Ric Edelman has opinions, and they’re both well-researched and timely. We pick his brain on annuities, crypto, central bank digital currency, and the future of money. Ric’s book, The Truth About Money, was a revolutionary and even-handed look at money way back in 1996. We’re sure you’ll find his take on modern money as riveting still today.
Plus, in our headline segment, what’s going on with your credit? A new study from TransUnion shows that credit scores are a-changing. How? We’ll share.
Of course, we’ll save time for Doug’s trivia and more!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at StackingBenjamins.com/201.
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Fireside Interview with Charlie Wise, Senior Vice President, Research and Consulting at TransUnion (YouTube)
Ric Edelman
Big thanks to Ric Edelman for joining us today. To learn more about Ric Edelman, visit The Truth About Your Future. Grab yourself a copy of the book The Truth About Crypto.
Doug’s Trivia
- Back in 2008 when Barack Obama ran for President, street artist, Shepard Fairey, created a poster of the future world leader and the word hope. The Associated Press (AP) sued Fairey for compensation because they discovered the artist had based his now famous design on one single photo from AP photographer, Mannie Garcia. Fairey argued that his poster actually INCREASED the value of Garcia’s work, making it more valuable, not less, so he should pay the AP nothing. The question is this: who won?
Need life insurance? You could be insured in 20 minutes or less and build your family’s safety net for the future. Use StackingBenjamins.com/HavenLife to calculate how much you need and apply.
- Our caller, James, started working only three days a week, five or six years ago. He was able to maintain his Director title, while being an exempt employee. When it was brought into question by another employee, he was able to keep his health insurance benefits. Was the company in violation of their benefit policy?
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 insurances 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).
Other Mentions
- Guide to the Markets (J.P. Morgan)
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Running Slow AF Toward Your (Big) Goals
Transcript:
He got me invested in some kind of root company and so
then I got a call from him
saying, we don’t have to worry about money no more. And I said, that’s good.
One less thing.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan, prepare to take a leap into your future. Today we’re talking about the economy, crypto annuities, and more with financial guru Rick Edelman. In our headlines, we’re talking about the record level of credit balances with Charlie Wise. Plus we’ll throw out the Haven Lifeline to stacker James, who wants to know if his company’s policy on benefits violated his request for reduced work hours, and then, I’ll share some protective trivia.
And now two guys who are invested in your future, Joe, and oh
and a happy Wednesday to you stacker family. Ma’am, we are gonna have some fun today. On Monday, we tr we, we brought the inspiration on Monday with Martinez Evans, didn’t we? Doug? That was an amazing story. Martinez. So good. Today we’re gonna go in the opposite direction. Not that we’re not gonna be inspirational, we’re just going tactical today.
We’re gonna give you the tools you need to get ahead with your credit and to look at lots of different areas of your money. And the guy who’s going to help us bring all this goodness stretching out right now, across the card table from me. It’s Mr. OG stretching
out across the cartel. Uh, yeah. Well, he’s mentally stretching out.
I he’s a torch singer at a nightclub.
I need to,
I was thinking more of that. Uh, like naked sushi dude. Wait, that’s a different thing altogether.
I met, I don’t know what naked sushi dude is, and I’m not sure I wanna know. But, uh, does he smell like, but you do
look good in that red strapless gown.
No.
Who wants a California roll?
Yes. I was talking, you were, you were just stretching your arms there and sitting across the card table. We, we should probably get this thing moving, you know. Great show. Rick Edelman been around a long time. His book, the Truth About Money Forever, has been one of my favorite books about money. Of course, he was Baron’s number one financial advisor a few years in a row, and now he’s, uh, doing whatever the heck he wants to do.
Og. Just, yeah, I was gonna
say, he’s, he’s retired but not retired.
But not retired cuz he’s here with us. But before all that, you know, Doug, I was thinking that very, very succinctly before you, before you decide to run for president, I think we should probably, well we should probably listen to this great
stuff, Joe.
That should bring in tons of money for the campaign. How about we do another one? Well
now the coffers are filling up. We can actually get on with the podcast, Rick Edelman’s here. But first, a headline with our friend, Charlie Wise from TransUnion. Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.
Our headline today comes to us from TransUnion. This time every year they take a look at the nation’s debt og. We’ve got, we got some wild numbers. We got some this year. Yeah, listen to this. Credit card balances remain near record highs at 917 billion. It’s for the usa, near 20% increase year over year.
Unsecured personal loans up 26.3% year over year. I spoke to recently on a live broadcast on the Fireside app and on YouTube with, uh, Charlie Wise from TransUnion about this. Here’s what Charlie Wise had to say when I asked him about this. These big, big credit card and, uh, unsecured debt numbers. We’ve seen
a tremendous, uh, I’ll call it rebound in credit card debt.
So remember little, uh, little history, time capsule, early days, the pandemic when the market was flooded with a lot of government stimulus enhanced unemployment, and people weren’t spending right. People just were, were home, and they didn’t, they weren’t traveling, they weren’t going to restaurants. A lot of excess liquidity.
And people did. What smart people do is they use that excess liquidity to pay down their most expensive debt, which is usually credit cards and personal loans. So we saw this big trough early on in the pandemic, and then a lot of the stimulus ended. This scary monster called inflation started raising its head, uh, mid 2021 and that’s when we started to see balances picking back up for a while we were saying, okay, they’re essentially rebounding from the troughs they’ve seen, but we’ve now seen them at a balanced level surpass where they were pre pandemic in 2019 and we are now essentially at or near record balances.
They are down. I will say that we’ve seen that quarterly dip that we normally see in Q1 came down a bit in Q1 as people normally do. They have their post, you know, post holidays shopping hangovers. They get their tax refund checks, they pay down their cards. So it’s nice to see that seasonality there.
That is
nice to see that seasonality as Charlie’s talking about og. However, that’s a big problem and we’re seeing credit card balance numbers higher than we had pre pandemic. Not a great sign. I
agree. And I think a lot of people are using consumer debt as their kind of go-to to solve the inflation problem.
I was looking at the JP Morgan. Guide to the Markets, which is a free publication that they have, you can just put into Google, JP Morgan guide to the markets, and they’ll come up with all this data, they say in all total of, uh, consumer debt that the US is at, uh, 1.2 trillion, which is, uh, you know, higher.
And, you know, you can kind of see that trough that he was talking about on this chart. What is a little bit encouraging, if there was some encouraging component of this, is that it still is a smaller percentage of disposable income. So while the debt has increased, which is not great, the payments haven’t got there yet, and maybe that’s just a lag factor.
