Stop Chasing Hot Real Estate or IPO Trends and Start Building Wealth (SB1786)

A new year has arrived, and with it comes a fresh wave of hot takes, bold predictions, and “can’t miss” investing ideas. Joe Saul-Sehy and OG step back from the noise to discuss what clearly doesn’t work and then to focus on what actually helps you build wealth in 2026 and beyond.

Rather than chasing hot trends, they revisit the timeless rules that have quietly done the heavy lifting through every market cycle. Why diversification still matters even when it feels boring. Why IPO hype and speculative real estate deals often disappoint. How consistency beats cleverness far more often than most people expect.

From there, the conversation shifts into a practical framework Stackers can use no matter what the market throws their way. Joe and OG walk through the proper order of investing decisions: start with clear goals, build the right asset allocation, choose appropriate asset selections, and then layer in tax strategy. By putting taxes in the right place (after the big structural decisions), they explain how to improve outcomes without letting tax avoidance distort the entire plan.

The episode also digs into real-world traps that tend to surface when uncertainty rises. Real estate crowdfunding. Penny stock temptation. Misunderstood property tax increases. The guys break down where people get tripped up and how to protect yourself without becoming overly cautious or frozen by fear.

Just as important, Joe and OG explore the difference between luck and skill in investing stories. If you’ve ever felt behind because someone else’s risky move worked out, this discussion brings perspective and relief by reminding Stackers what sustainable progress actually looks like.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why timeless investing principles matter more than 2026 predictions

• How diversification truly reduces risk and where people misuse it

• The dangers of IPOs, penny stocks, and “exclusive” real estate deals

• The correct order of smart investing decisions: goals first, asset allocation next, asset selection after that, tax strategy layered on last

• How to think about tax efficiency without letting taxes drive the plan

• What new homeowners often misunderstand about property taxes

• How to spot luck masquerading as skill in investing success stories

• Ways to stay confident and consistent when markets feel uncertain

If you’re looking to start 2026 grounded, informed, and focused on the moves that actually matter, this episode delivers a steady, practical roadmap without hype, fear, or shortcuts.

Listen for the principles that hold up when markets misbehave and the small mistakes that quietly derail otherwise solid plans.

FULL SHOW NOTES: https://stackingbenjamins.com/real-estate-scam-companies-1786

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 Headline

• How a Push for More IPOs Fueled a Wave of Scams (Wall Street Journal)
• Yieldstreet real estate bets leave customers with massive losses (CNBC)

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Doug’s Trivia

• If you bought a signed copy of Bruce Springsteen’s first album (Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.) for $10 in 1973 and sold it today for $10,000, what is the name of the tax you’d have to pay on the $9,990 gain?

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Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?

• Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).

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Join Us Wednesday

Tune in on Wednesday when we talk about how to make this year one to remember with time management researcher and expert, Laura Vanderkam.

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Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: GREATEST HITS WEEK double feature! How to Make $100M Dollars in 2025 – Part 2 (with Alex Hormozi) SB1785

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Joe: You know, it’s a great thing to do on a Monday morning. Start off your day recording early with, uh, leftover Santa Claus chocolates. You guys want one eating Santa? Yeah, 

[00:00:09] OG: I was gonna say, you know, we’re recording this just a smidge early and apparently whatever it is that you do on New Year’s Eve is the thing that you’re gonna do the whole year.

[00:00:19] OG: Oh boy. So cheers to that. Everybody. Oh boy. What’s in that coffee 

[00:00:25] Doug: og? 

[00:00:25] OG: What? 

[00:00:26] Doug: Drinking 

[00:00:26] OG: alone. 

[00:00:27] Doug: Og. Is that what you’re gonna do for the rest of the year? Podcast? Podcasting. 

[00:00:30] OG: Podcasting is what I was saying. He’s 

[00:00:32] Joe: got, he’s got two friends here with him watching him drink. Oh, podcasting. Gotcha. Mine’s out 

[00:00:36] OG: of the gutter.

[00:00:38] Joe: You know what else we’re gonna do all year long? We’re going to begin our Monday shows by saluting the troops on behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union, and the men and women make a podcast in mom’s basement. Here’s to the people who helped us. All over the holiday, stay safe and through 2025, and I know it’s gonna happen in 2026.

[00:01:00] Joe: Thank you so much. Let’s go stack some Benjamins together now, shall we? Thanks everybody. 

[00:01:06] trailer: Here’s the song that we’d like to do for all the younger set of people, the teenagers and what have you. This one’s called Vacation Zoe.

[00:01:27] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:01:41] Doug: I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Doug, and let me be the first podcaster to welcome you to a new year. Did you miss us last week? Well, we are back for 2026 and better than ever, let’s kick off this shiny new 12 months with some headlines ripped from the press, problems in real estate, land scam companies. People are tricked into investing in Yep, new year old problems.

[00:02:05] Doug: And we’ll tell you how to keep your portfolio upright and rolling toward better times. You want more? Okay. We’ll bring it. I’ll also keep the real estate theme rolling with our TikTok minute and just when you thought that was all we had. I’ll amaze you with a spoonful of Shareworthy trivia and now two guys who have already forgotten 2025 because they are so 2026, it’s Joe O and OG 

[00:02:40] Joe: 2025.

[00:02:40] Joe: Is that even a thing? We are so over it. We’re so absolutely over it. Hey everybody, happy New Year. Welcome back to the Stacky Benjamin Show. Super happy you’re here with us. I am Joe Saul Sea. Hi, and I’m joined every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by this gentleman across the table from me. Mr. OG is here. How are you brother?

[00:03:01] OG: I was just thinking that my wife’s grandfather just celebrated his 99th birthday at the end of last 99 last year in November, and he was born in 1926 and you think back from like 1900 to 1926 and you think like that is so much time. I, it’s so much time ago, but like all the stuff that happened in that, those 

[00:03:23] Doug: 26 years, between 19, 26 years, 1900 and yeah, I got it.

[00:03:25] Doug: Right. 

[00:03:26] OG: Yeah. That’s basically where we are in the two thousands. Oh yeah. Shut the hell up. And everybody here’s like, yeah, 2000. I was like, you know, four days ago we just, you So, uh, we are a quarter century into this century. That’s, that’s wild. 

[00:03:42] Joe: How do your goals change when you’re 99 years old? You like, I just gotta make it our 12 months.

[00:03:46] Joe: Like, I just gotta see the three digits, man. I gotta watch that odometer rule. He’s 

[00:03:50] OG: in, he’s in great shape. He’s, uh, physically, you know, some things going wrong, but mentally sharp as a t and lives on his own still and everything. 

[00:03:59] Joe: That’s great. Cheryl has a 96-year-old uncle who’s the same. Just That’s great.

[00:04:03] Joe: Super sharp. Fun to talk to when you talk to him. Fact, you forget he’s 96. Yeah, you totally forget. It’s amazing. Well, guess what it is 2026. And while we are getting days older than we were just a few days ago, say you should 

[00:04:16] OG: have some short term goals. You should have some 2026 goals, but you maybe 27 and 2050 as well.

[00:04:23] OG: Even if you are 99, hell with it. You might as well have some 20, 40 goals. Why wouldn’t you? You absolutely should have 20, 40, 20, 

[00:04:30] Joe: 50 goals. Come on. Uh, the theme today is it’s a new year, but the old rule still apply. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Same rule’s gonna apply in 2026 that applied in 2025 and before, and I bet, uh, Mrs.

[00:04:42] Joe: OGs grandpa would say same rules that applied in in 1947 or 1962, whatever it is. Also, finally, the team you’ve trusted with your money talk has created a product to protect your credit, your identity, and your privacy. You know how much OG and I like talking about insurances and emergency funds, and that’s why we’re locked in.

[00:05:07] Joe: Someone today is having a really, really bad new year because their credits wrecked, their identity’s been stolen while the Stacking Benjamin’s vault. Love saying those words does so much more than that. Run. What if scenarios before big purchases that affect your credit cut unnecessary subscriptions get off dark web list.

[00:05:26] Joe: We built it for us, but you can get it too. We call it the Stacking Benjamins vault. Go to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash vault to take control and lock down your financial life. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash vault gets you there. Super excited about that. That is new for 2026. The vault, things that aren’t new are people scamming you on your money, people telling you you can get rich faster.

[00:05:50] Joe: And that’s the topic today we’re gonna dive into. So we’re gonna hear from a couple of our sponsors who keep things rolling here in mom’s basement. And then after them, OG Doug and I gonna dive into what’s new is 

[00:06:04]  headlines: old and what’s old is new.

[00:06:15] Joe: Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. This is written by Jonathan Wheel. How a push for more IPOs fueled a wave of scams. Can you believe that? OG IPOs, initial public offerings for people who dunno what that are. These are new. Well, not necessarily new companies, og.

[00:06:34] Joe: These are just companies that are new to the stock market that people can invest in. That’s what an IPO is. 

[00:06:38] OG: Yeah. It’s uh, instead of it being privately held, now it’s available for public sale. 

