Love is in the air! Today we’re talking about relationships with two fantastic people – our guest of honor today is the host of the Optimal Finance Daily podcast and also the woman behind the EconoMe Conference, Diania Merriam. Diania and Joe talk about relationships, money, and that the whole idea of “relationship” doesn’t start where many people think it does. We especially focus on money’s role in a relationship and how focusing on the wrong aspects of “love” can end up helping out OUT of a relationship instead of getting closer with your “soulmate.”
Before that we have some fun talking about investing strategies with guest co-host, comedian Paul Ollinger. Paul rides along with Joe, OG, and Doug through a fun discussion on the fact that advisors are getting away from “boring” allocations of exchange traded funds and instead moving to separately managed accounts. What IS a separately managed account and why would an advisor do that? We get NERDY on today’s show and shine a light in an area that advisors may not want you to look.
Of course, we take a call for help from a Stacker AND Doug regales us with his amazing trivia, which we’re sure you’ll LOVE.
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/2024-econome-conference-diania-merriam-1477
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- New study shows advisors choosing SMAs over model portfolios (InvestmentNews)
Diania Merriam
Big thanks to Diania Merriam for joining us today. To learn more about Diania and the EconoMe Conference, visit EconoMe Conference – March 15th-17th, 2024. You can hear more from Diania on her podcast, Optimal Finance Daily on Apple Podcasts.
Doug’s Trivia
- What is the average annual salary of a 911 dispatcher?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- Dave wants to know what assumptions we use for long-term stock market returns?
Have a question for the show?
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Other Mentions
- Crazy, Funny Money (with Paul Ollinger) (Sept. 23, 2019, episode show notes)
Join Us Friday!
Tune in on Friday for a special roundtable episode where we’re looking at technology, your wallet, and staying out of debt with certified financial coach, Erika Young, who joins OG and Doc G.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: How (and When) to Break Up With Your Financial Advisor (SB1476)
Episode transcript
You’re going to end up eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a band down by the river.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. Today to celebrate the big pink Valentine’s Day Bo Joe’s mom has on this podcast, we are chatting friendship, love, and money. With the founder of the Econo Me Conference and host of the Optimal Daily Finance Podcast, Diana Miriam, in our headline, what do you hire advisors to do?
Would you prefer they were market wizards or that they created a nice boring collection of funds? We’ll find out what advisors are actually doing. Plus we’ll hear why stacker. David thought he’d better call Saul, see hi and og, and then I’ll share some celebratory trivia. And now three guys who spent all morning fighting over which one gets to claim me as their Valentine.
It’s Joe OG and comedian and host of the Crazy Money Podcast.
Paul Hoing.
Joe’s made that up right there on the spot. Kind of kicked ass, didn’t it? What? It’s pretty good. If you
don’t, don’t say so yourself. Hey everybody. Happy Wednesday. Sit back, relax. You found us. We’re so happy you’re here. We’re about to have an hour of financial fun with uh, well we’ve got our special guest here, but the guy across the card table who we refer to as special quite often.
Mr. og,
I’m very special. Thank you for noticing. Absolutely. To 15 years. It’s
about time down at the end of the table. A guy that we waited for Valentine’s Day to Han ’cause we love him so much. Mr. Paul Allinger joins us.
Dude, it’s good to be with you. I love you too, Joe. Doug, is that your Stanley Cup? Is that, did you get one of those,
Stanley?
It’s the small one. I got the 68 Ouncers. It’s just the small one. Yeah. I
don’t like this controversy. No, it’s not. It’s a brook trout, as
Dennis Miller would say, that that drink has an undertow. That’s right.
The, the moon affects its tides. It’s so
big. Whenever anybody says Stanley Cup, I think of these, you know, fashionable women carrying around a an NHL trophy.
Yes. Yeah. Is it
just me? I, I believe Stanley Cup was a hockey trophy before it was a, a vessel in which to, uh, carry your kombucha.
Is that the next trend where everybody’s carrying around an NHL trophy Kombucha? Could be. It could be. I have two cans of kombucha in my refrigerator and I haven’t yet drank them.
I, they’ve been there for maybe four months. They think Go bad. I have no idea it’s gonna
change your life. Two cans of kombucha sounds dirty.
Everybody’s wondering, is this a finance podcast? What the hell are we doing? Paul, tell everybody about the Crazy Money Podcast.
My friend Joe is a two timer on the Crazy Money Podcast, so he should know, uh, he’s a recidivist guest on Crazy Money, five years, 200 episodes.
Nothing compared to what you guys have done, but I explore the connection between money and happiness through the lens of my guest’s journeys, professional, financial, et cetera. And, uh, in addition to Joe, I’ve had smaller people on like LL Cool j uh, Judd, a Patel, Moby, uh, Moby, and winners of the Nobel Prize, Heisman Trophy, and, uh, Olympic Gold medals.
It’s been a lot of fun, dearly, as good as me. It’s Joe. Everybody else, if you’re not watching this, my hand is, is a very high for Joe and everybody else is down here.
Joe, why aren’t we getting his sloppy seconds? Would take any one of those people that he just casually waved his hand off as he is. Talking about
Nobel L.
Oh man. Well, when you have a podcast as big as mine, Joe. Joe Charitably described it as the best podcast nobody listens to. So thanks. Did I say that? Thanks to having friends like Joe. Appreciate that buddy. Shots
fired.
Oh, we got as good. It’s fantastic, you know, growing these days without a big platform like you guys have big time.
You know, I knew you before you went corporate, by the way. You guys are all sellouts. I’m just Wait, just, I’m just, will you tell me where to sell out? Can you just Joe, show me? Joe’s got a nasty addiction called Money. I need to sign to give my soul away to get a big audience because if I get a big audience then I’ll be happy.
He’s like, how do I get some overlords too? If I could have some Westwood one overlords, that would be great. And by the way, you’ve no idea how happy we are with our overlords. We just skipped to work every day, Paul. Good. That’s,
this is what makes you happy. I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad to hear it.
Yes. We got a great show today, Dyna, Merriam and I talking about relationships and money and, uh, Diana after dating for, uh, five or six years, getting married this year.
Oh. And, and she waited a long, long time and, uh, it had a, a lot of transformative. Did you just call experiences, call her old? Did you? I think you just called her old. I did not. I just said she waited a long time. It’s so male, but she started thinking about it when she was six mm. So my working my way out of it, probably not.
It’s getting
creepier.
Just keep moving. We’ll get HR in here while you guys listen to this.
In Indiana. That’s totally legal. Yeah.
Great fan. Fantastic. Le Lisa Curry. Our writer is from Indiana. Oh. And I think Doug. I think she’d agree.
Yeah. I mean, she slams on Indiana all the time because she feels like she’s allowed to.
I don’t know if they’re gonna take it so
well from you, Paul. I, I’ve been there once. No, twice anyway. No, I don’t claim Indiana is my home. Are you really have to be from Indiana to slam on Indiana. Is that really? It’s not like it’s a religion or a race. You know, it’s a geography. Everybody
else takes aim at Ohio.
True. Is Indiana the new Ohio?
I don’t know. I was just, I just was thinking Midwestern states. I’m from Georgia and I just, I people trash the south all the time, so I thought I’d, you know, I’d, I’d redirect it toward the Midwest.
Well, let’s do some good rips on Georgia while you guys listen to this.
You guys have ads, man.
That’s incredible. Is it possible you wait, you guys have revenue? There’s what, what, what? I didn’t know that was a thing. Podcast revenue. I’ve got a negative monetization strategy and I’m scaling it.
You make it up on volume.
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. My wife is like, don’t even look at my shopping bags. I know what you spend on your podcast. It’s important though. It’s who I am. It’s an expression
of myself. It was funny, Dr. Drew was at Pod Fest this year talking to all of the podcasters out there, two time crazy one, I guess, and he said, has he really been?
Really? Yes. Dr. Drew? Yeah. Are you kidding? He was my
second. He was my second stop. Just stop interview.
Just please stop all the flexes. Nobody listens. Nobody listens. We’ve had this for like four minutes and you’ve flexing nonstop. Guess who I’ve had, Joe?
I’ll take Paul out to dinner. I’ll be the little spur.
You
don’t, that’s what it takes. You don’t cut 10,000 downloads a month with just any guest, Joe Saul Sea. Hi. So
we, we actually got a show to do. But, but anyway, Dr. Drew told all these podcasters, he’s like, you know, I’ll tell you this about podcasting. Keep your real job. He goes, and I know half of you’re saying this is my real job.
And he’s like, is it really?
I had to have a talk with my accountant, uh, a couple months ago. He goes, do you know about the hobby tax? Do, do you know what that, I was like, ha, no, it’s not a hobby.
This is
my identity. Paul needs a sponsor to pay him $4 so that it’s not a hobby this year. He goes, you, you actually had
some revenue associated with, uh, it was some income associated with comedy this year, but very little associated with podcasting.
I was like, I spoke at two events. I spoke at two events.
Oh, that’s difficult. Anyway, Paul Allinger here if you guys couldn’t tell and Diana Merriam’s coming up. So let’s get to our headline. Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. Our headline today comes to us from investment news and here is.
Something interesting og uh, written by Greg Greenberg. New study shows advisors choosing separately managed accounts over model portfolios. Listen to, we’re gonna get a little nerdy on our audience today. Models are growing less super lately, as at least when it comes to advisor investment portfolios.
Greg writes, according to data release last Tuesday, from analytics and advisory firm, escal Financial Services, fewer financial advisors expect to increase allocations and model investment portfolios over the next few years. Instead opting for separately managed accounts. The report attributes the shift to advisors seeking increased customization, their desire to align investment strategies with client expectations.
