As we buckle up and prep for fall we think “curriculum.” What lessons do we need in our life? What lessons do our children need from us? Whether you’re headed back to work or back to school, we’re diving into helping those around you do better with money. John Lanza, host of the Art of the Allowance podcast joins us to talk families and money…and even if you don’t have a family OR money, there are LOTS of lessons in this discussion.
In our headline segment we remember that HOW we pay can sometimes be as important as WHAT we are buying. Fraud is through the roof, so we discuss the different ways you can settle up with a merchant, so you have smooth transactions.
Of course, we answer a (very creative) Haven Life line call for help AND Doug also spoon feeds us some trivia.
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/allowances-and-raising-money-smart-kids-john-lanza-1396
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Credit Card, PayPal or Cash App? How You Pay Matters (Wall Street Journal)
John Lanza
Big thanks to John Lanza for joining us today. To learn more about John, visit The Money Mammals.
Grab yourself a copy of the book The Art of Allowance: A Short, Practical Guide to Raising Money-Smart, Money-Empowered Kids.
To hear more from John, subscribe to his podcast, The Art of Allowance Podcast.
Doug’s Trivia
- In addition to Bugs Bunny, what other characters did the legendary Mel Blanc voice in the original Looney Tunes series?
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.
- Big Will and his wife are retired, he’s a financial DIYer, and he’s concerned about his wife’s financial well-being if he passes away before she does. He wants our input on the best way to make sure she’ll be well taken care of financially in the event that anything were to happen to him.
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Other Mentions
- Grab your copy of John’s other book, Joe the Monkey Saves for a Goal.
- Hear John’s eloquent explanation of the origin of the term “Art of Allowance” in Episode 058 of the Art of Allowance Podcast.
Join us Friday!
Be sure to tune in this coming Friday, where our roundtable will be joined by two very special guests: CFP Michael Kitces and CFP Dana Anspach. They’ll join our resident CFP, OG, to tackle the topic of where to look for advice.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: The Power of Confidence When Investing (SB1395).
Episode transcript
Hey, shake.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I’m
Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. Today we’re talking about how to teach kids to be financially responsible. With the host of the Art of Allowance podcast. John Lanza bonus doesn’t necessarily involve increasing their allowance and. You don’t have to be a kid to pick up a lesson or two. Before that, we’ll share a headline about paying.
Does it matter what payment method you use at the store? Turns out it does. We’ll help you choose the right way to pay. Plus, we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to a lucky stacker looking for help. And then I’ll share some hilariously comical trivia. And now, two guys who are emotionally kids at heart.
It’s Joe and Oh,
nothing. I like being better than the, uh, youngest guy my age. Hey everybody, welcome to the, uh, math equation that doesn’t work for the WIN podcast. Uh, OG giving me the look there as he’s trying to figure that out. I, I like, uh, having a young attitude, man, don’t you? He’s like being young at heart.
I can’t hear anything ’cause I’m chewing so fast.
Trying to, uh, yeah, he’s, he’s like a
12 year old. All I hear is myself chewing stuff in his mouth full of cookies. He’s got a mouth full of
cookies. It’s biscuits. It’s biscuits.
He’s got a mouth full of biscuits. Is that pepper pig?
That’s any British person? Yeah, I just made it
up. Oh,
I was gonna say, it does sound like a little Peppa Pig wine.
It’s youngest guy in the room. That’s, that’s me.
I meant youngest guy. Well, okay. Well,
okay. But we’re talking about in all things other than the calendar, because you are absolutely the oldest guy in the room by far.
Easily off of the calendar. Easily. What time do you go to bed? Og. What time do
you go to bed?
9 45. It’s very, how many people do you let on your
lawn? Nobody.
Do you read the paper every uh, weekend, morning?
Oh
no. ’cause it’s usually night, noon by the time I get up. How many
kids on skateboards have you yelled at
this week?
17, your honor, the defense, rest. Yes, the defense. You can’t even answer.
Defense. Rest. We’ve got a fantastic show today. Uh, given that juvenile moment, we’re gonna have a few more. John Lanza, who’s the chief mammal, that is his, that is his, uh, moniker at his company. He has a fantastic brand that helps credit unions teach, uh, kids about money and obviously a fantastic podcast.
And by the way, Doug, you said that, um, don’t have to be a kid to get lessons. You know what, if you’re just somebody starting out, whether you have kids are a kid, Doesn’t matter. John Lanza always brings some great tips for, well, better communication
in your family. Yeah, I mean, the basics that you would teach a kid are exactly the basics that you need as an adult.
There’s a dude named Robert Fullham who made a boatload of cash
on that principle. I, I don’t
know who that is, but Sounds great. Yeah. She knew
everything I need to know. I learned in kindergarten, remember all the books? Oh yeah. There were like five of those books. That dude is sitting on his own private island right now.
’cause of those
books. Independently wealthy. Yeah. On the backs of all the people trying to learn stuff from kindergarten when you could have just picked it up in kindergarten and you would’ve been fine. I mean, some of us were sleeping. Sounds like he ripped us all off. But actually, you know, it’s not a rip off this right here.
Probably not the way our sponsor wanted us to begin that spot.
Why not? We
said it wasn’t a ripoff.
It’s not a ripoff. That’s a strong
endorsement. It’s fantastic. And you know what, I’m gonna back it up with another one right here. Pow. Pow Yes. One, two, Pudge Doug. We’re on it. We got OG here. We got Doug here.
We’ve got John Lanza up talking to mom. He is going to give us some tips for beginners, but before that, a headline. So let’s go. Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. Our headline comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. This is written by Amani Moist, Amani, what was that last name?
Moist, not moist. Okay.
M o I ss e ’cause that would be a rough way to go through life. I,
I’m, I’m moist. Maybe that Amani writes, buyers have more ways to pay for things than ever before. Apple Pay Venmo credit cards. That, dozens of other options. I was Venmo mowing somebody, uh, about half an hour ago. Og. Uh, I did not get it.
Try again. Yeah. As much as the purchase itself, each of the different payment methods provides various conveniences, perks, and protections from fraud. Credit cards have longer than default option of choice, but higher interest rates have now raised the cost of carrying a credit card balance. This is something OG that we haven’t covered in a long time that actually, uh, deciding how you pay actually, actually does matter.
Like setting up a cash strategy can be a, uh, well, maybe it, it might not help you win, but it certainly may stop you from losing. Well,
and this is something that’s just relatively new, you know, over the last, what, maybe five or seven years before that, it was just kind of either charged it or you paid cash or, or some of us wrote checks,
whoa, hey, easy
there.
Like, where’s the checkbook, honey, I need to pay the lawn guy.
I actually had a situation where I had to write a check. I had to write a check maybe three months ago, and it, it did take me 20 minutes to figure out where the checkbook was. I had no
idea, you know, I just paid my summer taxes and I had to write a paper check because any other method I had to pay.
Like 3% convenience fees. It’s like Ticketmaster running my local city taxes. If I wanna pay online or even do a direct poll right outta the checking account, I had to pay extra. Well, that 3% is a big number on your property
taxes. You know that with restaurants too, by the way. When you use a credit card at a restaurant more often they’re, they’re teching on the 3% fee.
We just actually
had a stacker talk about that in the basement. It might’ve even just been a couple of days ago. Oh, did they? Yeah. She’s a small business owner. I think she’s in Texarkana. She owns a liquor store in Texarkana. She’s gotta be your best friend, dude.
, she said she’s really wrestling with this because like, I dunno, she talked about something like five or eight years ago, the majority of her business was cash, and now that’s flip flopped and she, oh, she’s wrestling with, do I raise my prices or do I
tack it up? But, and not to change the subject Doug, but I forgot.
You just paid your taxes. Your, uh, basement dues are due. As well Your, your summer basement dues. We have b we charge a 3% fee
even for cash. We do.
So
you gotta, if you wanna be on the Friday episode, you have to, you have to get, get, get paid membership fee. Well, and to your point, og, listen to how much money transfers are changing apps like Venmo and Zelle.
