Trading time for money. Most of us do it. In fact, before financial revolutionary Vicki Robbin (find her on past episodes), the practice was even more prevalent. Chad Carson is a real estate investor who believes that if you’re building a pile of assets, often less can be more (especially if it’s slightly hands-on like real estate). Using his own journey and real-life examples of other people, Chad talks us through the “trading time for money” conundrum, and hopefully helps us that Go Big or Go Home may not be the only approach to living your life.
We even talk trading time for money in our headline today. Amazon and other companies are calling people back to the office. Many are fighting this, wishing to spend their career at home. If that’s you, what do you do? Do we work better in the workplace or from home? We debate this (heatedly) on today’s episode.
How about someone who wasn’t trading time for money? We’ll cover that in Doug’s trivia segment. Before players were paid, they had to find their own way…and we bring you a question about the Heisman Trophy in honor of football season kicking off.
And, to keep the “trading time for money” trend going…today’s anonymous caller traded time for money which included a pension! She wonders if she should take a lump sum or the money monthly…and of course, we have thoughts to help her.
I think we have a theme! Trading time for money may not be the best path toward your goals, and today we hope you begin thinking how to exit that approach to life. Thanks for hanging out with us!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s brutal message to remote workers refusing to come back to the office: ‘It’s probably not going to work out for you’ (Yahoo! Finance)
Chad Carson
Big thanks to Chad Carson for joining us today. To learn more about Chad, visit CoachCarson.com. Grab yourself a copy of the book Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor: How to Reach Financial Freedom with Fewer Rental Properties.
Watch the interview with Coach Carson on our YouTube channel:
Doug’s Trivia
- Which college was the first to have a player receive the Heisman trophy?
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.
- An anonymous Stacker, (NOT Rachel from NOT Michigan) wanted our take on her situation: her small employer is doing away with their pension plan at the end of the year, and she has to decide whether to roll the lump sum to her 401(k) or leave it where it is and collect the monthly pension upon retirement.
Have a question for the show?
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Join Us Friday!
Tune in on Friday for a very special roundtable discussion. This week we tackle a piece that tells us what we should stop buying to save money and reduce clutter. One or two sentences about what/who is coming up on the next episode.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: The Naked Money Meeting: Where Money and Communication Collide Ep 1407
Episode Transcript
Spider Pig, Spider Pig, does whatever a Spider Pig does, can
he swing from a web? No, we
can’t. He’s a pig.
Look out. He is a spider pig.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And today you’ll learn how to earn your way to an early retirement through passive rental income with real estate investor and. And former college football captain, Chad Coach Carson. In our headlines, one company is throwing down the gauntlet to remote workers. Is it time to head back into the office?
Plus, we’ll throw out the Haven lifeline to a lucky stacker who needs help choosing between several different home loan options including a possible VA loan for disabled veterans. And then, of course, I’ll regale you all with some award winning trivia. And now, two guys who played Division I Quidditch, it’s Joe and
O J J J J G!
I wish, Doug, I knew what the Quidditch positions were so I could continue to, uh, continue that one. Oh yeah, I’m an all star forward backer, or something, you know what I mean? I don’t even know what it is.
Yes you do, don’t act like you don’t know what Quidditch is. Quidditch
is, we know what Quidditch is.
Hey there, everybody. Welcome to OG faking it till He makes a podcast. I’m Joe Sulci. Hi, uh, known as the Harry Potter of this podcast and the, I’ve never,
never read or seen a single Harry Potter in
my life. I’m looking this up right now,
and the guy who
is, I don’t think it’s look applicable. I assure you I’m
correct.
the guy who’s the snape on this podcast is, uh, og. What’s a Snape boy, man? You just, if you missed out on all that goodness, it’s shame on you, because Harry Potter Universe is pretty fun. How are you
this Wednesday? The only thing I know about Harry Potter is in the Simpsons movie, uh, Homer makes fun of him by calling his egg Henry Plopper.
Henry Plopper. Yeah, sure. That was a play on words. It’s got to be big cause Doug’s interrupting.
I, I found the positions, the Quidditch positions, and I guarantee you one of these fits OG very well. All right.
You’ve got a keeper. That’s me. You got a seeker. They call me the keeper. Cheryl calls me the keeper.
Three chasers.
And two beaters. Well, there we go. Tell me OG’s not a beater. Of course, of course he is.
If you guys ever diagram any of these Quidditch plays, if you haven’t, we got coach Carson, by the way, waiting for us. It’s super, super awesome on today’s show. We also have a great headline about your job and about, uh, well, maybe some tips on keeping your job, OG or, or rising up the ranks.
But before all that, I think we should review, like, how a Quidditch strategy works. You ready for this? So that’s how the forwards play. Let’s go into the backfield. And that’s how you score. A goal unit thing in Quidditch.
So how many points is a touchdown?
It’s a, uh, what is it called when you put the ball in the thing?
Um, yeah.
Scoring. Quidditch is a full contact sport where two teams of seven players, all of whom are mounted on brooms. Yes. What the hell? Are you serious? Of course. By throwing, I swear to God, by scoring points, by throwing a ball called a Quaffle. Through the ring. This sport sounds filthy. Through one of three differently sized hoops.
Yes. How
big is the ball? Is it like a wiffle ball?
It’s Quaffle. You can hold it in your hand. Lacrosse balls? I said that. In the movies the thing flies, but obviously that’s not going to happen on college campuses. I
think to Quidditch players, they, in their minds, it flies. They are flying.
We’re going to get into that on a future podcast.
If you have enough pre game mushrooms, everyone flies. When you play this game, I can tell already.
Get into that later, we got a podcast to do Jen, so let’s move. 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 Yahoo Finance, uh, and this piece is written by Eleanor Pringle.
Uh, Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, OG has something to say for people that are working from home. And I’m wondering how you feel about this. Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, Eleanor Wright, seems to have run out of patience with remote workers refusing to come back to the office. The return to office issue has been a problem plaguing some of the biggest businesses in America with companies from Meta to Disney and Starbucks, all wrestling with workers who want to hold on to their pandemic era flexibility.
How the hell do you work at Starbucks
and you don’t come to the office? I love barista ing at home. Virtual brewing.
I am making coffee, boss. I’ve been doing it all day.
What are you talking about? I’ve made myself coffee. Seven. It’s amazing. I haven’t had
one
person come through My neighbors love my latte mixture.
I think they’re talking about the executive. Yeah. Maybe.
Unfortunately for Amazon’s executives, summoning staff back to the office has been particularly controversial. After being hit with everything from criticism to staff petitions, It seems the Amazon boss has reached the end of his tether. He says, quote, it’s past the time to disagree and commit.
Jassy said in a recording obtained by insider. And if you can’t disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we’re going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so, unquote, what do you think about Jassy’s position on coming into the office?
Partially.
Sounds like a nice middle ground, honestly. There’s a lot of communication and strategy and ideas and conversation, you know, that happens in person, over the water cooler at a cup of coffee, you know, that sort of stuff. I don’t care how much zoom time you’ve got or slack on your phone or whatever.
It’s hard to recreate that in person. And I can tell even when I go, you know, we work completely remotely, but, but I’ve got a couple of entrepreneur groups that I belong to. And you get in a room with those people, whether it’s, you know, like you and I both do together, strategic coach or mastermind groups that I belong to.
