How global is your portfolio, really? This week in the basement, Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and the gang zoom out from the U.S. markets and take us on a whirlwind trip around the investing world. Spoiler alert: the case for international investing is stronger than you think—and it’s not just about chasing higher returns. It’s about risk reduction, smart diversification, and maybe even admitting that the U.S. isn’t always the world’s MVP.
You’ll hear how developed and emerging markets fit into a well-balanced portfolio, how correlation works in your favor (yes, this time that’s a good thing), and what history tells us about going global. Joe and OG share practical advice for how to get started, when to rebalance, and how much international exposure might make sense for the average Stacker.
Then in the second half, we pivot from markets to money buffers: listener Jeff from Cleveland wonders how to set insurance deductibles based on the state of his emergency fund. We break down how to think about the real return on your rainy-day stash—because spoiler: it’s not about the interest rate, it’s about your resilience.
To wrap things up, we share timeless wisdom from Stackers across the country on what they’d tell new graduates about money, life, and how not to blow that first paycheck on a jet ski.
What our community of Stackers wishes they had known after graduation
Why international investing may improve both your returns and your risk profile
How much of your portfolio to allocate internationally—and what history suggests
What “correlation” really means and why it’s your friend (at least in investing)
Risks and common misconceptions of investing overseas
How to choose between developed vs. emerging markets
Portfolio tools to visualize your asset mix and expected outcomes
Why your emergency fund’s best ROI might be peace of mind
How to align insurance deductibles with your liquidity cushion
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://stackingbenjamins.com/making-the-case-for-international-investing-1690
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our TikTok Minute
Our Headline
- The Best Country ETFs (2025) (justETF)
- Does International Investment Reduce Risk? (Morningstar)
Doug’s Trivia
- Grover Cleveland’s daughter “inspired” the name of what candy bar?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- Stacker Jeff wants to know how to set insurance deductibles based on emergency fund status.
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Join Us Wednesday
Tune in on Wednesday when we chat with a woman who builds global indexes. She’s the Head of Index Product Management at MarketVector Indexes, Joy Yang.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Is Flourishing Tied to Financial Freedom? A New Study Reveals Insights (SB1689)
Episode transcript
Joe: [00:00:00] Uh, we, we miss you Monday morning in Paris. Don’t I sound like a native?
Doug: I heard you say we miss you
Joe: and
Doug: you stubborn.
Joe: We, I I did miss you all weekend. We,
Doug: we miss you. That’s what I heard.
Joe: It’s international week in the basement. That’s why Doug’s got the funny hat on. It is why OG ISS wearing his kilt and man, is it an exciting, exciting,
OG: good day, mate.
Doug: That’s just his Catholic school girl. Miniskirt Joe. It’s not a kilt.
Joe: Oh, just pulling that old thing out again at the beginning of every week, whether it’s international investing week like it is here in the basement this week or any other week, we always begin the week by saluting our troops. Our troops who are true Spartans true warriors, which by the way, for people who don’t see the video, I got my Spart Spart mug, which I think is appropriate for this toast on behalf of the men and women [00:01:00] who make podcast to mom’s basement, the men and women who serve our troops and their families, and our veterans, the people in our military.
Here’s to you. Let’s go stacks and s now, shall we?
Doug: Thanks everybody.
Joe: How do you say, let’s go in French Vaminos?
Doug: Yes. Close enough. You beat me to it.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. If you’re thinking more international stocks in your portfolio would look good. We’re here to help you start building on today’s deep dive. We’ll make the case for global investing, help you find the right investments and put in just the right amount.
And that’s not all one stacker in Cleveland named Jeff said, you know what? I’d better call Saul, see hi and OG, because I’m wondering about how to set deductibles on my insurances. Sure. Jeff
OG: [00:02:00] Insurances, Jeff. You said it wrong.
Doug: Can I do my job? Not well, apparently not.
Joe: If we gotta tell you how to pronounce the words.
Doug: Let’s do that over again. One stacker in Cleveland named Jeff said, you know what? I’d better call Saul. See hi in OG because I’m wondering about how to set deductibles on. My insurance is sure Jeff. Nothing lights up these dorks more than insurance discussions. Of course. We’ll also light up a great TikTok minute and I’ll whip up some eye popping trivia and now.
Two guys who I can assure you are cuckoo for global investing in insurance Talk. It’s Joe and oh Ju ju g.
Joe: Hey there, stackers, and happy Monday. Welcome back to the Stacky Benjamin Show. We’re super happy you’re here and we are all about international [00:03:00] investing today. And the guy that. We call the International man of mystery. It’s Mr. Ochi. I, I need to say that without laughing. Yeah. Nobody says that.
OG: Yeah, not heard that anywhere, ever.
Joe: Never. You’re not an international man of mystery. Uh, do you have a good weekend, og?
OG: Yeah, I mean, uh, it’s summertime so you cannot not have good weekends. There’s only like 12 of them, so you better make due
Joe: nothing better in Texas. Then sitting out and uh, watching sweat drip off every part of your body all summer long.
Yeah. It doesn’t
OG: bother me though. I like warm weather. So play golf. You hit the golf ball super far. You, you play in the morning, you do a little, you know, sit in the pool, have a little Margie.
Joe: We had some fun after we recorded on Friday and that was, guys, this was great news. You know, they’re doing some work on the back of my house.
And, uh, got some great news from my builder. They discovered where the water main is that comes into [00:04:00] my house on Friday and they did it the hard way.
OG: You know, there’s a, uh, three digit number you can call that you’re supposed to call before you do any sort of work
Joe: outside. Welcome to Texarkana.
OG: I’m no expert in building code.
Joe: However, we got a great show today. We are going to be talking international investing all week long. So if you’re one of those people that I keep seeing online. Who are like, you know what, I got a little complacent and I didn’t build international out in my portfolio. We’re gonna talk about why you should.
We’re gonna talk about the risks involved. We’re gonna talk about the types of investments to use. And on Wednesday, joy Yang from Market Vectors, ETFs is gonna join us and she’s gonna talk about, uh, how they look at international investments. So we got the pros coming in. As well, og. Super fun week here in Mom’s basement.
