Kurt Long used to launch rockets for NASA, but lately, he’s been worried about your money (and your health). Kurt is the co-founder and CEO of security and privacy firm BUNKR, and has worked with some of the largest financial and healthcare institutions to keep your data private. We discuss where the biggest threats are coming from, what to ask advisors, what you should do to protect your health care records, and more. By the end of today’s episode, you should have a clear idea of when your financial information is at risk and when you’re safe.
But before that, we dive into a headline about timeshare exit fraud. If you’ve ever heard the commercials offering to help you get rid of your timeshare, you may have some idea what a huge industry it’s become, and also now full of scammers trying to “help” you…or maybe just help themselves to your money. We talk timeshares, scams to get you IN and unfortunately, now also scams to get you out. How do you steer clear of all of this? We’ll share ideas
Of course, we’ll also take a question from a Stacker who said, “I’d better call Saul….Sehy and OG!” and we leave time for Doug’s trivia question, that we’re sure you’ll be sharing around the virtual watercooler later today.
Our 1500th episode is coming! If you’ve changed your financial life at all because of the show or the SB community, call in and celebrate with us. Tell us how you’ve made some positive changes and we’ll help motivate other Stackers to get rolling on their financial plans! Go to http://stackingbenjamins.com/voicemail and leave us a message sharing something you’ve done as a result of the show. Thanks for helping us build this coming episode!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
Our TikTok Minute
Kurt Long
Big thanks to Kurt Long for joining us today. To learn more about Kurt, visit Kurt Long. Learn about his security app, BUNKR, and how they can help you keep your life secure and private by visiting BUNKR | Protect Your Life.
Watch On Our YouTube Channel:
Doug’s Trivia
- What are the statues from an ancient Chinese bunker collectively known as?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- Stacker Scott from Chicago called in with a question about what to do with the refund of an overpayment from their child’s 529 plan.
Have a question for the show?
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Other Mentions
Join Us Wednesday
Tune in on Wednesday for a special Stacker Community episode when we interview three Stackers who are doing impressive things with their lives and their money.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: How Do You Spend Money Wisely? We Have Thoughts. (SB1487).
Episode transcript
It’s Monday in the neighborhood. Kids are out front playing in the street. You know? Isn’t that what, isn’t that what Brian Regan says? He’s like, we played in the street. You know why? Because that’s where the cars are, right? Stealing
hubcaps.
Yes. But we, like all good adults are down in mom’s basement working for all of you.
But you know who worked for us all weekend, guys? The men and women of our military keeping us safe while we were out playing in the street ourselves. So, raise your mugs. I’m not talking about your faces. Raise your mugs. There we go. That ugly ass fishing mug. The cool, what is yours, og? What is yours? Is like a diagram of a Oh, it’s a, it’s a plane.
Of course.
Oh, I wasn’t even looking at it. And I, I know that mug already. I’m not even, I’m look, not even looking at the screen and I knew, oh, that’s his
airplane mug.
That’s a mug. That’s an
airplane mug. Here’s to the men and women keeping us safe in armed forces from the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union and the Men and Women making podcast and Mom’s Spaceman.
Here’s to you. Let’s all go stack some Benjamins together now, shall we?
Thanks everybody.
Hello there. Peabody
here and this is the way back machine. We’re traveling through time and this is my
boy she speak. Chairman.
Hello, good boy.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s. My Stacking Benjamin Show.
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. Today you’ll learn how to organize, secure, and share the most important information in your life with security expert Kurt Long in our headlines, some big news about timeshares that you won’t wanna miss. And speaking of real estate for our TikTok minute, one creator has a big solution for you to solve your money woes in a hurry.
Plus, we’ll talk to a stacker who thought I’d better call sa, see hi in og, and then I’ll share some hidden trivia. And now two guys who spend each week hacking into, whoops, that’s been redacted. Guess I can’t tell you. That point is they found the best personal finance advice just for you. It’s Joe and oh,
put a little extra into that one today. I dunno what got into me. Wow. Feeling
frisky
on a Monday. Let’s go. Welcome
to Mentor Monday on the award-winning Stacky Benjamins podcast. I have my Plutus in front of me. For those of you not watching the video, looks like we took second place and you ate soccer, but, uh, good stuff
also.
We did that. Yeah. Took second place and you ate soccer. It was really embarrassing to lose to a bunch of eight year olds, but
they were
pretty good.
They were good, they’re fast. It was a travel team. They’re so
fast. It’s
ridiculous, so frustrating trying to chase around a
bunch of eight year olds before, how coordinated those
kids up.
Have you seen youth trophies lately though? That little thing you held up? That does not make the cut. That’s about eight times smaller than the real second place trophy for a kid’s sport. No, they give
medals at my daughter’s. Uh. League or whatever. And the medals are like the size of your face. It’s like you got ninth place, you could eat off this.
It’s a dinner
plate. That’s the participation trophy you get at the end of each game. Yes, exactly. It’s snack time. We’ve got a fantastic show today on Mentor Monday, the day when we invite, uh, experts and thought leaders into the basement. Uh, Kurt Long additional thought leaders. Yeah. Addition plus they, they, we invited plus one Yes.
To the basement. Kurt Long is a guy who not only began his career at nasa, just, you know, launch and Rockets. Now he’s one of the world’s foremost security experts. We’re gonna talk to him about keeping your data safe. We’re actually gonna keep you safe a lot today. ’cause man, our headline, our TikTok minute all about safety.
So, uh, guys, we’re gonna launch into that in a second, but before we get to that, Doug you, you, you’re in a rush right now to get through your FSA options. Yeah. And speaking of safety. You can like load up on condoms apparently.
Yeah, totally. Gonna do that. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to spend free money on condoms.
So when you look at all the different types out there, what’s your favorite?
Well, so first you gotta consider, and then there’s colors. I mean, you cannot overlook the importance of colors, so you have to figure out what your decor is in the, wait a minute.
Did you say decor? Decor? Because you say that pretty quick and that’s not, uh, uh, we got a great show today.
Uh, make sure, by the way, some companies, it’s company by company with FSAs by the way. And, uh, Doug, you’re, you’re run outta
time, man. Ours is March 15th.
Could be coming in for a landing. We’re gonna take off on this show though, right about now.
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, uh, USA today and og. Speaking of safety, a lot of people been taken advantage of. And of course, we’re gonna help people avoid some of these scams coming up when Kurt comes down to the basement. But Steve Fisher for USA today writes this like an addiction. In quotes, thousands of Americans fall prey to Mexican cartel timeshare scam.
The first call came in December, 2011. Steve Wrights was a real estate broker from Mexico, offering an exciting opportunity. A buyer wanted to pay Steven, a financial manager from the Midwest, $65,000 for his timeshare in Cancun. Far more than the 47,000 he’d spent on it. Just six years earlier. Steven, of course, agreed he loved his two bedroom condo with his view of the Caribbean and an entrance line floor to ceiling and marble.
The concierge treat his family like royalty. Steven said we felt like kings and queens. He’d originally bought two weeks a year so his children could spend time near the ocean as they grew older and joined sports teams less and less time for family vacations. The telemarketers call seemed fortuitous, but there was one catch, believe it or not, og.
There was a catch. Shocking. Steven then 54 years old, he was gonna have to just first cover a Mexican federal tax of $3,900 that would be held in escrow and credit back to him in the deal closed. And looking back, that was the first sign that he was getting duped, by the way. He spent OG thinking that there might be a company that was actually going to do this.
