You Don't Need to Be a Money Genius to Win (SB1809)

Live from Joe’s mom’s basement (where humility is encouraged and spreadsheets are optional), the crew tackles a deceptively simple question. If most people think they’re above average with money, what advice actually helps someone who isn’t?

Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, Doug, Jesse Cramer, and guest Whitney Hanson (Money Nerds podcast) run a thought experiment inspired by Morgan Housel’s observation that nearly everyone believes they’re financially smarter than the median. What straightforward moves keep someone from needing last minute financial Hail Marys?

The answer isn’t flashy. It’s systems.

Whitney kicks things off with a practical starting point: identify your knowledge gaps. Tools like Investor.gov quizzes can reveal blind spots, and she suggests theming your learning (one focus per month) so financial literacy doesn’t feel overwhelming.

From there, the conversation turns to controllables: cash flow, savings rate, lifestyle inflation, and career capital. Because while markets bounce around, your habits are yours.

The gang also introduces the idea of a tactile money leak audit, physically reviewing spending to spot waste that autopilot budgeting apps can miss. It’s less glamorous than crypto speculation but far more effective.

Investing gets reframed too. Instead of treating it like a mysterious Wall Street game, they suggest thinking of it as owning small pieces of companies you already know and use. Start small. Automate it. Build reps. Confidence follows action.

Insurance and estate planning round out the episode. The crew urges listeners to shop multiple advisors, understand policy details before signing, use AI to help decode fine print without blindly trusting it, and avoid overconfidence just because something sounds right.

Doug keeps things lively with trivia revealing that Johnny Carson’s 1982 DUI fine was a very specific $603, and OG once again proves suspiciously good at guessing.

What You’ll Learn:

Why most people overestimate their financial knowledge and what to do about it
How to identify and close your personal money knowledge gaps
The key financial variables you actually control
How to perform a simple money leak audit
Why small, automatic investing beats waiting for the perfect moment
How to make investing feel familiar instead of intimidating
The basics everyone should understand about insurance and estate planning
Why repetition builds financial confidence faster than theory

The Big Takeaway:

You don’t need advanced tactics. You need consistent systems. Focus on what you control. Automate the boring stuff. Learn one thing at a time. Build margin. Repeat.

Because the goal isn’t to be above average. It’s to be steady enough that you never need a desperate Hail Mary.

This Episode Is For You If:

You feel like everyone else has money figured out except you
Financial advice usually feels too complicated or assumes knowledge you don’t have
You’re tired of feeling behind and want simple systems that work
You want to build confidence through action, not just theory
You believe steady progress beats trying to be perfect

Question for You:

What was the first simple money habit that changed your trajectory? Share it in the Spotify comments or The Basement Facebook group. Your small win might be exactly what another Stacker needs to hear.

Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201

Enjoy!

Our Topic: Morgan Housel: “By definition, 50% of us are in the bottom half”

During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:

Bottom 50% mindset
Above average bias
Knowledge gap quizzes
Investor.gov tools
Monthly learning themes
IRA vs investment
401k basics
Dunning Kruger effect
Overconfidence risk
Focus on control
Savings rate
Lifestyle inflation
Career capital
Cash flow tracking
Budgeting money leaks
Transaction printout audit
Investing as ownership
Index funds explained
Automatic investing
Market ups and downs
Insurance shopping
Term life insurance
Sales tactics awareness
Policy jargon decoding
Estate planning basics

Our Contributors

A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.

Whitney Hanson

Another thanks to Whitney Hanson for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Whitney on her show, The Money Nerds at The Money Nerds – Podcast – Apple Podcasts.

Learn more about Whitney and how she can help you achieve your goals by visiting Home – Whitney Hansen | Money Coaching

Jesse Cramer

Another thanks to Jesse Cramer for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Jesse on his show, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors – The Best Interest, on Spotify.

Learn how you can work with Jesse by visiting The Best Interest – Invest in Knowledge.

OG

For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.

Doug’s Game Show Trivia

In 1982, late night host Johnny Carson was arrested for DUI. How much was his fine?

Mentioned in today’s show

Join Us on Monday!

Tune in on Monday as we kick off the latest edition of Greatest Hits Week!

Miss our last show? Check it out here: How She Eliminated a $43,000 Hospital Bill (SB1808).

Written by: Kevin Bailey

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Doug: Uh, Hey everyone. Just a reminder to tell Joe’s mom, she looks like she lost weight because I accidentally parked on the grass again.

[00:00:11] Opener: Hey guys, mics are hot. Quiet on the set.

[00:00:22] Doug: Live from the basement of the YouTube headquarters. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:00:37] Doug: I am Joe Spa’s, neighbor Duggan on today’s show. What money tips would you need if people thought you were seriously stupid with your cash? On today’s show, we’ll explore what you need to know so you’re not just relying on last minute Hail Mer miracle events to be the savior of your financial plan. But that’s not all.

[00:00:56] Doug: Of course, I’m gonna regale you with my super amazing trivia question. And now a guy who’s super amazing at making a bottle of wine disappear and talking about good money habits. It’s Joe Saw. See, hi.

[00:01:13] Joe: Hey there, stackers. I like how part of that was added in. I expected part of that. I did not expect all of that.

[00:01:21] Doug: I zied You thought I was gonna sag.

[00:01:25] Joe: How’s it going, Doug?

[00:01:26] Doug: I’m doing great. I’m, I’m, uh, I’m feeling fresh as a daisy right now.

[00:01:30] Joe: Is that a euphemism? Is that a, I mean, or Uh,

[00:01:33] Doug: yeah. I haven’t

[00:01:35] Joe: shower the opposite

[00:01:35] Doug: in six or seven days. That too. Yeah.

[00:01:37] Joe: Oh, thank goodness you’re on the other side of the basement. Way far away from me.

[00:01:42] Joe: And by the way, because, uh, I was celebrating my birthday recently, I did help make a bottle of wine disappear. I know I did. I know. Very much did. And a guy who also is as you should have is great making it a bottle of wine. Disappear across the card table from me. Mr. OGs here. How are you, man?

[00:02:00] OG: Not anymore.

[00:02:02] OG: All the party time is over. More. Yep. Party time’s over. Yep.

[00:02:05] Joe: Oh, party’s o But because you’re back at work.

[00:02:08] OG: Yep.

[00:02:08] Joe: You’re working, you’re focused, focused things are good. Focus

[00:02:11] OG: laser.

[00:02:12] Joe: Yes. What, uh, how long does this streak go for where you actually WORK? Is it like two days, three days?

[00:02:21] OG: I think. I mean, it’s gonna be a solid four days this week.

[00:02:24] Joe: Oh, man. That is good.

[00:02:27] OG: Two and a half it, I mean. Roughly,

[00:02:30] Joe: that’s not a bad place to start. And a guy who works eight days a week, Hey, in Rochester, New York, Jesse Kramer is here with us. Is it a

[00:02:37] Jesse: Beatles song? It

[00:02:38] Joe: it, it might be, oh, I just made it up. I had no idea.

[00:02:41] Jesse: Great minds think alike. Joe.

[00:02:44] Joe: Me and me and, uh, Paul and John.

[00:02:46] Joe: We all think the same. How are you, Jesse?

[00:02:48] Jesse: I’m doing well, thanks. I’m doing well. Apparently I don’t look great. I mean, that’s what Doug was telling me. Doug was telling me I look a little worse for wear.

[00:02:55] Doug: You don’t, I’m looking, I’m here keeping it real. You’ve looked better, my man.

[00:02:59] Jesse: But I feel fine. I feel fine.

[00:03:00] Joe: We are backstage ahead of time and, uh, Doug offered Jesse some money and said, I’m not sure if, if you need a little help. Uh, I’m not sure what that was all about.

[00:03:10] Doug: Well, he was holding that, that metal soup. Can Joe jingling some change? I thought maybe he could use a help.

[00:03:17] Joe: He could just, just friends, helping friends.

[00:03:19] Joe: Well, at least you don’t have to admit, Jesse, that you smell bad, which is great.

[00:03:22] Jesse: Correct. Everyone smells

[00:03:24] Joe: great

[00:03:24] Jesse: over audio.

[00:03:26] Joe: And of old man and a woman who never smells bad. Is that, is that like the worst introduction ever? Thank goodness she’s a good friend from the money nerds. Whitney Hanson’s back. How are you?

[00:03:39] Whitney: I am great. I’m better now that I know. I never smell. Thank you for that.

[00:03:43] Joe: Never smell, no. What did Moms never smell?

[00:03:48] Whitney: Yeah, I was gonna say with a 13 month old, that’s even better news for me, so I’m really great to hear that.

[00:03:54] Joe: I remember when my twins, Whitney, were that age and you, I mean, let’s be real. You smell all the time like a baby all the time.

[00:04:00] Joe: That puked on you or whatever, mud or whatever it might be. Yes, yes. How is the family by the way?

[00:04:06] Whitney: So good. She’s just growing up so fast and learning how to walk and keeping me on my toes even more than I expected, but it’s going great.

[00:04:13] Joe: That’s what we say about Doug. It’s pretty incredible how close that is our lives.

[00:04:21] Joe: Whitney, by the way, I wanna ask you in a second about the money nerds and what you got going on lately. ’cause I’ve, yeah, been been following you from afar and seeing some really cool stuff. But first, what a lot of people don’t know about Whitney Hansen is you did a joint project. We actually featured it on our old show Stacking Deeds.

[00:04:40] Joe: With Airbnb, right?

[00:04:42] Whitney: Yeah. I did a giant flower pot build. It’s a 24 foot tall, life-sized flower pot that you can sleep in. And I built that with my mom, which, so it was kind of a fun situation and it’s still going well.

[00:04:54] Joe: Isn’t that cool? That’s so cool. And on the money nerds, what’s been going on lately?

[00:04:59] Whitney: Man, we are doing all kinds of fun things.

