As 2024 winds down, we’re taking a look back at the year that was—its challenges, its surprises, and the financial lessons we’ve all had to learn (sometimes the hard way). Whether you’re strategizing for big goals in 2025, making sense of unpredictable markets, or just trying to stay one step ahead of inflation, this episode has you covered.
We’ve assembled a powerhouse panel of financial thinkers—OG, Paula Pant, and Jesse Cramer—to break it all down. Together, they tackle everything from the unpredictable influence of AI on markets and investing to the surprising resilience of real estate in the face of rising interest rates. Plus, they explore the year’s most intriguing (and occasionally jaw-dropping) headlines, like the impact of significant economic shifts and even the infamous United Healthcare CEO murder.
Why You’ll Want to Tune In:
- Discover how 2024’s biggest events, including the AI revolution and shifting inflation trends, impact your wallet.
- Learn why patience and adaptability are critical tools for navigating market volatility.
- Get actionable strategies for tackling real-life financial challenges, like managing interest rates and planning for 2025.
Episode Highlights:
- Reflecting on the big financial lessons of 2024: From AI in market behavior to Bitcoin’s latest chapter.
- How the crypto craze evolved this year—and what it means for the future.
- The ongoing unpredictability of investing and how to stay grounded.
- Surprising lessons from corporate America’s headlines, including shocking events like the United Healthcare CEO murder.
- Inflation, real estate, and housing market realities: What it all means for your plans in 2025.
- How AI is reshaping everyday life, job markets, and even podcasting.
Our Panel’s Key Takeaways:
OG shares portfolio management strategies to help you ride out market uncertainty.
Paula Pant unpacks real estate trends and the importance of designing a life you love.
Jesse Cramer dives into how behavioral finance plays into today’s fast-changing landscape.
Looking Ahead:
As we close out another exciting year of The Stacking Benjamins Show, we want to thank you, our loyal Stackers, for joining us on this journey. In 2025, we’re bringing even more fresh takes, insightful interviews, and, of course, the best money advice disguised as good conversation.
What’s Coming in 2025:
We’ll dive into the latest financial trends, explore groundbreaking stories, and keep helping you make smarter money moves while keeping it entertaining. Stick with us as we continue stacking those Benjamins—and maybe even have a little fun along the way.
Thank you for being part of the Stacking Benjamins community. Here’s to another year of learning, laughing, and leveling up your financial life!
Watch On Our YouTube Channel:
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Topic: Lessons from 2024
During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:
- Inflation trends in 2024 and their impact on everyday expenses
- Rising interest rates and their effect on the housing market
- Strategies for homebuyers and sellers in a high-rate environment
- The shifting landscape of retirement planning
- Social Security changes and implications for retirees
- Lessons learned from market volatility in 2024
- The importance of patience in financial decision-making
- Delaying Social Security withdrawals: pros and cons
- Real estate trends and opportunities heading into 2025
- Managing portfolios during economic uncertainty
- Lessons from the baby boomer retirement wave
- Practical strategies for achieving financial goals in 2025
- Turning financial headlines into actionable steps
- Year-end financial planning tips
- Real-life examples of navigating tough financial decisions
- Preparing for potential economic changes in the new year
- The importance of long-term thinking in personal finance
- Reflections on financial wins and challenges from 2024
- Building resilience in your financial plan
- Insights and advice from OG, Paula Pant, and Jesse Cramer
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
Jesse Cramer
Another thanks to Jesse Cramerfor joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Jesse on his show, The Best Interest at The Best Interest – Complex Personal Finance Made Easy Podcast Series – Apple Podcasts.
Learn how you can work with Jesse by visiting The Best Interest – Invest in Knowledge.
Paula Pant
Check Out Paula’s site and amazing podcast: AffordAnything.com
Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything
OG
For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.
Join Us on Monday!
Join us on Monday as we wrap up 2024 with the first of five past episodes for Greatest Hits Week!
Miss our last show? Check it out here: Eight Strategies to Conquer Holiday Budget Overload (SB1617).
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] bit: Here Santa Claus. How have you been? Did you have a nice hammer [00:00:09] Doug: Live from the basement of the YouTube headquarters. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. [00:00:25] I am Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor,, Doug and I can’t believe it, but 2024 is coming to a close, which brings up two questions. One. How come you’re not independently wealthy yet? And B, how did the events of 2024 affect your money game? What should we have learned to share their wisdom? We welcome a panel of guests, including the woman who believes firmly that you can afford anything. [00:00:49] Paula Pants, and the guy who thinks you should get the best interest. Jesse Kramer. And of course, the man helping you stack Benjamin’s og. And now a guy who’s like that nerd from accounting, you can’t seem to shake at the company Christmas party. It’s Joe Saw Sea. Hi, [00:01:14] Joe: there’s Stackers. That’s a new opening I have never heard before. One that’s suspiciously different than the one we practiced earlier. But I still may identify as that guy. Welcome to the Stacky Benjamin Show. I am that nerd from accounting, Joe Saul Sea. Hi, and sit back and relax because we’re going to have an hour of financial fun. [00:01:38] Let’s meet the team of people that are gonna talk about all the big events of 2024. First of all, the guy across card table from you, Mr. OG is here. You had a, I would say a successful 2024, my friend. Can you call me later? I’m eating a granola bar. Okay. Enough from him and the woman in, uh, in New York City who’s not eating a granola bar. [00:01:59] Paula Pant is here. You had a successful 2024. [00:02:02] Paula: I had a great 2024, but I, uh, currently have a, a spot of confusion. I. Doug, your numbering system went from one to B, number one, and then number B did, did anybody else notice? I [00:02:14] Doug: get those confused. It’s very hard to figure out, am I using letters now or numbers? [00:02:19] You just blew mind thinking. That’s not, those aren’t in sequence. [00:02:22] Paula: I just, I’ve been like trying to put the puzzle pieces together ever since I heard it. I don’t know. I don’t know how to square the circle. [00:02:29] Doug: Lucky I didn’t use Roman s almost like the journalist in me [00:02:32] Joe: wants to know why that occurred and the man in Rochester, New York, where it’s been snowing since August 22nd. [00:02:43] Jesse Kramer’s here from the Best Interest Podcast. How are you man? [00:02:46] Jesse: Hello, stackers? Uh, I’m good, Joe. Thank you. It was, it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit today. Wow. The snow is all melted and, uh, to bring these jokes. That’s [00:02:56] Joe: not on brand. [00:02:57] Jesse: It’s not on brand. It’s not, it’s not. But it’s, we’ll, we’ll take it. I think I will say it’s, it’s unseasonably warm. [00:03:03] It’s unreasonably warm, it’s a little off-put. Warm as well. But uh, yeah, we’ll see if we get a white Christmas or not. [00:03:09] Joe: Speaking of great years, you guys had a great year. ’cause you went from a family two to a family of three. [00:03:14] Jesse: That is correct. We had a big highlight here. We are recording on December, what, 10th. [00:03:20] And, uh, our daughter turned six months old yesterday. So a big half birthday. Got her her half birthday hat. She had a, a cucumber to celebrate. That was yesterday’s new food. Cucumber. [00:03:29] Joe: I should still celebrate my six months. Joe is 56 and six months today. It’d be so great. Hey, [00:03:35] Doug: my new food, our gummies. [00:03:41] Remember back when diapers were cute? [00:03:45] Joe: Um, headed back there and they’re not so cute. We’ve got a great show today. We’re gonna talk about 2024 because I think for all of us, it, it was a very good year, but it wasn’t a great year for everybody. There were some. Some low lights. There were some highlights, and hopefully we’re gonna hit a lot of those. [00:04:00] But before we hit any of those, we’ve got some sponsors who have made sure that this is free and we can keep, keep it on, keep it on through the holiday season and for the rest of the year. So sit back, relax for just a moment, and then og Paula and Jesse are gonna dive into our top lessons from the events of 2024. [00:04:28] Alright. Uh, are you done with the granola