Protecting personal finances amid economic uncertainty
His & Her Money’s Talaat and Tai McNeely, join Yahoo Finance to discuss how they got their start as personal finance influencers and sharing personal finance advice online.
Video transcript
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: And we've got a growing number of people, especially young people, getting their financial advice on social media from people like my next guests, Talaat and Tai McNeely, of His and Her Money. They've amassed over 200,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel. And they are joining me now.
It is great to have you both here. You may have guessed-- they are a husband and wife team. And first off, just want to say you are not professional financial advisors. So tell me what made you want to get into giving personal advice to personal finance advice to folks?
TAI MCNEELY: That's correct, Alexis. Well, it actually was birthed from our own personal story. We've been married for 15 years, but our first year of marriage, it came with some issues, some ups and downs, trying to figure out all things money. One of us had great credit, the other did not. One of us had debt, the other did not. And so trying to figure out how to merge our lives together was complicated.
And once we figured that out, we noticed that there were other people that we're asking for our advice. They were coming into our home, sitting on our couches. And a few years later, we thought, hmm, what if we took this to the world? What if we literally created a platform online, where, every day, we're your everyday couple online and just share our personal stories. And everything wasn't always good. We also shared our failures. What we were struggling with, but we also brought them along the journey as well, too.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Talk to me about that because I know that a lot of folks can relate to what's happening there with the two of you. I understand, though. I mean, this has been a success story. You were debt-free, I believe, in your first year of marriage, even though you went into the marriage with some debts and a $330,000 mortgage. So how did you get yourselves out of that?
TALAAT MCNEELY: Yeah, my wife is very kind. What she didn't tell you was who was who, and I was the one that brought in all the debt. I was the one who had the bad credit. And we had to have a lot of tough conversations. There had to be a lot of give and take. There had to be a lot of humility in the process because at the end of the day, although we were entering into this relationship with two different financial portfolios, we did have a common goal of wanting to have an awesome marriage and awesome future together.
And so we begin to craft the plan. We begin to dream and have a vision of although this is where we're at right now financially, here is where we would like to be. And we used that to then backwards plan to figure out how do we get from this point to that point. And so we tried different things about money management. We tried different things about investments. We tried different things even about entrepreneurship.
Some things worked beautifully. Some things were abject failures. But we learned from both. And we were able to, like you said, become completely debt free. All of the debt gone, even went on to pay off our mortgage. And we've been able to start a very successful business together, all because of our hearts and our desires to create something better for ourselves, which grew into us having a desire to help other families and households do the same.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: And you're doing that, we know, on your YouTube channel. So Tai, talk to me about on days like this when we're seeing a deep sell-off in the market. We've got rising inflation, concerns about the economic outlook. What are you hearing from your subscribers about what's got them down right now? And how are they getting through it?
TAI MCNEELY: Sure. So yes, we do hear the fears and the concerns, but we pretty much tell people to keep their plans in order, intact. This is one of the reasons why we have every individual, every couple, no matter if you're married or not, create a life plan for yourself. What are your financial goals? So those goals, they don't change. Even though the market and the outside world is changing, you keep the course of your own individual plan.
And so, yeah, we're telling people if you're investing-- we still-- personally, we're still investing during a time like this. This is a great time for us to be able to get things on sale. And so our financial goals don't change, so therefore our plan stays the same.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, we're going to have to leave it there, but Talaat and Tai McNeely of His and Her Money, thanks so much for making some time for us today.