Before we get to that, we’ve got a couple sponsors who make sure that we can keep on keeping on and you don’t pay anything for any of [00:05:00] this goodness, so we’re going to hear from them. And then International Investing in the spotlight on a Monday.
Well, let’s begin our deep dive by making the case for international investing and, uh, really the state of international investing. I know that for. The last 10 years, OG International has not been the place that you’ve wanted to be. Frankly. However, when we look at longer periods of time, and I’ll get back to this, it paints a much, much different story when it comes to investing internationally.
And if we look just at the state of the world this year, we’re recording this a little bit early because of my travel schedule. But a site called just etf.com updates every day on what different economies are doing their ETFs, number one ETF in the world. As of our recording day, OG is wanna guess? Nope.
Poland? Nope. Poland is up a third. [00:06:00] Almost exactly a third, 33.32%. Greece is number two at 26.62. You say
OG: number one, ETF. What you mean is number one. Country based number
Joe: one country etf. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Okay. The number one economy, their ETF, that tracks their economy. So, gotcha. If you had just invested all your money in Poland, you would’ve been up a third this year with all your money.
Greece up 26.6, Austria up 23.7 Spain, 21.6 Italy, 19 the worst countries, by the way, Turkey down 16, uh, Thailand down 12 and a half. Indonesia down. 11. Pakistan down eight and a half. Saudi Arabia down 8.3. World investing OG all over the map. But certainly, I mean this, what we’re seeing here, right, is just classic diversification where the US is somewhere in the middle.
OG: Yeah. I don’t know what else to say about that.
Joe: Correct. Let’s, well, I’ll keep going with the statistics then, because I also [00:07:00] found this interesting from Morningstar. This is a piece from John Recanter and John broke down the. World into two different parts. He took 1900 to 1950 and then he took 1901 to 1949, and then he took 1950 to the present and he says the cause for the division should be apparent first half of the century, the 19 hundreds.
Two World wars in a global depression more recently, no World Wars, also not such a steep economic downturn like we had then. So you would expect that the sharpest declines would’ve occurred during those first 50 years. So he looked at bonds and he looked at stocks and he took a thousand dollars. And when he looked at the worst 10 year periods during each of those 50 year periods before.
1950, your bonds OG in the us. Your worst 10 year return would’ve taken you from a thousand dollars [00:08:00] up, $566. So to 1566, your international bonds would’ve only made $193 over a 10 year period, just absolutely horrible stocks in their worst 10 year period. Much better up $670 for the US only up 341. So during a time of global turmoil during the early periods of the 19 hundreds, you had.
The globe doing worse than just investing in the us but you turn that around and since 1950, the worst 10 years for bonds up 577 in the US up 815 outside the us. The worst 10 years for stocks up $655 for US stocks up 886. Clearly from 1950 till now using. 10 years as a timeframe and any time you 10 year timeframe, you had been better off investing internationally during the worst [00:09:00] time since 1950, take the worst 10 years.
You were better off being international than you were being in the us. So just from a risk mitigation standpoint, og, where we think international is riskier, it turns out that. At least for the last, what, 75 years being international might have helped save your bacon like it is for a lot of investors right now, in 2025, and again, because we’re recording a little bit early as we record this, the US market, just getting back to zero, the s and p 500, just closing in on zero.
Mm-hmm. Almost halfway through the year and we made it back. OG
OG: made it back, made it back even ultimately. If you believe that diversification helps and you believe that markets are efficient and you believe that you can’t have any sort of guesstimation on what stocks are gonna do well, what companies are gonna do well, if all of that is true, why do you only believe that with companies that are in the United States?
Why would you only believe [00:10:00] that with. Tech companies, if you like, only invest in the nasdaq. You know what I mean? Like why wouldn’t that also be true in other economies and also in other marketplaces and other periods of time. So it stands to reason that as you, you know, evaluate your asset allocation, that companies that are based in other parts of the world also have.
Good times and not so good times. And also the economies in those other parts of the world have good times and not so good times. And sometimes those are synced up with other countries. You know, you think of maybe Europe or you think of the Pacific, or you think of the Americas kind of moving lockstep.
And that somewhat makes sense, right? I mean, if the US is going down, it makes sense that you would also argue maybe Canada and Mexico, because we’re such close proximity to one another, there might be some similar things going on. But by the same token, you know, you just can’t. Guess on that. There’s no alpha, right?
There’s no benefit to trying to guess on it versus having some in everything. It just makes more sense. The [00:11:00] question, of course, is how do you pick that number? I. How much international, what, what percentage should you have in your portfolio?
Joe: Yeah, and I’m thinking that is where this all leads ultimately.
But one thing you, you talked about, you know, we began by talking about diversification. I mean, look at all these different markets that we talked about and having some in different places, but also og, another thing you touched on that I really think we should go a little deeper on is. Correlation benefits.
I mean, there is a benefit to, to having assets that aren’t correlated. I mean, the fact that, you know, the Poland economy may be doing something different right now that is happening in the US economy that is happening in Indonesia. Like that’s a huge benefit for people, especially people who think that the stock market is risky.
You, I’m sure hear this all the time. I hear it from people when I go around the country. Ah, the stock market is kind of risky. What do you do? Oh, well you have a financial podcast. I don’t do the stock market. It’s risky. Well, I think one of the best ways [00:12:00] to mitigate that risk is by getting rid of correlating assets.
Right?
OG: Yeah. And what you’re talking about here is how likely is something, uh, two things to do the same thing at the same time. I. For example, in the us, if you look at small companies and medium sized companies, there’s no benefit to the diversification of medium or small. They’re highly correlated, which means that if one goes up, the other one’s gonna go up, about the same one goes down, the other one’s gonna go down about the same.
Whereas big companies versus small companies aren’t nearly as correlated. So there’s no guarantee that if big companies go up, small companies are gonna go up. They’re gonna have their own wavelength As you think about it and the further away you get. You think about Poland in the us, they’re gonna be much less correlated.
So it does its thing. We do our thing. Sometimes we’re gonna ride the same wave and sometimes we’re gonna be completely opposite. Kinda like what you’re seeing right now. And that’s a benefit for investors [00:13:00] two ways. Number one, from a savings standpoint, you’re automatically buying the lowest thing as you’re investing, right?