bar, og? [00:04:31] OG: Yeah. [00:04:31] Joe: No, [00:04:31] OG: I’m good. Yep. Appreciate it. Fantastic. Got, need a little sustenance? Got a little, I need a little carb loading. [00:04:36] Joe: Well, let’s start with you then, my friend, uh, from the events of 2024. What’s the top thing on your list we probably should have learned from Top Event? [00:04:45] OG: Oh man. Um, um, a big broad brush stroke. Shockingly simple one, uh, you can’t predict the future. And you can try, but you are not gonna be good at it. And so did you just take out [00:04:57] Joe: every event of 2024 in one [00:04:59] OG: stroke? There it is. One stroke and scene. [00:05:04] Joe: Shortest episode ever. Doug, what should we have learned today? [00:05:07] OG: Well, what I was gonna say, Joe, is what I mean by that is, uh, a third of the way through the year, we had an idea of how maybe the market was gonna go. You know, halfway through the year we had a pretty strong idea who was gonna be running for president. The back third of the year, that changed and we had a pretty good idea who’s gonna win. [00:05:24] Then that changed and we were pretty sure, oh, well this is what this gonna be to the market. And then that changed again. And it was like, no matter what you, you know, if, if you were guessing or flipping a coin on any of those things, there was no guarantee that what you thought was gonna be the outcome. [00:05:40] I look at it from, I actually feel good about this because it just goes to show that everything could be crazy and still have, you know, the market can still do well. Your personal situation can still do well. Hopefully that was the case for this year and there’s a lot of external circumstances, but it doesn’t, you don’t have to play the game. [00:06:00] It’s not even a game you have to play of like, who’s gonna be president or what’s the market gonna do, or what are interest, you know, like all these different things that happened. It’s out of your circle of control, so [00:06:11] Joe: don’t [00:06:12] OG: spend [00:06:12] Joe: any energy on it. We’re not gonna spend time on the election. But just going through that, just the, we thought these people were running well, and it’s funny, even before that, even before that, I was going through the events of the year just to prep for today. [00:06:25] In May, Donald Trump is convicted on all of these charges with 32 different charges. And I thought, oh dude’s done. Well that’s [00:06:34] OG: that. Yeah, that’s that dude. [00:06:35] Joe: Dude is done. And then fast forward to November, we elected him. And so talk about just a roller coaster ride in an in an election year and thinking [00:06:45] OG: about it from a money standpoint. [00:06:46] ’cause we’re a money show. A lot of anxiety around outcomes and a lot of anxiety around, well if this person wins, or if this person wins, or you know, like whatever. Setting the politics aside, people are really stressed about, you know, what it meant to your money and it doesn’t matter. It’s not even a, like, there’s reasons to care about political environment that you’re in, but one of the reasons doesn’t have to be, you know, what’s gonna happen to the stock market because there’s been, you know, whatever, however many presidents, 40 some odd presidents, right. [00:07:17] And the economy’s continued to do well over. Good presidents and bad presidents, you know what I mean? Like spend energy on the things that have outcomes that you can control. And when it doesn’t have a, something that you can control, I, I just, I believe so strongly in not having any energy around that. [00:07:36] ’cause it just, it kills you. [00:07:38] Joe: Well, and let’s put this much closer to home. Paula, on the Afford Anything Show, I’d finally had enough. And for all the people out there that had said, I’m just gonna buy one fund, the Total Stock Market Index and chill, I. Went away from being nice and said, I think it’s stupid if you have more than a hundred thousand dollars and you’re doing this. [00:07:59] And we blew up our little portion of the internet. Mm-hmm. But what’s interesting is that’s in response to this, what people I saw this year a lot, Paula, was people going, why would I invest in international? I’m getting rid of all my international, why would invest in small companies, small companies suck. [00:08:14] Why would I invest in those? To OGs point, we can’t predict where the market’s going. Paula. [00:08:19] Paula: Yeah, exactly. I heard a lot of that, especially at the beginning of the year when Nvidia was this runaway hit. The magnificent seven was, you know, like all of these gains were accruing to large cap. And so you started hearing people say, why would I ever own anything other than us large cap? [00:08:37] Clearly that’s the only asset class that’s worthy of owning da da. Uh, which is funny because like a few years ago everybody was saying the same thing about small cap. Right? And this actually ties in 2006. They’re not making any more land. Paula. Yeah, exactly. I’m just gonna load up on real estate. This actually ties in perfectly with the asset that I was going to bring up as one of the things that I learned from 2024. [00:09:01] One of the things we can all learn in 2024 is just take a look at Bitcoin, take a look at the headline space, okay. Regard. I know it’s a polarizing topic and we won’t go down that rabbit hole right now of whether you think cryptocurrency is a quote unquote good or quote unquote bad investment. But regardless of your opinions on it, just take a look at its salience. [00:09:23] Take a look at the, um, the number of times it was mentioned, it, the headlines of mainstream media prior to November, prior to the big runup versus post-November when an asset is. Kind of bumping along and not doing very well. Nobody talks about it and it’s when an asset is absolutely knocking it outta the park, that’s when all of a sudden everybody pays attention again. [00:09:49] And so the way that people felt about large cap stocks at the beginning of the year when Nvidia was running away is the way that people feel now about Bitcoin. Like everyone’s just chasing returns. And so I think one of the lessons from 2024 is you really see kind of chasing returns amplified. You see some very extreme examples of it. [00:10:10] So learn from that, don’t chase returns. And, and the cousin to that is also don’t feel FOMO about the fact that you didn’t buy Nvidia or didn’t buy Bitcoin. Like don’t chase returns slash don’t feel FOMO about, you know, and have that FOMO level regret. [00:10:29] Joe: Boy, I love this. We, we talk about the election. We go right into crypto. [00:10:33] Jesse, let’s talk about crypto for a second. Let’s stop there. Mm-hmm. Because we had a lot of crypto news. Like I remember Bitcoin hitting 20,000 and thinking, oh my God, this is so overvalued. Then I remember hitting 40,000 thinking, oh my God, this is so overvalued. It hit a hundred thousand just what, a week and a half ago. [00:10:49] OG: Mm-hmm. [00:10:50] Joe: What do you think about crypto now, like into 2025? What can we learn from the crypto craze? Is it quote too late to get in, or I should get in? I mean, where are you at with the crypto game? [00:11:00] Jesse: I have no idea how to answer that. It’s such a hard question to, to answer, but I could explain. I think part of the reason why Joe is, ’cause I could make a pretty sound reasonable, logical argument on both sides of that question. [00:11:13] On the one hand, I could say, where exactly is the intrinsic value in Bitcoin coming from? Again? ’cause as far as I’m concerned, you could buy a Bitcoin today. A year from now, you just have one Bitcoin. And it’s kind of ironic that Bitcoin’s here to replace the dollar, and the only way we have to measure it is by measuring its value in US dollars. [00:11:31] So I, I, I don’t know. And so, you know, it’s kinda like a lump of gold. You buy a lump of gold, it sits there on your desk. What do you have a year from now? It’s the same lump of gold. So there’s that argument to me against it. But then at the same time, you say to yourself, well, there’s some intrinsic value in, in the blockchain and the security that it provides. [00:11:48] And I understand some of that. I won’t pretend to understand all of it. And it’s being so adopted by at this point. I mean, a lot of the price is being driven by institutional investing that you have to say to yourself, well, if there’s that much money in a single asset class all over planet Earth. Is it gonna be able to, like, just, how would it just disappear? [00:12:07] How will it go away? Won’t this trend continue into the future? Because just more and more people are, are piling into it. So I, I don’t know how to answer your question, Joe, but those are the, a couple different sides of the argument that I hold simultaneously inside my head. [00:12:21] Joe: Yeah. ’cause on the one side, I’m, I’m totally with you. [00:12:23] I’m like this, okay, what do I do with it? Wh where’s it going? I got no idea. But I’ve been making that argument forever while I sit on the sidelines and watch other people. Which goes back to Paula. Your point about the