And it’s just a different energy and a different, um, flow of information and ideas and conversations. So, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people to come back to, come back to work, especially if that’s how it was. originally. Our firm is completely virtual and has been from day one. So it’s, it would be very difficult for me to say, Hey guys, I changed my mind.
Let’s all get together in an office. I mean, we have employees all over the country. Same thing for stacking Benjamins, right? Our, our teams all over the country. It would be very difficult for us to say. New plan. Everybody’s got to live in Texarkana, you know, as great as that would be for everybody.
And I quit.
It’s a barbecue every day. Wouldn’t that be great?
There is that. Amens. Yeah, so good. It’s so good. So, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable request to have some sort of, uh, in person requirement. And I agree with him that it’s not fair to the people who are coming in and committing and doing all that stuff to have a few holdouts being like, oh, I’m just not gonna do it.
Make me. Like, that’s childish behavior too. If it’s not a good fit for you, based on the new rules, go find different work to do. Go find a company that will allow you to work from home. They’re all over the place.
Yeah, I think the market’s going to sort this out. I think the employment market and, and just the financial markets will sort this out.
And for those companies that really feel like it’s what’s right for them, and that’s what fosters the exchange of those ideas. You know, if that’s what you want to dictate, you get to do that. You’re a private company. If you’re a public company, you get to do that. So I don’t think there’s a right or wrong here.
I will say, and I may have told the story before, but not recently, when I was leading up internal consulting for one of the larger healthcare organizations, health, health insurance organizations in the United States, number two, actually, there was a new CEO who came in and of course, get a new CEO within 90 days, they want big changes, right?
And at that time, 54 percent of our workforce was remote. And the new CEO said, Don’t like it. Find a way to get everybody in house. I led a team that did a ton of research into the impact of people being remote and what’ll happen when we move everybody in. And we found, driven by data, we found exactly what that new CEO did not want us to find, which was that if She really wanted the company to soar.
She should send everybody home because all of the data showed that the majority of the people who were on the executive track to get promoted were all working from home. The people with the longest tenure were working from home. The people with the shortest hiring cycles working from home. All of the highest performers in the company and the groups that they supported were all the people who were remote.
And she did not like that answer, but it just depends on the kind of work your company does and the culture of your company and what the needs are. And in that case, Putting everybody together did not work. And, oh, by the way, the costs associated with that, with moving everybody, were staggering.
But this was a company that had been remote that was now changing versus Amazon, which was pre pandemic, not remote.
No, not exactly, Joe. I mean, to get into a couple of details, this, as was the case in the health insurance industry, for 15 years. This was a company that when they were smaller, yeah, they weren’t an office, but as they started to grow through acquisition, that was when people started to get really scattered.
And the remoteness just sort of happened because there were people whose offices got shut down, but they were working for the company that got acquired. So they just were allowed to work remotely. It wasn’t like OG’s company that was remote from the get go. So this was an. unintended remote workforce, but the benefits of which were unquestionable.
Undoubtedly, I think that the benefits of remote work outweigh the benefits of being in person from a cost standpoint and productivity standpoint. I mean, you can see that in plenty of studies. I wonder about the exchange of ideas like we were talking about. I think you have to have some sort of ability to recreate that.
If you’re going to have everybody be remote, then make sure everybody gets together. At some sort of interval for that sole purpose of, you know, team building and camaraderie and
flexibility. There’s some value there, but I think this romantic notion of, hey, we’re walking down the hall and I bump into Steve and we have this great strategic light bulb discussion that goes on.
Like, holy cow, we’ve discovered this thing because we happen to be both going to the cafeteria at the same time. You don’t think that happens? It doesn’t happen that much and I’ve worked in some pretty big corporate environments and I can’t think of a whole lot of times where I heard about that. No, I was about to broaden it and say, I can’t think of too many times where it was like, yeah, we just stumbled on this new thing.
Surprising. It doesn’t
happen to you. I knew
you
were going to say that. I think there’s, I’ll put this very bluntly. I think on two occasions, number one, if you’re going to disagree with the CEO, I think Doug, you nailed it. If the CEO wants to go a certain way. If Jassy’s saying, we’re coming into the office and you’re somebody going, yeah, I don’t think so.
Why don’t you make me? You’re the one who’s going to lose. So if you’re actually looking at the game of, if you’re looking at the game of employment, which is very important to your bottom line, then that’s number one. Number two is. I don’t know how, unless you’re around the other movers, unless you’re around the top movers, you are going to move up the ladder without being in proximity to the people that are making those decisions.
Like, proximity matters. And if, if people are going into the office, if you’ve got two thirds of the team that’s in the office and a third of the team that’s not in the office, I think five years from now, you’re going to look and you’re going to go, wow, the people who were in the office closer to the decision maker actually got promoted more often.
That is so weird. I don’t think it’s weird at all. I think if you’re not in the same place as the decision maker and you’re in that two thirds group that’s in the office, you’re not getting promoted. Doug disagrees. Is he frozen?
No, I’m not frozen. I’ve said it twice. I disagree. I don’t think that’s the case in today’s environment.
If
everybody’s remote, if every single person is remote, I get where you’re coming from. Why do you keep
saying that? Not in the example I brought up. Not, whoops. Wow, I’m really animated. I’m banging my computer around. No, in that example, I just brought up, not everybody was remote. In fact, it was about 50, 50, 54, 46.
It was pretty close to 50, 50. And the people who were climbing the ranks fastest were the people who were remote. I just got done explaining that. And yet you’re sitting here telling me, no, you got to be close to the people who are the decision makers. This was a company that had over a hundred thousand employees.
Yeah,
and obviously you’ve got a lot of that data, Doug. I can tell you with some other businesses that I’m involved in, the proximity certainly does matter. Proximity always matters. The top of mind. It matters the, you know, just the FaceTime,
you can’t. It matters with me. I’ve led enough people that if I’m around you and certainly even virtually, if I talk to you more often, I’m like most bosses.
I think you’re doing something. If I don’t talk to you, if I don’t bump into you, if we’re not sharing ideas back and forth on a daily basis, I just tend to think you’re not really doing anything. So even if you’re a virtual employee, I think proximity matters. I think being able to have those frequent Zoom calls or whatever it might be matters.
I mean, you’re going to have to do a lot if you’re going to have some face time, if you’re competing head to head with somebody who is in the office right next to your boss. Versus you are virtual, I think the virtual person has to realize that you’re up against it, that you’re up against a higher wall because that person who’s in the next office is talking about what’s going on with my family, with what I’m doing on the weekend, with all these other stuff, where if I don’t cover any of that with that same person, it, it just, it matters.
I think that people work, people work with people, people up with people, and now we’re just going on to make Doug mad, pretty much.
Succeeded, so
you succeeded?
I’m going to put this topic as a poll. on Spotify. Do you think you’re going to side with Doug on this one? You’re going to side with Joe. Which side are you on?
If you listen to this show on Spotify, well, weigh in there. By the way, I know a lot of people just left Stitcher. Spotify, not the easiest place to listen to podcasts, but some of the tools that I just learned that they’re bringing out are pretty exciting. And this is, this is one. OG is Switzerland. We’ll also see.