[00:06:44] Joe: So the government got involved. We’re here from the government. We’re here to help. Of course. So here’s what the government did to help us all.

[00:06:50] Joe: US Government has tried to address the long decline in stock exchange listings. Fewer and fewer companies being listed publicly by relaxing the rules for small public companies. So it gives us more opportunities, OG gives us more options and companies to invest in, but this approach creates a persistent risk, more stock scams.

[00:07:11] Joe: The commissioner of the SEC Paul Atkins is pushing to further ease the reporting obligations for many smaller companies under a 2012 statute called the Jobs Act, which gives special treatment to quote emerging growth companies. So if you call yourself og, an emerging growth company, you are likely 

[00:07:30] OG: to, I’m sure it’s more than just you calling yourself.

[00:07:32] OG: There’s probably some amount of, uh, rules around you. Don’t, 

[00:07:35] Joe: you don’t just get to call yourself. Hey, hey, guess what I am? Yeah. We are now a crypto podcast. Mm-hmm. We have our own NFT, our NFTs still a thing. Do those exist anymore? Is that a, is that a deal? 

[00:07:46] OG: Like all the monkey ones? I bet you can get ’em cheap.

[00:07:48] Joe: Yeah, yeah. You might be able to score a deal on those. The law gives special treatment though to emerging growth companies. So, but at the same time that Atkins OG is trying to encourage emerging growth companies, he’s also leading a fresh attack on stock frauds targeting individual investors. Listen to this since late September, the SEC suspended trading in 12 companies stocks, which is more, that’s more suspensions than in the previous four years combined.

[00:08:19] Joe: The SEC cited potential manipulation that appeared to be aimed at inflating the stock prices and volume. This is a big thing, especially I think with new investors and we’re seeing the Robin Ification of Stocks og, where it becomes, you know, betting some companies which truly aren’t companies. These are just people who are like, Hey, let’s take advantage of the fact that people just wanna bet on the new hot thing.

[00:08:44] OG: Reminds me, it sounds like, anyway, like penny stock stuff is this, is this kind of what Sure what it is maybe, or 

[00:08:49] Joe: All 12 companies are quote, emerging growth companies classified, to your point, they follow all the rules in the jobs act from 2012, but they’re not American companies. This is the wild thing.

[00:09:00] Joe: All 12 of these companies that were suspended based in Asia, four in Hong Kong, one in China, 10 went public this year and two last year on the Nasdaq, all 12 initially went public, which you nailed it as penny stocks. 

[00:09:18] OG: Well, the interesting thing, you know, I think what people misunderstand with low priced shares, penny stocks or something, when you look at it and you say, oh my gosh, the stock is trading at a nickel I can buy.

[00:09:33] OG: Oh, it’s gotta do 

[00:09:33] Joe: is go to 10 cents. 

[00:09:34] OG: Yeah. I can buy, you know, a thousand dollars worth and if this thing goes to a dollar, you know I make a gajillion dollars. While that’s true. The math is the math. There’s a reason that the price is where it is. My, uh, my brother worked in a stock brokerage company, uh, years ago and had a client at his branch.

[00:09:53] OG: That was a kinda older days when people would come to the office to do trades and that sort of thing. But anyways, he had a customer at his branch that was buying this penny stock because he had the same idea. Like, oh, I just, this stuff’s like a nickel, like this. This is almost like fun money. It’s gambling, right?

[00:10:08] OG: Like if I put five grand into a slot machine or five grand into a penny stock, you know, I probably have the same outcome potential. Fast forward some time. And, and the stock actually did appreciate a little bit, you know, it had gone from whatever, and on paper he had made a pretty good profit. So he came in, he says, I wanna sell my stock.

[00:10:25] OG: And my brother got to tell him, I’m sorry, sir. You are now a majority owner of the company. Oh my goodness. Really? And you’re required to file public disclosure forms before you sell your stock. Because he was, he was buying so much of it that he was over 10%. Do you know what the total was? The total amount of money?

[00:10:45] OG: I don’t remember. It was in the tens of thousands of dollars. Not in the hundreds 

[00:10:49] Joe: of thousands even. No, 

[00:10:49] OG: it’s not like he, it’s not, he wasn’t Warren Buffet, you know, owning 10% of American Express or something. No, no, no. Yeah, this was his own little, little thing. But his amount that he had put in was in the tens of thousands, and it was worth the hundreds of thousands it had done, you know, he bought it for a penny and had rows to 10 cents.

[00:11:04] OG: Well, basically he was buying the, his own float, you know, like he just saw it go up because he was the only one buying, and people were like. I don’t know this. Steve will buy it from me for 2 cents. S Steve will buy it for five purchase. That’s crap. He was the only one buying. But anyway, so it had gone up.

[00:11:20] OG: But now he was a majority owner, or not majority owner, but he was a, a, a big purchaser. And so now he had to have, uh, he had disclose his, his sales in advance. 

[00:11:29] Joe: Imagine, I didn’t expect this to go this way, og, but imagine what you can do. Like when you become an owner at that big a level, there are some things you could, you could start demanding things of management.

[00:11:40] OG: Yeah. Yeah. I’m, I wanna be on the board, man. 

[00:11:42] Joe: You see these activist investors could, could you imagine 

[00:11:46] OG: like you own $7,000 of some Asian penny stock, right? Right. And you’re like, I wanna see at the board, 

[00:11:53] Joe: who is this? Joe Saul-Sehy from Vicksburg, Michigan originally. It’s now in Texarkana, who owns 12% of our company.

[00:12:00] Joe: Uh, Leia. Listen, uh, they’re 

[00:12:02] OG: like, well, we’ll meet at Denny’s on Tuesdays. It’s BYOB. 

[00:12:08] Joe: I need a car allowance now ’cause I’m a top shareholder and I gotta get to all these different meetings, due diligence meetings about the stock. 

[00:12:16] OG: Great news, it’s fraud. There’s no meetings 

[00:12:19] Joe: when it comes to these penny stocks.

[00:12:21] Joe: It reminds me of, you know, one of the first books that got Cheryl, my spouse interested in personal finance was a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad, which OG you’ve read and I don’t know, Doug, have you read? Rich Dad, poor Dad? I have not. It is a fine book and I can see why it’s lasted because this idea of the Rich Dad and I don’t, should I say spoiler alert to people to fast forward if you’re gonna read the book’s been out forever.

[00:12:47] Joe: So if you haven’t read it yet, just the big takeaway is the Rich Dad tries to accumulate assets while the poor dad. Works his butt off working for somebody else and being taxed very, very heavily and never having any assets, really living a lifestyle where he’s much more in the rat race. So he’s learning from these two older, uh, gentlemen, these two mentor figures of his, I love that part of the book.

[00:13:14] Joe: The big problem with Rich Dad, poor Dad OG that I have is at the end of the book, Robert Kiyosaki goes, so here’s what you gotta do. You gotta invest in penny stocks. Because, you know, you buy stocks for, to your 0.50 cents and they go to 10 cents. Like you could lose on nine of them, but the 10th one’s gonna make up for all that.

[00:13:35] Joe: So just buy a bunch of funny stocks. I, I read that 

[00:13:37] OG: book. I do not remember that being in the book, but, but maybe I just never finished it. 

[00:13:41] Doug: I know that, I know it was pretty controversial. I didn’t know that was why, but I could see no, like, that would be one of the key things that might make some people, huge fans and some people more conservatively say No, no, he, 

[00:13:52] OG: his controversy has come in the last, I don’t know, 15 years, mainly around precious metals and cryptocurrency and that sort of thing.

[00:13:59] OG: He’s actually 

[00:13:59] Joe: gone the opposite way. I mean, he’s, Robert Kiyosaki’s always calling doom and gloom around every corner. In this case, he was like, Mr. Pedal to the metal, buy that and, uh, and flip inexpensive houses. 

[00:14:12] OG: Yeah. Real estate was the. Major. 

[00:14:14] Joe: Those were his two solutions. He’s the 

[00:14:15] OG: one that’s famously said online.

[00:14:17] OG: You know, if you owe the bank $10 million, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, that’s their problem. 

[00:14:24] Doug: Right? That was just a few years ago. 

[00:14:26] OG: I’m sure other people said that, but Des made famous with that. But the central thesis of Rich Dad Pured, I think is instead of, and this is the, this is one of the analogies that I remember from the book.

[00:14:38] OG: Let’s say that you wanted to buy a sports car, right? You know, you’re 40. You’re like, Hey, it’s gonna get me a Porsche and there are $50,000. His point was, don’t go take $10,000 outta your bank account, or $20,000 outta your bank account. Go get a loan for 30 K on this, you know, sports car. Instead, take $20,000, go buy a $200,000 rental property that is gonna kick off $700 a month of profit.

[00:15:05] OG: That’s the car payment that you have to get. Basically flip it around instead of buying things that are depreciating, buying things that are gonna cost you money. Take that money, invest it into an asset that’s gonna produce a return, and then use the return for consumption. Like, because, because the return will continue if you own the rental property, in theory.