fomo, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, I’m sitting here, I never get fomo and I’m like, what did I do? [00:12:38] Yeah. And in fact, in fact, my spouse, Cheryl even said at one point, because my brother-in-law has been a fanboy of crypto for a long time. Like he is a use case guy, right? He’s not this guy like, get in because I’m gonna get rich. He’s like, get in, because I think this is a piece of the future. So he bought a long time ago, he has made a killing obviously, on this stuff. [00:12:57] I remember making fun of him in 2017, at the holidays 2017. I was making fun of him. He can clearly make fun of me today for doing nothing there, man. I just, what do you do with it? But how do [00:13:10] OG: you, outta curiosity for you guys or for anybody who’s listening, how do you not go back to the moment that you knew about Bitcoin or Nvidia as an example and go, I seriously didn’t put a thousand bucks in this crap at a dollar. [00:13:29] Like what was I doing? Why did I skip that? Because then you do the math, right? You go, well, if I would’ve bought this when it was 25 cents per whatever unit. Then I would have, you know, slightly under 2 billion today. You know, like, how do you not like, wanna have a screen pillow, right? Because you’re like that that’ll never happen again. [00:13:52] Right? You’re like, well I had my shot, like I had my shot to change the family tree. All I had to do was have a little bit of foresight. [00:13:59] Joe: Wait, we can use screen pillows for that too. At this point. Every time Bitcoin goes up, I yell my safe word every single time. [00:14:06] Paula: Yeah. Paula. Well, but we easily, three years from now could be sitting here having the same conversation about Ethereum, about Solana, about gold, about, hold on. [00:14:15] I’m ready to use down cattle futures. Which [00:14:17] OG: ones am I supposed to be buying? Paula, and how much do I put in about [00:14:20] Paula: timber? [00:14:22] Joe: I mean, we never know. Well, and let’s talk about all those other coins. Mm-hmm. Because Paula, you know, I mean, you’ve had crypto experts on, we’ve had crypto experts on, Jesse, you’ve talked about crypto. [00:14:31] You know, I thought Ethereum was a better use case, [00:14:34] OG: right? I thought so. Too. Ere too, I thought [00:14:35] Joe: was definitely a better use. So I loaded up on Ethereum for a while by loaded up, I mean, I put two grand in it, hoo. Like, put next to nothing in, in terms of my portfolio in it. That’s a lot of money I recognize for some people. [00:14:47] But for me, I was like, okay, let’s just dabble a little bit. It went nowhere for a year, and I just sold it off. I’m like, I, I just don’t get it. I don’t care. And yet it’s Bitcoin that ends up being the winner. Can we pivot from that? Because on Monday, Paul and Jesse, you, you weren’t here, but we did the latest thing. [00:15:04] Let’s talk about the other coin. Did 2024, the Tua Girls coin? Hmm. We had this with NFTs, right? NFT scams going on. Bunch of people get Rich. Just a few people. That was a couple years ago. We had Sam Bateman Freed. Now we got the Hawk Tua Girls Coin. Jesse, what do you, yeah, what do you think about that? Is there a lesson there? [00:15:24] Jesse: I just had the Hawk Tua chart pulled up on my computer here. Well, ’cause when Josh asked that question, when OGS that question about how do you sit there and not kind of pull your own hair out, thinking to yourself, I could have thrown a thousand dollars at Nvidia when it iPod, or I could have thrown a thousand dollars at Bitcoin when I first heard about it in 2017. [00:15:42] And one of the. The reminders, and we have to remind ourselves of this idea of survivorship bias. There are so many other things out there that you could have thrown a thousand dollars at that currently would be worth zero. [00:15:52] OG: Mm-hmm. [00:15:53] Jesse: Yeah. The [00:15:54] OG: one I did would be worth 2 billion. So, [00:15:56] Jesse: and right, and that’s, that’s, that’s part of the human condition that you’re gonna have to combat OG is that middle voice in your head with [00:16:02] OG: that For the rest of my life. [00:16:04] Jesse: Yeah. I mean, something that makes me feel okay is the idea of like, yeah, you, you missed that one in 1000 investment and yet, and you dodged the 999 outright frauds. So on that, do you feel okay with that? I, I feel okay with that, but I, I honestly think that’s the way to approach that problem is, at least for me personally, is just to say like, yeah, for the rest of time I will miss out on buying the biggest stocks at their IPO. [00:16:29] ’cause I don’t buy stocks when they IPL. That’s not how I invest. And I just have to live with the fact that I am missing out on lottery cards, uh, lot of tickets because simultaneously I’m also missing out on all the IPOs that immediately lose 90% of their value. [00:16:43] Paula: Yeah. Well, I mean, I look at two examples that are both reasonably large public equities. [00:16:48] So one is Cava, which is a, a fast casual Mediterranean food chain. It’s sort of like the Chipotle of Mediterranean food, right? Since its IPO, it has absolutely skyrocketed. On the other hand, you’ve got Bumble, which is a dating app, and I don’t know what its latest numbers are, but it definitely, if you trace its history from IPO through at least most of its history, I haven’t looked at it recently. [00:17:10] It really tum. It tumbled, right? And so that’s it. Bumbled, bumbled, bumbed. Yeah. Bumbled, bumble bumbled. Yeah. It’s a pretty bumbling stock. And so you can’t throw a thousand dollars at everything for, for every cva there is a bumble. [00:17:24] Joe: Speaking of, of stocks. Let’s just pivot there for a second, Jesse. We’ll get to yours in a second. [00:17:29] I hope I’m not stepping on yours. But, uh, June 18th of this last year, Nvidia briefly surpasses Microsoft to become one of the most valuable companies in the world by market cap. This is, uh, from uh, britannica.com by the way, uh, that I’m getting this over the next six months, the largest company, crown Changes hands several times between Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple, all of which now market caps over $3 trillion. [00:17:55] Oh, gee, you can see why people want to load up on these, these tech companies, and yet if we not looking in the rear view mirror looking forward, you also, we talk about stuff that the Trump administration has said that they’re gonna do. One of the big things that we’ve heard people in the administration say, we wanna break up some of these big tech companies. [00:18:14] Could people be stepping in it by jumping in at this point? [00:18:18] OG: Well, and I think this kind of dovetails into the, you can’t predict the future because I don’t know where we are today as it relates to technology investing or technology stocks is the same as it was in March of 2000, or in March of 1990. Big difference between those two periods. [00:18:39] And the NASDAQ hit 5,000 in March of 2000, and it hit 5,000 again in, I believe, 2012 or 2013. Meanwhile had a 78% drop in the middle. And you know, like Paul, you were talking about all the rages just, just by large US tech companies and it’ll be awesome. And it’s like, well, yeah, it has been awesome. But does that mean that that awesomeness is gonna continue? [00:19:04] And is there any sort of evidence that the persistence of performance exists? I. I just don’t believe that there is, you know, the overall economy. Yes. Which is why we would say, Hey, let’s own the s and p 500. Let’s own the Russell two, the Russell three, like own one of everything basically in the entire expanse of the universe, because then it solves the IPO problem that Jesse talked about, and it solves the irrational exuberance of tech stocks. [00:19:33] You know, you, if it’s a momentum and it goes up, that’s great. And if it craters, yeah, it’s okay too, because then something else takes over. But I just don’t think that when it comes to investing in the areas that are at the peak, I don’t believe that. Even if you think, Hey, I’m okay with a little bit of a decline, I don’t know of any single person who bought the NASDAQ at 5,000 in March of 2000 and then still own those same shares in 2012. [00:20:03] Because somewhere on that rollercoaster ride, they cried Uncle. Because you can’t take a minus 78 and still go, yeah, I’m good. I put a million in, it’s down to two 20. It’ll be fine. It’ll come back. Maybe, maybe actually at two 20. You’re like, screw it. It can only go up from here. You know, if you made it to two 20, hello, you’re rivian. [00:20:24] I’m, I’m gonna be, I’m, I’m already broke. I can’t get broker. You know, so maybe that’s the case, but I just don’t know of anybody who’s done it. And my concern is if you focus on a specific sector or a specific part of the economy, or Bitcoin or Nvidia, you know, specific things, if you get caught, then you’re not gonna have the intestinal fortitude to ride it out. [00:20:45] And also know that that riding out period, you know, you look back and say, 2000, 2000 probably go, okay, cool. Let’s use today’s dollars or today’s timeframes till 2037. Okay. Think