Ever wonder what personal finance topics worry everyone else? You’re not alone. We all wonder if our view of the world (and personal finance, by extension), are the same that other people hold. That’s why today we’re live from the floor of the 2023 Podcast Movement Conference with two other great podcasters: Shannah Game from Everyone’s Talkin’ Money and Paula Pant from Afford Anything. Both Shannah and Paula, along with our own OG share their take on how our audience worries have changed this year. We tackle every personal finance topic from inflation to employment to interest rates…and more.
But that’s not all of the personal finance fun. We kick it back to Doug, who’s holding down the fort in mom’s basement for us, with a trivia question that you just might get right…
Truly the takeaway from this year’s version of what’s become an annual episode for us? It’s that while personal finance is truly personal, it turns out that the one constant is that the world always is changing, and if something seems like a “sure thing,” it’s sure to become unsure at some point. In one discussion, the conversation moves to inflation, which three years ago wasn’t even on the radar as a hot topic. Today, inflation is driving many of the worries that we have, from interest rates to real estate prices. It’s true that the world of personal finance only has a few topics to master, and yet, staying on top of them so that you make better decisions is always more challenging (and yes, sometimes even fun!) than you may think.
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/podcast-movement-2023-ep-1402
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Shannah Game
Big thanks to Shannah Game for joining us today. To hear more from Shannah, subscribe to her podcast, Everyone’s Talkin’ Money.
Check Out Paula’s site and amazing podcast: AffordAnything.com
Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything
Doug’s Trivia
- Who’s the original guy that put podcasting on the map?
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Other Mentions
- Check back tomorrow for more!
Join Us Friday!
Tune in on Friday to hear as Lacey Langford from the Military Money Podcast joins our roundtable how to become the CFO of your own financial life.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Charting Paths to Financial Independence (SB 1401)
Episode transcript
And now.
Live from podcast movement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. You know how we tell you that you need to attend industry conferences? Today we take you to one of our biggest conferences held this year at the Gaylord Hotel Denver Podcast Movement. Joe and OG will round up some of the biggest podcasters in the personal finance area to find out what their audiences are worried about when it comes to their planning.
And don’t worry, halfway through the conversation, they’ll throw it back here at me in the basement alone, and I’ll bring you some absolutely delicious trivia. And now two guys who have microphones hot and financial planning topics hotter. Joe and O
and thank you Doug. Thanks for holding down the basement. I am Joe’s Sea High Average Joe Money on, I always say average Joe money on Twitter, and now it’s like average Joe money on X. On X. So it’s so X Doug. So
is that the name of the company? I thought it was just a
symbol. Yeah, it’s just the symbol for the company.
So the company’s still named Twitter. It’s
still named Twitter. There you go. Yes, welcome to name that Social Media Outlet podcast. I’m Joe Cel Sea. Hi. No, seriously, we’re here at Podcast Movement. You can hear the background noise. The hum. All the fun. And let’s introduce who’s with us. We typed it in. First of all, the guy sitting to my right, he’s here.
Mr. Og, you’re never here when we’re live from these things.
Well, I’m never invited. Of
course. That’s right.
Yes. That always happen on days that I can’t be here. But I’m
here now. But you are here now. Yeah, and it’s, I, I have goosebumps and another reason I have goosebumps is sitting directly across from me, from Afford Anything.
Paula Pan is
here. Goosebumps was one of my favorite book series when I was a kid. Oh, do you remember The Goosebumps series by r l Stein? I do. Right.
But there’s an age difference right there, Paul, because I think when I was a kid, those weren’t written yet.
It’s
like those are the ones you bought for your kids, right?
That’s why you remember ’em. Welcome to the Okay Boomer podcast, and I’m super happy she’s with us. From the everyone’s stock Buddy podcast, Shauna Game is here.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I feel like I’m crashing a party here.
Well, no, you are the party. Oh, I don’t know if you know this. Yes. All right. All right.
All right. So it was funny, I’m walking around the expo hall on my way to my next thing. I see this woman. This woman looks at me. I look at her, we kinda look away and we’re like, wait a minute. We’ve never
met in person. We have never met in person. And
I feel like I’ve known you forever. Well, I’ve known of you forever, but really only known you for like the last couple
years.
Yeah. You know, in person you get the height differences, you get the, you do, you get the mannerisms. You, you get all the things. Yeah.
Yes. It’s, I’m way better in person. Right.
Of course. You’re way, way better in person. I was gonna say that a thousand percent.
That’s perfect. You know what? It’s way better to do in person what?
Listen to this. No, no, no. Shauna, that’s not it. It’s this one. That’s awesome. In person. All right. We’ve got Shauna here. We got Paula here. We got og. Let’s get moving.
All right. We keep it simple at podcast, move it. As Doug said so eloquently when we started the show every year, it seems like there are different things that our podcast audiences are worried about. I love to kind of mark time, almost like og uh, Len Penso and his sandwich survey every year kind of is this hilarious take on inflation.
I feel like every year at podcast Movement, we have these really different conversations and you think there’s only so many things to talk about in personal finance, and yet we have a different conversation every year. So Shauna, we’re gonna kick it off with you and everyone’s talking money. What does your audience seem to be worried about?
What, what really is, uh, is on their
mind? You know, the question I get asked all the time is, is it too late? Is it too late to dah, dah, dah, buy real estate? Is it too late to invest? Is it too late to have a good money relationship with my partner? Whatever it might be. And that is really the topic that I hear.
A lot of this year is just people feeling like they’re running out of time and I don’t know. And do you just, do you just say Yes, it’s, yeah, I mean that’s, I mean, you know, I just have a standard reply, right? And I just copy and paste. Yes. It’s too late. Right. Sorry. But I don’t know if it’s just, you know, the media around money is just, Um, you know, getting more and more sensationalized.
I don’t know if it’s, people are listening on TikTok and like constantly feeling like, oh my gosh, I, I haven’t invested in something and made like $10 million today or what it is. But like people are feeling this like intense pressure and I’m seeing it across like different age demographics and they just feel like, you know, they don’t have it together.
Is it
also because this is the first year in a long time. We had a significant prolonged drop in the market before this runup that we’re we’ve had lately. Do you think that may have something
to do with it, Paula? I think so. Well, I think it’s a combination of two things. One is we had a very long bull run from 2010 until 2020.
And even the, when the bull run ended in 2020, it ended for like. A second, and then we went right back into a more bowl, you know? Yeah. More bowl. A more bowl.
Welcome to the bull run this year. In more ways. In more ways than just the
market. Exactly. Right. There was a lot of bull was was a ton of bull. And also the markets were up.
