There’s a strange thing that happens to a lot of people as their income grows: the anxiety doesn’t go away, it just changes shape. More money, more accounts, more to track, and somehow the same low hum of worry every time a bill comes due. Jesse Mecham, founder of YNAB and one of the most trusted voices in budgeting, has spent over two decades helping people fix that, and his conclusion isn’t a better spreadsheet or a stricter budget. It’s a single question, one that sounds almost too simple to matter, until you actually try to answer it.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- The one question that replaces budgeting guilt with genuine clarity, and why it works even for people who “already have money figured out”
- Why looking backward at your spending almost never makes you feel better, and what to do instead
- The five categories every dollar actually falls into, and why skipping even one of them creates financial blind spots
- Why future income should never be allowed to rescue your current plan, and how that habit quietly leads to credit card debt
- A surprisingly simple system for making irregular bills stop feeling like emergencies
- The real story of a Costco cashier who became a millionaire without doing anything complicated, and what it says about the myth of needing to “get fancy” with money
- Why money worry doesn’t disappear once you have more of it, and what actually makes it go away
Why This Matters Now
It’s easy to assume that financial peace is just one income bump away. Get the raise, pay off the card, hit the next savings milestone, and the anxiety will finally quiet down. But that’s rarely how it actually works. Real financial confidence comes from knowing exactly what your money is for, not from having more of it. That clarity is available at any income level, and it’s the difference between managing money and constantly feeling managed by it.
From the Basement
A story about a seventh-grade inline skating competition, complete with donated gear, mystery sponsors, and an unauthorized parking lot, turns out to be the unexpected origin story behind one of personal finance’s most beloved communities. Some of the best lessons about building something people care about show up in the most unlikely places.
Resources Mentioned
YNAB (You Need A Budget) — Jesse’s budgeting app and free trial
Never Worry About Money Again by Jesse Mecham — Jesse’s new book on purpose-based spending
Our Mentor: Jesse Mecham
Big thanks to Jesse Mecham for joining us today. To learn more about Jesse, visit Jesse Mecham | YNAB Founder. Grab yourself a copy of the book Never Worry About Money Again: By Answering One Question
Our Headline
- He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire. (Wall Street Journal)
Doug’s Trivia
- In 1914, the first electric stoplight was installed in Cleveland. How many colors did it feature?
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Written by: Kevin Bailey
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Episode transcript
[00:00:00] opener: Ugh, I just can’t get these numbers to add up.
[00:00:02] Doug: It’s like we’re never gonna get out of this hole.
[00:00:04] opener: Credit card debt, does it ever end?
[00:00:07] opener: Maybe I can help. We sure could use it. Did you know millions of Americans live with debt they cannot control? That’s why I developed this unique new program for managing your debt.
[00:00:17] opener: It’s called Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford.
[00:00:26] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show
[00:00:41] Doug: I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and how’s your budget? On today’s show, we’ll help make bad budgets good and good budgets great with the king of budgeting. That’s right, Jesse Mecham is here. Plus, think you need to get fancy to stack Benjamins? I’m pretty sure today’s headline will dispel that myth. And then this isn’t a myth, but it sure is mythical.
[00:01:03] Doug: I’ll share some of that trivia you’ve heard about. You’re welcome. And now, two guys who are racing to beat each other at Stacko, it’s Joe and O JJ G.
[00:01:19] Joe: Hey there, Stackers. Welcome back to the greatest money show on Earth. I am Joe Saul-Sehy, and we’re super happy that you’re here with us. So sit back, relax, grab something to take notes, because we’re gonna be off and running here in a minute, and the guy running along beside me also trying to fill out his Stacko board this month is Mr.
[00:01:37] Joe: OG. So, um, we checked one box, but I th- I think we’re gonna have a bingo or a Stacko here fairly soon.
[00:01:44] OG: Okay. Who’s gonna get it?
[00:01:46] Joe: Uh, well, hopefully me before you, ’cause Mom said, uh, we get to be first in line for the brownies if we do that. How are you today, man? You’re getting ready to go on, uh, go on a little trip tomorrow?
[00:01:57] OG: I’m unaware of any trips I’m taking tomorrow, but okay.
[00:02:00] Joe: You’re not taking any trips tomorrow?
[00:02:02] Doug: He’s taking a trip to
[00:02:06] Joe: HR. Is that what we call- Again … Mom now, is HR?
[00:02:10] OG: Again.
[00:02:11] Joe: Yes.
[00:02:11] OG: Uh, yeah, no, j- I mean, we’re back from being up in Michigan for a week. That was nice. Uh, school starts in a week, which is frigging absolutely- Crazy … crazy. Um- That is, that’s, that’s horrible … but, uh, but we have a senior, so we are… I mean, also a fifth grader.
[00:02:28] OG: Oh. But a senior.
[00:02:30] Joe: I thought that’s w- we’re starting to refer to you as, as a senior. No?
[00:02:34] OG: 48, bro. Like, l- I’ll, I’ll let you know when you can… wh- when, when you guys can start calling me senior, I’ll, I’ll let you know.
[00:02:42] Doug: He’s counting on chronological date judging his age- I know … ’cause he’s grumpy as an 88-year-old.
[00:02:48] Joe: And it’s all you gotta do to trigger him, Doug. It’s all you gotta do. Start talking senior. Hey, we do have a great show. We have, when we think of seniors, we think of this guy. He is maybe one of the senior people when it comes to having an effective budget. His groupies, we lovingly refer to as a cult, uh, because it’s almost like CrossFit.
[00:03:12] Joe: If somebody… You know, how do you know when somebody does CrossFit? They tell you. How do you know when somebody’s a YNABer? They tell you. YNAB is software. You need a budget. He’s been in Mom’s Basement with us a few times. Always charming. Always so, so, so helpful. Jesse Mecham is back, and if you’ve never heard Jesse, you’re gonna understand why so many people love his, uh, YNAB software.
[00:03:37] Joe: So sit back, get ready to learn about making a better budget. Turn your budget a little bit into some art, which is really fun. If anybody can make budgeting fun, it’s Jesse. But you know what we’re gonna have fun doing first? Making sure that we can keep podcasting. We have a couple breaks during the show.
[00:03:55] Joe: One now, and one while you’re trying to figure out the answer to Doug’s trivia question. We’re gonna hear from a couple sponsors, and then the one and only Jesse Mecham joining us in Mom’s Basement.
[00:04:13] Joe: All right, Stackers, a lot of you are earning more than you did five years ago. You might have more saved. You might be investing. You might even be doing most of the things responsible people are told to do, and yet money still follows you around, to the grocery store, at dinner with friends, at 2 o’clock in the morning.
[00:04:31] Joe: Well, Jesse Mecham has spent more than 20 years helping people organize their money, but his view, and I can’t wait to get into this, has changed. He now argues the answer is not necessarily a tighter budget, a bigger spreadsheet, or even a larger paycheck. It sounds like, Jesse, you’re trying to go out of business with that open, but we’ll, we’ll get into that.
[00:04:49] Joe: It may begin with one simple question. There might be one simple question, Stackers. Jesse, welcome back to the basement, man. Great to talk to you.
[00:04:56] Jesse: I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me again, Joe.
[00:04:59] Joe: So I set it up. What’s the question we need to be asking?
[00:05:03] Jesse: Well, before I say the question, we, uh, just to keep everyone on pins and needles, you know, we used to teach people the YNAB method.
[00:05:09] Jesse: I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I’ve had to unlearn some things on podcasts like this, but we were trying to figure out what is the essence of this thing we’re teaching people. We figured out that we’re taking people from bad at money, no offense, to good at money, and that in that transition from bad to good, they stop worrying about money.
[00:05:33] Jesse: In realizing that, we, we just started to see money worry everywhere. What I taught in our first book back in 2017 still holds, but we wanted to teach it in a simpler, more accessible, just quicker to understand way, and so we realized that it all distilled down to just one question for money that is hard to answer.
[00:05:52] Jesse: So it’s a simple question, hard to answer, and that is what’s the money for? What is it for? All with the mission to have people stop having it, like you said, following them around at the grocery store.
[00:06:03] Joe: Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:04] Jesse: Yeah.
[00:06:05] Joe: Okay, so what’s it for? Why is that more useful than asking where did my money go?
[00:06:12] Jesse: What’s it for is prospective.
[00:06:13] Jesse: Where did my money go is retrospective. You’re looking back and you’re like, “Oh, there it is.” Usually there’s- And
[00:06:18] Joe: reactive, yeah. Like tracking versus budget, yeah.
[00:06:21] Jesse: Yeah, and when you’ve tallied up what you’ve already spent, I, I wanna know if there’s any listener ever that saw what they spent and they were like, “Good job, Jesse.
[00:06:30] Jesse: Good j-,” like, they’re never looking to be like, “I nailed it” … ’cause they actually don’t have a number in their mind of what would be good. They just, whatever they’re gonna see, they’re gonna be like, “I… Oh, man, I can’t believe I did that.” Like, it’s never, like, congratulatory, you know? So tracking and retrospective kind of analysis, while useful, especially as you want something to start looking forward, it tends to just kind of be like hand slappy and people just kinda do it to themselves.