Uh, they write here processed nearly $900 billion last year. Consumer Finance Protection Bureau expects that number is gonna be 1.6 trillion by 2027. We’re clearly changing the way that we pay, and I think maybe we need to think, I. Uh, do we need to be a little bit more careful? Because payment apps, according to this piece, are among the fastest growing sources of fraud reports and losses.
According to the F T C overall, fraud losses have increased more than fivefold to $1.2 trillion Since 2019. Losses tied to payment apps jumped from 5 million to 47 million. So wow, 5 million to 47, 40 $7 million of fraud on $900 billion of transaction still. Um,
you
know, yeah, that’s, that’s really not a huge number.
But the problem with PayPal, Zelle, Venmo Cash app, there’s some others, I’m missing them. The problem with those is that it’s kind of fire and forget you have sent the money and if you type the wrong cell phone number in there, You’re hoping on the goodwill of the other person to go, oh yeah, that’s not me.
Yeah. I think you meant to send this to someone else. I could
give that money
back. Yeah. Right. It’s kind of sort of like a wire trance. Remember remember years ago there was a, a rash, I’m sure it’s still going on, but a rash of title fraud. You know, where had we
had, remember we had Shannon Allen on the show, the blogger who uh, $55,000.
Yeah. She wired to a fraudster who was pretending to be her title company. Yeah.
And that’s kind of instant ish payment also, and kind of sort of fire and forget it’s gone, you know, you can’t get it. We have been long time American Express users, and I will Doug to your point about the 3% fee. I’ll pay the 3% fee for me, that’s the, that’s the insurance that this transaction’s gonna go through the way that I want it to go through, and I’m gonna get the service that I want.
Now obviously taxes are right, a whole different scenario, but, you know, you had an example a couple of days ago where you were talking about the knife that you bought. And how that kind of went belly up and thank goodness I just made knives. Yeah. Knives. Knives, knives. Good thing you paid with your credit card and not Yeah.
Venmo, right? Because absolutely that out. Uh, we’ve had tons of stories personally where, you know, the product just wasn’t delivered as advertised. And, um, you, you know, it’s just easier to fight Amex as opposed to,
Somebody else, let’s walk through these different types of payments. ’cause they, they go through them all and I think it’s a good thing for us.
Stackers credit and debit cards. It starts off with when you swipe or tap your card to or authorize a card transaction online, the merchant’s bank communicates with your bank through a card network like MasterCard or Visa or American Express to ask permission to withdraw a certain amount. Your bank then decides whether to approve the transaction based on your available funds or credit and the likelihood the transaction is fraudulent.
So you’ve got these banks OG looking it out for you when it comes to credit cards, debit cards too. But remember, debit card only if you process it through the Visa or MasterCard system. If you put your PIN number in there, now it’s going directly outta your bank account. And you could end up, uh, not having some of the same protections.
Yeah, that’s a different way. It says A credit card though can be expensive if you don’t pay the balance in full. Higher interest rates now raise the cost of carrying a credit card balance. Paying off a thousand dollars balance in 12 months. At the current average annual percentage rate of 22.16 means $103 in interest.
Compared with 77 roughly, it’s gonna cost you, uh, about, uh, what almost 25 bucks more, 26 bucks more Debit cards don’t offer the same re rewards as credit cards. Since their issuers make less money, they do come with similar fraud and payment protection. Again, if you use ’em that way. Uh, let’s look at digital wallets like PayPal or Apple Pay, among the safest and easiest ways to pay online.
Checking out with a wallet, typically faster than paying with a credit card directly since you don’t have to reenter billing information, shipping address, all the protections and benefits associated with the underlying card are still in effect for wallet transactions. So it’s best to connect these wallets to a credit card directly to maximize your protection.
I like that advice. Uh, I’ve been using wallets more and more if been using ’em, guys.
Absolutely super easy. And I’ve even started using the like Shopify one, and I think it’s Shopify, where if it’s offered, it already knows all this stuff. It texts me a code, you know, and then I type the code in and it fills in all the shipping and the credit card information and all that sort of stuff.
It’s a lot
simpler, which I think that’s why people think that because that’s so easy. And while it’s so easy that peer-to-peer payment apps like Venmo, cash App and Zelle are the same thing, right? And they’re not. They are not. It’s a great way to send money to friends and family, but they’re now used in more settings.
They move money more quickly instead of waiting on banks to prove the transaction it’s authorized. Once the center hits submit, it’s almost impossible. To get money back once it’s been sent. Of course, that’s the same for bank transfers and, uh, that can be ugly. I like, uh, what this gentleman at, uh, a company called BioCatch talks about who works in this area, the slower it is, og he says, the slower it is, the greater likelihood you’ll be able to get recourse.
So just because you can do it fast through Venmo, if you’re not sure of the transaction, ven mowing somebody, money, buyer beware.
Well, and that’s
really the crux of it. If it’s a small dollar amount, it’s a quick transaction. You’re for certain you know who the person is. It’s not, you know, a life altering sum.
It’s not a big transaction. Use Venmo, use PayPal, Zelle, that sort of stuff. You’re selling a car and the guy says, well, I’ll just Venmo you the cash or I’ll, you know, it’s like the bigger the transaction, the more opportunity there is for, you know, something to go wrong and you wanna have some of the, some of that protection in there to afford yourself the opportunity to have some recourse if something does go
wrong.
Coming up next, John Lanza, he’s on a mission to help parents raise money, smart kids, and help families live happier, more fulfilled lives. He’s the author of The Art of Allowance, A Short Practical Guide to Raising Money, smart Money Empowered Kids, hosted the Art of Allowance podcast, creator of the Art of Allowance Project, which features the Money Mammals, which is a D V D series.
He actually got his start in, uh, television and in animation and, uh, so the Money Mammals are a super fun series of books and DVDs for kids to learn about money. But today we’ve got John on the show and he’s gonna help us get back to school, you know, OG with your kids going back to school. Also a good time for parents kind of to go, okay, our kids have a curriculum at school, but personal finance not in there.
How do we add that to our curriculum for our kids? So John’s gonna help us with that. John’s up next. Uh, but Doug to get there ahead of time, you’ve got some, uh, trivia that actually might be a little bit about, um, some of the stuff. John’s interested in animation.
Uh, okay. We’ll see where it goes. I’m not sure yet.
Sometimes I just start talking and we see what comes out. Hey, there stackers on Joe’s mom’s neighbor. Doug today is telling joke day and I got a great knock, knock joke for you, but, um, but you, you gotta start it right. So, okay. Um, okay. Go, go.
Knock, knock. Oh, no, not dude,
not you, you, God ssid, you the listener.
Oh. Oh God. We’re trying to break the fourth wall. We’re letting the listener take part in the show. Right? And your ego
just assumes that when I say you we’re talking about og, that math adds up. Okay, we’re gonna try this again, everybody. Okay. Shout at your devices. You go first. Okay. Uh, who’s there? Okay, well, I guess we’re, we’re probably never gonna know the ending to that one.
But not only is it tell a joke day, but on this day, in 1930, the first ever color cartoon with synchronized sound debuted, it was created by cartoonist of iWorks, who after leaving Disney started his own company, iWork Studio of iWorks, a guy whose name sounds like the answer to the trivia question, which of these is definitely not a name, created a series called Flip the Frog, starring a character who was a frog named Flip.
Huh? There’s a fun coincidence. The de the debut episode of Flip the Frog. Remember it’s frog. Oh, they flip. It was, it was titled Fiddlesticks. And for the first time in animation history, audiences were treated to an animated cartoon with sound and color. So this got me thinking what was the longest running cartoon in history?
Although most people who’ve taken the poll that I ran in my imagination this morning, believe that The Simpsons is the longest running cartoon. It’s actually Looney Tunes, which ended its most recent series in 2020, the legendary Mel Blank voiced the Beloved and mischievous Bugs Bunny along with other characters.
So here’s my trivia question, which other characters did Mel Voice in the original series? I’ll be back with the answer after I see what Wacky Marma is up to now.
Hey there stackers. I’m Avid comic strip reader and three time coloring contest winner. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, that Marmaduke, he’s always doing something crazy. Today he caught the dog catcher, which makes him the dog dog catcher. He’s a like a dog catcher. Dog catcher. Unbelievable. Today’s trivia question was in addition to Bugs Bunny, what other characters did?
