers and spreadsheets. We're also sprinkling some millennial parenting tips or what not to do in my case, probably, and a healthy dose of humor to keep things light.

• Speaker #0

  So whether you're just starting your financial journey or looking to level up your money game, Millennial Money Matters is the podcast for you.

• Speaker #1

  Stay tuned as we explore the intersection of finance and millennial life. Let's get ready to make some money moves, folks.

• Speaker #0

  All right, this is it. We're just talking now.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. All right. So welcome to episode number one of Millennial Money Matters.

• Speaker #0

  The big number one.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Getting started is the hardest part is what I hear. So I think our goal for this podcast is to do a couple of things, right? Let's kind of figure out who the millennial generation actually is. Let's talk about how we can really help them from a parenting standpoint, talk about money. We'll give them some tips, hopefully educate some people, and we'll go from there.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely. Derek and I are a little bit on slay. ...painfully opposing ends of the millennial spectrum. I am like the oldest millennial that exists. I am 40, 1983 baby. We were like the first gen millennials. But millennials actually span all the way to the early 2000s. So a millennial could be 25 or a millennial could be 40. So we're a pretty wide generation. Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  I feel like they've got to tighten that up a little bit. It just seems like a little bit bigger. I feel like because we're kind of talking about this, I just feel like other generations, not much happened in 20 years. As the last, if you look at the last like 30, 40, 50 years, a lot of technological stuff happened and you at 25 versus 40 is a big difference,

• Speaker #0

  I feel like. A big difference. And what you've experienced, I think, especially financially in your lifetime during that time, is a big difference because our sort of financial awakening was what? It was 9-11. Yeah. And that was the first big thing that happened in our lives as millennials.

• Speaker #1

  Right. I mean, that's, I remember where I was moment. I don't want to say the same thing for you.

• Speaker #0

  It was my freshman year of college. So for me, it was like my first, it was two weeks into my... My freshman year of college, I just moved on to a college campus, moved away from home, and it was like the first major event. You know, our parents always talk about like they remember the moment like JFK's assassination. They remember the moment the man walked on the moon, first man walked on the moon. Mine is definitely where I was exactly the moment at 9-11.

• Speaker #1

  Absolutely. I was in a break at lunchtime, not at lunch, actually, 15-minute breaks we had in high school. So I definitely remember that.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And from there, it hasn't been, it has not been a quiet journey for millennials. It has not been a quiet journey. We've had so many so much happened and like, what are the impacts of that?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So we just wanted to get down and talk about what are the challenges that millennials have compared to other generations. And there's definitely a lot of them that we can, we can go through, but also talk about, you know, how do we get out of this stuff? Cause we definitely have different challenges with our generation. And I know Gen Z and the future generation is going to have different challenges we had and, you know, baby boomers and the greatest generation, they, you know, everyone thinks they had it easy, but they also had the depression to deal with. So we got some other things to contend with for sure.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely. So Derek, how did you end up in finance? What brought you here?

• Speaker #1

  Well, I grew up from three years old. I didn't want to be the MBA. I wanted to definitely be a financial planner. No, I just, you get, I think like most people, most adults in life, you kind of end up there randomly. You know, I went to Bryan University. My whole goal was to run my own business someday. But initially when I was even in college, I wanted to actually be a consultant. So I wanted to be that guy that went in and said, oh no, you need to do this with the widgets and change it out. But I got zero job offers from them. So I was at a job fair and I met someone at Aflac. I'm sure everyone knows the duck. FLAC. FLAC, yeah. So I did that for about a year and a half out of college. It was a slog, though. You're just making cold call after cold call, and you would be like the eighth person from AFLAC to call that day. So it was brutal. But I learned a lot. And then through networking, which I'd always recommend. If you're out there, you've got to network and meet people. There was a financial advisor in my networking group, and he said, hey, I'm moving up to manager. I think you'd be great at it. I always had a real interest in finance. I read Yahoo Finance and all the articles all the time in college. Obviously took some finance courses and I thought, you know what? I'm going to apply this to my own life if I fail at it totally. So at least hopefully I learned some things. So I got in 2009 right after the biggest recession in our lifetimes.

• Speaker #0

  Timing right there.