[00:15:25] OG: Right? It, you know, you get the $700 forever, eventually, you know that cash flows out positive and accounts for the car payment. 

[00:15:33] Joe: Yeah. Our friend Alan Corey, when he was on the show OGA few years ago, he’s now a big time real estate investor. He just hated paying bills. I mean, I love this story. He hated paying bills.

[00:15:43] Joe: So he is like, I’m gonna buy a house that will make my electric payment, then I will buy a house that will pay my groceries, then I will buy. And, and he didn’t think of it as an asset. He thought about it as another bill. He didn’t have to pay that the asset would pay for him. 

[00:15:56] OG: So he, there was a guy when I was an early planner at American Express.

[00:16:00] OG: And you would know who this is Joe, and I can’t remember his name now, but he was in Detroit, you know, he was an older planner, had been around for a hundred years. And those were back in the days of commission products. And he was, I remember him talking to the younger advisors, like, don’t let anything go.

[00:16:16] OG: You know, if your, your client could use a two year cd, make sure they buy that two year CD from you. And, and somebody said, oh, well that’s, that’s not a big deal. That’s only, you know, a dollar commission a month. Like, who cares? And he pulls out his statement, and maybe you’ve even told this story too, so maybe he’s, maybe he’s, uh, he, he used this more than once, but then he pulled out his, his comp statement and said, well, these $2, you know, see I’ve done 10 of these, that’s $20 that pays my electric bill, and then here’s this page and here’s the 10 of those that I did, and that’s $200 and that pays, you know, that’s a great way of thinking about it.

[00:16:54] OG: Set aside the commission piece. But I’m saying like, if you can find something that can pay a bill instead of consumption, you can use it from an asset. That’s a fun way to think about your lifestyle. 

[00:17:05] Joe: And I think that’s why so many people are attracted to real estate, which is why I wanna pivot, because real estate is in our second headline, og.

[00:17:13] Joe: This comes to us from, uh, CNBC when invest like the 1% fails. 

[00:17:19] OG: Mm. God, I love this article. 

[00:17:20] Joe: A famous piece. Now I really feel like 

[00:17:23] OG: this, as I told you so 

[00:17:24] Joe: from uh, 2025, how yield streets real estate bets left customers with massive losses. Can 

[00:17:32] OG: we go back? Can we check tape? Can we do this? Is there, is there like a search function in Stacking Benjamin’s archive?

[00:17:39] OG: Yeah. In 2019 when we’re like, this is a scam, don’t do it. And people, I remember people writing going, oh no, I’m getting all this cash. It’s really great. Like we’ve seen this movie, it ends badly, but carry on. Tell us how it goes, Joe. Tell us how it goes. 

[00:17:55] Joe: Well, I don’t recall us pointing at Yield Street, but we did point at one of their competitors.

[00:17:59] OG: Oh yeah. Fundrise, they’re all the same. 

[00:18:01] Joe: Yeah. Fundrise, we, we, we a hundred percent pointed at Fundrise. And by the way, Fundrise is still around. I don’t think Fundrise is a scam, but I do think that they’re a hundred percent it is. It’s just like this. It’s deceptive advertising. Absolutely. Just incredibly deceptive advertising.

[00:18:15] Joe: Yeah. Far riskier than pe. I remember on the front page, og, remember it said, engineered for superior results. I’m like, oh, every other real estate investor is engineering for mediocre results. You’ve got this asset that’s old as time, and you finally picked the luck on something that people before you weren’t able to do really.

[00:18:34] Joe: So this is the piece when Justin kli stumbled upon an AB for YieldStreet back in February, 2022, he said it was the company’s tagline that stuck in his head, right? Engineered for superior results. Mm-hmm. For Fundrise. This one says, invest like the 1%. The startup said the ad spoke to his desire to build wealth and diversify away from stocks, which were then in free fall.

[00:18:56] Joe: CLS said. YieldStreet says it gives retail investors such as cls, access to the types of deals that were previously only to the domain of Wall Street firms or the ultra rich. So cls, 46-year-old financial services worker living in Miami, logged onto the Yield Street platform where a pair of offerings jumped out to him.

[00:19:16] Joe: He invested $400,000 in two real estate projects, luxury apartment building in downtown Nashville, overseen by former WeWork, CEO, Adam Newman’s family office. That seems like, oh yeah, 

[00:19:27] OG: that’ll go great. 

[00:19:29] Joe: But at the time that seemed like a layup 

[00:19:31] OG: 2022 WeWork is hot. Oh wait, it was in 2022. I gotta find the book.

[00:19:36] OG: Was it already gone in 2022? Absolutely. 

[00:19:40] Joe: My God, in 2000 was like four days ago in a three building renovation in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York. Each project had a targeted annual return. Wait for it of around 20%. 

[00:19:56] OG: Yeah. By the way, uh, Adam Newman resigned in 2019. 

[00:20:00] Joe: Shut up. Really? 

[00:20:01] OG: Yeah. 

[00:20:02] Joe: Oh my God. 

[00:20:05] Doug: Where does the time go?

[00:20:06] Doug: Yeah, it’s a good docudrama that you can watch about that. 

[00:20:10] OG: Yeah. The other interesting thing about this piece here is the TLDR is they ran outta money. They’re running out of money. They’ve never had money. Everything is eaten up in fees. There’s no liquidity. And so they changed their name. They just went out.

[00:20:26] OG: We’re just a new company now. I, I remember reading some piece about it where it said, you know, it’s more, more encapsulates what we’re trying to do. You know, it’s definitely not the fact that we’ve completely destroyed the lives of thousands of investors across the country, and our name is really, really bad.

[00:20:44] OG: But it’s definitely, so what is the new company name? Willow. Okay. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I think that was the theme of your show today, Joe. 

[00:20:56] Joe: Well, let’s talk about this. Can we just start at the beginning here? Invest like the 1%, like you don’t want to invest like the 1%. 

[00:21:04] OG: Well, you know, and I was thinking about that because we’re at the beginning of the year.

[00:21:08] OG: Everybody’s making their forecast for what the year’s gonna be. Last year, you know, market was up pretty good. 17% s and p internationals were up bigger. You know, maybe this year’s minus, and anytime that there’s any amount of variability in. Stock prices, even if it’s just a short term decline. Like you know, we saw a couple times in 2025 out of the woodwork comes the marketing pitches of, you don’t have to take this.

[00:21:39] OG: You can get better returns without all this nonsense of volatility. And the reality to that is that there is no way to do that, period. Full stop. There is no way to have stock returns without stock volatility. It doesn’t exist. So if you’re getting stock returns or if they’re advertising stock returns, then you have to be getting stock volatility because the entire universe of people who invest the hundreds of trillions of dollars that trade on the open market in every economy in the entire world.

[00:22:21] OG: If there was a better thing than stocks, they would, the universe would do that. You know what I mean? Like, you have to believe that there’s not this one thing that, oh, we’re just gonna keep this a secret because we don’t want anybody, we don’t want the 99% to know this. So, um, we have this double secret thing that gets way better returns with no risk.

[00:22:46] OG: It doesn’t happen in real life. It doesn’t happen. Everything else is just purely playing on volatility or fear that people have of volatility, which by the way, is the reason that you get the returns that you get. Like, that’s, that’s the trade. That’s the trade. You have to be okay with waking up in a year from now and having 20% less in your portfolio.

[00:23:12] OG: That’s just the deal. If you buy a 

[00:23:15] Joe: stock for a nickel. Stocks trade for a nickel for a reason, and they’re delisted for a reason. They’re penny stocks on the pink sheets. Don’t need to go into all the definitions, what that is, but it’s because it’s a little tiny company that you might own 10% of with just a few thousand bucks.

[00:23:34] Joe: Yeah, that’s a risky bet. And so by increasing your, what’s called standard deviation, the ups downs, you can make a killing. But the inverse then is also true. You can lose your ass. You will 100% lose your ass or you’ll make a killing and you know what? You’re, you’re, you’re not gonna have to worry about it either way.

[00:23:55] Joe: I 

[00:23:55] OG: mean, everybody’s into gambling apps these days, right? I mean, it seems to basically be the, all the rage. So you know when you go look at the football game that’s this weekend, or the NBA games or something, you can build out a $10 bet that pays out a million dollars. You can say, if this team wins, if this guy has this many points, if this guy has this many touchdowns, if this guy throws this many interceptions, if this guy does this, this guy, you could just keep adding all of that stuff to it.

[00:24:25] OG: Right? And the betters or whatever the, the casinos, we’ll say, we’ll take your 10 bucks against a million for this range of things to happen. That’s the same thing, Joe, as what you’re talking about in terms of volatility. Standard deviation using a fancy word. You’re saying, I’m gonna take 10 bucks, I’m gonna turn it into a million.