[00:05:01] Whitney: We’ve been getting into video podcasts, so that’s been a whole new thing for me. But enjoying that. We just had a guest that’s gonna be coming on. It’s uh, Christie and Bryce from the new book, parent Like a Millionaire. So any parents listening in that want to learn how to make their kids a little bit wealthier and take permanent vacations, that’s the episode to listen to.

[00:05:20] Whitney: So it’s been a ton of fun over there.

[00:05:21] Joe: You had OG a permanent vacations. That’s what he’s, it’s like, forget the kids. Let’s just talk vacations.

[00:05:29] Whitney: Sure.

[00:05:29] Joe: It’s awesome. Well, we’ve got a great show today, everybody, because I was reading this piece by Morgan Hausel, the amazing Morgan Hausel Morgan is talking about as always some brilliant stuff.

[00:05:42] Joe: And then he just says he drops this one line that by definition, 50% of us are in the bottom half. Of course we are. And yet we all think we’re in the upper two thirds. And then I think, we think we’re in the upper two thirds. We think we’re, some of us are good at math.

[00:06:01] OG: I think we’ve figured out who’s who so far.

[00:06:04] OG: We got Joe taken care of and which half he’s in.

[00:06:06] Joe: Wow. And we think I’m at least in the 66 percentile, but uh, we think we’re in the top third. Right. Uh, uh What was that, uh, Doug Gar Garrison Keeler, who was, you know, yes. All the kids are above average and

[00:06:19] Doug: Lake will be gone.

[00:06:20] Joe: Yeah.

[00:06:20] Doug: Lake Wobegon. Exactly.

[00:06:22] Joe: Yeah. So we all think that we’re above average.

[00:06:24] Joe: And I’m like, well, wait a minute, what if we are the person who’s in the bottom half? And then I thought about some of the best money advice I ever got. It wasn’t this brilliance. I mean, I think part of the brilliance of Morgan Housel is when he says that stuff that’s right in front of you and you go, oh my did.

[00:06:39] Joe: Well that’s, you know, doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what, what that’s all about. What I wanted to do, this is the thought exercise everybody. I gave our team, let’s say that we have a friend that we know is in the bottom half, right? And we wanna help them be great financially. So it can’t be, it can’t be something that is this, you know, huge optimization strategy, mega backdoor, Roth IRA, can’t be some really technical thing.

[00:07:09] Joe: What are some of the keys to being great with money for those people that aren’t? Money savvy. All right, we’re gonna cover that today. Before we do that though, we got a couple of sponsors who help us keep on keeping on. We’re gonna hear from them. And then Whitney, og, Jesse, Doug and I, we’re gonna talk about making great financial decisions that are pretty straightforward.

[00:07:39] Joe: All right. I love this topic. Whitney, you’re the guest of honor, so let’s have you carry the show.

[00:07:46] Whitney: Come on guys, let’s go.

[00:07:49] Joe: What is a great strategy for your friend that’s maybe in the lower 50%, just when it comes to financial skills?

[00:07:57] Whitney: Okay. I love this question because I have been an adjunct professor for 10 years at Boise State.

[00:08:02] Whitney: Sweet. So I really get to see the starting point for so many students and so many people as they go into adulthood. And one of the things that I notice first is we don’t even know if we have a knowledge gap. So what I would say first and foremost is figure out where you may be falling behind due to lack of knowledge.

[00:08:20] Whitney: So for most 18 year olds, they’re not gonna know about five 20 nines. They probably don’t even care yet, but they should probably know about credit scores and budgeting. So one of the things that I like to do for most of us, is I go to investor.gov and I check out their quizzes. They are like so nerdy, so academic, I know.

[00:08:37] Whitney: But if you take a quiz, it’s gonna start to show you some of your maybe internal gaps, and then you can start to have fun with this. And I like to theme my months. If I notice that I’m maybe a little bit behind on investing or I don’t feel like I know enough, then I would say, okay, all of March is gonna be investing only.

[00:08:54] Whitney: That’s the only topic I’m learning. I’m listening to podcasts, I’m reading books, and I’m starting to apply one specific topic. And I mean, think about that. If you do that. Every other month for a solid year, you’re gonna be a little bit better than average on six different money topics. So I think that’s where I would probably tell my friend to start.

[00:09:14] Joe: Okay. Show’s over everybody. There it is. Thank you Whitney. Uh, we’ll see everybody next week as you’re talking. I’m thinking about the fact, I love this idea that we all start with different deficiencies and I started thinking about like what was something that a lot of people know that I had no idea about.

[00:09:31] Joe: And I can tell you exactly what one was. I didn’t understand the difference between an investment and an IRA. I remember when I was in college that was really tripping me up. I’m like, wait, but I can get a stock or I can get an IRA. I know what a stock is, but what’s an IRA? And it was so confusing for me and now I’m like, duh.

[00:09:54] Joe: Of course. But what are one of those areas for you, Jesse? You remember? Back in high school, college,

[00:10:00] Jesse: I, I still see it to this stage. I mean, that’s one of the most common ones is, uh, here’s a question for you, Joe. I mean, what’s smarter investing in an index fund or using my Roth, like, oh yeah, we see these questions all the time and, and you know, for those who know the difference between these two, you realize it’s kind of like saying, uh, like trying to think of another example that’s a little more mundane.

[00:10:18] Jesse: It’s like, you know, do you walk to school or do you bring your lunch? We’re kind of talking on two slightly different axes, but I still remember when I was starting to learn these ropes a little bit just in, in the, the smallest way. It was my first job out of college. I was earning an income. This thing called a 401k was there, and it was growing.

[00:10:34] Jesse: For some reason, I was contributing money to it. I just didn’t really understand any of the, the underlying mechanisms and uh, yeah, there was so much I didn’t know. That’s, I guess one of the hard parts about ignorance is you’re often ignorant to just how ignorant you actually are. It’s that, is it Dunning Kruger?

[00:10:50] Jesse: Am I thinking of the right thing? That Dunning Kruger Curve?

[00:10:52] Joe: Yeah. I don’t know what I don’t know

[00:10:53] Jesse: exactly. And the scary part about it is usually that that first bit of knowledge that you start to get really increases your confidence a ton. So like you’ve learned 5% of the knowledge base and you think you’re like the smartest person out there.

[00:11:07] Jesse: And then only as you keep learning do you start to realize how much you don’t know, and then eventually, maybe, maybe you learn enough to actually become an expert again. But, um, maybe I’m still in my Dunning Kruger phase. I don’t know. That’s a little scary to think about. But some of the conversations that I have, hopefully I’m, I’m past that bottom part of that Dunning Kruger curve.

[00:11:27] Jesse: But, um, I, I think maybe one of the scary things that I think about regarding today’s topic is that. There are plenty of people out there who, who just, you know, they know that first couple percent of the knowledge base that can be important to you in personal finance. But man, did they think they’ve got it all figured out.

[00:11:42] Jesse: And, and that’s a, a recipe for potentially personal disaster. If, if you think you know everything, but you barely know anything.

[00:11:49] Joe: That’s what scares me is the overconfidence. Yeah. I do get excited though when I see somebody who’s like 5% into the curve and they’re bragging to me about how they just found out about the thing.

[00:11:58] Joe: And I’m like, you are on this terrific journey, but it all is in the journey. The person that’s beyond bragging who’s like, well, you don’t need to worry about that because blah, blah, blah. And

[00:12:07] OG: like basically everybody on Reddit,

[00:12:10] Joe: wow. Reddit haters. It’s OG at Stacking Benjamins, not Joe. It’s Stacking Benjamins there.

[00:12:17] Joe: Uh, og. But you see this all the time too. I gotta imagine when you have first meetings with people,

[00:12:22] OG: I thought about this in a different way. I took the question that you had, which was what would we tell people. In terms of like knowledge or like where would we have people start? So I think there’s a lot of things like Jesse was talking about, like, what should I invest in this or that, that are not related.

[00:12:39] OG: Mm-hmm. We see a lot of stuff on credit. I know that there’s one person in the, uh, chat that just said something about credit. Uh, I just had a conversation with my son this week. He’s, uh, freshman in business school at a and m and one of their classes that they have, they have, uh, people come in that are graduates and like talk about their job and different areas of business and just trying to get the kids some exposure to what else is out there.

[00:13:01] OG: And clearly he had somebody there who was a real estate person and very much had the, you know, if you’re in debt, a million dollars, that’s your problem. But if you’re in debt to the bank, a billion dollars, that’s theirs. So get into debt as much as you can because that’s how you leverage everything and stuff like that.

[00:13:16] OG: And it’s like, that’s a great example, I think of one of those like, you know about this much and you go, that sounds like a great idea. Like why would OPM right. Other people’s money like I would. Why would I wanna use my own money? I’ll use other people’s money. And then you start kind of unwinding it. And my coaching with him was, well, let’s walk through this because it’s a really cool idea.

[00:13:37] OG: It’s really awesome, but let’s find out how you die first. You know, like, where does this end badly? And it’s like, oh, well if I don’t account for all these bad things that can happen. It can get really, really messy in a hurry and really blow up a lot of stuff. So I like that example of the Dunning Kruger.

[00:13:53] OG: You know, in fact, a lot of people know that I fly airplanes and there’s an example of an accident that happened this past weekend, and I think I’m on the other side of that curve, like at the very bottom, where I’m like petrified. Now again, like I’ve flown a lot, I know a lot about flying. And then like I see an accident that happens like this.

[00:14:09] OG: And one of the comments in our chat group was, there’s probably people out there that said, oh my gosh, this type of accident could have happened to me. And I was one of those people where I’m like, I don’t know that I’m smart enough to have seen this little intricacy of the detail. Of this flying situation that caused this dude to fly into a mountain with his family.

[00:14:29] OG: I don’t know that I’m smart enough to have figured that out. And that’s just part of learning and growing is recognizing there’s gotta be a little bit more knowledge somewhere there too. And you can do the same thing with your money. You know, leverage is a great example, right? Leverage is really cool and it works really well, but you can blow up the whole family pretty quickly if you do it badly.