• Speaker #1

  Well, you know what? It actually worked out really well for me because the market only went up from there. So it was- You looked like a hero to me. Yeah. I was like a genius. I was like, this is easy. What is everyone complaining about? Then I just bounced around a couple of firms, but I'm from Connecticut originally, went to Massachusetts for years and ended up back here. That's how Kelly and I met.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, absolutely. I- I had a totally different journey than you. I had a career path. I was working in higher ed and I worked in higher ed for 12 years. I thought that that was it for me, going to work in higher ed forever. I loved it. And then I went to buy my first house. And that was an experience. And I really realized in that moment, number one, how uneducated I was on finance. I didn't understand credit scores. I didn't understand all the words that were used, amortization, interest rates, APR. And I'm sort of a researcher by nature, which Derek would tell you. As we prepared for this podcast, I sent him articles and links. And that's what I like to do. I like to research. So I really started to dig into mortgages. And my husband, he was experienced. He'd already bought a house before. Loan officer was a friend who's now my business partner. And I grilled this poor man. I asked him 900 questions. I wanted to know every detail. And he was like, why don't you do this? And I was like, no, no. Number one, I don't do math, which I think most mortgage people would tell you. We don't do math. I don't do math. And I'm not a salesperson. I have no interest in that. And then I convinced all my friends to buy houses. I was like, we're all idiots. Stop renting. Here's what you have to do. And over the course of that first year after I bought my house, Bob, every time I talked to him, I'd be like, I think you should just. get your license and do this. And now it's been 10 years and I can't imagine doing anything else. But I'm really passionate sort of about the financial aspect of it and like what people don't know and what you're not taught. Like I deal a lot in like credit repair and things like that. And it's not that people are idiots. It's not that people don't want to do this stuff. It's that they literally don't understand it.

• Speaker #1

  No, it's overly complicated, unnecessarily probably. But I think most people think, okay, I've got my down payment and I've got my pay stub. Here you go. Give me a house. Can I get a house now? Thank you.

• Speaker #0

  It's so much more complicated than that, mostly because the government's involved.

• Speaker #1

  Right. Especially when you got, I mean, I'm sure we're going to get to this at some point, where you're looking at like your bank accounts and what the mortgage brokers see and the mortgage companies, what they look for. And like, with Venmo now, what is this? Pizza emoji?

• Speaker #0

  Pizza emoji. I had one, a mortgage where I had to have somebody source their Venmo and it was all poop emojis. And it was during the pandemic and it was for toilet paper. It was toilet paper. And

• Speaker #1

  That was a hot commodity.

• Speaker #0

  Like, are we, I really have to source poop emojis to an underwriter. Like, this is true, like millennial, like fashion right here that I'm, I'm sourcing poop emojis on a Venmo.

• Speaker #1

  So that's an easy transition now to, you know, how we got here. Right.

• Speaker #0

  And what, tell me more about millennials.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So it's, it's a poop emoji life for millennials, but let's, let's kind of get into a little bit of how millennials kind of came to be. You know, I think let's maybe just kind of break it down a little bit. So we had our, the greatest generation, which is most. likely the millennials grandparents um you know their big event is they went through the great depression but they had a very different financial upbringing compared to most people uh i mean us in the retirement space we we hear the three-legged stool all the time where they had their savings they had social security and they had a pension uh we no longer have pension so that's a big challenge for us now um then flash forward to the baby boomer generation um they just graduated you know in the summer of love and everything was great not always great because you have things like vietnam and things to worry about i'm sure every boomer would probably tell you how hard They had it. But there were a lot of advantages they had.

• Speaker #0

  The 80s, the 80s, the glorious 80s where, you know, interest rates were at all-time highs, 13%, but everybody was making money hand over fist, so it was fine.

• Speaker #1

  Right. I mean, the good news is you're also earning 70% to 80% just by putting your money in the bank. This is not happening at all at any point today.

• Speaker #0

  What do you mean?

• Speaker #1

  There's certainly tradeoffs to all that stuff. But, you know, even the little things like the cost of college was reasonable. Like I'll give you an example. My dad paid for his own college. Do you know what he did for a job? Why did he do that? He worked part-time at Stop and Shop. He worked at a grocery store. He was able to pay for college working part-time at a grocery store.

• Speaker #0

  That's very different than what millennials have experienced.