He got duped out of $1.8 million before this whole thing was over. How is that even possible? I know, right?
On a $60,000
deal, we’ll link to, we’ll link to this in the show notes and you can read this. What did this incredibly job, what was this guy’s job?
You know, you said it is finance something or another
Incredibly riveting, riveting story.
He was a financial manager from the Midwest. Ah,
not, uh, not a good one. Apparently,
apparently not. Great. At his own, at his own budget. That’s insane.
I mean, you know, it was probably a whole bunch of little, little teeny tiny transactions that added up to million. I mean, obviously you get, that’s, there’s gotta be more to the story than.
I just kept sending him $3,000 and eventually, but no, it’s
amazing. Every little thing OG is, oh, you know what? We got this one hurdle. We got just one more hurdle. We got just one. Oh, you know what? We’re almost there. Yeah. And he said it was wishful thinking. He’s, he, he, he gotta the point where he is like, oh, I think we can get this done.
Can’t get it done. Huge scam. Yeah.
Wow. A lot of those start that way and keep on going. It’s surprising. I’ve had people recently ask me what to do about the emails or the phone calls that they get from the IRS and I’m like, hold on a second, what to do about ’em? The IRS will never call you. They will never email you.
The IRS will a send you a letter. Or B, show up on your door with guns drawn. Those are the two modes of communication from the Internal Revenue Service. Like maybe not guns drawn, but like literally somebody showing up at your house, you know, or work a, you know, place of business. And even then you have to be somewhat cognizant of keeping your wits about you.
If somebody knocks on the door and says, I’m with insert agency and we need to talk to you about this thing or something, you know, because there’s still no guarantee that that person is, is, I mean, it’s a better guarantee, I suppose, but I. There’s still no guarantee that that person is who they say they are.
And so don’t ask
me how, but I know it’s pretty easy to get a blue windbreaker and have yellow letters ironed onto to the back of it.
Yours just says poppo, though. It’s really not. It’s just not as trust
does. Doesn’t quite resonate.
It doesn’t with the
locals. Lucky, it kind of gives it away Doug. I gotta be honest.
But you should, if somebody comes to your door or if somebody calls you on the phone, I mean, you see this with credit cards, you see it was all sorts of stuff. It’s like, yeah, I got a fraud alert from American Express a couple of weeks ago. We were traveling and I was just about to leave and I got a, a text message that said, did you just try to buy $500 worth of luggage at Samsonite?
And I was like, swim, swam. Swam. Oh, Samsonite, it says it right here. Now that’s a joke from Dumb and Dumber. Anyways. Um, it’s like, no, I did not. And it says, you know, press one for yes, two for no, whatever. So I do that. It says, call this number or call the number on the back of your card, which is what it should say.
Right? So don’t call the number that texts you that says, Hey, there’s a problem with your credit card. Call us. Here’s the number, click here. Take the card outta your wallet. Call the number that’s on the back of the card. Or open up the app and call it directly from your app. And then just say, I just received a text message that there’s fraud.
And see what happens. They may say, yes, of course. That’s what we
texted you about. Kurt’s gonna dive even deeper into that. Yeah, good. Um, and I can’t wait because he’s got so much, but to your point about even coming to the house, og, I think I told you guys the story. I don’t think I’ve ever told it on the show about our neighbors lived across the block from us.
Everybody in the neighborhood saw the moving van out in front of their house with official movers, like people in uniforms who were cleaning them out. They were crooks. They weren’t official movers, they were not movers that well. They were moving all their stuff out of their house. Yeah. But they broke into their house.
They had apparently done surveillance of their house. They knew that they both worked during the day. And the neighbors like me, I remember seeing the van and just going, oh, I didn’t know that. Ah, they’re moving. That these guys were moving. Wow. That’s wild. They weren’t moving at all. They were getting, they taken advantage of.
And we’ve had people come around door to door pretending they’re selling stuff. Mm-Hmm. During that same time. And a lot of people think these were related. The door to door people selling stuff could care less if you were gonna buy anything they wanted to know on a daily basis what time you were home.
Yeah. And what time you were not home. She’s gonna go into that. You know, the, you know, the part of this story though, guys that really, really caught me when I first read this, I’m like, wow, that much money and that type of a scam. But then I thought about timeshares, like, let’s just go to the basis of this story.
This dude, number one, paid $47,000 for a timeshare. And then his lifestyle changed like timeshares. Timeshares. For some people I’ve seen it work as a lifestyle decision, but they know that it is not the optimal way to buy real estate. I’ve seen it work. I know people that like their timeshare, but if you’re thinking about buying a timeshare, I think there’s another story in here, OG, that if you’re thinking about buying a timeshare, this dude spent $47,000 getting into the timeshare.
He spent $1.6 million trying to get out. He was so happy to be scammed. Yeah.
This is way better than actually being here. This is, this is so amazing. The cartels are like, sir, just sign the paper. He is like, can’t I just send you another $3,000?
The cartel people like, this is fish in a barrel.
These timeshare people, we can’t handle this.
What do
we do? You know, I hear on a daily basis these radio commercials of the all these firms, right? That that will get you outta your timeshare. There’s plenty people that will get you into a timeshare for the wrong reason. There’s all kinds of people trying to get you whatever. There’s a, an industry around getting you outta products og.
Yeah. It also seems like that’s a great place for scammers to show up. Not
knocking the timeshare business or if that’s your thing, but if you do the math on it, it’s really hard to, to justify. You’re a great example of this, but I had another great friend who they literally went to Disney every, every year, sometimes twice or three times.
They loved the whole Disney Vacation Club. Basically the timeshares at Disney until they didn’t like it anymore. Until they’re like, well now our kids are 20 and 18. We’re not going, as you know, we’re certainly not going three times a year. We’re barely going once the points are piling up. ’cause it’s kind of a point system.
You can only carry over so many, you know, and it’s, you’re still paying the
maintenance fees
every year. Yeah. And I’m still writing a check for all this stuff we were looking at. Um, you know, some people scroll Instagram, I scroll realtor.com. So I like, I’m like, Ooh, look, ski chalet, that’s only 19 million.
Hmm. A little work to do. You
know, Joe, I know you’re, uh, you kind of get a little dizzy and gloss over when you hear somebody talk about Disney. But what you missed at the beginning of what OG said was another. I have another great friend implying. Well, thank you. Wow. Thank you very much. You just made it over a big hurdle there.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that before.
Damn
it. People like me, OGs getting all touchy feely today.
Thanks for interrupting me in the middle of my story. By the way, I thought you were done.
Some people
are made for each other. Can you email
the rest? Some people can love
one another for, I’m sorry.
I did and
we’re done.
Deleted
and muted. How about us? How about us, baby? Is there a way to mute Doug from my end? I don’t even actually don’t care if he’s on the, I don’t care if he’s on the, the podcast. I just don’t want to hear it.
If I put my hand like this, I don’t even have to see your face. I just,
and go back to the real og. I just, I really thought you
were
done. It is funny to see your lips moving. I what I was, what I was saying was that even some of the deals are ridiculous because the maintenance is more than the actual payment on the.
