Social Security checks are getting a raise because everything costs more. Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and Doug are joined by a Brooklyn financial planner who works with creative people on lumpy incomes and Jesse Cramer of Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors to ask whether you should trim retirement savings when the budget squeezes. They play “Cut It, Keep It, or Crank It” and “Who Gets the Next Dollar?” with realistic households. The goal is to keep a temporary squeeze from turning into a permanent setback.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- Why a Social Security raise is both good news and a sign your costs went up
- What a single inflation number misses about how prices actually hit your household
- The first signs your budget is leaking if you have never tracked your spending
- A quick way to see price changes by scrolling through your online shopping carts
- What “enoughness” means and how to use it when prices shift
- When to cut your 401(k) contribution, when to keep it, and why many of the panelists would hold it at the employer match
- Why it is easier to keep a small retirement contribution going than to restart a stopped one
- A financial triage order for deciding where each new dollar goes
- Whether to pay a car repair from cash or a credit card
- Why a 401(k) loan is rarely better than pausing contributions
- Why retirement comes before college savings, even for loving parents
- How to handle lumpy income and set aside taxes before a windfall arrives
- Why asking for what you need in a negotiation costs you nothing
Why This Matters Now
Prices are rising unevenly, with groceries, gas, and airfare moving in different directions, and many people are trimming retirement savings to cope. Year-end is when budgets get reset and benefit elections get made, which makes it a natural time to decide your plan before the squeeze decides it for you. This episode gives you a framework you can use without feeling judged for being behind.
From the Basement
Doug’s trivia goes back to a sailor in 1492 who brought smoking home to Spain and got locked up for it, then to the giant settlement that came centuries later. He also confesses to once trying to smoke a Slim Jim, and nearly gets the guest’s name right while inventing a few new words. Everyone swaps stories about their love of the Sizzler salad bar, and OG tries to hold on to his lead for the “You suck the least” trophy.
Resources Mentioned
Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors: Jesse Cramer’s podcast
Creative Money: New Financial Rules for Artists, Innovators, and Misfits: the guest’s new book, out Tuesday, Nov 10
Our Topic: Inflation vs. retirement savings.
More Americans pull back on retirement saving to fund today’s needs: Goldman report (Yahoo! Finance)
During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:
- Inflation
- Social Security COLA
- Rising living costs
- Retirement savings
- 401(k) contributions
- Employer matching
- Credit card debt
- High-interest debt
- Debt repayment strategies
- Emergency funds
- Budget shortfalls
- Expense tracking
- Financial triage
- Financial priorities
- Spending cuts
- Lifestyle adjustments
- Career changes
- Increasing income
- Financial enoughness
- Retirement planning
- 401(k) loans
- College savings
- Variable income
- Financial windfalls
- Tax planning
- Automated savings
- Impulse spending
- Financial independence
- Opportunity costs
- Salary negotiation
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
AJ Ayers
Another thanks to AJ Ayers for joining our contributors this week! Learn how to work with AJ by visiting Your Trusted Financial Advisors in Brooklyn | BKFi.
Preorder her upcoming book at: Creative Money New Financial Rules for Artists, Innovators & Misfits.
Jesse Cramer
Another thanks to Jesse Cramer for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Jesse on his show, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors – The Best Interest, on Spotify.
Learn how you can work with Jesse by visiting The Best Interest – Invest in Knowledge.
OG
For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- In the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, how many billions of dollars did the four major tobacco companies agree to pay the states over the first 25 years?
Mentioned in today’s show
Join Us on Monday!
Tune in on Monday, when we compare Joe and OG’s top five money moves to make before year-end and find out which financial priorities deserve your attention before the calendar flips to January.
Miss our last show? Check it out here: How to Stop Your Brain From Wrecking Your Portfolio With Dr. Daniel Crosby (SB1919) | Stacking Benjamins.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] Jesse: Good evening. I’m Ron Burgundy, and this is what’s happening in your world tonight
[00:00:09] Doug: Live from the basement of the YouTube headquarters, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show
[00:00:24] Doug: I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and it’s a good news, bad news kinda Friday. You want the good news first? You got it. Grandma’s getting a Social Security raise. So what could be bad about that? Well, that means inflation numbers are high and people are cutting everything from restaurant spending to their 401plan.
[00:00:44] Doug: How do we negotiate this bumpy road? We’ll share strategies. But that’s not all. We’re closing in on the final stretch of our year-long trivia contest. Can Jesse or our special guest AJ cut into OG’s lead? We’ll all find out halfway through today’s show. And now, a guy who cut his haircut budget in half, which was easy ’cause he’s only had half the hair for years, it’s Joe Saul-Sehy.
[00:01:15] Joe: Oh, Doug, that wasn’t very nice. Hey there, everybody. Happy Friday to you. Welcome to the Stacking Benjamins show. I’m Joe Saul-Sehy. Doug, talking about hair, is that why you wear a hat, so you’re covering up your, uh, your same problem as mine?
[00:01:28] Doug: You don’t know. Nobody knows- … for sure.
[00:01:30] Joe: Nobody- Really … nobody knows.
[00:01:31] Joe: There’s probably a full mane of hair there. How are you today, man?
[00:01:34] Doug: You know, Joe, today I’m feeling like a fine wine. You know, I’m expensive to maintain, but, uh, I’m also getting increasingly bitter. So- Oh,
[00:01:41] Joe: good.
[00:01:42] Doug: Yeah.
[00:01:42] Joe: That is… Yeah, you can’t let it go too long.
[00:01:45] Doug: You gotta turn me a quarter turn every so often.
[00:01:47] Doug: You can’t turn the lights on too bright, keep me out of direct sunlight.
[00:01:51] Joe: I remember there was a post on social media a few weeks ago saying, “Remember when you were a kid and you were, like, 11 years old, and you would fall out of a tree or you’d fall off your bike?” Now you just wake up wrong, you wake up funny, you’ve…
[00:02:03] Joe: You know, it’s, it’s sad. We’ve got a great show today, ’cause there’s great news, Doug. You mentioned it at the top of the show. Grandma’s getting a raise, Social Security checks, according to information just a couple weeks ago. The, the Consumer Price Index came out, Social Security Administration came out with their new numbers.
[00:02:20] Joe: Social Security checks are going up about 3.6% next year. Doug, that means $75 a month for Mom, $75 a month more.
[00:02:29] Doug: On average.
[00:02:30] Joe: Yes. Yeah. That’s a lot of shrimp appetizer down at the Sizzler, man. It’s good. There is a problem, though. The reason why Grandma is getting a raise is because everything costs more.
[00:02:42] Joe: This isn’t politicians saying, “Grandma deserves more,” this is just the way that they calculate numbers based on inflation. So when Grandma gets a big raise, that means everything costs a lot more. And bad news on the other side of this, news out of Goldman Sachs, also a couple weeks ago, says that working Americans are doing the opposite of what we tell them to do.
[00:03:04] Joe: They’re actually saving less money for retirement, people backing down their 401contributions, their retirement contributions, to pay for today. So here’s the question, Doug, we’re gonna be asking everybody. You ready? Ready. Should you actually cut your 401contributions when money gets tight? And if you do, how do you keep this temporary problem from being a permanent money disaster?
[00:03:27] Doug: Do we have some people here today, Joe, that are gonna help us answer that question?
[00:03:30] Joe: Well, I’m glad you did, you said that, ’cause I was gonna say, now that we know the problem, we know the stakes, let’s see who’s gonna help us solve this. Uh, let’s start off across the card table from me. Mr. OG is here. You’re pretty happy grandma’s getting a raise, aren’t you?
[00:03:44] OG: I mean, it’s, uh, 75 less dollars that, uh, mom gets to spend on my credit card, so yep, I’m sure- … it works out for me.
[00:03:51] Doug: Trickle-down economics right there.
[00:03:53] OG: That’s, that’s exactly right. That’s, like, literally 75 more dollars in my pocket, so go me.
[00:03:59] Joe: However, inflation is the cause of it, so who know.
[00:04:02] OG: It was like the thing I saw the other day about college football and how everybody’s beating…
[00:04:07] OG: You know, it’s like you beat this team that beat that team, that beat that team, that beat that team, that beat that team, that beat you, and it’s like, congratulations, you beat yourself. You know? It’s like, like in this, this big Möbius loop.
[00:04:20] Joe: What was that old kid song, I Am My Own Grandpa? Like, the whole-
[00:04:23] OG: Wait, what?
[00:04:23] Joe: thing. No? Yeah, let’s just move this along. I was
[00:04:26] OG: unaware of any grandparent songs about being your own grandpa. That sounds pretty weird,
[00:04:30] Joe: but- No, Jesse Cramer’s here from, uh, Rochester, New York. Jesse, you know that there’s this kid song. You’ve heard it.
[00:04:37] Jesse: Right. I, I think, uh, I’m really glad. So between myself and our very special guest today, we’ll have some references that are, you know, beyond the baby boomer generation, right?
[00:04:46] Jesse: We’ll have some… I don’t know how good I’ll do at Gen X, but Gen Y, Gen Z, maybe even Gen Alpha, I probably start to fail there too.
[00:04:54] Joe: How are you today, man?
[00:04:56] Jesse: Doing well. Doing well. I’m excited for the conversation. Uh, we’ve got some beautiful weather up here, just gorgeous blue skies and colors in the trees, and, and it’s, it’s hard to be unhappy.