Let’s dive into what the heck this means, og. ’cause this, I don’t know if this is a trend or what, so we’ve got this perfectly fine. Maybe a little boring look at it once or twice a year. ETF model. Or we can hand over our money to a separate money manager who’s gonna buy and sell individual stocks for us.
And advisors are like, yeah, I’ll take a hot money manager for a thousand. I think that
some of this is a, is a rise from the direct indexing motif that’s going on where people are saying, well, I don’t need to buy an s and p 500 fund. I can go create one of my own. And with fractional shares being able to be purchased at most every brokerage company.
Now for some reason people think this is a much more efficient way. And in some cases it can be. I mean, with big dollar amounts where you can tax loss harvest out of one particular position or something like that. But for the average person, this is ridiculous waste of time and energy and cost frankly, because you know, all of that costs money.
They have offices they need to, uh, you know, pay rent on and staff to employ and whatnot. So. I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze
the juice of SMAs.
Yeah. Yeah. In certain circumstances it can make a lot of sense. For example, let’s say that you have a, uh, large appreciated position and you need to build around it.
And the way to do that sometimes is to hire a manager to say, okay, here’s this, you know, position that I have. Maybe I worked at a company and I got a lot of options and, you know, all these different cost basis and stuff like that. You can say, here’s that money plus my other money, and now help me kind of build a strategy around making sure that this is not, you know, a large concentrated position and help me get out of it over, over a period of time.
You know? Mm-hmm. Help offset gains and losses. But for the average investor, just buying a s and p fund versus direct indexing an s and p fund. Who wants to have a, a brokerage statement that has 600 pages on it? I mean the, what kind of sense does that make? You have one line item. It says the same thing. I mean, it’s almost, it’s, it’s a different variation of, I have three different s and p funds.
I got one from Vanguard, I got one from iShares, and I got one from BlackRock. I’m diversified. It’s like, no, you’re an idiot. You have the same thing in three places. It’s like, that’s not Diversi diversified. You have the same, literally the exact same holdings. So just have one. Make your life simple. Paul, for people that
don’t know your backstory, your backstory, super interesting.
We told that story the first time you were on Stacking Benjamins, and we’ll link to it in the show notes, but the very short story was, was that, uh, uh, you were with, uh, this little tiny company called Yahoo, I think. Yes. At one point I was, and maybe one that was like a, like a Facebook where you were with a Facebook as well.
We call it meta now. We call it meta. Sorry. Yes, that’s right. Yeah. Your overlords, your former overlords, the Zuck we call him might come down if we call it Facebook, the Zuck.
Yes, yes, yes. I, my, my overlords, uh, he was in front of Congress last week.
The Zuck just paid himself $700 million on a dividend.
That’s a, that’s not bad. Like it’s, yeah. I think we should issue
dividends. Good. Start. Exactly. You can feed cows in your, in your Hawaii, uh, escape hatch. Uh, a lot of beer with $700 million you can. By the way, I want to commend you for this Valentine themed, uh, Valentine’s Day themed, uh, segment here that we’ve got.
My wife and I this year are going, we’re gonna open a bottle of Rose and we’re gonna read each other’s sonnets from investment news. That’s how we’re gonna celebrate. And we’re, we’re gonna talk about, you know, mutual funds versus separately managed accounts. It’s, and then, and then it’s gonna get hot and heavy, Joe.
Wow. Way to
keep the fires burning. That, that is, it sounds like according to OG a statement that size, they’ll keep the fire burning for hours.
You can, you gotta shred your statement. Yeah.
So you had this existential, like, what’s life all about? Because you had lots of money at a young-ish age. I’m not calling you old, but at a young-ish age.
So I would have to imagine that you’ve had, you’ve used financial advisors before. You know, it’s funny.
Uh, coincidentally, I’m just gone through changing advisors 18 years with a, with my former advisor. And, uh, we, we shifted teams, jumped ship, went with other people, and so we went through several pitches from new potential advisors and all of them said, you need SMAs, because with SMAs you can do more aggressive tax loss harvesting, and you can do, you can play the options game, uh, in a way you can’t with mutual funds.
Oh gee, you’re nodding your head.
Well, I mean, there’s some, I mean, yes, you can’t, you can’t do options with mutual funds, but you can with ETFs, especially the biggest trading ones. So that’s able to be done.
Hey, I’m just telling you what they told me. I don’t know anything. I’m pretty unsophisticated when it comes to this stuff.
Well, I mean, part of this is, let’s try to make this as complicated as possible so that it looks like it’s too hard to handle on your own. You
know, that’s what I was wondering. Oh gee. Is how much of this is advisors trying to be a wizard, right? And go, Hey, look at, we can beat it with all these 50,000 moving parts versus having something very, very concrete that frankly, 90% of America could do.
Well,
on the other hand, uh, maybe some advisors wanna keep their costs low by keeping it very simple and not having to staff up to the point where they have to actively manage your,
your accounts well. And the fact remains that you can’t. Get away from simplicity is traditionally better. Lower cost puts money in investors’ pockets, and the facts around investing are nobody knows how to outperform the market.
Because if that one person existed, then that person would manage all the money for everyone. And since you don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future, we know that active trading isn’t worth it. Generally speaking, in terms of the cost to value ratio, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It means that you can’t prove it’s gonna work in advance.
And so you write a big check for it, you pay for it, and then maybe it works, but 70% of the time it doesn’t. So just for the average investor, unless you’ve got some fringe stuff going on. Uh, it just doesn’t make any sense to, to make your life more complicated, especially around something like this, where you should spend most of your time on is how do I get outta debt and stop paying 20% interest on my credit cards?
Or, you know, how do I buy a rental property and or how do I send my kids to college or pay less in taxes versus how do I sell 10 calls on Microsoft’s share so I can get, you know, 18 bucks this quarter of, of option income? It’s, it’s just, I, I, I just don’t see the, I just don’t see the value in it for, for an average.
You’re telling me to get a job. That’s what I’m hearing.
No, I’m saying the exact opposite. I’m saying this like, would it kill you? Would kill you to have a paycheck saying this, this would be a job. Having all that stuff makes it turn into a job, right. Versus going, and what’s really funny is you can do like overlay analysis on this stuff too, and you can say like, I’ve got all this diversification.
Look how great it is. And then you do a, an overlay versus the SAP or against a Russell or whatever, and it goes, oh yeah, you’re 99% correlated to that. Anyway. So you have all this complication. The idea with diversification is to have things that are not correlated. So you have one thing that goes up and another thing that goes down.
You have an opportunity to sell at a profit and reinvest those money, those dollars at, you know, at a, at a, at a lower value. And another asset class that’s undervalued presently. That’s the, that’s the benefit of diversification is uncorrelated assets. When you have this whole 30 pages of statement and it looks like one big, giant, expensive mutual fund, it’s like, why not just have one mutual fund?
It would be a lot easier. And your CPA will, uh, like you better
too. There’s the phrase that Mrs. Allinger will love tonight. Just light a couple candles, put on some berry white and say overlay analysis.
There you go. Nothing gets them all, and you’re good. Nothing gets ’em all hot and bothered, like overlay
analysis.
What did you think, by the way, when you were looking Paul at different advisors, I’m wondering how the different, uh, pitches were for, to get the, the Inger family to use their services. Well, you
know. They’re all a little bit different. Big corporate banks have a very different feel than independent advisors.
Do. You know, one of the things is I’m, as I’m talking to some of these big corporate bank people, you’re looking at these guys and you’re like, okay, how long are you gonna stay at this bank until, you know, another one of the big sexy firms comes along and offers to buy you out for 10 or $20 million and then I gotta go do this all over again in three or four years.
Because what’s happening, and what I believe would happen with our former advisors is there’s some private equity behind coming after rolling up these regional firms and they’ve gotta come in and, and shove 30% price increases on their clients. And they do so in, in very in artful ways. And so there’s always, there’s a lot of money in this space, there’s a lot of consolidation in this space.
And so when I’m thinking about a big corporate guy, I’m like, alright, how long till he jumps ship some other place? And so, as opposed to a smaller, independent person who’s trying to build their own thing, build equity in their own practice, and you know, that could certainly happen to them, but probably a little further down the line.
So you like that better? Yeah,
I mean, I, I don’t feel like I need to have Goldman Sachs be my advisor, you know, and I, nothing against Goldman Sachs, but you know, the, the bigger banks are generally less flexible on pricing. They’re geared towards people who have lots and lots and lots of money. And in the world of rich people, I’m a pretty small fish, right?
I mean, the intra 1% slope is a very steep curve, and I think in a lot of these places, if you don’t have 50 or a hundred million dollars, they don’t really give a damn about you,
Paul, your comedy would never get a bigger laugh than if you called up Goldman Sachs and said, would you be my advisor?
That’s Well, that’s exactly right.
That’s exactly, and I mean, what, what do you want to pay 75 basis points? Uh, that’d be the huge laugh. That’d be the big laugh. That’d be the, you know, hello? Hello. Right? Hello? Yeah. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. Tough room. It’s, it’s gone. It is interesting to me to see how different firms position themselves and how many of these firms are talking about comprehensive financial planning, Paul versus.
Just managing money in SMAs versus, you know, in some mutual funds or in a very boring index fund way. My,
I mean, I suppose they’re all tiered, but their incentive is to help you make a lot of money to help you keep that money and so they can continue to grow their book year after year. Right. And so the conversation is everything from Yeah.
