Does picking the right investments, avoiding debt, or saving for goals stress you out? To most of us — even the best savers — stress is a reality, and just part of the “game” of money. Michael Gilmore, the Seven Dollar Millionaire, says that it doesn’t have to be that way. Today he’s on the show to teach us how Zen philosophy can help us relax, unwind, and still reach our financial goals (and maybe while living a better life).
In our headline segment, there’s LOTS of money sitting in cash right now, according to new data out. We’ll share why sitting in cash might be a huge mistake, and also why trying to time “the right investment” is equally as dangerous. Plus, in our TikTok minute, we’ll share a video shared by a listener about ONE financial measuring stick you might not have considered. Would it make sense to pay more attention? We’ll share.
Of course, Doug shares trivia and there’s much, much more. Hope you’re able to join us on today’s show
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at StackingBenjamins.com/201.
Enjoy!
Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel:
Our Headlines
Our TikTok Minute
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Csj1QoGAQM8/
Michael Gilmore
Big thanks to Michael Gilmore for joining us today.
To learn more about Michael, visit Seven Dollar Millionaire.
Grab yourself a copy of the book The Little Book of Zen Money: A Simple Path to Financial Peace of Mind.
Doug’s Trivia
- What is the number one motorcycle manufacturer on earth?
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.
- Tracy from Chicago has a question about in what situations Roth 401(k)s would be better than traditional 401(k)s.
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurances to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Uncovering Money Wisdom from Dads.
Episode Transcript
It’s Monday. We got a huge special week this week. I can’t wait. Og, I can’t wait. It’s gonna
be great. What’s so special about this week?
We got Michael Gilmore upstairs talking to mom. Oh, we got Rosalie guitar is here on Wednesday. Do you know how how stores have that like Christmas in July sale kind of thing?
I feel like that’s what we got going on right now. It’s six months earlier, but it’s June. It’s the holidays.
Is it June swoon?
We talked about the June swoon. That’s exactly should be swooning over this week. But you know, we’re gonna swoon over for a second the, the men and women who serve our country, cuz that’s what we do at the top of every week.
So raise your glass people on behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union and the Men and Women making podcast in mom’s basement. Here’s to our troops. Let’s all go. Cheers. Stack some Benjamins together here, here.
Nervous. Yes. First time, no. I’ve been nervous lots of times.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamins chair.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and prepared to get enlightened with money. Today we are talking about how to develop a zen approach to your money with financial educator Michael Gilmore. For our TikTok minute, we’ll learn how strip clubs are the number one economic indicator. I knew it, which is why I’ve been investing in them for years.
And our headlines over 6 trillion is sitting in cash. And that’s just what’s under Joe’s Mom’s Mattress. What? No. Well, it’s gotta be lumpy for some reason. What’s all this money doing and why isn’t it in stocks? We’ll share. Plus we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to stacker Tracy, who wants to know more about Roth 401ks?
And then just because I’m a super nice guy, I’ll share some pretty powerful trivia for you at no extra charge. And now two guys who know how to become one with money, Joe. And oh,
it’s time to get send today, stackers. I can’t wait. And uh, we got the most zen man of them all across the car table from me. Mr. Mr. Oj. I bet you were zen when your son, uh, put the car through the wall. I laughed actually.
Yeah, I was surprisingly calm, said the
man with great insurance,
not so calm. After the insurance renewed and they went about that claim.
Oh yeah, that thing. We are talking Zen and money and I do think OG people need to figure out how to be a little more zen. It tends to make us uptight. So if we can help people not be so uptight with money, that’s our goal today. And we’ve got a bunch more going on. So I think we should just get into it.
Don’t you think we should just get, let’s just get into it. Dive
in as they say. Just I
say dive in. We’re gonna start off while we’re climbing up the ladder to the high dive, cuz we’re gonna seriously high dive it today. Why don’t you guys, uh, well pay attention to this. All right, I’m still climbing. I’m halfway there, so maybe we gotta play another one.
Dad,
dad, dad. Watch cannibal, cannibal off the high dive watch. We’ve
got Michael Gilmore here, but first a headline. So let’s go. Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. Our headline today comes to us from MarketWatch, written by Joy Wildermuth.
Why this 6 trillion pile of cash isn’t heading for stocks anytime soon? Oh gee. 6 trillion. That’s, that’s a big number. Joy writes, there are trillions of dollars parked in money market funds and other cash-like investments collecting about a 5% return. Probably don’t count on it being deployed elsewhere soon.
Money market funds hit a record 5.9 trillion in assets as of last Tuesday, signaling a continuing drain outta bank deposits into higher yielding cash-like investments. According Peter Crane president publisher of Crane Data, he expects the tally soon to eclipse 6 trillion and then to stay elevated even though money market assets already grew about 18% in May from a year ago.
Here’s my question. OG stock market’s up what? Roughly 20% off the lows. That is the textbook definition of a bull market. So if we’re back in bull market territory, why we got so much money sitting in cash? I think
it’s because all we’re hearing in the media is telling us to be a feared of this giant recession that’s coming.
Well, I think that the biggest reason, kind of dovetailed to what Doug said there about the recession or being afraid of the recession is, uh, people do the opposite things that they’re supposed to do when it comes to investing on the, on the whole, you know, we obviously highlight all of the good stories, you know, of rebalancing and investing, using your disciplined approach of investing throughout, uh, good times and bad.
We highlight all of those good stories, but in aggregate, we can see what really happens. What really happens is that the average investor takes all of their money and puts it in cash and then waits for the market to go really high again, and then goes, yeah, I should yolo back in. And, uh, that’s, and that’s a recipe for disaster.
But that’s what’s happened since the beginning of time. So it’s not a surprise.
Your sediment is echoed by Michael Rosen, co-founder and chief Investment Officer of Angela’s Investments, which advises endowments, foundations, and private pension funds. He says a lot of it’s on the sidelines and sustained bearishness about stocks could be a signal to move into stocks.
And what’s interesting about that OG is that we, we, we are definitely not about market timing. You’re always gonna lose that game. But I’m wondering if you did research around investing into the places where outflows are going out the most and then going the opposite way into places where tons of money’s going in.
So as an example, a lot of money going into cash right now. Taking money outta cash, putting money in stocks. If we made that move, I wonder, I’ve, I don’t know that I’ve seen that data, but I would imagine it’s gotta be pretty good. Cuz I always feel like when we see huge inflows into stocks, seems like the biggest inflows that we always report on are, are at times when, uh, when it’s just about to get ugly.
Well,
the problem with it is that you don’t know when the top is gonna happen, right? I mean, if you remember back in the late nineties, Alan Greenspan’s irrational exuberance comment happened a solid three and a half years before the market peaked. So you, you were right. If you’re like this, this seems overvalued, or statistically it is.
That didn’t make you write from an investing standpoint, which is why it’s hard to do this either way, you know, either to be tactically smart on the inverse, you know, be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. The Warren Buffet quote, or to just look at metrics like this. I’ll give you another great example of this since, uh, the middle of October, which is kind of, sort of the bottom of the pullback.
Last year, the tech stocks, you know, NASDAQ’s up 27%. Small companies are up eight and your regular run of the mill, big companies are up 13. So that to me, I see this wide range and we know historically that small companies do better than big companies over time. And so if we were tactical, we might look and say, well, eight versus 27 small companies against the biggest tech companies in the universe, this is backwards.
