 to join us today. Hold on one moment. Let's get that going. Okay. So my name is Tom Kilkenny. I have about 28 years as a wealth manager. And just over the last year and a half, I've come to white financial ratings providing unbiased, you know, financial ratings for, for the most part, public library patrons like yourself. We are 42 years at Greyhouse Publishing, a little over 40 years at white financial ratings. So combine this a little bit 80 years worth of experience for financial ratings, and we are not affiliated with any company whatsoever. So any of the advice that you're going to get or the ratings, the buy, sell or hold recommendations, or any of the financial strength ratings that you're going to see are completely unbiased. Today, I wanted to go over, let me just share my screen here. Hold on one moment. Let's go ahead. And can everyone see my screen right now? I just want to make sure that you guys can all see that. Okay, we have a thumbs up. That means we are good to go there. So what I wanted to go over today for financial literacy basics is the first and foremost is how to make and stick to a budget. The second portion of our presentation today is going to be what type of investor are you? You know, most people don't know where to start in their investment future or, you know, what type of time horizon they're looking at. And most of the time, some of us get caught up in the rut where we're not saving enough to be able to put away in order to achieve not only short term, but even long term goals like retirement and things of that nature. So I'm going to show on how these two really fall in line with one another. As we take you through our presentation today is going to be about 50 minutes. And then we're going to share the last 10 minutes for a Q&A. So if we could just try to hold any of the questions towards the end of the presentation, it would be greatly appreciated. Okay, so I'm going to move forward here. And let me just go ahead. I'm sharing the screen here. So the financial literacy tool that we'll discuss today are all available. It's for free, as been just mentioned, as a library card holder at the San Francisco Public Library. These tools are designed to help you navigate some tough financial decisions so you can make informed decisions about your financial future. Like I spoke about earlier, two of the topics that we'll be covering today is how to make a budget. And there's certainly a nice monthly budget worksheet for you. And the next is what type of investor are you? The first thing we want to do is we want to plan for success. The only way to win in life is to have a game plan. And if we don't have any sort of planning, the chances of success are greatly minimized. So from the beginning, building a budget is the best way to get you closer towards your savings goal, not only for your short-term goals, but as your long-term goals as well. Once you have built a budget, you can find out your budget, if your budget will allow you to save for a rainy day fund. Most of the times, it's highly recommended to try to have at least six months worth of living expenses put away. I think that now more than ever, with the current pandemic that had taken place, people have really seen the importance of being able to put away a rainy day or some would call it an emergency fund. So after you have saved enough money in the rainy day fund or emergency fund, as some would call it, you may look towards some of your longer-term goals and your retirement savings. One of the things we really want to cover today is first and foremost, how do we make a budget? We're going to show you a budget worksheet. We're going to talk about needs versus wants versus goals. We're going to set goals short, mid, and long-term. Now, all of these resources are available to you on the Financial Literacy Suite with what you call a short-term financial literacy suite with Vice Financial Ratings through the San Francisco Public Library. And I'll certainly, towards the end of the presentation, I'll show you the wonderful resource because these are just two short topics in a whole gamut of topics that are available to you with the Vice Financial Ratings Financial Literacy Suite online. So how do we pretty much build a budget? How do we make a budget? Some people get paid weekly, bi-weekly, some other schedules, some people get paid monthly. But a good number to focus on is a monthly amount. It's really important that we derive exactly what it is that we're spending on a monthly basis. If the hours vary, I always say take a look at the last six to 12 months and just calculate out average monthly wages. That's always important. We also want to consider any other income. Tips, commissions, occasional freelance work, interest earned on investments, as well as funds you receive from other sources such as family members or what have you. There's a lot of people nowadays that are holding on to second sources of income, whether it be a secondary job, some even carry three jobs at a time. But it's also very important to calculate those into the equation as well. What are your expenses? We need to figure out where your money goes. Track all of your daily expenses for one month, even every cup of coffee, bus ticket, movie tickets. We really want to make sure that we're counting every dime that we're spending on a monthly basis. Write it down what you spend each day and what it's actually for. There's a spreadsheet that's available to you on page 17 of the financial literacy basics, how to make and stick to a budget. I know that Doreen is going to share that link with you tomorrow, but I'm also going to show you how, at the end of the presentation, show you how you could go straight in and take a look at it for yourself. You can use some of these budget worksheets that I think are very useful. Again, like I was saying earlier on, you want to account for every penny. It's very important. Here's a monthly budget. These are your incomes, your expenses. Fill in your monthly income and your monthly expenses. Rule of thumb is if your monthly expenses are