You don’t have to like try to time that out because some of your money is going to the thing that’s. Not as good as the other things. The, the other benefit is you always get all the return. It just comes in a random order, so you don’t have to try to figure out when is Poland gonna take off because you have it.
You don’t care. You’re, it’s just gonna, you get it when it happens like everybody else should. And if you’re already retired or you’re not saving any more money, right? You have your portfolio and now you’re living on it. It provides an automatic diversification benefit because it’s gonna provide rebalancing opportunities where the US has been doing well.
Cool. I can take some of that profit reinvest into the areas that haven’t been doing as well US does. Well again, take some of that profit, reinvest it now, all of this whole time I’m buying more Poland. Using your example at lower and lower prices and then all of a sudden one year, all that stuff that you bought at those cheap [00:14:00] prices is up 30% in five months.
Joe: I don’t think we’ve had any stackers Ask. I can almost safely bet there’s nobody in our audience who’s gone. I wonder when the Poland economy’s taken off. Yeah. Sitting in their backyard going, come on. You know,
OG: Poland,
Joe: let’s go Warsaw on Warsaw. Warsaw, let’s do it. Yeah. And there’s also upside, right? Like you can’t predict when things are gonna go up.
But also just looking at the way that, uh, our economy is so global now. I mean, think about when you and I were young. And the economy in India versus og, the economy in India now, or the economy in Africa versus some of the exciting things going on in banking and technology payments. The speed of money with banking in Africa is just.
Absolutely amazing. I mean, I, I got a letter recently from an African prince who told me that he would, uh, yeah, he just needed a little help. You get a
Doug: lot of those letters, you’re connected, man. It’s [00:15:00] incredible.
OG: Well, and if you think, I think maybe big picture here, if you believe that part of the growth of the US’ market has to do with the.
Increased economic worth of the average person in America over the last 50 years, let’s say. If you think that some of that is tied to that, and then you look at some of the developing countries, you look at India, you look at Pakistan, you look at Africa, and you say, how many people in those countries don’t even have cell phones yet?
Are at the spot from an economic perspective of the 1950s of the us, right? Not everybody had a tv. Now we have three of them. You know, not everybody had a phone in their house and now we have five telephones in our house. You know what I mean? It’s like if you think that that was part of the cause. Or I don’t know, result, I’m not sure.
But if you believe that that was part of the, the growth trajectory of the United States, and then you [00:16:00] look at those other economies and you go, they also have to go through that whole thing. But they have three times the people, you know what I mean? India has what, a billion people. Pakistan has hundreds of millions, you know what I mean?
Africa, the whole continents bigger than the United States, so. Americans are kind of a little sheltered, right? I, I feel like, and you go like, oh, that small place over there of Africa. It’s like, no, that’s the size of everything over here. Like America, Mexico, south America’s like can say huge continent that’s full of billions and billions of people.
And a bunch of them still are lower, you know, like poor. They don’t, they, the whole rising middle class hasn’t happened there yet. So why wouldn’t you want to. If you knew what happened in the US why, and, and, and you go, well, that’s part of that. Why wouldn’t you wanna invest in other areas that are about to do the same thing or potentially.
So, and that growth sense growth of
Joe: course, is gonna come in waves. It’s not gonna be [00:17:00] even, which, which brings up, I think the next point. There, there’s two different opportunities here. You know, when people think international, they think one opportunity or they think of bajillion ones like we mentioned, you know, Poland and Turkey and you know, the continent of Africa or, or all these different things.
Truly, you can break this down and experts do into two different opportunities, which are. Developed markets and emerging markets. And for people who are new to this investing game, OJI, can you talk about the different opportunities that, that that means that those two are, and how to differentiate one from the other?
OG: Well, I don’t know that I can talk intelligently about it in my mind. Uh, emerging market countries are countries that you would say are up and coming. Like one of those, like some of the things that we talked about, some countries in Africa or. Some countries in the Middle East or some countries in the Pacific, whereas they actually, I think
Joe: they even still call Poland an emerging market.
Yeah, I believe, yeah. You know, I mentioned earlier that sometimes people think investing in international stocks is risky, so let’s talk about the different risks, og. I [00:18:00] mean, there’s a few big ones. Political risk. If we’re gonna invest in just one economy, you might have things happen politically in that country that are gonna change the game, which brings up another one.
Regulatory, what’s going on in
OG: Turkey right now?
Joe: Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Which brings up the second point. Regulatory differences, right? They might go, yeah, international investors can’t do X, so they can’t do Y
OG: so well, the reporting requirements are different. Um, there’s all manner of differences in the security of the information, the security of the securities, frankly, the hierarchy of the structure of who owns what and what happens if things don’t go your way.
Those are all parts of the risk factor associated with it.
Joe: Then another risk is of course, uh, currency risk. I mean, I remember, I remember right after. Right after Operation Desert Storm, there were some investors that I knew in Detroit that were buying up Iraqi money thinking it was coming back, right?
Mm-hmm. When this thing comes back, it’s gonna [00:19:00] be great. They’re gonna have to bring it back. We’re gonna make a ton of money. I mean, that obviously is a huge risk. That risk didn’t play out the way those people. Thought that it was going to play out, which is funny. I need to call those people and say, I told you so.
OG: Probably not, but I
Joe: won’t do it. I’ll just do it on our podcast instead. Not only that, you also have fluctuation between the dollar and and that local currency, right? You’ve got whatever’s happening there and your dollars worth more, your dollars worth less depending on what’s going on with that. And I think this brings up a big point.
This is why. I think I don’t wanna invest in an individual stock that’s just in Poland or just in Turkey, or just in Israel. I wanna invest in a much, much broader market, I think because of those challenges, and it’s so hard to know sitting here in Texas, what the hell’s going on in Turkey? That to me, seems to be very dangerous.
OG: Well, I mean, I would go even a step further and say, I don’t even know that you wanna pick specific countries [00:20:00] because again. Unless you’re really paying attention, I just look at data and you can look at the output of the US economy in terms of like how much of the global GDP does it produce, and maybe that’s your starting point from an investing standpoint.
You’d say like, okay, well it does 55% of the world’s GDP, so 55% of my money in the in the us.