[00:05:06] Joe: Well, we brought in somebody from the other side of New York from you. She runs a financial planning firm in Brooklyn, and she has a brand-new book out where she’s helping creative people who often have this, this problem where their money goes up and down and up and down, and often it’s a lot of down and then few spikes up.
[00:05:25] Joe: AJ Ayers is here. How are you?
[00:05:28] AJ: I am great. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:05:30] Joe: Well, I’m super happy you could be here today. Tell us about your financial planning firm because you serve a very specific group of people.
[00:05:38] AJ: Yes. Well, first of all, we are lying to everyone because we named our firm Brooklyn FI, and we have about 24 team members, and only one of them lives in Brooklyn, which happens to be me.
[00:05:49] AJ: I haven’t left. I’m never leaving. I’m never leaving. This is the greatest place on Earth. But yeah, so when we started the firm, uh, my business partner Shane and I looked around and said, “Hey, we’ve got all these friends who are artists, musicians, photographers, and they’re making real money. They’re getting advance checks.
[00:06:03] AJ: They’re shooting the cover of Time Magazine, and there is no one out there who can help them because they don’t have a million bucks, and by the way, they’re 30 years old. And they might have a million bucks in a few years. Maybe their company’s going public.” And so we thought, hey, why don’t we start a firm that can serve people who don’t necessarily have money today, and basically their entire net worth is gonna be based on a few windfalls?
[00:06:27] AJ: And we don’t know when they’re gonna happen, but they need, you know, complex tax and investment advice when they don’t have any money. So it was a really weird business idea, but it did work. It did pay off. And serving creatives and their partners who often worked in the marketing department or the engineering department at tech companies, that turned out to be a really good marriage of the niches, both the creatives and the tech entrepreneurs and tech workers who would go through these IPOs.
[00:06:52] AJ: So that is how Brooklyn FI was born.
[00:06:54] Joe: Uh, that’s fantastic. You know, uh, you and I backstage before we started this show, I mentioned that my very first writing job after I was a financial planner was writing for a woman who coaches creatives in Los Angeles. And what’s wild, AJ, that you know that maybe a lot of people don’t know is because money comes so sporadically, it’s very easy to live this gigantic steak dinner lifestyle when you have money, and then, you know, it’s ramen noodles for six months.
[00:07:21] Joe: It’s this boom bust lifestyle, isn’t it?
[00:07:24] AJ: Yeah, we call it lumpy income. There’s lots of different words for it. And there’s lots of different ways to smooth out the waves, smooth out the lumps. But at the end of the day, which I think we’ll talk about this, we gotta have good habits, right? And what do creative people hate more than anything?
[00:07:39] AJ: Routine. Being normal. Habits. Uh, so a lot of the struggle of helping creatives is, is frankly just, like, a mindset shift, and t- and talking to them in a way that they can relate to and understand. And that’s sort of why I wrote this book. That- Which I happen to have a copy of right here
[00:07:53] Joe: just in case. That you just got copies of.
[00:07:55] AJ: Yeah. It’s, it’s not out yet, but I got advance copies.
[00:07:58] Joe: Comes out November 10th. We’ll tell people how they can pre-order it. But that’s much later in the show. We’ll tell you that at the end. Right now, we’re gonna help you solve what we hope is a lumpy problem, the fact that inflation reared its ugly head again with the CPI numbers.
[00:08:13] Joe: And so a lot of people cutting back, cutting back on their future to try to solve problems today. How do you do that? Well, that’s why we asked AJ to come, ’cause she helps creatives do that all the time when it doesn’t feel like there’s enough money. And of course, OG and Jesse, they’ve been down this road many times with people as well, so I can’t wait for the discussion.
[00:08:32] Joe: We have a couple sponsors who help us keep on keeping on, bring special guests like AJ and Jesse and OG, and even Doug and I- Oh, you’re
[00:08:39] AJ: paying me?
[00:08:40] Joe: For free.
[00:08:40] AJ: Cool. I didn’t know that.
[00:08:41] Joe: Well, for…
[00:08:42] AJ: Just kidding.
[00:08:43] Joe: Oh, we gotta move it along. You’re paying her? Right. We make sure that- … that we can keep bringing this to you for free so we don’t have to pay AJ.
[00:08:55] Joe: We, w- we’re gonna hear from those… Listen to me get all flustered now. We, uh, are gonna hear from them, and then AJ, Jesse, OG, Doug, and I, we’re gonna dive into, well, how to solve this problem when there’s more month than there is money.
[00:09:17] Joe: All right, guys, here’s what’s going on. This is the news. So, uh, we got the numbers maybe mid-October, where the consumer price index went up 3.7%, Social Security checks were adjusted 3.6%. It always is crazy to me, by the way, that we have these two numbers that come out on the same day. They use two different calculations.
[00:09:36] Joe: They’re very close, but why one part of the government doesn’t talk to another, nobody knows. What’s weird about these numbers, though, is that they’re not even. The grocery store went up around 2%, a little less than 2%, price at the grocery store. That was good news. But if you’re somebody that travels, if you use a car, gasoline price is up by nine.
[00:09:55] Joe: I think everybody’s heard that. And then if you’re somebody that flies, airline tickets over the past year have gone up 22%. The price of rent, some good news there, only 3.2%. So we’ve got this really lumpy inflationary data that’s very frustrating. So depending on who you are, it might be hitting you hard or it might not be.
[00:10:16] Joe: So OG, let’s start with you. Grandma’s raise. Grandma’s raise, good news, bad news, or just an attempt to keep her from falling behind?
[00:10:24] OG: Well, I think that generally speaking, if your entire lifestyle is built into your Social Security wage, you’re always gonna feel a little bit behind because frankly, you know, that’s not a lot of cash to begin with.
[00:10:36] OG: Yeah. I recognize that some people, you know, that’s just kind of where they are and that’s how life is. And so I would think that it’s not so much of a raise as it’s keeping pace, you know, based on the Social Security data and the inflation data. But this also is an important reason why I think from an investment standpoint that you continue to think about investing long into your retirement years as being still in- investing your portfolio, as opposed to somewhat of this broad brushstroke, uh, stuff that’s still out there of like, oh, you’re getting close to retirement, you should be conservative.
[00:11:08] OG: Because, you know, as you just pointed out, there’s a whole bunch of things that have gone up a little bit higher than average inflation. You know, I’d probably put healthcare in there. I didn’t hear you say healthcare. Undoubtedly, that’s, um, through the roof also. And if you have fixed income sources like Social Security or like a pension or something like that, even if you start a little ahead of the game, you know, that’s just gonna catch up and get past it.
[00:11:29] OG: So you need assets that are gonna, you know, increase at a rate greater than that inflationary rate over time. So as it relates to Social Security increase, kind of a nothing burger. I mean, $900 is not zero a year. You know, if the average you said is $75 a month. But this is not extra money. This is keeping your lips above water money.
[00:11:50] Joe: Staying afloat. Mm-hmm. Hey, G, I just gave you how lumpy this is. What does a number like the consumer price index fail to show about what the average household’s actually experiencing?
[00:12:02] AJ: It’s an average. Most households experience hardship in clumps. And so yes, gas might be more expensive, and if you’ve gotta drive 30 miles to work like most people in this country who are gonna have to rely on Social Security, you know, that’s gonna be a much, much bigger impact in your ability to stay afloat as a household than what, you know, CPI is telling us.
[00:12:23] AJ: Whereas for me in New York City, you know, we jokingly track things like the shrimp cocktail index- … which is the price per shrimp in a shrimp cocktail, which does matter to me, right? You know, I don’t wanna pay $15 a shrimp. It’s very expensive to go out and have a shrimp cocktail and a marti- and a martini in New York.
[00:12:39] AJ: Gonna dramatically impact my life? No. Um, so I feel like these national averages… Unfortunately, we’re, we’re living in this K-shaped economy, where the rich are getting richer, and yes, things are more expensive, and we complain about it, but the poor are getting poorer and have less access to all those resources you mentioned.
[00:12:55] AJ: So yeah, 75 bucks a month, um, things are a lot more expensive than I think just adding 75 bucks a month.
[00:13:01] Doug: AJ, come to Texarkana. They give out brine shrimp at the Sizzler. You get, like, 7,000 of ’em.
[00:13:07] Joe: They’re called crawfish,
[00:13:08] Doug: Doug.
[00:13:10] AJ: I heard you mention, uh, Sizzler in the intro, and I was backstage, and I was not allowed to interject, but I grew up on Sizzler, and it remains one of my favorite re- I love a salad bar.
[00:13:18] AJ: Like, I’m, I’m- Yeah … a high-low kinda girl, and I love a Sizzler. T- that toast?
[00:13:22] Doug: Right on.
[00:13:22] AJ: That’s my last meal for sure.
[00:13:24] Joe: What happened to the Sizzler? I mean, what happened to the salad bar? It’s still around. I mean, yeah, yeah. We’ve got a few Sizzlers around.
[00:13:28] AJ: It survived the pandemic. I was worried about it for a second.
[00:13:33] Doug: Joe, of all the things to
[00:13:33] Joe: be worried about. That was, that was what she’s worried about most. AJ was like- Yeah … “If the Sizzler makes it, we’re all gonna be good.” Oh,
[00:13:38] Doug: no.
[00:13:39] Joe: Jesse, AJ brings up this great point that, you know, you’ve got these different indexes based on what, where, how people spend money. It’s gonna hit them differently.
[00:13:48] Joe: The average person doesn’t track their expenses, right? If you don’t track where you spend money, where do you start seeing this inflation hit? Like, what are your first signs that, uh, the ship might be leaking?