That’s not how it should be historically. But does that mean we should take all of our money outta tech stocks, all of our money outta the big companies that dump ’em in small? Probably not, because there’s no way to know how long this, uh, disparity is gonna last. And, um, what’s, what’s the phrase? The market will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
So you can be right, but you might not be right at the right time and you can still lose your butt. So, Just follow the plan. It’s so much easier and less stressful.
I love how forthright our Friday contributor, Le Pezo has been about sharing his agony OG in that area, as you know. But new listeners may not know.
Len has been very, very open about the fact that he tried to call the top several times and he swung and missed, and to his credit, he tells his readers like, you shouldn’t do that because of the fact that you’re playing with, you’re playing with fire. And he missed out on some big returns just before he retired.
Well, and I, I would tell Lynn this, and I’m sure that we’ve talked about it, but this was a conversation I had with somebody the other day. They’re getting close to retirement. They’re a couple years away and he says, I’m really concerned about a market, a big significant market pullback. You know, I had, I said, you mean in addition to the one that we just had a year ago?
He says, yeah, well that one I felt like, you know, I could withstand, but if we had another 2008, as I’m getting close to retirement, I’m really concerned about that. If you kind of unpack that a little bit, what are you really worried about? You’re not worried about the mar. If you believe in the, in the efficacy of owning companies over the long run, like if that’s kind of your base thesis, what you’re concerned with is taking money out if the market’s gone down, that’s the only thing you really are concerned with.
You’re not concerned about the ups and downs, cuz history has proven time and time again that it will go down temporarily, but eventually goes back up again. Right? So you just need to give it time. The biggest issue is having to take money out and have it go down at the same time. So if you can solve that problem, which we do with, you know, having make sure, making sure that you have enough emergency fund and cash reserve and kind of that war chest, if you can solve that problem, then you can be invested with the rest of the time.
And we would tell Len, and we have told him, if we kind of unraveled what he was really concerned with, which was, Hey, I wanna retire. But I also don’t want to withstand at market decline because I don’t wanna take money out during a market decline. I think, I think you would’ve chosen a different path.
Well, and I think what you stated right there, OG, is the reason why dollar cost averaging is important. It’s not because it’s a winning strategy, but it’s a not betting strategy. Dollar cost averaging works because everything else doesn’t or isn’t, let me put that a different way. It might work, but dollar cost averaging works every time.
Just keep buying. Buy it when it’s high, buy it when it’s low, buy it, what’s in the middle. Start off with whatever investment type you need to be in for the goal and dollar cost average into it, which means for people new to dollar cost average averaging, you’re just buying as you go. You’re buying all along
60% of the time.
It works
every time. Exactly right. I don’t think that’s the stat here. I don’t, I don’t think, don’t think that one applies here, but I like that. I think people spend a lot of time OG worrying about when to buy, when not to buy. When should I put money into, into money markets? When should I put this? Well, this is
really simple.
Yeah, let me summarize it. Let me, let me tell you the exact answer here. You should invest when you have the money and you should withdraw the money when you need the money. Boom, there it is. I believe they called that a mic
drop. I think we just killed CNBC’s, like 23 of the 24 hours. They do a day
shoot.
More than that
with that one line. Uh, we will dive further into that in our newsletter, the 2 0 1 tomorrow. If you’re wondering how dollar cost averaging works, if you’re wondering exactly what these very straightforward investment strategies are, that OG and I are talking about, stacky Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 signs you up for our free newsletter time for our TikTok minute.
This is the part of the show where we share some information sometimes submitted by our stacker audience today. I think it was Liz. Let me click on that. It was Liz. Liz sent this to me, og. Did Liz pick out something hilarious or something useful today?
Have we changed the terms of the TikTok
minute? I’m just, I’m just asking you if this one’s hilarious or useful.
Oh,
we’re changing the terms. Uh, cause
Liz sent it in. I didn’t, yeah, I didn’t pick it. Liz picked it. So did.
It’s hilarious. Usually the question is, is it brilliant or is it air quotes brilliant or hashtag brilliant or whatever. But so you threw OG off because you asked him a different question and he doesn’t know I’m just, which one to go with.
Cause he’s always gonna stuck in
the mud crap all over it. He’s gonna always crap over that question. Doug. Which is why I changed the question because A, it’s not one that I picked. It’s one that Liz picked. Of course. It’s brilliant. Duh. A stacker picked it. Of course. It’s brilliant. Okay, but is it hilarious or is it useful?
I’m gonna go hilarious in the eye of the beholder. You know
what? Let’s take a listen. This is an Instagram reel
on May 19th, 2022. Exotic Dancer, Botticelli Bimbo posted this tweet stating that economists were wrong and we had already entered into a recession. It was added onto by Agave Baby, reiterating that economists were far behind the curve on the incoming financial crisis.
This tweet went viral and was dubbed the Stripper Index as an economic indicator. It tells you how people feel about the economy and their bank accounts. As times get tougher and money is tighter, people will begin cutting back on spending. And the strip club is one of the first places people choose to save money.
Botticelli went on to tweet that strip clubs are not just places of simple entertainment. They’re an operative tool for business people. The worst salesmen bring their clients, and where recruiters bring perspective finance bros. She claims December makes up a large part of strip club revenues because that’s when finance employees get their year end bonuses.
She says Strippers are better trend forecasters than any finance bro, because strippers need to be aware of how upperclass white men are spending their money. Another user added onto the tweet sharing a story of a stripper who had advised him to sell his stocks in early 2007 since the club had been dead for way too long, and then buy them back after the market had crashed.
She sold her stocks, bought them back after the 2008 crash, and nearly doubled her
money. That is, I love the, I love the big fallacy in that There was this one stripper, this one time who in 2007 said, sell your stocks. And she was right. And then she said, buy it back. So she was right again. So this is, this is the reason why you probably probably should do that.
So hashtag brilliant.
Basically,
there it is. I think there may be og, the way that people spend money, I mean discretionary spending, I never thought of it as a stripper index. I did have a couple clients, OG that were veterinarians that would say that they could feel a recession coming on when Fido no longer came to the vet and did make the usual appointments.
Like Fido is a member of the family except when the economy goes down and then Fido’s, the first one voted out of the family. Apparently. Eh, I think we’re gonna choose not to spend money on that. So I always thought of it as the veterinarian index, not the stripper index, but maybe more the same. Uh, yeah,
probably same.
Same. Right.
Do you think that, uh, strippers have a leg up on the economy? I feel like there’s about 15 more puns there that we can make. And I’m not coming up with them, but I should have, should have rehearsed those. Uh, thanks, Liz, for the stripper index. Oh, G have you seen anything like that before?
Strippers, veterinarians, any of those
things? I’m not allowed. That are, I’m not allowed to any of those places.
Yeah. Be very careful here,
og. Yes. I You’re not allowed to visit your veterinarian. I don’t know that I’m allowed to answer any of those things. I, I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Just to be safe. I have
absolutely no, absolutely no idea.
Coming up next, Michael Gilmore is a guy who, who wrote one of those little books, you know, the Little books OG that Wiley puts out the little book of this? The little book of that? Mm-hmm. Well, they didn’t have the Little Book of Zen money and Michael Gilmore is the perfect person to write it. He’s worked in finance for over two decades, served as research director.
At Albizia Capital Independent Boutique fund management company. It was only though when he was teaching his daughter basic money concepts that he realized that this is something that isn’t being taught properly around the world. He created, uh, some awards which are highly sought after in the FinTech community called The Money Awareness Inclusion Awards.