[00:24:44] OG: Okay. Yeah. That’s doable. That’s doable. On DraftKings, you can build out that bet. You can even build it out where you’ve got a high, like in your mind, a high likelihood of getting it. It will it, it’s doable. What do you think the math wizards at DraftKings have figured out with your $10 bet? Is that your math skills are not strong?

[00:25:04] OG: They’re not as good as theirs. They’ve got it figured out that we can take these, this $10 because we’re gonna take $10 million of $10 bets like this before we have to pay one of them out. It’s probably more like a hundred million dollars of bets like this before we pay one of those out, you know? 

[00:25:21] Joe: We did this story a long time ago and you’re not hearing it anymore, but it’s not because it doesn’t exist.

[00:25:27] Joe: Remember the story we did a few years ago when these apps were just becoming big about how DraftKings have built these algorithms that were actively taking the other side of bets that were horrible bets that stupid people were making. So stupid person on one side, they built an algorithm that jumped in and bought the other side, which had a much higher likelihood of winning the bet.

[00:25:53] Joe: Really interesting. You know, that still happens today. I mean, that’s a huge, huge part of these apps is just preying on the stupidity as somebody who, who wants something for nothing. 

[00:26:04] OG: I mean, it’s not to say that it, to your point, it can hit, right. There’s the stories that you read about on Twitter. The the guy that put a hundred bucks on this guy to win the Masters, this guy to win the World Series games, this guy to win the Super Bowl, this guy to win the NCAA basketball championship, and there are three of those four in.

[00:26:20] OG: Their teams playing in the World Series, you know? And it’s like, it can happen, but it’s, it’s like that’s one guy. If it happened all the time, somebody in 

[00:26:29] Joe: Arkansas won over a billion dollars a couple weeks ago. Yeah. 

[00:26:33] OG: Must not have been you because we’re still here. 

[00:26:35] Joe: Damnit. I live 800 yards on the wrong side of the border.

[00:26:40] Joe: You’re like, joke jokes telling 

[00:26:40] OG: you I did win and I’m still here. 

[00:26:44] Joe: Would you tell anybody, uh, Cheryl and I talked about that. Would you tell anybody at all? I don’t think you could tell anybody. 

[00:26:51] OG: Like my son said, ’cause my oldest and I were talking about this. ’cause you know, I’m sure you guys put a dollar or $2, whatever it was in the Powerball.

[00:26:59] OG: Alex goes, what do you do if you win? And I said, well, you know, we talked a little bit about not telling anybody. He goes, oh, I wouldn’t tell anybody. But there would be signs, there would be signs. He is like, I might show up to school next week in a Ferrari instead of my Nissan Murano, or whatever we have, what happens?

[00:27:20] OG: Yeah, that’s great. The moral of the story back to the stock piece is you’re gonna hear more and more of this stuff if the, if 2026, I’m just, I’m just telling you, if 2026 has any amount of volatility in it, which inevitably it will, you’re gonna hear about how gold is the only hedge against inflation.

[00:27:38] OG: You’re gonna hear that you can protect your downside with buying annuities. You can invest like the 1% and have all these cool things that only only rich people know about, and it’s all, what, what would grandpa call it? Malarkey. It’s all malarkey. Malarkey. So love that term. Just put your money in the market and don’t touch it for the next a hundred years, but for God’s sake.

[00:28:00] OG: You could be like a Rockefeller. 

[00:28:02] Joe: Well, coming up in the second half of today show, well, not you, your kids or 

[00:28:04] OG: grandkids. 

[00:28:05] Joe: I do wanna dive into that OG. In the second half of today show we’re gonna talk about, we talked a lot about what you shouldn’t do. Let’s flip that script. What should you do? We’re going to talk about three big a hundred dollars terms, asset allocation, asset selection, tax strategy.

[00:28:19] Joe: We’re gonna have OG put those in order for us later on. We also have a TikTok minute with another lesson about real estate. I know OGs really excited about our going back to TikTok ’cause he loves it so much. Uh, we’re going to dive into that. Before all that, we’re gonna take a quick break here because Doug’s been warming up in the wingspan.

[00:28:41] Joe: I love the jumping jacks over by the hot water heater. 

[00:28:45] Doug: That’s crazy that you just used that and shared that, Joe, because I was playing categories recently over the holidays with people that were in and the letter was j. One of the categories was things you do every day. And I wrote jumping jacks and it got struck down.

[00:29:04] Doug: You’re kidding me? Yeah. I’m like, there are people who do jumping jacks every day. 

[00:29:09] OG: Jack 

[00:29:09] Doug: L. Lane. They didn’t believe that I was one of them. But there are people, 

[00:29:13] Joe: is that a name for the past? Is that just, I remember being like 25 going, that dude’s old 

[00:29:20] OG: and ripped. Right. You could hope to look as good as he did.

[00:29:23] Doug: Yes. But that jumpsuit, man, that jumps, he looked sweet in that jumpsuit, that jumpsuit. 

[00:29:28] Joe: Imagine Jack Leal doing jazz hands. Speaking of J words, 

[00:29:32] Doug: it was a little awkward in that jumpsuit. It was a little awkward when he reached above his head. Yes. Yeah. And stretched it all. Clothing stretched in ways you didn’t want that to, Jack, 

[00:29:40] Joe: put the hands down.

[00:29:41] Joe: No. 

[00:29:43] Doug: What do 

[00:29:43] Joe: we got today, Doug?

[00:29:48] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And remember last year in that awkward thing that we’re definitely not digging back up again? No, I’m not gonna tell everybody what happened. Both my lawyer and septic tank guy forbid it, but 2026 is not. Gonna be like that. Is it stacker? You’re gonna step up, you’re gonna press on the gas.

[00:30:09] Doug: You are gonna show ’em all. Hold on. You know what? Who cares about them? You are gonna show that person who’s most important, that person in the mirror staring back at you awkwardly. ’cause you’re in a public restroom. That’s right. You are gonna show the a number one person that this year is your year.

[00:30:29] Doug: Let’s tackle the new year like a boss, shall we? And we’ll get started with this because today is the anniversary of the day. The boss, Bruce Springsteen. Bruce released his first album, greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey. If you purchased a signed copy on the day, he released it for $10 and sold it today for $10,000.

[00:30:50] Doug: What is the name of the tax that you’d have to pay on that sale? Of course you know this. I’ll be back right after I go Tell Joe’s mom, just how much you’re gonna rock 2026.

[00:31:10] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m guy who totally believes in you and future motivational speaker. ’cause I mean, let’s be honest, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, the boss who’s only second to you in my book, you are totally the boss, but he, you know, somehow got the nickname first. Maybe we’ll call you like the chief from now on or something, but the boss released his first album on today’s date in history and a legendary career was born just like you are launching something here in 2026, right?

[00:31:40] Doug: You and Bruce Springsteen have so much in common. If you bought Bruce’s first album way back in 1973 for $10, signed and sold it for 10,000 today, what is the name of the tax you’d have to pay on the gain of $9,990? It’s called the Capital Gains Tax and applies to most assets. You purchas. One notable exception, your primary residence is excluded from the first 250,000 of gain if you’re single and 500,000 if you’re married, filing jointly.

[00:32:13] Doug: But remember, this only applies to your primary residence. See, you’re already thinking ways to rock your taxes in 2026, aren’t you? And now your wingman on your quest to Better Money Habits this year. Definitely not your wingman in the bar back to Joe and og. Why not? We’ll help 

[00:32:32] Joe: you out. 

[00:32:33] Doug: We’ll help us stack her out.

[00:32:34] Doug: I’ve been in the bar with you. Never once has it been a good night. 

[00:32:38] Joe: See that one over there? We’ll help you out. Yeah. With terms like malarkey, like we flew out of our mouth, the first half of this show, what could go wrong? 

[00:32:47] Doug: You are not thinking about any shenanigans with this fella over here, are you? You don’t wanna engage in any Tom Foolery with him.

[00:32:56] Joe: That could, that would be a hoot. Nanny. Let’s do a TikTok minute. Our TikTok minute is the part of the show where we dive into a piece that a creator on TikTok or another social media platform made, which could be either brilliant or air quotes. Brilliant, Doug. Our first one of 2026, Tina from our team found this one.

[00:33:20] Joe: This is real estate we’re gonna be talking about. 

[00:33:22] Doug: Oh yeah. I mean, if it’s coming from Tina, she’s money. She’s amazing. So this thing is gonna be, you’re gonna change the direction of your life based on this one right here. I dunno about that. I’m pretty confident 

[00:33:32] Joe: you could have gone from motivational speaker to overselling it slightly when you hear it.

[00:33:38] Joe: But I will say this is interesting, and Tina actually pointed this out. She goes, some people know this, but for first time home buyers and if you’re buying your first house in 2026, I think this is a valuable lesson to learn about how, when you talked about capital gains taxes, Doug and capital gains exclusions.

[00:33:55] Joe: You also need to know when you’re buying a house about this little thing called, uh, real estate taxes. 