The legendary Mel Blank voice in the original Loony Tune series blank was hired to voice, not only Bugs Bunny, but nearly every other Loony Tunes character as well, including Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer, the fud Elmer, the fud, right? Tweety Birds, Sylvester the Cat, and so many more. So the answer’s probably, look, whatever.
You guessed you were right at the height of his career. This is the good part. Voice acting earned blank. $20,000 per week, a salary I can easily get used to. And now you’ll hear the voice of another man who’s making stuff for kids who will grow up to appreciate him even more when they’re adults. John Lanza,
and I’m so happy he’s here with us in Mom’s basement. John Lanza, how are you
man? I’m great, Joe. I’m, uh, super excited to, uh, finally make the cut and get on Stacking Benjamins. Oh, come
on. I’m happy that you said yes, that you would come on. And when we met at the relevant conference, finally when I saw you, I’m like, I felt like it was my long lost brother who I’ve never met in real life.
Yeah, I felt the same way. It’s like watching you facilitate at a conference just got me excited. I’m like, I ha Oh, I just have to talk to Joe. So I’m glad it’s worked out and we’re here. Stop. Keep going. Stop,
keep going. Stop. Yeah, like that. Everybody’s asking this question. Money Mammals just the coolest name.
The Chief Money Mammal is like the best business card. Where did the idea first come from?
Complete ripoff. So way back in the day, we were in a different life basically doing some work with Build A Bear and Maxine Clark is the owner of Build A Bear. I got her card and it said on it, chief Executive Bear.
And at the time I was kinda like a little bit, you know, jaded 20 late, late twenties, early 30 year old, didn’t have kids yet. It was like, that is the corniest thing I’ve ever seen. But I never forgot it. And as soon as I had my own company, I’m like, I can’t call myself a C E O ’cause I don’t, I’m making this up as I go along.
And I just, I thought that Chief Executive Bear was such a great idea and I just went with Chief Mammal because however corny I thought it was, it stuck with me and it put a smile on my face. And that’s the idea behind Chief Mammal. So hats off to Maxine
Clark, but I like that it’s not really a ripoff. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve read Steel like an artist Austin Ian’s book, but Oh yeah.
All three of them. You riffed on it. You made it your own and you paid homage. You, you say, Hey, this is exactly where we got it from, which is I think, the way art is built. What about getting interested in kids and money though, John? I mean where, where does your interest in teaching kids about better money habits come from?
This is just scratching the itch. So it’s like when my wife and I had our kids who are now going to college, which is crazy, we just knew that we wanted to raise them money. Smart. So that that was the kind of starting point. And my wife seems to have come outta the womb. Money smart. I am more like you.
I’ve taken a very meandering path on the way to money,
smarts, John. You’re getting your money’s worth from the journey, you know? Exactly. Like I feel like the good golfers on a golf course, like they don’t get their money’s worth only hitting, you know, three or four shots. I take 20 shots. I mean,
if you’re gonna go out and golf, you might as well see the sites,
right?
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m a charter member of the Fairway Preservation Society. By the way, I dunno if you,
well, if you’re gonna practice for the Masters, you have to make sure you can get out of the rough. Exactly.
Anyway,
so I saw this kind of meandering path. I came from my background, I worked in animation for a long time, so I saw how powerful media can be and, and really well-designed characters and interesting characters and interesting storylines.
And I thought, well, why don’t we take something that’s fairly boring on its face? Um, you know, kind of financial literacy. No kid’s gonna wanna listen to any lecture on that. Just make it fun. And so we came up with this mantra, we’ll share and save and spend smart too. Uh, in fact, my brother wrote the songs.
This was like some advice from a mentor, my original boss, he said, if you’re gonna develop any kind of program, he said, be prepared to love it for a decade. And so I knew if I, if I was gonna make this work, I wanted to have someone write songs that I knew that I would love down the road. Right? So not kind of like kitschy kid songs, but fun songs.
And so that was the idea. So we have this idea, know the mantra is we’ll share and save and spend smart too. And we realized that this was something, it’s something that I think a lot of parents might be interested in, is trying to raise money smart kids, and do it in kind of a fun way. And that was really the genesis of Joe the Monkey and Clara j Campbell and Marmoset and Pigs, the Bank and the whole Money Mammals crew.
I like the idea,
though, of creating something that you’d love forever. ’cause I think about like Pharrell singing that song, happy, that’s an earworm. But if I had to sing that song on stage, like every night on a like a 80 city tour, I would wanna just bash my head in. Well, that’s why
it’s such a good point.
And it’s why people like Bob Dylan and David Bowie, like even though people get frustrated with the fact that they wouldn’t play the songs that they want to hear, if I were them, it’s totally what you would want to do, which is just play new stuff. I mean, you know, play some of the old stuff, but you’ve gotta reinvent yourself.
It seems fairly easy. You could certainly go down that path. So it’s, it’s nice to try to carve your own
path. Let’s set the stage here. You know, as we are getting back to school, this is our back to school episode, so while kids are getting the curriculum at school from their teachers, our child’s ultimate teacher, and hopefully a good money teacher, what is the thing we should be most focused on?
Like, let’s talk broadly, strategically. What kind of a environment do we want to create? What type of a mood do we want to set as we’re teaching people about money? What’s kind of the overarching framework, John?
Yeah, I would say open conversation is probably the kind of, that’s the overriding point. So you wanna start early with your kids, and the reason you wanna start early is that one, they’re very receptive to it.
Uh, they’re very receptive to, to you as a parent, the earlier you start versus, as we know, is once you get kind of tweens and teens, they become a little less receptive to your messages. But by starting early, you can start to build good habits with them. And I really think this conversation part is such a key thing.
So being prepared from a young age, from their young age to be open to a conversation, even as young as like two years old, right? So you’re not talking to them about anything complex like the rule of 72 or not that that’s that complex or compound interest. You’re just being prepared for the conversations about money at a young age because you don’t wanna shy away from those conversations.
And so that also gets at. Having you as a parent, just getting comfortable with the fact that the mistakes that you’ve made are actually not bugs in this system. They are features that you can use to help teach your kids. You can realize, one, your kids are mainly gonna learn from their own experiences, but two, you can share the experiences that you’ve, you’ve had that have not been so positive as a way of saying, you know, one, I’m not, you don’t have to hold me up on high with regard to this.
And two, I understand that you’re going to make mistakes as we go through this process. Does that
make sense? Well, I love teaching your kids from an early age that mistakes are a part of the process and that I make ’em too. I mean, that open, honest relationship I think is great. Versus being the parent who, you know, tries to come across as squeaky clean.
Your kid finds out later on the mistakes. I mean, you know, as they grow, they’re gonna learn where you mess stuff up. So better for you to teach them to be open about that. I do wanna ask about this though. Could you bring up a point about these open conversations? So, How much do I involve my kids then in the quote adult stuff, right?
Do I involve them in, so like I advocate this, uh, family budget meeting every week? Do we involve them in that 20 minute conversation that Cheryl and I have? Do we involve them in, you know, utility bill is due? Like how far do we go in this open conversation?
Those are great questions. I was actually thinking more on the younger side.
When you do get older, I think you do need to, I mean, I’ll give you one example. So I think it’s a great idea to do some kind of periodic budget meeting. We didn’t necessarily do that, but one of the things that we did was on lead up to the discussion about college from I think once they were tweens. So somewhere in that kind of 10 to 12 range, we showed them how much they had in their five 20 nines, right?
So they have a sense of, you know, there is money being saved for college. And college is going to cost money and there is some money there for you, right. That type of thing. So being open and honest about that, there’s a, a camp of kind of radical transparency. I think it’s very much a personal decision. I lean towards what Ron Lieber says about this in his book, uh, the Opposite of Spoiled.
It’s like once those kids get to be chem teens and they have a sense of, you know, being at other kids’ houses, they have a really good sense of how much money you’re making, how much money, you know, other people are making. And so you don’t have to necessarily sit down and say, you know, here are our exact finances.
