One snowy Christmas Eve in Texarkana, Neighbor Doug settled into bed in his snazzy Superman Footie PJs (Amazon affiliate link), still buzzing on Joe’s Mom’s eggnog… Today’s special holiday episode recounts a completely original tale of Doug and the money lessons learned when he’s visited by three ghosts—past, present, and future.
Make peace with your past, clean up your past mistakes, and learn from them
Especially when it comes to past credit mistakes, what’s done is done. Whatever method works best for you (debt snowball or debt avalanche), do that one. Come to terms with your bad money habits and realize that you can’t outearn them. It’s on you to fix the bad money habits of your past. Focus on what’s current and fix what needs fixing today.
Live in the present
Don’t get caught in the trap of lamenting your past nor only planning for the future. Our only truly limited resource is time. Balance living for today with planning for the future. Remain in the present – especially when spending time with your loved ones – while keeping a vision in mind for your longer-term future plans. Be intentional about your plans and actions today and timeline what you want to achieve in what time you have remaining.
Plan for the future
Communicate on a regular basis with your “team” (loved ones) about your financial goals, progress, and situation. We recommend scheduling a weekly Family Budget Meeting. Automate as many of your financial decisions as possible today so you never have to think about them again in the future. Commit to paying off that mortgage early, ramp up those retirement savings contributions, stack those Benjamins for your kids’ college savings. Decide where you want to be financially in the future; face reality of where you are currently (we like our sponsor, Monarch Money, to track where you are); and take the necessary step to make that future a near certainty.
Takeaways
Remember that time is the one commodity that’s finite for all of us. Value your time and experiences while staying responsible to your present and future self. Remember and learn from the sins of your past to build on your strengths; focus on living in the present and building your financial foundation; and head into the future with more confidence than Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor Doug during the annual Sun’s Out, Guns Out El Camino Competition at the Sizzler.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Thanks to Neighbor Doug for lending his dulcet tones to our Holiday Story Special
Sit down by a roaring fire with your favorite beverage while ‘Ol Neighbor Doug sooths your holiday anxiety away with his reading of a completely original tale just in time for the holidays.
Have a question for the show?
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- 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
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen (Amazon affiliate link)
- Wait but Why blog
Join Us Wednesday!
Tune in on Wednesday when we’ll be discussing what we should’ve learned in 2023 with Today Show Money editor and one of our favorite perennial guests, Jean Chatzky.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Retirement Has Been Cancelled (SB1449)
Episode transcript
The following is a special episode of the Stacking Benjamin Show. 📍
Our tail opens like any classic holiday drama, a cold evening in Texarkana, snow gently falling on the street where Joe’s mom lives. The camera zooms in on a house, a typical ranch with lights behind curtains, where surely a family is gathered together, celebrating that.
Finally, they’ve arrived at Christmas Eve. To be clear, this is a tale like no other. Sure. Once a long time ago, one very little story was written, which maybe sound slightly similar. One story indeed that. Also featured a chap who exclaimed B humbug quite frequently and we’ll concede that just like that.
Other tale you may have heard in this classic, our hero is visited by three ghosts in a single evening, one by one. It’s an epic story and so, so, so completely original. Can I stop saying how original this story is? Oh hell, as long as I’m getting 📍 paid, let’s get on with it. 📍 📍 So it is Christmas Eve and far beyond the usual quitting 📍 time for most Tians, which was typically 3:00 PM 📍 but Joe’s mum’s neighbor Doug was only now arriving back 📍 home from a long day toiling in Joe’s Mum’s 📍 basement.
Three takes for the Open. How many times does a guy need to say live from Joe’s 📍 mom’s basement? See, it’s brilliant Every time, God, where are my keys?
He
fumbled around in his pocket only finding gum, wrappers a hot wheel toy car, and his lucky wooden nickel.
Who’s, who’s there? I could have sworn I heard 📍 someone say something about a hot wheel.
Oh, there’s my keys. 📍 Okay. I’m definitely hearing voices again. God, I’m exhausted. I gotta get my ass to bed so I can work super hard 📍 on even better announcing tomorrow, like that’s even possible. Those idiots, Joe and OG are 📍 taking time off for Christmas. Ba humbug. I’ll show ’em who’s pulling all the weight around here.
You know what’s better than working, working with me who needs holidays? That’s like a gift I give them every day. These guys have no idea how lucky they are.
Doug has no idea as he settled in changing out of his work clothes and into his Superman footy pajamas.
I’ll have, you know, these are very manly PJs.
Wait, it’s that narrator voice again. Is he mocking
me that he was about to be visited by three very original ghosts,
original Dude, this is 📍 totally a dickens knockoff. Very original. Now you’re arguing with me. Let me be. You gotta try working for a living God Voices Dickens.
📍 📍 Oh man.
And so Doug drifted off to sleep, not knowing the first ghost of the evening was just outside the door, but before he was able to enter, there was a pause for this.
Wait, there’s ad breaks in my dream. Am in hell. I’m in hell. Alright. This is hell. This is exactly what I thought it would be like. It’d be just like this.
Oh, there isn’t only one ad spot. Check this out. 📍 now. Where were we? 📍 Oh yes. He 📍 drifted off to sleep.
The ghost entered the room in a bright flash of 📍 light. 📍 Sweet
baby Jesus. Turn the high beams down.
📍 A
ghost. Wait, aunt Edna, is that you? Are you here to share the winning lottery numbers like you said
you would? 📍 Wait,
I know that voice.
📍 No,
I do.
Holy crap, Joe,
you are the ghost of Christmas past. My God, why did I have to eat that mushroom dip from last summer’s party? It’s
wagging me out. Oh, uh, not just me.
