2025 Goals: Invest Better, Budget Smarter

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In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Tim Beyers and host Ricky Mulvey discuss:How newer investors can get started.Past market performance, pockets of speculation, and what matters for long-term ...

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Check out a Motley Fool survey on optimism growing about keeping financial new year's resolutions in 2025.Join Motley Fool Stock Advisor and get access to our premium podcast, Stock Advisor Roundtable.To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner's guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.This video was recorded on Jan. 02, 2025.Ricky Mulvey: Is this 2025 or 1999? You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined today by Tim Beyers. Tim, we've been talking for about a half hour. It's still good to see you in a more recorded fashion. Thanks for being here.Tim Beyers: Thanks, Ricky. Fully caffeinated. Ready to go.Ricky Mulvey: Let's get going. For our first show of the year, I want to acknowledge that we get some newer listeners who you want to get better about your finances as you start the new year and in the latter half of the show, Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp are going to cover some budgeting tools that can help you get your budget on track and systematize things. Tim, we're going to focus on the investing side and to kick us off, the sister side of Motley Fool Money, which does a lot of great research and surveys found that almost 70% of Americans have some financial resolution this year. Here's the kicker. But just 7% of folks, want to invest more. It's a lot of paying down debt, saving for big financial goals. Not a ton of action on the investing side. Are you surprised by that drop off?Tim Beyers: Not even a little bit.Ricky Mulvey: Okay.Tim Beyers: Not even remotely.Ricky Mulvey: Next topic?Tim Beyers: No, not next topic. Reason why. Investing is hard. Investing is really hard and it's unnatural, and so it is not something that people immediately gravitate to because even if I'll say, if you ask the question differently, saying, in 2025, do I want to invest? I think the answer would be very close to that 70%. Now we get to 7% because people don't really know what to do, to get started, and so it becomes intimidating, and they say, Nah, I'm just going to save more money.Ricky Mulvey: I'll assume that there's some self selection going on among the listeners of this show. For the few who do want to invest more, become a better investor this year. I'm going to allow you to take a time machine. You go back in time to the Tim Beyers who just became interested in stocks and investing. You cannot tell him to buy Nvidia. You cannot tell him about individual companies. But what is something about investing, you would tell that newly interested Tim Beyers?Tim Beyers: I'm cheating a little bit here, but I would go back and do what I did, which is I read two really important formative books which still have stuck with me, and remain the most important investing tomes I have ever read and they really got me started. The first is One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch. The second was the Motley Fool Investment Guide.Both of them just got their hooks into me and Ricky, it changed my life. I got really super engaged with wanting to learn how to invest better. I started engaging with the Motley Fools tools about how to value stocks, how to open a brokerage account, all of these things and it really was life changing. When I go on to say, Motley Fool Live, and as a Chairman and I do a show called Mindset. The reason that is so personal to me is it is because directly aimed at the person this question of yours is aimed at, which is, I'm new. I don't know exactly what to do yet. I know this is hard and I know I need to stay invested, but I'm finding it really difficult. We work through all of those issues because we know how difficult it can be. Number 1 advice, I would go and check out one up on Wall Street from the library, give it to my younger self, and say, do not leave this table until you have read at least three chapters of this and keep reading three chapters every day until you are done, it will change your life.Ricky Mulvey: One big theme from one up on Wall Street that I would invite newer investors to consider is that your observations about the world are valuable to you as an investor when you go into a store or you getting good service or bad service? What do you notice about your friends and family, especially if you're not living on the East Coast where there's a lot of investment analysts still? We're in Colorado. If you're in the middle of America, you get intensely valuable insights that may be not as apparent to the folks doing equity coverage for large institutional investment firms.Tim Beyers: Absolutely.Ricky Mulvey: Those coming into this year are coming into an interesting stock market, Tim. CNBC article by Eun Lee makes the case that animal spirits are on the loose at the dawn of 2025 trading. We're getting a groan. She points to the rise of Bitcoin holding firm MicroStrategy, trading platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood coming off very good runs in 2024 and there's more