Building Your Personal Finance Curriculum (At Any Age) SB1824

Most of us were never taught this stuff. So, where do you actually start?

Thirty-nine states now require a personal finance course to graduate from high school. That’s real progress — and it still might not be enough. Because financial education isn’t a one-time event. It’s a living curriculum that has to grow with you, stay connected to your actual life, and — crucially — help you get out of your own way when things get emotionally charged.

This week, Joe and the crew build that curriculum from the ground up. Whether you’re 22 or 52, there’s a starting point here for you.

Rubin Miller — Financial advisor, founder of Peltoma Capital, and author of the Fortunes and Frictions blog. Came from the investment world before financial planning, which means he sees the whole game differently and isn’t afraid to say so on LinkedIn.

Paula Pant — Afford Anything host, behavioral finance truth-teller, and the person who goes on record this week with a very confident guess about the trivia answer.

OG — The basement’s own financial planner, father of a teenager who wants to day trade, and enthusiastic opponent of giving the government any money he doesn’t absolutely have to.

On building the foundation:

• Why the first step in any financial plan is an honest accounting of where everything actually stands: income, spending, assets, debt, all of it
• What’s coming up in the next three to five years and why that question matters more than any abstract retirement calculation
• Why teaching a 17-year-old about mortgages probably doesn’t stick and what actually does
• The one thing traditional savings accounts do really well (hint: it’s great for banks, not for you)
• Why your behavior matters more than your math and what to do about it

On protecting what you’re building:

• The insurance mistake most people make: spending too much protecting low-probability events and too little protecting high-probability ones
• Why disability insurance is more expensive than life insurance and what that price difference is actually telling you
• When improving your credit score should not be your priority (this one surprises people)
• Why debt is never really “good,” just occasionally less bad

On growing your money:

• What an investment philosophy actually is and why you need one before you pick a single fund
• The behavioral biases — recency bias, loss aversion, the availability heuristic — that make smart people do dumb things with their portfolios
• Why nobody ever thinks they’re panicking. They just think the circumstances changed.
• Why taxes are a year-round event, not a February problem

The financial media teaches you to chase. New strategy, hot sector, better fund. But the research keeps landing in the same place: most investors’ biggest obstacle isn’t information. It’s themselves. The curriculum that actually helps isn’t the one that covers the most ground. It’s the one that connects to your real life, your real timeline, and the emotional triggers that quietly blow up even the best-laid plans.

Start there. Everything else builds on top.

Rubin joins the crew for the first time and immediately plays trivia on Jesse Cramer’s behalf — which feels both generous and karmic, given that Jesse and his wife Kelly just welcomed a new baby into the world (on Jesse’s birthday, no less). Doug brings the Eddie Murphy birthday trivia energy. Paula goes on record with a very confident guess. OG applies his usual ironclad logic to arrive at his number. Someone wins. Someone absolutely should not have said what they said out loud before the answer was revealed.

MENTIONED / RESOURCES

• Rubin Miller’s blog: fortunesandfrictions.com
• Peltoma Capital: peltomacapital.com
• Rubin on LinkedIn: Rubin Miller
• Paula Pant: Afford Anything podcast, wherever you listen
• OG’s calendar: stackingbenjamins.com/OG
• Wall Street Journal piece on personal finance requirements by state

New to the basement? Subscribe so you never miss an episode — and if this one made you want to finally build your own financial curriculum, that’s the whole point.

FULL SHOW NOTES: https://stackingbenjamins.com/looking-at-your-money-report-card-1824

Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201

Enjoy!

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Our Topic:

What’s Cool in High School? Personal Finance (Wall Street Journal)

During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:

• financial curriculum
• personal finance classes
• economics vs finance
• lifelong learning
• teaching trade-offs
• time value
• teenage debt mindset
• building wealth early
• Roth IRA basics
• compounding interest
• day trading temptation
• parental money lessons
• cash flow audit
• net worth snapshot
• upcoming life goals
• three-year planning
• financial inflection points
• likely outcomes
• tail risk
• investment philosophy
• market forecasting limits
• emergency fund setup
• high-yield savings
• money behavior
• emotional spending triggers
• bad debt costs
• term life insurance
• credit score priorities
• disability insurance
• tax planning year-round

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Our Contributors

A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.

Rubin Miller

Another thanks to Ruben Miller for joining our contributors this week! Check out more from Rubin at his blog, Fortunes & Frictions at Investment Blog | Fortunes & Frictions.

Paula Pant

Check out Paula’s site and amazing podcast at AffordAnything.com 

Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything

OG

For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.

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Doug’s Game Show Trivia

• How much did Richard Pryor bet Eddie Murphy that he couldn’t make an album without comedy?

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Mentioned in today’s show

• Ruben Miller’s LinkedIn
• Peltoma Capital

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Join Us on Monday!

Tune in on Monday when we dive into some everyday millionaire traits that you can use no matter where you live!

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Miss our last show? Check it out here: You Don’t Need a Big Break to Become a Millionaire — You Need a Better System (SB1823).

Written by: Kevin Bailey

Episide transcript

[00:00:00] opener: Ugh. I just can’t get these numbers to add up. 

[00:00:02] Rubin: Like, we’re never gonna get out of this hole. 

[00:00:04] opener: Credit card debt, does it ever end? 

[00:00:07] opener: Maybe I can help. We sure could use it. 

[00:00:09] opener: We’ve tried debt consolidation companies. 

[00:00:12] opener: We’ve even taken out loans to help make payments. Did you know millions of Americans live with debt they can control?

[00:00:18] opener: That’s why I developed this unique new program for managing your debt. It’s called Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford.

[00:00:30] Doug: Live from the basement of the YouTube headquarters. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:00:45] Doug: I’m Jim. I am Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Doug. And as we approach graduation season, it’s time to look at your own money report card. What should you know to graduate in your financial life? Today we’re helping you create a better curriculum to learn about personal finance with a fantastic team of contributors and a live YouTube audience.

[00:01:05] Doug: And that audience will be helping us along. Except when it comes to our year long trivia contest at the halfway point of the show. And now a guy who’s helped. Lots of people graduate with better Money Habits. It’s Joe Sa. See? Hi. 

[00:01:26] Joe: Hey there, stackers, and happy Friday to you. Welcome back to the Stacky Benjamin Show.

[00:01:30] Joe: I am Joe Saul-Sehy, and I’m super happy that you’re here. Whether you’re here with us, live on YouTube, or you’re listening at home on Friday, we got a great show for you today because this idea of a financial curriculum. We know there’s a bunch of stuff that we need to know. And I also know that when we do these podcasts three times a week, we skip around a lot.

[00:01:48] Joe: So how do we build that foundation from the bottom? Well, today we’ve got a team that’s going to help you with that, including the guy who just so eloquently did the introduction. Mom’s, neighbor, Doug is here. How are you, man? 

[00:01:59] Doug: I’m great. I love when you say that I did it eloquently. It’s like a Charlton Heston reading from the phone.

[00:02:04] Doug: Like, I can make anything to sound like with the cool British accent. It just, it’s great for my ego. So thanks, Joe. 

[00:02:10] Joe: Well, I’m not saying that you’re Don McDonald from talking real money. No, you’re not that level. No, but you’re the next step. 

[00:02:15] Doug: Thanks for keeping my feet on the ground, 

[00:02:17] Joe: Doug. We do got a great show today.

[00:02:18] Joe: I mean, you outlined it pretty well at this idea of a financial curriculum. That’s something you can get behind. 

[00:02:23] Doug: Oh yeah. We all need a playbook. We all need a recipe once in a while and uh, and we’re here to dish it out. 

[00:02:29] Joe: And a guy who’s a res who’s got the recipe every Friday and Monday and Wednesday, Mr.

[00:02:34] Joe: OGs here with us. How are you, man? 

[00:02:36] OG: Um, great. How are you? 

[00:02:38] Joe: I am 

[00:02:38] OG: happy to be here, Joe. First time caller, long time listener. 

[00:02:41] Joe: It is fantastic that you’re here and, uh, you’re ready to help people get the curriculum in order. I mean, you see people, they’re at totally different states of readiness. Like people come to you in your financial planning practice and some people are, you know, 400 levels.

[00:02:55] Joe: Some people just like, which way is a savings account. 

[00:02:59] OG: Yeah, that’s right. Let’s talk about it today. 

[00:03:02] Joe: Can’t wait to do that. And the woman who’s gonna help us do that today, as she does most Fridays from afford anything, Paula Pant is here. How are you? 

[00:03:10] Paula: I am riding high from last week’s victory. 

[00:03:14] Joe: She’s still enough.

[00:03:15] Joe: I 

[00:03:15] OG: knew I turned it off too early. I was on vacation and I was watching some of it and I was like, I’m good. Whoever’s filling in for me has probably got this easily handled 

[00:03:25] Joe: well. And had it been this year, Paul Meerman who sat in for you, he would’ve had it had it been this year, oog. 

[00:03:31] OG: Oh, I didn’t see the question.

[00:03:32] OG: So. Just another controversy basically to add to the stack of controversies, uh, the first 12 weeks. I like it. 

[00:03:38] Joe: Yes. And, uh, we’re gonna resolve, for those of you longtime listeners that know, there’s a controversy. We just got the enter back from Wichita, Doug, and, uh, we’re gonna resolve that at uh, halfway point.