Yes. Yeah. And so I think what happened, Is you have these people who are looking at what prices used to be, and, and I’m not, oh, the inflation factor. It’s the inflation factor. But even beyond inflation, it’s the, it’s the price of assets inside of the stock market. It’s the price of homes, of course, it’s, it’s the price of consumer goods and inflation, but also the price of entering into the game.
The price of beginning to accumulate investments. Everything feels so much more expensive that I think a lot of people. Now say, Hey, is it too late? And what’s funny is I started hearing that sentiment back in 2015 when people would look at what the price of homes were, for example, relative to 2010, and they’d be like, oh man, it’s way too late.
Yeah, right. Um, but I think what’s different now is that people aren’t just saying that about homes. They’re saying it about all kinds of assets and other purchases. Yeah.
Back to the social media thing though, Shauna, that you were talking about. We took this course. On social media a couple years ago, and it’s just so interesting to me that the more time you spend on there, really the worse you feel.
Oh yeah. A thousand percent. Because all you see is people with, you know, standing next to these planes, they don’t own. Standing next to these houses, they may or may not own. Right. These cars, these beautiful cars, everybody’s getting ahead faster than you. Like the more time you spend on TikTok, the worse it.
The worse
it is. Yeah. And everyone’s got this proclamation of like, you know, I’m a millionaire. Like, I just made a millionaire. Yeah. I’m a self-made millionaire. I just did, you know, X, Y, and Z and suddenly everything exploded for me. And I think you just feel, I don’t know, it’s like, it’s like the anxiety just.
Build within you. Yeah. Like there’s no possible way you could do the same thing.
And even if they’re being truthful, which a lot of them aren’t, but even if they are, that’s such a small subset of the population that’s being amplified, don’t you think?
Yeah. I mean, there’s sampling bias or selection bias, right?
Yeah. People who are successful, some subset of people who are successful might loudly proclaim their success. But very few people who are struggling will loudly proclaim their struggle. A thousand percent. Yeah.
Oh gee. Let’s bring you into the conversation. We also had the pandemic, and I feel like now that people are back to work, I think a lot of people feel like I had two years where I did nothing.
And now, you know, investing, you don’t need to do something to have your money work. It’s one of the few things you can do and do nothing and, and it works just fine. But I gotta feel like coming outta the pandemic, you’re moving in every other aspect of your life. You’re like, oh, my money just doesn’t seem to be moving the way everything else
is.
Well, especially if you’re looking at it from the perspective of 2022 and the how 2022 ended and the right answer of course was don’t do anything. If you had a good investment plan and you were diversified and you know you were saving money on a, on a regular basis, the right answer is to just keep doing that.
But you feel as though you have to do something. And the people who did do stuff. Missed out on the market, recovering a little bit. And now of course we’re at the end of August and August hasn’t been so kind. Yeah. You know, from an investment standpoint, you know, if you’re about to get your statement for the end of the month, it’s one of the rare things we’re doing.
Nothing is the right thing to do.
Is it hard, Shauna for people to hear that?
I think so because I mean, we wanna do something. There has to be like the answer, you know? And I think when it comes to money, everybody’s looking for like, what are the 10 steps or what are the five things I can do to get to X, Y, and Z?
And we all know sitting here that there’s an asterisk mark. It’s like, well, it depends. Yeah. Depends on this. Depends on start 20 years ago. Right,
exactly. I either want the five steps or the six numbers. Right. One or the other. Exactly. Or Or the
right horse. Yeah. And the problem is, is that we don’t appreciate how much compounding really works.
And we’ve talked about this recently, but Warren Buffett. A gillion dollars, I dunno what his net worth is now. 80 billion or some big number. Slightly
more than
ours. Combined. Yeah. Just a little more smid. Just a smidge. But, um, he’s in his nineties now, but if you think about what his net worth was when he was 50, it was only $67 million.
Now don’t get me wrong, only I’ll take $67 million is a hell of a lot of money, no doubt about it. But it’s not 80 billion. And I was reading a a Paul Merriman. Article from some years ago, and of course he’s got his little three, three fund portfolio and four fund portfolio, and you keep on adding stuff to it.
Anyways, the long and short of it was, it’s been 50 years since he started that. If you would’ve invested a hundred thousand dollars 50 years ago, you’d have 20 million today. Now, some of us don’t have 50 more years, but if you’re 50 now, you certainly have 20 from a compounding standpoint, which back to your point, There’s, there’s so much time that you, it feels like there’s not, but there really is.
You have
so much time. We feel, we feel like too, Paula, that, that if I’m behind, we feel like we gotta do something, then that must be complex. So I must have to go after a hedge fund or one of these cool, uh, real estate syndications. Mm-hmm. Or you know, crowdfunding option where it seems just oh, so sexy and.
It’s, I think it’s the behind thing that makes us fall more often
into that trap, right? I think the idea of exclusivity or access often can mislead people because I think, you know, e every ordinary mom and mom and pop investor has access to, uh, the same ETFs, mutual funds, actively managed funds, um, that you can get from any Vanguard, Schwab, fidelity, you know, any Yeah.
Major, uh, brokerage that serves individual investors. And yet, despite the fact that we all have access to it, you see very few, um, regular Joe’s become wealthy. And so people often mistakenly assume that the fact that you don’t see more ordinary investors be very wealthy is a reflection of the lack of quality of the assets that are available to them.
And so I think that then leads to the thought. Perhaps if I went into more sophisticated, yeah. More exclusive assets like real estate syndication. Um, you know, maybe there’s something behind this curtain. Yeah. I don’t wanna say behind the paywall, but behind the, the magic wall that, you know, works better, so to speak.
And that’s not to rip all real estate syndicators. There’s some mm-hmm. Good syndicators out there. But just generally, that’s where I, I feel there’s a lot of people selling the sexiness of, ooh, hey, guess what I’m doing that. Other people aren’t
doing. Yeah, exactly. And, and novelty is always attractive, right?
Sure. Yeah. So I, I think there’s a bit of that as well, you know, with compounding, and this is an observation from the author Morgan Housel, compounding happens very slowly over time, and often it happens too slow to notice. Whereas calamities often happen in moments, right? The great recession happened relatively quickly compared to the 50 years that it takes for money to compound.
So often growth is too slow to notice. Whereas disasters are like highly
noticeable. So Shauna, what’s your prescription then, when people, you know, obviously I was joking when I’m like, you tell ’em. Yep, it is too late. Sorry. What do you what? What do you tell them?
Well, we’re all money podcasters, right? So what we do for a living is talk about money and create more episodes and create more educational content.
But I, I, I often tell people, you know, this is really where I think getting back to your relationship with money and getting back to your vision and getting back to what you want in your life, what works for you, where you’re going, what you want your life to end up looking like, and turning down the noise of all of the excess information that is not valuable.