Obviously more data on this, probably agreeing with me, Doug, uh, from Kevin and the 201. StackyBenjamins. com slash 201. That’s our newsletter. It comes out every Tuesday. You’ve
worked in how many large corporate environments, but yeah, you know, and your entire organization is virtual for the last 10 years.
Yeah. You know, you’ve collected how much data? Yeah, you’re right. I’m just… You work directly for the CEO on a project to investigate this. I get it. I’ll shut up.
StackyBenjamins. com slash 201. is where you go to find out that, uh, Joe’s probably, probably right on this one. Coming up next, uh, Coach Carson is the man when it comes to real estate.
And what I love about
coach cars, great movie, by the way, that they made about him, he is, he is not
the basketball coach, like some other real estate people like Grant Cardone, um, who, no offense to Grant Cardone, but Grant’s teaching you to build an empire. And if you want to hear about maybe some of the other currencies out there when it comes to real estate, uh, coach Carson’s going to talk about those today, maybe a different way.
to reach your financial goals. But before we get to that, Doug, I think you’ve got some trivia for us, probably about how proximity matters.
I definitely have trivia that you’re going to disagree with, Joe. Hey there, everybody! I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. A very happy football season to all who celebrate.
As a former pre pre pre professional linebacker myself, this is my favorite time of year. You should have seen me in 8th grade, man. I was jacked! I could have played college ball if I hadn’t broken my toe in that championship league disc golf tournament. Anyway, each year, I miss out. Once again, on winning the prestigious Heisman Trophy, instituted by the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City in 1935.
It is the single most coveted award in college football, other than, you know, Olivia Dunn’s Instagram following. Named after the club’s first athletic director, John Heisman, the trophy is awarded annually to the player deemed to be the most outstanding in the sport for that given year. Today’s trivia question is, which college was the first to have a player receive the Heisman Trophy?
I’ll be back right after I add some diamond hands to my touchdown dance. That’s a thing, right? That’s what diamond hands are, guy, right?
That thing? Okay.
Hey there,
stackers! I’m retired football player and Lake County Disc Golf quarter finalist, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. I’m so excited that football season’s finally here. Go blue and boil her up, baby! Today’s trivia question was, Which college was the first to have a player receive the Heisman Trophy? The answer?
The University of… Chicago? What? Player J I know. Player J Burwanger was the first to receive the award, which at the time was called the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy. and Berwanger. I only got one. Heck, I got a Heisman every night at the bar when I was at the Southwest Bahama State Technical Institute and Beauty School.
And now, here to help you earn money in your sleep through real estate investments, it’s Coach Carson.
And I’m super happy he’s back with us. Coach Carson is here. Chad,
how are you, man? I am doing great. It’s great to be here, Joe. Thank
you. Well, it’s fantastic having you. All right. So let’s Right for the juggler here, everybody says, I’ve heard this, I heard this in high school, I heard this in college.
I heard this during my career, go big or go home, man. What is wrong with go big or go home?
Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m personally glad we have Elon Musk and all these people who like want to go big and make these huge corporations and the real estate people who do that because, you know, there’s people who want to passively invest with them.
That’s part of our capitalist culture, right? The thing that I push back against. Is I think a lot of us who is particularly people who get into real estate investing don’t have those aspirations. Like we’re not getting into business or own a few investments to take over the world. We’re getting into real estate and having investments so that we can have freedom so that we can have flexibility so that we can have options to do whatever it is we want to do in our life.
And so for that, there’s actually a much simpler way to accomplish that freedom and to get those goals. And so I, I, I try to push back against that because it’s a fun narrative. It’s like the Avengers of business is to watch these go big 10 X people, right? It makes for good TV, but in the real world of like living your life, when you actually have to manage a bunch of people and build systems and take risks, a small and mighty approach is actually the better way.
Well, and I was
reading your messages. I felt like I was getting a little bit of, do you remember the old movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen? And there’s a part in the movie where Charlie Sheen says to Michael Douglas, Chad, he goes, how many yachts can you water ski behind? In other words, he’s like, when is enough enough?
And it feels like you’re preaching that
similar thing. Yeah. Enough’s the key word. And for me, like I have my little Personal journey was when I first started investing, I was like, Oh, go big. This is great. That’s what everybody does. I played sports. And so I just thought you want to go for the championship.
But then I read a book like your money or your life. And it just was like a light bulb moment for me because they had this concept of enough. Like, wait a minute. Like once you have enough money, then the whole world opens up to you and you can figure out what you want to do with your life. Like, well, who do you want to be when you grow up?
What do you want to do? And. You can have enough and you can accomplish all of that. And money became more of a tool instead of like the end itself. It’s just, Hey, this is just a tool. It’s just a vehicle. And your life is the actual end we’re trying to accomplish.
Well, people that know me know that begin with the end of mine from Stephen Covey is one of my favorite things.
And if you’re doing a good financial plan, you’re beginning with where you want to go. And certainly Elon Musk is a place he wants to go. And that requires big you at a different place. And I know that in training, there’s this concept of efficacy and efficacy is for people that don’t know that term is what’s the most efficient way to get there?
What’s the, what’s the way to make sure? And I’ve heard that efficacy is starting with like, okay, where are we going to end up? If we do this training, where are we going to end up? Let’s show people where you ended up. First of all, your introduction to this book is written in Granada, Spain. Tell, how the hell did you get to Granada and how long were you
there?
Yeah, well, part of my why, part of my life goal was when I actually met my wife on my first date, we talked about living abroad and say, Hey, it wouldn’t be fun to go travel. And my wife teaches Spanish. She’s a, just loves the Latino culture and has lived in Guatemala and Mexico. And we’ve lived in South America now.
So just for us. living abroad and being immersed in another culture, particularly a Spanish speaking culture, was just our thing. And so when I worked that backwards, starting from the end, like Covey says, it requires some things. It does require money, like money’s part of the deal, but it also requires a ton of flexibility.
Like if you’re stuck in one spot and you have all these committees you have to do, and you have these responsibilities you have to do in person, then you can’t do that. Like you, you have to be flexible in addition to having money. And so for us, for
me, wait a second. Wait a second. I want to get to all that.
I want to get to that, but I just want to start with, tell me about Spain. Just seriously, how long did you live there? Oh,
we lived there for 12 months. All right. I got it. I got the car before the horse. Yeah. We lived there for a year. I played basketball. I played pickup soccer. My kids went to school there.
They went to a local public school. I love walkability. I love urban spaces and I live in a suburban kind of Southern town in Clemson, South Carolina, but. I love living in a place where you can walk to the grocery store, you can walk to the open market, you can walk to the school. You took the family skiing.
Yeah, we went skiing. Like Granada is an amazing place because it’s 45 minutes away from the original Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain, and they have a ski slope there, and you can go another 45 minutes to the beach. It’s just an amazing place. And Spanish people are amazing. Food, culture, having fun. So we just, we lived it up for a year and, and we’re able to do that because of the money equation, but also just having a lot of flexibility and time as well.
I wasn’t on board with that, by the way, uh, I thought that France and Italy were everything. And of course I went to France and Italy and they proved that to me. And then Cheryl said this last year, I want to go to Spain. So we did this road trip through Spain and I’m a hundred percent with you. I want to go back.