Diversification and performance, net of taxes, performance net of, of fees and estate planning. And it’s like, okay, there’s all different levels of estate planning and as things get, you know, more complicated with, in a, in a presidential election year, and we don’t know what the exemption the estate exemptions are gonna be going forward, what, in two years there’s a lot of work to be done and to, and to stay on top of.
That’s why I keep having Paul on so that maybe we get in on that estate planning of his, like, just remember how much we love you on a day. On a
day like today. One other question then becomes, he’s like, how much do you wanna leave for your kids? Or would you rather give it to the state or to the government
or, I’d say very little.
Your kids give it to Stacking
Benjamins. That’s right. The Stacking Benjamins fund. The Foundation. Stacking Benjamins
Foundation. We just started it as a matter of fact. Today. Yeah, today. Right now it’s, it’s, it’s odd that you brought that up. So weird.
It’s a 5 0 1 C, 5 0 1, C two, two and a half something, two and a half.
Right? Right. OG Do SMAs with, with all the things Paul’s talking about, does it get better, does it become more attractive, you think? ’cause there’s more zeros in your net worth?
Well, I mean, I think everything gets more attractive to you, more zeros in your net worth, doesn’t
it? Well, I’m not talking about from the advisor’s
point of view.
I mean, I think I get more attractive the more zeroes that are in my net worth. I don’t, I can’t say the same about Doug, but you know, no, I think there’s. There’s a benefit of simplicity when it comes to the complicated life around money. It’s already complicated enough. You, Paul, you talked about estate planning and charitable giving, ingest, but maybe you do that anyways.
That’s the time and energy you should be spending with your planner and with your family and money, not, not on, you know, how many shares of Microsoft do I own? Because you can’t prove, nor can anyone else if Microsoft’s gonna do better than Facebook this quarter or this year. And so who gives a crap?
Just own both. Um, it’s just, it’s just easier to do that and spend your energy on the things that are gonna have the biggest impact in your family and, and, and beyond. And that’s on those other planning related topics like you
mentioned. We will dive more into, if you’re just confused by this discussion, what the heck is a separately managed account?
We barely covered that. What’s the difference between that and the quote, boring allocations we talked about with exchange traded funds or mutual funds? We dive into all that in our newsletter, the 2 0 1 head to stacky Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 and we will dive in even more. But it’s, uh. It’s interesting to see most advisors going that way, and I do feel like you do og that I think we look at it as competitive advantage, you know, that the, the client doesn’t know that, uh, this magic behind the scenes maybe not as much going on as, as we’d hope.
Sorry, Paul, but that’s, that’s our, that’s our take is that, that to some degree there’s some smoke of mirrors. Maybe. I hope not, but there’s some smoke of mirrors happening. It’s the Wizard of Oz.
We’ll see. I mean, the claim is they can add 1% return to the performance every year, and that does add up the higher your stack is.
And so if you’re looking at, Hey, I’m living off this corpus of money, you know, an extra 1% per year as a sizable increase to your income, if that actually happens, you know, if they can do it. Yeah. If they can do it, that’ll be interesting. If
they can do it, it’ll be great to circle back and see over time.
That’s gonna be great. I’ll be calling in
for my new smaller house because I had to sell this one because of all the, the options losses that I had.
Come down and live in the basement with us. That’s exactly what you’ll be doing. Hey, time to dive into the joke off. We have this math joke off. Oh my God.
Going on between all of our, all of our stackers who submitted math jokes to us. And Paul, you get to help us. You, you know you’ve ever watched Dancing With the Stars? No. And they have the No. Only Swinging a Miss. I have other to
do with My Life, Joe. That that it’s like a hundred. I don’t watch The Mask Singer either.
I don’t watch Real Housewives.
Well, you get to be one of the celebrity judges on one of those shows. You don’t watch Paul is exactly what’s happening here. Okay, good, good, good. And we don’t really get a vote. Everybody in our basement Facebook group gets a vote. If you wanna join our Facebook group so you get to vote, stack your Benjamins dot com slash basement gets you directly there.
’cause it’s a long URL We are in the second round. Doug. Let’s finish up the first round because we’ve got some results from last week’s scintillating competition. I think
one of the last pairings of jokes we had was the four seed versus the 13 seed. Ooh, yeah. Pretty solid matchup. It could ripe for upset.
Let’s see what happened. You may recall that the four seed was, this is a pretty hard time for me financially. Last month I was unable to pay the bills to my exorcist, and as a consequence, I have been repossessed
fabulous against the number 13 seed from Patrick. That was Susie by the way. Uh, Patrick, uh, wrote us this one.
Math teachers don’t die. They just reduce to the lowest terms. Paul,
any predictions, Paul, on who you think won
between those two? Uh, as a as as a person who was raised Catholic? I gotta go with the exorcism joke.
Exorcism joke was actually the winner four. Beat 13. So Susie moves on in this one. So congratulations, Susie, write, uh, we’ll be writing you and you’re getting a couple books from recent guests that were on the show.
Oh, what books? What books? Well, she gets to choose. I got so many of them here. Paul, Jared, Dillon. No worries. Because of all the great guests we have. Mm-Hmm. Should I, should I start flexing on all the guests we have Paul, you should.
You
should. This was Susie Orman, though, who submitted this joke. So she might already have the books.
I’m sure it was Susie Orman. Yes. The Suze, yeah. Uh, down in the bottom half to finish out the first round we got the seven verses 10 Doug.
So that was, uh, I’m gonna start with the unders seed this time. The 10th seed was with the ark, settled safely after the flood. Noah opens the doors and commands the animals go forth and multiply and all the animals departed the ark except for two snakes in the back.
Noah proclaims again, go forth and multiply. Yet the snakes stay put perturbed. Noah finally asks them, why have you not followed my command? And the snakes flicker their tongues and answer, we can’t multiply. Noah. We’re adders.
Oh my God. That was from Kevin versus the number seven.
That was very slightly very, that was a very long setup for a very yes.
Small
payout. I love that we do these, uh, setup jokes with comedians in the room. Just the look that you guys are missing on Mr. Hollinger’s face is classic number seven. Number seven is
slightly more
efficient. Yeah. What’s the difference, Paul, between taxes and taxidermy?
I don’t know. Joe, what is the difference between taxes and taxidermy?
One’s
cruel and inhumane. The other’s dealing with dead animals. Jeff. So Kevin versus Jeff, who’s our winner there? Doug? Uh, that would be Jeff. I think that’s wrong. Love you, Jeff. It’s great. But I think the adders joke is so bad. It’s good. So missing out in the second round. You ready Paul to weigh in? Now?
Now, now you get the flow of this thing. Yeah. Okay.
How exciting. Yeah, no, I like it. I like it. I like the way you involve your, your
guests. Okay, we go to the second round and, uh, we’re just doing one here. So everybody ready to vote on this onell give you our idea. Uh, it’s the number one seed versus the number nine.
The number one seed in the entire game is from Zach just lost my job at the bank. Lady asked me to check her balance, so I pushed her over. Sorry, number
one, I, I, I pushed her over.
Wait, Paul, I pushed her over. Oh God. No. Still nothing. Oh God. Uh, Doug. What’s the number nine? Number
nine is I saw my math teacher with a piece of grass.
Nice. Wait, a wait to sell it. Doug
just
crushed it. Wait, what? I killing? What just happened was I buffering
Doug had a little brain
hemorrhage. Rectum. Damn near killed
him. Yes. Doug. Alright, take two.
Okay, take two. Take two. I saw my math teacher with a piece of graph paper yesterday. I think he must be plotting something that’s from
Jen.
Yes, Zach versus Jen. As they get even better. Ugh.
Wait, what was the first one I’ve already forgotten?
Uh,
lost my job at the bank. Oh, checking balance.
Yeah. Lady asked me to check her balance. I pushed
her over. Those are it, I think. I think the graph paper by a tiny margin. Tiny
margin. I think number nine.
Seed. og. Which one you going for? Yeah. Graph paper Doug.
Wow. Uh, I, I like the physical comedy, so I like the pushed her over
some Stacking Benjamin swag on the line for the winner of this one. We will find out next week and we’ll do the other, uh, round two, uh, this time
next week. I like how he’s advocating violence against women.
That’s, that’s really progressive. Oh God. Way to go guys. Way to go. Is that what this show stands for? Is that what you’re all about? Here at Stacking Benjamins, I noticed there’s no women on this call right now. Thanks. So how, thanks for planting that
seed. No, we saved the woman. We have three dudes as the, four dudes as the, sorry, Doug almost.
Forgot, uh,
Doug, otherwise known as the Patriarchy.
We’ve got four, four dudes as the Setup Act for our main event. Diana Miriam, who’s the creator of the, uh, economy Conference, and the woman who’s the voice of the Optimal Finance Daily Podcast is going to join us for a long discussion about, uh, well, what she and I have learned over time about money, relationships, and, uh, where we start there.
So whether you’re somebody who is in a committed relationship looking for a relationship, just want a better relationship with your money, Diane and I cover all that, but as a way to get there, Doug, I think you’ve got some trivia while Diana comes down and fights the patriarchy. Darn
right, I do. Joe. Hey there, stackers.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. I love, love italics for emphasis. Love Valentine’s Day. Every year I send Dick pics to all the women I went on dates with over the past years. Whoa. As well as some of the others I’d like to go on dates with. Oh, would you relax? I send him pictures of Richard Nixon. Tricky.
Dick Get it. Tricky Dick. So damn funny. Oh boy. I really want Joe’s mom to have an extra special Valentine’s Day this year, and I know she loves weddings, so I invited her over to watch movies that feature my favorite wedding scenes. We’re gonna watch The Wedding Singer and Wedding Crashers and of course The Godfather, which gives you both a wedding and a bonus Horsehead scene.
