7 Money Moves to Buy Your First Rental Faster

Ashley:
Rookies listen up. If you are having trouble having money for your first deal, this is the episode for you or maybe your next deal. Today we are bringing on a personal finance expert to help you get your house in order. And no, we’re not talking about budgeting because she even admits she is Antib budgetting. So we have Amberly coming on today to talk personal finance and specifically on how you can get your first property.

Tony:
And I think what you’ll walk away from in this episode are not just concepts, not just ideas, not just frameworks, but real tactical things you can focus on today, tomorrow to set yourself up to actually buy your first or your next rental. And Amber Lee did this being, I think it was close to $100,000 in the hole on a deal. She’s able to build herself out of that. You’ll hear that story and learn some lessons along the way.

Ashley:
This is also a really monumental episode because Tony roast me for probably the first time ever in rookie history, so make sure you listen for that. This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast and I’m Ashley Kehr.

Tony:
And I’m Tony j Robinson. And give a big, warm welcome to Amberly Grant,

Ashley:
Thank you so much for joining us on Real Estate Rookie. How are you today?

Amberly:
I’m fantastic. It’s a beautiful day out. Things are good. Thanks for asking.

Ashley:
We are so excited to have you on. To help rookie investors really set a strong personal finance foundation before they get their first deal, or even if they’re already into real estate, things they can do because if your finances aren’t in order at home, how are you going to have them in order for your business or your rental property? So Amberly, just to start us off, give us a little bit of your background with personal finance.

Amberly:
In 2020, I actually was greatly affected by the pandemic. I had a property that I owned with my ex at that time. We bought it together and it was an up down duplex. I had TR the basement for almost a year at that point, 2020 rolls around. I bought out the property from him and his mom for $80,000 and STS went to zero and I was in quite a pickle and I figured if I was in a pickle then other people might be in a pickle. So what I decided to do was actually start doing Facebook lives and sharing my financial journey as well as any knowledge I’ve gained in the past since I was 15 years old and started reading finance books to the community of whoever wanted to listen and hopefully just help a couple people on their journey while the pandemic was happening and they might be losing a job or whatever might happen and just give them some tools for their finances.

Amberly:
As I mentioned, I had been reading finance books since I was 15 years old, and so I had a ton of knowledge, but I hadn’t applied it too much in my life up until about 2017 when I got my first real job and finally was just shoving money into index funds, saving so I could buy my first house, which is the property I was talking about, and essentially got myself into a really good position after the pandemic, after buying out my partner and honestly starting a community of people where we could talk about all of these financial issues that we might face in our life and supporting each other through it, which is what came out of those weekly conversations on Facebook that I was having.

Tony:
Amber, first I just want to say I’m super excited to have you as a true personal finance expert because I call actually our resident personal finance queen, but she definitely let me down in our last episode where I was asking her some questions and she was like, I actually do not know the answer to that. So I’m glad we’ve got a true professional on the podcast today.

Ashley:
I feel like this is the first time ever Tony has ever dissed me on an episode. This is like a monumental moment. Usually it’s me roasting him at every occasion, but this is a monumental moment on the Rookie podcast today

Tony:
Only took us 570 episodes to get here Ashley. So maybe episode 1200, I’ll do it again. But Amber Lee, I love that there’s this arc of your story where you get the big girl job. Like you said, you’re able to start saving up, you get to this pinnacle of we’ve got the property, we’ve got things going in the right direction for you, and this gut punch of COVID of things not going the way that you want. So I obviously want to get into some tactical things that you learned, but just what did you do to get yourself out of that tricky situation?

Amberly:
So before I say that, I just want to say Tony, that a true expert knows their limitations and boundaries and steps out of a conversation when they’re not sure what’s going on and then gets the knowledge and comes back into it. So I mean, hey, so I have an opportunity to bring that knowledge

Ashley:
To you someday, Tony, there we are.

Tony:
You get a pass here or maybe you can redeem yourself for one day in the future.

Ashley:
The fact that you don’t even remember what the thing was. I can just make something up I don’t remember either, and be like, oh Tony, just so you can do this with your IRA.

Tony:
Honestly. Yeah. Alright, cool. I believe you.