about how far away 2037 seems in your mind. Yeah, that’s the same distance as 2000 to 2012. Right. Can you confidently say that you’re gonna hold the same stuff for the next until 2037? [00:21:07] Yeah, I don’t think you can, [00:21:08] Joe: Jesse. It feels like a lot of the stuff that OG ISS talking about Paul is talking about, I mean, between who’s gonna win the election and all the stuff we talked about about crypto. Now, what I brought up with these big tech stocks, it was the year of betting, right? I mean, a lot of times when big bets either paid handsomely or you got flushed. [00:21:31] What’s interesting also at the same time is that betting on sports like the NFL this year widely went from hardly anybody betting on sports to nationwide. Man, you can bet on it in almost every state, we one of the few states you can’t, Texas, where you just open up your phone. I can bet on a coin flip of any game that I want. [00:21:52] How do we get away from this betting mentality, Jesse, and maybe get back to setting some goals and achieving them? [00:22:00] Jesse: Uh, boy, how do we get away from that betting mentality? I was just listening to, uh, one of my go-to heroes, uncle Warren Buffet last night, and one of the quotes in this particular interview had to do with, um, it had to do with the negative repercussions. [00:22:13] I’m paraphrasing here when someone can wager a small amount of money in order to obtain a large amount of money. And specifically, Buffett was talking about indexed futures, I think, or like zero day options. He was talking about options trading, basically, where someone right can make a, a really small wager. [00:22:30] And this was back in like 1984. He’s talking about these new things called index futures and how he sees them as a net negative. And it’s just so funny that here we are 40 years later probably, and they’re still not negative. They’re still on that negative. They are, but we’re talking about, you’re asking about a slightly different arena, but something pretty similar. [00:22:49] And when Warren Buffet said that, I thought of these people who do like the 14 leg parlays on a sports bet where if, if you’re not familiar with that listeners, it’s this idea that, you know, I’m gonna bet that the lions win by 21. Duh. Obviously I’m also gonna betly that Josh Allen, the quarterback for the bills scores a rushing touchdown. [00:23:05] I’m gonna bet did three that the giants miss at least one field goal. And so it’s all three of those gonna happen, you Yeah, exactly. It’s a bunch of completely independent bets that if they all hit, you know, essentially the, the bet magnifies and Right. You can bet two bucks and win a million. Did [00:23:21] OG: you see the guy who posted on Twitter at the beginning of the year? [00:23:25] He bet. I believe the number was $600. He bet. $600 on Scotty Scheffler to win the Masters, the Florida Panthers to win the Stanley Cup. Who’s the guy that won the US Open? Carlos Alcatraz or whatever. Oh, Alcaraz. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tennis, Raz, Alcaraz, whatever. Same thing. Wow. To win the US Open. And then his fourth bet was the Yankees to win the World Series. [00:23:48] Ooh. And so he posted this picture as the Yankees hit the home run to win the pennant to go into the World Series. And as you probably know, you can cash out these parlays, right? They price ’em in real time. So if the Yankees win, and this was his Twitter post, the Yankees win. I get $790,000. If I cash out today, I get 3 25 on a $600 bet. [00:24:15] What do you, of course the Yankees didn’t win on a $600 bet. So the universe was like, dude, are you crazy? Take the 3 25, you idiot. And he is like, nah, I think the Yankees gonna pull it out. Oh [00:24:27] Jesse: no. It’s funny, Joe, I, I was thinking back to a few weeks ago, a month ago, whenever it was, when the same panel, I believe we had a conversation about, well, did we talk about ETFs that own a single stock? [00:24:39] Joe: Yes. And, [00:24:40] Jesse: and maybe leveraged ETFs that own single stocks. Yes. And whether that’s good or bad for investors. And I kind of took the line of, it encourages some pretty bad behavior. It encourages some gambling like behavior and I don’t really see the positive of it. That’s my feeling on sports gambling too. [00:24:55] It’s a little curmudgeonly, but I, I don’t see the positive here for society as a whole. And so, uh, I think it creates a lot of pretty bad personal finance behavior and uh, but its proliferation here in 2024 has been huge. So I, I’m glad you brought it up ’cause I think it’s a good topic for this episode. [00:25:13] Yeah. Your [00:25:13] Joe: ability to bet I think has never been, never been easier. Paula, how do we get outta this gambler mentality when gambling league’s all around us? [00:25:22] Paula: I think. We decide in advance because, you know, you can’t, like with food, you can’t just deprive yourself of sugar 24 hours a day. I tell myself [00:25:34] Joe: this every day, right? [00:25:36] Right. I can’t deprive myself of sugar. [00:25:37] Paula: Right. 365 days a year. It’s, it’s, for most people, it’s unrealistic to say, I will never eat dessert. So you decide how you are going to moderate it. You know, you decide, um, what are the rules, what are the boundaries and parameters around which you will eat dessert, and what are its limitations? [00:25:56] And I think that you apply that to. The gambles, the small gambles that you take, right? Because there is the temptation to make the asymmetric bet. There is the temptation. You know, there’s sports gambling, there’s the bachelor or bachelorette trip to Las Vegas. There’s gambling on politics and political outcomes, which we were talking about earlier, right? [00:26:17] There’s, there’s gambling on election outcomes. There’s also gambling on buying, and I’m using kind of gambling in air quotes here, but in buying IPOs or buying into a certain extent, even individual stocks, particularly if you haven’t done a whole lot of due diligence on them, there are different levels of risk concentration and different types of bets with various profiles of expected return. [00:26:41] And it’s, I think, unrealistic to say that you’re gonna abstain from all of them. So instead you just decide the parameters like, all right, I’m gonna spend no more than I. 2% of my overall total portfolio on this, and then the other 98% I’m going to put into some more reasonable investments that have a higher expected return. [00:27:02] Joe: Yeah. I think for me, the way that, and I love all those answers guys, for me, the way I get around it is if I just start out with the goal and what investment meets the goal, then the FOMO kind of goes away that I’m like, yeah, that Bitcoin thing’s pretty cool. The Hak two girl has a coin. Really? Yeah. You know what? [00:27:18] That doesn’t help me meet my goal, so I don’t, I don’t need it. And if I do bet I’m gonna bet money that’s not for that goal. Mm-hmm. I’m gonna go ahead and hang on that $600 bet that the Yankees win. ’cause I don’t care. You know what I mean? Hey, I got a, I got a third, I don’t know, would you guys take that or not? [00:27:35] A third of a million dollars. Jesse, would you take that? Would you lock in the 300,000 or would you send it to 700? I know OG you would. You would totally stay in it. [00:27:45] OG: No way. You would’ve taken the money. Hey, you take the money and then you make another side bet. You know, with a hundred grand on. You know, the Yankees and four or something to get the same, the same odds, but you’ve cashed it in [00:27:56] Joe: just to color the bet. [00:27:57] Yeah. Jesse, how about you? Would you take it? [00:27:59] Jesse: Yeah, if, if I ever found myself in a situation where 600 turned into 300,000 and I could double or nothing, that bet I would just take the 300,000. You’d take it. The 300, [00:28:08] OG: not double or nothing. [00:28:09] Paula: Paula, how about you? I, I mean, it’s impossible to know unless you’re actually in that situation. [00:28:13] But from sitting where I am right now, I would, my mindset would flip to asset preservation. Take the 300,000. [00:28:22] OG: But the question also is, is undoubtedly he saw these numbers, you know, at different times, right? So he saw 600, he saw when Scotty Scheffler won, he probably saw, Hey, you can get outta this for 3,200 bucks right now. [00:28:35] Like, oh, well, maybe. And then when the Panthers won, like, dude, I got two of ’em. You can get outta here for 32,000. And I think we’d all say 600 to 32 thousand’s. Pretty good outcome in a four month window. Then when, uh, the prisoner guy wins, won the, won the, uh, Al Tennis Tournament, Al Alcatraz, you know, [00:28:56] Joe: so that’s, uh, probably not gonna be his new nickname. [00:29:00] We haven’t heard Jesse Kramers yet, but I’m looking at the break time. We are going to say hello to our sponsors and make this possible one more time. We will be right back with the second half of our discussion about the events of 2024. [00:29:15] bit: This is Aaron from Colorado Springs, and when I’m not teaching three boys how to patch hockey, stick holes and drywall, I’m