The True Path to “Wealth” (AKA: Uncle Danny’s Story Hour) SB1552

Want to know how to make your money perform better? Begin controlling that stuff between your ears. Between negative self-talk and obviously-bad money moves, we find plenty of ways to sabotage our long term goals. Today we’re joined by behavioral economist Dr. Daniel Crosby, who dives into what he calls “the soul of money.” We’ll discuss wisdom from some of the world’s greatest legendary figures, like Alexander the Great, and dive into stories like The Kite Runner and what we can learn about money, happiness, “more,” and being truly wealthy.

Plus, in our headline segment, one type of worker is loading up on cash inside of their retirement fund at work. Who? It turns out, that it’s workers at companies that have decided to default retirement contribution plan percentages at a higher rate. Huh? It’s not only fascinating, but probably the reason why you might be able to save more…but never have been able to pick the lock. If you’re a great saver, you’ll also know this is the key–so send this headline to your friends! Joe and OG tackle this topic from beginning to end, and hopefully, you’ll be richer as a result (or on your way to riches).

We also take a call from Stacker Blake, who asks about his Acorns account. Now that he’s been using it for awhile, should he move it to a different home so that he doesn’t have several different accounts?

Of course, we’ll also save time for Doug’s trivia question, groan about the state of Ohio, and more!

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

Enjoy!

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Our Headlines

• 6% of Your Paycheck Is Becoming the New Standard for 401(k) Saving (Wall Street Journal)

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Dr. Daniel Crosby

Big thanks to Daniel Crosby for joining us today. To learn more about Daniel, visit Daniel Crosby | Orion. Grab yourself a copy of the book The Soul of Wealth: 50 reflections on money and meaning.

Watch the conversation on YouTube:

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Doug’s Trivia

• What British seaman is the star of a bestselling, Benjamin-earning series of books by author C. S. Forester?

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Better call Saul…Sehy & OG

• Stacker Blake has a question about transferring his account at Acorns to a more reputable brokerage.

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Join Us Wednesday

Tune in on Wednesday when we dive into what changes we might expect from Vanguard now that they’ve appointed a new CEO.

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Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: Winning Your Personal Gold Medal in Personal Finance (our 2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony episode)

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Joe: Oh gee. It’s hotter than hell here in Texas, which is why I’m supporting my Upper Michigan mug. 

[00:00:05] OG: It’s hotter than, hello. I am in Upper Michigan. I’m not too far from M 22. 

[00:00:11] Joe: I’m dreaming about heading up that way. 

[00:00:14] OG: Just a blistering 84 today. Oh, to our sweatshirt. 

[00:00:18] Joe: It’s just horrible up there. What do you do? 

[00:00:21] OG: I know.

[00:00:22] Yeah. Wind that wind across the water. 

[00:00:24] Joe: If only we had somebody to protect us from that. I mean, the men and women, our military can do a lot, but if they could change the weather for me, well, just north 

[00:00:31] OG: of the cottage is Camp Grayling, 

[00:00:34] Joe: a bunch of bad asses, 

[00:00:35] OG: which is where a lot of training goes on. And every so often a couple of a tens fly right over the lake.

[00:00:42] Joe: Oh, awesome. And they 

[00:00:42] OG: do it at like 2000 feet. So it is. Very loud and very, very America. 

[00:00:49] Joe: I thought you were gonna say they do it at two and then you said a thousand feet. Two in the morning. 2:00 AM 

[00:00:55] OG: Yeah. That would be cool too. But if you’re listening to this and you’re going, Hey, I’m trying to figure out how do I get back from Grayling to my base in such and such.

[00:01:02] Just fly south for a little bit. Just buzz the tower for me. I think it’s pretty cool. 

[00:01:07] Joe: Well, let’s salute all those men and women at Camp Grayling and at camps around the nation and the world. On behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union, the men and women making podcast in mom’s basement.

[00:01:17] Thank you for all you do. Cheers. Let’s go stack some Benjamins. I 

[00:01:22] bit: brown. You

[00:01:26] bring out your dad. What? I’m not dead. What? Nothing. Here’s your nine puts. I’m not dead. Yeah, he says he is not dead. Yes, he is. I’m not. He isn’t. Well, he will be soon. He is very ill. I’m getting better. No you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment. Oh, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations

[00:01:50] Doug: live from Joe’s mom’s basement at the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:02:04] I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And what are some of the biggest problems we have with our money? I’ll tell you the biggest problem. It’s that thing between your ears to help duct tape all the damage we do to our financial plan. We welcome Behavioral Money psychologist Dr. Daniel Crosby, and good news for retirement Savers.

[00:02:24] 6% is the news. Zero. What am I talking about? We’ll explain everything in our headline segment. Plus we’ll answer a question from one stacker who thought, you know what? I’d better call Saul, see hi and og, and of course I’ll be sure to share some amazing trivia. And now two guys who are ready to help you fight the good money fight.

[00:02:48] It’s Joe and OG

[00:02:55] Joe: Refresh. We’re ready to go. Time to fight the fight. Hey everybody, I am Joe Sulci. Hi, average Joe Money on Twitter or X or your favorite social media platform. We got a great week of shows. Sit back and relax because it is time for well really, man. An action packed agenda this week and og, we’re starting off The one and only Daniel Crosby’s here.

[00:03:20] Ooh. 

[00:03:21] OG: I’ll just swing him. 

[00:03:22] Joe: I know. I love that guy. Love, love, love this guy. And you know what my favorite Daniel Crosby saying 

[00:03:29] OG: is 

[00:03:29] Joe: him is just, we all think we’re different. You’re not a snowflake. Right. His biggest TED Talk, I think was You are not a snowflake and you’re not. If you think that, you know what?

[00:03:39] I can screw up my money like everybody else can screw up my money. 

[00:03:42] OG: I’m just as good at this as anyone. 

[00:03:43] Joe: I’m probably gonna do a better job. By realizing all those things they tell our people that, that was my problem in the nineties. I don’t know about yours. I’m like, man, you know, all these rules that they say other people should do, like having a budget or living within your means or finding the difference between what comes in and what goes out.

[00:04:00] Like that was crazy. Talk like that was good for other people. Hmm. But for me, if I just made more money, OG life was gonna be great. 

[00:04:07] OG: Yeah, in the nineties for me it was mostly being a teenager, so I didn’t have any of that. But I appreciate you sharing your story around, uh, what, what worst, what 

[00:04:15] Joe: was, what was yours like in 2018?

[00:04:17] Tell me about 2018 for you young man. Yes. 

[00:04:20] OG: 2018 was definitely a doll. Two thousands is definitely an adult too, but, uh, a lot of the nineties, better than half were spent in my teenage years. So 

[00:04:28] Joe: I was busy, uh, messing it up for both of us then. 

[00:04:31] OG: Thank you. Appreciate it. Well, I got, I got the memo because I did it in the two thousands.

[00:04:35] Joe: So here’s what we want you to do. Get your sheet of paper ready or your favorite, uh, device where you take notes because we got a headline that is note taking worthy. We’ve got a guest that’s note taking. Worthy. It is time to get this party started before we do though, we have some sponsors that keep this show free for all of you.

[00:04:54] And here is one of those fantastic companies right now. We’ll be right back. Dr. Daniel Crosby upstairs chatting with mom. So let’s get the headline moving so we can bring him down. 

[00:05:04] bit: Hello darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. 

[00:05:11] Joe: Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal written by the Amazing Anon.

[00:05:17] Every time I see Anne Tursen OG on a Wall Street Journal piece, I know it’s gonna be rocks. I’ve never met Anne. It’s one of those people that I would just love to meet this person who, uh, writes so eloquently about personal finance. 

[00:05:30] OG: Instead, you speak eloquently about personal finance, so there’s that.

[00:05:33] Joe: Well, halfway there if only I could type it in. New hires and rights are putting more of each paycheck into their 401k, and not necessarily by choice. 

[00:05:44] OG: I was gonna play the applause. Nope, that’s wrong. And then, uh, not by choice. Maybe that’s okay. 

[00:05:53] Joe: Well, it’s interesting because I wanna chat about that because she writes nearly a third of companies that use automatic 401k enrollment now start workers at 6% of their salaries or higher about double the share of organizations that did so a decade ago.

[00:06:07] So a lot of companies getting on board with this. That’s according to the Vanguard Group. By the way, a default 6% contribution rate was once considered too onerous for younger workers and too paternalistic for those who favor leaving decisions to individuals. It seems like OG that even though Yes, they didn’t choose to do that.

[00:06:25] Defaulting people at doing something closer to the right thing has actually been good for all of us. And a lot of people high fiving themselves about the amount of money they’ve saved just because they made it automatic. 

[00:06:39] OG: It’s like the, uh, the government defaults us into 6.2% every single paycheck until you’re 67.

[00:06:46] Our social security money, it’s something magical about six fica, something magical, about 6%. But the whole idea is to try to take the decision out of it. And if you’re going from having little income to more income, if you’re getting a gigantic increase in your comp because you’re changing jobs or you’re fresh outta school and you’re, this is your first job, honestly, going from making school wages, you know, at the, in the kitchen, in the cafeteria, or working on the sports field or whatever you’re doing for your college job, and then all of a sudden you’re an accountant, you know, or all of a sudden you’re a engineer.

[00:07:20] That’s such a huge increase in compensation, huge increase in pay. Why not have that be 6% or 10% or 15% less right off the bat? Because we know that as that baseline, you know, whatever that baseline is, is, you know, you’re gonna rise to that spending and I don’t care. It’s harder to go backwards. Well, it’s, it’s almost impossible to go backwards.