• Speaker #1

  So there's a little thing called inflation that we have to worry about. So then we kind of come in. Oh, don't forget about Gen X. Everyone forgets about Gen X.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, we can't. Listen, Gen X, we're here for you as well because I'm a cusper. So some of this information can speak to you as well.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, the slacker generation. We had no parents when we came home generation. We stayed out until the lights went dark and had to come home. MTV was actually cool back then.

• Speaker #0

  You didn't get yourself. until you were 20.

• Speaker #1

  Right. Yeah, cell phones don't even exist. So yeah, then we come to the millennial generation. So we started in the early 80s. You know, I don't know, Kelly, you want to take us through kind of the big main events we had?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, you know, if you think about the early 80s to the 2000s, a lot really happened during that time, right? So as we sort of led off with 9-11, I think was the distinguishing moment in most of our lives. So we thought. So we thought. And it should have been. It should have been. If you look at. the way other generations have sort of gone, there has been one defining moment in their generation. No, we didn't stop there. We didn't stop there. So we had that. And then we had the 2007 to 2009 Great Recession and the housing market crash that went along with it.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, but that was only like right when we got out of college and we were looking for jobs though, so that doesn't matter, right?

• Speaker #0

  Correct. Yeah. I was lucky because again, eldest millennial here, I graduated in 2005. So most of us in my years, we got jobs. We couldn't move up in them because then the recession happened. We were stuck in whatever job that was, but we got them. The millennials that came after me, which is probably more your millennial.

• Speaker #1

  Well, actually, I was just just got in there. So I started in 2000. I graduated 2007. So I. My friends all had jobs. We didn't have that issue, but I was at Aflac. But I will tell you this, a lot of my clients were tied. We got their plans through their employers. So about a third of my book of business was laid off. in the Great Recession. So I went from making no money to a third less of no money.

• Speaker #0

  Negative zero.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So I definitely felt the impacts of recession for sure. But those that came after us even had a much harder time.

• Speaker #0

  Much harder time. And I think people, we like to really put that Great Recession, like it was 2007 to 2009. Depending on where you were in the country too, Connecticut really had struggles that some of the rest of the country didn't have. We struggled in that recession for longer. And so while it ended, right, I'm making. air quotes here into the microphone. While it ended in 2009, those ripple effects lasted for another five to 10 years.

• Speaker #1

  I'd actually argue a little longer because one of the things that people don't realize is if you don't start out with a good paying job that promotes you or gives you raises right away, you're starting out a lap, half a lap behind in the race. So that's going to carry through for the rest of your life because you're getting a 3% or 10% or 5% raise on whatever you started with that and that number was lower. That's going to carry through the rest of your life. So we have this real burden. anchor that we had from the Great Recession that isn't necessarily quantifiable because if we just kept improving like the economy was at the time, we may be a step or two even ahead of where we should be now.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And then we struggled with other things such as student loan debt. And we're going to get into student loan debt in this podcast and probably both from the mortgage standpoint, also from the financial advising standpoint. But this is really where student loan debt really took a turn was during this time period where college went from you could pay for your own college with your part-time job at Stop and Shop to... to $50,000 a year for a mediocre private institution to maybe even more than that with room and board and books and food, where this all of a sudden student loan debt went from being this thing that was like OK debt to burdensome, right, to all of a sudden we've got people with $100,000 student loan bills. You know, and through that time, and I think it goes along with the because millennials were already behind in the job market, they started taking things like gig work, that this is the rise of. the Lyft drivers and the Uber drivers and all of that, all that gig work and the side hustle. Like why do our parents did not need side hustles? Why do millennials all need a side hustle? And this led us all the way to what happened four years ago, almost to the date, which is kind of funny that we're recording this now in March is it was the pandemic. And so all of a sudden you have all these millennials who like finally got it together.

• Speaker #1

  Maybe just got a house.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. I got a house could be getting married. Right. This is sort of the age demographic could be getting married, maybe having babies, paying for daycare. Life is finally like working. They're being promoted. They're hitting that mid-30s stride and bam, the world shuts down. Our next major life event. Again, we were only supposed to have one. Ours was 9-11, but we got to have two.

• Speaker #1

  Three, really?

