Ever wonder how where you live and work could affect your ability to reach your financial goals? More specifically, is living in a big city making you poor? Here to discuss this topic on today’s special roundtable episode, we’re happy to welcome Maggie Tucker from the Inside Out Money podcast. She joins Len Penzo and OG to tackle this important topic and extract key lessons that Stackers can apply to their own lives.
In our second half of the show, sponsored by DepositAccounts.com, we dive into what are ways that Stackers can save money despite living in a big city? Be sure to listen to the show, as you won’t want to miss these tips!
Be sure to stick around for the continuation of our year-long trivia game. Doug has a doozy of a question with a literacy charity-related theme.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Watch On Our YouTube Channel:
Our Topic: How easy is it to stack Benjamins if you live in a city?
Why Living in a Big City Is Making You Poor (DariusForoux.com)
During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:
- How improving your mindset improves your well-being.
- Costs of living in a big city.
- How you can control your expenses despite living in a high cost of living area.
- Expenses that tend to be higher in an urban vs. suburban vs. rural setting.
- What major expense categories to focus on cutting to achieve the most progress.
- How avoiding lifestyle inflation is key to making financial progress over time.
- How your lifestyle choices affect your finances.
- Why your savings rate may be more important than your salary.
- How to use self-discipline to go further financially when distractions abound.
- Why you should audit your peer group.
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
Maggie Tucker
Another thanks to Maggie Tucker for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Maggie on her show, Inside Out Money, at Inside Out Money Podcast.
Len Penzo
Visit Len Penzo dot Com for the off-beat personal finance blog for responsible people.
OG
For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- How many books has Dolly Parton donated through her nonprofit, Imagination Library?
DepositAccounts
Thanks to DepositAccounts.com for sponsoring Stacking Benjamins. DepositsAccounts.com is the #1 place to go when you’re looking to see if your rate is the BEST rate on savings, CDs, money markets, and even checking accounts! Check out ALL of the rates ranked from best to worst (and see the national averages) at DepositAccounts.com.
Join Us Monday!
Tune in on Monday when you’ll learn how to be better with your money than your parents were with author and first generation mentor, Gigi Gonzales.
Miss our last show? Check it out here: Finding Your People, Extinguishing Negative Self Talk, and Finding Peace (with Amy Minkley) SB1465.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
What a filthy job could be worse. How could be raining?
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Hi, I am Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug, and today you’ll learn how improving your mindset improves your. Financial wellbeing with former marketing executive, early retiree, and host of the Inside Out Money show, Maggie Tucker plus the guy who described the movie Inside Out as too Mushy. It’s a resident curmudgeon, og.
And finally the writer, director of the Hit Pixar film, it’s Pit. Oh, that doesn’t say Peter. It’s just Len Pezo. But that’s not all. Halfway through the show, I’ll share my generous trivia question, and now a guy who’s always reading up on the latest personal finance advice, it’s sa.
Read another piece today, which we’re gonna go over Doug. Thanks for the intro. I am Joe Sulci, high Aboriginal Money on x slash Twitter slash your favorite channel. And man, we’ve got a great crew here today. So let’s dive in and meet everyone before we talk about living where you live. What’s the upside?
Living in a city, downside, living in a city and living in the country, wherever, but. A guy who lives in just outside the city of Dallas, Texas. Mr. OG is here. Cross the card table from me. How are you, man? Good. I want to
know why, why is it that it’s like, you know, a curmudgeon and, uh, make fun of Len and make fun of og and then it’s like, and then the guy who does all of the reading, Joe, like, what?
How about the guy who wears like a weirdly salmon
shirt? We had, we had, uh, Lisa Curry, our writer on Wednesday, og, if you spent more time with Lisa, she would say nice things about you too. Well, I,
she doesn’t need to say nice things about me. She just needs to say mean things about you. Oh,
I, I, I misinterpreted that.
And the guy who we never say mean things about deep under Los Angeles. Mr. Zoss here, how are you man?
I am doing fine. I think I’m excited. The New Year’s. Kicking off well, and uh, everything’s going great. Congratulations, uh, to, uh, OG and your Michigan. Team for winning the national championship. I have a lot to do with it.
Very
happy for you. It was, it was all that cheering from the corner of the end zone line. I dunno if you know that. There was that one guy that said, you can do this. Go
team. That’s where he put the biggest
fans.
Yes. Right there in the corner. Did you ever see the movie Rudy? Did you see when, uh, Mary Lou Retten needed to nail that last flip in the Olympics?
Yeah. It was OG giving that
speech. Yep. You’re showing your age with Mary Lou Retten. I mean, that she’s,
when it comes to gymnast people look that up though.
We have people at, I think she’s been overtaken by quite a few gymnasts in the last 40 years.
Welcome to The Old Guy Podcast. Yes, I’m Joe. And I’m super happy we have this guest with us today.
She is the co-host of the Inside Out Money podcast. It’s Doug so eloquently said earlier. And it’s funny, she’s a woman I wanted to had on this show for so long that when I was on my way to give my keynote talk, I’m literally throwing beads and I’m in this ridiculous gesture outfit. I see her and I go, Maggie, Maggie Tucker is here.
I think I scared the hell out of you at FinCon. Yeah, I mean, it
was the beads you were throwing at me all. It was just a lot happening. It was a full band behind you, but it was great to see you. Glad it ended in this.
Great to see you. So you are in Atlanta, the big city of Atlanta, Georgia. I am,
yes. Yeah.
And born and
raised. Well, tell us about your early retirement. What year were you able to say, you know what, I’m done with this.
I Earl, I say I, we, my husband and I actually early retired on the exact same day just for fun. That was May of 2022. So we’re at about the one and a half year
mark. Yeah. You know, this is the most, I implied question ever, but how old were you
then?
That’s fine. In the world of fire, I feel like people are like proud to share their ages, I guess. Sure. But I was 41 at the time. I’m 44 3. Something 43 or 44. Now she’s 40 something. 40 something. But I was 41 at the time for sure. And it was my husband’s 43rd
birthday. That’s fabulous. Sweet. And how has the road been since then?
Oh gosh. Can I just clarify real quick? Yes. The next day was my husband’s birthday. I’d just like to clarify. I do know my husband’s birthday. It was the day he was, he wanted to do it just for fun, like the day before he turned 44. That’s all I’m done.
Don’t ask og his, uh, spouse’s
birthday. I’m terrible with birthdays, so
No shame.
I am too. I know ’em all.