We are the ghost Doug. Sup
dude? No.
At two brute
📍 as always here to serve
Doug. Remember when you got into trouble with credit cards that won Christmas? Remember how you didn’t ask for a raise that day because you didn’t think it was the right time? The ghost of the past, they follow you around and we’re here to make sure you make better decisions in the future.
Oh gee, aren’t we oh
one. I mean, sure. Yeah. Things like, uh, you know, how about, uh, buying a four bedroom colonial house when you have no kids on interest? Only at 6% Who would do that without the credit to be able to do that, but because of the laws at the time, they didn’t really ask you for your pay stub, and you’re like.
Eh, this is probably a good idea. And you know what else is a good idea? Buying A BMW to put inside the garage of the new car before you make the first mortgage payment. Oh. Because you can’t have a new house without a beautiful new car.
New car. Yes. Not even new to you. Absolutely new. Yeah. Brandy
New. Oh,
it’s such a nice car.
No, I think this ghost to Christmas past has, uh, a similar tail. I mean, here I am giving people advice on managing their money and winning awards for the advice that I’m giving, and I have the worst credit score in history. My credit was so bad, I. That I could, single digits, I could, I could not, I could not get a new car loan.
I remember a mutual buddy of ours, Dan told me, he’s like, I, I came clean with him and I’m like, Hey man, my credit sucks and I really need a car for our young twins. And he’s like, go to a new car dealer. I. Because they give credit to quote everybody. They give it to everyone. And so I walk into the car dealership and I tell the guy right away, I’m like, I don’t wanna waste your time.
I got horrible credit. Guy’s. Like, don’t worry about it. What’s your social security number? Walks back to the office. He’s gone forever. He comes back and he goes, dude. Like I managed to mess things up. But the point is this stuff, this stuff will follow Doug or any of our stackers around forever. OJ if you don’t clean it up, how did you start getting your financial house in order so the ghost of the past don’t, uh, continue to rear their ugly head?
I think you have to do a couple of things. The first thing is understand and, uh, be okay with the fact that you are where you are. You know, a lot of times people will. Think about it and go, oh, you know, I’m just, and try to, you know, there’s this stuff going around right now on self-help world of extreme ownership.
Right. You know, Jocko, David Goggins, David Goggins. Oh yeah. He’s all over my YouTube feed right now, which is that dude drinks the same Kool-Aid I drink. He just gets to swear more than me, which I think is unfair. But there can be too much of that. But at the end of the day, you know, you have to just be like, I am where I am.
And do that without emotion and any of the baggage that goes with it. Because a balance sheet is a balance sheet. You know, companies, apple, whatever, they have to put out a balance sheet every quarter. Sometimes, you know, I try to massage the data, but if they’re not truthful, then everybody goes to jail.
It’s just is what it is at that moment. So be okay with where you are. I love
that advice because for me, I had to quit dealing with right now and trying to solve it to just be better tomorrow. I had to realize, oh gee, that if I want a year from now to be better, forget about today, tomorrow, and begin building a foundation.
’cause I think there’s a couple lies out there. Number one lie that I was living, that I know a lot of people. Our living is that if I just make a little more money, this’ll take care of itself. So to your point, I’m, you know, telling myself over and over making excuses. One of those excuses is, oh, I just not make enough money yet if I just make, no matter how much money you make, you can’t out earn your bad money habits.
That’s number one. Yeah. And number two was I had to surround myself with better people. I had to finally create a team of people that would help me forget, forget about tomorrow. And all of my creditors, which were call, who were calling me all the time, I had to just hang up on them and go, you know what?
Do what you gotta do. But I gotta finally build a base and I gotta start acting out on the same advice I was giving other people. Like I thought the advice I was giving to other people didn’t apply to me. Right. Which is pretty funny. It’s working for everybody around me and I’m not taking any of it.
Right.
I. Well, and I’m sitting here today probably six or eight weeks into like trying to make better health decisions for me, eating better and exercising a whole bunch and all this other sort of stuff. And my trainer is constantly remind like it’s progress, dude. Everybody. What? What does everybody want?
Right? Six pack and no beer belly. like, I don’t care what the rest of it looks like. Just shave that part off. It’s like, well, tough. That’s the last part, right? Like that’s, that is the last thing that goes, and it goes in weeks 52 and 53. And it’s the same thing with your money. It’s, you have to build the foundation and the habits every single day because the payoff doesn’t happen immediately.
The payoff happens. Years from now, years and years, how long did it take you to get out of credit card debt? Well,
the cool thing is, is I thought it was gonna take forever, and it seriously took me about five years. But that’s only because after about a year of complete pain, I could see the construction happening and the pace quickened, partly because we got excited about it, you know, and all of a sudden it became a game, like, how fast can I do this faster?
Can I do things better? But I was gonna say to OG that that game began for us with the first move I needed to make. So let’s get tactical for just a second. The first move I needed to make was not just to ignore the creditors. It was also, believe it or not, to ignore my debt because I needed to stop using credit altogether.
Like I use credit again now ’cause I can use it responsibly. But then, then I, I had to live an all cash lifestyle. So the first thing I had to do was build my emergency fund. , and, and it seems weird, you know, you’re like, I got all this debts hanging out here at 25, 26, 27, 20 8%. Why the hell am I gonna put money in a bank account earning nothing?
Because if I didn’t have anywhere to go for the next emergency, I was never gonna turn the bus around.
Yeah. And just, I mean, you kinda breezed through it, but I wanna spend a few seconds out, and I know you said tactical, but when you’re 25 and somebody tells you this, Hey, this can take five years, that is 20% of your life.