Maybe there’s just, maybe there’s just a period of time here where it just kind of hasn’t caught up yet, but percent of, uh, debt payments to household income is, is kind of the same as where it was, you know, for all of the 2010s, give or take, not including, you know, that covid dip. So, Maybe a little light at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah. Well, I
hope so, but let’s not look at the leaves on the tree. Let’s look at the root. You know when Charlie’s mentioning that there’s heavy inflation,
what? You worked on that line for a week, didn’t you? Hat tip? That was poetic. No. Can we all just stop for a minute and appreciate
that?
When Charlie mentions that there’s heavy inflation?
Oh, it’s like harps are playing in the background. Oh, and at the same time we’re seeing these numbers go up. I feel like that’s the effect of us, not like our credit card is the way that we realize that the numbers are higher, not tracking our spending. It seems like if we tracked our spending, we would know early enough on that things are outta whack, that we wouldn’t see our credit card balance go up to this huge degree That with 20%, I mean, that’s a big fat number.
Yeah. I mean, again, it’s kind of a, of what are you really looking at? Yes, it’s up 20% year over year, but it was down so much the years prior. That the trajectory is very similar to where it would have been without the covid blip, so to speak. So I’m not as pessimistic about it, but I do think that if you are noticing, and this is where you’re gonna really notice it in your spending, you’re, if you’re noticing that you’re starting to carry a balance like a lot of people have over the last year or year and a half, and it’s largely because of what you’re talking about, Joe, not paying attention and just going, oh, I’m still gonna go out to eat, I’m still gonna go on vacation, I’m still gonna shop at the same stores.
I’m gonna do my thing without seeing how that affects how my cash flow is being affected by these rising costs. You will eventually run out of runway, right? Like eventually those payments will start being such a big number relative to your cash flow that then it will No, you’ll notice it. So if you don’t normally carry a balance and all of a sudden this month you start carrying a thousand dollars balance, next month you have a $2,000 balance, and the month after that you have a $3,000 balance.
You gotta nip that in the bud, right then that’s the time to figure it out. Not when the payment’s a thousand a month and you can’t, you
can’t cover the payment’s a thousand a month. Then you’re carrying some serious debt. You know the problem is, I think a lot of people do it the way you’re talking about.
My point was, was that if we tracked our spending, we could get to it even before that. And it’s not a difficult thing to do to track how you spend money. Yeah, from month to month and, and see it even earlier than you’re talking about. In fact, oh gee, Charlie also is positive and we’ll link to the YouTube video so people can go watch all of it if they’d like.
But he also, uh, mentions another fact related to Covid, which was, as you know, companies cut their debt to people with credit problems during Covid times also cuz they didn’t know it was gonna happen. And so you saw people with not very much credit history, people with sketchy credit history not being allowed credit and what’s happening now, they’re reopening those areas.
So we’re seeing actually huge swaths of the population. They’re actually able to get credit now when they couldn’t get credit for a while. During, during the pandemic we talked about other types of debt as well, og We also looked at the mortgage market and here’s what TransUnion. And Charlie, you’re looking at, in that arena, it is a
great time to have a mortgage if you got your mortgage before 2022.
Um, it’s what I’ll say, you know, as you look at some of the, the areas that you called, you know, concerning or maybe alarming the credit cards and the unscript personal loans, the reality is that the consumer credit market is dominated in terms of balances by mortgages. And anybody with a mortgage and a decent credit score took advantage of the near zero interest rates and refinance their mortgage in 20 20, 20 21.
And is right now sitting at sub 4%, in many cases, sub 3% interest rates. Yeah. So me who’s had a mortgage for pretty much my whole adult life is now sitting at a mortgage. It’s not gonna change in rate for the next 15 years. That’s good news. So what we actually see right now is that on average, if you look at total household debt, that’s a percentage of income.
Near record lows over the last 40 years. But averages are deceiving, right? Because yeah, it’s great news if you have a mortgage, there’s lots of people out there who are renters instead, renters don’t have that same security. They don’t have fixed payments for the next, um, you know, 15 years like I do.
They’re seeing their, their rents increase and that’s putting a big, big strain on their wallets. So it’s really kind of a tale of two Americas, the homeowners, those that didn’t buy in the last six months are probably doing pretty well relative to where they were before. The people who are renting and the people who are using credit to make ends meet, they’re probably struggling.
It’s very difficult OG somebody who’s just, uh, getting on their feet financially right now, they wanna buy a house. It’s so much more expensive to buy a house today than it was before. And to Charlie’s point, you know, we’re seeing the year over year rent increases going up. I like his analogy. The two Americas.
Yeah.
For certain, I’m super happy that I have a nice two and a half percent mortgage. I, when we bought our house in 2015 and our mortgage was at 4%, I, I couldn’t believe it at four. And I thought, oh my gosh, we’ll never refinance this as long as I live.
And now we’re sitting at two and a half, which is probably something we’ll never see again. That seems, but again, the long term average is somewhere in that five to six range, right? So we’re above, we’re above that. If you’re getting a mortgage right now, if you’re looking to, to refinance it. And frankly, most people do that anyway.
You know, most people are gonna refinance as soon as the rates give them an opportunity to do so and free up some cash flow. But I’m also curious how many people do it from the equity pulling out standpoint. Right? Like how many people. I wouldn’t know how to look this up, but I, but I bet you there’s a significant number of people who pull equity out of their house for the sake of pulling equity out of their house.
Oh, he did. He did. And he said that, that an issue that’s going on right now, oh gee, is that nobody is doing it because they are afraid of refinancing the house if they’re doing it. He said they are seeing a TransUnion, a segment of the market coming back that very nearly disappeared when rates were at those historic lows.
The home equity line of credit is coming back on the map because a homeowner to get at this record level of equity that people homeowners have in their homes right now to get at, they don’t wanna refinance their house. They don’t want to get rid of that, but they, they’re not
gonna refinance the
primary, right?
Yeah, exactly. So they’re going with a home equity loan, which is, which is back,
Hmm. Yeah. Well, it’s encouraging that there’s still there. Well, you know, we’re still at a spot where the debt service, and I think this is what he talked about, the debt service is still at, you know, historic lows in terms of the percentage of your debt payments that are part of your income.