Steel trap. You got all Yeah, my steel trap is called a Google Calendar. Yeah. Not a steel trap. No. Maggie. So tell us about inside out money. ’cause what you guys do, the three of you is a ton of fun.
Yeah. So it’s more than the three of us, but I am. The main host, I have a rotating set of co-hosts, which is a mix of my husband, some of my good friends, and we started it about less than a year ago.
And for three years before that, I was podcasting with another friend at Friends On Fire. I started Inside Out Money because honestly, friends on Fire, my co-host wanted to retire and I wanted to keep going. And I love the concept of the psychological aspect of money. I think you can tell people what to do all day long.
They, you, you know, they either know what to do or don’t, but even once they know what to do, they don’t actually do the things that they could or should do. Right. It, it’s hard. Right? It’s easier said than done. I really wanted to focus more on the psychological aspect of it and, and starting on the inside because it’s, it’s getting your mindset and, and your framework of how you think about money.
Right. And that will lead to outside behaviors and actions eventually. So we’re, we’re, uh, just a bunch of friends talking about money, but we try to do it in like a fun, approachable way and. A meaningful way where you take something away in terms of helping, you know, your financial mindset and different tactics to improve your finances
since you retired way, way, way early, has it been the mental part that’s been more difficult or the math of staying retired?
Well,
the market’s been doing fantastic since I retired. I know. So the math hasn’t been too tough. I somehow quit making a lot of money and have more money than I. Did when I left. So that feels good. Quite on, you know, for someone who was a little, I was afraid to take the plunge. So I mean, it feels nice to be a year and a half in and have more money than when we started.
I like the tone
of our voice, like, you’re not gonna believe this, but I’m a little happier now that I have more money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. More money and more time. It’s a win-win. I forgot what the question was, Joe. I’ll be honest. Well, you know
what, let me remind you of the question right here. Does that clarify what the question was, Maggie?
Yeah, sure. I dunno what’s going on guys?
Maggie, you think we know what’s going on? Yeah. Doug. Doug. Do you know what’s going
on? Um, checks. Notes. No clue. Joe? Nope. No? No idea. Oh, am I supposed to? Well, how about
this? Yes.
Well, hey, on that note, you asked about the mindset. Since early retiring, I am sort of losing my edge and sharpness.
I’ve noticed not being, I mean, I have a very demanding, stressful job, and I’m just like not quite as on top of crap as I used to be. Oh, this is, it just made me think of that as I watched this whole thing. Did you watch? Watch
our mental acuity go in the ter.
This is, yeah, you said it. Not me.
This is how on top of it we are, Maggie.
We’ll be right in the middle of a thrilling discussion like this one and something like this will happen. Whoops, my bad. Maggie Tucker’s here from Inside Out. Money OGs. Here. Neighbor Doug. Glenn Penso. Let’s get talking about where you live and your financial security.
We’re
going back today to a blog. We’ve, uh, dove, divin. Have we divin dived, be dived, be dived. Be dived into do. Yeah, the Darius Farrow. Blog, uh, Darius, F-O-R-O-U x.com. Darius is a very opinionated blogger, and Darius has a piece about why living in a big city is making you poor. Let’s go to the man that, uh, lives in the biggest city of anyone on this panel, Mr.
Penso, uh, living in LA making you poor. Well,
it’s Southern California is a very expensive place. But if you choose wisely and you make good decisions, actually no, it’s not making me poor. Uh, things are more expensive in the city, okay? But there’s ways around everything. There’s ways to make do almost everywhere if you control the things you can
control.
Well, I wanna talk about that piece later because what I first wanna talk about though, is. I know that the area that you live in LA was once like a remote, remote, remote suburb, and I feel like over the years the city’s come to you. What has that done for property values where you live? Yeah, it’s
property values have gone up, up, up.
And, you know, I, I’m a native here of Southern California. Even at my old age, it was a lot more rural when I was a kid. Uh, now it’s completely, you can go. A hundred miles to the east of LA and it’s just sprawl. And with that sprawl, prices have gone up. Um, and that’s just the way it is. I mean, homes are more expensive, you know, you wanna buy, land’s more expensive.
The competition for schools, if you want to go to a private school that’s more expensive than ever.
What about your commute? The commute is horrible. Over
the years, I’ve tried to, I’ve actually used, believe it or not, Southern California has commuter rail and it has commute. And I actually used commuter rail for, uh, probably two years.
And even that went, that got expensive after a while, and I, I ended up going back to my car. But, uh, yeah, it’s expensive.
Maggie? Uh, Atlanta. Not close to the size of Los Angeles, but still that’s a city you live in a city known for gridlock as well. Like I feel like whenever I’ve been in Atlanta around rush hour, like you can’t get
there.
Yeah. I mean, I don’t miss not having a commute anymore since early retiring, but I don’t think the traffic in Atlanta, I was gonna say it’s not that bad, but it depends on where you live. I always find it fascinating, you know, people complain about wherever they live. I live in fairly in town in Atlanta, but would would still look like a suburb to many people.
And it’s somewhat a reverse commute to most places in Atlanta that you would wanna work. And I’ve worked at multiple different locations around the city and my husband has also, it used to take me 30 minutes to get to work, 30 minutes to get home every now and then on a crazy day, maybe 40. I never thought it was that bad.
Now you can choose to live really far out in the burbs and work somewhere where, yeah, it takes you an hour and a half. But I think Len said it, it It’s a choice, right? You control what you can control you. You chose where you lived in the city and you chose where you worked in the city to some extent.
It’s interesting though, you talk about the reverse commute. Did you guys choose that location on purpose? I mean, did you choose a place where all the salmon are swimming one way and you get to go the
opposite? I mean, yeah, in theory we did, because I grew up in the same area and I loved it for many of its qualities.
One of them was, it’s a great commute to, you know, many different locations in Atlanta.
Oh, gee, you and I were in the Detroit suburbs and now you’re in the Dallas suburbs. Like, I feel like it’s way more expensive in Dallas than it was in the Detroit area.
Well, I mean, yeah, absolutely it is. It’s insane. I mean.
One of the things you guys haven’t mentioned yet is the actual, you’re talking about commuting, the cost of commuting as it relates to just being on the road. I don’t know. I don’t think LA has a lot of toll. I’m not sure about Atlanta. It’s been a while, but every road in Dallas, you have to pay money to be on.
And it’s like every one of those little overpasses that you kind of zip through and it, it’s like automated tolling. Automated tolling, automated tolling. Like you get hit at a dollar every time you hit one of those things or whatever it is. So not only is the commute suck downtown.