interest in whatever meme stock trader Roaring Kitty is doing. Do you agree with her? Are animal spirits on the loose right now? Do we need to rein them in, get some leashes? (HOOD 0.62%)Tim Beyers: I guess. I loathe this term and by the way, I did a rant on our daily Q&A program for members that we call Fool 24, and I really railed against MicroStrategy because I don't know what it is. What is it? It's not a software company. It was. It isn't anymore. It's a Bitcoin holding company that is valued at an extraordinary premium. If animal spirits means, yes, there are sections of the market that are crazily out of control, yes, that is absolutely correct. There are parts of the market that feel just utterly mad to me, and I stay as far away from those portions of the market as humanly possible.Ricky Mulvey: How about the broad market? Because you're going to see a lot of forecasts which are historically very bad, but can give you certainty if you really need it. I can give you five decimal points about how I think the market will do this year, Tim, if you want that level of specificity. But broadly, the market has been enjoying a great run. The best two year run since 1997 and 1998. What happened the last time is that you had a.com crash. Folks are worried about that now and most market watchers are pretty optimistic about this year, which makes me concerned. If everybody's happy, that's a time to get a little concerned and you're a bottoms up investor, focusing on individual businesses, but are we in a frothy market, and if so, does that mean anything to you?Tim Beyers: I think the answer is yes, especially in certain pockets. But does it mean anything to me in terms of how I do equity analysis? No, but what it does, do for me is it gives me something to think about and something to look at because my investing decisions, every investment I make, every recommendation I make, is grounded in a belief that the underlying business can perform better for a longer period of time, than the market price suggests.Now, having said all that, I do love the idea, Ricky, of if a market crash is coming for me, that is great. Thank God, finally. We need that because we need market cycles. I'm not kidding here. I know it sounds crazy, and it sounds a little bit just strange to be saying that, but I need that because I am an investor in high growth stocks, a lot of high growth tech, and those companies tend to go to the moon and then fall precipitously and I need moments where those stocks fall precipitously, and reset.In order to successfully invest in the sectors that I invest in, you must have resets. You must. It cannot go up into the right forever. I do not place a lot of stock in things like market sentiment and other things like that. But I do appreciate and want resets. Now, the one caution I will say here is that if I were retired or if I was on fixed income, I would pay a lot more attention to market cycles. I would really be well prepared with five years of cash so that if I had a three year cycle where just everything fell apart. Well, it doesn't matter. I don't have to draw down from any of those equities I got five years of cash.Ricky Mulvey: Let's move on to some individual company chat. Because we had a winner, I would say, from the holiday break, and that was Netflix, who just reported that Squid Game season two reached 68 million views in four days and, Tim, that real number is higher because that's the number of folks that finished the series. That's total viewing time divided by total runtime. The previous one week record set by Wednesday. That was at about 50 million views. We got about, we'll call it 70 million to 50 million. A huge increase for a Number 1 show. Looking at these numbers of viewership, Number 1 show on Netflix, what do these mean for the long term investors in Netflix?Tim Beyers: Well, it's funny you mentioned that about the creator here because, this is something that Netflix has needed to contend with since the writers' strike, but let me get to that in a second here. I do love that this is a feature of Netflix, where they can fund content in one territory and then run it globally and any multi territory content that they have is immediately generating returns for them. I find that so super interesting.But when we look at the numbers, there are two things going on here. It is good for creators here that the Writers Strike did unleash some new terms here. Those terms include Netflix having to report numbers like this and so on the back end, things like residuals, bonuses, a gross involvement for the creators and actors in these productions, is a thing that Netflix has largely avoided. That's not going to continue forever, especially with their biggest hits here.There's a bit of cost sharing that Netflix does have to deal with here. That's not necessarily a bad thing because if you are putting up those kinds of numbers, you're going to have global talent that's going to want to come to your platform. But for investors here, I really do think this is something investors should be super excited about because what it tells you is how easily a hit can scale on Netflix. It is fairly typical, Ricky, that if you have a hit, say, like in the US, and you want to get it into other territories, you have to go through a vast distribution network, and