In my Money Managers interview series, I interview notable members of the personal finance community. Generally, my interviewees are bloggers or professionals working in finance. In this article I interviewed Kyle, creator of the @GetRichWithMe91 Twitter account and cofounder of the MoneyWorksGuys YouTube channel. I personally enjoy his actionable tips and sense of humor. Without further ado, let’s get into the interview!
For my readers who may not be familiar with you, would you please introduce yourself? Who are you? What do you do?
My name is Kyle, @GetRichWithMe91 on Twitter and one of the MoneyWorksGuys on Youtube.
I am a 29-year-old father to a lovely 10-month-old daughter and a husband that enjoys staying active mentally and physically between working out at the gym or playing card games like poker and even some trading card games.
By education, I am a chemical engineer that now works in sales for a global chemical specialty ingredient manufacturer.
What is your platform about, and in your opinion, what sets it apart from the others in your niche?
My platform is all about having your money work for you while not having to think about your money. I am happy to say that me talking about automating as much as possible in my life has gotten many other people on board with automated investment contributions and even some are seeing the light on automatic deliveries for household goods such as toilet paper or pet supplies.
When and why did you start getting involved in Twitter and online communities? Looking back, would you have gone about starting it differently?
I started my financial Twitter account in August of 2020, sort of bored during the pandemic and in a holding period with my wife’s due date quickly approaching. I really can’t say I would have done anything different with my account, at first I was just trying to gain any semblance of a following which I have since backed off of, and just tweet about the things important to me, a lot of which still resonate with everyone following along.
Are there bloggers, authors, friends, or anyone else who has inspired you?
Depending on what lens I want to look through My financial journey started with a podcast, “Listen Money Matters” and evolved into YouTube videos from Graham Stephan and “The Money Guy Show” none of which are particularly big on Twitter. I ran across some tweets from @youactualized and @TheWealthDad that really convinced me to just dive in out of a selfish nature for me to learn more to help my finances even though I felt I was in a decent spot already.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced so far, through helping people learn about finance as well as in your own personal finance journey?
My biggest struggle for helping others is connecting with people that actually need and want help, I think as a collective whole this Money Twitter community we have does a great job at putting out very helpful information, but it can become a bit of an echo chamber for arguments around emotional tolerance for finances.
For my personal struggle in finances, I still have not determined an end game for my family’s finances. My wife and I were both raised to be frugal and cautious with our money, In the first year of growing our family and hoping to have one more child our expenses are going to change drastically over the next 10 years, and it is hard to chart out the course with so many variables.
Time for a bit of a loaded question – what is your favorite type of investment and why (index funds, stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.)?
INDEX FUNDS! I don’t expect everyone to be as excited as I am about index funds because let’s be honest, they are boring. The reason Index funds excite me is because I don’t have to worry about my financial future, I don’t have to keep up with the news for all the individual companies that one might own in a balanced portfolio. Studies also show that professional actively managed funds only outperform their benchmark ~25% of the time over a 5 year period. I’d rather take the sure thing!
At the end of the day, what is the main thing you hope your viewers learn or understand?
For my viewers, no matter how you decide to invest my main message is to start ASAP. If you can earn an extra couple percent with a unique strategy that’s great, but that extra couple percent won’t mean much if you start at 50 as compared to 25.
Compound interest really should be the 8th wonder of the world, everyone in our corner of Twitter understands it but there is still a long way to go to get the rest of the world to understand it as well.
What’s the best piece of advice you received growing up? How did it shape you into the person you are today?
The best thing my parents ever instilled into me was to not spend money on dumb shit. $5-$10 may not be a lot of money one time but when you tell yourself it’s ok to do it once you inevitably end up doing it often and $5-$10 turns into hundreds or thousands of dollars over time.
Everyone views success differently, what personal metric do you use to define your own success?
I am in a fortunate position where money does not stress me in my life the studies that say any salary over some amount of money is generally true, my life has not changed much since my original salary out of college even though it has doubled over this 7-year working span.
For myself my metric of success would be the happiness of myself and my family, I am still working on some big things for myself, getting back in shape, and trying to do more things that align with my values, I don’t think anyone will be perfect but we can all work to get a little better each day and I am very happy to say that I am doing that for myself and my family.
People tend to struggle with finding a good work-life balance, especially these days. How do you manage? In other words, what’s an average weekday like for you?
Work-life balance is a tricky one, being in sales and my compensation is directly tied to my performance I struggle to get work off my mind. That being said a typical day is start work at 8 and shut my work laptop off at 4:30, working from home I have a mix of time with my daughter before during and after work. 4 days a week after my daughter goes to sleep at 7 pm I eat dinner then get to the gym. The gym is my escape when I can shut everything off and just focus on improving.
What’s something you’re interested in – outside of personal finance?
I really enjoy strategy games and leveraging sportsbook promos for some value. I am a New York Sports fan, top of the list being the NY Football Giants with a distant second being the Yankees and further down the list Devils and Nets.
If you had to give advice to someone who has just joined the job market and started their personal finance journey, what would it be?
I hope they pursued a good education with a lot of job prospects, or they are willing to become an apprentice to a trade, the best advice I can give in a broad sense is to be coachable or trainable. In my experience I have always looked towards the people 2-3 positions above me and asked myself do I want to do that, If I don’t I look for a new job if I do I figure out what it will take me to get there. The good news is you can talk to them and figure out straight from them what their path was to get there and be open about your intentions to getting there as well. In general, you want to keep asking for new projects and making yourself visible in your organization for work that aligns with your ultimate target.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed learning about Kyle and his views on personal finance as much as I did! If you liked what he had to say and want to see more, be sure to check him out on Twitter @GetRichWithMe91 and on youtube at MoneyWorksGuys. As always, if you have any thoughts you’d like to contribute, add a comment!