They charge you for it.
Well charge well. They like
monetize the commute,
which is interesting. And when you’re in a bigger city and you’ve got a lot of traffic where you’re going stop and start traffic, that’s harder on your vehicle. So your maintenance costs are gonna go up. You’re more likely to get into fender vendors. Yeah.
So you’re gonna hit your insurance deductible more often. Yeah. I mean there’s all of those ancillary kinds of commuting costs you don’t think of.
Yeah. You know, here in LA they have a couple toll roads where the whole road is toll. But what they are taking advantage of here, they have commuter express lanes that you pay for.
Yep. So you can go free or you can use the commuter express lane. And I would use that on occasion. And in rush hour it was, let’s see, last before I retired, it was $18 at rush hour. One way for me. Yeah. Think about how much that
adds
up. Yeah. My most expensive, uh, express lane story was we were trying to get across town from Dallas to Fort Worth.
And there’s one, I mean, there’s a couple of roads that do it, but from where we are, there’s kind of a major road and there’s a huge accident, and so it’s dynamically priced where every, you know, to keep that lane going, the prices tick up so that you know the volume of cars is manageable. Yep. Same.
Because that’s the whole idea is you’re paying, you’re paying for the speed. It was $48. Wow. To go six miles. Yeah. That’s
crazy. Six miles. Hey, in Atlanta we also have some of those express lanes. For most of the parts, there’s some like weird exclusions, but if you drive an ev, you basically get to drive in ‘EM for free, even when you’re with one person.
Oh, right. So you get to drive in the HOV with one person and you get to drive in the express lanes for no charge. It’s added benefit there. Yeah. It’s
nice. He talks in this piece about high living expenses, by the way, no need for people to read this piece. I think it’s, it’s very short. If you wanna follow along, you can follow it at stacky Benjamins dot com.
But I wanna read a quote from this. High living expenses such as rent, transportation, need away at your income, you’ll have little left to save and invest. This is talking about living in the big city. Meanwhile, the rich live in their mansions outside the city. They’re far away from the chaos and pollution.
Maggie, you know, people looking at. Trying to do what you and your husband did. Three main things to cut your cost of rent slash owning your home, your cost of transportation. Those are two of the three. Then your food’s. Number three, like wouldn’t you agree living in any of the cities you guys live in Way more expensive than mom’s house here in Texarkana and, and he has a real point there.
Yeah,
I, I agree. I mean, I think he oversimplifies it, but if we’re gonna keep oversimplifying it like he does. Yeah, I agree. In theory it is.
What do you mean by he oversimplifies it? Well,
he oversimplifies that it’s a kind of binary decision that a big city has to be expensive, housing’s expensive, everything else I.
I don’t think it’s that simple. So just as a simple example, I’m in Atlanta. I live in a house that’s of a certain amount. I haven’t increased my, I haven’t done a lot of lifestyle inflation over the past 15 to 20 years, and so I have a very reasonable cost of living. I paid off my mortgage, I don’t know, 10 years ago, and I don’t really have expensive, uh, an expensive cost of living, but there are tons of other people in my peer group that made the amount of money that I made that chose to live further out.
Really expensive houses continue to inflate their lifestyle. And yeah, they’re kind of getting sucked into many of the things that big cities have, which are bigger, nicer houses.
Y you know, I
will say this for, there are to that aim, yes, expenses are more expensive in the city. However, at least when I worked in the corporate world.
They tended to pay more too. If you had a job in a city with a corporation, it paid more as a metric. I rem, the company I came from had different pay scales depending on where, even though people worked for the same company nationwide, there was totally different pay scales depending on whether you lived in Texarkana, Texas or you lived in New York City or you lived in.
So it kind of, that kind of offsets a little bit in that regard. Yeah, I totally
agree. A big piece of the compensation formula is where it is. You, you can like hack that by. Getting the job in one city, convincing them to keep you on and then going and working remote somewhere else. That’s hard to do, but
they often don’t.
Lower side. Yeah. In, I remember at the beginning of Covid, there were a lot of people who just got the heck outta San Fran or you know, Boston, the really high cost of living areas. And it didn’t take the companies long to say, look, if you know you’re not just going there for a couple of weeks, you’re gonna be there long term.
We realize we’re all remote, we’re gonna cut your salary. And people went crazy like You can’t cut my salary. Look, it was predicated upon you paying rent in Boston.
Yeah. Doesn’t it still feel like violating a contract though? It felt like you were I still felt that way. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I live in Texarkana, but if I had moved someplace and I was told I had salary of X and my, my boss comes to me and goes, Hey, we’re cutting your salary.
’cause you moved to a lower cost of living place. Like, wouldn’t that, wouldn’t that drive you crazy?
I would say a lot of bigger companies wouldn’t do that for that very reason. Like the company I worked for would not do that. The company I
worked for, they had two options. They did the, we cut you by 10%.
If you move to a lower place or you just wouldn’t get raises for the next four years, you know, they would until you, you’re capped out. That’s right. And that’d say, fine, you’ll keep your salary, but you know, you’re way overpaid now for, you’re not gonna see anything else.
Yeah. Other cost of living in the city.
og, what’s a cost of living in Dallas that you put up with, that somebody living in the country doesn’t have to put up with? Well, I
think the big one that I just mentioned was the toll situation. You know, just driving around cost money. Although you can, you know, skip that by just taking surface streets that’ll take the entire day to go places.
I think the one thing that we noticed a lot, you know, when we moved from Michigan to Dallas and. Definitely the suburbs of Detroit are much, much, much smaller than the suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth. I mean, DFW is as big as the entire state of Michigan almost in terms of population. Um, no, I mean, it is, it’s, yes.
It’s
insane.
I thought at first before you said population, I thought you were referring to the sprawl. I’m like, it feels like it sometimes. Yeah.
Well, there’s that too. But the price of food I thought was pretty, pretty interesting in terms of the differences. And, and it was, I mean, it’s a. Easy, a hundred and something bucks for breakfast, you know, to go out with the family.
It’s just, I think some of that’s inflation recently and that sort of thing, but just being in the metroplex really was kind of eye-opening groceries, I don’t notice it as much, although I don’t do a lot of that. LSA does, but it does seem to me that just going out to eat component of. Of expenses is, is higher than it
maybe don’t go to the four seasons when you go out to breakfast.
Well, you know, there is that, that is a component of the cost. Undoubtedly the cost of valet is
way higher. Doug,
you wouldn’t way higher. Where am I gonna park my McLaren? Not in front of a Denny’s. Duh. But I mean, even just a, you know, the local coffee place, it’s. You know, Starbucks pricing for, you know, local co.