[00:07:41] And you can see this from everybody who gets into trouble. ’cause they spend too much and then go, ah, I don’t even know what to cut. I, I, you know, there’s, I don’t think there’s anything here, but if you start at a lower number, just pretend you got a crappier job. You know, it’s like, imagine that job offer was 10% less and just work off of that number moving forward.

[00:08:01] Because as life goes on, you’re gonna, you know, your lifestyle’s gonna change, right? So instead of having a $60,000 job out the gate, plan 54 and, and start from 54 and start that slope from 54, it’ll be fine. And that’s a great time to do it. Or if you’re gonna have a big increase because of, you know, a job change or something like that.

[00:08:21] You were making 60,000, you got a, you got a career change and now you’re making 80. Well just go from 60 to 72. That’s also really good and it’s a great time to kinda reset all of that right then. ’cause if you spend 80, all of a sudden it’s hard to get back to it. 

[00:08:36] Joe: If you feel like you can’t og, just think about how difficult it’s gonna be later.

[00:08:41] Go, okay, well spend the whole thing now and then let’s see. When you try to retire, what you can do, like later on, you’re forced into decisions if you can’t do that. So having a little bit less now, I feel like we worry, well what if I need that money now? I think you can trust that you owned well, you haven’t needed it yet.

[00:08:58] OG: You know, like what you’re had, you’re a college kid and you’re 22. Short of student loans, which I would be, the vast majority of people have student loans and you know, are borrowing money to kind of live during college. But assuming that you’re not spending your student loans on vacation, which I knew somebody who did that.

[00:09:15] I dunno if you ever knew somebody who’s like, they gave me 25 grand, I only need 10 to go to school, but that 15 

[00:09:20] bit: woo-hoo. 

[00:09:23] OG: We’re going to Cabo for spring break. But uh, yeah, as long as you’re not doing that, you know, I get it that there’s, you know, there’s you, you’re running a deficit probably either you’re running it or you folks are running it and you’re running it because of debt and you know, that’s how you’re kind of keeping it afloat.

[00:09:36] But once you get done with that baseline everything and include some savings right out the gate and automatic increases. 

[00:09:44] Joe: Absolutely. Well, and we’ll get to that in a second ’cause I think that’s important too. Anne writes that the higher savings rates into 4 0 1 Ks especially help ensure people take greater advantage of matching employer contributions, which is free money that, you know, gee, people often leave on the table.

[00:10:00] So if you’re defaulting to at least what the match is, then you’re picking up all that money, which is just, to me, that’s all gravy. Let’s broaden this because if it works for the 401k, like this shows that whether we, you know, we can talk all day about whether companies should be this paternalistic, whether they should actually default people at these bigger numbers or not.

[00:10:23] It’s working and if it works with your company doing it, and to your point earlier about we have this social security, this f attacks taken out of our paycheck all the time, right? And we don’t get to do anything about it, but we get a social security check then for the rest of our life after we retire, that also works.

[00:10:43] Why the hell if I see it work for my company, I see it work for the government. Why the hell wouldn’t I set that up with everything? Like would, why wouldn’t I make more of my saving automatic when I see it working all around me? And yet we don’t, we don’t do that. 

[00:10:58] OG: Before I go down that road, I want to kind of go back to the employer match part for just a quick second because, you know, kind of glossed over that and, and I hear a lot of people say things like, well, my company only matches 3%.

[00:11:10] My company only does this. If you put in a hundred dollars and tomorrow your investment strategy was so profoundly awesome that you made a hundred dollars, you would consider yourself the greatest trader of all time. If every time you put in a dollar into the stock market, you instantly made another dollar, that would be the, well think about if it’s, well think amazing thing ever.

[00:11:31] Joe: Even if the match is only 50 cents on the dollar, which it is for some company, it would be also the 

[00:11:35] OG: best invested. I mean, Warren Buffett averages, what, 20% a year? That’s kind of his number since the 1960s. And here’s this built-in strategy that you’re gonna get a hundred percent return or 50% return. Oh God, they only match 20 cents on the dollar for the first 10%.

[00:11:50] Okay, well now guess what? You have a 20% return. Like that would be a fantastic return. You know, and I get it as part of your comp and as part of your benefits and that sort of thing. We don’t look at it that way, but it is free money and you absolutely have to move heaven and earth and I don’t know we or different finance.

[00:12:08] People fall down on this. I know some people are like, well, it doesn’t matter. Just always pay off your debt or something like that. Look, if somebody’s gonna give you a free amount of money for, for just taking some of your money and putting it in a different account, you have to take that every day of the week.

[00:12:23] I mean, look, look at how many times people do that for like savings account. Hey, chase sent me this thing. If I give ’em a thousand dollars deposit and they gimme $500 free interest, you do that for one check for 500 bucks, your company’s going put in 10,000, we’ll give you 10,000. Put in 5,000, we’ll give you 5,000.

[00:12:39] Like, holy crap. It’s insane. 

[00:12:41] Joe: I think oog, I don’t know about you. For you, my order of operations is if you’ve got debt, get a thousand dollars in the bank so you don’t have to use the credit card anymore, and you can rely on that thousand bucks. Don’t, don’t do the whole three to six months thing first, but get a thousand bucks in and then take the match.

[00:12:57] OG: It’s not a big step. That’s like a really teeny, tiny step, right? Super tiny step. Super tiny step. But like, like something an infant would do, like an infant step in, infant step one. 

[00:13:07] Joe: We should TM that infant steps. We have a series of infant steps here on Stacking regimens. Step one, get a thousand dollars.

[00:13:12] Yes, get a thousand dollars. But then step two, which may be different than other people’s steps, I think you go back and you grab the match. 

[00:13:20] OG: I mean, the long range benefit of that is so amazing that you, it’s just, I mean, the number of people that I talk to and the dichotomy that it is between the people who did that and they’re 35 and they go, alright, I, you know, I’ve been saving, I’ve been investing, dah, dah, dah.

[00:13:37] I’ve got a million and a half dollars. I dunno what to do. Versus the people who are like, all right, I’m 35, I’m ready to get started. What do I do? And the trajectory is so much different over the course of the next 30 years for those two different types of people. Both of them will be successful financially, right?

[00:13:54] If you start when you’re 30, or if you start when you’re 35, if you start when you’re 40, still be fine. You’re gonna be fine. It’s gonna be different. I. But, but you’ll be fine. You’ll be able to, you have the capacity, the time, capacity to save enough money, let it grow and compound and do that stuff. But if you start early and you start when you’re 22 or you start when you’re 18 and you’re doing just little bits of stuff like taking full advantage of your match or you know, maxing out a Roth or you know, just the beginning stages of it, we’re not talking about mega backdoor Roth contributions up to, you know, his and hers and we’re doing 150,000 a year of savings.

[00:14:28] I’m saying like, do your match max out your 401k, or I’m sorry, max out your Roth. Yeah, if you can max out your 401k, that’s great. But it’s, you know, that’s the difference between being 35 with a million bucks in the bank and being 35 starting both of which you’ll end good, but. It’s the difference between retiring with 5 million bucks and 12 million.

[00:14:46] You know, 

[00:14:46] Joe: let’s go back before we finish this on all the things that we can do automatically that really help. One of the first things that I did automatically was that I added automatic, um, enrollment to was actually minimum credit card payment. When I was starting to get my acting gear in the nineties, I was like, at the very least, I gotta make sure that I keep my credit good and that I make at least the minimum payment.

[00:15:08] What’s cool is often because I was so aggressive with my strategy, og the minimum payment thing never came around. But there were a few times when I was either away or working on other stuff, just forgot where that minimum payment saved my bacon. So, sign up on your credit card. If you’re paying down your credit card, sign up for the minimum payment on each of those to be automatically deducted from your bank account.

[00:15:31] I super, super like that. 

[00:15:33] OG: Yeah, I, I was gonna say, I’m a credit card points guy that is literally step two of, got a new credit card. Trying to figure out the point system, you know, get the bonus and all that sort of stuff. You have to set up the minimum payment because nothing will blow that up faster. Or to your point, you’re using something like other debt instruments to kind of help maybe consolidate this stuff down to 0% or whatever.

[00:15:55] If you don’t make that minimum payment, boom, it’s 30% the next day. There’s no grace, right? They’re, they’re giving you the 0% knowing that half the people that get the zero are not gonna pay it off or are gonna screw it up in the meantime and get to go right back to 30. So what was a $5,000 balance? You just made a $15,000 balance because they’ll give you 0% and you missed a second payment.

[00:16:15] And now Chase is like, sweet, we got 15 grants in here. Shut shame that the meter’s running at 30 cents every dollar for the year. So that is absolutely a critical step if you have any debt at all. 

[00:16:26] Joe: Well, a lot of people. Don’t realize. It’s amazing the number of people that don’t realize when they first start out that you can just set up this contribution to a Schwab account, to a Fidelity account, to a Vanguard account.

[00:16:37] Like it amazed me how every day people are like, oh, I can do that. That’s just not my 401k. No, you can do that. These companies are very happy to take your money and put it into investments on your behalf. So starting, you know, a hundred dollars, a couple hundred dollars, $300, $500, a thousand dollars, if you can do it, man into some fund, that gets you moving ahead every month and doing it automatically, either from your paycheck or from a savings account.

[00:17:04] It’s a great strategy. I 

[00:17:05] OG: have a great example of this, of like. Practicing what I preach. I’ve always said that you can always change it, right? So just like really go aggressive and then if all of a sudden your credit card balance is arising or something, you cash service going down. Okay. You went too far.