The thing, it took all the wind just like, it’s like you’re out sailing and everything’s great, and then the wind is gone, and now you’re stuck in the middle of the ocean with no wind. You took all the wind outta
my sails. Doug. Yeah. Look what happened to this guy. I mean, it was great when his kids were younger, right?
Mm-Hmm. They were able to take vacations and then you guys have been through it with your kids. I went through it with mine. Kid sports took over. I remember that every fricking trip I took was organized around some trip. I took more trips to Minneapolis to visit a swimming pool in the middle of January.
Like, that’s a dream come true. Said nobody ever, no offense, Indianapolis, I’d love you, but wait, spending go to Indianapolis
or Minneapolis? Yeah. I think
he just switched cities on us. Oh, he did. I, I, I, I switched Mylas. It was Indianapolis.
In the Annapolis. Yes, that’s right. That was the best commercial ever.
Uh, big horse stories there too. I would think twice before getting into a timeshare. Think twice before somebody has something too good. To be true, to get you out of that timeshare. Um, oh,
og, did you notice that you just interrupted Joe and he didn’t bite your head off. You corrected him in the middle of his story about Indianapolis and Minneapolis.
He was totally cool with it. He didn’t say that he wanted to delete you from his life.
I I was fixing something. You were not fixing anything. You were just merely interrupting.
I’m, I’m not sure
that had anything to do with that story. I think you just wanted to delete. Delete. That’s, it’s a bigger, bigger thing.
Acy Acy race time for our TikTok minute. This is the part of the show where we shine a light on a TikTok crater who’s either brilliant or air quotes brilliant. So Doug, I’ll go to you. You can be a big part of my life.
Aw.
Is this gonna be brilliant? Or air quotes brilliant.
I’m ready for some brilliance. I need some.
Please let this really challenge my brain.
We have a show called Stacking Deeds, which is our real estate show, and, uh, maybe we should have played this here because, uh, a talker named Sam, faster Freedom with 1.8 million followers. Says this is the way to get ahead financially
if you do not come from money.
The only way to realistically create wealth in a short period of time is to get into debt, which means borrow money to buy cash producing assets. As long as those assets produce cash and you manage them well, you can take the cash created and the equity gained to pay off who you borrowed the money from.
Then at the end of the day, you still own that asset. You get the cashflow and the equity, and you can repeat that process as many times as you want.
What’s sad about that guys is that there is, oh gee, there’s so much. There’s just so much there. He isn’t wrong, and thanks to Kristen, by the way, for sending that to us.
He isn’t wrong, but he’s so wrong and that advice is so dangerous. It can be great and it can be horrible.
Well, I mean, you, you, you can’t start with debt. Debt is a multiplying effect, both for good and for evil. You know, kinda like Doug, Doug is a multiplying effect for good and for evil. You know, it just depends on, depends on what’s happening.
Getting spicy today, the hard part is keeping the leverage number at a reasonable enough risk to return profile. Because you can leverage your stock portfolio seven to one. Schwab will let you do it. You just have to ask ’em and pass a test and they’ll be like, sure, you have a hundred thousand. Go buy $700,000 worth of stocks on your a hundred thousand dollars.
We’ll charge you 80% interest on 600 grand and Yolo baby. And if you’re right, you’re right. Really, really, really big. And if you’re wrong, you get wrong in a hurry. And the same thing is true with real estate, real estate. Works, especially cash producing real estate. What he’s talking about rental properties, right?
It works when it works, when it stops working or if you walk into a bad timing situation. Our example with real estate was like that. We had a great cash flowing property that was a really crappy property, so it was a triplex that we bought for $45,000 that was producing $2,000 a month of rent. And on paper you go, that is insanely good.
I’ll do that all day long until you realize why it’s producing 2000 rent. It’s because it’s the, the, the owner has not put a single dollar of maintenance into the place and needs all new everything. And you go, oh, well I’ll just start that project. Right. And now you have the mortgage payment on the 40 5K in our case.
And no cash flow and taxes and insurance still coming and now you have this outflow of how do I fix this property up? It was just bad timing. You’d say it was bad decision to buy at the beginning, which is probably true, but it’s very slippery. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong,
but it’s slippery. I’m
waiting for you to call on me so I don’t interrupt you.
I’m not gonna call on you, but you started by talking about a risk profile and I know that’s different for everybody, but is there a rule of thumb you like to use that that we can tell our listeners is kind of a good place to start for most
people? I will, because this is where I was going with this as as OG as you were talking.
This is what I think Doug, I think if it’s your first time doing a deal. Using leverage is gonna multiply the effect of that mistake that you’re inevitably going to make because it’s your first time investing in this thing. So the place where Sam gets it right is that leverage can be your buddy, but I’m way more comfortable with leverage on your 10th deal.
More comfortable on your 15th deal. Super comfortable on your 20th deal that you know what the hell you’re doing. But if you’re somebody just starting out and he’s like lead with debt and you feel like you’re lucky and you’re not gonna miss anything, everybody misses so much. Man. I miss so much stuff early in my investing career, and you know what it, part of it is you gotta get out there and you gotta do it.
Like you can read about this stuff on paper all day long. My son’s a great example of this, owns all these rental properties, right? He goes back and looks at that first rental property after he had started off with Scott Trent. Spent a ton of time in BiggerPockets, read David Green’s great book about the Bur method.
Went through all of this, knew everything on paper, and immediately screwed up so many things on those first two deals because there’s still a ton of holes in what you don’t know, and you don’t know what you don’t know until you actually get
there. Even the frighteningly intelligent OG just had a rare moment of humility and told us he got into a situation with that first property that he didn’t expect.
Is that, that’s how I interpreted your story. Is that right? Yeah,
yeah, yeah, it
is. Uh, and and certainly og you do that again, you’re doing it differently because of that lesson, right? Absolutely. And the good news was because it was an inexpensive property in relation to your net worth. The stakes were not that high.
Mm-Hmm. But man, if you’ve got zero, and Sam here is telling you to start with debt, you’re a moron if you start with debt. How do these guys get
1.8 million followers?
It blows me. But you know why? Because they’re selling you a dream. Because they’re selling you the same thing. These, it’s, it’s the same thing.
Why would somebody spend $1.6 million trying to get out of a $47,000
timeshare thing? I’ll tell
you why. Because this dude’s dream was to get out of the timeshare. Your dream when you’re 25 years old is that Sam’s gonna give you the
secrets of the universe. I thought you were gonna say Sam wasn’t wearing a shirt.
’cause I’ll take my shirt off right now if that’s what it takes to get 1.8.
I think the we’re going streaking. I think the goal hero gee, is for Doug to keep his shirt on. Please, God. Coming up next. Kurt Long is a force of nature when it comes to keeping yourself safe. And man, what a, what a great theme.
Running all the way through this to kinda watch out for your blind spots. Kurt has over 25 years of starting, growing and building information security and privacy businesses. He’s worked in data on the health side, keeping your data private when it comes to your healthcare data. He’s worked on the financial side, keeping your financial data private.
Now he’s the co-founder and CEO, along with his son of a company called Bunker, B-U-N-K-R. And what he counsels big companies across the world on is how to keep data safe. And today he’s helping you and I do the same. So, Kurt Long coming up next, but uh, Doug before that, we’ve got some trivia.
Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. 50 years ago, a group of Chinese farmers got a big surprise when they discovered a hidden bunker in a field while digging a weld. Soon after archeologists went to work, excavating the area where they found artifacts dating back to the late two hundreds, BCE.
