Allison Baggerly was in trouble. She owed a TON of money to everyone and had just found out she was pregnant. How does she solve the problem? On today’s show she shares how a budget saved her financial future and took her family from a horrible place to one where she’s in control. The best news? You can learn from her experience, as we share budget secrets on today’s show with the woman behind Inspired Budget!
In headlines we ask the question, “Will getting more information make you a better investor?” A recent WSJ piece dives in and we’ll share thoughts. In our TikTok Minute, we’ll see how well a former CEO of a certain company aged. Doug will dazzle us with his intimate knowledge of women’s garments. Not creepy at all. And we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to Tom who has a question about what happens when an account owner dies without explicitly naming anyone as the account beneficiary.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at StackingBenjamins.com/201.
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Ignorance Really Is Bliss When It Comes to Investing (Wall Street Journal)
Our TikTok Minute
Allison Baggerly
Big thanks to Allison Baggerly for joining us today. To learn more about Allison, visit Inspired Budget. Grab yourself a copy of the book Money Made Easy.
Check out Joe’s interview with Allison on our YouTube channel:
Doug’s Trivia
- Who is the founder of Spanx?
Need life insurance? You could be insured in 20 minutes or less and build your family’s safety net for the future. Use StackingBenjamins.com/HavenLife to calculate how much you need and apply.
- What happens to a savings account without a pay on death designation when the account holder dies and has a surviving spouse?
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 insurances 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).
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Our Best Secrets to Slash Your Grocery Budget and Save Big.
Episode Transcript:
It’s Monday morning in America. We all successfully woke up. You know why I can say that, og? Because if we didn’t successfully wake up, we, we wouldn’t be listening to this
show. That’s show that’s not true. Che G p t four now fixes all of this. It just will create avatars for us and we don’t even have to be here anymore.
So we could, they don’t know. We could be Chap GTP four in it right now.
People have no idea whether we’re actually here or not. But you know who was here all weekend long? The men and women in our military keeping us safe while we were chat. G p ting it up. So let’s raise a glass gentleman to our armed forces.
On behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union and the Men and Women Macon Podcast, mom’s Basement. Let’s go stack some Benjamins together this week.
My gosh, you boys already know. I’m not letting that Ramsey boy come over and play until you clean up your rooms.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamins Show.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and today we dive into the Sav for your money problems. The. Cure for your empty wallet. Yes, the spanks of personal finance. Your budget. Say hello to the woman who makes budgets work. Allison Bagley in our headline segment, does more information make you a better investor?
What kind of information is best? We’ll share a recent story from the Wall Street Journal and in our TikTok minute, well, you’ll just have to hear it to believe it. Plus we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to Tom, a lucky stacker who wants to know what happens to your savings account when you don’t have a beneficiary designated.
And of course, I’ll share some restrictive trivia. And now two guys who could inspire Midas to budget. It’s Joe and oh.
Hey, it’s Monday stackers, and happy Monday to you. I am Joe Saul-Sehy. Average Joe Money on Twitter. It is Budget Monday. Doug Budget Monday. Did you, uh, is that always been a thing? You’re wearing your lucky jacket? Yeah. Aren’t you excited? No. You know the guy who is excited about Budget Monday? Mr. OG is definitely excited
beyond excited for a Monday.
I’m excited. I’m so
excited. I’m, I’ve been told I’m excited.
Welcome to the ER of Personal Finance podcast. I’m excited. Yes. Alison Bagley’s
here. Spring breaks over. Now I have to talk about my budget. Guess I’ll never go on spring break again. Mm. I knew it was too good to be true.
You are down. You got that down.
I love those books. By the way, how are you this morning, og? Cantankerous the legend lives on. It’s more, more, more of the same. We got a great show. We’ve got Alison Bagley here. She is amazing, the inspired budget. Uh, she has been teaching budgeting, uh, especially on Instagram, but all over the place, uh, for quite a while.
And, uh, can’t wait to dive in with you all into how to budget. But first, uh, Doug, as you said, a great headline. But even before that, guys, I think we need to team huddle. Can you guys just come over here? Let’s huddle up. I think we need to, uh, alright, let’s whisper. We need to talk about this and break.
Wasn’t that great?
Okay. I don’t, am I running a post? I don’t understand. What do you want me to do? A curl route? What was
hot after all that? You still don’t get what you gotta do.
Hot, hot, hot.
Is hot route
cold for wing it, crabcakes of football. That’s what Marilyn does.
We got a great show, Alison Bagley coming up at first this headline, so let’s get into it.
Hello
darlings and now
it’s time for
your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal written by a guy who’s been on the show. Our friend Spencer Jacob saw this a couple weeks ago. Oh gee. And I think it’s time for us to really get back to basics here.
I really like this piece. It is called, well, you know what? I’m not even gonna tell you the title to start off with, cuz it gives away where we’re going. Spencer writes the opening shot in Animal house pans across the campus of Idyllic Faber College, focusing on a statue of its founder, inscribed with the words knowledge is good.
The statement’s so obvious is to be laughable. The perfect way to kick off an hour and 49 minutes of not so subtle humor, but is knowing more always good in investing. At least it isn’t. It can even hurt. Listen to this experiment. This is a 1973 experiment, guys that he dives into. Psychologist Paul Slovic gathered eight talented handicappers to guess the outcome of 40 actual horse races in four rounds.
The names of the jockeys and the steeds were hidden, but the handicaps could ask for five pieces of information, any five. They wanted five pieces of information from a set list of 88, so gave ’em 88 choices. You could choose five. They were also asked to say how confident they felt. How do you think the guys did better than average,
but not very great?
They did. They did very well. They reached 17% accuracy compared to 10% if they guessed just blindly. And their confidence was almost exactly right to it. 19% confidence. So their confidence matched the expectation. Now, here’s what’s interesting, okay. In the next three rounds, they could ask for 10, 20, and finally 40 bits of information.
, their conviction went up to 34%, but their results stayed the same at 17%. The more information they got, OG it didn’t do any good, more information did not solve their problem. I think there’s a huge, and obviously Spencer Jacob does too. Huge correlation with investing here.
. Well,
there’s a great book, um, that was written by Larry Baity called Execution and Such a good book. That’s really the, the name of the game. I mean, when it comes to investing, when it comes to, I mean, really anything, the three of us talk about eating healthy and exercise and our golf games and you know, like we just talk, we know what to do.
It’s like, I, I know I’m not supposed to eat cake and drink bourbon, but I do, you know, it’s like, I know I’m supposed to start my Roth IRA when I’m 16, but I don’t, you know, I know I’m supposed to have a cash reserve and not charge stuff on my credit card and have interest and, you know, buy a house within my means.
And I know all of these things. We know all of these things and yet, yet we do, uh, we do the opposite
anyways. He points out sometimes OG. He points out. Sometimes that more information makes you crazy overconfident. He talks about how in October, 2001, five Goldman Sachs analyst wrote an 11 page report calling Enron.
Still the best of the best.