It’s just, you know, it’s just extra. Yeah, just it
seems like extra. I was just gonna add, I’ve definitely noticed what Josh is saying. I mean, I don’t think grocery food is necessarily any more expensive in a large city. If anything, I think it, for logistics and supply chain reasons can actually be less expensive at times.
You, you have more or less expensive options available, but I do think restaurants. Our expensive, and a lot of it is like retail space is expensive. Right? The leases and the rent and and the cost of labor. Labor costs more. Yeah. Cost of labor, you’re right. It’s all. I often will get frustrated and then I’m like, well, it’s really hard to run this business and I get it.
They’re having, and everybody had to do it during Covid. I mean, you saw prices shoot up. How about
insurance? Yeah,
I was just gonna say that. Yeah,
insurance is every,
yeah, all of it. Oh my gosh. There you go, Len. Oh my
gosh. I thought you were talking about insurance for the restaurants, but you’re right, even just insurance
in general.
Oh yeah. Like car insurance is typically, you know, closer. You live to a downtown city. The insurance rates go up the, the one exception I can think. This is one where I’m suffering from right now is if here in Southern California, if you live in the, believe it or not, there are rural areas out here in Southern California.
You’ve lived close to a rural area. That might be a fire hazard there. You’re here in Cal, Southern California. Anyways, your, your homeowner’s insurance would be more expensive, I would think. But other than that though, I think insurance living in the city is much more expensive.
You know, Maggie, you brought up something earlier about, uh, him oversimplifying this and about how you made, uh, some.
Choices that have kept your lifestyle inflation from being high? I’m wondering about new people. Uh, new. New people. New people. People that are, they’re babies. They you? Babies. Babies. Like babies. Yeah. You mean babies? Newish people. Uh, young people that really, I think a lot of times people in their twenties or sometimes even early thirties move to a new city and don’t think about the cost fluctuation between city A and CB Mm-Hmm.
Or think enough about, Hey, you know, my salary. Sounds like it’s a lot of money. Let’s say you get a good job with a six figure salary. You think that’s a lot, but then you start adding in all these things that Darius is talking about. You, you could have a six figure income and still be living paycheck to paycheck.
Yeah, totally. I mean, the, the math is pretty simple, right? It’s like your income minus your expenses is what you can save and what you can, you know, build for your chance at any freedom in the future. Whether you know baby freedom or big freedom like I’m experiencing right now. And I think I was just trying to tie it back into babies, since we’re talking about new people.
New people. So a real life example is like, right, I could have had, there are people in a small town making a lot of money that are spending all their money. Yeah. And they’re saving nothing. But then you could be, you know, on a teacher salary or something smaller in a big city and living. Very intentionally and creatively and consciously, and have a higher savings rate than that person on a huge salary in a small town.
And that’s just what I mean by it’s oversimplified. It’s all about our personal choices, regardless of where we choose
to live. Well, he does say one thing that I notice, which is he ends this particular. Section of his piece by saying the bright lights and endless entertainment options only serve to distract us from the fact that we’re not getting ahead in life.
I think there’s a lot more of the bright lights and endless entertainment options when I think about going to. Los Angeles, Dallas, or to Atlanta that I think about here in one or two more than in Texarkana. It’s very close. Yeah, very close. But, but I think what you’re saying, Maggie, is you gotta kind of put the blinders on about the bright lights and the endless entertainment.
Yeah. You
gotta have a lot more discipline and ability. It, it is, it takes a lot of internal motivation and discipline to not constantly inflate your lifestyle. And I think he’s spot on and you’re spot on from that point of. If you are in a city around a lot more people that are, I mean, I’ll take LA as an example when I go to LA and I love la, but when I go to LA, I start to see things and want certain, you know, you just get around a vibe of people spending a lot of money and being mu, and again, I’m like stereotyping a city.
So I could pick New York, la, anything. I’d say less so where I run in Atlanta perhaps. But you’re around people and there’s more peer pressure to look a certain way, drive a certain car. Spend money a certain way, and so I do think who you’re surrounding yourself with there, there’s more temptation in big cities for that.
For sure.
I wanna dive into that in the second half of this discussion because I think that leads us to the key, which is I hear a lot of people complain about where they live and think, if I only lived over here, things would be better. If I only had this thing, things would be better. And I think you can do very well living right where you are.
And take advantage of it. So I’d love to dive into how you guys have taken advantage of the quote, bright lights and endless entertainment to make your life better and, uh, in some ways richer. NOG I’m sure has some of the, a couple of those
things he’s done. The Four Seasons breakfast is pretty nice.
But before we get to that second half of this discussion where we get a little more tactical about making where you live work for you, it’s time for week two of the 2024 trivia competition in which we pit three mortal enemies, OG Len and Paula Pant.
And today, Maggie OG and Len are your mortal enemies because you’re on team Paula pant today, which means. I’ve got good news and bad news for you. Which one would you like first? Just all at once.
Both of them. Please Just give
it all simultaneously.
Yeah. Well, it actually is kind of bad news. Good news. The bad news is, is that you are not in first place.
I. Because Len took the early lead. The good news is, is Paul is rarely in first play, so it doesn’t matter much. Okay. I can’t screw this up.
That’s right. You’re
gonna
get to, you can only go up from here. You have to guess. Second, because OG won the Benjamins in a Box competition before our holiday break.
Len will guess first. OG guesses last. But to do all that, we need a trivia question. Doug, what do we got this week, man?
You surely do need a trivia question, Joe. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug on today’s date. In 1946, the patron saint of my heart, Dolly Parton was born. The world hasn’t been the same since.
Raised in a one bedroom log cabin in the Smoky Mountains with her 11 siblings. Dolly knew at an early age that she wanted to be a singer. I’m all for a cost effective living situation, but 14 people in a one bedroom is a little bit much for me. Although, look, I, I’d tough it out for Dolly. I bet they could’ve used someone as helpful and rugged as me around the house.
You know what I mean? Right. Okay. Yeah. At just 10 years old, Dolly began her music career on the CS Walker Show in Knoxville, Tennessee. Then at the age of 13, she performed at the Grand Ole Opry for the first time, exposing her to a bigger country music audience. And setting her on the path for Superstar.
Maybe even more importantly, it set her on a path for me to eventually discover her music as a teenage boy and start a years long campaign to be the president of her fan club. After relentless emailing on my part, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame got wise and inducted Dolly in November, 2022. After 66 years in the industry, that was why.