that has costs, it has friction. None of that exists for Netflix and so I think you could make a strong argument that Netflix is one of the world's most capital efficient entertainment businesses, period. I am including Disney in that conversation. They are scarily good here. Those who think that streaming is going to kill Netflix, I think I just got it wrong.Ricky Mulvey: Who says streaming is killing Netflix? I'm not..Tim Beyers: Meaning that streaming broadly, where everybody can stream and so there's just endless competition. I don't think that kills Netflix. I just think they are better at it than everybody.Ricky Mulvey: One way they're trying to get better at it is more live sports. Netflix has said in the past, they're really only focused on the big eventized things. I talked to entertainment reporter at Bloomberg, Lucas Shaw a few weeks back. He said, That's what they're saying for now. We'll see if that actually remains to be true. Turns out, you might be right about this. Netflix had the sparring match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. They had the NFL on Christmas. It was a sparring match. It was not a boxing match.Tim Beyers: Yes, I agree.Ricky Mulvey: Whole other discussion, Tim and you know what? It was for the best that it was a sparring match because that could have been more disturbing than Squid Game if it was a legit boxing match. Anyway, let's get to the topic at hand, which is that Netflix secured the US rights, going back to your global strategy discussion. Netflix secured the US rights for the FIFA Women's World Cup for 2027, 2031. This is a pretty significant shift, this move into live sports entertainment. Do you think it's a smart strategy shift? Is they're getting into these bidding wars?Tim Beyers: I think so. The Women's World Cup is going to be cheaper, but it's still going to be a big audience. They won't have the global rights, so, fair enough. But the US rights should be interesting here. But as a global platform, I think they're going to plug in quite nicely here. I will say, I think the women's game is getting better and better all the time. It's going to be good. The thing that they're going to need to get right is you've got to get the commentary right. Fox is not very good. It's not like they have bad commentators. They've had some decent commentators here, but I think you want to get people who are really plugged in and honestly, I would love it if they had a Spanish simulcast because if you've never heard Andres Cantor give you the [inaudible].Ricky Mulvey: They're doing Spanish, yeah.Tim Beyers: I love it. You've got to have that. No, I think this is really good, Ricky and it is a sport that is begging for more global engagement. Netflix can give them that and so I think it's a very good partnership. I think you will see Netflix trying to occupy as many of these lower cost, but still really interesting niches where the upside is potentially very significant and I think that's true with the Women's World Cup.Ricky Mulvey: We've thrown some flowers, Netflix's way deservedly so. I'm going to give you something I'm wary of. Everyone loves Netflix again. Remember 2022, they had a subscriber slip. The stock had a huge sell off and this year, Netflix will no longer report subscriber numbers. The growth levers you're looking at now if you're a long term investor, you're looking at ad sales, the ability to increase prices with live events. Something that I noticed is that there are no open market buys among Netflix insiders over the past 12 months. That gives me a little caution. But are these growth levels enough for a maturing growth stock?Tim Beyers: I mean, it depends on what you are looking for here. If you are looking for significant growth, then no. However, I don't think that's what anyone expects from Netflix. What I think we expect from Netflix is an increasingly efficient, profitable platform that is growing strategically overtime here and playing the game smartly, which I think they are doing. Put another way, Netflix has put themselves in position to get variable growth when really they were a fixed growth business.But what I mean by fixed growth business here, Ricky, is that you have a certain number of subscribers paying a certain fixed rate and that was fixed. There's no variability in that whatsoever. Now, they have that fixed business and with that, they have a variable growth business in the ad platform. Let me give you an example of how this can work really well to their advantage. So over the holidays, I watched Anola Homes and Anola Homes 2. It was great. There were eight ad breaks in each of those films that I hardly noticed and I didn't care. They were perfectly fine. I could not shut them off, like YouTube ads. They were decent. There's nothing wrong with them, but I was very happy to endure them. That speaks well for A, the content and B the strategy because as you get those numbers, like Squid Game and Squid Game 2, guess how you can variabilize the value of that content. You can make the ad buys on that content more expensive and more expensive over time. That is a really big lever for Netflix that others will have, maybe, depending upon how they break out their ad platform. But I like the position that Netflix is in and the fact that they can do that. It started with third party help and now they're building some of their own homegrown ad development platforms. I think they're in a good position, Ricky.Ricky Mulvey: Good place to end it. Tim Beyers, I appreciate you being here. Thank you for your time and your insight.Tim Beyers: Thanks, Ricky.Ricky Mulvey: If you're ready to take your investing chops to the next level, head over to fool.com/signup to join Stock Advisor, our flagship Investing Service. As a Stock Advisor member, you'll get two new stock picks each month, rankings of a whole scorecard of companies, and access to all episodes of our premium podcast Stock Advisor Round table. That show is only available to premium Motley Fool members. It focuses on Foolish recommendations and takes a deeper dive into the businesses we cover featuring full analysts you already know from listening to Motley Fool Money. Tom appears regularly on bonus episodes of Stock Advisor Roundtable to discuss what's new in the Stock Advisor Universe and to answer questions sent in from Motley Fool members. That's fool.com/signup and I will include a link in the show notes.Up next, Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp discuss the free and paid tools that can help you become a better budgeter in 2025.Alison Southwick: Happy New Year. If year like many, now is the time when you ponder your waistline and your financial bottom line. According to discover, just over half of Americans are planning to make a financial resolution. 42% want to save more in general. About a third want to earn more or spend less, and other popular resolutions are to improve their credit score, build an emergency fund, and pay off or consolidate debt. Well, no matter your financial resolution, you're in luck.Bro and I are here to torture a metaphor because managing your money is just like riding a bike. Let's say you're just starting out. Maybe you need some training wheels. There are apps and online tools to help you. But what if you're ready to take the training wheels off, or what if you're ready to turn managing your money into an all consuming lifelong obsession of tinkering and tooling? Well, today we're going to talk about a few of the best apps for managing your money no matter where you are on the bike path of life.Robert Brokamp: Very nice. We're going to talk about a few specific tools to consider as you aim to be better with your money in 2025 and really, there are a lot of choices out there. It could seem overwhelming. But answering these five questions will help you identify the best tool for you. So number 1, what do you want to keep an eye on? So some of these tools focus mostly or exclusively on budgeting, while others will also help track things like your assets, your debts, or maybe even your credit score. Number 2, do you want account aggregation? So many of these tools will pull information in from your bank and investment accounts. Are you comfortable with that? If so, that's great.But make sure that your account providers are supported because not every tool links with every firm, especially true when it comes to 401K providers and crypto platforms. Number 3, are you flying solo or will this be a joint venture. So some apps do a better job of facilitating marital money management than others and also you'll just have more success sticking with a new system if you make choosing the right tool project with your partner. Number 4, what tech will you mostly be using? So some tools are best used on a desktop or a laptop. Others are really best used as apps on phones or tablets. Then there's the whole PC versus Mac, IOS versus Android factor.Not every tool is available or at least fully functional on every device. Finally, number 5, how much are you willing to spend? Some of these tools are free, but then you're going to be served ads or encouraged to sign up for something like investment management. You might also want to wonder what they're doing with your data. So no tool can be completely free. The provider has to make money somehow in some ways of doing that by sharing your data. Many tools do provide a bare bones free version, but you really have to sign up for the premium version if you want to take full advantage of the most powerful benefits. The costs are going to vary anywhere from $5-$15 a month, and you usually get a discount if you sign up for the whole year.Alison Southwick: Well, let's start with some tools for beginning budgeters who maybe still need some training wheels.Robert Brokamp: Let's start with one that's been around for a long time and is really popular with folks who are just avid budgeters and that is YNAB. YNAB starts for you need a budget. It's really a system and a philosophy and it encourages you to follow four rules when it comes to managing your cash flow. Number 1, give every dollar a job, also known as zero based budgeting. You're going to have a plan for every dollar that comes into your bank account. So you're not looking at past expenses, you're having a plan for what's coming down the road. Number 2, embrace your true expenses. Here you're going to take larger, less frequent expenses like vacations and how are they spending as we all just went through. You break them into smaller amounts that you save for each month.Number 3, roll with the punches. So life and spending don't go as planned. So when