Oh, good point. You know what I mean? Like, that seems super, super, super long time. Now be 45 and imagine the last five years of your kids, right? Boom. My daughter’s seven and a half, and I don’t remember her. You know, I, I think she skipped from two to seven. I mean, I don’t remember tons in the 3, 4, 5, 6. It’s just, here’s where we are today.
The time seems like forever, especially if you sit down and do the math on it. It’s just like going back to this weight loss thing, but it’s the same thing. It’s like, no, you should lose like half a pound a week. You’re like, no, man, I gotta lose 20 pound. That’s 40 weeks.
Like, yeah. Yeah. So what? I gotta be new mean by New Year’s?
Like, no, that’s,
that’s not that long. It seems long right now. Like 40 weeks. What are you talking? That’s 20 pounds. I gotta go to 20. I gotta wait till
next fall.
Yeah. But in when you’re 55, spending 40 weeks of that, I mean, that’s nothing, , so you gotta build it the right way and just be okay with the progress.
, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do some immediate things right away. Like if you can build your cash reserve or negotiate. That for
me was job one. Was that job one for you? I think
so. Um, you know, I think for us. Because of being a little bit helter skelter on like pay and that sort of thing.
For me it was more of consistently making sure that I knew that, you know, my wife was getting paid and I was getting paid the same thing every single solitary Friday. Because our issues, a lot of ’em stem from the fact that the feast or famine life of being an entrepreneur, you know, it’s like I got all this money.
And now I have none, and then I have all this money and I have none. So for us it started kind of more at the business level of how do we make this so that the, the paychecks are the same, even if they’re not great. Right. Just so that there’s some consistency and we can, to your point, cash, cash diet for sure.
I had to do the exact same. And the way to do that is if you pay yourself or you get commissions or you have an up and down for whatever reason, paycheck, lifestyle, have that money go into a separate account that’s not the same account that you budget out of, and then have automatic. Exchanges, transfers from that account that’s gonna go up and down based on whatever’s happening with your sales life or whatever your income stream is.
Have the same amount. Go in and do a separate account for budgeting. Oh gee, now you know, you can put the utilities on level payments. You know how much your grocery bill is every month. You know how much you can put toward the debt. You got
all that. I don’t know why you wouldn’t do that even normally, right?
Because so many times we get thinking about, well, my paycheck is my cash flow. You know, it doesn’t have to be, you can have your pay, you can you, you know, you can live on 2000 a week. If you’re getting paid 3000 a week, that’s okay too. , you could just put your money in your savings account, take out what you need.
Not the other way around.
Divorcing your income from your budget
divorcing would be very expensive. That would, that would be, that might be a ghost of Christmas past or a future
wedding. Yeah. Rear in its ugly head. Do you care what method people use to get outta debt? Some people talk about, you know, there’s the, uh, there’s the snowball method, there’s the avalanche method snowball where you take your smallest bills, you pay those off, off first, so you get confident.
Yeah. And then the avalanche where you take the biggest interest rate first. Do you really care which approach people use
that way? Um, no. I think that it will be a lot faster if you snowball it. I mean, also, think of it this way, generally speaking, if you’re upside down in the credit world, which one sucks worse?
My 21% interest rate or my 27% interest rate, it’s like, yeah, they both are awful. And if you have the opportunity to surf that down a little bit, and what I mean by that is do a balance transfer or some sort of line of credit or something to kind of get that interest rate lower to assuage some of that interest accumulation.
That’s a great thing. You should do that. But if you’re in like lips above the water stage like you were and like I was, that’s not even a reality, right? It’s not, you know, Amex isn’t gonna let you have more debt to like, no, no, I promise this one I’m gonna totally do, right? They’re like, no, we don’t care.
So make some progress, because what you’re trying to do is mentally be okay with it, and then also from a cashflow standpoint, freeing up extra cashflow to put on the next thing. So I think the snowball works best. I like
the snowball, especially when you start at, at about halfway through I had enough confidence in momentum OG that I switched.
Yeah, I switched from the snowball over to the avalanche. ’cause then I, I, the ball was rolling. It didn’t matter that I was attacking bigger balances first because I knew that this is, I was an unstoppable force at that point. And when you get to that point and realize that the behavior’s already there and now the machinery is in place.
Avalanche, uh, mathematically will get you there, but you definitely need those wins. I’ll tell you the first win for me because I had some debt that was already well into collection land and other debt that was current, I had to let the collection land stuff go. ’cause I didn’t have enough cash flow to pay everything I needed to keep my current stuff current and just bury the other stuff.
So I got used to telling the collection agencies that were after me in the early nineties, Hey, sorry, don’t have the money. Come get me. You know, it just, just come get, and you know what? They never did. Turns out. Yeah. They didn’t. Yeah. Yeah. They were a bunch of bark and nobody, and I did by the way, get them paid off and I never declared bankruptcy, but they had to be second.
I had to keep my open lines of credit open and I had to make sure that if I, if I needed that, uh, which I never did during that process, but I had to, I had to take care of what was current first. Yeah.
Stop digging is the first step. Wrong. Exactly. Yes. Agreed. No, it really is agreed. I mean, it sounds silly, but I mean, it really is it, it has to, you know, you have to recognize where you are and then 📍 like you said, do everything that you can to tear the bandaid off.
So Doug,
I think that’s your course of action as the ghost of Christmas past. I think using that tactical approach of stop lying to yourself. Focus on what’s current. Build yourself a foundation. I think then the future can be better for you. Wow. Thanks
guys. Wait, aren’t I just thanking my own bad 📍 decision to eat six month old leftovers?