We’ll have more on that on Wednesday cuz we have one of the award winners joining us on, on that day. But today, Michael Gilmore gonna talk to us about Zen and money. I think it’s important discussion because too often are we not relaxed about money. Money makes people pretty uptight. So learning how to be zen with our money.
All Buddha like, uh, OG is right now. It’s, uh, would be super. Those not watching the video might wanna go get the YouTube of that one. Uh, but Doug, let’s have them YouTube. You do. And trivia. How about that?
Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s moms neighbor. Doug and Zen is the place to be. Zen to me is relaxing and letting your intuition lead you to the best barbecue. And you know what? I’m great at it. My stomach hasn’t failed me yet. Or maybe it’s my nose. Either way, I’m telling you, I’m practically a zen master. I can blank my mind on command.
I can make that own noise. And Joe’s mom yells, and I’ve apparently mastered the art of tuning people out. Speaking of Zen, thousands of books have been written about the practice, but perhaps none more famous than Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Which leads us to today’s trivia question, what is the number one motorcycle manufacturer on earth?
I’ll be back right after I find out where my intuition is. Lead me for today’s lunch.
Hey there, stackers. I’m back. Porch and Lightener and lunch navigator. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. We’re quietly contemplating which motorcycle manufacturer is the largest in the world. I’m something of a zen motorcycle mechanic myself. Well, now it’s Zen, but back in my Wilder days, I ran with a pretty tough Vespa gang called the Flamingos.
We terrorized sidewalk cafes and farmer’s markets by revving those massive, super loud two-stroke engines those Vespas have. And while admittedly Vespas may cater to a smaller crowd, here’s today’s trivia question. Which company founded in 1959 became the largest motorcycle manufacturer on the planet?
The answer is Honda. And now it’s time to rev up and tune in to your money intuition with our guy Talking Zen and Money Michael Gilmore.
And I’m super happy he’s having a seat at the card table with us. Michael Gilmores here. How are you, man?
Very good. Very glad to be here. Thanks very much.
I have to address the elephant in the room immediately and in your latest project all about Zen and money.
It does not say Michael Gilmore. It says The $7 Millionaire. So everybody’s gonna ask me this, so we might as well start there. How did you get the moniker, the $7 Millionaire?
Yeah, it was actually, it was the book before this, I was working with migrant workers and I was trying to teach them about money because there’s probably 150 to 200 million migrant workers in the world and they all leave their homes and they leave their families behind cuz they wanna make more money.
And a lot of time there’s studies showing that maybe only 5% get the money that they wanna do. So I was working with migrant workers and at the time my daughter was, my older daughter was 17 years old and I realized I wasn’t teaching her the things I was teaching to migrant workers, nor was anybody.
And I had like one year before she left to college. So I thought, what am I gonna do? I can’t just give her a lecture every weekend cuz that’s gonna ruin maybe our last year together. So I thought, I’ll write her a book, I’ll write her a fun book about money. So we worked on lots and lots of different things and one of the things we looked at was how money compounds.
And she’s like, okay, but what about a million dollars? She asked me this very specific question, what’s the smallest amount of money I would need to save every day? To become a millionaire by the time I retire. And I said, okay, throw a few assumptions in. Pull out a spreadsheet. Put the numbers $7. If you start saving $7 a day, when you’re 20 and you invested and you get 7% returns by the time you’re 70, that’ll be a million dollars.
And I was like, it’s such a small amount of money per day. I had to right back check it, recheck it, play with her numbers again, and she just looks at me. But I saw a light go on in her eyes, it’s like $7. I mean, she was 17, so when I say all her life, it wasn’t very long, but she thought, she’s never gonna be a millionaire.
It’s out of her reach. And then she heard $7. She’s said, oh no, I can do that. That’s a number I can do. And I was like, done. That was the whole book in that one sentence. It’s like she got it there. She knew she could do it, and she knew. Then she was like, okay, how do I do it? How do I do it? How do I do it?
That was it. So I thought, yeah, Michael Gilmore, it says who I am, but it doesn’t say as much as $7 Millionaire. If you can learn that you can be a millionaire, $7 at a time, then the book’s done right. You’ve got that whole message right there, and so that’s why I keep that name and yeah, it’s better than my name.
I don’t know about that. Michael Gilmore’s a pretty good name. However, I do like that it lowers the temperature, which is really, this project is all about zen and money. Where is the intersection? Because as you know, Michael, people think hives and money or fear and money or trepidation and money, we think all these other things, but zen and money isn’t something you hear together very often.
No, it’s not. That was my main motivation for writing it exactly as you said, lower the temperature, because I’d written a book for my daughter, so I wrote that book. I’d literally just wrote it for her and then I was very lucky. I publisher, heard about it. And wanted to publish it. And I, they, they, they did a lot of kind of detailed asking me questions of who’s the target market.
And I described my daughter in exact detail and said, that’s a very accurate market description. I was like, yeah, cuz it’s my daughter. It’s a market of one. Uh, it’s like just her, not even her sister. This is just for her. Um, and then they’re like, we’ll do
another book, Wiley Michaels. Think about, you’re saying that we might wanna sell at least two of these.
Maybe two, maybe three. Okay.
Okay. Maybe. So they’re like, okay, that’s good. So then we’ll do another one. I was like, well if, if I had like the smallest target market with my first one, who do I wanna talk to? The second one, I’m the younger one doesn’t need it. She’s kind of got ahead, screwed on already. And I wanna talk to people who feel stressed about money because that’s the biggest group.
That’s everyone. I mean that’s like, if you look at, and the latest data shows like something like 50% of all people in the US cite money as their number one concern. And that includes, People that earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year. You know, it’s like that’s telling you it’s not about the money, it’s about the stress.
And now one thing we all know is you can’t say to a stressed person, don’t be stressed. It’s like telling your wife to, you know, calm down. It never works. Right? It’s not the golden rule when you get married. Right? Don’t ever say that. You can’t tell people to unres. You’ve gotta ask them to look for something else.
And you, that was the appeal, like zen. Now, that was one of the starting points was that idea. But there were lots of others as I worked on it. This sort of realization that, you know, less is more, that it’s at the heart of Zen. You aren’t just happy because you spend all your money and you know the number of people that will say to you, I don’t wanna save money cause I wanna enjoy myself now.
And you say, so enjoyment equals spending money equals enjoyment. Really? Is that what you think? Because I guarantee you it doesn’t. So the book has got lots of exercise working around that concept. One of my favorite bits of it is that Zen is one of the few philosophies that actually has like a, a math for happiness for Nirvana.
And it is that, you know, it’s. If you get more than you want, you are happy. Supposedly, that’s like, that’s what we all believe in the we in the west. But actually if you do that some, you can change how much you want, right? You can change the denominator, change the bit underneath. Now what the beauty of that is, we all know, we all learn in basic math class, if you divide anything by zero, you get infinite, right?
So this is where the, the zen comes in, is like, doesn’t matter what you get, if you want nothing, if you really strive for it, you’ll be very happy. And we turn that into all kinds of different practical ideas of, of how we drive down our spending, how we drive down our wants, and how we look at the world in a different way.
And that’s the goal with this. And that can make us happier.