To reach those goals is really important, and I think that because we live in a society where there’s just so much noise all of the time, and with money, we always feel like we’re behind. I think it’s really important to just tune in, like, what do you want? Where are you going? And, and just block out the stuff that doesn’t matter.
You know, focus on things like compounding. Focus on the things that are slow growth, that work. If a real estate syndication is the thing that, you know, you think is brilliant for you, then go that direction. But don’t just go in that direction because everybody’s talking
about it because you’re ro or, or you’re just rolling the dice hoping that it’s gonna do something you didn’t think, you know.
It’s funny that you say that. Is, I mean, I even calmed down. Listen, listening to you talk about that, the idea of just beginning with the N M I. We’ve never talked about that here before. Never heard it. No, not at all. Tmm, by the way, sarcasm. No extra fee for sarcasm there. Uh, we talk about that all the time, so I like that.
But it makes me remember this time when I was a financial planner, I remember a meeting with this mentor of mine. And we sit down and he’s like, what’s going on? I’m like, I got like 80 things going on. I’m totally freaking out. Nothing’s going right. He’s like, okay, let’s get rid of all that. We’re just gonna write out the things that you need to do.
When I got out of the, the freak out factor, you know how many things were on that list? Like six. Once I had these six things written down, I was fine. I was great. He’s like, well, all you gotta do is those. How long is that gonna take you? I’m like, yeah, that’ll probably take me a week. And life was so much better.
So you’re right. Even if you are behind and you, you put together this plan there, there probably are only three or four things you need to do differently, right?
There’s nothing wrong with simplicity. Is it usually still
though about save more money, find a way to save more money?
I think it’s find a way to spend your money better, more intentional.
That’s what I think. Yeah. I mean along, along with that is savings,
of course. Sure. Where do you see people mess that up the most?
They have no idea where their money’s going. I mean, yeah, I’m guilty of it too. We all are right. But they have no idea where their money’s going. Well, so they have these goals they wanna achieve and yeah.
They’re not doing anything intentional to move toward them. And then that creates more of a panic factor and that creates more of a, it’s too late factor. And you know, before you know it, you’re spinning. Well, it’s
just the fog. It’s just the fog. Paula? Yes, we’re gonna skip you. Alright. For later. Woohoo.
Until later. Saying the best for last. We’re going to Paula. Oh wait. Checks his notes. We’re not going to Bala. We’re going to og. OG from your clients. What’s kind of different and hot this year?
Yeah. I don’t think hot’s the right word. Cold. Yeah. I think that there’s a lot of conversation right now about interest rates.
I’m thinking more tactical stuff. Uh, a lot of stuff around interest rates, both the potential upside in terms of, you know, I’ve got, you know, my emergency fund is just sitting in my Bank of America checking account and I haven’t given a crap about it for years because it didn’t matter. And now, you know, they’re still paying 0.1 and I should be finding.
You know, four or 5% interest because you know it’s there for the taking. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal today about how banks are starting to lighten up on their lending to jumbo mortgages. And of course there’s some, you know, trickle factor of that. And frankly, the affordability numbers have changed quite a bit, you know?
You look at, I don’t know, one of my hobbies is I scroll Realtor or Zillow. Oh yeah. I’m a Zi
fellow. Zillow Hawk over.
I’m just like, I’m like, oh, that, how’s it been for sale for a while? I wonder what’s going, you know, like I know it’s all going on every five minutes. And in your mind you have an idea about how much that payment is based on your recent experience.
And we have a mortgage that we refinance during the, uh, COVID years at two and a half percent. So I know how much my mortgage is relative to the balance. And so now you apply that same logic to, well, I kind of think I might want to, you know, have a. Uh, start looking at a lake house or something like, you know, something fun and, and then you do the math.
You go, wait, this is like three times as expensive. This is ridiculous. And then on top of that, the inflation stuff that Paula, you were talking about, that’s also not just in goods and services, but it’s also in taxes and in particular where we live in, uh, insurance costs and some of that Anecdotally you’re talking about property taxes?
I’m talking about property taxes. Yes. And then homeowners and property and casualty insurance. And we’ve heard kind of stories across the country. I live in Texas, so we’ve had a lot of issues in Texas, but Florida, California, big major carriers that are going, we can’t stay in business in this state anymore because the state won’t let us raise rates enough, which is, you know, okay.
Right. There’s, so I’m glad that there’s some sort of, some sort of, uh, supervision over the profitability of insurance companies. But then when you have, we have these big giant calamities. That are billion dollar events. And then State Farm says, we can’t do business with you anymore. That just drives everybody, you know?
So there’s all these other, it’s not just milk and eggs that’s going up. Yeah, it’s, it’s the other things, other dominoes. So I think there’s a lot of that that’s kind of weighing on people’s minds. Um, and the default answer to it up until recently has been, well, I’ll just put it on my charge card. And now we’re starting to see the kind of.
Final, I don’t wanna say the final straw ’cause it sounds very Pollyanna, but the next piece of that, which is consumer debt rising quite a bit, some defaults in car loans, some of that starting to happen. So I think people are recognizing that all the fund free money that was around during Covid V I d and the ease back to having to go back to work and the cost associated with, you know, getting in your car and driving your butt across town and.
Getting work clothes. You can’t just wear Lulus anymore to work. Dammit. You know? I know. Well, I still do, but you know, you know, it’s like, it, it’s like all those things are adding up or we’re kind of compounding on top of one another in a bad way. So
this feels like Shauna, the, the time when it’s really important to track your expenses.
’cause to OGs point, we’ve seen the numbers outta TransUnion, Experian outta other places with credit card debt rising. I feel like that’s just a reflection of. People have no idea what they’re spending and they’re like, oh, I’m a little short this month. Well then that happens six
months in a row. Yeah, a thousand percent.
I mean, you can always make the case for that, you know? And I think what you’re saying too, like it feels like a lot of factors are coming together all at once and with student loans being restarted here soon. Didn’t you
put that one on my radar? Oh yeah.
That mean it’s like, you know, we’ve forgotten about student loans for a couple of years and then all of a sudden that payment comes back wet.
Can we, A house payment a lot people, we can’t even afford the. The lifestyle that we’ve adjusted to even the last couple of years. It’s, yeah, it’s a lot.
Yeah. Paula, so what’s our prescription?
The oh, oh. What’s the solution to all of this? Solve this problem. Solve our problem. Solve our problem, solve the problem for us.
Paula, could you go talk to the Fed for us, please? Well, so I think the good news is that we have record low unemployment, and that means that a couple of things. Number one, it means that people have a greater ability to switch jobs and often can negotiate for a higher salary when changing jobs. A lot of times the biggest boosts to a person’s income happens, uh, at the time that that person switches from job A to job B right, and gets a much higher offer at Job B.