Joe: Okay.
OG: It’s a fine starting point. I can’t argue with you. Well, how much money should we put in Canada, for example? Well, if you’re using the same number, you’d say, ah. It’s 3%. 3% of the world’s GDP is from Canada. I’d say, how much should be in China?
You go, oh, China. Oh geez. They’re, they’re slaying it, right? No, 3%. But we think ’cause of news and our personal biases and all that, like everything comes from China, right? Like we would think their economy is slaying it, so why wouldn’t we have lot? You know what I mean? So it’s really risky to try to put your own psyche into how much should go into Columbia versus Argentina.
Right? I, unless you’re doing [00:21:00] business there, unless you’re very familiar, I. There’s plenty of people who have family and relationships and you know, they’re like, well, I was born and raised in Brazil. Of course I know what’s going on. It’s like, okay, cool. Well then use that to your advantage. But for the rest of us mere mortals, I think you can’t go wrong with just a regular diversified international holding.
In fact, if you wanted to get frisky with it, what you might choose to do is separate it by big companies and small companies. That’s what you do in the us, right? So I got my big growth companies, and I got my small growth companies. I got my big value companies. I got my small value companies. Why wouldn’t you do that internationally?
If the US is about 50% of the world’s GDP, could you not just say 50 50 if you wanted to 60 40, 70 30, like pick your number. Right? But in inside the US you’re gonna go big and small. Why wouldn’t you go big and small outside of the us?
Joe: Are you to some degree though, doing that? If you go developed countries and, uh, emerging markets because emerging markets are gonna also be smaller up and coming.
Uh, stocks, I would think [00:22:00] in those. But
OG: you’re, so, yes. I would submit to you that, back to your second point about correlation. I’m gonna have emerging markets separate than developed market. The way that I think about it is developed market is big and small. Emerging market, big and small, if you can get it, but probably emerging market is separate.
Doug: I would think there would be even a higher. Risk multiplier on a small company in an emerging market than there would be in a developing country or a undeveloped country.
OG: Yeah, I mean, the factors of small versus big are true irrespective of location or time.
Joe: But I would think going back to some of those risks, og, I mean, to Doug’s point, I think you probably have more political risk, more currency risk, regulatory risk with some of these developing countries.
Yeah, I’m
OG: supporting what Doug’s saying. I’m saying there is a higher. Risk premium, risk adjusted return expectation. If you could specify emerging markets, [00:23:00] small, right? It would provide a greater return expectation than emerging market. Large. Yes, I would support that. But now you’re talking about like percent, it’s like, yeah.
How much, like do, do I want that to be 2% of my portfolio? Right? And I’ve got a million dollars. So we’re talking about a $20,000 fund. Or do I have a hundred thousand dollars? We’re talking about 2% of my portfolio. That’s a $2,000 position. You know what I mean? Like. You also need to consider that.
Obviously,
Joe: I wanna address that question in a second, but there’s a burning question that I know that a lot of our stackers have, which is, okay, if I’m not gonna buy the individual stock, I’m not gonna buy an individual country, their market. Like you buy the s and p 500, right? Mm-hmm. How do we buy it? I mean, you’ve got all these different ways to buy things you could do in a DR.
You could do exchange traded funds, you could buy mutual funds, you could do direct investments. You can go active managers because of the additional risk internationally, you know, have managers like, you know, Templeton historically is a company that was great at picking international investments, active versus passive.
Can we talk about A-D-R-E-T-F [00:24:00] mutual fund direct investment? Like how do we, what’s the best way for a beginner to get into these things?
OG: I mean, any of those would be fine. What you’re talking about is fundamentally, do we wanna own an individual position or do we want to own a basket? The way my brain works is I just kind of think of it like a flow chart.
Yes or no? Like these are the break points and then I can just, yeah. Should
Doug: I get Taco Bell tonight or shouldn’t I? Yeah,
OG: it’s not even that. It’s more like, should I get Taco Bell or should I have KFC? If kfc, do I go with the 20 piece or the 15? What’s your cholesterol level currently? Exactly. Is this
Joe: like a Venn diagram though, or there’s an intersection?
Why not both? Why not both?
Doug: And now you can with Taco Bell’s new nuggets.
OG: Yes, indeed. But Taco Bell’s nuggets are breaded in. Tortillas to tortilla chips, which is weird. Taco
Joe: Bell, if you’d like to sponsor the show.
OG: Yeah. Not
Joe: that
OG: we’re doing, you sell, not that I’ve had any
Joe: rumor has it. Right.
OG: Anyway, so on your international side, you’re going, do I wanna own a basket of stuff or do I wanna pick my stuff individually?
I pick [00:25:00] basket. To your point, I’m not gonna figure out have the time, energy, or effort or expertise or interest, frankly, in trying to decide which. Tech company in Poland is the one. Yeah. Which companies
Joe: lighting it up in Warsaw. Yeah.
OG: It’s just not gonna happen. All right, so number two then. All right, so we’re gonna go basket.
Now, do I want active or passive? Don’t care. Doesn’t matter. You know, it’s hard to have outperformance repeatedly. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It’s hard to predict it in advance. Hard by heart. I mean, it’s nonexistent. You can’t do it. I can’t prove to you that it’s not gonna happen. So Joe likes Franklin Templeton because they historically have done well, because they have active managers, and there’s a case for that, right?
There’s somebody on the ground in this small country that goes, no, no. This is the one we wanna buy. Trust me, I’m live. I’m right next door. They’re killing it. I watch the commercials on tv, right? Passive investors say, I don’t wanna play that game. There’s no wrong or right way to do this. So I pick passive.
That’s just what I pick. So I’ve [00:26:00] got basket of things, I’m gonna go passive. And then that really narrows it down to, now do I just wanna go individual countries or just lump it all together and say, international, I’m gonna pick international. I’m gonna make the diversification decision. Back to what I talked about before on the things that I, that I know have been proven to make a difference, big versus small growth versus value.
That’s what makes the difference in long-term performance. So I want to have some consideration over that. I don’t care about the consideration of which company in Argentina is gonna be which company in Poland. That’s not a game I can play,
Joe: and I’m with you. I know we mentioned Templeton as, uh, active managers.