I wanna pause for a second on those equations because I found both of those very interesting in the simplicity of them, which is of course zen, right? We take these things that sometimes, and you talk about the difference between complicated and complex, and we use those terms so often interchangeably.
But this idea that get over, want that, the happiness equation. If we have get on the top want on the bottom, then we want very little, the infinite happiness equation that you just walked through, that we infinitely this math. Michael feels very much like minimalism, you know, I mean, our zen and minimalism related to each other,
do you think?
I think they are. I mean, minimalism is really, you know, it’s just the modern term for it. I think the difference, I’d say with, with Zen is obviously like real zen. And I can’t pretend to understand real zen. You know, I haven’t shaved my head, I don’t live in a temple. Real zen really does go on. There’s a, there’s a Zen Cohen which says, you know, if you meet, uh, Buddha on the, on the street, murder him cuz he’s fake.
Uh, and so are you, you can’t, it’s impossible. And there’s the beauty of this math, right? The thing we have to do is you, the math is simple, but the, there’s like the difference between complicated and complex, right? There’s also a difference between simple and easy. That math is simple. It’s the opposite of easy.
It’s just, it’s actually impossible. Now, knowing it’s impossible doesn’t mean we shouldn’t move towards that direction, cuz happiness is that way, right? That’s the path towards happiness. That’s what the kind of structure of the whole book is about is this is a path. This is a path. We walk down and we learn these big milestones.
We can learn the big landmarks, but then we take little steps to get there and each of those steps will take us a little bit further towards it. That simple mass to me says we’re on the right track. We really know we’re on the right track. Whereas, you know, you’re on the wrong track. When you see every big celebrity and every famous person, every sportsperson that earns tens and hundreds of millions of dollars blow through it all and have all kinds of addiction problems cuz they’re not happy and they can’t keep their money.
The right path is the one that leads towards that. Towards the other, towards zero. Towards, you know, get over want.
I wanna ask you, there’s a story that you tell that I actually participated in this, uh, ritual that happens. I believe it’s every day. You will know better than me, Michael. It’s in, uh, Luang, prang, Luang Pang.
I’ve been there and I can’t pronounce the name of that town, but you described the monks and I actually woke up very early. One morning I had a bowl of sticky rice and the monks proceeded by me. Can you tell everyone the story of the monks and what do the monks have to do with us and being zen about money?
Yeah.
No, it’s great. I’m glad you’ve been there. We might have to talk longer about that in another time. The poll point to the monks is they don’t need anything in their lives. So what happens is once, at the beginning of every day, they only eat two meals a day. They eat breakfast crazy early, like six o’clock in the morning, which means they have to go around and collect it at like five 30, which is why you have to get up at five to, to give them the food.
Yeah. If you sleep in the wrong hotel, which I’ve done, you know that they wake up at three 30 in the morning to start their prayers before that cuz the wrong hotel has the huge gong next to it. And I got woken up by the mor. Yeah. One morning as well. Essentially what it is, is the monastery, they pray, they learn a lot of it’s kind of kids from the local towns who aren’t gonna learn anywhere else in this very poor part of the world.
And so the families come out, everyone’s family comes out and gives them a little bit of food. So they have a morning meal and then they have a lunchtime meal and then they don’t eat again the rest of the day. But that’s their wants taken care of. That’s their minimal wants. They don’t need to strive for anything else in life that we can’t all be like that, that that’s impossible.
But you know, they’re getting exactly what they want. They walk around town, it’s done for them. And there’s this reciprocity that everyone in the town knows that these monasteries are doing good by their kids and doing good by everyone in the town. And so they just, they’re very, very happy to give them food.
And of course if you’re a tourist, you’re very happy to do it too. You know, it’s kind of part of the local culture. It supposedly within Theravada Buddhism, which is the bit through Thailand, Indo-China, it was done in almost every monastery, but it sort of got out of favor and they all stayed in the monasteries.
And Luang Kang is the last town in the world left where they do that. And you know, as you’ve seen hundreds, maybe even thousands of these monks walk past every morning going collecting food. And it’s just, it’s a simple life, but it works.
I was so emotional. I couldn’t believe how emotional I was getting as I’m taking my rice and trying to make sure these people ate.
I felt like if I didn’t feed them, they weren’t going to eat. And the fact that they wanted for nothing else, I thought was, you know, says a lot about consumerism. And so let’s do that next. Let’s talk about these anxieties. That we have this culture, because you described that just our culture is anxiety inducing.
I mean, we turn on CNBC or Fox Business, there’s this tape running across the bottom with the letters that don’t make words like I thought about this from somebody that hasn’t been doing finances a long time. As I’m reading your words, Michael. I’m thinking about it as somebody who doesn’t do that. I turn on this thing, I got this tape with these letters that don’t say anything, which you and I know are stock symbols, but a new person doesn’t know that.
Followed by these numbers that seem completely irrelevant with two decimal points. What the hell are they talking about? All of this. Is so oblique and you write that this makes us judge ourself, which is the first thing I think you caution us against. Yeah. It’s right
at the beginning of the book cuz it, that actually was inspired by a group I gave a talk to here in Singapore of people in the creative industries.
And I, I realized that they were gonna look at me and like, ah, he’s a finance guy. What does he know about our lives? And there was gonna be a lot of shame and a lack of desire to disclose things. And I wanted right from the very beginning to say, there’s no judgment here. And I think it’s very important that, that a lot of the.
Difficulty people have with learning finance. There are multiple things that are, but one of the starting problems is judging ourselves and saying, I’m, I’m not good at this. I can’t do this. I, you know, I have done this really badly in the past and I’m ashamed of it. And we have to let that go because the moment you have shame, the moment you have embarrassment, your brain clogs up and you can’t learn new things.
And that’s why we start the book with that and say, I’ve lived in, in Asia 30 years, I can’t speak Mandarin, I can’t speak Japanese, I can’t speak Korean. I speak a smattering of some other language, but only, but why don’t I speak them? Because I was never taught. These is things I’m not taught. I don’t beat myself up about this.
I wasn’t taught these languages. And there’s lots of things that we all don’t know how to do that we’ve not been taught how to do. And we don’t beat ourselves up. But the world sets this expectation of us that we should know how to do money. But we’ve never been taught. And so we feel this guilt that we shouldn’t feel because we shouldn’t feel guilty about not knowing how to do things that we’d never been taught how to do.
And so we need to put that self-judgment aside before we start any program of learning about money and just say, okay, up until now I’ve not been very good with money, but that’s cuz I didn’t know anything and I’d never been taught. I’m gonna start at the beginning and I’m gonna learn the basics and I’m gonna get the basics down.
And if we can say that to ourselves, we’ve got a chance of really learning and, and proving our situation well.
And there’s a a place where you caution us then right after that, which is, you know, in my life I see very few of the people who truly know money on social media. And it’s because a lot of those people, Michael, have compliance departments, lawyers behind them that caution them that you can’t say the wrong thing.
So they decide to say nothing. Well, that makes social media a vacuum where you write that marketers then step in buying it stores makes us want more. So we learn about money through the lens of people marketing for us to want more. And in fact, you even write that it used to be stores. Now the store has come to us because it’s an app on our phone, which consistently tells us all the things.
There’s this vacuum that’s being filled by marketers because we refuse to teach each other about the basics.
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think the scariest thing about this is it’s only gonna get worse because that is an industry that’s developing. And until we teach people better about money right from the beginning, from the youngest stage, and, and then people who are older how to deal with their money too, it’s only gonna get worse because the money is getting spent on newer and newer psychologies.
