What if the key to a richer life isn’t about chasing the next hot stock or grinding harder — but learning to master the timeless truths of money? In this episode of The Stacking Benjamins Show, Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and Neighbor Doug pay tribute to legendary financial writer Jonathan Clements by revisiting five of his most impactful lessons. These aren’t complicated formulas or secret hacks — they’re the kind of deceptively simple ideas that change the way you think about money, work, and what truly matters.
We’ll explore why prioritizing financial stability before passion can actually lead you to a more fulfilling career, how “winning by not losing” may be the most underrated investing strategy of all time, and why patience isn’t just a virtue — it’s a tax strategy. Along the way, we’ll talk about how to strike the right balance between frugality and joy and why living your life may be the best investment you ever make. Plus, we help Stacker Kat tackle a tricky severance situation and share tips on how to put that cash to work without capsizing your financial plan.
If you’ve ever wondered how to align your money with a life you actually love, this conversation is the perfect mix of inspiration and actionable wisdom. Grab your coffee mug and settle into Mom’s basement — this is an episode you’ll come back to whenever you need a financial reset.
What You’ll Learn
- The real reason you shouldn’t chase passion too soon — and what to do instead
- How to avoid the most common (and costly) financial mistakes
- Why patience pays: how time turns taxes into opportunity
- How to balance frugality with actually living a fulfilling life
- Smart ways to use severance, high-yield savings, and investing strategies together
Points To Ponder:
Which of Jonathan Clements’ five money lessons hits closest to home for you?
Do you believe financial stability should always come before passion — or is there a time to flip that script?
Have you ever faced a tough severance decision like Stacker Kat’s? What did you do?
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our TikTok Minute
Our Headline
Doug’s Trivia
- What is the potassium-filled food that has SO MUCH potassium in it that they’re technically radioactive because of how much potassium they contain?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- Longtime Stacker Kat wrote in with a question that got the whole basement buzzing. After being laid off, she received a three-month severance and has a year’s worth of expenses tucked safely in a high-yield savings account earning 3.75%. Her side hustle currently covers about 30–50% of her bills, and she’s confident she can stretch her emergency fund to last 18–24 months if needed.
But here’s the twist—Kat’s wondering if she should move her severance into her brokerage account, which has averaged 9.2% annual returns, while using her savings for living expenses. On paper, 9.2% looks better than 3.75%, right? Kat wants to know if that simple math holds up—or if there’s more she should consider before taking the plunge.
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
Join Us Wednesday
Tune in on Wednesday when we help you invest in your community with today’s mentor… Mel Dorman. You’ve heard her TED Talk, and now she’s here to teach you real estate.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: What’s Missing From Your Financial Plan? (SB1743)
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] Joe: Know it’s gonna be an exciting week when we just hit record and uh, I’ve already finished my coffee. Like it’s gone. It’s gone. [00:00:08] OG: What makes that exciting? Right? That sounds pretty miserable to me. That sounds like the worst way to start a week ever out of coffee. No. [00:00:16] Joe: Well, that means that I’m already caffeinated way than I thought. [00:00:18] Joe: You ever get to the bottom of the, your cup and you’re like, oh crap. [00:00:21] Doug: I’m never happy when I see the bottom. No. Yeah. [00:00:23] OG: Oh, no. No. ’cause there’s always more. I [00:00:24] Joe: finish that way quicker than I thought. [00:00:26] OG: There’s always coffee in the banana stand, Joe, [00:00:29] Joe: we can’t do that og. We have a show and I’m committed to this audience. [00:00:33] Joe: We’re gonna get the show done. That’ll get more coffee, [00:00:36] aftershow: okay? [00:00:36] Joe: But for now, raise your mug. Raise your empty mug in my case, or your full mug. What the hell are you drinking about, Doug? It’s backwards. Coffee out of a can. [00:00:46] Doug: Yes. Lime flavored. Kirkland Sparkling Water coffee. Yeah, that’s what I’m drinking. [00:00:51] Joe: On behalf of the Men and Women making podcast at Mom’s Basement and the MO Wedding and women at Navy Federal Credit Union, as we do every Monday, here’s a big salute to the troops that kept us safe all weekend. [00:01:01] Joe: Thank you so much. And now it’s all head out and, uh, stack some ments together. Stack stack ‘ [00:01:09] OG: em. Stack ’em. Let’s get some Stacking going. [00:01:13] Doug: This is Hot Ray symmetrical book Stacking, just like the Philadelphia Man’s turbulence of 1947. You’re right. [00:01:21] bit: No human being would stack books [00:01:23] Doug: like [00:01:24] bit: this. Listen, [00:01:26] Doug: you smell something. [00:01:33] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s my Stacking Benjamins show. [00:01:47] Doug: I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. Last week we mourned the death of longtime personal finance. Columnist Jonathan Clements, but we can do better than that. Today we dive into five of Jonathan’s shiniest pearls of wisdom that’ll help you create a better financial plan. Plus we’ll answer a question from stacker cat with a K who thought, you know, I’d better call Saul. [00:02:12] Doug: See hi and og. Cat’s worried about her emergency fund and her investments, how should she prioritize them? And don’t you worry one little bit because of course I’m gonna rocket this show into the stars with some absolutely nuclear trivia. And now two guys who are the pumpkin spice of financial podcasting? [00:02:35] Doug: Well, one is shaped like a pumpkin and the other’s pretty spicy. It’s Joe and o ju g. I gotta be the spicy one in that one, I think. Well, I mean with the miniskirt. Yeah, I mean, you’re naturally, you’re the spicy one. Hey everybody, [00:02:53] Joe: welcome to Let’s Make It Awkward, the podcast. Super happy you’re here. We do have a great week of shows this week. [00:03:00] Joe: We have of course our great headline today and those pearls of wisdom, Doug, that you just so brilliantly mentioned. Mel dormant stopping by to talk real estate on Wednesday. How, how long has it been since we’ve discussed real estate on the show? It’s been, he’s months, two or [00:03:16] bit: three days. Yeah. Right. [00:03:19] Joe: And then, uh, our friend Sean Mullaney joins our round table on Friday, but. [00:03:25] Joe: That’s what’s coming up this week. Who’s coming to the mic right now? You heard him? He’s here ready to go. The OG is with us. How are you brother? Woo. It is super. To be back on a Monday, isn’t it? Always so excited about, uh, getting into stacker land. [00:03:43] OG: This is kind of like the middle of the chaos for me. It’s fall. [00:03:47] OG: We’re not to the holiday stuff yet where it just kinda really, and for us, you know, like the podcast stuff. Our chaos is a little different ’cause ’cause we, you know, we have to do some recordings ahead of time so we can, you know, enjoy some family time and that sort of stuff. And, and that’ll be crazy too. [00:04:01] OG: But all of this stuff right now, like, it just rolls into another week for me and it’s like, oh my God, is it Monday already? Like I have to like restart my week and yeah, it’s, uh, so [00:04:10] Joe: yep. I did see a motivational speaker this morning though. And other than me, but go ahead. Well, and you guys know this is true. [00:04:16] Joe: The guy’s