[00:06:58] Joe: A lot of our Stackers talk about, “I’m good with money, but I still feel anxious.” Is this why we still feel anxious?
[00:07:04] Jesse: Yeah, they just don’t have a firm answer for what their money’s for. It, that’s it. That’s the end all, be all of it. It is, again, it is not easy to answer. Like, it takes a lot of looking inward, a lot of…
[00:07:15] Jesse: Like, if you’re sharing finances with a spouse, a lot of good discussion between the two of you to figure this out. But when you do figure it out, the money worry starts to disappear, and you start to see more and more of you in what your money is doing, which I think is a, an exciting spot to be.
[00:07:31] Joe: For a long time, I was in this group called Strategic Coach.
[00:07:35] Joe: You might have heard of Strategic Coach. Oh, yeah. I’ve
[00:07:36] Jesse: been in there
[00:07:37] Joe: before. Yeah. Yeah. Dan Sullivan, good stuff. But he talks about, as you know though, Jesse, the gap and the gain. Mm-hmm. We find ourself in the gap all the time. “Man, I should’ve done this. I should’ve done that. I should’ve…” And you’re talking about, I believe, the gap with your money, but the gain is where you actually look back and you go, “Look at how much ground I covered.
[00:07:53] Joe: Look at how great I’m doing.” Yeah. Y- you’re talking about something similar in your budget with your money, but you gotta notice it in the moment. Like, how do you begin to see that gap in the moment? You know what I mean? S- see the fact that- Yeah … I’m actually doing okay versus, you know, spinning this wheel of misery that’s never gonna end.
[00:08:15] Jesse: One thing that Dan teaches, and I… That’s a, it’s a simple but powerful concept. One is just to look back and demand of yourself that you say, you, you define and explicitly state what you have done, where you have gained. And, and that alone is an interesting and useful exercise. I gave that book to actually one of my teenage boys, and he read it quick.
[00:08:35] Jesse: It’s not like it’s some tome of a read, you know? Yeah. He read it quickly and was just like, “Man,
[00:08:39] Joe: Dad.” I read it very fast. It was really fun.
[00:08:41] Jesse: Yeah. But he was just like… I, I feel like I’ve made… He- I think he’s maybe a junior or a sophomore in high school. Yeah, young, young boy, and he,
[00:08:48] Joe: he was always- Wait a minute.
[00:08:49] Joe: This is your kid, and you don’t know what year they are?
[00:08:50] Jesse: Yeah, I, I couldn’t
[00:08:51] Joe: tell you now. Oh,
[00:08:53] Jesse: you gave it to him back then. What’s he… Yeah. I gave it
[00:08:53] Joe: to him back then. Oh, the gap and the gain. And he always- You know, I thought we were talking about your book right now. Yeah. I’m like, my God, you don’t know what year
[00:08:57] Joe: No, I’m
[00:08:57] Jesse: talking about… I’m not. I’m talking about Dan’s book. Dan’s book, ’cause you got me on it.
[00:09:01] Joe: I was like, Jesse has no idea how old his kids are.
[00:09:04] Jesse: Yeah. I can give you a rough estimate of when, how old they are. There’s, there’s a lot of them. So you gotta kinda like do the hands and th- and stuff. He’s a hard charger, which is a good thing, but I gave him that saying, like, “Listen, you gotta make sure you look back and note what you have achieved.”
[00:09:21] Jesse: Not always just, “It’s not enough. It’s not enough. It’s not enough.” So just to kinda reinforce what you’re talking about. With our money, it’s the same thing. I mean, gosh, with life it’s the same thing. You could browbeat yourself all day long. And I think too many people with money, when they get an itch and they’re like, “I’m gonna take this more seriously,” or whatever.
[00:09:38] Jesse: Maybe they get their W-2 in the mail and they’re like, “There’s no way I made that much money ’cause I have nothing to show for it.” Yeah, where did it go? That happens. Yeah. Maybe, I mean, maybe a lot of your listeners, like you said in the intro, you’re making more and more money, and you’re like, “Why do I still feel anxious like I’m 27 just getting started?”
[00:09:54] Jesse: That happens all over the place. And if we can, one, acknowledge first we have made some progress, and then second to kind of note, okay, there really is some anxiety here. What is it? How can I get my arms around it? How can I eliminate it? That’s where I hope the book can come in and help people out quite a bit.
[00:10:11] Joe: It is fascinating, but I think that knowing there’s other people anxious too. The fact that you said- Everybody … somebody like you, who sees people every day, their, their money every day, and their relationship with their money says that everybody does it. It’s, you know, “Hey, I’m in a sinking boat, but everybody’s sinking, so I feel, I feel much better.”
[00:10:30] Joe: But I know it does make you feel- Yeah … better when you go, “Hey, this isn’t just me. I’m not this person off, um, by myself. Everybody feels this.” So what does this look like in real life? Do I open up my accounts and start going through then my account line by line?
[00:10:44] Jesse: Yeah, you would… I mean, you look at a pile of money, ’cause we’re only perspective.
[00:10:48] Jesse: Look at that pile of, of money and you ask yourself, “What is it for?” It can only be five answers. Now, inside those five, infinite, you know, unique spending DNA of all people, but there’s only five answers that are possible. The money can be for now- It can be for later, it can be for ease, making the system itself easier to operate and run, less overhead, less friction.
[00:11:11] Jesse: It can be for you, or it can be for change. And if you consider all five of those as you’re deciding what your money is for, you will be considering a thorough amount of possibilities such that you begin to make trade-offs. You begin to feel, “If I do this now, I can’t do this thing that I thought of, like, for later.
[00:11:30] Jesse: If I do this thing later, this thing that is not available to me now.” I mean, Thomas Sowell, one of… a great economist, he said often, “People are always making trade-offs. They just don’t know it.” And what we’re trying to do with explicitly saying what our money is for spread among these five categories that cover everything, we are saying make these trade-offs known, and then decide.
[00:11:55] Jesse: There’s no, there’s no correct answer inside there, but to consi- to not consider all of them is incorrect. That’s where people will make the mistakes.
[00:12:03] Joe: Stackers, what I’d love for you to do would be to pause this right here, and if you’re not gonna pause it, do it in the next 24 hours, ’cause we already know if you don’t do something the next 24 hours, you’re not gonna do it.
[00:12:13] Joe: I would love for you to open up your bank account and just go through it the way Jesse just mentioned. So again, Jesse, we’ve got five.
[00:12:20] Jesse: Yeah.
[00:12:20] Joe: L- let’s walk through the five one more time.
[00:12:23] Jesse: For now, it’d be like, “I’ve got a bill due tomorrow.”
[00:12:25] Joe: Yep.
[00:12:26] Jesse: Cool, easy. Gotta do it. Right. For later could be, “The car’s making a funny noise.
[00:12:31] Jesse: I got a feeling in my stomach.” It could be the HVAC’s doing something it shouldn’t. It could be something cool like we have a big Christmas trip, you know, a few months from now kind of a thing. So anything for later in that regard. For ease is something very unique to YNAB, where we want people to build up money such that when they earn money in September, they’re spending it in October.
[00:12:53] Jesse: Money they earn in October, they’re spending in November. So the system gets some slack in it, and everything, bill paying, timing, paychecks. Paycheck one is paying these bills. Paycheck two is this. My spouse just got this commission. All that just goes away. It’s like, here’s the money we have for the month.
[00:13:09] Jesse: We use it, and as we’re using it, more money’s coming in. That’s the ease part. For you would be where you and I could sit, Joe, like, I don’t know, go to dinner or something, and I’d be like, “So Joe,” like, it’d be like we’re playing Spending Boggle. I’m like- “… Joe, tell me something that you spend money on that these other eight people around here will not say they spend money on.”
[00:13:29] Jesse: That’s how you can kind of find out like- Yeah … the unique thing that gets someone going. It’s a very, very fun conversation. And then the last section is for change, and that can be, money can be for change that comes at you. Like, I don’t know, you were furloughed. A job is looking a little iffy. Um, it could be that you got a big raise.
[00:13:47] Jesse: That’s a, that’s a great one. Um, it could be that you’re starting a business. It can be change that, like, is just happening. That- that’s normal. Or, or it can be change that you decide you want to see also. Maybe you’re like… I, I mean, I remember when Julie and I carved out… You’re gonna laugh at this ’cause you’re, you’re old enough, no offense, to, to get this.
[00:14:04] Jesse: Easy. When we were first starting YNAB in 2004, this new thing came out called AdWords, you know, where you could bid on terms and- Yeah … see yourself in the rankings. And I told Julie, I said, “Julie, we have s-” We had… Our, our grocery budget was 120 bucks a month, to give people context. And I said, “Hey-” We have $63 that I’ve carved out.
[00:14:27] Jesse: Could, we could use this to experiment with AdWords. And she was like, “Okay, yeah, 63.” That, and to us, that was like half of grocery money. Huge. This is a big deal. But clicks were like five cents a pop, so you actually could get enough people in to see like, oh, this is working, this messaging is working.
[00:14:43] Jesse: Anyway, I say that because that little bit of like $63 seed money for me and Julie, while big at the time, that was money that we were using for change. We were like, “We’re going to start this business. We’re going to see what happens.” That money, and it gets me most excited kind of on the entrepreneurial side, where people are like, “Listen, Jesse, I’ve squirreled away this money.
