Les Brown, no stranger to hard work and the resulting success it brings, famously said, “Do what is easy, and your life will be hard. Do what is hard, and your life will become easy.” Does the secret to creating an easy life lie in doing hard work first? How much of what seems easy from the outside looking in is actually the result of hours of hard work that was put in beforehand? Joining Joe for a special roundtable discussion that centers around how to do the hard things in order to create an easier life going forward are three people who are no strangers to doing the hard work: Roger Whitney, the Retirement Answer Man; Carl Jensen, creator of the 1500 Days to Freedom blog; and Paula Pant, host and creator of the award-winning Afford Anything podcast and blog. They dive into the complex relationship between hard work and an easy life and offer some gems for Stackers to take away.
In the second half of our show, sponsored by DepositAccounts.com, we discuss some hard work life skills and money skills that you can tackle today that will help you out financially in the future.
Be sure to stick around for our resident hard work expert Doug’s astrological-themed trivia! Will either of our two guest contributors pull out the W and Len or OG benefit from their hard work, or will our regular contributor Paula continue her late season charge for our spectacular dollar store trophy?
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Topic: how to do the hard things in order to create an easier life going forward
Do Hard Things if You Want an Easy Life (Darius Foroux)
During our conversation you’ll hear us mention:
- The complex give-and-take relationship of confronting or avoiding problems today and how it impacts your future ability to live life in easy mode
- How you can prepare yourself mentally and physically by doing hard tasks.
- Our contributors share what hard things they did to achieve the easy lives they now live.
- The benefits of getting out of your comfort zone.
- Learning and growing by doing the hard work.
- Building hard work habits.
- The compounding effect of habits over time.
- Money skills that compound over time.
Watch On Our YouTube Channel:
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
Roger Whitney
Another thanks to Roger Whitney for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Roger on his show, Retirement Answer Man, at RogerWhitney.com.
Check out his book (with co-author Joe Saul-Sehy), Rock Retirement: A Simple Guide to Help You Take Control and be More Optimistic About the Future.
Carl Jensen
Another thanks to Carl Jensen for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Carl on his show, Mile High FI, at MileHighFI.com.
Paula Pant
Check Out Paula’s site and amazing podcast: AffordAnything.com
Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- What percentage of Americans check their horoscope every day?
DepositAccounts
Thanks to DepositAccounts.com for sponsoring Stacking Benjamins. DepositsAccounts.com is the #1 place to go when you’re looking to see if your rate is the BEST rate on savings, CDs, money markets, and even checking accounts! Check out ALL of the rates ranked from best to worst (and see the national averages) at DepositAccounts.com.
Mentioned in today’s show
- The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, by Michael Easter
- Ramit’s interview with Carl and Mindy Jensen on Ramit’s podcast.
- Definition of bussin
Join Us Monday!
Tune in on Monday for a special pre-Halloween episode of the show when we’re all about helping you fight your money demons.
Miss our last show? Check it out here: Life Advice From a Top American Entrepreneur – Panera’s Founder Ron Shaich (SB1426).
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
 This is hot, Ray.
Symmetrical book stacking. Just like
the Philadelphia Man’s Tribulance of 1947.
You’re
right, no human being would stack
books like
this.
Listen! You smell something?
Live
from Joe’s mom’s basement, it’s The Stacking
Benjamins Show!
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and today we’re talking about the value of making life hard on yourself with the guy who makes retirement Easy! He’s the retirement answer man, Roger Whitney. Plus, the woman who’s farthest of all of us from retirement age, and who makes our life easier just because we know her.
Oh, that’s barf. Oh, that’s just gross. Paula Pant! And finally… The co host of the Mile Hi Fi Club, uh, uh, I mean, uh, podcast, Carl Jensen. But that’s not all. Halfway through the show, I’ll share my starry trivia. And now a guy who makes life hard on himself by not staying in the same place for more than two weeks, it’s Joe Saul
Sehy.
Hey stackers,
happy Friday to you. I am Joe Saul Sehy, average Joe money on Twitter. And what a. Fun day we’ve had so far. We haven’t even started recording yet. It’s going to be, I’m sure, a great hour. So sit back and relax as we meet this cast of characters. Let’s start with a woman whose voice you hear here often, just back from Scotland.
She just flew in from Scotland and boy are her arms tired. Paula Pant is here. How are you?
I am fantastic. Scotland was amazing. I hung out, a lot of the listeners will know, Mad Fientist. Yes. A friend of all of ours, part of the financial independence community. He lives in Scotland. He lives in Edinburgh. I didn’t know this, but he has a son now.
He has a 14 month old named Oliver. Wow! Awesome! Yeah, I got to hang out with him, and we drank some scotch.
You had to! You were contractually obligated. You’re in Scotland, you gotta drink scotch. Exactly, when in Rome. Yes, absolutely. And my friend, who is my buddy every time I go to a conference. He’s a guy I sit next to who makes sure that I stay awake and take good notes.
Roger Whitney. Is he your
conference wife? He is my conference wife.
He copies my notes. It felt like high school copy. Nobody’s ever copied my notes in high school. That’s for sure. I do. I sit
next to the straight A student, the retirement answer man. How are you, Roger? I am exhausted. What do you mean?
This is my recoup day because yesterday we finished the RRC Roundup conference, which basically hosted a couple hundred Rock Retirement Club members.
And it’s hard being nice to so many people for three or four days.
I’d just like to end that on it’s hard being nice. It is. It’s so hard for Roger to be nice. I got to ask you. So there’s three people that are in your rock retirement club who were with us in Bali, and they told me they were going to do something when they got to the, are they were flying directly from Bali to Fort Worth.
Did they do what they said they were going to do?
Yes. They wore skirts. Yes. Sarongs. Yes. They wore skirt. They’re called. They looked like skirts to me. Crons. Okay. Yes they did. , I could say marks who wore it the best. Kevin Esti, Kevin. Life and Fire definitely was the one that supported it. The, it looked perfect
on him.
Looked absolutely fantastic. I’m sure Kevin looked fantastic.
Mark problem was very uncoordinated. He had, he didn’t have ger animals, he had the wrong animals. He had a ostrich and a elephant. They weren’t matching.
And Becky Hetic, who is my co-host on that episode, she must have rocked this wrong. She looks great in anything.
Yes, absolutely. And the guy who looks great in anything joins us today. He is the co host of the Mile Thigh High Club, the club where you get in a, I don’t know if you guys know how this works. You get in a plane, you get up to a mile high and you find out you’re, you’re financially independent. Is that what happens, Carl Jensen?
It is pretty much what happened, so this is an amusing show, because you just contacted me about five minutes to be on your show, but ten minutes ago I was in the shower and I was thinking about you.