Stacking Benjamins. [00:29:25] Joe: All right, Jesse, we got so carried away that you’re gonna get two in the second half. So what’s your first one? [00:29:31] Jesse: Well, that’s okay Joe, and actually I can only do one if that makes more sense because my first one was AI driven market behavior like the AI industry and concentrated returns in tech and also just the proliferation of of AI usage in general. [00:29:46] I mean, the way that people are using chat, GPT or image generators, or my podcast producers. Here’s one for you. As you all fellow podcasters, my podcast guys recently said like, can you read us the script? Because there might be a time when we’re editing your podcast and we need to like have you re-say a word and we’re gonna have AI recreate your voice to re-say that word just to save time. [00:30:06] That’s kind of cool and freaky. But anyway, that was my first one [00:30:10] Joe: until, until your producer has you saying all kinds of stuff that it’s like, [00:30:13] OG: grandma, it’s Jesse, I need a thousand dollars. Can you wire it to my account? My account number is this. You’re like, this doesn’t seem like a script. I would say it’s like, no, no, just read it’s weird script. [00:30:23] Just read it. Clown. [00:30:24] Jesse: Well, you, you guys are all screwed because your voices, all four of you, even you, Doug, I mean, your voices are so out there saying so many different syllables that AI is gonna be able to recreate you so easily. It’s scary. [00:30:36] Joe: All the deep fake, all the people wanna deep fake the Stacky Benjamin show. [00:30:38] There’s a ton of them. Yeah. I’ll be so happy when that happens. I know we’ve made it, [00:30:43] Jesse: but I, I can skip to my second one, Joe, ’cause I think it’s a little juicier. Well, but hold on. Let’s take the [00:30:47] Joe: AI for a second because [00:30:48] Jesse: Yep. [00:30:49] Joe: I think that if you’re out there in Benjamin Stacking land, I think this year Paula, your life did change because of ai. [00:30:56] Like, I don’t know about you. I use AI a ton more than I was using it on January 1st. [00:31:01] Paula: Absolutely a thousand percent. The other day I was like, man, how did people used to live before ai? I know it’s hard to imagine [00:31:10] Joe: and I have found one other thing, OG, is that AI hasn’t made me lazier. It hasn’t taken away the fun of the work. [00:31:17] It actually helps me, my brain think about creativity is I’m feeding it prompts. [00:31:22] OG: This is the thing with all technology, right? It’s at the end of the day, the whole purpose of it is to continually upscale the things that you’re better to do than, than the technology can do for you. I mean, back from, it’s like it was us plowing fields and then people were like, wait a second, let’s take animals, and the animals can plow the fields like, well, they’re better at it than we are. [00:31:46] And then it’s like, well, hold on a second. There’s a machine that will do it, that’s a hundred x better than the, than the animals that can do it. It didn’t mean that the farmer had. Could just sit around and not do anything. It said, well, instead of having an acre of land to farm for his family, now he could farm 10,000 acres and feed the whole town. [00:32:05] It multiplies the highest use of the people in the chain, so to speak. So yeah, I would expect you to be more efficient. And there’s some downsides to that, or some potential downsides. People think anyway, it’s like, well, it’s gonna take away jobs and whatever. It’s like, well, no, it’s gonna, it’s gonna mandate that we start using higher and better use of, of ourselves in these other things that are more productive. [00:32:27] I’m interested in the AI component of it, particularly around with my kids. There’s been a couple of situations in our kids’ school where the boys have written something and then it gets flagged as an ai. And you know, I trust my kids and I feel like they would tell me the truth if they were kind of, you know, gaming the system a little bit and they’ve been flagged incorrectly. [00:32:50] The argument from the instructors or the teachers are, well, you, you, you’re not gonna have this in the real world. And I’m like, are you freaking crazy? What do you mean you’re not gonna have this? That’s like telling a kid in math class. Well, you gotta know how to do this by, uh, by your, you know, paper and pencil. [00:33:05] You’re not gonna have calculators when you go to engineering school. It’s like, it’s, the tool is meant to improve again, like move you to a higher level and, and expand your thinking. And so I’m looking at it from the perspective of like, well, where are I believe strongly that it’s effective, but like, where are the downsides and how are people gonna lean into the downsides that are not necessarily actually even downsides Allah? [00:33:31] Well, you, you’re not gonna have a calculator in the real world, so you gotta learn how to do calculus by hand. It’s like, well, no, I mean, I agree. You need to know how to do calculus, but doing it by hand is pretty stupid when you can do a thousand problems using a calculator instead of one problem at a time. [00:33:47] Joe: But you should know the mechanism behind the machine, [00:33:49] OG: but you should know how to think about the problem. Sure. And what we’re trying to do is to create, you know, I at least, I think anyway, we’re trying to create how to do the thinking around the solution. [00:33:59] Joe: I wanna go into the other side of this though, because you very quickly said, people are talking about losing jobs. [00:34:04] I wanna talk about the other side of, I wanna talk about losing jobs. I wanna stop there, Jesse. Do you think in 2025 and 2026 we gonna see people lose their jobs ’cause of ai? [00:34:13] Jesse: At least some people? Yeah, but I, going back to Josh’s OGs point back in, you know, 1830, a hell of a lot of farm hands lost their jobs. [00:34:22] When better plow technology came around and other jobs were created. And I think that’s this term, creative destruction. The creative destruction of the economy is that innovation comes about. And it does lead to some industries or some jobs or some businesses going out of business because they’ve been innovated away. [00:34:40] Some people lose their jobs accordingly, but often that means that the new technology, whatever new that comes in, helps create new jobs or create new opportunities for employment. And, uh, it’s a net benefit for the economy at least so far. That’s the way the economy’s played out over the last few hundred years. [00:34:57] Well, [00:34:57] Joe: no, I tend to agree with you, but I do think that, uh, you know, you used an analogy of farm hands and then we get better plows or better technology there. I was thinking around the early 19 hundreds and right, all the gas lamps and the people that went around and lit the lamps and then we came up with, uh, light bulbs instead. [00:35:14] But Paula, I do think this is a touchstone time. Like there are gonna be people that lose their jobs and man, if you’re somebody who’s in the crosshairs, if you’re one of those farm hands to use Jesse’s, uh, analogy or the people in the gas lamp industry, I think you gotta kind of be awake and ready. That change is coming. [00:35:32] Paula: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree with Jesse. There were plenty of typewriter manufacturers that lost their jobs. Plenty of cassette tape makers that lost their jobs. Um, it’s also come back, cassette tapes are making a comeback, [00:35:46] Joe: but as long as there’s pencils, there will be cassette tapes. You gotta be sold to get that. [00:35:49] Anyway. [00:35:50] Paula: I think with ai, I think there are two fundamental differences. One is that the, the progress is exponential rather than linear. The second is that the jobs, many of the jobs that are being lost. Are the ones that had a high barrier to entry and required many, many years of training to be able to get, so it isn’t, you know, in history, many of the jobs that have been lost by new technologies have often been jobs that have required, we’ll say, less training than that of a software developer, right? [00:36:23] And so now you have these, these jobs that people have spent, uh, an enormous amount of time training for. And so the training burden, the retraining burden, feels like a much higher burden. But that being said, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people from the jobs be, that are being eliminated need to retrain in some completely new and different field. [00:36:43] It may just mean there’s another class of occupations that don’t exist yet that are adjacent to what they have already trained in, that require more human to human. Um, like the [00:36:59] Joe: people working the robots. Yeah, exactly. If you’re just being taken over by the robot, then you’re the person working the robot. [00:37:05] Yeah, precisely. I find that really interesting. But Jesse, we’ll stick with you. You said you had a more salacious one. I’m always interested in salacious. [00:37:12] Jesse: Yeah. So I know this is the topic de jour in a lot of the headlines, but I