But by the same token, if you don’t pay attention to that, like we were talking about earlier, you know, that snowballs pretty quickly from, you know, a few hundred dollars a month of a payment to all of a sudden it’s a thousand dollars a month of a payment. And that’s pretty noticeable. And then you add something like a line of credit or a HELOC in there.
And what people are finding now is that that really cherry payment that you had for the pool loan or the really cherry payment you had for, you know, whatever fun thing you wanted to buy is adjusting. And with it adjusts the interest rate. When the interest rate adjusts, the payment adjusts, and now it’s, you know, two, three times as expensive on a cash flow basis.
So, Again, I think what you said at the very beginning of this, Joe, is probably the, the best kind of beginning step of this is you have to have a good idea of where your cash flow is going every single month, so you can identify where those, where those holes are, if there’s gonna be any quickly.
Yeah, I think a lot of people have debt.
I think having a comprehensive debt strategy where you’re looking at all your debt together and how am I gonna pay this down? How do I think about this? Like I’m a company, is the way we want to go with this, and we’ll dive even more into that at our newsletter, the 2 0 1 tomorrow, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 to sign up for the 2 0 1.
Our free newsletter that comes out Tuesdays and Thursdays. Hey Joe, that
sounds like a great interview. Are we gonna have a link to like the full, can somebody hear the full length interview anywhere in either in the show notes or Yes. In the newsletter, or, Nope. You just get what we’re sharing with you and tough.
That’s it.
If you miss the live. You’re out. Uh, you can go to, you’re out. Sucks to suck as they say. I’m so glad. Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up because Charlie, I spoke to Charlie for about 25 minutes and it was a lot more data. And if you’re really into all the things credit, uh, Charlie was so gracious with this time.
Head to our show notes pages, Stacking Benjamins dot com, and Kevin will also have a link in the 2 0 1 newsletter. If you get the newsletter, you could just scroll down, you’ll see Charlie and I and click on that link and that’ll take you directly to the YouTube page. The other thing is too, and I’m glad you brought this up, Doug, which is that TransUnion, like all of the credit agencies, have some phenomenal tools to help you get better at your credit.
And they’re not, you know, cheesy. Come on, tools. These people actually, their clients are not you and me. Their clients are businesses. So I find some great tools and not a lot of quote selling happening in the tool areas, but if you go to transunion.com, you’ll find a bunch of tools to help you get a grasp of your credit coming up next, Rick Edelman is a guy who Barons recognized for several years as the number one financial advisor in the country.
He also had a nationally syndicated radio show, the Rick Edelman show. Of course, people that know Rick and they know his show know that his name is r i c and his last name is E D E L M A N. So they bit, people often joke that if you scrunch his name together, it looks like Rice Delman. So whenever I talk to Rick, I’m like, Hey Rice.
And uh, if you know Rick, you know that that’s, uh, That’s his thing. Rick has a brand new show called The Truth About Your Future, and because of that, we’re gonna talk to him about Poperia topics. I want to talk about the problems with longevity, about annuities, about where he stands on crypto. We pick Rick’s, uh, Rick’s brain, and as always, I’m sure Rick may have something to say as he’s, uh, I can hear him coming down the stairs right now.
So while he’s getting settled in Doug, Uh, give us some trivia. What do you got?
Well, stackers, I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug and I, I know this might come across like I’m a real negative Nancy. I am sick of people copying my amazing life. I caught Todd, that horrible assistant manager down at the Sizzler browsing El Camino’s online.
I’ll write Todd. Just because you’re pulling down that sweet, sweet assistant manager paycheck doesn’t mean you command that kind of power. You know, they got laws for that kind of stuff. Which law? You know, the, uh, that one law, the, uh, Hey, hey, May 31st is a historic day for those oppressed by copycats like me.
On this day in history, way back in 1790, the people took a stand against impersonators and established the first Federal Copyright Act in the United States. While Todd’s only infringing on my turf, often those copyright cases involve huge sums of money. So let’s chat, copyright and Benjamins. Here’s my question.
Remember that hope poster, which the Obama campaign used after it was created independently by street artist Shepherd Ferry? Well, later it came to light that Ferry’s designed was based solely on one AP photo of the President, taken by Manny Garcia, the AP sued fairy for compensation for the photo with fairy arguing that his work didn’t diminish the value of the initial photo, but actually enhanced it.
Here’s the question. Who won? Was it the AP or the artist? I. I’ll be back after I change over the laundry. A task where Joe’s mom says, hope is not a strategy and I should just get it done. Settle down, ma.
Hey there, stackers. I’m incomparable and can’t be. Xeroxed. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and I gotta tell you, me and the Beastie Boys, we’re not gonna take it. Wait, what? Anyway, copying is not only against the law, it violates everything I stand for, which is anti impersonation. Todd has to realize that we’re all unique just like everyone else.
But let’s get you today’s trivia question on this topic of Benjamins and copyright. Back in 2008, when Barack Obama ran for President Street artist, shepherd Fairy created a poster of the future world leader and the word hope. Remember that poster? The Associated Press sued fairy for compensation because they discovered the artist had based his now famous design.
On one single photo from AP photographer, Manny Garcia Ferry argued that his poster actually increased the value of Garcia’s work, making it more valuable, not less so. He should pay the AP nothing. My question is this, who won the case? While the short answer is that the case was settled out of court, so nobody won the cases Famous because the AP did receive money from ferry, while also admitting that the poster did make the work more valuable.
More importantly, all of this would’ve been avoided if Ferry the artist had just attributed his work to Garcia in the first place and paid the probably much smaller sum to the AP in the first place. Let that be a lesson. Todd, what lesson? Uh, well, you know, here’s the deal. When you go for the El Camino, I mean, um, well, here’s the thing, Todd.
Okay. Um, like the first point I wanna make is Todd, um, all right, well, I’m not really coming up with anything, but you know what? Let’s just forget about the past and focus on the future of your money with today’s guest, one of the most recognized former financial planners in the world, Rick
Edelman, and I’m super happy he’s here with us in Mom’s basement.
Again, Mr. Rice Delman himself, I, I can’t stop doing it. Rick, Rick Edelman’s here. How are you? Joe, it’s good to be with you as always. It is fabulous to see you again, my friend, and congratulations on. Man, all the stuff going on. But what I’d like to do, Rick, is there’s so much going on right now in personal financial planning.
You obviously, you know, between the Barons accolades, and heck, I’ve told everybody, I told you this when we met in, uh, Boston at an annuity conference. That your initial book, the Truth About Money, is my favorite book, uh, about financial planning. So I just wanna pick your brain on some of these hot topics now, if you don’t mind.