And
I’m out.
No, no,
no, no, there’s a good story behind
this. I just completed, I just completed a brand new shower about 20 minutes ago, and I went in there to test it out, because you have to test it out, and I’m like… Why isn’t the water getting hot? I’m freezing in here. And then I remembered Joe, when you stayed at our house and you had the same problem and it turned out I had to adjust the valve correctly.
I’m like, Hey Joe, how was the shower? You gave it its maiden voyage. And you’re like, it was okay, but it didn’t get hot. I’m like, Oh yeah, this happened with Joe. So that’s why I was thinking about you in the shower,
just to be clear.
I’m glad you clarified that story, but, but it is weird, Carl. Cause I think about you in the shower all the time too.
But tell everybody about the Mile Hi Fi Club.
Well, I want to keep calling it that the Mile Hi Fi Podcast. Yeah. Call
it whatever you want. Uh, yeah, we talk about finance sometimes and asparagus and other. Silly things. Uh, we get around to talking about money sometimes too,
which is good. It’s a fabulous show as is the retirement answer man show as is afford anything.
And as will be today, because we have all three of you together stacking Benjamins, we’re going to talk about living a difficult life to make your life easier. What does that mean? We’re going to get into it in a second, but Carl, you’re the newest member of this show, a guy we’ve wanted to talk to for a long time, but you’ve never been on before.
So do you know the rules about you being here on the show?
Ah, you better explain them to me.
Yeah. Let’s take a second. Do that. Hold on. So rule number one.
I thought the rule was we can’t talk about the rules like a fight club. Is that
like this or? Well, we don’t usually say it live. I’m glad you said that, but this is another rule that we probably don’t mention.
Got it? Yes. We got Carl Jensen. We got Roger Whitney, Paula Pant, neighbor Doug. Let’s get the party started.
Today’s piece comes to us from Darius, how do you pronounce this? Farouh? Farouh? You think it’s Farouh? Yeah.
Farouh. That seems
like it checks out. F O R O U X. Darius Farouh is the author, according to his website, of seven books including the international bestsellers Think Straight and Do It Today. He says he writes for people who continuously want to become wiser and wealthier.
And we’re looking at his blog because I found this piece very interesting. The headline, I think, says it all. You don’t need to read it to follow along. If you want to, though, head to Stacking Benjamins and, uh, the show notes, and you can click on this, but I think we’re just going to take inspiration from the title.
Do hard things if you want an easy life. Darius begins by saying, the other day, my mom told me about a family member who had a flat tire on her bike. This relative doesn’t live an easy life. She had a doctor’s appointment. When she pulled out her bike to go there, she discovered the flat. She doesn’t have a car.
So she ended up walking to the doctor’s office to make it worse. It also started to rain after a few minutes into her walk. She barely made it. I thought, man, I’m lucky I have an easy life. But then I also thought I did a lot of hard things to get here. And then he starts walking through how this collection of difficult things led him to this point.
But Roger, let’s start with you. This seems a little bit like a contradiction, right? Do hard things to live an easy life. What’s that all about?
Oh, I actually embrace that concept. One of my favorite books this year was The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, which is essentially, we’re too comfortable, we need to do hard things.
Because that’s where the spice comes to make life worth living. One of the hardest things to counsel clients on is not to rob their children of their problems. And we tend to do that because robbing them of their problems or letting them have an easy life actually sets them up for a harder life.
Carl, you’ve got two kids at home right now.
Do you espouse that idea, giving them a hard life?
I do. I make them move rocks around the yard and they do not approve of the chores I give them like that. The dishwasher is another one. Pretty much any chore is met with a lot of resistance, but I tell them that they will thank me for it later. And they probably won’t, but at least I don’t have to do the
dishes then.
But you hope so. Paula, you’ve got a kid at home that doesn’t grow up. If people are watching on video, walking right behind you, well then another one in the turtle tank. But what do you think about the idea of hard life makes your life easy? I think
it absolutely checks out. It’s hard tasks make your life easy.
Whereas easy tasks make your life hard. right? So do hard tasks and your life will become easier because it’s by doing the hard tasks that you improve your health, that you improve your wealth, that you improve your relationships, have difficult conversations, things like that. Like hard tasks lead to an easier life in the longterm.
He
presents that he did some really hard things to get to his easy life now. And I know all of you And I think you all have pretty cushy lives today. I mean, if we’re honest with ourselves, we truly do have pretty cushy lives. But what’s a hard thing you did to get to this cushy life? I’ll start with you, Carl.
What’s a difficult thing you did to kind of reach this, this nirvana you are living in now?
Yeah. So people who follow me know that I do live in flips, which is where you live in a house and fix it up. But 20 years ago, I didn’t know how to do much of anything. I was a computer programmer and I wouldn’t touch anything house related.
And then one day my kitchen and no, it was my, uh, this all goes back to showers again. I guess that’s the theme of my appearance.
But were you in the shower and started dreaming about flipping houses?
Almost.
So my shower started leaking and I called the plumber and he didn’t show up at. He eventually showed up and he wanted like 150 bucks and then he didn’t show up to actually do the repair.
So I went to Home Depot, got like a 1. 15 washers and this was when they had these things called libraries. There was no YouTube, I had to get a book from the library to fix this and I did it and it wasn’t that hard. I’m like, wow, if this little task wasn’t that hard, maybe I should try other stuff. So my next job was tile and then we redid a kitchen.
And I’ve since done all kinds of work, like nine flips, and that built the core of our nesting. Uh, it’s worth about one and a half million dollars, which we reinvested. And like you said, Joe, our life is glorious now just because that plumber didn’t show up that one day. And I went out of my comfort zone and did that hard thing.
And my house didn’t float away either. I was
successful. The most difficult thing in your life right now is you had Ramit Sethi yell at you. That was very
difficult. I had to go on a cry in a corner for about 45 minutes after that. Yeah. People
that don’t know financial influencer Ramit Sethi, who’s been on the show a few times, has a, has a podcast and, and they talk to people about their money stuff.
And you and Mindy volunteered. to be on that show. And man, he put you in the crusher for a little bit there. I listened
to it and you didn’t even hear the worst parts. He told me I needed therapy and, uh, which is
probably true by the way. We’ve
thought that about you for a long
time, Carl. Is anyone a
therapist in the
audience?
Anyone here about stacking Benjamins?
It’s a whole reason we had you on so I could tell you publicly that you need therapy. I appreciate it. Roger, what’s a tough thing you did to get to where you’re at now? Well,
first, I don’t think I’d ever let an influencer give me advice. First off, I don’t think that’s a qualification to give somebody advice or definitely lay into them.