less than your monthly income, plan to put some money into a savings to create that emergency fund. If your monthly expenses are more than your monthly income, then we need to start looking at ways that we need to cut back. Again, we have your wants, your needs, and then your goals. We always got to make sure that we're accounting for everything. Now, when we talk about needs versus wants versus goals, we have fixed needs. Fixed needs are things that we have to account for every single month. It's a necessity for us. It's usually the same from month to month. It includes maybe rent, mortgage, maybe a phone bill, car payments, student loan payments, credit card payments, or an electric bill. These are all expenses that we just can't avoid. These must have, these are needs. Then we have variable needs. Variable needs are probably some of the things that we might be able to scale back. They're also necessities, but again, they're not the same from month to month. They may vary, and they include gas, food, pet supplies, necessary clothing. Being in San Francisco, you probably don't have the same type of weather fluctuation that we have here in New York. It's very important for us here in New York to make sure that we're dressing appropriately for the weather. Wants are non-essentials. They might include meals at a restaurant, movies, gym memberships, electronics, gifts, and unnecessary clothing. I can tell you that when you're in a metropolitan area like San Francisco or New York City, you may think that wants are truly needs, but they're not. Again, it's very important for us to take a step back and take a look. If we're not saving any money, if our expenses are far exceeding our income, that's really where we need to start scaling back a little bit. Otherwise, we're never going to be able to achieve some of not only our short-term goals, which is that emergency rainy day fund, or even our long-term goals in being able to put money away maybe for retirement or maybe the purchase of a home. You add the total amount of the money that you spend on a monthly basis on your fixed needs, your variable needs, and your wants, and then obviously you subtract it from your monthly earnings. If you have a surplus again, that means you're in good shape. That means you're doing the right thing. Set goals. Every day that I wake up, it is my goal to speak to as many librarians and patrons as possible to give you the information that's needed. I set goals for myself every day. Being a wealth manager for 28 years, I set goals every day not only for myself, for my family, but I also set those goals for my clients. Now, I also set those goals not only for my colleagues, my fellow librarians, but also the patrons of the libraries as well. I set goals to pretty much plan for success. Short-term goals, those are ones that you can reach in less than a year. Mid-term goals usually take one to three years to reach. Long-term goals take many years to reach. Some people may never own a home. Some people, it takes them 15 to 20 years before they can go ahead and make a purchase on a home. Some people like myself are still striving for retirement. I hope to get there one day, but being able to put away for retirement is very important. A short-term goal may be to pay off a credit card, a mid-term goal, maybe student loans, a car loan, and obviously saving money for retirement is and should be everybody's long-term goal. Long-term goals, set up, save for an emergency fund. Set a goal for six months of expenses for your emergency fund. If you lose your job, you have large unexpected expenses, you can turn to your emergency fund. After you have money in your emergency fund, then I think it's vital for you to set up a retirement savings goal. Whether it be at work in a 401k, maybe an individual retirement account, it's really important that you start putting away for retirement. I'll share a personal experience for setting up for an emergency fund. I did have the unfortunate experience to be there for 9-11. I did share this with Doreen and JP. It did take me about anywhere from five to six weeks to sort of recoup from what had taken place. I did actually have to go into my emergency fund to cover some of my expenses. First hand, I felt on how important it really was to be able to have that rainy day fund. Now, we went over how to build a budget. Now, what I implore everyone to do after the presentation or maybe sometime tomorrow, the financial literacy suite workbooks that are available to you for free usually range anywhere from 50 to 85 pages. It all depends on what topic you're speaking about. It is very detailed. It is very informational. It is very easy to follow, but you're going to find a lot more information there than we're talking about this evening. Unfortunately, we have 50 minutes to talk about both topics, but you'll have that opportunity if you're a library patron of the San Francisco Public Library and you hold a public library card to be able to go in and research this on your own and really get as detailed as you would like to with not only how to keep and maintain a budget, but even more importantly find out what type of investor are you. I think that when we're working for a budget and we wind up getting that surplus and we wind up achieving our goal of having that six month rainy day fund, emergency fund, it's important that we start putting money away for retirement. One of the things I think that people dive right into is they look at investments and they look at returns right away and they don't look at any other type of risk that's involved and that's why I think ultimately it's very important and I think it's probably one of the most important books in our entire financial literacy suite is what type of investor are you because before we can go ahead and start investing it's important for us to find out what type of risk tolerance we actually have. Investments should be a long term goal however it is a goal and investments could cause you to stay awake at night. We need to find out investment risk, we need to really determine what your risk tolerance is. Managing risk with diversification and you can also set up a watch list to help manage your investments in the market. I can tell you that you know somebody that might be you know with have a nest egg of let's say $500,000 in their retirement plan and somebody who has $50,000 in their retirement plan but they're right at the same age. I think that possibly the person that has $500,000 in their long-term retirement savings plan might be able to take on a little bit more risk than the person who has just $50,000 saved. 