like if you nail Monday. And it has been true my entire life. If you nail Monday the rest of the week, it’s like running downhill. You just got this momentum. If Monday, you’ve trouble sitting, you know what I, you want the weekend to extend. You’re like, what am I doing? You spend the morning trying to get organized and you’re having trouble getting the let out, you know, getting the rust from the weekend out like it is, man, make the Monday count. [00:04:40] Joe: So if you’re listening to this, it’s like, make [00:04:41] OG: your bed. It’s like the make your bed guy. Just make, make Monday great again, eh, no. [00:04:49] Doug: All right, I’ll keep working on it. I mean, I can make my bed in like nine seconds. I gotta do that for the whole day on Monday. That’s asking a lot, [00:04:57] OG: Joe. No, let’s the Navy Seal guy from the U2 commit. [00:04:59] OG: I understand. Understand. [00:05:00] Doug: But I mean that he’s not asking me for much when he just wants me to make my bed to like get off on the right foot. Joe’s telling me I gotta nail the whole day. [00:05:08] Joe: Oh boy. It’s, it’s gonna be trouble for Doug. Well, guess what? What we are gonna nail is this headline. Jonathan Clements. [00:05:16] Joe: A lot of people paying tribute to Jonathan Clements. We did last week, but we’re gonna do it even more today. Wonderful piece by Ron Lieber in the New York Times. We’re gonna walk through, so let’s get to that. But before that, we have some sponsors who make sure we can keep on keeping on you to pay a dime for any of this. [00:05:32] Joe: We’re gonna hear from them, and then we’re gonna dive into five pearls of wisdom from Jonathan Clemens. [00:05:45] Joe: For people who don’t know who Jonathan Clements is, he was the longtime personal finance columnist at the Wall Street Journal. I knew of Jonathan Clements. We hadn’t had him on the show yet. He’d been on the show a few times. Of course. Throughout the years, but Jonathan, before, before I knew him, he started sharing my tweets, which was really wild. [00:06:05] Joe: It was really neat. [00:06:06] OG: That’s how you knew you made it. [00:06:07] Doug: I wouldn’t have thought a man of his caliber was that desperate. Me neither. I was like, you’re follow what? He must have [00:06:12] OG: confused you. For someone else. [00:06:14] Joe: I know [00:06:14] OG: that my stuff was actually important. He, Joe s Ron [00:06:17] Joe: Lieber. The New York Times writes Jonathan Clements, wall Street Journal personal finance columnist who may have done more than nearly anyone who didn’t work at Vanguard to bring index funds to the masses. [00:06:26] Joe: Died a couple weeks ago after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. He was 62, uh, UK native with a dry wit and a sharp tongue for fools who chased stock market fads. Mr. Clements was resolved to see out his days in the wake of his diagnosis, much like he lived them before in a cheerful state of frugality. [00:06:45] Joe: Five pearls of wisdom that Ron wanted to shine a light on. I love these guys and I thought for our stackers, these can all help your financial plans so much. So let’s dive in. Number one from Jonathan Clemens. Doing the thing you’re passionate about is overrated for the young. Jonathan writes, when I talk to college students, I don’t tell them to follow their dreams. [00:07:11] Joe: Mr. Clements wrote in how to Think about money in 2016. Instead, I tell ’em to focus on making and saving money. He goes on to consider the assumption that pursuing your passions is better to do in your twenties than in your fifties. I think that’s nonsense. He wrote, in fact, I think just the opposite is true. [00:07:29] Joe: If you can get yourself in a great financial shape early. Far from a sure thing. In some economic environments, you can spend the last quarter or more of your career worrying less about money and more about happiness at work. What do you think about that, og? Yeah, [00:07:43] Doug: I Oh, okay. Fine. Go to OG first. Yeah, [00:07:46] Joe: yeah. [00:07:46] Joe: Hey, Doug. You’re starting to talk, so I’m going to pivot away from that. [00:07:49] Doug: I’m open. I’m open. Go deep. Doug, keep going. [00:07:55] OG: No. Uh, next time. No, you got it. Go ahead, Dougie. [00:07:59] Doug: Uh, yeah. I love that because the other important piece there is that your passions change and you probably don’t have a really great sense of what true is truly satisfying your soul at 20. [00:08:18] Doug: Versus 50 something. I, I just think you have a whole different perspective on life. You’re much less impulsive later in life, and I think not only will you have that financial base to work from, which will allow you to explore more options, but it may not be quite as fantastical, you know, as based in fantasy as it would’ve been in your twenties if you went off chasing windmills in your twenties. [00:08:44] Doug: So I love that notion. [00:08:47] OG: I’m thinking about this like a 20-year-old, um, ’cause I have a 19-year-old at home while he is not at home, but I can see his eyes rolling as we talk about like career choices and like, yeah, it’s not like that anymore dad though, you know, whatever. And so I get the, these old guys don’t know what they’re talking about type of thing. [00:09:05] OG: But I’ll give you some real world examples or the way that I think about it from a planning perspective, the idea that I want you to have when you’re in your twenties and thirties. And maybe even early forties. It’s all about trying to build in the potential for flexibility from 45 on. Like you said, Doug, at the end of the day, maybe the things that you are really excited about will change, but more importantly, you have to recognize that your circumstances are gonna change. [00:09:33] OG: And when you’re 25, you might not know if you’re gonna be married one day. You might not know if you’re gonna have a family one day. You might not know if you’re gonna have a health issue like Jonathan had one day, or you’re gonna have a family issue that requires. You to move back home. You know, you live in the big city and now you gotta go back to the small town to take care of mom or so you know, there’s like all sort of stuff happens that you don’t have any, this became a Hallmark movie. [00:09:57] OG: Well it is. And then you find your high school crush and turns out she’s just recently [00:10:01] Joe: divorced. Your current boyfriend or girlfriend isn’t living up to. Yeah, what you [00:10:05] OG: hoped. And then chaos happens. So you don’t know any of that and maybe none of that happens. But the idea is you want to build in the opportunity for flexibility. [00:10:13] OG: And so rather than saying like, don’t follow your passion or don’t do these things that make you happy, think about it the other side and say, I want to be able to have the flexibility to do whatever I want in my forties and fifties. And I can point to two examples of this. Recently, we have a client who. [00:10:29] OG: And has been working for some time, full career and uh, for many years has been kind of kicking around the idea of being done working. But he likes his job and recently, within the last year or so, has found something that really he finds way more exciting and interesting than work takes about as much time as work. [00:10:49] OG: What is a complete volunteer project and, and kind of a passion thing. Now we had an opportunity to chat. I don’t think he’ll mind me telling this story, but we had an opportunity to chat, uh, a couple weeks ago and all the time talking about work, you can almost see it. It was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Work, work anyway, but lemme tell you about this cool thing. [00:11:06] OG: And then we did this and then I had this, and then we’re doing that and then this. And you’re like, well, I can see the difference in the energy here. Like just go spend time on the energy thing. Well, he’s a young guy. He is not 65. He is not retirement