Something really similar happened to me. When I first bought my house, I was planting some petunias in the backyard. When I spotted the end of an old key poking out of the ground, started digging around it just as I suspected there was a lot more than just an old key there. After about five hours, I’d found two nickels, a double a battery, and an old Swiss Army knife.
That may seem like a bunch of junk to you, but as a former Eagle Scout, I know that’s exactly the type of stuff you’d bury in your backyard if you were a spy in hiding. I asked Joe’s mom about the previous owners, but she wouldn’t say a word. I’m like, I don’t blame her either. If she swore an oath, a secrecy, she could get herself into a whole lot of trouble if she breaks it.
Unlike my backyard, as far as I know, the Chinese bunker was filled with over 8,000 life-size statues of soldiers, along with hundreds of statues of horses, chariots, and other non-military figures. Today’s trivia question is, what were those statues collectively known as? I’ll be back right after I dig around my yard a while to see what else I can find back there.
Hey there, stackers. I’m spy catcher and archeologist Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. During the break, I found more clues hidden in my yard, a pen, the bottle cap. I’m starting to get a pretty clear picture of what the spy that used to live here was up to. Clearly something to do with a key two batteries, a bottle cap, and a pen.
That’s right. Practically a modern day, Nancy Drew, after the bunker in China was fully uncovered, scholars learned that it was actually a massive tomb, and here I thought it was too much to ask to be buried in my El Camino. Today’s trivia question is, what were the statues found in the bunker?
Collectively known as the answer sculpted out of terracotta, the statues are known creatively as the terracotta soldiers or the terracotta army. And now here to teach you how to protect your privacy as you build wealth. It’s today’s mentor, Kurt Long.
I just read a recent headline from the Harvard Business Review.
Listen to this, everybody, why Data Breaches Spiked in 2024. This is written by Stuart Maddick. I’ll link to it in the show notes ’cause I’m not gonna spend a lot of time here. But Stuart writes, for many years, organizations have struggled to protect themselves from cyber attacks. Companies, universities, government agencies have expended enormous amounts of resources to secure themselves.
But in spite of these efforts in which hackers steal personal data, continue to increase year on year, there was a 20%, 20% increase in data breaches from 2022 to 2023. This piece then goes on to talk about what organizations can do about it. Of course, we’re not as worried about that as we are about what you can do about it.
And guess what? That’s why we asked our, our guest today, the co-founder of Bunker, uh, dealing specifically with this issue. Kurt Long is here. How are you man?
I’m really good, Joe. Thanks for having me on.
Well, you, you’re on the front lines of this brother. I mean, did you see this huge increase, this 20% increase?
Uh, yes. A lot of it began in 2020 as we stayed home during covid and people had to work from their, maybe from their home laptop instead of a corporate laptop. And, uh, everything became digital and at that time. We’d, we’d already seen a big, you know, uptick in cyber crime against the public and businesses over the years, but during those covid years, it particularly escalated.
And then they’re like a business. These, uh, these bad guys, they, they’re truly bad guys and they live all over the world. They are well funded, and then the more money they get, the more they pour back into their organized crime businesses. So over time, they just get more and more organized. They have more and more resources to deploy.
They’re able to get more and more targeted. And it’s interesting to go head to head with them sometimes. And you, you know, you realize like, okay, I’m up against this other individual who’s part, clearly part of an organized crime syndicate, and you’re, you’re matching wits against them. And they, they know what they’re doing.
They know what they want and. Upon the vulnerable. And I know that’s a hard thing for everybody to hear because most of us wanna help people that are vulnerable. That is not the psychology of criminal, particularly cyber criminals. They’re looking for that vulnerability and profiling it, and then they go after it with all their might.
Yeah. Our local city here, Texarkana, Texas, got hit with ransomware. Yeah, I know. Another podcast I listened to, I uh, it was a Disney podcast. Their school system shut down for a couple days. Yeah. At least because of, uh, because of a ransomware attack.
So the ransomware attacks are gonna be mostly against businesses, and they had a huge year in 2023.
They broke records. Uh, they shut the casinos down. I don’t know if you saw that in the headlines. cio Yeah. Into the casino. Yeah. And they got in through social engineering attacks. They got through to say the security, uh, desk if you will, and through. Impost that they were someone within the business got the security desk to hand over the credentials, and they did that twice and shut the floors down on two separate casinos once the bad guys find like a vulnerability.
And ransomware was that vulnerability last year where they could find a way in. They are gonna play that to the end. They’re gonna take all the money they possibly can until the public or businesses shut down. That down on the public side, meaning you’re, you know, not on the business side, maybe like family offices, high net wealth individuals, that kind of an attack, they’re gonna go after people that have the money to pay.
Um, and you know, fa famously, you had one of the largest, uh, dental suppliers in the country get shut down multiple times, just completely shut down from being able to service their customers. And, you know, these, these, and it all begins with like a fake email, a fake text, some kind of entry point into either your personal life or into, you know, a business’s infrastructure.
And that’s all it
takes. That was my next question is obviously the places you’re talking about, Kurt, are the places where we work. We’re interested in that definitely. But we’re definitely we. We also wanna protect just our own personal stuff. So is that the biggest weakness we have is that we click on that text or we click on that email?
Where are the weak points that we should think about shor up when it comes to our online
communication? I’ve come to conclusion it’s the tools that we’re asked to use are incredibly vulnerable. Email was never designed for secure communication. It’s not secure communication. As you receive emails, you kind of inherently have to be suspect of them because anyone can get your email address, including the bad guys.
The same for texts. So if I’m receiving a text, that is not a secure communication mechanism. So as you’re using these mechanisms, all the imposter has to do is have your phone number. Have your email address and they can begin sending you emails that are use increasingly using artificial intelligence to create content that looks more and more readable.
So you kind of have to be deliberate and slow when you’re using those kinds of tools. And the other one I would put in there are the social media messengers. Any of the social media messengers, particularly like the WhatsApp of the world, the Instagram direct messaging, all these kinds of direct messengers, incredibly vulnerable to imposter attacks.
It’s a little unfortunate, but that’s the condition we live with. It’s the tools that we’ve been given to use in our day-to-Day. Digital lives are inherently insecure.
So the second I’m communicating with somebody, you’re saying, maybe what, what’s that line, Kurt, trust but
verify. Right. I had the trademark on it.
I had the, I had the trademark. I, you know, at Fair Warning, I, I had the trademark on Trust but Verify, and Ronald Reagan made a famous, but I own the trademark. And, uh, we, we sold fair warning a while ago. But yes, so I’m a big fan of trust, but verify.
Joe, let’s talk about some of the things that have come up lately.
Yeah, Microsoft and the people open AI coming clean and saying that their tools are being used to make hackers smarter and to make hackers better. What do you make of this AI in the world of hacking?
It’s already accelerating and we’ll see more of it. And the place, as I already referenced it, kind of in the emails and the text messages you got, especially email, it’s a little
longer form.
That’s how they’re
making it more readable. Yeah. And these, these guys are organized. It’s not like these are just people in a basement. I mean, they, they have their own infrastructure, they have their own processes. Probably the big one out there has been the voice fake. They’ve been able to synthesize voices and they do, if they can get a clip of your voice, they’ll use artificial intelligence engine to generate your voice saying whatever it is they want.