[00:14:46] Joe: People are leaving some fantastic stories on our chat on YouTube. We record these Monday afternoon, so come join us on a Monday afternoon and be a part of the show. Uh, Curtis is the one I think OG you’re talking about. He says, I was told by a mortgage broker for our first home that we needed more credit lines and should go open multiple quote store branded credit cards.

[00:15:08] Joe: Pretty, pretty ridiculous. I don’t know why would I, is the mortgage broker than somebody who’s 5% up on the scale? Like they’re, they think that’s the answer. You know what I mean? The, this is. This is somebody that isn’t aware that they’re sending, well,

[00:15:22] OG: you gotta demonstrate your ability to handle credit.

[00:15:24] OG: Right? Makes sense To have to have a lot of it to be able to demonstrate your ability to handle it, you

[00:15:29] Joe: know? Yeah. So go apply for it all at once. Yeah. You take your credit very quickly.

[00:15:32] OG: Well, there’s the other side of that.

[00:15:34] Joe: Yeah. Not good. Uh, Kelly says, through my twenties and thirties, I didn’t know I had to roll my employer’s 401k to save for retirement was more focused on paying my monthly bills.

[00:15:44] Joe: And then there’s other people that know, by the way, Kelly, uh, and thank you for the note. There’s people that know. Yeah, but that’s way like, you know what I mean? We don’t understand compounding interest. So Whitney, I love that is a kickoff. Let’s go take some quizzes like@investor.gov. Let’s dive into where our weaknesses are.

[00:16:02] Joe: Design ourself a curriculum, but let’s adopt some of these systems for people. ’cause I feel like. Some of the systems are where we really win. Jesse, what’s a system we could help somebody who might not be that money savvy, not have to be that money savvy and still win?

[00:16:19] Jesse: Um, uh, lemme see if this answers your question, Joe.

[00:16:22] Jesse: A system. So I think this is maybe a, a mental system, but it’s really to focus on what you can control. Okay? So there’s this broad system that someone who’s maybe in the bottom half of the personal finance sphere and they’re, they, maybe they’re even aware of all these different things. Like, oh, I, I gotta pick a stock that’s gonna win like that.

[00:16:39] Jesse: That’s something that good finance people do, right? And I gotta look the part, I gotta dress up in nice clothes. Like that’s something that finance people do. Like, my point is that there are a lot of things in the world and, and in the world of personal finance that are somewhat outta your control, you can focus on the things you can control.

[00:16:54] Jesse: You can focus on your savings rate, you can focus on lifestyle inflation, you can focus on career, your career capital. And I think so much of the foundation of good personal finance is just focusing on those things that are within your circle of competence and within your realm of control. And accepting the fact that sometimes the things that are out of your control are actually gonna go against you, which it sucks.

[00:17:16] Jesse: Like, no, nobody enjoys doing that. Nobody wants to feel like they’re losing in some way, especially when it’s something that’s outside of your control. You know, it’s kind of wasted energy to get too anxious about those things outside of your control. So focus on what you can control. That’ll be the, the system that I used to answer that question.

[00:17:32] Joe: But I’m wondering, Whitney, how we do that. Because I’m thinking it was always what, back when I was an advisor, it was always the the new investor, right? Mm-hmm. That would see the stock market as an example, as voodoo. Also to judge the results as if the fund had been bad that they chose instead of the fact that they invested when the market was down.

[00:17:53] Joe: Mm-hmm. Right. So they think, oh, I should have never invested right then. That was crazy. ’cause you can do the right thing as you know, and have it initially not go great. So how do you, how do you teach somebody who’s brand new at this to not pay attention to the stuff they can’t control?

[00:18:09] Whitney: I think the, kinda like what Jesse was talking about is really honing in on what you can control, which for so many people it’s cashflow.

[00:18:16] Whitney: Can you monitor your cashflow? Yes, we’re talking about budgeting. Nobody likes that term, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to how much do you earn and how much goes out every single month. And for so many people, we don’t track that. We don’t pay attention. It’s a lot of money leaks. And that does impact your ability to have extra money to pay off debt, to invest, to take a sweet vacation, to set up that estate.

[00:18:39] Whitney: That you know you need to, your wills, you, there’s so many things that come down to cash flow, so an exercise that I personally have to go through. Occasionally, if I feel like I’ve been a little bit lazy with my own budgeting, I will print off 30 days of my transactions. I’ll do my bank account and I’ll do my credit card statements.

[00:18:57] Whitney: Just for 30 days. And I will assign three categories that are ones that I maybe slack off on or don’t really know how much I spend. So this would be for me, coffee. I love my coffee, it would be eating out and sometimes groceries. I get a little bit lazy there too. And then line by line, I highlight every single transaction.

[00:19:15] Whitney: And a lot of people are like, yeah, but Whitney, we, we know there’s apps that do that for you. Did you know that? I’m very aware, but the reason why I like this so much is when you are going line by line, your brain goes, oh damn, I have to take accountability for this. Like this was me swiping my card.

[00:19:31] Joe: Like the fact that it was tactile is what’s

[00:19:33] Whitney: working for you.

[00:19:34] Whitney: Yeah, it does. And it does so much more differently. Like I’ve done this in a lot of groups and what I find is when we see the number at the end of that, we have to take accountability, but then we also have that awareness so we can start to say, what changes might I make? But I think that’s a great first step for just like cashflow management is understanding where your leaks are.

[00:19:53] Joe: That’s fabulous. I wanna go back to the stock market though. Because I feel like OG people that are new will invest in the stock market. The stock market will go a different way than they thought and they’re like, I never should have bought that total stock market index. That was a horrible move.

[00:20:10] OG: Well, I think that when it comes to investing, this is probably one of those pieces where back to like education and back to like kind of the beginning of the beginning of like, what the heck are we even doing?

[00:20:24] OG: Like 4 0 1 Ks, IRAs, investing, index funds, stocks, like all of that seems very basic to probably the five of us that are here. But I also recognize that a lot of people just don’t even, don’t even understand like this whole concept of what we’re doing. I would break it down into, frankly, the most basic way that I can think of it is you get to go out there.

[00:20:48] OG: And this is what we taught our kids and we used a cool tool for this, so we’re not gonna pitch it anymore because they charge too much money. But the way that we pitch it to our kids was, you’re going out there and you’re buying little, teeny, tiny pieces of the companies that you get to do business with every day.

[00:21:04] OG: And so when you, when you take away the idea of investing as this big, giant nebulous thing of like, I just throw my money into this black box, and you know, the internet says I should use this, this fund, but then I also read that maybe I should use this fund, and I don’t even know what any of this means.

[00:21:22] OG: Just break it down into the idea that you’re owning companies that are places that you already do business with. And if you look around your house and you look at the stuff that you interact with, and you look at the stuff of where you already spend your money, Whitney, you spend money on coffee, maybe you buy your coffee at Starbucks.

[00:21:41] OG: So if you’re gonna buy your coffee at Starbucks, you could say, I’m gonna own a little teeny tiny piece of this company so that when I buy Starbucks coffee and when everybody else buys Starbucks coffee and they make some money, I make a little bit of income on that. I drive a Chevrolet so I can buy General Motors.

[00:21:59] OG: I watch TV on a Sony television. I, my kids play Xbox. I go to Costco, I shop at Target. All of these are companies that you do business with and all the things that you buy while you’re at Target, right? Gillette, razor blades and you know, whatever. So it’s like all these things that you already do business with, think about it from the perspective of, do I want to own a piece of this organization moving forward?

[00:22:24] OG: And then it makes it a little bit easier, I think, to recognize that not every single day is Target gonna make a bunch of money. You know, it’s, there was an ice storm in Dallas. Guess what? All the restaurants in Dallas were kind of closed. I own some McDonald’s. So it, I can justify the fact in my brain that McDonald’s didn’t make any money this week.

[00:22:44] OG: ’cause everything was closed, you know? So it’s not so much like it went down, or the worst thing is you think about it from a gambling standpoint. Somebody posted that in the chat too. It’s like, well, investing is gambling. It’s like, no it’s not. You’re just owning little bits of companies.

[00:23:00] Joe: So I like this idea of breaking it

[00:23:02] OG: down.

[00:23:02] OG: I can, Andrea, I can name lots of companies in one minute. Don’t at me, bro.

[00:23:08] Joe: Andrea just asked, asked OG in the, in the comments, how many, how many companies, uh, names come one person drop in a minute. I’m working on

[00:23:16] OG: my MacBook, which is an Apple, and I’m looking at my phone.

[00:23:19] Joe: I thank you. You, you already proved the point.

[00:23:21] Joe: Should I keep going? It was pretty amazing.

[00:23:22] OG: Thank you.

[00:23:23] Joe: It pretty wild. I was like, wow, all these are public companies and he’s going, going crazy. It is interesting, Whitney. I do like the idea, OG said, you know, break it down to the smallest component, which is you own these companies. I like that. Mm-hmm. You know what?

[00:23:34] Joe: On a daily basis it might not do well, but I also like something that, uh, that, that Jen, I believe said in the chat, which was this idea of putting money into the 401k, which means. Here’s one that I really like. Just the idea of automatically investing a little bit. Mm-hmm. Like the, you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to do this.

[00:23:55] Joe: You don’t need to be brilliant to do this. You gotta go to your HR one time and all of a sudden you’re winning week after week, paycheck after paycheck. Like there’s a system that works.

[00:24:07] Whitney: Oh, I agree. I think the part about investing that feels so scary is when we think of investing, we think of the big dollar amounts at the end, a lot of stakes on the line.

[00:24:15] Whitney: It feels really scary and heavy. So we’re thinking about the million dollar portfolio we have to build, not the $20 that we have today that we could invest into an ETF or an index fund. So it is a little bit scary, but I do think if you start with such a small amount that it doesn’t feel so heavy when it goes up and down, when you start to boost your confidence and you continue doing that, you do have those ups and downs and you feel okay about it because you, you practice with your $20 and now you have $200,000 and it’s still a little scary, but it’s not the same degree.

[00:24:47] Whitney: And so I think it is just kind of those little baby steps where you just get your feet wet and you just try it with a little, little bit here and there.

