When to Trust Your Gut and When to Trust the Math (SB1795)

Ever made a money move that felt right then immediately wondered if you just emotionally invested in a bad idea? We’ve all done it. Some of us have receipts.

Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and Neighbor Doug tackle one of the trickiest parts of personal finance: knowing when to trust your gut and when your gut needs to sit down and let the math speak.

Because here’s the thing. Most Stackers aren’t struggling because they don’t know what a Roth IRA is. You’re struggling because real life decisions don’t happen in a spreadsheet. They happen in the middle of a busy Tuesday, with a dozen tabs open in your brain and a million little “what ifs” fighting for attention. So the guys dig into how intuition works (and when it betrays you), and why data is powerful until you start using it to talk yourself into doing something dumb with extra steps.

You’ll also hear how the best financial plans aren’t built on perfect predictions but on repeatable decisions. Plus the episode veers into some surprisingly useful territory with Costco membership strategy, the hidden psychology of “good deals,” and how advisors use tools to help optimize Social Security choices without making you feel like you need a PhD in government paperwork.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to tell the difference between good intuition and financial anxiety in a trench coat
• Why data can be a superpower or a weapon you use against yourself
• The role of AI and research in decision making and what it means for everyday people
• How OG thinks about sticking to a plan when emotions get loud
• Why “a deal” can be a budget win or a trap door
• What a Costco membership is really doing to your spending habits
• The Social Security optimization tools advisors use and why timing decisions matter

This Episode Is For You If:

• You’ve made emotional money decisions you later regretted
• You either overthink every financial choice or jump too fast without enough info
• You’re not sure when to trust your instincts versus when to run the numbers
• You want to make confident decisions without needing perfect information
• You’re tired of second guessing yourself every time money is involved

Questions to Think About:

When was the last time your gut feeling saved you financially or cost you money? Are you more likely to overthink decisions with too much research or jump too fast without enough? Drop your answers in the comments or the Basement Facebook group because finding your balance between intuition and data might be the unlock you need.

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

Enjoy!

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Our Headline

• T. Rowe Launches New Social Security Optimization Tool for Advisors (NAPA)

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Doug’s Trivia

• Benjamin Franklin was unhappy about the eagle as America’s symbol. Which bird did he prefer?

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Better call Saul…Sehy & OG

• Write listener question here

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

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

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Other Mentions

• How to balance intuition and strategic thinking – Fast Company
• 1% Better Conference

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Join Us Wednesday

Tune in on Wednesday when we explore how do the best moments of your life happen when we’re joined by our Wednesday mentor, George Newman.

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Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: How to Afford Life Without Living Like a Monk (SB1794)

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Joe: Gentlemen, I have a new mug. Check that out. Quacked. It’s a Daffy duck. Daffy duck. Donald Duck. It’s a Donald Duck mug. ’cause I just went to the House of Mouse, and I don’t know if you guys know this, but this mug, which is beautiful and is supposedly for an espresso coffee, extra strong. It says Deep roast, uh, quacked roasters Coffee’s for an espresso.

[00:00:23] Joe: Yes. Yeah. 

[00:00:24] OG: The size of your head. 

[00:00:26] Doug: And it’s not for an ES espresso. Take espresso mug. You’d be in the hospital if you drank an espresso that large. 

[00:00:31] Joe: But the good thing, guys, is because I bought it at Disney, it only cost me $187 and 46 cents for this mug. 

[00:00:37] Doug: I think the good news is, is that it is maize and blue colored.

[00:00:41] Doug: Oh God. Moving on. You’ll never drink from that mug again. Gotta Now I gotta throw it away, Doug. 

[00:00:48] Joe: I gotta throw it away. That’s tag winning. But you know what, I have this mug especially, I was so excited because we get to salute our troops with it like we do every Monday. So raise your mugs, gentlemen. And.

[00:00:59] Joe: All you stackers out there, come on, pull over on the side of the road, make sure you’re safe, and let’s salute our troops. On behalf of the Men and Women Making podcast to Mom’s Basement, the stackers out there in the field, getting it done every day, and the men and women at Navy Federal who support our veterans and our active duty troops and their families, here’s to you.

[00:01:21] Joe: Thank you so much. Now let’s go stack some Benjamins together, shall we? Thanks everybody. 

[00:01:28] opener: It’s easy to grin when your ship comes in and you’ve got the stock market beat. The man worthwhile is the man who can smile. When his shorts Aren too tight in the seat.

