Sure, you’ve rented a car. Maybe your home. But what about renting your clothing, your tools, or even your Christmas tree (if you celebrate the holiday)? Today we talk about an emerging group of people who have taken renting to the extreme. They rent nearly everything. If you decide to rent are you asking to spend more money or is the concept of “ownership” outdated? Today we dissect renting and what it truly means AND how it affects your financial picture. We’re excited that CFP Benjamins Brandt (Retirement Begins Today podcast) and Paula Pant (Afford Anything) join OG, Joe and Doug to help you make better rent/own decisions.
Plus, of course, at the halfway point of our discussion, we make time for our epic trivia challenge!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Watch On YouTube:
Our Topic: Are we becoming a nation of renters?
Americans Are Moving to a Rent-It-All Economy (Wall Street Journal)
During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:
- Is renting throwing your money away?
- Where do we draw the line on what makes sense to rent?
- The advantages and disadvantages of a rental lifestyle.
- Extreme renting.
- Renting clothes.
- Furniture rentals.
- Mattress hacking.
- Convenience factor.
- “Buy assets; sell liabilities.” – Greg McFarlane.
- Leasing/renting cars vs. buying.
- The utility of using Uber rather than owning a car.
- Renting a phone.
- Renting tools.
- Renting during retirement.
- The effects of inflation on the price of renting.
- The costs of taxes, maintenance, and insurance when owning a house.
- Price-to-rent ratio.
- Weighing your life preferences when deciding whether to rent or own.
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
Benjamin Brandt
Another thanks to Benjamin Brandt for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Benjamin on his show, Retirement Starts Today at Retirement Starts Today Podcast Series – Apple Podcasts.
Paula Pant
Check Out Paula’s site and amazing podcast: AffordAnything.com
Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything
OG
For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- How much is Luxembourg’s minimum wage, per month, in Euro’s?
DepositAccounts
Thanks to DepositAccounts.com for sponsoring Stacking Benjamins. DepositsAccounts.com is the #1 place to go when you’re looking to see if your rate is the BEST rate on savings, CDs, money markets, and even checking accounts! Check out ALL of the rates ranked from best to worst (and see the national averages) at DepositAccounts.com.
Mentioned in today’s show
- Nuuly
- Mr. Tuxedo Shop Tux Renter (YouTube)
Join Us on Monday!
Tune in on Monday as we kick off Greatest Hits Week
Miss our last show? Check it out here: Stop Losing Money on Your Company Benefits (SB1565).
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] bit: I guess you should have called. I did call earlier when using the phone. Earlier. When was that? Or later? When Then I, uh, left. Left a message. A message. What number did you call? 2 4 9 0 5 6 7 8. I can’t hear you. You’re trailing off. And did I catch a niner in there where you’re calling from a walkie tuckie? [00:00:23] No, it was cordless. Mm-Hmm. You know what, don’t not here. Not now. [00:00:32] Doug: Live from the basement of the YouTube headquarters. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. [00:00:47] I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And are we entering the rental economy here to help us determine when renting is the best option? We welcome the guy behind the retirement Starts today. A podcast, CFP Benjamin Brandt and from the Afford Anything Podcast, it’s Paula Pant. And finally, the guy who’d rent you the right to mow his lawn. [00:01:10] It’s og. But of course that’s not all Today. We’ll celebrate the beginning of the Long Labor Day weekend in the USA with some Labor Day trivia. And now a guy who’s ready to get on with it so we can fire up the grill for the unofficial last weekend of summer. It’s Joe Saul-Sehy. [00:01:36] Joe: Hey everybody. Happy Friday to you. I am Joe Sulci. Hi. And uh, I can’t wait to get the girl fired up. Doug, uh, what do you like to fire up on Labor Day weekend? [00:01:47] OG: Uh, it’s a PG show. Doug. Be careful. [00:01:51] Doug: You cannot tee it up for me like that. I know it’s [00:01:53] OG: Michigan. What’s legal there? It may not be legal everywhere. [00:01:57] Doug: There’s gasoline cans involved. Pallets that I get from surplus lumber yards. It’s, it’s a big old fire. Oh man. [00:02:07] Joe: og. Uh, what are you cooking? What’s cooking at the OG residence on Labor Day weekend? [00:02:10] OG: Oh, absolutely. Double tomahawk ribeyes. [00:02:14] Joe: Oh my goodness. Yep. I’ll be there. Yep. I, if I were in a Camp Phi this weekend, I would be there slow [00:02:19] OG: roasted, and then seared afterward. [00:02:21] Oh, it’s just, man, too bad. There’s none extra. I. [00:02:25] Joe: Paula pant. You live in a high rise, do you have like a Mm-Hmm? Is there a common area or do you have like a little, uh, porch patio thing where you can, you can, uh, we have [00:02:33] Paula: grills in the common area. Whoa. Hey. Yeah. We’ve got, we’ve modern amenities. We’ve got three large grills, and right next to it there’s a bocce ball area, and then there’s an outdoor movie theater. [00:02:44] Perfect grill. Yeah. [00:02:45] Joe: Work it off with some bocce ball. I don’t know if you’re burning many calories of BCE ball and then go watch a movie, which you never do. So there you go. Exactly. Yeah. But are you, uh, big weekend plans for Labor Day? [00:02:57] Paula: No. No. No particular plans? Um, yeah, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be a low key weekend. [00:03:04] ’cause that’s what you think of when you think of Manhattan. You think Lowkey weekend? [00:03:07] Joe: Well, I didn’t know. I think Lowkey weekend, Paula, you know what I think. I think North Dakota, I think because Benjamin Brandt, certified financial planner and the host of. Retirement starts today. Podcast joins us. Uh, Ben definitely is Is there a, uh, stressful high alert weekend in North Dakota? [00:03:26] I don’t think so. [00:03:26] Benjamin: Well, 4th of July, you know, 4th of July. If, if, you know, lots of fireworks, if you wanna keep all 10 fingers. So you gotta be on high alert. So [00:03:34] Joe: you got to, you told us, by the way, when we came and visited you a couple years ago, it was a North Carolina or North Carolina. North Dakota. Way more beautiful than I could have expected. [00:03:44] I didn’t think it wouldn’t be. I just didn’t. I just didn’t think about it, which is why you guys have those stickers that say, uh, save the best for last ’cause North Dakota knows that you saved the best for last. But you told us about a place where they made us, uh, stakes on pitchforks. They took pitchforks and put it in pitchfork. [00:04:05] Benjamin: Fondue. Yeah. At the Teddy Roosevelt, uh, national Park Manor in North Dakota. [00:04:09] Joe: Yeah. Lots of flag wave like this has Labor Day written all over it. Lots of flagwaving and. Uh, Americana and, oh, you can [00:04:15] Benjamin: eat Americana. That’s exactly right. Yeah. [00:04:17] Joe: Yes. Fantastic. Well, tell the three people that have not heard you on the show before about retirement starts today. [00:04:24] Benjamin: Yeah, retirement starts today. Every Monday morning we talk about, uh, retirement topics, both financial and non-financial. [00:04:31] Joe: That’s very, very succinct. You had to go longer ’cause I was taking a, a drink of drink of my. Of my stuff. Uh, so you own that brand, you’re not renting it, Ben, just to be clear. [00:04:43] Benjamin: That’s right. [00:04:44] Yep. I’m I’m own. I rent it from the government. I mean, they charged me to use it, but in theory I own it. [00:04:49] Joe: That is so true in so many ways. Even if you own your own property, free and clear, if you stop paying property taxes, watch how quickly you don’t own it. It’s, it’s very strange. The piece we’re gonna talk about today. [00:04:59] Americans are embracing a rent first lifestyle, preferring to try things out rather than committing to ownership. Listen to this guys, more than one in four Americans say they rent or lease their car, clothing, electronics, or furniture, according to a new survey commission by a personal finance firm, credit Karma. [00:05:16] It’s what we’re gonna talk about today, A recent Wall Street Journal piece about about extreme. Rentals. Has renting gone too far or is this a good thing? I think we’ll probably find the middle ground, but you