She’s gonna love it. Yeah. I’m even cooking a nice dinner for us. I mean like, you know most of it. I’m asking her nicely to bring the main course. Lovely chicken. Cordon blue would be super. And of course the green beans. ’cause I mean, I can’t make those. And some good cole slaw. Oh yeah. And a salad. But hey, look, on my end, I’m picking up a six pack.
You know how hard it is to choose a pairing with all of those different foods. I just played it safe and I got some keystone light after tonight. I bet she’ll wis. Valentine’s Day was every week. Today’s trivia
question is, oh, there is one. There is a trivia question.
We’re getting there. We’re getting there.
Which country has a holiday on the 14th of every month? I’ll be back right after I get some flowers from the grocery store.
Hey there stackers. I’m canned food chef and real life Cupid Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. You would not believe how crazy the grocery store is right now. Every line was filled with guys buying flowers at the very last minute. I don’t know how anyone can forget Valentine’s Day. It’s always on the 14th, starting to feel like I’m the only real romantic left around here.
Today’s trivia question is, which country has a holiday on the 14th of every month? The answer, not only do they have a holiday on the 14th of each month, but in South Korea, each of those 12 holidays is love themed. And now here to chat all about relationships, love, and communication. It’s today’s mentor, Diana Miriam,
and it’s weird to not have her do her own intro. You’ve heard her do the intro for the show. Diana Miriam’s ear. Happy Valentine’s Day to
you. Happy Valentine’s Day. And you’re not wearing, I wore this shirt for you, Joe. I thought you would show up in pink or red. I should
have. I showed up in my beautiful romantic bamp tourist shirt.
Look, I’ve got some lovely flowers behind me. You do. Do you know that? I do. I do flower arranging. So this is not special for Valentine’s Day. Every single week I arrange beautiful bouquets for the house, but it just so happens that it’s Valentine’s Day and we’ve got some nice pink roses. You do
good work and And you just go buy them and put them around the
house.
Yeah, so I just go to regular grocery store. I usually buy a dozen roses and then I look for an, an arrangement of other things that I feel like looks good with the roses. And then I arrange them and I usually do about. Three different bouquets. One for the living room, one for the kitchen, one for the bedroom.
That’s fabulous. Yeah. Well, number one, buying yourself flowers. We’re gonna talk a little bit about today, but tangentially, not that exactly, but really kind of self-care because on a day when there’s a lot of relationships and non relationships, we start thinking about what relationships should we be in?
What relationships should we maybe not be in? You’re somebody who waited to get married. Mm-hmm. And really has had lots of different relationships and, and economy. You have speed dating at the conference. You also, a lot of people would call economy itself, like just speed dating friends. ’cause in three days you make a bunch of new friends.
Right? Yeah. How important to you. Is relationships when it comes to somebody’s financial independence journey
outside of finances, I think health and relationships are the most important things in life. And when I think about money, money is a tool to. Allow you to build a life focused on what truly matters.
Money itself is not what truly matters. Health and relationships are what truly matter. And so when I think about spending money, that’s usually kind of my litmus test. Is this an investment in health or relationships? Great. Swipe the credit card. You know, I’m in the financial position where I’m able to do that.
So yeah, there is a connection, but honestly, money is the only thing in life that you can completely mess up. And it can be totally fine when it comes to your health and your relationships. You can actually do irreparable damage there. You have to prioritize them over money. And when it comes to health, you know, we, you started talking about self care.
To me, health is about the relationship you have with yourself and you cannot love another person until you love yourself, which sounds great as like an Instagram post, right? I read that in a book somewhere a long time ago, and intellectually I said, yeah, that makes sense. But emotionally, I didn’t have a very good relationship with myself.
You know, we agreed to record this a month ago when I called you crying because I had this realization, you know, I went and had this crazy experience and I realized how much I actually hated myself. And I healed that and all of a sudden I was able to see that all the love and connection I’ve ever wanted was already there.
I just didn’t have the capacity to engage in it. Wait
a minute, hold on. Hold, hold on a second. Okay. We got, sorry, we’re getting
real intense. Well,
no, but, but, but with all the intensity, I can just hear people screaming at their device right now going, hold it. Wait, you hated yourself and you healed that like you don’t hate yourself and then heal that overnight.
You don’t wake up the next morning and go, I’m healed, love myself. Good
work. Right? So I did something called the Hoffman Process, which is basically a lifetime of therapy and healing in one extremely intense week. I wouldn’t say I took a shortcut. I think that it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and all of the work that I’ve done for the last, I don’t know, 17 years of therapy kind of.
Primed me to be able to be ready for that intense experience.
But don’t you feel like even with a week, I’m, I’m sorry, just the concept of being healed, I would think that just based on the conversations we’ve had, I. You figured out where the wound is.
Yeah. I made a really good headstart. I’m still doing the work, right?
I’m still processing things. I’m still reaching out to people and having conversations like we had a month ago. You know, I keep feeling like I’m digging deeper and deeper into this. I’m still in what they call my like integration phase after the Hoffman process. The first 90 days are, you’re continuing the intensity.
I’m still in that phase
right
now. What is the shortcut? The Hoffman Method, just for people going, okay, wait a minute. Hold on. What’s the Hoffman Method? What, what does it mean? I would
say Hoffman is a masterclass in authenticity, and if I told you what specifically we did there, you would say, what is that gonna do for me?
It’s like you’re sitting there and you’re doing meditations and visualizations, and you’re learning about what you’ve read in self-help books your whole life. I think what makes it different is that you’re doing it in a group. So there were like 39 other classmates that I had a teaching team of five people that are incredibly skilled at what they do.
They’ve been doing this for 50 years and they get 1400 people a year through and no one ever does it again, right? There’s no upsell. To the Hoffman process. It’s like they show you something. Wait a minute, hold on.
You don’t buy the Tony Robbins book, which gets you to the DVDs, which gets you to the event, which gets you to the one-on-one sessions.
No, there is no upsell. It’s, most people go for one week where you turn in your laptop and your cell phone for a week. So it’s a complete digital detox. It feels like you go to another planet for a week, you see something that you can’t unsee, and then you move on with your life. And the work is just, the tools and practices that they give you are really basic.
It’s like I write my appreciation and gratitude every night. I start every morning with a journaling practice to get in touch with myself. It’s nothing like earth shattering, but I needed to have that intense experience while I was there to jumpstart my ability to like actually get something outta those practices that I was doing halfheartedly before.
It’s funny, and I hope it’s not lost on all of our stackers hanging out with us, Diana, that we started this conversation about relationships about self because that is an aha that I had and I actually asked you if we could frame it around another book because you’re like, you must have done the Hoffman Method.
And I said, yeah, no, I have not. But I did read this book called Bridge Across Forever and I said, that framed a lot of, a lot of my worldview. And by the way, for those of you that haven’t read it, we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk a little bit through some of the concepts in Bridge across Forever Hoffman Method, which that’s why Dina wanted you to define it just a little bit.
You don’t need to have practiced off a method no more than Diana just said. You don’t need to have read the bridge across forever to understand what we’re gonna talk about when we talk about the book, which we will a little bit, will fill you in on exactly what happens. By the way, I don’t think it will also hurt your reading of it if you do decide to read it later.
I do wanna give a couple caveats about Bridge Cross Forever. First caveat is, is that this is an older book, so there’s some dated stuff going on. Number two is if you look up the author Richer Bach, and you look up Richard Bach’s relationships, and this is a book about relationships, relationship with self, relationship with money, relationship.
Mostly though finding your soulmate on a day like Valentine’s Day. What a better day to talk about the idea of soulmate. And this whole book is framed in what is a soulmate, what is it, what is it not? And what’s funny is, is that when you look at Richard Bach, he’s kind of like the mechanic whose car sucks.
Because Richard Bach’s been married four times. The woman who he’s talking about in this particular book, Leslie Parrish, they had kind of a nasty divorce after this. So this dude is not a relationship expert, but he is a great guy at opening your brain to mindfulness really around some of these topics.
And what the hell are we doing here? And, and why, like, before I go jump in somebody else’s lap and, and well actually, let me frame this a different way. I’m gonna frame it one more way. Most of our stackers have heard this scene from a popular movie before.
I Love you. You complete me. And I just
had Shut
up. Just shut up. You
had me at,
hello? You had me at Hello?
That’s from Jerry McGuire, and of course she’s at a book club. He walks into the book club and the oh is all of the women in the room who are oohing and eyeing, and then you see. Her sister giving them a look because there’s two ways to look at this particular scene. The first thing is people that haven’t seen the movie or kind of glossed over think that’s a very romantic scene for people that kind of dive into the movie.
I thought that was a very disturbing scene as did, uh, the main characters, uh, sister sitting there going, oh God, no. Oh, oh God, no. I dunno. Let’s dive into it though, with all those caveats. Let’s start here. There’s a few concepts in the book that I’d like to talk about. Uh, you haven’t finished it, but so far, what do you think?
Well, I’m in the first a hundred pages and I sent you two pages of notes because it, there’s so much there and I’m really, really enjoying the book and I’m agreeing with like so much that I’m like, it aligns with my experience so much. And I’m excited to continue with this character development because he starts out where I’m like, Ooh, he gets it.
And then he like, I’m in the part now where it’s like he loses himself, he doesn’t get it. And I’m like, he wait, he doesn’t get it. And then I’m like hoping that it comes back around because what he was saying in the beginning, I’m like, oh yeah, you know, he is talking about how like he comes across a million dollars and he doesn’t care and he is got all this like fame and people knocking on his door and wanting him to be on tv and he’s like.