And so they will use that for, let’s do the public first, because I know this is primarily a. Public audience as opposed to business, they will use that for fake kidnapping. And that’s relatively common at this point. I’m not gonna call it rampant yet, but it is, it’s relatively common. And they’ll a lot of times go after an elderly parent, I should say, grandparent, and they’ll synthesize the voice of a grandchild and call in and say, you know, this person’s gonna lose their life.
The grandchild’s gonna lose their life unless you wire money. And they know that the grandparent is a little more vulnerable, if you will, to these kinds of attacks. And so that would be a simple attack. You know, other kinds of attacks on businesses, and I would absolutely consider them possibly directed at the public, is money wiring.
They’ll take the voice of, say, someone who has access to the bank’s accounts and they will synthesize the voice of someone. That’s known to them and part of a business or part of a family, and ask that they wire money usually in an emergency circumstance, and those are just happening. That’s, and that’s all AI driven.
I’m sure We’ll see if we’re not already video, that’s gonna look like you’re talking to me. Oh, yes. Or, or Joe and I, I haven’t heard those yet. Maybe your audience has, I haven’t heard those yet. But the voice, the voice
fakes are everywhere. And to tell you, uh, stackers how prevalent this is on the software, Kurt, that we use to edit our shows.
Mm-Hmm. If I make a mistake asking you a question, I ask it the wrong way. I wanna ask it better. We have AI inside of our editing equipment where I can just type in the question I meant to ask. Ah, it’ll change the long meandering bad question I asked into me asking a question that I never asked when you and I were, I mean, that, that’s how prevalent this is.
We’re using it in a quote. Good way. But if it’s easy for us to use, you gotta believe the
bad guys have got it. 100%. And you know, I don’t wanna be the doomsday guy, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. This is just getting started. And just to kind of put things together so people understand when they hear about a breach and you’re like, well, did that breach really impact me?
And it doesn’t feel like it did, even though you get a breach notification and the way that works. And you could pick any breach you want. I’m not, I’m not even gonna name one. There’s been so many big ones. What happens is when the bad cyber criminals get the breach, they get your data, they’re gonna get a phone number, they’re gonna get, usually gonna get an email address.
They might even get your home address. Whatever they get, it’s gonna be sent to the dark web where big databases are maintained of all of our information. And then people actually bid on that when there’s a fresh breach to say, I will bid a certain amount for this kind of information. And then there’s, it’s to be forthright, it’s software is, you know, crime, crime as a service.
You can purchase different kinds of criminal services and then you plug the data in. And so when you get all those crazy text messages that say, Hey, uh, FedEx has a package for you, all you need to do is pay and click the credit card thing. And you’re like, how’d they get my number? Well, it’s because there was a breach back that you might’ve read about.
It all goes to the dark web and then it’s in perpetuity there. And then you wind up with different criminal enterprises purchasing that data and running crimes, especially as new technologies come out, like the ones we’re talking about today with the AI generated. And, uh, they love getting fresh data out there.
Most recent
fresh data. You know, we talk a lot about working with professionals here. Kurt, I saw an interview you did, uh, with a company talking about wealth managers. Yes. And wealth managers, obviously protecting the client’s data and making sure they have secure communication with their client. It sounds like to me, these are some questions I should be asking.
The places I work with my money, like, how are you, how are you making sure my data stays safe? What do I do when I ask those questions? What kind of an answer am I looking for from the wealth manager I’m working with, or a financial planner I’m working with that would lead me to believe that my stuff’s reasonably safe in their hands?
You
know, overall the data inside of these wealth management companies, they do a pretty good job with protecting the data inside of them. They’ve been under what’s called, you probably know FINRA and SEC regulations for some time. Sure. And then like at the really big ones, say the Vanguards of the world or the Mayorals or Boas of the world.
They have really good processes all around. Maybe you don’t get quite the intimate relationship you want there. So you’re kind of at a, maybe you’re at a mid-size wealth manager. So the vulnerability between wealth managers and their client is in the way that they communicate. And they should have strict policies about the, the messaging systems they use.
So if you’re using WhatsApp or some type of social media messenger or even text messaging, quite frankly the SEC has come in and said, you’re not allowed to do that. And they find businesses $2 billion. So at a minimum, yeah, that’s two. You can Google that real quick and wow. Uh, and see that. But yeah, the fines are up to 2 million and.
So your wealth manager should be directing you to use a secure messenger once it’s in their business. These guys are usually pretty good. So that, that’s where the real rub is right now to watch for. And then like, there’s all kinds of vulnerabilities in these different messengers that we all use that I touched on today.
And that’s part of the reason the SEC is cracking down on them. I, I’m trying to encourage wealth managers to see security as a little bit more of an opportunity. I’m not sure we’re gonna get all the way there. I’d love to see the advisors know enough to respond and not just say it’s the law, but to actually understand their clients a little bit better, help them with some tools and not just outsource it over to them and tell ’em, Hey, it’s your problem.
I think there’s an opportunity there.
It makes me happy. My bookkeeper slash CPA that I use uses secure communication every time, every time she chats with me. Yes, it’s always this, this very secure channel, which, which gives me this level of comfort. You know, a few years ago, Kurt. I felt like wealth managers were the target.
Then they, to your point, largely got their act together in a lot of ways. Obviously there’s still vulnerabilities to your point, but you saw they started going after our healthcare records because the hospitals out there and our local doctor was not keeping up with stuff. What are we seeing with our healthcare records and what should we be asking our doctors about secure records?
Yeah. You probably saw there, you know, I founded a business in whatever it was, 2005, and we became a world leader at that and secured somewhere around 250 million patient records around the world. I would say on the healthcare side, I. They’re so big and they’re so sprawling with so many different people across so many different facilities that have to look at your record.
They’re always gonna be a little bit more vulnerable to insider kind of breaches. And that’s the nature of what we did. You can ask for like a access list of who accessed your records within the hospital if you’re particularly sensitive to that. And if you are, there’s good reason for that if you choose not to be paranoid, I understand.
But boy, a lot it’s, it’s dozens if not a couple hundred people will wind up looking at your records inside the business. And then most, and then they have the same problems with messaging as well. They wind up, they can wind up using insecure messaging over to you and interacting with their patients and the office for civil rights.
That’s the enforcement body there. They’re having trouble keeping up with that. They have other problems. So. To be forthright. If you’re concerned about your privacy and concerned about having your information stole, I would go to the healthcare provider with specific questions about who accessed my records.
How do you secure information that gets communicated between my care team and myself? I would ask questions proactively. ’cause when it disappears or is stolen, you really can’t track it down from there. That’s about the best advice I can give. I know it’s not the, it’s not perfect, but that’s about the best advice I can give
Joe.
I, I think about with my doctor the number of just huge number of touchpoint that I see, and to your point, the number of touch points then that I don’t see has to be big. Just people you know, that are trying to, to make sure that, that I’m healthy and that’re trying to get their job right.
And just to give you one sense on the healthcare side, at one point on the dark web, you could buy a financial record on Joe or Kurt that it might include my.
Account information or maybe credit card information, basic profile, five bucks a record. And at one point it was $50 a record for a fully loaded patient identity that would include healthcare insurance because they could false bill, Medicare and false billed insurers. So the bad guys go where the money’s at.