I have a tweet that somebody sent me from, I think it was Jim Kramer that said something like, Silicon Valley Bank is the best bank in America or something. It was like, really? It was literally tweeted, it was literally tweeted like 10 hours before it went belly up. I mean, what’s that phrase?
Confidence is what a man feels just before he learns all the facts. You know, when it comes to investing, the, the solution is process, right? The solution is recurring process, not, not more intel because. Again, you know, you can add more and more information, but that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna do anything with it.
I, I was talking to somebody a couple of weeks ago about something I was going to do. I said, oh, I’m gonna go do this thing. And he said, do you know that merely telling people that you’re gonna do something gives you the dopamine of actually doing it? So you’re really not supposed to tell people you’re going to go do something because your brain can’t tell the difference between going to do, like when you tell the thing, like if you say, Hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start exercising five days a week.
Right? And you get all juiced about it. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between actually exercising five days a week and telling people that you’re going to exercise five days a week. Especially if you tell the story with a lot of enthusiasm and emotion. So you get all the benefits and then you, your brain goes, oh, we’re awesome.
Good
job, everybody. This is definitely the best thing I’ve heard all week. This is the best news ever.
Well, it’s Monday. It’s Monday. Yeah. So just merely even talking about the change in your life, It can have a negative impact on it. It’s weird. This
is what, uh, writers, writers don’t like to talk about what they’re going to write because you’ll get all the emotion out when you’re telling people about it.
Yeah. And if you talk about it too much, every writer will tell you you never write it. Yeah. So you keep it to yourself so you can spill the emotion onto the page and not through the discussions that you have. And I think anybody that believes that buying individual stocks is, is the way to go. I think this is something individual stock investors have to watch out for individual property investors.
You get emotional when you know more about the thing. Like if you own Apple stock, the tendency would be og I think, to dig into what’s going on at Apple. You know, the latest thing, you know, all this stuff. Mm-hmm. You know, but my, uh, uh, I got a family member who is deeply involved in the GameStop stuff still, and he will tell me every single great thing that’s going on with GameStop currently.
We’ve seen GameStop stock really not do much, but he’s a true believer. , he feels like he knows the management team gives him this bias toward buy more.
Everything’s gonna be great. Yeah.
Which is, I think, you know, shameless plug. But this is part of the reason why advisors, whether it’s the financial planners that we are, or, or tax people or, uh, attorneys or, you know, o other third party professionals, health coaches are so valuable a lot because, because they don’t, they don’t have the baggage, they don’t have the story that goes with your, your thinking, uh, to your point, right?
I mean, when you listen to your family member talk about GameStop, I’m sure you just shake your head and go, no dude. No. Like cuz cuz you don’t have the baggage. Of that experience, it never makes sense to have all of your money sitting in one company stock. I mean, there’s thousands of examples of, of why that’s a terrible idea.
Most recently, those two banks that just went three, I guess you count, uh, credit Suisse, right? And yet next week we’ll all talk to people who are like, yeah, but that’s not gonna happen to my company. You know? It’s like, okay.
So, you know, and, and you would hear more about individual investors being lights out better than the rest of us.
I think we’d hear far more stories of that if it were true. We always hear the opposite of true done. At the bottom of this piece, OG Spencer writes, the fire hose of information available to retail investors through their smartphones is even worse. When millennial Focus Broker Robinhood sold shares to the public back in 2021, it revealed that active customers checked the app more than seven times a day on average.
Seven times a day. And yet I’m not hearing tons of stories of lots of these Robinhood investors knock
in the, they weren’t, they weren’t seven times better than the, uh, professional investors or the, uh, buy and hold, you know, systematic investors. Weird
big case here for indexing. Again, just staying away from staying away from the bias or at the very least, there’s a guy here on Stock Twiz who talks about, at the very least, you need to know what your bias is, that you have this bias and, and counter Yeah, listen to, listen to voices from the other side.
If you’re gonna be an active investor, great. I am to a certain degree, a, a little bit. I’ve got a sandbox account. I think og, you have a little sandbox account. It’s fun to do, but man, knowing where your bias is is a big part of winning. I got a sandbox and, and Doug’s gotta sandbox. It’s like kitty litter box, but same thing, just smells a little different, right?
We will link to this in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. And of course, we’ll take a deeper dive into this topic and our newsletter. The 2 0 1 that always comes out the day after the show, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 to subscribe to the 2 0 1 newsletter time for our TikTok minute.
This is the part of the show where we dive into either some fantastic knowledge bombs, or some I roll knowledge bombs. Uh, og, which one do we got today? We got some good stuff or some internet craziness. I roll always. I roll always.
Speaking of bias, we also have point in time bias where we think that things are gonna go a certain way because that’s the way that it’s always been, and that’s the way the universe used to be. This is a video that, uh, Trish, uh, stacker Trish found on TikTok, which was, uh, Steve Balmer, the former Microsoft c e o.
His reaction when he heard that Apple was actually coming out with their own phone. What was your first reaction when you saw that
$500 fully subsidized with a plan? I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.
Now, it may sell very well or not. I, you know, we have our strategy. We’ve got great Windows mobile devices, okay? Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace.
And let’s see, you know, what’s the expression? Let’s see
how the competition
goes. Bomber, maybe a little cocky back in 2007.
He should stick to dancing. You ever see him dancing on stage? No. No. Oh, spectacular.
Is he a good dancer? No. No, Joe, he’s a horrible dancer. I didn’t, I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t
know.
What do I say that’s ever serious?
Maybe Balmer the Flaco dancer, who knows?
But it is worth looking up on YouTube. Like when they did their Windows 95 launch and they did some other stuff.
That’s right. All the, oh, it’s so they’re all out there dancing.
So all those like senior executives are Microsoft are up there trying to pump up the, you know, their internal audience.
It’s just fantastic, just how awkward it is.
I do have to say, getting back to the phones, I like the Windows phone. I thought the Windows phone was a great product, but no app developers would go near it. And so the phone, the phone died.
That was the issue, Joe. It was the app developer’s fault. You
don’t, you don’t think that was the issue.
Blackberry, by the way, was also on that in 2007. They’re like most expensive phone and no keyboard. What idiots gonna buy this thing? Oops.
Yeah. I still have my iPhone three
somewhere. Because you love it so much.
It really wasn’t a thing to do with it back then. You know? Now you can trade ’em in and you can, you know, sell back to Amazon and stuff that, that really wasn’t my thing.
So I
have the boxes for all my previous phones in my basement. That’s smart. That’s why doesn’t everybody have just a stash of boxes of technology devices and they’re like, I don’t, I might need it for
something someday. I’m gonna need to read this. Licensing agreement. That’s right. That they pack in there.
Coming up next, Alison Bagley is the amazing woman behind the Inspired Budget Instagram account. And she also teaches tons of people how to do better budgets. She’s not somebody who was originally inspired to budget. She’s gonna tell her story today. And, uh, what I love about Allison as somebody who’s not a natural budgeter, if she can budget, then you can budget.
And every time I talk to her about budgets, I get super excited because she gets way, she gets way more enthusiastic talking about budgeting than anybody I know. So a great way to wake you up on a Monday, Allison, but before we get. I think Doug, you’ve got some, uh, some trivia for us. What do you got today?