Amberly:
I love it. I think the first thing about all of anyone’s financial journey is you need to be flexible when something that you’re planning for to happen, which is I purchased a house, I had an STR, I was planning on living for free with my partner and it all blows up and now I’m out of $80,000 worth of cash. There is no STR, what do I do next? Instead of panicking, I think we should really go to our resources. And so I put it out to my community saying, Hey, this is what happened Right away went on Zillow and Facebook marketplace and put my basement up for long-term and midterm rentals in case that’s needed. I also went to Furnish Finder and at that time, travel nursing was quite big. So I ended up getting a friend who reached out to me saying that he actually had to go from Crested Boot to Denver with his wife for about seven weeks, or ended up being about three months actually, and can he rent my basement? And it was literally like, can I rent your basement in a week from now? And so the ability to be flexible, so I didn’t start whining about the fact that STR were gone. I didn’t sit there and twiddle my thumbs. I literally took action and started putting it out into the world of, Hey, this is what I’m looking for. I’m happy to negotiate price on this because this is not part of my plan and I just need to get through it and I can optimize or do better after this.

Tony:
I just want to point out one thing from your story that I think is really important for rookies to understand, and this is more of just a mindset around life that I think is really important. We can not always control what happens to us that is just a fact of life. The one thing we can always control is how we respond to those things that happened. And we have the choice of either responding with a victim mentality and saying, woe is me. I can’t believe this happened. This isn’t fair. Or we can respond with a bias for action saying, well, given the current truth of this circumstance, what are my options? What can I do? What can I still control to improve this situation? And it sounds like that’s what you did amberly. So I always want to pause when I hear people say things that I don’t even think they realize how profound they are, but that’s such an important lesson for our rookies to understand. So you pivot strategies, you’re able to start generating some additional revenue and does it start to kind of get you back on track what you were hoping that property would do?

Amberly:
A hundred percent. This property has performed amazingly and if I had tried to sell it or taken a different route, I wouldn’t be where I am today in my financial journey. So I was able to host my friend for a while, then I had nurse rentals for a bit, and then I actually moved back into the STR space once everything was good done with COVID to the extent that people were starting to travel again. It’s a separate unit, so it worked out really well and I think was desirable to the community at that point. I ended up getting a roommate as well, so I had a friend who was looking for a place to live, so I had a second bedroom and I decided to fill that bedroom so that I could also get income from my actual, the top space that I was living in.

Amberly:
So both places generating money, I ended up doing really well just in those difficult times. But then STR took off in 20 21, 20 22. I think we all know that it did really well, the short-term rentals market, and I was able to capitalize on that. I ended up moving out of the property and using a lot of that cash that I had saved up from being able to do that to buy my second property as well as a HELOC on the house. So honestly, I look at that time as this big tumultuous time, but it was just a stepping stone in my journey and moved on and it’s not even a blink of an eye at this point. It’s like, okay, that just happened and let’s keep going.

Ashley:
Well, we have to take a short break, but when we come back, I want to get into your advice for a rookie investor that’s starting their personal finance journey or

Speaker 4:
Just getting started in real estate. We’ll be right back. Okay. Welcome

Ashley:
Back from our short break. We are here with Amber Lee. So Amber Lee, if somebody else is on their journey, maybe they want to get a duplex or they have a couple investments already, but don’t feel financially secure, what are a couple things that someone could do today to take steps or make progress towards that kind of financial security?

Amberly:
I think getting honest with yourself of where you actually are in your financial journey is super important. It’s really easy to dream, I’m going to buy a house, I’m going to do this. But the fact is that you may not be in that position to do it yet. So if you can get realistic, where am I with my debt? Do I have high interest debt? If that’s the case, you need to start paying that off. That can go against you in debt to income ratios. So making sure that any high income debt is starting to be paid down. You’re not making any large purchases at this time. So we don’t want to go buy a car or make any impulse purchases and buy, I don’t know, a gaming computer. It’s only probably like three to $4,000. But still what you’re trying to do now is you’re trying to start almost making your life a little bit smaller so that you can save a bunch of money.