really do think that this United Healthcare, CEO, Brian Thompson murder is a major story beyond just the, the human aspect of it. [00:37:28] I think it’s a major story in our investing world because it’s a story about corporate America and corporate leadership and governance, and it’s related to the stock market in that way. It’s a story about corporate profits and how companies earn their money, how those companies interact with everyday citizens. [00:37:44] And I, I would bet most people listening to this podcast right now, whether they realize it or not, own United Healthcare, whether you have a total market index fund, an s and p 500 fund target date fund. You own United Healthcare. And so that, I think that’s kind of interesting and it’s bringing things into focus. [00:38:00] I also just think it’s such an interesting story. ’cause most of the opinions I’ve been reading online and I was just talking to someone about this, maybe I’m stuck in the wrong echo chamber, so I’ll start with that. But the opinion I’ve been reading over and over that does kind of bogle my mind. People are saying like, yeah, it is murder, but don’t you see that United Healthcare and therefore the CEO are committing a lot of crimes too. [00:38:19] And don’t, don’t you think he’s guilty of something, something serious? And to me that’s a, a wild opinion. It does just [00:38:25] Joe: blow me away. Mm-hmm. The lookalike contest they had in Bryan Park, I was like, what? Who would go to that? Like that was just [00:38:31] Jesse: horrible. Yeah. To me, it opened my eyes to the way that other people are thinking about this, uh, murder in a way that much different than the way I thought about it. [00:38:40] It opened my eyes to some extent, to the way younger people are a little nihilism that I think some younger people view the world and view our society through. And it also just, again, kind of bringing it back a little bit more to the money topics is this idea that. Whether it’s individual people moving forward, thinking about what corporations do, individual people thinking about the way their money is invested. [00:39:01] Is it corporate boards and corporate CEOs thinking about what their corporations do to turn profits? This is a very interesting moment, I think, and, uh, I don’t know. I have to take some of my thoughts and make ’em a little more concrete and I plan on doing so in the near future, but to me, this is a, a very interesting thing that we’ll probably learn and, and see some long-term repercussions from. [00:39:22] Joe: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I heard a pundit on one social media platform a few days ago that I agreed with Jesse, which was I. If you believe that, you know, healthcare in America is messed up, number one. And it, if you believe that United Healthcare is not the best company when it comes to claims experience and, and denying too many claims, this still is murder. [00:39:43] Everybody has the right to their day in a court of law. Right? [00:39:47] Jesse: Right. [00:39:47] Joe: Mm-hmm. And to just go out and go, yeah, I don’t like it. I’m taking ’em out, is [00:39:50] Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. [00:39:52] Joe: And that reaction also blew my mind. But are you gonna see og? Do you think we’re gonna see PR on company’s behalf then? I mean, you gonna see the UnitedHealthcare PR machine start working about, Hey, we’re not the bad guy. [00:40:04] OG: I don’t know. I don’t particularly have any significant interest in talking about this. Honestly, I think it’s really sad because I, I think it was a pretty disturbed individual who did a really jacked up thing and did it to a guy who, you know, was doing what he thought was best. And that doesn’t mean that it was the best, but. [00:40:28] I don’t know anything about the CEOI. I assume that he probably was a family guy and I’m sure he had a family in some way, shape or form. And I mean, no different than any other sort of brazenly awful attack anywhere by anything. I mean, so, yeah, I don’t, yeah, it’s, I don’t feel like talking about it. It’s too sad. [00:40:49] Paula: I think there are two stories. You know, Jesse was talking about how when you unpack this, there are a lot of different stories that we can pull out of it. And two of the stories that I see, one is that there’s sort of a, a microcosm of some broader themes in our time. One is a story of a lack of faith in institutions that drove the murderer to think that he had to take justice into his own hands because he felt as though. [00:41:20] He couldn’t pursue justice through established institutions and through established processes. So I think that’s one of the stories that’s sort of a, a microcosm of, of the zeitgeist. And I think the other story is Karl Marx wrote about this ideology of the oppressor and the oppressed. And within that ideology, there’s an oppressor class and there’s an oppressed class. [00:41:46] And if you belong to the oppressed class, then you can to some extent do whatever you, and I don’t wanna put words in in Marxist’s mouth, you know, but you can sort of do whatever you want in order to declare your rights over over your oppressors. Hmm. That’s the reason that some people think that it is justified to have street protests in which they rampantly destroy property. [00:42:15] Including property that is owned by struggling small business owners. But they say, well, we’ve been really oppressed for a very long time, so our protests don’t have to be peaceful. And property destruction is justified because of everything that we have suffered. Right? It’s that core philosophy of the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. [00:42:36] And the oppressed have carte blanche to do whatever they want. Uh, which obviously I vehemently disagree with vehemently, vehemently disagree with. But I think that there are a lot of people in society who disagree with me. Mm-hmm. And who feel that way. [00:42:54] Joe: Yeah. It’s, I think there’s gonna be more to come on that front, sadly. [00:42:58] Let’s go to, um, I’m looking at the time we got, uh, two more og uh, what’s next on your list? [00:43:05] OG: Uh, I’m going to talk about inflation still mattering. There was obviously a lot of talk about it a year ago, 18 months ago. I bonds. Everybody loved those for a while when they were paying 10%. But you know, inflation seems to have slowed its rate of growth. [00:43:22] And I think the terminology there is really, really important because people say inflation is down. No it’s not. Inflation is always up. That’s the definition of inflation. It’s just the speed at which it’s ifl is down compared to previous periods of time. And maybe in some areas that’s become flat perhaps. [00:43:41] But the reality of inflation is such, and we got a little glimpse of it a couple years ago, you know, when it was going really crazy, is that this is gonna have an impact on your portfolio and on your retirement income and your distribution planning well into your retirement age. We got a short term blip of holy crap, it costs a lot of money to buy eggs all of a sudden. [00:44:03] And so we got to experience the realization of what 3, 4, 5 years of inflation looks like in one fell swoop. Now do that three or four times throughout your retirement and recognize that under normal circumstances, without those wild swings of covid, under normal circumstances, it’s more like death by a thousand paper cuts. [00:44:24] Yeah. And the outcome is the same. You buy a gallon of milk for $5 today, and in 25 years from now, that gallon of milk will be 15 bucks. And if you don’t have an income that increases with inflation, you’re gonna be in a world of hurt. And so you got to experience, I’m using milk as an example. Eggs would probably be a better one. [00:44:42] Eggs were $3 and then they became seven. And people were like, what the F? Well, the reason it freaked ’em out was because your income didn’t rise commensurately with that price change. Right. That’s why it wasn’t the fact that they were seven seven’s just a number. It’s the fact that my income stayed here and this thing went up more than my income did. [00:45:00] Now, extrapolate that out over your retirement lifetime, your retire at 60 and go from 60 to 90 or 60 to 85. This is gonna happen again. Only it’s gonna happen a lot slower. And so as you think about your financial independence, how this matters is, as you think about your financial independence, remember we’ve talked about this a million times and I still get questions about it. [00:45:22] You don’t have to be conservative on your 65th birthday just ’cause that’s the day you’re retiring. You still need to have money that’s growing with inflation or outpacing inflation. You need to have 10 year money and 12 year money and 15 year money, and 25 year money because you’re gonna still need those assets to be producing growth when you’re 85. [00:45:40] So even though inflation’s changed and it’s a little bit slower, the rate of inflation’s slower, I think inflation is still an important topic. [00:45:47] Joe: I find this interesting, Jesse, what OGs talking about, because you know, last year on