[00:15:03] Jesse: What do you think?” And what they’ve done is they’ve used some of that precious, beautiful resource called money to give themselves some time, some opportunity, some options to maybe make some change happen.
[00:15:13] Joe: That’s cool. It could be that course you wanted to take, the-
[00:15:15] Jesse: Absolutely.
[00:15:16] Joe: Yeah. You have one non-negotiable rule.
[00:15:20] Joe: We only answer the question using money that we already have. Why is future income not allowed to rescue the plan?
[00:15:28] Jesse: Yeah, ’cause it’s not there yet. That’s it. Now, I’ve just seen it too often to allow it, so yeah, it is non-negotiable. People will say, “Okay, here’s my pile of money, and I know what each dollar of it is for.”
[00:15:39] Jesse: And so you’re like, okay, g- and they’ve traded off because that, that pile of money is finite, so they can’t have it do everything. It’s gotta be e- you know, either or So they’ve done this fantastic exercise, and then something else will come up and they’ll say, “Oh, well, hold on. I will be getting this commission check on Friday,” or the, the client will pay me.
[00:15:56] Jesse: They said they’d pay me. Or even my paycheck guaranteed, right? Guaranteed on Friday. That’s coming. And so they’ll step away from that really important trade-off game with finite resources, and they’ll give themselves a little more breathing room, suppose it, with new money that isn’t there yet. What starts to happen is they’re trying to escape that squeeze of having to actually prioritize with a finite resource.
[00:16:23] Jesse: They’re trying to just make it not quite so much of a squeeze and give themselves some future money to make some hard decisions.
[00:16:30] Joe: This is where credit card debt comes from, by the way.
[00:16:32] Jesse: Always. It’s like, “I’ll just get out of it this month, and then next month will be different.” And it will be different, but it’ll be a lot the same, where some other new thing pops or whatever and something else is making a noise in the house, and it’s just on the card this one time.
[00:16:45] Jesse: I wonder if you- you’ve heard this. An oft-cited statistic that medical debt is what the main cause of bankruptcy, at least in the United States, right? And what they never talk about is all of the debt preceding the straw that broke the camel’s back- Oh … that was some kind of medical emergency. It is very rarely this person was not living on the credit card float, had no debt, and this big medical thing just nailed them.
[00:17:09] Jesse: You were teetering
[00:17:10] Joe: already. It’s
[00:17:11] Jesse: usually just you were teetering. You were not in a safe spot, and then that, it tipped you over. So the credit card… I mean, we’re, we’re hitting records again with credit card debt. We… During COVID, when everyone ratcheted down, had, had some money sent to them a little bit.
[00:17:25] Jesse: But even before all the money was given to people, everyone was ratcheting down, and credit card debt was precipitously dropping. The banks were freaking out. It was so awesome for me, though. Chase, Wells
[00:17:34] Joe: Fargo. I
[00:17:35] Jesse: loved it. Yeah, just plummeting, and the banks are like, “Where are our fees?” I mean, they were looking at their earnings prospects dropping.
[00:17:42] Jesse: That is such a lucrative business for them. And, uh, it’s sad for me, it’s sad for you to see that everybody’s just back to normal again, man It’s so sad. Back to normal.
[00:17:51] Joe: We are such a debtor economy that banks are freaking out. Where, which is funny, I don’t know if you’ve studied this worldwide finance, but Singapore is the exact opposite.
[00:17:59] Joe: I mean- Yes … the, the banking system, everything’s built on the fact that everybody saves. People stay out of debt. Yeah. And generally it’s a very lucrative place to be when everybody is not living in debtor hell and, and owes people money.
[00:18:13] Jesse: They… Singapore used to attract money from, from foreigners because the banking system was so solid.
[00:18:18] Jesse: Not a, not a lot of this fractional reserve type stuff where, you know, you could say, “I’ll park some money here,” and it’s really, really safe. They have so much of it that they’re kinda like, “Ah, we’re good now. We don’t need anyone else.” Wow. So it’s tougher to become a customer there now than it was- That’s a flex
[00:18:31] Jesse: you know, 20 years
[00:18:32] Joe: ago. Yeah, isn’t it?
[00:18:33] Jesse: Yeah.
[00:18:33] Joe: I’ve never heard what you talked about medical debt, but in my own practice back when I was a financial planner, I remember in the early years of financial planning I had this mentor. And it’s funny, it’s one of these guys, Jesse, that I learned what not to do as much as I learned what to do.
[00:18:47] Joe: Oh, yes. Yeah. You know? You can learn from the positive and the negative. He had some great stuff he did. This one I’m about to say was awful. We would always see this. People would come in and they would have medical debt, and they would go, “Well, the reason I have $25,000 in credit cards is because of these medical debts.”
[00:19:04] Joe: This, you know, whatever the, the situation is. And his name was Tony. Tony would ask to see their statements, and then he would do what was the most demeaning thing ever. He would go, “Oh, I see, I see Wendy’s hamburgers on here.” Uh- Oh, geez. … “You get those at the hospital? I see, I see JCPenney. I didn’t know there was JCPenney in the hospital waiting room.
[00:19:27] Joe: Like, why did you need that with medic… ” And he would just point out that none of this is medical debt. And it was what you were saying, but he needed to put some velvet on his hammer. A lot of velvet. Yeah.
[00:19:38] Jesse: Well, maybe a,
[00:19:39] Joe: maybe a pigeon, yeah. ‘Cause, uh, nobody was appreciative he brought it up that way, yet everybody got the point that, hey, maybe we need to do a better job of looking at- Yeah
[00:19:47] Joe: the little things so when the medical debt happens, that we’re in a good spot.
[00:19:51] Jesse: Yeah, they were trying to avoid some cognitive dissonance of like, “I know better, but I’d like to have my story be this so that maybe it doesn’t feel so rough.” Absolutely.
[00:19:59] Joe: Let’s do this in a kinder, gentler way than Tony did though, Jesse.
[00:20:03] Joe: Let’s start with this person though that feels buried, whether it’s medical debt or something else. Bill’s debt, a lot of priorities. You know, you see people I’m sure at YNAB come to you and they’re like, “The reason I’m here is I’ve got 50 priorities that all shout my name at one time.” Yeah. Where do I, where do I start?
[00:20:20] Jesse: You know what’s interesting about the word priority? Is it didn’t have a plural when it first became known. Like, there was no plural. It was just you had a priority. That was it. And I think the Latin is like a priori or something like that. Like, it literally means just one. And so it’s, we’ve, we’ve taken that word and made it, we’ve kind of taken the teeth out of it.
[00:20:38] Jesse: Many just ones. And like oh, well now I can have, yeah, I can have 40. Um, but the, the exercise that they haven’t done yet that got them here is kind of feeling like, um, the system wants you to feel like the money is always available. It’s always gonna be coming. You can walk past Zero and just swipe a card really quick if needed.
[00:20:57] Jesse: The bing that Apple Pay does. I love Apple Pay. It’s so convenient. Yeah. Bing. And that, that little bing, like I wonder how much money they spent developing that extremely pleasant sound of the bing, you know? Because you know that what they’re angling for is for people to spend and spend. Apple makes money when everybody spends money, now on anything, right?
[00:21:17] Jesse: The debit cards, the credit cards, they all make money when we spend. So the whole system is really geared toward us spending. Instagram’s really good at having you one-click shop and have it just arrive at your door so, so fast. Amazon invented the one-click back in the day. Mobile ordering, QR scanning, all this tech is pointed toward easier and easier spending.
[00:21:39] Jesse: And so this person that has all these places where their money’s going, they’re in a stream, and that stream is just carrying them, them along. And they are now slowly realizing like, “I don’t like where this is going. I don’t like how this feels.” And what we need them to do is just to kind of find footing in the stream decide what is most important to them, which they haven’t done yet, and then start to maybe walk upstream a little bit.
[00:22:03] Jesse: It’s, it’s not a r- it’s not rapids. Like, we can do it, but you gotta find your footing, and you really have to say, like, “This is the pile of money. What is it for? It can’t be for everything.” But when we get people doing the exercise, they’ll say in the first minute or two, “Listen, I have so much going on. I have this, this, this, this.”
[00:22:23] Jesse: But when you kinda slow it down and you remove all the noise, and you just start having them whittle away at the pile saying, “This’ll go for this, this’ll go for this,” their demeanor changes. It is… it’s one from a little bit of victim, a little bit of like, “Woe is me,” a little bit of like, “Hey, I, I’m helpless here.
[00:22:41] Jesse: This is just, this is what I’m dealing with.” And suddenly you see them a little… Their, their body language changes, their tone changes, and you see them asserting a little bit, and, and choosing, and actually exercising some agency with their money. And they realize, one, that wasn’t that hard, and two, it feels actually pretty good.
[00:23:02] Joe: Well, and I think it feels good ’cause you’re finally in control.
[00:23:05] Jesse: You are in control. You are taking control. You are t- now, they haven’t earned more money. All the bills are still sitting there waiting to be
[00:23:12] Joe: paid.