I mean, Seven or eight years ago, we were talking about how all the kids were on Facebook all the time. All the kids were on Instagram all the time. And then now it’s like they’re all on TikTok because TikTok is more addictive. It’s never going backwards. No one’s going back to a pen and paper ever again.
You know, it, it’s, it’s only gonna get more and more of that. And I think there was, it’s, I put it in the book, it’s a survey by Jan Calovich, which said that essentially we, we see an ad like once every 15 seconds on average. So we’re seeing some kind of commercial message once every 15 seconds. Now that sort of sounds a lot, but what’s really staggering about that number is Yankelovich did that survey in 2007.
Oh my goodness. Oh my God. Before the iPhone.
And now with TikTok that we can flip even faster. Now we’re getting like seven per second.
And how many times does anyone say, you know what? It’s okay to not spend your money today. Yeah, you know what? It’s okay. You could actually have more money in the future if you don’t do this today.
You might hear that once a day tops, and you are hearing 20, 30, $40,000 messages saying You will be cooler, you’ll be more attractive, you’ll be more successful, youll will be happier if you spend this money. And it’s all lies. But those lies, they just build and build and build, and it becomes the defacto education system that we all live in.
I’d like to walk through one exercise that you take us through that I think our stackers can do is they’re hanging out with us. So you have us take out a sheet of paper and write down several of the best things that have ever happened in our life. I think it’s six or seven. Just write out six or seven of the best things.
So stackers, if you wanna take part in this, just hit pause right now. Write down six or seven of the best things that ever happened to you. What is the point, Michael, of this exercise of writing down these six or seven things that are the best things that you’ve ever done.
Yeah, there’s a number of things.
One of the things I wanted to do with the book is, is slow things down. One of the things I wanted to do was to, with towards mindfulness, to and towards journaling, and show the ways that you can journal around happiness and money. But more than that, this came from how angry I got once when someone said to me, I don’t want to save money.
I want to enjoy myself now. And I was just stunned when I heard it. I was like, you literally just said money equals happy. Happiness is so much more than that. And I was like, okay. So I remember doing a time, I said, look, I’m gonna just sit down. I’m gonna write down my happiest times. And I, before saying what I was doing, why I was doing it, just wrote them down.
And some of them. You know, family holidays were expensive. They were on there. You’ve gotta be honest with these things. But there was a bunch of other things, which was just like going for a walk in the park. There are things like, you know, finishing the training for, for a race, right? I don’t have to do that anymore.
That’s a happy moment. All these tiny little moments that aren’t expensive because the next part of the exercise for stackers is to sit down and write the most expensive occasions. And that’s where this becomes interesting, because if they’re not exactly the same, six or seven occasions, Then there’s no relationship between money and happiness.
Now, I’m not trying to say they’re the opposite. I’m not trying to say that everything free is amazing and everything expensive is bad. I’m saying there isn’t a relationship. Some of the expensive things are really worth getting and some. Expensive things are just the worst things. I mean, I, it was, I think it, I put it in the book, right?
I think I’d just come from a very expensive meal that was so expensive. It just made me angry. And I was like, you know, I’m never going there again. That’s just like, that’s, I’m still getting angry now, even thinking about it. It’s like, what the hell? Yeah. Not all expensive things are great, as long as you know that you can start to optimize for your life.
You, and this is how, it’s just about mindfulness. It’s just about thought. If I put this thing away, if I don’t buy that, if I keep this money, if I do something, if I just go for a walk, I mean, who goes for too many walks, right? There’s never, occasionally it’s just like, like just popping outta the office for half an hour and just wandering around doesn’t make that day better.
That always makes that day better. Totally free, right? That’s a free thing. That just made your day better, and that was the exercise to find those little things for you and for anyone that you can just say. Yeah, I could throw two or three things at those into my life and it would get better. Didn’t cost any money, no relationship.
And that’s
the proof. The anti-marketing, you know, fighting against the marketing message that’s spending more equals better in that whole diatribe just blew me away. I wanna do one more thing during our time together, which is you tell people to take the small path and to build the little wins, which makes a ton of sense to me.
I feel like people get overwhelmed so quickly and the complexities of money, you have a word you came up with mission, and mission means something completely different. Can you just walk us through the steps to mission?
Yeah, so Mission is an acronym and I’m one of those people that forget things unless I make them into acronyms.
And that’s kind of how this came around. And really there’s, there’s six steps to mission. So I put together m is for money. Uh, and this is, I, I should also explain this came from working with my daughter on this because I wanted her to start at the very, very, very beginning. We all think we know what money is, but because we don’t really, we mess up.
It’s not a lot of the things we think it is. So I wanna start with that very, very basic of what is money. And then when we know what money is and we know why we want to get it into our lives, then we have to understand how we get it into lives. So I is for income. So it’s, we, we have to get that income.
The next thing is saving. Because that’s the first thing you do with income. It’s not spending, spending comes next. You always say first you never spend first. Uh, my, my favorite version of this is actually that the people say, well, I can save at the end of the month. It’s like, no, no. That’s money you accidentally didn’t spend.
That’s not saving isn’t an action.
That’s so true.
Right. Save it at the beginning of the month. If you accidentally didn’t spend it all that you got left, you could add that to your savings. But that’s still accidental non spending. Yeah.
High five yourself for that. Yeah, but that’s not saving. Yeah, right.
It’s
not saving. Saving comes first then spending, cuz spending. We gotta work out how to budget. So we do that and then we got another I, which is for investing because this is what we do with those savings. This is how we, we turn these things around. But I don’t think you can be talking about investing until you’ve understood what money is and what income is and what saving is.
And then the last letter of the acronym is O, which you know, I know it sounds odd cuz it doesn’t, it’s not owe but it’s o because that’s owning. And that’s what we want to do. We want to own. That’s what investing is. Investing is a process towards ownership. That’s how you don’t confuse it with speculation or gambling, cuz speculation and gambling is just things going up and down, but you wanna build ownership of something you invest.
So we had that and I had this wonderful acronym of missio. Um, so which is rubbish, right? I thought, okay, we’ve got, if I tag an N on the end, we have mission N is
my favorite though. It’s
your
favorite, right? Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Keep going.
It only starts one time. Then we come back to Zen again. Right? There is only one time, and that time is now.
You don’t start tomorrow, you don’t start in a week and you don’t beat yourself up for not starting last week. There is only, now there is only the present. And so that, that’s how we got the acronym mission. And what I liked about that is that gave me a. As I said earlier on the milestones, the bigger landmarks are on this path that we need to walk, because we’re going from do we even understand money?
Do we have any income? Do we have any savings? Are we investing? Are we owning now? And then that’s eventual goal. We actually have our ownership of our lives.
I like the N on the end for this simple reason. We actually got a call into our show a couple weeks ago from a guy who’s a super saver, Michael, and I feel like there’s two ends of the spectrum in our stacker community.
There’s people trying to get started and trying to fight through fear to get moving, and then you have the Uber savers that are so busy accumulating they can’t make themself live in the now. And this is, I think, important that once you’ve done the missio, you’ve done all that. Mm-hmm. You can forget about everything.
You’re fine. And now you can live today with the rest of your money. You don’t have to worry about it at all.
I love that. I love that because it’s, you know, you mentioned earlier on about fire and we talk about financial, I like the term financial freedom and sometimes people say, well, you know, isn’t that old money obsessed?