So that’s one thing that people can do right now, particularly given the record low unemployment. The other piece of that, Is that there’s much more opportunity for freelancing, consulting for, uh, 10 99 work that you can do outside of your normal nine to five. Again, as a reflection of the fact that employers are hiring for W two, they’re hiring for 10 99, uh, work is needed and work is being more highly compensated than
ever.
And I, and I feel like if somebody hasn’t either gotten a raise, asked their boss for a raise, or figured out a way to earn more money, while the price of everything has gone up, like you are now
behind. Yeah. What’s interesting of course is that that exacerbates the problem, right? Because it’s, yeah. For, for a lot of cases, it’s not like we like to sometimes poke at, you know, the big evil company that makes all this money and that sort of thing, but, but that’s kind of their job is to make money for shareholders.
You know? It just is what it is. But generally speaking, general Motors or GE or, you know, whatever, they, they don’t eat the rising costs. They just go, oh, well, we’ll just charge you more for the car then, and, You know, we’ll figure it out. So it’s kind of a weird, a weird spiral that, um, is slowing down. I think mainly because of the rate increases, which is also good for a lot of people.
If you’ve done the right thing with money and you’ve got a nice emergency fund, or, or you’re older and you’re a little bit more conservative and you’re investing, like, you’re making boatloads of cash right now on interest, which is fantastic. Yeah.
You know, I love what you said earlier, Shauna, about having more conscientious spending and how we can all do better there.
But I also feel like a lot of the time the equation is on the income side, right? We, we can only shrink the pie so much. What’s a mistake you see people make when they go to ask their bus for a race?
You undervalue your skills. And I think the other thing is obviously knowing your worth, but also telling the company what you’re gonna give them for this raise.
So it’s, it’s constantly showing them the value that you’re gonna provide for the extra amount of money. I think people just kind of go in and think, well, okay, I’m just gonna ask for an extra $50,000 or whatever they amount is. Without any reasoning behind.
I like how you go for the small raise, by the way.
I’m just gonna walk in ask for 50 more.
Yeah. You know, it just felt like a really good round number, right? Yeah. It felt like, you know, why not, right? Yeah. But yeah, like constantly showing what you’re gonna do for the company, how you’re gonna help the company grow, how you’re gonna, you know, whatever it might be for the company, but constantly showing, uh, your worth to them, but then also not being afraid to, yeah.
Ask for the big money.
Let’s not give Doug any ideas. No,
no, Paula. Well, I’d say the more that you can quantify, uh, the results that you have already done for your company, the better. So if you can go in there and say, Hey, so
not just saying what you’re gonna do and what you’re worth, but also here’s what I’ve done already.
Yeah.
Here’s what I have done already. So in the past year, I drove, uh, revenues by X percent, or in the past year, I drove engagement by y percent. Um, the more that you can document what you have done, And, and demonstrate that the better
og Uh, yeah. I can’t add anything besides what they’ve said. I mean, I think the biggest thing is not asking That’s, I mean, agreed.
Really it’s just the, you know, I’d rather, it’s easier to not have conflict. It’s easier to just sit there and go, well, you know, this sucks ’cause I’m not getting any extra, you know, I’m not getting the money I deserve. As opposed to just say, having that conversation with the person who can actually do something about it.
And because it costs so much money to hire and train and recruit new people, there’s a really good chance. That you’ll get a lot of what you asked for. Maybe not 50 k, but hey, hey, you know the hell. Right? Swing for the fences, man. Right. Be like, I’m just, it’s just a small
$50,000 raise with you. I saw this, uh, Shauna, to your point, one of, one of my favorite quotes is from this book, which is like Wisdom of nine year Olds, and my favorite piece of advice came from this girl Melissa, and she said, If you want a kitty, ask your mom for a horse.
So there you go. There you go. That’s exactly what, see, start with 50 and go down, uh, study after study. OG shows exactly what you said, that your boss wants to give you a raise. They have because of other things going on, they haven’t thought about it. It’s not the priority for them to give you more money, and you haven’t asked.
So I don’t know that they want to,
well, they will give you more money. They, they would, they will give you more money if, if asked. Let’s talk about this. We were talking about interest rates and interest rates going up, you know, We, so we have the second deeded show, and we’re talking about being a real estate investor, and there is this phrase that I feel like means one thing, if you’re a real estate investor, it means something different if it’s your primary residence, which is when we’re talking about rates on mortgages.
And Paul, I’m gonna turn to you to see if this is a dichotomy like I think it might be, which is, Buy the, marry the, marry the mortgage, rent the rate. Oh yeah.
Marry the house. D d
in other words, going, if you’re going to go ahead and make a real estate investment, realize these rates will change. Mm-hmm. And I can renegotiate that later.
Right. Makes sense to me, by the way, from a, from a real estate investor standpoint. Right. Because I’m looking at changing these rates anyway and looking at the value of the portfolio. But do I buy that if it’s my primary
residence? Yeah, absolutely. ’cause you can refinance any mortgage. It’s, you think it still is the same?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And what’s wonderful about it is that necessarily you are going to be buying the property that you qualify to buy because rates are high right now, you’re gonna qualify to buy less property. You’re a less expensive property. So you’re, if it’s your primary residence, you buy a cheaper property, you move into it.
And assuming that you don’t trade up later, assuming that you really take this adage seriously, you marry the property date, the rate. So in the future if rates decrease, You stay in the same property, which is a cheaper property than what you otherwise would’ve purchased in the year 2020 or 2021. Uh, and yet you refinance the rate into a lower rate and boom.
Now your housing payments are substantially lower than they were, and actually very doable
or affordable. Or you, or you keep ’em the same. Mm-hmm. And, uh, pay down the place faster.
Yes, you could do that as
well. Yeah. Ochi, are you on that train?
Well, I, I was thinking about it from a real estate investing standpoint.
If, if you’re in commercial real estate, you probably only have a five-year rate anyway. You’re kind of more used to the fact that that’s gonna change over time. I’m also thinking about in the perspective of kind of longer term time horizons. Our first mortgage was at 6%. Now it was interest only, and there’s a whole bunch of other shady stuff that happened with it, but it was six.
And then our second mortgage was at four. And I was like, oh my gosh, what, what idiots. That gave us money for 30 years at 4%. And then some idiot gave me, you know, a whole bunch of money at two point a half percent for 15 years. And I was like, you know, I should have took as much as I could get at that time.
But, um, my concern with the, the date Mary concept is that, Very few people actually do stay in the house for the, for the long time, right? And so if you’re kind of right up against your cash flow or you’re, you’re maxed out in terms of your living expenses. And kind of a side note to this is everybody goes, well, my rent payment’s going up a whole bunch, right?