For me though, I I definitely agree in my portfolio, it’s passive. I just don’t wanna play that game of who’s gonna have the hot hand tomorrow regardless who had the hot hand yesterday, not a game that I need to play either. Which gets to your question then, og. So how do we then, how do we then think about this in terms of portfolio percentage?[00:27:00]
You know, do we, uh, do we do the 50 50 thing? Like you’re talking about over the last 10 years, we got smoked M 50 50. Over the last 50 years we’re looking pretty good. Mostly because of the fact that during those early years, yeah, from
OG: 50 to 80 it was great. Yeah, international
Joe: got a huge headstart, got just a monster headstart so they, they could give some back.
So longer term I think you’re good. But you know, if we look at the short term, that would’ve been a miserable place to be. How do we figure out what our allocation is to international?
OG: Again, I, I can’t say that there’s a right or wrong way to do it. If you look at the expected return of the US versus the expected return of non-US positions, I think those numbers vary.
I think that the correlation of those things are different and it boils down to what is the return that you need in your portfolio to make it happen. If your financial plan says, I need 12% a year to make my financial goals work. You’re not gonna have [00:28:00] any developed market. You’re going all small US and emerging market.
Like that’s the, those are the only things that fit. ‘
Doug: cause that would be a super aggressive choice, right? That’s what you’re saying? Yeah,
OG: because that’s, those are the only investments that historically have produced that level of return. If your portfolio says, you know, you need six and a half, then you’re gonna be okay with a little less return for a little bit more stability.
That’s the trade. I think a good starting point. Is 50 50 because, or maybe more 60 40, and then I think you ratchet it up or down from there. I can say that we’re probably more 75 25 US because I recognize the home bias, right? Yeah. It’s very difficult to, you know, lose week after week, month after month, year after year for 10 years and not wanna make a radical change.
And from a behavioral standpoint, I want to, I wanna make sure that you’re from an [00:29:00] investing perspective in the ballpark, so that you stay the course. If you’re, if you’re moving from Poland to us, to Argentina, to, you know what I, if you’re bouncing around trying to find it because you’re not happy with what’s happening or you don’t think it’s working in your plan, then you’re gonna be making a bunch of changes and those changes are gonna end up.
Probably costing you in the long run. I’d rather have something that’s less likely to, you know, shoot the lights out, but still gonna make the plan work. So I think it’s fine to start, you know, do the portfolio visualizer thing at 50 50 and see what happens. See what happens at 60 40, see what happens.
It’s 70 30, see what happens at 80 20. Us versus non-US.
Joe: Generally speaking, we talk about volatility. How does international develop market volatility? Compare to us. Volatility. Like if we talk standard deviation, should we expect a little more bumpiness in that ride or less or similar? I similar. I think it’s about the same.
OG: It’s about
Joe: the same Think it’s about the same. Mm-hmm.
OG: It’s just it has a lower [00:30:00] historical return. So the waviness is different.
Joe: Well, and that’s the key, right? Is that as long as those bounces that, uh, volatility doesn’t match up with the us, that’s part of the win. That’s part of what we want, is to have things that will bounce up and bounce down at, at, uh, different times.
OG: I still think it’s great though. I mean, the reality is it’s almost always all green, you know what I mean? Uh, this is a little book that we have, it’s called a Matrix book, and it’s hard to read this column here. I’m showing this to Joe on the screen. It shows a column, it goes from 1970 to present, and so every year it’s tracking the return for the year and then the average return every year behind it.
And so you could just, all you could see is just lots of green. It’s almost all green. Green, yeah. There’s a little bit of red in the short run. Right. Little periods of time where a one year period or two year period or three year period would be read. But the vast majority of the time it’s green. And you can look at this, you can look at the s and p, you’ll look at big companies, small companies.
The overarching thing with investments is once you [00:31:00] pick it, freaking don’t touch it. That’s the key. You just have to be okay. It it’s, there is no wrong answer to this.
Joe: That’s why at the beginning of this year, you know, we did the round table is the time to ditch your international investments. Because you and I both thought it was ridiculous to do that start of the year.
It definitely proving to have been ridiculous if you bounced out of international at the beginning of this year. What a horrible time to have done that. At the very least, you know, when I use portfolio visualizer, I will, I will set a minimum, and this, by the way, is an arbitrary number and I’ll, I’ll admit that, but it’s arbitrary based on 30 years of experience.
15% minimum international, 5% minimum emerging markets, and then work up from there. But I pegged those minimums in there to make sure that I get some exposure to international and then move up. And really, I like what you’re saying, you know, starting at 50 50, why not 50 50? And ask that question and then work your way down to whatever works for your goal.
And that volatility [00:32:00] measure should be based on how close your goal is. I think og, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, you’re gonna look for more volatility, which means skew more toward emerging markets if your goal is further away. And if your goal is closer, well then I’m gonna play it closer to the vest because I wanna, the goal is to have the money available when, when you need it.
Doug: Joe, in the intro, we said that we were gonna tell our listeners how to put in just the right amount. So I, I don’t know why we’re not. Getting straight to this. It’s 8,745. I mean, I don’t know why it’s taking you guys so long to get to that. I
Joe: know, right? Why not? It’s all, it’s the right amount is definitely based on that goal.
Or 8,742,
Doug: whichever is greater.
Joe: Well, that’s our deep dive. We’re gonna go even deeper guys. On Wednesday, joy Yang from Market Vector’s, ETF’s gonna join us. She’s gonna dive even further into international investing. Can’t wait to talk to somebody who is on top of this every day in the ETF markets. So tune [00:33:00] in for that show.
But also in our newsletter, the 2 0 1, we’re going to dive even deeper. Kevin Bailey will take you on a ride through some of the, the best stuff on the internet on this topic. So if you want to dive even deeper than we did today, we’re gonna take you there. Of course, we’ll have links to the places that I talked about today, this Morningstar piece about volatility.
The. Just etf.com piece about ETFs around the world and where they’re at currently. We’ll have those and more in our show [email protected]. So a lot of resources to get your investing game on the international front working. We got a question in the second half of today’s show from Jeff and Cleveland.
We want to answer that and our amazing TikTok minute. But before all that, of course. The highlight of the podcast, me, Doug’s trivia.