[00:23:13] Jesse: Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed except they are saying, “I am in control of this situation.”
[00:23:16] Joe: It
[00:23:17] Jesse: i- That’s the beginning of that transformation.
[00:23:19] Joe: It is so powerful, and when I was going from being bad with money to good with money, that’s exactly the way I felt. I remember this moment, Jesse, when I felt like m- my life was screwed. I was doomed, and then all of a sudden, after just walking through what you just said- The next collection agency called and I was like, “No, you’re getting paid when I tell you you get paid.”
[00:23:42] Jesse: Yeah.
[00:23:42] Joe: And by the way, you- ‘Cause
[00:23:43] Jesse: you have the-
[00:23:43] Joe: You,
[00:23:44] Jesse: you, you- Yeah, you’re, you’re the one holding the money.
[00:23:46] Joe: Exactly.
[00:23:46] Jesse: You have… Like, it’s like when you accidentally pay a bill you shouldn’t have, and the, and the insurance is like, “Oh, well, uh, yeah, we’ll not cover that.” You have no option, so holding that money is…
[00:23:55] Jesse: You have so much power when you’re the one holding the money. I love that. I ju- that little bit, you can tell them to take a hike for days and they can’t do anything about it.
[00:24:03] Joe: It is fantastic, and I assured them, I’m like, “You will get your money, but you’re not running this game anymore. You can call me as many names as you want.”
[00:24:08] Joe: Yeah. “It’s me.” Let’s move… There’s so much to talk about there about today, but let’s move to tomorrow. Once today’s handled, you know, then we start looking at tomorrow. Why are so many surprise expenses not actually surprises?
[00:24:22] Jesse: I don’t know what it is about where we… I, I don’t even… Like Christmas, people are like, “Oh my gosh, here it comes.”
[00:24:28] Jesse: And you’re like, “Man, that’s pretty, pretty consistent,” you know?
[00:24:32] Joe: They haven’t had a change in the calendaring of Christmas ever.
[00:24:36] Jesse: Yeah, for so, so long, and it goes back to a little bit of, like, who’s in control. Are you in control or, you know, are you just, uh, you know, flapping in the wind? But, um, my oldest boy, who’s 22, okay?
[00:24:48] Jesse: So I did, I did know that right off the bat. That’s a nice job.
[00:24:50] Joe: But
[00:24:51] Jesse: yeah, he curb checked and, like, popped a tire just like that. Bless his heart, I’ve been teaching him these things for years and years, and he’s out working and traveling. He needs his car daily ’cause he’s- it’s- he’s, like, on the road. And I was like, “Ah, that’s lame.”
[00:25:03] Jesse: And he’s like, “Yeah, it was 340 bucks for the tire.” And I’m like, “Wait, what? For, like, a little Kia?” I, uh-
[00:25:10] opener: Man …
[00:25:11] Jesse: that’s not a Formula 1 tire. And then he’s like, “Oh, no, it was, it was 150 for the tow truck.” And then I was like, “Okay, you didn’t get taken. The tow truck was expensive, but you didn’t get taken.” And he’s still kinda learning the ropes on, like, car ownership and all the hassles that come with it.
[00:25:25] Jesse: But what was really cool is I was like, “Oh, that’s lame. Like, that’s- that cuts into your earnings.” And he’s like, “Oh, no, I, I have like two grand set aside for car stuff.” There it is.
[00:25:36] Joe: Fantastic
[00:25:37] Jesse: You know? And, uh, the guy eats at Chipotle a lot. I’m not gonna lie, like he’s still eating at Chipotle all the time.
[00:25:42] Jesse: But he does have money squirreled away for the car stuff. And that, that mentality of like this surprise expense doesn’t need to be a surprise, and it can be kind of pretty ho-hum normal. I would love for people to, to say after they’ve been doing this for, I don’t know, maybe six months, eight months, suddenly where they’re like, “Man, money’s gotten kind of boring.”
[00:26:05] Jesse: Even when they’re using our app sometimes they’ll be like, “I wish I could open the app more and like had something to do with it.” But you’re like, “You don’t. It, it’s all don’t. Go, you know, go stare at a wall.”
[00:26:16] Joe: You gotta put some games in there, Jesse .
[00:26:17] Jesse: Yeah, something like that. But that’s when you know you’ve arrived, where you’ve made money pretty boring because you’ve considered those later expenses that have always surprised you, usually made you reach for a card, and you’ve said like, “No, we wanna go on the next vacation with cash.
[00:26:32] Jesse: Yes, summer camp comes every summer, Christmas comes every Christmas,” all that stuff. And everyone’s a little unique. I mean, you and I’d have a lot of crossover. I’d be like, “You have insurance premiums?” You’re like, “Yeah.” Yeah. And I’m like, “Okay, so do I. You have property taxes?” “Yeah.” “So do I.” There’s a lot of that.
[00:26:44] Jesse: But then there’s some unique stuff where I’m like, oh, we… My family is all into the travel right now. That’s Julie’s main way she loves to spend. And, uh, so we s- we’re setting aside money for an October trip with fall break with the school. And when the trip comes, you just do the trip, like you just have fun on the trip.
[00:27:01] Jesse: There… Like the whole money game and should we buy this churro at Disney or whatever, I don’t know if that’s your thing. It’s not really mine, but you just get the churro. Heck, get two. You know, live on the edge. All right, can I
[00:27:10] Joe: ask you if the churro’s my thing or if Disney’s my thing?
[00:27:13] Jesse: Churros are my thing, but Disney churros, I, the overlap starts to get really small- Oh, yeah
[00:27:17] Jesse: at
[00:27:17] Joe: that
[00:27:17] Jesse: point
[00:27:17] Joe: Agreed. Yeah. I’ve never… But D- Disney churros, not together. What’s the thing at Disney? The, uh, the Dole Whip. That’s my, that’s my Disney thing. Yes. The Dole Whip.
[00:27:25] Jesse: That would be a g- that would be a good one.
[00:27:26] Joe: It’s incredible.
[00:27:27] Jesse: I, I always saw you more as like one of those turkey leg guys.
[00:27:29] Joe: Oh, my God.
[00:27:30] Joe: Just like grab the turkey leg and kinda- Just ’cause I have a turkey leg body doesn’t mean I’m a turkey leg guy . And I thought you were my friend. If I’m just starting out at this though, Jesse, you know, there’s a place to start and a place to get to. I mean, the place to get to, I think, is that anything comes up and it’s almost like swatting a mosquito.
[00:27:49] Joe: I’m like, “Okay, yeah. Got it, got it, got it.” Yeah. All about
[00:27:51] Jesse: it, yeah.
[00:27:51] Joe: But how far ahead should beginners look? Just next month, next quarter, full year? Where do we begin?
[00:27:57] Jesse: I mean next, next paycheck, honestly. Yeah, if you’re just getting started and you’re living paycheck to paycheck, then that, that paycheck that’s there, maybe a little bit that’s left over right now, you get that money assigned that you have on hand, take control, assert your authority, and then when that next paycheck arrives, repeat.
[00:28:14] Jesse: And start thinking a little bit about later so that you can slowly step away from that paycheck to paycheck grind. But yeah, it’s a paycheck dance for a little bit. Usually, on average, we see people l- start to live on their prior month’s income entirely f- four to six months-
[00:28:31] Joe: Sweet …
[00:28:32] Jesse: usually how long it takes.
[00:28:33] Joe: That’s so great. There’s another source of anxiety that’s related that’s nothing to do with overspending. It’s just the timing, the cadence of life, right? Yeah. The electric bill’s due two days before the paycheck arrives. The insurance payment hits the same week that groceries hit. How do we- Yeah … begin to fix that problem?
[00:28:50] Jesse: Yeah, that ease answer where some of that money is for ease, when you have a pile of money sitting at the beginning of the month, all of it, c- conceivably you could go to Costco, pay your electric bill, pay your insurance bill, pay the dog whatever thing, pay some Netflix subscription, all on the first, and you’d be like, “Oh, this month is done.
[00:29:09] Jesse: Easy breezy.” So the timing of when those bills actually land, we eliminate, and that’s just by having that pile of money there at the beginning of the month, and then while the month is happening, you’re obviously earning more money and kind of replenishing that pile to then be drawn down for the next month.
[00:29:24] Jesse: But that, that bit of stepping away from that edge of paycheck to paycheck living, the psychological gain people get from that is unbelievable, where like they, they put, they start putting bills on autopilot that used to rob them of sleep, right? And suddenly they’re like, “Oh, yeah, the gas bill’s higher in the winter, but yeah, I…
[00:29:45] Jesse: It, it, we’re good.” You know? And it just auto pays. And again, mosquito. You just, you don’t even think about it. That ease portion, I can’t overstate how critical it is for just the system operating well enough where good decisions can keep being made.
[00:30:00] Joe: You’ve been on Stacking Benjamins, down here in mom’s basement enough times to know how much I like games.
[00:30:04] Joe: Our Stackers know how much I like games, but Stackers, I want you to play along because Jesse, let’s play a game. I’m gonna give you the spending. You tell me where it fits or tell me the answer depends, right? And tell me how the answer depends. Okay. Yeah. So, uh, and Stackers, I want you to play along. With everything Jesse said so far, let’s see how well you do.