Let’s go back right now. We should have done this from, I will go back in a heartbeat to Granada.
We could do it with the Alhambra in the background or the interview. Let’s make it happen. Just
absolute heaven. Uh, but before that, you mentioned earlier on, uh, you lived in Ecuador for what? 16, 17
months? 17 months.
Yeah. So it’s kind of been a, every three to five years, we look to do something like this kind of mini retirement, you know, sabbatical. And we lived there when our kids were three and five. And so it was sort of the, the objective, if you have one was just, we wanted our kids to be fluent in Spanish and what better way to let them go to local preschool and local elementary school in another country.
And Ecuador is amazing too. It’s one of these countries where it’s pretty small relatively, but you can drive. And four hours to be on the coast and, you know, you could go to the, the, uh, Galapagos, which is an amazing, you know, set of islands. And then you could go to the jungle on the, the, the, on the other side of the country.
And then you have the high plains are really an amazing culture and food. And I mean, I, I loved living in Ecuador and would go back in a heartbeat as well. It’s just a really cool place.
I’m just wondering what it’s like having a three year old in Ecuador.
You know, it’s one of the fun things when you take kids somewhere else, it could be an excuse or it could be like an open window to the culture.
And so when we went to the playground, you’d start meeting other parents and start talking. And you know, when we, they went to school, we would meet parents there. So it’s really like your kids are almost like the excuse for you to like get to talk to people. Whereas when you, I mean, it’s not impossible, but sometimes when you go to another place, there’s always a wall there and there still is.
But it was really fun to make friends and connect with people there who we have something in common. Hey, you’re a person. I’m a person. We just speak. from different countries, let’s learn about each other. That’s one of the coolest parts about traveling.
So, uh, we talked to Joseph Rosendo, travel expert, who’s got his shows on, um, public TV and Joseph, uh, said he’s like, it’s not about seeing the ancient stuff.
It’s about getting to know the people. And yet everywhere I go. You know, you’re always intimidated by the people, so you’re right, your three year old’s a total excuse to get
there. Yeah, it’s interesting listening to three year old vocabulary, because they don’t have a huge vocabulary in Spanish or English, so you can see the body language and how they play with each other.
It’s really, I mean, from a language standpoint, it’s really fascinating to watch as well.
So everybody’s wondering you, you’re known for real estate, you own a bunch of real estate. So now we’re getting there, Chad, now we’re at the point of like, people are wondering, and I was wondering how many properties did you own at the time that you’re in Ecuador and then when you’re in Spain?
So I have a business partner. So everything I say, like numbers wise, you can just kind of split that 50 50. So we’re, we own it together. We’ve been doing that for 21 years, but we have a, we’re kind of on the bigger side of the small and mighty spectrum, but we have 33 properties. But some of those are houses, some of them mobile homes, some are like multifamily properties, like 12 unit buildings and 14 unit properties.
So that the total of those is 99 units, just under a hundred. My half is about 50 units and, um, then about 16, 17 properties. And that’s big enough for us. Like I wouldn’t mind being a little smaller. But it’s, it’s also depends on the part of the country you’re in. We’re in a part of the country, the Southeast where the rents are lower and we’re in a college town.
So the average rent for us is about 750, 800 bucks per unit. Whereas other parts of the country might be a little higher. Um, so it just, you know, to get your number, what you need, the number of units that also depends on how much you’re generating per property as well on, on how many you
need. Going back to the beginning of this discussion, we said, you know, go big or go home to a lot of people that still sounds pretty damn big, but you prove that you can actually do it with less.
But even before we get to that equation, you’ve got a great story that kind of kicks this off of three different investors. One, I think the first one owns, owns 10 properties. Do you, do you mind walking us through these three couples? Yeah,
this is a story I heard early in my career that really influenced me.
And there’s three couples and the short version is they all wanted to go to Europe. They wanted to go on this trip together, but they’ve been buddies for 15 years. They got started in real estate together. 15 years later, they’re all pretty successful. And they’re like, Hey, let’s take a trip. Well, they all took a trip.
And just to give you a background, the first investor had 10 properties. They lived in the Heartland of the U S and St. Louis, Missouri. Another, the second investor lives in Oakland, but they have some long distance properties in North Carolina and they have about 50 units being like apartment units. And the third couple, like they’re the, they’re the richest couple.
They own like syndications and apartments, thousands of units. And they’ve put together this big organization. They make like hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, a million dollars a year. They’re making tons of cashflow. They all go on the trip. They get after two weeks and one of them proposes extending the trip.
Hey, let’s do another two weeks. Everybody could do it except for the wealthiest couple because they had meetings to go back to and they had to speak somewhere and they have projects and the interesting thing about the story was the people with less money on paper had a much larger bank account of time and flexibility to be able to do the things they wanted to do to have the spontaneity, the flexibility.
And for me, it was an aha moment because it’s like money’s important. But don’t let that be the only measure you have if you actually want to work it backwards from a good life, from a quality of life, of lifestyle. And that was just a wake up call for me.
This idea that there’s different currencies, that we will not waste money, being financial geeks, right?
Financial geeks hate wasting money. We get this pit in our stomach. But we will waste all kinds of time, Chad, chasing 3 and 4 opportunities.
Yeah. Yeah. Time is the ultimate currency. I mean, you have 24 hours in a day. Everybody does. Doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy or don’t have much money. And you also, how long are you going to live?
Like nobody knows, like we, we don’t know. And so you have to balance this out. And that’s why I mentioned earlier, taking breaks in my career, like not everybody wants to travel, but I think if you grind away for 20, 30 years, hoping someday to live your life. What then, like, are you going to make it there?
Like nothing’s guaranteed. So it’s gotta be a balance between like, I’m a type A person. I like goals. I like, I like measuring money. I like doing this stuff. But my wife actually has a really good balance for me. She, she and I have worked together to like balance that enjoyment of the now with the long term aspirations.
And the cool thing is like, if you plan it well, financially, you can do both. Like you can have your cake and eat it too. You have to, as Paula. Pan, our friend, mutual friend always says, you can’t have everything. You have to, you have to make a choice. There’s a trade off here, but if you work it backwards from what you want, you can build a financial plan, a real estate plan that allows you to enjoy and kind of taste the fruits of that long term quality of life all along the way.
Well, this is what was so interesting to me about this project was that you still have goals. You still have big goals, but the goals aren’t the same monetary goals. I feel like your goals now are around. community and, and craftsmanship and family. And you’ve got this whole other set of goals now, which I feel like in some ways are bigger than just making the Scrooge McDuck pile of money bigger.
Yeah. It’s money allows you up to a certain point, but when I, I had the kind of identity crisis, to be honest with you, like when I started, and I think this happens when you meet one goal, you start saying like, what next? Because I, I identify
with that goal. And
And Exactly. The goalposts keep moving to use a football metaphor. But, but one, one thing I, when I was on one of these sabbatical trips, I did some soul searching and I started asking myself that question that a lot of people ask when you’re 16, 17, 18 years old. Like, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Who do you want to be? And I’m like, in my thirties thinking about this. And one of the things I just followed my interests. Like, what, what are you interested in? Well, I have kids and like, I’d love to be present with them. And I’d love to be kind of coaching their little. You know, football or not football that I played football, but they’re volleyball and they’re they’re soccer and that’s fine.