• Speaker #0

  Three, really. Yeah, with the recession. So I think that's sort of the traversing of the millennial life is right. We've gone through all of these things. And here we are now, four years post-pandemic. and we're seeing the effects for millennials of what has all of this done to us. And that's really what we're hoping to talk about on this podcast is how do we help? Like, what do we do to make it better?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, because we've had a unique set of challenges. You know, we've been able to live through them. And I think the benefit of us being the quote unquote older millennials is we're probably a little bit more established than a lot of the folks who may be listening. And we've kind of said, OK, we have kids, we have houses, we're a little further along in the journey, and we are hopefully experts in our field. at least somewhat knowledgeable. So we are going to be able to talk kind of a unique twist based on someone with a financial background and with a mortgage background. All right. So what are the challenges we have, you know, for those that are younger than us, how can we get you set up for financial success, financial ability to buy a house? Like what are some of the roadmaps? And we can really kind of go through a lot of common challenges we've seen with our clients and personally. And, you know, the other thing is weaving kids in that because, you know, raising a family is, you know, anytime I talk to my mom about kids, she's like, isn't it just magical?

• Speaker #0

  You're like, it's so magical.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, always. Anytime our kids say something stupid, we just like Nicole and I, my wife, we turn to each other like, isn't this magical? Kids are screaming in the background.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Well, and I think even that, like the pandemic raising of children, you know, again, it's very unique. We've had a very, I was paying for daycare that I wasn't able to use for a period of time. Like we really had a unique outlook on what that looks like. And even, you know, that's another topic of conversation, like the cost of childcare, like what are these costs that millennials are dealing with? What can you do to alleviate that? alleviate them? What can you do to make it better? And how do you use all of this as a springboard to having actual financial stability? Because all of these pieces, your 401k, your student loans, your child care bills, your home. your credit, all of this is the building blocks to financial stability.

• Speaker #1

  Exactly. Because at the end of the day, you know, it's been, like Kelly said earlier, it's such a tab, money is always such a taboo topic for all of us to talk about. I don't really have a lot of conversations with my parents about money. I don't know if you, my dad had like three things he told me. He's like, cars and expense, save money. And then there's probably something else I forget, but like, you know, it just wasn't, it wasn't a lot. We didn't, we didn't, I didn't know what they had for money. I don't know if you ever knew what your parents, your parents made.

• Speaker #0

  Correct. Like that is the big, and even now I, and it's funny because it's what I love about younger millennials. Because I think the older millennials, we still live a little bit more in that like boomer mentality sometimes of like, you don't ask people what they make. Like a 25-year-old has no problem being like, yo, what do you make for this same job? Like that sort of openness and financial transparency is huge. And that is what will make a difference for people.

• Speaker #1

  And, you know, I think one other thing kind of out of left field, it may seem like, but our generation nowadays even has so much more access to information. So I think one of the things that we spend a lot of our time on, especially with our clients, is debunking some of the stuff that they see online because TikTok is so powerful now and so popular and YouTube. You can literally look up anything, but not everything is going to apply to you. So I think one of the things that we're going to try and help be for you folks is be more of a filter. Right. So like what is stuff that's BS? Like I had I had a prospect call me a while back. She was maybe trying to be a client. And she said, yeah, I'm a W2 employee. I think I should open an LLC to save taxes. I'm like, that makes no sense whatsoever. That would never apply to you. Here's why. So I think that's one of the things we want to try and debunk is what are some of these myths we're hearing out there and some of the, quite frankly, BS that we heard in the market and try to make sure we find something that actually makes sense for you guys to listen to.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely. So we're hoping that this is a fun journey. We're hoping that we can help educate, make you laugh a little bit, find some joy in some of the stuff that we're doing. Talk about long-term care and parents. and how we're caring for them, saving for children's college. Like there's just so many topics in this realm that are so pertinent and they're so important. And so many millennials like haven't even touched them yet, haven't even contemplated how they're going to do these things because we haven't had the time. Right.

• Speaker #1

  Exactly. Yeah. I think we just want to be here as a resource and hopefully some smart advice for everyone.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely. So we can't wait for this journey. Thanks for bearing with us on episode one. But I think as we go, we're just going to uncover more and more topics to talk about.

• Speaker #1

  I think it's going to get much worse from here. I don't know. This is going to be the best we ever do.

• Speaker #0

  Number one. All right. We'll see. We'll let everybody else be the vote of that.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. All right. Well, hopefully we'll tune in next episode and we'll have to pick the topics someday about it, but hopefully it'll be a good one.

• Speaker #0

  Awesome.

• Speaker #2

  The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision.