It is Chelsea Fagan.

And I am back with another episode

of The Financial Confessions.

This time, with an unusual guest, a man,

someone we rarely see the show, but also someone

who is an incredibly astute and-- dare I

say-- even funny expert on money.

So he should make for a very interesting conversation.

But first, I wanted to give a quick hello

to our beloved partners with whom

we create every episode of The Financial Confessions.

So as you guys almost certainly know by now,

we make this show in partnership with Intuit.

And if you have not heard of Intuit,

you have almost certainly heard of a lot

of their amazing products.

I am personally someone who has used Mint ever

since the very first moment I decided to get good with money.

That is a full year before I started

at thefinancialdiet.com.

And it was the only app that ever allowed

me to really confront my money.

So I really immediately fell in love with Intuit's products

and wanted to learn more about what else they offer.

And lo and behold, I ended up filing taxes

with TurboTax, which totally simplifies the process.

Another great product they make.

And I now use QuickBooks every single day

to manage my business's finances.

And of course, I still use Mint on my personal accounts.

Basically, Intuit has become an indispensable part

of my financial life.

It helps me make my decisions.

It helps me manage my goals.

And it helps me just get a very clear picture every day

of the exact state of my financial health.

Intuit basically makes everything

you need to do money better.

If you can't wait to get started,

check them out at the link in our description or our show

notes.

So as I promised, we have a man in the studio.

Who let him in?

He is a CFP.

In fact, I've heard you maybe even referred to

as the millennial CFP.

I'll take it.

He's a New Yorker.

He is someone who loves a good tie.

He's an expert on money.

He tweets.

His name is Douglas Boneparth.

Hey.

Hi.

What's up?

Not too much.

Welcome to The Financial Diet.

Thank you so much for having me.

Tell our audience a little bit about you.

Sure.

Sure.

I'm the founder and president of Bone Fide Wealth.

It's a wealth management firm that specializes primarily

in now older high-achieving millennials.

So we don't care how much in assets you have.

We care about where you're going and what

goals you want to accomplish.

And I was one of the first people

to go out and say, hey, I'm going to work with millennials.

And if you did that seven years ago, you got

laughed at in the profession.

Right.

But look who's laughing now.

Is it you?

Yes.

Are you laughing person?

Not.

I'm not-- I think my wife's the one laughing really.

Mostly at me.

Uh.

Yeah, yeah.

We should have a little counter up for how many times you

mention your wife.

For those joining us, so Doug is a man who loves his wife.

Yes.

Mentions her a lot.

And so hopefully, we'll hear a lot more about this elusive

person.

She'll probably come up a lot.

A lot of her financial story is our financial story.

Oh, how nice.

We co-authored a book together.

So I guess that's the next part.

Look at you guys.

We wrote The Millennial Money Fix in the three months

she had off after having our first child.

Yeah.

OK.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We really--

I got tired just hearing that.

Right.

Right.

We really-- you know?

If we're not going to sleep, then we

might as well be productive.

So my wife and I wrote this story

to pretty much address the massive amount of student loan

debt that we've taken out respectively.

And we wanted to show you that if you do understand

personal finance, you can get organized enough

to get out of really precarious situations.

Right.

Something that was very unique to millennials

is the average amount of student loan debt on their heads.

And we wanted to show that you can still

achieve your great things in life

despite these financial realities and obstacles that

are kind of unique to our generation.

So she's an attorney.

Yes.

And you're an MBA.

Yes.

Got it.

So how much-- do you ever disclose how much

student loan debt you have?

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're very forward about it.

It's right in the book.

Right now outstanding balance is just shy of $300,000.

Woo, buddy.

Yeah.

Good gracious.

It's a lot of money, right?

That is a lot of money.

Goodness.

But if you work hard enough and are

deliberate about how you want to build your career

and go after your goals, and prioritize them right,

you can deal with stuff like that.

There's-- you know, humble brag, not really,

but you've got to have a lot of income to deal with that

expense and still put two kids through daycare,

and buy a house, and afford living in that house.

So for all the flak that the generation gets

around millennials don't own homes,

and they can't do x, or start families,

settle down, and get married, I'm

here to tell you that that's just not true.

And there's some real practical things

you can do to get on your way.

I think there are--

I think that's not totally untrue.

I think there is some reality to it

for a lot of people who maybe have similar levels of debt,

but perhaps not the earning potential to go with it.

But we can get to that in a bit.

I'm curious in your particular situation,

so that's quite a significant amount of debt.

Is there any element of your education

or how you took on the debt, how you went through school,

that you regret?

For me and my decision to go get an MBA here in New York,

I have zero regrets about that decision.

I think it was always a goal of mine when I moved to New York.

And I think it was necessary to acquire

a few things that I would need to continue

building my business.

It was a very calculated decision,

down to how many clients I would need

to acquire within graduating to make that student loan payment,

you know, a wash.

And then how to make money on top of that.

And granted, I went to business school

after Heather went to law school.

She, as we write in the book, is the cautionary tale

of what happens when you make perhaps

uninformed financial decisions that load you

up with student loan debt and what you

need to do to overcome that.

And she faced tremendously--

well, a lot more obstacles than I

did, because she graduated right into the middle

of the recession in 2010 and what the job environment looked

like for her.

And I do understand your point that you

wanted to make earlier that--

look, people make decisions to put huge debt stacks

on their balance sheet, and their income is just not

going to alleviate, or the profession that they chose

doesn't offer that type of revenue

to justify the expense that they're

going to have from their loans.

And for those particular cases, it gets more extreme with ways

to solve for that.

But I do feel that.

I do work with clients in that position all the time.

And I'm going to continue to toe the line that there is a way

to plan around those types of situations.

You might not like the answers, but--

Yeah.

I mean, but that being said, there

are also a lot of situations that people can find themselves

in that are kind of totally out of the realm of preparation.

One thing, for example, being huge medical burdens.

So I don't think--

for the record, I mean, if I were

a fatalist about this sort of thing,

I wouldn't be in this business.

I obviously believe that for a huge number of people,

including millennials, there is a good amount

of individual choice that will go into the life you can have.

And I even think that--

I think that even for someone who is scraping by,

even if you're taking in $10 a month,

I think you should have a nice itemized budget for where

that $10 is going.

No question.

So I definitely agree with that.

But I do think one of the things that our audience will often

have kind of like a bit of an eye-rolly response

to, because audience is, I would say,

very different from the vast majority of personal finance

people, that they'll kind of eye-roll about is hearing

people who are success stories talk to you about how they

can also be a success story.

And obviously, the path that you have with your wife--

she's an attorney.

You're a financial advisor.

That is a pretty lucrative set of married people.

So I guess what is maybe your most salient tip

for people who have maybe not such great earning potential,

but a ton of debt?

Yeah.

I think it goes to fundamentals and mastering things like cash

flow.

It squarely comes down to putting

in the work on these foundational areas

to set yourself up for success.

It's step one.

If you don't know-- as you just perfectly said, if you make $10

and you spend $10 and you don't know where that $10 went,

you're not in control.

And if you're not in control, you're

going to have a very difficult time achieving any goal

you set out to achieve, whether that's affording an apartment,

building a cash reserve, buying a home, whatever it may be.

And this applies to everyone.

Right.

And cynically, I think we as a society are

terrible at personal finance.

Typically, we do very bad in this category.

But the one area that deserves the most attention and the most

work is cash flow.

And people don't go through 12 months of their expenses,

generally and broadly, at the very least,

categorize them and start learning about their spending

behavior.

Now, I don't want to tell people how to spend their money.