Yeah. Oh yeah. I take full credit. There’s lots of massive numbers that come to mind when we think of Dolly. There’s her, uh, uh, 25 number one hits and also massive. There’s her, uh, 54 Grammy nominations and 11 wins. Wow. And of course, even more huge than that is, uh, the tremendous, uh, number of books that she’s donated to kids.
Lynn, you didn’t think I was gonna say any of those things, did you? Today’s trivia question is how many books has Dolly Parton donated through her nonprofit called Imagination Library? I’ll be back right after I finished designing campaign flyers to make Dolly the mayor of Texarkana. So she’s gotta move here.
Perfect. Fantastic. Come on down, Dolly Parton. Is there a bigger badass than Dolly Parton, by the way? Just amazing. It’s her world. We just live in just, I swear, and more so every year. Like people think Taylor Swift is incredible. Dolly. Pardon? Man. Te Taylor. Who? That’s right. Swift. Never heard of her. Sorry.
No,
we had a lot of teenage girls in my house. Right.
Did you go to the uh, to see her in concert? Maggie? No,
Joe. I don’t have a job anymore. So what’s funny is we discussed and we told our, I go, man, if we were still working, I would totally have sprung for the amount of tickets, but I feel like I need to make more responsible decisions now.
Our kids were like, could you go back to
work? Right. Your kids are like, fire movement sucks. Yeah. They don’t,
they they don’t get the trade off. That
sucks. All right. Uh, len’s gonna go first. Maggie second. OG goes last. Len, how many books has she donated through her nonprofit? Did
Doug say when she started that nonprofit?
I did not, did you mention that? Okay. Well then I’ll just really have to wing it. Uh, let’s see. It’s probably some humongous number seven. I’m gonna say,
were they kids’ books? These are kids’ books, right? All books
to like all ages, all books. Li just to like school age libraries. So it could be
K through 12, I’m
gonna say.
Let’s just, oh, I’m sure it’s a huge number. I’m gonna say 10 million. 10
million books. Maggie, does that sound high or low to you?
I don’t know. That’s, that’s just a tricky question. And you think we do? I’m, I’ve never heard our show. Show. I’m singing nine to five show. Yeah. Uh, I’m just singing Dolly Parton songs in my head.
Now I’m gonna go, uh, because I think I understand the rules to this game, and I’m gonna try to do Paula solid here. I’m gonna go with, you said 10 million, Lynn? Yes. I’m gonna go with 9.5 million.
9.5 million OGs. Liking that,
loving it. Definitely the over 10,000,001 third books and everything above it.
10 million and a book shredded into thirds.
I think the real
number is four 6 million. That’s what I think the real number is. 46 million. You think it’s, you think it’s way higher? My official guess. I was gonna say 50. Wow. But my official guess is 10 0 0 0 0 1.
That’s, that’s a ton of books. Well, uh, uh, Maggie, you were the nicer of the two of you because
what ticks me off when he does that, Joe, is that he knows I’m over here trying to do math to figure out who’s closer.
And he goes with these like, infinite,
small, just announce og og just announce it. You think so? Do think I,
well, you know what we’re gonna find out here in just a minute. We’ll be right back. Len, you kick things off at 10 million. Look good for about, I’m gonna say, well, until Maggie started talking, it looked good.
Yeah, that’s, I’m out of this one. Maggie, you feeling good with the under? ’cause OG thinks it’s a big, huge number. What do you think?
Uh, I, I don’t know. I mean, I was feeling like unsure until you just said that. Now I’m feeling better. But you might have given me a false sense of hope. Oh, would I do
that?
Would I? You would, I think you would, but let’s keep going.
I very well might. That might be something I’ve done in the past, but. Nothing better than watching OG get angry when he loses og. How are you gonna feel when you lose this one? I
dunno. Just gotta let Len build a nice sleeve. He looks like he’s gonna be fine.
Sneak up from behind. Let’s find out. Take him out with the
knees. Uh, sweep the knees. Doug. That’s right. What’s the, what’s, who’s, who’s gonna bring this one home?
Hey there, stackers. I’m political strategist and Dolly Parton’s most humongous fan. Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug. It’s well known by now that Dolly Parton insisted on retaining ownership rights of, I Will Always Love You when Whitney Houston recorded it. But what’s lesser known is that Dolly wrote both that song and Jolene on the same day talk about work ethic.
I can relate one last Dolly related number that’s on everyone’s mind. It’s the one everyone’s thinking of. According to cosmopolitan.com, I will always love you. Has earned Dolly $20 million to date with income from the mega hit. Continuing to rise every year. That reminds me, I gotta add write number one song onto my to-do list.
Forgetting to do that. Today’s trivia question was, how many books has Dolly Parton donated through her nonprofit called The Imagination Library? A longtime champion of education. Dolly Parton started her nonprofit Imagination Library in her home county in 1995. Since then, she’s donated an estimated, I’m not gonna tell you that.
What I will tell you is that I’ll tell you that Len is off by 190 million in the wrong direction. Maggie’s off by 190.5 og. I just rounded. He’s only off by 189 million because she’s donated. 200 million books to kids in need that makes og, but mostly all those kids, the real winner. That’s a lot of books.
Wow.
Goodness’s gracious. Are those like hardback books like Pam, like thin books?
Lot, four pages long, Maggie. Yeah. I feel like they, those were
pamphlets. There was like a, I’d like to read the fine print of the, those books. Maggie gets
along well here. I wanna read the fine print of that question. Yeah. Like that is, that is a good, that’s a good answer.
We’ve had those fights here, so, yeah. Mm-Hmm. Welcome to the party. Yeah, thanks. Alright, so OG scores and we’re back to what we have every year. Letting OG in first and, uh, Paula, sorry. Paula, you’re, she’s gonna be very comfortable when she gets back, Maggie. That’s fine. The second half of today’s show is brought to you by deposit accounts.com.
Maggie Tucker, you know what happens when you go to deposit accounts.com.
A webpage comes up.
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I felt like when I lived in Detroit the first time, I didn’t take any advantage of where I lived. We went back, moved back, and lived there for two years. I took much more advantage of where we lived and getting those people together. I feel like I tried to do that now in Texarkana. But Maggie, what’s one thing that you make sure you take advantage of in Atlanta that makes your life bigger, richer, better?
I would say there’s just a lot of free, free cultural activities around the city, so from certain nights of the month, there’s museums that usually cost a lot that are free. There’s really cool parks. There’s really great outdoor infrastructure and areas that don’t cost us anything to hang out at. I think that’s something I’m getting in, not just my own big city, but in many big cities.