My rent’s 2000 a month. I can go get a house for 2000 a month. It’s like, yeah, you probably can, but remember, you’re heating and cooling a lot more. You’re watering a lot more. You have maintenance and all this other sort of stuff. You have way more expenses associated with that. With that house that you own versus the one that you rent, even if the payments are identical, but most people, I say increase it.
And so if, if you’re used to that stress level of like the bank, let me borrow 42% of my income, you know, or whatever the, whatever the rate, you know, the number is, and then the next time I get a pay raise and go do the same thing again, like Rich Dad, poor Dad’s stories, right? Yeah. That’s basically the risk at
board dad.
Well, and the amortization table’s, not your friend. Oh, it’s bad. I mean, if you’re not gonna stay there long term, you think you got a two and a half percent rate. You’re paying huge interest. It’s full
interest in, in the first, the
first several years, Shauna debt strategy now I feel like becomes more important than ever with interest rates higher.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, no having a strategy. I think so many people who have debt want to pay off debt. It’s just they kind of throw money. I just got debt. No strategy. Yeah, in all different directions, and that’s not actually a strategy, you know, coming back to the strategies that work and sticking with one, and again, I’m gonna sort of like beat a dead or beat a drum here, I guess I should say, is it comes back to intentionality of, of your money and where your money’s going and what direction do you want it to go.
What are your goals? You know, when Paula was just talking about, you know, the mortgage strategy, it’s okay if the interest rates come down and we have more money now. Then we were paying on our mortgage before. What are we doing with that excess amount of money? Where is that going? What directions are we funneling it in?
And a lot of people don’t do that.
Let’s say I’ve taken care of that. Now I have the end of mind. I have a fantastic interest rate on my house, but I have $40,000 of credit card debt. I have room on my mortgage. Do I refinance that mortgage and roll it into the house for the lower payment and overall aggregate?
Or is that a. Is that a no-no.
First we have to deal with your relationship with money. First, we have to deal with what is causing us to get in $40,000 of credit card debt. What is going on there? What are the emotions that are happening? Mostly it’s wine. It’s mostly wine. It’s mostly wine. For
me, it’s my dog.
Oh, this wasn’t about me. Nevermind.
Forget he said anything. I thought we proved that last night with, uh, with OG and Paula. It was mostly about wine. Mostly. Those are mostly martinis. Oh, mar espresso. I’m sorry. It’s mostly espresso martinis. But anyway, Shauna, back to you.
Yeah, so I mean, we have to deal with what is causing this to happen.
Are we overspending, are we, you know, have some sort of anxiety and angst around money? And so when we get upset, we go out and spend more money than we have, like what is causing the factor of the $40,000 credit card debt? And until we fix that, we could roll it into our mortgage. Sure. Fine. Right. But we’re gonna go be back in credit card
debt.
Yeah. You only get to do that one time.
I love that. So often we deal with the leaves, right? And we never get to the root. And then we’re, we constantly are just doing this over and over and over again and like, what do we, well you, to your point, you can’t do that very many
times. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, especially now, if you’ve got the cherry rate on your house, my goodness, that’s a big swing to save a few bucks versus.
Buckling down and going, what? What’s really going on here? And how do, how can I solve this in a different way? Coming
up next, I alluded to this earlier, Paula Pant might have one of these too. But before we get to that, we’re gonna make you wait a minute ’cause we’re throwing this back to Doug for our trivia.
Doug. Back to you man.
Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, holding things down here in the basement. Sitting here alone, like some kind of putts. Nobody’s here with me. Wait. There’s nobody here. There’s nobody here. Okay, let’s get you right to today’s trivia because I got drawers to pry open and refrigerators to unlock.
When it comes to podcasting, there have been lots of success stories, but one story goes deeper than all of the others. While guys like Joe Rogan are pulling down bajillions of dollars million, one podcaster is the guy most people acknowledged. Started it all. Maybe not by being the first podcaster, but a man who truly put it on the map way before Rogan.
Who was it? Here’s a hint. He’s a guy you saw on television back in the eighties and nineties. I’ll be back right after I figure out where Ma keeps are bolt cutters.
Hey there Stackers. I’m Nero Caster extraordinaire. And the guy who gets to explain to Joe’s mom, what the heck Joe and OG are doing in Colorado. No, ma, for the third time, there’s no red light district in Denver. Anyway. Like I said, I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug holding things down here in the basement all alone.
And anyway, today’s question was the podcasting boom really took off well before Joe Rogan. Many people talk about the N P R show serial as truly bringing a big surge of people to the world of earphones and audio listening on demand. But even well before that one podcaster is widely acknowledged as the guy who started it all.
In fact, many call him the pod father. Oh, that’s clever. So who is this celebrity from the eighties and nineties television? If you cast MTV’s Adam Curry, you’d be correct. In fact, you can still hear Curry’s podcast, the No Agenda Show where you are listening to me right now. All right, let’s divide the tasks.
Here you go. Brag about that knowledge drop to your friends, and I’ll send this podcast back out to Joe and OG, where they’re at. The FinCon booth inside the beautiful and sprawling Gaylord Hotel. This is gonna teach ’em not to leave me here alone. Again,
I don’t know if there’s a lesson from where we sit, but it is that this is a beautiful place, Shauna. It is a beautiful place. It is fantastic. And Paul, I think half the reason you were coming back was because it was at a Gaylord
hotel. Yes, exactly. And uh, as I’ve, I was looking at the schedule for the next two years and the next two years they’re also at, at different Gaylord Hotels.
Oh, I see.
Exciting.
I think there’s, there’s collusion going on here. We exposed it. Are you
exclusive
to the Gaylord Hotels? Oh, no. I, I had never heard of it until the, uh, last podcast movement that I attended, which was at the Gaylord Hotel in Nashville. And it was such a, Spectacle. It was like it is. Um, it’s obscene.
Yeah. It was so crazy and I assumed that must be the only place like it in the nation. And then this year I come to find out, Paul hears about, wait, there’s more. Right, exactly. Who knew this was a chain? So it’s, this is my second time.
It’s like a Wendy’s. You just, once you show up, you’re like, this place exists everywhere.
You have one in this town and Taco Bell, frosty. Who knew? Yeah. I’m sure they don’t serve the, the single in every single city. I don’t know. Alright. Ah, let’s get back to it, Paula. We’ve heard Shauna’s, we’ve heard OGs. What’s a big topic The afford, anything community’s worried about
on the Afford Anything podcast.
I like how you go right into the right into the Roma mode. You could just get AI to be me. Well,
when I buy Sheg carpeting.