[00:03:49] Doug: We are thanks to Dottie and all her hard work, sitting in her, uh, studio apartment in Wichita, smoke-filled studio apartment. She finally came up with a resolution, and we will have it for you during trivia. 

[00:04:01] Joe: She looked at the tape to see if Jesse’s foot was on the line. Yep. And she has her ruling, so we’ll have that partway through.

[00:04:08] Joe: Do reminds 

[00:04:08] OG: me of Roz from, uh, monsters, 

[00:04:10] Doug: monsters Inc. 

[00:04:11] Joe: That guy. I think that’s pretty 

[00:04:13] Doug: accurate. 

[00:04:14] Joe: And our special guest today, the guy that’s gonna help us get this curriculum in order, he is the Mind behind the Fortunes and Frictions blog. It is the one and only financial advisor, Ruben Miller is here. How are you man?

[00:04:26] Rubin: I’m fantastic. Thanks for having me. 

[00:04:28] Joe: For people that are brand new to the world of Reuben Miller, tell everybody about what you do, man. 

[00:04:34] Rubin: Well, I, yeah. I write the Fortune of Frictions blog. I run the second most important RA in Texas. As Josh will tell you, I have a little boutique RA here in Austin, Texas with a few other people.

[00:04:45] Rubin: Uh, we all used to work at Dimensional Fund Advisors, so we kind of came from the investment world and now we do the financial planning world. Most people do it the opposite. They learn financial planning and then learn investment. So it’s been a fun little journey. We’re about three years old. And then I hang out on the internet, mostly on LinkedIn and uh, Josh just basically makes fun of me on there and I deal with it.

[00:05:03] Joe: That’s, that’s shocking. Og you making fun of anybody? That’s so 

weird. 

[00:05:06] OG: I don’t, I actually think if you don’t follow Ruben on LinkedIn, uh, he’s a great follow mostly because he says the things that everyone wants to say but don’t have the, uh, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for? Keone, uh, to say out loud. So 

[00:05:20] Rubin: I came from the, the fund world where there’s a lot of compliance.

[00:05:23] Rubin: Yeah. And when I left it was pretty liberating. I like calling out Wall Street for what it is. That’s right. And we run our firm that way. We run our lives that way. So yeah. I’m not afraid to sort of call it out there on LinkedIn. 

[00:05:33] Joe: One of my favorite things that you called out in your blog post at the beginning of this year, people go to your website, which we’ll link to on our show notes, is your predictions for the financial market.

[00:05:43] Joe: Your expectations, Ruben. ’cause. You guys had phenomenal expectations. I mean, uh, JP Morgan puts theirs out there. Chase has theirs gold. Yeah. Goldman’s 

[00:05:51] OG: got theirs. 

[00:05:52] Joe: Goldman’s got theirs. And then 

[00:05:54] OG: Ruben’s, 

[00:05:55] Joe: can we run through yours? 

[00:05:56] Rubin: Sure. 

[00:05:57] Joe: What is Ruben Miller’s expectation for large caps in 2026? 

[00:06:02] Rubin: Yeah, we don’t have one, 

[00:06:04] Joe: which is okay.

[00:06:04] Joe: Hold on, hold on, hold on. Because you must have one then. For small caps, it’s gotta be small caps that you have. What’s your expectation for small caps? 

[00:06:12] Rubin: We also did not publish one. 

[00:06:14] Joe: Okay, wait a minute. What about international? None. Oh, come on. Bitcoin bit. How about crypto? You must have crypto. 

[00:06:20] Rubin: Yeah.

[00:06:21] Rubin: Unwilling. Unwilling. No, not, not against owning it, but unwilling to make a, make a forecast and where it’ll go in one year. 

[00:06:29] Joe: Yeah. But what I love is your point there. What’s the bigger point you’re making? 

[00:06:33] Rubin: I think it’s an expectations versus reality thing for investors and we we’re all in the ecosystem of Wall Street.

[00:06:40] Rubin: That’s who has all the advertisements and that’s who. Owns the stadiums and puts the commercials on. And so we all just are accustomed to it being normal for some brokerage or wirehouse to come out and say, we, our s and p forecast for the year is 7.5% and our expectations for inflation or crypto, whatever it might be.

[00:06:57] Rubin: And the reality is if you look at the long-term data, no one should be making those forecasts on a one year basis. And so a few years ago I started putting out this, this blog post at the beginning of every year where I said, look on risky assets, we don’t have a forecast and our clients better be cool with that ’cause that’s the only way we’re gonna do it.

[00:07:12] Rubin: I do think it’s important for investors to realize that all assets are on a spectrum of our ability to forecast what we expect them to do. And so some more reliable investments may be like traditional bonds or short-term bonds, something like that. It is reasonable to have a forecast of what, a range of what that might be.

[00:07:27] Rubin: But when it comes to something like small caps, international stocks, it, it’s a fruitless effort. And you see it right now with the recent downturn of what’s going on in the Middle East. You have these banks and wirehouses now updating their forecasts. What the hell use is an update of a forecast. I gave you my money January 1st to do the right thing with it.

[00:07:44] Rubin: I don’t care if you, what you think now, how did we do the last few months? And I think you can have a better investment journey if you don’t play that game. 

[00:07:50] Joe: Paula, your economic updates would be horrible if, if it was all Ruben’s stuff, you’d be like, and we got nothing. 

[00:07:56] Paula: My economic updates are always backwards looking.

[00:07:58] Paula: So those updates are, here’s what happened in the economy in the past month, not in the future month. Yeah. 

[00:08:04] Joe: Well, thank goodness they’re not forward looking. And Reuben’s not your early contributor, because that would be a awfully 

[00:08:08] OG: fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. 

[00:08:11] Joe: Well, we, we’ve got a fantastic show today because people come at financial planning as, uh, Reuben, OG and Paula, you guys all know, they come from different stages of life and, and they’re all starting in different spots and we tend to skip around a lot in the world of podcasting.

[00:08:27] Joe: So really putting that foundation together. Where does it come from? We’ve got a Wall Street Journal piece that I was very fascinated by and I thought, you know what? Even if you’re not in high school, which is what this piece is about that I’ll get to in a moment. What if you decide, you know what I wanna go quote back to school with my money?

[00:08:45] Joe: Where do you begin? We’ll get thoughts from Paula, from Ruben, from og, and maybe from people hanging out with us on YouTube. First, we have a couple of sponsors who help us keep on keeping on, so we’re gonna hear from them, and then let’s help you start your personal finance curriculum. 

[00:09:02] headlines: Hello Darlings, and now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.

[00:09:09] Joe: Today our headline comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. This was a great inspiring piece written by Oyen Edit Oyen. The piece is called What’s Cool in High School, personal Finance. It seems that states are ditching economics and instead giving us more practical education. We are up to, this is some great news guys.

[00:09:29] Joe: We are up to 39 states that require a personal finance course to graduate high school with four that have added it since 2024. That compares, by the way, with 22 states that ask students to take economics. That’s down for since 2024, according to a report from the Council for Economic Education. This idea of a curriculum.

[00:09:52] Joe: Paula, they’re getting it in school, but it’s pretty cool that more states are adding this. Like I feel like states are going, oh, wait a minute. Instead of teaching you about, um. I py 

[00:10:04] Paula: pain, you know, because of all of the times I’ve used the Pythagorean Theorem throughout my life. 

[00:10:09] Joe: Right now we’re just in time to teach people how to balance a checkbook when kids are like, what’s a checkbook?

[00:10:13] Paula: Yeah. You know, I, I had a roommate once I mentioned writing a check, and she was like, you know what, I, I don’t have any checks. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to write one. And I said, oh, I’ll teach you how to write one. And she said, oh, well then can I just borrow one of yours? 

[00:10:30] OG: Perfect. Seriously, though she was being serious.

[00:10:32] Paula: Yes. Yeah. Which, if you don’t know how to write a check, is actually a reasonable question. 

[00:10:37] Joe: Yeah, a hundred percent. I’m all out. Why don’t I just take one of yours. That’s awesome. 

[00:10:43] Paula: I love the fact that schools are teaching personal finance. I think this is a wonderful development. I do not like, however, the fact that in, in the article, it’s pitted as an instead of economics, I think it would be better as a both and rather than under or Yeah.

[00:10:58] Joe: But I do feel like. If I am somebody outta high school mm-hmm. Listening to us or watching us, and I see that more schools are figuring this out, most states require it. Now shouldn’t that mean we all should be building our own financial curriculum, 

[00:11:16] Paula: like as individuals? 

[00:11:17] Joe: Absolutely. 

[00:11:18] Paula: Yeah. Ab Well, and I mean, lifelong learning generally is something that I believe that we all should pursue, but there’s a difference between policy that you make for the aggregate versus the decisions that you make as an individual.

[00:11:31] Paula: And when it comes to policy for the aggregate, uh, particularly when it comes to, to curriculum in schools, personal finances a, a wonderful development, a much needed development. 

[00:11:41] Joe: Reuben, your whole fortunes and fiction blog is basically about how money doesn’t behave the way the textbook says it should.

[00:11:46] Joe: Are we even teaching the right stuff? 

[00:11:48] Rubin: That’s a great question. I don’t know what each of these states. Our teaching. When we think about personal finance, there’s so many parts of this. There’s there’s core parts of personal finance that I think are the foundation to understanding how money flows through our lives.