But to your point, it’s not a bad idea to certainly talk to them about, here are utility bills, for example. A, a great example is if the utility bills go through the roof, You know, enlisting the family to help bring the utility bill down. That kind of practical discussion, I think is, is worthwhile. So it’s engaging with the money conversation and it’s going to be different for different families, but engaging with it really matters.
But I’m not advocating for, you know, full transparency of, you know, here is every single dollar that we have allocated in our family for, for whatever use
it might be. Well, I think it’s tough if you’re struggling with money. Like, I don’t know. I want my kids to be educated, but I also don’t wanna worry them that we might be out on the street next week.
Yeah,
and that comes to age appropriateness, right? So obviously if you’re going through real difficult times, you’re not gonna sit down and have a, you know, a heart-to-heart conversation with your five-year-old. But you know, your 10 or 11 or 12 year old knows if there’s been a major change. And I, it’s worth engaging with them not to say, you know, one, to give them some confidence that you are going to figure out how to kind of get past whatever this financial blip might be.
But two, just to, to recognize that you’re going through some difficulties, you know? So it’s giving ’em the confidence that you’re gonna get past the difficulties that recognizing it, because they know, I mean, they can feel it. Sure, they can feel your stress. So being open to engaging with that and engaging with them is just essential.
It’s funny, I was just listening to Simon Sinek talk about exactly what you said. It’s not just kids, it’s just everybody. When you show up and something isn’t completely authentic, like people just know, like, they just completely know. So just show up to help your kid and give them everything you can. And I think, uh, yeah, the more you hide, the more
it’s gonna be.
You can read me like an open book if I’m bored in a conversation. Like last night I was at my mom’s house, loved my mom, but she’s talking about a roof for, you know, 20 minutes, the new roof that’s going on. And my wife afterwards, she’s like, you didn’t say a thing. It’s like I was tired of talking about roofs.
I can’t hide. I have the same thing. Maybe that’s why we get along so well. When an assistant I had when I was a financial planner, One, uh, a person came up to her, came up to Susan and said, I just don’t know what’s on Joe’s mind. And she goes, are you kidding me? Ask him, because he will tell you way more than you wanna know.
Like way more like just please. And when you ask him, you’re gonna regret doing it. So. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. You know, when you’re talking about 5 29 plans and about whether you share, you know, how much money you’ve got for retirement, that sort of thing, the, the details with older kids, your kids haven’t had PR training, I mean, unless you kind of taught them.
But how do you make sure some of that stuff stays in the house instead of all of a sudden your neighbor’s telling you about how their, your kid told their kid about what your credit card debt number is?
There’s not much we can do. The only thing we can do on that I think is modeling. ’cause I really actually don’t know.
It’s a, it’s actually, it’s a really good question and it’s something I think about a lot is, you know, what are these kids talking about? And with regard to the 5 29, I know they have a sense from their friends. So they’ve had these discussions. I’m fairly sure with our kids, you know, they’re not walking around crowing about their 5 29 plan amounts.
But I don’t know. Totally. And I think with some of their closer friends, they probably have had kind of more intimate discussions about that. But it’s a good question and I think the only thing you can do, well, not the only thing, one thing that you can do is model some modesty and some decorum so that they have a sense of, okay, well this, this is not something you don’t go out and prob about.
Money in general because like, you know, if you start crowing about it, there’s always a bigger crow. And so it’s like, so just, just the decorum. So that, that’s about all I can offer there is just the modeling side
of things. Alright, let’s get to the, uh, elephant in the room. Every person talking to you, I’m sure John wants to talk about this next topic and a way of getting at this on your podcast, the Art of Allowance.
You actually have a mini episode dealing with allowances. So let’s listen to you. And this is a clip from the Art of Allowance podcast.
I often see folks questioning the value of an allowance, and I’d like to respond with my perspective. When I wrote my book, the Art of Allowance, a Short Practical Guide to Raising Money, smart Money Empowered Kids, I. I’ve thought about trying to coin a clever new phrase to replace allowance because I know some folks bristle at this idea of allowing their kids to have money.
Still, allowance is a term that most folks immediately associate with raising money, smart kids. So I decided to focus instead on what I call the art. Of employing an effective and purposeful
allowance. I love this idea of the art of the allowance because obviously there’s some, some people have, have maybe used some science behind it.
But like you, I’ve noticed on the Art of Allowance podcast, John, you’ve had different guest on that have some different ideas. So let’s talk through this. Let’s talk about it. We can, and I’ll link to, by the way, this episode of your podcast on the show notes so people can dive into that full discussion.
But let’s have, let’s have a little bit of that here. So framework around an allowance. How should this work? So the
key for the allowance is kind of identifying your why for an allowance. . And that is that you are here to help your kids learn to become money smart.
You’re giving them allowance to get experience with money because we all know that is that experiential learning is the primary way we learn the hard lessons of life. There’s two other ways that that could happen, that can happen through modeling. Good and bad. And it can also happen through lecturing.
And we all know how powerful lecturing can be, uh, particularly with our, with our kids. So the experience is the point of that allowance. It also serves as a catalyst for this conversation. That’s been kind of the thread of our entire conversation. And so that’s the why behind an allowance. And you really wanna start it early.
You wanna start at age five, and then you wanna introduce to them this idea of making money smart choices. Because the reality is every time you’re getting some money, you are making choices, whether they’re conscious or unconscious. And so an allowance time will have three jars. The share, which is for charitable giving, save for longer term items, and then the spend smart.
We add the smart so that we’re kind of emphasizing this idea of thinking about our spending. And then you just allocate that money and to a basic allowance for a five year old would be $5. And the way we did it, Again, it’s the art, it’s gonna be different for each family as we would put, uh, $1 into share, $1 into save, and $3 into that spend.
Smart. And the idea is that sharing is telling ’em where you value charitable giving. The saving is we value the idea of paying yourself first. And then the last one is, this is money that you can go and, uh, do whatever you
want with. I, it seems to me on that, do whatever you want with a lot of parents. I know my parents, uh, a long, long time ago didn’t want me to make mistakes, but I think there’s gotta be some bravery there, John, where you’ve gotta see a mistake coming as a parent.
You know, it’s a mistake for your kid to spend money on this. And I think you kind of gotta let ’em do it anyway and have the bravery to circle back later and go little Dr. Phil on ’em. Like how so how’d that work out for
you? I think brave is a great word because I think that is a leap that we have to take with those kids.
And again, it’s gonna be different for different parents ’cause certain parents are gonna be more brave than others. And if you’re a little less brave, You might ramp up your advisory and other parents are more brave and they, they’ll be like, okay, I’m just gonna let ’em learn. The other thing is understand it from the kid’s perspective.
So I remember, uh, one of them buying some play set. It was like, we call it my colorful unicorn, so we’re not, uh, calling out any actual products. But she bought this, you know, $20 play set and when she bought it, I’m thinking, this is gonna, she’s gonna be done with this in a week or two. Right. And she was, but she also got a lot of play out of it.
So as much as I look at it and feel like I. That seemed like kind of junk argument can be made in my favor. She got a lot of pleasure out of spending that money on that thing. So her perspective is a little bit different than my perspective. And that doesn’t mean that there aren’t gonna be some things that they buy and they realize, oh, that I really shouldn’t have bought that.
And what this does is by giving them control and letting them, uh, spend the money, is that you now have a reference point for a conversation. So if, if you see that this becomes a pattern and then you say, you know, you go to the store and they’re getting their third item and they’re not playing with those other two items, you can say, well, how much time have you spent with, you know, these other two things?
It seems like you bought them and you know, nothing’s hap, you know, you’re not playing with them anymore. Now they may not say, oh wow, you know, I have an epiphany and say, I don’t want this thing. But what you can do at that point is A, as a parent, if you’re kind of at your wit’s end, you can say, you know what?
I’m gonna call a timeout here. We’re gonna wait a week, or we’re gonna wait a few days. What? What we call it a waiting period, and then we’ll come back. If you still want it, you can then come back and get that item. It’s a way of putting guardrails, and that’s, that’s why I call it the art of allowance, because you just have to kind of work within how every kid’s gonna be different, and every scenario’s gonna be different.