[00:14:01] Jesse: If you don’t track your money what are the signs, what are the signs that, uh, the ship is leaking?
[00:14:06] Jesse: Yeah, well, I guess it’s gonna come up in things like, uh, overdrawing a bank account or, um, a monthly credit card payment that you don’t have enough cash to actually cover, or a check might bounce. I mean, right? Like, if you, if you’re not actually tracking in some way, it’s, it’s- I don’t think that… I, I used to, I’m trying to think of how I used to say it.
[00:14:24] Jesse: It’s like, not, you don’t have to track, you don’t have to budget, but, but you can’t do nothing. When it comes down to tracking money, like that’s one of my principles that I kind of stand on is some people plan ahead on the month. They know they’re earning $5,000, and they apportion that out through a budget, and that’s fine.
[00:14:39] Jesse: And other people don’t budget at all, but at least after the fact they’re looking at how they spent money, and that’s fine too. But the act of just not paying attention at all, it, it, boy, whether inflation is high or not, is eventually gonna lead to some circumstance where, you know, you do something stupid like, like bounce a check or overdraft or, or miss a credit card payment.
[00:14:58] Joe: And- And you’re like, “Wait, what?”
[00:14:59] Jesse: Yeah. And, and now you really know the ship is leaking, and, and you probably don’t have enough data on hand to easily fix it either. Now you have to
[00:15:06] AJ: go back- Well, here’s an interesting thing-
[00:15:07] Jesse: Yeah …
[00:15:07] AJ: about data is now we have the data because we all have Amazon carts, and we all have Walmart carts, and we all have Target carts.
[00:15:12] AJ: So a lot of us are ordering the same sh- stuff every month, right? So if you’re ordering your Listerine, your mouthwash, your eggs-
[00:15:19] Jesse: Your shrimp
[00:15:19] AJ: cocktail … you know, your protein powder, your shrimp cocktail, you know, your, your Texas toast, you know what your cart was last month. I’ve noticed all these people posting all these memes of like la- you know, “Last year-” Mm-hmm
[00:15:29] AJ: my grocery cart was $67, and now it’s $111.” We now have all this data because we all shop and we buy the same things. So even if you don’t track your expenses, you can start to see, like, oh, wow, I, last time I bought double A batteries they were half price. These are things that people need, you know?
[00:15:46] Joe: Yeah, just go back and scroll through your history.
[00:15:49] AJ: It’s brutal. Don’t do
[00:15:52] Joe: that. OG, I, I think OG’s on your team there. Like, do not go back, OG, and look at your, uh, Amazon history.
[00:15:57] OG: Oh, Amazon history? We just had a chat about this at my house. We’ve had more Amazon deliveries than days in the year.
[00:16:03] Joe: I thought about you the other day, OG. I saw a comedian. I forgot to capture it or I would have played it here.
[00:16:07] Joe: The guy’s like, “I work for Amazon now. I’m the guy that, uh, breaks down the boxes after my-” Yeah. Yeah … after our latest order.
[00:16:14] OG: Yeah. I had, uh, Claude take our transaction history from all of our credit card spend and put it into, like, a visual capitalist style of d- d- deliverable basically that I could share with my family.
[00:16:27] OG: What it created was a dot for every time my kids went to McDonald’s, every five times they went to McDonald’s, so it’s like, you know, all these dots. And my son looked at it and he goes, “Well, that’s not that bad, Dad. There’s only, like, 15, 16 dots there. That’s not bad for the entire year.” I go, “Each dot’s five, William.”
[00:16:44] OG: Let’s do Chick-fil-A and then Jimmy John’s, and- Sometimes it’s better not to know, I gotta be honest.
[00:16:49] Joe: AJ, I wanna divert away from this for just a second to bring up one of the concepts in your new book, because I think this is gonna be important. You have this concept called enoughness. Can you talk about enoughness, and then I’m gonna come back to inflation here and ask you some questions about enoughness.
[00:17:04] AJ: Yeah, I mean, the, the problem with all of us is we say things are too expensive. What does that mean? Can you literally not afford them? Does it mean that you’re have, gonna have less for retirement? For me, when I wanted, when I set out to write a personal finance book, I thought, “What’s actually gonna change people’s lives?
[00:17:21] AJ: What is a concept that is gonna get people to think, like, ‘Oh, actually, I’m okay.'” Because sure, we all know, we’re all relatively educated personal finance media people and professionals. Like, we all know what the answers are, right? Spend less than you make, invest for the long term. We’ve known the right answer for so long.
[00:17:39] AJ: So I came up with this idea of enoughness. It’s based on other people’s ideas. It’s not like a silver bullet. It’s be happy with what you have, understand what little things that you like that can increase your happiness. For me, it is shrimp cocktail and martinis, and that is very important to me, and I know that even if I have no money or very little money, spending $40 on this one thing is gonna make me very happy.
[00:18:04] AJ: So this concept of enoughness is look at what you have, take stock, and think about where you’re going, and sort of always be striving, and the, the liminal space between what you have today and where you could be, that’s enoughness, and if you have that and you’ve identified it, you’re gonna be happier.
[00:18:20] AJ: That’s my thesis.
[00:18:21] Joe: AJ, sticking with that, I think that’s such an important thing to think about. What is enoughness for us, right? What am I really solving for? ‘Cause a budget shouldn’t be about less happy. It should be about building a moat around the things that make us enough and ev- other things not having.
[00:18:37] Joe: What happens when inflation changes what enough actually costs?
[00:18:43] AJ: Yeah, I mean, this is what we’re all dealing with right now, right? And the government’s trying to solve it by increasing Social Security payments for those who are lucky enough to receive them. When inflation changes things, like, you know, my whole book is about, like pivoting.
[00:18:54] AJ: You know, if you can’t afford the lifestyle that you have right now due to increasing costs, whether that’s inflation or, you know, a bad rental market in your city, you know, you have agency and you can move. You know, if you can’t afford your lifestyle, like I, I sort of feel like I sound a little harsh sometimes, and people are like, “Well, that’s not fair.”
[00:19:13] AJ: I’m like, well, if you can’t afford to live in your city, do you wanna be $100,000 in credit card debt? No. Is it actually
[00:19:19] Joe: fair to your- You should move … is it actually fair to yourself to stay there is the better question, I think. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:19:23] AJ: Exactly, so, you know, when things become untenable, you kind of have to do this evaluation of, you know, can I ride this out for a few months?
[00:19:31] AJ: Is this a temporary problem, or is this something that’s gonna dramatically impact the trajectory of my life? Which, wink, wink, I think we’re gonna talk about later. Am I gonna make changes that are gonna be temporarily painful that will help me in the long run, or is this so detrimental to my health and happiness and future that I need to do something drastic like change careers or move cities or get out of a relationship that’s a drag?
[00:19:55] Joe: Well, let’s make some of this actually tangible. I got a game, Stackers. We’re gonna play a little game called Cut It, Keep It or Crank It. So everybody tells you to save more for retirement. Great advice, very inspirational. It’d be great on, like a motivational poster. But what, what happens when you also need groceries, the car needs tires, the credit card company’s sending you love letters with a 24% interest rate?
[00:20:17] Joe: So here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna show you guys a couple Stackers whose financial lives are getting squeezed. Each of you have to decide what happens to their retirement contributions. Do you cut it, meaning do you temporarily reduce the 401? Do you keep it? Do you maintain the retirement contribution because you’ve got maybe a better solution?
[00:20:37] Joe: Or three, do you crank it? Do you increase it because the bigger danger is gonna be falling behind, all right? So it’s, it’s do we cut it, keep it or crank it? So here we go. Number one, Marcus, 35 years old, makes $85,000 a year. His 401contribution is 10%. His credit card debt is 12%. Marcus has been told that a 10% contribution is a great retirement savings rate.
[00:21:02] Joe: He’s pretty proud of that number. Unfortunately, his credit card company’s even prouder of their number, 24%. He wants to know whether he should reduce his 401contributions to attack the debt. Do we cut it, do we keep it or do we crank it? OG, let’s have you go first.
[00:21:20] OG: Uh, can I ask a follow-up question about, uh, Kevin or whoever this guy’s name is?
[00:21:24] Joe: Marcus? Yeah.
[00:21:25] OG: Marcus. Yes, sure. You can make up names, I can make up names, all right? You’re
[00:21:30] Jesse: a people person, OG.
[00:21:32] OG: Right. I definitely do scream people person. Like, what the hell is your name again? Bob, Tim, Tom, whatever. Anyway. So is this a problem that, uh, Marcus is increasing, or is this something that’s been lingering for a while?
[00:21:44] OG: Like, it’s just, you know, we’ve got a credit card balance- Yeah … we’re not really making any progress, but we’re not getting any worse. What’s the line there?
[00:21:49] Joe: Yeah, he had a few big chunks that made it, but it’s kinda stayed at 12,000. He’s been able to keep it there.
[00:21:55] OG: Yeah. I like the idea of reducing the 401contribution to, uh, the match, assuming that there’s a match there, for a short period of time to attack it, but I wanna see the exact dollar amount go from 401to, to debt payoff.
[00:22:11] OG: Uh, assuming that it’s, this is not a systemic problem of like, “I spend too much,” it’s like, “I had a couple of bad things going on, and, um, I got a little bit behind.” But only if it’s a dollar for dollar thing. We’re not gonna guess and by golly here, we’ll figure it out and make those automatic payments happen.