[00:12:02] Rubin: So if I take a personal finance test in high school, I’d like someone to teach me what the time value of money means. I can’t see a world where that’s not useful. But if you teach a 17-year-old about how mortgages work, is that gonna be relevant to everyone? Especially when they don’t use it for 10, 15 plus years.

[00:12:18] Rubin: I don’t know. Teaching personal finance in schools gets thrown out there as like a ubiquitous good, which it probably is all things considered, but it’s a lot more nuanced in implementation. We now have, as you said, 39 states or whatever it is. Like what are you actually teaching? What is the curriculum and are the kids gonna remember it?

[00:12:33] Rubin: So much of our financial lives. The way we get paid 401k matching. These things are not relevant to a seven and they don’t, they don’t care. I think it matters a lot, sort of what foundation are you laying and how do we do that in a way that a lot of it sticks in their brain for a long time. 

[00:12:47] Joe: It’s interesting that you say that because I remember when I would give, uh, talks at high schools, Ruben.

[00:12:52] Joe: I would always, you know, take questions at a time and every single question was a different facet of how do I get myself into debt, up to my eyeballs? Like every single question. Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t phrased that way. It was when I graduate, how do I finance a truck? How do I get a credit card?

[00:13:09] Joe: How do I get student loans? How do I, everything was debt focused. A friend of mine, Jean Natali in Pittsburgh said that when you talk to kids about debt or about mortgages, like you talked about, we lose them. But when we actually talk to them about getting wealthy, something they think they can do, you know, beginning with the part-time job they have, all of a sudden the Roth IRA, you teach ’em the Roth ira, he’s like, you see their eyes light up because that compounding interest thing, Ruben, you talk about.

[00:13:33] Joe: Mm-hmm. That’s dynamite to a 16-year-old, wait a minute, time’s on my side and I’m 16. Holy crap. I 

[00:13:39] Rubin: think that similar to our lives as older adults, it’s all trade-offs. The whole world of personal finance is just trade-offs. It’s just that for them, it’s a little less tangible. I remember being 16 years old and I wanted my mom’s credit card so I could go buy crap.

[00:13:54] Rubin: I didn’t understand it, right? No one had laid down me. When happens if you contribute the max to a Roth every year, so I, I do think it’s about reinforcing that they do care when they see those numbers pile up, that is what they want. But this idea of immediate payoffs and getting those dopamine hits, they’re harder for 15, 16, 17 year olds to avoid that.

[00:14:13] Rubin: Like they’re more susceptible to it than we are as older adults. And so again, I think it goes back to like it’s complex designing a personal finance curriculum, but there are gonna be some core tenants that are gonna be relevant your whole life. 

[00:14:24] Joe: Well, and that’s a great segue. Let’s go around. If we’re beginning our journey, then og.

[00:14:31] Joe: Uh, where did somebody hand you a blank? Syllabus Life and Money 1 0 1 for the average person. What’s lesson one in your book? 

[00:14:40] OG: Oh, man, you had to pick me first. I was all ready to talk about the fact that my, my 16-year-old yesterday said, can you teach me how to day trade? And I was like, I would love to learn from you if you know what to do, actually.

[00:14:53] OG: And he was referencing a friend of his that he said, well, you know, such and such a person started with X dollars and now has this, you know, has been really successful with this. I’m like, that’s awesome. I don’t know that those things are connected. You know, I, I was thinking about this in the context, Joe, of, and maybe just dovetailing a little bit off of what, what Ruben said about like not having any control over the content.

[00:15:15] OG: I think it’s probably a good thing that there’s somebody somewhere that’s saying, Hey, we need to have some sort of. Education on personal finance, like whatever the hell that means to whoever decided to do it. Right. But is it, is it one of those things where we’re trusting that the government officials who may, we’ve talked a little bit about broke professors a little bit on the show.

[00:15:38] OG: You know, you and I do, Joe, is it like, do we have the problem with we’re we might be teaching the wrong thing or focusing on the wrong stuff? And if I were looking at this, or how I think about this is as a parent, and I’ve got a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old, and even a 9-year-old, I feel like this is our job, you know, in terms of our, our responsibility to, to share the story of money, you know, and I think Ruben, what you were talking about, about like, you know, nobody cares about like how mortgages work.

[00:16:08] OG: You know, my 19-year-old could give a crap about that. But what he does care about is I still don’t think he understands. The impact of not paying off credit cards. We were talking about it and he was like, well, I don’t understand this. Interesting. Like, why would you ch, he had actually had a really great idea.

[00:16:23] OG: He was, or a great comment. He was like, why would you charge something that you didn’t want to pay off? Like how would, why would you wanna pay more for this? Save 

[00:16:32] Rubin: that moment, Josh. 

[00:16:33] OG: Save it for the thing. I know. Cherish 

[00:16:34] Rubin: it. 

[00:16:35] OG: I know like, but you know, ’cause they didn’t teach this in school and he’s got a credit card for when he went to college and he’s like, what do I do with this thing?

[00:16:42] OG: Because his whole life has been, I just Apple pay with dad’s money. And now I’m like, well hold on, you’re 18, bro. Like this is on you now. Like I’ll pay for college, but if you want a sweater that’s on you. So he’s trying to like learn that stuff. And like you said before, Ruben, it’s like the really relevant things are how do we teach kids?

[00:17:00] OG: Or anybody for that matter. I mean, I’m 48 and I still need help doing it. Like defer gratification, just a smidge, you know, like, is that just a little bit? 

[00:17:09] Joe: Yeah, let’s get away from school and what we learned there, let’s just design our own. Like, do we begin, uh, no matter what age we are, we’re, you know what?

[00:17:16] Joe: There’s people watching this that are 50 that are like, I think I’m too late. There are people that are 35, like we don’t know where they’re starting from. Does it start OG with cash flow? Does it start with emergency fund? Does it start with, don’t screw up the basics. What is lesson one on the lesson plan?

[00:17:31] OG: I think if you’re designing your financial curriculum, I think the first thing is taking stock of where everything is and not, not kidding yourself. If you’re going to look at your cash flow, you gotta count everything, right? If you’re gonna look at your net worth, you gotta count all the assets and all the debt.

[00:17:50] OG: I think the first order of business, if you’re starting over, whatever that looks like, is to go where is everything at presently? And that is being truthful to yourself. You’re the only person there. So you don’t have to prove this to anybody, but don’t lie to yourself because you know you’re the most trustworthy person that you know of.

[00:18:06] OG: So be careful with that. But I think if you’re gonna start, you gotta start with what are the facts of the case? Where is everything? How much money do I make? How much? You know what? Where do I spend my money? How much money do I have? Who do I owe money to start there? 

[00:18:19] Joe: Do you like that first starting place?

[00:18:21] Joe: Paula? 

[00:18:22] Paula: You know, I like it. But one thing I would add to it is what is coming up in my life in the next three to five years? And when we’re talking about high school students, the answer to that is the decision around whether or not to go to college. And if you’re not gonna go to a four year college or university, then what?

[00:18:39] Paula: Are you gonna go to a two year school? Are you going to go to a trade school? Are you going to start working right away after high school? You know, if broadly speaking, any person at any age can ask themselves what’s coming up in the next three to five years, and no matter how old you are, that answer might be, I need to replace my car.

[00:18:55] Paula: ’cause my car is 10 years old and in the next three to five years it might break. Or in the next three to five years, I might wanna buy a house. Like when you’re older, those might be your answers. In high school. Yeah. It’s, it’s in the next three to five years, I need to figure out what the next step is in terms of either vocation or education, and then how am I gonna pay for that?

[00:19:13] Paula: And so my hope is that these high school personal finance classes have a lot of, how much debt should I take out, if any built in. 

[00:19:22] Joe: But I’m, I’m gonna say this guys, for the fifth time, you’re all stuck on high school. 

[00:19:27] Paula: Mm-hmm. 

[00:19:27] Joe: I don’t care about high school. Yeah. Let’s say that you’re 50, let’s say that you’re 35, let’s say that you’re, you’re, you’re whatever age, right?

[00:19:35] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Where do you start there? And Paula, I’ll take that and wide it out for the 30 5-year-old, what I hear you saying is this weird phrase that I just came up with. You can afford anything, just not everything, 

[00:19:46] Paula: right? 

[00:19:46] Joe: Like this idea of trade-offs feels like it’s where you would start. 

[00:19:50] Paula: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:19:51] Paula: Well, and, and that’s what I mean by the, you know, the next three to five years. So maybe you wanna replace your car ’cause you’ve got an old car and you know it’s a clunker and you know it’s probably gonna die. Maybe you wanna buy a house. Maybe you want to take a sabbatical from work and travel for six months, or you plan on switching jobs.

[00:20:07] Paula: And in that interim period in between jobs you’d like to take six months. And all of that is gonna require financial planning. And those are all things, you know, when you’re talking about retirement. You’re talking about a goal that’s like 15, 20 years into the future, it can be harder to visualize what that’s going to cost.

[00:20:24] Paula: But when you’re talking about that three to five years in the future, even if you’re 50 years old, it’s easier to put numbers on it and then it’s easier to work backwards to say, what’s this gonna cost and what do I need to do today in order to be able to set that money aside. 

[00:20:38] Joe: What, what I like Ruben about what Paul is talking about is this idea of beginning with what’s really important to you right now.