know what else we’ll find, Paula? [00:05:28] Paula: What’s that? [00:05:29] Joe: We’ll find that. State Farm is awesome enough that they sponsor these Friday episodes, this episode brought to you by State Farm. [00:05:37] If you want a small business, whatever your business might be, you need somebody who understands, and that’s where State Farm Small business Insurance comes swooping in to the rescue like Superman. I don’t, I dunno, maybe. Uh, state Farm agents, well they’re small business owners too, and they know what it takes. [00:05:55] They can help you choose personalized policies that fit your budget. Small business insurance from State Farm, like a good neighbor State Farm. Is there? Is that good? I. No. Should I keep going? [00:06:05] Benjamin: Nailed it. [00:06:06] Joe: Talk to your local agent today. State Farm helps us make this episode free for you. We have a couple more sponsors that make this free. [00:06:14] We also have a couple that we will introduce you to during Doug’s trivia at the midway point. But besides that, we’re going to be ad free. So let’s hear from them right now so that we can get the show on the road. Benjamin Brat here, or Paula Pant? Benjamin Brat. Paula Pant. That sounds great. And OG Neighbor Doug. [00:06:33] Let’s get this party started. [00:06:40] Alright, our piece today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal, and this is all about extreme renting. Uh, we often hear OG that renting is a waste of money, right? If you rent it, that because you don’t have any equity. These people in this piece that we’re talking about, they challenge that some of these people rent everything. [00:07:03] Where do you think the middle ground is on renting? Where do you draw the line on renting? [00:07:07] OG: I’m so happy that I get to have equity in my furniture, and I’m so happy to have equity in my clothes and because that’s the argument, right? It’s like, well, you don’t have any equity in those things. I don’t know that there’s a consumable versus equity thing. [00:07:21] I don’t know. I, I don’t really put clothes in the category of super valuable in terms of, it’s not on my balance sheet, right? It’s nothing that I’m gonna jot down and say, you know, I can go leverage this for my financial future. It’s an expense, and I don’t know, I don’t know that there’s any material benefit to having an expense be a rental expense or a consumption expense that has a. [00:07:45] End life somewhere down the line. I, I, I bet it kind of works out to be about the same. [00:07:50] Joe: I think Ben, that OG makes a good point. I mean, people instinctively. When they talk about renting, they talk about having equity in it, right? When you own something, you own it, and you can later then sell it to somebody else and recoup some of the costs, potentially making it less costly. [00:08:06] Are there flaws in that thinking? [00:08:08] Benjamin: I would say there’s not flaws in the thinking. I. I think generationally too, there’s a big difference between owning and renting. I think older people want to own more things, and younger people are either maybe priced out of buying or are more comfortable with renting. [00:08:19] There’s definitely a line in the article, they talked about renting their clothes. You know, I, I could adopt, I could understand a minimalist lifestyle, but, you know, returning your clothes or that just seems like a, a bit of a bridge too far. Maybe I’m too set in my ways. [00:08:31] OG: Like a subscription cost for your skis? [00:08:34] I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like a, something that I want to deal with. I don’t know. [00:08:38] Joe: There may be somebody on our panel who rents her clothes. [00:08:40] Paula: Mm-Hmm. I love renting clothes. I rent a lot of my clothes. And so the reason that I do, it’s, it’s a few fold. One is, um, a few fold. A few fold. Yeah. You know, it’s not like twofold. [00:08:52] It’s like more than two. So it’s a few fold. [00:08:54] Doug: If I rented my clothes, I would never fold them. Ever. [00:08:57] Paula: Well, yes, that is one of the benefits. So one of the benefits is they send you clothes, you wear them until they’re dirty, and then instead of washing them, you just send them back. So that’s fun. Uh, you, so you basically, you don’t have to do laundry. [00:09:11] Um, which particularly when it comes to things that would get dry cleaned, like blazers, you know, or like professional clothing. It saves on all, like not just the dry cleaning costs, but the time to take it to the dry cleaner and then pick it up and all of that. In addition to that, you can try on a lot of different styles and a lot of different thing, like, you know, if you want some variety in your wardrobe, you can have all of that variety without committing to it. [00:09:35] And then the third reason, and this is one of the biggest ones for me, is. I live in Manhattan, so I live in a 600 square foot apartment with two people, right? So two people in 600 square feet. And then you think of cycling out summer clothing and winter clothing. There just isn’t that much space. And so if you have clothing that you’re renting, then you don’t need the storage space for that, that you don’t have. [00:10:01] I know I’m talking about Manhattan, but if you think of how many people live in high density cities. Where square footage is really expensive. You know, you could either pay for the markup of having a bigger apartment or relatively the much cheaper cost of living in a small footprint and, and renting. I. [00:10:21] Joe: I usually reference at the top that we will, uh, link to the piece that we’re discussing on our show notes page at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This is, uh, from the Wall Street Journal and it is behind a paywall. So if you get the Wall Street Journal, uh, you’ll be able to click through it. If not, uh, you won’t be able to. [00:10:35] I don’t think that it’s super important, but I’m gonna reference the piece a little more often than I do on Fridays ’cause the people in this piece are, are very interesting to this topic. To your point, Paula Jammy, Jackson Cole, an elementary school teacher in Oklahoma, started renting her work outfits last year from, uh, a site called newly NUUL. [00:10:51] Y. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. The company owned by Urban Outfitters mails her six items each month for about a hundred dollars. Then another six after she mails those back. Cole learned about clothing rentals from her 26-year-old daughter Keeley after seeing her sporting a pink heart sweater around Valentine’s Day last year, just like OG does. [00:11:07] Uh, recently a fellow teacher complimented Cole on her dress, a pink and green number with a horse print. When she confessed it was rented, the colleague replied that she rented clothes too. She said, we get tired of wearing the same thing over and over. Is that part of it, Paula? [00:11:19] Paula: Yeah. Like I said, the variety. [00:11:21] You don’t wanna necessarily be wearing the same pieces over and over and over. And plus again, as the seasons change, you need different clothes in May than you do in January seasonally. And then on top of that, if you are sizing changes, let’s say you are working out a lot and you’re, you’re losing weight or you’re gaining muscle. [00:11:39] Or gain weight, [00:11:40] Joe: losing muscle. Like Doug. Yeah, [00:11:42] Paula: yeah, yeah. Or maybe you stop working out and you, you quickly start gaining body fat, like your sizing can really fluctuate. And so I have, well, I’ll just tell you, in my storage unit, I have a bunch of clothes that will fit me 25 pounds from now. I call them aspirational. [00:12:01] Um, you know, so not only then do you have summer clothing and winter clothing, but you also have your clothing that fit you 25 pounds ago versus clothing that fits you now. And so you need the clothing that fits you now, but you don’t wanna get rid of the clothing that did fit you 25 pounds ago. ’cause you’re determined that you’ll get back there. [00:12:21] Joe: I totally have those in my closet. [00:12:22] Paula: Yeah. So then you’ve got all of these clothing, not just for different seasons, but for different body weight categories. Back to [00:12:28] Joe: Ben’s point, like when I think of rented close, I can’t not think of, well, let me play what I normally think of when I think of rented. Close [00:12:38] bit: Bud Light presents real men of genius, real men of genius. Today we salute you, Mr. Tuxedo Shop Tux Redder, Mr. Tuxedo Shop tux red when the evening calls for five groomsmen in identical robin’s egg blue. Double breasted. You are there. Last night, little Jason Weinstein had the slow dance of his life in the exact same pants I’m now wearing. [00:13:10] Any schmo can wear a suit, but only a gentleman can pull off a canary yellow set of tails with a matching top hat your star. So crack open an ice cold, bud light titan of the tux because a classy event always. Always calls for rented clothes, bud Light Beer and St. Louis, Missouri. [00:13:32] Joe: My favorite line from that whole group of commercials might be the, because little Jason, so-and-so had the slow dance of his life in the pants. [00:13:39] I’m not wearing Ben. Is it? You know, you, we were joking about the renting skis factor earlier. Is it a grossness? Like, why do you not think about renting clothes the same way that Paula does? [00:13:49] Benjamin: Yeah, I dunno. You rent cars and you sit in the same place. I don’t. That’s not too far. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m right. [00:13:53] Jim [00:13:53] Joe: Gaffigan, to your point, says, Hey, anybody want my used mattress? Everybody’s like, oh, hell no. He is like, Hey, let’s go stay in a hotel. [00:13:59] Benjamin: Right, exactly. I don’t know that I’m the Target demo. I wear elastic cargo shorts, so it’s year round. It’s golden. [00:14:05] Joe: But still, you could rent those who needs it, but you wear ’em over and over and over. [00:14:09] Right. Paul, I do have a question for you in the contract. What if you spill wine on something that’s not gonna come out or it accidentally gets ripped? What happens then? [00:14:16] Paula: I use Rent the Runway. And I think technically the contract says like, if it’s minor damage, that’s uh, no big deal. We’ll take care of it. [00:14:23] But if it’s major damage, then you’re on the hook. I believe I would have to double check the fine print. I believe that is technically what it says. In all practicality. I, I mean, I’ve never done like major, major damage, but I wear tinted sunblock and so the collars of any shirt that I’m wearing, mm-Hmm. [00:14:40] It gets makeup, like it gets foundation, it gets tinted sunblock and like. Tinted sunblock. Think of brown sunblock. It’s hard to get that out of fabric ’cause it’s like sunblock. It’s meant to stick, [00:14:51] Joe: but they’ve never made you pay for that. [00:14:53] Paula: Yeah, never, never, never. [00:14:55] Joe: There’s a another couple in this piece and, oh gee, I think I want to go to you with this one. [00:14:59] Their townhouse came with the furnishings. They pay around $1,100 each in rent. So for the two of them, these roommates, it’s 2200 bucks and it includes all the, all the furniture. They figured they could find something a little cheaper that didn’t have furniture. But listen to this, they say, but it would’ve cost at least $5,000 to bring their own stuff during their cross-country move from North Carolina. [00:15:20] So I think about $5,000 to take their stuff across country. One time fee. I. Versus the ongoing fee. Like I feel like these people might not know math. Like the, I, I think sometimes we’re renting, we’re not thinking clearly enough about the math, or am I, am, am I missing something? [00:15:39] OG: Well, I think the missing part is what’s the difference between what the rent could be and what they’re paying. [00:15:44] Obviously if it’s $50 a month difference or you know, whatever, you can kind of decide whether or not that’s worth it. I do think that there’s something around, you know, if you’re kind of in that stage of life, we moved from a four bedroom colonial to a three bedroom, not colonial apartment. In hindsight, I think we probably could have left all of our stuff in Michigan and just went like, whatever. [00:16:07] We’ll just get new things. The amount of money and energy that it took to pack our stuff and haul it across the country and the stress and all that sort of thing, I bet that there was an easier way to do that. Move now. Having had more time here now, another 10 years or 11 years in Dallas and we have more things and you know, that sort of stuff and arguably a little nicer. [00:16:29] I don’t know that our first set of furniture at our house when we first were married is the same caliber of stuff that we have now. So maybe there’s a little different there. But my point here is I think that where you are stage of life, it can make sense just to go, I, I, I’m, I’m not buying, you know, a nice. [00:16:46] To your point mattress, yet I’m hauling around whatever I had from elementary school. Still I’m not at the, like my back hurts all the time. I gotta spend seven grand on a mattress yet now you get to that spot. I think you wanna carry that thing with you. ’cause that’s a big thing to flip over or just do the a hundred day free thing with all the mattress companies for like, you know, the better part of five or six years. [00:17:05] I bet all of the direct to consumer mattress companies could, could hook you up for a solid. 18 months, I bet of free mattresses if you are packing. Speaking of that, this [00:17:14] Joe: episode brought to you by Casper. [00:17:16] Doug: Actually, it’s funny you mention Casper Joe. I had a friend who I’m almost sure it was ca, it was either Casper or Purple, but a friend who bought one did not like it, I think within the a hundred days or whatever the timeframe was, and said, I’m gonna send it back. [00:17:28] And they said, no, we’re good. Just keep it. [00:17:30] Paula: Keep it. Yep, [00:17:30] Doug: yep. ’cause it’s not worth it to them to, because you can’t package those things back up the way they come to you. [00:17:34] OG: Yeah, it’s just shift in like a little box and it, and it explodes when it’s in your living room. It is [00:17:38] Joe: a miracle of science. Watching those things inflate. [00:17:41] OG: Yeah. It makes you wonder what’s inside of ’em that, you know, it’s like, uh, where do all the springs go that are supposed to poke me in the back? Is that the key by [00:17:49] Joe: the way then is, is that our hack, just get a Casper mattress and a hundred days later ask for your money back, and then you keep the mattress too. [00:17:55] You didn’t hear that here. We have no, no idea. Can either confirm nor deny. Is that Ben, it, it sounds like the point we’re making is that this might be either, is it generational? Meaning people that are older, they’re used to buying stuff, are not gonna rent stuff? Or is it just stage of life or maybe both. [00:18:13] Benjamin: It could be both. You know, I had, I had a similar situation at my house. Our, our triplets turned seven and we wanted to rent a bouncy house. And I looked at the bouncy house and it was like a hundred dollars to rent it, or you could go to Walmart and it was like $300 to buy it. And I was like, well, I’m gonna use it more than three times. [00:18:27] So I bought it. But that, what I neglected to think about was, we have eight people that live in our house. Space is limited. So I’m folding this thing up and I’m like, lugging it up a ladder with, with one arm to try to put it, you know, in the storage. And it’s like, what’s my life worth? Right? I could have just for a hundred dollars, like some guy would’ve came and taken this problem away from me. [00:18:43] So my problem is I’m, I’m looking at everything through the lens of return on investment and, and in this instance, you know, it was not a good idea. [00:18:51] Joe: Yeah. Is that the case? Paula, do you agree that this is sometimes about more than money? [00:18:54] Paula: Yeah. Yeah. It’s about money. Well, like what I said earlier about dry cleaning, right? [00:18:58] Mm-Hmm. The, the dry cleaning of professional clothing. Part of the value that you get is it’s not just the cost savings, it’s also the convenience factor of knowing that there is a, a chore or an errand that is now off of your plate. So then it frees up your time. [00:19:15] Joe: Yeah. Sticking with you. By the way, another woman in this piece, Berkeley Brooks, feels as though she was raised to rent. [00:19:21] She says her parents told her, and this gets to the math, her parents told her never to buy anything that would lose its value within five or so years. You agree with that? [00:19:32] Paula: Huh. Well, so I’m reminded of, uh, our, our old friend Greg McFarland, who used to always say, long time [00:19:38] Joe: contributor. Yeah. [00:19:39] Paula: Long time contributor to the Stacking Benjamins round table. [00:19:42] And he always said, buy assets, sell liabilities. Or