our list, everybody was talking about inflation, about how inflation had been this silent thing that nobody really cared about, and all of a sudden it’s the number one thing that everybody cares about. [00:46:01] Maybe, I guess what OGs saying, maybe it was a blessing in disguise that hey, now we’re all pretty damned aware of inflation and how that might hit us. [00:46:09] Jesse: Right in that we had such a long period of pretty tame inflation. Now you guys lived through and probably have some memories of, what was it, the seventies? [00:46:18] Oh, eighties. Eighties. Yes. Sorry. So there, there’s been really high inflation before. And uh, it, it’s funny, this is a weird analogy to make, but I remember hearing someone during Covid talking about like, there’s no law of nature that says that another pandemic couldn’t spawn and kick off tomorrow. No. Like it just as far as virology goes. [00:46:39] I know, I know. But it’s, it’s kind of similar where it’s like, yeah, inflation, it’s, it’s not something that you can necessarily like keep down forever or, here’s something that I’ve been having some conversations about recently in the light of President Trump getting elected again, is if some of these policies that could potentially. [00:46:56] I wanna say like loosen or some kind of a favorable business policies, or whether it’s like lower tax rates or just lower interest rates in general, or whatever it may be, some of these stimulative policies that might be coming forward in the forthcoming months. Inflation might come back. It totally might come back. [00:47:13] And that statement can be true as OG said, throughout future years, throughout someone’s retirement. And I think it serves us well to be aware of that. [00:47:21] Joe: I just think totally being aware of it is a great thing. ’cause it was surprising how people just kind of went to sleep on it and then like, wait, what? [00:47:28] Huh Paula, you’ve got the last one. What’s, uh, one more event from 2024 we should have learned from? [00:47:34] Paula: Well, uh, so mine actually relates to housing. [00:47:37] Joe: Whoa. [00:47:37] Paula: And yeah. Yeah. We’re, we’re, we’re really shifting the focus here and going to real estate. And it is that even in an era of high interest rates. Basically the broader lesson is just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean that it will be true. [00:47:59] And what I mean by that is that for years and years and years and years, I’ve heard so many people say, well, housing prices have to come down. They just have to, they’re too high. Housing feels too expensive, it’s out of reach. And once interest rates go up, won’t prices come down? And for many, many years I’ve said, no, that’s not what’s going to happen. [00:48:22] And I’ve tried to show them data, uh, you know, and I’ve demonstrated, look, there’s actually, historically there is a slight positive correlation between interest rates rising and home prices rising. So it is not the case that when interest prices rise, home prices fall. Actually, it’s the opposite. When interest rates rise, home prices also rise. [00:48:42] Historically speaking, I said that ad nauseum prior to when interest rates went up. Nobody believed me because everybody wanted to. I shouldn’t say nobody, but you know, people pushed, now let’s go with nobody, [00:48:54] Joe: not one person. And the entire unit. Everybody’s like, Paula Pants, what’s she talking about? [00:48:59] Paula: Yeah. [00:48:59] Yeah. People really, really pushed back on the idea. People kept supporting this assumption that when interest rates rose, that means home prices would fall. Even though the data did not support that, people really wanted to believe it. They wanted to believe it because homes felt unaffordable and they couldn’t imagine what was going to come down the pipeline. [00:49:25] You know, when interest rates rose and homes would feel even more unaffordable. And sure enough, what happened in 2024 is it followed the exact same historical pattern that we’ve seen for decades, which is. That slight positive correlation between interest rates and home prices. Generally speaking, when interest rates rise, home prices also rise ta. [00:49:49] That’s what’s happened in the past and that’s what happened in 2024 as well. [00:49:53] Joe: We still have a very tight supply, OG of housing for people. It seems like getting that money together for your first down payment, let’s say you’re out there in stacker land, you’re trying to put together your first down payment. [00:50:05] In a world where it’s tougher every year, man, do you try to pull the trigger quicker and put less money down or do you hang on longer? [00:50:13] OG: Well, I don’t know that there’s a right answer here. I suspect that is probably not great to do the 3% down. You know, if you can avoid it and maybe get closer to five or 10. [00:50:22] But I think this also goes to the conversation around, um, need versus want and timeframes. I remember buying our first home under the guise of God’s not making any more land, so we better get out in this development now because. They’re probably not gonna do any more developments in this city, ever for the rest of my life. [00:50:42] So I better buy this lot now. Then the market promptly went down and we lost half of our value in our house 12 months after we bought it, which was really awesome. Mm. The feeling of now, or how important it is, is very, very, very real of like, I, you know, I’m X number of years old, I’ve been doing X thing. I, I need to do this thing, right? [00:51:03] I need to have this house. I’m starting a family. We need a bigger lot. We did, you know, and it feels very constrained, but I can also look at it from the perspective of the past 25 years looking backward and going, wow, I still have a lot of tomorrows, like there’s a long runway between now and when I’m gonna hang up the shingles forever. [00:51:26] And it wasn’t that important, you know, would it have mattered one extra year to save money, to have a little bit bigger down payment? Would it have mattered to do a little bit more intelligently around the house per, I feel like when we bought our house, no kidding. In Novi, I feel like if I would’ve had four more months, I would’ve been able to see the crest of the hill and gone finally, maybe we ought to wait, and then we would’ve waited for it to crater and been like, sweet. [00:51:49] Good thing we waited, but I didn’t because we had that strong pull as a young person of like, I need to make it, I need to demonstrate that like, you know, I’m successful or whatever that was. And I’m just trying to grasp at words, but, but this also kind of ties into, you know, my real firm belief that there’s always enough time I. [00:52:07] When people feel like there’s the compression of that and you’re like, you know, oh my God, I’m 45 and I haven’t done anything, I feel da, da, da. You’re more susceptible to doing the the wrong thing than just compounding doing the right thing. All you need is just to do the right thing and just the time will work itself out. [00:52:25] When you’re 45, you feel like 55 is forever away, but looking at you two guys, if I asked you how far 45 is from 55, you’d be like, dude, it’s a blink. When you get to 55, you’ll look back and go, that was like yesterday, man. You know, I have a lot of experience, but that felt like yesterday. So you have more time than you think when it comes to this stuff. [00:52:47] And I feel like if we’re just okay with going a little slower in these decisions, then I think we have a little bit better outcomes. You know? Instead of putting 3% down, put five instead of five, put 10. Even if it means you gotta wait an extra year. It’s gonna be [00:53:03] Joe: okay. I think that I’m running outta time thing. [00:53:05] Takes us full circle back to that gambling mentality that we talked about, right? Yeah. When I feel like I’m running outta time, I’m like, you know what? That’s when I start betting on which crypto is gonna go next. Oh, the Tua woman has a point, it’s a story about the guy [00:53:17] OG: who put all his money in the thing. [00:53:19] ’cause he retired, got laid off, only had 800 k, gets diagnosed with some health issues and I’m 60. I don’t have any time I need to, like you know. No, man, you’re good. Just, just hang out for a little bit. [00:53:31] Joe: It’ll be all right. There were two more that we didn’t talk about, but I think her big events. I think that, you know, when you live in Asheville, North Carolina and there’s a hurricane, like you’re like, I’m good, I’m fine. [00:53:42] I think that was a big. Big lesson on, well, oh gee. I guess back to your point that we don’t know when things are gonna happen. Right? We just, stuff comes at us outta the blue. Yeah. I [00:53:50] OG: mean, tomorrow’s not promised to me. I saw this thing the other day on a message board that Ivan, it kind of resonated with me only because, well, you’ll see it in a second. [00:53:58] They were talking about the concept is tomorrow isn’t promised to everybody. And the author was like, there’s a probably a bunch of people on this message board that have piles of wine at their