I would love to be there when they get off the bus. So that was like one aspect of my life. That’s hard to measure. But man, is that important? And then another aspect that just I was just interested and as I was pushing my kids in the stroller in my community, I got really frustrated. that the, my local Clemson, South Carolina community was not built for anybody, but cars.
You couldn’t walk anywhere a quarter of a mile away to my park. I couldn’t walk without getting hit by a truck. And so I started volunteering and some friends and I built a nonprofit in 2014 to build a network of walking and biking trails in the town because nobody was working on it. I’m like the entrepreneur in me is like, wait a minute, nobody’s doing this.
And so I’ve been beating my head against the wall. It’s been a frustrating long process, but man, I am more about this trail system called the green Crescent trail that I am. Making 10 million. I could care. I’m not making a dollar. I don’t want a dollar. I’m getting a lot of money to this thing. But man, is it purposeful?
Is it meaningful? And I feel like it’s a legacy that my town, my small community 10, 20 years from now, it can make a big difference. So I think we entrepreneurs, we investors have a lot of other things we could do with our lives that matter, that are meaningful, that are needed, that are beyond just piling up a bunch of money and swimming around in your money.
Yeah.
Every time we meet, you surprise the hell out of me. You don’t know this about me, but I was for a long time, and I still serve on the board, but I was president of a group called Partnership for the Pathway, because in Texarkana, Texas, I was frustrated that there were no sidewalks, that there’s just no place for, so same thing, same mission.
That is
creepy. That is so creepy. That’s a connection I didn’t see coming there, Joe. I love it. But it’s
funny, you say investors who want to be small and mighty share a few common principles. And I want to dive into a few of these. The goal is to have enough, not the most. I think we talked about that. And abundance of time is more luxurious than private planes or yachts.
I think we also. chatted about that. But this is your first rule of small and mighty. Life comes first, business comes second. It’s 2007, you write, and you said how you, you during one of your sabbaticals, you wrote, but you and your business partner together actually did this. You say you had a heart to heart about your real estate business.
Tell me about that heart to heart during the middle of the meltdown.
Yeah, we had grown a lot in 2007 and it was going back to my 10 X, you know, go big kind of mentality. That was our goal. And we sort of accomplished our goal. We bought a bunch of properties. We were flipping houses and making like 60, 000 per flip and we had piled up some cash, but at the end of 2007 we were just busy, busy, busy.
And we were also taking a lot of risk and here, here’s the financial meltdown. Things are shifting. The ground is shifting underneath you. And my business partner, I think was wiser than me. He was the one who kind of like, Hey, wait a minute. Like, let’s, let’s talk about this. Should we keep growing? And we, we had this exercise to write down a list of things just personally that you would like to do on a day to day basis.
If money were not an object. Like, what would you do? Like, what would your life look like? And this is a great exercise for people to do if they hear this, is, and I wrote down things like, I want to hike in the middle of the day because I live in a beautiful part of the country with hiking trails and nature.
I want to travel with my family. I just got married that year. If I have kids, I want to be present with them. I wanted to do things that yes, they required money, but like a lot of these things like hiking or playing pickup basketball for me is another big one. Like these just, you need a time, like you need a flexibility and mobility.
And so working it backwards, we said, how can we build a real estate investing business that would actually accomplish those things that would give us the money we need, but not necessarily the main criteria was life first. Like what, how can we make that list happen? So basically, when I look back on that list, like it’s amazing.
Like this just last year in Spain, we hiked the Camino de Santiago hiking. I played basketball every single Friday night with my amigos and I hung out with them and got to learn how to speak Spanish. I was there picking up my kids from school every day, dropping them off, walking with them. My wife and I got to spend a lot of time taking classes.
I mean, so it’s possible. Like you, you can, if you specifically lay out what you want to do. It’s flexible. You can, you can make it happen, but you have to start with that. Going back to the cubby thing. I think if you don’t work backwards from your life first, money will take over. I call it like a Frankenstein monster.
Like it business will become a Frankenstein monster who will take over your entire life if you let it, but you have to kind of keep it under control. You got to say, Hey, Frankenstein, like you’re in, I’m in charge here. You’re serving my life, not the other way around. And it’s just, it happens all the time where ambitious entrepreneurs wake up 10 years later thinking.
Like, what was I starting this for? Like, why am I doing all this? I got a ton of
employees. I’ve got this huge business. It takes forever to run the business and I can’t escape it. So instead of the business working for me, I’m just working. I’m a cog in the machine that I build. I try it myself. You, this is where beginning then, by the way, this is not real estate specific.
You mentioned earlier that you’d be happier if your empire was a little smaller. You prove, in one part, you do this math where somebody does this with 10 houses, that you start with what you want and then you build the real estate empire based on getting
to that point? Yes. And I’ve got, I’ll give you an example of a couple I wrote about in the book.
I’ll state their names, but they live in Portugal now and they have 10 rental properties back in the United States and the rough numbers, it’s like real, we don’t have to do fancy math here, they rent the properties out and after they pay all their expenses, they net 1, 000 per month. So this is simple math, 10 properties times 1, 000 per month is 10, 000 per month net income after all their expenses.
And here’s the key though, they don’t have any debt on those properties. They saved up for years, they worked in like Silicon Valley. They had this big 401k. Part of their portfolio is very traditional stocks, bonds. That’s great. But they, they took a chunk of it and invested in real estate, approximately 50%.
And they just paid cash for everything. And that’s one way to do it. There’s, I know, not everybody has a bunch of cash sitting around, but the point is like the end of that story was, they own these properties free and clear. They make 10, 000 per month, 120, 000 per year, and they can live in Portugal. They have flexibility.
Managing 10 properties is not, I asked her specifically how much time she spends. She spends four hours per month. doing some bookkeeping, talking to our property manager. It can be a very, very part time job, passive enough kind of investment portfolio that lets you do
whatever you want to do. Yeah. And certainly this isn’t, doesn’t grow overnight to your point.
You don’t have enough money. A lot of people listening to do that right away, but having that as a goal is a much more achievable goal that I can see on my radar versus I need 50 properties doing all kinds of stuff. The other way that this is not, um, you don’t change overnight. I noticed something from two different parts of, of your story.
You talk about how in 2007, you had this heart to heart and you realized time and mobility are important, but then you write later on, Chad, that it’s 2009. And you feel like you’re still kind of running ragged. Like, don’t expect you to change overnight. Like, I feel like there’s this process of. You know what the Caterpillar Chad becoming the butterfly of coach
Carson.
Yeah, it changes a little bit by a little bit. Yeah. I mean, 2007 was our aha moment, but we had already dug our hole. Like we had to dig out of the hole. We’ve all, I think we’ve all been there. We all make mistakes. We made a lot of mistakes in 2006 and seven, but you know, isn’t that part of learning, isn’t that part of life?
Like none of us are perfect. I’m still amazed, Joe. Like if you think about like the big picture of like our society is that most people retire and get a retirement age and don’t have much money, like they don’t have enough to support themselves. And yet. If we learn these kinds of things, like we’re talking about today and whatever path you choose 10 to 15 years from now, you could be set.