[00:22:26] Joe: Jesse, you like that?
[00:22:28] Jesse: Yeah, I like that as my upper limit on how much I’d keep contributing to the 401is up to the match. And then I think from a behavioral point of view, there’s nothing wrong with Marcus just saying like, “Okay, I done goofed up. I got myself in this credit card debt. I’m just gonna cut off 401contributions for now and put as much as I possibly can against the debt.”
[00:22:48] Jesse: And, and similar to what OG said is like he should be able to project forward a certain number of months and, and determine like, well, if I now take $1,800 a month and put it toward the credit card debt or whatever, it’s probably too much, but whatever- Yeah … the math ends up being-
[00:23:01] Joe: Yeah …
[00:23:01] Jesse: it should be paid off in 14 months.
[00:23:03] Jesse: Like, he should be able to figure that out and then execute on it.
[00:23:06] Joe: Now, we’ve got, there’s a lot of programs out there that do this, but even in FieldKit, our app, we’ve got a debt payoff calculator. If I apply this directly to that, how will it shrink it? AJ, you’ve got this cool financial triage plan in your new book.
[00:23:19] Joe: How do you work through this using your financial triage?
[00:23:22] AJ: Yeah, I agree with OG. I am a big fan of never turn off your retirement contributions, even if you have to get it down to 1% during like a really hard stretch. Like, I just think it’s very hard behaviorally to turn it off and then bring yourself to turn it back on.
[00:23:36] AJ: Chances are life doesn’t get a lot easier, right? Right, you have the hardship, you gotta pull out the credit card, you pay it off, like something else is gonna come up. So yeah, I have the financial triage plan, also known as the savings order of operations, and we basically just go down this list and it’s like, hey, I think everyone should have a financial planner, but if for whatever reason you can’t afford one, you don’t want one, this is a framework you can always come back to.
[00:23:58] AJ: Step one, do you have high-interest credit card debt? If yes, you gotta pay it off. Step two, do you have an emergency fund? We need to have that so we have that cushion so we don’t go back into credit card debt next time. Step three, contribute to your 401. Obviously, those three are kind of at odds with each other.
[00:24:15] OG: Sure.
[00:24:15] AJ: But my recommendation here for you, Marcus, is keep that 401contribution. I like OG, keep it up to the match. Like, let’s reduce it a little bit, but let’s not kill it, and then let’s aggressively pay off that credit card debt. There are probably other places in your life that you could temporarily turn down $12,000 in credit card debt, $85,000 salary.
[00:24:33] AJ: This is not, this is… You can, you can do this in a year, I think. I think you could do this about a year, maybe 18 months, and not have to have your retirement suffer.
[00:24:41] Joe: That’s exciting. I love, like Jesse alluded to, and you just put a pin in, knowing that if I stick to this, what my payoff date is, ’cause that’s where the excitement is.
[00:24:51] Joe: You kind of show people the top of the mountain and how cool it is when you get there, and you’re like, “We’re a year, maybe 18 months away.” What could be better about that? AJ, let’s stick with you. The Rodriguez family, they make $110,000 a year. Their 401contribution is 12%. They have $3,000 in emergency savings.
[00:25:09] Joe: But the bad news is, with all this inflation over the last year, they have a shortfall every month of about $400. So that emergency savings has been going down every month. They have two kids. Groceries, insurance, and utilities have gone up. They’re covering that monthly, like I said, with emergency savings.
[00:25:23] Joe: So they’re doing what every financial expert tells them to do, save aggressively for retirement, but they’re borrowing money every month to keep the lights on. They’re beginning to wonder if maybe they need to, uh, do something about their credit cards. So do they reduce the 401from 12 to 4 until they stabilize things?
[00:25:43] Joe: What do they do, AJ?
[00:25:45] AJ: Yeah, I mean, this is one of those situations. Like $400 a month is sort of kind of like on the edge, so are there a few expenses we could cut? Could we turn down the retirement contribution 1% and, you know, cancel cable or something that we could live without? But I also have to go back and ask the question, is $400 gonna become $800?
[00:26:05] AJ: Like, are there bigger structural changes that we need to make in the family, whether that’s look for a higher paying job, easier said than done. Maybe look for a different school district that has cheaper or better after-school care. Like, if you’re teetering towards the edge and you’re trending towards debt every month and not being able to kind of get out of it, that’s when we get to this question of what are the big changes we can make so we can get out of this without sacrificing quality of life?
[00:26:30] Joe: That is interesting, Jesse. AJ brings up it’s usually not black or white. There’s, I mean, there’s y- you could change the way that your family just lives.
[00:26:39] Jesse: There are so many dials to turn, right? There are so many dials to turn. It can be discretionary spending, it could be, you know, I think one of AJ’s points was, like, well, you have to live somewhere, so, like, housing expenses are mandatory.
[00:26:50] Jesse: But do you have to live exactly where you live right now? It’s a hard decision to make, but it’s, it’s a decision that is on the table. Similarly, like, people say, “Well, the only way I earn money is through my job,” and that’s true, but, but do you have to work right there forever? Can you, can you figure out other ways to pad your income or over a long period of time to increase your income?
[00:27:09] Jesse: I would say for this, um, what, what was their name again? The, the Raminstein family? The, the the Rodriguez family. No, for the Rodriguezes. Yeah. I remember, I remember. For the Rodriguezes, I would say in the short term, I would encourage them to try to identify to some discretionary spending, uh, that they could cut to at least eliminate that $400 monthly deficit.
[00:27:29] Jesse: So that’s the short-term solution, and I think the longer-term solution probably involves either increasing income or, or just finding some other things that would really move the needle in terms of decreasing their, their monthly spend.
[00:27:41] AJ: Give one of the kids away, right? That, that’ll- You’ll find your 400 bucks a month easy.
[00:27:45] AJ: Payment
[00:27:46] Jesse: plan.
[00:27:46] Joe: That is so funny, AJ, because every parent is laughing with you ’cause they know you’re joking, and I know every person that I’ve ever met who doesn’t have kids is like, “Oh, you’re awful. That’s horrible,” right?
[00:27:56] AJ: As a new parent myself, I’m allowed to say that.
[00:27:59] Joe: I was gonna say, I- the second you crack that joke I’m like, “Oh yeah, she’s a mom.
[00:28:03] Joe: She’s gotta be a mom,” ’cause as a father of twins, we’ve had days where I’m like, “You know? Yeah.” OG, how much do you dive in with the Rodriguez family on their expenses? Like, look line by line to see, you know, is there maybe some cuttable stuff here?
[00:28:19] OG: Me personally as it relates to, like, professional capacity?
[00:28:22] OG: Yeah. Very little, honestly. But I don’t necessarily think that that’s our role. I was, I was thinking about this question. So I have a family member that’s kind of going through some of this stuff right now, right? Kind of lives in a house that maybe is a little- Well spendy for, you know, where we are lifestyle-wise and, and, um, or income-wise and, and, uh, I think that far too many people have all of this, you know, stuff that’s out there and then have too many, like, sacred cows that we can’t do anything with, right?
[00:28:54] OG: It’s like, “Well, no, I can’t, you know, the school district, you know, you don’t understand. Like, it’s the only one good, uh, only good one in town.” It’s like my wife went to the crappiest school district in Michigan, literally was the val– salutatorian, sorry, and, um, you know, went to the University of Michigan.
[00:29:10] OG: Like, got a great education, did well in her career. Some of it’s how much you put into it also, and I think there’s so many lines in the sand that get drawn when in reality if you’re facing these things, I think you have to say everything counts. You know, everything is on the table. And some of it’s income.
[00:29:26] OG: We’ve talked about it many times on the show about how you can cut expenses only so much. You know, you still have to eat and, you know, heat your house, and Doug doesn’t believe this, but you do, you do have to shower on occasion. But you have unlimited income potential. You can attack it both ways. I don’t know that it’s my job to say who’s important or not important.
[00:29:48] OG: I mean, I have a personal opinion about it, but it’s for you to decide. But the reality is is like if you’re trending in that direction like AJ said of like, well, it’s 400 now, but it might be 500, it might be 800, you know, you gotta do something eventually. So do you wanna rip the Band-Aid off now, or do you wanna wait until it’s really bad and you’re maxed out on credit?
[00:30:07] OG: ‘Cause that gets ugly in a hurry.
[00:30:08] Joe: And that’s where, AJ, I like… And this is why I wanted to bring up this idea of enoughness. School district, is this enoughness or is this just fine? Your job, is this enoughness or is this just fine? Like, really only you can answer those questions.
[00:30:23] AJ: Yeah, I mean, that’s the hardest part of…
[00:30:25] AJ: The financial advice that we’re all saying is spend less money, like, that sucks to hear, right? Like, we, we all know that. Yeah, one star.
[00:30:31] OG: Like, we
[00:30:31] AJ: all spend less money.
[00:30:32] OG: Unsubscribe. We’ll have
[00:30:32] AJ: more money. Yeah. Yeah, this show sucks. What am I doing? Just kidding. No, this is great. The idea of enoughness is, like, not every single thing in your life is gonna be firing on all cylinders at all times, right?
[00:30:43] AJ: You’re gonna have ups and downs. Early on in this whole me learning about money thing as, like, a weird, right brain-brain creative girl was like, oh, the US stock market, if you, if you look at 100 years of history, it goes up and to the right, but there’s all these blips along the way, right? There’s the Great Depression, there’s, you know, the ’70s, and I was like, oh, that’s kind of what life is like, right?