Doug: Oh, finally said it. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and all this talk of international investing makes me hungry. [00:34:00] Hungry for some trivia. How about this one?
On today’s date, way back in 1886, Grover Cleveland. Married Ms. Francis Folsom in the White House. Yes. Francis would go on to inspire the great Johnny Cash song and Grover would go on to play a character in the Muppets. What do you mean? None of that’s true. Why else would they have made Grover Blue? Geez.
Cleveland was a spry 49 years old and only the second US president to wed while in office and was the only president to actually get married in the White House. Their first child was born a few years later and became a national sensation, ultimately inspiring the Curtis Candy Company to rename their candy cake bar after the young.
Cleveland, what was the name of the new candy bar? I’ll be back right after I go clean out the kitty pool. I think one of the neighbor kids, well, you know they did what kids do in kitty pools.[00:35:00]
Hey there, stackers. I’m pool cleaner and Guy who now needs a Snickers. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. This is quite a story. Grover Cleveland’s daughter inspired a new candy bar. Interestingly, she shared a name with another person who was a huge star at the same time. A star who would’ve surely demanded compensation if this candy bar had been named after him.
His name was Babe Ruth with Curtis Candy Company assured everyone that the fecal shaped bar was named, named after the daughter of Grover and Francis’s new baby, baby Ruth Cleveland. That is so business savvy right there and now. Back to the two sluggers running this podcast. Hey, little sluggers. It’s Joe and og.
Joe: What do you think the chances are with Babe Ruth being the [00:36:00] superstar that he was, that this was actually named after the baby Cleveland? Like I think there’s like almost 0% chance, almost
Doug: 0%. The story I heard about this was that Babe Ruth did at least threaten to sue them, or may have actually tried to sue them, and they were able to say no.
It was, no, no, no. You got it all wrong. New baby in the, I mean, ’cause who wouldn’t wanna buy a candy bar named after a baby, right? Yeah,
Joe: duh. Makes total sense of, of course. I don’t know what a big star she, I mean by all reports she was a star, but nowhere near paper. Ruth not, not quite. No. Good times. What a piece of history there, by the way.
Well, who was the first, do you guys know who the first president was to get married in the White House? Grover. Cleveland being the second.
Doug: Ooh, that’s a great question.
Joe: Excuse me. Not married the White House. Married in office.
Doug: Married in office, right? Yeah. The
Joe: only one married in the White House. Like you said, Doug was grove over Cleveland, but the first one to get married while in office.[00:37:00]
Doug: It is gotta be somebody like that, A president nobody thinks of. Oh, and one of the big giant, it’s everybody’s favorite giant fat guys like Howard Taft or something like that. So close because I mean, he had no pull. That dude had no game at all until he became president. And finally he is like, I gotta become president just so I can get a little action.
Joe: And then I could become the president. Then I become the what? Commissioner? Baseball. Uh, because Taft long time, no. Who was it? It was, it was of course everybody’s favorite. John Tyler. Everybody. Everybody’s every, are you sure he was a
Doug: president? When I think of president, wasn’t he the lead singer for
Joe: Aerosmith?
Just Steven’s brother John, his older brother, John, Steven, Tyler. Even when Aerosmith was hot back in the eighties, I thought he looked like he was a hundred years old. For sure. Yeah, he sounds
Doug: like it. He and Keith Richards. I want to see the sales data for Baby Ruth candy bars. After the scene in Caddy Shack came out, when they found the baby Ruth at the bottom of the pool, [00:38:00] everybody thought somebody pooped in the pool bill merge like it’s okay.
It’s no big deal, and he takes a bite out of it. Sales just plummet.
Joe: We had that happen twice at our community pool in when I lived near you, Doug. Happened two times where somebody threw the baby Ruth bar in the pool, and I’m fairly certain it was one of the lifeguards that just wanted a break.
Doug: How did you know that it was actually a Baby Ruth?
Other thing?
Joe: Well, duh. Same way time for our TikTok minute. This is the part of the show where we shine a light on a TikTok creator who’s either saying something brilliant or air quotes Brilliant. Doug, we’ll stick with you. What do you think? You think this is gonna be brilliant or air quotes brilliant.
No, this is the real deal, I’m sure. Yeah. Well, uh, OG you were talking about compounding interest earlier. This woman is going to talk about all the compounding interest you get when you put money into investments.
TikTok: Saving a quarter a day is $10,000 at the end of the year. Let that sink in.[00:39:00]
Joe: And then she sits there and goes, duh, just I’ll let it sink in.
Doug: I’ll wait. I love the attitude. I don influencers give.
Joe: All you gotta do is save a quarter a day, og, and it’s $10,000. That’s, that’s
Doug: compounding. So somehow $91 and 25 cents of cash, that compound interest turns that into 10 grand. Did
OG: you do that in your head?
Is it really $91?
Doug: Well, if you, if you just. Multiply 365 times 0.25. Yeah. You get 91 in some change.
OG: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t know if you had to use a calculator. No, we were just
Joe: thinking, Doug, it’s, I mean, a lot of people could do that, but you, Doug, like, did you just actually do that? Who doesn’t
OG: get a hundred extra turn on their daily investments?
Joe: Duh. By putting it in. What was the one Jesse talked about a few weeks ago? Fart coin. Fart coin. Put it on fart coin. That’s the way to go. Uh, let’s transition and let’s help a stacker in need, you know, uh, stackers off [00:40:00] and say, you know what? I better call Saul Cihi and og. Lots of times stackers need help with their money.
And if you’re one of those people, well, uh, call us, stack your benjamins.com/voicemail. Leave us a short question and we are sure to answer it. Jeff from Cleveland, Ohio is on the line. Cleveland Rocks. Jeff, what’s that? Cleveland Rocks. You can’t say Cleveland. You gotta say Cleveland Rocks. Yeah. Every time, every, in my head that happens.
And is it that bridge? Is it the guardian bridge? That rocks. That bridge is really cool.
Doug: What, isn’t it just like a standard like highway bridge with a little ornamentation on pillars, big
Joe: ornamentation. Those, those guardians on the, I mean, they named a baseball team after those. It’s, it’s, oh, don’t get me started on
Doug: that.