And I think, I think you’re missing the point. It’s freedom from finances. It’s not freedom from anything else. Your family worries are still gonna be there. Maybe your work worries might still be there. If you wanna carry on working, your ego worries, your status worries, your health worries, they’re all still gonna be there.
You only don’t have financial worries because you’re financially free. So it’s not about the money at all. It’s literally about getting the money out of the equation. So a hundred percent right. Get it outta the equation. Understand where you are. That’s where the, I mean for me on with the book, as important as the title, as a subtitle, cuz it’s simple path, because this is a path.
And one of the reasons so many people get confused by financial information that they see is it’s meant for someone at a different point on a different path. You know, I might turn on the TV and I might be talking about mortgage rates, but I’m just beginning to save. And I’m thinking, oh my, the deposit on a house, the down payment is so huge.
Who the hell can worry about mortgage rates? Or they hear about something else or you hear about something else. Not all information is for everyone, but if you can start at the beginning of your path and then take small steps, then you know when the information is relevant for you and you know when it’s not.
And that I think is one of the most important parts to, to having the mission there. Those big signposts to be the bits in between, you know, that you can see from the small steps.
Yeah. Uh, we’ve all seen the little book series from Wiley. This is the little book. Is Then Money. A Simple Path to Financial Peace of Mind.
Michael, I think it’s available everywhere, correct?
It is, yeah. I mean that’s the great thing about Wiley, right? I have to say it’s such an honor. When Wiley suggested that they would like me to write a little book, and I was like, are you talking about the same series that Jack Bogle wrote? One and Damodar are, you’d like a $7 Millionaire one?
I like, okay, you know, there’s no way I say no to this and now I just have to work out, you know, the, the book that would work. And it was actually, it was because it was called The Little Book. The Little Book of Zen Money sounded like the right thing as well. So that was one of the, the reasons that led to it was because it is called The Little Book.
Well,
thank you for helping so many of our stackers today. Get a little bit more zen about their money. I super appreciate
it. That’s my pleasure. Love doing it. Congratulations on all the work you do, helping those people too.
Hey, this is Pete the planner, u S A Today Money columnist and host of the Ask Pete the Planner podcast, when I’m not
fixing the weirdest financial situations you’ve ever heard of.
I’m Stacking Benjamins.
Huge thanks to Michael Gilmore. I love that simple equation. Og. Get over Want. It’s the things you get versus the things that you want. And I love the fact that he realized early on that infinite happiness means not wanting anything. If you find that you can lower that number, and of course that number is not something we’re always gonna achieve.
But, uh, but I do think Zeni minimalism, I’m with him. I think zeni minimalism have a lot to do with each other. Make your wants. Laura
Books on my desk right here. It’s coming with me on summer vacation. The probably third or fourth time that I’ll read through Essentialism, which I think is a really good book by, uh, Greg McCune.
Yeah.
Being happy now with what you have. Mm-hmm. Hey, let’s throw out the even lifeline and tackle some of the life’s most important questions. Our friends at Haven Life Insurance Agency, og, they put what you value first. Uh, it can’t be golf for the 67th time, please
know. No, no, no. Or just, uh, trying to, you know, trying to finish up summer stuff here.
That’s all we’re trying to do. Which includes golfing. Hey, see what I did there? No, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. Um, nope,
not golf. Some of life’s most important questions are how do we navigate your and my calendar to actually record episodes? That’s one of life’s most important
questions, right?
That will be a challenge. If you can make that happen, we’ve got a job for you,
Joe. You must be terrified of what my possible answers are to the Haven Lifeline value question. Because you’ve asked OG now like six episodes in
a row. I’ve been wondering if
we can get him. You just wanna to hear from me and you’re, you’re willing to put up with him saying golf every damn time, just because you don’t
want to hear what I have to say.
I keep thinking we’re gonna get something else that we’re, we might get a different one. Why did you have something else? You got one ready? No. Doug.
No. Of course I don’t, cuz I know you’re not even gonna ask me anymore, so I don’t even
bother prepping. Doug, what is the most important thing to you? Doug.
Hearing the rest of this Haven Lifeline pitch, let’s go move on with it. Bad boy. It’s, it’s
the things you love are your loved ones in your time. It’s why they may buy quality term life insurance. Doug actually simple. You go to Stacking Benjamins dot com lovingly and with no anger in your voice slash HavenLife and you’ll get a free quote.
Love what they’re doing at Haven Life now because they’re committed, offering a modern way to buy life insurance, their application as simple, it’s online. Get an instant coverage decision. Prices are affordable, Doug and lovely customer support. Lovely stack of Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife. Get your life insurance done, people.
Let’s get it done today. We’re gonna throw out the lifeline to our friend Tracy. Hey Tracy.
Hey guys. It’s Tracy from Chicago. Um, was wondering if you could talk about Roth 401ks and in what situations would they be beneficial over a traditional 401k? Me and my husband are in our forties. I have a pension.
He has a 401K that he contributes to and gets an employer match. We both max out our Roth IRAs. We’re probably in the 22% tax bracket and his employer now offers a Roth 401k and we weren’t sure how to know if it’s a good idea to put it in a Roth 401k or the 401k or a combination of both. And you can give my t-shirt to Doug cuz I already have mine from a long time ago.
Hopefully. My extra small size will fit him. Thanks guys. Bye.
Can you imagine how awesome my pecs are gonna look in that shirt.
Tracy Doug. As you know, Doug loves the shorty short, so he, he loves the shirt. That looks like a half shirt, but, uh, I don’t think we can, I think mom allow that in the basement. Oh gee, I don’t think, uh, I think mom would have something to say about that.
That’s against the dress code Doug. It’s against the dress code. So we gotta wait for somebody who’s maybe the X X X X X L that you are, Hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, hey, hey. Whoa, why you gotta lash out at me like that?
That escalated quickly.
Wow. It was just sitting there. It was sitting there and I, I apologize.
That was, that was not great. But I think that might be Tracy, by the way. And, uh, I think this might be Tracy that helped us set up our Aurora event. You guys remember Tracy? Yes.
Sorry. Yes. Yeah, she was awesome. Yeah. Big help.
Great event. I think that’s the Tracy, but let’s be awesome to Tracy, what do you think about the Roth 401k?
Oog? Who’s this right for? I always
love this question because you know, what we’re trying to do is solve a tax problem today without knowing all the details in the future, right? And when are we gonna know whether or not putting money away at today’s tax rate is better than taking it out at tomorrow’s tax rate?
And the, when we get to know that information is when we take the money out at tomorrow’s tax rate. It may be lower or it may be higher. And, and that’s gonna give you the answer to, was it better to put it in my pre-tax or my Roth 401k? The right answer I think is probably to make sure that you have an equal balance between all of the different types of accounts, accounts that you have that are gonna have taxes assigned to ’em.
So you get some tax deductions today, but grow tax deferred and you pay a little taxes on the backend. Some money that’s tax deferred today, but you’ve already paid taxes on it and you get tax free on the backend. And then a combo, your regular brokerage account where you kind of pay taxes as you go because we don’t know what the tax brackets, we don’t know what the tax rules are gonna be, you know, in 25 years from now when you’re taking money out of your retirement accounts.