I’ve been to that. Not that you don’t get any of that in a smaller city, but you certainly don’t get the like breadth and options of it. It’s just a cultural diversity too. It, it is so
cool to see all the different cultural stuff that’s free. I never paid any attention to it. Like I mentioned, moved back to Detroit.
There were tons of things that Cheryl and I did that cost us zero and were fantastic. The museum thing being leased among them. I mean, if, if we didn’t go on the free day to the museum, the cost difference just for two of us was through the roof compared to going on free days. Yeah.
og, how about you say those senior citizen discounts finally are kicking in?
Huh? Oh, easy. Got ’em right here. A card for
the win. How do you, how do you take advantage of, uh, living in the city, living where you live? Well,
this isn’t free, nor is it relatively inexpensive, but I think compared to a smaller town or way, way, way out in the country, it would be an issue. We really like going to all of the Broadway stuff that Dallas has, which obviously is a big enough city to attract a pretty decent schedule year in, year out.
And we’ve started taking the kids, although. William decided that, uh, Les Mis was boring enough to sleep through the first half. Oh, good. So we went out at, at, at halftime, whatever that’s called. Intermission. Halftime. And he was like, I think that’s the official name.
He,
he goes, all right, well you’ll have to tell me what happened.
’cause I fell asleep. I’m like, it’s intermission. He’s like, wait, there’s more. I said, yeah. The second half of it, you know, the wraps up the whole storyline. He is like. Can you just tell me how it, can I just sit out here instead? It didn’t quite land the way that I thought it would as we’re, you know, sobbing to the end of Les Mis like normal people.
But you know, we really like that sort of stuff and I don’t know that necessarily that’s as readily available or easy to access, so, but it’s
funny, it costs money different than what Maggie and I were talking about a minute ago. Yeah. But you’re saying just the, the ability to have some of these cultural experiences Yeah.
Your kids at a younger age, being able to get that on the free
front. I absolutely adore our bike trails. And can go from my house just about to almost downtown Dallas without seeing a surface street or you know, crossing a major road or any of that sort of stuff if you follow the right bike trail. So yeah.
That’s
awesome. That’s pretty cool. Those are fantastic. You guys have like a road that’s a kind of a bike trail ish road around Atlanta, don’t you, Maggie? Yeah, the belt
line. Yeah, the belt line. Yeah. I, I unfortunately can’t say what Josh said around actually being able to get like, where I want go with it.
I gotta like drive my car to it and get on it. But if you live near it or on it, it’s awesome. And it’s great just to go and have, again, it’s like free stuff to do that’s really fun and cool. And uh, get you outside. And to be
fair, different, I’m a mile from it, but I can get there on back roads. Yeah. So I don’t have to drive, but I could, I could drive and park.
Sure.
Len, how about you? How does being close to LA make your life richer? Um,
well, I’ll tell you one thing that is really nice when you live next to a big city is if you like to travel, believe it or not, I guess this is a little ironic, but if you’re trying to move away or go out and travel away from the city airfare here, at least I’m, I’m, I’m sure it’s at all the big cities.
I mean, I. la if you get an airfare out of LAX, the main airport there, it is generally, I don’t know, 30, 40%. The airfare iss cheaper than if you go to one of the smaller suburb, uh, airports here in Southern California and there’s a lot of ’em, there’s, uh, you know, Burbank or Beach, beach days and traffic to get there.
Well, you know what though? It’s all a trade off and there’s, it’s all a trade off. It’s a trade and the way you get around that. If you’re off in the suburbs and you’re driving into LA just to let you know, you get a taxi or you get an Uber to take you to the, and they could because you also have to pay for parking if you drive your own car down there, right?
So you don’t have to worry about that. But if you live right in the heart of the city and you take those big airports, you’re gonna get much cheaper airfare to almost anywhere. So, I mean, it really is,
it’s a huge
savings. It’s cheap to get outta town. It costs you 200 bucks to get to the airport, but it’s so cheap to fly outta
here.
Uh, very seriously though, Len, I, I mean, we struggle in Texarkana. Not only that, I mean, you can go anywhere you want as long as it includes Dallas. Exactly, yeah. And there’s, there’s two flights a day, and the price
is, you can go anytime you want, as long as it’s. Give or take, plus or minus two days. Right?
Right. ’cause we may or may not make this flight today. We haven’t decided.
We’ll let you know. There’s been so many times, I’m two and a half hours from my house and I get stuck overnight. ’cause they cancel that flight like it is just the major airport. But you know what, we counter that with a much lower cost of living just across the board in Texarkana.
I just have to remind myself that I’ve got all these other. Great things about living here, and one is I don’t have the cost for the lifestyle I live that I would if I lived the same lifestyle in in a major city. How would you encourage people when they move to a city, when they move from one city to another city to make sure that they take into account that move?
Right. People moving around more than ever before. The average person has over seven jobs during their career. Maggie, what would be your advice to somebody who’s going from city A to city B to make sure that the budget stays intact?
I mean, my biggest advice would be to talk to people that actually live in that city, like real live people that maybe people you’re gonna work with, but get into some like in-depth discussions.
So you can obviously do a lot of internet research, you can join different Facebook groups and other things. But like if you’re interviewing for a certain company, I would say, Hey, can I talk to somebody else about my age and my situation that already works at this company and gets some advice about moving to this market and you know, where to live and.
All sorts of things. I always think of this really funny story from when I hired somebody and I, I was in Atlanta and I hired someone that was moving from Iowa. They didn’t ask a lot of questions, bought a house like I think before they even really had the job. Oh no. Bought a house. And when we heard what we were like, why would you buy a hou that’s like two hours from our office?
Oh. And she was like, well, it’s 40 miles away. My, where I live in Iowa, it’s 40 miles, 40 minutes. And I was like, Nope, 40 miles is gonna, in that particular area you live. So I was like, you could have, you know, in like four seconds, I could have told you, like, live there if you wanna drive, you know, an hour and 45 minutes every day.
But I think a lot of times people just don’t take advantage of the other human beings around them that can give them. A lot of great advice, tactical and, you know, higher level advice. Well, and that’s
a cool thing about living in, in a major city as well, is the affinity groups. Like whatever you’re interested in.
Like, I have to believe that the, the financial independence community, Maggie in Atlanta is pretty robust.