10% one way the other could be devastating for one where maybe it isn't for the other. Maybe the level of annual income coming in is quite different. So you know risk tolerance is very different for many different people so it's really important that we find out what type of investor we are before maybe we dive in and maybe take a look at individual equity stock which are probably at the higher scale of the risk factor to oppose to maybe mutual funds that maybe have anywhere from 50 to 200 different companies inside of it. It helps alleviate a lot of the risk in the portfolio with that level of diversifications or even exchange traded funds that have a little more diversification than an individual security itself. Again you know we'll be able to make those smart educated decisions once we find out what type of investor we are. Investment risk, any decision you make involves a degree of risk. We all need to recognize this concerning investments. Risk equates to uncertainty. All investments carry risk whether it's time risk, whether it's inflation risk, risk is an even political risk. There's risk abound. There's employment risk. You know if you're buying a new home or a new car you know will you be able to make the required payments without fail? I think that's very important. Will your financial investment have a negative impact on your overall financial plan? Again setting up a budget, setting up short and long-term goals are very very important. Will you make money? Well you know again some people that maybe have money just sitting in a regular money market fund maybe not earning as much interest as needed. It's going to take them a lot longer to be able to achieve their long-term goals. Will you lose a portion or all your original investment? And again that's all going to be based upon what your risk tolerance is. Obviously the more aggressive that you get usually it goes with risk and reward. The more risk you take you typically get more reward. However with risk sometimes comes a down market and you have to be able to prepare yourself for that as well. Will your investment fail? And again that's another key reason why to set up a watch list on the Weiss financial ratings tool so that once you go ahead and you set up your own profile on Weiss financial ratings and you put some of maybe it's a mutual fund or a company that you own with a watch list. You set up your own account there and if there is an upgrade or a downgrade in a company you automatically get an email. We all get tied up in our everyday lives and not every day we're looking at the stock market. We're tied up doing what we do on a day-to-day basis so to be able to get those wonderful alerts letting us know whether or not there's been an upgrade or a downgrade in a portion of our portfolio it will then allow us to go in take a look and see if we need to make any adjustments in the portfolio to adjust for risk that is. Determining your risk tolerance. Conservative risk tolerance short-term investments usually bonds are the main interest because you know they don't fluctuate to large degrees and then you also have moderate risk tolerance those are small market changes that are tolerable for yourself. You like to equally distribute your investments between stocks and bonds so a lot of people will call those with mutual funds balance funds but it's a really good way to diversify your income because typically when a stock market is up and a bond market is down if you have a little bit of both it sort of acts as an equilibrium and I always recommend that you try to diversify your portfolio regardless of your risk tolerance. High risk tolerance market changes don't bother you at all the potential for greater returns excites you more than a concern of losing principal. Stocks are better than bonds because you have more opportunity to earn again individual securities stocks are a little more aggressive than bonds and with risk comes reward. How do we manage overall risk? Again I talked about diversifying your portfolio keep your dollars in different baskets could be large cap companies mid cap companies small cap companies maybe even international companies and then we also certainly have fixed income bonds and those can go in the way of corporate bonds they could be in the way of municipal bonds and they could even be government bonds which are a little less aggressive than corporate bonds. The difference between stock and bonds stock you actually partake in ownership of the company bonds you're actually a creditor to the company so with a bond you're actually purchasing what we would call paper with a promissory that at the end of the term of that bond you'll be able to receive your principal in full but in the meantime you'll be able to earn the interest that that bond is supposed to be paying you. If one industry experiences a downturn other stock categories will gain and hopefully continue to earn for you asset allocation helps you spread your wealth into varied classes of investments like I spoke about small mid large cap international like stocks bonds and mutual funds. Long-term investing also reduces risk because you have time to ride out the market fluctuations. Again your time horizon means a lot if you're 55 years of age and you're just starting out for retirement now you need to realize we have a certain amount of catching up to do so you might need to be a little riskier. If we've been investing for quite some time now and we're 55 years old and we're starting to venture into that retirement phase we might