[00:31:02] AJ: You’re going, you have a nice childhood, college is fine. You know, then your dad gets sick, and you gotta leave your job and go home and take care of him. Then everything’s trending, and then you meet your partner, and then they turn out to be terrible, and you break off your engagement, you know? And so there’s these, like, things to get through.
[00:31:16] AJ: So, so much of, like, this idea of lumpy income also I think applies to, like, lumpy life, and if it’s something that you think you can get through, tone down the 401contribution. Mm. Make a little adjustment. If it’s something that’s gonna be really big that’s gonna take you a few years to get through, might be time to think about bigger sweeping lifestyle changes.
[00:31:36] Joe: It is interesting. It’s these times when you’re struggling a little bit that you make these big changes that really affect the rest of your life. It’s never when you’re high-fiving yourself ’cause things are going great. It’s times like now when you find out, you know what? I cut that out of my budget, and it was phenomenal.
[00:31:52] Joe: I never needed it. Or I moved, and I had no idea that living in a smaller house is something I’d like or whatever, whatever the thing might be. Hey, we are way overdue for what we normally do at halftime during our Friday shows. That’s our Friday competition. We have this year-long competition going on between OG Jesse and Paula Pant.
[00:32:11] Joe: AJ, today you are sitting in for Team Paula Pant. Wow. That means- Big
[00:32:15] AJ: shoes to fill. Big fan.
[00:32:16] Joe: It, it means good news and bad news though, AJ. Do you want the good news or the bad news?
[00:32:20] AJ: Bad news, just tell it to me straight
[00:32:21] Joe: Well, the bad news is you’re not winning, uh- Oh … because, well, Doug, what’s the score so far as we have maybe a month to go?
[00:32:30] Doug: Yeah. It’s rough out here, Joe. I do not like where this is headed, because we’re back in a situation where the Prince of Darkness has, uh, an extended lead. Both Jesse and Paula, today AJ, have 10 points. OG’s, uh, he’s getting his kick going. He’s at 13 points.
[00:32:50] AJ: Okay.
[00:32:51] Joe: OG’s up by three for the chance to bring home this beautiful dollar store trophy that says, “You suck the least,” on the bottom.
[00:33:00] Joe: Jesse’s trying to defend this. Jesse, you gotta defend this, man. This is high stakes here.
[00:33:05] Jesse: There’s a plan. Uh, there’s a plan in place. Doug is ye of little faith.
[00:33:10] Joe: We better see if that plan starts today. The good news, though, AJ, is because Paula finished last last year, and you’re tied with Jesse, that means OG’s gonna guess first, Jesse will guess second.
[00:33:20] Joe: So you get to guess third, which is- Okay … always great. But only one person knows what the question is, and that’s neighbor Doug. Doug, what’s on tap today?
[00:33:31] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. On this day back in 1492, Christopher Columbus and his posse were out looking for a Burger King that was open late when they encountered something Europeans had never seen before: people smoking tobacco. One of Columbus’ sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, saw a bunch of the natives taking a smoke break and said, “Hey, guys, can I be one of the cool kids?”
[00:33:58] Doug: He brought the habit back to Spain, where people were understandably a little freaked out by a guy blowing smoke rings out of his mouth. In fact, according to the story, the Spanish Inquisition decided the only possible explanation was that Rodrigo was possessed by the devil, so they threw him in prison for seven years for smoking.
[00:34:19] Doug: Ooh, ooh, maybe that’s where the term the devil’s weed came from. Probably. By the time Rodrigo got out, smoking had started catching on across Europe. So apparently, the lesson was, if you’re gonna introduce a new product to the market, make sure you get regulatory approval from the EU first. 506 years later, all these smokers got together to blame cigarette manufacturers for the whole mess.
[00:34:40] Doug: So here is today’s trivia question: In the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, how many billions of dollars did the four tobacco companies agree to pay the states over the first 25 years? I’ll be back right after I take a quick break. I’m just going to the bathroom. Ma said I wouldn’t do that at four
[00:35:03] Joe: OG, it is, uh, the great, the great cigarette, um, uh, uh…
[00:35:11] Joe: What’s it called? Oh, my goodness.
[00:35:13] OG: Settlement. Settlement.
[00:35:14] Joe: S- settlement. Settlement. Thank you.
[00:35:15] OG: Settlement of ’98. Wow. You know, fun fact, the lead attorney for this was our neighbor, so.
[00:35:21] Joe: It was so weird. So
[00:35:22] AJ: you know the answer.
[00:35:23] Joe: Oh, AJ, every week the person lives in his neighborhood. It’s amazing.
[00:35:27] OG: Well, I mean, we have a pretty nice neighborhood, but this guy in particular, uh, blathered on and on and on about how big this settlement was.
[00:35:34] OG: And, you know, even as a wee lad in ’98, I remember this like, like it was yesterday. Now, now, you did clarify this was, this was the settlement over the first 25 years.
[00:35:45] Joe: Correct.
[00:35:45] OG: So I gotta adjust it- Yes … a little bit ’cause I do believe I had the full number. So I, I… I’m pretty confident that the, that the first settlement amount in billions was, uh, very close to five, but I’m gonna say 4.9, because I think it was, like, 4.93, but I’ll just say 4.9 billion just so there’s no, uh, confusion there.
[00:36:07] OG: 4.9-
[00:36:08] Joe: But, uh,
[00:36:08] OG: 4.9 billion …
[00:36:09] Joe: billion- Yeah … with a B dollars. Yeah. Uh, Jesse, how many billion do you think that number’s low or high?
[00:36:15] Jesse: This isn’t the per year for 25 years, this is the sum of 25 years. This is the sum of 25 years. Correct. Correct. Oh, yeah.
[00:36:20] Joe: Yeah.
[00:36:21] Jesse: And by the way, that conquistador, didn’t he have to cut $400 a month out of his budget?
[00:36:27] Jesse: He broke- What was his name? Right. What was his name? Ted. Wasn’t it Rudyard?
[00:36:32] Joe: And you know where we found it, smoking that, smoking that devil’s weed, right.
[00:36:35] Jesse: I was gonna say, if he stopped smoking cigarettes, he could probably, you know… Anyway.
[00:36:39] Joe: There’s a piece of-
[00:36:40] Jesse: Uh, so I was just doing some, like, mental math of, like, how many people smoke and, and how many people are gonna sue and, and w- how much is the tobacco industry gonna owe them in each case, and I ended up with a number bigger than OG by a, by a lot.
[00:36:55] Jesse: So I don’t know, I might be crazy here, but I’m gonna go with my, my answer and say t- $200 billion.
[00:37:02] Joe: 200, wow. We go from 4.9 to 200 billion, AJ. So you’ve got a wide field goal there- Not loving Doug’s
[00:37:11] Jesse: reaction …
[00:37:11] Joe: between the, between the two.
[00:37:15] AJ: Do I have to go between the two?
[00:37:16] Joe: No. No. No, you can go wherever you want.
[00:37:18] Joe: All
[00:37:18] AJ: right. I’m
[00:37:18] Joe: just
[00:37:18] AJ: saying. Well, my first thought is that OG is blowing smoke, and that- … he just made that up. Nice.
[00:37:24] Joe: S- Me? Who, me? No, no.
[00:37:26] AJ: I remember the mov- I remember seeing the movie. I forget the actor’s name who, like, plays… So that’s my only reference point. Uh- Oh,
[00:37:33] Joe: the Thank You for Smoking movie?
[00:37:34] AJ: Thank You for Smoking.
[00:37:36] Joe: Aaron
[00:37:36] Doug: Eckhart. Thank You for Smoking?
[00:37:37] Joe: Aaron Eckhart. Yeah. Right?
[00:37:39] Doug: That’s a
[00:37:39] AJ: great movie. Thank you. That guy. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, Aaron Eckhart. Great, great film.
[00:37:42] Joe: Yeah.
[00:37:43] AJ: Love, I love… Yeah, I’m a big fan of any, like, small person versus big evil company. Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, any of those. 5 billion seems…
[00:37:55] AJ: 1992? ’98. ‘
[00:37:57] Doug: 98. Eight.
[00:37:59] AJ: My gut is to say around five. I think it’s 9 billion, but just to make things interesting, I’m gonna say 3.7 billion.
[00:38:10] Joe: 3.7 bi- So she thinks it’s above OG, but you’re going below.
[00:38:16] AJ: Yeah.
[00:38:16] Joe: Gotcha. All right. Well, we got 3.7 for AJ, 200 for Jesse, and 4.9 for OG. Who’s closest? We’re about to find out.
[00:38:25] Joe: We’ll be right back All right, OG, you kick this off with $4.9 billion. Now that you’ve heard Jesse and AJ, what are you thinking? Feeling good?
[00:38:35] OG: I just wanna clarify, that was per state, right?
[00:38:40] Joe: Ah, that tells me how you feel. Jesse, you’re way up there at 200 billion. AJ’s down back d- down there with OG. You think you got it?
[00:38:49] Jesse: Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know. If 10,000 people a year… You know, like, that’s what I was- I was doing like 10,000 people a year need a settlement and then- But it’s just
[00:38:57] AJ: a settlement.
[00:38:58] AJ: It’s not-
[00:38:59] Jesse: Yeah, I know, but
[00:39:00] AJ: It’s a made up number by the courts.
[00:39:02] Jesse: I get it. I get it. I just think there’s a lot of people who smoke, and it doesn’t take many fi- it doesn’t take a five or six figure settlement times that many people times 25 years. I- if it’s under $100 billion, I’m gonna be… I’m gonna need to figure it out.