So
glad you used the word behind Joe. I sure do have trivia today. Hey, there’s stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And before we talk about spanking Up Your Money with Allison Bagley, let’s talk about the OG of Women’s Shapewear Spanks. It’s a company valued at more than 1 billion in their products are a staple in every woman’s closet.
And not surprisingly, in o geez, you know the days when he’s especially surly. Yeah. Now you know the rest of the story. Okay. Stop giving me the stink iog. Here’s today’s question. What one time? Door to door fax machine salesperson founded spanks in their free time with $5,000 of savings, a self written patent, and went to all sales pitches, armed with a signature red backpack.
That’ll be back with the answer right after I asked Joe’s mom to cut me out of these men’s spanks. Don’t judge me. It was for research. Just ask her not to look me in the eyes.
Hey there, stackers. I’m double cheese Pizza lover and girdle limit tester. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and wow. I just saw some things I cannot unsee when I was trying to look up the trivia answer. Pro tip, when you’re looking up men’s spanks, make sure you spell spanks with an X. Otherwise, you’re gonna see stuff that’s gonna be burned into your eyes and your internet search history forever.
Maybe this trivia answer will help me forget. I don’t know about you. But I wanna know who the Billionaire Mastermind is behind. Get it behind the staple in every woman’s closet. So what, one time. Door-to-door fax salesperson founded spanks in their free time with $5,000 of savings, wrote their own patent and did all their sales pitches.
Armed with a signature red backpack. If you guessed Sarah Blakely, you get a pat on the back. And now here comes the Spanx for your budget. Prepare for some money motivation from budgeting expert Allison Bagger
and I’m super happy. She’s on her way back down to the basement, Alison Bagley joins us. How are.
I’m doing great. Thanks for having me .
It’s about time you wrote a book. It’s about time. Uh, you
know, I never thought I would, I, I, this was never something that I thought I would do, but I did it.
I wrote a book, Joe, like my words. It’s mine. I didn’t ghost write it, so if it’s terrible, I hired a ghost writer. If you love it, I wrote it myself,
which it reads like I’m, I’m, I’m reading it by the way, in your voice. I can hear you talking to me. Thank you. As you read it, and it’s funny and it’s sad and it’s poignant and it just, there’s tons of great advice, which we’re gonna share some of the early advice in the book here today, but let’s talk about this right from the introduction.
Let’s get into it. This journey started for you when you and Matt, your adorable spouse, who I’ve met on two occasions, and what, what a cool guy. You and Matt are sitting at the table, but you guys didn’t think each other were cool at that time. You’re 111,000. Well, you’ve got the exact number. It’s $111,108 and 29 cents in debt, and that doesn’t include your mortgage.
You don’t talk about this. You talk about you crying, and this is kind of a big catalyst moment for you, like a wake up call. But what caused you to sit down at that table that day? Like why did you guys, were the bills just coming in faster and faster? Like why did you sit down and finally add it up?
Oh my gosh.
I had a positive pregnancy test. There’s nothing like having a baby on the way that’s gonna wake you up and force you to be an adult. We had a positive pregnancy test and we were like, okay, how much is daycare? Is it like what, 200, $300 a month? And we were like, holy crap. No. This daycare at the time was $900 a month, which is like cheap these days.
Yeah. And we didn’t have, like, there was not $900 left over. There was no money left over. So we had this wake up call of, well, I can’t quit my job because we don’t make enough money for me to quit my job. So we have to find some cash flow. And that’s what forced us to sit down. I would love to take you on this journey and say it was super introspective and it was all about, you know, wanting a better life for myself and my husband and that I was worthy of change.
But that’s a lie. I didn. Do it for me. I did it for someone else. But on that journey, I realized, wait a minute, I am worth it. My husband’s worth it with or without kids. This was a worthy journey of going on, but I didn’t start there. And that’s
okay. Yeah. It it, and that was one of my favorite lines, by the way, in the introduction when you write, I wish I could tell you that it was great.
Mm-hmm. But that wasn’t it. It took you five years mm-hmm. To clear out $111,000 in debt. And when I see that number, by the way, and that’s minimum payments, $1,400 a month, I’m imagining on two teachers salaries. Yeah. And, and and, and you’re not getting anywhere. Right. We’re paying 1400. I mean, it’s gonna take you your entire life to pay that off.
But five years. And I look at that and I think Alison, that is way fast. But you say , you could have done this much faster. Like you, you screwed everything.
Do I say that in
the book? Well, you don’t say it exactly like we made so many mistakes and how inspired, of course. But how inspiring is that for a guy?
That was also my catalyst was I was on the side of the road, I’d run outta gas. I’m advising other people how to do their money. I’m a complete sham. I’ve got tons of debt. My credit is horrible. And for me, it was the same as you. I am crying about my money, but I remember thinking this hole is super, super deep.
Mm-hmm. And to hear that it would only take five years for somebody out there that might have $111,000 of debt and you can still mess it up and get there in five years. Mm-hmm. I don’t know. I found that really inspiring. Well,
thank you. It felt very long. And I think that’s part of it is when you’re in it, when you’re in the process, it can be very overwhelming and it can feel very, very long.
And every screw up feels like it’s screwing up the entire journey, right? It’s very easy for me to say, oh my gosh, we had car trouble and now the entire journey is messed up. But it’s not, those are just little blips. It’s not gonna be this straight line. There’s going to be times whenever you lose motivation and you have to motivate yourself, honestly.
Like no one’s gonna stand there and do it for you and, and help you stay on track. But that five, it’s actually, it was four and a half years, so I just, I wanna put that out there. What’s four and a half years? But you know, five years was our goal and it was, it was a lot, especially with kids in daycare.
And I look back and I think, gosh, sometimes I worry that five years, like that’s not very inspiring. Like five years, you know, that’s a. That’s like, like having a baby and sending them to kindergarten. But when you look at it and you look at how much money that was on two teacher salaries, I mean, we were bringing home 5,000 to $6,000 a month and you have 1500 of that going to debt and another 900 and then ultimately 1500 going to daycare.
That’s a significant amount of money that we weren’t able to necessarily enjoy, and that was our goal was to be able to keep all of our money and
enjoy it. You’re trying to get ahead then on roughly $2,500 a month and live, like get, get this paid off and live on, on the 2,500 that’s left. The first chapter of your book is all about finding a catalyst.
You and your catalyst. I have my catalyst. So many people have a catalyst like yours or mine that I’ve heard stories of over the years of it’s this phoenix from the flame, right, that I was, I was crying at my table or I was standing next to this rusted out minivan, whatever it is. How do you find your catalyst without getting to that point?
Yes. I love this question because I don’t think that every catalyst has to be this rock bottom moment that you and I experienced. In fact, I would prefer for it not to be for anyone that’s listening, like, you don’t need to have this rock bottom moment that Joe and I hit and we were like, oh, crap, what do we do?