house, like waiting for the, the special occasion to crack this, you know, these bottles of wine. Like, I’ll wait until, and he is like, there’s a really good chance you might not get to all of ’em. [00:54:18] Even if you went like, even a moderately important day. I should have a nice bottle of wine. Like if you’ve been collecting wine for a while, I love how [00:54:25] Joe: OG brings it back to drink all your wine today. [00:54:28] OG: Well, just, you don’t need to save it. Just start enjoying it basically. Right. Just, yeah, it’s okay. It’s okay. [00:54:36] ’cause [00:54:36] Joe: tomorrow’s not [00:54:36] OG: promised everybody. [00:54:37] Joe: I think that is one. Another one was Pink. Had a major US tour this year. Beyonce had a major tour this year. Yet, if you want to talk about anything that happened with that stuff, it was the Taylor Swift Domination year. All I heard about all year long was Taylor Swift. [00:54:57] Just between the ERAS tour, the fact that she won her fourth record, fourth Grammy, like I think there’s a business class around just the Taylor Swift world that, um, we could spend probably a whole show talking about or even more. Because that’s a masterclass, man. There’s so many more events. You know what, uh, how about world insecurity? [00:55:20] I mean, Syria, the stuff in Syria that just happened, all these events that popped up around just a crazy, crazy year. 2024 was, well, let’s talk about something else crazy. What all of you are doing the rest of your, your year. We, we only have one more live show for 2024 og and then we say goodbye. That’ll be on Monday. [00:55:42] What do you got going on this week? You got a birthday? [00:55:45] OG: Hmm, indeed. Uh, watching football, man, I, I wasn’t too sure how I felt about the playoff situation. I feel like they got the right teams talking about college football, but I’m excited that there’s really three games on Saturday and they’re all banger games. [00:55:58] The downside is, is that if you look at the bowl schedule on the back end of it, yeah, they all kind of suck because all the good teams are being used up in this, uh, playoffs situation sucked into this thing. [00:56:08] Joe: Yeah. And I feel like for being the number one team in the land, Oregon got the short end of the stick there, man. [00:56:13] I don’t know. I mean, they gotta buy. That’s pretty good. Yeah. But they still have a lot of strength on that side of the schedule [00:56:19] OG: compared to the number two team, or number three team, or number 14. There’s no clear path. There’s no easy path. I think Penn State has [00:56:27] Joe: an easier go at it. So they gotta play SMU at home. [00:56:31] Oregon’s playing the winner of what, two teams? Ohio State and Tennessee. I don’t, I don’t wanna face either one of those, but I get to face SMU Ohio State’s really scary. Says the University of Michigan guy. And then after that then Penn State plays Boise State, don’t get me wrong. Yeah. SMU and Boise State fans. [00:56:54] I will take SMU or Boise State. Oh, so [00:56:55] OG: you’re going Penn State’s winning this no matter what? We should, we should. Uh, I’m not saying that. [00:56:59] Joe: I’m just saying that if you’re the number one team in the country. How come you’re not playing the smaller universities? How come you get the winner of Ohio State and and Tennessee? [00:57:08] I don’t know. Anyway, that’s for another day. Jesse Kramer, what’s going on at the Better Interest Podcast? [00:57:14] Jesse: What is going on? Uh, we’re rounding out an all time year. We’re approaching episode 100. Crazy. I think we’re about to crazy. I know, I just [00:57:20] Joe: read that. [00:57:21] Jesse: Yeah, episode. I’m trying to think. Episode 96, I wanna say will be out next week and so we’ll have episode 100 early in 2025. [00:57:30] Should be a banger. We might go through a minor rebrand. That’s exciting. [00:57:33] Joe: You’re gonna call it the Better Interest Podcast, aren’t you? [00:57:36] Jesse: That’s on the table. Just gotta go with it on the table. I will say it’s probably on the chopping block, but at least it’s on the table. One [00:57:41] Joe: star Kramer. One star. [00:57:43] Jesse: Here’s a fun question for you. [00:57:44] Who’s more famous globally? Taylor Swift or Christiano Ronaldo. If you want that answer, you’re gonna have to go read at the best interest blog. ’cause that was a recent post ’cause there’s a pretty interesting investing lesson tied up in that question. [00:57:56] Joe: Look [00:57:56] Jesse: how I set [00:57:57] Joe: you up in inadvertently. You’re welcome. [00:57:58] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome. And that’s at the Best Interest Blog and the Best Interest podcast, Paul Lap Pant. How are you finishing out? 2024. [00:58:08] Paula: Oh, 2024. We’ve got a lot going on. So we recently aired an interview with Cody Sanchez, who talks about those main street small businesses, uh, laundromats, dry cleaning, the company’s HVAC plumbing. [00:58:22] She talks about acquiring small businesses as opposed to starting one from scratch. We also interview Paulina Pompano, who, um, has interviewed she we’re, we interview the interviewer. Basically, Paulina has, has interviewed and profiled a lot of thought leaders from a huge variety of disciplines and gleaned lessons from. [00:58:47] This big interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary set of people who, um, you know, lessons gleaned from that, that can apply to any of us or all of us. And then we have a big New Year’s Eve episode that we’re planning on the first Friday of every month, I do a monthly economic update where I talk about what’s happening in our economy and in our world. [00:59:07] The last three really October, November, December, have gone deeper than we typically go when it comes to macroeconomics, geopolitics. You know, we decided, you know, we’re going there. And so we’re gonna tie this all together in our big New Year’s Eve episode where we do our own, look back on 2024 and talk about what’s happened, and then look ahead to 2025. [00:59:33] And we do so through a, a very economic, a purely economic lens. [00:59:37] Joe: Awesome. And that’s at the Afford Anything podcast. [00:59:40] Paula: Yes. [00:59:40] Joe: Where finer economic discussions occur. Well, sounds like a great year. It’s a great way for us to round out our year here. I’m so thankful for the two of you. For Paula. For Jesse, how come we’ve been thankful for OG and for Doug? [00:59:54] How about that? We’ll get, we’ll give, give everybody the group hug. But, uh, Doug, Doug’s. Doug’s like, wow. I reject your group hug. [01:00:05] Doug: It’s [01:00:05] Joe: already awkward. Oh, come on. Bring it in, man. Bring it in. That’s gonna do it for today. We’ve got one more episode that’s gonna be live, and then next week we’ve got five of our greatest its episodes to round out the year on the Stacky Benjamin Show. [01:00:19] So, Doug, take it from here, man. What should we have learned? From our podcast about what we should have learned from the events of 2024. Here’s [01:00:28] Doug: what you should have learned on the podcast where we talked about what you should have learned over the last, should have learned years. First, take some advice from OG and remember that you can’t predict the future, whether you’re trying to predict the market or if Paul is ever gonna get another trivia question, right? [01:00:45] Be prepared to be using Paula’s $12 word of the day here. Asymmetrically surprised. We have to make that a feature in future episodes. Just every Friday. What was Paula’s $12 anyway. Second, remember what Jesse said about fomo. If you wanna have more predictable growth in your investments, you have to be okay with knowing that you might miss out on the next Nvidia. [01:01:10] But the big lesson. Don’t tell Joe’s mom. There’s no trivia today. She interpreted that as Doug doesn’t have enough to do. So now I’m wrapping presents for her neighborhood holiday party. By the way, who wraps Fruitcakes to give away to the neighbors anymore? Ma? You know, they’re just throwing these straight in the trash can, right? [01:01:30] Whoa missed me. [01:01:34] Thanks to Jesse Kramer for joining us today. You’ll find Jesse’s best interest podcast wherever you are listening to us right now. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Thanks to Paula Pant for hanging out with us today. You’ll find her fabulous podcast, afford anything wherever you listen to finer podcasts. [01:01:53] And thanks also to OG for joining us today. Looking for good financial planning. Help head to stack. What are you doing? Head toes Stacking. Benjamins blowing kisses. Got so awkward. Head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG for his calendar. This show is the property of SB podcasts LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Saul Sea High. [01:02:21] Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah, and before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. [01:02:43] 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, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
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