No, I enjoy my life. I don’t need all this fame and money. And I was like, alright. He gets it and then it like he loses that.
Let’s start with that. Let’s talk about this idea of where money really sits, because I think Richard Bach does a really good job of this, and especially on a day like Valentine’s Day when people are spending money on Hallmark cards that cost $8 and 50 cents or more.
People are going out to restaurants, spending tons of money with people they’re trying to impress, you know, a lot of that. I think Mrs. The Mark, the book starts off true story by the way. He’s flying this biplane, he’s, he’s flying across the Midwest and he lands at a farmer’s field and goes up to the farmer and says, Hey.
If you let me advertise flights in the local town and I get to charge people for flights, I’ll take you up for free if you let me land here. And the farmer always goes, yeah, cool deal. So he’s up in the air and he’s looking down and he says she’s here. She doesn’t know that she’s here. And I don’t know that she’s here, but I know she’s, she’s gotta be here.
His soulmate, and he lands the plane. Of course, he looks at all these people waiting for a ride and she ain’t there. Right, right. She is not there. That in particular, Diana, hit me hard. And it hit me hard for what was to come because it turns out that the more you read richer Bach, that it all does start with you.
You know, we heard that scene from Jerry McGuire. You can’t be completed. There’s no such freaking thing. And
also I’m thinking about this scene that you’re mentioning in the beginning of the book. He’s. Kind of colliding with all these women and he’s recognizing how beautiful they are and what good qualities they have.
But she’s not perfect. So she’s not for me. It’s not her because she’s not perfect. And I was like reading this going like, oh man. Like in some ways he gets it when he talks about money and not wanting to be famous. But in that way, when he is not able to appreciate another person, it’s because he’s so disconnected from himself.
It is so funny because we start off any relationship and if you’re listening and you’re, this is not even just romantic relationships, I think we expect all the relationships around us to complete us. Like I get into relationships. I know Diana Diana’s my buddy ’cause she can complete me in some way by being my friend.
Even that, you see your friends and you start to pick out imperfections, right? You go, well, Diana’s kind of whatever, and let’s pick on somebody else. Uh, Brad Barrett, let’s go with the nicest guy in the, in the universe. Brad Barrett from phi. You know, he’s kind of, you know, whatever. Like we start, and I can’t even think of anything with Brad ’cause he’s so damn nice.
So he is the perfect person. But you know what I mean? We start nitpicking because we want them to complete us and be exactly like us. And I love this idea, which by the way, you’re not there yet, Diana. And you’ll get there in the book. That them completing you is like the wrong fricking mission. And the fact that we’re different is what’s so damn fun about
life.
Yes. Okay. So I’ll say a couple things. I think other people are mirrors to your relationship with yourself. So when you’re nitpicking at someone else, it’s because you don’t have enough self-awareness to see what they’re showing you of where your discontent is with yourself. And I will say that, you know, me and Brad are getting married on June 1st, which is our six year anniversary.
It took me five and a half years. To recognize that he actually is my soulmate. But I was so struggling with my relationship with myself that I couldn’t see it and he could not help me. Like he so desperately wanted to help me through my long battle with depression. I so desperately wanted him to help me, but he couldn’t.
I had to do it for myself. And once I was able to give that to myself, it’s like I see him completely differently. Now. First of all, I think it is a miracle that he stayed with me for the last five and a half years because I dragged that man through hell, and I really did. He is the most loyal, dedicated patient person I’ve ever met in my life, and I had no capacity to appreciate that because I was suffering so deeply.
Like I’m gonna get emotional thinking about it. But after I came to this realization, I. And I’m telling him about all this stuff, and I’m just expressing so much appreciation for him. And I asked him like, how did you stay? Because if anyone were to tell me about someone treating them the way that I treated him, I would tell them to get the hell out.
You know? And so I said, how did you stay? And he would never use the word soulmate. He would say, I knew we were meant for each other. Hmm. And he was willing to wait for me. Like he was willing to sit in the shit for five and a half years and wait for me to come around because he just knew on some level.
And I think that concept. Gives me so much comfort because it makes me feel like you can’t mess it up. What is meant for you? You can’t mess it up. And what is not meant for you, there’s nothing you can do to force it to be. That gives me so much comfort because for all intents and purposes, I sabotaged this relationship and he stayed.
It feels like a miracle. It really does to me. But how
do, ’cause you know, we’ve got stackers that are listening and, and certainly we’re not psychologists, we’re not relationship experts, we’re just two people that have walked this journey. But what do you think the magic is there versus the person sitting there listening to this who’s in pretty relationships, somebody’s treating them like crap and they probably should go away.
Like, what’s the difference between what you and Brad have versus the person who’s hoping that somebody’s going to change?
I think that there is a level of discernment in that if it is abusive, if it is physically abusive, if it is emotionally abusive. It is self-care to get yourself out of there. You know, I wasn’t abusive towards him, but I wasn’t really nice to be around.
You know, like I would go through phases where we were really good, you know, like our relationship was really good because I was feeling better for whatever reason, for a period of months. But when I was like really depressed, I was laying in bed for five months, not participating in life. And so that meant that he would go to work full-time, take care of our 11-year-old coach basketball, come home and do laundry, all of the food shopping.
He didn’t have a partner. I was laying in bed all day while he was doing everything. So it wasn’t abusive. But I wasn’t participating in our partnership and it was really hard.
I wanted you to say that on the microphone because you know the impression I got from the outside looking in, and this is where we get back to Richard Bach or or to Jerry McGuire, is that it doesn’t sound like he was trying to change you.
I think when you’re in a relationship where you want the person to change, the only person that you can change is yourself. We had a great guest on a about a year and a half ago who still resonates with me, and I use this language all the time. He talks about Diana Penguins and he talks about you can do one of two things with your friends.
Your friends are all penguins. You can either sit around going, they’re effing birds, they should fly, they have wings. Why are they not flying? Birds fly and penguins don’t fly. Like that is so stupid. What do they have wings for if they don’t fly? And you can sit around and bitch that they don’t fly. Or you can go, you know what, they’re a penguin and a penguin’s not gonna not be a penguin.
Even though they have wings. Like I can look at my friends and go, yeah, you know what? I just hope they realize they’re a penguin. Because I think what he was seeing was that was there’s this Diana, this spiritual Diana that I love and I love being around, and I hope she realizes she’s a penguin versus him trying to make you a hawk instead of a
penguin.
I. Yeah, when I would have moments of being rooted in my authenticity, that’s what he loved. You know, he knew it was there. It was just buried under all this crap of my trauma and my emotional baggage and my jadedness, you know? I mean, I’m getting married for the first time. I’ll be 37 years old and I’m so grateful that I waited until I’m older because it took me this long to build a relationship with myself, you know?
And I’m so grateful that I have a partner that was willing to wait. I mean, this is his second marriage, you know? But he learned a lot from his first one. And now we get to co-parent with her. And it’s funny ’cause like I don’t think she listens to anything I do, but, and she would not be offended by this.
But you know, I had a two hour coffee with her yesterday and we had. The most bonding, emotional conversation. Crying about how much we love these kids. You know, parenting is the hardest job in the world, and I’m doing it with someone that I didn’t know and that I didn’t understand. And there’s so much pain and betrayal when a marriage falls apart and you know, and it’s really hard to have to now raise kids.
Together. You know, for us, I avoided her for years because I felt so insecure around her. And so being able to heal that in myself, and like you said, it’s still a process. I’m not like enlightened or anything. Right? Like let’s be honest, right? Like I’m still working on it, but like I never in a million years would think that I could have a deep vulnerable conversation with her.
You called out the wound. Yeah. And said, this is where the wound is and she knows where it is. You know where it
is. Yeah. It’s like we had so much tension and uncomfortableness and awkwardness between us, and every time I saw her Sure for trading the kid back and forth, I felt so, like, so much anxiety and nausea and like, it was just so uncomfortable.
And like then last night he does this brain bowl. It’s like a trivia thing. And we sat next to each other and we got yelled at by the teacher because we were talking so much. And it’s like, that’s a, that is a ridiculous amount of progress in like two weeks. You know,
Bach decides that he’s gonna go search for his soulmate.
And what happens is he sells his biplane. He thinks that’s all the money that he has. And he jumps on a Greyhound bus to go looking for her. And by the way, again, true story. This dude actually did this. And while he’s on these long bus rides going from town to town looking for a soulmate, he really has these feelings.
Diana, there’s a lot of internal, who am I? Hmm. Like the whole thing. He goes through this big, long thing about smoking. I don’t know if you’re there yet. I had a friend that read this book and stopped smoking after, after he did this because he had enough introspection to go, you know, why do I smoke? What is this about smoking?
Like what does this have to do with life and reaffirming and what does it really do for me? And for, in some ways it’s like you’re Hoffman method where it’s not a big thing, but the fact that he’s meditating on it for so long, it becomes really, I think, this placeholder for the introspection that we all need to have with ourself to enter into not even romantic relationship on Valentine’s Day, but any relationship like.
The best relationship you can have for anybody else is a better relationship with you.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it’s funny, I was a smoker. I haven’t had a cigarette in I guess two years now. Over two years. And I wasn’t like, I don’t know, I was kind of a heavy smoker. But I look back on it now and it was almost a little bit of a form of self vindictiveness, you know, that like I used to joke that smoking was punctuation for the day.