Every family’s gonna be different, every kid within each family is gonna be different. So it’s providing some kind of structure and a framework within which the parent can work with the kids. Does that make sense? Well, yeah. I
like
teaching those guardrails too, because those are guardrails that are great to use when you’re an adult, right?
You really crave something. You know that it’s something that you think that you’re gonna want, but you also don’t wanna regret it. So what do you do? You put it in the Amazon shopping cart and you wait a week and you set that timer, and if you still want it a week from now, then it probably was good, man, I did that.
When Sirius Satellite Radio first came out, XM Sirius, I did that for a year and a half. I just sat and s sat. ’cause I thought, am I really gonna a, a radio subscription? Like how bad will that be? And when, a year and a half later, John, I still wanted it. I was like, okay, I think I’ll get it now. I’ve been a subscriber for, and I used the heck out of it ’cause I just like, believe it or not, I like Radio Joe.
I did the same
thing with my, I have this bag, right? It was a $200 bag, but I knew exactly what I want. What I wanted. I wanted a standing bag. And when I travel, I wanted to be kind of like my office. Right. And I waited six months because it seemed like an outrageous price to pay for the bag. Yeah. Just
stupid
money.
Yeah. But I kept coming back to it, kept coming back to it, kept coming back. And finally I said, I haven’t found another bag. And it was a terrific, and really, for me it was an investment, is the way I look at it. Yes. It’s not a traditional investment. I can’t sell it for more money, but I went through that process.
So I think it’s, it is, this gets to the kind of modeling and my kids saw me go through this process.
Well, and that conversation, Evan, this conversation out loud with your kids, they’re picking this stuff up. I mean it’s, yes, it’s incredible. Now let’s talk about kids in investing for a minute. I was very surprised at the conference where you and I were just at face-to-face at relevant woman named Samantha Paxon on stage.
She’s talking about her flipping 11 year old John, her 11 year old, wanting an app to go buy some stocks. Now, when I was 11, I wasn’t thinking about stocks, but I thought, how cool is that? That is absolutely neat. But what’s a great way to get your kids interested in investing and what might be some pitfalls that we want to avoid?
Well, I think
you could start as young as, we didn’t do this, but you could start as young as seven. I was talking to Brad Klontz, you know, who’s uh Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. Money expert. And he started his kids at seven. And it was funny because, uh, Brad’s so realistic. He’s been, he’s seen, he’s seen it all. And so he said his biggest concern with his seven year old buying some stock was that he would make a killing.
And then, you know that, right? And then the kid is gonna be, is gonna think this is how it works. Right. It’s easy, right? Yeah. I actually, and I, I think there’s, there’s a lot of truth to that because, uh, those first experiences actually really can have, uh, an oversized effect on us. But, uh, you could start really, um, as, as young as he’s talking about, uh, we started in, it was actually my daughter came to me, I think it was around 13, and she was interested in buying a stock.
And in this case, I. It turned out to be, um, we use Adidas. We’ll just say that. And I’m not making any claim that you should be buying Adidas. It was only because she was buying what, you know, again, not necessarily the best advice, not necessarily the worst advice. This was really for her to learn about the stock market.
So she bought. Three shares, she bought it in. We didn’t have at that point, like a, a program, a way for her to buy it. So she bought within my account. But here was, the reason why it’s worth doing is that she only bought three shares. Uh, it happened to go up fairly quickly within a year. We talked about selling it, right?
She’s thought about selling it. I explained to her, well, if you do sell it, you’re gonna have the commissions. You’re gonna have short-term capital gains at my rate. And if I sat down and had those conversations with her without this being her money on the line, she would be snooze fest time. And this case, she was all ears and she ended up, you know, holding onto it.
And we talked about the risk of holding onto the stock as well. So I think it’s good for them to, to just, once they express a little bit of interest, just like Sam’s kid figure out some way. To enable them, uh, in a way that’s not gonna be problematic. You know, it’s like, uh, Jason’s wag says that he calls it mad money for adults.
So, you know, if you’re gonna have outta your investing funds, most of it should just go into kind of basic index fund investing, and then you take 10% of it and have some fun. So that’s, that’s a way of introducing them to it. I also think it is worth looking at the other side of things, which is getting them invested in some, some basic index funds and learning how to pay themselves first outta their allowance.
And then obviously once they get jobs, Incentivizing them to do that. And we could talk about that if we wanna.
It is funny because I’m of two minds. I mean, on, on one hand I agree with you and I know you had our mutual fun friend, uh, Chris Browning from Popcorn Finance on your podcast talking about the value of boring investing, right?
And teaching boring investing, which is awesome. But I also think that much like you said, if you tried to just do this textbook style before you have any skin in the game, that your kid is just gonna fall asleep. Like you were with your mom with the roofing stuff, right?
Where are we talking? My mom is gonna,
my mom is gonna kill me because she is the first person that listens to anything that we do.
Mom, we love you. We love you very much. We do. But so I can totally see a boring investment account, you know, not setting a kid on fire yet if they buy a individual stock and at some point they lose money on that. I mean, then they see firsthand with just a few hundred dollars, the, you know, maybe they lose 30, 50 bucks, whatever it might be.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not inconsequential, but they learn a micro lesson versus what they’d learn if they waited till 40 about the value of diversification firsthand. It’s almost like, you know what I mean? You let them touch the stove, but the stove is a, uh, easy bake oven.
Yes, I think that’s, you know, just another reason why it’s worth engaging and allowing them to invest.
I will say the one thing is I don’t think the investing games really are the best way to go about this, because an investing game tends to be something that you’re trying to do in the short term, which is kind of exactly what we’re, we don’t wanna be encouraging them to be focused on is the short term investing, because that’s really let’s face to face, it’s really gambling is what that is.
Yes. So I’m not sure that those kind of, uh, simulations work. I think it’s better to use some real world money and have them engage with it. And then if they have to take a loss, that becomes a lesson. If they make some money, then you have discussions about commissions and gains and, and that becomes a lesson.
So it really ultimately comes down to, I think using some of their own money is a good way to have ’em learn well,
and they’re also on those games. I think that you make completely different decisions when there’s real money on the table. I’m thinking about Adam Carroll’s, uh, Ted Talk where he played Monopoly with real money with his kids.
And it was amazing to see how different John that game was when he put real money on the table and the winner was gonna keep it, like the game went slightly differently when you’ve got your own money invested.
That’s a great
idea. Uh, so I want to ask about kids and jobs then. So kids working versus kids getting, uh, I mean, ’cause obviously working, earning a paycheck, part of Yeah.
Learning about finance. Versus focusing on your schoolwork, getting school done, having the jobs later. Where do you stand on kids in jobs?
This is a totally personal decision because, uh, David Owen, who wrote the first national book of dad, you know, he came on my podcast and he makes the case. He said their job was to be focused on school, right?
That was their gig. Now it actually turns out that his son was kind of entrepreneurial and engaged in, uh, in, um, creating some kind of business opportunities. But that was his focus. And then there’s the other side of the coin. So we’re, we were kind of in both ways. We didn’t really emphasize. The need to have a job till they became teens.
And it’s different with each of the different kids. I mean, right now, my younger daughter who’s about to go to college, is making really good money scooping gelato. And that’s terrific. And especially during the summer, you know, we defaulted to the focus being, uh, much more on the schoolwork and the amount of work these kids have to do in school, especially if they’re doing any other activities, it’s just over the top.
So also holding it down a job, I think is, uh, fairly difficult to do. But during the summer, obviously that’s a great time for them to hold down a job. And the other thing I do want to just say is that for the people that have like bristle at allowance, uh, then you can just ramp it down. So like as, as they start to, you know, if you’re giving them allowance as a teen and now they’re starting to make money, then you can just turn the dial down on allowance because now they’re making their own money and they, they, they should have more control over that money.
And then you can encourage them. For example, let’s put some money away for taxes, or let’s put some money into your Roth I r A. Maybe we’ll even match that money as an incentive. ’cause everything’s about incentives and it’s not gonna be very exciting for them to put money into a Roth I r a. But it’s obviously something that would behoove their future selves.
And so if there’s some way we can incentivize that, great.