[00:17:18] About eight months ago I was looking, you know, my son’s gonna be a senior starting in in a couple weeks. I have a sophomore and then, and then Carolina’s in third grade. You know, I was doing the math on college. We were woefully behind with Alex. We were way ahead for Caroline. You know, it’s like, like, oh crap.

[00:17:34] Like a lot of people, right? Kind of dealing with the struggle of all this stuff put together. And I was like, I’m just gonna like totally hammer ’cause I know I got some extra money, right? I’m just gonna totally hammer a, just a crap load of money in five 20 nines. Crap load of money in the brokerage account.

[00:17:48] And I went from a monthly a CH of $500 in our brokerage account to weekly. And I went from a monthly, weekly, just listen, it doesn’t end that way, trust me. And then I went from $150 a month into each kid’s, 5 29 to $400 a month in each kid’s, 5 29. So I went from saving basically $900 a month to, oh, you know, roughly 4,000.

[00:18:14] I did that for like a month and a half and I was like, why is all my savings account going down and why is the, you know, but it didn’t go down all the money, right? So it proved that there was some, like I found out where that limit was and it was higher than the 900 I was saving substantially lower than the 4,000 I tried to save, you know, because just moving money around right from the savings company.

[00:18:33] But it gave me the freedom to kind of say, alright. I know the number’s higher. I’m not willing to sit down and like pencil whip every dollar that I spent to exactly go, well is it 9 22 75? Is it $948 and 31 cents? Like how much can I save? I’ll just save a butt load right now and then see where, where I cry uncle.

[00:18:54] And it didn’t very long where the pain point is, it didn’t take very long. It took, it was just a little bit and I was like, boom. I saw this savings account go down. You know, credit card balance was went up just to smidge for the month. So it was like kind of pretty easy to see when that happened. But it also proved that the number was higher than 900 that we could save, you know, lower than the 4,000 that I projected saving, which I kind of knew was gonna happen, but I wanted to give it a whirl so it’s doable.

[00:19:14] You could just do it for one month and see what happens. The other thing that you just said about automatic saving, this just popped in my head and I wonder if anybody’s done this. I’ve never heard about it. I’ve never read about it, but I gotta imagine there’s a stacker out there that’s doing it. You know, the whole like bank on yourself thing.

[00:19:29] You know, the whole idea of like, you. Get a HELOC and you know, the double mortgage thing, whatever you, 

[00:19:34] Joe: you know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Adam Carroll has the shred method. Okay. That even has software behind it where he attacked that with his house. He paid off his house in some crazy amount of time.

[00:19:43] Like 

[00:19:43] OG: okay, 

[00:19:43] Joe: four 

[00:19:43] OG: years. It takes some energy and effort and for some people it’s good and some people it’s, you know, a pain in the butt. But basically you, you, you know, it involves having debt and to take all of your money, you put it on this line of credit. Well, so why not put all of our money in the Schwab account and then spend out of it like you would your savings account and then at the end of the month, whatever’s there, boom, invest it.

[00:20:05] Like kind of the inverse of that. Like get debt to do it, do it from an investment account. Now you can’t put the money in the investment account, invest it and then, you know, need the money for a me, you know, for that month obviously. ’cause you know, the market could go down or whatever. But getting it in the place to kind of what you were saying about automatic savings, why not just put it in the place where you know you’re gonna need it or know where you want it to be eventually.

[00:20:28] And then. And then aach h out of the investment account versus the other way around. Just find 

[00:20:32] Joe: them behaviorally though, you’ll start, you know, you’ll touch that money more often if it’s not Yeah. Because I found often that if, you know, if the meat touches the potatoes, people, my my thinking about my brother, he wouldn’t eat it.

[00:20:44] Yeah. You know, if it was just, eh, 

[00:20:46] OG: yeah. 

[00:20:46] Joe: Meat touches potatoes, all of a sudden it’s, it’s not working. Yeah. 

[00:20:50] OG: Well, it’d be interesting to know if anybody’s tried that. I don’t know. See if it’s, see, how do I die? That’s all I wanna know. 

[00:20:56] Joe: It’s like a step further than, than the anti budgett that we’ve talked about before.

[00:21:00] It’s like one step further. Hey, just put it all in the investment account. Oh, 

[00:21:03] OG: we say, like, deposit your money in the savings account and then transfer money into your checking account as you need it to pay bills and so on and so forth. Right. Well, you know, I 

[00:21:09] Joe: love that one. 

[00:21:10] OG: So why not just transfer it in your brokerage account 

[00:21:13] Joe: instead 

[00:21:14] OG: and then it’s already in the spot where, well, that’s 

[00:21:16] Joe: an interesting thing.

[00:21:17] And 

[00:21:17] OG: then on Decem, you know, on the 30th you go, oh, there’s $812 left here. Invest ac, you know, ETF Done. 

[00:21:23] Joe: I see what you mean. Are you talking about the savings account’s already built? Yeah. Yeah. So now you’ve got your emergency fund, not just go directly to the investment account and then move money outta there to be your budget money into your checking.

[00:21:34] bit: Yeah, 

[00:21:34] Joe: that’s a great idea. Well, I don’t know if it’s great, but I’d love to know if somebody took that. Well, it’s the same concept just at the next level, right? Okay. Emergency fund’s done. Let’s put it where it goes. I also like this idea that you kind of referenced when you were like finding the pain point.

[00:21:49] I like this when families are having a baby and they wanna, they wanna know like, what, what’s gonna happen to my budget? I’m like, well let’s, let’s kind of see what we think it would be and then let’s take that money and let’s hide it. Let’s put it into a savings account so you can kind of feel the budget constraints of what the, all these new diapers and formula and all this stuff is gonna cost 

[00:22:07] OG: in advance.

[00:22:08] Yeah. Can I afford the new house? Well, yeah, let’s start making the mortgage payment right now. Tell me what you think in six months. 

[00:22:13] Joe: And it all goes into this separate savings account. And hey, if you need the money, then we back it down and you don’t get yourself into debt trouble. And then on the other side.

[00:22:21] If you don’t need the money, well now you’ve got, you know, your paint fund, you’ve got your fund for all those repairs that happen every time you move into a new place. Love this piece. We will, uh, link to it in the show notes, but what’s even better, if you took notes today, I think, uh, you’ve got your work cut out for your stackers.

[00:22:39] Where is it that you can challenge yourself to raise that automatic savings? Where are you not automatic savings, where you should be? We’re gonna dive into that more in the 2 0 1. That’s the place where the learning goes to the next level. If, uh, you like this topic, we’re gonna dive in even more.

[00:22:54] Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1, which is the Stacking Benjamins place where you dive in even deeper curated links from all over the internet on this and about the topic we’re gonna talk about next. You know, og we’ve been talking a lot lately. I’ve been a little bit of obsessed with the idea that.

[00:23:12] It isn’t just all about money. There’s other types of wealth. There’s this kind of thing that we’re looking for that’s beyond money. Well, Dr. Daniel Crosby is a behavioral psychologist who every time he is been here, he is talked about the tactics of money and about making sure you do kind of what inte him was talking about in our headline today.

[00:23:31] Automating for the Win, leaving your, your hands off your investment account, not day Trading Your, your Index funds today. Instead, Dr. Crosby, it’s gonna be, I think we’re gonna call him Uncle Dan OG because he’s got some stories of people in history that have grappled with this already. How do we find the Soul of Wealth?

[00:23:54] That is today’s mentor topic and we have the perfect mentor for that. Dr. Crosby’s back, and I can’t wait to talk to him about that. But first Doug time for you to step back up to the mic, my friend, he’s been. Eely quiet today. Peaceful is the word I used, but go ahead. What do we got on the trivia front?

[00:24:18] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug and wow, it’s a big week in history. First in a moment, money Python memorialized in their song. Every sperm is sacred. The Pope in 1968, outlawed birth control and much earlier in 1588, the Spanish Armada was defeated by the British Navy, both events proving that it doesn’t matter how many semen you have, it’s what you do with ’em.

[00:24:46] So today’s trivia is this, what British Seaman is the star of a bestselling Benjamin earnings series of books by author CS. Forester. Wait, Forester was English. So it’d be pound earning, right? Like a pound earning series of, okay. Yeah. Now we’re correct. Look, regardless, tell me who he is or mom will make you swab the poop deck.

[00:25:10] Hey, I said 

[00:25:11] bit: poop.

[00:25:23] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m British Navy lover and the guy who thinks Spain is awesome even without a huge Navy. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Today’s question is c. S Forester created a whole world set in the Napoleonic era in 12 books, starring and up and coming, and Brave Seaman named who the man was, none other than Horatio Hornblower.

[00:25:48] And between the first book in 1937 and the last in 1962, he made Forrester both wealthy and famous. Forrester also wrote a book, which later became a huge movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn called The African Queen. And that is today’s trivia question you can share around at the water cooler or on the next Zoom call, whatever they do nowadays.

[00:26:14] Back to you guys.

[00:26:20] Joe: Super happy Dr. Daniel Crosby’s back. Hey, I got a question for you. How do you find time to read? When do you sit down and do do, do you read much fiction? No. 

[00:26:30] Daniel: No, I never read any fiction. I shouldn’t say that. I mean, it’s true. I shouldn’t tell people that. I never read any fiction. I am a true psychology dork.

[00:26:40] I just read psychology books for fun all the time. It’s my only interest. 

[00:26:46] Joe: Wait a minute, but then how do you, okay, so I’m very confused because you begin. This whole new project, which I feel like it’s gonna be like Uncle Daniel’s story time here, where grandpa’s just gonna sit back and tell us a bunch of stories, which is gonna be super fun.