So I don’t know who this guy is, but you don’t know, you don’t know Rameed. I’ve heard the name, but I’ve never heard anything. So I’m out on that. Things that I’ve done that are hard that have helped me set up a better life is, well, obviously the entrepreneurial journey. When I left the evil empire of UBS at the time and started an independent practice, my income went down by 80%.
And then… While my wife wasn’t working, we had hard kids. That was hard, right? We had to sell the house that we had built and we downsized and, you know, woe is us, but it worked. And then we built that firm up. And then I blew the next firm up and said, I left that firm because I knew where I wanted to go and everything went down again.
And I rebuilt every time I have leaned into what felt right, even though it was on the short term, uncomfortable, it’s always. been a huge blessing. So I, I, I have a really strong muscle there, which, uh, is why I’m so cushy now, I guess, Joe.
Was your spouse on board when you’re like, hey, I’m gonna blow this up and it’ll probably blow up our paycheck.
Well, well,
yeah, well, I said yes. Let’s qualify that as yes. It’s far enough away because that was 2003. We didn’t have the healthiest conversations about money, so I hid a lot of it. And this knows to this day and that, that doubled the pain. So that was the unhealthy part of it because I was a little embarrassed and I was a little frightened and I hid a lot of that.
I’ve since worked through that and we were, we’re even, there’s another very difficult short term thing, reconciling and cleaning up those big conversations that probably should have been happening. I’ve had those moments in my marriage and marriage is totally amazing now as a result of all of that cleanup that we did.
So, yeah, I love hard things.
Boy, it would have been fun, though, to have you on our meat show during that time, watching him rip you.
I need some influencer advice. Would
have been fantastic. Paula, what’s a hard thing you did to get to the cushy life you’ve got today? Oh,
a couple of things. I mean, one is, you know, similar to Carl, I’ve had many, many real estate headaches over the years.
I’ve renovated seven kitchens. As well as 20 ish bathrooms. So, you know, presiding over many, many, many renovations has been one of them. I think the harder thing though, has been growing a company, growing a Ford anything, because that, especially being a content company. Joe, as you probably know, in the, in the beginning, you’re just like shouting into the void and you’re putting all of this effort into creating material that you think is good, or you hope, you know, that, that you, you put a lot of effort into making it good.
And then it goes out into the world and it’s great. Nothing. Yeah. Zero. Absolute crickets. And you just have to do that again and again and again and again and again, until very slowly. Audience growth starts to compound.
I worked three jobs at the end of college and early on before I became a financial planner.
And, uh, I remember one of those jobs is in telemarketing. I remember somebody complaining and one of the guys sitting next to me was like, Oh, how horrible you could be laying concrete right now, which is truly hard. People are hanging up on you on the phone. Really? Like, I feel bad that your feelings are getting hurt while there’s some guy sweating it out in 95 degree heat, you know, busting his butt or she’s busting her butt.
And it actually made me realize, even as a telemarketer, how freaking lucky I had it. Like, even then, I’m like, I am, I’m sitting on my butt getting my feelings hurt. How lucky am I? Right. Because some people truly have it, have it tough. But Carl, you know, I hear about you and the plumber. I wonder at the time, did you think I’m going to, I’m going to laugh about this someday?
Like I’m building a muscle or was it just what you’re doing at that time to get by?
No, I pretty much thought it was horrible. I had no idea how to do this. The one shower in my house was broken and I smelled worse than normal. I didn’t know what to do. So now if I could back then, if I would have saw that guy, I would have been angry and yelled at him, but now I’d shake his hand.
It was, uh, I’m so thankful.
Yeah. Roger at the time, did you think I’m going to look back on this and laugh? No,
in, in, in hindsight, I had probably an overabundance of belief in myself and didn’t know what I didn’t know. I’m glad that I did it, but I wouldn’t recommend the way that I did it. In hindsight, I don’t think it was a wise pathway to create.
I think I could have made life a lot easier for myself.
Roger, the one thing you have to be if you’re an entrepreneur, you have to have a ton of belief in yourself and where you’re headed though. I mean, cause if you don’t, especially if you’ve got employees, nobody can follow you if you’re like, well, I hope this works, like, you know, cross my fingers.
And I think you have to be a real entrepreneur rather than a kind of preneur and I think a lot of people get into the idea of wanting to be an entrepreneur, not realizing that that doesn’t mean you just get to set up your office and sign the lease and have, you know, it’s not setting up house. It’s doing what Carl did and doing all of the really hard stuff.
You know, we started off not having any employees to where I was doing all of the paperwork. I was emptying the garbage. I was doing every little thing and I didn’t pay myself for eight months because we were building cash. Those are the hard things. A lot of us think entrepreneurship is getting into setting up the house part of it, not actually going and doing the dirty work, which is really.
What you should be able to do, like with this conference, I ran like six, 7, 000 steps in a three room conference center, running around, making sure everything was working as I was getting ready to present and do other things. That’s the kind of hardness I think you need to have as an entrepreneur.
Does this have to do a lot, Paula, with goal setting as well?
It does, but goals without habit formation are just dreams. So yes, goal setting is necessary, but not sufficient.
So what you’re saying is build the habits to make you tough.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because all of these things that we’re talking about require consistency. You know, it’s, it’s not one day of muscling through.
It’s not one day of toughness. It’s getting up every morning. at, you know, to an alarm, doing the hard work again and again and again and again and again, and just lather, rinse, repeat. So goals, yes, goal setting is fantastic if the goals inform the habits that you create, or conversely, the bad habits that you break.
Carl, you very publicly, you know, talk about that when, when you became financially independent and actually just that whole journey, but that habit forming thing, I know some people, they get to the point where I don’t need to work tomorrow. And that idea that Paula talks about, about setting the alarm, getting out of bed every day.
Like, what was that process like knowing that I don’t want to wake up tomorrow at X amount of time or X certain time. Is it more difficult to build difficult? structure into your life when monetarily you don’t need to?
Don’t think so. I think you just have to know that you have to evolve and change. For example, well, I’ll go back and say that normal actions get normal results.
So if you want to do anything extraordinary, you’re going to have to put yourself through some discomfort. So before I had a job, I was working on houses. Now I still work on houses, but I don’t have a job. But now I spend a lot more time at the gym. And if you want to build strength or run a half marathon, which I did, by the way, one of the worst days of my life.
By the way, Carl, by the way, I want to get back to that. But I got to tell you that Paula texted me one day and said, you run for fun. She ran like 12 steps and was like, this sucks.
Worst two minutes of my life.
She didn’t even have to run a half marathon. She knew
way before you did how
bad it
was. Paula is a lot smarter than me.
A friend said, Hey.