[00:24:53] Joe: You know, what I really like too, is you can also then break that down to the smallest step. After, after six months, I would show my client the different, um, the different prices we were buying in at, so they could see OG what you were talking about, you know, little bit up, little bit down.

[00:25:07] Joe: See, it’s just, it’s, it’s gonna go like this. Some guess what we’re doing, we’re just continually buying. And look at what happened to you. Now your dividend check’s bigger now you’re, you know, you’ve got, uh, much more money invested and it didn’t break anything in your budget because Whitney, we’d done some of the stuff that you were talking about.

[00:25:24] Joe: I wanna keep this rolling. In the second half. I wanna talk about risk management, which is a hard thing for people to understand, right? Buying insurances. You see so many people. Especially that aren’t financially savvy get ripped off on insurances. We’ll talk. But Whitney, you mentioned you doing your estate plan, like why do I need an estate plan?

[00:25:39] Joe: I’m 30 years old. Like, does it matter? So we’ll talk about those and more, but at the halfway point of every episode of Stacky Benjamins on Fridays, we have this amazing year yearlong competition between our three frequent Al.

[00:25:54] OG: Oh,

[00:25:54] Joe: that, that is, that is Jesse OG and Paula Pant. Whitney, you are on Team Paula pant, which is good news and bad news.

[00:26:03] Joe: Do you want the good news or the bad news?

[00:26:05] Whitney: G Gimme the bad. Let’s just get it over with.

[00:26:07] Joe: Well, well the bad news might be the good news in this case, which is, uh, Paula as usual is, uh, incredibly brilliant, but is in last place, which,

[00:26:16] OG: no, she’s not. She’s tied for second, isn’t she?

[00:26:20] Doug: She is indeed tied for second.

[00:26:22] OG: See?

[00:26:22] Joe: Yes. Not

[00:26:23] OG: last,

[00:26:23] Joe: which also means she’s tied for what place, Doug?

[00:26:26] Doug: Uh, dead freaking last. Yes.

[00:26:29] Joe: So the bad news here, Whitney, is uh, Doug’s gonna give you the score and well, it isn’t looking great for team Paula or team Jesse Kramer.

[00:26:40] Whitney: Hey, you know, we’ll do what we can and the stakes seem pretty low, so I’m, I’m up for it.

[00:26:46] Doug: Do worse. The great news, Whitney, is you can’t do any worse. Uh, we had a giant shift last week. Uh, OG used a margin call and that just changed. It was a tectonic shift in the let no, it wasn’t really nothing changed. OG stayed in the lead. He’s got five. Jesse had one, but he lost it. We went back to zero and Paula always had zero.

[00:27:08] Doug: So we’re right whack where we’ve been for like 15 years on this show, OG in the Lead, and he is the evil empire. Please embarrass him today.

[00:27:16] Joe: That’s right. And here is the deal Stackers and Whitney, this is for you too. OG used his margin call already for the first quarter. His won’t come back until April 1st, but Jesse has the opportunity on this episode if he wants to stay margin call to you or to og.

[00:27:35] Joe: And that means can’t Paul if

[00:27:36] OG: doesn’t have a point,

[00:27:36] Jesse: can’t depa.

[00:27:37] Joe: Oh yeah, that’s right. He can only do it to og.

[00:27:39] OG: Don’t you have to have a point to be able to margin call though, because you have to lose a point. Can you go negative?

[00:27:44] Joe: You can go negative. Oh, because you get one margin call per quarter no matter what.

[00:27:48] OG: Golly, that could really widen the gap. Jesse, og,

[00:27:50] Jesse: just tell me what you would do if you were in my shoes. Just make my decisions for me actually. OG you. Can you margin call for me? Og? And then can you also answer for me before you answer for yourself?

[00:28:00] OG: Sweep the knee if you’re ahead. You keep winning by all manner possible.

[00:28:05] Joe: So Whitney, if Jesse says margin, call the leg. What that means? What that means is that OG will have to answer the question correctly. I have to be the closest and if he’s not, he’ll lose a point and Jesse will will gain a point. Mm, right.

[00:28:19] OG: No, he

[00:28:20] Joe: gets a point.

[00:28:20] OG: If he wins,

[00:28:21] Joe: he gets a point. If he wins. I’m sorry.

[00:28:22] Joe: I was like,

[00:28:22] Whitney: well, can we explain this again?

[00:28:24] OG: We’re just trying to give Jesse points and basically if either of you guys win today, you get five points. Because it’s tied. It’ll be tied. Five. Five. Then.

[00:28:31] Joe: Thank you for explaining my game that apparently I don’t even know the reels to, I have no idea what the rules are to this game.

[00:28:38] Joe: I swear to God, Doug, I am in the 66 percentile today. I don’t know what’s going on 50% of

[00:28:44] OG: the time. It works every time,

[00:28:45] Joe: right? That’s right. Alright, Doug, get me outta here. Uh, what’s today’s question?

[00:28:51] Doug: Here you go Joe and everybody else. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor Doug, and it’s a party here in the basement now that Whitney’s joined us.

[00:28:58] Doug: I mean, you know how crazy it gets when money nerds get together. We whip out some 10 99 DIV forms, we crank out a couple of Schwab backdoor Roth contribution forms and from there, I mean it is off the chain yo. But of course we reel it back in just in time because you know, over the years we’ve learned our lesson by watching others not know when to say, when.

[00:29:19] Doug: One unfortunate lesson came from longtime late night talk show host Johnny Carson way back in 1982 when he was arrested for driving under the influence. Here’s the money question. How much money was Johnny’s fine. I’ll be back right after I go print out a couple of more Schedule Cs for og. If that’s not a sign, you’ve been overserved.

[00:29:41] Doug: I don’t know what is.

[00:29:44] Joe: It’s about to get even more crazy here. But before you get those Schedule Cs, let’s uh, dive into this one. So, 1982, Johnny Carson gets arrested for a DUI driving under the influence og, you get to go first. How much was Johnny’s fine?

[00:30:01] OG: So, uh, 19 and 82. Huh? Um, Jesse wasn’t alive yet,

[00:30:07] Joe: correct?

[00:30:07] OG: I know that.

[00:30:08] Jesse: Correct.

[00:30:08] OG: And he probably wasn’t alive either. She’s young. She’s like, no, not even close. Doug,

[00:30:13] Jesse: Joe, you guys,

[00:30:14] OG: Doug was at the bar with Jesse or with, uh, with Johnny.

[00:30:19] Doug: Joe was the bartender.

[00:30:20] OG: Joe was the bartender. Joe was DJing the party. I’m gonna say, so there’s two ideas here. One is, did they make an example of him because he is a public figure, so that’s a risk, right?

[00:30:31] OG: Like, like they’re like, oh, we’re gonna throw the book at him. Times 10 just to like, you know, maybe he does a PSA. Like don’t, don’t drink and drive, you

[00:30:39] Doug: know, like they always do to celebrities. They never get off anything easy.

[00:30:43] OG: Well, and that’s the other side. It’s just like, well, we’ve got this thing. And like Johnny Carson got so much money, he is like, I can pay you in nickels.

[00:30:49] OG: I don’t really care what y’all want. You know, I’m gonna keep doing this stuff. And then he got the whole inflation and time value money and all that sort of jazz. So, Doug, how much was your fine recently? What did you think?

[00:31:02] Doug: Boundaries.

[00:31:03] Jesse: Boundaries. Oj that wasn’t DUI, sorry. Indecent exposure. It’s a different crime.

[00:31:07] OG: Oh, that’s a way different thing. All right. Yeah. Fines are way different for that. Okay. Anyways, I’m gonna say that the fine in 1982, old Johnny uh, paid a grand total of $750.

[00:31:22] Joe: $750. Jesse, what are you gonna do with that?

[00:31:26] Jesse: I know it’s expensive, but my gut was that all the expenses are like legal fees. My initial gut instinct was lower than what OG said.

[00:31:35] Jesse: I’m gonna say, uh, 300. $300.

[00:31:39] Joe: $300. Well, Whitney, we’ve got seven 50 and we’ve got 300. What do you think?

[00:31:46] Whitney: Well, Jesse, I was kind of with you on your logic there. So my first question was, was this a first offense? I think it probably was. I don’t know, man. I’m going two 50. I’m just gonna like slightly undercut you friend.

[00:31:58] Whitney: Sorry.

[00:32:00] Jesse: That’s okay. You do go 2 99 if you want. I mean, if Paula was here and she had your logic, she would probably go 2 99 and the answer is gonna be like three 10. So you can go 2 99 and I’m still gonna win.

[00:32:11] Joe: That’s right.

[00:32:12] Jesse: Sorry Paula,

[00:32:14] Whitney: to confirm. Two 50 we’re, we’re going for it.

[00:32:17] Joe: If you’re channeling Paula, you’re playing the game wrong.

[00:32:20] Joe: OG with seven 50. Jesse with 300. Whitney with two 50. Who’s right? We’re about to find out. Andrea in the chat is wondering if Jesse’s gut is more reliable than Paula’s. Actually, it should be his Whitney’s gut more reliable than Paula’s. Whitney, you feeling good?

[00:32:39] Whitney: I’m feeling all right. I don’t know,

[00:32:42] Joe: Jesse, I’m surprised that nobody thought it was more than a thousand bucks.

[00:32:46] Jesse: Like I said, I like the, the legal fines themselves, I thought tend to be like kind of on the small side, like the judge finds you even today, like judge finds aren’t that big. It’s the, uh,

[00:32:58] OG: I mean, it’s like five or 10

[00:32:59] Jesse: grand now, and I genuinely don’t know. Don’t ask me how

[00:33:02] OG: I know. I

[00:33:02] Jesse: just, is that the

[00:33:03] OG: No, I, I no experience.

[00:33:05] Jesse: Yeah. Is that what the legal fine is? I thought ’cause I, I, I had heard that it can be that expensive when you get a DUI just like you said, oh gee, five or 10 grand. But my thought was like, yeah, 95% of that is the attorney’s fees for trying to prevent you from getting into deeper

[00:33:17] OG: jump. Yeah. Right. Maybe I’m,

[00:33:20] Jesse: I don’t know.