[00:27:03] But your first story is from the Kite Runner. And The Kite Runner is a book that my wife read a long time ago. She’s been trying to get me to read it forever. Mm-Hmm. And I feel this, this jealousy, when I open your book and you’re quoting the Kite Runner, I’m like, I, I feel like even my buddy Daniel’s like yelling at me that I need to read this book.

[00:27:21] Daniel: Okay, so I lied. Everything revolves around psychology. For me, even if I’m reading something else, it’s with an eye to like, how do I tie it back to human behavior? Yeah. Everyone read the Kite Runner, dude, come on, get with the program. 

[00:27:37] Joe: There’s the shaving right there. How does, how does the Kite Runner tie into the soul of wealth?

[00:27:43] Daniel: There’s a story within the story, uh, about this man. Let’s see if I can get the story within the story, right. There’s a man who says that basically he’s granted a wish where he can create wealth by shedding tears, and this man is a happy man. He has a good life. And so at some point at this story, within the story, you see this guy like weeping over the sl body of his wife who he’s just killed, and he enacts all this horror in his life to make himself wealthier.

[00:28:15] That, so he killed his wife for more money. Yeah, well, ’cause he knew that killing his wife would make him cry and, and his tears become pearls basically. And so you got heavy on us really fast. I guess I get heavy in the book really fast. But, you know, I analogize this to like all of sort of the these sweet, precious things.

[00:28:38] So many of us sacrifice in our own lives in the pursuit of wealth. And that’s sort of in the introduction of the book. ’cause this whole book is about. Money and meaning crafting a meaningful life in and around money, but not having money become the pursuit itself. And I’m just a big believer and I’m, I’m deeply guilty of having sacrificed some really wonderful parts of my life in pursuit of more.

[00:29:05] And as we’re having this conversation, my family’s at the San Diego Zoo and I’m stuck here with stupid old me. With me. Yeah, 

[00:29:12] Joe: you’re welcome man. You didn’t we need any animals when we got Doug sitting over here in the corner, you know that’s animal enough for you. Big guy. Yeah. And I apologize for that.

[00:29:23] ’cause the San Diego Zoo people haven’t been there is amazing. Have you been there before? I have. Oh good. Okay. Because if I’d taken you away from the first time, I was like, we’re, we’re hanging up now you’re getting an Uber and you’re gonna San Diego Zoo. No, no. 

[00:29:35] Daniel: I’ve been 

[00:29:36] Joe: place is amazing. But it is interesting ’cause you delineate between.

[00:29:40] How kind of comical it is that we have these New Year’s resolutions every year that focus on one thing and then, you know, you read these things about people on their deathbed and what they think is important and they’re two totally different ball games. Like why the dichotomy between the two? 

[00:29:57] Daniel: Yeah, it, it has a lot to do with our wiring, right?

[00:30:00] So I talk in, in one of the chapters about the work of Brony, where, who’s this Australian sort of palliative care nurse, and she interviewed all these people who are at the end of their life, and as they’re looking back with 2020 hindsight over their life, asking them, you know, what they wish they had done differently.

[00:30:18] The only place where work or money enters in is there’s one of the five sort of regrets of the dying is that I wish I had worked less and effectively deprioritized money. So it’s like if work or money enter the conversation at all, it’s in a negative way when we are at the end of life. And yet when you look at the a PA, the a PA, the American, uh, psychological association does this stress in America survey every year.

[00:30:49] And this last year, the top three stressors of Americans were money work. The economy. So money, money and money. So moment to moment, we’re so mired and worry about money, and then at the end of life we look back over life and we go, oh, that was stupid. And so there’s a couple of reasons why this is the case.

[00:31:13] And, and you know, part of it is just we’re, we’re wired for concreteness, we’re wired for immediacy, and money has immediate sort of visceral. Power, right? There’s something you can do with it. It’s a way to keep score. It’s a proxy for how we’re doing. But then when you look at the things that make life worth living, it just doesn’t scratch that itch in the way that we want it to.

[00:31:39] So a lot of people treat money like liquid happiness because it’s, it’s, it’s easier to count and stack and, and sort than things like relationships or self-betterment, self-improvement, growth. Uh, these things can be kind of hard to get our arms around and money. Uh, you know, money’s, money’s easy to count.

[00:32:01] Joe: It’s funny because I think of money as a door opener that gets the relationship that I want, that gets the thing that I want, that gets all this stuff. And you immediately go into the story of Alexander the Great. So Uncle Daniel, tell us that story. Let’s talk about Alexander the Great. How does he factor into this?

[00:32:20] Daniel: He’s a prime example. So I learned a bit about Alexander the Great’s Wealth when writing the book. Each chapter of the book starts with a narrative, then kind of goes into the science and then talks about application. That must have been 

[00:32:33] Joe: fun, by the way, researching some of these people. ’cause I never knew Alexander the Great was this wealthy.

[00:32:38] Like I think just digging into that would be a blast. 

[00:32:40] Daniel: Yeah, so fun. Alexander the Great, by some accounts, the second richest person to ever live by the most conservative estimate of his wealth. He would be richer than the 10 richest people in the world today. I mean, just like absolutely staggering wealth, incredible power.

[00:32:59] He goes, well over a decade, never losing a battle, controlling half the world. And then his best friend dies in one of these battles. His best friend was a general in one of his armies and his best friend dies in the siege of tire. And he is completely undone by this. And here is, you know, second maybe to Genghis Khan, the richest and most powerful man that has ever lived, and he loses a buddy.

[00:33:27] And that is the beginning of the end for him. When we look at the research around what makes life worth living, if you could only have one thing, if you had to maximize for one thing, it would be relationships. There’s really sort of five pillars of life well lived, but the one that’s most impactful, if you had to choose one, it would be relationships.

[00:33:51] And we see this in his life. He has all this power, all this success, all this wealth, and he loses a relationship and none of it matters. I. 

[00:34:03] Joe: What’s the relationship with working and living a fuller life? 

[00:34:08] Daniel: It’s deeper than most people think. So, you know, I mentioned the positive psychology, the work of Martin Seligman has these sort of five things that, that Seligman unearthed for a meaningful life.

[00:34:20] And only one of them, I think, do we lock in on very much, you know, the first one is, uh, what he calls positive experiences, which is just like fun, you know, fun or leisure. Eating an ice cream cone, going to the beach, going to a movie, going on a walk, hanging out, relaxing. We over index on that. Like when we think about retirement, we’re like, all right, like, I’m gonna go live at the beach, or I’m gonna play golf all the time, or whatever, sort of this, you know, stereotypical, I’ve, I’ve actually never played golf once in my life.

[00:34:56] You know what? Whatever this sort of stereotypical vision of a, of a retirement is, and that’s part of it, right? Like leisure’s nice leisure is lovely and, and we should have some of that. But when we look at the other four facets, the second one is engagement. That’s deep work. That’s hard work. Pouring yourself into something that is so immersive that you lose track of time and, and sort of lose yourself in that.

[00:35:21] Joe: Yeah, I felt there’s kind of this flow state, right, that you get into and that’s like optimal experience. 

[00:35:27] Daniel: That’s right. The flow state that, uh, Chi sent Mihai talks about in his book is, is very much a part of engagement. Uh, relationships are another one, meaning is the other one, working for something bigger than yourself, right?

[00:35:41] Religion, spirituality, philanthropy, charitable service. All of these things kind of qualify as that. And then the last one is advancement or growth. If you think about someone’s career. A job scratches a lot of those itches, right? A job gives you money for leisure. It gives you that engagement. It puts you at least back in the day, proximal to other people with whom you form relationships.

[00:36:11] It allows you to work for something bigger than yourself as part of a team, and it allows you to get better today than you were yesterday. To grow, to learn. You know, a good job goes a very long way towards ticking all of those five boxes of a meaningful life. People, when they’re thinking about money, and they’re so locked in on that retirement number that allows for the leisure, but what are we gonna do about the relationships?

[00:36:38] Yeah. What are we gonna do about the growth? What are we gonna do about that flow state? And a lot of people don’t plan for those other facets of retirement. 

[00:36:46] Joe: Well, and I’m wondering as you’re talking, is this where the fire movement kind of gets it wrong? 

[00:36:50] Daniel: Yeah, I don’t wanna be critical of the fire movement because of the pitchforks, but no the, 

[00:36:57] Joe: come on Susie Orman.

[00:36:59] Gimme my Susie Orman moment please. 

[00:37:02] Daniel: Yeah, thanks for setting me up for a fall there, bud. I think what the fire movement gets right is freedom and restraint and common sensical sort of types of investing. I think if there’s something that’s often overlooked as part of that is that the number is focused on to the exclusion of the psychological facets of, of retirement, which is why you see so many people who are successful in hitting their fire number, continuing to work, or teaching other people how to fire, or starting a blog or you know, whatever.

[00:37:36] Because you know, man can’t live by bread alone. Like you can have all the money you ever need and like that’s nice, but now it’s freed you up to do what. What are you gonna fill that life with? That’s still a deeply consequential thing. And you, you can’t just be running from something. You need to be running towards something.

[00:37:59] I think a lot of people are running from soul crushing W2 employment, but what are you running to is at least as important a question to answer. 

[00:38:09] Joe: Well, I think there’s, I totally a hundred percent agree, and we just talked to Tessa Woods, the NYU professor and psychologist about finding meaningful work versus dropping out for that very, very reason.

[00:38:20] I think that early fire practitioners are falling into this Alexander the great trap to quote you, which is, I’m just gonna have more money. If I have more money. If I have more money, if I have more money, if I have more money, everything’s gonna get better. Mm-Hmm. And yet it doesn’t make it better necessarily.

[00:38:37] It can, but it doesn’t necessarily make it better as much as finding meaning in my life. 