[00:30:23] Joe: Ready? $1,200 car repair. Where does it fit?
[00:30:27] Jesse: For later.
[00:30:29] Joe: A vacation booked nine months from now.
[00:30:32] Jesse: That one’s, that can go in either later, or if you’re like, “I’m going…” I mentioned F1 earlier, and you’re like, “Jesse, I, I live and dream F1,” and it’s that, I’d be like, “Ooh, that’s kind of for you.” Like, that’s a uniquely Joe thing.
[00:30:43] Jesse: Yeah. So you could go either way.
[00:30:44] Joe: Yeah. I’ll do F1. I’ll do NASCAR. I don’t care. I like it all.
[00:30:47] Jesse: Yeah, who cares?
[00:30:48] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Auto racing is, uh, and yeah, 100%. Getting ahead of my mortgage payment, where would that go?
[00:30:54] Jesse: That’s four E’s. Yeah.
[00:30:56] Joe: A cash cushion that lets you leave that toxic job
[00:31:02] Jesse: For change. Yeah
[00:31:04] Joe: A $75 dinner after a difficult week.
[00:31:09] Jesse: For you, most definitely. Yeah.
[00:31:12] Joe: How about this one? A new woodworking tool. My buddy’s big time into woodworking. He gets the latest, greatest woodworking tool.
[00:31:18] Jesse: That’s for me. That’s for Jesse Meatham right there. No one else. Yeah.
[00:31:22] Joe: You’re into it, too.
[00:31:23] Jesse: Oh, I’m so into it. I, I come up with projects just to buy a new tool.
[00:31:26] Jesse: That’s my buddy
[00:31:27] Joe: Rick. It’s ridiculous. He just, and, and he l- Yeah … and the deeper he goes, the more he’s in YouTube heaven, I think. I was gonna say YouTube hell.
[00:31:33] Jesse: It’s-
[00:31:34] Joe: But YouTube
[00:31:34] Jesse: heaven … it’s a great, it’s a great place where you, you, there’s, it’s endless, right? Like, you can just, you can dive into green wood carving and for the rest of your life if you want, or you can go a completely different direction and do wood burning, you know?
[00:31:48] Jesse: Or, I mean, or you can just go Japanese and just stay there your whole life. It’s a great, great spot.
[00:31:53] Joe: That’s… You’d never think something so niche would be so wide.
[00:31:56] Jesse: Yeah. And that’s the beauty of what, when we live now. You can find your people and then spend money in that area, uh, your whole life.
[00:32:03] Joe: That is funny.
[00:32:04] Joe: I feel like that with board games. I’m like, yeah, I like board games, but not that kind of board game. Like, are you kidding me? No way. Uh, college savings, either for you or for a child.
[00:32:14] Jesse: Oh, yeah. Um, oh, that could be so many. It could be for you. It could be for change. What if it’s the first college graduate in your family?
[00:32:22] Jesse: That’s maybe a change energy there. It could be for later, where you’re just like, “Ah, that’s, that’s for, you know, 18 years down the road.” The baby’s just born, and you’re like, “Okay, college fund starts,” if you’re so inclined.
[00:32:32] Joe: And what’s so exciting about this, and I think, Jesse, this is a lot of… And you get much deeper into this, but I feel like this is the big, biggest takeaway point, is just look at the fun we’re having just deciding where it goes.
[00:32:45] Joe: Yeah. The power you’re giving yourself in thinking about, no, this is this. So when you actually then spend the money, it goes from, where did that money go, to this big high five, to wow-
[00:32:54] Jesse: Yeah …
[00:32:55] Joe: I completed the- You’re
[00:32:56] Jesse: acting …
[00:32:56] Joe: the cycle. Yeah.
[00:32:57] Jesse: Yeah. You’re, you’re expressing yourself authentically and forcefully in the world through money.
[00:33:02] Joe: It’s wild taking your budget and turning it into an art project. It’s so fun. A charitable gift.
[00:33:09] Jesse: Oh, that’s a good one. I’m, I’m thinking about my, my, my buddy Dave, really into, like, uh, adaptive skiing, where they can buy all this equipment for people that maybe don’t have a leg, or they’re missing, you know, something, um, wheelchairs on skis.
[00:33:24] Jesse: And so that, I would say that’s for you in the sense that Dave like lights up thinking about raising money to just get more of that gear for people.
[00:33:33] Joe: Uh, a 50 cent donut.
[00:33:36] Jesse: Man, that started it all, you know? But, um, that was just for me. Yeah
[00:33:41] Joe: We’ll get into that
[00:33:41] Jesse: I wanted it and didn’t think I could have it, yeah
[00:33:43] Joe: We- we’ll get into the 50 cent donut in a second.
[00:33:46] Joe: But I like to make most of our questions, make sure most of what we’re talking about is for people if they’re single or if they’re married, Jesse. But sometimes, you know, in that list that we just had, a couple disagrees. In which of these areas do you find couples most disagree, and is the disagreement a good thing, or is that friction?
[00:34:06] Jesse: Ooh. I think, uh, at first it’s a good thing because the friction… I mean, that’s, that’s information, right? You’re… Like, finding out you disagree is good information. Now, can you from there work toward agreeing or just agreeing to disagree, and that might be totally okay also. Like, can you just do it in a way that’s productive and communicative and honest?
[00:34:28] Jesse: Then I think you’re good to go. But just disagreeing is just a point to be like, “Ooh, we’ve, we’ve just found something out. Let’s… A little archeological, you know?” “Let’s, let’s brush it away and- Yeah … figure it out a little bit.” You know? Yeah,
[00:34:38] Joe: I think so too. I think sometimes the MMA cage match, you know, where we’re just gonna go ahead- Yeah
[00:34:43] Joe: and disagree is a great thing to figure out, what do our shared values look like?
[00:34:48] Jesse: Yeah. And what’s interesting about those cage matches, just to run with your metaphor, in the moment, they turn it on and they’re going, and then so much of the time… I mean, they’re doing, they’re putting on a show obviously, but so much of the end of it they’re both just like, “Hey, don’t we love doing this?”
[00:35:01] Jesse: Right. It’s, like, fist bumping. Like, there, there’s a respect there. There’s a, a camaraderie in that. I mean, there are very few people that have the same understanding that those two have.
[00:35:11] Joe: Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano hugging it out after they- Yeah … totally wasted our time with that 30-second-
[00:35:16] Jesse: Yeah. Sometimes those are a little disappointing.
[00:35:19] Jesse: You’re like, “All that build up- I know … and there it was.” You know? I
[00:35:22] Joe: know. Let’s talk about that- But, uh- Let’s talk about that donut, ’cause you were studying accounting. You and Julie were being intensely responsible. You’re saving for a baby and a car, and you couldn’t bring yourself to spend 50 cents. I teed up that story.
[00:35:36] Joe: Yeah. Tell us what happened.
[00:35:38] Jesse: Yeah, I was standing there. It, I don’t… People don’t know this, but if you take one of those old-fashioned donuts and you microwave it for 10 seconds, it’s just pure heaven. I think it absorbs into the bloodstream quicker. Like, the… Everything’s good about it. I, uh, was walking past on my way to class, and I was a hardworking, diligent student, new husband.
[00:35:55] Jesse: Like, I was giving it my all. And I just see it. It’s 50 cents. There wasn’t even tax, I think, because it was on the university. You’re sitting there like, “Oh, I can’t even have that.” We’re doing everything right. We’re saving up for a… You know, I think we had just bought the new car partially with wedding money that we had been given.
[00:36:16] Jesse: We had bought a laptop with wedding money, ’cause we didn’t have a computer before we got married. I mean, we were just scraping and scraping. And I just thought, “Here I am supposed to be, like, good at this, and I feel like money is just this source of endless anxiety for me.” Yeah, it was the realization. I didn’t buy the donut.
[00:36:35] Jesse: And then I came home that night pretty whiny for a little bit with Julie. It’s just like, “We can’t… I can’t breathe,” you know? Now, Julie grew up not, not… I don’t wanna tell too much of her story, but it was like, if you open the fridge, you hope there’s food. Mm. Like, single mom, teacher. So Julie’s natural ability to just get by with virtually nothing was sky-high.
[00:36:59] Jesse: Mine? No. And I was just feeling like I was suffocating. So I go to her and we, we kind of… And I’m like, “I just, this is too tight. Like, there’s just no room to move.” And so we decided like, okay, well, let’s take some of this money Like, kind of make it our own, in a sense. And that was where we said, “Okay, we’re gonna do a date each week,” and one of those weeks each month we got to get a pizza.
[00:37:22] Jesse: That was how tight things were.
[00:37:23] Joe: This is where the for you kinda came from.
[00:37:25] Jesse: Absolutely. And then, like, we knew going to the gym was important, and so we’re like, “We’re gonna do a gym membership. We’re, we’re just gonna… We’re gonna do it.” There was another one that I can’t think of off the top of my head that was just kind of like our claim on some of our money.
[00:37:39] Jesse: And once we claimed a little bit of it and just said like, “No, no, money, we work hard for this little bit of money we get. We get to say a little bit what it’s for.” In doing that, it just bought us a l- just enough breathing room. We each got five bucks a month to spend on whatever we wanted, which mine was mostly donuts and hers she just wouldn’t spend.