one expense is higher than expected, then you need to move money from another expense and then you spend accordingly. Then, number 4, aid your money. This is really all about building up savings and increasing the time between when you earn money and when you spend it. So YNAB has a lot of educational material, an active blog with a recent post about managing money with ADHD, which I appreciate and has a podcast, so there's a lot of handholding and support as you set up a budgeting system. It's free for the first 34 days, but then it's $14 per month or $109 per year.The downside to YNAB is that setting it up can be a bit of work and maintaining it takes time. I know people who were never able to stick with a budget until they found YNAB. But there are plenty of others who just find it unwieldy and cumbersome. So if you're looking for a more scaled down budget tool, check out good budget. It's basically a digital version of the old envelope system in which each month, people would put actual cash at a different envelope for each spending category, such as groceries, entertainment, gas. When that cash was gone, you couldn't spend more on that category until the next month. Good budget is built on the same philosophy. Plan for how much you'll spend each month and don't go over, except that the amount is actually tracked in digital envelopes.Good budget has a free and premium version, the latter costing $10 per month or eight dollars a year. The biggest difference between the free and premium version is that the premium version gives you more envelopes and it allows you to sync with your bank so you don't have to enter all the expenses manually.Alison Southwick: Well, maybe the training wheels have come off, and you're ready to level up your budgeting Jujitsu. Yes, I realize I'm mixing metaphors here. But where do you go after you've got your budgeting all in check?Robert Brokamp: So the tools in this category not only help you stay on top of your spending, that's still important, but will also track your investments, net worth, maybe even help with some financial planning. The first one is the OG personal finance tool and that's Quicken. It's been around since 1983, though it's had a few owners over the years. Go to quicken.com, you'll see three options, starting with Quicken Simplify and that's actually something to consider if you're looking for a more introductory app based tool. But for those who really want to level up, you should consider the classic Quicken options. Now, the classic Quicken is software that's actually downloaded onto your computer, which in itself is a differentiator since most of the other tools are either web based or app based.This is the option for you if you want to run your finances like an accountant. You can track and pay your bills through Quicken, keep tabs on your investments, create customized reports. That can be helpful for everything from monitoring your net worth to doing your taxes. I would strongly consider the business version of Classic Quicken if you're self employed, or if you have a side gig or maybe you own rental property. The downside to Quicken is that its mobile app isn't really considered the best. Quicken really is designed to be a desktop solution. Classic Premier Quicken currently costs 599 a month and classic business costs 899 a month. Now an alternative to Quicken, especially if you're looking for a free web based service is Empower, formerly known as personal capital.While Empower helps you track your spending like all the other tools, it's really best known for the information it provides about your investments. It can help track your portfolio and even gives you some insights into how it's allocated, which is helpful if you're aggregating all your accounts from various places. They're all in one place and you can see your overall asset allocation. On top of that, Empower can take all that information, as well as information about your spending and your debts and put it into a calculator to estimate whether your retirement is on track. It also analyzes the fees you're paying on your investments and suggests a withdrawal strategy in retirement.While Empower is free, you're going to get some marketing messages encouraging you to sign up for its wealth management and financial planning services. The third option in this category is Monarch Money. Now, if we were having this discussion a little more than a year ago, we would be mentioning Mint, which originally launched as its own service, but then eventually got into it. It was very popular. Unfortunately, last year in the fall, into it announced that it was closing down to Mint and shuttling people over to their Credit Karma App. This is just my anecdotal observation, but it seems that many if not most of the disgruntled MIT users jumped over to Monarch Money. And it may not be just a coincidence since Monarch was co founded in 2018 by the original project manager for MIT. So I quick and power Monarch Money, lets you track your spending, your goals, your investments, even has a suite of budgeting and planning tools that provide financial forecasts. It also gets really high marks for its user interface, very sleek. Monarch Money costs 833 a month or a little under $100 a year, though new users get a 30% discount for the first. Full disclosure, Monarch