Wow. They’re lazy. Wow. They’re, they’re, they’re high value, let’s call ’em, not lazy, but they’re high value. They wanna, they wanna get paid the highest they can for their time
invested. Well, and I also think just the difference between those prices though, five bucks and 50 bucks shows me what kind of money they’re probably getting for that healthcare record.
They’re
making tons of money. Yeah. They were false billing. Medicare, they still are. And then the, it’s a pay and chase model, so they just set up PO boxes. The bad guys get the data they buy from the registration desk. They’d set up PO boxes that were false clinics and then just run the bills through the false clinics to the government.
The government would pay some portion. So if I false bill 20 million bucks and I get 5 million of it before they figure it out, I’d just roll over to the next PO box with the next false care, you know, false clinic, and it’s a whole system. And then they, all of these guys are still doing this with us.
It’s just, you don’t feel the crime when it happens. It’s not like you got mugged. It only happens later when you know your life is impacted and you don’t really understand how
well, and it’s almost like Kurt, when somebody tells me that X person’s a good salesman, I think, no, they’re not because I felt the sale.
Yes. You know, I think the best salespeople are sublime and if the, if the same thing here, if the crime’s happening and I don’t feel a thing and it just kind of silently happens, like that’s the true criminal. I
think that’s right. And you know, so there’s, you know, a related topic, you start, and again, we’re just gonna keep coming back to this idea that cyber criminals, they’re criminals, they look for vulnerability.
And believe it or not, there’s two broad categories of vulnerability. Your children and say, why my children? Because no one monitors their credit. They don’t, they’re not out there. Their credit card’s not gonna get denied. So if they can get your children’s information, they’ll take out loans on it.
They’ll set up credit card fraud. They will, they will just do everything they possibly can to maximize the financial gain from your child’s identity. And then as your child becomes an adult and goes to get a credit card, they find out they have bad credit and no one keeps after your child’s finances, if you will.
So they’re gonna go for that. That’s the first one. Then I know, I can tell you’re gonna wind up with questions the second one. Is aging elderly parents, they’re just so vulnerable, so they a lot, there is often imposter attacks coming into their text messaging coming in through social media apps and billion, and you couldn’t go to the FBI cyber crime statistics and you’ll see easily.
That, uh, the elderly by money volume account for the largest losses. And sadly, you know, if you have an elderly parent, I call ’em aging. ’cause it could be all different range. You really gotta get your head as the, my opinion is if I’m the person in the household, that’s the responsible party, if you will.
Can I get my head around trying to protect my loved ones from the pain that these people intend for? One last one, they go after the sick too, Joe. So like, if they’re sick and they know they’re not gonna be spending money, and you might think, oh, this is the homeless, the home. Nobody monitors the homeless, so they’re just gonna go after the most vulnerable.
And you have to psychologically accept that. Control what you can control, protect your information, and communicate securely. I would say you’ve gotta get organized. Get everything in one place, like Carnegie said, you know, get all your eggs in one basket. Protect that basket.
Boy, I just think as you’re talking, Kurt, that uh, these people are like searching for the inner ring of hell.
Like
I think that’s where they wind up. They wind up just below the, the devil in Dante’s, uh, circle of hell, I think. Ferno, right? Absolutely.
They’re like, oh, wait a minute. We forgot one nuns. We haven’t got after nuns yet. Oh, they
would, they would do that in a hard, there’s no, there’s no conscious, like there, you, you know, we, we deal with people in our lives that have some kind of conscious, there’s.
Do what they’re gonna do. Yeah. We talked
to Kathy Stokes from a RPA couple months ago. Yeah. About, uh, some of the new frauds that are perpetrated on, on the elderly. And it was just, Kathy is, is brilliant. I’m sure you’ve probably interfaced with her before. And just so scary the stuff going on just in that arena.
You and your son built a business together on this and it’s called Bunker. Mm-Hmm. And it’s a way for people to, on your end, to safely store data. Talk to me about Bunker and how Bunker actually works and help some of these things we’re talking
about. Yeah. So for 15, 20 years, we ran a company, you know, the long family.
We ran a company called FairWarning. It was all about healthcare privacy, couldn’t be prouder of it. We changed that industry absolutely forever by showing that you could protect and we had patents all over. You could protect information on the inside of healthcare systems. And, and we did. And we had a really big market share.
So we eventually sell the company. Pivot right into Covid. So we’re stuck at home and you start using all these tools that, you know, I previously described, and you’re like, oh my gosh, I know better than all this. But I didn’t have any administrative assistants. I didn’t have anybody to do anything for me.
I just had to do everything myself. So it’s the first time in a long time I came face to face with using these tools to communicate and run my life. And I, we were all just like, this is crazy. We are using these tools that are so insecure and, uh, there’s not alternatives out here. So we, um, well, there’s alternatives, but not secure and not trustworthy, you know, so that was the inspiration.
We built it first for our family to say, how do we centralize our documentation? That could be wills and trusts. It could be your credit cards, your, your social security cards, your drivers, the passport, all that information. Have it at your fingertips. A hundred percent secure all the time. Then be able to securely share it within the family and securely share it with others.
And, um, we built that platform over three and a half years, and it’s running in 33 countries now, and we have families and extended families around the world using it to solve many of the problems that we’ve talked about today. And that’s the gist of it. Wherever you wanna go from there, Joe. And it’s called Bunker.
You can see it at Bunker Life. Yeah. Bunker
Life. I noticed when I first went to, went to do my research for this, uh, segment, Kurt, I, uh, there’s a few different bunkers out there, so make sure you go to Bunk. Yeah. Bunker. Bunker. Bunker. Yeah.
Bunker Life. Hey, we, we do have the trademarks everywhere though.
We’re working on some of those, but we do own the
trademarks. I wanna ask you about keeping people’s stuff private and people can dive into all that on, on your website. What I’m gonna ask about this is your pricing for bunker. Mm-Hmm. Because this is the big question I had 99 cents a year at the base level.
How the hell do you guys make any money at 99 cents a year? Like, how can you afford to charge that little?
Well, for one thing, just to give you some context to it, you know, I’ve sold three different companies that, that didn’t happen overnight. That was over 30 years and we had some pretty big exits and I don’t really have any financial pressure to.
On the other hand, I don’t wanna lose money. I’m not into losing money, right? But there’s no financial pressure and I just feel like bank level security is something that everybody in the world should have access to. And so, you know, before the call we were talking about visiting Argentina and Chile and going to these remote places, and I just feel like everybody should have that now.
You know, do we hold it at 99 cents forever? Eh, probably not. But for the foreseeable future, I have no problem for it being 99 cents. And you can try it out, see if you like it, and hopefully you convert like a lot of other people do. I just feel like everybody in the world should have access to why, why?
Why do corporations get to have information? Security experts, privacy experts, compliance experts. They get to protect their information. But we as human beings don’t, you know, so that’s, that’s where it’s coming from in the heart. And then part of me wants to market adoption so that we grow and prosper as well, Joe.
So that’s some of the thinking.
We’ve been seeing, uh, some thoughts, by the way, lately from, uh, economists and experts talking about 4 0 1 ks may be going away and possibly in the future, we’re just gonna carry around these portable plans, which by the way makes sense to me, but also means you keeping your data private becomes even more important because the companies that you work with will be keeping it, but there’s gonna be even more onus on you to keep it, to keep it private, which is so difficult for me because I think about, um, all the stuff that we just talked about for the last 25 minutes.