[00:33:20] Jesse: Mm-hmm. I don’t know.

[00:33:20] Joe: I don’t know. Are you feeling confident?

[00:33:22] OG: I, I believe it’s one of two things. It’s either gonna be an astronomical number because it’s Johnny, or it’s gonna be a really small number. ’cause that’s just what the book said back in 1982.

[00:33:32] Joe: Or is it a tiny number? ’cause it’s Johnny, right?

[00:33:34] OG: No, no, no.

[00:33:35] OG: They wouldn’t give him a lower number because he was a celebrity. They either threw the book at him or did whatever the schedule said in the, you know, San Diego manual or wherever the hell he was.

[00:33:46] Joe: Well, here are the scariest words in modern sports. Doug’s about to let us know.

[00:33:52] Doug: That’s right everybody. Hey, there’s stackers.

[00:33:54] Doug: I’m finance dungeon, party master, and the guy who’s safe word is liquidity. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. We’re celebrating, but safely stackers. I’ve taken away OGs keys and his password manager, so he can’t drive or take a premature distribution from his 401k. I mean, nobody wins in either one of those cases.

[00:34:12] Doug: Nobody won. When Johnny Carson was pulled over for drunk driving in his DeLorean back in 82. When I first read this, I assumed he was trying to hit 88 miles an hour so we could go back in time. Do that Doris Day interview he did back in 1974 all over again. Go look it up. Turns out he was originally stopped for an expired registration.

[00:34:32] Doug: The iconic talk show host had a blood alcohol level of 0.16. Well over the 0.10 limit. Here was the question. Besides three years probation, how much was he fine. Well, I’ll tell you this. It was $353 more than what Whitney guessed. $303 more than what Jesse guessed. And just $147 less than what OG guessed.

[00:34:53] Doug: The correct answer is $603, making the guy that causes cold breezes to come outta nowhere. The guy who makes babies cry when he gives him candy. The guy who hates puppies, the guy who must have the password to our scripts, because OG always wins.

[00:35:10] Joe: He’s on a tear, Jesse,

[00:35:12] Jesse: he’s on something. He has more points than there are weeks in the year, and two of us are trying to beat him.

[00:35:20] Joe: The good news is stackers, if OG wraps us up by April, we got the rest of the year to do something else. You just start a different game. You’re like

[00:35:28] OG: dormy in like, uh, June.

[00:35:31] Jesse: Yeah, so I, I just wanted to check this out. Assuming that this is not a skill-based game, that this is all just pure luck, what are the odds that someone would win six times in a row?

[00:35:42] Jesse: It’s 0.14%, 0.14. It’s 14 and 10,000. That’s how lucky that’s,

[00:35:50] OG: this isn’t like golf handicaps. It’s uh, I I have 20 years on you in terms of like, it just life experience, Jesse.

[00:35:59] Jesse: That’s fair. That’s fair.

[00:36:00] OG: Sorry bud.

[00:36:00] Jesse: Yeah. You were alive in 1982 and I wasn’t, I think that’s, or Whitney,

[00:36:04] Doug: Jesse, it’s not quite as bad because he didn’t win six in a row.

[00:36:07] Doug: He actually only won five. But when, well, and somebody, somebody

[00:36:11] OG: won for me.

[00:36:11] Doug: When Sarah c Catherine was here, not only did she win for him, but she won the game show that we had that day. So she got an extra point for

[00:36:18] Joe: him. It was that two for Sarah Catherine Gutierrez got

[00:36:21] Doug: odds are only like 1% not 0.1.

[00:36:23] Joe: That makes, that

[00:36:24] Jesse: makes a

[00:36:24] Joe: lot more

[00:36:25] Jesse: sense.

[00:36:25] Jesse: Yeah.

[00:36:26] OG: Somebody goes like, when Augusta Tiger proofed its course and just made it easier for him.

[00:36:33] Joe: Charles, in the comments, uh, with a golf analogy. Let’s dive back in guys, because we got some people that you know might not be financially savvy. But Whitney, we’ll go back to you. Let’s talk about risk management because you know all you hear, especially when you’re starting out. I remember thinking this like insurances are evil.

[00:36:53] Joe: People that sell insurance are evil. How do you make a good, like what’s a good way for a non-financially savvy person to dive into the world of insurances?

[00:37:04] Whitney: I think it’s, most of us are probably already doing that. So hopefully that gives you some peace of mind. You have car insurance. If you own a home, you have to have a, a mortgage insurance.

[00:37:12] Whitney: There’s different pieces of insurance that will help cover you, but it, the other portions that are a little bit more nuanced is gonna be a lot of situational dependencies. So I have properties, I have fire insurance on one of my properties in the mountains. That’s not something I need on a different property.

[00:37:28] Whitney: I have a child now, so life insurance is very important to me. When I was 20, it didn’t really make any difference to me whatsoever. So I think it’s getting to the point where whatever your stage of life is, you’re going to probably have an idea of what types of insurance you, you need. If you’re married and you combine money of some type and you depend on that income, you probably will need some type of life insurance.

[00:37:51] Whitney: That’s where it gets a little scary though, because there are so many. Bad characters in the financial world when it comes to that stuff. I would not use the strategy of just going with the person your friend recommended because they recommended them and immediately going and having a sit down conversation With insurance brokers, I would do your own research first and then start to reach out to at least three different people so you can understand personality types, sales pitches, and just get a good context of like what you’re signing up for.

[00:38:20] Whitney: And when you have three different people you’re chatting with, you’re gonna start to pick up on some patterns and so then you can make the best decision for you. I think that’s true for all insurance, but specifically life insurance. I’m a good old fan of term life insurance. That’s just me personally. I really enjoy that and I think it’s inexpensive for most people.

[00:38:37] Whitney: If you are to that stage where you have kids and families and you need to protect that income.

[00:38:41] Joe: It’s so funny, Jesse, when Whitney’s talking about you talked to three different people. At first I’m like, oh, that just seems cumbersome. But then I think, you know, I just bought a car. I bought it from a car dealership.

[00:38:53] Joe: I’ve done that several times and because I’ve done it several times, you start to see loops in the sales strategies, right? And you get used to the sales strategy and you can easily go, yeah, I’m not, I’m not, we’re not gonna talk payment. But that’s because I’ve done it several times. So is it seems to me there’s probably some truth in what Whitney’s talking about.

[00:39:12] Joe: Go talk to three, four people and yeah, it’s monotonous, but it might be well worth the time.

[00:39:18] Jesse: Well, I think what both you and Whitney are pointing out to some extent is that when someone is in that bottom 50% of maybe financial knowhow or maybe they’re just in a little bit of the bottom half of life knowhow, and I’ve got a great story on this front.

[00:39:30] Jesse: There are times when you don’t know you’re being sold. There are times when you are just susceptible to a sales pitch and you’re just totally unaware of it. I got sold a hot tub. That’s my story. I wanted a hot tub. It’s, it’s not like I didn’t want a hot tub. I invited a hot tub salesman to my house.

[00:39:46] Jesse: Clearly I was interested in a hot tub. Let’s be clear. But I still remember this guy. Once I read the book, it’s, there’s a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini, famous psychologist. It’s a great book about basically how sales tactics work. And this hot tub salesman, I only learned after the fact used like every psychological trick.

[00:40:06] Jesse: He gave you the

[00:40:06] OG: copy of the,

[00:40:07] Jesse: signed

[00:40:07] OG: copy

[00:40:07] Jesse: of the book? Yeah, yeah. Basically he said, thanks for the, thanks for the, I put my

[00:40:10] OG: commission, I bought you a book

[00:40:12] Jesse: here. Here’s a gift for you. And basically my point is, going back to the whole insurance sales, the idea of talking to three different people is maybe you can start to compare and contrast the different things they said.

[00:40:24] Jesse: Uh, maybe you can start to notice pattern like, huh. All three of them said, you know, boy sure would be bad if you left behind your entire family in destitution ’cause you didn’t have insurance. And it made you feel a certain way and it probably compelled you to wanna buy something like, but

[00:40:39] Joe: I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

[00:40:40] Joe: Halfway through that story, it’s like what does destitution have to do with a hot tub? Like that’s a hell of a sales pitch. You would watch your family to not have a hot tub.

[00:40:47] Jesse: So I’m Quentin Tarantino now and going back in timelines, if you want me to talk about the hot tub, the one thing I do remember was, uh, this gentleman’s daughter was in like dire financial straits.

[00:40:56] Jesse: She couldn’t make a college payment. He had promised her that he would help her make the next payment and that this sale of this particular hot tub would really help him. Not only would it answer my dreams apparently for owning a hot tub, but it would really help him out. So I, he was guilt tripping me a little bit.

[00:41:12] Jesse: Anyway, we are all susceptible to sales. That’s my point. That’s the big point here. And so whether you’re shopping for insurance or some other product, I mean part of the reason for shopping around in general. Not getting like overly committed to the one thing you want is that sometimes you’re not really aware of how a sales pitch is subconsciously kind of influencing you.

[00:41:31] Jesse: And, and it’s helpful to be aware of that.

[00:41:33] Joe: I had a similar thing, Jesse. When I was 16, I had this car that was so bad that the, you know, that the ceiling fabric hung down. It wasn’t even glued to the top anymore. Like it was that bad. And I took the car in to get a new muffler and the muffler salesman takes me to the back room where he’s restoring a car and he’s got this hot new engine.

[00:41:52] Joe: He’s like, you know that car you’re working on could be like this. I went home with sports struts, with new shocks, new sports struts, and like the sport muffler on this piece of crap car. And what was funny was, was that the, the receptionist, even, you know, Doug, back in the old days, these, these kids won’t remember these days, but there was that big old phone book and in the back they had all of the coupons in the back of the phone book.