Money has advertised on this podcast.Alison Southwick: I imagine because you're listening to the podcast, this next category may describe you, our dear listeners. So to extend the metaphor, you might be one of those amateur bike mechanics who loves to customize their ride or even build one from scratch. In other words, you really want to nerd out with your money.Robert Brokamp: Personally, some of the most avid budgeters I know use spreadsheets and here we're talking about either Excel or Google Sheets. The reason are the spreadsheets are very customizable. You create everything yourself, including the categories, the charts, other graphics, how any other information is presented, you input the formula so you can be confident in the math going on behind the scenes. Plus spreadsheets are generally free. So if you've taken a gander at some of the available pre-manufactured tools that we've discussed or any others and you'll find that you don't like the way they look.They're not flexible enough for you, then maybe just consider a regular old spreadsheet and you don't have to start from scratch. There are plenty of free templates available on the Internet that you can choose or just customize for your situation. A good place to start is budgetsaresexy.com, which is also a fun and educational blog by a friend of the Fool J. Money. Once you're at the site, just click on Spreadsheets tab and you'll be taken to plenty of downloadable free tools. Now, if you like the idea of a spreadsheet and the idea of sinking information from your financial accounts, then consider Tiller, which connects banks and brokerages to your spreadsheet.The site also has free spreadsheet templates and an informative blog. You can try Tiller for free, but then it's $79 a year. The final thought when it comes to using spreadsheets is that really, they're not so easy to use on a phone. This is really the downside. Both Excel and Google Sheets have mobile apps, but they're a lot clunkier than the apps created by the other services we've mentioned so far.Alison Southwick: Last but not least, let's say you've added a side car to your bike. Is that a thing? But what we're talking about here is a spouse, a partner, kids. What are some of the best tools for managing money as a family?Robert Brokamp: So a few of the tools we've discussed have good reputations for being easy to use as a couple or a family, particularly good budget and Monarch Money. But there's one that's specifically designed for couples and that is Honeydue, that's Honey D-U-E. It's an app for your phone, keeps a couple on the same page when it comes to bank accounts, loans, investments, as well as reminders about things like upcoming bills or really just anything else you need reminders about. You can even send each other messages and emojis. Honeydue is free, though you'll be served ads. Then finally, if you have children, consider green light, which is a debit card and an app for kids ages 8-22. Basically allows kids to manage their bank and investment accounts, but with parental supervision, there are some controls on what the kids can do with the money. The older the kid, the fewer the controls, the parents have some say over that. There's also a built in financial literacy game and if you so choose, monitoring of driving habits, including crash alerts. Green Light has three plans, ranging from $5.99 to $14.98 a month.Alison Southwick: Bro, let's bring it to some close with some final thoughts here.Robert Brokamp: So hopefully we piqued your interest in a tool or a few, and you'll find plenty of reviews out there on the Internet about these tools and plenty of others that we didn't have time to mention. One place to start is Motley Fool Money, the fool's website formerly known as the Ascent just to fool.com/money/ personalfinance, and you'll find lots of helpful information there.Once you have a few tools in mind, find recent reviews, and demonstrations on YouTube, so you can get a sense of the look and the feel of the various options, I think that's important. When you see the tool, do you feel like that's something I want to engage with? Then try a few. Just the process of trying them will teach you something about your money, even if you end up going with another tool. Then finally, the best tool is the one you actually stick with. That really comes down to the system, the time commitment, and whether you'll look forward to using the tool on a regular basis. So if something feels overwhelming, clunky, burdensome, look for a simpler option. On the other hand, if something feels too basic, look for a tool that provides more information, maybe more analysis, and maybe even gets you excited about tracking the flow of your dough. Whatever you do, you'll end up with more information about where your money is going and I'm certain it'll help you make better financial decisions in 2025 and beyond.Ricky Mulvey: Before we leave today, just we're thinking about New Orleans as it recovers from a terror attack over the weekend. Right now, I'm thinking about the city's recovery and reminded that the freedoms we enjoy in America are rare and not to be taken for granted.As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. The Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. 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