I gotta try to get
some
📍 sleep. Doug said, snuggling back under the covers and closing his eyes.
You again, stop talking. I got work tomorrow and it’s 📍 almost midnight. But
tomorrow’s Christmas,
Bob Humbug, one of us has to write a good Christmas episode.
Sit yourself. But remember, you’ll be visited twice more before the clock strikes midnight,
whatever.
Just leave. Maybe cut out the headlight effect. Not cool.
And the ghosts of Christmas passed, stepped back into the 📍 light and vanished as if they’d never been there before. 📍 Leaving Doug to bury his head back into his 📍 pillow
lessons. Ah, my God, I gotta get some shuteye. I, why couldn’t this story have happened during normal working hours?
All was quiet again in Doug’s house, 📍 and he peacefully slept. Maybe for a moment, maybe two. He’d nearly forgotten the ghosts of Christmas past 📍 when,
holy
shit, don’t you people believe in
subtlety, Doug, exclaimed,
and not you. Again, I’ve had just about enough of you. Wait. Hello? 📍 It looks. It looks like someone’s there in the light.
Before Doug’s eyes was the outline of a man backlit by an absolutely blinding light.
Seriously, all this drama, who’s
there? Hey buddy. Oh, you have got to be kidding. They
weren’t kidding.
No, we’re not kidding. Who is this narrator guy? Do we pay extra for this?
You certainly did, and I think it was quite the upgrade.
We
gotta talk about the budget for these shows.
Just get on with it so I can get some sleep. Who the hell are you supposed to be this time? Doug
asked. Exasperated.
We 📍 are the ghost of Christmas present
now we’re talking Christmas presents, gift cards to the Sizzler. Just put ’em over on the nightstand.
Christmas present. Doug, there are so many things happening around you now, and because you’re stuck living with your past bad choices and dreaming about the future, you don’t spend a lot of time here. Well, you fellas
really think your fountain’s a great advice, don’t you? Just text me next time and I’ll read it in the
morning.
Yeah. I don’t think a text is gonna be nearly as effective.
og. Yeah, Doug we’re talking about now. Now, bro. Yeah,
and you know, it’s so funny, OG, because this is so many people. Let’s go from the sins of the past to what happens with a lot of money nerds, which is we’re spending so much time managing our money, managing our dollars, managing the future.
That we mortgage now, like we’re not here because we’re so busy trying to cheapen today that we don’t spend any money. We don’t do anything. I mean, talk about Ebenezer Scrooge. Well,
this is something I am particularly good at. Living in the present. That’s what works. I’m uniquely qualified to talk
about this, but how did you get there and how do you counsel other people to get there?
Because you know this, I mean, the couple that’s in my mind is the classic couple where he thought he was going to die. And so all of a sudden they’re gonna do the stuff today. Then they get the second opinion, right? It turns out you have this rare thing where you’re not going to die, and immediately he starts taking overtime and his spouse is exasperated to work.
I’m exa back. Yeah, everybody’s exasperated because he doesn’t value time. I remember we had Ashley Winn’s, the Harvard researcher on the show, and she said, so many people overvalue money, but they undervalue the other currency, which is time.
Yeah. , I. Would you take Warren Buffett’s money or your age right now?
Yeah, I’d take the age. Yeah. Everybody would, including Warren Buffet, he would love, he would love to be 46 again. Right.
We went to, uh, the Texarkana Symphony Christmas concert, which they pull in all these other groups. So it ends up being, it feels like Texarkana. They had the ballet group do some stuff.
They have this choir do some stuff. They have, uh, high school actors do some stuff like it truly is. A community vet and I thought about what a big moment this is, and then I had that horrible feeling OG, that I am 55 years old. If I’m lucky, I will see this thing 20 more times, which is one of the highlights of my year.
And you think about how finite doing it, 20. And then I thought, you know what? A lot of years, I’m outta town, I’m doing other things. I’m lucky if I see this 10 times. And then I thought, I’m lucky. I’m seeing it now. Like why am I thinking about the next 20 years I should be? I’m literally at this concert and I’m like, why am I not present with this today right now?
Yeah,
well, uh, there’s a great blog called, wait, but Why, and I don’t know if you’ve seen that before, but just the visual representation of things like time with your kids or visual representation of time with your parents. And you know, this other stuff that we go, oh, you know, whatever. And you go, no. You will spend 99% of your time with your parents before you’re 18.
Then after that, it’s like, you know, you see ’em once every six months or a week, or you know, whatever number it is. It’s some insignificant total for the rest of your life. Same thing with your kids, if you’re on that side of it, and I think when it comes to money, it’s super important to focus on saving and investing and making sure that you’re doing all that stuff.
But what’s the point of having 10 million bucks in the bank and not having ever taken your kids to Disney? Disney is an insanely gigantic waste of money. It’s so expensive, but it’s awesome, you know, and there’s ways to do it that are more expensive and less expensive and you know, go different times of the year and all that other sort of stuff you can do.
But it’s insanely expensive no matter how you cut it up. But it’s an experience and I think that the more time that we spend thinking about like this mythical, you know, financial dependence time, which is important to do, I. At the expense of saying, well, I’m not gonna do that thing now with, with the people that I care about or the things that I care about.
It doesn’t have to be people. It can be stuff, you know? I mean, think about, since you’re significantly older, Joe, you know, you just ran the, I’m right here, dude. The thing up in Michigan. Did you do the whole marathon? I think you did, right? That was at Hot Springs.