So why not have the opportunity to have the most flexibility if you’re putting a gun to my head and saying, but I need an answer now, I come down on the same side as Ed slot. If you have the opportunity to pay the taxes today, if you can save the amount of money that you need to save for your, for your retirement plans, and you can pay the taxes today and not have to worry about.
Any taxes ever again, asterisk, assuming that the government doesn’t change their mind. I like the Roth 401K because it’s completely tax free from
here on out. Uh, I think an interesting point that you make OG is different than people will often hear, which is people are solving for optimization. Tracy and her husband might be solving to optimize their tax situation.
And you’re solving for something different. You’re solving for flexibility. And it’s partly because we don’t know the future that we truly can’t solve for optimization. It’s hard to optimize something when you don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future. So giving yourself access to all the different options, I think, uh, is, uh, where you’re going with this.
Yeah, flexibility wins. Tracy, we have this in a quick PDF form because we’ve talked about it so much. It’s stack Benjamins dot com slash tax triangle. For people that wanna see the different sides of the tax triangle. There’s, there’s the three areas that OG talked about, and we have this in a very simple graphic that we use.
So you can dive into it and you’ll see that we’ve got the Roth IRA slash four ohk, uh, at the top, and then one of the sides has the traditional 401k. And often what people will try to do is make sure they have summon all those pots. So I think looking and seeing how much money you have in each one of those is also a nice place to start.
Stack Benjamins dot com slash tax triangle for that, uh, for that resource. Thanks for the question, Tracy. And, uh, Doug, although you don’t get a t-shirt, that was, it was very nice that she, uh, That she was just trying to help the man. That’s cool. Appreciate the thought, Tracy. Thank you. Yes. Good work, Tracy, and, and great hearing your voice.
Hey, let’s talk about the community calendar for a moment. I just gotta say a big thank you to the people at, uh, farm Credit for having me be their keynote speaker at their event this last week, OG and Doug, I got to talk to some young farmers, a bunch of farmers all under 35 years old. And if you’re new to our audience because you were there, glad that you’re with us.
But I gotta tell you, I got to hang out with some of these people. And the future of farming in America looks pretty, looks pretty bright. These people, the questions that they asked, Their interest in, uh, financial planning. Really super exciting. It was, it was a great group. I think
that what a lot of people don’t know who aren’t from the heartland, who haven’t spent a lot of time out in rural America is that farmers are business people.
Yeah. And it’s a very complex business. It’s actually very complex. And you know, I’m even guilty myself of using that phrase, oh, I just did some quick farmer’s math here and you know, as a way of a euphemism for, I did some rough, simple math. There’s nothing simple about running the business of a farm. And I totally understand why.
Not only are they interested in personal finance, but just finance in general.
I get it. Farm credit was putting them through all kinds of breakouts about succession planning. You know, you got this multi-million dollar operation. To your point, Doug, like, how do you make sure that the next generation takes it over?
The people you wanna have, take it over. Like that’s a. That’s a big thing. And oh gee, as you know, that’s some pretty complex estate planning for these people. And then also how to evaluate real estate, different real estate decisions. I sat in on, on one of those pieces, of course, looking at some of the accounting stuff that they used.
And then my job was to help bring it together at the end with some good personal finance. So thanks to Farm Credit for having me, thanks to all the farmers that were there. It was super, super fun. Speaking of fun, we got some fun happening on our Instagram live this week. On Thursday. Christina Roman from Experian OG is gonna join me.
I don’t mean from Experian, og, there is no company called Experian og. It’s Experian comma og. Although you could merge with Experian. You ever think about that? Og? You could, uh, maybe, uh, had a, the businesses
together propelling pitch. I mean, I might think about it. You know, might
just write ’em a check. I could acquire their firm.
All cash deal. Maybe I’ll ask Christina, maybe I’ll ask Christina about that. I love talking to people like Christina because there’s so much that we don’t understand about her credit, we don’t understand how it works. We have all these assumptions. So Christina Roman joining us, uh, on Instagram, you’ll also hear her with a separate interview that we are going to do on the Fireside app.
You’ll hear her also here on the show. So you’ll hear a little bit of Christina Roman here in the next few weeks with us. That’s what’s happening here. If you wanna know all the places you can interface with us, stackie Benjamins dot com slash welcome gives you our complete welcome guide and all the different channels.
We talked about our YouTube page earlier. We’re, uh, just getting into TikTok, trying to get Doug to dance, and we haven’t been able to get that going yet. But wait, maybe, maybe soon we’ll get, uh, hold on. Are
you kidding me? They named an entire dance after my dance, the Doug.
Yeah. The Dougie. Yeah. Don’t know og.
Do you know the Dougie Justin
Lander’s wife doing it? I mean, I think, I think I’ve got the dancing covered. Do.
Nobody’s doubting my dance. You can tell, you can tell OG when somebody’s a baseball fan because they call her Justin Lander’s wife. I don’t know what her
name is. It’s who? Justin Verlander married shortly before his arm went to.
Are you
talking about Kate? Kate Upton? Yes. Yeah. Okay, sure. Yes. Mrs. OG doesn’t go by Mrs. Og. Like she just doesn’t wanna be known that way. No, it’s uh, miss Upton to you. Where, where are we
at? I’m sure she’s mad. Some accomplishments
of her own could ran. Ran this trade right off the, where are we going? I know where we’re going.
If you don’t wanna be in the weeds like I am right now, wondering what the next sentence is in your financial plan, you know what it should be. It should be, I need to make better financial decisions. How about that? And if I’m gonna do that, I need great people in my corner. Oh, OG and his team are taking clients.
So to get on their calendar, you go to stacky Benjamins dot com slash og. That is the link that gets you rolling to making sure we’re already halfway through the year if you started working on your goals this year. If not, maybe, maybe you need somebody to give you a little bit of a nudge. Stacky Benjamins dot com slash og.
That’s it for today. Coming up on Wednesday, a special episode, the first person who won two awards from Michael Gilmore’s awards the M I A M awards. We’re gonna talk to Bixie creator. Rosalia Gaal in an extended interview. We had so much fun talking to Rosalia. As you guys know, if you’ve been here a while, we normally talk to people for about 20, 25 minutes.
Her story is so compelling and she had so many setbacks and made so many great moves. We’re gonna have a much, much longer interview with Rosalia from being an orphan to living abroad, to creating some brand new FinTech because of her passion to help people do better with their money. We’re gonna talk about all those things that’s coming up on Wednesday, but coming up right now.
We went through a lot today, Doug, why don’t you help us distill it to uh, three. What should we have learned today?
Well, Joe, first take some advice from Michael Gilmore and practice the art of getting Zen with your money. Second, take some advice from our TikTok and keep a close eye on strippers to stay in tune with the economy.
It’s research. Let the big lesson. Sometimes your intuition isn’t right. It looks like Joe’s mom’s making tuna sandwiches for
lunch. Hard pass. I love tuna fish sandwiches. What? I love tuna fish sandwiches. Oh my
God. So good.
Disgusting. Oh, do you like tuna fish sandwiches? Just disgusting. A hundred
percent.
Yep. Yeah. Easy protein. Oh, so good. Oh, pickles and, and some duke’s Mayo mashed up
in there. Oh, I’m in. But don’t put all that extra crap in it. Like, you know, mom used to put celery in it sometimes. No, I, I
can give a celery, but pickles. Say
that word again. Pickles. Celery? Yeah. I thought you
said salary.
Salary. He’s from Texarkana.