age. So the flexibility to be able to do that and to say, Hey, I’m gonna cut down from full-time to 80% so that I can spend more energy on this other thing. [00:11:28] OG: That’s all because of the decisions in your thirties and forties. I mean, that’s where that happens. [00:11:32] Joe: Well, and some people are gonna ask with that story, og, they’re like, well, wait a minute. Why doesn’t he just go do the thing that lights him up and find a way to monetize it? Like why doesn’t he find a way to make that he is going to make money [00:11:44] OG: and not monetization possible? [00:11:46] OG: It’s all charitable and intent. [00:11:49] Joe: I think there’s a whole nother way to look at that. Another multiple time guest of the show, friend of the show, Scott Galloway. Mm-hmm. Had a feeling about this. I wanna play this clip from uh, Scott here recently talking about this idea of following your passion when you’re young. [00:12:03] bit: The less sexy in industry, the greater the return on your capital. I mean, we’re just talking about the creative industry. You have to be in the top 1%. If not the top 0.1%. Last year, 83% didn’t qualify for health insurance ’cause they didn’t make $23,000. And basically it has almost an 80% unemployment rate. [00:12:21] bit: You want to be in modeling, sports, nightclubs, hospitality, fashion, anything that sounds cool. I don’t want to crush your dreams. But if you aren’t getting bright, bright green signals, you might be in the top 10, 1.1%. Go do something that sounds much less romantic. At NYU, we invite two types of speakers. One really impressive, credentialed people or billionaires, and they always end the session with the worst advice you can give to a young person. [00:12:45] bit: Follow your passion, anyone telling you to follow. Your passion is already rich and the guy telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron or smelting. Here’s what you do when you’re young. You wanna find out what you’re good at and what you could be amazing at. And ideally in an industry that has a 90 plus percent employment rate, no kid dreams of being a tax lawyer. [00:13:02] bit: The top 10% of tax lawyers probably make over a million bucks a year. The top 1% fly private and have a much broader selection set of mates, and they deserve because they went into something that didn’t have an overabundance of human capital. Every tax lawyer is employed. [00:13:15] Doug: My favorite line in that whole thing is have a much greater selection of mates than they deserve. [00:13:20] Doug: Well, well, and you know, [00:13:22] Joe: I mean, he advocates a lot for, and, and talks about how your average person has a problem. The way that we, the way that we date today, we have big problems like trying to find a significant other. So he’s like, Hey, you wanna be rich and you want a bunch of people that wanna, wanna sleep with you. [00:13:38] Joe: Can I hang out with you? Yeah. Be a billionaire in iron ore smelting, which is boring as hell. Right, but you’re good at it and there’s a huge employment, right? [00:13:47] OG: That’s the biggest thing is find what you can be excellent and unique at and just make a crap load of money. [00:13:55] Doug: And I’ll just add one last point to this and we, I know we need to move on ’cause we have four other pearls that we need to get to, but there is often an opportunity to. [00:14:04] Doug: Find the, the intersection between the thing that you’re good at that you can earn a living at and make some money at. And the passion. My oldest and I are way, way into music. You know, we have huge, broad musical taste. We’re constantly sharing music back and forth. We go to concerts with each other. It’s just a major happy spot, you know, driving point for us. [00:14:24] Doug: And when he was in business school and focusing on finance, they had a great speaker come who was in the music industry and he called me. Right afterwards and decided, dad, I think I’m gonna change my major and go into, go into music. And it was really hard as a parent to squash that excitement that he had. [00:14:45] Doug: No, but over a but over, like, no, but over a, over a couple of discussions. I just said, what about this? What if you stick with finance, which is a hard skill that is, can be used in any industry. Get your feet stable in the finance industry and then go into music and own a record label, or be a major promoter or work for the Devil Ticket Master. [00:15:12] Doug: Um, but you can take that finance background and be in the industry you wanna be in, and then you get the best of both worlds. [00:15:20] Joe: I remember when Oscar Munoz was on the show, the former United Airlines, CEO, and he was talking about doing that very thing, Doug. He went into finance. He had a degree in engineering and he did then a business school. [00:15:35] Joe: So he ends up getting all three areas. He knows the numbers, he knows the people count and where to put people in the right places and logistics. And he knows how the system works because of his engineering background. And that’s what you need to be a good CEO. And what’s funny is that goes beyond just the degree as well. [00:15:54] Joe: It goes beyond the degree it goes into. Really diving into your career. And Bonnie Hammer, the former, uh, vice chairperson for NBC Universal was on the show on Memorial Day, and she talked to this very fact. [00:16:11] bit: Those that just basically assumed the world’s gonna be giving to them on a platter just because they went to college, got a decent degree. [00:16:17] bit: It’s not happening. It’s. Especially in this world right now, when you think about all the restructures that are going on right now, you think about AI taking over so many jobs, companies being closed, restructured, things changing around us. You can’t be that fussy and if you try different things and try out different opportunities. [00:16:38] bit: It’s just gonna help you grow and be prepared to move in a variety of different directions. [00:16:42] Joe: She talked about, Doug, I think what you were getting to, which is follow the opportunity. Don’t follow your passion. Your passion might start the journey a little bit, but you know, like Scott Galloway said, if you want to go into hospitality. [00:16:56] Joe: Ton of those people are employed or they’re not making any money. You have to look for opportunities. She was interested, like you are Doug in photography, right? But photography was going nowhere. It was far more boring than she thought it was gonna be. Setting up these ads for, for, you know, corporate accounts. [00:17:11] Joe: And then she gets this opportunity in television, and so before long, she’s working full-time in this behind the scenes role in television, making good money for the industry that 25 years ago when she was beginning is rocking, you know, not today, not rocking, but back then was rocking. So you have to be open to going where the water’s flowing. [00:17:33] Joe: But Jonathan Clements saying that back in 2016, saying that, I think, what’s that, nine years ago? [00:17:40] Doug: What? No, no it wasn’t. You did your math run. I [00:17:44] Joe: know. Isn’t that? Isn’t that horrible? It was [00:17:45] Doug: like two years ago. I know. [00:17:47] Joe: The year before last. 19, whatever. Jonathan Clement’s second one here. Winning isn’t everything, but not losing is really something. [00:17:55] Joe: So what he says here, OG, is that you don’t need to hit a home run. Everybody’s looking a home run with their money. You know, the better thing to do. Stop effing up all the little things. If you automate that makes sure the money goes to the right way. You’re not losing dollars in the process. If you reexamine your current insurance, your homeowner’s insurance, uh, once every other year, you’re going to make sure you’re not losing there. [00:18:22] Joe: If you are not panicking during the next market downturn, you’re just staying the course. The problem is, is