And so in the first chapter, I do talk about how your catalyst could be just those annoying moments in your life. For instance, you wanting to take a vacation, but realizing that, hey, you can’t really go the way you wanna go, or you. Fly, you have to drive instead because you don’t have the money to save up for it or prepare for it.
It can be these small, annoying moments that altogether combine to be a catalyst, and then also your catalyst can be your dreams, your hopes, and your wants for your future. I think that we live in this life where everyone is constantly telling us what we want, what we need to spend our money on, what’s best for us.
So we have to block out the noise and really think about what do I actually want, because I don’t have to have it all, but what do I want? And if paying off debt or saving money or investing gets me there, then that can be enough of a reason to kickstart you to changing your money habits.
That is such a powerful point because up until I made my change, I was trying to make everybody else happy.
Like I was trying to make creditors happy by sending them a little bit of money. I was trying to make other people happy by bringing gifts to the party, right? Or, or paying for everybody’s dinner or doing all this crazy stuff. When I didn’t have any money to do that with, I realized that this is my journey.
Like, I don’t know, I don’t know if this happened for you, Alison, but something clicked like I was like, okay, I’m already screwed. These people can get a little bit from me now, or they can get a lot from me later. Which I’d much rather have I I’d much, so I had to go, I had to tell creditors to screw off.
I’ll pay you when I’m paying you. I had to tell, uh, family members that we weren’t doing holidays the same, but that was so powerful. How did you see things change as you found yourself in the driver? You know
what’s interesting is I didn’t have that same experience. For me. It was telling myself those things.
Oh, for me, I love spending money, Joe. I get high. I enjoy it. I love it. I don’t get that same feeling when I invest or save. I’m just gonna be honest. I’m gonna own it. Do I invest in save? Yes. It’s more of like a checklist on my, on my thing. But when it comes to spending money, I was such an emotional and impulse spender.
I would spend money when I was happy, when I was sad, when I was mad, when I was glad, when I was bored. When I was tired. Anytime I would wanna spend money to either celebrate or deal with the feelings I was having. So for me, it was more like coming to myself and saying, okay, Allison. Just because you feel this way doesn’t mean that you turn to spending to deal with it.
And I think so many people turn to vices. You have alcohol, you have drugs, you have eating my vice with spending. And so being able to feel in control of that and being able to tell myself, you can wait, or there’s something bigger and better. That was very powerful for me. And it changed my money habits and it allowed me to no longer hate and resent my budget.
But, but love it. Enjoy and look forward to it. Yeah.
You called, you called your budget like a timeout for your money. I thought that was Yes. I laughed. I I out loud at that one. I literally, I’m sitting in the room alone and I’m, and I’m laughing. I’m like, oh, money, time out. That’s pretty good people. That’s what it feels
like.
Right? And that’s what I thought it was. I thought it was like a shame on you because I had, I was so, I was so unhealthy with my money and anything that tried to control my money felt like a punishment.
I gotta think. That’s why in the second chapter, you go from the catalyst into money mindset, cuz you gotta know you, right?
For you and me, you and I bond over our a, d, D number one. So a, d, d, I’m gonna go make a decision and then later on go, oops, that might have been a mistake. Or I’ll go down the wrong rabbit hole, so I gotta know that about myself. Second thing is, you and I both like to spend money, so I gotta know that other people that are in this community that we know, they, they will never spend a dime.
And that’s a problem too, right? Yes. I mean that, that’s, that’s a whole other problem. Talk about money mindset for a second and how we kind of get in our head and say, okay, how’s my budget gonna be different if I’m a spender versus if I’m this, whatever it might be.
Mm-hmm. I think it’s so important for you to understand your past with money, your history with money, and then also realize like just because you are the way you are doesn’t make you bad.
You don’t necessarily have to change. We have to deal with the emotions. So here’s an example. Sometimes, you know, I’m a business owner. I get in my head about things and I will start telling myself thoughts and lies. Like, oh, your business is going to fail. Or, oh my gosh, one day you’re gonna get canceled, Allison, like, all of these crazy things and all of these thoughts are not necessarily true.
So sometimes I have to go to my husband and I have to say, okay. You’re very much like a robot. You don’t have a lot of emotions.
He’s, he is, I’ve met him, by the way, everybody, he is not like a robot, but that’s,
no, he does not about himself. That’s the way they talk to each other too, though.
That’s true. He doesn’t have high highs and he doesn’t have low lows.
He’s just always stable. He’s always very realistic. Whereas me, I can be a very emotional person. I don’t know if you’ve caught that yet. Oh, not at all. Not at all. And so sometimes I have to go to him and I have to say, okay, I need you to, to help me just like not think on emotions, but think on facts and base my decisions on facts.
And I’ll go to him and he’ll help me just think through things. And he’ll just ask me questions like, well, is that really true? Do you know it’s true? And I’m able to think about. Fact based. And I think that we have to do that when it comes to our money mindset as well, when we think about our money, because so often we can think I’ll never be able to pay off this debt, or I’ll never be able to retire, and those emotions can control our actions.
But instead of doing that, we have to say, okay, is that true? Do I actually know it’s true? .
Well then with that framework, then we go and we set up our budget.
And what’s interesting, Allison, as you’re talking and you’re thinking about what drives you, I found that as I started winning with money, as I went from losing to winning, that those changed. And you even talk about in the book how, how you went from thinking this was money jail to it. It kind of felt like, these are not your words, but it kind of felt like a game for you too.
Like all of a sudden your brain kind of changes as you budget successfully. When did you see that change for you?
Oh, probably like six to nine months in. I have a, it’s
a while. It’s a while. It
was, which, which to me, like anyone who’s listening now and they think, I don’t like budget. That’s okay that you don’t like it.
Now, that doesn’t mean you’ll always feel that way, because when we started, I said, I’m gonna write a budget until we’re debt free. And after that, I am done. I am done with it. I’ll never do it again. But what happens is it became a part of who I was. I was no longer writing a budget. I was a budgeter. I was no longer trying to control my money.
I had control over my money. It changed just the way I felt. It gave me so much confidence when it came to managing money, confidence I never had before. And so I think that when it comes to budgeting, it’s just about. Looking at it in the, in the sense of what do I value and how can I make sure that I am putting money towards those
values?
Let’s give people some tactical tips on their budget that you list off. Number one, you say budget per paycheck. Some people budget per week. Per month. Yours is per paycheck. Why is
that? Because that’s why money comes in. Like why would I budget just like right, right in the middle. So for instance, my husband and I, we get paid at the very end of the month.
He gets paid on the 25th, I get paid on the last day of the month, whatever that is. I combine those paycheck. Into one like lump sum, and that lasts us from the first of that next month through the 14th. My husband’s paid again on the 15th. That paycheck last us from the 15th until the end of the month.
For me, it just makes sense. It makes sense for you to start exactly when that money comes. In and that way you feel like you have this fresh slate, so you don’t have to do March 1st to March 31st. It doesn’t have to be like that.
His income and most people hanging out with us, their income is the set paychecks, your and my income comes in, in waves, right?