Okay. I got one more question, the question everybody asks you. You started off your career at Kennedy Space Center. You were putting people into orbit working on the space program. How did you get from this, first of all, tell me about those early days, number one. Sure. But then number two, how does that translate into then healthcare security?
Yeah. And now security for all of us.
So on the space center side, I, as a young person child, you could watch the Apollo missions from Florida. And so we were across the state, but you’d literally see the Rockets Yeah. At night. And uh, watch that. And then a couple days later you’d come over to the television.
There’s guys walking on the moon, you know, and you’re like, it’s a real thing. And then I wrote the Space Center, I think when I was 13 and they wrote back and you’re like, that’s a real place that re they really exist. I know that sounds a little naive, but I was 13 and it gave the possibility that you could work there and, you know, so as I went through school, the further I, I just got really into that of what if I could work there?
And luckily enough I had a interview in the real time space shuttle launch data bank, and they hired me. And, um, so this next roughly 10 years of my life, we launched space shuttles and things like Venus Radar Mapper. Things like Ulysses, which flew, uh, fly by satellites, uh, close to the sun. Yeah. Uh, Galileos probes into Jupiter, and the one I really wanted to be a part of was Hubble Space Telescope.
So got to be a part of Hubble Space Telescope and the got to work with that generation of people. Those were the greatest engineers of their time, if you will. They were all MIT, Berkeley, Georgia Tech. Super hard on me, deservedly I was a kid who didn’t know, you know, you’re just a kid. And they were super hard on me and they became like my family to me.
Very much So over time it became clear that I should leave and to be forthright with you. One of my bosses said, Kurt, you know, we can’t take care of you, you the way we used to. Budgets are gonna be tight. You know, you should think about leaving. You can do more than this. And I did. I tried corporate America.
I. Didn’t care for it that much and started my own businesses when the internet hit. And then the last, when it, when it hit, I mean, I was like, oh, this is it. I gotta be involved. And I was, I, I left corporate America and started my own companies. And you might say, what’s the space center have to do with entrepreneurship?
I really do think it’s like teamwork, believing in something bigger than yourself. And truth, and I’ll drill in on the truth side a little bit because in space flight it’s all about the truth. It’s like you can’t bs it either works or it doesn’t work. You either get the launch successful or not. You either rendezvous with the capsule or you don’t.
You get the telescope deployed and the, and the lens is ground properly or it’s not. There is no room for BS and that’s the culture of it. Like you just, there is no other culture because you’re gonna be shamed. Very badly if, if you bs about something and it will get revealed as an error and you’ve let down the entire launch complex, you know, and quite frankly all of Brevard County and the whole nation.
So there’s a lot of pressure to be truthful. And I think that’s what helped me as an entrepreneur. I wasn’t afraid of the truth, you know, I’m not, I wasn’t afraid to be like, oh, the product’s not working, or There’s problems here, there’s personnel problems, there’s market fit problems. So I think it’s that truth thing.
Believe in something bigger than yourself and, uh, teamwork are the, are the three things and super grateful for
it all. It’s fabulous. Well, thank you for sharing your story. Thank you also for mentoring us. On keeping our, our data safe. I will say for the next time, Kurt. Yeah. How with launching all this stuff, you dealt with the fact that the earth is flat, but we’ll deal with that
a different day.
Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. We’ll joke a different, you
know, there’s,
there’s been so many, there’s been guys trying to prove it’s flat and I don’t know if you saw the guy lost, lost his life, trying to prove its flat.
Just the, the craziness you see. Speaking of online, the
craziness you see there. Kurt, thanks
Aton for hanging out with us.
Thanks. Congratulations on your podcast too. I’m Andy Dwyer, and when I’m not pulling suckers off my tomato plants in my garden, I’m Stacking Benjamins.
Big thanks to Kurt Long for joining us today. OG goes back to exactly what you said. Seems to good to be true. Probably is. And and the frightening thing for me is, is that these are not some dude who’s just angry at his parents who’s out there hacking.
These are people who put on a suit and tie every day, go into the office and steal your stuff. It’s an incredibly professional organization with a hierarchy, bosses and general managers, and that’s their job. General manager of their job is to take your way. Scam, general manager of thievery. It is ugly.
Hey, time to shine a light on a stacker who decided. You know what? I better call Saul. See Hi and og. This is the part of the show where we help a stacker who is in need of some help with their personal financial situation. You can also call us with your question by going to stacky Benjamins dot com slash voicemail.
I’m leaving one for us there like Scott just did. Hey Scott. Hi Joe,
this is Scott from Chicago. I have a 5 29 question for you. This last semester, we sent the funds to the university for our daughter’s educational costs and after the funds were received, there was some additional scholarship that was applied to her account, which was great, but resulted in a refund to us.
So a few hundred dollars and now I’m wondering what to do with that refund. Can we deposit those dollars and put them back into 5 29? Can we deposit the dollars and hold that for the tuition for next fall’s semester? Uh, and in the meantime, do we need to count that as income in 2024, either to her or to us for receiving that check?
Any advice you can have is greatly appreciated and I’m really looking forward to reelect neighbor Doug 2028.
Reelect. He’s already
assuming the L for 2024. No
reelect. I see what he
did
there. He said, you’re gonna
win. Oh, reelect. He did say that Reelect
in 2028. Nice. Oh, ah, nice. I miss that too. I was like, wait a minute, I’m doing the math.
I’m too busy doing the math on the year. Uh oh. Gee, that’s a, that’s a great question. We often see this, uh, well not often, but we see it with this, we see it with Roth IRAs, right? People put money in their Roth IRA, and then their income goes up and they, they can’t contribute as much as they thought they could.
What does he do with this excess college fund money?
Well, I think the Roth and the 5 29 are completely different in this regard. Remember, a 5 29 is for higher education expenses, and it’s not just limited to tuition. You know, you can use your 5 29 for required books or fees or. Travel expenses. If your kid goes to school way out of the area and you know you’re traveling or they’re traveling, you had to buy a computer, an iPad, a new Apple pencil, ’cause your kids seem to figure out how to break them.
It’s a little personal. I know. You know, there’s lots of different things that you can use a 5 29 for, and especially if it’s such an insignificant amount in the grand scheme of things, like a few hundred dollars, I would have no problem with just keeping that money and just saying, yep, there’s a additional expense.
You’ll get a tax form from the school that will kind of detail all this stuff out at the end of the year that says here’s how much tuition was. Here much scholarship you got, here’s how much you know, you were refunded from your fi. Like all of that will be laid out and you reconcile that on your tax form by saying, you know, I use this money for a higher education expense.
If it’s a few hundred dollars, I’m certain that there’s plenty of odds and ends that were paid for out of pocket. That will be super easy to so many, you know, you’re not, you’re not, you’re not running a foul of any rules by, by going, what do I keep with this a hundred bucks? Now if it was like they refunded 22,000, obviously that’s a much more difficult thing to get around.
In which case, yeah, I think I would put it back into the 5 29 and use it for subsequent years. Your CPA will be able to kind of work through like how to recalculate that basically. ’cause the same thing happens, it shows the distribution from your 5 29, it shows the tuition payment, so on and so forth. So you have to work through the back way of not counting that as income.