Is that all right? Yeah. Sounds great. All right, let’s, let’s start here. Interest rates raised again as we record this a couple weeks ago. You know, we always see that the economy follows a little bit behind that. There were some people that thought that the Fed might be overstepping, right? We’ve seen this, them go up more quickly, I think, than they have in, in any time in the last 30 years.
What is this gonna do to the economy? Do you think that the people, our stacker community needs to watch out? That maybe the economy might have some, some drag coming that we’re not seeing yet?
I’m not sure if we’re not seeing it or we just don’t wanna acknowledge it. Mm. Everything is incredibly obvious.
I think what’s going on right now, yet the markets are shrugging it off. My biggest concern is real estate. The high interest rates are, I think, setting the stage for a real problem and it’s all a result of covid. You know, we, we all know painfully well what has happened over the past five years from pre Covid through Covid now post Covid.
Yeah. And what it all means is that we took interest rates down to near zero levels. Huge numbers of real estate developers obtained loans to develop. Property to refinance their existing properties at these very low interest rates. Well now many of those loans are coming due and they have to be refinanced at today’s interest rates.
So that 1% loan, 2% loan you got is now a five or a 6% loan, and that means the monthly payment is skyrocketed. And at the same time, because of the aftermath of covid with everybody working from home, a third of us workers are now working remotely. Office buildings are empty. Companies are realizing they don’t need that space.
That means two things. One, companies that have leases are letting them go, and new companies are not interested in replacing those rents. So the landlords are discovering that the rental income is dried up at the very moment that they have to refinance their loans. And they don’t have the loan income, they don’t have the rental income to pay off that, that payment.
So the landlords are in trouble, and this means we’re going to see a massive number of defaults. They’re gonna hand the keys to those buildings back to the banks that provided the loans. The banks are going to discover that the properties aren’t worth what they were worth before. They’re only worth 60% of what they were worth before, maybe even less.
And this is going to force the banks to mark to market. This has not yet happened, but it’s going to all of the owners of that real estate, pension funds, endowments, institutional investors, private equity, venture capital, they haven’t marked a market in their portfolios yet either. Non-traded REITs. They haven’t marked a market yet either.
Yeah. Yeah. And so all of this is coming in the next few months. It’s going to be terrible news for those who are the current owners of those properties, the investors, and the funds of those properties, the banks that have lent to those properties. This is bad news for all of them. It’ll be eventually good news for new investors who will be able to buy these properties as a vulture fund at pennies on the dollar.
We saw this in 2008. It was really, really ugly. Eventually, it all worked out. Look how great the economy and the markets were through the 2000 tens, but it was really ugly from 2007 through 2009, and that’s kind of what we’re the storm we’re entering right now. Um, how much of that is already priced into the market?
I’m not sure so far. The markets will tell you they’ve priced it all in, which is why the stock market has not dropped. It’s why the market dropped last year, 30%. That’s when they priced it in. So the fact that we may be headed to a deep recession, markets tend to anticipate recessions. And so the markets fell last year before the recession.
As the recession hits this year, the markets will emerge quicker. So it’s hard to say exactly what’s going to happen over the next few months. And oh, by the way, Joe, we haven’t even talked about what’s happening in Washington with the debt ceiling, right? Is the government gonna shut down compounding all of this problem?
Will treasuries default? And if that happens, what will be the domino effect on money market funds? Uh, why they go going to all break the buck in June or July? I mean, this is the, there’s so much uncertainty in the markets right now, and yet I find that many people are simply not paying a whole lot of attention to any of this, or they’re discounting the negative results that all of this could occur.
I also feel like Rick, that’s the reason why every time we meet, I feel like our hairlines look more and more similar because we worry about this stuff. Uh, no. Sorry about that. I, it’s alright. Uh, no. We’re the cool guys. Right? I wanna flip over to another in financial planning. The place where you and I, the one time we met face-to-face, of course, was at this.
I, I thought it was a great attempt at m i t for all the people that are interested in the problems of financial planning around longevity to get together and work through them. And boy, some of the fights we saw between people on the media side, people like you and Michelle Singletary and the annuity companies were much needed like these, these back and forth battles.
Have annuities gotten better since that time that we met? I think it was back in 2017.
No they haven’t. Uh, sadly, I don’t know if it’s because they don’t think there’s a problem that needs solving or that they haven’t figured out how to solve it, or that the market isn’t pressuring them to come up with a solution.
I think frankly, it’s a little bit of all three. Uh, so I think it’s worthwhile, Joe, if we remind everybody of what we’re talking about here. Yeah. MIT’s age lab put together an event and invited me to speak. Um, and you were there and there were CEOs of some of the biggest annuity companies and insurance companies in the country who were there.
Uh, several members of the media, such as our friend Michelle Singletary from the Washington Post, Jean Chatzky was there. Um, and the reason I was invited and the reason I agreed to go, and then I know, I know Joe really well, who’s the head of the MIT’s age lab. I’m pretty deep, as you know, in the longevity space, uh, recognizing at m i t and Stanford’s Center on Longevity and.
The Milken Institute’s Center for the Study of Aging. Everyone’s studying this stuff is pretty much an agreement that if you’re alive in 2030, you’re likely gonna be living to age 100. This is shocking. This has never happened in human history, and so we have to evaluate if we’re gonna live to our nineties and hundreds.
Is today’s financial, economic and social structure designed for that? And the answer of course is no. Social Security. When it was built in 1935, you were supposed to be dead by 65 annuity products today, generally assume actuarily that you’ll be dead in your eighties. What happens to pension funds and annuity contracts and social security when people start routinely living into their nineties and hundreds?
These systems were never designed to pay so much money to so many people for so many years, and that is why, a big reason why I’ve been a big critic of annuity products because they’re setting up a lot of people for failure with a, I think, misleading sales pitch. That sales pitch is put your money into this annuity contract.
We will give you income for life. Yeah. Well, if your life is to age 85, they will honor that contract. But what if your life is to 95 or 1 0 5? I don’t think the annuity companies are gonna be able to make those payments because they aren’t getting the rates of return. They aren’t recognizing how many annuitants are going to be ho living that long and continuing to receive those payments.
And what happens when those actuarial assumptions blow up? I think we’re going to discover that the money that you were expecting for life isn’t going to be there. And this is not just true of annuities, but it’s equally true of pension funds and social security. This is a crisis. Uh, and my argument at that event, as you will know to the insurance CEOs, was build a product that works for today’s longevity and instead of effectively delving into ways we can solve this coming crisis.