rent. The corollary to that was sell or rent liabilities. Now obviously my post-it notes, you know, are technically a liability, but I buy them, um, you, you’re gonna have those small consumables, my kitchen sponges, my dish soap, things like that. But as an overall thesis, I think that really follows, [00:20:06] Joe: uh oh, gee, you agree with that math? [00:20:08] Five years or so lose its value. Well, don’t buy those things. [00:20:12] OG: I mean, again, I think it’s gonna be very uniquely situational because the same could be said for cars and we don’t really like the idea of leasing cars. And renting car. Now, on the other hand, if you were to take a car and say, I’m not gonna have a car payment. [00:20:27] Instead I’m going to rent a car, I’m gonna rent Uber. And I think we were talking about this, I dunno, maybe a couple, three weeks ago we did. We postulated. Yeah. Is it better to just Uber? Yeah, I got [00:20:35] Doug: yelled at for this. Yeah. [00:20:36] OG: It’s like at some point, especially take Paula for example. I mean, Paul, if you had to have a car, have a parking space, pay for car insurance in Manhattan, which. [00:20:44] Probably is not inexpensive relative to other places. You know, just again, due to the density, it’s like that’s a real cost. Mm-Hmm. And that thing sits there versus like, yeah, I get uber black every so often, whenever I have to go anywhere. And yeah, that costs money too, but it’s. Pound for pound a lot less. [00:21:00] Exactly. In Ben’s scenario where maybe there’s a little bit more space and there’s not the density in terms of people and you know, all these other sorts of things, maybe Uber’s not as available and that price, you know, supply demand thing gets a little fouled up and Uber’s more expensive. But I don’t know that. [00:21:14] Just purely looking at like buying versus leasing cars. I’ve done both. I’m, I’m really glad that I bought the last one and I’m also really glad I leased the one before that so that I could get rid of the damn thing as soon as I got it. I couldn’t wait to get outta that car, but I also know almost across the board the number works out to be about the same. [00:21:32] I think Doug, you and I have talked about this before, that we just, we just kind of feel like whether you lease a car and get a new one every three years. You take the 10 year cost versus buy a new car, [00:21:42] Joe: we’re going here [00:21:42] OG: again. You own it for 10 years. We [00:21:44] Joe: are, it’s happening Paul and bad it’s these two against the rest of the world. [00:21:47] But [00:21:47] Doug: anyway, Joe, the other thing where it’s situational, right? The other use case that OG and I have talked about where leasing may make sense is you have a kid going to college and you’re not gonna provide them with a car after college, but you want them to have reliable, uh, transportation for three or four years. [00:22:04] So you can just wash your hands of it. Lease goes away. Kid graduates, you’re done with the whole thing. And you might be able to do that for 220 bucks a month for basic transportation. Might be a heck of a lot cheaper than what I provided my kid with, which was the oh nine Traverse. Everybody’s heard about, which OGs brother told me to sell the second he even heard the model in year of it. [00:22:24] And, uh, I didn’t, and I paid way more than I would’ve had, I just gotten rid of it and, uh, leased a cheap car. [00:22:31] Joe: But it’s, well, I’m not gonna get [00:22:33] OG: into that. [00:22:33] Joe: There’s, [00:22:33] OG: I, I bet that if you average it out though, this is a recurring topic on this show. I think the 10 year cost is about the same. I think sometimes you’re gonna roll the dice and you’re gonna be way cheaper by owning, and I think sometimes you’re gonna roll the dice and leasing is gonna be better off if you get a lemon. [00:22:47] But I bet if you asked a hundred people, you’re gonna get. An average of 10 year cost is the same. That’s my bet. [00:22:53] Joe: Let’s talk about other things. Renting other things in the second half of the show, renting a phone. They talk about in this renting tools, you can of course now put your own stuff up for rent. [00:23:02] Is that a good deal? What are the potential pitfalls there? Children renting a, yeah, when Ben said triplets, Ben, when you said triplets, I’m like, whoa, I thought you were gonna say, and when I tried to rent them out, um, [00:23:13] OG: and no takers surprising. Do you need some kids for your. Family reunion. Are you sick and tired of your parents asking you? [00:23:19] When are you gonna have kids? Well, here’s three that you can bring with you to the next holiday event. And then they go elsewhere. They’ll even call you mom and dad for an extra fee. [00:23:30] Benjamin: I, I have a two part closing thought if you’re curious. [00:23:33] Joe: Yes. [00:23:33] Benjamin: Do you think there’s clothing rental repo man? And if so, could we sell that show to the Discovery Channel? [00:23:39] Joe: Oh, wouldn’t that be great? Chasing Paula down the street, like pulling at the dress? Oh, speaking of [00:23:46] Paula: show up to your office, we’re gonna have to confiscate that shirt. That’s right. [00:23:50] OG: Speaking of Ben, I know you’re tongue in cheek, but there was a movie, what was this? It was called Repo Men, Jude Law and Fort Whitaker. [00:23:59] You rented your body parts, so like if your kidney went out, you, you rented a new kidney and if you didn’t pay your thing, they repoed it And it was a very graphic movie as I recall. Doug, you’re nodding like you might have. Might have heard of it or seen it too, but, uh, uh, I [00:24:12] Doug: was with you until you said who was in it. [00:24:13] ’cause there was also a long, long time ago, a repo man, uh, that was just a bizarre, like, independent movie with I think Emilio Estevez in it, like one of his first roles ever from the early eighties. So I was nodding my head to something else. [00:24:26] OG: It wasn’t that long ago, but, uh, it was an interesting take on renting things. [00:24:30] I just remember, uh, Jeff Foxworthy [00:24:32] Joe: the, in his memoir. Which, by the way, Jeff Foxworthy, the memoir obviously not a book that’s gonna win any big awards, but hilarious from the beginning to the end. He talked about how when he was completely broken, the repo guy showed up to, uh, take his firebird and the repo guy said, uh, yeah, uh, gimme $250 right now. [00:24:52] Or I gotta take your car. And he said, uh, Jeff goes two $50. I don’t have, who has $250? And the repo man goes, well, could you just write a check? And Jeff goes, check, I thought you wanted money here. I’ll just pay the whole thing off. Write, writes a check for all of it, which obviously probably wasn’t going very far. [00:25:12] In the second half, we are gonna talk about specifics and get a little more technical on this idea of not so extreme writing, but when you do rent stuff. But at that way point of every Friday show, we have this ruthless competition between our three frequent contributors, og, Paula, and mom. And uh, mom can’t be bothered coming down the stairs. [00:25:30] She really doesn’t care about trivia. So, Ben, today you’re playing on behalf of Mom, which brings up some good news and some bad news. Mr. Brant, which one would you like first? [00:25:38] Benjamin: Bad news. [00:25:39] Joe: The bad news is you’re not winning. OG is winning. OG has 11. You have nine. Paula feels very comfortable with eight right behind, but. [00:25:48] Paula was on a roll before this, so is she gonna come back and tie you? What’s gonna happen is once we get our trivia question, OG is going to guess first. Ben, you’ll go second on behalf of mom and then Paula will guess third. But we need a trivia question. I. So that we can see who’s gonna win this week’s competition. [00:26:08] So Doug, here we go. [00:26:13] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and let me be the first to welcome you to Labor Day weekend. It’s the weekend you watch racing on television and celebrate being able to wear white again. Wait, what? What’s that Steve? Uh, really? Okay. Uh, Steve, let’s rewind that. Welcome to Labor Day weekend. [00:26:36] This is the weekend when we celebrate our independence from those red coats across the pond. What’s that now? Really fireworks. All right, cool. Alright, take three. Welcome to Labor Day Weekend when we celebrate our independence from the man. That’s right. Those of us laboring while, oh, my GFI and O Joe, I, if you know who I’m talking about, revel in sitting