Oh,
hot Springs Marathon. There it was. Oh, you did something Turkey,
Charlie Hot Springs did a half marathon.
Up two mountains. Yeah. And did the Turkey trott where I did the 10 K and the 5K. Yeah.
I mean, that’s something that you enjoy. You enjoy training for it, you enjoy doing it. You probably don’t enjoy doing it when you’re on mile 24, but you know, the accomplishment and so on and so forth. There’s coming a time when you won’t physically be able to do that, even if you’re alive for 30 years beyond it.
Right. And yet people would say, oh, Joe, you’re not being efficient with your time. You know how much time you’re wasting. It’s like, no, no, no. This is the thing that you enjoy doing, and you do it with your friends, and you do it with your family. And why would you not want to spend that energy, that capital, that time capital right now doing the thing that you wanna do?
I think it’s important to focus on, you know, saving for the future and that sort of stuff. But
you know, this point is made really well. Often the, the top points are made really well through comedy. Adam Sandler has a piece from a classic SNL Skit, og, where he is a, uh, tour guide sending people to Italy.
And then he starts talking about the bad reviews that, uh, he gets sometimes from people. And as the travel agent, he’s defending his bad reviews by telling them this
our tours will take you to the most beautiful places on earth. Hike the cliffs of the
Amalfi Coast.
Fish with the nets in Sorento. Do this, I don’t know, but remember you. Still
gonna be you on vacation
if you are
sad where you’re, and then you get on
a plane to Italy, to you
in Italy, it’ll be the same sad you from before, just in a new place.
I think a lot of people think the future’s gonna be really bright. I’m, you know, happiness is a destination and even though there’s a lot of comedy there, happiness is much, much more a state of mind. I
mean, it has to be right otherwise. What? What’s the point? You just,
it’s like, but it’s so hard. How many times have you met with people though and they’re like, oh, when I get to retirement, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do this.
Yeah. What are you doing today? I’m doing, you know, nothing. ’cause I’ve got this dream of unicorns and rainbows in my future. I. And I’m, the future is great. Not today. Today’s gonna suck, but the future is gonna be awesome. And then they get to the future and it’s the same sad you who’s now showed
up. And to be fair, it’s a balancing act, right?
You can’t just always absolutely yolo everything. But at the end of the day, having some sort of balance between the future and and now is extremely important. 📍 So
let’s get tactical on this point. I think the place for me where I had to begin, . Was with, uh, David Allen, the getting things Done. Guy organizational expert and David Allen says you want to be like water, and a lot of Eastern philosophy talks about this, , the river flows.
You wanna be able to move where the river moves. And there’s a lot of people that are stuck in the weeds. When people talk about being in the weeds, they’re stuck. They’re in these little cesspools, and it’s because I’m worried about my money, I’m worried about my stuff, I’m worried about everything. But I.
What my daughter’s telling me right now, what my spouse is telling me right now, what my best friend is telling me right now. Whatever the thing is, I’m so in my head that I can’t do it. And I think a lot of us are like that with, with our money. If I’m at Disney and I’m worried about how expensive it is the whole time and not enjoying what’s around me, to use your example, or I’m in Italy to use Adam Sandler’s example and I’m worried about the cash.
I can’t get there.
We’ve been to Disney with the kids I think four times, and I have the same. Dream nightmare at the end of every trip. No joke that this is obviously different now with the little, you know, wristbands or whatever, but in the days when they would put the hotel bill under the door, you know, when they used to do that, they don’t do that really much anymore.
Yeah. The first time we were at Disney, the dream was that the envelope was so thick it didn’t fit. So the guy had to wake me up in the middle of the night, knock on the door to hand it to me. I still think about that, you know, on our last time to Disney. So maybe the last night of sleep, I’m a little like anxious ’cause I’m like, ah, I wonder if they’re gonna let us leave.
We’re gonna have to make a run for it to the airport. I
think the way to be present. Is to focus first more on your, your short-term goals. What do I wanna do this year and how am I gonna partition that money out from my long-term? I think I start long-term, but I also, uh, knowing I might not make it there, I partitioned some money out.
I know when we had, I took two trips to Disney. One was while we were money disasters, and I did that whole trip on credit. By the way, I did the whole thing. I, it’s stupidity. The second time, , I worked extra jobs, I made extra money and I partitioned the money off and then I had a set budget every day. I prepaid as much as I possibly could.
Right? And then when we were at Disney the second time, we had so much fun. ’cause I wasn’t worried about the money at all. The money had taken care of itself by making sure I prepaid stuff that I could, that I had the cash set aside. Didn’t think about it.
Important thing when it comes to short-term things, I think is about being intentional.
We’re going through this right now. My oldest is a junior, uh, halfway through the year, so he’ll be, you know, kind of one more summer before he’s a senior. What our summer plans look a lot like are, oh, it’s June. You, you just wanna do something? Maybe we take, should we grab the kids? And I don’t, let’s see if there’s a VRBO in the beach or something.
Let’s go do that. Let’s, yeah, let’s just, let’s get in the car. There’s probably a place and let, let you guys wanna go. No, no. You don’t wanna go to the beach. Okay. That’s our summer. And then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, cool. It’s August. Everybody’s going back to school. We didn’t do any, did we do anything?
What did we do? And it was, and it’s very much like a, just a, a whole three month period of. Nah. , And what I’m trying very hard to do this summer because Alex is. Gonna be a senior is, I don’t wanna plan out every day. That’s, you know, also defeats the purpose of holiday. Yeah. But like, do something, I don’t wanna get to the end of the summer and go, what did, why we didn’t do anything.