[00:38:41] Daniel: Yeah, the psychological term for that tendency of ours to move the goalposts is the hedonic treadmill. And I just, I love that term because it’s so vivid. You know, hedonism of is of course the pursuit of pleasure. But a treadmill, you move and move, but sort of stay in place.

[00:38:58] I have absolutely seen that in my own life. I have a number, I hit the number, the number is no longer the number. Right. And you know, your tastes change. Your tastes move upstream. You know, it’s like 

[00:39:12] Joe: the uh, the horizon moves on you. 

[00:39:14] Daniel: Yeah. It’s the old cartoon carrot on the fishing pole in front of you and you’re running and running and it’s not getting any closer.

[00:39:23] Joe: It’s funny ’cause you talk about the hedonistic treadmill. Chasing hedonism seems to me has always been the natural thing. If I do, what makes me happy, I. This is the path and doing what gives me pleasure is the thing. And yet your next story I’d love for you to tell is about abundance and how we actually find it.

[00:39:44] And it might not be the hedonism thing according to this next story. You found an area where religious text, Buddhist, Hindus, Christianity, they all agree with the scientific research. What is that? 

[00:39:58] Daniel: Yeah, it was fun to look through sort of all these faith and wisdom traditions and they all have verses that say something to the effect of he or she who gives money away.

[00:40:11] Will have it replenished in greater abundance. Right. And from a purely practical perspective, like the math ain’t math in Right, right. You know, it’s like, how, how is it, it’s hard math. Yeah. Like how is it that if I’m giving money away, then I should be decreased by that much money? And yet every wisdom tradition in the world throughout history has this common theme.

[00:40:37] And, and when you see that, I think we should start to have our ears perk up a bit. And what the literature says that’s so fascinating is two things. People at every income level, at every income level, from very modest to very wealthy, the more they give away, the happier they are. Right. The more they give away, the happier they are and the richer they feel.

[00:41:02] If you ask someone, you ask someone who makes you know what is, I would call objectively, not that much money. Do you feel rich? The amount of money they give away will be material in their answer to that question. And when we look at people’s self-perceptions of financial wellbeing, right? Just like, hey.

[00:41:24] How are you doing financially? Like, are you okay? Which is kind of the question. My clients are predominantly financial advisors, and this is kind of the question that all their clients want answered is, am I going to be okay? I. When we look at that question in clients’ lives, am I going to be okay?

[00:41:45] There’s two things that are predictive of it. The first one is fairly obvious, which is how much money do they have? Right. You know, so of course you know how much money they have is materially predictive of whether or not they feel okay. But the second most powerful predictor is how charitable are they?

[00:42:05] Wow. The fact is that people who give money away, whether they have a lot or a little people who are generous, feel wealthier. And once again, I see something that I’ve seen throughout my whole careers is that the philosophers and the theologians got it right. Right. The philosophers and the theologians, the wisdom traditions got it right.

[00:42:26] That, uh, giving money away is one of the surest paths to felt prosperity. 

[00:42:34] Joe: I felt this in my entire life. I’m 56 years old. I fought it every single time, every single, I always fight giving stuff away. And every time, like, you can ask me any time and anything I’ve ever given away, do I regret it? The answer’s always been, no.

[00:42:51] It’s always been, no. In fact, it’s, it’s been some of the happiest times I’ve had in my life and I, I also think as I was absorbing this when I was reading your words the first time I thought about how, you know, when I achieve financial independence, I felt pretty good. I felt great, you know, and I actually felt better.

[00:43:09] I felt better when I had enough people around me. I had a community around me of people that no matter how bad the crap was that I got myself into, that would pick me up and would carry me. When I came to that realization that I had this network of, um, charitable people around me too, that it. I don’t know.

[00:43:31] I felt I felt a hundred percent better with the community. Kind of tying in what we’re talking about, about meaningful work, about Alexander the Great and his friends about giving about all these things really gave me this completeness that I thought having enough money would give me and didn’t I. 

[00:43:46] Daniel: Yeah, it can’t be overstated.

[00:43:48] I’m going to misstate the research here. Well, I’ll exaggerate the research here a bit, but when you look at even the research on blue Zones, like these parts of the globe where people live a very long time, a lot of it makes sense. Like many of the blue zones are like, you know, places in Japan that are by the shore and they eat fresh fish and veggies all day.

[00:44:08] Yep. I get it. That’s a, a recipe for longevity. But there’s other blue zones that are sort of hard for us to get our arms around. It’s like places in Italy where they eat processed meat and pasta and smoke unfiltered cigarettes all day. But it’s like, why do these folks live to be a hundred as well? And it’s because they live in these high relations, high relational wealth environments.

[00:44:35] You know, they’re living in these small villages where they’re all hanging out on each other’s porches at night, playing music, drinking, having a good time. Chopping it up, sharing stories. And this is as powerful the predictor of longevity as some of the more sort of obvious determinants of longevity like exercise and diet.

[00:44:54] So it just can’t be overstated how powerful relational wealth is as a predictor of true wealth. And I, I think your story is a perfect exemplar of that. 

[00:45:06] Joe: Dude. Gimme the smoking and pasta blue zone any day over those other places. 

[00:45:11] Daniel: I want the, I want the salami blue zone myself. That’s the Marlboro red salami blue zone coast of 

[00:45:18] Joe: Japan and fish.

[00:45:19] That’s fine. That’s great. Yeah. But I’ll go with the Italian one. A lot of our stackers are thinking, okay, you know, charity’s gotta be, no matter how much you and I talk, it’s the same thing. Right. Uh, charity’s gotta begin at home. You’ve got some, some great tips. I’d like to end our time together on, if you don’t mind, just, uh, comment on each of these.

[00:45:38] ’cause you’ve got four different things. First of all. You, you say, you know, you don’t have to start big, you can start small. 

[00:45:43] Daniel: Yeah. In terms of being charitable, I think a lot of people have this attitude that when I hit my number or when I have X then I’ll be charitable. And I think the, I think the inverse of this is that many of us are critical of really, really wealthy people.

[00:46:00] And we go, well, like if I had that person’s money, I’d be giving it all away, but here’s poor old me. And I think a lot of times we have abundance that we don’t recognize. The hedonic treadmill works that way too. You know, you go, oh, well when I’ve got a million in the bank, then I’ll start being charitable.

[00:46:18] And then you get to that million in the bank and you go, well, you know, a dollar doesn’t buy what it used to anymore. Like the average home. I, I mean, a, a house in Omaha is a million bucks now. So like, you know, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna do that. And so I think you really need to start today and start small.

[00:46:36] Joe: That’s the second thing is, you know, you mentioned giving money. But there’s huge benefits where it’s not even monetary. You say give of yourself. 

[00:46:44] Daniel: Yeah. I had a good model for this in my dad that he would write checks, which is important and every, you know, charitable organization would tell you to do that of course, but, but also to give of yourself.

[00:46:57] I had a great experience earlier this year. My wife signed us up to volunteer at the Special Olympics and Oh, cool. Yeah. I am not proud to say that I pissed and moaned about this. It was at 6:00 AM on a Saturday and I was like, really? I got a drive to Atlanta at 6:00 AM on a sa on my day off and like, what are you doing?

[00:47:21] I mean, I was not cool about. You know, her having signed us up for this, and by the end of that afternoon, I was a puddle of tears. These kids had changed my life and I got so much more than I gave that day. And now I will make that part of my charitable efforts because I have seen firsthand the the power of involvement with that.

[00:47:46] So money’s important, but get yourself involved at the talent level as well. 

[00:47:52] Joe: I love this point, Daniel, because in 2021 we interviewed a guy named Chris Field who talked about the best 14 minutes of your day, and he talks about if you could give 14 minutes away. Every day that the charitable interest in organizations that you love, or community organizations that you love get a ton of benefit.

[00:48:09] And he actually encourages people not to give money because like I could give a hundred dollars to a place, but if I could teach them how to use their sound equipment better as an example, or how to give presentations better, or how to do social media better, which are things that I’ve learned through what I do, he’s like, a hundred bucks is fine.

[00:48:31] But think about that 14 minutes of teaching them better social media could be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bucks. Yeah. So to your point, if you can give of your expertise, that could be absolutely huge. Mm-Hmm. Third on your list is to make it meaningful. 

[00:48:46] Daniel: Yeah. When you dig into the research around philanthropy, a lot of people sort of take a hard line stance where it’s like, well, hey, you just want to mathematically do the most good possible.

[00:48:58] And if, if you think about it in this way, you know, some people call that effective altruism. You’re gonna do something like buy mosquito nets because the ROI on mosquito nets is, is enormous, right? Like, you can spend a couple bucks and save a human life, which is an incredible thing to contemplate. But, you know, one of the things that I talk about is making it personal and making it meaningful.

[00:49:20] And my family kind of diversifies our giving portfolio the same way that we diversify our investment portfolio. And, you know, a, a portion of that goes to. Doing the most good possible just from like a purely mathematical perspective. Part of it goes to like mosquito nets, types of endeavors, but part of it goes to stuff that is like, you know, my wife is a visual artist and I think that the arts add great richness to our lives.

[00:49:49] And so, you know, donating to your local ballet is maybe not saving lives, but it is, it is personally meaningful to you. The biggest check I write every year is to mental health related causes because I’m a psychologist who sold his sold to Wall Street early in his career and there are lives that I have not been able to touch and people I have not been able to help because of that road not taken.

[00:50:15] And I wanna help other psychologists do the important work that they need to do. So that’s personally meaningful to me and my story. And so I try to give in ways that balance this idea of effect of altruism with. Something that, that I care about. 