You could have a really amazing life, whether that’s 3, 000 per month coming in for the rest of your life or 5, 000 or 10, 000 or 20, 000. It’s just a matter of what your goals are, but there’s a pretty simple plan of buying one property per year. two properties per year, eventually getting them paid off that can happen in 10 to 15 years.
And I’m, I’m just blown away that you can just kind of chunk away at that kind of goal at a reasonable pace and end up in 15 years, like 150 times better off financially than most people are in society. Like that’s, that still blows my mind. And it’s, I think if people can get their head around the simplicity of that plan and the mighty part of small and mighty, like how mighty that is, like, that’s, that’s really amazing.
If you’re 50 years old and you want to do it by 65, if you’re. 20 years old and you want to do it by 35, like that’s 15 years is a long time, but it’s also the big scheme of things is not a, is not an insurmountable thing to do.
You talk about enjoying the journey along the way. It doesn’t have to be a sprint yet.
I think though, Chad, that you were sprinting for several years before you had this aha, right? Do you think that you have the hindsight to know that sprinting might not be a great life, but the sprint was necessary? I’m thinking about people in their twenties. Is it necessary to have that sprint and go, this is not forever.
This is maybe a short term sprint or is it enjoy it the whole way and maybe not sprint so hard? Yeah, I
look at it more like in seasons and maybe let’s use a metaphor. Like if you’re trying to climb to the top of a mountain and when I was in Peru, we had to climb this big pass to get to the Inca trail and to get to Machu Picchu.
If you just sprinted up the entire thing, you will fall over dead on the side of the trail. Like it’s not. possible, right? But you could kind of push it hard for maybe, you know, a couple hundred yards and then, then start walking a little slower or take a break or then push it again a little bit harder.
And I think that’s kind of the way the optimal way for me is, is like, I like to go in these two to four year sprints and then take a break and like enjoy it a little bit and then push for another two to four years and take a break. And that, I like that pattern. That works for me. That’s just, it’s, you could call it like.
long term ADD. Like if you just 10 years in a row, gosh, that’s a grind. So yes, sprinting is necessary. And if you’re in a lot of debt right now and you’re just trying to dig your way out, like you just got to sprint, like you just got to push it. You got to get that debt paid off. You got to get to another plateau and then you take a break, like celebrate.
Pat yourself on the back. The same with when you’re building wealth and buying properties, like you might need to, if you got zero properties, maybe you need to get to that three or four property plateau. You just got to sprint. You got to learn, you got to network, you got to get financing. It’s not, it’s kind of a grind a little bit, but the grind could be fun.
If you know, it’s not forever, you know, it’s just like, this is something I could do for a period of my
life. It’s funny as you’re talking. It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with Steve Chu. Do you know, Steve? Yeah, yeah, Steve was talking about how he does his, you know, he didn’t call him sprints, but it really truly is talking about the same thing, Chad.
For him, he goes half a day every day to the grindstone and then the rest of the day he doesn’t think about work. So for him, it’s a daily thing. He is a friend who is, does what you’re talking about. He will go six months. And then the next year does nothing and then six months and then does nothing and then and by nothing I mean Nothing that is building that mountain of money He’s dealing with the other goals in his life these other facets of his life that he’s that he’s interested in It’s cool to see that there’s different ways different ways to do this.
There’s so much here. We talked about Today really the philosophy behind this if you want to hear Some of the tactics, uh, Chad was nice enough to do another interview with us on Stacking Deeds. If you just go over there and look up our interview with Coach Carson, you’ll see we get into the tactics. But really, if you like where we’re going, you dive into this.
You then, we talked about the beginning, you dive into how to get this done with real estate, how to buy. properties, uh, which properties are best, what good locations are, how to analyze them, how to find good deals, how to negotiate. I mean, you really then dive into this jumping off point that we just talked about.
Yeah.
I wanted it to be a, like a guidebook, you know, going back to our mountain metaphor. Like if you’re going to go climb a mountain, you want to know the big picture. Like, where am I going? Give me a map. And so you start with a map, but then I want to know, like how to use the ropes and how to, what shoes should I wear?
And like, I want to know how to tie my shoes. Like, so those little details are really important. Those are the tactics of real estate investing. And they, they are super. Like, how do you get financing? Like, if I have no money, like, how do I start when I only have like 5, 000 bucks and it seems insurmountable when interest rates going up and the prices are high, it’s like those challenges are real.
But my hope was that I poured 21 years of my best strategies and tactics and try to summarize them and simplify them and put them in a, in a, in a framework that you can use and hopefully go back to and pull it off the shelf and use it as a guidebook down the road.
It’s called the small and mighty real estate investor published by bigger pockets, but available
everywhere.
It’s available everywhere. Amazon. If you listen to Audible, a lot of people listen to it on Audible as well. And then BiggerPockets has some pretty cool bonuses. I did, for example, it’s called the two hour work week. I had a little agenda showing like, come on, Chad, like what are you actually doing your week?
And so I made this kind of chart of like, here are the things I do with my time. And then I have an exercise for you to do when you’re reading this. Like, what do I want my ideal week to look like? How can I work it backwards from that and build a life where I spend a couple hours per week in my real estate?
And then I have this. huge block of time to do this other stuff. So there’s some bonuses like that. And another one, a bonus chapter about how to be a small and mighty investor in a changing market like 2023. And how do you navigate that? So those are some, some, if you just go on bigger pockets, that’s where you get those bonuses there as well.
Awesome. We’ll link
to it then at bigger pockets and, uh, the audio book. Did I ask you this before? Did you read the audio
book? No, unfortunately I didn’t. I did ask you that. I remember this. Yeah. We couldn’t fit it in. So if you want to hear this crazy Southern accent that I have, you know, you won’t be able to hear that when you listen to the book, but there’s a, the, the, the person who recorded it sounds amazing.
He’s great. Second best. Second best.
Chad, thanks for hanging out with us and, uh, helping our stackers begin at the end of mine. I really appreciate it. This has been
a lot of fun. Thanks for having me, Joe. Hi,
I’m David Stein. When I’m not talking to other people about money on money for the rest of us, I’m stacking Benjamin.
Big thanks to Chad for joining us. Oh, gee, that time, time currency is the currency people always forget about. Especially, you know, when you’re listening to money shows, you’re like, Hey, I just need more money. Sometimes if you build the bridge too big, uh, you end up spending all your time maintaining it and can’t buy your time back.
Time’s the only thing that matters. It’s interesting because this is, this is maybe the first thing that I learned at a strategic coach. was buying your time back. And actually what’s funny is in a lot of entrepreneurs, I don’t think think this way that your business will actually do better without you.
Don’t get me wrong. It takes, it takes you to get there, to make that thing roll, but spending time away from your business. It’s a good thing for your people. Noted.
I’ve been meaning to talk to you about my vacation plans for the fall.
I think the last 12 years, Doug, have been his vacation.
Hey, now. Oh, if there was ever a pot calling the kettle black, it’s happening right now.
No
kidding. Holy crap. Like, where are you headed, Joe, next?