There was instead a big argument. Number one, they refused to even talk about it. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. We began at eight that morning. It was two o’clock in the afternoon before I finally got so fed up that I demanded they start talking about it and all they did was justify and rationalize why their current products are sufficient.
Yeah. Literally everything. The whole thing came to a stop. You stopped the whole thing and said, Nope, we’re done. And then we had the runaround for the next hour and a half. Yeah.
Yeah. It was unfortunate. Uh, there was a circle at wagons mentality among the annuity companies, and I get their point. They’ve sold a lot of product to a lot of people raising a lot of money.
And they don’t, I think, wanna be in the position of having to admit that their products are going to fail 20 and 30 and 40 years
from now. Well, and the other thing, Rick, that frustrated me was they also didn’t, and, and this is another complaint, people address the way that annuities are sold.
Fundamentally, people don’t buy annuities. And they should be if they’re, if the product can last, people should be asking for them. But instead, we have to thrust them upon people and they have this whole structure of sales that needs to be dismantled as well. And I think that was, Michelle single, Terry’s whole Mo was to try to get that through their heads and they didn’t wanna hear any of that
either.
Yeah. The big issue, I think you’re exactly right, and so is Michelle, that the, the product themselves aren’t necessarily bad, it’s the way they’re sold. Yeah. A lot of annuity sales reps are overly aggressive in touting the benefits and the promises of these products in a way that manipulates the buyers.
I mean, let’s face it, the person who buys an annuity is by definition, a risk averse person because these products come with words like guaranteed and lifetime no loss from stock market risk. I mean, I mean, these are the kinds of words that you use to placate someone who doesn’t like investment risk, but what they’re not doing is talking about the risks that do exist.
The mortality risk, the longevity risk, the expenses, the tax risk, and so on. And so, a lot of the concern that Michelle was raising in which you and I echoed, was that the sales tactics are often abusive. And this is why the state regulators will tell you that annuity fraud is among their perennial top 10 list of, of, of investment frauds in America.
And so, uh, they didn’t want to hear that either.
At that event, continues to put a pit in my stomach. You are here, uh, with the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals and your podcast, the Truth About Your Future. I’ve been fascinated by your podcast, by the way, any podcast that can make Tupperware interesting, but, but not for the right reasons.
I’ll let people listen to that episode. But I wanna talk about some of the things, some of the modern money stuff that you talk about on the truth about your future. Let’s start off with this. What’s your take on the future of Central Bank digital currency? Where do you think we’re headed? Uh,
we’re headed toward it and, uh, I talk about it a lot on my podcast.
Yeah. Um, uh, the Truth About Your Future, which is, um, the successor to my radio show. I’ve been hosting radio for 32 years, and this year I converted my radio show, which was once a week into now a daily podcast. Uh, the Truth About Your Future, and it’s in the top 1% of podcasts already we’re. I’m very excited.
It’s doing so well. Uh, great production
that Rick, you look like you’re having fun. It just seems like you’re having a good time. It
is, it, it is fun to talk about these topics. They’re intellectually interesting and they are of a huge impact to a great many people, and it is fun to do. And I’m at the stage of life, it ain’t, if it ain’t fun, I ain’t doing it.
I mean that, that’s kind of my metric now of whether I’m going to accept an invitation or do anything. And that’s why I said yes to you Joe, cuz this is fun. Yeah, thanks man. Um, but if it ain’t fun, I ain’t doing it. And cbdc are something I talk about a lot on the show because this is one of the big innovations that’s coming in this decade.
A C B D C, it’s in short, I’ll refer to it as a digital dollar. Right now our dollars are paper. There aren’t very many businesses today or industries that operate on pen and paper and yet dollars are one of them. We have the government printing dollars and then distributing them by armored vehicle to banks around the country who stuff them into ATMs where you have to go to physically get the cash.
This is nuts In a digital world, why are we playing with. Paper money. We’re using credit cards and debit cards and PayPal and Venmo and Zelle. Why are we still printing money? And so there’s a movement to move toward digital dollars. They’re called CBC’s Central Bank. Digital currency issued by our central bank, a federal reserve, and they will simply have a digital version of dollars, and they will be the same as the paper dollars, except instead of having the dollar bills in your pocket, they’ll be in your digital wallet, in your smartphone.
This makes a total amount of sense. It’s a lot cheaper, it’s a lot safer. It, it is available 24 7. The government loves this because it not only saves the money, it’s a wonderful way to thwart terrorist financing and drug cartel financing. It’s a way to beat tax. EVAs, the IRS loves this. The Department of Justice, the F B I, even the, the Defense Department loved digital money and so do governments around the world.
Every government around the world is exploring the development of digital money. Seven of. Already launched their digital currencies, including most ominously China. And this is why we’ve gotta get in a big hurry. The Fed is working hard about this. A good friend of mine, Sunna Tasia, is the Fed’s chief innovation Officer, and she is, uh, heading this effort to figure out how to do this.
By the end of the decade, power Fed, every central bank will be launching digital dollars, digital money, digital currencies in their home nation.
And by the same token, I’ve seen you recently on a couple other shows. You also, I believe, and tell me if I’m wrong here, that there still is room for crypto and crypto growth and use of crypto.
Tell me, because it seems like digital currency, central bank, digital currency, one thing. How is there still room for crypto and digital to live in harmony? Well, you
have paper dollars today and you have stocks. So why would a digital dollar interfere with stocks? It won’t. Currency is one thing. Assets are another.
You buy currency because you need a store of value. You need liquidity. You need to be able to transfer money to another individual or company through payments. And then you have the stock market, the bond market, the real estate market, the gold market, the crypto market. These are. Assets that people buy because they believe they will generate income or they will grow in value.
Usually a combination of the two. Like think of real estate, you get rental income and the property rises, stock market stocks grow, they also pay dividends. So the fact that the Fed will create a digital dollar is confirmation of the legitimacy of this technology. That will increase, I believe, interest level and engagement in Bitcoin and other digital assets like NFTs and, and more.
So it’s not a question of either or one doesn’t eliminate the other one supports and justifies the use of the other. Do we
have to see though the government get more involved, uh, with the oversight of NFTs? Cuz the problem that we saw in the last couple years, Rick, as you know, better than most is not the NFTs are bad or that the, or that the technology doesn’t help.
Certainly there’s so many use cases for the technology. But it looks like some of these bros that created the technology have been cheating on us and are just making it their own little personal cash register.