around taking credit for my uh, hour work. [00:27:07] Am I right ladies? Of course I am. Let’s get you some Labor Day trivia to celebrate us while some of us get 100% raises handed to us all the time by our amazing bosses, others languish. Which is why countries around the world passed minimum wage laws, the highest minimum wage in the world that’s in Luxembourg, a country I thought Joe and OG had made up until just a couple minutes ago, but it turns out it’s a real place. [00:27:38] My bad, Luxem Berg. Here’s today’s question in Euros. How high is Luxembourg’s minimum wage per month as of 2023? I’ll be back right after I figure out whether the X should have been silent in Luxem Le Loewenberg. Maybe I’ll figure it out. [00:27:59] Joe: I think you go ahead and say the X, uh, you can say it however you want to, but I think they pronounce it with the x. [00:28:05] Oh gee. A month of, uh, minimum wage in Luxembourg. A month. A month. It’s not per hour. It’s not per hour. It’s per month. Crying [00:28:18] OG: out loud, I had an answer. Uh, okay. In Euros. So I have to convert it from Yen ’cause I had the answer in yen. So gimme a, [00:28:31] you know, if you work 40 hours. Uh, California just passed 20 bucks an hour, give or take something like that. Uh, UI think the US is still, like, nationally pretty low at eight bucks or some awful number. But, uh, so 20 is of 800 minimum wage in Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s a very wealthy country. Uh, I’m gonna say that the minimum wage in Luxembourg. [00:28:59] Is 3,800 Euros per month, [00:29:04] Joe: 3,800 euros. What do you think about that, Mr. Brandt? [00:29:09] Benjamin: Is this prices right? Rules? Can I guess $1 more? [00:29:12] Joe: You can, but it’s not prices, right? Rules. It’s just whoever’s closest. [00:29:15] Benjamin: Oh, okay. I’m gonna say, I don’t know. You know, euros versus dollars. I’m just gonna say 5,000. [00:29:21] Joe: 5,000. Going with a $60,000 a year lifestyle. [00:29:26] Paula, how’s that sound to you? Ouch. Well, 60,000 euro a year lifestyle. [00:29:31] Paula: This is hard. ’cause I think those are both very good guesses in terms of, do I think either of those guesses could be correct? Yeah, man. So where do I situate myself? [00:29:46] I’m gonna go with 38 0 1. [00:29:49] Joe: 38 0 1, so she’s taking the upside of the middle. [00:29:53] Paula: Yeah. From OG. Yeah. I’ll take the upside of the middle play defense. [00:29:58] Joe: Yeah. So we got 3,800 from OG 38 0 1 from Paula, and 5,000 from Ben. We’ll tell you who’s right in just a minute. As we hear from the people that make this free. [00:30:13] og, you started with $3,800 or 3,800 euros. How you feeling about that now? [00:30:19] OG: I mean, it’s about 50 grand, a little under 50 grand Euros. That would be, you know, 60, $70,000 a year. And Luxembourg’s a pretty wealthy country, so I feel like I. I feel like that’s a pretty good, I mean, like Paula has said, I think these are all really close. [00:30:34] I, I think Ben’s got a better answer, honestly, but I just say, [00:30:37] Joe: oh, Ben, OG likes your answer. Are you feeling good [00:30:40] Benjamin: as always? I’m always brimming with un confidence, so, yeah, I, I’m sticking with my answer. [00:30:45] Joe: Well, you couldn’t change it anyway. Oh, right. Okay. So you’ve been here before, you know, but, but yeah. Uh, Paula 38 0 1. [00:30:51] Paula: You know, I’m, I’m honestly, I’m second guessing myself. I feel like I should have gone 37.99 ’cause then I would’ve captured the entire downside rather than what I did was I, I have a much, uh, narrower sliver that the answer has to land in. [00:31:05] Joe: Well, I don’t know if, if that was the right move or not, but I will tell you this, that, uh, generally if your instinct was to go a dollar more and usually finish last, you should probably do the opposite. [00:31:15] Yeah, exactly. [00:31:17] Paula: I have a long track record of. Choosing one side of the equation or the other and being wrong. [00:31:23] Joe: But this time was she right to trust her instinct? Let’s find out. [00:31:32] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m European fun guy and gelato taste tester extraordinaire. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Today in honor of Labor Day, we’re celebrating the minimum wage in Joe and og. Certainly put the emphasis on minimum here in the basement. I mean, if I was paid a dollar more, I’d earn a whole buck. [00:31:52] Luxembourg boasts not only the highest minimum wage, but also the wealthiest country in Europe. As of 2020, the gross domestic product of the country was so gross. It was. How gross was it? How gross was it? Yeah, thank you. It was over 120,000 American dollars per person. But before you go move to Luxembourg, economists predict that Ireland will gain the throne by 2027. [00:32:18] But today’s question was how much is luxembourg’s minimum wage per month in Euros? The answer, well, what I will tell you. Is that, uh, Ben was 2,429 Euros over Paula was 1,230 over OG was just a scant 1,229 over because the correct answer is just under 16 euro per hour, which translates to 2,571 Euro per month, making OG once again winner. [00:32:56] Congratulations, og. [00:32:58] Joe: Woo. I feel like Paul, if you’d pump the brakes just for a second and thought of that earlier. [00:33:03] Paula: Right? I know, right. Shortly after making that guess, I realized my error. [00:33:09] Joe: I feel like you just want OG to win. I I just get that feeling. [00:33:13] Paula: og. You can send the check too. [00:33:17] Joe: Send the, the milk bar gift certificate. [00:33:18] I don’t even know if Eric’s gonna do that this year for us, but, uh, we’ll send the trophy. I forgot [00:33:22] OG: all about that place. [00:33:23] Joe: Yeah. og uh, any, uh, big words? You got a, a speech planned? I. At the end of the year. No, I haven’t. No, I mean just for winning this one. [00:33:31] OG: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just, uh, just one inning and many, you don’t, uh, come strutting off the field in the middle of the seventh just ’cause you’re up by two runs. [00:33:39] That’s a bad juju. [00:33:42] Joe: Time for the second half of our discussion about extreme renting. The second half is brought to you by deposit accounts.com. But you know what happens when you go to deposit accounts.com. [00:33:52] Benjamin: Uh, good things, very, [00:33:54] Joe: very good things. You find out that, uh, that brick and mortar bank where you’ve got your savings account might not be competitive. [00:34:01] In fact, most of the biggest brick and mortar bank still paying 0.0 something percent while the national average, and I found this, by the way, when you go to deposit accounts.com by LendingTree. You’ll find this right on the front page, the national average as we record this. And of course it’s a little early, so go check it yourself. [00:34:17] But the national average is half a percent, way better than some of those big brick and mortar banks. But you know what? If you go up to the top 1%, which is still hundreds of banks, they’re at 4.91. A little bit down from last week when we talked about this, but you can compare more than 275,000 deposit rates from over 11,000 banks of credit unions for free. [00:34:35] They’ll rank them against each other@depositaccounts.com. Find out which ones are going to be best for you. Alright, uh, second half of this discussion. Let’s talk about something that, uh, one of our stackers in the chat talked about. Let’s talk about renting and retirement. Now I’m gonna go with a guy who’s got the podcast. [00:34:55] Retirement starts today. This stacker asks the question, Ben, what about selling your house and just renting? A house during retirement or apartment during retirement? Where do you come down on that? [00:35:08] Benjamin: This is something I think that has changed generationally as we go from kind of the baby boomers retiring to starting to see Gen X retire more. [00:35:15] I don’t think that newer retirees are as married to the idea of I’ve gotta be building equity in everything. I think more people, myself included, are looking more at. When the roof leaks, I want it to be someone else’s problem. If I want to be gone for an extended period in retirement, I want the yard work to be someone else’s problem. [00:35:34] So I think there’s a lot of wisdom in renting in retirement because you can focus on what specifically you want to be doing in retirement rather than having to do the maintenance of a house or worrying about flooding or worrying