[00:50:33] Joe: Well, we mentioned the book. We haven’t really talked about the book as a project because stackers, we just, we just went through like two of 50 stories, like literally 15 pages of a few hundred pages of stories.

[00:50:48] Let’s talk about the book for a second. Let’s talk about this project. ’cause you and I have talked about several of your projects in the past. Why this book and why you, why now? 

[00:50:56] Daniel: Yeah. My first couple of books were really about the blocking and tackling of finance, right? Like how can an understanding of your psychology, your behavioral biases, help you make better decisions, pick better stocks, allocate your resources better?

[00:51:12] The good news for me is those books did well, people read them. The industry at large has started to apply those principles because of, you know, the work of the giants upon whose shoulders I stand to write these sorts of books. Those things are getting implemented in bigger and bigger ways, and people are making money and people are thriving as a result, which is awesome.

[00:51:34] But what I observed is that many people, even among the very wealthy, still have this emptiness. We live in this weird place in time where we have greater abundance than we’ve ever had in human history. Yet, you know, a couple years ago, for the first time in peace time in American history, we had a decline in the average life expectancy of Americans because of deaths of despair, because of suicide and, and overdose type deaths.

[00:52:05] We actually saw our life expectancy as a country declining. Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and, and wrote about his stories, he talks about, you know, evermore people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. And I feel like that’s the moment that we find ourselves in.

[00:52:26] We’ve become more sophisticated, better educated, with respect to how to manage and invest our money. But what we’ve done with the proceeds from that has not always been as meaningful or fulfilling as it could be. And this is why I thought that this was the book that people needed today. 

[00:52:46] Joe: We can tell through the first 15, first 15 pages how, how much we dug in.

[00:52:51] I mean, it just keeps going and going. The book is called The Soul of Wealth, 50 Reflections on Money Meeting Available Everywhere, I assume. 

[00:52:59] Daniel: There you go. 

[00:53:00] Joe: Thanks for mentoring us again, as always, Dr. Crow. I, I, I feel like calling you Uncle Daniel as you’re telling us stories is probably a more fitting moniker today.

[00:53:09] Daniel: Yeah. Just Uncle Danny’s story time. Hopefully that’s the name of this episode. 

[00:53:15] bit: I’m Andy Dwyer, and when I’m not pulling suckers off my tomato plants in my garden, I’m Stacking Benjamin’s. 

[00:53:22] Joe: You ever see the African Queen og? Uh uh No. 

[00:53:26] OG: I 

[00:53:26] Joe: don’t know what that is. How about, uh, Horatio Horn blower? You ever, you know, they had a great series of, uh, what was a series?

[00:53:34] It was a while ago now, maybe 10, 15 years ago, about Horatio horn blower. No, 

[00:53:39] OG: I know who Horatio Sands is. Same guy. 

[00:53:42] Joe: Nope. A little different, but Horatio horn blower, quite a badass. 

[00:53:46] OG: Sounds like you’re making this up. 

[00:53:47] Joe: I read this books actually initially when I was a kid. Love, love the Horatio horn blower series.

[00:53:52] So good stuff there. Speaking of good stuff, this is the part of the show where we reach out to a stacker who said, you know what? I better call Saul Cihi in og. We’re helping a stacker in need. We’re gonna say hello to Blake. Blake, what you got for us, man? 

[00:54:10] caller: Hi Joe OG and Doug. I have a question for you. I originally emailed my question in because I was a little too nervous to ask my question in front of the other two listeners, um, however, Joe asked me to go ahead and call it in.

[00:54:25] So figured I would go ahead and do that. My question is, I listened to the show the other day where there was a discussion about Yoda. It made me think about my situation. I started using Acorns about nine years ago with investing my Roundup, setting up a recurring investment and not taking any money out.

[00:54:43] I have a decent amount saved there. I have wondered if I should move it to a more reputable broker such as Vanguard, fidelity, or Schwab, rather than continuing to invest through an app. If I transfer the assets, I believe there may be a transfer fee charged by Acorns, and if I liquidate, then reinvest the cash.

[00:55:00] I will have capital gains taxes. I do like the fact that Acorns does be investing automatically. I have truly just said it and let it go. Am I overthinking this and should I just continue with Acorns or maybe make the switch to the other brokers? I really enjoy the show sincerely. Blake. 

[00:55:18] Joe: Blake, nice job, Blake.

[00:55:20] As, uh, Blake said so eloquently, man, he did write that to me. Yes, og. And I said, man, call it in. Get the free swag and we, we’d love to hear you. So Blake, great job. Thanks for the question. This is a question I think a lot of people have. You invest into one of these online apps like Acorns with a cool Roundup thing.

[00:55:40] I’d love, love me some Acorns, but do you leave the money there? 

[00:55:44] OG: You know, I think that all these things have a time and a place depending on where you are in your financial journey. I was, I keep on getting these emails from Stockpile, so that was a app that you and I have used and, and recommended for a while.

[00:55:58] They changed their fee structure, so we kind of stopped recommending it, but, but I kept on getting a email from them and finally I had logged back in and, you know, there’s 68 cents in the account or something. That’s why they’re sending it to me. But I think there’s a time and a place for these different apps as you build the consistency around investing and as you build the predictability into your life, and then there becomes a time where the acorns, literally the roundups aren’t making that big of a difference anymore.

[00:56:28] This was a question we had a couple of weeks ago. That Doug and I did, and I don’t remember if it was last Wednesday or if it was one of the other shows, but you know, it was like, how much should I get involved in the day-to-Day management of my money relative to other things, while you’re investing a hundred dollars a month and it’s doing its thing, you wanna make that as simple as possible, make it really easy, and as you’re building out your getting started in your financial journey, all the little tricks of, you know, hey, I can round this up and I’ll get an extra 82 cents, and that’s fantastic.

[00:57:01] But there comes a point where your money starts making as much money as you’re putting in, right? So you’re saving a thousand dollars a month and you have a thousand dollars in your account. Well, heck, just focus on the thousand dollars a month. Try to make that $1,500 a month, that’s gonna make a bigger impact over the next year than you fiddle in with which app to use, or fee structures or any of the other sort of stuff.

[00:57:24] But all of a sudden your portfolio is a hundred thousand dollars. This year so far, your a hundred thousand dollars account’s grown, 10,000 and you’ve put in five or you’ve put in six. It’s like, well, wait a second. My money is starting to make more money than I’m contributing to it, you know, and it gets to 200,000, or it gets to 500,000.

[00:57:43] You know, you can see the point where all of a sudden your money is making a ton of money. I was having a discussion with a client about retirement. She was talking about being more conservative around retirement, and I said, they’re retiring with a good sum, a nice seven figure sum. I’m like, look, in a normal year, your portfolio is gonna make as much money in retirement as you made before retirement.

[00:58:02] You can’t just forget about that. That’s not like chump change. You know, two, $300,000 of, of portfolio growth needs to be taken care of. You need to be thinking about making sure you’re doing that the right way. That’s a lot of cash. So I think when it comes to like Acorn or Stockpile or different types of getting started apps, they’re fantastic for doing that.

[00:58:25] But once you’ve built a regularity into your life of, you know, I save $200 a month in my brokerage account, I save, you know, I max out my Roth using this feature or something like that. I think it probably makes sense to make that a little bit more cost effective. Make it a little bit more brand name if you want, because of the fact that sometimes these apps go away or they change their structure or whatever the case may be, because you don’t need to do the roundup thing to save anymore.

[00:58:51] If you’ve been doing Acorns for a while. The Roundup thing is just, it’s a nice to have, right? Yeah. So just make your, just look at how much you save every month and just put that as your a CH into your brokerage account. Like you’ve, you’ve demonstrated that you can do it, is my point. And that’s what Acorns and all these FinTech apps are generally about is, well, I see if it equals 75 bucks a month, 

[00:59:12] Joe: then just 

[00:59:13] OG: save 75 

[00:59:14] Joe: bucks a month.

[00:59:14] OG: Just save 75 bucks a month. You’ve demonstrated to yourself that you can do it. And that’s the point is to like, get you into the habit of doing that thing. And now you’re at the point where you’re like, I’m saving 500 a month. Okay, just, just save 500 a month. It doesn’t have to be in Acorns at that point.

[00:59:29] You know what I mean? A couple of things that I wanna point out about what he said about transferring and paying taxes and that sort of thing. There’s probably a transfer fee because the low, low cost of products, they have to, you know, they gotta have some money somewhere. And that’s sometimes where they put it is, you can have the account, but if you wanna move it out, we’re gonna charge you a hundred bucks or something like that.

[00:59:48] The taxes may not be as bad as you think if you’ve been investing over a long period of time. Every time you’re investing, you’re buying new shares at today’s price, because the market’s been going up. You have some shares that you bought a long time ago. You have some shares that you bought yesterday, and so you can look and see what that cost basis is.

[01:00:04] If they report that and then do the math. If you make a certain amount or less, then the capital gains rate zero. So, you know, you might find that you’re under that, depending on your income and your household income, or you can structure it such that it’s a low amount this year and you know, over, over a year or two of trading.

[01:00:21] The second thing to be aware of in transferring positions from these accounts to another is that they will generally only let you transfer whole shares. So part of the feature of the FinTech apps is it allows you to buy fractional shares, right? So you’re, you’re diversifying, you’re buying, you know, whatever ETFs or you’re buying stocks, but you’re buying 0.002 shares of Amazon Point oh oh three shares of Apple, you know, with your 11 cents of.

[01:00:45] Of contributions today. And that’s totally great. You know, that’s a fantastic way that they do that now as opposed to all shares. But when you transfer it, they’re not gonna let you transfer the point, whatever shares, generally speaking. So look at your account statement and you see, you know that you have 1.682 shares of Amazon, you’re probably gonna sell the 0.682 anyway.