Comes in at different times. How do you budget if you’re somebody who is commission based or somebody who’s based on these variable income streams like you and I get? Mm-hmm. I
really struggled with that, Joe. I had been just a set salary, same amount every single month for years, and I went to being high and low and high and low.
It cost me so much anxiety. I always felt like I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to expect, so I decided. That’s it. I’m not doing that anymore. So I started paying myself a set salary. This is before I even became an S corp and became an employee of my business. So money would come in every month. I would pay myself the same amount.
And you can do this no matter how you’re paid, if you have some sort of variable income or one that fluctuates, I like to call it like an income bucket. So you have money that comes in. Let’s say you make $6,000 in a. You need $5,000. You give yourself $5,000. You put that $1,000, that extra $1,000 into your income bucket, then the next month comes if you’re only paid, if you only make $4,000, you pay yourself that $4,000 and now you have money to draw from so that you can continue to make that same set
amount.
You’re replicating a paycheck for yourself. You’re creating a paycheck. Yes. Why
not? I mean, if that’s what you thrive on, then do it. And that’s exactly what I thrive on. So
I, which also makes, which also makes sense too, Alison, because a lot of people I, I met when I was a financial planner, I found if they are on a commission basis, they get big bonuses.
They live these boom bust lifestyles, which are not healthy. Like, it’s like ramen noodle, ramen noodle, big screen tv, ramen noodle, ramen noodle, big screen tv. Like it is just, it’s horrible. Mm-hmm. Uh, that thing. So setting it up so it’s reliable and consistent not only helps you budget, I think it helps your life too.
Yes, because then you’re not gonna fall into lifestyle creep when you make a lot of money. It’s easy to sign up for things that might have more maintenance costs later on. And then we have this lifestyle creep that maybe one day we can’t deal with. And that is something that as a business owner, and as my income has grown, I have really tried to be very careful about because I don’t wanna set my family up to where if something does happen with my business and I’m not making the same amount, we have to move out of our home from the school where my kids go.
I don’t want that. So you have to be very mindful and you can’t let the, those big, high times influence you because you have to be aware that those low times might be coming and you have to prepare
for them. Yeah. What’s cool is if you look at it that way, then you just give yourself a raise when you know that things have changed versus that boom bust.
Yes. Um, number two on here, list out your income and fixed expenses. Use two tools, a bill, payment log, and a calendar. Talk about these two tools and how they work together.
So I particularly love the calendar. I, I still budget like this and it’s literally just a calendar. I’m a very visual person, Joe, and just with teaching students for so many years, I think that there we have, we are all such visual learners, so the calendar allows you to see when you’re paid, when your bills are coming out, so that way you know which paycheck covers which bill is.
You don’t really need this if you’re paid monthly, but I feel like most people are not paid monthly. This allows you to really see that, and then the bill payment log is because sometimes we just forget. Sometimes we just miss a payment. I remember when we were paying off debt, I had a car payment, I completely forgot to pay it.
I was pregnant, so I had pregnancy brain, and I remember looking at our money being like, dang, we did good. This. Like, God, we have all this extra money. This is amazing. Oh no. Yeah. And then, and then I get a, uh, notice in the mail that’s like, uh, you didn’t pay it. Here’s your fee. And I was like, well, crap. If I had gone back to my bill payment log and almost did this as a checklist for myself, I would’ve realized I missed that bill.
So if you have your bill set up on Autodraft, you don’t necessarily need this. But at the time, I didn’t have my bill set up on Autodraft, but it allowed me to kind of just double check and make sure I didn’t make that mistake. Cuz here I was thinking I was so awesome. I was the best. I was so proud of myself.
I even said something to my husband and then this notice comes in and I was like, oh, I have eaten my words.
What I like about what you said is the calendar kind of gives you the heartbeat. Like you can feel the heartbeat of your money in and out. Yes. So that you look at your bank statement and you don’t high five yourself and you don’t freak out when things are a little low, things are a little high because you know that that’s.
What time it is. That makes total sense to me. Uh, number three on your list. Then budgeting for variable expenses. These are the ones that threw off my early budgets. Like my twins would get invited to a birthday party and they both had to bring, you know, something or, or the dishwasher breaks, which happened right now, like literally tomorrow we’re getting a new dishwasher installed.
That was money I’ll never get back. Budgeting for these variables, how do you put them? Oh
my goodness, I just put him right down on the budget sheet. But you have to really be mindful, and this is where it’s good to know your, your patterns, know your past spending patterns. For instance, gas always throws us off like, how much am I gonna spend on gas?
My husband has a long commute. When I’m able to go back and look at the patterns and see how often he’s filling up, I can estimate an amount that should be about right. So when it comes to budgeting for those variable expenses, those expenses that change, it’s kind of, to me, it’s a game. I see it as like, how close can I get?
Like when I’m budgeting and I’m trying to estimate my electricity bill, I might go back and look at what I paid last year in this same month. And I try to just get as close as I possibly can. And that is really where I think a lot of people go wrong when it comes to their spending money and their restaurants and their groceries.
If you’re not keeping tabs on it, it can be really easy to spend way more than you. You are spending, and it can be really easy to assume you don’t spend that much when you’re actually spending a thousand dollars a month at the grocery store. If you don’t know that, if you don’t know that pattern in yourself, it’s very easy to sit down at the budget when you’re making your budget and say, I’ll spend $400.
Like a hundred dollars a week is great. No, it’s not. It’s not realistic. If you spend a thousand dollars and you wanna spend less aim for $900. You don’t need to like cut it all the way back and then be frustrated with yourself because you blew it in one
week, you’ll spend a hundred dollars on eggs.
I know, right?
That’s why, that’s why I’m trying to convince my husband to get chickens. You know, in my hoa, we’re not allowed to have them. But chickens can be an emotional support animal. Technically. No,
no.
Cheryl said the same thing a few weeks ago. I’m like, no, no. Oh, I want him so bad. Oh, we are not, do not talk to Cheryl, please.
Okay. Won’t, no. I’ll you send me a number here. No, do, no, I’m not now. I was like, oh, you gotta meet my friend Allison now. I’m like, Nope. You do not need to meet my friend Allison, please. God. No chickens. Number four, budget for debt, payments and savings. I was interested that this was last cuz everybody says, pay yourself first.
Why? Why was this number four on your list and not number one?
Oh good. Good question. Um, I mean, I guess it could be number one if you want, but for me, when I think about budgeting and the way I budgeted when I was paying off debt was I always wanted to make sure I sent extra money to debt as soon as I possibly could, because if I left that money on my checking account, I’m gonna spend it.
Yeah, me too. I have no issues doing that. So once I knew all of my fixed expenses and all of my variable expenses, anything left, I would leave a buffer. Anything left went straight to my goal. So I personally like knowing my numbers first, and the numbers change every month. I mean, my fixed expenses stay the same, but my variable expenses do not stay the same.
There is some fluctuation. So I wanna be able to really maximize that number and be able to say, okay, everything left is going to a goal I have. Whether that goal is to. Invest, save money, pay off debt. You know, you enter your goal here, but I like knowing that dollar amount. And then if it’s not as much as I want it to be, that’s when I go back to my variable expenses and I say, okay, can I shave off $50 here and there from different things.