Well, and I love with older kids, you talked about the rule 72 earlier. If you show them compounding, our mutual friend, Jean Natal talks a lot about that. About, yeah, show them the Roth IRA and how they can become a millionaire and all of a sudden your kid’s like, I can become a millionaire.
Really? It’s okay. It’s exciting. You know, it gets at the,
I think the toughest thing for all of us to get to
understand. It’s unfathomable,
even at my age, the power of compounding. Can only be experienced through time. And that’s, that’s one of the most difficult things to get across now. Even the best analogies that I’ve seen, I think don’t do it justice to our brains because our brains are so now focused, you know, we’re so not future focused.
And you think about, for a kid even more so, it’s really a tough thing to try to, to get across the power of compound interest. You know, it’s like we all know that it was, Warren Buffet made 97% of his wealth after age 50, right? So it’s, it’s really hard to get our heads around how powerful that is. So all we can do is help them build the habits that will help them take
advantage of that.
I think you and I could talk forever, my friend, but I’m looking at the clock and, uh, if only there were a resource, like a podcast where you talked about this all the time, man, I wish, oh, wait a minute. There might be, there might be one called The Art of Allowance with John Lanza. Tell us what’s coming up on the show.
I just interviewed Anne Garcia, who’s, uh, has a new book out how to pay for College. So we’ll be talking about that ’cause the, uh, that pain is real. We have two kids, uh, in college now, and it’s, it’s a confusing landscape and Anne will bring some very good clarity to that. She is really a clear thinker when it comes to how parents should think about this.
So, uh, we’ve got that coming up, which I think will be really exciting. So it’s fun to talk to people at all different ages, uh, different areas of the spectrum, the young kids. And this will be for the older kids, for the parents, the older kids. Of course, you do wanna start saving for your kids as early as possible.
And, and we talk about that with Anne as well. That’s
fabulous. It’s the Art of Allowance podcast, wherever finer podcast are distributed, which I think is, is pretty much everywhere. John, John, thanks a ton for hanging out with us and helping us raise, uh, money Smart Kids. I really appreciate it, Joe. I really
appreciate being on Stacking Benjamins.
This has been a lot of fun. Hi, I
am
David Hirsch, and when I’m not hosting
the Dad to Dad podcast for the Special Fathers
Network, which is a dad to dad mentoring program for fathers raising kids with special needs, I’m Stacking
regimens.
Oh, gee. I know we’ve talked about this a few times on the show about you and your kids and money, but for people that are new to the show, it’s a great day for us to go over this again since we’re specifically in the title of this episode talking about curriculum.
Do you involve your kids in the money discussions around the OG household? It’s like you were
sitting in the living room of my house yesterday. Oh, it’s going, huh? I wonder what we should
talk about on the
podcast. We definitely weren’t, Joe. We were definitely not listening in, were we? You, oh, not, not
at
all.
You put some black tape over that
red blinking light, didn’t you? Just, if you look to the left and wave og, you’ll,
so there I was sitting on the couch and my daughter says, daddy, What are you doing? And I said, these are called scratch offs.
I didn’t see that coming.
How do you do it? And I said, well, you scratch this off and if it matches you take your beer bottle cap.
See Caroline right after you buy the smokes.
I know you guys think that I’m actually kidding, but I decidedly am not. I I, you know how like some people binge watch Netflix? I, I binged. Scratch offs Yesterday I was like, I was at the store and I was like, I need to get back into this. This is, this is,
this is what’s been missing from my financial life.
Gimme a big old, I’ve fat
stack of the,
I used to, I used to chew tobacco and smoke cigar. I don’t do anything fun anymore, but damn it, I’m getting
back
into scratchers. I’ve had
scratch, I’ve had way too much wind in my life lately. My money situation’s been way too good. Let’s see if I can grind that
to a halt.
Oh god.
Anyways, we went a little overboard on scratchers yesterday, but we had a nice, nice chat about it, about how, uh, you’re always one, you’re always one little, one little wagon wheel scratch away from a hundred thousand. You know, it’s always the wagon wheel. You’re just waiting on the one and then you can fill out that bingo card to, to do it.
But, uh, as my son said, after he scratched off a couple dad, these things are rigged. I was like, yes, you think? You think right?
We just lost like a thousand listeners right there. John
Lanza gonna come back down with a baseball bat.
Guys are not paying attention.
Let’s distract everybody and throw out the Haven Lifeline right now and tackle some of life’s most important questions. Our Friends of Haven Life Insurance Agency, Doug, they put what
you value first. Right now it’s scratch offs. Are you kidding me? How could, how could I have another answer besides that?
As soon as we’re done, I’m running out to the liquor store. See, losing is contagious. If my financial advisor is saying, this is what he’s doing for his future, you damn well sure, that’s what I’m gonna go do. It’s
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Actually, simple. Head to stack your Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife now for a free quote. By the time you get that, all that last wagon wheel scratched off. You’ll find the application’s already done. You’ve already got an instant coverage decision. You know what the price is gonna be and you can get your life insurance done.
Stacking Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife for a solution to your life insurance. That’s a guaranteed scratch off winner every time. How about do you think Matt, from Haven Life? Like that one? I dunno like it. Today we’re gonna throw out the, uh, Haven Lifeline to uh, man guy with a nickname. It’s not Will with us.
It’s Big Will. Hey, big Will.
Hey, Doug, Joe N og. I need to disguise my voice. I don’t want anyone to know that I am the one other person that listens to this podcast and I would hate to be the first person to admit. I have learned a few things on the podcast. The other issue is I am in witness protection, but that’s another story.
So here is my question. My wife and I are retired. I am a do-it myself or handle all the home finances, taxes, et cetera. We paid a financial advisor to backtest our plan, and we are basically set. My only concern is when I passed, my wife, who has no interest in finance, taxes, et cetera, will have issues. I have started the process of her doing things with her.
We have started together to balance checkbook, pay bills, having monthly money meetings, and watch me rebalance yearly, et cetera. The last two items, I watch her eyes glaze over, and that’s even before her beers. So my main concerns are the investments and taxes. Taxes seem simple. Just find a tax professional.
But the handling of investments seems to be the issue because our plan is strong and all our goals are being met. I am not sure of turning our investments over to an advisor is the way to go. Basically all she would need to do is rebalance yearly and make withdraws as needed. At first, I was thinking a robo-advisor, but that doesn’t seem to make sense now.
I was now thinking maybe just put all our funds into a low cost 50 50 balanced fund and have a five year in cash, and she makes withdraws as needed. Am I being shortsighted? Thanks for any input. Oh, and Doug. I know you’ve been wanting a t-shirt. On August 3rd, I will be at the Sizzler. I will be wearing dark glasses and a copy of El Camino monthly under my right arm.
Leave the cash inside the third stall in the men’s room and I will drop the t-shirt off. Wink wink. See ya.
Wouldn’t be the first deal I’ve done in that stall in the bathroom.
20 bucks is 20 bucks, right? That’s right. The
calls. I know the calls just get. Just get, at first I’m like, Doug, stop messing with us.
And uh, that was not you. It never,
I gotta hand it to that guy. ’cause it never even occurred to me to do a robot voice, but guarantee you that’s coming. Just
at first I’m like, oh crap. But wow. Wow. Okay. Serious question there. Og behind all the theatrics, we’ve got a spouse who is, uh, bored silly by money management.
And, you know, I mean, I really like what John Lanza said earlier about maybe a weekly meeting versus a monthly, you know, about short, fun, uh, take care of that. ’cause monthly might not be often enough, but, but eyes glazing over is a difficulty.
I think this is the crux of, you know, hire professional or don’t hire professional.
And sometimes we look at it in, in purely the dollars and cents standpoint, right? The ubiquitous, you know, using a, using an advisor as an example, uh, the, the ubiquitous 1% number, right? And you go, well, I’ve got 3 million bucks. Holy crap, that’s $30,000. As opposed to considering it from a percentage standpoint and going it’s 1%.
It’s a pro, it’s a, it’s a portion of the return of the portfolio. It’s a portion of the dividends of the portfolio. You know, some of the time when you hire a professional, what you’re trying to, trying to do is to fix a problem, right? You’re trying to say, I, I don’t know how to solve this, or I’ve done a poor job at this and, but the only solution I have is to hire somebody who can do it for me.