that people get off the, gonna use that golf analogy again, even though I’m not a golfer. People get out of the fairway. They get in the bunkers of life, they get behind the trees. It’s not a golfer. [00:18:38] Doug: No argument here. You are not a golfer. Not a golfer. [00:18:42] Joe: They get in the rough patches because they tried to mix metaphor here, swing for the fences, right? And they miss boy and they end up trying to [00:18:49] OG: hit a dunk. [00:18:50] Joe: Joe’s outta control, dude. You gotta reel it back in here. And the third period, they try to slam the dunk touchdown and they get in a bunker. [00:19:01] OG: Yeah. I dunno what to do with any of that. It was good for a while. My favorite sports team. It’s crazy. I just like it when the Dodgers score a bunch of safeties. Those are really fun. I mean, there are plenty of people out there who make a, can I say buttload? Is that a accurate term of money? By being super concentrated and or being super risky in getting lucky. [00:19:25] OG: If there’s a reason why Iger has $500 million net worth, or Tim Cook does, it’s not because they diversified. It’s because they were the CEOs of very giant companies who largely did well while they were there. You know what I mean? If you would’ve told Tim Cook to diversify, you know, back in like 1998, like, yeah, you know, I know you got them this Apple stock, but we should probably put it in an index fund. [00:19:51] OG: He’d have a, you know, a 10th of the money that he does now. But for every Tim Cook, there’s a thousand or 10,000 other people who aren’t lucky don’t have the same volume of stock options who aren’t at the top. And all of this, I think, stems from the feeling that you’re behind. If you just squash that idea that I need to catch up for some reason, oh, I’m 30 and I haven’t done anything. [00:20:17] OG: I need to, I need to be aggressive because I’m a little behind. I’m 40. I haven’t done anything. I, I, you know, I need to, need to be aggressive ’cause I’m behind, or I’m 50 and I’m behind and I need to do this thing. You don’t have the flexibility to do that. You, you can’t afford to have another 10 year period where things don’t go according to plan. [00:20:37] OG: So the only rational solution is to be diversified and stay outta your own way. You know, I would add one more to that. You talked about different ways of investing. I would also add avoiding high interest credit card debt. Yeah, it is profound the amount of money that you have to make every single solitary month to pay the freaking interest bill on your credit card. [00:20:59] OG: It’s not the payment. Like people go like, well, I can afford the payment. Like, but you’re not doing anything with that. Like, it’s not like it’d be one thing if it was like, it’s a payment and I’m paying down the principle, you know, and it’s just even at 0%, like I can, I can sign off a little bit on the 0% stuff where you’re like, yeah, I’m just spreading this cashflow out over 12 months. [00:21:17] OG: Like, okay, cool. I can kind of wrap my head around that. But when it’s a 30% interest rate or 27% interest rate, and you’re like, well, I can afford that payment. The payment’s only four grand a month all in, I can afford that. It’s like, but you’re not doing anything with that. Four of that 4 3800 goes to the bank. [00:21:33] OG: You know, like you are just literally pissing that $3,800 away every single month. So it’s really trying to avoid the big mistake. Right. That’s the. Bombing outta the market when it goes down 30% and you can’t take it. So you put go in cash and you’re sitting there waiting, waiting for the market to recover. [00:21:47] OG: There’s people right now that have that did that in April. Oh, this is crazy. The tariffs, you don’t have any idea. The last time this happened was in 1970 and you know the market was chaotic for an entire decade and I’m just gonna get out and wait and they’re still waiting. [00:22:02] Joe: We spoke two weeks ago on Friday about using your 401k better. [00:22:06] Joe: We had a fantastic round table. Discussion to help people tweak their 401k choices and decisions. And, uh, Jesse Kramer dropped this little nugget about high interest credit card debt and how it might make sense. The only time he might see you skipping the match on your 401k is if you have high interest. [00:22:27] Joe: Credit card debt. I don’t know if you guys saw this, but our friend stacker David in the basement Facebook group brought this up and actually did a spreadsheet showing $20,000. In a fund earning 8% per year systematically, and a credit card at 25%. Now what you know, OG, is that you don’t get 8% systematically. [00:22:49] Joe: You might get 3% and then 12% and then whatever. So that’s gonna grow. Mm-hmm. In an uneven way. But that 25%, you’re paying off the credit card forever, but you only have half the credit card debt that you have at 8% in the market. By year number five, that credit card debt is ahead of, even though it started only 50% of the money that you had in the fund. [00:23:15] Joe: By year number five, it’s crossed over and the high interest credit card debt just killed your plan. You now, in year number five, you’ve got $29,386 in the fund. Your high interest credit card debt is at 30,517. Now, not talking about payments and there’s some stuff there, but if you just let that high interest roll, you’re, you’re, you’re dying. [00:23:37] Joe: It’s ugly. Let’s move on to number three on this, which is, uh, Jonathan wrote also famously, the tax man favors the patient. Quote, the tax code is stacked in favor of savers. Mr. Clements wrote in the Little book of Main Street Money. This is awesome. It was one of the big takeaways for me, not just in Jonathan’s writing, but also. [00:23:59] Joe: In a book that I have a love-hate relationship with called Rich Dad, poor Dad. They talk about this idea of tax savings over long periods of time and about how taxes can be such a friction, but, oh, oh gee. If you’re a saver, your money works so much more efficiently than you can, like the payroll tax. [00:24:21] Joe: There’s so many taxes on a payroll tax versus the tax that your money pays. That man having a bunch of money go to work for you every day, just lets that compounding happen much faster than if you just try to get raises at work. [00:24:34] OG: I do find it interesting. People say like, well, I’m only in the 22% tax bracket, plus the state, plus fica. [00:24:42] OG: So you’re really in the 35 ish percent, you know, 30, 32 ish maybe, depending on what state you live in. And contrasting that to somebody who says, well, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna rebalance this because then I have to pay a little bit of taxes on this. Or, I don’t wanna sell that because I’ve paid, it’s like, this is the cheapest money you can possibly pay taxes on. [00:24:59] OG: 15% straight to your point, like. Like it’s done, right? Even on retirement distributions, you just pay federal taxes on there. There’s no employment taxes, right? There’s no FICA on that as well. So yeah, investment taxes are, are the best taxes there are. And I was reading a post the other day on a finance blog, and one of the questions was, when do you start noticing the compounding? [00:25:26] OG: You know, I’m saving money, I’m investing it. Matt X dollars. I don’t remember what the author said. Maybe a hundred thousand or something. So like when do you notice that it’s kind of that snowball’s starting to work? Somebody said that for them it was around three or 400,000 because a simple 1% move in the market, which happens, you know, somewhat frequently at 400,000 is a $4,000 day. [00:25:49] OG: The person who, who responded was like, that’s more money than I make in a week. So when my money, I look and I go, golly, this thing may even, a quarter point change in a day is a thousand dollars. That’s a full on second paycheck. The market’s open 270 days a year. So if your money makes a thousand