Well, Joe, I mean you’re, you and I answer audience questions together, so you we do you get to hear a lot of them? I do. And, um, I mean, My general impression, I, I haven’t like run the, the questions through some type of ai like cloud mapping, right?
To, to see which words stand out the most, which
clearly Shauna and OG did.
But my overall impression is that the broad concern is things are more expensive, therefore my budget is tighter and therefore I don’t know how to prioritize between A or B or C. Right? And A and B and C might be. Paying off student debt, saving for retirement, wanting to save for a down payment on a house.
But I feel like a lot of people are just saying, Hey, you know, I, I used to have bigger margins, and those margins are getting smaller and smaller. My, my rent is increasing. Um, my overall bills are, are increasing. My salary hasn’t kept up with it yet, given these tighter margins, I need to be, I need to be making more clear cut decisions.
This, I think Shauna goes back to you and the clarity of the plan.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you know what you’re talking about Paula too is, is what’s leading people to ask me, is it too late? Yeah. Because they’re feeling that pressure of. There just isn’t enough to go around and how do I, how do I prioritize how I pick and choose what I’m doing with my money?
And that often leads people to just that paralysis of not doing anything. But
I do like this question better, like somebody listening and they think it’s too late. It might be too late for everything,
but not for, for anything. You can do
anything, right? Just riffing off of somebody’s, uh, somebody’s theme there, but truly you have
choices.
You do have choices and I think that’s, you forget about it. Yeah. Again, you get so clouded in the anxiety and the headlines and the confusion around, you know, do I pick A, B, or C or, which one’s better? Which one goes first? And so I think it just, you know, you, you just don’t know what to do.
Is this where, you know, it’s funny, we talked about exclusivity.
As an answer OG that people often have to feeling like they’re behind or feeling like they, they don’t know what to do with choices. It seems like this is where that creativity and exclusivity, like coming up with a better plan, spending more time in the planning phase makes a lot of sense.
I like looking backwards to find out, uh, solutions for the future.
You know, a lot of times when you look at where you are today and you’re concerned about where you are, And you look back and go, well wait a second. You know, assuming that you’re not like, you know, 22 and just outta school or just starting your first job, if you’ve worked for a period of time, a couple of decades, there were times in your life when things were a lot more challenging and you made way less money than you do now probably.
And somehow you managed to make it work. Now, I, I understand things cost more and all that other sort of stuff for sure, but there’s ways around it. And I think that at, at the end of the day, when you look at your. Financial plan, you have to recognize that everything counts. You know, there’s sometimes there’s like, well, I, I can’t, I can’t, I, I mean, I have to do 10% of my 4 0 1 k, right?
It’s like, no, you don’t, everything counts. Well, I have to have this insurance, or I have to have this, you know, my kid has to go to this school, or we can’t cut out baseball, or, no, everything counts. You know, if you’re really that serious about it. To your point about being very intentional, Shauna, about saying like, this is where I really wanna spend my money.
You have to recognize that there’s. You know, nothing is off the table. You have to put everything on. And once you do it that way, then you can start putting the pieces back together, kind of the big rocks. And we stole some stuff from Stephen Covey before, so we’ll steal it again. But you can put the big rocks in first and then you find out that there’s a little bit more there than you think.
Generally speechless. I win
and scene. Yeah. It’s like what is status and what is show. Yeah. And what is what you really need a hundred percent. And those things get very
clouded.
I mean, it’s. Whole Foods versus Kroger. Some people are like, no, I shop at, I get it. I, I like that too. But you don’t have to.
There’s other grocery stores. My kids don’t like generic Cheerios. Well, I guess they’ll be hungry. You know, it’s, I mean, there are real people who are making those real choices. You’re just choosing not to right now, which is okay. You don’t have to. That’s a choice in it’s itself. Yeah, but that’s a choice, right?
You’re choosing to do that, and so if it’s really that important to you, You know, using that example of 40 K in debt or something like that. If, if that stuff, it’s really important to you, then everything counts. Maybe you should walk your butt to work instead of drive a car. I’m serious. Ride a bike, you’ll lose weight.
Supposedly. I haven’t yet, but in theory,
theoretically in
theory. So they say
pedal faster, so they say, yeah. Paula, just hearing OG and Shauna talk about this, I think this is more than just managing money. This is about examining your habits. I mean, there’s a lot of things that are unintentional habits that we have, or we just grab the thing, you know?
Right. Speaking of the Cheerios, we just grab the thing and we do it like maybe there’s a habit examination
happening here. Right. It’s, I think it’s two things. It’s habits and it’s also assumptions in, in some ways habits are assumptions in action, but under that habit, you know, the habit of. Opening up the DoorDash app when it’s Wednesday night, you haven’t prepared anything for dinner.
The habit of driving everywhere when you could be walking or riding a bike to a couple of, at least a few places. Right? Under all of that, there are certain assumptions about how you’re supposed, quote unquote, supposed to be living and to go back. That’s,
that’s kind of the show Shauna’s
talking about.
Yeah. And to go back to OGs example of. Likely when you were 22 years old, you made a lot less and you still made it work. I think at 22 you have a certain set of assumptions about, this is how I’m going to live, and there’s a certain threshold that you find acceptable. I’m putting acceptable in air quotes.
And when you’re 42 or 52, uh, or 62, you don’t find those things acceptable anymore. You have these assumptions that you’re supposed to not live with roommates, or you’re supposed to drive a nicer car, or you’re supposed to eat better food. There’s power, you know that that’s one of the stoic practices.
Right? Every now and again, just live a bare bones existence, even if only for a week. Just to demonstrate to yourself that you still got it in
you. It’s almost like intermittent fasting for your budget. Mm, yeah. Yeah. You know, just take a few days. Have you guys done that? Have, have you done any of the No.
Spending challenges,
Shauna? I have, yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s incredible what you find of like, wow, this is, there’s a lot of excess here. I can eat that. Right. Exactly.
It’s a game in our house called, that was in the bottom of the freezer.
Let me
just get off the little, little crystals that exist there. It’ll be fine.
It’ll be fine. Just scrape
off the mold, right? Well, and that’s the habit side, but some of the assumptions guys can be really big. Like I, I assume that I have to live in this house, right? I mean, sometimes it gets as big as that. Or I assume I have to have this job. That’s another big one. ’cause that’s how I earn money now.
I remember talking to people about that when I was a financial planner and going, so why did you have to have this job? I’m like, oh, well I did. You know how hard it would be to to go find a new job. And then two months later they found new work and they’re happier where they ended up. Everything counts.
Everything counts. I. I think that’s a great place to leave it. Everything counts. Yes. Bam.