Amberly:
So start looking at your expenses. I like to go three months back and make a list of literally everything I’ve done, Venmo, payments, PayPal, look through every single credit card statement and bank statement and make a list of what it is that’s going out and then cut it. This is for people who are like, I want to buy a house in the next six months and I need to make this happen, or I am really motivated. So go through your expenses and see what you can cut just so you can go smaller so you can live bigger later after you’ve gone through your expenses. Start seeing what you’re bringing in and see if you can spend more time bringing in more money that might be consulting, taking the job that you have now and just doing it more, taking on more hours at work. Of course, check your contracts.

Amberly:
Some people you’re not allowed to compete with your own workplace, but making sure that you are actually taking on side hustles jobs and filling your time to make money. And that’s exactly what I did. I had three jobs. I still have three jobs, but I had three jobs throughout it all where I was constantly just picking up anything that someone tossed at me and then putting all that money into a high yield savings account. Some people might think about putting this into the market for their money to buy a property for the down payment, but as we know, the market could go down the day that you need it. Look at this past April. Imagine you needed it on that day. It dipped almost 10%. You could be in serious trouble then. So you want to make sure it’s in someplace safe and accessible, which is a high yield savings account.

Amberly:
A few other things that I find really, really important when it comes to finances is go and talk to a lender. Go and see what you can actually afford. A lot of people disqualify themselves or again, dream a little bit too big in regards to buying a property. And if you go and talk to someone, just walk into your Chase bank. It doesn’t have to be Chase who you end up using because you’ll want to shop around, but go in and just have a conversation, show them what you have and they’ll tell you what is the range that you can afford. And then lastly, put that range into a spreadsheet. There are so many places online that you can find actual spreadsheets of what is it I have for a down payment? What’s the average home price in my area? And then you can add in maintenance costs and you can see what does that end up, what’s your payment going to be? Plus all the extra little things that you never think about when you’re buying a home and an investment property or a primary residence that you’re going to also rent out or rent out in the future. Go through that spreadsheet and see what those numbers are and can you actually afford it. So those are just a couple of things that I think about when I’m thinking of someone new starting that they just need to pay attention to.

Ashley:
So a great example of a tool for that is biggerpockets.com/calculators where you can use the calculators to compute that. But what about the budgeting side and maybe a savings goal tracker? Do you have any other recommended tools, apps, spreadsheets, checklists that someone should be using when they are trying to get their finances in order?

Amberly:
I am so old school, but there are some really great things to use. I know YA is a fantastic, it’s not a budgeting tool, it’s a where is your money going tool. So you kind of give your money almost like future and buckets to go into, but I truly, whenever I coach clients, it literally is a spreadsheet. I do it the most rudimentary way for a reason because I want them to feel it. I want them to see it and really connect with what’s going on because it’s so easy to go to your bank and say, Hey, can I just get a spending summary? Which they do, but you’re not really understanding what that means. So when it comes to actual savings, a great high-yield savings account like Ally can have buckets and you can put your money into those buckets and have a home bucket versus just your emergency fund bucket. And that can be really helpful to see your goal and really have, I want $60,000 in this specific bucket and start putting money towards it. That’s really great. When it comes to other apps, I’m sure there are some out there. I don’t use them. I’m so technology illiterate, even though I am a tech pm, I don’t normally use apps. I find it’s just too much for me to think about. But other people may have suggestions, so definitely stick ’em in the comments, right?

Tony:
One tool that I really like for budgeting is Cube Money. They used to be called Proactive. That’s when I first found out about them and I was using them when I was a W2 employee. And the reason why I like it’s because it takes Dave Ramsey’s idea of the cash envelopes and it digitizes it. I tried the whole Dave Ramsey cash envelope thing back in whatever, 2015 or something, and even then it was super inconvenient, even more so now in 2025. So the reason that Cube is so cool is because it forces you to divvy up all of your money between the different spending categories that you have, your groceries, your fun money, your clothing, gifts, travel, whatever it may be. And then before you swipe your card, you have to choose which spending category that money is going to come from. So every time you swipe your card, there’s this conscious decision around where is this money coming from? And I think that small behavioral change is one thing that folks who want to curb their spending would be beneficial for. And I guess on that same note then Amber Lee, what are maybe the financial red flags that keep people broke? What have you seen

Amberly:
Not paying attention? So like you just said, the reason you enjoy Q Money is intentionality. So you can do that with an app or without an app, but the idea that you are not actually paying attention to what you’re doing will keep you broke. I do this really fun exercise before I move forward with any coaching client, and the number one thing I do is I say this, tell me how much you’re think you spend a month on average. So someone will say, I spend $1,000, and I’ll be like, are you sure about that? Great. And then I’ll say, okay, I guarantee when you do your three month exercise is going to be 1500 to 2000 because almost every single person, including us, spend about 50% to a hundred percent more than what we think we spend in a month because we’re not taking into account all the things.