One of the biggest things I do is I, I would always make those debt payments right away so that way, that money, yes, that way that money was not in my account and it really forced me to stay accountable with the rest of my spending.
Which is important for a spender to do, right? Yeah. Just get it, get it out of there.
And then your brain’s gotta find a different way around it mm-hmm. Than spending money.
Um, yeah, I don’t recommend doing that. If you don’t have a savings though, make sure you have money in savings just in case. I mean, life happens.
And, and it’s funny you say that because even as I was asking that question, Alison, I was thinking about the very next chapter of your book.
You talk about big problems people have. And one is, you’ll be excited about this right after you hear Allison speak here today, after you read her book, you’re gonna be super excited. You get geeked and you’re gonna live that ramen noodle lifestyle.
And I will tell you right now, that is a monster mistake. You’re gonna budget everything to the bone. You’re not gonna leave yourself a buffer. You’re never gonna go out to eat, you’re never going to have any fun. It will be a timeout for your money. Life is gonna suck and you will implode and you say this in your book, you will implode and then you won’t get back on the horse.
You won’t do it again. Like it’s, yeah. I think it’s far better to have your income and fixed expenses first. Maybe for that reason too. Mm-hmm. That you can give yourself a little bit of life before you No.
Yeah, I agree. Because I think that we all deserve spending money, and that was my thing. I imploded, I remember walking into Target.
That was my, that was my vice, that was my place I would go and I remember like spending $300 and I came home and I told my husband, I was like, you and the budget can suck it. Like, this is not, this is not like I’m, I’m not taking any of this back. This is my, this is what we’re doing. Because I had no control.
I had no freedom. I, I felt like I was just like, She living just to pay off debt and have no fun. So I’m a big believer in finding balance, and I think that by budgeting your variable expenses and budgeting, spending money first really allows you to have that. That balance in life, which then allows you to make progress and still be motivated and wanna stay on track for the long haul.
Cause four and a half years, five years, that’s a long haul. That is lots of opportunities to fall off track, which we did, but we always got back on and it’s because we were creating a budget that was realistic and reasonable for our
family. That’s so exciting. In five years, if you have six figures of debt, you can, you can get out of it.
Yeah. I mean 5, 5, 5 years and to your point feels like a long time at the beginning, but man, looking back, it’s, I don’t know. It’s so cool. Oh my
gosh, it’s so worth it. It’s so funny because Joe, the other day, my husband was mowing and I’m totally gonna throw him under the bus here. He was mowing and he mowed over a rock and the rock shot out and it hit the very top of this massive window in our entryways, like it’s on the second story massive window.
And it just shattered, I mean, into like a million pieces. I was mad, but at that moment I was like more annoyed than anything. And I thought the fact that this annoys. And doesn’t keep me up at night, stress me out cause me so much anxiety lead to a huge, massive fight where I resent my husband. The fact that that annoys me is all because of that five years of work of setting ourselves up to where we don’t have any other debt payments other than our mortgage, and we have money in savings to cover things like an $1,800 window replacement.
All of my questions today came from just the first couple chapters of the book you get into then efficient strategies paid on debt. You talk a lot about saving money. The book is called Money Made Easy, how to Budget, pay Off Debt and Save Money. And it’s available everywhere tomorrow, correct.
Yes, it’s available everywhere tomorrow where you can buy books.
I would love for you to get yourself a copy. And then what would make my heart so happy is if you actually got a copy, read it, and then passed it on to a family member or a friend, someone that you know wants to make money easy.
A lot of our community likes audio books. You doing the audiobook? You have to.
You’re a
podcaster. I know. So I’m doing the audiobook, but I’m not reading it. I’m super whoa. One,
one star. One star.
I know, but at least it’s gonna be an audiobook form. But I do have a podcast. You can go listen to my podcast.
Me, i, a podcast.
I know. Inspire budget, which is fantastic. But then also this is Awkward, which is, uh, these amazing cover I’m seeing.
This is awkward. Every I’ve, I’ve seen inspire budget all over the place as well, but this is awkward. Just lately, I’ve seen everywhere. Like you guys are everywhere.
Oh gosh. Well that’s all Chris’s doing.
No, no, no. I’m saying people talking about it going, oh, I was listening to my favorite show. This is Awkward.
Yes. Oh yeah. It’s fun show. Yeah. So go listen to Allison and pick up the book and then hand it to a friend who needs help. Allison, thanks so much for hanging out with stackers and helping us get better with our money and better with our budget. Thanks for having me.
This
is Rebecca from Connecticut instead of Stacking, Hamilton’s and Jackson’s, I’d much rather be Stacking.
Benjamins. Huge thanks to Allison for joining us. Og. This proves that Maxim, you and I have heard over and over and over. Just because you couldn’t do it yesterday does not mean you can’t reinvent yourself today. Couldn’t budget before does not mean you can’t. Budget today. Didn’t save any money before.
Doesn’t mean you can’t save any money today. Man, Allison dug her way out of a hole. Just do a little bit. Absolutely. Just do a little bit. And when you hear that she got out of that much debt in five years, like I was so surprised talking to her and she’s like, yeah, it took forever, five years. I’m like, are you kidding me?
You paid off a ton of debt in five years. Like that is so amazing in the
grand scheme of things. You can look back five years ago and you don’t even remember what you were doing back then. Yeah. I mean, it’s like a blink of an eye, so just do the next logical thing.
Sadly, for me, like five years ago, my kids were four.
You know? That’s what it feels like.
Yeah. Not quite.
It just, it just flies. Hey, let’s, uh, throw a taven lifeline. Speaking of your family and protecting your family, we’re gonna tackle some of life’s most important questions. Our friends at Haven Life Insurance Agency, og, they put what you value first. Well, getting off
work early so I can catch the championship game.
That’s what I value today.
Ncaa. Center stage tonight?
Yes. Have you ever been to a championship game? Did you go to go see Michigan State play when they played? I never, never have. No. The NCAA does this really dumb thing of putting the basketball stadium in the middle of a football stadium. Yes. And so the sight lines are awful.
You know, there’s 80,000 people there when there should be 30 or 20, you know, in a field designed for football is, you know, they put this little teeny tiny basketball stage, you know, which you don’t really think about how small a basketball, basketball court is until you overlay it on top of a football field.
You’re like, oh yeah, it’s like a
third of it. And then you realize what a money grab it was that you’re even there sitting. Yeah. You’re like, I’m
in row. I’m in row 17 seat three and four. This is awesome. And it’s like, well, row 17 for a football game would be amazing, but there’s 87 fake rows in front of you, so it’s not that great.
, it is a great day for college basketball fans. And you know what? It’s your loved ones in your time. What’s more fun than spending your time with your loved ones, watching your, uh, favorite team maybe win the National Championship much better than filling out a life insurance app. And that’s why they’ve made buying quality term life insurance actually simple.
You go to stacky Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife before the game. You get this application that’s quick. It’s online. You get an instant coverage decision. You don’t have to wait weeks for a decision. Their prices are affordable and all policies issued by their parent company, mass Mutual, more than 160 year old insurer.