Whether it’s taxes, estate planning, financial planning, lawn care. It doesn’t matter. Sometimes you hire somebody to prevent mistakes that could happen along the way. For example, you might hire an attorney to do all of your estate planning because Yeah. Can you, can you write your will on a notebook paper and stuff it in the cushions of your chair?
Yes. Is it legally enforceable? Maybe Aretha Franklin’s family’s finding out that maybe it is, or maybe it’s not. It doesn’t mean that’s not what she did, and it doesn’t mean it’s not valid. It’s just there’s a lot of. Issues with doing it that way. So that’s a mistake that you can avoid by just having a professional do it.
And then sometimes you’re, you hire a professional to do things that you don’t know exist, right? You, you know, you have somebody look at your taxes or you have a C P A that does your taxes and they say, oh, did you know that you could take this credit? Let’s look back the last couple years. Oh my goodness, you haven’t been taking this credit.
We’re gonna do this from now on, and therefore you’ve, you know, saved a certain dollar amount in taxes or something like that. When it comes to stuff for a spouse who’s not, or a partner who’s not super excited about money, it’s probably not about fixing problems to this caller’s point. They said that they went through the financial planning process, you know, kind of did a once over and everything looks great, so, so they’re not trying to fix a problem that exists.
Right. What we’re trying to do is prevent a mistake or find some additional areas of opportunity. Yeah. It could be just as simple as like, well, I. If I’m dead, the wife takes money outta the account. Well, yeah, but is there a better way to do it than just randomly taking money outta the account? Can we be smarter with taxes in terms of pre-tax withdrawals or after-tax withdrawals or, you know, those sorts of things.
Can we be smarter with distributions in terms of, you know, where do we leave assets if there’s kids or grandkids or other places you care about charitable strategies and that sort of thing? So I think there’s an opportunity to engage a professional at different levels and at different times in your life.
And this is probably one of those ones where you could say, is the juice worth the squeeze? Maybe your, your wife might think so, uh, in terms of I don’t have to think about this, and it only costs me a small percentage overall of our, of our net worth every single year deal. How do I sign up? But maybe that’s not a conversation that you have to have right now.
I don’t know.
But this has gotta be, I, I don’t think the planner’s for him, I think the planner is somebody that can help her be more excited about the process. So really this is where he’s gotta kind of take a backseat. And this is a problem that I, you know, that I have when I was a planner in meetings sometimes, was that the guy would wanna geek out.
I mean, it wasn’t always the guy that wanted to geek out, but by and large it was. Uh, the guy wanna geek out and his spouse would sit there asleep while I’m going deep on stuff that she does not care about and we’re losing her, you know what I mean? Yeah. I’m not even, I’m not even helping her get any closer to her money.
I’m actually helping push her away because the engineer in the family won’t go back to a one-on-one level and relate this to actually any of our goal attainment. Like, we’re so in the weeds about little tiny things that, that the nerds care about that, um, that we lose the other person. So I think it has to be somebody that the other spouse interfaces with much more than this person.
Yeah. And make no mistake about it, if something happens to you, your spouse will seek counsel from someone, whether it’s her girlfriend at church or a colleague at work, or a, a child or a, you know, a sibling. Like there’s gonna be some counsel from someone and you know, because she’s been getting it her whole life.
From you. And so if you want that to have, if you wanna have some influence on making sure that that decision process is good, I think you have to start it sooner while you have some influence on that. If you don’t, then there is some chance that she makes a decision or goes down a path that you don’t think would be the best solution.
I, I, I’m thinking, you know, I, I can think of this example very clearly. The widow says, I don’t know what to do with all this. She’s at the bank and the banker says, oh, well, why don’t we just put it all in a nice safe cd? It’ll be, you know, it’s guaranteed every single year you’re gonna get some nice interest.
It never goes down. You never have to worry about it going up and down. Baa boom, baa binging. Okay, cool. And now you just take your whole nest egg out of, you know, the thing that’s gonna grow and compound with, you know, to offset inflation and all that other sort of stuff. And you just dumped it into a savings account.
Like, how much is that worth over the life of the rest of your retirement, your wife’s retirement, your kids’ retire? You know that the, the time value of that is worth many multiples of paying an advisor to go, no, don’t do that. So she’s going to find counsel because she’s always had it, so why wouldn’t she keep on having
it?
My issue with the, uh, the balance fund approach, and I agree that a, a robo in this situation probably doesn’t do anything that he’s trying to fix. Although I do like robos for people with money much more than for somebody who’s 24 years old and just beginning. I think you’re wasting a lot of the cool stuff that a robo approach could do when you have a very small portfolio.
But I think that, um, I guess it’s a, you know, it’s a big part of the topic that I’m gonna talk about at Camp Phi Texas early next month, and I’m gonna talk about Bali og, which is that. You know, when you’re quote, okay, maybe your goals aren’t big enough, maybe there’s another range of goals. And, and, and what I’m okay leads to is wasting money with an approach that’s really sloppy.
And you look at, if you paid as much attention to your asset allocation as you paid to the other pieces of your financial plan, you know, your frugality, the, uh, the way you spend money, your tech strategy, whatever that is. If you were like that with your asset allocation, you could probably find a lot of money there.
Or for your spouse, find a strategy that she could be involved in, which really, uh, helps bring her along. So I’m not at all a fan of, hey, let’s just use the balance 50 50 approach and just let it slide. Yeah. Like that is so sloppy and it’s, um, it’s underachieving. It’s underachieving by a long way. Well,
and, you know, juxtaposed against, The well, but I don’t wanna hire somebody to do it.
It’s like, you’ll, you’ll underperform and under, like all of the stuff that you’re trying to solve for will be under undervalued. I don’t even know what the right word is. You know, you’ll, you’ll under attain all of that stuff by just going, well, I’ll just make it easy and go 50 50 as opposed to going, well, why don’t I just structure this around working toward the goals that are important to me and have somebody who’s on my side who can kind of help shepherd us along the way, provide advice, provide counsel, prevent mistakes, give us new ideas, and be a resource for the people that we care about.
Uh, you know, on the back end if something happens. So Pennywise pound
foolish, we’re gonna touch on this, uh, on our Friday show with Michael Kites a little bit. Ah, yeah, that’s come on. But I really think that, um, that this isn’t, you know, there’s a recent piece in investment news OG about advisors who are getting out of just being advisors for everybody and going, Nope, I’m really helpful in these situations that I’m not helpful in these other ones.
Like advisors niching down almost as much for their quality of life. And I think it’s gotta be that type of approach. I don’t think the answer is just go find an advisor and here you go. I think it’s gotta start with what do I really want? What am I trying to do? Which is education for the spouse, which is a better asset allocation, which is when I pass away, how, how do we make sure that she’s got a trusted person to go to?
So you’ve kind of helped, uh, helped her along in that route. So somebody who’s really on my board of directors already, you know, somebody who’s helping me make smarter decisions. I mean, you can already see that there’s this laundry list, a much more specific questions that you’re gonna ask this person.
So I don’t think it’s just advisor or not an advisor. I think it’s honing in on really what are you after. And then who, who would be my, my ideal person I’m trying to add to my family board. Thanks for the question. Uh, big will. I thought he was gonna, he was gonna say, this is anonymous and we are onto you.
Stacking Benjamins or what, you know, what’s, what’s that group? Isn’t it anonymous? That, yeah. Shows up with the guy, Fox Mask and, and all that, but Whew. Thankfully not. It was much less creepy than that. Hey, hey. Coming up on our community calendar, I am going to have Andy Hill on our Instagram live. That is tomorrow night, Thursday evening, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2:00 PM Pacific.
Andy is speaking of, uh, kids and money. Andy’s working hard to help his kids become millionaires at a young age, and that includes helping them learn to save early, helping them learn to earn money. Lots of, of, uh, key takeaways. So Andy and I talking about that tomorrow as kind of a second handsomest man in personal finance cartoon.
Very, very good looking behind, uh, og, is that what you’re saying? Oh, oh, yeah. That, well, we’re trying to get people
to watch the YouTube version of the show, right?