Amberly:
That’s one thing. Also, not running numbers before you make a purchase. If you’re going to buy a car, can you afford the car and all the maintenance that comes with it. Again, taking that spreadsheet or being realistic with your numbers for a house, the same thing that you’re going to stay broke. If you’re like, I can afford a $700 a month payment for a car and a house and this and that and mentality, I can do it all. I love that there’s the idea that we can have everything but not anything or whatever. You can’t have everything. So you really need to decide in your life at this point in time what is important to you and what are you going to do going forward. A few other red flags is not like buying a Starbucks every single day isn’t going to screw you on finances. Idea that you can’t say no is really going to be a problem because again, you’re not taking the time to set your goals and then move towards them. So that’s something that I think of is not being intentional, not being able to say no and then not using resources like spreadsheets and stuff to actually see what the true cost of whatever you’re doing is.

Ashley:
I usually pay off my credit card every couple days. I pay it off because I feel like if I get to the end of the month, it is such a huge shock to me as to where did all this money go? And so it really does help me keep on track of like, okay, I check it every couple days, make sure I’m on track with my spending. That is one thing that I feel happy about is that I’ve never not paid a credit card off each month. And so I think figuring out ways to be diligent on your spending, what is hurting you now? Is it not making timely payments on your auto loan? Is it racking up credit card debt? What are the things that you can do to be proactive? So for the credit card, pay it off every day or your car loan payments are getting late. Do you need to set aside money every single paycheck instead, every single week you’re dumping money into one account and that’s just for your car payment for the following month. So I think that’s great advice as to first of all, what are the Fred flags? But then what can you do to actually correct those things and be proactive in your investing journey in your personal finance journey?

Amberly:
I agree with that completely. And I don’t know if I would agree with checking every single day or paying off your credit card every day. That sounds like way too much work. And if someone’s already nervous about doing something, it’s really difficult to keep up habits, so you want to make sure you’re kind of setting it and forgetting it. But here’s what I say in the beginning is I hate budgeting. I absolutely detest budgeting. I have tried it so many times in my life. I tried Q Money, hated it. It was too much. And what I love is kind of the budgett, and this I think works for some people, which is I want to pay myself first. So everything that I need, if I have money towards a house that I want to buy, I throw $400 every single week into that fund and it goes there right away.

Amberly:
It is automatic. I don’t even think about it. It goes right into my ally account, into that bucket, and we’re done. If I’m going to invest in the market, it goes every single week. It goes, my investments just go in every single week, my 401k, whatever it is. So I think that’s super important to pay yourself first. And then the cool thing from that is anything that’s left over if you’ve budgeted correctly in the sense that you’ve gone through all of your numbers, but if you’ve done that correctly, then anything in your bank account you can spend because you’re going for your goals and looking towards your future and planning for it. But it means that today you’re also taking care of because you can do what you want with the money that’s in your account. And I think that’s a much more freeing way of looking at things than not.

Ashley:
Yeah, I’ve used Monarch money. I actually still use that, but I tried the budgeting thing too, and even when I was paying off my debt years ago, I tried to do it and I also hated budgeting to no end, and I had to find other ways to help me besides budgeting because I have no idea how much I’m going to spend on groceries or if this expense is going to come up. And it was too frustrating trying to figure all that out. So I definitely am anti budgetting, so I’d like that advice there. But you mentioned paying yourself first, and I perked right up because I know Tony, I did this with his businesses, and I don’t know if you still did do this, but you read Profit First and you implemented a lot of that into your business.

Tony:
We still run Profit First in all of our businesses today, and we’ve actually interviewed the author Mike mcot in the podcast, I believe twice now. So if you go back in the archives, you guys can find it. But the basic premise is that most entrepreneurs pay themselves less and they view profit as what’s left over after they’ve done everything else. And the idea of Profit First is that you allocate money very much in the same way that Amber Lee said, but you allocate money every month specifically for profit. And it’s this counterintuitive idea to say, well, what do you mean I get to take my profit before everything else? And the answer is yes. And the idea is that you have a few core bank accounts, you have your profit account, you have your tax account, you have your operating expense account, you have an owner’s pay account, you have a team member’s pay account loosely.