Why don’t we run a half marathon? Like, sure, that sounds great. I’ll download some app. I’ll bet running gets easier after you do it for a while. And it turns out it does, and it sucks the whole entire time. But anyway, back to your question, I think you just have to learn to evolve and you get new challenges.
Maybe you can let up on it a little bit because you’ve made it, you’ve got money, you don’t have to work. 80, 100 hours a week at what you’re doing, but I still think we all need to push ourselves out of the comfort zone. I think if you, you’ve achieved something crazy and good in life, you can’t just turn that off.
And I think it would be a mistake to turn it off as well. You gotta have new challenges.
Roger, some people listening to this are living that hard existence right now, right? They’re in the middle of the crap. They’re in the middle of a time when they really need to do hard stuff and they don’t have any other choice.
Is this a mindset thing to get through it? Like someday I will laugh about this. Is it a, like, what type of encouragement do you give people that are just, they’re in the crappy spot right now?
The idea of consistency that Paula mentioned. I have a C on my arm, which is the exponent to a tattoo It stands for consistency and it’s the super.
Can we actually, can we actually look at the entire tattoo because this is really cool Yeah, explain that to us.
I have a formula on my arm, which is E stands for energy Multiplied by your ability to focus, multiplied by your ability to focus on what’s important now, to the power of consistency.
Bring energy and focus to what’s important now, consistently.
And you want to have all of those working together, because I come with lots of energy, but I can’t focus. Okay, I’m just running around. If I can focus, but I’m focusing on the wrong things, I’m not going to be productive, and if I only do it when I feel like showing up, I’m not going to have much of a change in the trajectory of my life.
So somebody that’s going through something hard right now, and it can be financial or otherwise, You gotta focus on your energy that’s moving, eating, sleeping, because you have to be able to show up, right? And then, you have to focus on something to do, and here’s what I, here’s what I’d argue is, sometimes when we’re in the middle of doing things and we’re really struggling, you really have to have, find some space.
Am I doing things that are going to compound to a better trajectory? Because it’s easy just simply to tread water. Right? And that’s important to survive, but at some point you’re going to have to start doing some things that you can see are going to be moving you in a direction that you want to go. And it’s easy just to sit there and tread water and feel manically busy.
without actually building some longterm momentum. So that would be the counsel is we’ve all been there and we’ll all go there because we’re never going to be exonerated from any of this stuff. Even if we are retired, be very cognizant of, am I doing some things that can compound for me in a really good way?
That is, uh, brilliantly said, and, but I’m still stuck on the fact that I’ve put lots of motivational phrases on screensavers and on my bathroom mirror, but I’ve never thought about putting it on my freaking forearm, like, so I see it whenever I, whenever I, Looks
a lot different than the one on his left butt cheek.
He can’t see that one quite as well, Doug. Yes. Hey, before we go to the trivia, Doug, I want to bring you into this because during your early days of your career, you had to do some tough stuff. What’s something that was a pretty tough that made your life cushy today? Wow.
Um,
I did. You had to watch Carl put the shower together.
Toenail trimming at an Oriental spa. No, I don’t know. Uh, I mean, I, like a lot of folks, I did those when you’re just getting into stuff, there’s a lot of jobs that are commission based. I sold knives. Uh, I sold sports equipment and it was just all on your guile, right? On your ability to read people and the read the situation.
And there were a lot of days I made no money, whether it was. selling sports equipment or selling knives or, or other stuff. But man, did I learn a lot. Didn’t make any money. Thankfully, it was at a time when I also didn’t have a lot of responsibilities. Didn’t have a family that I had to take care of. And I learned some of those hard lessons then.
One lesson that I’ve not learned yet. was told to me, I saw it work, but it just didn’t become who I am, was when to shut up.
Now I’m making a living by talking too much. But, uh, and I’m sure there’s a corollary here between this and, and how you, you know, plan here. I guess this is the corollary as we talk often, Joe, about when you make a plan, if you’re on track to reach your goals, then that allows you a lot of flexibility to do it.
Like it’s okay to just, Stop and use that money for something else, for some joy or something like that. And I guess it’s that ability to know when it’s okay to stop. And that’s, I’ll try to get that back to the, when to shut up, because when I was selling, this is when I was working at a ski store selling really expensive ski equipment.
And I thought, I’ve told the story on the show before, but maybe there’s four people who are listening that are new. I thought that if I could just share everything I knew about that equipment, all the data, all of the details about it, I just kept on talking about how much I knew I would earn that person’s trust and that they would have to want to buy from me because they would think this guy knows everything about this stuff.
So he’s, and what I realized was. I wasn’t selling anything because I was giving them too many choices and too much information. Yeah, the
paradox of
choice. Yeah. Sometimes it’s better to just say, based on what you’ve told me, here’s three things about this ski, buy this one.
Roger will appreciate this. I did that the early days as a financial planner.
Exactly, Doug, what you’re talking about. Roger, I had a mentor tell me, he’s like, You’re showing people everything you know, which is why nobody’s doing anything. Like, cause I’m
like, we’re chopping up the onion and they only want the first layer. So I
would say, Hey, there’s so later on when I got better at my job, I was like, Hey, there’s 15 things we could do here.
I’m going to give you just the top two. If you want to know why we don’t do any of the other ones. That I’ve considered, feel free to ask, but I’m just going to give you the top two. And so here’s, I think we go this way, but an alternative is doing this, give them two and you’re done.
You know, another place that that shows up and I’ll say corporate land is you are trying to convince maybe some senior executives, maybe it’s not a sales opportunity.
It’s just an internal thing that I think we should take this strategy and you build the whole PowerPoint. It’s. 27 slides long, and the first 25 of them are all the, the buildup and all the reasons you’ve lost them. Yeah. They are not going to be there listening to you on slide number 27 when you make your recommendation.
Yeah. And they’re gone. And by the way, Doug, you got to learn when to shut up right now, cause we got to get onto the trivia. So
well, then you do the freaking trivia, Joe, good luck with that.
Roger. I’m sorry. Did you have something there before we, I thought we had to shut up. We do have to shut up, but I, but you were starting to say something.
What did I think?
I think what this article is really about is compound interest when it comes to habits, right? And I think of the Rock Retirement Club roundup that we just had. There were 200 people that had great habits of saving and self denial and working and, and denying themselves that are now at the point that they have the resources and lots of options.
So they’re the end of that compounding of all of those great habits and what will happen with these good habits of doing hard things? is that you actually enjoy it. You enjoy seeing your bank accounts move up because you’ve been saving. And actually, you actually have to sort of get to the point where sort of what Doug was saying is, at some point you have to relax and enjoy it.
And it’s a little bit hard because those muscles are so well developed that you can’t stop. And we’re doing a series now on wisdom for our children and it’s around this compounding of doing hard, do hard things now so you can give yourself your future self some better options.