[00:39:19] Jesse: Wow. Where, where’d my logic went wrong? You’re gonna
[00:39:21] Joe: start smoking?
[00:39:21] Jesse: Start smoking- Yeah. … if it’s under
[00:39:22] Joe: 100 billion. Feel like it’s
[00:39:24] Jesse: not worth it. I like my answer. I like my answer.
[00:39:25] Joe: AJ, 3.7. How you feeling?
[00:39:28] AJ: Uh, I’m not feeling great. I’m gonna go back to nine if I can change my answer.
[00:39:33] Doug: You
[00:39:33] Joe: may not. By the way, welcome to the Stacking Benjamins trivia.
[00:39:35] Joe: Nobody ever feels great about their answer. All right. But-
[00:39:39] AJ: This is like the opposite of, like, the questions they ask you at Go- Well- You know, when you get a interview at Google, it’s like how many paintballs can fit in a- Yes … 747, and you’re like, “I don’t know.”
[00:39:48] Joe: I got no
[00:39:49] AJ: idea. I can at least use arithmetic.
[00:39:51] Joe: AJ, that’s next week’s.
[00:39:52] Joe: That’s next week’s question. All right. Don’t foreshadow. Don’t
[00:39:54] AJ: count me back.
[00:39:56] Joe: Doug, who’s, who’s winning this thing?
[00:39:57] Doug: Well, hey there, Stackers. I’m internationally recognized tobacco historian and guy who once tried to smoke a Slim Jim because somebody told me it was a cigar, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. I’ll tell you what, terrible cigar, pretty good snack once you get a little char on it.
[00:40:12] Doug: Before the break, I told you about Rodrigo de Jerez, the sailor who reportedly brought smoking back to Spain after sailing with Christopher Columbus. Again, according to the legend, the Spanish Inquisition threw him in prison for seven years because they thought he was possessed by the devil. By 1998, the United States had decided that tobacco companies were the devil and decided that they should help cover the healthcare costs associated with their products.
[00:40:40] Doug: The resulting agreement was one of the largest legal settlements in American history. So how many billions of dollars did the four major tobacco companies agree to pay over the first 25 years? Well, the correct answer was… $202.3 billion higher than AJ’s guess. Oh. $201.1 billion higher than OG’s guess.
[00:41:04] Doug: Oh. And just 6 billion higher than Jesse’s guess. Which means Jesse is today’s winner because the tobacco companies agreed to pay a staggering $206 billion.
[00:41:15] Jesse: No way.
[00:41:16] Doug: Per state, per year,
[00:41:17] Joe: OG. Apparently that neighbor of yours, OG, wasn’t bragging enough. Didn’t brag nearly enough about all the work that they had done.
[00:41:24] Joe: Imagine the lawyer fee on that one, right? How much money they got. Mm. They settled one of the big oil, uh, settlements here at the courthouse in Texarkana, and there are some very wealthy attorneys that live here as a result of that.
[00:41:37] AJ: Just goes to show you how little faith I have in the legal system.
[00:41:40] AJ: That’s why I went low, ’cause I was like, “There’s no way this actually helped people.” I know it was a big victory, but there’s no way actual people got help from that.
[00:41:47] Joe: No, but somebody took home 200 and something billion dollars, AJ.
[00:41:50] OG: I have a fun story about this. Maybe I’ll share later.
[00:41:53] Joe: All right. Let’s help somebody put a few dollars in their wallet.
[00:41:57] Joe: I wanna play another game here in the second half, which is who gets the next dollar? We’re gonna go through some financial triage, which is a whole rubric in AJ’s book. Most people aren’t sitting around with unlimited money, where, wondering where to put it. They have very limited funds, and they gotta know what to do with it next.
[00:42:13] Joe: So here’s the deal. Your jobs are going to be to tell me where the next $200 belongs. So the, our first victim here is gonna be named Chris. Chris makes $92,000 a year. He has emergency savings of $1,500. He has $5,000 of credit card debt at 22%. His 401contribution is 3%. Now, his employer matches 100% up to 5%.
[00:42:43] Joe: He also has a car loan at 6%. He doesn’t have a Roth IRA, and he has a young child with no college savings, and he wants to help make sure his kid goes to college. Jesse, we’ll start with you. You gotta choose one. You can’t split it for the win. “I’m gonna put part here, part there.” You gotta go with one.
[00:43:02] Joe: Where are you starting first?
[00:43:04] Jesse: Does he live in a state with a lottery? No. Uh, $1,500 in the emergency fund, I think is enough to, like, be that, like, desperation emergency fund. It’s not fully fledged, but it’s a desperation emergency fund, which means I would apply this extra money he has to the credit card debt.
[00:43:22] Jesse: Go- That would be next on my priority list … going to
[00:43:24] Joe: the 22%. O- is that why? Yep. The 22%?
[00:43:27] Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. High, really high interest rate.
[00:43:29] Joe: Yep. OG, thumb up, thumb down?
[00:43:31] OG: Yeah, 100% to the credit card. I’m, I’m not in love with 1,500 bucks in cash, but it’s better than zero. Already saving some money in a 401, so let’s, let’s get rid of the credit card bills, yep.
[00:43:41] Joe: Hey, Jill, I’m, I’m not gonna ask you for a me too. I’m wondering if in real life you split that between the credit card debt and getting up to that whole 5% match.
[00:43:50] AJ: How old did you say this person was?
[00:43:52] Joe: Uh, he is, I got it, 39 years old.
[00:43:56] AJ: 39? Ooh, yeah. I mean, at 39 I think we should be… It’s, it’s time to, to save for retirement, so I would say yeah, split the difference if, if you’re allowing me to bend the rules.
[00:44:07] Joe: What is the opportunity cost here, A- AJ, if you can kind of break it down a little bit, of choosing the wrong one?
[00:44:13] AJ: Choosing the wrong next best place to put your dollar, to me it just makes the problem worse, and if you already have the bad habit or you al- as we just talked about, if you already have the extra 400 that you’re spending over what you’re making, you’re just kind of digging yourself deeper.
[00:44:29] AJ: Whereas if you put the money in the 401, the reason why I love 401s so much is that it’s protected from you, right? It’s, it’s protected from bankruptcy. It’s protected from, uh, taxes on any investment gains that you make while it’s, it’s sitting in there. But most of all, it’s just protected from you. And the problem with emergency funds, you know, all of us we’re, we’re good savers, we put money in there, and then when something happens, what do we do?
[00:44:52] AJ: We go raid the emergency fund. It is much more difficult to raid your 401by design, which a lot of the financial media has glommed onto as, like, a really bad thing. Like, “You can’t access it.” It’s like, no, you guys, that’s the point, right? Like, we gotta save for the long term, so let’s put some, let’s put a fence around it.
[00:45:09] AJ: So yeah, the opportunity cost can be very expensive, and, you know, I don’t- I always try not to make people feel bad if they’re behind, but you know, 39, probably need to start increasing those, those contributions to retirement. We’ve got a, a few decades left. We don’t have unlimited time. If you were 22, I would’ve said, “Yeah, whatever, you got time.
[00:45:26] AJ: Don’t worry about it.”
[00:45:28] Joe: Doug? Oh, I th- I thought Doug raised his hand.
[00:45:33] AJ: Don’t call on me.
[00:45:34] Joe: I thought he… Yeah. Doug’s like, “Whoa, wait.” Oh, God, no. Yeah, well, then I’m going to Jesse because, uh, we do this… For those of you that don’t know, we do this, uh, Live on YouTube Mondays. It’s always fun on Monday to pretend it’s Friday, by the way.
[00:45:45] Joe: Always a great time. So come hang out with us on, uh, Monday afternoons, uh, 3:30 Eastern Time-ish, maybe 3:45. But one of our Stackers hanging out with us said, “Would it be better to just take out a loan on a 401rather than stopping contributions when you get in trouble?” What do you think about that, Jess?
[00:46:03] Jesse: I don’t think it would be better ’cause taking principle out, right?
[00:46:06] Jesse: We, we all make this probabilistic bet as investors that by having money invested, it will grow over time, and by having money not invested, that money that’s not invested won’t grow. And when you take a loan on your 401, granted you’re taking a loan from yourself, and you do only owe it back to yourself, and so you say, “Well, I’d rather take a loan from myself than take a loan from the bank,” but you’re removing money from the account that’s no longer exposed to the investment markets for whatever duration of time that is.
[00:46:35] Jesse: And yeah, I, I would rather just keep all the money in and dial down your future contributions. And I think mathematically speaking, you’re, you’re probably gonna end up in a better place for that.
[00:46:44] Joe: Let’s change the rules here a little bit, OG. How about this? Chris’s car right now, it needs $1,200 in repairs, and he’s gotta get it to work.
[00:46:53] Joe: He could pay cash, but that would nearly wipe out that emergency savings, or he could put it on the credit card. What would you do there?
[00:47:02] OG: Cash. Why would you voluntarily pay credit card interest when you have the money? Like, that’s the whole purpose of having money, is to not have to do that. What you’re doing is you’re saying, “I might have a, a future problem that would cause me to go to need this money,” but you have a current problem that you need the money for.
[00:47:26] OG: So why… You know, maybe you do end up with a future problem that you also have to go into debt for, and that is what it is, but why would you voluntarily do that on the first problem? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
[00:47:36] Joe: Let’s say that, uh, AJ, he goes to work, and he gets a raise. He has an extra $300 on top of this.