[01:01:03] They’re gonna force that to transfer it in cash. So there’s always gonna be some sort of, you know, ruffles, some sort of ripples I guess, of, of changes that happen. And then the only other thing that I would say about this is kind of fast forward into the future, so think about the next 10 years. Do you think that acorns, and I’m not throwing shade shaded acorns, but do you think that they’re a custodian that you wanna have hundreds of thousands of dollars with in the future?

[01:01:31] Or would you envision having a custodian that is a Vanguard, a Schwab, a Fidelity, one of these other big companies that you mentioned as being the primary place for your portfolio? Once you’ve demonstrated to yourself that you can save and address the taxability and that sort of thing of changing it, I think most people land on because the products are all ubiquitous and you can buy Vanguard stuff at Schwab.

[01:01:57] You can buy Schwab stuff at, at Fidelity. You know, like everybody’s got all the products. You just have to find the custodian that works best for you and that’s probably where you’re gonna end up. So once you’ve gotten to the point where that behavior’s good, you can probably, it served its purpose, 

[01:02:15] Joe: disengage.

[01:02:17] I think my initial answer to that goes right along parallel with everything that you said, og, which is that if this becomes a significant part of your portfolio, it’s a significant part of your, your growth. I think it makes sense to have your portfolio diversified appropriately. It’s easier to do that in one place.

[01:02:33] It’s easier to just have the portfolio in one spot. We always talk about that when people leave jobs, have an IRA on the side so that you just have this one spot where as you change from company to company, all your money goes into this same pot. And if the company a gets cheap that you used to work at and decides to jack up the fees on the 401k, or for some reason they make bad choices, they decide they want everything in gold.

[01:03:01] And that’s gonna be the only, the only option you have if you’re in that old 401k. Even though you don’t work there anymore, you still have to go along with what the new, the new rules are. I mean, the 401k committee creates these rules in an ira. You create the rules. So the flexibility, the freedom to keep your portfolio in one place and just having that one dashboard I think is so much, so much.

[01:03:24] OG: Well, some people say, I’ve heard this a couple of times lately, it’s like, well, don’t I wanna diversify place? I don’t wanna have my money all in the same place for safety. And it’s like, okay, I get that. From a banking standpoint, if you’re somebody that has a million dollars of cash and you’re going, I got a million bucks of cash, it doesn’t make sense to have one bank that has a million bucks.

[01:03:42] I should have four banks that have two 50 for the FDIC protection. Frankly, there’s ways around that too. We have a solution, a banking solution, that you can do 12 million of FDIC insurance between business and personal accounts, and it’s all high yield savings. So there’s a, there’s ways around that too.

[01:03:57] But when it comes to an investment account, there is no protection for ups and downs, right? So if you make a bad investment and it goes down, you don’t get to go back to Fidelity and go, you guys let me do that. I want my money back. Like that’s Whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, that doesn’t happen. There was a time, Joe, when you and I started where it did make sense to have an account at American Funds, and it made sense to have an account at Franklin and an account at American Century and an account at Ameriprise because Oppenheimer.

[01:04:23] Oh yeah, Oppenheimer Global. Remember that? God, yeah. O-P-P-G-X-I think was the ticker that was, that was ooh, gimme all, gimme all in the fields. But because all of those places had products and you know, different specialties that they were good at, you had an account of Fidelity ’cause you wanted Fidelity stuff and they had good stuff.

[01:04:39] They had Fidelity Magellan, you want a Fidelity Magellan, you had to buy at Fidelity. But now all of the products are virtually all transaction free. All of the stocks you can buy at every single company. You can buy Vanguard stuff at Schwab. You can buy Fidelity stuff at, well, maybe most Fidelity stuff at Schwab, you know what I mean?

[01:04:57] Like there’s no benefit to having 13 different accounts. And to your point, for simplicity’s sake, you can be a lot more specific. Make sure there’s not overlap. Make sure you’re not missing anything. If you’ve got one place that you’re looking at all of your money, it makes a lot more sense to have as few places as possible where you have to manage it from.

[01:05:17] So I’m a big fan of consolidation. 

[01:05:19] Joe: I do wanna go back though. Acorn’s a pretty cool app for people just starting out. I love it. Like you’re just trying to get this motor running. Go open yourself up an Acorn app. ’cause it’s just another way to get that savings muscle started and, and you realize sometimes fairly quickly, sometimes it takes a while that you can do this.

[01:05:37] You think you can’t, you think, oh, I gotta have that money available. No, you don’t. Yeah. And Acorns kind of proves to you that this power of automating it and getting it outta your hand is 90% of the battle. 

[01:05:49] OG: It’s like starting out in your 401k at 5% and then in June, flipping it to six and then seven in December and then eight in June.

[01:05:57] Again, it feels impossible. If you were to say to somebody, you can max out your 401k, they go, dude, that’s 23 grand. I don’t have 23,000. It’s like, but I bet you I can get you there in five years because it’s just a little bit, you know, you just make that little change if you make a big drastic change. I.

[01:06:14] Yeah, you’re gonna notice it, but you’re not gonna notice 20 bucks, probably, probably not gonna notice 20 bucks a month and you make that little change for over the course of four or five years, you find 3, 6, 12 months increments. You get there, you get there. It’s not about doing all of the things all at one time.

[01:06:32] When we work through with clients, we kinda go through this process of, of all the different areas of financial planning. CFP Board says there’s six, they say seven now with behavioral finance, but six client facing areas and everybody wants to do everything. It’s like, we’ll get there. Let’s address the major things right now.

[01:06:49] As exciting as your estate plan is, I’m sure there’s a, we’ll get to it. Just do a little bit. It’s progress every single time period that you can do, and compounding is profound. 

[01:07:01] Joe: Blake, great job. Again, thank you so much for calling in. We’re sending Blake, uh, over to our shirt shop where he can pick out his favorite, uh, stacky Benjamin swag that he can show off to everybody.

[01:07:12] He got it done. If your question isn’t, what do I do about one little thing with my money, but how do I make sure that I’m getting everything automated, that I’ve got a plan, that I’m putting the right amount away, and that I have my downside protected? Well, OG and his team are taking clients, so you go to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash og and that’s the place where you will interface with his team.

[01:07:37] You set a calendar date with Destiny and with OGs team to do better with your money than you have in the past date with 

[01:07:44] OG: Destiny. 

[01:07:45] Joe: Well, destiny awaits tm. 

[01:07:48] OG: I like it. 

[01:07:49] Joe: Time to do some infant steps with og. Yes, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash og. Hey, let’s wander out to the back porch. I got some great stuff.

[01:07:59] We have one. In-person Meetup group and it is in Minneapolis, St. Paul. And if you don’t get the 2 0 1 and you’re not a part of our Twin Cities meetup group and you’re in that area, you missed Don McDonald from talking Real Money who was there about a week ago, hanging out with all of our stackers, had a nice cookout, welcome Don to the Twin Cities.

[01:08:20] So that was a ton of fun. Uh, OG and I couldn’t be there. But you know what, og I will be there on Thursday, August 29th. Stillwater, a place called The Red Siren. Red Siren Brewing in Stillwater, which is not far from where Camp Phi is gonna be. My son and I are both speaking at Camp Phi, so I’m excited. Oh, cool.

[01:08:41] So Nick will be there. I’ll be there. Uh, Steven Boyer, the, the creator of Camp Phi will be there. I think Amy Minkley, who created the Five Freedom Retreat will be there. We’ve got lots of cool stackers, uh, lots of cool, just people in the PHI community, the financial independence community who’ll be there.

[01:08:57] So to get your ticket, it’s Stacking Benjamins dot com slash meetup. That’s Stacking Benjamins dot com slash meetup. And come hang out with me in Stillwater. The day before I had up to, uh, camp Phi to give a talk. You know what’s cool, og I’m gonna be interviewing Nick, my son, about his journey buying all these rental houses that he’s bought, and he’s got some, he’s got some stories about stuff that went really well and about stuff he wished he, he wished he might have known before he started.

[01:09:26] OG: Smells like nepotism.

[01:09:31] Joe: I didn’t ask Steven, I actually told this is what happened. Steven asked me to speak, I said yes. I said, you know what’s cool is I’ve been telling my kid that he would love this community. So he’s coming with me. And he goes, would he speak, he, he owns all those rental houses, right? Would he speak like, well he’s not the blabbermouth, his dad is, but maybe I’ll ask him.

[01:09:51] And Nick said, uh, well, and I said, you know what? What if I interview you in front of everybody? Makes it a lot easier. He’s like, yeah, yeah, that sounds great. So, yes, so nepotism, I don’t know on behalf of us, Steven Boyer, but then that would make Steven Boyer’s dad. So, I dunno, 

[01:10:10] OG: dunno what’s going on. That’s all right.

[01:10:11] Joe: Yeah, no, that’s a whole different train wreck. Speaking of train wrecks, what’s happening with you in August? 

[01:10:19] OG: Uh, well, I mean now that the kids are going back to school, uh, in a week, we’re, we’re off this week. We’ve got one final week of summer break, like I mentioned. We’re in, we’re in Michigan, then the boys are back for football, football camp next week and then school starts the week after.

[01:10:33] So we are in the, the, uh, the last of the first. That’s what we’re saying as Alex is a senior, so it’s the last time we’ll have a first time doing senior night homecoming. This stuff, all the things with the stuff. 

[01:10:49] Joe: Next year will be the first time you’re doing stuff without him, which is so weird. 