Joe: All right, here we go. Jeff. Uh, what do you got first, man?
caller: Hey guys. New to the show and love what I’m hearing so far. I’ve heard you talk a few times about how the return on your cash or [00:41:00] emergency fund can be measured on what you save. On insurance premiums, can you expand on that and discuss how to set your deductibles based on emergency fund status? Thank you.
Joe: Jeff, first of all, kudos for pronouncing that word correctly. Good on you. It you, you missed the look at Doug’s eye, which is half the fun of being at the card table with him.
Doug: Jeff is clearly new to the Stacking Benjamin show because not only did he enrage me on his first try, but he didn’t give me my proper kudos, which enrages call in it’s enrages,
Joe: Doug Moore.
Doug: It’s an unwritten rule. People, if you’re calling into the show. Gotta gimme a little something, something
Joe: OG for other people that are new here, let’s talk about this. The crappy return on your emergency fund is not that savings account interest rate, it’s all the other benefits you get from having that money sitting in the bank.
OG: Well, and I mean, you should be getting 4% on your savings account right now anyway, so that’s not zero. [00:42:00] But yeah, sure it’s not stock market returns. Having an adequately funded cash reserve or emergency fund allows you to make other choices. It allows you to change your deductible on your car from 500 to a thousand or from a thousand to 2000 on your house.
We went from 1% wind hail to 2% wind hail. A lot of reason for that was honestly, the price was going up on 1%. Just was. It allows you on disability insurance to have a 180 day waiting period instead of 90. Yeah. The short term
Joe: Aflac duck insurance. You might be able to say, I don’t think I need that.
OG: Yeah, I don’t need short term, I don’t need to pay for it.
I’ve got six months of cash sitting there. It allows you to make other decisions and there’s not a right or wrong answer on deductibles. I think there’s two things that happen in the insurance world, and the first is, is that you are underinsured for a lot of property stuff because you. Start with premium, right?
It’s like, how much can I afford? Therefore this is how much I can have, and that’s a [00:43:00] really crappy way to have your house insured. I was talking to my neighbor the other day and he was talking about how his insurance company wouldn’t insure his house for more than a certain amount. You know, they have we’re, we live in Texas, there’s a lot of property casualty insurance issues going on here, like in other states.
And the company that he’s with said, we don’t do anything above this, this amount. I said, well, but your house is worth 40% more than that. He’s like, yeah, but you know, what’s the worst that happens? I’m like, well, we live in Texas, man. So I don’t know. An EF four tornado levels the thing that’s probably pretty bad.
I don’t think we have to worry too much about, I. A hurricane at this point, but you know, you get hit by lightning, it can burn to the ground. Our neighbors down the street, their Tesla battery blew up in their garage and burned their entire house on the inside. So yeah, there’s lots of stuff that can go wrong.
And so he’s settling for a lower insured value, partially because his company won’t insure him for more. And secondly, because the premium would be too much. And I get that that’s like a [00:44:00] rock in a hard place. But if you have a good cash reserve, you can help mitigate that maybe a little bit by saying, well, I’ll cover the first 10,000 on the house, therefore I can keep the premium that’s more affordable because I’ve got an emergency fund for your car.
The default answer for everything is they plug in $500 deductible. Well, maybe you don’t need 500, maybe you can go to a thousand, you know, maybe you can go to 2000. What does that do to the, what does that do to the premium? Um. Does it allow you to have a little bit more coverage? In case something bad does happen because you’ve got the premium in a more reasonable spot.
Joe: You know, the people that I always see that wanna raise their deductibles are people that have a tight budget. To your point, og. And that also is a huge mistake, frankly, when you start off, you need to cover those risks. Then as you have that emergency fund, you, you know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
I think a lot of people think, oh, okay, I’m gonna get rid of this insurance. Remember that you’re taking [00:45:00] on the risk. Yeah. If you get rid of that insurance, it doesn’t mean just lower premiums. It means you are shouldering that risk. So realize that that’s the case. So look at your driving record before you look at,
OG: well, I’ll add to the car insurance side of it.
If you can make the deductible, let’s say 2000 instead of 500, because you’re gonna cover that zero to 2000, that’s the risk that you’re talking about, and you’re in a, you’re in a light fender bender where it’s, uh, $800 to fix. You can pay this out of pocket. Your insurance company doesn’t know that you had a fender bender and your premiums don’t go up next extra review cycle, you know what I mean?
Like there’s other secondary effects that even happened because of this versus, you know, going like, oh, well my deductible is 500. This is a thousand dollars bill. Of course I’m gonna pay 500 and have them pay 500, not me pay the all thousand. Then finding out six months later that they, they dropped you or finding out six months later that they went, oh, your premium was.
$2,000 a year, now it’s 4,000, you know, because you had a claim, you know, or whatever. So yeah, the, the risk doesn’t go [00:46:00] away. The risk stays the same. It’s just who’s paying the risk.
Joe: So I think, Jeff, to answer your question, really the guardrails that we’re talking about is if you’re first starting out and you don’t have much of an emergency fund, deductibles should probably remain low.
It’s when they get bigger, you then ask yourself that question, how much of this risk do I wanna shoulder? And frankly, OG in a lot of cases, like, what’s the bang for my buck? I know for some people, when we just got done doing our success, uh, sessions, classes, going over my book that just ended a few weeks ago.
All of our participants go and they check if I change my deductible, what will the price difference be? And for some of our students, it was a big difference for other students because they live in a different area or they have, maybe it’s not as much, you know, kids driving. Yeah. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
Like, why would I not give that risk the insurance company and pay the extra a hundred dollars or $200? The, the savings didn’t make a lot of sense. Jeff, thanks a ton for the question. If you’ve got a [00:47:00] question for us, stack of benjamins.com/voicemail, one of my, uh, well, they’re all favorites. I’ve had a lot of fun in Boston, but because I have family in Ohio, uh, I, Jeff, come to Cleveland.
At least a couple times a year. We have meetups, so hopefully pretty soon, I know I’m going in July and we’ll see if we can do a cleaver meetup when I come in July. That kind of gets us out into the back porch territory where we have our community time, talk about stackers doing some fun stuff. I wanna say a big thank you to everybody in Boston who hung out with me.