[00:20:45] Joe: Because I feel like financial planning gets really good and it’s easier to pick investments, it’s easier to understand insurances, it’s easier to, if it’s all aligned with this thing that we want for ourself. ’cause now we’ve got a little, I dunno if it’s greed or fear involved, maybe, maybe both. But is that where you start?

[00:21:02] Joe: Do you start with goal planning and then the curriculum kind of flows outta the goal? 

[00:21:05] Rubin: Yeah, I, I, I’d fiercely would. Paul and Josh would say this, but basically for us, at our firm, we, we think about the organization process of getting all these assets and liabilities together. Once you have that loaded up in a spreadsheet or a financial planning software or something that’s there and you can either sync it and it automatically updates through time, or when you readdress your financial plan, that updates through time.

[00:21:25] Rubin: That part’s not to me, doesn’t take a lot of time afterward. It’s kind of what Paul was talking about, just like when you hit these inflection points of what am I trying to accomplish in the next three to five years and these big moving rocks that we’re trying to either endow through our assets or debts we’re trying to pay off or whatever it might be.

[00:21:40] Rubin: I think that once it’s all set up. Most conversations I find that we have with our clients are really about unpacking what is the distribution of likely outcomes here. If we do all these things and we have our portfolio, let’s say we have a 70% stock and 30% bond portfolio or something like what’s likely to happen?

[00:21:56] Rubin: How’s this money likely to grow, and in this distribution of things that’ll happen in our future, how do we mitigate some of these tail risks of really bad outcomes? Making sure they don’t shock our lives? Because your point, Joe, then that’s where it’s like really about, if I can’t do what I want in life, then my financial plan failed.

[00:22:11] Rubin: It doesn’t matter if I beat the s and p or not. To Josh’s point about day trading, this is not just a problem with teenagers. This is a problem. Everybody’s enticed by hearing about their friend who made a bunch of money trading zero dated options. The challenge is it’s always gonna be a distribution.

[00:22:26] Rubin: There’s always gonna be a few people in the right tail who crushed it. Even if 95% of the people go bankrupt, we’re always gonna hear about these five people and people are gonna be enamored by that, especially if they don’t understand distributions. So to me. It’s more of a quanti, statistical answer, but like I really wish people understood distributions of likely outcomes more.

[00:22:45] OG: I got a C plus in statistics, Ruben, just, I wasn’t far behind 

[00:22:48] Rubin: to be honest. 

[00:22:48] OG: Yeah. So I like, I get the concept, but I think, you know, sometimes you look at those, I’ll use financial planning as a, as charts or Excel or there’s a lot of million tools that people can use to build their own plans. And so you do that and you see this number, right?

[00:23:04] OG: And it says, okay, if I put this money in my account and dah, dah, dah, it says, you know, $17 million when I’m a hundred years old, or 65 or like whatever. And we look at that and we go, this isn’t right. Even if it’s just an Excel formula that you dragged over for 30 years, it’s some number that is an unbelievable number, but the real number is somewhere in a range of returns there.

[00:23:25] OG: And I think maybe what you’re talking about here is understanding what that range looks like and planning around the variability of that, maybe as opposed to saying this is a linear outcome. You know, I’m either gonna succeed or fail. It’s like, well, no, you succeeding and failing is not binary. It’s not zero or a dollar.

[00:23:43] OG: It’s you’ll have some money, you might have a lot, or you might have, not as much as you think, but you’re gonna have some. And how do we, you know, how do we address that as the years go on? As you get closer to these liquidity events or things that you need, 

[00:23:57] Joe: you know, I like Josh about your story about, 

[00:24:00] OG: hold on, we gotta stop that for a second.

[00:24:02] OG: I think that’s the first time Joe has called me Josh in like 15 years. 

[00:24:06] Doug: Yeah, Ruben did it and all hell broke loose. Sorry. 

[00:24:09] OG: No, you can Ruben, it’s fine. But, uh, 

[00:24:11] Joe: Reuben is contagious. My bad. I 

[00:24:13] OG: wasn’t listening the first part. ’cause I was like, who’s this? Who’s this Josh guy? 

[00:24:16] Joe: There’s an interesting piece about your c plus story because I feel like a lot of the time these concepts don’t make sense to us because they’re not connected to our real life.

[00:24:25] Joe: So this idea about distributions or risk or whatever, we don’t grab onto them because they don’t have any real meaning. I get the feeling og, that it would’ve meant more and maybe you would’ve done better if it was attached to your goal. You know, because as an example, Monte Carlo simulation, like you look at the variability in a Monte Carlo simulation and how the statistics work out for that.

[00:24:47] Joe: If you just said, Monte Carlo simulation, blah, blah, blah, here’s the statistics. I go, whatever. But if you said to me, this is your probability of being successful in your retirement with zero moves, I’m all ears. Like, I’m like, wait a minute, how does this work? What are the downsides? What’s the process? They made this like, I’m fascinated.

[00:25:06] Joe: I feel like some of these abstract things, if we start to make this curriculum, we we get pretty good at in a hurry. 

[00:25:12] OG: The whole piece about, like you said, curriculum is taking the parts of money, which are from simplistic things like creating a net worth statement to the invest like the 1%. And you know, you see these esoteric type of tools that people can use or strategies I think is a better way of thinking about it and trying to gain enough understanding to recognize the areas that you should focus in on.

[00:25:40] OG: I’ll just use a very simple example. I think generally speaking, most people would say annuities suck. Unless you sell annuities, then you think they’re pretty awesome. 

[00:25:49] Rubin: Or you’re married to someone who sells annuities. 

[00:25:53] OG: Fair enough? Yes. Yes. If the likelihood of you paying your Amex bill is determined by how many annuities are sold in or around your person blanket, you have a uh, you have a particular feeling about it.

[00:26:04] OG: But I think we could all intellectually step back and say, you know, there are cases that this makes sense. There are some scenarios and there are some tools. It’s an arrow in the quiver. It doesn’t make it a good arrow or a bad arrow, it’s just an arrow. And sometimes it’s useful and sometimes it’s not.

[00:26:22] OG: And maybe that’s a broad statement for that particular product. But if you say something like something else like a, uh, charitable remainder trust. It sounds pretty cool. Like I have some charities maybe that will remain in a trust. Maybe, you know, it’s a good place for ’em. There’s so many different things and I, and I feel like the problem with personal finance or financial planning in general is there are so many ways to get yourself in trouble and part of your curriculum, part of your learning has to be around, is this even relevant for me to even be thinking about right now?

[00:26:58] OG: Like I think all of us generally know what a charitable remainder trust is. Maybe half the people listening have an idea of what that is, but for the half the people that don’t, they might be going, well, maybe I should know. Maybe I should spend energy on this. Mm-hmm. Maybe I should I call my attorney and find out if I need, like this is all just probably energy that you can put on other things that will produce a better outcome.

[00:27:18] OG: So part of education is. You know, not going a mile deep on every single thing, but just a little bit to know like, this is relevant for me or this isn’t. 

[00:27:27] Joe: Well, and I think you’re more likely to do that if you begin with a plan, right? If you begin with your own plan, then you’re like, oh, I’m interested charitable giving.

[00:27:35] Joe: What are the outcomes fair that I’m looking for? And then, Ruben, were you gonna say something? 

[00:27:40] Rubin: Yeah, I was gonna say that once you have all your information organized, or if you work with a financial planner and you go through financial plan, I think what Josh is really highlighting is this idea that like the magnitude of our decision making and the outcomes of our decisions, that magnitude changes through time.

[00:27:54] Rubin: Like a 23-year-old probably doesn’t give a shit about giving money away to charity right now. It doesn’t move the needle. It might really move the needle for a 60-year-old who just sold their business that year. I, we have this, this client, this is just a funny thing, had us this year who a very, very large client, it’s the first time he’s had an HSA.

[00:28:11] Rubin: And we had all this frustrating paperwork to like open this HSA that was at one place and have the account we can invest in Schwab and the magnitude of this HSA in this guy’s life is diminished. But we had like, 

[00:28:22] OG: yeah, it’s like $8,000 decision and, and it takes you seven weeks to get open. 

[00:28:26] Rubin: It’s di minimis and yet we have this frustrating paperwork process that Schwab wasn’t approving it and whatever.

[00:28:31] Rubin: So like for him, it doesn’t matter. For a 23-year-old, HSA is an incredible tool. Maxing your four one K and getting a free employer match is an incredible tool. So the magnitude of these things we can do in our financial life changes through our life cycle. And I think it’s important to have an idea of that.

[00:28:45] Rubin: Otherwise you just jump on podcasts. You hear people talk about charitable remainder trust and you’re like, that’s cool. How do I do that? Like, actually maybe that’s not that relevant to you. 

[00:28:52] Joe: Right? Yeah. We start learning a ton about the wrong stuff. I’m gonna propose a structure that in the second half I’d like us to just play with.

[00:29:00] Joe: That if we start off with, in our curriculum a foundation, I’m gonna ask you all a couple questions. Number one, what do you think people learn too late? That should be part of your curriculum. Number two is maybe what’s a good resource? That’s not the five of us for people to get more information about that.

[00:29:18] Joe: I think if we start off with foundation, then we’ll talk about risk management growth, which will include investing, retirement, taxes, big decisions. I think I’ll call the fourth area, and then more advanced stuff like negotiation behavior, financial independence, like some of these. These more heady, philosophical things.