Well, I don’t know if they’ve been cheating. I think they’ve been exploiting the get rich quick mentality.
I think they’ve been taking advantage of the stupidity of a lot of people. Uh, and that’s true in any asset class. I mean, you’ve got penny stocks in the stock market, you’ve got pink sheet stocks. You wouldn’t compare them to the s and p 500. Right? And it’s true in digital. So you’ve got the underlying technology, which is doing really cool, amazing things.
And then you’ve got some aggressive marketers and promoters who are exploiting that tech to make a quick buck for themselves. Well, you know, if you’re gonna fall victim to that get rich quick mentality. You know, you can’t fix stupid. So there’s not a lot I can do to protect you if you’re gonna fall
for that.
I have a friend who’s also my primary care doctor who has that, uh, on his desk. Literally it says, I can’t cure stupid. Right, right on the front of his desk. Yeah. When do we get to the point, Rick, that grandma can think about buying crypto? Oh, we’re
already there. Uh, I mean, if grandma already has a diversified portfolio, crypto is just another asset class.
If you believe in diversification, if you believe in modern portfolio of theory, if you believe in the efficient frontier, then you acknowledge that you need to have as many asset classes as you possibly can because different asset classes perform differently at different times. That allows for, uh, portfolio rebalancing, and it allows for tax loss harvesting, and dollar cost averaging.
So if you believe in that and you’re already doing that with your portfolio, then you want to be as diversified as possible. Crypto is the first new asset class in 170 years. Why would you not want to add it to your
portfolio based on the screen behind you? For people not watching on video, Rick has a screen about the digital assets council, financial professionals.
I wanna ask you this last question, Rick, which is, it must bother you. Certainly bothers me that so few financial advisors are still talking about modern money, or, or their client brings to them the issue of modern money and they’ll, yeah. Tell me where you’re going with that, because clearly you have an agenda to hopefully make us smarter as a group of advisors.
Yeah. I created Dak fp, the Digital Assets Council of Financial professionals@dacfp.com. As a crypto education company, that’s all we do. We don’t manage money, we’re not running funds or whatever. We, we simply teach financial advisors and investors about digital assets because since it is a new asset class, nobody has any experience with it.
Uh, and that’s a big missed opportunity. As a result, today, it’s a really tale of two cities, uh, half of the nation’s financial advisors. Personally owned Bitcoin and yet only about 10% are recommending it to clients. That’s a huge disconnect. The reason that advisors are not recommending this to clients, most commonly their firms won’t let them because their firms aren’t sure what the regulations are.
They don’t know what they’re allowed to do or how to go about it. Uh, and so we teach compliance offices and we teach risk management teams, the investment committees, the sales and marketing teams at firms, how you can engage in crypto in a compliant, safe way that is consistent with your firm’s culture.
And people are often shocked that how easy it is to do this, that it doesn’t raise the ire of the SCC or finra. That there are ways you can go about this that are completely in sync with how you manage the rest of a client’s assets. So the first thing we do is help advisors realize this is something you can talk about with clients.
And second, this is something you should be talking about. Why? Because 22% of US adults own. Bitcoin, which means a lot of your clients own it and they did it without you because they didn’t think you would help them, and you need to help them because if they are left of their own devices, they will get themselves in trouble.
They’ll get caught up in those get rich quick schemes. They’ll use the faulty platforms, the they’ll get involved in fraud and abuse. You can protect them as an advisor, but if you’re silent about it, you’re not doing them any good. You’re also not doing yourself any good. So our mission is not really to champion Bitcoin, it’s to champion education because once you understand how this works, you can figure out what you ought to be saying to your clients and how you can best help and protect them.
For our stackers, who our advisors will link to Dac fp on our show notes pages, Stacking Benjamins dot com. For everybody else, go listen to the truth about your future. I’ve been, uh, binging it. And, uh, again, Tupperware, uh, very interesting story about long-term care, by the way. And the way you do this magic of weaving in these stories into our own personal, uh, financial planning is, is just, it’s amazing Rick watching the way you work.
I appreciate
that a lot, Joe, and, and you, the podcast. It’s every day, but it’s only three or five minutes. It’s a real quick, easy listen, uh, we’ve got great interviews every Friday and long form. Uh, and so I really encourage you to, to go to the truth about your future, get it wherever you get your
podcasts.
Yeah, please do. And thank you again, Rick, for helping so many of our stackers, uh, get their financial planning in order over the years. You certainly helped a lot with mine. Just love your work. Thank you,
Joe. Feelings Mutual. Thanks for having me again. Hey, this is John in
Seattle, and when I’m not telling terrible dead jokes to anyone who will listen, I’m Stacking Benjamins.
Big thanks to Rick. Good to see Rick again. Og uh, his take on annuities. How about that? Sadly, the annuity industry, I wasn’t surprised by that answer. Were you? Well,
no. I just saw an investment news a week ago, maybe, maybe two weeks ago. There’s a big headline piece about annuities and the, uh, massive year over year growth in fixed indexed annuity purchases, which we’ve talked about a lot here as it relates to quite often, that benefits the annuity company and the annuity salesperson a heck of a lot more than it benefits the annuity purchaser.
And some of them, depending on, you know, how slimy you wanna get or 10 or more percent of your premium, your, of your, if your deposit. It goes to the sales guy and the, the only way to solve this problem is to take away the financial incentive. If you’re looking at two separate things and you’ve got a mortgage payment due and one of those things is gonna pay you a thousand bucks and one of those things is gonna pay you 11,000 bucks, it’s very difficult.
It’s very difficult to choose the one that’s a thousand. And we talk about conflict being an advisor and trying to be conflict free, and almost all of that conflict stuff boils down to compensation, almost all of it exclusively. So if you can frustra level the playing field on comp, then you’ll level the playing field on product, which is, I think his point is make it pay the same.
And then the annuity folks will have to compete with all the rest of the world in terms of wallet share, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re not gonna have the. Arrow in the quiver, so to speak of, but we pay 10%. You know, like we don’t have to do anything cuz, cuz you slimy sales guys are gonna go out there and sell it for us.
So we don’t have to innovate, we don’t have to do anything different versus every other company is continuing to compete for your investment dollar. So anyways,
yeah, you just feel like annuities, if people truly, let’s say that annuities did what they said they were supposed to do, which, you know, initially before all these bells and whistles that do a bunch of stuff that people don’t need, annuities, protect people from outliving their cash.