[00:37:58] Jesse: That’ll get you 10 donuts. That’s a pretty good gig. That is a good gig. You know?
[00:38:01] Joe: That makes the gym feel even more worth it. It
[00:38:03] Jesse: does. Yeah, you gotta do something about it. So that was the beginning of it, and it was us recognizing we decide. We aren’t just doing even what good books are telling us to do, right?
[00:38:14] Jesse: Being uber responsible and intensely responsible, you had said. We, we weren’t letting enough of us come into the decisions.
[00:38:23] Joe: As I was reading this, I was thinking, “Okay, if 50 cents felt unsafe, like, what amount of income would’ve felt like enough?” You know? Mm-hmm. Or, or is it an income or other people’s expectations or my own expectations?
[00:38:37] Joe: What would’ve made that feel safer?
[00:38:39] Jesse: My first salary job out of school at a big accounting firm was $45,000 a year. And, uh, but rent was 900. To give people con- that, that’ll help them quickly do some computation, like, oh, okay, they could still make things happen. Sure. You know? But I remember even then, you know, we get this steady, stable, safe job.
[00:38:58] Jesse: Those are air quotes the whole time. I remember we wanted to buy a couch. Well, Julie wanted to buy a couch, and I was okay sitting on the floor for a long time ’cause we again felt like, “Is there enough? We can’t do this,” you know? We were super excited about getting a washer and dryer in the apartment.
[00:39:13] Jesse: That became this penny-pinching moment where Julie had to kinda call me back again. We were making way more money than we were at that donut story. Same, same worry, same consternation. And then, Joe, I talk to people making ear-curling amounts of money, and when you get them talking long enough, especially to me ’cause they feel like I’m like a safe-
[00:39:36] Joe: Sure
[00:39:36] Jesse: I don’t know, like, I’m like a priest or something- … where they’re like, “I can confess this to you.”
[00:39:40] Joe: Well, you’ve seen it so many times you’re not gonna blink.
[00:39:42] Jesse: Yeah, I don’t blink at all. And you hear the, the worry in their voice, and we’re talking about people that are making, I, I’m not overstating, millions of dollars a year.
[00:39:50] Jesse: And they are worried because they, they haven’t sat down and said, “Well, what are these millions of dollars for?” You know? Like, “What are they really for?” And man, you get someone that’s making that kind of income to bring intentionality not just to earning it, which they’re killer good at- But also to how they allocate, spend, distribute all of that.
[00:40:11] Jesse: Man, that’s a powerful thing, and I think they know it. I think they know that there could be something there for them.
[00:40:18] Joe: It is so interesting because tying your money… I had never thought about it until this conversation and this book. I had never thought about it in terms of my day-to-day budget, but I had thought about this in terms of your goals.
[00:40:32] Joe: Like, the effectiveness of tying your assets to specific goals makes it so you don’t chase returns. You’re not chasing the next index. You’re not comparing yourself to stupid stuff. You’re just, “I’m going after this thing that I want,” and I’m, if I begin with what I really want and then I work backwards, it makes this whole thing much easier, and you tie it all the way back into your daily spending.
[00:40:56] Joe: Uh, it… And it’s, it’s so powerful Let’s end by going back much, much further. We asked you for a story you almost never get to tell, and you were telling us about seventh grade Jesse. And I just seventh grade Jesse, you organized a grassroots skating competition with these brand donations and about 100 competitors.
[00:41:21] Joe: Like, what could go wrong there, Jesse?
[00:41:23] Jesse: Nothing at all. Unless you talk to the principal of the elementary school where we held it without permission in the parking lot. Good old, good old Mr. Hammond. I was a year out of elementary school. We went one through six in there, and then I was in seventh grade, and I was into this very niche thing.
[00:41:39] Jesse: You talk about, you know, niches that go deep. I don’t think this one went deep, but, uh, aggressive inline skating, you know, guys sliding down rails, half pipes, stairs, and the whole thing. I was so into it with my little friends, and we thought we were just so… We were so cool. Who am I kidding, Joe? You were.
[00:41:56] Jesse: We were so cool. Yes, duh. We got in our heads where we wanted to hold a competition to see who was the best aggressive inline skater around. And I don’t know what it was, but I tend to kind of be a galvanizer, if you’re using, like, uh, Lencioni’s, uh, wonder, you know, framework. I, yeah, I just tend to kind of promote.
[00:42:15] Jesse: I think I have a little bit of ego and a little bit, you know, like, enough pride to just kind of be like, “This is important for everyone to know about.” So we started procuring ramps and h- you know, like, half pipes that you would kind of bring on trucks. We had older boys that could drive vehicles helping, you know, which was a big deal to have a vehicle that you could use.
[00:42:35] Jesse: And we ended up setting up this whole course-
[00:42:37] Joe: It’s also a big
[00:42:38] Jesse: deal- …
[00:42:38] Joe: on a Saturday … to have a 16-year-old that will do your bidding when you’re in seventh grade.
[00:42:41] Jesse: That is true. Well, they were en- they were entering in the competition, and there were prizes at the end. So the, the half pipes, everything, we get there in the parking lot, but prior to that, I needed prizes to attract people.
[00:42:52] Jesse: So I formed an organization in the moment. I called it the Arizona, uh, something, something Association, you know, Inline Skating Association. And I wrote letters, uh, because that was what you did back then, to these, these brands, and I really was just wanting to score, like, free gear, you know? And they called me.
[00:43:10] Jesse: I remember one time at dinner, the phone rings, and my mom’s like, “Uh, Jesse, it’s for you. It’s Hyper.” And they were like… They would make wheels. And she’s like… And so I have to pretend I’m, like, older.
[00:43:22] headlines: Hello?
[00:43:22] Jesse: And I’m part of this associate- Hello … hello, you know? And I don’t think I hit puberty yet probably at seventh grade.
[00:43:28] Jesse: So I don’t know what they thought, but they were like, “Yeah, is this…” I said, “Yeah, we’re doing this competition.” They sent boxes. They sent banners, wheels. I mean, I probably got $1,000 of gear from Hyper Wheels alone, bless their hearts. And then at that point I was like, “Well, I can’t…” I thought I would get some free gear, but they had given me so much, I was like- I, I have this obligation to make this competition legitimate.
[00:43:51] Jesse: Like, they’re acting like it’s legitimate. I need to make it legitimate. Sure. So instead of this, this kid just being like asking for freebies. So we plaster flyers everywhere, word gets out, I think probably through pagers is how it was spread, you know, back then. And, uh, we get 100 kids in there, and we’re judging it, and there are parents coming.
[00:44:11] Jesse: A lot of people had never seen people do stuff on rollerblades like what these kids could do. And then Mr. Hammond arrives. We were at, you know, peak competition. And he rolls up, and he knows me. I mean, I was in his school the year before, you know? And
[00:44:25] Joe: he- But did, okay, wait a minute. I wanna know if this is omission or commission, right?
[00:44:29] Joe: Did you just in your checkboxes in seventh grade, I could see you just not realizing, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize I would need permission to do it here,” ’cause, you
[00:44:38] Jesse: know- That
[00:44:38] Joe: is exactly it … we just play around. Yeah. Or was it, “I bet I can get away with this on a Saturday,” or…?
[00:44:42] Jesse: No, I was too naive to even think that it was a big deal to…
[00:44:45] Jesse: It’s an emp- It was on a Saturday. I’m like, “No one’s gonna be parked there.” Yeah. So that’s just- Perfect … clear, like that’s asphalt. That’s a public good, right? Like this is like the Boston Commons here. Anyone can use this for anything. So that’s, yeah, we just set it all up. And by that time it was going. I mean, we had crowds, like adults, like cars stopping and just watching.
[00:45:05] Jesse: And you have 100 attendees, but then you have probably 200 in the crowds milling around. And I just regretted not selling water. At that point I was like, “We could have made some money on sodas or something cold.” Cleaned up. You know? Concessions. But Mr. Hammond’s like, “Who’s in charge?” And I’m sure his eye level was going high, and he was just totally missing the five-footer that was like, “Hey, it’s me,” you know, down here.
[00:45:28] Jesse: So- Look
[00:45:28] opener: at it, all the
[00:45:29] Jesse: parents watching … um, he was so cool about it. Was
[00:45:31] opener: he?
[00:45:31] Jesse: Like this is a, yeah, this is the thing that was cool about an elementary school principal, and I think, I’ll bet they’re all, like, they read kids. He got a read on me so quick. And I think what he did in there with- that was so awesome, he comes up to me, he’s like, “Jesse, this is amazing.”
[00:45:45] Jesse: One, he complimented me. He’s like, “This is amazing. Next time you do this, make sure you get my permission.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah, we will.” I, I just think that’s such a cool thing for him to do. He read the room, or the parking lot, and I don’t know. I, I’ve always been grateful to him for not just shutting it down.
[00:46:02] Jesse: He, he could have. Maybe, maybe there’s a lawyer listening that’s like, “He should have.” Sure. You know, “Mr. Hammond’s crazy.”