bucks a day, you know, that’s a pretty, you know, that’s $270,000. [00:26:11] OG: That’s, you know, more than most people make every single year. Obviously it’s not linear like that, but you get the idea just you have to keep on doing the systematic stuff and there is a day coming where you’ll look and you’ll go, wow, my money made more money than I put in my money. Made more money than I made my money. [00:26:30] OG: Made more money than I made for the last two years. You know, it’s like you just have to follow the process when it comes to saving and investing and let that little, teeny, tiny snowball start working on, you know, in your favor. [00:26:43] Joe: Number four on Ron Lieber’s List of pearls of Wisdom from Jonathan Clements. [00:26:51] Joe: Wanna enjoy life more? Mr. Clements wrote in From here to Financial Happiness, put down the remote. Slowly away from the television and do something where you’re a participant, not an observer. Oh gee, this isn’t just about having more money. In fact, it’s funny, the show’s called Stacking Benjamins, but really we take a wider view, right? [00:27:08] Joe: We’re looking at Benjamin’s life. Look at all the things Benjamin Franklin did, not the money that he had Stacking Benjamins. It’s truly about Stacking more life and looking back at Jonathan Clemens, you don’t know when all of a sudden, you know, the, the reaper comes, right? Shows up at your door and says it’s your turn. [00:27:23] Joe: You don’t know that. So. Stack those experiences, [00:27:27] OG: adventures, maybe. [00:27:28] Joe: Yeah. Stack those adventures. Uh, number five is, uh, no really do something four and five. Lieber’s, like no, really. Let’s put an exclamation point on this quote. There’s a reason the world’s gardens are full of benches that nobody ever sits on. [00:27:43] Joe: Mr. Clements wrote and how to think about money. We aren’t built for leisure built to relax, rather we are built to strive. This realization can be key to a happier retirement given how much we humans love the feeling we’re making some kind of progress. Retirement can be like a kind of continuation of one’s career. [00:28:00] Joe: We still need fulfilling work. You wrote, the only difference in retirement is we don’t have to worry so much about whether it comes with a paycheck. Now, og, and this goes back to 0.1 right now, that your buddy has the flexibility to do this thing that lights him up. It’s still work. But now he’s glowing and who cares if there’s not a paycheck attached? [00:28:20] Joe: It doesn’t it, it doesn’t matter. But you’re still accomplishing something. [00:28:24] OG: Yeah, and that goes back to the first point, which is all about flexibility. You know, just that came when the sun shines, try to think about the future a little bit and squirrel some away for a later time. Do it in a manner that’s repeatable and systematic and keeps you out of the ditch most of the times, and let the process do its thing for. [00:28:43] OG: Two decades and you’ll wake up and go, oh, I have all this money and this flexibility, and I can choose my own adventure from here. [00:28:50] Joe: Jonathan had a great point about this the last time he was on the show, which was. He said that you really have two choices. You can live it up in your twenties when you don’t have much money, and you can go to nice places. [00:29:02] Joe: You can spend a ton of money, but realize you’re not gonna be able to do that later. Then you’re gonna be locking down the later years of your life. There’s no free lunch for 99.9% of us. On the other side, you can be very frugal when you’re young. You can squirrel that money away. And not only OG does that give you the flexibility later on, but it also, and I love when Jonathan said this, you’re nearly as happy out camping as you are at the Four Seasons because you did camping when you were in your twenties. [00:29:35] Joe: But now you can also stay at the Four Seasons, which Jonathan said, I do a lot now, and it’s really nice. It’s super fun. But if I ever want to go back to camping, it’s different than if I partied hard in my twenties and I only did the Four Seasons. I’d be like, oh, campground, Ugh. Gross. I can’t do that. [00:29:53] Doug: Now you’re camping unwillingly, [00:29:55] Joe: right? [00:29:56] Joe: You would be right because you’d have no money to do anything else, right? Great points there, Mr. Lieber. Ron Lieber nails it. As always, we will link to Ron’s piece in the New York Times in our show notes, stacky Benjamins dot com, and of course, in our newsletter to the 2 0 1. Not only do we have a guide to Wednesday’s interview with our mentor, Mel Doman, but we also are gonna dive more into this headline. [00:30:19] Joe: As we do every week in 2 0 1 stacky Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 time for us to take a quick break for Doug’s trivia so you can be the smartest person at the virtual water cooler on your next Zoom call. Doug, how you gonna help people get smart this week? [00:30:32] Doug: I have no idea, Joe, but let’s find out. [00:30:34] Doug: Sometimes I just stumble upon stuff. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and on today’s date I learned that people discovered potassium. I mean, sure, yeah, he’d been there the whole time. But before October 6th, 1807. And some dude named Humphrey Davy. Everyone thought some foods just tasted really good. [00:30:54] Doug: They didn’t know that they contained potassium. That sounds great. I’m gonna go grab a potassium filled food right now and eat it while seeing what Joe’s written me for trivia. Okay. Uh hmm. Well that’s, yeah, that’s good. That’s, that’s a good one. Okay. Uh, there’s that question here. Here it is right here. Uh, what. [00:31:18] Doug: Is the potassium filled food that has so much potassium in it. So much potassium. That’s Oh, whoa, that they’re technically radioactive because of how much potassium they contain. [00:31:39] Doug: Oh God, og not for nothing, but am I glowing right now? [00:31:44] OG: That’s the lotion. [00:31:46] Doug: I’ll be back after I go see if everyone needs protective coverings now. Can’t be too safe around Joe’s Ma. [00:32:02] Doug: Hey there stackers. I’m former potassium lover and guy who may be a basement based Chernobyl problem. Chose mom’s neighbor, Doug. Well, either it hasn’t worked its way through my body yet, or my stomach is every bit as solid as they tell me down at the Sizzler after my third shrimp platter. But my question was this, what food was I just eating that is so potassium rich that technically it’s radioactive? [00:32:28] Doug: The answer. Of course, it’s bananas. I mean like the fruit. Not crazy. It’s bananas. And now two guys who are bananas for a good solid exchange traded fund, Joe and og. Oh, check this out guys. [00:32:47] Letters: We just got a letter. We just got a letter. We just got a letter. Wonder who it’s for. [00:32:54] Joe: Kat sent us a note and said, Hey, Joe, longtime listener, stacky Benjamins. [00:33:00] Joe: I have a question that I thought could be an interesting one to debate. So gee, ready to debate. Let’s debate. [00:33:06] OG: Doug’s a master debater. [00:33:08] Joe: I was recently laid off, so the reason I’m here and given a severance of three months, if Doug doesn’t stop debating so much, he will go blind. Go blind. Yeah. I was recently laid off, given a severance of three months. [00:33:20] Joe: Since I live frugally and I have a small side hustle, I should be able to stretch that severance. To six months. However, having seen the writing on the wall, given the industry I’m in as a downward spiral, I have one year of expenses saved in my high yield savings account, making 3.75% in interest. My thought and question is to take the chunk of money from my severance and put it my brokerage account, which averages 9.2 in growth currently, and draw from the one year of emergency savings only making 3.75. [00:33:50] Joe: Seems like simple math to me. [00:33:52] OG: Oh