I mean, imagine the number of people that would actually need that product and would buy it. There’s this whole portion of the market that won’t buy an annuity just because of the way that annuity is sold. Because there’s the worded annuity. Yeah. Yeah, and I’m, I just feel like we need to, I don’t know. We need to do a better job.
I was sad to hear that. It hasn’t changed, but you and I, not surprised by that. Hey, let’s throw a haven lifeline in Texas. Some life’s most important questions. Our friends at Haven Life Insurance Agency, Doug, they put what you value first, this post-holiday week. My vine. Oh, yes.
Yeah. The cotton woods are blowing too hard.
Oh, it’s like
too much co og. I just can’t keep my nose out of the flower too much. Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. Yeah. No, it’s like it’s snowing here. Again, the cottonwoods have just completely released all of that. They’ve got, and it’s unbelievable.
It’s your loved ones and your time, but when you can actually open your eyes and see your loved ones while you spend time with them, that’s even better.
It’s why they made body and quality term life insurance actually simple. You go to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife Now you’ll find they’ve streamlined the application process. No waiting several weeks for a decision. Really lovely customer support, robust online life insurance calculator for people who aren’t sure how much they need, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife gets you there.
Get that done to people.
Pause. Does it say lovely in the script when you say lovely customer support? Or is that, are you choosing that word? Because that does not
sound like you. I, uh, I choose that word. I love that word. That is a, it’s a wonderful word. Lovely.
Beautiful, lovely, lovely customer support.
It’s like we’re in Britain. Lovely. How was
your evening? Oh, it was lovely customer support. You know, it’s always lovely when we get a call from James. Hey James.
Okay guys, I have a question. Next question that’s not necessarily pertaining to me today as it’s something from my past, but I thought the answer might have some broad sweeping ramifications to some of your current listeners today that may be considering semi-retirement.
So here it goes. About five or six years ago, I was director of finance for my company. I approached my boss to cutting back to three days a week, and after a bit of consideration, he agreed and that I would retain my title as director, which is an exempt position now comes to talk with the director of hr.
The director of HR said that one of the managers in their department was arguing that since I would only be working 24 hours a week, that I would not be eligible for health insurance benefits. I argued that I was still an exempt employee and that I would still be covered. Anyway, I had a good relationship with the HR director and they cited with me, and I kept my health insurance benefits.
My question is, was the company technically upside down and in violation of their benefit policy? I viewed the situation as very gray at the time, but since it went my way, I was okay with that. Love to hear your opinion. And I want a t-shirt. So I finally called in. Thanks for your help.
Easiest way to get a shirt and to answer some, uh, some nagging questions.
This is a, an interesting one, og. There are times when maybe people give you the benefit of the doubt because you’re easy to work with. You’re a person that they like. However, were they, uh, that really doesn’t happen to me. Were, no, never. Were they were, were they, were they violating not easy to work with?
Were they violating any rules?
That’s a really good question. I’m not an employment benefits lawyer, but I do know that we have to, for our group benefits for our work, we have to kind of put that into a box. You know, we try to be as, as gentle with that as possible, right? As broad brush stroked of this is what full-time means, this is what qualifies for being in service and that sort of thing.
But I do remember there being some limitations on it. You know, like you had, you know, you had to work this many hours over this period of time or something like that. I don’t know the difference between exempt and non-exempt. I know there’s something in there about overtime and stuff, but, um, yeah, I mean, again, since it benefited you, I don’t know that I would be going back to the, going back to the company going, I think, uh, I screwed you guys outta some money here.
You should probably come collect it from me or something. You know? I don’t know that I would do that, but some of those things, I think maybe that’s his point, is that some of those things, You have to be aware of when you, you know, when you make changes in your life. If you go to part-time or you want to go to a virtual only position or something that’s gonna have a different schedule, that there may be some other factors that go with it, right?
Your 401K matching may be changed, your profit sharing numbers may be changed. And, and certainly in this case, like he was talking about potentially your, your group benefits and, and not because they don’t want ’em to provide ’em to you, but because they have a legal document that they have a plan. It’s just, I think what people don’t understand is that, you know, when you create a 401K plan, right?
There’s all these documents, you know, there’s a summary description of the plan. Here’s all the funds that go in it, and there’s a trustee of the plan, and then there’s insurance on the, like, there’s, it’s a big operation, right? Which it should be. Maybe it’s a little overkill because of bureaucracy, but, but there’s, you know, there’s some importance about getting that right.
The same thing is true for all your other plans too. You don’t see that. You don’t see, like when you go to do your health plan, there’s a big stack of documents that go behind that. You go, I want to pick the Blue Cross plan with this deductible. But on the HR side, there’s a whole binder full of crap that goes, here’s all the rules about us putting this plan in place.
No different than if they have a PT O plan or a vacation policy, or here are company holidays. It has to be written down. So there are some unintended consequences I think, of having those conversations, which, which is, I think what
his point was. And the rules are, the rules are designed so people get consistent benefit.
You and I, if we work at the same company we have, there’s some consistency in the benefits and you know, the manager’s not going, well, James, because I like you, A and person on the other side gets, uh, thing, thing B. Well, Joe,
let me step in there a little bit. I don’t, I’m also not an expert on this, but have, have kind of crossed this bridge once or twice in the past, and I’ll say that OG was on the right track.
The exempt classification is really pertaining only to the F L S A Federal Labor Fair Labor Standards Act. Um, and it has to do with overtime pay. And so, you know, if your company has to classify you correctly, so if you work less than 40 hours, you fall under that FLS a and if they don’t classify their employees correctly, there are all kinds of penalties they can accrue if they don’t do it right according to the law.
But employee employers can choose to offer non-exempt. Employees benefits if they want to, and they can. There aren’t any state rules for the most part. A couple of states have some rules around that, but for the most part, they can do whatever the heck they want. They run the risk of really pissing off other employees who may find out that James is getting benefits and they then they’re not.
But I don’t think there’s any federal level rules around whether or not they can
offer benefits or not. No, but it’s still the plan. Like it’s, it’s no different than the four plan. Like when you put the plan in place, the administrators say, okay, well how many hours of a year do you have to work to be eligible for the match?
And the trustees or the people thinking of the plan go, I don’t know. I mean, what does everybody else do? And they go, well, most people say you have to work a thousand hours. Oh, okay, well I’ll put a thousand hours. That, that’s, they’re not doing that to say, well, I, I want, I want Bill to get some and Tom to not get some.