I got the place to leave it
this time. Uh, let’s talk about what’s happening where you guys all are. Thanks for hanging out with us here at Podcast Movement, by the way. Uh, uh, just one thing, ’cause we talk, we do talk, as Doug said so eloquently at the beginning of the podcast, we, we do talk about attending industry conferences.
Mm-hmm. And just how important that is for you. What’s the thing you’ve gotten out of this so far, Paula?
Whew. Um. I don’t,
you don’t do a drinking challenge with OG on night one.
You know, I think the value of conferences are the conversations, the face-to-face conversations that you have with the people there, the sessions.
I mean, you can watch a recording of them later if you really want to, but the convers, the, the, the ability to sit down with someone and talk to them and see what ideas generate or just build the relationships that take you through your industry. I feel like that is, The primary value at audience.
We’ve talked about this a billion times, and I’m on the other side of that fence.
Yeah. I will never watch the video. Yeah. I don’t get nearly as much of it out in the video. You gotta take me outta mom’s basement, sit me in Denver, and I will actually then be in a space where I will make the changes that I need to make. Hmm. I won’t do it
otherwise. Yeah. No, we’re, we’re, we’re on opposite sides there.
Yeah. But I also find, I mean, I know that at least in my own business, there’s an implementation gap. Right. What? I don’t need more ideas necessarily. I have an implementation gap between the ideas that are in front of me and the execution of those ideas, and so that bridge is what needs to be crossed.
Shauna, how about for you?
Yeah, I agree. I’m kind of in both of your camps. I probably will not listen to the recording ones, but. I do think there’s a lot of value in the conversations and you know, specifically a conference like this where they aren’t just money podcasters, right? They’re all different types of podcasters.
So really hearing the different niches and the different strategies they use, I think it’s just really interesting and it, it goes back to this idea of, of storytelling and what we do and how do you bring what you’re talking about to life for
a listener. It’s so exciting. I get so excited every time I’m, I’m at this
conference, OG.
I can’t add anything else besides the face-to-face stuff. I don’t get to see Paula very often, so that’s nice to see. Paula, I see you way too often, so you get to meet Shauna. I got well, of course. And seeing people, uh, I got to see PT in the John. That was, that was, was that exciting? It was awkward. It was, well, I, I didn’t even know it was weird.
And then I heard my name and
I was like, so, so people who don’t know who PT is, he’s the founder of another conference, FinCon, and we’re sitting at the FinCon booth by the way. Thanks to FinCon for letting us sit here. And by the way, also thanks to Hyle for the
microphones.
Steve Stewart’s here, his lovely wife and Vicki is better Half better half, yeah, for sure.
So all the swags, pretty cool technology stuff like things to make your life easier. I think that’s, I’m a simplifier, so I, I, I look at things through the lens of how can I take this thing and make it easier. Not only for us to do, but also for everybody to enjoy and experience.
I come away from every
conference with that.
You come away with not a simplifier mindset. You are a multiplier mindset. A hundred times out of a hundred, you’re like, you come back with like 72 pages of notes. Alright guys, here’s what we’re doing. We’re like, oh boy. Maybe you only, that’s why I’m here actually, that’s why I’m here this year is to just, you’re trying to cross some things off the list.
Just, I’m like, no, we don’t need to do any more sessions, bud. Let’s go. Uh, let’s go sit out by the patio and. Have a cigar or something like, oh, there’s a session. Nah, we don’t need to do that
session. You don’t have to mainline all of it, Joe. I know, it’s fine. You can
do the recordings. Yeah. So this is coming out the, uh, few days before Labor Day.
So we got a nice Labor Day holiday for a few days. Uh, it’s hard to believe the kids have been in school for a month already, so a well earned break and maybe a break from the bajillion degree temperature in Texas. I don’t know. Well, if
Sean, our guest of honor, go last. So Paula, what’s going on at Afford Anything
On the Afford Anything podcast?
Wow. Where have we heard that before? As I mentioned earlier, Joe, you and I answer questions that come from our community, so we’re about to record one of those. Yeah. We’re about to record one Live. Well, well not live. It’ll be recorded, but ish. Yeah. Live in front of the people who are here right now.
That’s right. Today’s topic, which is what are people concerned about right now? Uh, that’s what you can hear on The Afford Anything podcast, real voicemails from real people who have real questions. And, uh, you know, you, you listen to enough of those and you get a good sense of what money concerns are on people’s mind today.
And that’s where Finer podcasts
only the finest. Yes, finer. Check us out on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts.
Finer podcasts. Like everyone’s talking money. Woo. Yeah. All right. Super happy we got to meet in person. Finally, finally,
finally. I know
right? What’s going on at everyone’s
talking money. You know, we just passed a thousand episodes, so we had a little rah rah celebration.
Kind of feels weird to say, a thousand episodes, but, um, yeah, we’re, we’re tackling a lot of these topics that we talked about today. I mean, I, I love talking about intention, relationship with money, how to deal with anxiety, couldn’t tell, like, oh yeah, all that fun stuff. So, you know, we do that. But we, we cover all the current stuff too.
Obviously we’re talking about interest rates and we’re talking about is it too late? All these topics. So, yeah. Come
on over. It’s fun to follow you on Instagram talking about that stuff as well.
Yeah. You know, I don’t know. I still have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with Instagram, but we, I think
we all do.
Except maybe Paula. I love Instagram. Paula looks
like she’s having fun. Instagram, I need to borrow some of your, uh, enthusiasm. You’re a good
juju. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Thank you Deshawna. Thanks to Paula. Thanks to you og. Uh, Doug. Back to you, man. What should we have learned today?
So what should we have learned today?
First, take some advice from our panel while the topics change. Every year we do this live show. The message is the same. Planning ahead so you don’t have to worry later is 99% of the time your biggest, most reliable key to success. Second, keeping up with current events, even on a peripheral level, can help you ask smarter questions.
So keeping the pulse, yeah, that’ll make your plan better as long as you focus on the roots of a problem and not the branches, but the big lesson, there are some drawers in life you don’t wanna open. Now that that’s not a metaphor for anything. Seriously, just leave them locked. Hey, uh, un unrelated. Know where I can find some good antibiotics without insurance.
Thanks to our panelists for joining us today. You can find links to everyone in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the property of SB podcasts, L L C, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul Sea High. Our producer is Karen Repine. This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast.
With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1. You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are.
Of course, you’ll never know if you don’t. Check out our YouTube version of this show Engineered by Tina Eichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast. Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now.
Want to chat with friends about the show later. Mom’s friend, Gertrude and Kate Youngin are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement. Say hello when you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement.
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.
Welcome to the after show. If you’re new to this part of the show, this part doesn’t exist. What happens here stays here. We don’t talk about the after show if, if you have, every once in a while somebody has to talk about it. And so I don’t know why they have to talk about it, but we call it dessert. But for dessert today, I thought I’d tell you guys a story about how we got here.