god. No, God, please, no, no, no, no. [00:34:00] Joe: But is there something more I should be considering before I take the plunge? If it’s valuable to the question and conversation? The current job market. My industry’s dim with most executives at my level, taking approximately 18 months to find another position. [00:34:13] Joe: However. I do have a side hustle that brings in between 30 to 50% of my needed monthly nuts. So realistically, I can likely make this one year emergency fund last 18 to 24 months provided no other emergencies happen. Also, I’m not necessarily interested in returning to my industry. It’s too unstable for my taste, and while I’m keeping my options open and applying to jobs in my current industry, I will also be devoting my fund employment time. [00:34:39] Joe: To building my side hustle a new full-time thing. So thoughts 9.2 that’s greater than 3.75. Is that all I need to consider? So I think halfway through that question, we got OGs take, but, um, og y to quote you and Michael Scott. Oh God, no. No. Oh God no. Nah. [00:34:59] OG: The reason is because of all of the things that she mentioned before. [00:35:04] OG: I dunno what the future’s gonna hold. I don’t know if I can find work. I’m pretty confident that I can do this. Why wouldn’t you want to have the continued flexibility and safety of being able to extend that and not have to go find work? Because the risk that you run in a relatively short period of time is you take that severance money, and I’m gonna say, I’m gonna say you made $10,000 a month, and so your severance check is $60,000. [00:35:29] OG: There’s a very real chance that you can take that $60,000, dump it in the market, and five months from now when you are outta cash, or eight months when you’re out of cash and you’re like, I’m gonna go back to this other account, that 60,000 is worth 40, very much can happen in that short period of time. [00:35:45] OG: Now, if you said, I’ve got 10 years on this 60,000, okay, I believe that in 10 years from now, that 60 will be worth 120 that I will sign off on, but I can’t promise it in the next 10 weeks or 10 months. And the impact is so profound in terms of how that affects you from a cashflow standpoint and from, you know, being able to extend your unemployment, you know, to be able to find the things you really wanna do or to build up the side hustle to make, get your main hustle or like you need to have that runway. [00:36:16] OG: In case everything doesn’t go exactly perfect. And the other thing that I would think about here is what exactly are you getting? Like what’s the delta? And just to make math easy, I’m gonna say it’s 4%, 9% just to, so I can do it in my head. If you put that $60,000 and you’re making 4%, that’s 2,400 bucks, right? [00:36:35] OG: So you got $2,400 sitting in the account. If instead you make 9%, so nine times 60,000 is $5,500. $5,400, right? The delta here is three grand. I get that. That’s not zero. $3,000 is not an insignificant amount of money, but what do you gain? You gain three grand of potential return, you know, four versus nine in exchange for minus 30 potentially happening. [00:37:04] OG: Where your 60 turns into 42,000, like that’s not a good trade. I wanna [00:37:08] Joe: talk specifically to our new stackers because there is a piece OG that I think you jumped right over, which are experienced stackers already know, but new stackers might be going, wait a minute, cat didn’t say anything about the market. [00:37:20] Joe: They just said 9.2 versus 3.75 and 9.2 is higher. You immediately went into, well, that means it’s in the, how do you know? That Kat’s talking about a market and the potential for loss when she says 9.2%. [00:37:39] OG: Well, because there’s nothing else that would have that. There is no savings account that pays nine. [00:37:43] OG: There’s no CD that pays. Nine. There’s no guaranteed outcome at nine. And the reason you know that is ’cause all the banks are paying three. If, if, if all the banks are paying nine, then. The stock market will be producing 20 because there still has to be that delta there, but, and I think [00:37:58] Joe: that’s the key here that you’re getting at is 9.2 carries risk [00:38:02] OG: a profound amount. [00:38:04] OG: You know, on the surface you say, well, nine is better than three, or nine is better than four. And it is, if you extrapolate it for the next 30 years, you know, if you said, well, I could put this money here for 30 years and I get nine, or I get four, like, which one’s better? You eliminate virtually all of the volatility risk ’cause it’s a 30 year time horizon, and the compounding effect of growing at nine instead of four is profound. [00:38:31] OG: But in a 12 month period, you have all the volatility risk, all the ups and downs, and you don’t get a lot of compounding benefit in that time. I understand that it’s still more money. 3000 bucks is maybe another month worth of expenses, but the trade is, I might get a minus 18. You would never go to the casino. [00:38:49] OG: You would never play a game where you said, I’m gonna give you either $3,000 or you give me 18. And any number in between there, we’re gonna just roll a dice and whatever comes up is gonna be what? It’s because you look at that, you go, the number scale doesn’t work. I’m plus three on one side and minus 18 on the other. [00:39:10] OG: There’s so much more minuses than pluses. It’s not worth it. If you take that timeframe and make it from a year to 30 years, you go, I’m gonna give you, you know, plus a hundred or plus 85. You go, well, okay, I’ll take that deal. Like, there is no downside to me ever. This has too much more, too much downside. [00:39:31] OG: So anyways, I just belabored that too much. Uh, Michael Scott said it best. I don’t, [00:39:37] Joe: well, I don’t think you belabored it too much at all because this goes back to Jonathan Clemens earlier today. We think we need to hit a home run. We think that we need the 9% where the potential outcome is so bad. If there is another emergency, CA said, if there’s not another emergency, this will be great. [00:39:56] Joe: There’s always another emergency. [00:39:57] OG: Well, and she’s right. Yeah. If, if there is no other emergency, it would be awesome. [00:40:01] Joe: Yeah. If we knew 9.2 was a straight line, which we also know it’s not, [00:40:06] OG: what’s the phrase? If hopes and butts were coconuts or something. I dunno. [00:40:10] Joe: Wow. That was back to your second grade teacher, right? [00:40:12] Joe: Somebody said that. Was that, is this a lesson Ji got in second grade? I, I wanna talk for a second about something Kat’s doing though, that’s really good, that I think a lot of stackers forget about and we gloss over this all the time, but you know, we talk about these little fundamental moves. They don’t make a lot of money. [00:40:28] Joe: They give you stability and while you have stability, you actually are getting a little bit of a return. So you said $3,000 isn’t insignificant, but there’s all that risk attached to it. Og for people that are leaving a bunch of money in their checking account or at a savings account with a major bank, the fact that CAT has a high yield savings account paying 3.75%. [00:40:53] Joe: Is fantastic. Like that is, that’s probably the optimal place for her to, well, I think that is the optimal place for her to be with this money and to add that money too. But having that high yield savings account, we forget about this advice all the time, but go get one. If you don’t have one, what are you, what are you waiting for? [00:41:09] Joe: This is free money you’re giving away. [00:41:12] OG: Correct. [00:41:15] Doug: Yes. Well, I actually was just thinking of as OG was recommending that to me, I don’t know, three, four years ago, you know, I had the standard savings account and checking account with my primary bank. He’s like, you gotta move most of that to a high yield. And initially I wasn’t comfortable with moving