[01:10:56] OG: So, well, we had a little snippet of that a couple weeks ago because we got back from Michigan for a couple weeks, but for the first week Alex was gone.

[01:11:03] He went with his friends to a another vacation. And William, because God 

[01:11:07] Joe: knows you need a vacation from your vacation. 

[01:11:10] OG: Yeah. And our middle son, William was like, he was like walking around the house aimlessly. I’m like, what? You know, what do you doing? He’s like, it’s so boring without Alex here. I’m like, that’s good.

[01:11:21] Wait until a year from now, brother. Yeah. And then you’ve got two years before you’re in college and it was already pretty quiet last week without both of ’em. So we’ll see. We’ll see how it goes. Oh, and college application season’s starting next week too, so. Wow. Already. So we’re, we are kicking that off.

[01:11:37] Uh, all of the schools, a couple safety schools in there. Harvard and, and Penn. Yeah. Good, good safety schools, you know, I mean, he’s just in case you don’t get in elsewhere, just in case you don’t get into Michigan. Exactly. If 

[01:11:48] Joe: UNT doesn’t take him, he could fall back to Harvard. I 

[01:11:51] OG: don’t think we’re applying to UNT no offense to the fine folks at the mean, uh, the mean green Green, 

[01:11:55] Joe: I think.

[01:11:55] I think 

[01:11:55] bit: that’s, they’re, 

[01:11:56] OG: uh, UNT is not on the list. Um, but some other big, you know, kinda the big schools around here and, and, uh, Oklahoma and Arkansas and then some stuff out east. And of course the, uh. Big blue in Ann Arbor. So we’ll see what 

[01:12:09] Joe: happens. Has he visited Arkansas? Is he gonna visit it? 

[01:12:12] OG: Um, no we haven’t.

[01:12:13] We, uh, we’ve been to this, the airport a number of times, but that’s obviously, you know, not representative of the school. They have a nice airport. They have ice cream sandwiches, which is really, uh, really a hit. Bentonville makes the best ice cream sandwiches. But, uh, no, the guidance counselor said, she’s like, I know that you’ve visited a number of schools, but I would encourage you to apply to every school that may be on your list, maybe even in the slightest 1% chance, whether you think you might get in or not get in, or you’re maybe interested but you don’t know, just apply.

[01:12:42] And then if you get accepted, then go schedule the tour because you don’t know if you’re gonna get accepted into whatever school. And so if it’s kind of on your list, you know, you may get accepted and then go and go, wow, this is really kind of, you know, something I hadn’t thought about before. So there’s a number of schools like that on his list, uh, of schools that we haven’t visited.

[01:13:02] They’re, you know, kind of off the. Um, off the beaten path in terms of what we are originally thinking, but, but still gonna apply, you know, just to, just, 

[01:13:11] Joe: that’s actually what Arkansas was for us though. I don’t know if you know the story, but we weren’t going to apply at Arkansas. Neither one of my kids were going to apply.

[01:13:18] And then a friend of ours said, have you looked at the honors program at the University of Arkansas? We’re like, Nope. And they said, you need to just, Mm-Hmm. Take a look at it. And we did enough that I thought, okay, we’ll go take a look. Almost 25% of that school is the honors program. And it is, believe it or not, this is shocking.

[01:13:39] Very well funded by a certain family who might have their home based in northwest Arkansas and the, uh, the 

[01:13:48] OG: Jerry Jones, 

[01:13:49] Joe: the number of awards that is one, but that’s not the family. Uh, the number of awards that people in the. In the honors program win every year, and how prestigious these are just stuff, you know, being a guy originally from Michigan that I’d never heard.

[01:14:06] bit: Yeah. It just 

[01:14:07] Joe: blew me away. My son was like, yeah, not for me, but my daughter, you know, her mind completely changed and she’s very now a proud Razorback. Uh, loved her time there. Now, this summer she’s working at Harvard while she does her master’s program at Brandeis, out on the, out in Boston. Yeah. But she, um, just loved it, but it surprised the hell outta me.

[01:14:26] It was not anywhere close to our radar. I’m like, university of Arkansas, eh, I, eh, 

[01:14:31] OG: yeah. There’s a number of schools. Uh, I was talking to another friend of mine who has a child who’s a senior. Another thing that we hadn’t really considered is the schools that have automatic admissions or, or, you know, automatic scholarship based on grades and scores.

[01:14:47] And Alex is definitely smart enough to kind of fall into that group. In fact, what made me bring it up with this friend of mine just out of, you know, hey, we got this email, was a college, had sent us an email saying, we have your student’s information. Yeah, he should definitely apply here. Really, we’re not interested in an essay or, or any of that sort of stuff, but you should apply.

[01:15:07] Like you can skip all that stuff and just, you should just apply. Like, that was the massive like wink, wink, nudge, nudge, you know? Yeah. Tell us you’re interested and we can show you how much money we’d give you. Um, you know, big 12 schools. So I was like, oh, I wonder if that’s in other places. And so I was talking to this other friend, he goes, oh yeah, it’s such and such school.

[01:15:24] If you’ve got this GPA, if you’re auto in, you know, we’re thinking of the big schools, you know, like the UTS and the Michigans and you know, those smaller ones like Harvard, he wants to go to a big 

[01:15:32] Joe: school. 

[01:15:32] OG: Yeah. I mean any of those schools, any Big 12 school or SEC schools a big school, you know what I mean?

[01:15:37] Yeah. Like maybe not Vanderbilt, 

[01:15:39] Joe: I, but I’m just saying my niece is in the same situation, but she is almost exclusively these very small. Liberal arts colleges, like just she, she wants nothing to do. Her dad took her to, now this is, this is part of the problem. Her dad went to Ohio State and took her to Ohio State.

[01:15:56] She’s like, hard pass. Which I agreed. Yeah. 

[01:15:58] OG: Well, everybody would say that if they had to. I mean, I’m convinced that most people are just like forced there against their will. 

[01:16:05] Joe: They gotta be, they must have some parent that like her dad. 

[01:16:07] OG: Speaking of Ohio State, I know you’re, you know, it’s not a political show.

[01:16:12] We’re not talking about it, but I know that you pay attention to it. So I’m curious, did you watch a couple weeks ago the Republican convention and some of the speeches, did you have catch? I watched a 

[01:16:21] Joe: little bit of it 

[01:16:22] OG: or some of them. So there was a section, uh, the vice president candidate is from Ohio. I don’t know if you caught all this, but I thought it was very well played out from, you know, a guy from Michigan who’s now in Texas.

[01:16:35] He goes up there, you know, they all the MPTs are ladies and gentlemen, you’re vice president, the next vice president, you know the whole thing. Yeah. Right. And so all the people, and he does the, oh, where’s my Ohio people? And they’re going, oh h And he’s like, I, oh, it’s like the stupid thing Ohio people do.

[01:16:49] And uh, and he goes, he goes, they did it twice. He goes, all right, hold on, hold on, hold on. I appreciate the love, but we gotta get Michigan on board too. Really. And then like the Michigan people are like going, let’s go blue. Let’s go blue. It was just kind of like this big Ohio, Michigan thing, which was kind of funny.

[01:17:04] And then he dovetailed into his speech after that. But I just thought it was like, okay, that, that’s a, that’s a thing that like a 30-year-old would kind of have a pulse of, which I thought was pretty. Of all the things that happened in the last three weeks or four weeks of in the, like, that was the most levity anyway, I thought was, 

[01:17:20] Joe: we should, by the way, I do know there’s a bunch of people that are, uh, probably doing dumb stuff with their money just based on politics and, and obviously, and we, we, you know, we called this a year ago og, that things were gonna heat up and all of a sudden people are, oh my god, my money.

[01:17:34] Oh my, go back and listen to our episode from a year ago because I was just listening to it. And this thing, this thing plays, like, we wrote it yesterday, like all the comments. Make you think, oh, they must have, this is current, well, it is current, but I think we called it. This is, uh, episode 1435. Just go back and listen to episode 1435 if you’re worried about you and your money.

[01:18:00] And you’re gonna hear experts from Fidelity, investments from T Row Price, and, uh, behavioral economists, uh, colleague of Dr. Crosby, Dr. Brad Klotz. And the three of them talk about what you should and shouldn’t do with your money in an election year. And that is, it’s so, it’s so funny to go back and listen to it now.

[01:18:21] I’m like, wow. Called it, yeah. Yeah. But you know, there’s people OG with their finger on the trigger right now going, oh my God, that my world is just, yeah. I’m seeing it on social media every day. Some people are gonna make some big mistakes and regret. Yeah. Every minute of it. All right, we gotta go. We’ll see you on Wednesday.

[01:18:38] We got a fantastic headline on Wednesday. Things Changing at Vanguard. For those of you Vanguard Loving Stackers out there. Times are a changing. What’s changing? A changing. We’ll have that for you and what you should do about it. But for now, Doug, what should we have learned today? 

[01:18:55] Doug: So what’s stacked up on our to-do list for today?

[01:18:58] First, take some advice from Dr. Daniel Crosby. How much money do you have? Turns out that’s not as important as how much life you’re gonna live. Second, wanna find wealth? Well, just like your chem partner in high school told you, you can’t be trusted. So stop trusting yourself to invest, set up insurances or do your estate plan or plan it all.

[01:19:21] Just automate it and work on the process and your winds will begin happening. But the big lesson, maybe I should hang out with robbers more. One broke into my house last night and told me he was looking for the money, so I joined him.

[01:19:40] Thanks to Dr. Daniel Crosby for joining us today. Check out our show notes to find links on where you can learn more about him. At Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the Property of SB podcasts, LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends.

[01:20:02] You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. 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.

[01:20:21] 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.