And Andy Hill tomorrow, who is very, very, very handsome, dreamy, uh, some may say, can’t even think
when I’m talking to that guy.
Andy. Tomorrow, coming up Friday, we’re talking about, uh, the future of advice and we’re talking about the science of advice versus practical advice and, uh, which advice you take, which ones you turn down with.
One of the top people in the financial advising industry, og. Besides og, uh, Michael Kites joins us. For a rallying episode, that’s our community calendar coming up. If you’re somebody that right now you wanna make better decisions with your money, OG and his team are taking clients at to stacky Benjamins dot com slash og.
If you’re somebody looking for a person to add to the team and need to begin those interviewing processes, stacky Benjamins dot com slash og. Alright, that’s it for today, man. Great show Gents. Doug, what should we have learned today? So
what should we have learned today? First, take some advice from John Lanza and let’s all help get kids on track for a lifetime of financial security by teaching them to have financial literacy and teach ’em this.
If you have a plan, you won’t have to panic. Second, do you pay for stuff? Remember, some methods have protection and others don’t practice safe payments kids. But the big lesson, I gotta start doing silly voices on this show. Maybe that’s gonna land me that sweet 20 grand a week gig. Check this out, Joe. I’m but eat.
But eat lands off folks. Thanks to John Lanza for joining us today. You can find his podcast, the Art of Allowance, wherever you’re listening right now. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is The Property of SSB Podcasts, L L c, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
Our producer is Karen Repine. The show was written by Lacey Langford, who’s also the host of the Military Money Show. With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from The Earner and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the 4 1 1 on all things money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Tina eikenberg 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.
Wanna 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 is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I am Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Guys, I haven’t done a movie review in a few weeks and I thought, uh, this is a. This is a good one to talk about. This is a little known man in it named uh, Tom. Cruz, you pronounce it, Cruz.
Our lives
are the sum of our choices
and we cannot escape the past. Ethan, this mission of yours is gonna. Cost you dearly.
The world is changing. Truth is vanishing. War is coming.
It’s been a long time. Fred, you have no idea. The power I represent.
It knows your story
and how it ends.
And like any mission impossible movie, there is, uh, car chase after car chase. Uh, lots of stuff blowing up. Og tons of stuff blowing up. You know, the first like, uh, two or three Mission Impossibles I avoided. ’cause I was like, this just seems stupid. I don’t know that I want anything to do with this. And then maybe it was.
The fourth one I started watching, but it was, it was the one where they climbed the world’s biggest building, the, what’s it called? The B Kif. The, uh, Birge Khalifa. Birge Khalifa, yeah. Yeah. Birch Khalifa. And they actually go on the outside and Tom Cruise does all his own stunts. That was a very, very good movie.
I absolutely love that movie. And then I’ve been addicted since that. Uh, so I was super excited when a New Mission Impossible came out. And, uh, this one, what I hate is when I see part one, part one of two. ’cause that’s a commitment. And I, you know, what’s that Jim Gaffigan joke. I don’t have time to go to meetings.
Like, I just, just give me, give me the movie and let me, uh, just watch it in one sitting and I’ll be, I’ll be good. Which is funny because, you know, Jack Ryan, we talked about before, and I’ll sit through plenty of episodes on Netflix, but having to show up at a theater twice for a part one, part two just kind of drives me crazy.
Maybe it’s because, you know, Lord of the Rings made us do that, and we waited forever for those things. And, and, uh, I, I don’t know. Something about that that I don’t like. That said, this movie has a fine ending. You know that it’s going to continue, but it does have a resolution of part one, sends it into part two, which frankly is gonna be a self-contained story.
I think you’d be able to watch part two without part one. You can watch part one and go, okay, I’ve had enough. I don’t wanna watch part two. The thing I liked about this best guys, you know, mission Impossible over the years has been based on what do we fear, what is kind of going on in the zeitgeist And right now it’s this AI thing.
And so what we have is we have the quote bad guy. It’s not a bad guy at all. It’s a bad machine. And it’s now Ethan, Tom Cruise against a machine. And uh, the machine’s trying to take down, take down a lot of
stuff. Sounds like Space Odyssey
2001 with Better Action
Skynet.
It is so Skynet, but it’s funny. I mean these, you know, you can’t have Simon Peg in a movie and not have it be funny.
Like the, like the hench people. You get this feeling like I did on Jack Ryan of the team, you know, going at them. You have this new, you have a new character who, she’s kind of on the team, kind of not on the team. And um, you know, she kind of throws in some, throws in some stuff. I, I, I highly recommend this movie.
I know it’s been overshadowed by Barbie and, uh, Oppenheimer. I’m gonna go see Oppenheimer this weekend. I was gonna see it last weekend, but I couldn’t sit in a theater for three hours. I’m like, I just, prostate problems. No, I just didn’t wanna do it. Plus there’s, there’s more previews than ever before, so it’s like three hours and 40 minutes.
So, uh,
yeah, my boy saw it, Oppenheimer, they
loved it. I think it’d be great. Nick saw it. My son saw it, said it was awesome. I can’t wait to see it, but I, yeah, so, uh, mission impossible though. Kinda overshadowed by those, but a big thumb up. I think you guys would both love
it. I already saw it. I’ve never seen a single one.
I thought the day it came
out, did you see it the day it came out? Og? Oh yeah. Took the boys. Do you agree with that assessment? Did you really like it? I thought it was
great. Yeah. I mean, I don’t care about the part one, whatever we did, uh, probably, uh, I feel like it’s been a couple of mission Impossibles ago where we committed to them.
You know, it’s like this is coming out in the, you know, I, you know, I want the boys to come see ’em with me. So we started over and, and like watched them in sequence over the course of like, oh, half a month or something. Kind of got through all of the mission Impossibles. Oh, cool. So then we could roll into whichever one it was that we ended up seeing at the theater the first time.
So you
get all the subplots and bla and backstory, which are so important to Mission Impossibles. Yeah,
exactly. Yes. All the, all the, all the Easter eggs. Have
they kind of just generally gotten better? I feel like they’ve gotten better. Absolutely. Better. They’ve gotten
tighter. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this one, this one was a very long movie also, I thought.
Yeah. And you could see why they said, well, we just gotta name this one, because like, every time you go, okay, we we’re coming to an end, this is gonna be, and it’s like, oh. No, there’s a whole new part here. And then it’s like, okay, all right, now we’re coming to an end. And no, it just keeps out. There’s like always a little, it’s like Cedar Point, you know, you go up, you go down and you’re like, that’s it.
Yeah. And then you go back up again. Nope. Yeah. And you keep going.
So, but I was on my, the edge of my seat for the whole thing. It did not feel long. It wasn’t a
movie that felt long. I’d seen a number of previews, a number of like, behind the scenes stuff, like, uh, the most famous one and of course was the, the motorcycle jumping off the cliff and like how they filmed that and that sort of thing.
And the story behind how they did all that. So, you know, so you’re watching them going, when’s he gonna get on the motorcycle? And how’s this gonna kind of work? Me too. Yeah. And then he, and then he does it, of course. But, um, but yeah, I like all the Mission Impossible movies. They’re not, they’re popcorn movies.
They’re not, they’re not super stressful. You know, the good guys who are eventually gonna win, probably, there’s a lot of twists and turns, a lot of whodunits. Those are, that, you know, that’s kind of interesting to me. I’ve, I enjoy that.
Well, I said that I don’t like action scenes when there’s really no consequences, which is my problem with a lot of the Marvel movies.
Where I’m like, I’m gonna watch a 20 minute fight scene. I really don’t care. I, I hope Antman gets choke. Doubt one will die. Yeah. If Antman dies here, that, that’d be super cool for me. Like,
that’d be great. Well, I mean, think about the Marvel movie where Ironman did die. Right? When they like wrote him out. I think it was Ironman, right?
They may know, I think it was Ironman, right? That was like a big shock. That was like, holy cow, one of them. Sure. Like, what, what, huh? You know? And then they went, oh, well, we’ll get ’em back by just going into a parallel universe. And then
Yeah. Which you’re like,
okay. Yeah. One other thing. But, uh, yes. Mission impossible.
Super awesome.
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