[00:42:20] Joe: The receptionist goes to the back of their phone, book receptionist at the muffler place while I’m waiting for them to work on my car. And she’s like, here, honey, this is for you. And she’s telling me that I’m getting ripped off by the dude without telling me I’m getting ripped off by the dude by trying to find me as much stuff.

[00:42:40] Joe: I remember going home to my dad and he’s like, you were just gonna get a muffler. Like, how, how’d you spend that much money? Mm-hmm. It was, it was incredible.

[00:42:47] Doug: Yeah. I’ve heard about those big thick phone books, Joe, my, my grandparents told me about ’em.

[00:42:50] Joe: Nah, there we go.

[00:42:51] Doug: Yeah, yeah.

[00:42:52] Joe: There it is. Yes. It, it only took us, uh, 46 minutes to get to that point, so I love the idea of, of talking to three people.

[00:43:03] Joe: Og. Is there a way you talked with stocks about going back to the basics. Do you do this when you’re teaching people about insurance? Like a little bit about how insurance works to kind of bring ’em up to speed?

[00:43:12] OG: I can’t get over the fact that I. Jesse is surprised that he got sold a hot tub when he invited a hot tub salesman to his house.

[00:43:18] Jesse: I’m telling, I I was pretty green.

[00:43:20] OG: Did did you invite him for like, Thanksgiving and then you ended up with a hot tub or were you like, did I, this is, this is, uh, I need to learn more about that, but I will also tell you that your mind will only see what your, your ass is looking for. So just so you know, it was preordained.

[00:43:37] OG: You were getting a hot tub one way or the other. Mm-hmm. Uh, but that’s okay. Hopefully you got a nice one.

Uh,

[00:43:41] OG: you still use it.

[00:43:42] Jesse: Sold the house and left the hot tub behind.

[00:43:44] OG: Yeah. You did.

[00:43:44] Jesse: Didn’t use it enough. Didn’t use it enough.

[00:43:47] OG: Yeah. But you looking outside, I bet you wish you had one right Now.

[00:43:50] Jesse: What do they say about like, boats?

[00:43:51] Jesse: Like you, you want a friend with a boat, you don’t wanna own the boat yourself. Yes. Same thing with a hot tub. Everybody out there listening

[00:43:57] OG: friend with a hot tub. I don’t know anybody that says that. Like, I wanna go to my friend’s hot tub.

[00:44:01] Jesse: Yeah. You

[00:44:01] OG: know,

[00:44:02] Whitney: depends on the friend, right?

[00:44:03] Jesse: Maybe they’re a good friend.

[00:44:04] Jesse: It does.

[00:44:05] OG: It better be a clean, good friend. When was the last time you put this thing through chlorine? The other thing that, uh, wasn’t mentioned here. That I was thinking about, and not about life insurance or anything, but I was thinking about, we just had our house renewal in, you know? Mm-hmm. Come through.

[00:44:19] OG: You just, whatever, you know, they send you the big packet of stuff. First of all, nobody ever reads that, right? It’s like, here’s, here’s your policy, and you’re like, cool, I guess. And you never know like, what’s in there. Like what does this mean? How am I covered? What am I qualified for? What do all these numbers mean?

[00:44:37] OG: You know, especially like you think about like house insurance, it’s got dwelling and, uh, secondary coverages and secondary buildings and replacement costs and reimbursement costs and deductibles, and like all these words that mean different things. Again, we look at ’em money nerds, and we go,

[00:44:54] Opener: okay, yeah.

[00:44:55] OG: Got it. Mm-hmm. But you can use chat GPT or Claude or GR or something like that and say, here’s this PDF, explain this to me, like I’m a bottom 50 percenter.

[00:45:05] Joe: Oh, this, this I think would be a great use of ai. Mm-hmm.

[00:45:07] OG: Absolutely. It is. You know, what am I covered for? What am I not covered for? Using this information.

[00:45:13] OG: If my house burns to the ground in a wildfire, do I get a new house? How much house do I get? One thing that I found out and not ashamed to admit this, we were shopping for insurances one time and I was talking to an insurance person and she said, well, um, I see, you know, I got your policy here and we’re trying to, you know, beat the price, right?

[00:45:32] OG: And she’s straight up, she’s like, I can’t beat this price. And I was like, okay, well I thought we had a pretty good deal. She goes, well hold on before you go any further, how much do you think your house would cost to rebuild right now? And this was kind of COVID ish time. And I was like, well, geez, with the supply chain and lack of workers and you know, whatever, I suspect that’s probably gonna be a little, you know, it’s gonna be X dollars.

[00:45:54] OG: She’s like, well, you’re covered for this. I said, no, no, it says here that this is what she goes, no, no, that’s not what that means. That means that they’re gonna cover you up to this number. And how much do you own her, your house and how much do you think it’s worth, and how much do you think it would cost to rebuild?

[00:46:07] OG: Because those are all different numbers and, and our house was insured for plenty to cover the mortgage and about a half of what it would cost to rebuild because we just accepted whatever the insurance company said and just had slowly increased. Well, the rebuild cost was way more, so it was interesting.

[00:46:25] OG: Maybe this was a sales job, Jesse. What was interesting was we actually ended up with more insurance, but I felt better about it because I was like, okay, I now understand these numbers and I know if something happens, they’re, we’re more likely to be, you know, we’re gonna be covered at whole as opposed to, as opposed to others.

[00:46:43] OG: So I, I would, you know, shop a couple places.

[00:46:46] Joe: But you felt

[00:46:46] OG: educated.

[00:46:47] Joe: You felt educated. Yeah.

[00:46:47] OG: Yeah. Shop a couple places, that’s great. But then, you know, ask for a sample policy. Ask for a sample declaration and say like, I, I, I need to understand what these numbers mean and what these words mean. Just dump it in chat or I.

[00:47:00] OG: Just ask the person, Hey, let’s have a meeting and let me go through this with you. And they’re gonna be more, more cagey than chat GPT would, but at least you can get a sense of, of what you’re covered for and whatnot. Like jewelry, right? Whitney? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Have you got any jewelry? Ladies? Like to have jewelry sometimes.

[00:47:15] Whitney: Do you see my sapphire over here?

[00:47:17] OG: I didn’t, but um, you seem like somebody that has some nice stuff. Like what’s the coverage of jewelry on your house, you know, on your regular homeowner’s insurance.

[00:47:25] Doug: Right?

[00:47:25] OG: Like a thousand bucks. It’s not uncommon to have a engagement ring that’s 5,000 or 10,000, you know, so know what all that stuff means and what you’re, what you’re really getting when you have it.

[00:47:37] Joe: It’s interesting the question that OG poses about chat GPT or using chat GPT Whitney on the surface. I like that, but mm-hmm. You work with people all the time when you’re teaching classes. Mm-hmm. Do people even know the right questions to ask to use chat GPT in a way that would make it helpful here?

[00:47:55] Whitney: I think it depends if we’re talking about the, the lower 50%, probably not.

[00:48:00] Whitney: It’s gonna be a little bit harder to know what questions to ask, but you could even just put that into chat GPT and say, Hey, I don’t know what, I don’t know. What are some of the questions? What ask I should be asking? Should I ask? Yeah. But I think that’s a good place to start. It certainly doesn’t hurt to help.

[00:48:15] Whitney: With using like AI and just getting a better grasp of what things you should be looking for. But it is scary. You give a policy, a car insurance policy to an 18-year-old and they’re gonna be like, what’s the cheapest possible? That’s what I can afford. You know? So it really does depend on your situation.

[00:48:30] Whitney: But I would say like we, a lot of people do this often with health insurance too. We’re kind of inherently weighing out the pros and cons between, do I do a higher deductible plan and get an HSA that I can then invest possibly, or do I just go for a low

[00:48:43] Joe: deductible

[00:48:44] Whitney: plan?

[00:48:45] Joe: I’m sorry, what you just said right there.

[00:48:47] Whitney: Yeah.

[00:48:47] Joe: Do I get a high deductible plan with an HSA where I can deduct, like if I’m bottom 50%, I’m like, I have no idea what the hell you did. You swear at me. Hundred

[00:48:56] Whitney: percent. And it would be right. That’s, I think that’s the exact, if you are finding yourself in the bottom 50%, or if your kids are starting there and you’re trying to teach them, try to use that really simple, simple language Use chat, use technology that they’re familiar with, for sure.

[00:49:11] Whitney: But yeah, try not to complicate it too much. I think it can get really scary and overwhelming. And then the inherent factors, we don’t do anything and we just ignore it.

[00:49:20] Joe: Yeah. The lingo just kills, kills me sometimes that we use Jesse. Uh, let’s talk about estate planning. How do you help somebody who’s not financially savvy realize they need an estate plan and go get one?

[00:49:31] Jesse: Yeah. The place where I might start, might start is similar actually to the insurance conversation too. What goes back to one of Charlie Munger’s big philosophies, one of his philosophies was Invert, always invert. He stole that from a mathematician named Jacobi

[00:49:46] OG: Top Gun.

[00:49:47] Jesse: But the whole idea is that it’s very easy if you’re sitting there in the bottom 50 cent to be like 50%, you, you wanna say like, how do I make my financial life the best as possible?

[00:49:57] Jesse: Okay. Okay. This is a natural question you’d wanna ask yourself, but what Munger would say is turn that question upside down and it’ll actually help you find the answer. How do you make your financial life as terrible as possible? Identify those behaviors that make it terrible and then do the opposite of those behaviors.

[00:50:12] Jesse: So for insurance,

[00:50:13] OG: don’t

[00:50:13] Jesse: do that. Especially if you’re right. Don’t, don’t do them. Exactly.

[00:50:16] OG: Hot tubs, for

[00:50:16] Jesse: example. Well, correct. I mean, seriously. Um, but no, you know, Whitney was talking about, you said you have a, a child, Whitney, right? You said you have a a child now, right? Mm-hmm. So it’s scary to think about. I, I’ve got a young child too, but one thing that could put my family in financial jeopardy is if one of the two breadwinners somehow dies, okay.