[00:34:03] trailer: Now this is the section that saves people thousands. How your taxes are calculated depend on whether you own the home or you’re buying it. If you already own a home, your taxes are the taxable value times the millage rate.

[00:34:18] trailer: If you’re buying a home, do not trust the seller’s tax bill. It’s capped tighter than your jeans At Thanksgiving. Your future taxes will be based on the SEV times the millage rate because the home UNC caps at the sale. That’s why the seller pays about $2,800 and you suddenly owe $4,600. 

[00:34:38] Joe: Yeah, don’t, don’t trust in a lot of states where that tax is capped and is gonna go up slowly.

[00:34:45] Joe: Og don’t trust that when you’re buying your house. That tax bill for you may be significantly different, as this gentleman said, than what it was for the previous homeowner. 

[00:34:56] OG: Definitely state specific that, uh, accent was very, very, very Michigan, so very Michigan, very, very Michigan 

[00:35:06] Doug: and, and he didn’t say anything about people freaking out.

[00:35:09] Doug: When they get that letter every year that says tax it in their home value is like $9,000. And they’re like, oh, I sold my house for a lot more than that. God, I got it can be confusing. 

[00:35:20] Joe: I got crushed last year on just property tax. I was like, are you kidding me? Really? 

[00:35:26] Doug: There’s no limit on how much it can increase in Texas.

[00:35:29] OG: Oh yeah, there is. There has to be. It’s a comical limit, 

[00:35:32] Doug: I think it’s called 

[00:35:33] Joe: The sky’s the limit. The sky’s the limit. 

[00:35:35] OG: Sky, it’s one limit. No, basically in Michigan, and maybe this has changed, but the last I remember in Michigan, the max increase was 3% in your Yeah, I think that’s right. Taxable value. So, and, and this is what the guy’s talking about here in this video, it’s like, let’s say that you buy your house for $200,000 and you live there for 15 years and this, the house price is gonna, you know, bounces around, right?

[00:36:00] OG: Some years is worth more, some years is worth less, whatever, but the most that the state can increase your taxable value is that 3%. So your tax value is 200,000 ’cause you buy it. But in then in year two it’s 206,000. And, and to your point, Doug, you’re like, well wait, my house is worth two 50 now. It’s like, I know that’s cool but we’re only gonna tax you on 2 0 6 and next year it’s two 12 or you know, whatever the 3% number is compound.

[00:36:27] OG: That leads to some problems because you have this slowly rising property tax bill. And like the author of the video said, when you list that online, it says, you know, how much are your taxes? You go, oh, we paid 2,800 bucks because I’ve had this small increase, but now I sell the house for $500,000. It gets recalculated.

[00:36:45] OG: And you start that 3% over at the 500 K in Texas, uh, the limit’s 10%, but it’s cumulative. So if this year is 20, they go, oh, well we can only use 10 and then next year’s zero, they go, oh, but we had 10 from last year, so it’s 10 again. So they can hold on to previous year overages to fill up last year’s bucket or this year’s bucket.

[00:37:08] OG: So it gets pretty high. But the current proposal, one of the proposals by the, uh, sitting governor as he’s, uh, trying the reelection, it’s also happening in Florida, is, uh, they’re trying to give the power to the localities. To decide whether or not they want to even have property tax. The proposal is to put it back in the localities to say, do we even want to have property taxes here?

[00:37:37] Joe: It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. 

[00:37:39] OG: I mean, there’s some arguments about this. Obviously you pay your house for 30 years, you know, and now you still owe $20,000 a year in taxes to live at your house, so. Different topic for a different day, I suppose. 

[00:37:53] Joe: Absolutely. But, uh, big thanks to Tina for sending that in.

[00:37:56] Joe: Well, 

[00:37:57] OG: TLDR property taxes suck. Yeah. And this is the time of the year when you pay them. 

[00:38:02] Joe: Well, you do these projections though, you know, you do these projections on what you think your cost is going to be around your house, and you forget. Property taxes in some states might go up. You forget maintenance costs.

[00:38:13] Joe: You’re gonna go in, oh my God, every time I’ve moved Home Depot, I feel like I need a frequent flyer card. Like, oh, do you have a Priority Lounge at the back of Home Depot for your customers that come here a lot? You know, you walk in like that old show, cheers, norm. It’s like, Joe, hey, you’re back for the 47th time today.

[00:38:32] Joe: People forget all of these other expenses when you purchase a new property. We talked in the first half of today’s show about what you shouldn’t do with your money. I wanna pivot that because we’re not the show about what you shouldn’t do. We want to talk about what you should do. And I think the number one thing that we talked about here, OG, was diversification.

[00:38:52] Joe: Diversification matters. Having money in a couple of penny stocks or in a couple yield street, uh, properties probably not a great idea unless, unless your primary goal is to get rich quick. If your primary goal is to get rich quick, then don’t diversify. But otherwise, if your goal is to get rich off of your income stream that you bring in, then do something safer with your money.

[00:39:21] OG: Well, I would challenge you on the, if your goal is get rich quick because the reality of investing in penny stocks or virtually any sort of alternative anything is most likely it’s get poor quick. I don’t think that get rich quick actually exists other than luck. By all means, if you wanna try the luck bucket, you can.

[00:39:45] OG: I was talking to, uh, a pilot the other day. We were talking about flying in some challenging weather and I was reflecting on this quote that I heard, or some variation of it, which was something like, you know, you have a luck bucket and an experience bucket and your goal is to fill up your experience bucket before you run out of your luck bucket.

[00:40:03] OG: You know, when you’re flying. Yeah. So, because you know, sometimes you use some luck and you’re like, oh, oh, that was a bad idea. Oh. But I think the same thing is kind of true with investing. Sometimes you’re gonna make a mistake and it’s gonna pay off. I think like the investing that we did when we bought the rental properties in Michigan and we had the apartment buildings, I think that that was more luck than it was experience and.

[00:40:30] OG: Efficacy. I mean, we bought a really dilapidated property that had some decent cash flow. We put a bunch of money into it, and then we got lucky that COVID hit and drove the price of the property up by 250% in a year and a half. And we got lucky that there’s some other idiot who was, I mean, uh, investor who was like, oh, I wanna buy all these things in the street.

[00:40:55] OG: Like this sounds like a good idea to like corner the market here. Then I got lucky because I knew the realtor who sold the other deal, and I called her and said, Hey, you know, I’d be interested in talking about it if your investor’s interested, dummies in investors interested. And she was like, I’ve got just the DUM investor for you.

[00:41:14] OG: And, and we got out. And then the thing like, you know, I don’t think that was because we were some magical investors. You know, we got lucky. We got lucky on the timing, on Lucky with COVID, but you know. Just how it turned out. Um, well, sure. But because that’s one property, 

[00:41:31] Joe: because that’s one property. So I got rich quick.

[00:41:34] Joe: It wasn’t because I was good. No, but the standard deviation on that deal is because you own one and not 10. If you had owned 10 of those properties, you would’ve taken your luck and it would’ve mitigated it down to more the mean, and you would’ve had less chance for that serendipity to actually hit. 

[00:41:53] OG: I mean Right.

[00:41:53] OG: So there is no such thing as get rich quick. It’s get lucky quick. Well, let’s talk about this though. And you have to make money, 

[00:41:59] Joe: right? Right. But this is all still about volatility. And I think that, I mean, if we take it the way that more real life example than betting the lottery or betting on a single apartment building, you can own five stocks.

[00:42:12] Joe: Or own five funds. Five funds, each one’s gonna have between maybe 150 to a thousand different companies in it. Mm-hmm. So you’re gonna own a lot of different stuff. Or five individual companies. Your portfolio, even if they’re all big companies, og, it’s gonna go up faster. It’s gonna go down faster. And a normal market owning five stocks, then owning five funds.

[00:42:36] trailer: Yeah. 

[00:42:37] Joe: I think diversification, truly, for the average investor who doesn’t wanna follow five stocks or trust serendipity is gonna be the way to go. But I do wanna be clear here. A lot of people listen to shows like ours because they want to find ways to get rich more quickly, and you are eliminating some of that serendipity in order to get some.

[00:43:00] Joe: More certainty, by all means. You’re not buying certainty, but you are buying the economy. You’re buying the, the long-term ability to grow your money in exchange for this volatility that is gonna, you know, wipe out most investors. 

[00:43:16] OG: Well, I, I mean, to some degree I think you are buying certainty if you give it enough time.

[00:43:21] OG: I think this just boils down to a person understanding or being okay with the fact that the power of compounding, the power of market returns you can’t see in advance. Like you just have to experience it. And I think that more people try to take bigger risks once or if they feel like they’re behind the eight ball.

[00:43:46] Joe: Yeah. 

[00:43:47] OG: And I want to just preach the message that you’re not behind. You have enough time and if you’re 50 and you haven’t started, like are you gonna retire at 55? Probably not. Like you’re not gonna probably do that unless you make an insane amount of money and change your lifestyle magically. But you still can retire at 65 or 70, like 15 years or 20 years is still a long freaking time.