[00:46:07] Joe: But what an educator, right? I mean, what an educator.
[00:46:10] Jesse: Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:11] Joe: If he would’ve shut it down, you wouldn’t have learned anything. Like my obvious follow-up question is, so knowing you for almost a decade now, I mean, not well, but I’ve known you for about a decade, like what part of the person that created YNAB was created that day?
[00:46:29] Jesse: I think there was something in me that likes to get people together. And you, you know, you see that with YNAB. Like, YNAB has this crazy strong community. It’s like-
[00:46:38] Joe: We’ve talked about it before … you get each other. It is, y- you know, in the best way possible, we have called it a cult, right? Yeah. My buddy here in Texarkana, people don’t remember the last time you were on the show, so for the few people that might have heard that, I’ll say it again.
[00:46:51] Joe: Sitting next to this friend of mine who barely knows what I do, new friend, our, our kids went to school together. I start telling him about our podcast, ’cause he asked, and, and he goes, “Oh my God, I use this thing called Y- It is amazing. It is just so amazing, and there’s so many cool people that use it.” Yes.
[00:47:07] Joe: “And I’m on the forums all the time, and it is great.” And I, I literally, Jesse, rolled my eyes because Because I love the cult so much. It is so awesome, but it still is… I knew for the next 20 minutes he wasn’t gonna shut up about how amazing, not just your product is, but getting these people together with these shared values.
[00:47:29] Jesse: Was he a vegan CrossFitter too? ‘Cause that’s the end of the joke- He was, he was … where it’s like, how do you know? Yeah.
[00:47:34] Joe: Well, then I wouldn’t have been sitting next to him. No, but he coulda had a donut, then we would’ve been… Coulda
[00:47:40] Jesse: had a donut, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:47:42] Joe: Oh, man. The book is called Never Worry About Money Again.
[00:47:49] Joe: It’s available everywhere?
[00:47:51] Jesse: Yeah, everywhere. We self-published this one, and I say that because we got to do something really cool. We got to make it as short as we wanted to make it, and publishers don’t let you do that. They’re like, “You gotta hit, I don’t know, 180 pages or something.” I cut things from that book, whole chapters that we had written, and one of them I actually really liked and was…
[00:48:11] Jesse: I was like, “I need to make an essay out of that or something.” But the book is a tight read. N- there’s, like, I’m, we’re not wasting people’s time. I want you to get in there and see how we have you think about money as a, as a, an extension of you, and then that money is meant to be spent and only. That’s the only thing it can do.
[00:48:30] Jesse: And then you just have to know, okay, how, how is that money to be spent? And the book walks you through it quick. So I hope it’s an accidental full read for people where they just are like, “Oh yeah, I, I got it.” And no fluff in there. I’m really proud of the fact that we could give someone, give people something tight and not, uh, I don’t know, not just bloated.
[00:48:48] Jesse: I, I shouldn’t say that. There are a lot of great books, you know, by publishers- Sure … that, that don’t do that. I was, I was excited to like kind of do this on our own terms in, at least in that one way.
[00:48:56] Joe: Well, what I think is amazing is there’s no fluff. We just spoke for 45 minutes, and we just skimmed the surface.
[00:49:03] Joe: Like it is- Yeah. And it’s a short read. So there’s how packed it is, Stackers. Again, the name of the book, Never Worry About Money Again. We’ll link to it on our show notes. Thank you for mentoring our Stackers again, Jesse. So great to catch up with you. Let’s go have a donut and watch F1 together.
[00:49:18] Jesse: Absolutely. Sounds great. Thanks, Joe.
[00:49:25] Doug: Hey there, Stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and it was on today’s date in Cleveland, Ohio, that a miracle occurred.
[00:49:31] Joe: Cleveland? I see what you did there.
[00:49:33] Doug: Yeah. I mean, now that I know that they’re spelling it wrong, I’m only gonna pronounce it Cleveland. It’s just, it’s the right thing to do. That’s right, Stackers, it’s the apocalypse, ’cause I’m doing a second piece of trivia about Cleveland in a three-week period.
[00:49:47] Doug: Time to gather up the kids, head for the storm cellar, because the end of days is nigh. You have the green light. Which, in the world’s worst segue, brings us to today’s trivia question. It was in Cleveland back in 1914 that the first electric stoplight rolled out. How many colors did it feature? I’ll be back right after I green-light Joe’s mom making more brownies.
[00:50:11] Doug: Those things are addictive, and I need something to get all this Ohio taste out of my mouth. Blah.
[00:50:22] Doug: Hey there, Stackers. I’m Michigan lover and guy who uses the word Ohio to bring a pox upon your family, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Ah, Cleveland. It’s weird that the electric stoplight inventor put the first one in Cleveland because if you look at a map, you’d see Cleveland isn’t anywhere near the edge of Ohio.
[00:50:40] Doug: Shouldn’t the first stoplight been, like, right at the border warning you that you’re about to enter the Buckeye State? Well, they messed that up because it was at the corner of Euclid and East 105th Street that the first electric stoplight was erected. But here was today’s question. Erected is a funny word.
[00:50:59] Doug: But here was today’s question. You are 11 years old. Here’s today’s question. How many colors did it have? Well, today’s has three. The first one had only two. That’s so- such an Ohio move. It had a red one that said stop and a green one that illuminated the word move and a buzzer to tell you the light was about to change colors.
[00:51:25] Doug: Of course, we’ve now traded that buzzer for the yellow light to remind people to speed up. Just kidding. Yellow means caution allegedly because you might be driving into Ohio. And now back to two guys so happy they’re in Texarkana, Joe and OG.
[00:51:44] Joe: It is, it is always an adventure when we go near Ohio stuff, especially, OG, that it’s getting close to football season.
[00:51:52] Joe: I mean, we’re, we’re there. Time to do some, uh, Buckeye bashing.
[00:51:56] Doug: Is there a time not to do that? I’m- I’m sure- I was gonna say, is there ever an expiration date on that?
[00:52:01] Joe: Do we need football season for that? Uh, we don’t. Uh, big thanks to Jesse Mecham for joining us today. I love this idea. What’s the money for?
[00:52:09] Joe: The one question. What’s the money for?
[00:52:12] bit: That’s what the money is for.
[00:52:14] headlines: Hello, darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins
[00:52:21] Joe: headlines. Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. And you know, OG, people think they gotta get all fancy. They gotta get fancy to get millions of dollars stacked.
[00:52:32] Joe: Well, it turns out that is not the case. I was so pleased to read this piece by Sarah Nassauer. Sarah writes, “He earns $33 an hour as a Costco cashier. Now he’s a millionaire.” Guess how he did it, OG? He just put the money-
[00:52:50] OG: I’m gonna say he saved a little bit all the time for a long time?
[00:52:54] Joe: Pretty incredible, huh?
[00:52:56] Joe: Long tenure workers like cashier Tony Barzar are reliable, experienced, and able to speed shoppers through a checkout line. Costco’s willing to keep them around. This piece is actually written for business owners, but I wanna talk about the fact that Tony didn’t do anything fancy at all, OG. There was, there was nothing.
[00:53:14] Joe: He used the power of automation. He put money away for 30 years, and he looks at his account, and as a Costco cashier, and a damn good one, reading this piece, by the way, which is why Costco works hard to hold onto him. And we’ll get to the business owner piece of this in a minute. He’s, he’s a millionaire.
[00:53:34] Joe: You mean you didn’t need Kelce? He didn’t need to jump on DraftKings?
[00:53:39] OG: Lose 20% on SpaceX?
[00:53:41] Joe: Yeah, didn’t need to do any of that.
[00:53:43] OG: Too soon? Too soon? I mean, I’ve seen a lot of this stuff lately, which I find kind of interesting, and, and it’s a, it’s a great thought experiment just to kinda wrap your head around it.
[00:53:52] OG: But the amount of time it takes you to save to get to 300K is half the distance as it takes for you to save to get to a million. If you’re saving 1,000 a month, and your portfolio grows to 300K, you’re halfway there. And it just doesn’t seem that that’s logical because you’d say, “Well, you know, 500,000 would be halfway to a million.”
[00:54:13] OG: But because of the value of the compounding. And I’m sure you could do that for all sorts of numbers, to two million and five million and whatever. And whatever your goal is, it seems really impossible to get to. I don’t care what the number is that you’re trying to reach or where you are, unless you measure backwards on trying to get a sense of what your progress has been, the idea of compounding in the future just, it’s very hard to comprehend, and it’s very hard to believe.
[00:54:40] OG: It’s very hard to experience in real time. And no matter where you are in that process, it, it can feel pretty discouraging. It’s not until you have done it for a while and then look back to be able to go, “Oh, wow, I remember a time I had 100 grand. Now I have 300.” Like, holy crap That’s awesome
[00:55:00] Joe: Doug, while we’re talking about this, can you, uh, pull up the guy in the basement, or is that where you’re going?
[00:55:05] Joe: Way ahead of you. You already did.
[00:55:06] Doug: Way ahead of you, Joe. Yeah. It’s, um, Stacker Mark who s- uh, said… Now, this goes back a couple of weeks, but he said, “OG was talking about years to double your investments. I’m one of those folks who has all my financial data in Quicken back to the ’90s, so I did a check to see how long it took for each year’s end of year balance to double.