Lovely customer support stacky Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife.
If I go do all of that, Joe, will that somehow magically pull my number one seated team back into the championship game tonight? Dude, it was
mine too. Your team, the Purdue boiler makers blew up my bracket. Grew up my, but by the way, who’s, whose bracket was not blown up this year.
I mean,
well, right. Everyone’s well. And I, and I had another bracket that I built that had Arizona going all the way. Oh, oh, oops. They were the first ones upset and out and then my team chokes. So ugly. Yeah. Bunch of Kansas
fans upset. But if you’re Arkansas fans beaten Kansas to make it to the Sweet 16.
Not bad there. . Okay. Today we’re gonna throw it out to Tom in the basement. Uh, Tom asked this of our stackers in the basement.
I thought this OG was an important question. So we bring it out today. Savings account of deceased without a pay on death on file is his question. My grandfather recently passed away. He had an individual account with one of the largest online high interest banks. He did not have anybody set up as his pay on death on that account.
His wife, my grandmother, is still alive. Am I correct in saying that your assets go to your surviving spouse by default if you have not designated someone else? So let’s talk about the, oops, OG and not selecting a beneficiary for your account.
Yeah. Um, every state’s different on this, although, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I know of any state that doesn’t, uh, have the spouse be the primary, you know, if you don’t have a, a specific designation.
So my guess is that it will be, uh, grandma. The downside is that you have to go to court for that. So that’s really the biggest issue is that it’s not as simple as just showing up and going, Bob died. I’m Sally. Hook me up. Like they need a court order for that, which is gonna be a little bit of a process.
It’s gonna be, uh, some time and, and probably a few, you know, a few dollars worth of expense to get done. So, so don’t leave stuff without beneficiaries. It’s a, it’s a pain in the
butt. Is it a good idea to contact a lawyer in this case? Or is it, um, simple enough OG that he can do this himself?
Well, I, I don’t, I don’t know the first darn thing about probate.
So I would have, I would have an attorney help with it, you know, or at least a paralegal, somebody that’s had the experience of, you know, what forms to file and all that sort of stuff. For sure. Um, it seems like it should be pretty simple, but you know, again, there’s a process there that you have to follow.
Unless you’ve done it before, I doubt that you know exactly what that process is. So,
and maybe then the first step is to contact the bank, right? And say, here’s what is going on, how does grandma get access to the money? Mm-hmm. And the bank may be able to help as, as well. But, but still, og a great lesson, which we talked about last week
on the show.
Yeah. Especially in the, especially in the day and age of like, you know, moving money around because to try to find better rates and that sort of thing. And it’s like something as simple as a bank, how you don’t think about it, you just think, oh, I’m gonna go, you know, discover’s got a better interest rate, or allies got a better interest rate, so I’m gonna move things around to kind of get a bonus or, or whatever.
And that extra step of making sure that, that you’ve got the t o d or p o d on the account from a banking standpoint or brokerage, whatever, eliminates all this hassle for sure.
Make sure it’s updated as well. If you’ve been through, uh, divorce, if you’re remarried. Um, How many times have we heard the horror story, if somebody has the wrong people on the mm-hmm.
On the account. Yeah. Thanks for that question. Tom. You know what, because Tom asked this in the basement, great place to ask questions if you want to get the crowd, uh, answered to the question. But if he would’ve called in to the even lifeline, we would’ve sent him, we would’ve got a shirt. A shirt. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail gets you on the Haven Lifeline, and, uh, it is, it’s a great time to call.
We can get to your question fairly quickly. It’s probably
faster too, right? Not only do we, we probably get your question faster, but you don’t have to do all that pesky typing. Oh, yeah. You don’t have to say, oh, I only wanna post this in this group. You just go straight to the, the lifeline on our website and boom, you’re in.
I mean, who can be bothered with all those keystrokes? I mean, your hands will be exhausted after that. Yeah. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail. Get you there. We’ve got a great week in the basement on a lot of different channels. We are going to be live on Instagram this week on many weeks. We’re also doing recordings for the show over on our, the Fireside app, which also simulcast YouTube for a link to all the different places where you can hang out with us.
Stack Benjamins dot com slash welcome and uh, you can sign up for our social media accounts where we, we have other stages where we’re helping people out all week between the shows. And also that’s a great way to say hello to us. We’re, if you wanna interact with us podcast kind of a one-way street, we get to do all the talking.
I like the, I like the back and forth that we get on social media. By the way, on that note too, more back and forth, I didn’t have time to say this last week, but thanks to everybody who came out and hung out with us at the Economy conference, doc G and I were. Had a fantastic time a couple weeks ago. If you get a chance to go to a conference, uh, either a campfire or economy or one of the few personal finance conferences out there, just a lot of, lot of fun to hang out with like-minded, like-minded people.
But if you’re not here to hang out with like-minded people or to go hang out with us on Instagram, you are here because you’re worried about the financial markets. You’re worried about your money, that it’s in the right place. You’re worried that your financial plan might not dovetail. What I’d like you to do is check out this free Guyo Gina’s team put together to help you plan more and panic less no matter what the market does.
Has some great insights on what you should be doing and smart questions to ask yourself so you’ll make financial decisions your future self. We’ll, thank you for head over to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash. That’s Stacking Benjamins dot com slash guide to get that free guide from og. All right, that’s our community calendar for today.
Coming up on Wednesday, Bob Wheeler is gonna be here. He’s the CFO of the Comedy Store, and he also is a working c cpa. I almost said certified financial planner. Not that he’s a working cpa, and he is going to help, uh, all of us with some last minute, uh, tax tips. If you haven’t done your taxes yet, we’re coming to the rescue on Wednesday.
We’ll see all of you then. Doug, take it from here, man. What should we have learned today? Well
Joe first take some advice from the inspiring Budgeter Allison Fagley, and create a budget to reach your goals and stick to the plan even when life throws a wrench in your budget. Second, take a lesson from Our Haven Lifeline and make sure you decide your beneficiary designations to ensure that the person you want to receives the money.
Bud, the big lesson. Turns out Spanks can’t work a miracle and help you drop 20 pounds for your big date night at the si. You know, a friend tried, just somebody that I talked to one time, they tried it. I, I would never do that sort of thing. Hey, what side question? Totally unrelated. What sort of rips do you think the warranty on Spanx cover?
Thanks to Allison Bagley for joining us today. You’ll find her book, money Made Easy Wherever Books are Sold, looking for great reads and wanna help the. Visit our Stacking Benjamins store for some of our favorites, including Allison’s book. Head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash store and check it out.
Who knows, maybe a great graduation gift waits there. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the Property of SB Podcasts llc, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Our producer is Karen Repine. This show was written by Lacy Langford, who’s also the host of the Military Money Show.
With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earnin Invest Podcast. Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1. You’ll find the four 11 on all Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 Tina Eichenberg makes the video version of this show.
Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Why chat with friends about the show later. Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Youngin are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.
So say hello. When you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know this. Show us 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 Benjamins Show.