Let’s take the family to Disney. Yeah. Let’s not plan out every moment at Disney, but let’s make sure that I’ve got the accommodation, I got the ticket, I got the stuff. So now we can make it up inside of a, a much more creative space. I’m thinking about when Don Han from Disney was on the show. I asked him about constraints, about is it tough giving these wonderful artists, these constraints?
And you know what he said? He said, if we don’t have any constraints, nothing ever gets produced. And I think that creating, we’re gonna go to the cottage on the Finger Lakes as an example. We’re gonna be there for a week. I’m gonna plan maybe three dinners and the rest will make up when we get there. Yeah.
Is a wonderful constraints. Yeah.
But getting to the cottage and the finger lakes the week of July 4th, that’s the important piece of that.
If you try to play in that two days early Yes. And you go to VRBO, everything’s booked. Yes. Yes. And now you’re getting the crappy cottage that’s three miles away that nobody wanted.
Everybody else passed over. Yeah. And it’s a rotten vacation.
Intentionality I think is, is super important. And for me, I’m not a super creative person, but list making and working through like. I dunno, like bucket list stuff, right? Like what is it that I want to do over the next five years? What do I wanna make sure gets accomplished?
And it doesn’t have to be, you know, trips or something like that, but it can be money things too. You can be excited about, Hey, over the next five years I wanna make sure my line of credit’s paid off in the next five years I wanna set aside enough money to make sure my kids go to college or whatever.
You can be excited about those things too. That also is living in the present as opposed to. You know, just blindly investing money or saving money into the future. I see this a lot when it comes to cash. We talk about cash being a really important piece of a financial plan, and it’s, and it is, but too much cash is a waste, an insane waste of money, and it doesn’t feel like it, especially now with interest rates being the way they are.
But you know, when you’re sitting there and you have $20,000 in your savings account, it feels really good. But if you’re not intentional about it, all of a sudden you have 40,000 in your savings account. Lemme tell you something, 40,000 is a heck of a bigger number, and it’s super, it’s way better than 20.
And if you don’t pay attention to it, now you have $80,000. And I’ll tell you something, in case you’re wondering, 80 grand in your savings account feels a hell of a lot nicer than 40 does. And all of these numbers happen. You say, well, that wouldn’t happen to me. I see it every single week. I talk to people every single week.
They’re like, yeah, I just don’t know what to do. I had 20,000, now I have 40. I had 40 now, 80. It’s like, we don’t think that that will happen to us, but that’s a, that’s a byproduct of not being intentional about what you wanna have happen. The downside of the money component of that is that you’re losing opportunity.
I mean, obviously savings rates are higher now, but for the last 20 years they haven’t been. So, even being intentional around this is what our emergency funds should look like and intentionality goes a long way.
📍 Let’s get tactical about intentionality. I really like using the calendar and just set up your next year and think about when am I gonna do whatever?
And even if it’s stuff around the house that you wanna do. I’ll give you an example. Uh, I’ve taken Sunday afternoons and I’ve, I’ve always wanted to make my house more technology, uh, based where I can walk into a room and I can just voice command. And I’ve been doing that room by room on, on Sundays, and now I have about half the house.
It’s pretty damn fun. But I had to put on a calendar to have it go from, I want this to. It’s going to happen. But do that, I think with your entire year. And I love, I love an assignment we did at Strategic Coach that I think everybody can do. . Start off if you know where you wanna be in 10 years and you know the things that make you happy and you want more of that in your life and 10 years, start off with the 10 year goal.
Then write the five year goals and work that back to the one year goal. We did this three months ago, OG at Strategic Coach, and I love how now my one year things that I want for myself are these building blocks that make me happy today. One of them is healthy eating and the things I’m gonna do around healthy eating this year that are gonna build this thing I want 10 years from now.
I think working that calendar like a company where you’re dealing with your 10 year plan, your five-year plan, your one-year plan. And I think the way to get there, and we’re gonna have John Acuff on at the beginning of the year, I think, to talk specifically about this. ’cause reading his book’s just fantastic.
A lot of people are like, I don’t dunno what I want 10 years from now. Just think about what makes you happy today. Start making lists of things that make you happy. Look backwards, don’t look forward. Yeah. And that will create for you, you know, what truly gives you joy. But I think OG the calendar is.
The key in getting that done. I like what you also
said about, thinking about the things that excite you today. What’s fascinating motivating right now, what of that do you wanna have in the future and breaking down your, uh, the different areas of your life. And there’s lots of tools on this, you know, wheels of, you know, different life.
Yeah.
The
life coach, real Tony Robinson. Robinson stuff. Yeah. The, you know, strategic Coach does obviously, uh, Michael Hyatt’s company has stuff. You know, like all of these different, you know, assessments of your. Financial life, personal life and your spiritual life. You know, health and wellness and all that other sort of stuff.
You can kind of measure and then track of, here’s where I want it to be. You know, I’m a seven, I want it to be a nine. How do I do that today? How do I do it today?
Wow. So you really think I can do better with the present.
It’s not all about you, Doug. We all can do better in the present, but hey, this is your fever dream.
So yeah, you can
suddenly Doug saw 📍 the light. I. No, not the metaphorical light that some people talk about when an idea hits them just the right way. No, he saw the light blinking. What’s that all about?
Oh,
come on. 📍
I’m still amazed. My dream is sponsored.
How much is my cut?
Relax. This will all be over Before you know it, now you
sound like my proctologist. 📍
And just like that, the light was gone. 📍
And if you’ve ever had a nightmare, you know Doug’s next feeling, it’s when the light is gone, even the moonlight, and you feel all alone in complete darkness, which terrifies you, especially when you realize it’s just you and your heartbeat. But then something even more terrifying happens when you realize that you are not alone in that darkness.