I want to ask, uh, in the second half of this discussion, all of you about what some of those things are that maybe around learning about money that pay the biggest compounding interest.
Like what are those things you can teach yourself about money that will really go further? And then last, I want to, I’m also going to want to talk about some of the. tough things you guys are doing now. Cause I know that even though you all live in cushy worlds, I know you’re not that type of person.
You’re all still out there pushing stuff. But before we get to that, we have this incredibly important centerpiece of our show, which is the year long trivia competition between our three frequent contributors. Len Penzo. Len has the day off. And Roger, you are our guest who is going to be on team Len. And then OG was going to be here.
Thank God he’s not, because we got the far better Carl Jensen today from Mile Hi Fi. Carl, you are team OG, OG’s son sadly broke his collarbone and is having surgery. So we’re all hoping for the best for OG and his son and their family, but Carl, you’re playing on behalf of OG and Paula is playing for herself, which is the amazing thing here is that Paula went to Scotland and, and, uh, last week.
Filling in for her, it was amazing. Heidi Dussek scored a point, Paula, for you. Yes!
Yes. Haha,
thank you, Heidi. Which means, uh, Len and Carl, here’s what’s going on. Carl, OG is the two time reigning champion. Len won the two years before that. Len is in first with 14. Paula, for si Somehow is in second with 13.
Paula’s never in second for people new to the show. She’s usually in last, brilliant, except for when it comes to trivia, but this year, brilliant, even a trivia. And then OG, our two time champion, Carl is in last place with 12. So 14, 13, 12. So will Carl help OG move back into a tie with Paula? Can Roger help Len pull away with only a few weeks to go?
Can Paula force. a tie for first place, which would be so weird this late in the year. We’re about to find out, but Doug, we need a trivia question. So what do we got on tap this week?
Well, we sure do, Joe, but just to be clear, I need to know this. So Carl is on the loser team, right? So he gets to guess last.
He gets to guess last. Yeah, that’s the advantage of such is
also good is Carl’s first time here. So he gets to the benefit of hearing everybody else. All right,
so Carl, get ready for this really succinct, it’s quick. Listen carefully because you might miss it. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug.
Just after midnight tonight, we’ll get the first glimpse of the hunter’s moon. Without reality television to help pass the time, ancient Babylonians were so bored that they began vigorously tracking the moon cycles around 750 BC. It was the women of Babylonia. I have to assume that quickly noticed the moon waxed and waned in a 29 day cycle back in 18.
Wait for it. You’ll get it back in 1894 bc the Babylonians connected patterns of stars in the sky to create the 12 signs of the Zodiac. You know, probably to make tons of Benjamins off the hot new online psychic industries coming up. For any ladies out there wondering about our compatibility, I’m a Libra with a Scorpio rice.
And I like long walks. Anyway, while the belief in astrology is most widespread across Asia, people all over the world take comfort in following their horoscope, especially during times of crisis. Knowing that, it makes a lot more sense that Joe’s mom called me the cancer of the neighborhood after I accidentally chopped down her lilac bushes.
Today’s trivia question is, see I told you it was quick, What percentage of Americans check their horoscope every day? I’ll be back right after I read up on the traits of Leo so I can learn more about Joe’s mom.
Very important mission Doug’s on. But we start with, uh, Roger. Unfortunately, you have to go first here.
You check your horoscope every day, Roger? I do not.
Did you think you don’t?
No, I do not. Could have seen what a lucky day it was for you today.
Len, I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever won a point for somebody as a stand in. So I’m going to make that disclaimer. So I have to give a percentage of what number of people check their horoscope every day.
Do you think it’s a lot? I’m gonna say you think it’s a lot? No, I think it’s in the forties. I’m gonna say it’s 45. Okay. Percent. That’s almost half. Yeah, I guess it’s almost half. I’m not good with numbers. . That’s why
he’s a successful financial planner. Not good with numbers. Paula, you think? Uh, Roger’s, uh, higher, low.
I think he’s very high. I, I, half the U. S. population. To do anything every day is, I, I don’t even shower every day, right?
Carl thinks about me in the shower every day.
That was out loud, Paula, you know that, right?
Oh, Doug, by the way, I am also a Libra. I don’t know what my rising is, but I, I
am a Libra. Nice, I knew it.
So balanced and even keeled you are.
Exactly. Yes. I would say. 5%. Five.
Wow. Carl, they gave you wide berth. We got five and 45. Holy crap,
Carl. Yeah. And I’m so happy because my number was kind of right in between those. I was thinking I’m going to go, is this like prices, right? Rules where it’s not, it’s just closest.
Yeah. Okay. So I can’t screw Robert by saying like 44%. I’m gonna say 22%. I’m gonna go right in the middle,
sort of, I got, got 22 right in the middle. So we got 45, we got 22, we got five. Who’s right? We’ll let you know in just a minute. Roger, you kicked this off by saying 45%. You got your arms in the air for people not watching us on YouTube.
I thought you were calling me out as the winner. I’m not. You’re not calling you out as the winner. I’m not. I’m, I’m asking you how confident you are, but with your arms in the air, you must think you’re pretty confident. We are.
I’m an entrepreneur. I’m very confident in myself, .
Paul, are you confident that Roger’s wrong?
I am.
I’m feeling good about my answer. You know, just to check your horoscope every day, that’s a big
commitment. Well, and Carl, you got the middle ground there at, uh, what, 25? 25%? Was that your guess? Twenty two. Twenty two percent, yes. Feeling good? Oh, that hurt
you. I do. I’m feeling good. I’ll give myself a 48 percent chance of winning.
What do you give Roger’s chance of winning?
Um…
Two.
Sorry, Roger. I like
you. So that means you’re giving Paula like a 53 percent chance of winning by math is right? Sure.
Yeah. Well, thank you. Let’s see how
those statistics work out. Doug, who’s our champion here?
Hey there, stackers. I’m Libra and part time psychic Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. People often turn to astrology to help them answer life’s impossible questions like. What’s up with all of my electronics lately, and how the hell did Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, get to be so damn sexy? While many people think their respective star signs set the foundation of their personalities, most people believe the same moon that controls the tides doesn’t really have any effect on them personally.
But me? I only use my horoscope and Ms. Cleo for major investing decisions. But since she 2016, the medium and seance fees are killing my budget. Today’s trivia question was, what percentage of Americans check their horoscope every day? The answer is, according to the Washington Post, while roughly 30 percent of Americans believe in astrology, 29.
2 percent fewer people than what Roger guessed check their horoscope, 15. 8 percent more than what Paula guessed check their horoscope. But just 2. 8 percent less than what Carl guessed checked their horoscope. I know you’re trying to do your math in your head, and it looks like that scene from Good Will Hunting.