I totally own the fact that I watched some pretty trashy reality shows. It’s uh, yes you do. You know, it’s a nice break from watching my. My basketball team choke. And, uh, it just, it, it, it makes me realize how good I have it. So, uh, you know, yeah. I’m totally fine admitting to people that I watch Bachelorette and Bachelor and Love At First Sight, and now we’re onto the show called Married At First
Sight, where people, wait a minute.
Do you notice before you get into this, do you notice OG how he has to continually tell himself over and over? I’m okay with, and I re Yeah, I do,
I do. Like, he’s, he’s, he’s gotta say
it out loud, over and over. Just maybe if he hears himself it, I watch The Bachelor. It’s okay.
Well, not only, it’s okay. Not only am I doing it for myself, but I’m doing it to put up walls so that if anybody comes after me for it, I’m gonna be like, look, I told you I’m admitting this.
It’s a defense mechanism. It’s why I do it. Right. The,
uh, the first battles, the best battle Sun Sue is the one that’s never fought. Yeah. There you go. See, you define the battlefield ahead of time. Yeah. You’re, you’re good.
Yeah. Anyway, so we started watching this show called Married At First Sight. And we started at season 10, so it’s just, you know, we binged it last week.
How
could you possibly start at 10 without knowing all of the characters in the
I know the developments. That’s the great thing is that every season they have new people, so you don’t need to, you don’t need to go back cause, but amazingly they have a season 10. In fact, they have a season. I think they’re on like 16 now or something.
Crazy. That’s what, that’s what I was thinking.
Season 10. Right? Season. I
know, I’d never heard of this thing until it showed up on our Netflix queue. Like a manna
from Heaven. I saw a new show, by the way, this show seems absolutely like, who would do that? Who would just show up and, and hey, we’re getting married and uh, and do that.
But I saw, I saw a video the other day and they said, this is a real show. I should have looked it up, but I didn’t know we were going here Doug. But did you see the one with the guys, young guys who are all looking for love and it turns out the people they’re going to be dating. Are each other’s hot moms?
Yes. Yeah. It’s something like Mill Island or something like that. What has happened to us? That one that is a bridge. What’s happened to Doug? What has, what is happening to us? And where’s the application show for that show? More importantly,
did you know your mom was starring on the show?
That’s right.
No, none of ’em in the preview.
I saw none of the guys know their moms are. Like they all, they all go, mom, what are you doing here?
What a great plot twist. I, I’ve seen a snippet of a show, but not like that. That sounds intriguing to me. That first episode where the big reveal is your mom’s one of the, wow, that would be spectacular.
Anyway, the whole reason I’m getting to this is actually relevant, germane, contextual, one might say to our program that we produced for our fair listening audience, and that is that, uh, so we of course had to move on to season season 11, and, uh, there’s a, we had to, I mean, we had to, we couldn’t
be left
Hagen in Season 11.
They move to, it’s a different city every season, apparently, I’m told. You know, people talk in locker rooms.
Do you know what the, do you know what the cliffhanger is? OG at the end of every season. Is somebody else gonna be dumb enough to be on the show? Yes. Right. Do we have somebody dumb
enough to do another one?
So it’s in New Orleans in season 11 and there is a couple where the wife, it’s hard to even say that cuz they’ve known each other at this point for like seven days. But the wife makes considerably more than the husband. But the husband is a, he’s one of us. Like he, I actually look to see if he was in the basement, if he was a member of the basement because he is hardcore into personal finance and budgeting.
Oh, sweet. Yeah. And he is like, he’s talking to her about, She’s spending too much discretionary. She, well, she has no idea what’s discretionary because she’s out just spending away on restaurants and travel and going shake games.
It’s, it’s a shock. You had to go on a show like this to find a date.
Yeah, right.
Such a shock. I’m surprised he’s not trolling the, our basement looking for hot single budgeting finance
partners. We haven’t told you the 4% rule yet. I haven’t told you.
But, uh, I, I real, I did look him up to see if he was in the basement. I didn’t find him. I mean, you only get first names, so I don’t know what a last name was, but I looked up all the Brett’s. So Brett, dude, if you were on season 11 of, of married at first sight and you’re a listener, reach out cuz we want you on the show.
I want to know how that ends. Pretty cool. Yeah. One night he starts making dinner. They put him in an apartment together for a couple of months and he sort of takes over cooking responsibilities and I think it’s like the first time he is cooking for. And it looked awesome. It was like steak and asparagus.
You’d have loved it, OG. And uh, He’s like, well, we got 10 or 15 minutes. And she, I couldn’t believe it cuz she was really opposed to this whole budgeting notion. But she’s like, do you wanna spend a few minutes budgeting? I thought, wow. Wow. That’s really like healthy. Such sweet pillow talk. I know it. Of course he flip, he gets the laptop out.
He’s already got a, a template because of course he does. Who doesn’t? It’s like one of his quick lines on his
desktop. Here’s my Google sheet stock.
Right, right. And hold on the rest of us, hold on. I’ll get the Merry white
while we do this. Yeah. The rest of us are quickly closing our PornHub tabs on the top of the browser.
He’s got his budget just ready to go. She’s got a little, you know, piece of paper, but it was really good to see actually, I, I was impressed and they were talking about, oh, where can, maybe you’re gonna cook more, so maybe I don’t have to eat out as much as I normally do. And they have these marriage experts or marriage counselors that the couples talk to and one of the guys that is just like, if we ever needed one, I want to go see Pastor Cal.
This guy is amazing, but he had an interesting comment to the couple when they were talking about the finance issue was a, was a wrinkle for them. And it was, look that people always tell you or you always hear. After infidelity, finances is a thing. It’s like the second most common thing that breaks up a relationship.
And he said, no, it’s not. It’s communication about finances. It is what breaks up and an issue with, you know, not an inability to talk about finances. It’s that it’s not the finances themselves that break people up. And, uh, I thought that was, that was a pretty interesting little twist, pivot on, on that whole notion.
So, uh, you know, I really just brought this up to you to say, we gotta go find this guy and get him on the
show. I can’t believe the dissertation on the show, though. You’re, Doug’s like into it. Totally into it. And then on season 12, yes. You know, a, um, uh, a side note, just communication in general. I had found this today, Doug not knowing we were going there, but I think we can make the bridge on communication and communication the right way really matters.
I, I spoke a few weeks ago about how much I love British humor. And I’m bringing this up because it’s just some more just hilarious British humor, mate. This is a guy in his doctor, take a listen. Well, we’ve had your test results back and you’d be pleased to hear that it’s benign.
Oh, thank goodness.
That’s such a relief.
Yeah. It’s good
news, isn’t it, Mr.
Ig?
I’m
not Mr. Ignorant. I’m Mr. E. Mr. Ben e.
Well, who’s this mal ignorant British
Huber is just so amazing.
Did that have anything to do with what we were talking about? No. Nope. Okay. All
right. .
I don’t need to sell you guys on these shows.
They sell themselves, but I really think, I really think once you try ’em, you’ll be hooked.
Leave a Reply