[00:29:37] Joe: Uh, well, not necessarily when it comes to negotiation, but behavior and financial independence mostly. But, um, I’d love to get your take on the two of those things. What do people often miss in the curriculum? And then number two, what’s a good resource for us? But before we get to that, we have something very important we have to do because on Fridays, if you’re new to the show, we have a year long competition between our three frequent contributors, og Paula and Jesse Kramer.

[00:30:06] Joe: By the way, Ruben, you’re gonna be playing on behalf of Jesse Kramer. You know, Jesse and I got some good news from Jesse, by the way. As we record this last week, I found out it was Jesse’s birthday. And so I texted him and I said, dude, is it your birthday? He said, it is. And he showed me a picture. How cool.

[00:30:28] Joe: And many of our stacker family might not know this, but uh, Jesse and his spouse Kelly were expecting, and on Jesse Kramer’s birthday, Kelly gave birth at 2:47 AM to test Elizabeth Kramer, uh, sharing a birthday with her dad. So eight pounds, four ounces. And uh, Jesse said, and she’s hungry, and Kelly is doing well and resting.

[00:30:49] Joe: So congratulations to the Kramers with their new member of the family. 

[00:30:54] OG: Just a real quick point, do you have 190 unread messages? Is that what that, is that what that said on your phone? It does. 

[00:31:03] Joe: Does it say, uh, it says 282. 

[00:31:05] OG: Oh my God. Yes. Folks, if you’re trying to get ahold of Joe, this is, 

[00:31:11] Joe: I think I’m a distance second to Paula Pan though.

[00:31:14] Joe: I think. Oh. Have a 

[00:31:16] OG: bunch of stuff on red. 

[00:31:16] Paula: Oh, 

[00:31:17] Joe: Paul says 1500. 

[00:31:18] OG: Really? 

[00:31:19] Paula: Yeah, it’s pretty up there. 

[00:31:20] OG: How do you live with yourself? 

[00:31:21] Paula: My phone’s plugged in over there, so I can’t check it right now. Why you didn’t 

[00:31:24] OG: have a phone? What’s the 

[00:31:25] Paula: point? Right. 

[00:31:26] OG: Just start over. Just redo it. 

[00:31:29] Joe: I have to admit, Paula and I have laughed about this before.

[00:31:31] Joe: People are like, Hey, I know you’re friends with Paula. Could you get a message to her for me? Could you 

[00:31:39] Paula: just 

[00:31:39] Joe: wave your arms? 

[00:31:40] Paula: I just don’t understand how people are able to tolerate so much inbound. It’s 

[00:31:44] Joe: just, it’s good. 

[00:31:45] Paula: It’s bananas. 

[00:31:46] Joe: It is good that you can focus, uh, Paula, that it is an amazing trait. But two weeks ago we had a controversy.

[00:31:54] Joe: Three weeks ago now, actually, we had a controversy, which was, we had mentioned 

[00:31:59] OG: slight disagreement. 

[00:32:00] Joe: We had mentioned that, uh, Jesse could margin call, could margin call OG when he didn’t have any points. And as we reviewed the tape, we found out that, uh, yes, in week number one we had said that you couldn’t margin call somebody without a point.

[00:32:21] Joe: So in fairness, while Jesse keeps his point, OG goes back up the point that he lost because Jesse couldn’t margin call him. However, however, we do have. A better rules explanation than we had at the start of the year. ’cause we didn’t realize just how crazy this was gonna become. So, Doug, Doug, uh, for Reuben, because it’s his first time on the show doing this, and for everybody else listening to this amazing trivia competition, Doug, what are the rules of our Friday trivia?

[00:32:54] Doug: Yeah, I will recite them. Now, Joe, I think, uh, this is a big lesson for us. We had no idea just how invested our stackers are in trivia. Boy did we find out there 

[00:33:04] Joe: was anger Ruben. There was anger. 

[00:33:06] Doug: Oh, it was vitriol on the highest level. So here they are. Here it is everybody. And, and pay attention because most important rule is last, but we’re gonna build up to it.

[00:33:16] Doug: So rule number one, each contestant gets one margin call per quarter. If a contestant has zero points, they can’t use a margin call. They specify the opponent that their margin calling. Uh, they can, they can utter that, that phrase margin call at any point. The, the second I start reading the trivia question, they can say, margin call on OG or whoever.

[00:33:37] Doug: It’s probably gonna be og, let’s be honest. Uh, rule number two, if the person margin called. OG gets the correct answer, they gain a point as usual, and the margin callee loses a point. So you stuck your neck out there. You tried to make ’em pay, but it didn’t pay off because the person you called got the answer right?

[00:33:56] Doug: You’re gonna lose a point if the person margin called gets the answer wrong, they lose a point. And rule number four, if the margin called the person who got margin called gets the wrong answer and the margin call E gets the correct answer, it’s essentially like a two point swing. ’cause when OG got margin called and he got it wrong, he lost a point and the person doing the margin call got the the answer correct, they win a point.

[00:34:23] Doug: That’s a major swing in the field of battle. But here’s the most important rule, rule number five, trivia host. 

[00:34:30] Joe: This is this. This is the rule we should have mentioned at the beginning of the year. 

[00:34:33] Doug: Yes, trivia. I 

[00:34:34] Joe: think that we are now a hundred percent putting into effect, 

[00:34:37] Doug: right? Trivia host. This guy reserves the right to make up any and all rules necessary.

[00:34:44] Doug: If one contestant starts running away with the competition and or gets a big fat head about being in the lead, 

[00:34:50] OG: you guys are jackass. 

[00:34:52] Paula: Wait, so rule number five is that there are no rules. 

[00:34:57] Doug: I 

[00:34:57] OG: mean, just so you know, it was seven to zero to zero and then all of a sudden somebody 

[00:35:01] Joe: kept bragging about it. Ruben, somebody kept bragging about it.

[00:35:04] Joe: I 

[00:35:04] OG: wasn’t bragging. I was just winning. You know, it’s like the DJ Khaled song, man. What are you gonna do? Like, that’s all we do is win here. But apparently hater’s gonna hate, as they say, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. Well, 

[00:35:15] Rubin: it sounds like a very, uh, host friendly approach and I’m here for it. 

[00:35:19] Doug: It’s all about the listeners, Ruben.

[00:35:21] Doug: We’re trying to make this exciting and compelling for our stackers. We don’t wanna get to October. Oh geez. Winning like 39 to zero to one and there’s no point in doing trivia anymore. So we gotta keep it this a battle and we’ll do whatever we have to have. Well, but 

[00:35:36] Joe: let’s be realistic, Doug. That is number two.

[00:35:38] Joe: Number one is watching OGs head explode when we change the rule. Good, 

[00:35:41] Doug: fair point. 

[00:35:42] Joe: Like that is 

[00:35:42] Doug: fair point. That is 

[00:35:43] Joe: purely what we’re doing is entertaining ourself at OGs expense. 

[00:35:47] Doug: Joe, did you, did you understand from Dottie in Wichita that as a revision after the rule review, that OG who previously had seven points, he’s back to six points now.

[00:36:00] Joe: He regains the point that he had called, 

[00:36:02] Doug: so he is back up to seven. Okay, so it’s now our score. Now after Paul’s miraculous performance last week, our score as it stands right now, OG in the lead with seven Jesse slash this week. Reuben, you’re the beneficiary of his, uh, illegally gotten gains previously.

[00:36:23] Doug: He has one point and Paula, Paula now has one point. So it’s seven to one to one going into today’s competition 

[00:36:31] Joe: deal and Ruben guess just to keep it easy, don’t margin call. So don’t worry about all the margin call stuff, you just get to answer the question. Which is fantastic. 

[00:36:40] Doug: We ready? 

[00:36:41] OG: And this is, uh, this is the first episode of 

[00:36:44] Joe: Q.

[00:36:45] Joe: Everybody has a margin call again starting right now. Good to know. And to do that we actually need a tri. Now that we got through that, everybody ready for some trivia? Let’s go. 

[00:36:55] OG: The trivia question is, how many rules are there? Yeah. What are the rules? 

[00:36:59] Joe: Uh, here’s what’s gonna happen. Uh, OG because he is in first place, is gonna guess first Ruben, because Jesse was last year’s champion.

[00:37:06] Joe: You’re gonna go second and then Paula gets to go last and it’s closest, closest person to the answer. Either side doesn’t have to be closest to about going over. It’s just closest. Doug, you’ve got the question. What are we talking about this week, man?

[00:37:24] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and today we celebrate the birthday of iconic comedian, actor and big fan of the show. Eddie Murphy. Yeah. Eddie and I were together a lot growing up. And old Eddie was crazy. He cracked some joke and you know, of course I’m gonna laugh. I mean, it’s Eddie Murphy, right?

[00:37:44] Doug: We’re pretty much best friends except, uh, yeah, he was always up there on the movie screen and I, I was just in the audience watching him. But other than that, we were tight known for hits, like Coming to America and Beverly Hills Cop Murphy’s, not quite as well known as a singer. And yet back in the eighties, he also released three studio albums while some were funny, like his hit Boogie in Your Butt, which come on.

[00:38:07] Doug: I mean, that’s just, it’s just the title alone is funny. Others were bonafide Radio Gold, his song party all the time produced by none other than Rick James. Was part of an album of songs, none of which included any comedy. After comedian, Richard Pryor told Murphy he couldn’t do an album without comedy, the two bet and Murphy won reaching number two on the billboard, hot 100 for three weeks, and being certified as a platinum record holder by the RIAA.