want to scale back and become a little bit more conservative because we have a very shorter time horizon before we might need to touch that money for additional income and retirement. Setting up a watch list. Weiss financial ratings allows you to create your own personalized account with a watch list so that's an account that you can certainly go in set up set up your email and anything that's sitting in your watch list again Weiss financial ratings especially in the stocks and mutual funds and exchange traded fund section of our database it gets updated on a daily basis so if there's an upgrade or a downgrade you're immediately alerted via email. Life changes may come and you'll want to be able to evaluate everything that's going on at least on an annual basis. If your current investments fit your current risk tolerance it's like going to the doctor everybody needs a checkup. We may feel like we feel fantastic but it's really important for us to visit the doctor sometimes blood work tells us that we have high blood pressure or there are more things that are happening so it's always great at least on an annual basis to go back review your portfolio see where you are see maybe on if you've lost money throughout the year maybe you've gained some money throughout the year maybe you might want to take some of the gains off the table and redistribute those gains that's what we would call dollar cost averaging into other securities but this is something that should be done at least on an annual basis and with Weiss financial ratings you'll certainly be able to go in and evaluate your investments and you'll also be able to get the research tools that are necessary for you to make great educated decisions so I do not have a clock in front of me but I certainly wanted to I wanted to go in I wanted to let you know exactly how you can go in and how you can achieve looking at some of the database that is available to you you can always visit the San Francisco public library website click on research and learn articles and database I believe Doreen went over this and I'm certainly going to follow up with this and let's see if we could just pull up another screen here let's see here so we're going to go and share this screen right here and again you know we're going to simply go into books and media excuse me research and learn I apologize for that articles and database and we just hit that w right there and we scroll right down to Weiss ratings now once we get to Weiss ratings I want to be able to get in here and I want to be able to show you the Weiss financial ratings page so that we can certainly go ahead and take a look at that for you but for some reason it is not pulling up and I apologize for that Tom would you like a card number to type in there I can just send you a private message with that uh hold on one moment there shouldn't be any reason why my Weiss financial ratings is is not up and ready for me to use so let me just go with a new use page here let's see and I again I apologize for that you know what let me go ahead and let me just pull up my screen here yeah for some reason I don't know why uh I do not have this uh lined up here for you and I do apologize for that um let me just take a quick look here if you can just bear with me for a moment what I'll do is I'll just go straight in here and and let me go ahead and share the screen here with you okay so everyone should be able to see this screen now can you see the screen Doreen yeah we see fantastic I apologize and I thank you everybody for their patience I'm just going to go straight over to the literacy tool section of the database here this is actually what your screen will look like when you log in with your public library number uh as you can see here in the literacy tools you have consumer guides you have financial literacy basics you have financial literacy planning for the future and you have financial literacy how to become an investor what I want to do is we want to go to literacy basics and these are all of the books that are available to you now there's how to make and stick to a budget and all we would need to do is simply click on that pdf and it'll download the pdf for you uh and there's about 65 pages that are available to really help you game plan to make and stick to a budget now as you can see how to manage debt buying a car understanding auto insurance rent renting an apartment understanding renters insurance calculating for cost of college as you can see there are a whole host of really great educational books that are available to you the financial literacy how to become an investor we have what is investing different types of brokerage firms and the topic that we covered today is right there and I know that Doreen is going to share that with you as well what type of investor are you now this book is probably is about 80 some odd pages long but it's a really great book different types of financial advisors whether it's a a discount house whether it's an online firm whether you're dealing with a wealth manager all about investment fees and tax consequences obviously there's long term and short term capital gains and then one of the hot topics is alternative investments everybody's talking about cryptocurrency and some of the alternative investments like commodities especially where we are now in the current energy sector of the market again this is all available to you right underneath the literacy suite and we also have planning for the future again this is all all these books are available to you I only chose two topics to go over today okay so we actually we actually ended the section a little earlier than I anticipated which now will actually leave us about 15 to 20 minutes to be able to take any questions that you might have again I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability and sometimes I may even refer you to certainly go to the database itself and take a look to have some of your questions answered so with that being said I'd like to move straight on in to the Q&A and I know I believe at this point we're going to stop