most of the savings to a high yield savings until two things. [00:41:40] Doug: One, the one that he recommended had great flexibility, like I could move money overnight. And he just said, what’s the biggest check you think you ever gonna have to write? Like overnight in, in less than 24 hours? It’s not as big as you think it is. I mean, you, you’re not gonna have to write a $7,000 check. [00:41:59] Doug: This afternoon ’cause something happens. If it’s a copayment, uh, you know, on your insurance for your car or something like that, or deductible, you got time on that one to transfer money from your high yield back to a more transactional system that you can write a check out of. So really, a vast majority of your savings, if not entirely. [00:42:18] Doug: All of it could be in a high yield savings account because they’re so flexible and fluid now, they didn’t use to be, I don’t think [00:42:25] Joe: it was the same thing, Doug, with Cheryl at first when we got our high yield savings account, said, I don’t think I want to do this. Yeah, feels weird. And then she did it with a little bit of money that she thought was quote, extra money and I would say within three months, almost all the money right within. [00:42:38] Joe: Right. She’s like, what did I wait so long for this now not a sponsor of the show. We have no affiliation with this company. I use Ally. Yeah. I really like it because we can use buckets inside of one one high yield savings account and I can bucket our money. So we’ve got this for the next trip fund. We got this for our home improvement fund. [00:42:56] Joe: We’re doing a big home improvement project right now. And you know what’s cool, Doug, to your point is that every other week on this project, the builder comes to us with the money he needs for the next two weeks, right? He’s like, Hey, I’ve got this that is due on today. Uh, if I can pick up a check. And Cheryl tells him every time she’s like, great, I’ll give you a check. [00:43:15] Joe: Can you hold it till Monday so she can transfer the money to Ally? This is gonna come as a big shock, Doug. Guess what the builder says every single time. Yes. Yeah, of course. Right. No problem. Yes, I will. So we hand him the check after we transfer it over to our regular bank where we can write the check out, right? [00:43:34] Joe: It’s super easy, super duper easy. I wanna address, Kat, you going into the side gig, because you know, you spend a lot of time talking about how much you may not wanna go back into this field that you were in. This idea of turning your side gig into your full-time gig, I think is a great opportunity. I love it when somebody opens up a whole different chapter of, of their life to try out the thing that they always wanted to do. [00:43:59] Joe: A book I’m reading about that right now is written by one of the creators of Doug, a coffee firm that’s up by where you are, not og, where you and I are in Texas, but up in Michigan. One of the creators of Big B Coffee. Oh, no kidding. Big B coffee, expanding all the time. Love going into Big B Coffee, by the way. [00:44:17] Joe: Now also not to sponsor the show. I would love it if Big B Coffee sponsored us ’cause I like that. But this, this guy wrote two really good books. First one is called Grind Get It Coffee Grind. But it’s about when you have a new business that you’re trying to make succeed. And I feel like as I’m reading this book, it’s all the advice I would’ve wanted to give to a new entrepreneur that if I had it to do over again, I would’ve done everything it says in this book. [00:44:42] Joe: It is so good, and it gets rid of all the horrible stuff that you see. Failed entrepreneurs preach like as an example. Everybody in a big business is great at everything about massaging the product, making the product look better, making the product feel better, taste better, whatever it is. You know what the number one job is? [00:45:02] Joe: Doug Sales. Oh yeah, number one. He goes, but in a big business, nobody’s good at sales. You got a lot of great people who can do a lot of great stuff, but the one thing you need to get comfortable with and get good at is. Sales. ’cause if you don’t have sales, you don’t live. Yeah. Period. Yeah. Full stop. [00:45:20] Doug: My mind immediately went to what I think of as an analogous mindset of Dan Gilbert when he was building up Quicken Loans. [00:45:29] Doug: It’s now the rocket companies, but as listeners may have heard, I, I worked there for a while and, uh, he said, I, I could put a lot of you smart people in a room and you could figure out how you could save. A couple thousand dollars a month on coffee to stick with that. ’cause he used that as an analogy. And we could find a cheaper supplier for our coffee. [00:45:51] Doug: But I’d rather take those same smart minds and put you in a room and figure out how we can generate more revenue, more business. Yeah. So it’s not always sales like, ’cause you may not have a sales role in your title, but there are ways you can think about generating revenue. The role you are in and even not, I mean, how, how much would a company appreciate your enthusiasm to think outside of your role and how the company could earn more money? [00:46:19] Doug: Those are almost the most [00:46:19] Joe: valuable people in any company. [00:46:20] Doug: Absolutely. [00:46:22] Joe: But if you’re the founder, you are most often, even when you have your first three or four people working for you. You are gonna be the salesperson. You’re more passionate than anyone Yeah. About it. And, and you can’t afford to delegate sales to somebody else. [00:46:35] Joe: You need that to come in. And if, you know, if I hired Doug to do it and he takes a day off to eat bananas and go nuclear, well then we’ve got a, we’ve got a problem. It’s [00:46:44] Doug: in the contract, Joe. I get to do that. [00:46:46] Joe: See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. But anyway, Kat, good luck with the business and, um, love, love, love this question. [00:46:55] Joe: Uh, if you’ve got a question for us, you know what you can call in stacky Benjamins dot com slash voicemail is the way to call us. And if you call, we’re gonna send you some swag and you see our Sweet New store, the Stacker Supply company, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash swag. What a fun store. We were looking at it together, Doug and Tina and I yesterday, [00:47:16] Doug: just right behind how great some of those, those swag items are. [00:47:20] Doug: The products are, is the writing like just go to the website just to read some of the descriptions. The team has just knocked it out of the park. There’s some really clever stuff in there. It’s so damn over the top. Yeah, it’s so over the top and I mean, that’s not us at all. We never do [00:47:36] Joe: that. No, no. It’s not on brand, but they just went their own [00:47:39] Doug: direction. [00:47:40] Joe: Just another boring. Financial podcast, [00:47:43] Doug: what’s going on in the neighborhood? Doug, before we say goodbye. Yeah. Joe, one thing I wanna make sure we point out is we’ve got another great meetup group, a Stacking Benjamins group that has started and we definitely want to A, give props out to Chris for putting that all together. [00:47:58] Doug: Yeah. [00:47:58] Joe: Chris and our buddy Cole farrier. Chris and Cole doing a great job with help from stacker. Rebecca, who actually founded this uh, group, came up with the idea and wanted to get it rolling. So it’s rolling this coming month, I think it’s like a [00:48:11] Doug: week from Tuesday. So October 14th, the Seattle group is meeting at the Poodle Dog restaurant in the bar. [00:48:21] Doug: So I’m already a fan of this group ’cause they’re just getting straight to the good stuff. Uh, seven o’clock. Specific time at the Poodle Dog restaurant in the bar. Uh, and it’s in Fife, Washington, which is down kind of Tacoma ish, gig Harbor ish. [00:48:36] Joe: On the way to