[00:44:09] OG: You have to do some work, right? And if you’re 30 and all you’re seeing are Instagram posts of people on JSX flights and you think that they’re all flying private and you’re like behind, you’re not, bro. Like 30 year olds do not have money. There’s a few that do because they got lucky or because they got in at the right job at the right time and did the right stuff all the way.

[00:44:33] Joe: Which was pretty much the right thing to do is to buy a ring light and tell everybody how wealthy you are. 

[00:44:39] OG: Yeah. In some level. But again, it’s like if that person from 22 to 30 maxed everything out and lived within their means and like avoided all the temptation of being in your twenties, then yeah, that person probably at 30 has some good money.

[00:44:54] Joe: Doug, I’ve got a question for OG about order of operations, but you had your hand up. 

[00:44:59] Doug: Yeah. I mean just, you know, regular guy. Question over here. Uh, what’s a JSX flight? 

[00:45:04] OG: Yeah, that’s nothing that you, people in Michigan have. Don’t worry about it. 

[00:45:07] Doug: Okay. Alright. I don’t even know what a JSX flight is 

[00:45:12] OG: either.

[00:45:13] Doug: Yeah, I’ll just slink back into the corner. 

[00:45:14] OG: The backwoods of Texarkana don’t have it either. No. JSX is a, a airline that flies ember air one 70 fives I think. And basically they took out every other seat, 

[00:45:26] Joe: every seat’s. First class, 

[00:45:28] OG: they fly to select destinations out of. Dallas and Miami and New York and LA and Vegas and whatever 

[00:45:35] Doug: destinations I probably have never been to, nor will never be to, 

[00:45:40] Joe: I don’t know.

[00:45:41] Joe: Sounds fun. I mean, let’s set that as a goal, but my goal here, before we finish this up, guys, what 

[00:45:46] OG: I was making fun of was not the actual flights themselves, but people who take pictures on the flights going, look, I’m flying private. It’s like, no, you’re not. No, 

[00:45:52] Joe: it’s even better. Are those people that rent the fake airplane?

[00:45:56] Joe: Yeah. On the set in Los Angeles? Yeah. For X amount of money per hour to pretend they’re on that flight. Yeah. That’s who we’re making fun of. There are three different big terms that investors are gonna hear this year, OG. One is asset allocation. That’s how you diversify appropriately toward your goals.

[00:46:14] Joe: Next one is asset selection. Choosing the right. Actual investment, right? I saw a post just this last week on social media saying, actually in our basement Facebook group, somebody saying, Hey, I’ve been buying the total stock market index. Is there something else that’s more popular, I think was the term that I should be buying?

[00:46:33] Joe: Well, and I actually loved it. Our stackers actually helped this person saying, popular is not something that you, that you really want to use, you know, to get there. Uh, so I thought that was really helpful. Shout out to Rebecca who did that. Is it diversifying correctly first, buying the right investment first?

[00:46:52] Joe: Or is it your tech strategy first, like having the right Roth or pre-tax or type of investment for taxes? Can you put those three in order about the way we think about ’em? Which one should we think about first, second, third? 

[00:47:07] OG: I think that the first thing that you wanna do is you need to make sure that you investment goals and your investment return.

[00:47:15] OG: Is lined up with what stuff you have. So what I mean by that is when you look at the goal that you’re trying to accomplish, if we’re just using retirement and financial independence as a goal, let’s assume that’s out in the future. We need investments that have long-term growth potential out in the future.

[00:47:32] OG: And so that’s gonna eliminate some things from our selection list, right? ’cause we’ve got a big bucket of all these things that we can pick from. So you’re gonna remove things like cash and short-term fixed income, and things that don’t behave in a long-term or don’t belong in a long-term, you know, investment bucket.

[00:47:49] OG: So asset allocation, I think is clearly number one. Making sure that that’s in line with what your, uh, expected return is or your needed return for your goal. 

[00:47:58] Joe: And before you, yeah, and before you go on from asset allocation, I love your way of thinking is it isn’t so much about picking the right thing as it is about avoiding the wrong thing.

[00:48:08] Joe: Look at your portfolio. I remember when I was a financial planner just going, this doesn’t fit. This doesn’t fit. This doesn’t fit. Yeah, this doesn’t fit. 

[00:48:16] OG: Yeah. And how many times, Joe, did you meet with clients and how many times does our team meet with people that have cash sitting in their retirement account or short-term fixed income?

[00:48:26] OG: It’s like, well, I wanted to be diversified, so I picked the uh, you know, the whatever, the stable value fund in my 401k. I mean, I guess by definition you’re diversified, but you’re also using the exact wrong thing for the time horizon. Diversification isn’t about like picking one of everything. It’s picking between the things that are most appropriate for the timeframe of the goal.

[00:48:48] OG: If you add something that doesn’t belong, because the timeframe of the goal is incorrect, just flip that around. Think about it the other way. You wouldn’t diversify your cash reserve into technology stocks, right? You wouldn’t say like, well, I gotta be diversified, so, I mean, I gotta take my emergency fund.

[00:49:04] OG: I can’t all be in cash. I gotta diversify it. Um, uh, let me get some, uh, I don’t know. Um, let’s go Alibaba, right? You’re not gonna diversify that way. Why would you do it the other way? Because it’s way too volatile. Yeah. So if the first one is asset allocation, then the second one is definitely gonna be of the things that are left from your asset allocation.

[00:49:25] OG: Now what are you gonna, what are you gonna use? You know, big companies, small companies, US based ones, non-US based ones. And I think that for most people, you can get away with really kind of four or five buckets at most US companies, non-US. So that’s kind of two buckets right there. And then in those buckets, big companies, small companies, big companies, small companies, that’s four buckets.

[00:49:48] OG: And you get to pick, there’s no right or wrong answer to do this. You can use some math, you can use portfolio visualizer to get an efficient frontier calculation, but that’s always backward looking, right? So that’s just gonna, you know, you can add. What about fixed income? Okay, cool. What about real estate?

[00:50:05] OG: Okay, cool. Like you’re, you can add complexity to that or you can look at say, well, my s and p fund has some real estate holdings in it, so you know, I’m kind of getting some exposure there and good enough, you know, fine. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. 

[00:50:22] Joe: I think this is the part people overemphasize is that’s the fun part.

[00:50:26] Joe: Selection part. Well, it’s fun part, it’s, but once you get to the fact that you’re like, okay, I want to own an exchange traded fund. I wanna own a diversified position that some traders’ not trading in and out of that I’m just, I’m buying and I’m holding, which says exchange traded fund all over it. That’s the type of investment that does that.

[00:50:47] Joe: Once I know that, then people are like, oh, do I buy the Vanguard one? Do I buy the Fidelity one? Do I buy the iShares one? Do I buy the pick one? Pick one. I think people spend so much time going, do I buy the s and p 500 through this company versus through that company Y you can waste a ton of time where figuring out what doesn’t meet the goal or what the tax strategy is.

[00:51:12] Joe: To me, those are far more important things than whether you choose the iShares IVV versus the Vanguard, you know, version of the s and p 500, 

[00:51:23] OG: a hundred percent. Pick the one that suits whatever company you’re at. 

[00:51:28] Joe: I think then OG tech strategy is a little bit like asset allocation, where your tech strategy, it’s more make sure that you’re not messing this up by having money.

[00:51:37] Joe: You can’t, where you can’t get at it like, oh, I over optimized and now I, I’ve got cash in this tax bucket that, uh, uh, doesn’t really meet my goal. 

[00:51:47] OG: Well, this one’s far down the line in my opinion. I think far too many people will focus on tax stuff when it’s completely unnecessary. Famously, Dave Ramsey has this, uh, conversation with people about, well, I can’t pay off my house because I gotta get my tax deduction.

[00:52:05] OG: And he very astutely points out, you recognize the interest that you’re paying to the bank is more than the tax deduction you get. It’s like 

[00:52:15] Joe: people chasing reward points on their credit cards and carrying balances. What 

[00:52:18] OG: do you want more of? Money or you, it’s like, I was having a conversation with someone, I don’t remember who it was now, but they were talking about making a charitable contribution at the end of the year last year, right?

[00:52:30] OG: The end of 2025. You’re like, I gotta, you know, gotta lower my taxes. And it’s like, okay, cool. Are you charitably inclined? They’re like, what? I mean if I donate $20,000, I get a tax duck and I go, absolutely true. Of like 10,000. So do you want 20 grand in your bank account or do you want zero? Well, I don’t really want to give money away.

[00:52:53] OG: I’m not really charitably inclined. It’s like, well then pay the taxes. Like the tax bill. You end up with $17,000 in your bank account instead of zero, you know, by paying taxes. So pay attention to what you’re doing from a tax standpoint for sure. But don’t let the tax tail wag the dog. Obviously I would look at very easy things to do here.