I was walking to a meeting, I had a cigarette, comma, I finished something, I had a cigarette, period. You know, I had sex, I had a cigarette ex explanation mark. You know, it’s like, why do I need punctuation for the day? But what it really is, or question mark, yeah, question mark. Um, but like I think of it as anything like that, whether it’s smoking, whether it’s doom scrolling, whether it’s.
Drinking. Just drinking, distracting yourself from your feelings in any way is a form of self vindictiveness. And it’s a form of like, you’re not being the adult in the room. We are emotional beings and when we bury our feelings, we’re saying that we don’t think we’re worth having a relationship with ourselves.
You know, when we distract ourselves with all of these kind of destructive behaviors, to me there’s nothing morally wrong with smoking. It’s just a little sad that I did that to myself and that I didn’t respect my body enough. I mean, like I, I had a kind of. Moment years ago when I was smoking, I mean this was in college, I had this kind of realization that it felt like I was keying my car.
Like I was walking up to my car and I was just keying it. And I felt like it was, I didn’t feel bad about it. It just seemed silly. Like why would I key my car? That’s just kind of silly. There’s nothing morally wrong with that. It’s just silly, you know? And I feel like that about a lot of destructive behaviors.
It’s funny because I, I think you have to look at that stuff before you have relationships with people. And what’s funny was when I stopped caring about relationships with other people so much. And began after reading Bridge across forever. I began thinking about the relationship with myself and a healthier relationship with myself.
Not in egotistical way, but just a, nobody’s coming to save me. There is nobody that’s gonna rush in. And, you know, the spotlight aren’t all of a sudden gonna turn on. I am left in my either my own miserable hell or my own heaven, and I get to choose that. And then once I am completed inside, which to your point, you never are, but at least you know the path and the journey, then I can go have a relationship with Diana Merrim and I can actually bring my full self, which is far more powerful.
And what’s funny is, and people are wondering what the hell does this have to do with money, Joe, tell you what it has to do with money. Richard Bach then goes to, I think it was, was it an ATM machine or did he get a receipt from some, somebody at the bank? He stops to get what he thinks is a little bit of money out of his bank account, and he sees this number, I think it’s an a TM machine, and there’s two commas in it.
And he has no idea that his book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, has made him go from no money where he thought he had to sell this one plane, that he had to look for her to a guy that has more money in the 1970s than he can ever possibly spend. And what’s funny, Diana, and I hope you can, you can kind of fill in the story, ’cause I haven’t read this in a long time, but how does he feel about all this money now that he’s on this self-actualization journey?
Well, what I liked about his reaction, and I’m looking at my notes here, I said in my notes to you, I love his reaction to seeing a million dollars in the bank. He’s like, well, that’s fine. Whatever. What am I gonna do with that? You know what I mean? And I was just like, yeah. Like I was so excited when I saw that.
And then he starts to say, well, what if I could use this money to find her? Right. You know, he kind of gets distracted by it and there’s a, and you’ve
groan. You start to groan.
Yes. And you know, he says, there’s a few quotes here where he’s talking about his relationship with money. He says, airplanes I can handle.
I thought, but money, it makes me nervous. Can money crash? And you know, I wrote a note here and I said, I think airplanes are actually much more dangerous than money. ’cause you can lose your life in an airplane. You can lose your soul with money, but that’s a lot easier to fix than losing your life, right?
I don’t know. I like the other side of that. I think people sometimes don’t get afraid enough of how money can destroy your life. I mean, look at these lottery winners. Would it be better to not be a lottery winner? You know,
I think that people get the lessons that they need and you know, when you come into a big sum of money, like I’m really glad that I haven’t, I mean, I think about.
When I graduated high school, my mom handed me $10,000 and a year later it was gone. Thank God she didn’t hand me more than that, you know what I mean? I could have done some real damage with some more money, but I was young and I didn’t know what I was doing. And you know, he says this other quote, to be handed a lot of money is to be handed a glass sword blade first.
Best handle it very carefully, sir, very slowly while you puzzle what it’s for. You know, like I think people just have this assumption that if I have more money, I will have more happiness, I’ll have more resources, I will, you know, money solves money problems. Money can take away the, the stress of not having resources.
But it can’t ultimately make you happy, especially if you don’t have that relationship with yourself and you know who you are and what you want out of life. People say, oh, just spend money according to your values. How many people actually have a very deep rooted relationship with their own values? Most of us don’t because we are so conditioned by society for what society tells us to value.
Like that’s actually deep inner work. To have intrinsic motivation to really like, feel comfortable in your own skin and have contentment and have peace of mind. Money can’t give you that. And if you don’t have that, when you get money, you’re gonna go looking for it in the wrong places.
I think the answer to that rhetorical question you asked, you can get the answer about whether we’ve looked at our values or not by looking at, walk into any shopping mall in the United States and see the number of people that are there, and then walk into any financial planning office in the United States.
And not that financial planners have all the answers, but the number of people working on their money versus working on retail therapy, which leads nowhere, is, I think, a great indicator. I love that. I love the fact that money is subservient to the relationship, like it’s relationship. First he gets the money, he’s like, yeah, no.
And then he starts to go, yeah, yeah. And you’re like, no, no, no, no. Please God. Don’t, please, no, don’t, don’t have an idea here, Jonathan, but, or, or Richard Jonathan’s the his, uh, in his, in his book. But Richard, don’t have an idea here. Please, please don’t. And sadly he does. But it does have, it does have an, uh, a nice ending.
There’s a great. Chapter, I don’t think you’ve gotten there yet about a symphony. The Symphony chapter is, is fantastic, and to tell everybody just a little bit about what it is. He also likes this idea of newness in, in relationships. Not only does he like the sparkle of his friends being perfect and everybody being perfect and having perfect stuff, which totally Diana, a hundred percent like you, I think you nailed it.
That is a reflection on you, not on the other person when you’re doing that. He also likes it when the relationship is fresh and new. I get to meet Diana at first, and I don’t see any of the penguin stuff that I want her to change. You know what I mean? I can’t bitch about that. I’m too wowed by the brilliant Diana that shows up first when she’s on and I’m on.
And then when we become better friends and I find out that Diana has her quirkiness, I. And I have my quirkiness. Well, then I start to pull away ’cause I don’t need it. I’m gonna go find the next thing. And Leslie writes him this wonderful letter saying that life is like a symphony. And to truly get to know people, you gotta get through that.
You know, at the beginning of, uh, of Beethoven, you got the, and that’s all exciting, but the middle of that is very soft and delicate and much more nuanced. And relationships go from big and bold to nuanced. And Leslie challenges him and goes, you can’t handle the nuances of real relationships and it has no reflection of us.
It’s a reflection of you and you don’t know yourself enough. Which is funny. I read this book and I said, here I’m Valentine’s Day, I’ll say this. I said, uh, I’m never getting married. ’cause I don’t know myself enough. I can’t bring anything to a relationship. I keep bringing crap to a relationship if I don’t know who I am.
It hit me that hard. And it sounds like the Hoffman Method hit you the same, like I gotta do some discovery on
me. Totally. And I think I had, before I had this relationship with myself, I had some sense of like, I’ve always wanted to get married, but I. I said I need to be with someone for at least five years before I marry them because I wanted to get into the symphony.
Right. And the way you describe it, and a lot of like our cultural norms are like, you know, people would say to me like, if he didn’t propose after two years, then you know, he’s not the one kind of thing. There’s almost like this timeline that people expect you to follow. And I’m really glad that I was able to kind of rebel against that because I had in my head, I don’t wanna marry someone unless we’re together for five years, first and Brad proposed on our five year anniversary.
I mean, it was right after our five year anniversary. Um, and it takes that long. So I think it’s getting through the symphony, but also I needed to have that relationship with myself before I could fully participate in this relationship with
him. Yeah. I love this on Valentine’s Day because, um, there’s a lot of people out there that are single that may be thinking what you, and I thought at one point I teach somebody to complete.
No, you don’t complete yourself. Right, and by the way, one of the best ways they can complete themself. How about that? For, for a thing, it’s to go learn a bunch of economy.
Yes. And you know, we’re not doing speed dating anymore because we did it one year and actually two steamy relationships came out of that.
However, I feel like it was too much pressure in the interaction to have that undertone of romance to it. And so what we’re doing instead is on Friday night, kicking off the weekend, we do something called Speed Friendship. And actually Brad Barrett, the nicest man in the world, co-hosts it with me. So annoying because he’s everybody’s friend.
And, um, he co-hosts it with me. And so we have this process, it’s kind of formalizing, it’s like. It’s speed networking, like way less professional though. And so you end the evening, the activity with 14 new people that now you know, that you may feel more comfortable with going up to afterwards. And so many people in my post event survey last year was the first year we did this, said that that was their favorite time of the weekend.
And usually like the people that they met there became their friends over the course of the next two days. That’s fabulous. So it is a really nice way to start and if your soulmate is at economy, you’re going to collide with them. Just trust that. And if you marry them, I will crash your wedding. And I’ll also offer to officiate if you’re looking for, I think I could be good at that, you know.
Um, but yeah, don’t, you don’t need speed dating to find your soulmate. You need to know yourself. You need to put yourself out into the world and trust that you will collide with
them. And just bring the best You work on the best You absolutely Dyna Marium, where can we get our tickets to economy? ’cause they’re going fast.
We are recording this on, well, we’re launching this on February 14th, about two weeks away. So they might be sold out. We are like so close to being sold out. But you can go to economy conference.com, you can buy your tickets there and you can get 10% off with the code. Stacking Benjamins, all one word.