[00:01:47] opener: Okay. Cookie To be honored.

[00:01:54] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:02:08] Doug: I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor. Duggan. I got a strong feeling that today’s gonna be your favorite episode ever. You know why? Today we’re talking about when to trust your gut and when to lean into cold hard data. There’s new research on the topic and we’re helping you make the most of it. Plus, speaking of data, T Row price is out with some new social security software to help advisors, but how much of this software do you really need to make?

[00:02:36] Doug: Good decisions and you know it. We’ll Also share a TikTok minute about Costco. Oh, that reminds me. I need another pallet of MiraLax, but I’ll try to keep it together long enough to finish this intro. Please keep it together. It’s a struggle. And of course, the laugh, it makes it worse too. Doesn’t it? Laugh, it makes it worse of quivering.

[00:02:55] Doug: And of course I’ll share some absolutely incredible, amazing, some may call it glorious money trivia. And now two guys who think the most glorious day is one where there’s lots of sun, couple of microphones and a positive stock market. It’s Joe and oh, ju ju.

[00:03:18] Joe: Oh, don’t all three of those factors make things great. Hey everybody, happy Monday. Welcome back. You made it. You found us. Sit back and relax because you’re about to experience the greatest money show on Earth. And the guy who is. In the main event in the center ring of this circus, Mr. OG is back. How are you man?

[00:03:40] Joe: I’m good. Yeah, thanks. We somehow find, found a way without you last week. You look tan, you look rested. I hope you had a great time. We were here. We got some upgrades, Doug. We got Anna on Monday last week. We got Dana on Wednesday, so Oh gee. We had some, uh, some good help while you were gone. My 

[00:04:00] OG: plan is coming 

[00:04:01] Joe: together.

[00:04:05] Joe: He’s about to announce his retirement. Well, this week guys, we’re making you 1% better every day. Oh, gee, I think it’s saltier by 1%. Ev every single day. 

[00:04:17] OG: It’s salty. Put that pox on me. You were 

[00:04:20] Doug: just salty in that response. Just in Tide. How do you not see 

[00:04:24] Joe: this? We’ve got a great mentor this week on Wednesday.

[00:04:29] Joe: We got a phenomenal guest on Friday, and this is personal development week, so, so every, 

[00:04:34] Doug: everybody’s gonna get 3% better by the end of the week. 

[00:04:37] Joe: Hopefully you even do it on the off days, Doug. So hopefully by Friday for 5%, 5% better. Imagine that’s isn’t that great if you just get a little bit better every day.

[00:04:46] Joe: And today we’re gonna help your critical thinking skills with all this discussion about AI and so many chat rooms talking about all the different ways that we use ai. When do we trust our gut? When do we trust ai and when do we just look at hard cold data? There’s some new research out on that and we’re gonna dive into that today.

[00:05:05] Joe: But before we get to that, we have this new tool, you know, uh uh, Cheryl guys, a couple of years ago, we were actually driving down the road and she’s like, what the hell happened? Somebody used your credit card to buy a flight from San Francisco to Seattle on Spra Airlines and we’re driving down the road in country.

[00:05:23] Joe: Everyone 

[00:05:24] OG: knows Joe would never fly Spirit. 

[00:05:26] Joe: Number one. So that was an indicator, but spirit’s awesome. Finding that out way too late, made it very difficult to unravel. Well, that is one thing that our new product, the Vault, helps you do. Between that subscription management, staying on top of your credit, running what if scenarios, this thing does 15 things.

[00:05:46] Joe: You’re paying 15 different other people to help you with and it does it all in one. I’m gonna be doing walkthroughs of the vault all week, Monday, today this afternoon, and on Wednesday over on YouTube. If you get the 2 0 1, we’ll give you the Times, stacky Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 to get that stacky Benjamins dot com slash vault to dive in and to see what, uh, well, what everybody’s been raving about so far.

[00:06:09] Joe: Great to see all the people that are using it and saving bunches of money and also. Making sure that when scammers arrive, that you’re completely protected. Alright, we got a couple more sponsors who keep us keeping on, keeping on so that all this goodness is a hundred percent free. Doug, you know the line Stacking Benjamins a hundred percent free and worth every penny.

[00:06:31] Joe: There it is. We’re gonna hear from them and then we’re diving into critical thinking versus intuition to begin your 1% better everyday week.

[00:06:48] Joe: Alright, I am so excited guys to get your take on this in stackers. I’d love to get your take too, whether you’re commenting on Spotify or you are in our basement Facebook group. This is interesting research that they’re focused on at uh, fast Company and the piece is called How to Balance Intuition and Strategic Thinking.