Yes. I gave it the big old Michigan. Did you put her whole salary in? All right. Doug, I think you were doing some credits for us. Where first, no
respect for my art. Just jump in whenever you feel like it. Start talking about your mom’s salary. All right. Thanks to Michael Gilmore for joining us today.
You can purchase his book, the Little Book of Zen Money, wherever you find the finer books. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the Property of SB podcasts l c copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Sulci Hot. Our producer is Karen Reine. This show was written by Lacey Langford, who’s also the host of the Military Money Show.
With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode. In our newsletter called the 2 0 1, you’ll find the four 11 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Tina Ichenberg makes the video version of this show.
Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Youngen are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.
So say hello when you see us posting online. To join all the basement fun with other stackers type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know this. Show us for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor.
I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamins Show.
I gotta tell you guys, especially og, this will resonate with you from your time as a pilot. Uh, so yesterday, I. Cheryl texts me that there are, uh, uh, tons of storms rolling through Texarkana. And so that last leg of my trip, which can be difficult a lot from Dallas to Texarkana in the much smaller jet.
There have been several times that that gets canceled for many different reasons. I don’t know what all the reasons are, but that flight gets canceled a lot, but this time it’s for a very good reason that there’s storms there. But I’m sitting in Nashville waiting on my earlier flight, and I keep watching weather.com and where there was gonna be solid thunderstorms around midnight when my plane came in.
All of a sudden there’s this break, like a field goal for two hours where there’s not gonna be any storms. And I told Cheryl, I’m like, Hey, this looks, this looks pretty, this looks great. And in fact, my flight was on time. I get to Dallas, my flight is on time, my flight loads on time, everybody gets into the plane.
The captain comes on and he says, right now there are some severe thunderstorms right over where we’re headed in Texarkana, but the good news is they’ve been heading off to the east and just like weather.com said, by the time we get there, in about 35 minutes, they’re gonna be off to the east and we’re gonna be able to get in there.
And so we take off last night, everything’s going great. We get almost all the way to Texarkana and the uh, and the pilot comes on and says, Hey, bad news. Remember how those storms were just moving along? Well, they have stopped right on top of the airport we need to get into. And this whole idea that the storms are just gonna keep moving didn’t happen.
He goes, but the good news is we’ve got enough gas to just stay up here for an hour. We got enough fuel, so we’re just gonna kind of hang out. And so, OG we saw the best light show last night, just this gr It was, it was just constant lightning in the clouds, just constant lightning in the clouds as we kept.
Circling back and forth along this, along this front end. I gotta imagine sometimes when you’re flying, cuz you’ve, you’ve flown quite a few times around thunderstorms. You must get some beautiful, beautiful views.
Yeah. As long as you’re a safe distance. It looks pretty cool when, when it’s inside of 30 or 40 miles, you’re like, that is pretty close.
That looks like that could touch me. I don’t want that.
Well they seem to be very respectful, these pilots of, to,
it’s hard to fly at night with thunderstorms because of the, uh, you know, cuz you can get into ’em and you don’t even know that they’re there. You know what I mean? Like, it’s hard to Oh.
Or the weather pattern kind of develops around you.
Yeah.
You know, you can see a tall cloud that’s lightning, you know, whatever off in the distance, that’s fine. But if it’s a, if it’s a day like yesterday, it would’ve been a pretty difficult thing to sit there and, and fly around. And even if you were safe, Well, so
the first, yeah, Doug. Well,
I, I was, I didn’t even think you were in the air in Texarkana last night, cuz I thought you said that you had to get a room in Dallas.
Was there
more to this story? Well, yeah, we were, we were 90% of the way there and we tooled around for a long time, which is why og uh, I didn’t call you last night cuz by the time I got back it was really late, but about 30 minutes in, the guy said, well, it’s not looking all that great. We’re gonna hang out a little bit longer.
We probably hang out about another 15 or 20 minutes and then we’re just gonna have to go back to Dallas because there’s no way we’re not
gonna, I just pulled your flight up on, uh, on flight Aware so I can, I’m, I’m watching it. We’re not gonna do, I can see all the
laps You did. Yeah. We’re not gonna do anything.
We’re not gonna try to be brave and get in there and I’m like, that’s good, that’s fine. Um, but I certainly would like to go home tonight. I certainly would love to do that. And then, uh, That little bell ring, ding, ding, ding. That, you know, a lot of times I think is, is like people pushing the button, but I’m sitting in row one and the, I hear the flight attendant go, oh, that’s not good.
I think we’re going back to Dallas. And she gets on the phone, she goes, Uhhuh, Uhhuh. And then she goes, Hey, good news, everybody that, that storm that was over Texarkana has separated and there’s a little sliver and we are going in. So the pilots tell me it’s gonna be a little bumpy and, uh, we’re gonna go, so we should be on the ground in about 15 minutes.
The second we start descending. Oh gee, I was sure I was gonna die. I wish it, it wasn’t a little bumpy, it was horrible. I think I’ve been on one flight my entire life that was more bumpy than this flight. It just felt the whole damn plane is shaking like hell. The, it was just, it was nasty. And we probably in endured that, you know, it felt like for about seven hours, but I, I would say it was closer to maybe three and a half minutes.
When, when, when all of a sudden I hear the engines just kick in and hear, like just all of a sudden we got tons of power and the guy behind me goes, yep, we’re done trying this. And, and, and sure enough, we, uh, we turned around and the pilot comes on. He’s like, guys, I, I tried but I’m not going to go into unsafe conditions.
And that was getting unsafe in a hurry. So we’re going back to Dallas and, uh, good on American Airlines, who I bust on a ton for being so crappy, especially in Dallas when I was in Detroit, that the people with American Airlines were amazing in Dallas. I always felt like morale was very low and they were just, it was, it was not a great organization.
They took care of us last night, like everybody was super, the guy waved the whole, you know, if it’s an act of God, they don’t have to put you up at a hotel. They don’t have to give you a food voucher. They don’t have to, uh, a taxi. They did the whole thing. They spraying for everything and they were super, just super helpful.
So the people at American Airlines, Fanta, by the way, there wasn’t one person, cuz I was in a taxi with one of these, uh, van taxis going to the best Western this resort they put us up at called the Best Western. I’ve heard of it. There wasn’t one, there wasn’t one, there wasn’t. They really did treat you right.
Do you know who I am? Right. There wasn’t one person by the way that I talked to either last night or this morning that was like, oh, I wish we would’ve kept going for it. Everybody was like, I’m so happy we turned around. I’m so, so, so, so happy. We turned around cuz. Oh my, oh my goodness. That was tough. Yeah.
I can’t imagine og in your plane. I would just think that the, the swaying immediately
would just be, yeah. I mean that’s why you don’t go anywhere near those things. 25 miles minimum.
I did find something else. Doug. I got one more point here before we say goodbye, which is, I found this, this person on TikTok who I think represents OGs thoughts a lot of the time.
You ready to hear this Doug? This is George Carlin explaining how OG feels about, uh, about being around people fired up. You wouldn’t know it from some of the things I’ve said over the years, but I like people.
I do, I like people, but I like them in short bursts. I don’t like people for extended periods of time. I’m all right with them for a little while, but once you get up past around minute, minute and a half, I gotta get the outta there.
I’m, I’m flipping videos that I’m like, I think that’s my co-host. Right there. He’s just stared at us like this and studied
and yeah, I’ve sat here for an entire hour. So on that note, deuces.
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