Now if Tom goes, Hey, I, I wanna drop down my hours 800. I think if you’re being responsible, kind of forthright business owner, you would say like, Hey dude, if you go from 1500 hours down to 800, you’re not eligible for the NA match. Not because I don’t want to give it to you, but way back when, when I created this darn thing, w we just had to pick a number and that’s the number we picked to prevent, you know, the 16 year old who’s mowing grass from getting the thing.
Yeah. Only a couple times a week. But,
but I’ll come back to your, your statement of, to be forthright and fair, but there is no rule stating they can’t, if they, if their benefits comp administrative company can allow it and their systems will allow it, they can put, you know, retired people who used to work for the company and they want to continue giving them benefits as one of their retirement benefits, not working any hours.
They can still get benefits. There’s no federal law. Absolutely. But they
can’t exclude that, that class, they can’t give it to you and not to the other person who’s
retired. Not in good conscience. No, I think
no. You, you, you can’t, you would have an issue
with that. Okay. Betcha somebody’s gonna write in and correct this.
Yeah. Hope they do. Yeah, do it. It means they’re listening.
Yeah. Good question, James. If you’ve
got a question for the Haven Lifeline, head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail and that that will lead you to the path to asking your question here on air. And you can show that to all your friends.
Brag to them that we answered your question on the Stacking Benjamin Show, and they will be just amazed. It’s incredible. I know when people go, guess what happened to me today? I got my question answered on Stacking Benjamins. It’s a thing. I’m gonna say it
again, Joe. We, I think we need to require, if you’re getting a free T-shirt outta the deal and you’re becoming famous because you’re on air with us, and you’re now the envy of all of your friends and neighbors, post a damn photo.
Online of your shirt. You don’t even have to be in it. If you’re worried about how amazing your pecks look in our t-shirt or whatever, don’t have to be in it, but post a photo and say, look what I got. I got my swag for asking a question. Yeah. Yeah. Is that a lot to
ask? I don’t, I don’t think so, by the way.
Uh, I think this is also a good segment for community involvement too, if we’ve got some HR people out there that wanna weigh in on, on James’ question as well. Yes. Uh, would be great. Hey, uh, that’s gonna do it for today. Big stuff on the community calendar. I will be tomorrow on. Instagram, I’ll be on the gram with, Miss.
Be helpful. She is a Miami-based creator and big financial influencer, and she and I gonna be chatting all things money. She is a new book coming out and we will be chatting about themes from her book on Instagram, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2:00 PM pacific tomorrow. Follow Stacky Benjamins podcast on Instagram.
Fact, you know, we had that early. Interview today with Charlie Wise that appeared on Fireside and on YouTube. If you wanna know all the channels, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash welcome. Our welcome guide leads you to all of those. Uh, if you’re not here because you wanna hang out with us on Instagram, you’re here because you are worried that you’re not making great financial decisions and stepping in it either with your credit or with annuities, or one of the things we talked about today, or maybe something we didn’t talk about.
OG and his team are taking new clients. So head to stacky Benjamins dot com slash og. That’ll lead you to OG and his team’s calendar. And then you too can set up a meeting with OG to see if you can make better decisions in the future. And move your financial picture in the right direction. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash og.
All right, that is it for today. Coming up on Friday, we’ve got a big episode, Paulette Per Hatch’s last episode on the Stacking Benjamins Show. As a regular contributor, I’m sure she’ll be back again in the future, but she filled in all year for Paula Pant while she was finishing a master’s in journalism at Columbia.
Paula returns in two weeks, so this week we’re gonna have some fun with Paulette Perha, but also special guest El Martinez from the Simplify and Enjoy podcast talking minimalism and doing more with Less. All right, that’s it for today, Doug. You got it from here, ma’am, what should we have learned today?
Well, Joe, first
take some advice from one of America’s financial gurus and prepare your finances for the future. Second, beware of creeping credit balances. The research shows it’s a problem for many, but the big lesson, you gotta play big people so nobody steals your thunder. If Todd wants to mess with the bull, he’s gonna get the, the, the Tiger’s tail or something like that.
There’s only room for one El Camino in Tea Town, Todd. Thanks to Rick for joining us today. You can find out more about his new podcast, the Truth About Your Future with Rick Edelman, wherever you’re listening to me right now. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the Property of SB Podcasts, llc, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
Our producer is Karen Repine. This show was written by Lacy Langford, who’s also the host of the Military Money Show. With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earner Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the four 11 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Tina eichenberg makes the video version of this show. Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now.
Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Youngin are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement. So say hello. When you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement.
Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know this. Show us for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Welcome to the after show. If you’re new here, uh, this is the part of the show that doesn’t exist. We don’t talk about the after show. We’ve had people violate that before. When they do, uh, we just ask. Okay. Okay. Just if you have to then call it dessert. All right. We’ve got a big event coming up that I know you guys, uh, have both been interested in the past.
Uh, all trails lead to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the Little League World Series is coming up shortly, like we’re getting to that time of year, which is why we’re increasingly seeing videos of parents getting angry because their 11 year old who they think is the champ, world champion of the universe, is not being treated right by the refs.
But I saw this video, which is announcing a lineup for the World Series, and I think, I think this is pretty much where it is. Let’s listen to this team that’s gonna be competing in this year’s. Little League World Series Paterson. I’m 11. My favorite cover is Blue and my favorite player is Ryan Braun.
So up.
My name’s Ryan McGaffy. I’m 11 years old. My favorite show is Madman. My favorite player is Ken Griffey Jr.
Hi name’s Cody Grammar. I am 13 years old. My favorite food is hotdogs and my favorite player is John Carlos Stan.
Yo, up. I’m Ron Abrams. I’m 11 years old. My favorite food is lobster and my favorite player’s, Martin McGuire, my favorite player, Mark McGuire. By the way, what you can’t see is on the video for those two dudes. They gotta move the camera up.
I love
how they’re old enough. They’re all old enough to know players from the nineties. Right. I’m 11 years old. My favorite player. Some dude from the nineties that the other kids haven’t heard of. That’s good. That’s fine.
Well done. Internet. Well done. Yeah.
I love the coach that goes to do mound visits of little kid, you know, little pitchers who are struggling and it’s, they’ll just say some of the, the awful things.
Hey, uh, Vinny, I know your mom and dad probably told you you could be anything you want in life, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t say you could be the worst pitcher in little league history, but you are.
It’s just horrible. I love it. I’ve seen some of those.
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