about a tornado or something like that. So I think there’s a lot of wisdom in renting and retirement. [00:35:52] Joe: But you do have a problem, og, which is that now you’re, whatever happens inflationary wise, I don’t know if that’s the correct terminology, that’s the scientific wording, but when it comes to inflation, like you become kind of, just whatever happens, happens, you’re on that hook. [00:36:09] OG: Well, yeah, but it does give you a lot of flexibility and, and I would challenge somebody who has, uh, been in the same home for. [00:36:17] I don’t know. Let’s say maybe 20 years or more. So you’re on the backside of paying the house off. Maybe you’ve got a regular 30 year mortgage. Go back and if you still have the records of it, or if you can get the records of it from your county. Find out how much your tax bill was in your house. [00:36:32] Insurance bill was in year one. Contrast that to what it is today and forecast what that looks like in year 31 when you’ve got the mortgage paid off. And my guess is, is that that number for taxes and insurance in year 31 is the same or more than the entire payment was when you first bought the house. [00:36:52] 30 years earlier. And so my point is, is that you’ve been experiencing this your whole life anyway, this slow kind of matriculation of inflation and just, it doesn’t affect the payment obviously, unless you know you refinance or do something, pull equity out. But you know what I mean? Like if you just had 30 year mortgage, that payment has gone up every year. [00:37:12] And if you say, well, even if I get rid of the payment, I’m still on the hook for. A thousand a month or 3000 a month or 2,500, like whatever the tax bill and insurance bill is for your property. And you’re on a hook for maintenance, which is ballpark, roughly 1% of the cost of your house every year on average. [00:37:31] So if you look at those numbers and add both of those things together, divide it out into a monthly number, I think you can find, you can buy a pretty fancy freaking house for the insurance costs. The tax costs and the maintenance costs. You mean rent one? Rent one. Rent one. Yeah, rent one. I’m sorry. Yeah. [00:37:45] Yeah, you’re right. And understand that hey, these numbers are gonna go up every si. ’cause they’re gonna go up anyway. You’re already on the hook for that. You just, for some reason we do have this attachment to, but I own this house, so I’m good. It’s like, like you said at the very beginning, well. You kind of own the house, but you don’t own the dirt. [00:38:01] You’re renting the dirt. And if, you know, if you stop paying the rent on the dirt and form of taxes, they’ll just come take your house. It’s weird how quickly you don’t own it anymore. [00:38:09] Doug: Yeah. You’re like, wait, I own it. Well, uh, not anymore. Pal Oji, you know, in a different way of supporting your point. We’ve been in a house over 30 year, just under 30 years actually now. [00:38:19] Uh, and it’s paid off, but for the first 20 to 25 years of that, if we looked at what we paid for the house. At the beginning and then just, uh, use an inflation calculator, see what that equivalent was in today’s dollars. Mm-Hmm. It was darn near to the dollar the same. So really it hadn’t, and, and it was in an a neighborhood that was tracking or exceeding the market, but it was about the same as what we paid for. [00:38:45] It was only in the last five to seven years that it really started to exceed that. I guess what I’m saying is it’s not that hard to make a case where renting a home and then taking the difference of what you would’ve spent on taxes and maintenance and insurance and everything else, and investing that is a better financial outcome. [00:39:05] If all you wanna look at is the dollars and cents and what the bottom line is, there’s a lot of other. Less, what am I trying to say? Intrinsic value of owning a house. There’s an emotional component of it, but if you’re just looking at dollars and cents, you can make a pretty strong case where renting is actually better for a home. [00:39:21] Joe: Speaking about the emotional component, Paula, people that are just casually, I. Aware of your work in financial media, on the real estate space, right? Mm-Hmm. Because you talk a lot about real estate. They might be surprised to hear your take on this as well. ’cause I’m sure p somebody’s walking their dog right now going, oh, Paul is gonna be the voice of sanity here saying that owning the house is a better idea. [00:39:44] Paula: Well, I will say with regard to the inflation conversation that we’ve just been having. Certainly as a homeowner, yes, you will. Your, your property taxes, your homeowner’s insurance, your labor costs for services provided, maintenance costs, repair costs, those are all going to rise at market rates. However, when you’re a renter, there’s also going to be the additional layer of a landlord there who also has to put some type of a markup. [00:40:08] On top of all of that, they wanna get paid too. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now that all being said, there are a couple of additional points. One is I would look at the price to rent ratio in your location. So there are certain locations where the price to rent ratio is the price of a home divided by the. [00:40:28] Annual cost of renting that home. And if you assess the price to rent ratio in a given location, if that is a relatively low number, we’ll say 16 or lower, that’s a good place to be an owner. If that is a relatively high number, like 25 or higher, it’s a great place to be a renter. And if it’s between like 15, 16 to 25, you’re in the gray zone. [00:40:53] There’s a case to be made either way. But I would start by calculating the price to rent ratio in the place where you live. So going back to Manhattan, the price to rent ratio, just for the average domicile here is 55. So it is a slam dunk case to be a renter in a place like Manhattan. Whereas there are other places, you know, Toledo, Ohio, it’s a slam dunk case to be an owner and most places across the country are somewhere in the middle. [00:41:21] And then bigger cities, it goes neighborhood by neighborhood sometimes. So I would start there. The other other thing that I would say is other, other, exactly the other, other, I would approach this question. With the lens of am I making the decision from a place of strength or from a place of weakness? [00:41:41] Because I think that there’s a big distinction between. A retiree who is stressed about money and is thinking about selling their home as a last ditch effort to squeeze some lemon from the juice because they’re so worried about money, you know? So they’re trying to like. Just cash up in any way they can. [00:42:04] You know, and they’re in their early sixties and they just want the cash, but potentially because they’re coming from a place of weakness and a place of scarcity, that’s only going to set them up to be even more stressed when they’re in their seventies and eighties. That’s a very different scenario than someone who’s in their early sixties and they’re like. [00:42:22] We’re feeling great. We’ve got big portfolios with lots of investments and a great withdrawal strategy, and we just wanna travel a little bit and enjoy the early part of our retirement. Those are like, they’re both retirees who are considering becoming renters, but they’re very different starting points. [00:42:41] Ben, you’ve gotta see both sides of the spectrum, I would think. [00:42:44] Benjamin: Yeah, I think I agree with what Paul’s saying. Some people are in a position where. You know, their home equity’s their biggest asset and other than like reverse mortgage, you know, selling it outright is probably the most straightforward way in tapping that equity. [00:42:55] So some people are gonna be in a position where they kind of have to sell, and I don’t think that’s really a negative thing. I think in many instances that can be a positive. Maybe you could rent a nice, replace lower maintenance, you hate your neighbors. It’s a lot different. Selling your house and moving versus just waiting for your lease to rent out and getting a new place. [00:43:10] So there are people that are gonna be in a position where they have to sell just to be able to live and retire. But there’s also people that can. Enhance their already flush savings with a couple hundred thousand dollars, more of their equity. So I think it depends on where you’re coming from, but either way, I don’t see it as a, as a big negative to rent, at least not in the