It was super fun. Loved seeing stackers getting our stacker community together in Boston or wherever I travel. Thanks for hanging out with me, Boston. Great time. My daughter graduated, guys. She has her master’s now. Congratulations to Autumn and also to my niece, uh, saffron, who also just graduated from high school.
Oh, gee, you’ve got one now that is graduated from high school. Mm-hmm. And, uh, my friend Troy’s daughter. Lots of graduations, I feel like. Yeah. [00:48:00] I just graduated to a big kid bed.
OG: Good job doing the thing that everyone largely expected you to do. Right?
Joe: Doug finally was able to get rid of the plastic mattress cover.
Doug: Yes. It’s just, it’s been a great spring all around. I don’t pee the bed anymore. The great thing is they make them less noisy now than they used to. So no one has to know.
Joe: Yes. Doug has finally been. Trained. It’s, it’s great. What else we got on the back porch, Doug?
Doug: Uh, well we’ve had some great activity in the basement, our Facebook group.
Uh, you know, one of the things that I really like, you put a question out there in, you know, in the spirit, or maybe it was timely, maybe not in the spirit, but it was a timely question you put out, given all of the graduations that are happening. Asking, Hey, fellow stackers, what’s your best money or career advice for graduates this year?
And, uh, we got some really good contributions from people, and a and a lot of people contributed. Andy said, after starting your retirement savings, always live beneath your means. Buy as little as possible. Let other [00:49:00] people be fashion victims. Well, I know Andy, he definitely lets other people be fashion victims.
Wow. Oh, he totally deserved that. Shots fired, Andy. He says, don’t buy a new car. I don’t think Andy’s bought a shirt since the Clinton administration anyway. Wow. Uh, but we’ve got some other great stuff here. What’d he say? Don’t buy a new car. He did. He also said, don’t buy a new car. And that is how many times
Joe: have you guys known somebody that graduated from college and immediately bought a new car?
Doug: This guy
Joe: right here. You’re one
Doug: of them. I am one of, well, not immediately, but pretty soon. Too soon.
Joe: Yeah. I, I, one of my best friends from college, the day he got his first job and he got a big boy job, he immediately went and bought a Pontiac Grand Dam. That shows how old I am. By the way, Pontiac
Doug: Grand am.
Wow. Yeah. Nick, uh, wrote in that if your situation allows it, nothing wrong with living at home for a few years. Wrong. His parents let him. There’s a [00:50:00] lot wrong with that. Oh, geez. Kids listen to the show. Dad, how come we didn’t listen to, uh, the June 2nd episode? Yeah, well we didn’t have one. There wasn’t one.
I like
Joe: that Len Penso talking about that with his kids. You know, it’s so hard to get that down payment in Southern California, like depending on where you live.
Doug: And it sounds like Nick, I mean, Nick had a real job. He lived there for three years. He was making good money and he was disciplined about what he did with that money.
And I think that’s the challenge a lot of. Kids who live at home probably aren’t as disciplined with their money management because it’s easy not to when you’re, you know, eating in mom’s house. And yeah, are you wasting time or do you know why you’re there? Right? So you don’t, Nick, Nick stocked up on his emergency fund.
He maxed out his retirement accounts, paid off student loans, kept a side hustle going. I mean, he was killing it. Yeah, cool. And, uh, so some, just some great suggestions there. So I hope parents hold on, OG, read this post and got some good ideas. A great, [00:51:00] great friend of the show Karen happened to say, be willing to travel with your first job.
You get to see really cool places on someone else’s dime and hopefully get a per diem. Per diems are not as common as they once used to be, Karen. But it’s great advice ’cause a lot of kids are all looking for stay at home, you know, or work remote jobs. But it’s a pretty great time in your life to travel.
And see where all of the best, uh, best Western hotels are. My
Joe: daughter did that outta college. She was a road warrior working in electronic medical records, helping hospitals set those up around the country. So she’d help one set up and then she’d fly to another place. She actually got to go to Ireland as part of that deal.
Yeah, I remember
Doug: that.
Joe: What was really cool when she was in Belfast was that, uh, for American Thanksgiving. The hospital actually did a Thanksgiving dinner for her and a few of the other Americans. Wow. It was, it was really neat.
Doug: But it was all made out of potatoes. Right? It was. It was like mashed potatoes shaped into a Turkey.
That’s exactly it. Yeah. A [00:52:00] little home cooking in the Ireland. That is cool. Onto another post. I just needed to, to mention. This is a guy who he, he knows. The rules of the game are, he knows how to play it. James Bos said As a lifelong, diehard Red Sox fan. I have to admit, neighbor Doug is right. That’s it.
That’s the end of it. I just wanted say. He just put that out there in the universe. Doug’s right, uh, now he said everybody should go to Fenway once it is a museum, but you don’t need to go twice. And boy did that create, I don’t know, man, that stirred up some emotions online. My seats
Joe: the second time I went to Fenway, uh, just a couple weeks ago.
Way, way, way better than my seats. The fir Like once I’ve been in this museum, I know which parts of the quote museum you shouldn’t sit in. But you know, you got so many seats that don’t face the field. Squarely so many obstructive view seats. Seats like the ones I had the first time where water dripped on us.
Doug: Water in air quotes.
Joe: Yeah, that’s, who knows what was going on in the upper deck that [00:53:00] day. All right. Big thanks to everybody for all those tips in our basement Facebook group for helping each other with. Better money habits. That’s gonna do it for today, Doug. You’ve got it from here, my friend. What are our three big takeaways from today’s show?
Doug: Well, Joe, first making your portfolio more international. Wema SOEs, GRA RA Plan, Xi nailed it. Second, that horrible interest rate on your high yield savings account. That’s not your ROI. The freedom from worry ability to be more aggressive with the remainder of your portfolio and your ability to self-insure are the true return on your emergency fund.
But a big lesson, baby Ruth bars are actually pretty good. And here I thought they were just something you threw into the deep end of the neighborhood pool as a prank, huh? This show is the Property of S SP podcast, [00:54:00] LLC, copyright 2025, and is created by Joe Saul Sea. Hi, Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends.
You’ll find out about our awesome [email protected], along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah. And 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, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
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