Tony:
Those are the accounts that you need. And then the idea is that every month or multiple times a month, depending on your business, you look at how much money is in the bank and then you distribute that money across your various bank accounts. And when you do it that way, it forces you to, maybe not budget is the right word, but it forces you to reconcile with how much money do I have to spend on these specific things? And it forces you to make sure that your spending is in line with how much money is left in that account. And I think the thing that I struggle with when I first started, it’s like, well, how much should I allocate for profit? And I asked this to Michael, we interviewed him and he said, always start with something super small. He was like, the smallest number you can start with is 1%. So if you open up your bank account on whatever day and there’s $100 in that account, you’re going to take $1 put into your profit account, allocate the other 99%. And the thought there is that if your business can’t operate on 99% of its revenue and you need all 100%, there’s probably some other issues you need to go tackle. So that’s the idea. And yes, we still rent it across all the businesses that we have.

Amberly:
I absolutely love that because especially with entrepreneurs, and I’m an, I don’t know if we would call real estate investors, entrepreneurs, do we do that? Is that a thing?

Tony:
1000%? Yeah.

Amberly:
I mean, we have our own business with entrepreneurs. That is something that we have a hard time with, especially I find new real estate investors love to pretend that they’re going to make a lot more money than they will. And so they don’t put it into all those buckets of CapEx and vacancies and things, and they won’t do that, and therefore they’ll try and make that profit line a little bit bigger. But if you’re honest with all those numbers and then you can see the profit line, you can be like, is this even an endeavor worth going towards? Because like you’re saying, Tony, if it’s 99% output and you only take 1% back and the number of 1% is $1, that’s not worth the venture, that’s not worth the time and energy that you’ve put into it. And so I think that’s a really great way of looking at is what is the profit I’m going to be making off of this and then going from there. That’s a great idea. I have a non-conventional advice for people, but you have to be very diligent if you do this. Can I say it?

Ashley:
Yes, please.

Amberly:
Okay. So whenever I’m buying a new property, the first thing that happens is I pare down everything that I’m putting out. So I said, go through all of your expenses, stop all your subscriptions. Maybe like Netflix, I love some sort of show at night, but stop everything you can. But also if you are disciplined, something I do recommend is if you are maxing out 401k, which might be something that a lot of people do, which is what I did, I actually take it down and do it just to the employer match for a little bit for a month or two months, or if you’re serious about buying a property and you want to save for a couple months, you can just take that down to the employer match because you want the free money that your work is going to give you. You want to continue saving for your future, but you could take six months where you just don’t max out your future retirements because you’re going to essentially buy a property and you’re going to get more money.

Amberly:
And so then hopefully you allocate that money towards your future retirement in the future. The only problem with that is that you have a bucket for your 401k, so you can only put in 21 or $22,000 in a year, and then once that year’s up, you can’t use that bucket anymore. But it’s okay. And I want to give people permission that you don’t have to optimize everything when you’re taking on a big purchase. And so you might bring it down for 2, 3, 4, 5 months, try and take that extra $16,000 into a savings account. That would be for the whole year, but whatever, and then go back and start doing it and filling it up at the end of the year or just start again the next year.

Tony:
Amber Lou, you said something that I think is really interesting, but you said you don’t have to optimize everything all the time. And I think that’s a really, really powerful lesson because it doesn’t just apply to saving for that next deal, but it applies to a lot of different things. Like even for example, if we stay on the track of personal finance and getting yourself financially ready, sometimes maybe your optimization should be on the defense, and maybe it is cutting the 15 bucks a month you’re spending on Netflix and the $5 you’re spending on your coffee. But maybe the better optimization is your income and maybe you need to go apply for a job at a different company where instead of getting a two to 3% raise every year, you’re going to get a 10% raise or a 15% raise. So I think understanding where the biggest lever is and then focusing on optimizing that lever first is probably how you can make the most amount of progress in the shortest amount of time.