Oh, is it Bali or is
it Texas Camp 5? Hey, speaking of a whole different topic, obviously with Coach Carson being here, we were talking about football. a little bit. And of course, Doug, on your trivia, we talked about football and his football season.
And, uh, well, this is a TikTok. I know it’s not TikTok Monday, but this is a. Uh, husband who is, uh, well, let’s just listen in.
I need to hand this to you. Is it meaningful? As soon as you read it out loud. Callie, this is to inform you that two weeks from today is the start of the NFL season. The past several months, I have been an engaged, loving, helpful, and thoughtful husband and father.
However, I must, with remiss, inform you that I am putting in my time. I will no longer be available for work on Sundays 10 a. m. to 10 p. m., Monday evenings nor Thursday evenings due to conflicting commitments. I’ll also be unavailable every Saturday due to conflicting commitments between the hours of 10 a.
m. the next morning. This will be in fact until the end of February and early March. Thank you for understanding.
This is, this is, I’m sorry you can’t quit, we’re short staffed.
I don’t think about that. Like I’m unavailable every Saturday and Sunday, uh, for a good portion of the day until February. Yeah,
one of the reasons I got so into college football, I always have enjoyed college football more than pro because I grew up in Detroit, so we didn’t have a pro team, but, uh, and I grew up going to Michigan games on Saturdays, but when our kids were young, We didn’t really sit down and have a discussion, like pick a day, but it just sort of evolved that I sort of got to pick a day where I could do what I wanted to do on the weekend, Saturday or Sunday.
And I realized if I pick Saturday, I can watch a heck of a lot more football on a Saturday than I can on a Sunday because of how many games there are in college football and going deep into the night on, on the West coast, you know, watching games till like one
30 in the morning. Crossover point on how lazy can be like, where’s my most lazy
meter.
Yep. Did some research, so that was really what accelerated my college football appreciation. Laziness. Uh,
lesser of a thievin lifeline. Tackle some of life’s most important questions. Uh, a little less lazy questions. Our friends at AVEN Life Insurance Agency, OG, they put what you value first. I’m
going to go with both Doug and the TikTok minute.
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get after it. It’s your loved ones in your time and the Michigan State Spartans. I love
spending time with my loved ones in another room. While I have the door closed,
and a little bottle of bourbon,
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two o’clock, kind of halftime of the first game, you know, as you kind of fold into the second game. That way you can just get your phone open, hit DoorDash, go, my favorite, send, bam, you don’t have to miss any game time. That’s what’s up. Pro
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Pro tip. Get your DoorDash set up, get your life insurance. I think you’re good to go. Today we have a stacker calling us that doesn’t want to be seen with us apparently, OG, because they want to remain anonymous. Which, uh, you know, can’t blame her. I know the
feeling. Yeah. Hi
guys, my name is not Rachel and I am not in Michigan, but I wanted to remain anonymous.
I’m one of the few companies that is a private, smaller, under 100 employee company to still have a pension plan. We were just notified that at the end of this year the pension plan will be eliminated, however they will. Increase the amount that they contribute to our 401ks regardless of what we put into that.
So I think I’m absolutely okay with the pension plan dissolving. I’m in my mid 40s. I’ve been with the company about 15 years. My question is what to do when it comes time to make a decision on our vested pension plan amount. Whether I take a lump sum and either invest it into my own retirement plan or pay off or pay down on my 401ks.
I don’t know the amount I’m going to get yet. Or to just keep the plan with a new company and, um, keep the monthly payments that I’ll receive in retirement. Wanted to get any thoughts that you might have on this. Um, any calculators you might have that would help me do a comparison. Uh, anything you might think of that could help.
Thanks.
Thanks for the question, Anonymous. And you know what, OG, this is something that has happened a lot in the past. We haven’t had this question lately, so it’s probably great timing. If people are trying to convert any type of a pension stream of income into a lump sum or well, they’re pension specific, what do we do?
So there’s kind of two different things here. When you think about the pension being frozen or discontinued, she used the word I think dissolved in there, which could be a different thing altogether, but probably what’s happening is the company is saying, listen, we’re not going to fund the pension anymore.
It is where it is. It’s frozen at this level. And, you know, we’re not going to put any more money into it, so you’re not going to accrue any more years of service or benefits from this pension, but it will stay where it is. If that’s the case, then, you know, then you’ll make that decision when you go to retire and the decision about lump sum or stream of income will be largely based on what the interest rates are like in, you know, in and around the time that you’re retiring.
Generally, that’s the tradeoff. If interest rates are really high, it’s better to take the stream of income. If interest rates are really low, it’s better to take the lump sum, if that’s even an option, because sometimes they don’t even have that as an option. Now when the pension is frozen or, you know, discontinued or whatever you want to call it, you know, upcoming, they may give you an option right now to do something with that plan and to say, Hey, you’ve got 82, 000 in this account.
You can leave it where it is or you can move it into another plan. What would you like to do? And in that case, the analysis you’re going to want to do is what kind of investments is the pension? using for their investment pool versus what you have access to outside. Maybe you can roll it into an IRA.
You can invest it however you want. Maybe you can put it in your 401k. You can invest it within the plan options that are available in your 401k. Or maybe the pension options are invested just fine. And you like it where it is there. And that would be fine too. The only thing you don’t want to do is take the money out.
So we’re not going to take the money out and go, Woo hoo, I just got 80 grand. Here we go. Or whatever the number is. This money needs to stay as part of your retirement, go into a retirement account, if that’s an option for you. And if you choose to do that, probably they’ll let it sit there, or you’ll have the option to roll it into an IRA and manage it on your own.
That’s generally kind of the direction these things go. And the reason,
OG, you don’t want to take it out Right now.
Well, the biggest reason is because it’s not your retirement. I mean, unless you’re going to retire soon, you know, this is retirement money. When you set money aside for retirement or when your company sets money aside for your retirement, it comes with strings attached.
And the strings are, you don’t have to pay taxes on this until you retire, as long as you use it for retirement. If you dip your grubby little fingers into your retirement pot before it’s time to retire, the IRS slaps you around like crazy and says, not only are you going to have to pay taxes on this, but then we’re also going to hit you with a penalty on top of it.
And all of your other stuff is gonna, you know, all of the other tax stuff that kind of dominoes from that. Child tax credits, or the ability to deduct certain expenses, and you know, all these other things that are tied to how much money you make. Guess what? In the IRS’s eyes, all of a sudden, if I used 80, 000 before, all of a sudden you just made an extra 80, 000.
And now you gotta pay taxes on 80 grand, put you in a different bracket, and a penalty. So you don’t want to do any of that sort of stuff. Keep it retirement money. Don’t, don’t, don’t spend it. Yeah,
a lot of unnecessary tax that you’re gonna pay. But I do like the idea if you’re not retired, just
leave it alone.
Well, and that’s the other side of it. People also are frustrated by this, by the fact that you can’t, I can’t touch my money till I’m 59 and a half. Well, that’s not true either. The IRS just doesn’t want you to use it before you retire. If you’ve saved a lot of money and you’re ready to retire and you’re 47, there’s ways to access your retirement account without a penalty.
You just have to tell the IRS you’re retired and off you
go. Thanks for the question. And by the way, Anonymous, we do have your email here. So we’re going to send you a Haven Life greatest money show on earth. Circus t shirt. As a thanks for being brave and calling in. So, and a great question, by the way.