same way. [00:43:28] Maybe it was 20 years ago. [00:43:30] Joe: Does this come down to then OG something that you and I chat a lot about on lots of episodes of the show over the years? You’re trying to really solve for flexibility. [00:43:39] OG: Well, and I also think that it’s, it’s so uniquely personal. I was thinking about a couple of clients. I know obviously Ben works in this space also, and it’s like, I can think of a client who was very adamant about like, I can’t wait to retire. [00:43:52] I’m gonna sell the house. I’m gonna take the money. I’m gonna travel the world and I’m gonna solve this problem. I’m the back end when I get done doing all my fun travel and I’ll figure out where I wanna live. That happens with people on occasion, and then there’s people that are like, I can’t wait to move away from the. [00:44:06] 110 degree temperatures in Dallas and move back where my kids are closer to a more temperate client, you know, and they move to a smaller home, or they move from a small city to a bigger city that has more amenities or something that’s more important to them. Uh, culturally or healthcare wise or something like that. [00:44:25] And so everybody’s gonna have a lot different perspective on where this falls. And then once you take that, like, where do I wanna live component, I think it’s great to add Paul’s scientific approach or tactical approach there of going like, well, is this a community that makes more sense to rent? Or is this a community that makes more sense to own over this period of time where I think I’m gonna be here? [00:44:45] Ultimately you’re, it’s a big gamble anyway. I mean, how many times do we talk about people that move or change jobs or change careers or whatever, you know, it’s like, okay, we’ve got, we finally got this place where we wanna live and retire, and turns out we actually don’t like the beach that much. Or the weather here isn’t as great as we thought, or I didn’t know my kids were gonna pack up in six years and move all the way across the country with my grandkids. [00:45:07] And that’s more important to me than being on the ocean. I think ultimately, if you’ve got the opportunity to choose flexibility. You know, choose the decision that gives you the most opportunity to have more decisions in the future. Like that’s always my default when it comes to any sort of financial planning or financial advice. [00:45:26] It’s like if you’ve got the opportunity to make a decision that makes you happy, and it gives you a choice to make a decision in the future, sweet. If you’re gonna lock yourself in for a long period of time, you really need to spend a lot of energy on analyzing that to make sure you make a good one. [00:45:41] Benjamin: Yeah. Even if you’re positive that you do wanna buy in retirement, if you’re switching locations, I always recommend renting for like six months in the new place. ’cause you want to figure out, you know, is this a tourist place? Is there an on season or an off season? Which side of the tracks is the wrong side of the tracks? [00:45:56] Get to know a city because we’ve had clients in the past that have bought, and then it wasn’t what they thought it was and they tried to. Sell six months or a year later, and you’re gonna lose your shirt most of the time. So yeah, burn the money. Yeah. If you hate renting, yes, you’re burning the money, but rent for six months just to make sure you love it, because like OG said, grandkids enter the picture or your friends from the neighborhood move two towns over and you wanna be closer to them. [00:46:18] Give yourself that flexibility. Rent for six months, and then make more of a long-term decision. [00:46:23] Joe: Let’s get back to this idea of extreme rent, and actually before we do that, I think it’s. Actually crazy talk, Paula, that you would apply some math to this versus, uh, using a, a, a rule of thumb that we create arbitrarily, like I think in finance we should use arbitrary rules of thumb. [00:46:38] Not No, I’m kidding. I see that all over the internet. I’m like, really? Why don’t we actually apply some numbers first before we make that decision. But let’s go back to the, some of these more extreme renting. They talk in this piece about renting tools, renting a phone. Where do you come down, Paula, on renting? [00:46:57] Those types of things. [00:46:58] Paula: Those are very different. So tools like if you need to rent a, a jigsaw for a day or you need to rent a drill for a day, that, that makes a lot of sense. This is a specialty item that you rarely need, but just for a weekend you need a drill. It doesn’t make sense to buy a drill, just to use it for one weekend and then like have it sit somewhere gathering dust. [00:47:21] Right. So it makes a lot of sense. But something like a phone, you know, it wasn’t until I read this article that I was aware that you could rent something like a smartphone or an iPad. I didn’t know that either. Yeah. I had no idea. It’s new enough information that my brain is still trying to process it together because the reality, at least with a smartphone, is that it’s only gonna last you for about two years anyway with normal usage. [00:47:46] Joe: Well, I was thinking about the way that we use a phone. I. Because as an example, there was a photographer in here who rents some high-end photography equipment that makes sense. And for their, for their job and they’re always need the new, new thing for them. It kind of makes sense to rent it just a few days a month for us in the way we use phones. [00:48:03] I mean, you’re pulling out your phone to do social media post quite often and having the new camera, the new thing to be able to do that. I think makes sense because I was looking at what I paid for my iPhone 14 mm-Hmm. And then what they gave me back for it when I sold and then I looked at the prices they talked about if I would’ve rented it. [00:48:24] It almost to you guys’ point, crazy point about cars. I point out how crazy it is all the time. It’s about the same. But the difference is I’m not out all this cash. It’s way different with cars. You still have a 14? Dude, that’s embarrassing. Wait, no, no, no. I got rid of my 14 and [00:48:38] OG: I sold it for a crap load of money. [00:48:40] No, that’s what I’m saying. Like isn’t that how phones go where you’re like, you get the one, you pay for it for a year and then they go, Hey, if you want the new iPhone 41 x or whatever they’re on now, send this other one back and you just keep paying 35 a month on your at t bill. Uh, actually now it’s 36 a month and you’re like, yeah, yeah, whatever. [00:48:59] As long as it’s got seven cameras and a bajillion gigahertz, as long as it makes french toast all I care about. [00:49:05] Joe: Yeah. I think Paula, to your point. When I read about renting, it’s almost the same thing, but I’m not out that initial cash outlay and I can use it for something else. [00:49:13] Paula: Yeah, I would need to dig more into the details of renting a a phone, ’cause that one broke my brain a little bit when I learned that that was a possibility. [00:49:22] Joe: Ben, I wanna flip the switch here before we say goodbye, which is instead of renting this stuff. You know, you don’t like the fact of renting clothes, but what if somebody wanted some of your cargo shorts you’re not wearing right now and they wanted to rent it from you? Have you thought about renting out your stuff to make a little bit extra money? [00:49:39] Benjamin: You know, if I had like power tools and things like that, sort of taking the other end of the trade, right? I think it makes a lot of sense. If you need a chainsaw, do I wanna store a chainsaw forever or do I wanna borrow it for two days? If I had extra stuff that was valuable, that would be an interesting idea. [00:49:54] I would wanna make sure that I knew the commitment and the hours involved, and then kind of did the math. Am I making $2 an hour or $25 an hour to go through this effort? But that’s an interesting idea. [00:50:04] Joe: Oh geez. You read through this. Was there anything at the end of this discussion or at the end of this piece that you went, you know, maybe I should look into reading that, that you’re not reading now? [00:50:13] OG: No, no, I’m just kidding. No, no. I was just, I was just back on the tool thing. Well, I mean, [00:50:17] Joe: that’s an honest answer. That’s a good answer. No, [00:50:19] OG: no, no, no, no. I was thinking back to the tool thing and I was thinking, is there any self-respecting American that walks into Home Depot and says, I should just rent