There it is. Go do it stackers. And what’s funny is, and I know I’ve complained about this previously, I see a lot of stackers, a lot of people wearing Stacking Benjamins swag. When I’m there, I. And yet Diana has said, and I’m just gonna put it out there, nobody’s ever used our
code. Okay? One person this year, one person used your head, we
finally got one.
But come on, it’s your, it’s your what? Four of me supporting this thing and one person this year has used our code.
You know what it is, Joe? You have such a generous audience that they just wanna pay full price, so they’re not, they’re not using your
code. Let’s prove Diana wrong.
Use our
code. Diana, Miriam, thanks for
hanging out with me.
Well, thanks so much for having me. Hey, hey,
this is Tiffany
Grant from The Money Talk with Tiff podcast. And when I’m
not sprinkling business and money gyms everywhere, I’m Stacking Benjamins. Big thanks to Diane and Miriam for joining us, and we’ll, we’ll have a link to bridge across forever and to the uh, Hoffman Method on our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com.
Hey, time for one stacker that thought they better call Saul. See hi and OG and Paul and Doug in this case. This is the segment where we take a listener call who’s wondering, man, maybe you guys can help me with a financial issue we have. If you need to better call Saul. It’s stacky Benjamins dot com slash voicemail.
Today, it was Dave who decided he needed to call us. Dave, what’s happening man? Hey guys.
I’m curious. What do you use for long-term stock market returns?
I have seen 4%, 6%, 8%. There’s even a guy that says 12% over the long term.
The s and p returns
about 11. Do you use different numbers for clients depending on their aggressiveness?
Conservativeness? Do you use different numbers for yourself, for friends and family?
I’m curious also,
what kind of rebuttals do you use when someone says, oh, the stock market only returns 5%, or whatever imaginary
number they
put in. Thanks.
Did Dave try to figure out how to finish the call? Yeah, um, I think that’s it.
Checked all the boxes. I’ve said all the words. Dave, thanks so much for the call. Paul, neither you nor, uh, Doug nor I have clients, but when you’re thinking about returns that you use, what kind of a return do you use in your plan? Well,
traditionally like 7%, but, uh, my new advisors promised 37% based on the SMA that we’re gonna, they’re gonna sell all the covered calls that you’re gonna do.
The name Sam Bankman free came up in their strategy. Yeah. I’m not sure how they’re gonna do it, but I just pay them and let them do the magic.
There’s a, there’s a Madoff on the board of directors of your company.
What could go wrong? A Jimmy Buffett song. Madoff. Madoff with all the money. Yeah, that his lyrics.
It’s pretty good. I thought I No, really a, it was a great play on words and a Yeah. And a song he is talking about. Um. I, it’ll come to me, but We’ll, maybe we’ll find it for the back porch.
I didn’t know, I didn’t know Madoff ever made a Buffett’s
song. No. I had Buffet, a Madoff song the other way
around.
That’s what I meant. He made it into, I’m sorry,
Madoff’s in prison. Like wasted away again
in Margarita, put his flip flops on in, in JLo Bill. Yeah. Here’s what I, okay.
You know that there’s this whole, all these Jimmy Buffet retirement homes, right? Like Mar, they’re called Margaritaville. Do you know what Jimmy Buffet, how he explained Margaritaville when he was asked back in the seventies what it was, he said, it’s the lonely place at the bottom of a Quavo bottle.
That’s how he described what Margaritaville was. Yes. And now people are moving there to drink their, their retirement away. Yeah. And stroll beaches that are strewn with dangerous canned lids. Right. They.
Anyway. Sounds like paradise. What? I don’t get your point. And I could have a cheeseburger in that paradise.
Doug. You could. You could, I could. I did hear Paul, a comedian talk about recently how Margaritaville’s a real place now. You know, like back then too. It was kind of, it was kind of this place we could imagine maybe not a great place, but even worse now that it’s a chain restaurant across the MM-Hmm, that’s right.
Across the United
States.
That’s right. Uh, OG what return do you suggest that uh, Dave uses?
So I just whip out my handy Dandy matrix book that has all the returns.
Oh, thank God. He said matrix book
of all the asset classes from all time. And uh, we can see here, this is the s and PI dunno, can’t see it. It’s really tiny.
It says the s and p average is 10.1 over the last, uh, roughly a hundred years. I think that the real answer here is I. You have to be careful with return assumptions that are either too high or too low. Because if you put 10 in there, which is the historical number over the last, you know, roughly a hundred years and the future gives you 9.8, you’re not gonna hit your goal.
And if you put four in there and you get nine, you’re gonna be saving way too much or waiting way too long, or all these other things that are gonna delay your financial independence also. So I think it’s more realistic to be somewhere in that seven to 10% range and model out different scenarios along the way.
And then have a, a process for checking in every so often, maybe every couple, three years to say, well, what am I really doing based on my plan? My plan was seven, I’m getting five. Now, is that because my investment allocation’s a little bit more conservative? Is it because I market timed and got wrong? Is it because some asset class that I have isn’t performing the way I anticipated?
I need to make some changes? It’s important to have a number in mind and then benchmark yourself against your plan. And if for 10 years your plan in seven and you’re getting six, you better change the plan to six. Otherwise, Paul said earlier, 1% is a lot of money over a long period of time. Millions of dollars compounded.
It can work in the other direction too. You know, if you go from nine to 10, yeah, you have millions more dollars over 30 years, but if you go from 10 to nine, you have millions less, and that is a far worse thing. So whatever the number you pick, benchmark yourself against what your plan is. Go am I, am I attaining what I think I should be doing for my plan?
And then you can adjust your savings rate, your financial dependence, timeframe, goal, withdrawal rates, all that sort of stuff.
This is why I like beginning Dave, with what you need to do. You know, start off with how much money do I need to save and what rate of return does that mean that I’m gonna need to get on that money?
Then that’s when I look at risk, uh, because then I think OG then instead of starting off with one of these, I don’t know, silly risk tolerance quizzes. People take when they get a new job, they begin with, oh, here’s what I need, and then they look at investments historically that have done that and they can go, yeah, no thank you.
Yep. Can’t do that. Like, you know, because to your point, if I use the four or five number and, and I’m comfortable with the rollercoaster, that’s the stock market. I’m wasting my time saving too much money and not experiencing as much joy today as I could. But to your point on the other side, you know, you already went through that, but I think this is exactly why I don’t begin with my assumption.
I begin with, I. Based on the amount I can save, what return do I need to reach the goal? Yeah.
Because from a planning standpoint, I mean, if you sat down, and I’ll give you a great example of this. I was using chat GBT to kind of just screw around a couple of weeks ago, and I, I think we talked about this on the show maybe three or four weeks ago, and I said, okay, here’s my net worth.
How much money do I have to save every year to be a billionaire by age 90? And it was like, you need to save 1.9 million a year. And I’m like, or a month or some astronomical number. And I was like, okay, well that’s not gonna happen day day, but I’m gonna use the power a time. What if I lived to be 110? I get myself 20 more years to get there.
And it went, yeah, you’re good. You don’t need to save anymore. The power of compounding that extra 20 years on the backend is so much more powerful. Sometimes the adjustment factor isn’t saving more money or getting a better return. It’s just giving yourself another five years in terms of working or in terms of saving.
Because that really has a profound impact in a really profound way. That’s a really dumb way to say
that. You’re gonna be the sugar daddy at the nursing home. You’re gonna, you’re gonna have so
much cash. Now I’m living to be 140, so I’ve like kind of in my prime at one 10 is kind of how I’m feeling. But I think, Joe, you said it the best.
You have to, from a planning standpoint, figure out what you have to get. Because you can’t say like, oh, I’ll just save a million dollars a year then ha ha ha. It’s like, well, you don’t make a million dollars in order to save. Like that’s not a realistic Oh yeah. You know, plan. You know, so how much can I save?
What’s my budget? All that sort of stuff. Now what are the investments that reach the goal that I need? And if that number is my money needs to grow at 13% a year, those investments don’t exist in real life. So you have to change something else. Now, savings or time.
I think, Dave, to your second question, what do you do to friends is say the market’s only done five.
Yeah, I think you just do what you just did og. Hold up the real number.
It is what it is. Yeah, yeah. But still, none of this matters in the future, right? It’s like, yeah, that’s what it did in 1974, but what is it gonna do in 2025? Nobody knows.
Over long periods of time. I think there is a, uh, case to be made for something in the 8, 9, 10 range.
When you look at the, the amount of debt the average company has. So companies have to be able to pay the, they have to be able to pay their debt. And then beyond the debt, then they also have to make a return for shareholders. Or shareholders are gonna bail on the company, right? They’re gonna go, this isn’t worth even having the company.
Why do we own this company if it never makes any money? Mm-Hmm. So there’s like an acceptable return over and above the debt. So if you look at the average debt is maybe at a four or 5% rate, and then the average acceptable appreciation rate that a, uh, investor will have maybe is another four or five. I think that’s why we look at eight to 10 is specifically for those reasons.
Right. But, but, and to, to think about what has to happen for us to get something as low as five, like just going through the building blocks of how you come up with five, that means the economy’s screwed. Yeah,
for long periods of time, Ray Dalio’s got a great 30 minute video that you can get on his website or it’s on YouTube or on the app, his principal’s app that kind of explain how, why this never ending gravy train will pretty much keep on going.
It’s also the thesis of why he thinks that eventually it does stop, but you borrow money, you reinvest it, you pay that money back, you borrow more money, you reinvest it. You know, that’s basically this kind of ongoing cycle of capital creation. But yeah, from a mathematics standpoint, Joe, if you look at it of from the perspective of I can put my money in US treasuries, which are the basis for the safest investments in the world, you can put your money in treasuries and get four or five.