I’ll just give you the answer! 20. 8 percent of people check their horoscopes every day. Can you believe that? That means… Carl is our winner!
Yes!
Congratulate Carl’s first appearance and he knocks it out of the park. You almost nailed it, Mr. Jensen. Yeah,
that was close. Yeah, it was, uh, it was pure luck.
No, you say it’s pure brilliance.
That’s, you gotta come on here and get some bravado.
I should check my horoscope today. Apparently it might be my lucky day. Go buy one
of those Mega That minimum wage intern who wrote your horoscope today probably knew what they were talking about. I think it’s probably just chat GPT, not nowadays. Right now it is.
Yeah, that’s right.
Well, I do know something in the horoscope and that the horoscopes telling me that we’re going on to the second half of the show, apparently. And, uh, the second half of the show is brought to you by depositaccounts. com. Mr. Roger Whitney, you know what happens when you go to depositaccounts.
com. What happens? You don’t know. You find that you can compare more than 275, 000 deposit rates from over 11, 000 banks and credit unions to do it all for free. They post right on the front page what the current rates are. Listen to this. We’re recording a little bit before you hear this. So make sure you go deposit accounts yourself to check it out.
But the national average is record this in savings accounts. 0. 47%. is the national average. The top 1 percent of savings accounts, though, in the country, averaging 4. 92, big difference between the top 1 percent in the national average, comes to one year CDs. National average 3. 94 for a one year CD. Top 1 percent average 5.
72%. How do you find out more? Go to depositaccounts. com and you can look at more than 275, 000 deposit rates. Click on the one you like and bada boom, bada bang, you’re in the top 1%. How about that, Roger? That’s impressive. It’s
amazing. It’s so nice to have normal interest rates.
Isn’t it? It’s like back in the day.
I just remember for so long where you’re hovering around 5 percent for interest rates. And then for a while there were like, uh, yeah, you’re earning a 0. 0004, right? Yeah. By the way, that’s also the reason why it’s better right now to be somebody with money than somebody with debt. Because if you’ve got that man interest rates through the roof, let’s talk about some of the tough financial things in your life.
Things that seem tough. But you think that they pay real dividends. Paula, let’s start with you. What is a skill that our stacker community should really try to learn if they don’t know it? Because, man, it seems tough, but it’s going to pay off forever. Writing
well. A lot of people mistakenly believe that they can do so, because a lot of people believe that if they are literate, that means they know how to write.
In fact, They don’t. To be able to write well, even in the era of chat GPT, is an important skill and an incredibly difficult skill
to master. What’s funny about that is if you don’t think you write well, another great skill is showing it to somebody else before you send it out. Hmm. Right. Because when I was at American Express, we had a group vice president who could not spell and would never run it by anybody.
And he made himself look far worse than he ever knew. Right. Because he, while he was competent, he seemed very incompetent. Every time you read his memo, you’re like, what is this guy doing? Well, you know,
often if you see somebody who doesn’t write well, the assumption is they probably don’t read very much.
Um, and maybe that’s a fair assumption, maybe it’s not. But, broadly speaking, poor writing, at least in many people’s minds, seems to correlate with a lack of reading. And a lack of reading is an indicator that this person is not a lifelong learner.
Yeah. And I think the big takeaway there is sadly, people are judging you, right?
Which is sad, but people just, just naturally do. Carl, what’s a tough, Paula gave me a life skill. I was actually talking about money skills. Maybe that is a money skill too, Paula. But, uh, Carl, either one, go the Paula route and ignore my question or
You didn’t specify, you just said skill.
I thought I didn’t say money skill.
Maybe I was just thinking it. You
said it before the break. Yeah, you did. Back in the day, memory is also a skill.
Either one though, Carl. I like where Paul is going and I like my original question. So you choose which one’s best for you.
Well, I’m going to do both of them. So my first one is how to use Google search engines in YouTube effectively, because any information you want is out there.
So if anything breaks in your life, like. You could have a washing machine from 25 years ago and if that sucker breaks and no one’s there to fix it, there’s, I guarantee you, there’s someone out there who has published a YouTube video on how to fix that. And on top of that, to build on that a little bit, just have a little bit of self sufficiency and lack of fear to fix things when they go wrong in your life so you don’t have to be as dependent as other people.
Even if you hate fixing stuff, doing breaks on cars or things like that, you might have to resort to those skills at some point and if you do find out you like it, you can make tons of money from it. Like, uh, Kitchen remodel can cost you 75, 000. I can do the same thing for like 15, 000 or 20, 000.
If you don’t like to fix things, starting with the brakes on your cars is a place I wouldn’t advise you to start.
Agreed. Where I would start is, number one, learn about disability insurance, and then number two, learn about fixing brakes on cars. Roger, what’s a life skill slash, uh, slash money skill? I really like
Carl’s. I just want to call that out. I really like that one. I like Paula’s too. Well, no, I didn’t like that one.
But Paula’s inspired me to go more the, the universal skill than a specific money skill. And that is. to collect amazing people. And you actually do this really well, Joe, but to you, if you want to see where
your life is going. It’s like he was, he was complimenting himself there.
If
you think about it, that was if you want to see where you’re going to be going in life, If you start to look around with who you hang out with most of the time and look at their lives and see what’s happening, that’s likely who you’re going to be. And it can be trite nowadays, but there are a lot of rules of the five people you hang out with.
But the other part of it is, if you do this authentically, those things will pay dividends in so many ways. I have a really good friend who is C level at a private equity firm. Throughout his life, he keeps in touch with amazing people. And I’ve seen job opportunities in his financials flourish, but Also, his life flourishes.
I mean, he keeps in touch with other CEOs, but he also keeps in touch with the lady who ran the, the kitchen in the Marriott that he would go to every week. He just loves good people that are curious. And I think that skill will help you, obviously, personally, but I think it will help you immensely financially.
If you can collect good people and stay in touch with them and just love on them in an authentic way, I think that’s something that we fail to do a lot.
Carl, you’re nodding your
head. No, I think that’s so good and I’m thinking of that, Roger. One thing I really try to do in my own life is to remember people’s first names, so everyone says, oh, I’m bad at remembering names.
Is that why
you called me Robert earlier?
So everyone likes to say I’m bad at remembering names, but I don’t think anyone is bad at it. They just don’t try hard. So when I meet someone, I do, I repeat it a couple of times and then when I meet them again, I’m like, Hey Mike, or whatever their name is, Robert, Roger, um, and they’re usually impressed. It sets you a little bit apart and then you can collect good people in your life just by making a little bit of effort, little tricks
like that.