[00:38:39] Doug: So here’s today’s question. How much did Richard Pryor bet Eddie Murphy? That he couldn’t make an album without comedy? I’ll be back right after I figure out how to get some comedy into this podcast, man. Wouldn’t that turn a good thing? Great. 

[00:38:54] Joe: That’d be amazing if we could only do that. OG, you are first.

[00:38:59] Joe: Richard Pryor Bet Eddie Murphy. Yep. Around comedy. How much did they bet, 

[00:39:04] OG: uh, do we have the year in which this bet occurred? 

[00:39:06] Joe: Well, what year did Party all the time come out? This was a late eighties song. I don’t know that I have the exact year, but I remember it was a late 

[00:39:13] OG: Okay. That’s, that’s the vibe that I had.

[00:39:14] Joe: Eighties. 

[00:39:14] OG: So this is Post, uh, Brewster’s Millions. So obviously Richard Pryor had a gazillion dollars after, uh, inheriting all that money in, uh, Brewster’s Millions. Uh, if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s great. So he inherited what, 300 million? Wasn’t that how much he inherited in the movie in Brewster’s?

[00:39:31] OG: Millions. In Brewster’s as the character 

[00:39:33] Doug: in the movie? Yeah. I was gonna say, are you using a movie plot to help your logic? 

[00:39:37] OG: He didn’t get to keep any of that, you don’t think. 

[00:39:39] Rubin: Has Josh explained the logic on all seven wins? 

[00:39:42] Doug: Yes. 

[00:39:43] Rubin: Was he just going through and 

[00:39:44] Doug: just 

[00:39:45] Rubin: to arrive at the conclusion? 

[00:39:47] OG: Yes. 

[00:39:47] Doug: We got a lot of airtime to fill.

[00:39:49] Doug: Reuben, 

[00:39:50] Rubin: got it. Yeah. 

[00:39:51] OG: So he has 300 million and Eddie Murphy, maybe not, not as rich. I’m gonna say that the bet was a poultry, a poultry $999. 

[00:40:04] Joe: $999. Ruben, how does that sound? 

[00:40:10] Rubin: That sounds low. Very low. 

[00:40:13] Joe: So you think they would’ve bet a lot more than that? Come at me, 

[00:40:15] OG: bro. 

[00:40:15] Rubin: I don’t have logic to defend my answer though.

[00:40:18] Joe: If you call what OG just did Logic. I think there’s a 

[00:40:21] Rubin: yeah. Flaw 

[00:40:22] Joe: in your, 

[00:40:22] Rubin: I don’t have flawed logic to arrive where I’m arriving. Uh, I’m gonna say 20,000. 

[00:40:28] Joe: $20,000. So we got $999 and $20,000. Paula, do you know who Eddie Murphy is? 

[00:40:36] Paula: He’s an actor. I do know that, that’s probably the only recognizable name in that entire question.

[00:40:43] Joe: No, no. Richard Pryor. Not Richard Pryor. 

[00:40:45] Paula: I have no idea who that is. 

[00:40:47] Joe: Okay. 

[00:40:47] Paula: No clue. 

[00:40:48] OG: Minor League baseball player nerd to 300 million. Trust me. It’s a great movie, Paula. You’d love it. 

[00:40:55] Paula: Let’s see. So what logic do I have? Well, 65 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth, uh, sometime after that. But before today is when this deal took place.

[00:41:08] Paula: I’ll be honest, when I heard the question, the first two numbers that popped into my head, I figure if it’s a bet, it’s gotta be a round number. Most people bet in round numbers. So the two numbers that popped into my head, one was 10,000 and the other was a million. But if this was like closer to the dinosaurs than it is to today, a million was a lot back then.

[00:41:27] Paula: So I’m gonna go with 10,000. So I’m just taking the middle of the field goal. 

[00:41:32] Joe: Wait a minute. And Ruben, what was your guess? 

[00:41:34] Rubin: I’m at 20, 

[00:41:36] Joe: he said 20,000. 

[00:41:37] Rubin: Next person say under 20, and I’ll feel pretty good. 

[00:41:40] Joe: Right? And Paula takes the middle at, uh, 10,000. 

[00:41:43] Paula: Why don’t I take 10,001? Yeah. 

[00:41:47] Joe: Why? 

[00:41:48] Paula: Because I think that numbers that end in zero are unlucky.

[00:41:51] Joe: Okay. Well there we go. 

[00:41:53] Paula: Yeah, 

[00:41:53] Joe: I got no idea. Our guesses are locked. We’re gonna see who’s our winner in just a moment. Og you started this off by saying, uh, $999. Turns out both Reuben and Paula thought that number was very low. What are you thinking? 

[00:42:10] OG: I mean, it was a gamble, uh, for me, literally to anchor everybody around something.

[00:42:15] OG: And I was trying to decide if I wanted to anchor everybody at a loan number or the million dollar number or the 500 K number. We’re gonna find out. I, um, it’s, it’s, it’s one extreme or the other. I will, I will recognize it’s gonna be something stupid. Like they built a dollar, 

[00:42:30] Joe: right? ‘

[00:42:30] OG: cause you guys have pulled that crap before us, where Doug’s like, how much money did this?

[00:42:34] OG: And it’s like 74 cents. You know? It’s gonna be something really dumb like that. Or it’s gonna be like a million bucks and Paula’s gonna be like, son of a biscuit. I knew zeros were unlucky. So many zeros in the answer, 

[00:42:46] Joe: Ruben, you’ve already seen. There’s nothing ridiculous at all about this competition. So when you’ve, now that you, all the bets are in, you’ve got all the upside, everything above 20,000, what do you think?

[00:42:56] Joe: Yeah. You gonna win this? 

[00:42:58] Rubin: I, I normally feel like Paula would be stymied in between the two, but she’s kind of perfectly in between the two. So I feel like if there was a lower range bet, she’s actually got a pretty decent chance, which usually the person in the middle maybe doesn’t. But I do think I have a lot of upside here.

[00:43:12] Rubin: Any anything? You have a till 

[00:43:14] OG: infinity statistically, 

[00:43:15] Joe: correct? 

[00:43:15] Rubin: Yeah. If it’s 

[00:43:15] Joe: a million dollars, you’ve got it. 

[00:43:17] Rubin: Yeah. 

[00:43:18] OG: The long tail. 

[00:43:19] Rubin: I think we all have a decent chance. I think we all have a decent chance. 

[00:43:22] Joe: Paul, you’ve been playing this for a long time. You could have pulled a Chelsea Brennan and gone. I could have 19,000 9 99.

[00:43:29] Paula: It was either gonna be 20,001, or I was gonna pick 10,000. And won. 

[00:43:34] Joe: And so you went 10,000 and won? 

[00:43:36] Paula: Yeah. You know the two numbers that popped into my head, either 10,000 or a million. I just don’t think a hundred thousand is the answer. 

[00:43:44] Joe: Well, your guy can’t be wrong. 855, 5,000 times in a row, Paula. So let’s see.

[00:43:50] Joe: Is OG Ruben or Paula bringing home today’s winning answer?

[00:43:58] Doug: Well, hey there, stackers. I’m Eddie Murphy fanboy and guy who likes to party all the time. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. That’s right. It’s my old pal, Eddie Murphy’s birthday today. Man, we got a lot in common. I mean, he’s from the mean streets of Brooklyn and I’m from, uh, middle class suburbs of Detroit. I mean, that’s the same thing, right?

[00:44:15] Doug: He started on Saturday Night Live, and I of course got my beginnings on a little podcast called Stacking Benjamins Parallel Lines. I tell you parallel. Both of us also bet friends that we could make a record outta comedy. Alright, well I lost that bet to OG Murphy won. Although Richard Pryor, the guy who bet Murphy died before he could pay up.

[00:44:35] Doug: But how much did Murphy bet? Well, this is OGs favorite part of the show. I will tell you that it was $99,001 more than what OG guessed It was $89,999 more than what Paula guessed, and just 80,000 more than what Jesse slash Ruben guest. ’cause the correct answer is a hundred thousand dollars making Ruben Jesse our winner.

[00:45:02] Doug: Ruben Brink 

[00:45:03] OG: on the win. I just like how Paul is like it can’t be a hundred thousand. 

[00:45:09] Paula: I love that. I just got finished saying those words. That’s kind of perfect. 

[00:45:13] Rubin: I feel like I would be, I would be remiss just like my middle name. Is Jesse. So this Ruben Jesse thing, this Ruben, Jesse, thing’s been working out.

[00:45:22] Rubin: It 

[00:45:22] OG: really works out. Yeah. This is, this is for you Paula.

[00:45:29] OG: So close. 

[00:45:29] Joe: Yeah. And Paula thought I was being a little, uh, ironic when I said, your gut can’t be wrong 800,000 times. Can’t. And I already, I 

[00:45:36] OG: said a hundred thousand, but it can’t be that. 

[00:45:39] Paula: My gut literally said it just can’t be a hundred thousand. God’s gotta be either 10,000 or a million. 10 million. It can’t be a hundred.

[00:45:46] Joe: Oh, well this is it, Ruben. Thanks for bringing home a great, uh, birthday gift to both, uh, Jesse and to Tess Elizabeth. Uh, with your wins. That’s a nice, nice present for them. Sure. Alright, let’s dive back into our conversation and I propose this structure that we maybe start with foundation. So Ruben, we’ll start with you as the guy that just won cashflow, debt and emergency fund.