this drill. [00:50:27] Oh, crap. I. It’s like, I need another drill. [00:50:30] Paula: Yeah, [00:50:32] OG: yeah. Which drill are we talking about? I’ve got three of them in my closet. Paula and none of them are charged. They all use different batteries. I needed a hedge trimmer once, and that’s in the garage. It’s amazingly awesome. Very sharp. Still. I. Because I used it for, yeah, he needed to do some [00:50:46] Joe: serious manscaping, so I went with a hedge trimmer. [00:50:50] By the way, stacker Annette, who’s in both the, uh, she’s in the afford Anything community and in the Stacking Benjamins community, she will tell you that with tools, the library’s become a really good option. But anyway, OG back to you. [00:51:00] OG: No, I was gonna say, I think we put a lot of stank on this, but we do already do a lot of renting anyway. [00:51:04] We rent cars when we go on work trips or personal trips, we, we rent vacation houses through Airbnb or VRBO. We rent jet skis and boats, and instead of buying them when you go to the lake for a few days, it’s like we already do all these things. And even if you don’t rent them, you might borrow them from your friend who has one, which is like what? [00:51:25] Renting it, but for free. And the whole thing is the same thing. You’re just saying Better option. [00:51:29] Joe: No contract. [00:51:30] OG: Yeah. But what’s going on in your brain? You’re going, it doesn’t make sense for me to own this forever. I just need to use it right now for a period of time. And I’m willing to trade the safety of having it be mine for the immediacy and the convenience of. [00:51:46] Doing what I need to do with it and making it go away. Whether you’re paying for it or you’re, or you’re borrowing, we already do all this a lot. [00:51:52] Joe: Ben, anything you, you feel differently now about renting after this? [00:51:55] Benjamin: I think it all boils down to kind of the constant with financial planning and retirement planning. [00:51:59] You know, take your time, think things through and just be as intentional as possible. [00:52:04] Joe: Yeah. Do I really need to doing this? Paula, how about you? [00:52:07] Paula: Yeah, I, so I think renting is a great way. To share resources because most of the items that we have, whether it’s our cars or our clothing or our tools for 90 plus percent of the time just sit unused. [00:52:23] And so I think the beauty of renting is that more people can use the same item, which means we get more use out of our resources. I [00:52:33] Joe: think about that when I’m cleaning out closets. I’m like, oh, I might use this someday. And then I think. You know, somebody out there needs this thing right now and I’m sitting on it for this, this day, which might be eight to 10 years from now, and I can go get it back and it clears up closet space and I think of somebody, you know what I mean? [00:52:50] It’s not about, I get worried when I think about me getting rid of it, but then when I think about somebody else enjoying it while it’s sitting in my closet instead [00:52:58] OG: Yeah, you, you don’t wanna waste it. [00:52:59] Joe: Yeah, exactly. Yep. I’ll tell you the one that I liked that was really cool. I like the idea of renting a Christmas tree, being in a family that celebrates Christmas. [00:53:09] Just the fact that it’s a potted Christmas tree. Just take the Christmas tree, put my lights on it, give it back. That’s great. They can then replant the tree. I thought that was, that was pretty quirky and I. Wild and different and I gotta think like you, Paula, more about the phone. I think that’s gonna do it for today. [00:53:26] Once again, we will link to this Wall Street Journal piece on our show notes at stacky Benjamins dot com. Let’s talk about what you guys have going on at your wonderful places. This, uh, holiday weekend. og, let’s start with you. What’s happening at the OG household this weekend, besides those wonderful stakes that, uh, [00:53:44] OG: yeah, that’ll be on, uh, Sunday or Monday, tomorrow, Saturday traveling, flying up to Indiana, uh, Bloomington to watch a little college football game for fun. [00:53:55] You know, the cornerstone of college football is in, uh, Bloomington, so we’re gonna go watch the, we [00:53:59] Joe: had a, we had a message from a stacker about a previous episode. Speaking of, uh, Bloomington, Kevin. On X said, uh, please remind Neighbor Doug that IU has five national titles and Purdue has zero, not four. [00:54:12] OG: Bang. [00:54:15] Joe: Just going back, dude, I’m still on mute. Discussion on purpose this time Moog, [00:54:23] OG: so doing that. Doing that on Saturday, coming home Sunday. [00:54:26] Joe: Fabulous. We’ll go to our guest of honor last, Paula, what’s happening at the Afford Anything Podcast [00:54:31] Paula: on the Afford Anything podcast. Our interview with David Novak, the former CEO of Yum Brands, which is the parent company of KFC Pizza Hut. [00:54:38] Taco Bell is up and running, so head to the Afford Anything podcast for a lengthy interview about leadership [00:54:47] Joe: and about what’s really in the Taco Bell meat. [00:54:50] Paula: He does talk about his favorite Taco Bell menu item. That’s [00:54:54] Joe: who doesn’t have a favorite Taco Bell menu item. Chalupa obviously starving right now. [00:54:57] Yeah, Mexican pizzas and no meat for any of those Mexican pizza’s. A lot of meat. Ben, thanks for hanging out with us again, man. This was a great time as usual. [00:55:06] Benjamin: Always a pleasure. [00:55:08] Joe: Well, what’s going on at retirement starts today? [00:55:11] Benjamin: Retirement starts today. We are going to do a deep dive on retirement tax and we’re, we, we’re developing a tool in-House where we can, uh, have a person answer a quiz and we can kind of fill you in on what, what we feel the totality of the taxes are gonna be over your retirement. [00:55:25] So trying to develop some tools, some Excel tools for our listeners. [00:55:29] Joe: That’s awesome. And that’s it. Uh, retirement starts today, the podcast, wherever finer podcasts are at. If people wanna go to your website, where do they go? [00:55:39] Benjamin: They can check out Retirement Starts today, radio.com, or they can check out 1 million retired.com. [00:55:45] Joe: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us again. It was fun as usual. And it’s this time of year, Ben, I’m always wishing I was up there with you in, in North Dakota where you, you don’t have 108 [00:55:55] Benjamin: degrees. It’s a beautiful 76 in Bismarck right now. It’s delightful. It’s [00:55:58] Joe: easy, easy with that talk. It’s crazy. Talk. All right. [00:56:02] I think that’s gonna do it for today. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. If, uh, you know, somebody that needs some financial literacy in their life, just tell a friend about today’s show and, uh, they will. Thank you and so will we. Right now, thanks to everybody who’s done that, and at the end of our show, we always end by asking what should be in our to-do list and Doug. [00:56:21] What should be on our to-do list? So [00:56:25] Doug: what’s stacked up on our to-do list for today? First, remember when OG totally blew our minds when he said, [00:56:32] OG: well, if it flies floats, or you should rent it. [00:56:40] Doug: Second, I gasped when Benjamin Brandt had this to say about bouncy houses. [00:56:47] Benjamin: Rent it, [00:56:51] Doug: but the big lesson, did you hear about the short guy who got pickpocketed in Luxembourg? I can’t believe someone could stoop so low. Wait for it. Wait for it. Thanks to Benjamin Brant for joining us today. You’ll find his podcast, retirement Starts Today, wherever you are listening to us now. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. [00:57:18] Thanks to Paula Pant for hanging out with us today. You’ll find her fabulous podcast. Afford anything wherever you listen to finer podcasts. And finally, thanks to OG for joining us. Looking for good financial planning, help head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG for his calendar. This show is the property of SB podcasts LC copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Sulci High. [00:57:42] Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. 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. [00:58:04] This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show. [00:58:26] bit: Oh, that was so bad. It locked up my computer. Quick. Let’s get outta here before it finds the key. No, I mean it. Alright.
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