Ashley:
We have to take our final ad break, but we will be right back after this while we are away. You can go to youtube.com/at

Speaker 4:
Realestate rookie. Okay. Welcome back from our short

Ashley:
Break. So to kind of wrap us up here, Amber Lee, most people are listening because they want to invest in real estate, but are there any other types of investments that you are investing in or you’d like to recommend that someone that’s looking to invest or build wealth should look into?

Amberly:
I’m not a financial advisor and I’m not your financial advisor, but the things that I do, the stock market is a fantastic place to actually have passive income, and I absolutely love investing in a s and p 500 index and something like V-T-S-A-X-V-T-I and also international funds is something that people aren’t talking about much these days. But if you looked at the beginning of the year, especially up until April, the international indexes were outperforming our US Company Index. I am not sure how to say that the best way, but essentially the s and p 500. And so I think once you have the money you need to invest in real estate. I didn’t have much in investments. I ended up taking all the additional income that I was making and funneling it just, I mean, throwing thousands of dollars into the market. And it has done really well for me because now I have a diversified portfolio.

Amberly:
I’m not only just invested in real estate in Colorado. I have real estate in a couple of different places. So I now diversified not only locally but country. I have investments in Canada, but then I also invested in the stock market. So then I have an entirely different asset class that’s working for me behind the scenes while I’m sleeping. And I don’t need to call plumbers or talk to property managers or do any of that, which is really nice. And so that to me, but between the two of those has been super helpful to grow my wealth and get me to the point that I am today where I can buy as many Starbucks as I want.

Tony:
Ash, have you ever invested internationally in stocks?

Ashley:
Yeah, in my Vanguard account I have the international and tax funds.

Tony:
I’ve never even thought about doing that. Most of the stocks that I invested in were company RSUs, and that’s just where even today most of my stocks are still in that same company, but I’ve never thought about looking internationally, so you just gave me a great idea for diversifying my portfolio.

Ashley:
What you do need to look at are the fees and the expenses that you are being charged to invest in some of those funds. Amber Lee, we’re going to have to have you come back on and we’re going to have to go through Tony’s stock investments and go through his portfolio and help him rearrange it.

Amberly:
I love doing that. Yeah, a portfolio review as we would call it.

Ashley:
I was just going to look to see if I could pull up what percentage I have into,

Amberly:
And I’m lucky enough to be both Canadian and American, US in the us. So I have physical property, so home in Canada that I pay for. It’s like my father lives there, so my sister and I pay for it so that he has free living. And then we have a condo in Vancouver. So again, diversifying whatever that looks like for anyone is really important. And really for me, when I was getting started with real estate investing, I know that there are lots of people who are like, Hey, go invest in Ohio. You can get a house for a hundred thousand dollars. Colorado is quite expensive. It’s like 500 to get a house. But I personally wanted to invest locally at first just to lower my risk because I can show up at the property, I can meet my tenants. I know the laws really well because I have been participating in them. I know the community, I know what the jobs are, and it was really helpful for me to be a local investor at first for my first property. I probably now could take on something somewhere else, but that was something that I wanted to do to reduce risk. And it’s just something I just thought of that maybe people may or not find helpful.

Ashley:
Isn’t that funny because that’s exactly where I started was in my local market. But isn’t it funny that you’re also invested into the stock market and you can’t physically touch it, you don’t have any control, but that mindset is so different as to I feel like this is a safer investment because I can touch, I can feel I can walk the property, I can meet the tenants, I can physically see it and be there. And the companies that we invest in the stock market, I’m not showing up on the door of all of the companies that are in the s and p 500. So I think that’s such a funny mindset that a lot of us have, and still to this day, it is very true for me still, I have to like, oh, I can’t be there if something goes wrong. When am I ever even at any of my properties right now

Amberly:
That are close to me? A hundred percent. That’s so true. And I didn’t even think about that of like, oh, I have no control over what Apple does. I can buy their products, but I don’t know. I can’t control anything. And that is so funny. I’ve just read enough books and listened to enough people who tell me it’s going to all be all right, so I’m just going to keep fingers crossed, legs crossed, and hope that that’s going to all be there for me whenever I need it and want to take from it.