[00:55:25] Doug: It is surprisingly consistent for a while, even with the financial crisis in there.” Yeah, and then he, he posted kind of a quick, you know, scr- whatever, grab of his, of his screen to show when it doubled.
[00:55:38] Joe: In the early years, it actually doubled quickly, but that was because it was his contributions. He was just starting out.
[00:55:43] Doug: Yeah. Right.
[00:55:43] Joe: So obviously- It’s the capital … you know, he puts in $5 this year, puts another $5 next year, bam, he doubled it. Right. So the first couple years, it’s one year to double, then two years to double. But then later on, these later years, it- it’s like, what is it, six years, six years- Yep … seven years, six years, seven years.
[00:55:59] Joe: Exactly.
[00:56:00] Doug: Exactly.
[00:56:00] Joe: Yeah. Pretty powerful stuff.
[00:56:03] OG: And what’s profound about that, even where that person is right now, so maybe he has $4 million, and in the last seven years it’s doubled for two million, right? If you said to him or her, “You know, you got four million today, I really think that there’s a pretty strong chance that you’ll have $30 million sometime in your lifetime.”
[00:56:21] opener: They go, “No, no, no, no, no,
[00:56:23] OG: no, no. You’re, you’re… No, no. It’s, that’s not happening.” It’s like, why not? Why would it all of a sudden stop working-
[00:56:31] Doug: Because math is hard …
[00:56:32] OG: if it’s worked this wh- your whole lifetime? Like, it’s just now gonna stop? It’s the same thing, and it doesn’t matter, you know… And people that are listening are saying like, “Well, yeah, if I had 4 million, I wouldn’t worry about anything.”
[00:56:43] OG: It’s like, okay, I got you. But at 100 grand, you’ve already demonstrated how to make $100,000. This is the thing that I think people just really have to just internalize. It’s like whatever the balance is that you have, you’ve already demonstrated how to do that. So why would you think that suddenly you can’t do that again?
[00:57:07] Joe: And I love the idea, and I wanna get back to this, ’cause you talked about SpaceX, but people think they gotta get fancy. I gotta get these hedge f- I gotta do what the hedge funds people do. I gotta do what private equity does. This guy didn’t do any of that. He didn’t do anything. In fact, it’s funny, I found a TikTok video that I’m surprised that I missed, ’cause people know my love affair with, uh, Robinhood and how much they help you.
[00:57:28] Doug: And how wonderful they are.
[00:57:29] Joe: By the way, the first broker to get, the first of the, quote, major brokers to get into predictive markets and betting, guess which one it was? The one that, quote, helps you the most. Robinhood. Oh yeah, now you can bet. It’s crazy. I thought, I thought that, well, people made me feel like I was like Don Quixote with windmills.
[00:57:52] Joe: Turns out, uh, there’s a guy that many of us know who said the same thing a few years ago, and I just totally missed it. This is the late, great Charlie Munger talking about his feelings about Robinhood.
[00:58:05] bit: I don’t think allowing all the swearers in the world to act as though they’re banks is a good idea.
[00:58:11] bit: Which maybe we should talk about Robinhood and some of the areas that come up. Well, Robinhood
[00:58:14] bit: is beneath contempt.
[00:58:17] bit: Why?
[00:58:18] bit: Well, it’s a gambling parlor masquerading as a respectable business.
[00:58:22] bit: And the pushback on that is always this is a way of getting average people into the markets,
[00:58:28] bit: people who didn’t invest- Well, of course you don’t want to say you’re, it’s a gambling parlor, but it is a gambling parlor.
[00:58:31] bit: It’s not encouraging people to buy a very, very, very low-cost index fund and hold it for 50 years. I will guarantee you that you will not walk in there, get that advice. No. Instead, you’ll get advice on how you can trade options, and they’ll tell you that-
[00:58:45] bit: And it’s telling people they aren’t paying commissions when the commissions are simply disguised in the trading.
[00:58:50] bit: It’s basically a sleazy, disreputable operation
[00:58:56] Joe: I love it when, when… The, and the other voice you heard, of course, was, uh, Charlie’s buddy, Warren Buffett But when I say
[00:59:02] OG: it, I’m the a-hole.
[00:59:04] Joe: I know. I know.
[00:59:06] OG: I just need to be 95 and, and also worth $65 billion, and then all of a sudden people will be like, “Eh.”
[00:59:13] Joe: Everybody keeps coming at me about my dislike of Robinhood. Turns out, yeah, I’ve got some pretty good company there. Let’s flip to the other side of this, which is on the employer side. For our Stackers that own businesses, OG, the point this piece makes too is the cost of training a new peop- a new person is really hard.
[00:59:33] Joe: So work hard to keep people like Tony in this piece so that he gets a great career, you don’t have to train somebody new, the customers get somebody great. Like, I think that there’s some employers out there that don’t think hard enough and long enough about the cost of losing some quality people.
[00:59:53] OG: Yeah, I mean, as a business owner, it’s exceptionally difficult to hire, train…
[00:59:58] OG: recruit, hire, and train people. You spend all this time and energy, all this money on recruiting people and, you know, having teams of recruiting and all that sort of stuff, and then, and then you don’t give them the resources and support to stay. And this is evidenced by when your people go to, you know, say, “Hey, I’m gonna go take this other job,” and then you find out why.
[01:00:19] OG: Well, it’s because they got a pay raise of, like, 10 grand, and you’re like, “If you’d have asked me for 10 grand, I would’ve given it to you.” It’s like, well, why weren’t you proactively doing that to begin with? Why weren’t you going to your employers, employees and saying, “Hey, we’ve done some market research.
[01:00:35] OG: We know that new people in this field are getting paid X”? And the reason is, is because inertia’s very powerful, and if you pretend that you care about employees, or you pretend that you care about your people versus actually caring about them, eventually it shows itself out, right? I mean, you’re gonna eventually see, and it’s not always about money, it’s about other things as well, but money’s a great barometer for your display of-
[01:01:00] Joe: Yeah
[01:01:00] OG: value received and value created. You know
[01:01:03] Doug: what also works, I’ve found, is two Fridays a quarter just get some, like, Little Caesars pizzas and bring those in. People-
[01:01:12] OG: You’re a big fan of pizza Friday? Like, who
[01:01:13] Doug: needs a raise?
[01:01:15] Joe: Who needs a raise when you can get pizza Fridays?
[01:01:17] OG: $5 footlongs. Those are-
[01:01:19] Joe: That’s, that’s proof that your boss loves you is because they bring in pizza.
[01:01:22] Joe: Listen to this, OG, to really illustrate, Doug, your sarcastic comment, but even more than that, OG, what you just said. This is what Sarah wrote: “Costco has long paid more than most US retailers they compete against to help keep turnover low, a strategy company founders believe reduce costs.” I’m gonna pay them more to reduce my cost I mean, think, think about how contradictory that sounds until you truly think about what does it cost to train a person-
[01:01:53] OG: Yeah
[01:01:54] Joe: versus to keep them there. Yeah. I’ll link to this piece. Uh, I did not flag this for that second discussion, but certainly great for employers to read. And then for all of us, you don’t gotta go do Robin Hood stuff to make your dreams come true. Set it and forget it, and you can be like Tony Barzar, who is a Costco cashier and a millionaire.
[01:02:17] Joe: We kinda melded today our Back Porch segment in by shining a light on Stacker Mark. By the way, Mark, thank you for sharing that. That was fantastic. Loved it. Also, Stacker Doug, uh, was saying that we need more Story Hour with OG. And by the way, Steve, nice job of laying the music underneath, uh, OG’s, uh, Story Hour.
[01:02:37] Joe: That was fantastic. You can hear just a few weeks ago OG’s Story Hour if you just go back through recent episodes.
[01:02:46] Doug: And I doubt anybody’s confused by this, but that was not this Stacker Doug asking for more OG Story Hour.
[01:02:52] Joe: That was not, yes.
[01:02:53] Doug: It was definitely not.
[01:02:55] Joe: He’s like, “Please no.” All right. Speaking of Doug, this is where we turn it over to our Doug.
[01:03:00] Joe: Doug, what should we have learned on today’s show?
[01:03:02] Doug: Well, Joe, first take some advice from Jesse Mecham and solve for one question. What’s your money for? That’ll clean up your budget and make life far more fun. Second, a million dollars? You don’t have to be fancy about it. A good 401can get you there, just like our featured Costco cashier.
[01:03:22] Doug: But the big lesson, don’t tell OG you gave Joe’s mom the green light to make more brownies. He’ll give you the red light to climb the stairs and try one until he’s ahead of you. Seriously, OG, this is a horrible game. Thanks to Jesse Mecham for joining us today. You’ll find his new book, Never Worry About Money Again.
[01:03:44] Doug: We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. Also, thanks to our Ohio friends for joining us. Actually, some of our favorite Stackers are in Ohio, which we can’t figure out why, but hey, you know, I mean, as Joe’s mom says, “Nobody’s perfect.”
[01:04:03] Doug: This show is the property of SP Podcast LLC copyright 2026 and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. And oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
[01:04:29] Doug: 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
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