[00:53:13] OG: I would make sure if possible, that my long-term growth things are in my Roth IRA. There’s a downside to that. The downside is, is that there can be long periods of time where the thing that’s supposed to grow the fastest doesn’t. And that can be really frustrating when you’re like looking at your IRA and you’re looking at your Roth IRA and you’re saying.

[00:53:36] OG: Well, I did it right. I put the, I put the really aggressive stuff in my Roth, but it’s not, it’s not, you know, it’s averaging 5%, but my regular IRA is averaging 10. Like it should be the other way around. Like I should be getting 10 or 15 in my Roth. So again, when you put specific asset classes, they’re not all gonna behave in the same way at the same time.

[00:53:57] OG: So you gotta be careful with that. I think that you wanna put your things that pay dividends instead of interest in your brokerage account. I like dividends. I think they’re spendable, I think they’re tax favorably versus things that have interest, which is taxed at a higher rate. You know, I’m okay with not having that in my taxable account if I need to have cash like returns or interest, like returns my, in my, uh, traditional ira.

[00:54:22] OG: So I think that there’s an opportunity there far more is made. On the strategy of tax deductions and of capital gains and forward thinking brackets. Then there is, I think, in making sure that my small cap value stocks and my Roth, 

[00:54:43] trailer: yeah, 

[00:54:44] OG: that’s a piece. But I think it’s a very, very, very small piece. Small tax planning is well beyond just asset location, which is what we’re talking about here.

[00:54:53] OG: Yeah, and way more on like forward looking like how do I qualify for the correct Medicare when I’m 65 and I have all this money and you know, I don’t want any surprises that will save you far more money in the future. 

[00:55:09] Joe: If you wanna dive more into topics like this one our own, Kevin Bailey writes our 2 0 1 newsletter that takes these 1 0 1 ideas dives in deeper with curated links to the best that, uh, we find on the internet.

[00:55:22] Joe: Stack Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 gets you our freight newsletter, comes out every week and, uh, you also find out when we’re going around the country in 2026. We have, uh, just a few things on the calendar right now, but that’ll be obviously developing and we generally try to make it to several cities every year to have some fun times, uh, celebrating with our community.

[00:55:44] Joe: Speaking of 

[00:55:44] Doug: celebrating, 

[00:55:45] Joe: yeah. 

[00:55:46] Doug: Yeah, Doug. Tucson, don’t give up on the group in Tucson. I’m coming to you. If you get yourself, get your act together. He just wants a burrito. I’m, he wants a, we’re going to Tony 30. Burrito three. That’s a, that is a deal breaker if that doesn’t happen. But Tucson, you’re being used.

[00:56:02] Doug: You’re being used by Doug. But I will be there. I will come to a meeting if you guys can get your act together. Now. We need at least five people in Tucson to get me there, 

[00:56:12] Joe: but Right. I’m, and if those five people tell five of their friends and then they tell five of their friends, the original five people get their burritos for free.

[00:56:20] Doug: Yeah, it just reduces the amount Each one has to contribute to buy me a burrito. 

[00:56:26] Joe: Well, as we’re celebrating, we end every show. If you’re new here, by celebrating our community, we talk about what’s going on in the neighborhood. We’ve gotten some interesting notes from our, our stacker community, Doug. 

[00:56:39] Doug: Yeah, Joe, we got some great ones.

[00:56:40] Doug: Stacker Gary shared his Spotify unwrapped results. Just wanna provide my unwrapped results. He says Stacking Benjamins was my number one podcast on the Spotify 2025 wrapped this year after listening to over seven. Hey, 

[00:56:55] Joe: that’s fantastic. 

[00:56:56] Doug: After listening to over 7,914 minutes, I can’t believe I haven’t learnt anything he says learnt.

[00:57:06] Doug: I never know when to use that, but I’m impressed Gary. Uh, he hasn’t learnt anything. Thanks for the greatest show in finance. And by the way, I’m a little confused about the Kit Kat. Which side is better? Mine has one side bigger than the other. Does that mean anything or you know, just for Doug? I corrected him.

[00:57:24] Doug: Gary, he had it wrong. It isn’t the kid Kat, it’s the Twix. It was the Twix. 

[00:57:29] Joe: It was the Twix, you, you, you wonder if Gary’s got a Twix as well, 

[00:57:33] Doug: right? 

[00:57:33] Joe: Maybe. I don’t 

[00:57:34] Doug: know. Are you a left side or a right side? 

[00:57:36] Joe: We had a lot of people share their Spotify unwrapped and it’s so thrilling to see some of our stackers spending so much time with us this year.

[00:57:43] Joe: Thank you so much for trusting us with your time. We know that it’s valuable and I love the fact that this year, speaking of Spotify, Spotify really stepped up with the ability for us to talk to people there and uh, chat back and forth. I know we can’t do that on Apple, which is really frustrating when somebody leaves us a review and I’m like, I can tell you why we were thinking that you might not like what we were thinking.

[00:58:06] Joe: Yeah. Which I can appreciate, but I love the fact that we can chat about, uh, the show and some of the making of the show and what’s going on in the community. I’m going to try in 2026 and I, but the keyword here is try ’cause you never know what’s gonna happen. But think of us the ability to post polls.

[00:58:22] Joe: And so we can put up polls, we can ask questions. I’m gonna try to do that more in 2026 ’cause I really enjoy the back and forth. I love it when we get replies to the stuff that we do here. Yeah, it makes it really fun to create new episodes. So thanks for that, Gary. Thanks to everybody who shared their Spotify, uh, unwrapped.

[00:58:40] Joe: So, so, so cool. We actually did our own version of Unwrapped in the 2 0 1 last week as well about some of the crazy statistics and stuff that happened here in mom’s basement. 

[00:58:49] Doug: Yeah. Joe, I’m hoping you can help me with this next note we got though. I’m, I don’t get it. I’m a little confused by this. I don’t know what caused this note, but I need, I need everybody’s help.

[00:59:03] Doug: Uh, Shane, Shane sent a very curious note that says, next year, Doug and the three ghosts of diarrhea, past diarrhea, present and diarrhea future, 

[00:59:15] Joe: I think he’s talking about OGs, grandpa. And his toilet paper solution. That was kind of gross. Oh, did that. But that we ended 2025 on a really topic. Oh, I think that’s where Shane was going.

[00:59:32] Joe: Oh, I forgot all about that. 

[00:59:34] OG: Had nothing to do with diarrhea. I recall. 

[00:59:36] Joe: It did not. No. But just imagine how that ruins your grandpa’s plan. Just I guess to 

[00:59:42] Doug: Ah, thanks Shane. 

[00:59:43] Joe: A couple more things about that episode, which is for people that are new here, an annual episode we do around holiday time where we talk about, um, the mistakes of the past and the present and having a better future.

[00:59:58] Joe: Dug in the three ghosts, Chris, who apparently lives up the road from me in Little Rock. Chris wrote Perfect weather and location for listening to the Three Ghosts. He’s got a highway sign that says, headed toward Texarkana and Dallas near Hot Springs. So not that far from us. And it’s gray and it’s overcast and he’s listening to it with the perfect weather as he’s driving down the road.

[01:00:23] Joe: That was a cool post. Yeah. And another stacker, Matt had some commentary. You know, we talked Oji on that episode about. Especially when you’re in debt and you’re just starting out and you wanna take a vacation or do something really fun. Prepaying for tough. Oh yeah. Right. And prepaying for pieces of it makes it so that you don’t get into a ton of debt like I did the first time I went to Disney, we talked about the second time I prepaid a piece at a time.

[01:00:49] Joe: I bought my tickets at a time. I bought the hotel rooms like I slowly built up. And then we had a completely prepaid trip and he talked about how prepaying is so enjoyable for him and it makes everything so much easier since the first time he heard Doug in the three ghost a few years ago, which is great.

[01:01:08] Joe: He, he likes the fact that. We got to remember, remember that? It was 

[01:01:12] Doug: like you were playing categories with us, Joe, because that also came up. The letter was a, and one of the categories was things you save up for. And I wrote Admission to Disneyland. And did they vote that one down too? It was controversial.

[01:01:29] Doug: It sounds like a mean game of categories you were playing. Oh, it was, it was heated. We had to bring in an independent judge. It got heated, but we had some, we had some great ones. Here was a great one. Uh, I think the, uh, letter was m and the category was states. My son wrote Matter. Oh, I would’ve put mass confusion.

[01:01:53] Doug: Yeah, I know. Slow clap. People wanted to argue it, but we’re like, damn, that’s good. Yeah. Yeah. Or we had another one. Wireless things and the letter was elephant or the letter was E and and somebody wrote Elephant. Oh, there’s no 

[01:02:10] Joe: wires in an elephant. No, no. That’s so good. Well, thank you for the notes, everybody.

[01:02:17] Joe: Please keep those coming, whether it’s on Spotify notes to me, Joe at stacky Benjamins dot com or in mom’s basement, our Facebook group where our friends who hang out together share good money tips, some dad jokes and uh, thoughts about the episodes. Alright, that’s gonna do it for today, except this. If you wanna start off 2026 with a bang.