[00:50:34] Jesse: That’s something you wanna avoid or you at least wanna avoid that risk that comes with that. And that’s a reason to buy a term life insurance. Mm-hmm. Similar on estate planning. There probably comes a point, I’m not quite sure I’m at it yet, but there comes this point where you say, you know, how do I avoid leaving my heirs with all this complexity?

[00:50:51] Jesse: How do I put directions in place so that if in the unlucky event that I die, they understand exactly which assets are going, where they understand who the guardians of my children are? Like all those really important things that might either save a headache or save something worse. Well, you, you, you put a clean estate plan in, into play, uh, into place in play, maybe both.

[00:51:12] Jesse: The point is like you, you think about these terrible outcomes you wanna avoid and you try to then enact some behaviors to prevent those outcomes. Uh, so that’s how I would approach the estate planning. Estate planning question.

[00:51:24] Joe: Oh gee, do you get any pushback from people when you’re like, you know what, you don’t have an estate plan, you need one.

[00:51:28] Joe: They’re like, I don’t. Why do I need that?

[00:51:32] OG: Usually when we’re sitting in their hot tub and, um,

[00:51:34] Joe: and heat’s on fire,

[00:51:36] OG: enjoying a glass. All bets are off when you’re in the hot tub. Oh no.

[00:51:40] Joe: I feel like it’s the shark and there was just a little blood in the

[00:51:43] Jesse: water. It’s okay though, because I just wanna point out what OG identified.

[00:51:47] Jesse: Whose hot tub was it? Og It was not yours. It was your friend. You want a friend with a hot tub.

[00:51:52] OG: So, to be fair, I, my, I kind of wanna buy a sauna. Do you know a guy, Jesse?

[00:51:59] Jesse: I recently actually heard that the Costco sauna offering is terrific.

[00:52:03] OG: Oh, okay. All right. Set it up at your house. I’m gonna come

[00:52:06] Jesse: visit, I will disclose.

[00:52:07] Jesse: I am a shareholder. Uh, you didn’t name Costco earlier. I’m a shareholder. But please, I, I, I own this little fraction of Costco and I have friends who do business there. So if you go do business Oh, nice. And buy that Costco sauna. It will help my little share.

[00:52:22] Joe: Margin call. Margin call.

[00:52:24] OG: I will hook you up.

[00:52:25] OG: Jesse Kramer.

[00:52:26] Joe: It is funny, we don’t even have a Costco in Texarkana, but Jesse, I know that like I know, I know that. How do I know that the sauna at, at Costco is a good deal, but you’re, you’re not joking. It’s all over the place. I’m

[00:52:39] OG: gonna have to look this up. Is it a barrel sauna? I

[00:52:40] Whitney: think it’s $3,999.

[00:52:43] OG: Can I put it on my Costco card and get for sure 5% cash back or?

[00:52:47] OG: For

[00:52:47] Joe: sure. There we go.

[00:52:48] OG: So it’s like a discount. It’s like a free, it’s like it might as well be free at that point.

[00:52:52] Whitney: Yeah,

[00:52:52] Joe: surely. So you get talk saunas, they’re setting up your estate plan.

[00:52:55] OG: I like saunas better. Honestly, your question was, you know, what do you do? I mean, look, if you wanna be, if you’re in a position that you need to have an estate planning and you don’t have one and you don’t wanna do it, like it’s okay.

[00:53:07] OG: That’s on you. You’re just an idiot. I can’t help you. I would say that most people. Overcomplicate this stuff just like anything else, I like Jesse’s way of looking at it from backwards. Like how do I, you know, how do I die basically, is the perspective. You know, the same thing is true with estate planning.

[00:53:27] OG: I specifically went through and, and put a lot of thought into hours, but I also communicated it with the people that I knew were gonna have to facilitate this on the backend. And so like, there’s a method to my madness, but the reality is, is that the government, much like everything else, already has an estate plan for you.

[00:53:48] OG: So Joe, the answer to your question is like, somebody needs an estate plan and doesn’t have it as I would say, well, like you already have one, you have the default plan, which is provided by your county or your state. And for some people, and maybe for most people, that’s gonna be good enough, especially if you, you know.

[00:54:06] OG: Do an okay job of making sure the beneficiaries on your accounts are correct. Like who gets my stuff when I die. But I think a lot of people struggle with trying to, whether it’s estate planning or anything else, like overcomplicate, something that’s relatively, like the estate tax limit is what, 13 and a half million?

[00:54:25] OG: It’s more now, what is it? I think it’s

[00:54:26] Jesse: 15 per person. 30. 30 for a couple

[00:54:29] OG: guys. Okay. I mean, I was in the ballpark. You’re acting like I was wo my a hundred

[00:54:33] Jesse: million. What an idiot.

[00:54:34] OG: $1 billion. It’s, you know, and so if you’re in a, if you’re in a relationship, if you’re married with pretty normal planning, you get 30 million tax free, federal tax free.

[00:54:47] OG: Okay. I mean, that really doesn’t apply to, it doesn’t apply to me. I don’t know Whitney’s net worth, but I can Why is that? ’cause you’re over that pictures Doug’s and Jesse’s,

[00:54:55] Joe: it doesn’t apply to you ’cause you got way more

[00:54:58] OG: No, I’m just saying like, people like to sell complexity because complexity is. It’s hard to argue with, right?

[00:55:07] OG: Especially if you’re like, you know that bottom 75% or 50%, right? It’s like, wow, that’s really complicated. I think it’s complicated to change the oil in my car. My brother is a mechanic and it’s like, are you absolutely crazy? What is wrong with you? Like this is the easiest job I do at the shop. Like this is, this takes me two minutes.

[00:55:27] OG: I can do five things while I’m doing this one thing. How are you so dumb as to not do it? And we have to be careful because we’re on that side of the equation. We have to be careful to say, oh, this is super easy. You just do the Roth IRA, and then, you know, obviously you just kinda max out. We were talking about 4 0 1 Ks earlier.

[00:55:42] OG: I was thinking about, one that I hear a lot is, no, I max out my 401k to the match.

[00:55:46] Joe: Mm. Right? Mm-hmm.

[00:55:48] OG: You go, hold on. Wait. Max it out? Or you put in the match? Yeah, I max it out to the match. Okay. Those are two different words that are two different numbers. Probably the max is 24,500 if you’re under 50. The match is probably 3%, 5%, 6%.

[00:56:07] OG: Now, maybe your income is such that the max is also the match, which is would be cool, but it’s probably not. But we look at this and go, oh, this is really easy for us to understand our job. And I think if you’re one of the people that are, you know, listening or you’re in the top 50% and you’re trying to explain this to the bottom 50, you know, kids or parents, sometimes you’re moving up the food chain, right?

[00:56:29] OG: You know what’s going on. But mom and dad don’t, we have to be really careful to not, to not be, I mean, judgy is probably a little strong, but judgey with like what, you know, like, come on, come on. This is easy. You just do the estate plan and you have, you just max out your 401k and you just do the backdoor, do the mega backdoor if you want.

[00:56:47] OG: It’s totally cool. And like pick the, pick the high deductible one with the HSA and uh, of course you should do the 5 29, but make sure you use the 5 29 in your state with the tax deduction, but only up to the tax deduction amount. The rest you wanna do in the other state, because that’s a lower, that’s a lower expense ratio.

[00:57:01] Joe: Yeah,

[00:57:02] OG: that all makes sense to the five of us.

[00:57:04] Joe: Yeah. Well,

[00:57:04] OG: four of us.

[00:57:05] Joe: No, I remember this. Doug’s like, I’m just sitting here.

[00:57:10] OG: Alright. Doug doesn’t even paying attention. I like zapping back in. Doug was sitting in Jesse’s hot tub in his mind going, this is nice

[00:57:18] Doug: daydreaming. Our knees are touching.

[00:57:19] Joe: But I do remember this, I do remember this in seventh grade, I was really struggling with math and it was, my math teacher was really not good.

[00:57:28] Joe: And I remember asking him if he just leaves this equation on the board up a little while longer, and he looks right at me and goes, no, no, you understand this is just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. As he’s erasing it, he’s like, no, it’s just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, I just told you, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.

[00:57:44] Joe: And still like, oh no, no. Super easy.

[00:57:46] OG: Is that when you turned into a janitor and then finally solved it when it was on the blackboard in the hallway?

[00:57:51] Joe: I did. You saw my movie, the movie. They based on my life. It was so good. I think it won some major awards. Yeah. I think that brings up the point that I’d like us to cover last, which is this.

[00:58:03] Joe: I think Whitney, a lot of the time when we’re in that bottom 50%, we start experiencing some confidence issues. Right. I love where you said we should start, but I think part of this is also just gaining some confidence. Mm-hmm. What can you tell somebody who thinks they’re not financially savvy that will help them gain confidence that, you know, like us, you can learn this too.

[00:58:27] Whitney: I love this question because it’s something we, we all deal with. Anytime we jump into any new area, whether it’s fitness or finance or anything, parenting, that was something for me. I was drinking out of a fire hose, but what I learned was that confidence comes from confidence. I thought you’re just

[00:58:42] Joe: gonna end with, I was drinking,

[00:58:44] Whitney: I was just drinking.

[00:58:45] Whitney: Don’t we all do that when we’re parents? I mean, that’s just me. Connie

[00:58:48] Jesse: Carson did,

[00:58:50] Whitney: right, right. Well, now we know the fee has gone up too, too. We, we gotta be careful. Don’t That’s correct. So bad. So I do think though, that confidence comes from competence and competence comes from experience. And so if we just focus on the experience piece and just doing the reps and getting comfortable with it, that’s where true confidence comes from in my opinion.

[00:59:10] Whitney: But you have to really go through, and it has to be from the experience piece first. It can’t come the other way. You’re not gonna be a confident investor. If you’ve never done it before, in fact, it’d be weird if you thought you were a great investor and you’ve never invested before. That would be a little scary.

[00:59:25] Whitney: I think that’s where we really begin, is just with the confidence and working on the experience piece.