Tacoma. Yeah. [00:48:37] Doug: Yeah. Right. So, uh, if you are anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, I mean, it’s so close to everything in the Pacific Northwest. [00:48:44] Doug: It’s easy to travel around. I mean, you’re in San Francisco, just Dr. San Fran, as they like to say. Just get there. Get just drive. That’s all you gotta do. Yeah. Just try. I mean, it’s like New England, right? Everything’s 20 minutes away. But anyway, if you’re anywhere in the, uh, in that area, get to the Poodle Dog restaurant seven o’clock on October 14th and go straight to the bar. [00:49:04] Joe: It’s perfect. And by the way, our Twin Cities group, so now we have two meetup groups, Seattle and Minneapolis, St. Paul. Just put in Stacking Benjamins twin cities or Stacking Benjamins Seattle, and go join those groups. We also do online activities with each of these groups, so we get everybody together. [00:49:22] Joe: Have a great time, meet like-minded people. [00:49:24] Doug: Yeah. For sure do that. But Joe, we also, before we finish our drinks here on the back porch, there’s some really big stuff happening with guides, right? Oh yeah. The guide update. [00:49:34] Joe: Every month we update these guides. So if you are somebody who gets the guides, guess what? [00:49:39] Joe: Go to your email. Make sure it’s not in your spam. If you’ve the company benefits guide, we just added professional development. A lot of companies pay for professional development, even if they don’t. We’ve got this great checklist. To try to get your boss, to send you to professional benefits, to conferences, to whatever it is. [00:49:56] Joe: I gotta use this checklist with OG every time I wanna go to FinCon or any other thing. So I thought that we’d make a checklist. On the tax guide, man, the OBBB, we keep digging into this thing and people keep coming out with, oh, here’s another creative way to use it. Here’s another way. So we dive into Trump accounts, more child tax credit changes, good stuff out of the OBB in this month guide and then in the college planning guide. [00:50:23] Joe: October 1st, the fafsa. You can finally send in your fafsa. And here’s the deal with the fafsa, that people, if you’re new to this idea of college, you may not know financial aid is first come, first serve. They don’t wait till everybody submits their stuff by X date and they compare years with everybody else. [00:50:41] Joe: They evaluate years on the merits of does it fit or not? And if it does, they give you the financial aid. They allocate it to you. So these funds do run out of money. So if you think that there’s any chance for financial, even if you don’t think there’s a chance for financial aid, you wanna fill out the fafsa. [00:50:59] Joe: October 1st was the first day that you could do that last week, so gotta get on it by the way. On Wednesday, Doug Robert Farrington from the College Investor, and I are gonna do a FAFSA 1 0 1 for people to get comfortable with this. So if you’re brand new to this FAFSA game, join us, uh, stacky Benjamins dot com slash fafsa. [00:51:18] Joe: And, uh. That’s gonna be a YouTube live event. Is Wednesday the eighth? Yep. In two days. So in two days, 8:30 PM Eastern, five 30 Pacific. And sign up, as I said, stack your Benjamins dot com slash fafsa. It’ll be about an hour long as we intro this and make it a little less scary. [00:51:38] Doug: Joe, before we’re done on the back porch, I have to say, Michelle posted perhaps the greatest dad joke of all time in the basement. [00:51:45] Doug: Uh, she said, what do you call a man who has finished digging? I [00:51:49] Joe: don’t know Doug. Doug the [00:51:51] Doug: best joke of all time. Hold [00:51:52] Joe: on a second. That thing needs a whole drum solo on that great note. Thank you. Who? Who posted that? Michelle? Michelle, nice job. Michelle. Thanks to Michelle. Thanks to everybody for lending us your ears. [00:52:03] Joe: Coming up on Wednesday, we’re back talking about real estate that we haven’t talked about in a few months. Mel dormant here. She had a amazing TEDx video that went viral with her incredible story. She’s gonna talk about helping your community and helping yourself at the same time. So wonderful story from Mel that you’ve gotta hear. [00:52:20] Joe: But the first thing you gotta hear to get outta this episode are the three things that should be on your to-do list. Now that. Our time here is done, Doug. [00:52:29] Doug: That’s right, Joe. First, take some advice from Jonathan Clements. Don’t follow your passion. Follow what you’re good at and exploit that advantage. [00:52:37] Doug: Extra points if you choose something, quote boring. Second, take a big win that Katz had, that emergency fund. Keep it in a high yield savings account. Sure it isn’t huge money, but it could pay for a few more groceries each week. But the big lesson. You know how Imagine Dragons have that song where they say they’re radioactive. [00:52:59] Doug: Who knew they were that big on bananas? Coming up on Wednesday, we’re talking real estate. It’s been months since we’ve covered that topic, and Mel Doman gave a huge moving TEDx talk about her real estate journey. Now she’s coming down to mom’s basement to chat about helping build your community and your life using something called seller financing. [00:53:22] Doug: How does it work? She’ll share on Wednesday, so don’t miss it. This show is the property of SP podcast LLC, copyright 2025, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Joe gets some 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. [00:53:50] Doug: 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. 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. [00:55:00] aftershow: Saw some weird news [00:55:01] Joe: over the weekend. Gent in the Czech Republic, they found an envelope from Czechoslovakia’s founding father. Listen to this. This is from, did it have [00:55:14] Doug: the original recipe for Czech Mix? Well, that’s the thing. [00:55:18] Joe: Uh, this is from Prague. Unknown Amus. Of the founding father of an independent cze of aki, it’s first President Toma Garri Marick. [00:55:29] Joe: I’m sure our Czech fans are gonna say, Joe, you missed on that one. Our belief to have been unearthed an envelope whose existence was unknown to living members of the family was unveiled a live broadcast, uh, two Fridays ago with president uh, Peter Pavel in attendance, speculations swld about what it may contain. [00:55:47] Joe: Guess what they decided to do? They decided that they wouldn’t. Open it for another 20 years, so they’re not going to open it for 20 years. I think we should speculate as stackers about what? What’s in that envelope. Yeah. [00:56:08] Doug: I think in 20 years this is gonna be a Geraldo Rivera moment. [00:56:12] Joe: It totally is my first choice for this one, Doug. [00:56:15] Joe: They’re gonna open it up. They’re gonna have all the nation’s TV cameras on it, and the top line’s gonna say, toilet paper. The next one’s gonna say cheese slices. And the third line’s gonna say birthday card for mom. It’s like a grocery list or something. [00:56:29] OG: Or the ink will have run out somehow and like go like, ah, I guess we can’t read it after all. [00:56:34] OG: We should have done this 20 years ago to see. [00:56:36] Doug: Did the ink all faded? Yeah. [00:56:39] Joe: What if it says like, invest everything in a Roth IRA, like this is scribbled down, but only if you don’t have an HSA. And then it says this whole public [00:56:47] OG: thing is a really terrible idea. We should go back to communism. [00:56:53] OG: Yeah, [00:56:54] Joe: that I have no idea what a Roth IRA is or an HSA, but that sounds good. Or a don’t under any circumstances. Low money to cousin Pavel [00:57:03] OG: Bitcoin, FTW [00:57:06] Joe: Bitcoin. I got this idea for a cryptocurrency. Uh, well, I guess we’ll find out in 20 years what’s going on. We’ll still be making podcasts.
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