There is something, a force, a spirit, a being. It seems to call you without words, haunt you, without form. Show
yourself spirit.
The wind violently, howl. I
know I’ve neglected the past, and because of that, I’m, I’m never present, yada, yada, yada. Now stop harassing me and cut this damn howling wind. You’re freaking me out kinda.
Hey dude. Oh, for
sake,
we’re back. This truly is a nightmare. How much more would it have been for a couple of actors to play these ghosts? 📍
Funny thing, budgeting is exactly what we’re here to talk to you about. Unfortunately, the budget for this project largely went to hire that narrator,
and it was well, well worth it.
The narrator commented,
oh, get on with
it. We are the ghost of Christmas. Future things won’t be good. If you don’t plan Doug next year, it’s, it’s a plan that’s gonna save your life. Let’s talk about our favorite parts with Emoji because, because it’s these parts that allows you to stay present. Like for me and Cheryl OG being able to stay present.
At the very least, we can talk about big financial plan next and maybe a, an investment policy plan, but at the very least. Tracking our expenses. But even more than that, communicating once a week for like 20 minutes and making sure that’s scheduled so it happens, is a way for us to stay present and the future begins to take care of itself then because our goal in the future is obviously not to worry about money the way that we have in the past, right?
I mean, if we come from debt like you and I did, and we want to be present today, I think the way to stay there. Is to have the future take care of itself.
Sounds really simple to say and it sounds really easy to talk about. The funny thing is, is if you think about the future as different steps along the way, you can put processes in place in order to make sure that it happens automatically.
It’s hard to see the benefit of 20 years of saving and investing. The only time that you’re gonna see that is in 20 years. So you just have to trust the process. So building a process around saving and investing will help a ton. For example, with your workplace plan, if you are fortunate to have one, which you know, the vast majority of full-time employed people have some sort of retirement plan.
And even if you don’t, you can create on your own, setting up your investing and then systematically increasing that savings. Automatically so you don’t have to think about, Hey, I got a pay raise. I, you know, anytime that you can exclude yourself from decision making, you’re gonna be much better off. Make it one time when you’re sober.
And I don’t mean that like literally, but I kind of do you know of sound mind? Not in a bad mood like Adam Sandler is talking about, you know, thinking nicely about your plan and go, okay, I wanna do this and now I’m going to. Automatically increase my 401k contributions, 1% every six months until I get to the maximum.
If you do that one time, you make that decision once. You don’t have to worry about that decision. Fatigue of trying to decide. Every time you get a bonus or every time you get a pay raise or every time your life changes a little bit, oh, now what do I do with this money? What do I do with this money? What do I do with this money?
It’s like it’s already decided. You decided at one time and it’s done.
And especially for our stackers that are earlier in their income producing years, OG setting these things up so that their automatic frees you up. Because we’ve seen the studies, the number one thing that people worry about at work.
It’s their own personal financial situation. And if you can take that away and be better at whatever your career is to future proof these future raises, to give yourself more income streams, better income streams more coming in, and you can automate it once you get it, that automation process makes it so you can just purely focus on creating more income.
And there’s a
real thing about decision fatigue. It you just run out of energy and ability to make good decisions. You know, I mean, think about it like at any level throughout your day or career or your life, do you make your best decisions at 11:00 PM or you’re not best decisions at 11:00 PM You know when you’ve gotta do the hard thing for work.
What do people say to do? Wait until 4 55 and knock it out at the last thing you do before you leave. No, I said get it over with. Right. You’re gonna be your most creative, your ability to, to make the decision and, and execute on that is higher earlier in the day. But when do we make our money decisions?
Do we go to work and sit down and I should balance my checkbook today? No. We work and we come home and we eat dinner and we deal with our kids and we do all our stuff and then we go. Okay, let me open the laptop here. Update the spreadsheet, right? Like we’re, you know, you’re just not gonna do it. So do it once and be done with it.
Same thing for all these, all of these things. I look back, the Roth IRA started right when I started my career. Joe’s old enough to remember there not being a Roth IRA in financial planning. I mine started kind of, or the Roth started right then and the limit was 2000 bucks, right? And it was $166. 67 cents a month, which is not zero, but also is not a profound amount of money every year for 15 years.
I said, yeah, I’ll do that next time. And if all I would’ve done when the damn thing came out was said, I, I can’t save hardly any money into this thing, but you know what? I can save. It’s 10 bucks and next year I’m gonna try to save 11. And the year after that, I’m gonna try to save 12 or 13. And you know what I mean?
I would’ve gotten there, I would’ve gotten there and I wouldn’t be looking at it going, I’ve had 25 years, 26 years of Roth IRA opportunities in my life. And the first ones were the easiest ones to do. Like what the hell was so important in 1998 that I didn’t have 50 bucks and July. It’s frustrating.
Solve that for yourself early by just going, I’m just, I can’t, whatever the number is, be 1% of your salary, 2% of your salary, 15%. Who cares? Pick a number. Then increase it a little bit. You’ll be
📍 done thinking about the tools to get this done first. You want a good, uh, money tracking system? Uh, personally, uh, uh, we ask Monarch money to sponsor the show.
Rocket Money sponsor the show. Those are two good ones I. That we really like, but be able to track. Now, if you set those trackers up and they’re automatic and you never open them, og, we haven’t solved a thing. So there not always to be a system of tracking. There also has to be a system of when do I look at the tracking?
