A short interview between Ramit Sethi and Bettney Townsend describing how Bettney applied lessons from the book 'I Will Teach You to Be Rich' after reading it in one afternoon. She immediately opened a City rewards credit card (earning 2–3% back on groceries), a Charles Schwab investor checking account (about 0.75% interest), discovered and transferred a rollover IRA containing approximately $1,300 from Fidelity to Schwab, and used her phone/Google plus Google Calendar reminders to complete multi-step tasks.
Questions this video answers
About one afternoon (she read the first two-thirds in one afternoon).
2–3% back on groceries.
About 0.75% interest.
Approximately $1,300.
Chapters
Hey, guys. Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach youh Be Rich here I am here with Bettney Townsend, who's a friend of mine and she recently started reading my book, I Will Teach youh to Be Rich. And now, Betany, you're pretty much at the top of your game. So you have done a lot of stuff for my book and really dominated with your finances in just a little while. So I want to share what you did with my readers. Is that cool?
Absolutely.
Alright, so you read my book for how long?
I kind of sat down with at least the first 2/3 of it during one afternoon.
Okay, so you did it in one afternoon and what have you done since then?
Well, the first thing that I did was I opened another credit card because I had no idea how important that was to your credit score. I opened up a city rewards card where I'm getting 2 or 3% back when I buy groceries, which is going to be awesome. So I'm going to be buying a lot of those. I opened up a Charles Schwab investor checking account because I tend to keep a lot of money in my checking account rather than putting it into savings. And you get 0.75% interest on that, which sounded pretty good to me. And I discovered that I actually had a rollover IRA that one of my former employees set up and have now transferred that to Charles Schwab so I can start investing in.
You didn't even know about that?
Well, I kept getting these letters from Fidelity.
And you threw them straight away?
I threw them straight away. And after reading your book, I was like, well, maybe it's a good credit card offer. Maybe I should look at it. And actually turns out that I had about $1,300 in there.
Wow, so you found 1300 bucks.
All right.
And are you writing me a check, by the way, for this? So what's funny is you did this after reading it for one afternoon. And to be quite frank, that's more than most people do. So how did you do it?
Well, almost everything I accomplished, I accomplished at that time. I had my cell phone there, I was ready to go. I actually even was able to sort of anticipate where the book was going. I actually researched credit cards and come up with my own list before I got to your list. And they were pretty similar. So once I figured out the stuff needed to happen, I just said, okay, I'm here now. I'm not doing anything this afternoon. Let's see how far I can get right here, right now. And so, yeah, having My cell phone right there was really handy. Knowing how to use Google was pretty cool to, you know, kind of confirm everything that I was doing.
You mentioned something about calendar reminders as well to me, right?
Oh, right. Well, that's something I've actually learned after fact because I got so much done in that afternoon. And then I did nothing for like two or three weeks, including putting work into transferring that IRA account that has a lot of money into it. And so what occurred to me after not doing anything is that if there were kind of two or three steps to something, if you had to sign up and then you had to wait for confirmation, and then you had to mail something and fax something in, the only way I was going to do it is if it. If I remembered. So what I did is I went into my Google Calendar, which is how I organize my life, and, you know, at those intervals, about a week later, I said, okay, check on status of, you know, activation of account. And then a week after that, I said, okay, still check on status. If you haven't confirmed it or, you know, week three, fax that paperwork in. And for me, that was really helpful because I'm really good at focusing on whatever is most important in my life at that period of time. And I decided that afternoon finance was the most important thing. But as soon as I got busy, it kind of. I let it slide, but it is important to me. And so by putting it on my calendar and actually blocking out at least small chunks of time for it, I was able to get a lot of time.
I love that. That's my favorite part, is that it didn't even occur to you to wait or delay or say, I'll do this another day. You're just like, oh, yeah, duh, I'm going to do it right now.