[00:46:09] Joe: Let’s just take those areas, right, kinda your financial position. What’s something people learn too late that maybe really needs to be a part of this curriculum to make it really good 

[00:46:21] Rubin: that the traditional way of using a savings account is pretty much irrelevant today? 

[00:46:27] Joe: What, what do you mean by that?

[00:46:29] Rubin: When I grew up, my parents told me to have a checking account and a savings account. And savings accounts don’t earn any yield. And so in reality, what you want is a checking account and either a high yield savings account or a brokerage account where you buy short-term bonds or something. But this idea of a lot of people who went through a personal finance curriculum, maybe in high school and were told, you know, your emergency fund of 10,000 or 20,000 or $30,000, whatever it is, belongs in your savings account and don’t touch it.

[00:46:57] Rubin: That’s really good for banks and not so great for you. 

[00:47:00] Joe: Paula, what’s another area that we need on that curriculum that people get either get wrong or learn too late? 

[00:47:07] Paula: I think your behavior matters more than math. I think that’s something a lot of people learn too late because people it similar to like food, people will learn what makes sense in theory, but the best nutrition plan in the world is useless if you’re not gonna follow it.

[00:47:24] Paula: And the same is true with money. And so you might learn what is mathematically sensible, but if you’re not gonna follow it, then it’s useless. 

[00:47:33] Joe: So you’re saying like instead of the, that old 50, 30 20 rule, which is different parts of your mm-hmm. Budget like this Yeah. Kind of tired number, really tracking what you do is what I’m hearing.

[00:47:44] Joe: Tracking what you actually do and learning from it. 

[00:47:46] Paula: It’s less about tracking and more about understanding your own psychology, understanding, hey, you know, I can, when I get stressed, that’s when all my plans for restaurant spending go out the window, because if I’m stressed, I’m gonna, I’m gonna pop into, um, you know, the restaurant down the street and order a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine or whatever, or a beer, that sort of thing.

[00:48:10] Paula: That sort of like ob the observation of your own behavior so that you can find out what your behavioral triggers are so that you know what are those emotional breakpoints that cause you to, to steer off of your plan. And 

[00:48:23] Joe: that hits cashflow. Could hit debt, could hit emergency fund, could 

[00:48:27] Paula: hit all three.

[00:48:28] Paula: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I, I think the nutrition analogy, or the diet and exercise analogy is I think the closest one because you can design a perfect plan, but when you hit those emotional breakpoint, that’s when the whole plan collapses. 

[00:48:41] Joe: Oh gee. Cashflow, debt, emergency fund. 

[00:48:44] OG: I think out of those three, the thing that people, uh, figure out too late is that debt is awful in every form and fashion, and there’s no such thing as good debt.

[00:48:53] OG: There’s just less crappy debt. And, um, every dollar that you spend paying other people is money that you are not accumulating yourself debt. Wait 

[00:49:01] Joe: a minute, what about what we said on Wednesday about using other people’s money? Yeah. On our April 1st episode? 

[00:49:07] OG: Yeah. Exclusive of that. 

[00:49:10] Joe: A second go round. Let’s go to protection.

[00:49:12] Joe: Ruben, I’m gonna say protecting your credit score using insurances, risk management. What do people learn way too late and needs to be a part of the curriculum? 

[00:49:23] Rubin: Not my, not my forte. So I’d probably follow, or Josh, be better at this. So I’ll, I’ll briefly say, you know, as a planner, I think the one thing that really smart people I meet don’t quite get is that life insurance is, is just for this lower probability event that you actually need it.

[00:49:40] Rubin: So you don’t wanna ever have to use it. Probabilities are that you won’t. That’s why the business model works for these life insurance companies. So, when you buy life insurance for our firm, we tend to recommend term insurance. You just wanna identify what is the gap between what the person who’s gonna get paid out on me passing needs to sustain my family’s lifestyle.

[00:49:58] Rubin: If it’s your spouse, something like that, what’s the amount they need to keep up the lifestyle? It’s not worth paying Above that. Don’t go get a ton of life insurance for no reason. Most people. Expectations should not do that, but also identify what that gap is, and that is the amount that you should probably fund for some term life insurance.

[00:50:14] Joe: I like that in the curriculum because how many times have we met people in their twenties with no, uh, no dependents, really nothing to their name, and somebody convinced them to buy a million dollar whole life insurance policy as a savings account. 

[00:50:28] Rubin: One of the best decision like outcomes of going or not going to college can be just do not end up in college where one of your like frat or sorority sisters goes into selling awful and life insurance policies when they graduate.

[00:50:42] Rubin: That is a great outcome that you can get through college without knowing any of those people. Um, because 23 year olds without dependents don’t need insurance. 

[00:50:49] Joe: Just a general rule too, if you graduate from college and you’ve got a friend who wants to have a lunchtime meeting, I won’t tell you what the topic is.

[00:50:56] Joe: That’s, that’s not gonna, not gonna go well. Paula, credit scores, insurance risk management. What do we need to know that we either learn too later is super important in the curriculum? 

[00:51:07] Paula: I think if you are struggling with debt and you can’t pay your bills and, and all of that, don’t worry. Like the thing to fix is not your credit score.

[00:51:17] Paula: If you’re not planning on taking out any new, if you’re not planning on moving apartments or taking out any new debt, like I, I meet so many people who are in these very precarious financial situations where they’ve got credit card debt and they, they’re, they’re in a bad spot financially. And I talk to them about what do you wanna fix?

[00:51:37] Paula: And one of the first things they say is, oh, I wanna improve my credit score. But why? You’re, you’re not moving apartments. You are not planning on borrowing any money anytime in the near future. Yeah. Why do you want to improve your credit score when instead you could focus on doing these other things that would increase the gap between what you’re earning and what you’re spending?

[00:51:58] Paula: Because that Delta is right now way too narrow, and that is the crux of your problems. 

[00:52:03] Doug: But all those funny commercials about credit score, they tell me that’s important. That’s why I do it. Make it better. 

[00:52:11] Paula: I mean, I’m not saying it’s bad to improve your credit score, it’s just in, in the waterfall of the hierarchy.

[00:52:17] Paula: Right? The priority list. 

[00:52:19] Joe: Yeah. Having it, protecting it is important, but I do feel like it’s always people with a lot of debt that over or overstimulated in that area. Yeah, I think og uh, credit scores, insurance risk management. 

[00:52:33] OG: I think the biggest thing on insurance is most people spend way too much time and money, ensuring low probability events and not enough time and money, ensuring higher probability events.

[00:52:44] OG: Reuben talked about life insurance is a one in whatever chance of getting hit by a bus when you’re 35, but you’ve got a one in 20 chance of being sick or hurt for an extended period of time. And so you look at the life insurance number and you go, I can get a million dollars of life insurance for 50 bucks a month.

[00:52:59] OG: That’s i’ll, I’ll do that. Instead of saying, I need to have 15,000 a month of disability insurance in case I get hit by a car, or in case, you know, I slip off my stairs and I can’t work for a while, that’s gonna cost me $800 a month. That’s where the risk is. And you can just look at it from a cost standpoint.

[00:53:18] OG: It’s pretty obvious. The reason that it costs more to have disability insurance than it does to insure your house, even though your house is, you know, a million dollar house or something like that, is because the probability, the likelihood of you collecting on it according to statistics is way higher than it is than your house burning down.

[00:53:36] OG: Look at like cars. Cars versus houses is another great example. Car insurance probably costs more than your house insurance. Unless you live in Texas and then everything costs too much. 

[00:53:44] Joe: Roughly 300 to one risk to 1200 to one risk. Yeah. Chance of something happening to you in your car and something happening to you in your house.

[00:53:52] Joe: Something happening to in your house. 

[00:53:52] OG: Yeah. Or like long-term care insurance, as you get older people go, that’s really expensive. Yeah. No kidding. 

[00:53:58] Joe: Guess why? 

[00:53:58] OG: You know? Guess why? Because it costs a crap load of money to have somebody take care of you 24 7 365 and the statistically the chance of a couple age 65, 1 out of the two people are gonna need some assisted care later in life.

[00:54:12] Joe: This is where that, uh, c plus C plus in, uh, in statistics gets better. ’cause when you start looking at risk management, knowing statistics can save you a, a ton of money. If you couple those just, uh, magnitude and probability, those two things. Let’s go to growing, investing, retirement, and taxes. You know, we spent full episodes on just one of those, Reuben, but tell us what’s one thing in those three areas that people get too late?

[00:54:41] Rubin: It, it maybe echoes what Paul said earlier, but I mean, most investors issue is they just get in their own way. And so what you need is a philosophy around how you want your money to grow through time. So an investment philosophy. You need a design and you need an implementation plan. If you get those three things and you can get outta your own way, to me that’s a, that’s a foundation to a successful investment journey.

[00:55:01] Joe: What does philosophy look like when you say that word? ’cause I think a lot of our stackers don’t know what you’re talking about. 

[00:55:06] Rubin: Yeah. So generally I’d say you need to decide what drives my returns when I’m an investor. So do I think that the market drives returns? So I just wanna buy an index fund that maybe looks like the market, or do I think that a manager should drive my returns and I wanna pay someone a relatively higher fee to go pick stocks for me or pick sectors at certain times for me?