If I’m gonna go buy a stock, I better get something north of five, otherwise I’ll just put my money in treasuries and it better be a multiple of five. Right. It’s not, it’s, I’m, I’m not gonna take 5.2 for all of the potential of the business going out, out of business and all that other sort of stuff. It needs to be, yeah.
A bigger percent than that. Man.
You guys are smart. I, I, I should listen to your show more often.
See Paul, I just think, I think if you truly want something romantic Yeah. Today, yeah. Just sit around this show with Mrs. Inger and Oh
my God, I’m afraid I’d lose her to you guys. ’cause you know, yeah. You guys are the one, you smarter me.
Have you looked in the mirror lately? Paul? What’s that?
Do you know my wife Doug? You’ve been trolling around Atlanta, the suburbs of Atlanta.
Let’s, uh, let’s head on back, uh, to the end of the show spot. We call the back porch. Before we do that, if you’re somebody who’s here, not because you’re looking for the perfect aphrodisiac for your friend, you’re actually thinking, you know what?
I think I need better help in my corner. OG and his team are taking clients, so at stacky Benjamins dot com slash og, and that’s the link to their calendar ticket on their calendar. And talk more about maybe 5% being wrong and maybe that 12% guy being a little wrong as well. I love the
irony of it taking Joe three tries to say Aphrodisiac.
I think
there’s some,
just say money because money is the greatest aphrodisiac. That’s
time for us to walk out to the last section of the show, which we call the back porch. And Paul, you have been on the road a lot lately. I wanna ask you, we asked Lisa Curry, uh, who you referred us to, by the way. You’re welcome.
Brilliant writer. You’re welcome of. Thank you very much. But let’s ask you some of the questions like going out on stage before you go out on stage in front of an audience. Do you still dozens and dozens of people? I
was just gonna say several
people, A handful of people. Right. At every PTA meeting you perform in front of, I’m
not a comedian, but I think I’m pretty funny.
That’s
what uh, people have said that about this show. So do you get nervous before you go out on stage?
Depends. Depends. I had a show at the Hollywood Improv last year on the show was Greg Fitzsimmons, Melissa Villa, Senor Taylor Tomlinson, and a few other people. And I’m like, and you, this is a solid lineup and I want to do well.
And I, my heart rate was just racing before I went out and I went out and I had a great set but. When it’s really, you know, a place that you want to do well, you, it’s, it’s real easy to overthink it. How do you deal with hecklers? I don’t really have heckler problems. I mean, I perform in pretty reasonably run places, so I don’t get a lot of unruly people.
It’s generally people that wanna, with all the crowd work videos that are on. Social media now, a lot of what’s happening is that crowds start to think that they’re part of the show. And so they’re like, talk to us. And it’s like, it, it’s more of people talking back to you than it is heckling. And so that’s, and you just kind of go, now, I know you were hot in high school, but you’re not part of the show.
You know, this isn’t, this isn’t where you have a voice. This is where I have a voice. And so you just have to sort of navigate around
people who, this is the same conversation we have with Doug, right? Doug every week pipe down, bro. We’re like, this is where, this is where Joe and I talk and you just, you’re just there.
We’ll let you know
when it’s done. Well, his favorite line is Doug. The adults are talking
now. Oh, I haven’t said that in a while, but that’s
a good one. That’s painful. It actually hurts me when you say that
it, that that is mean. That’s very, very mean.
You even said that to anybody in the audience though, have you, Paul?
I.
Adults are talking. I haven’t said anything. The, the adults are talking. I haven’t said that, but now you’re going. No, I’ve said that. I mean, look, you know the, it’s, I have said that the line about, I know you were hot in high school because a lot of times it’s that person who’s always felt entitled to participate where they don’t belong.
And so that’s one of the ways you can shut it down.
What’s up with, by the way, all the crowdwork videos on Instagram and TikTok lately? ’cause it seems like from comedians. 80% of what I see right now is just, I’m talking to the crowd. Two
reasons. Number one, the algorithm seems to like it and the most important gatekeeper in comedy and any art form today isn’t, isn’t uh, somebody at, at a talent agency, it’s the algorithm.
And so you give the algorithm what it wants. Number two, crowd work is renewable and it doesn’t burn material. So you don’t have to worry about putting all your jokes online ’cause it’s this suppo, this supposedly organic thing. But it’s changing comedies because people are doing more and more crowd work ’cause they wanna generate more and more clips.
More clips, generate more views, more views, more followers, et cetera, et cetera.
Paul, uh, fly me to your show. We can stage some crowd work. I’ll be the guy in the, in the audience. Plant me with a couple of comments. Where
do you, is it public? Does the Stacking Benjamin verse know where you live?
Occasionally.
We have let out that I live deep in the woods of Northern Michigan. Ah,
oh wow. Yeah. I was actually just where the, where the
authorities like to
keep
me. Yes. And then he commutes to work in Texarkana. Texarkana.
Uh, I, I was in Austin last month. Nothing’s planned for Michigan anytime soon, but looking for excuses to go to Northern Michigan during the summer ’cause it’s beautiful.
That’s true
also for the, uh, everything in Michigan. Nothing is planned road work. Iation growth,
the state of Michigan, I think has ever heard of planning when it comes to that type of, that type of planning.
If Michigan gets through this election year without a revolution, I’ll go,
oh my goodness. That’s a whole different podcast.
Yes. Welcome to the, uh, we got Sidetrack podcast. Uh, you are going to be, by the way, in some amazing place. You’re at Cobbs Comedy Club at San Francisco on the 22nd Zanies in Nashville on the 28th and April 19th to 20th, uh, DC Comedy Loft. You’re in Denver on April. May 3rd and fourth. May 3rd and fourth, thank you.
And in, uh, Kerry, North Carolina at the Kerry Theater. I love Kerry North Carolina. Uh, five 17, by the way, we were thinking about moving to c true story back in 2001, 2002, right in the middle of the tech wreck. If I had bought a house in c in 2002, I think I’d be a bajillionaire. I think it’d be a trillionaire, a Joe Zillionaire, coulda,
woulda, shoulda.
Gotta avoid that. Gotta avoid that. That’s, don’t take his example listeners live with what you, the decisions you’ve made, and be happy with them.
Don’t shit all over yourself.
Joe, thank you in Texarkana. You guys are so uplifting. It’s fantastic. Paul. Thanks for joining us, man.
Thanks for having me. I love you guys.
Happy Valentine’s Day. I wish we could all get together and wrestle. It’s, I don’t, sorry, did I say that out loud? Oh my God. I’m just trying to talk about love. I’ll wear my shirt. I’ll wear a
shirt. Doug, what should we have learned today? Let’s get outta this.
Well, Joe, here’s what’s stacked up on our to-do list today.
First, take some advice from Diana Merriam looking for great relationships. Instead of trying to change the people around you, begin looking inside. You can’t change other people, but you certainly can focus on our outlook and world. Second, take some advice from today’s headline, your advisor. It’s not about fancy, it’s about results No matter where you get them.
If you have an advisor, meet with them to revisit your process and outcomes. If you aren’t sure, there’s a great to-do for you, but what’s the biggest to-Do, do not suggest to Joe’s mom that she’d probably be alone on Valentine’s Day if it weren’t for you? Oh God. She does not like to be vulnerable and give credit to men for being romantic, at least.
That’s the way I took it. Yeah.
Thanks to Diana Miriam for joining us today. You can find tickets for Econo Me from our link@econome.com and use code Stacking Benjamins all one word for 10% off. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Please use it. Thanks also to Paul Allinger for joining us today.
You can find his podcast Crazy Money wherever you are listening right now. Also, check out Paul’s comedy shows on February 22nd at Cobbs Comedy Club in San Francisco, February 28th at Zanies in Nashville. Aren’t they all called Zanies? Uh, April 19th and 20th at the DC Comedy Loft, May 3rd and fourth at the Denver Comedy Lounge and May 17th at the C Theater in C North Carolina.
This show is the Property of SP podcasts, LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Sulci High. Our producer is Karen Rein. This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast. With help from me, Joe Kate Yakin, Karen Rein, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are. Of course you do, but you’ll never know if you don’t. Check out our YouTube version of the show Engineered by Tina Eichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast.
Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude Stacey Doe and Julia Garib are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.
So say hello. When you see us posting online. To join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement. For more interactive fun, join us on Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday for our Instagram lives. Kate Yakin and Joe host those weekly. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time Back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Hey, have you noticed that the world has changed,
that the news is all bad? Well, I think it’s time for a song about that up on the east side of Man Ha, there’s still, still Dancing with the Star while over in Subprime City, it’s getting ugly in the logo box. Watching the news only gives me the blues.
There’s too much going wrong. It takes the likes of me to hit the reboot key and ride a high speed
drinking
zone. Millionaires losing everything. Hey, welcome to the other side of life. There goes the yacht, there goes the rolls, but
you get to keep
your wife. And don’t forget the auto makers swimming upstream like a trout.
They let the hit the fan and then they made a plan. We got a lot to drink and buy. There’s the press oil, the spoils. Here’s your for the big. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. We got a a lot to drink about
now. Madoff Madoff with all the
money and his clients are down to
skunk weed.
Repeat after me. It’s so easy to see. We’re only talking simple greed. And those Somalian pirates
are counting all their gold while Bush and Cheney ain’t around.
And all the good lookers seem to be Russian hookers from Key West to London and town with the oil F—ing
bam.
All the gooders.
I’m glad we made it to the Russian hookers
Russian.
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