[00:07:08] Joe: Often og we’re driving down the road and we’re like, oh, maybe I’m listening to satellite radio and I hear about some great stock and my gut goes, oh, this, uh, this sounds great. Or I’m eating a tuna fish sandwich at lunch. And I go, oh, you know what? I think I should probably sell this thing that I have, right?

[00:07:26] Joe: Because it’s not great Doug not a fan of T fish. I think I should not be 

[00:07:29] Doug: eating a 

[00:07:30] Joe: tuna 

[00:07:30] Doug: fish sandwich, 

[00:07:31] Joe: is what I’m thinking. You 

[00:07:31] OG: have a weird timing sense of like how to make financial decisions. 

[00:07:35] Joe: I’m just saying you have these bizarre times. So there I was 

[00:07:37] OG: doctor minding my own business, having a tuna fish sandwich, and I thought to myself, I should get a prostate exam.

[00:07:44] Joe: Well, doesn’t intuition hit it the weirdest time again at the strangest time? In fact, it’s funny, David Allen, the Getting Things Done Guru, the time management and organizational guru says that your brain bring things up at at these weird times because you don’t have great systems for being organized and to make sure that you’re gonna get this stuff done.

[00:08:07] Joe: So your brain tells you at the time that you will never remember the milk. Remember, when you’re at the grocery store, you gotta get milk. Like it will tell you at the most bizarre time. You’re like, what the hell? Because you haven’t gotten a system together. So I’m wondering about this. So Natalie writes, balancing gut feelings with hard data isn’t a soft skill.

[00:08:27] Joe: It’s actually a strategic advantage. She says, in an era where AI automation, ubiquitous dashboards flood us with metrics, it’s tempting to believe that better spreadsheets will yield better decisions. But our most consequential choices rarely emerge from a cell In Column D, they arise from an ongoing negotiation between intuition and rational.

[00:08:49] Joe: Analysis. The frustrating thing is we have some stackers that are always trying to make their best decisions around their retirement plan, around their investment portfolio, OG based on just, well, this is what the data says, but sometimes, sometimes your intuition going, you know what? This doesn’t seem right.

[00:09:07] Joe: Sometimes that’s a hundred percent right. 

[00:09:10] OG: I mean, not for investment decisions. No, your intuition is almost always wrong. I mean, think about it like when would you intuitively want to be investing? Generally speaking, you’re like, oh my gosh, the stock market’s doing really good. Or like right now, what’s the number one asset class performer of 2026 so far?

[00:09:30] OG: Last year was international. Right now it’s small companies. Or the last time I looked anyway, and by a considerable margin. So what are most people doing the month of January? They’re getting their investment statements, they’re starting to work on your taxes. Maybe you’re, you’re gonna update, you know, your, your spreadsheets.

[00:09:47] OG: Like she’s talked about, you know, you’re, you’re doing all that kind of end of the year, beginning of the year, like refresh stuff. And you look at your 401k and you go, oh, I mean, I knew the stock market was good, but my god, you know, it’s really great. Spain, I totally missed the boat on Spain last year.

[00:10:04] OG: What I, I, I didn’t even think to have money in Spain. My gosh, they were up 58%. You know, I should have a little bit of Spain money this year. Let me, let me do a, let me do a strategic rebalance and so I can rebalance. I’m, I’m just being very strategic now and I’m just gonna rebalance back into my Spain holdings that I, you know, missed in the last, uh, 25 years because I didn’t even think about it.

[00:10:25] OG: And maybe more broadly, I just look at it from an international standpoint and say, well, I didn’t have enough last year. I only had 20%. Maybe I should have 25 or 30%. That’s not being intuitive, that’s not following, that’s not following the right way of doing things. You’re taking the one piece of data, a year’s worth of returns to support the next 50 years of your investing life because, you know, you think that this is now the new way of doing it.

[00:10:52] OG: Or you look at, you look at, well, a small companies are doing really well in January, so I, I must have to rebalance into small companies right now that’s not following. You need to follow a system when you invest and you have to have very standard rules. Absolutely. 

[00:11:07] Joe: A hundred percent you do. And I think you 100% by the way.