StackofBenjamins. com slash voicemail if you’ve got a question for OG and us to tackle on a future show. We’d love to hear from you. Speaking of that, if you’d like to hang out with me tomorrow, let’s go to the community calendar. Tomorrow at 5 p. m. Eastern, I will be on Instagram live with another one of our Friday old time, we used to call it the Friday FinTech segment, where we talk about a FinTech company.
Tomorrow, I’m going to be talking to Lisa Fisher, who is from Mission Lane. Lisa has an interesting story that she’s going to share about how her, uh, her husband at the time was racking up lots of debt, wrecking her credit along with his, and how Mission Lane is Solving a problem for those people. I love OG some of these companies that are really solving problems in new and exciting ways And we’re gonna talk to Lisa Fisher tomorrow 5 p.
m. Eastern 2 p. m. Pacific on Instagram If you want to find out all the places where you can join us for live recordings of the show coming up or Instagram lives Whatever it might be stacking Benjamins comm slash welcome is our welcome guide with all the different channels where we help you get better with your money If you really don’t need that, you just need better people in your corner, though.
OG and his team are still taking clients for a little longer this fall. So head to stackybenjamins. com slash OG. That’s the link to his team’s calendar. We’ll get you on the calendar so that you can make better decisions in the future with your money. All right. I think that’s going to do it for today, Doug.
You got it from here, man. What should we have learned today? Well, Joe,
first, take some advice from Coach Carson and set yourself free with passive income from real estate investments. Second, remote work? It’s great for work life balance if you can separate work from home life while you’re in the same kitchen.
But if you want to get ahead with your peers, Joe says it’s probably time to spend at least a little time face to face. Not Doug! Joe. But the big lesson? If you want to get your quaffle through the hoop, you got to slide past the beaters. I mean, who needs college football when Quidditch sounds so damn
sexy?
Thanks to Chad Carson for joining us today. You can find his book wherever books are sold. We’ll also include links in our show notes at StackingBenjamins. 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 Lisa Couric, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast.
With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earn Invest podcast. Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 201. You’ll find the 411 on all things money at the 201. Just visit stackingbenjamins. com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are?
Of course you’ll never know if you don’t check out our YouTube version of this show, engineered by Tina Ichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast. 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.
Want to chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Youngkin are our social media coordinators. and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement. Say hello when you see us posting online. To join all the basement fun with other stackers, type stackingbenjamins.
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’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamins show.
Thought I’d take a minute here in our post script as it were. Yeah. Post to post script. PPS. P P P S. Post Post Postscript. And, uh, talk about a letter I received. Somebody sent me a letter, Doug, Joe. Who does that?
Like on paper? Very long. What the? That’s a chapter of a book. That’s not a letter.
Oh, that’s nice.
It’s, uh,
it’s somebody’s doctoral thesis.
Uh, yes, this is, uh, I, I, I won’t read
the whole thing. If I didn’t get to see OG every day, I’d totally send him a letter that long. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Pretty much. Can you write something that long with all four letter words?
So this is a letter from Ed in San Diego, and it’s very comically written with the dates up here all crossed off until you get to the August date.
And he sent this some time ago. I just had four different dates or five different dates. Yeah. December 17th, January 8th, January 27th, March 3rd. And he forgets to send it. And August 8th. Since I hope this finds you doing well and thoroughly enjoying life after your birthday, this was originally intended to be your birthday present circa 2022, but well, here we are today nearing your upcoming birthday.
Things happen and I heard you took up a hobby in drywall repair, so, uh, and I thought maybe you won’t need a drink coaster so soon as you’re probably drinking from the bottle. So I waited, as I once heard, the further after your birthday you receive a gift, the more important it is. As it shows, the bearer of said gift did not forget about your birthday, or your important day of celebration.
So being that we’re closer to your next birthday and further away from the previous, I’m sure I win for being the one who hasn’t forgotten about you. Nice save. Yeah, exactly. This gift began after hearing an episode nearly a year ago when Joe was bragging about, who knows what, a trip to Spain, his solo stove that’s just a glorified washing machine drum, or Oh, no, it was a gift a listener sent him.
In this show, you stated that all you wanted was a bottle of bourbon, or a plane, or even both, which got me thinking I, much like you, are surrounded by iddy, lesser intel, uh, lackluster co workers, crossed out. I often listen to the show on my way home from work, and I can feel the pain you must endure, as I just did so myself.
So, uh, anyways, he goes on and talks about, um, all these different things. And he sent me a bottle of Woodford, little teeny, tiny, courtesy of American Airlines on a trip and like little, little sketch there of, oh gee. And then also have a little drink coaster. It says OG on
it. How about that? A little
woodworking.
Yeah. I like how it is, Doug, it’s perfect for OG because we’re, you know, most coaster sets come in like at least two, but sometimes four. OG drinks alone. He gets one. So just one draft. I did
get two. He sent another one. Oh, he did send another one. Oh, that’s nice. In reference to the Marine Corps. Hoorah.
Which is… which is pretty cool. So, uh, so he goes on and talks a lot about, uh, his retirement planning and some of this is personal, so I won’t share a lot of it, but, um, you know, basically being frugal and making good decisions and, you know, and now here he is, you know, closing in on retirement and. You know, after work type of goal is to help share the passion of retirement planning and financial planning with other people.
Uh, he says, my dream give back retirement activity during my first future years would be presenting this information to young sailors and Marines we have here in San Diego. So that would be super helpful, you know, because military folks are, are, uh, generally a little behind the curve when it comes to money.
And then I thought the last little bit was kind of interesting. So, uh, circling back to the bourbon here. So this was, uh, wasn’t purchased. I think it was, uh, what is that called when somebody gives you a gift after the same gift that somebody else gave to you? But he got it included in his airfare to Rome.
He says, I hope you enjoy your birthday past and future gifts. They come with a warranty, which I’ll get around to explaining soon. Oh, that Rome to Dallas flight was in 2019, and I kept the bottle in my workshop as an emergency. I can’t guarantee its quality. Thanks for all you do. Cheers,
Ed. Kept the bourbon near the power tools, did he?
I don’t think it goes bad, right? I mean, it’s been, it looks to be pretty sealed still. Yeah, he took a little nipper out of it before he sent it, but he took out just one
or two. But uh, here’s the only way that dark liquor really goes bad in less than like 20 years is if you leave it. in the sun. And I know that because if you look just behind me to that nice snifter right
there, right at the window,
a beautiful snifter from Tiffany’s it’s wonderful crystal that I put 18 year old Scotch in.
And thought, how amazing is that gonna look sitting on the back desk of my office, right in the window. And I learned a few months later, that’s a quick way to get you to spit out your drink. Huh. I sprayed it all over my office. So as long as, uh, Ed from San Diego didn’t store that up in the window of his south facing workshop, I think you’re good.
I think we’re
all set. Very kind of Ed to put this together and send it to just me and not you two losers and So I’m
very very
grateful. Oh, I got gifts. I’ve gotten gifts.
Well, did you get your own coaster and GIFs?
And free free bottle of Included Woodford from American Airlines very kind very kind it will go to good use right now as a matter of fact
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