Because for new listeners to Stacking Benjamins, you may not know that OG because of a lot of the business stuff that he has has a plane. And so OG flew us. Boy, are
my arms tired.
Oh. From,
from Dallas all the way here and, and it was cool. We stopped in a little town in Kansas, a little town called Liberal Kansas, right in the middle of nowhere.
If you’re from liberal Kansas, please reach out because we could had a meetup and we didn’t do it. We
could’ve with the other six people that lived there. Oh. But I gotta tell what was cool about it though? It’s a little town. Nice little town. It,
it was, and they had this wonderful barbecue place that I would’ve never gone to.
Totally would’ve
never. Well, when you go to these small towns and there’s the people at the airport, you just go, Hey, can I borrow a car? They usually have cars that you can use and they’re always generally like the old police cruisers or something like that, right? Yeah. And you go, what’s good for lunch?
And when the same restaurant comes out three times in a row, you go, okay, that’s where I’m going. Yeah, I’m not gonna, so he went to a
barbecue place, brick house barbecue.
I think that was it. Brick house. Barbecue Brick yard or Yeah, think Brick House had a salad
getting there. It’s, it’s pretty wild as we take off in Dallas for people who haven’t done this before in one of these little planes, you’re sitting with headphones on like we have right now and you have a little calm system where we don’t talk back and forth ’cause there’s a lot going on.
OG is in big time listen mode, talking back and forth with, first of all, the field that we take off from then from the area and then the, the wider Fort Worth. Tower that manages the big, he’s, he’s, he’s getting these handoffs from place to place. But at some point we’re almost to Oklahoma and it gets pretty quiet and OG turns on some music and we just kind of chat.
And then it’s like you’re on cruise control and it goes from really exciting to really, very boring, nothing. And so we’re talking along, and then OG says, as we’re getting ready to land, goes less duck. And not even by the way, not even in a, not even in a nice tone. Like we’re just going along. He goes, let’s talk.
And then he’s banking. He’s banking. And then we’re coming in very flat field, no trees around, as you can imagine. And uh, as we’re on the prairie and he slowly lands and he gets close to the runway and he lifts the front end of the plane just ever so gently and we just barely touch down in the runway.
And you don’t even feel, I mean, it was just one of those beautiful, smooth landings. And I’m thinking to myself that was like butter. And I’m just about to say that when OG turns to me and he goes, that was just like butter.
They’re not all like that though,
right? They’re not. No, that’s my point. It’s so rare.
I got a, as soon as I know I did it, I’m like, woo hoo, woo. Go meet.
He was, he was so proud of himself and I wanted to give him a compliment, and yet he complimented himself so heartily that I just couldn’t do it. That I’m like, yeah, it was okay. Whatever, you know, all the times that I’m, that I’m riding, you know, private, fancy, you have a lot of experience that right as you do.
Yeah, it was Okay, so we take off again in this time because it’s now the afternoon and it was a hotter than hell day. It is bumpy as all get out and so OG keeps going higher and by the way, you, how bad would this scare you? Well, I can
already answer. Oh boy. Very
scary. We’re in a plane together, Shada, let’s say we’re in a plane together and I reach over and I take out this little thing and I hook it up to my, uh, headphone and I grab this little tube.
It’s got two little nostril things, and all of a sudden I put these things in my nostrils and you don’t get one.
I’m like, what
the
hell is this? He’s like, oh, it’s oxygen. I’m like, what about me? As he’s going higher
and higher. Apparently you’re dispensable. Yeah. I guess we learned that, right.
90 night, Joe, you talk too much. It’s
take a nap on 90 night, 99. I’m like, this is, oh, she’s like, uh uh. So
count backwards from a hundred.
For me,
I’m thinking to myself, this is how the show ends. This is, this is finally
show. I should say, Hey, it’s in the, it’s just reach back there and grab it yourself.
He did later. He’s like, if he really wants to, I’m like, no, I’m, I’m like, will, I’d be okay? He’s like, yeah, you’ll be okay. Wink, wink. And uh, anyway, it’s like 30
minutes at 10,000 feet.
Yes, this time.
But it is super bouncy. We were bouncing
around a lot. It is super bouncy. Levit levitated for a second and we’re
talking along. And we’re getting close to the runway, and, uh, all of a sudden o g goes, let’s talk. And so I go into Joe, shut up mode, and we turn. But this time it’s a really bouncy turn.
And then we are coming down, we’re coming down. Of course there’s houses all around. And this is a much busier airport, close to where we’re at the conference here and there’s, there’s crosswinds. And right as we’re getting ready to land, there’s a cross wind from the left and our front end goes veers hard left.
And I see OG yank it back to the right, and then we veer hard. Right? Right at the last second. He evens it out. He sticks the landing and I turned him to go. That was Fing incredible. And he looks at me and goes, that was fing incredible. And all I could say then was, if you don’t say so yourself,
I think it’s noteworthy that ex, the exact compliment that was on your mind, Joe, is precisely what he said.
Where, where he’s going.
Simpatico, we’ve been, we’ve been working together way too long. Yeah, I think, yes. Shauna, how long have you been married?
It’ll be 10 years in November. You guys
complete each other’s
sentences? We do, although he’ll say, you don’t know what I’m thinking. I’m like, yes, I do. But we can play this game.
All right. Tell me what you were thinking. No, that’s exactly what I knew you were thinking, but all right.
I like that from the guy’s perspective where they’re like, no, really, tell me what you’re thinking. And I’m like, no, you don’t wanna, yes, I do wanna think it. No, you don’t. No, no, you don’t. Because
she, because it’s either absolutely nothing.
I was, I was really thinking about football. Exactly. I was wondering who’s gonna start for the Chargers? A tight end. You
know, that is a very important thing
though. It could be. She’s had some, we’ve been in the middle of a deep conversation. She’s like, so what are you thinking? I’m like, Nope. She’s like, what are you thinking?
I’m like, well, the Mariner said an eight game winning streak. And if they, uh, catch up three more, and if I say that out loud, it’s not good. So do you truly know what he’s thinking?
I do, but actually he’s more of the talker in the relationship than me. Oh yeah. So he’s more concerned about what I’m thinking.
’cause I only share. In increments. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a thing. He, you know, we started dating, he had a list of 10 things that he wanted in a potential match, and I hit nine outta 10. The last one was communication. So it’s odd that I do this for a living, but you know, I think I use up all my words. So
I was gonna say he had a list of 10.
So does Shauna, but she’s only shared three of her so far.
I can tell you you’ve made three of them, right? The other seven, I won’t tell you what the other seven are.
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