[00:47:44] Joe: So now he’s funneling money toward that credit card debt. Does he put the next $300 toward the credit card debt, or does he now start to go to two different places?
[00:47:53] AJ: I love using positivity for positivity, so I would say two different places, split the difference between the credit card debt. Well, nah, let’s wipe out the debt.
[00:48:02] AJ: I’m gonna go back on that. I don’t like credit card debt. Yeah, let’s, let’s get rid of the debt. Let’s wipe the slate clean. That
[00:48:09] Joe: was like a whole ride
[00:48:09] Doug: we
[00:48:10] Joe: just
[00:48:10] Doug: took right there.
[00:48:11] Joe: Doug’s on a rollercoaster. Yeah. That’s good, though. I like that. Jesse, do you agree? Let’s wipe out the credit card debt now that he’s got 500 instead of 200?
[00:48:19] Jesse: Yeah, I think so. I think for most people it’s just easier to conceptualize, like, it’s the number one thing, and I’m gonna attack the number one thing until it’s gone. Uh, I just think it’s probably actually also probably is financially optimal, too, but from a behavioral I, I think it’s easier for people to grasp.
[00:48:34] Jesse: Also, uh, not to, uh, I, I hate to do this, but Doug, does your shirt say Frisky on it?
[00:48:40] Doug: Oh, sure does, baby. Is
[00:48:41] Jesse: it Frisky Apple Farm?
[00:48:43] Doug: Yeah.
[00:48:43] Jesse: Is that how you pronounce it?
[00:48:45] Doug: Yeah, it is, actually.
[00:48:46] Jesse: How about that? Shout out Frisky Apples.
[00:48:48] Joe: Hey, do you guys mind if we do a podcast? Would that be great? AJ, welcome to Stacking Benjamins right here.
[00:48:55] AJ: I’m sorry. I was on a call earlier, and someone was talking about their AI agent Hermes. You familiar with this? And they pronounced it Hermes. Ooh. And I lost my mind. You’re
[00:49:06] OG: like, “Slow down.”
[00:49:07] AJ: I felt bad ’cause I, I don’t like to make fun of people, but I just, like, could. I was like, “You guys, I think it’s Hermes, not Hermes-” Yes.
[00:49:13] AJ: the French fashion
[00:49:14] Joe: brand.” That’s a, that is a costly, very costly AI agent right there.
[00:49:19] OG: Yes. Basically, it’s the same AI, AI agent as any other leather bag, but it’s, uh, 20 times as expensive.
[00:49:24] AJ: Exactly, yes, and you can’t get it. You have to beg them.
[00:49:28] OG: You have to first buy $50,000 worth of stuff from us, and then you can buy this other $20,000 thing from us.
[00:49:33] AJ: Exactly, yes. Run up a $200,000 a year token bill, and then you can use our agent.
[00:49:39] Joe: Oh, gee, when it comes to the, this idea of not saving enough for retirement, right? Not even getting all the way up to the match, but much sooner than this, he has a child that he wants to help with college. How do you rectify the college shortfall versus the retirement shortfall?
[00:49:55] Joe: Where do you go first there?
[00:49:57] OG: You can’t finance retirement. You’re not obligated to go to college. You’re not obligated to go to an expensive college. Retirement doesn’t have scholarships based on your, you know, interests or abilities. So the only answer is you’ve gotta take care of yourself first, and that’s counterintuitive to parents because, you know, we want our kids to have a better life than we have.
[00:50:20] OG: But it’s actually a big disservice to them to… And we’re seeing this a little bit more frequently now with this, you know, larger than normal kinda sandwiching of boomers, where they’ve got grandma and grandpa or grandma or grandpa still hanging on ’cause, you know, healthcare is better than it was 100 years ago.
[00:50:40] OG: And then they’ve got their own kids that are having struggles on growing a family and, you know, adapting to life, and all that other sort of stuff, and it’s like getting… You know, getting pulled in a couple different directions. The worst thing that you can do for your kids is be a burden to them in the future, especially financially, right at the time where they need all of their financial resources for their financial stuff, right?
[00:51:01] OG: When they have their move across the country, or they have to save for their kids’ college, or, you know, one, one person’s not gonna go to work anymore because it makes more sense to stay at home than to pay, you know, daycare bills or something like that. And then you’re gonna say, “Oh, by the way, I’m outta money, you know, ’cause I paid for your, you know, college.”
[00:51:20] OG: Mm. So no, 100%, you, you get your retirement squared away, and then, and then we just teach Junior how to be really good at chemistry or something to get a scholarship.
[00:51:30] Joe: I wanna talk last about the, very much, AJ, the topic of your book, which is people have variable income. We have stackers that earn commissions.
[00:51:38] Joe: We have, uh, stackers who are in the creative community who get paid big sums of money. Let’s say that, you know, they’re 2/3 of the way through the year. They’re expecting to make $120,000. They might be at $35,000 right now, right? How do you deal with the lumpiness of commissions or all this money that comes in in uncertain timeframes?
[00:52:00] AJ: Yeah, you g- you gotta get ahead of it, especially if you’ve chosen this profession. You work in sales and, you know, you got a decent salary, but, you know, you’re, you’re expecting that higher number, that commission number. To me, it’s like it takes a few years, so it might take a year or two of kind of that scrimping and savings to build up that cushion so you have your actual salary in savings.
[00:52:20] AJ: You have what you think that you should be worth and that you are able to earn, but that takes time, and unfortunately, people don’t often have that time or that patience to get ahead. So what I actually tell people to do is never turn off your savings, even if you’re in those kind of like, you know, feast and famine.
[00:52:37] AJ: When you’re in that famine dip, still always be saving, always be contributing at least 1% to your 401, or if you’re self-employed, to your solo 401or your IRA, or just a plain old savings account called savings. The other part, this is my area of expertise, is taxes. We cannot forget tax bills, and one of the greatest destroyers of wealth and sleep, uh, are surprise tax bills when you have lumpy income.
[00:53:04] AJ: So I hate to say this, folks, but if you are in a high income tax state like New York, we should be saving 40 to 50% of every dollar that, that we earn for taxes. Oh, that hurts. Yeah, it hurts. It’s horrible. Um, and I’m talking about folks who are 1099, who aren’t W2. If you’re W2, you can do a little bit less, and then if you’re not in a high tax state, shave off 8 to 10%, but that’s what is gonna be the difference between you having a successful m- you know, cyclical, lots of windfalls, lots of commissions creative life, or the one where you buy some- you, you get a windfall and you spend it, and you just are constantly in this state of, of wealth and poverty, and that hamster wheel’s pretty exhausting
[00:53:42] OG: I was just gonna say, as somebody who wrote a check to the IRS today, I can, I can appreciate the
[00:53:46] OG: the pain and the, and the sourness of the day. Like, there are not enough- Yeah … uh, S’mores Pop-Tarts in my life to assuage the pain of-
[00:53:54] AJ: To, to heal the wound …
[00:53:55] OG: uh, of, of, uh, the check-writing.
[00:53:57] AJ: So much of this is, is not… Like, the, to me, true financial independence is not having to worry about money, and for most of us, that doesn’t mean having unlimited money.
[00:54:07] AJ: For most of us, that just means having our savings on autopilot, having enough in the bank that we can sleep at night, and, you know, when a check comes in, knowing where it goes, and knowing that, hey, I’ve got cash saved for taxes, and yeah, writing that check totally sucks. It, it never gets easier. But if you do it four times a year, it’s a little bit easier.
[00:54:25] AJ: It’s a little less painful.
[00:54:26] Joe: Oh, but I like that, AJ, a lot, that, that you’ve already thought through where this money’s going. The money already has a plan ahead of time so that you’re not living that boom-bust lifestyle we talked about. You know, oh, I got a big check. Let’s go buy a big-screen TV that I wasn’t even planning on buying, you know, two, three weeks before.
[00:54:40] AJ: Yeah, and that’s also kind of my, my advice is always, like, if, if you were planning to buy the big-screen TV, if it was in your life plan, by all means- Dude … buy the big-screen TV. I’m not here to tell you not to do things that make you happy. What I have found in my work is that people are like, “Oh, I got a check.
[00:54:54] AJ: I gotta buy a vacation house in-” “… uh, in, in Rochester.”
[00:54:57] Joe: Forget this 80-inch TV. I gotta buy a vacation house.
[00:55:01] AJ: And I’m like, “When? Where are we buying a vacation house in Rochester? I’ve li- I’ve known you for 10 years. I’ve never heard you mention Rochester.” So I almost like- Yeah, it’s like- … spend- … just a trash
[00:55:07] OG: hole, isn’t it?
[00:55:09] OG: Who wants to buy
[00:55:10] Joe: a vacation house in
[00:55:10] AJ: Rochester? How are you gonna afford it? It was a small, it was a small windfall, you know.
[00:55:13] Jesse: It’s great up here. That’s right. A small windfall. Gets you a 4,000 square foot house.
[00:55:19] Joe: Jesse, you made this change yourself, right? Going from a consistent income, somebody else writing a check, to being a partner.
[00:55:27] Joe: How did you plan this out ahead of time?
[00:55:29] Jesse: Yeah. Um, well, it’s, it’s funny, and I don’t mind sharing a few details. I guess part of it is, is saving up. You know, tried to save up a bunch of money. Tried to put together a plan for how long it would take me to get my income back to where it was before, and to kind of get the household back on its feet, so to speak.