But then third, during those meetings going through and saying, which of these transactions, to your point, can I automate, can I, can I automate the utilities? Can I automate this, this line item? Or what can I get outta my way? So I don’t waste my decision making ability on these little tiny $2 moves, and I can instead make my decisions on the thousands of dollar moves.
That’s, that’s really what I wanna do. I love that. Our, our friend Paula Pant talks about this og she never shops sales. She’s like, because I wanna be thinking about thousands of dollar opportunities. I don’t wanna be shopping to get $30 off. Yeah. I don’t wanna worry about $30 off. I wanna worry about making thousands so I never have to worry about $30 off.
That’s the type of thing I think you want to, and, and we’re all not there yet, right? But we wanna be able to get there. So walking through that tracking app and then automating transaction after transaction is job one of what you’re talking
about? I’ll give you another example of this. We refinanced our house during Covid, like 80% of America only.
I chose the 15 year term. On the mortgage because I just wanted it to be done. I thought it would be a great timing for my daughter when she went to college and so and so forth. And since then, I’ve picked up another two mortgages. I didn’t like find ’em on the street, but I have acquired two additional mortgages.
The rates are profoundly different. They’re 30 year terms, and you look at the numbers on ’em and you go, my god almighty, am I gonna pay a lot of money to the bank? The difference between a two and a half percent mortgage and the 6.8% mortgage is profound in terms of interest. So I started figuring it out like, well, what do I have to do to pay this mortgage in the same term of this mortgage?
Because I know it’s gonna happen if I just set it up to like automatically pay the minimum payment like everybody does in 15 years from now when this one’s done, this one’s not even gonna be half done. And I’m going, oh, what am I doing right? So I looked and I did the math, and it was a whopping $127 more to pay the second one off at the same term as the first one.
The second mortgage. Yeah. Even though the rate was profoundly different, 127 bucks is a lot of money. It’s not zero. That’s $1,500 a year. That could be used for all sorts of other things, and I know we could debate the merits of investing it versus not, but this is a goal that I have, so it’s so much easier to work through all of that.
Over the span of an hour or two and get out your spreadsheets and your calculators and think about it and can I cashflow this? And how do I make this work and move the, and then set it up and never think about it again. It’s so much simpler and you know what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna save hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest by making one decision in 2022, setting up the system and not thinking about it again.
Until 2037 when all of a sudden the bank’s gonna go, uh, you should stop sending us money. Sir. Sir, sir, sir, sir, please could you stop sending us money? But you’re good. You’re good.
And what I love about that 📍 is that when you finally figure out, at least directionally what your goal is, and you can put a price tag on that.
Think about this, og. You’ve got, you’ve got that plan in place and it’s automated, and you know that’s gonna happen going back to us several minutes ago. In the present, you can be in the present because, you know, the money’s automatically flowing toward the future. And now, now I can be much more present and I don’t have to worry about, uh, going, oops, I showed up and there’s, there’s no cash there.
But on the other side. Some of our Uber stackers people that have built a huge stack. You get back to intentionality. I’ve got this huge stack of money, but I don’t know what I’m doing with it. You’re not gonna make that mistake either where you over save and don’t play the time game ’cause the commodity that’s, you know, limited for all of us is, is time and Doug.
I think that that is the most important point of all.
Okay. I mean, that seems doable. I’ll consider
it. 📍 📍 where are you taking me? 📍 Let
me at least get dressed as you’re finding those cute pj, but very cute PJs. 📍 It’s
completely unnecessary. My future’s bright, maybe. I mean, not as bright as that stupid floodlight you keep walking in here with, but you know, it’s pretty decent
📍 Okay. Thi this is a little dramatic, don’t you think? I mean a dirt nap. Really. What did you want me to say? Oh, stop the narrator. I promise I’ll do better. I’ll pay attention to the past and stay present in the moment. The future can be great for me. Oh, please don’t
show me this.
Well, yeah, K kinda. Oh,
wow. Got it.
And that is, it’s a deep hole in the ground. Did they at least spell my name right on the
headstone? Well, uh, funny story about that. It says, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, so no, they didn’t, and you don’t have the funds to change it, and nobody else caress. Alright. Okay,
let’s, let’s go home. You’re right. I can do better.
And so they went 📍 floating across the sky as the residents of Texarkana Slumbered peacefully away beneath them. And while many people were going to have the same holiday season they’d had before over hustled, overworked, focused on the wrong things, one Tian had maybe just maybe learned an important lesson.
📍 You think he did?
Oh God, no. Zero chance.
📍 I’m right
here next to you. Doug, hopefully will remember the sins of his past and build on his strengths. He’d focus on the present because he’d built a foundation with his money and that would propel him into the future, which he’d planned wisely so he didn’t have to worry about anything but sleep on this fine Christmas Eve.
Hey Joe, this was awesome. Let’s head upstairs and pull this gag on your mum.
Uh, no, it’s not in the budget. Dickens this man.
Thank you for joining us for this special event, Doug and the three Ghosts was written by Joe Saul-Sehy with a little help from a guy named Charles Dickens. The character of Doug was played by. Me and for more information on how you can book me for your next Bar mitzvah, just call me at Stacking Benjamins dot com.
The ghosts of past, present, and Future were played by Joe and og. Yeah, they were okay, but our amazing narrator was voiced by Peter Walters. Know someone who needs a visit from the three ghosts. Share this episode with ’em, or just share it on social media. Tag us and we might chime in too. You’d be so popular with all your friends.
I’m Joe’s mom’s narrator, Doug, saying, God bless us, each and every one. Hey, that’s got a ring to it. No actual ghost. Were harm in the recording of today’s episode.
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