[00:11:10] Joe: Nailed it. If your intuition says, I need more spa, how come I’ve never looked at Spain? I remember I did this around Africa once, uh, our old contributor, Greg McFarland, wrote this whole. Peace romanticizing. The fact that, you know, when it comes to emerging markets, Africa is going to be where it’s at. And I had happened to schedule an interview with a woman and ended up being a great interview, Carol Liny, talking about how the money systems in Africa working so much faster because they didn’t have all these legacy systems than they were in the us.

[00:11:41] Joe: So of course they didn’t 

[00:11:42] OG: have rules or banking requirements or yeah, legislation. So it works so much faster. There’s no supervision of any kind. 

[00:11:51] Joe: Well, that’s on one side. I mean that’s on the negative side. On the positive side, you got these things like a CH, which, what the hell? Three days, like what are we talking about here?

[00:12:01] Joe: But because I had this confluence of reading Greg’s piece and Carol Reini coming on the show, I start looking at Africa and you know what? I start thinking, oh gee, now’s the time my 

[00:12:12] OG: intuition is telling me, I go, my intuition. Time 20 x into, I should lever two to one into Africa. It’s a, it’s, you can’t miss.

[00:12:21] OG: And 

[00:12:21] Joe: there was zero data, there was zero data to prove it, there was zero data. But you know what the zero data told me, og, because of my intuition. Now’s the time. This is, I’m on the front edge of this thing. Like of course there’s no data ’cause I’m the first mover, I’m the person here. I’m gonna be the guy that invested in Nvidia at $14 a share when it first went public, right?

[00:12:43] Joe: I think the number one performing stock between the time it went public and and today. So I’m that person. Like I’m a freaking genius. So I invested in Africa. Guess what happened to that money og. 

[00:12:56] OG: It intuitively went away. 

[00:12:58] Joe: Intuitively not good. Intuitively horrible things happen, but we can widen that.

[00:13:03] Joe: Number one, I think there’s things you can do intuitively. Against that because I will tell you this, my intuition has changed over the years. I know like you now, when most people run from the stock market, my intuition is to run toward the stock market during those times of panic, and I know yours is too.

[00:13:26] Joe: So I think you can study your intuition over time to make better decisions. You can actually combine, okay, my intuition has been this forever, or most people’s intuition is here and it’s wrong. I think I can intuitively begin to turn that around to fight against these negatives and instead turn it into a positive ’cause.

[00:13:45] Joe: I don’t make those type of mistakes often. In fact, usually I’ve had times when I’ve come across money serendipitously at the same time that the market has happened to be down and instead of going, you know what, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t add to my funds. Now I should dollar cost average in, or I should, I should leave this money in cash even though it’s long-term money.

[00:14:07] Joe: I have intuitively went, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. But I do know that since everybody’s running out of the stock market, this is a decent time as decent as any to get in. 

[00:14:18] Doug: You know, I think you’re skipping a step in most people’s intuition on investing, which is, I mean, you guys are assuming people are already invested and where should I invest?

[00:14:30] Doug: But I think you gotta back that up. For most of our listeners who are early on in their investing journey and they’re waiting for the intuition that says, I got this giant pile of money. I’m gonna wait until I have a lot of extra before I invest, when that’s when you should, you should be doing counterintuitive thinking, which is you gotta invest when you have just a little bit of money available to you.

[00:14:55] Doug: To then get that big pile of money later. I think, I think uh, we all trust our gut thinking, I can’t invest now. I don’t have enough money to invest. I need to wait until I have all of this excess cash. That’s the intuition I think we all need to be fighting. 

[00:15:09] Joe: And isn’t that interesting, Doug? Because that counter intuitive approach work so often, and I’ll give you an example.

[00:15:16] Joe: When I was struggling with money, I was that guy that wanted to have more cash available. ’cause if I had more cash available, it would solve my cash crunch problem. And yet. What really happened was when I made it so my money wasn’t as liquid, I moved it to a bank across town and I had two choices. Either have it wired to me, which is gonna cost me 15 bucks, which in the scheme of, you know, if there’s a big emergency, 15 bucks is nothing right.

[00:15:44] Joe: So I can have it wired to me, or I can drive across town would’ve taken me about an hour and a half round trip to get back and forth from this particular institution. And I cut up all the other ways to get to it. I got rid of all my online access, so I removed myself from my money, which intuitively is stupid.

[00:16:01] Joe: You know what happened? All of a sudden that money started to. Accumulate. And as I had more money go into that fund, my emergency fund built, even though intuitively it seems like the stuff I did to put it there was a hundred percent stupid. But turning that intuition upside down. I love that. I love that.