Carl, I’m going to put you right here on my shelf. I’ve just collected you.
Well, let’s do the second round, which was the question I was hoping for. I love the skills that you guys gave, but let me tell you the type of stuff I was talking about. The traditional money stuff. So as an example, I think that more technical asset allocation.
pays tons of dividends. And it seems very technical and very difficult. And it’s not, it truly is far easier than people think that it is. And it’s the kind of thing, Roger. Well, actually, Carl, it’s close to what you’re talking about, where, you know, you look at the YouTube video on the dishwasher and you think you can’t fix it yourself.
And then to your point, like you said earlier, once you get in there, you realize, Oh, I can do this. And, you know, people hear terms like efficient frontier and you think I can’t do that. There’s, there’s nothing, it’s so much easier than the big words that we use. That’s a skill I’m thinking of. Uh, Paula, let’s, let’s go back to you for this one.
What’s, what’s a money, traditional money skill that pays big dividends that feels hard? Actually,
Joe, I learned this one from you. Timelining your goals and then just doing the basic arithmetic of how much is this going to cost? How many months from now or years from now do I want this? How much money do I have to save per month over the next X amount of time in order to reach this?
And you know, you do that for every single goal and then you add all of that up and then you realize that’s higher That’s like triple your salary and then you start adjusting and cutting back and extending the timelines and dropping some and that practice is actually not difficult to do. It’s a little bit of planning and it’s fourth grade arithmetic, but most don’t.
It’s wild when you start playing with those levers. It’s so fulfilling to know that you actually have realistic goals instead of this pie in the sky. Roger, what I like though about you and you and I’ve talked about this a lot was Paula’s answer in a lot of ways is kind of the opposite of what you like.
You like the ability you, and this is hard. Dealing with uncertainty is okay, right? Being sure that there’s no certainty in anything is a difficult place to be, but becoming comfortable with that is hard. Yeah, well,
well, we’ll never be exonerated from uncertainty. A lot of trouble that we get ourselves in is by trying to get exonerated from it.
Because there are plenty of people that will sell you the solution to uncertainty or pain or the need to do hard work, but you can’t be exonerated from any of those three things. And it’s hard to accept that. It takes work. It takes work, for
sure. Yeah, which one were you thinking
of? Actually, the one I was thinking of, I stole from Paula, I forget how many years ago that she was on my show.
She used a phrase, there’s only so much frugaling you can do. Which is, you know, obviously on the budgetary side, it’s important to control slippage from how you spend. And her point. And she can correct me if I’ve been saying it wrong all these years was the, if you think of levers, you have this dashboard.
Yes, budget is a lever of controlling costs, but you have another lever that is a lot bigger that has that set on a much more powerful fulcrum, which is increasing your income. Then even if you’re in a corporate job, you can be creative in how you can increase your income. And that’s where the real opportunity for a lot of people.
Did I get that right, Paula? Yeah, 100%. It
sounded awesome, so just say yes, no matter what, because I would take credit for that. Totally.
Spot on. Spot on. Got it right. Too bad
I bought the URL. You should have bought that when you said it, but I got it.
You know, I think I’m going to tweet your E times F times win to the power of C.
Oh, it’s so awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m stealing
that one from you. Roger, I’ve known you for quite a while now. It was at Camp Phi when I’ve noticed that on your forearm for the first time. And just got it in February. Oh, did you? No wonder I hadn’t seen it before. Yes. All that time we spent naked together.
In the shower.
We did room together at Camp Fi. I was the big spoon. Carl, you got the last word here to get us off that uncomfortable point. Um, what’s a, what’s a money
skill? Yeah, I’ll tell you a little bit of a story. First, I met some guy over the weekend who I’ll back up a second. I got a chip in my windshield.
I paid this guy 75 to fix it. And I looked up the kit he was using. And the kit was 300 that you could buy from Amazon. So while he was fixing my window, I said, is this a good business? He’s like, you have no idea. It’s so good. I make so much money from this. I’m like, that’s pretty cool. So my tip is I think a lot of people underestimate themselves.
There’s always. Something you could do outside of your normal job, especially if you’re younger and not tied down to make money. For example, just look at real estate. We did live in flipping and that was great for us, but you don’t have to do that. You can do a house hack where you’ve got roommates. You can do an Airbnb property.
You can be a traditional landlord. So I would suggest people do a lot of experimenting and figure out where their sweet spot is. Like find the Venn diagram of making money and something that you actually enjoy doing. It might not be easy, but it’s worthwhile. This window guy, he’s loaded and a 300 kit from Amazon.
So there you go.
You know, I’d love about that story too. And I think this is a great skill that all of you guys have asked that question. I mean, that’s just a great, is this a great business? Like that’s a question that I never ask. And I’m just thinking, just asking that person, that one simple question opens up so many doors.
Yes. Good stuff. We’re going to leave it right there. People want to dive more into this piece. I thought it was a wonderful piece. I don’t know what you guys thought about, but, uh, DariusFaroe. com. We’ll link to it on our show notes page at StackyBenjamins. com. It is time for our community back porch. This is where we, uh, have some fun sitting out on the back porch.
We, by the way, recorded a little bit earlier, a little back porch stuff where we were talking about how Gen Z people talk, uh, Steve for today’s back porch. Do you mind just running kind of the pre show banter we had going on about that?
A new video where they translate. Teen text talk. It’s well done. And then at the end of it, you see him like doing the making of and he’s running it by his two kids getting their approval for the script.
It’s pretty funny. It’s pretty funny.
Look for it. I’ve had to do that with a couple of Instagram captions. I’ve had to run it by some Gen Z friends. Yeah. We
always have Kate in millennial. She is, she’s,
uh, Yeah, Millennials are
outdated now. Right. Yeah.
Totally outdated. So not cool. Gen Z, the youngest Gen Z now is 13.
It goes from like 13 to 26. I think my kids are the first year. My oldest is the first year of Gen Z and that goes all the way down to 13 year
olds. Yeah.
And Millennials are 27 to 42. Wow.
Right? Yeah. My kids are on the trail end of that. It’s not
cool.
I feel old. I know.
Carl’s part of the greatest generation.
Tell me what Iwo Jima was like, Carl.
I can’t understand my kids. I made dinner last night and the younger one is like, Hey dad, this food is bussing. I’m like, Is that a compliment? Or are you insulting me? Like, I don’t know which one. Apparently it was a compliment. Oh,
I thought busting was like they have to bust the table afterwards and throw it away.
That’s
what I thought too. They were complaining about chores even before I got to it. But no, it was a compliment. Frozen orange Costco chicken is good, apparently.
Oh, that’s got this fire. That’s lit.
It’s
lit. Look at her in the back! It’s busting. Oh, there she is right there. Why
am I hissing like a snake?