I think it’s, I mean, you’d be shocked. I’m not like a. Huge. I’m not hugely active in it, which, which is more just my stage of life of, I’ve got three kids and I know a lot. I’m very well ingrained in Atlanta, so I, I know a lot of people here already.
But yeah, I think there’s a lot of people from what I gather, and it wouldn’t be hard for me to try harder and find more people if I had more time to, you know, engage with new people. Another really interesting thing as you. I think about like stuff like buy nothing groups. Mm-Hmm. Are you familiar with those?
Yes, absolutely. Even just secondhand goods being able to borrow, there’s like big parenting parent exchange groups on Facebook and my community, multiple different ones. If I wanna borrow something, I can post the craziest things, like during COVID, my car battery died ’cause I hadn’t been driving in. I was like, does anyone have like an you know, charger?
Within five minutes someone had messaged me and was like, yep, you can come over and borrow it now. There’s just those things that I think are much easier in a big city. You’ve got a, a larger kind of swath of community members to, to pull from and
totally agree. OG though, you’ve gotta be. You, you gotta take advantage of that stuff.
Like I feel like there’s people to Maggie’s point, the woman that didn’t talk to anybody, I feel like so many people, they’ve got all these cool things in their backyard, these groups they could join and they don’t take any advantage of it. Yeah. I think if you’re moving
to a new area, you have to try it out.
I was thinking about, you know, your story there and when we moved from Michigan to Dallas, I was. Just, it was crushed as a adult male, right. Moving from a big giant house to a teeny tiny apartment and like, oh my gosh, what have I done to my family? And this is so ridiculous and I’ve failed and all this other sort of stuff.
And in fact, it was such a great opportunity because it, we figured out where all the stuff was. We figured out what communities we liked and what, like you said, the commutes were and things like that. ’cause we thought the same thing when we were looking at, when we were looking in Dallas. We’re looking at the cities going, oh, well that’s like 25 miles.
That’s, you know, that’s, that’s pretty reasonable. And then you get down here and people are like, you’re gonna look, you’re gonna work where and live where, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s, that’s an hour. You don’t want that.
Yeah. I think buying a place in a new city is a huge gamble. Right. Even if you rent a place for a few months, you can do a short-term rental.
You can do an Airbnb for a month if you want to.
Yeah. Agreed. How long did you guys rent for og? Uh,
it ended up being, uh, we about 15 months. We, it was about 12 before we put an offer on a house, and then that’s kinda the proverbial two, three months to close and all that sort of jazz. But yeah, it was, I thought it would be six months and it was a solid year before we were serious about looking, and even then we were, when we, you know, bought our house that we have now, it was, we, we went in.
Eyes wide open in terms of what the commute was gonna look like and you know, and all the other construction that was going on around us and all that sort of stuff. We knew, we knew what we were getting into
at that point. Len, other advice for people moving from city A to City B?
Yeah, no, you know, OG took, what I was gonna say is basically don’t sit down your roots and try the, where you’re gonna go out first if you can.
I mean, if you can get there and live there or, or visit for a week or, or what have you. I know in when I was in the corporate world and people had to transfer. What was really nice was the company would let allow you to spend to, you know, work in the new location for two or three weeks and then come back to where your old location was and you could trans that way you could learn where was the nice places to be, where was the nice places to stay, learn your surroundings, figure things out because, uh, you can’t just, you just can’t jump in.
I mean, you’re gonna, you can’t just take that shock and go in there without knowing that stuff ahead of time. So you gotta do your research. Just don’t go in blind. I mean, that’s really the best way to do it. It’s just get knowledgeable on where your new location is and whether you like it or not. You know, if you’re considering moving maybe, and you’re working for a company, ask if you can go work at a new city for, you know, take an assignment for two or three months to see if you like it.
There are companies that will do that for you. So try things out
first. Well, and if they don’t, if your company doesn’t ask. Sure. Right. I, I mean, so often there have been so many studies that show that people just don’t ask. Almost Maggie, to your point earlier about the woman not asking people in the new city what it was like, you’re about to say something.
I was just saying Yeah. To myself, to you.
Just, yes. Nothing important. We’re agreeing what you said. Uh, this piece again is called Why living in a big city is making you poor, and my goal with this piece. Was to point out that it can, but I think you have to take advantage of the place you live and look for those opportunities.
Maggie, you had a thought about this piece just in general when we sent it to you. What was your thought about this piece? Well,
I felt a little bad ’cause my first thought was a little bit overly critical, but it was just that the overall take from the author, look, it was. A provocative title and you know, that’s what a lot of people are going for, but it was overly simplistic and it didn’t give human beings enough kind of credit for agency over their own life and decisions like if you want to live.
And he, I mean, he later goes on to clarify this towards the end briefly, but like, if you wanna live in a big city, good for you. You might have reasons I’ll give you, I can’t really leave Atlanta. Right. I we’re a blended family. We, I need to convince like six family, or not six, three families to move. To be able to take our kids anywhere else.
And I happen to like
Atlanta, but I thought you were gonna toss, your ankle bracelet would go off if you
got No, no, no. I can’t take, you know, we can’t take my husband and I can’t take our kids out of Atlanta without convincing our exes to also move to another city. Right. And. And we don’t want to, we like it here, our kid, we have good roots here.
My family’s here. So there’s a lot of reasons why you might wanna be in the city you are in that have more to do with quality of life and family and other things. And I just think that the point is, you know, you can make any city work. Certainly there are things that are just like mainly housing that are significantly less expensive.
You can get a lot more house for your money. Outside of a big city and, and that’s great. And you know, if the world is your oyster and you can go do whatever you want, like, I would go live in some places where I can just, you know, have this beautiful piece of land and nothing around me, and it would be awesome, but I’m not able to do that at this point in my life.
And, and that’s okay. Right. And so that’s why I think that just he, he just sort of oversimplifies it and makes it almost like a binary decision when two things can be true. Right. Yeah. There are some pros to big and small cities. You also can make your own choices and decisions and you can decide what trade-offs you’re willing to do and make an intentional decision for yourself.
I love that take, which is why I think that’s a great place to land. ’cause I think no matter where you live, like when we moved to Texarkana, we realized all of the benefits of there. When I hear people complain. About living here. I just think why? Why? Like, there’s so much cool stuff here. You could make it cool.
Yeah. You choose not to. You choose to complain instead, and it, I don’t know, it drives me. It’s funny because living a richer life to me is part money and part just, you know, embracing where you are at that time. I. Yeah, let’s dive into speaking of where we are, let’s talk about where all you guys are.
We’ll have our guest of honor go last. og, what do you got going on this weekend? The 20th and 21st of January already. Time flies.