[00:59:30] Joe: Yeah, I love that the confidence comes. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. Most of what we do, Jesse Kramer isn’t gonna, isn’t gonna kill you unless they say irrevocable on the paperwork. You’re, you could probably unwind it, whatever you do.

[00:59:43] Jesse: Yeah. You gotta experiment. You gotta have a little skin in the game. I mean, that’s something I think about for my own learning curve was, uh, having a little bit of skin in the game really inspired me to wanna learn more and, and grow that experience and competence and then eventually confidence, like Whitney was saying.

[00:59:58] Jesse: And I also just think, it’s so funny how something that came up, I think as OG was last speaking, was in that bottom 50%. We all have kind of agreed today that it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re ignorant to your own ignorance, and that’s really important. But then also in that top 10%, like, oh, gee, you pointed out, there’s this thing, it’s a recognized phenomenon called the curse of knowledge.

[01:00:18] Jesse: And it comes up in like teaching circles a lot, which is that once you really experienced, you forget, or at least you can forget what it was like to have not known about something.

[01:00:26] Joe: My seventh grade teacher.

[01:00:27] Jesse: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Mm-hmm. And so you end up using this jargon and then, uh, next thing you know, you’re, you’re leaving the people behind who have no idea what you’re talking about.

[01:00:34] Jesse: So it’s almost like, I think when you’re in that bottom 50%, you have to be willing to maybe expand your horizons a little bit and, and try to expose yourself to new ideas and, and learn these new things. But then also, if you’re listening right now and you are the experienced one in your friend group, let’s say, and you’re teaching your friends or you’re teaching your kids about this stuff, you have to try to put yourself in their shoes and remember what it was like to be clueless and, and put things in terms that they understand.

[01:00:58] Joe: That should be a great place to leave it. But, uh, oh, gee, can you learn all this while you’re in a sauna?

[01:01:03] OG: I mean, probably there’s a lot of research to suggest that you get a lot outta sauna time. So just play, play a Stacking Benjamins episode while, while you, uh, switch to the oldies.

[01:01:15] Joe: That’s a super place.

[01:01:17] Joe: Just put a

[01:01:17] Doug: towel down first

[01:01:18] Joe: because I could just imagine all of our stackers in the sauna. Sweating it out. Thank you guys for this fantastic conversation. Thanks to everybody who hung out with us on YouTube. You guys had some, you brought it today with some of the comments on YouTube. Mm-hmm. Let’s find out what these brilliant contributor contributors, easy for me to say of ours are doing this weekend, og last weekend in, uh, February.

[01:01:43] Joe: Can you believe it’s the last weekend in February already? What do you got going on?

[01:01:45] OG: Yeah. Yeah. Time’s flying. Um, absolutely nothing going on right now. We’re, uh, kind of smack dab in the middle of spring sports, uh, for the kiddos. And, um, yeah, it’s, uh, fastly fast, fastly. Very, very much fastly,

[01:02:01] Joe: very much b fastly, I think

[01:02:02] OG: very much b fastly approaching the end of the school year, which, uh, will transition us from having a non-senior to another senior.

[01:02:11] OG: So we are, we are on the doorstep of another senior season. Wow. Yeah, it’s kinda cool.

[01:02:18] Joe: Time flies, man. Speaking of time flies

[01:02:20] OG: and a fourth grader, just to be clear.

[01:02:22] Joe: Right? Well, speaking of that, Whitney, I just still can’t believe your daughter’s 13 months old. That’s just crazy. Talk about time flying. I know.

[01:02:31] Whitney: Yeah, it is wild. It’s, it’s crazy how fast they really go and everybody tells you that, but when you see them change so much every month, it’s just that like stark reminder. You’re like, oh my God, I’m getting old and you’re getting old and this is sad. Like, it’s just like a very like slow breakup I’ve heard.

[01:02:46] Whitney: And it kind of does feel that way.

[01:02:47] Joe: Isn’t it amazing though, especially those first, well, Jesse, you had this recently, your house as well, just those first several months. It’s not even month by month, it’s day by day.

[01:02:55] Whitney: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:55] Joe: Like you’re watching them, them just grow day by day, just phenomenal. I would

[01:02:59] OG: argue there is a little bit of a lull between maybe age eight and 18, but you know, the first eight are pretty stellar.

[01:03:07] Joe: I’m talking about the first like six months Sochi.

[01:03:10] OG: Yeah, I can agree. Then after six months, you’re like, all right, this is,

[01:03:13] Joe: yes. Yes. Jesse. Oh, oh, Whitney, we didn’t finish. So what’s going on at the money nerds? What’s happening? What’s coming up?

[01:03:22] Whitney: I’m working on an episode, ’cause Spring is on my mind too, of thinking about what are all the fun projects I wanna tackle?

[01:03:28] Whitney: So we’re starting to put together a list of budget friendly projects that you can do that make a big impact on your house, but don’t break the bank. And I’m looking outside and thinking about, I need to finish staining my fence because that’s a high impact thing that still needs to happen. So that’s like an example of that too.

[01:03:44] Joe: Jesse gets to do that in, uh, Rochester, New York. Like during those, what, two weeks of summer in early August, Jesse?

[01:03:50] Jesse: Yeah, correct. There’s about a one month window where

[01:03:53] Joe: you wanna stay the fence. That’s when he goes out to stay in the feds. And that’s at the Money Nerds. Whitney, where the Finest podcast are found.

[01:03:59] Whitney: That’s it. It’s the money nerds.com, where on all the, all the podcast places. It’s there

[01:04:04] Joe: all the places. Speaking of all the places, that’s also where you’ll find personal finance for long-term investors. Jesse Kramer’s, awesome podcast. What’s going on, Jess?

[01:04:14] Jesse: Uh, is it the 20th and

[01:04:16] Joe: 27th? The 27th? Can you believe it already?

[01:04:18] Jesse: It is the 27th. I, I, I can, I literally am losing track of the weeks, so I recently released an episode. I’m kind of proud of it. I’m excited to see what the audience thinks. Uh, I, I titled it The Devil’s Advocate buys an annuity.

[01:04:32] Doug: Oh,

[01:04:32] Jesse: because it’s like annuities, right? Very controversial topics. I can’t say I’ve ever really found an opportunity to recommend one.

[01:04:40] Jesse: But I wanted to almost like steel man, as they call it. It’s the opposite of a straw man. It’s a steel man. And like truly dig into the math behind an annuity and maybe the different types of annuities and when, if there is a corner case, when an annuity is the perfect thing for Tellman for someone to own.

[01:04:56] Jesse: Why? And like, what are, what does that look like? I don’t even know how long the episode is gonna end up being, you know, 45 minutes to an hour of just nothing but annuities. Just so that when some person in the future asks me a question about it, I can be like, yeah, go listen to this episode. So that’s what’s going on over on, uh.

[01:05:11] Jesse: Personal finance for long term investors.

[01:05:13] Joe: I, I love that. All the reasons why you should buy an annuity and you could just call it annuities. The hot tub of the personal finance product space.

[01:05:23] Jesse: Exactly right. Exactly right. You’ll be sold one and then you might regret it later.

[01:05:28] OG: The best annuity is the one that your friend has.

[01:05:32] Jesse: Exactly. Hopefully there’s a friend writer on it. So when they die, you can get the benefits.

[01:05:37] Joe: Could you imagine the woman selling you the annuity going, you know, my daughter needs, needs new shoes. I’m gonna

[01:05:43] OG: use that next time.

[01:05:44] Joe: And if you buy this, I’ve

[01:05:46] OG: a kid at a and MI

[01:05:47] Jesse: can imagine that Joe

[01:05:48] OG: tuition’s not cheap.

[01:05:49] OG: It’s like 25 KA year. I mean, if we can close this deal, this goes a long way to helping me pay my kids’ college tuition.

[01:05:57] Joe: The, the whole personal pull, the heartstrings, that’d be so horrible. All right, that’s gonna do it for today. Thanks again for hanging out. We’ll see everybody back here on Monday. Let’s stack some Benjamins, shall we?

[01:06:09] Joe: Doug, you’re gonna take it from here, man. What should we have learned on today’s show?

[01:06:13] Doug: Well, Joe, first take some advice from Whitney. Not sure if you’re in the bottom 50%. Go to investor.gov to learn all the areas of personal finance where you are a complete idiot. Then dive in, learn a few things, and you too can be slightly above average.

[01:06:30] Doug: Second, I think she said that. Second, I love the point OG made when he said the thing about the homeowner’s insurance. Make a PDF of your policy, upload it to chat. Let AI give you a layman’s understanding of your insurance policy. But the big lesson, don’t ask Jesse Kramer if he wants to play taxes.

[01:06:49] Doug: Twister, let’s just say that guy plays fast and loose with the rules. Thanks to Whitney Hanson of Money Nerds Fame for joining us today. You’ll find the Money Nerds podcast at that lunch table in the corner where everyone’s pants are pulled up a little too high, and they’re all talking about that time they almost had a date with a financial planner, or you know, wherever you’re listening to us now.

[01:07:13] Doug: We’ll also include lakes in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Thanks to Jesse Kramer for hanging out with us today. You’ll find his podcasting party personal financed for long-term investors. Wherever you find podcasts whose titles are so long, they need punctuation. Thanks also to OG for joining us today.

[01:07:30] Doug: Looking for good financial planning. Help head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG for his calendar. I’m not saying anything funny about him because he’ll shove me in a locker. Again, this show is the property of S SP podcast, LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul Sea High. 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.

[01:07:58] Doug: Come say hello and oh yeah, 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.

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You Don’t Need to Be a Money Genius to Win (SB1809)

Our Topic: Morgan Housel: “By definition, 50% of us are in the bottom half”

Our Contributors

Whitney Hanson

Jesse Cramer

OG

Doug’s Game Show Trivia

Mentioned in today’s show

Join Us on Monday!

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Our Topic: Morgan Housel: “By definition, 50% of us are in the bottom half”

Our Contributors

Whitney Hanson

Jesse Cramer

OG

Doug’s Game Show Trivia

Mentioned in today’s show

Join Us on Monday!

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