[00:55:25] Rubin: It’s important you can have a successful investment investment journey. Either way. My, my personal belief is people should probably accept that the market does a pretty good job on its own. So if you can keep your fees pretty low and your taxes pretty low, that’s probably the best way to build an investment journey as far as this probability of a successful outcome goes.

[00:55:42] Rubin: If you believe in stock picking or something like that, the more you can sort of set it up, be systematic, not change halfway through. ’cause you have a disappointing outcome here or there. Markets are very random and noisy over short periods, and it causes us as humans and, and our behavior and inclinations to sort of hijack our own experience away from ourselves.

[00:55:59] Rubin: So whichever route you go, we can all have preferences, what we think is better, but whichever route you go, you’re always gonna be a human. And so that’s not a good thing when it comes to investing. Uh, and you wanna make sure you can, you can design a process where you can get out of your own way. It 

[00:56:12] Joe: was fascinating.

[00:56:12] Joe: Last Wednesday we interviewed, uh, for our normal Wednesday interviews, Claire and Lee, who research what they call stock market maestros, and they dove into how the best of the best stock pickers pick stocks. And what struck me was the fact that there’s no gut decisions, to your point, you know, there’s no man, my brother-in-law has this, so it should be in my portfolio.

[00:56:34] Joe: And even people with investments, having that investment policy statement, uh, which no matter what you do is so important. The, I think the philosophy piece is, is so huge, Paula, when it comes to investing retirement taxes. 

[00:56:48] Paula: To build off of that. I think one thing that people should be aware of are behavioral biases, cognitive biases, things like recency bias or the availability heuristic or loss aversion.

[00:57:02] Paula: People should be aware of these things. They should have names for these things because once you know that this is just how the human brain is wired, you begin to see those patterns play out in your own thinking, and then you have a, you know, when you do feel yourself pulled in a certain way, nobody thinks of themselves as panicking.

[00:57:20] Paula: They see a changed set of circumstances, and they will rationalize that in light of new information, they’re going to change that investor policy statement. Right. We saw this happen a lot during the pandemic where no one said, oh, it’s April, 2020. I’m panicking. Like nobody has the thought of, I am panicking at this moment.

[00:57:42] Paula: People will say, oh. X happened, and because X happened, that brings new information to light. And because that new information has come to light, I’m going to do things differently. And that is actually a panic decision, but it is rationalized. And so it doesn’t, it, it, it’s wearing the clothing of reason.

[00:58:02] Paula: And that’s why I think it’s so important to understand behavioral biases and like cognitive biases because you can then start to poke holes in that rationalization, 

[00:58:11] Joe: which is also interesting. These researchers talked about Paula having the humility to, instead of defending where you thought you were, right, where you were clearly wrong, having the humility to say, no, I’m wrong.

[00:58:22] Joe: And that’s how the best investors among us, uh, do so well, is through humility, which you would think they’d just be right all the time. They’re, they’re wrong a lot. They just curb it by making sure they don’t compound the error. Uh, investing retirement taxes, oji. 

[00:58:38] OG: I don’t know. I’m gonna beat these two guys here because um, you know, they have some pretty good stuff.

[00:58:43] OG: Um, I’m gonna say taxes are a year-round event and most people think about ’em in February or March, maybe into April, and then go, oh, thank God my taxes are done. And then, uh, throw it in the trash and then wait until next February and go, well, it’s time to do taxes again. And, uh, we know from research that especially around investing decisions, there’s some benefit to paying attention to your taxes.

[00:59:08] OG: There’s some benefits to paying attention to what investments you put in different type of taxable accounts or depending on the type of account, uh, tax treatment in the account. Ruben was talking about not having a savings account and instead of, instead of using bonds or fixed income or something like that, like that has a taxable difference and can be, um, uh, impactful to your long-term wealth.

[00:59:29] OG: And so sitting down in the summer or in the fall and saying, you know, where are we at? What’s going on with my tax situation and what can I do in these final four months? To plan for what this liability is gonna look like and make any adjustments to assuage those issues. The government sucks at managing money.

[00:59:46] OG: I don’t want to give them anything that they don’t absolutely, positively need. 

[00:59:51] Joe: I think that’s a fantastic place to leave this discussion. Let’s talk about what’s going on where all of you work, uh, og, this first fine weekend in April. What do you got going on, man? 

[01:00:02] OG: Yeah, so it’s Easter weekend, uh, after school activity today on Friday, and then my kid’s home from college, so I get to hang out with him for a few days before he goes back to school and wraps it up.

[01:00:11] Joe: Paula, what’s going on at the Afford Anything Podcast, 

[01:00:14] Paula: on the Afford Anything podcast. We have Jamie Hopkins on the show. He talks about your retirement sketchbook. 

[01:00:20] Joe: This guy. 

[01:00:21] Paula: Yeah, exactly. That guy. He came and joined us up in Westchester County, New York, sat down at the radio station with us. We had a long conversation through lots of different points of re and non-obvious elements of retirement planning.

[01:00:36] Paula: So that was what I loved about the conversation. If you think that you have heard, you know, retirement planning 1 0 1 or 2 0 1, this goes way beyond that. This goes to some sophisticated nuances of retirement planning. So that is, uh, Jamie Hopkins on the show. 

[01:00:51] Joe: That is awesome because you’re going to hear him stackers on Stacking Benjamins.

[01:00:55] Joe: But if you’ve ever heard. Paula and I do interviews. It’s like a great one-two punch. Yeah, we ask completely different questions. And Paula, because we don’t play in these in concert, we both were pretty taken by the work that he and his co-author Bonnie did. 

[01:01:09] Paula: Yeah, absolutely. Love that work. Very impressed.

[01:01:12] Joe: Really great stuff that’s coming up on the Afford Anything podcast, where finer podcast are found. Ruben, thanks for hanging out with us, man. 

[01:01:21] OG: Been great. Thank you. 

[01:01:23] Joe: Well, I’m excited that you made it to the end of the interview or the end of the the hour because some people they like take off as you know.

[01:01:29] Joe: This was an 

[01:01:29] OG: interview. Did you, Ruben, 

[01:01:31] Joe: you had no idea. So what’s coming up on the Fortunes and Frictions blog or what’s coming up in your practice? 

[01:01:37] Rubin: Uh, fortunes and Friction blog. I really write whenever I want. So running the small firm, I’m not as consistent as many other content creators. I just got back from.

[01:01:48] Rubin: Four days at Disney with my three and a half year old, 

[01:01:51] Joe: you’re exhausted. 

[01:01:51] Rubin: So I’m on break for like three weeks. Yeah. Maybe I’ll get a blog out. 

[01:01:57] Joe: But if people wanna know more about your firm and what you guys do, how do they get in touch with you? 

[01:02:02] Rubin: Yeah, thanks. You can find me on LinkedIn again. It’s Ruben Miller and uh, paloma capital.com if you’re interested in sort of getting introduced to our firm.

[01:02:10] Rubin: And then the blog, as you said, is fortunes and frictions.com. 

[01:02:14] Joe: And as OG said earlier, you’re a fun guy to follow on LinkedIn. So make sure that you follow Ruben. 

[01:02:20] OG: Okay. Got 

[01:02:20] Doug: yeah. Fun and LinkedIn don’t go together. 

[01:02:24] OG: Yeah, if you logged in there every so often, Doug, you’d see he is a pretty fun follow. 

[01:02:30] Joe: I was gonna say, I think there’s some people on LinkedIn more and more that I find, I find my happy place more and more on LinkedIn.

[01:02:35] OG: He says all the stuff we wanna say, but we all have jobs and you know, responsibilities and apparently Reuben doesn’t. So. 

[01:02:42] Joe: Well, that’s gonna do it for today. Big thanks to everybody who hung out with us for the last hour. If you know somebody that needs to create their own curriculum, this is a great opportunity to share an episode of Stacking Benjamins with them, and I hope that it helps you begin your curriculum for better personal finance habits.

[01:02:58] Joe: Doug, you got it from here, man. What should we have learned on today’s show? 

[01:03:02] Doug: Well, Joe, first, take some advice from Reuben Miller when you’re building your own financial curriculum. Start with the stuff that matters in your life right now. Then you can worry about learning the stuff you might need in the future.

[01:03:14] Doug: Second, Reuben’s, like I said, that second, it’s 

[01:03:17] Joe: like, wait, what 

[01:03:19] Doug: Second, learn from Paula’s Sage Wisdom. Know thyself, understand your own emotional triggers and how they impact your spending habits. But the big lesson, don’t bother trying to teach the neighborhood kids why it’s important for them to help pay off your mortgage.

[01:03:35] Doug: You need to meet them where they are in their lives. They’re just trying to figure out how to save up for a case of Shiner Bach. Thanks to Ruben Miller for joining us today. You’ll find Ruben’s writings@fortunesandfrictions.com, which is a weird coincidence ’cause that’s the name of a gentleman’s club out by the airport and also his financial planning work@palomacapital.com.

[01:03:59] Doug: We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Thanks to Paula Pant for hanging out with us today. You’ll find her fabulous podcast. Afford anything wherever you listen to The Finest podcast. And finally, thanks to OG for joining us today. Looking for good financial planning.

[01:04:15] Doug: Help head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG for his calendar. This show is the property of SB podcast LLC, LC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube. And all the usual social media spots.

[01:04:38] 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 Benjamin Show.