Uh, whole bunch of nothing. This is a quiet period for us where we’ve got, uh, you know, no real sports for the kids. They’re in preseason for track and baseball, uh, headed to Chicago next week.
So yeah, we’re enjoying the quiet lull before spring Sports kicks off and. In my, uh, spring. Stuff that kicks off in the spring. So we are enjoying some quiet time at home.
Your spring stuff kicks off in the spring. That’s, wow, I didn’t know Spring stuff kicked off in the spring. It’s a good time. That’s a lot of, lot of specificity.
It’s a lot
of stuff. Yeah. Uh, things
with the stuff. A lot of things, you know, speaking of museums, what’s fun about living in Texarkana is that I get excited about coming to Dallas OG to visit you guys. Or when we go to a city and we make like these lists of things we’re gonna do when we get, we’re busy this weekend.
No, no, no. I’m going to Houston now that the stench of all those UM people is, is leading that city. So we’re headed to see some of the museums in Houston. We’ve never done the museum stuff in Houston, so I heard this really fun. So we’re gonna do that, Len, uh, what’s going on@lenpenso.com man. Ah, let’s
see.
We’re talking this week about the high cost of convenience on brand. I was offered something by my communications company, uh, that, uh. Works the internet in my house and all that. They actually gave me a deal that when I looked into it, the, the thing they offered me was so expensive. It was ridiculously, it was total rip off.
It’s a good thing I did my research because I found the thing they were offering me I found elsewhere for about, uh, 70% less. So it’s just a little anecdote about how this company openly tried to rip me off, making it sound like it was a great deal and it really wasn’t. Stop on by if you’re interested and if you’re not, hey, what the, Hey, don’t show up.
Then when you
and I first were getting to know each other and I was first reading your blog, the one that still impacts me, impacted me. Just this last week at the grocery store, Mr. Penso. Was the piece you wrote about the incredible cost of having the grocery store slice your vegetables for you? Oh yeah.
And Cheryl had this, they had these packs of asparagus, pre-cut, and it was two for the price of one. She goes, oh, that’s a good deal. And picks ’em up. I’m like, we have a knife. We got like a really cool knife and I went and I still saved like 30% off the asparagus cost. Even though it was buy two, get one or you know, buy one, get one free.
Yeah. Still saved a third by just. Slicing my own asparagus items. Do you know what
though? I’m gonna, I’m gonna blow that up just with another anecdote. It just happened last week that honeybee and I were at the store. We needed a bell pepper. We needed a yellow bell pepper. There were no yellow bell peppers there except for the organic variety.
And I think this thing was like $4 for a bell pepper. The person there in the produce section said The guy, the produce guy says, he goes, yeah. He goes, that’s really ridiculous right now. Or, you know the prices. He goes, but if you go over to this corner over here, we have some sliced bell peppers, red, green, and yellow.
And it was like 99 cents. So. There was enough sliced yellow bell peppers in there that we actually saved me. Normally that doesn’t happen that way, but it’s just
strange. So you picked out all the gross? Yeah, we picked all the gross. We threw away the red ones. The
red ones, and we just kept the yellow ones ’cause it was only like 99 cents.
Doug would’ve just gone to the self scan and just typed in regular red pepper, not organic and really, really giving him the business You
mean like everybody else would do?
Yeah. Welcome to Theft for the Win podcast. My name’s Holy Co. Thanks Doug. I don’t know these people. Maggie, thank you for coming on and saving the show.
I appreciate it.
No problem. I’m not sure I saved anything. I lost, uh, trivia, so I’m going, going, leaving with my head held down.
No, you’re keeping Paula’s, Paula’s torch lit. She lives for last place and we made sure she stayed there. But what’s going on at Inside Out Money.
Uh, we actually just recorded last night and it’ll go live this weekend, our 2023 expense review, so you can actually hear what.
Three different families spent in fairly great detail in all of 2023 and like what we spent it on. And so it’s a good time to talk about cost of living because I always think it’s really cool to hear like we did a whole food breakdown. We actually talked about how I’m like physically incapable of buying pre-cut fruit.
It’s such a ripoff. I do have my own knife. And it’s like, not it’s, it’s not as fresh too, to be clear, like Right. It’s been sitting there with all the like ends open. Right to error. And you want that stuff like fresh cut, then you put it into your
mouth. Yeah. J just saying, well, it just looked like a super deal.
You know, when they put the five one get one free, Cheryl’s like, oh, finally,
yeah, nope. I’m gonna write a whole article like this guy did about big and small cities about cut up fruit and non cutup fruit and really like, dig deep on the pros and cons. So stay tuned for that. Folks. That’s,
that’s the hard hitting stuff they do@lynnpencil.com.
Maggie, you don’t wanna, don’t wanna on that. We’ll team up, Lynn. Yeah, absolutely Collaboration. By the way, pause it right now. Go, uh, subscribe to Inside Out Money. Follow Inside Out Money wherever you’re listening to us right now. All right. I think that that does it. Uh, Doug, man, you got it from here. What should we have learned today?
So,
what’s stacked up on our to-do list today? First, take some advice from Maggie Tucker. It’s easy to oversimplify costs of living, whether you live in the city or the country, but one thing that’s tough to simplify is the cost of commuting. Look for ways to reduce your fuel maintenance and insurance costs.
Second, no matter where you live, be sure to take advantage of all the great things your location has to offer. Maybe there are some great parks or theaters or natural attractions that out of towners flock to. You should go there too. Be a tourist in your own town. But you know, in the off season when all those annoying people are gone, so what’s the biggest to do?
Make sure you check in with Dolly Parton’s team before you campaign for her to be your mayor. You could end up getting a restraining order filed against you. I was just trying to help Dolly. Thanks to Maggie Tucker for joining us today. You can listen to her podcast Inside Out Money, wherever you are listening to us right now.
We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Thanks to Len Penso for joining us today. You can find Len at len penso.com/get out of la. And thanks also to OG for joining us today. Looking for good financial planning. Help head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG for his calendar.
The show is the Property of SP podcasts LC copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Sulci High. Our producer is Karen Reine. This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast with help from me. Joe, Kate Yakin, Karen Rein, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast. Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are. Of course you do, but you’ll never know. If you don’t. Check out our YouTube version of the show Engineered by Tina Eichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast.
Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude Stacey Doe and Julia Garib are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.
So say hello when you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement. For more interactive fun, join us on Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday for our Instagram lives. Kate Yakin and Joe host those weekly. 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, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
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