This is the one who said my, the food was bussing. It was bussing. Oh,
uh, head, you’re embarrassing the whole family. Yeah, I’m
no longer bussing after this.
No,
no, no, no. Now you’re
tricycling. You never were. It was the orange chicken. Yeah.
Yeah. You’re walking. I don’t know. I’m fussing. Roger, that clearly wasn’t a lit conversation.
I’m sticking with that word. Those kids love that
word. And Carl, maybe we could, is this, is this conversation bussing? I still
don’t know what bussing and it is bomb, which I think means it’s good too, right? You ever hear kids say bomb? It is bomb. They tell me
that all the time. Bomb is
so outdated. I know.
I thought
bombs were bad things. I don’t want to have bombs in my normal life or
any life. No,
that’s right.
But the term bomb is so outdated. Now it’s like dead ass. You know, that’s what everyone
says. No cap. We’ve had some reviews that say that this show bombed. I take that back. This show is the bomb.
Yeah. Isn’t it funny? Intonation is everything there. It’s giving old guy. Is that what I’m doing right now, Paula? Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. Oh my God. All right. I think that’s a great place to leave it. Let’s find out what’s going on with all of you. Today, uh, we’ll start with you, Paula. What’s going on at the Afford Anything podcast?
Oh,
at the Afford Anything podcast, Joe, you join me every other week to answer questions. Exactly. To be brilliant. To be absolutely brilliant and answer questions that come from our community. We also, uh, recently we had on Dr. Virgie Bright Ellington. She is a physician who talks about how to handle your medical bills.
If you get a bill in the mail. Uh, like an expensive medical bill. What do you do? She talks, uh, kind of walks through step by step. Here’s how to read a bill. Here’s how to negotiate the bill. Never pay that first bill. So that is all on the Afford Anything podcast.
I love that topic and talk about something that seems hard that I think that once you know, it’s like riding a bike, right?
Once you know how to read the bill, that’s a skill you’re going to have forever.
Right, exactly. So yeah, it’s a lot of it is just don’t be intimidated by it. So
by the way, the other thing, what is her
name again? Dr. Virgie Bright
Ellington. I want that name when I grow up. That is just an awesome name. Dr.
Virgie Bright Ellington. Like she sounds intelligent. Just her name. Barely sure she
was in a Jane Austen novel. I’m pretty sure. I think
she might have been.
And that’s at the Afford Anything Podcast. We’re a finer podcast. Arfa. Yeah, you can find us on YouTube. Awesome. Roger Whitney, now that you’re decompressing from an awesome retirement, uh, party, whatever it is, you call the phenomenal meetup you have for people who are rocking retirement.
What’s going on at the retirement answer man show? Well,
uh, let’s see, we’re opening up enrollment to the rock retirement club on October 26 cause we bring people in and cohorts so they can create a retirement plan of record. So that’s going on right now. Our series is wisdom for our children and we’re We’ve collected from our audience and club members wisdom of what we wish our younger self would have known about love and family and money and career.
So we’re going through that and putting together a resource that we can hand to our kids or someone younger because we know they don’t listen to us. So we thought maybe they’d hear somebody else.
That’s fabulous. And by the way, the 26th was yesterday when this came out, Roger. So. Awesome.
Well, we’re open for another
three or four days.
So get on it. That’s the retirement answer and podcast where finer podcasts are distributed. Carl, it’s about damn time. And I’m so happy you were available. We heard from OG. I’m like, we got to get Carl here and thank God you were available.
Thank you so much for having me, Joe. This was a super fun.
Well, let’s talk about what happens in the Mile Hi Fi Club, because it might be different.
Well,
I’m actually going to be talking about showers because my life is just about to take a huge pivot after two decades of home improvement. I’m looking up right now because the shower I tested like literally one hour ago is above me and it is not raining, which is pretty good. That’s uh, successful so far.
But the other thing I’ve realized is, uh, is happiness, I think is one of the hardest things that some of us have to work on. And we’re going to have a three part series on that coming up because I thought early retirement and financial appendage would just make me happy with rain beer and unicorns and rainbows.
And then it didn’t. And I learned that I have to create happiness from the inside. It took me a long time to figure that out and to figure out some of the basics of it. So we look forward to talking about that. And hopefully, hopefully not
rainy ceilings. No, and you and your co host, Doug Cunnington, you guys always have the best conversations.
It’s so cool. So entertaining. Like you guys like to laugh, but you also like to get in the weeds, which I appreciate. Thank you
so much, Joe.
Yeah, fantastic. And it’s not the Mile Hi Fi Club, although you got to start that. It’s the Mile Hi Fi Podcast. Again, where finer podcasts are distributed. Doug, you got it from here, man.
Man. There was a lot to learn today, but what are our top three? No,
I figured it out. I got it all boiled right down here. First, take some advice from Robert Whitney and the gang doing hard activities. Nailed it. Doing hard activities can make life’s downward moments seem like a cakewalk. You know, I know people say cakewalk, but what the hell is that?
Anyway, when we find out, I seriously want a piece of that cake. Second, consider teaching yourself to be handy around the house. Sure, it’s difficult, but not only can you save yourself a ton of money, you could also turn your new skills into a side gig. But the big lesson… Don’t tell Joe’s mom about all the bad traits of Leo’s even if you’re trying to explain to her that it’s not her fault That she’s bossy.
Thanks to Roger Whitney for joining us today. You can find more of Roger at, wait, Roger? Your name’s
Roger? Yeah!
Okay, I won’t, we’ll run with it You can find more of Roger at RogerWhitney. com, or you can listen to Roger at the Retirement Answer Man podcast, wherever you’re listening right now. We’ll also include links in our show notes at StackingBenjamins.
com. Thanks to Paula Pant for hanging out with us today. You’ll find her fabulous podcast, Afford Anything, wherever you listen to finer podcasts. And thanks also to Carl Jensen from the Mile Hi Fi podcast. You’ll find the Mile Hi Fi podcast. where you’re listening to my dulcet tones right now. This show is the property of SB Podcasts, LLC, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul Sehy.
Our producer is Karen Repine. This show was written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast, with help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earn Invest podcast. Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called The 201.
You’ll find the 411 on all things money at The 201. Just visit stackingbenjamins. com slash 201. Wonder how beautiful we all are? Of course you’ll never know if you don’t check out our YouTube version of this show, engineered by Tina Ikenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast.
Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Want to chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Yunkin are our social media coordinators and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.
Say hello when you see us posting online. To join all the basement fun with other stackers type stacking benjamins dot com slash basement. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time, back here at the Stacking
Benjamins
Show.
What are you still doing here? The show is over. Go home.
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