But for a few hundred dollars, no problem
there. There are so many little expenses, just tons and tons. I felt like those first few weeks of school, all we did with Nick and Autumn was just send more money, send more money, send more money, send more cash. Thanks to Scott for calling in. If you’ve got a question for us, you know what?
Head to stack of Benjamins dot com slash voicemail. And uh, not only will OG answer your questions succinctly, you will also take home some free stack of Benjamin Swag for being brave and calling the show. We love seeing our stackers in their swag and we’re seeing it out more and more, which is pretty exciting.
If you just wanna cut right to the swag, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash shirts gets you there and you can just cut out the middleman of calling in and just go grab your own. One caution there too, Scott, much like Kurt said, our mentor today, uh, trust but verify, right? Whenever it comes to a tax question like this where you’re dealing with a tax shelter, you always wanna talk to your tax advisor as well.
So Tax advisor is gonna go, yep, og got it. Right? But I would still remember that this is for entertainment purposes only. If you’ve got a question, it’s not just about 5 29 plans, but you’ve got a question that’s. You know what? I’m not sure how my money is actually moving, and it’s really not going the same way that my goals are going.
We know what OG and his team are taking clients, and the first step would be to go to stacky Benjamins dot com slash og to get on his team’s calendar. And that’s the first step to seeing how his team can interface with you so that you can make better financial decisions overall in the future.
Everything needs to dovetail. Uh, it was interesting, I was talking to a mutual friend, OG that just started working with, uh, your team. It was talking about, uh, when you guys say everything needs to dovetail, I didn’t get what you meant. It’s like, I, I, I didn’t understand why you were asking for our tax forms.
I didn’t understand why you were asking for our estate plan. I didn’t understand why you wanted to know how much money we spend on groceries and whatever. And then she went, oh yeah, it all dovetails. They say that every show. The light bulb turned on. Ding. Time for us to wander out to the last segment in this show.
Uh, the back porch Doug. What do we got going on in the back porch today? Well,
first of all, Joe, I gotta warn you, there is a major. Stone. Some people call a milestone, but it’s racing towards us like a meteor coming at us in about three weeks, our 1500th episode. Whoa. Screaming at us. I hope we got something big planned.
Not just this normal stuff we do that’s amazing, but like super, super amazing in three weeks you figuring that all out?
I’m glad you brought that up. You, you know what I’d like to do guys, is instead of the way we celebrated 500 and a thousand was talking to some of the other creators out there. But you know what?
The reason we made it to 1500 is because of our stacker community. Let’s celebrate our community. You know, I think we’ve tried to do that more on social media with our Instagram lives where you can ask our, you know, the mentors we bring up increasingly ask them questions yourself. We try to do community, of course, with our local meetup in Minneapolis.
We’re gonna be going to some more cities, probably four more cities this year. Nice to celebrate with as many stackers as we can, but I think. We should celebrate this. What I’d love to hear is what are some changes that you’ve made in your life? I know we joke around a lot, but I really wanna hear what changes have you made because of the Stacking Benjamin Show?
What have you done because you’re a part of this community, either from listening to the show or hanging out with us on social media, or attending our events or reading my book, whatever it might be. What are some of the things that you have done differently? So let’s celebrate your wins. To do that, I guess what we’ll do, rather than set up a separate line, just go to the same line as the, uh, better call saw line stack you Benjamins dot com slash voicemail.
But at the beginning of your message, just say 1500 and then we will edit that. We’ll edit that out. But please celebrate with us. What are some things that you’ve done differently and let’s celebrate each other. Let’s high five each other on some of the awesome things we’re gonna have tomorrow. A show where we celebrate three stackers doing great stuff, but, but I’d love to hear from a lot more.
So how about
that? Can’t think of a better way to find out if I’ve actually had, I mean, you guys have actually had an impact on people’s lives.
Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail slash voicemail gets you
there. Yeah. We’ve also had, uh, I’ll tell you, we’ve changed another way. We’re changing lives.
They tell us in reviews for the podcast. Joe, we’ve had a couple of really good ones lately. Um, here’s one that’s solid, uh, five star review. Hands down, best Personal finance podcast. Stacking Benjamins is the OG Personal Finance Podcast content’s current, relatable and delivered with a side of comedy.
I’ve been listening for five plus years, haven’t missed an episode. The advice I’ve received has led me on the right direction for my own financial journey. Thank you, Joe Doug and og. But I mean, that’s, that’s amazing. That was from Gas Burn. Hope I’m saying that right. Gas burn. Uh, but, uh, here’s one that I, I find really good titled Jeff Sports Approves.
I’m, I’m sure that that’s his name.
Is he is, is he, is he talking about that? Well, we were talking about that video
game. I think
so, isn’t it Dirk? Sports Wood.
It is like the leadoff hitter for my Exactly. Uh, baseball team. Super mega, super mega
baseball three. But this is Jeff Sports approves. Still don’t get that joke, but I’ll figure it out someday.
Above me. It’s a five star review and he leads with Above Mediocre podcast. Even with that Doug guy hanging around like a stray dog. Great advice. I’m hoping it will eventually help me move out of my parents’ basement. Dad’s not too happy with me. Something to do with me being 43 and a virgin. Aside from still wetting the bed, things are looking up.
No, who, who knows. Maybe I can score a book or a totally awesome t-shirt out of this. So this is a guy who’s still living with his parents Virgin. He is wet the bed, but his handle when he left. This was Wild man for life.
So
good. Totally wild. And once again, uh, new people to our community, very confused when they read that. The hell going on. Great stuff. Thanks to both of you who left those, those new reviews. And please, if you’re a person who loves helping out total strangers who you met by listening to their podcast, by giving them a review of their show, we would very much, uh, appreciate that from you as well coming up on Wednesday.
As I mentioned, we’re diving into your success stories, what’s cool stuff going on in the Stacking Benjamins community. We’re gonna cover that. And then again on the episode, 1500 Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail. We need a quick turnaround on this. So we are going to need these by next Tuesday.
Next Tuesday is uh, March 19th. We need those by March 20th for our air date coming soon. Alright, that’s it for today, except for one last question. Doug, what’s on our to-do list? I.
Well Joe, I’ll tell you what’s stacked up on our to-do list today. First, take some advice from Kurt Long and trust but verify.
Don’t click the link in the text, don’t click the link in the email, and certainly don’t share your medical or financial records with strangers. It’s also easier than ever to lock down your credit, so go do it. Second, thinking about buying a timeshare, take two aspirin and call us when the fever comes down.
But the biggest to do, I gotta find some Boy Scouts who need an archeology badge to help uncover the rest of the clues in my backyard. Once I figure out what device the spy uses with these batteries, I’m sure I’ll break wide open a worldwide conspiracy, and I hold the key in a bottle cap.
Thanks to Kurt Long for joining us today. You can find more about Bunker at Bunker Life. That’s B-U-N-K-R dot LI fe. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. The show is The Property of SB Podcasts LLC, copyright 2024 and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Our producer is Karen Repine.
This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast. With help from me, Joe Kate Yakin, Karen Repine, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are. Of course you do, but you’ll never know if you don’t. Check out our YouTube version of the show Engineered by Tina Ichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all the.
I’m the best thing going for this podcast. Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude, Stacey Doe and Julia Gar. 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. For more interactive fun, join us on Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday for our Instagram lives. Kate Yakin and Joe host those weekly. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
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