[00:55:46] Jesse: And, and part of it, too, and, and maybe this comes down to either negotiating skills or having very generous partners, but part of the deal was, like, I was open and honest with my current colleagues, and I was like, “Hey, guys, I’ll go open kimono and share my finances with you, and show you how I’m kind of taking a step back in the short run to take a big step forward in the long run with all of you.
[00:56:07] Jesse: And I’d appreciate…” Basically I said, like, “It would be helpful if somehow, some way, I were made whole for this.” And long story short is we, we negotiated something that makes me feel a little bit better about my cash flow, at least in the interim. And, and so when you’re changing jobs or if you’re going through something like that- Just a, a good lesson that I’ve had over 15 years in the working world is to not be afraid of negotiation, and to not be afraid just to throw the question out there and ask for something that benefits you.
[00:56:34] Jesse: Because if you bring a lot of value to your employer, there’s a good chance that they’ll be happy to meet you in the middle.
[00:56:39] Joe: A good friend told me once, a good mentor told me once that you already at no if you don’t ask. Right, right. You’re already at no.
[00:56:45] Jesse: Yeah,
[00:56:45] Joe: exactly. So why not just ask? Maybe there’s a yes.
[00:56:47] Joe: If they say no, you’re at the same… You didn’t lose anything by, by just asking. Well, I think that is a great place to leave this discussion. Thank you so much, everybody, because with these big inflation numbers, I think they worry people a lot. And if you begin with what is enoughness, to use AJ’s term, and then think through your financial triage plan, I think you’ve got a good start on navigating this and whatever other hurdles life sends your way.
[00:57:12] Joe: Let’s find out what’s going on this… Oh, my goodness, we are in November. AJ’s book comes out next week. A- AJ, we’re gonna go to you last to talk a little bit about the book. OG, what’s going on with you this weekend, man?
[00:57:24] OG: I mean, pre-ordering dozens and dozens of copies of AJ’s book, obviously.
[00:57:29] Joe: Duh.
[00:57:29] OG: Eagerly awaiting their, the arrival.
[00:57:31] OG: Uh, this weekend, first weekend of November, sad to say, but my in-laws have left, you know, after just a short three-week visit. So it was really, oof, really breaks my heart that they had to go-
[00:57:43] Doug: That just feels empty …
[00:57:44] OG: earlier this week. No, actually, this weekend, shout-out to my wife’s grandpa Uh, they’re having his birthday party this, this weekend.
[00:57:52] OG: I cannot attend because I have afterschool activities on Saturday, but they’re having his 100th birthday party. Wow. So shout out Grandpa K- That’s great … up in Michigan, living the life we all hope to be at 100. Still kicking it, still witty. Doesn’t drive anymore. That’s probably for the best, but otherwise-
[00:58:10] OG: doing really well, you know, healthy-wise and, uh, you know, still sharp as a tack. So-
[00:58:15] Joe: Yeah, d- …
[00:58:16] OG: that’s my goal, be 100 with a bunch of friends and have a big party.
[00:58:20] Joe: That’s
[00:58:20] OG: fabulous. You guys, well, Joe and Doug, you guys f- probably not gonna attend my party at 100, but-
[00:58:25] Joe: Easy …
[00:58:26] OG: you know.
[00:58:27] Joe: Sitting right here. Jesse, Jesse- Y’all
[00:58:29] OG: are invited.
[00:58:30] Joe: Thank you very much. Jesse Cramer, what’s going on at Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors, man?
[00:58:36] Jesse: Just earlier this week, we released an episode about the history of retirement, which I f- was fa… I mean, I didn’t know a lot about it, so kinda went down the rabbit hole of how did we get here to today’s, you know, modern concept of what retirement looks like as opposed to maybe what it looked like 50, 100, 150 years ago.
[00:58:53] Jesse: And then next week, publishing an episode just about these, like, tensions and confliting, uh, conflicting goals in retirement. You know, one person wants to maximize their spending, another person wants to minimize the risk of ruin, another person just wants to give a lot of money away, and how these competing goals can lead us to, to different decisions.
[00:59:11] Joe: That’s awesome. Man, that sounds like a good time listen for my favorite finance nerd, and that’s at Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors. AJ, thanks so much for joining us. It was great to get to know you. I was so excited to see that you had this new book coming out, and then I started digging into who you were and who you work with and all those records behind you.
[00:59:33] Joe: It’s like somebody very much a kindred spirit. Tell us about the book because Tuesday, Tuesday is the day. It’s out on November 10th.
[00:59:42] AJ: It’s the day Uh, I’m gonna read the subtitle, ’cause I think it kind of sums it up. It’s called Creative Money: New Financial Rules for Artists, Innovators, and Misfits. So yes, it is focused on creatives, but it’s really for anyone who feels like the financial system doesn’t serve them well.
[00:59:59] AJ: Um, so people who feel left out, people who maybe think they’re not great with money and have just kind of avoided it. I talk a lot about avoidance. We’re all guilty of it. Uh, I have an IRS letter sitting on my desk that I have not dealt with, so much so that I started getting letters from people who could help me out with my IRS debt, and it was just quite literally avoidance of not paying it.
[01:00:17] AJ: I was fully capable of paying it. And so it’s me talking in my voice and basically saying like, “Hey, I know this stuff is really hard and you’ve been avoiding it, but like, I’m probably the only person who you’re gonna listen to because I used to be you. I used… I was an English major. I didn’t even know what a 401was 10 years ago, and then I went way too extreme because that’s just my unfortunate personality, and I went back to school.
[01:00:38] AJ: I became a CFP. I started a wealth management firm. I became an… You know, I, I went way too deep into it.” You went way the other way. And hopefully that can be helpful to lots of people, uh, who are not gonna do that, who are not gonna go become CFPs and start wealth management firms. But I’ve been working on it for…
[01:00:53] AJ: You know, the ideas came from working with clients, what I learned about how people actually take advice, because I think as financial advisors, we have all these great ideas about, you know, how to retire and how to make money in the stock market, and insurance, and at the end of the day, what do people actually do?
[01:01:09] AJ: So that’s kind of what I internalized over five years of working with, with clients, and then I sat down and wrote a lot of it down, and now there’s a book, which is crazy.
[01:01:17] Joe: It’s so exciting, and just reading through it the last several days, what, what a fun read. And you’re right, creative people very much…
[01:01:26] Joe: And not just creative people. So many people just avoid it and they think, “If I don’t look at it, it’s gonna get better,” which isn’t true at all. Isn’t true.
[01:01:33] AJ: Well, sometimes it’s true. If you put money in the stock market and you don’t look at it- Oh,
[01:01:36] Joe: good point …
[01:01:36] AJ: it might get better.
[01:01:37] Joe: Yeah. I meant more that letter you were talking about, or my credit card debt, or not building an emergency fund, whatever it might be.
[01:01:42] Joe: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:01:43] AJ: My husband goes, “Are we okay?” I’m like, “Yeah, sorry, I m- I messed up. I didn’t set the check.”
[01:01:49] Joe: And again, the book is Creative Money: New Financial Rules for Artists, Innovators, and Misfits, and it’s out on Tuesday. You can pre-order it, right, today?
[01:01:57] AJ: You can. You can pre-order it whenever you like, wherever books are sold.
[01:02:00] Joe: All right, Stackers, that’s gonna do it for today. Thanks everybody for hanging out with us online. If you wanna hang out with us and watch the show being made and participate, we’ve had a lot of participation today from our Stackers online. Join us on Monday afternoons, nearly every Monday at, uh, 3:30 Eastern Time.
[01:02:17] Joe: You can find us making the Stacking Benjamins Friday show. All right, Doug’s gonna end this one. Doug, what should we have learned on today’s show?
[01:02:25] Doug: Well, Joe, first, take some advice from the woman who’s apparently allowed to just make up words like enoughness, AJ Error.
[01:02:35] AJ: Almost got it.
[01:02:36] Doug: I’m making up her last name.
[01:02:38] Doug: AJ Ayers. She says, “Be prepared to make some big life decisions like moving or changing jobs. It may seem unfair, but it’s more fairnessness than being 100,000 in debt.” Second… See, I just made up a word right there. Second, remember the thing Jesse said about the, the stuff. Even if you’re not a line item budgeter, you’ll know inflation is hitting you if your rent check bounces, and that’s your sign it’s time to start some basic tracking.
[01:03:08] Doug: But the big lesson- Always consider the long-term cost of your decisions because something that seems like a great idea today could come back to haunt you 500 years from now, which is why I’m starting to get nervous about that lifetime warranty I offered on the used mattress I sold out of mom’s basement.
[01:03:28] Doug: Thanks to AJ Ayers for joining us today. Head to her website, AJ Ayers, a- yeah, ajayers.com- … where you can pre-order her new book, which includes an entire chapter about me. It’s called Creative Money: New Financial Rules for Artists, Innovators, Misfits, and Ne’er-do-wells. I’m one of those. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com.
[01:03:54] Doug: Thanks to Jesse Cramer for joining us today. Are you a short-term investor? Are you into macro corporate finance? Well, then don’t bother listening to this guy’s podcast ’cause his podcast is personal finance for long-term investors. And thanks finally to OG for joining us today. Looking for good financial planning help?
[01:04:14] Doug: Head to stackingbenjamins.com/og for his calendar. And if you notice, I never make fun of his credit because I’m afraid of him. This show is the property of SB 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.
[01:04:39] Doug: 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. 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.
Leave a Reply