Ashley:
I guess kind of on that note, let’s wrap up with our last question today are what are some book recommendations that someone who maybe wants to learn more about personal finance or even stock investing? What are some of those books you would recommend

Amberly:
If you’re younger? So this would be like early twenties. One of the most helpful books I have found is The Wealthy Barber. I haven’t heard of that one. It’s Canadian. If you run in some personal finance circles like I do, you’ll hear of it from time to time. The Wealthy Barber is the first book I read when I was 15 years old, and it explains the true amazingness of compound interest. And essentially if you were to put $20 a month away from the time you’re 18 to the time you’re 65, you will have a million dollars. And that really opened up my eyes to the fact that if I start now and early and be diligent about my savings, which I was on and off for years, I can reach a million dollars at 65 and be okay. I can buy my freedom then. So that was the very first book I read when I was really young.

Amberly:
That was super helpful. Some fun books to read just for anyone is The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. That one truly, when you’re talking about essentially having faith that the stock market is going to perform the way that we think it will, it really gives a great explanation in regards to how the stock market works. What is it when you’re buying a stock, what happens when it goes up and what happens when it goes down? I find that one, if you’re ever nervous, you just don’t understand it. It is a great place to anchor yourself in. And then some really great books that are, I find very, they’ll give you step-by-step guides on what to do is of course, Ramit safety. I’ll teach you to Be Rich if you are just, it just has everything that you can think of and how to do it as well as the Choose five blueprint. I find that one’s awesome with my coaching clients. I get them to choose a couple different books and it’s a simple Path to Wealth. The Ruit safety I Lt You Be Rich, the Choose five blueprint. And yeah, those are my book recommendations.

Ashley:
I love the Simple Path to Wealth too that if I was asked this question, that would be the one that I’ll respond to. Tony, do you have any book recommendations?

Tony:
Yeah, I’m thinking personal finance. I just read The Psychology of Money for the first time late last year, and that was a really, really just a mindset shifting book for me. And I shared this, I can’t remember if it was on this podcast, one of the other BP podcasts, but there was one line in there that really, really stuck with me. So there was this anecdote in the story where this professor at this dinner charity thing with all these successful entrepreneurs, and someone asked a professor like, oh, look at this super successful billionaire guy over here. Don’t you wish that you were him? And the professor says, well, I have something that he’ll never have. And the other person replies, well, what is that? And the professor says, I have enough. And hearing him say that was just so incredibly profound for me because I’ve always been so focused on what’s next and growing and more and more and more that it really forced me to pause. This is at the time that I’m welcoming my third child into the world. And it’s like, okay, well what is enough and what does that look like? Anyway, that was a great book that I read recently was The Psychology of Money. What about you, Ash? You got to give your recommendations now.

Ashley:
Yeah, the Simple Path to Wealth was honestly, when I first asked Amberley the question that was going to be it, but also the Index card, I really liked that book. And then The Millionaire Next Door, I think that’s what it’s called, that one too, because that’s how I imagine myself. I’m not going to work hard enough to become a billionaire, but I will have enough that I will secretly be a millionaire and live comfortably with no worries, but not enough to buy a Lamborghini.

Tony:
Ashley, you’re a podcast host, one of the biggest real estate podcasts on the planet. I don’t think your wealth is going to be a secret to anyone,

Ashley:
To my neighbors that don’t listen to the podcast. Maybe to them, I’m just some unemployed person that goes outside

Amberly:
With their goat for walks. I don’t even leave my house, so they don’t even know.

Ashley:
Well, Amber Lee, thank you so much for joining us today on Real Estate Rookie. Where can people find out more information and reach out to you?

Amberly:
My website is Amber Lee grant.com. I do a Tuesday conversation where we just speak about different financial topics. I mean, we run the gamut of literally 4 0 1 Ks, wills and trusts. We talk about meditation and how to define what enough is because Tony, that is something that, that’s my journey now is what is enough and how do I really define that so that I can feel totally comfortable and change my mindset from something of scarcity to more abundance. And so we talk about those types of topics and it’s called Tuesday Fin Talks, so you can find that on my website. I also just host people for cruises. So if you do want to join a cruise, feel free to go to amberley grant.com/cruise. We have one in January going to the Caribbean, and then in May going to Alaska May, 2026. So that’s where you can find me. And of course, Instagram is where I’m most active, and that’s just at Amberley Grant.

Ashley:
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us some advice on personal finance. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.