[01:02:41] Joe: What a better way to do it than spending time here with us today. But if you need more help and you need good people in your quarter to help you out, OG and his team of Anna and the rest of the team at OGs firm, they’re taking clients. So head to stack your Benjamins dot com slash OG to get on their calendar.

[01:02:59] Joe: You wanna do that early this year, so 2026, you’re kicking it off on the right foot. All right. We end each episode by asking Doug of all people we ask Doug, Doug, Doug, what should we have learned on today’s show? It’s not, not the direction most people would 

[01:03:15] Doug: go in, may not be what we should have learned, but Doug, what do you think?

[01:03:18] Doug: What did I learn? Well, Joe first takes some advice from today’s headlines 2026 different year, but the same basic rules will still apply. Second, did you hear my first lesson, but still think you wanna peek at an IPO or invest in some hot real estate scheme? Get your hand out of that cookie jar. Or Joe’s mom’s gonna whack it with a wooden spoon.

[01:03:42] Doug: Ouch. Probably that one that has the nail through it. No. Anyway, but the big loud, 

[01:03:47] trailer: you just put, I mean, shes got her, 

[01:03:49] Doug: it’s there, dude. It feels like it, but I don’t think so. That would be cruelty. She’s a ninja with that spoon. But the big lesson, I can’t believe I compared you to Bruce Springsteen earlier. I mean, you are way better looking than the boss maybe.

[01:04:04] Doug: I mean, pretty much everybody is, but maybe like Taylor Swift Is your spirit celebrity or, or no, no, no. I got it. I got it. Ryan Gosling. Oh, you think you’re more handsome than Ryan Gossing. Okay. Maybe Jonathan Bailey, uh, Beyonce. That’s it. That’s it. You are the Beyonce of personal finance. Even Joe’s mom can get behind that one.

[01:04:24] Doug: Now. Go tell all your friends. Thanks for kicking off this year with us Stackers. Come join us and our first mentor of 2026 on Wednesday when the Laura Vanderkam joins us, she’ll share her time management secrets to help you accomplish more and enjoy more free time all year long. This show is the property of SP podcast LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.

[01:04:52] Doug: 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 and oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.

[01:05:11] Doug: 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.

[01:06:14]  headlines: I went and saw one of the 

[01:06:15] Joe: movies guys that was, is supposedly when the movie’s up for Oscars this year, and I like seeing all of those before the Oscars come out. This is a movie starring Tim Timothy. Pronounce his name wrong all the time. Doug, how do you say it? I love this. It’s, uh, 

[01:06:32] Doug: Shaza is, uh, Timothy, his last name 

[01:06:37] Joe: also.

[01:06:37] Joe: I call him Timothy Shamier, but it’s uh, it’s just Timothy Shamima. 

[01:06:42] Doug: It’s 

[01:06:42] Joe: just Shamima like Shalamar Timothy Shala, a great group 

[01:06:44] Doug: from the eighties, Gwyneth 

[01:06:45] Joe: Paltrow. And, uh, we’re gonna talk about another guy who’s in this movie here in a minute. But this is, uh, Marty Supreme. I have a purpose. 

[01:06:56] trailer: Okay, let me ask you something.

[01:06:59] trailer: Do you make money at this little table tennis thing? Not yet. Do you have a job? No.

[01:07:08] trailer: Back hand. Back hand, forehand. How do you live? While I live with the confidence, if I believe in myself, the money will follow. And what do you plan to do if this whole dream of yours doesn’t work out? That doesn’t even enter my consciousness. Maybe it should. 

[01:07:25] Joe: It sounds like people who, uh, start a podcast wanna make a living off it.

[01:07:30] Joe: I have this belief that if I start a, it’s always funny when people podcast for three weeks and they’re like, Hey, uh, so how do I monetize? It’s crazy. This is a fictionalized account of actually a real life person who is a table tennis star and a hustler. Uh, first name of Marty played by. Tim Timothy Shati and uh, also, uh, starring one of the people.

[01:07:56] Joe: He actually is as much of a hustler as he is a table tennis player. He does think he has a purpose, which is to be the top table tennis player in the world. He gets shocked the first time that he goes to a table tennis event that he’s expected to win. And, uh, the Japanese who recently. Had not been allowed to compete after World War II in all these different competitions.

[01:08:23] Joe: That ban was lifted and now they have a table tennis star who kicks the crap out of him, and he’s angry and he’s frustrated. And his goal is to get back to number one, to face this, uh, Japanese table tennis star. Gwyneth Paltrow plays one of the people that he takes advantage of. During the movie. She had been a, a movie star.

[01:08:44] Joe: This, this gentleman Marty, the entire movie’s taken advantage of people. In fact, uh, he has a run in with a character played by Pen Gillette. So there’s all kinds of people in this movie. Wow. Gwyneth Paltrow’s husband in the film. And who has a major role in the film is Kevin O’Leary, the guy who’s the Shark Tank dude, who’s not even an actor.

[01:09:06] Joe: I’ve never seen him in a movie. He’s incredible. He plays himself. He’s a total, he’s just a complete, complete jerk like he is a lot of the time on Shark Tank. Uh, Kevin O’Leary does a really nice job. I hear you saying OG has an acting future. Yeah, I think he does. I think OG we can, it, it isn’t a leap forward.

[01:09:28] Joe: This is the new you in 2026, uh, Hollywood agents. If you need a a star, get ’em ahead of time. Uh, og this is all an act by the way. Well, it’s been beautiful. You played this part now since 2012. Like, it’s amazing. Well, 2011, if we go with the earlier shows that we had so strongly acted, uh, uh, Timothy Watt’s, his name is amazing.

[01:09:52] Joe: Gwyneth Paltrow is incredible. Kevin O’Leary is, is also great. This movie couldn’t have sucked more. It could not have sucked more. It was all over the place. I like watching movies with empathetic characters that I wanna follow. I hate this Marty dude. I hated him from the beginning. He’s scamming everybody.

[01:10:15] Joe: He’s trying to get a free lunch the entire time. I wanna get outta the movie theater. Every cringe-worthy scene. Take Ricky Vet’s humor, which is very much, oh God, this is a train wreck in slow motion, but make it not funny. Make it schizophrenic, put it all over the place. This movie was such garbage, and I think this is one of those things, Doug, that you and I have talked about in the past with like the studio.

[01:10:43] Joe: Where? Where Hollywood insiders have these great actors and it’s like they know too much about film and they’re too much inside baseball, and they’re like, oh my God. Well, the visuals were great, and the acting was great. Yes, all that is a yes. But the story is, the script was horrible. And who in Middle America wants to go spend two hours with a bunch of jerks that I don’t want to support or believe in?

[01:11:10] Joe: One critic even called this, I, I, Cheryl and I looked up the Rotten Tomatoes for this movie. One critic called it a feel good movie, feel good, somebody ripping people off the entire movie. There’s a feel good moment and, and I’m gonna trust that you’re not gonna go see this film. ’cause I wouldn’t go see it.

[01:11:27] Joe: I wouldn’t waste any time on this movie. But the last two minutes of the movie are feel good. The last two minutes of the film, the other two hours are complete. Feel bad about humanity. Yeah. About yourself, about the fact that you’ve been taken advantage of. Ugh. Good girl. 

[01:11:45] Doug: We watched Flight recently, the old Denzel Washington movie where he is an alcoholic pilot upside down plane.

[01:11:52] Doug: Yeah. He is upside down and I mean, an amazing performance. Uh, you can’t call that a feel good movie, except for the last 90 seconds where he reconciles with his son right at the end. Or his son chooses to come to him in prison and learn about his dad. But up until then, it’s a pretty rough ride. Did you like the movie though?

[01:12:11] Doug: Yeah, it’s not my first time seeing it. I do like it. Don’t love it. He’s amazing. It, it’s really it. You made me think of it because great performances in that movie, Kelly Riley, I’ve forgotten. It’s an early Kelly re appearance from, you know, Yellowstone fame. She’s quite good in it. Uh, there’s a, there’s a few other really good and Denzel’s, just Denzel, unbelievable.

[01:12:30] Doug: Sure. But it’s just not a feel good movie. It’s the great scene at the beginning where he’s saving the plane and, uh, cool scenes in the trial at towards the end. But just rough, like leaving Las Vegas. Amazing performances, but you’re like, oh my God, this is killing me. Can we get outta here? 

[01:12:49] Joe: If you’ve watched Marty Supreme and you liked it, I would love to hear from you, like, fight me on this.

[01:12:54] Joe: What, what did you see in this film? I, I generally, as you guys know, I agree with the critics a lot. People are like, oh, I can’t stand that. I, I kind of follow the critics and like what the critics do say and do and, and generally enjoy those movies. This one I was so excited to see and halfway through the movie I’m like, when does this end?

[01:13:14] Joe: Does this end anytime soon? ’cause oh Lord, 

I.