[00:16:19] Joe: So that bank 

[00:16:20] Doug: across town was in 1963. Like you mean they were, you had no access to it. There was no way to get to that money except driving there. I’m just joking, but I, no, I think there, I got rid of it. 

[00:16:29] Joe: I had all those options and I got rid of them. I made sure I didn’t have online access. Ah, yeah. I made sure that I didn’t have a debit card, like it was me putting barriers between me and my emergency fund.

[00:16:41] Doug: Yeah. And. You probably don’t even need to work. You might have, but other people may not need to work that hard to put barriers between themselves because it could just be that if you take that little bit of available funds that you have and get it invested someplace that it’s outta sight outta mind and you will be less tempted to liquidate it and bring it back into make a catch 

[00:17:01] Joe: a hundred percent.

[00:17:01] Joe: If I take the money and I invest. Now, investing your emergency fund is stupid, number one, but let’s say that you have this money that’s beyond your emergency fund investing. It totally makes you think it’s not available. I look at the money in my Schwab account, in my brokerage account, and to me it’s not available.

[00:17:18] Joe: Right? Absolutely. That is not a solution to buy my Disney mug. I cannot pay for my Disney mug, your U of M Disney mug. Easy, easy on that one. But I do think og, I think we can use our intuition. We can study our intuition, I think, to make better decisions. But I also think there’s a way to widen this. Like when we think about the cold hard data, like as an example.

[00:17:40] Joe: You’ve run numbers with people before, you’ve used some financial planning modeling tools and come to the the conclusion that, hey, if you wanna retire the way that you told me, you can’t do it. Like the data in this spreadsheet says you can’t do it. And yet you and I have been in meetings with people before where using intuition and using that data then to think creatively.

[00:18:11] Joe: We were able then to mix the data that we had that said a hundred percent no and come up with something that was a yes. 

[00:18:19] OG: But I think that’s still just using data. That’s nothing to do with gut feelings on stuff. I think maybe gut feelings on, you don’t have to live to 120 in your plan. 

[00:18:30] Joe: Okay, lemme give.

[00:18:30] Joe: You got a gut 

[00:18:31] OG: feeling you don’t need to do that. 

[00:18:32] Joe: But no, no, no. Let me give you the direct, I haven’t told this story in a long time, so I feel comfortable telling it again. But I had this client who really wanted to retire along the shore of Lake Michigan. And if you’ve, if you’re familiar with the shore along Lake Michigan, like the house hunters 

[00:18:50] OG: show where they’re like, and we’ve got, uh, Betty and Bob and uh, they’re moving down from, uh, they Chicago and they want to get a place on 30 A and you know, well, like what’s your dream?

[00:18:59] OG: How, like, okay, we want three bedroom, well we want four, but we’ll take three bedrooms, two bath, we need direct ocean access. Okay, cool. What’s your budget? A 2 25. We could stretch it to two 30. And they’re like in hundreds of millions. Is that what you’re talking? You should be good becausecause if you’re in hundreds of thousands.

[00:19:14] OG: I thought you were going the other 

[00:19:15] Doug: way, which is he’s a squirrel taxidermist and she’s a crayon organizer and their budget is $7 million. 

[00:19:24] Joe: That’s 

[00:19:24] Doug: exactly, 

[00:19:24] OG: it’s one of those two things. 

[00:19:26] Joe: So she wanted to do it and clearly the stuff in the spreadsheet said there’s no way in hell she’s gonna be able to do this.

[00:19:31] Joe: Right there, there was just, there was no way in hell she was gonna be able to do that. Right. So what she did then was she goes, wait a minute. I’m somebody who’s an extrovert, number one. So this is where her intuition and her gut comes in. I’m an extrovert. I think I can still get this done. I think I can do this maybe a little creatively and in a way that actually helps me.

[00:19:52] Joe: So she then uses that data that said, no, sets that aside and goes, okay, let’s see if I can use some creativity to come up with something different. She came up with this solution in northern Michigan. There’s beautiful town called Ludington, just outside Ludington. She found this property on a hill that is across the street from the lake, so considerably less expensive property.

[00:20:17] Joe: She has this beautiful view, looking across the street, still has a view of Lake Michigan, and on that land, she opens a bed and breakfast. Now she’s working in her retirement. She’s. Not sitting on her porch by herself, but she’s an extrovert and she’s like, and breakfast, like my favorite time. So she’s making breakfast for these people.

[00:20:38] Joe: She’s making money, which helped her afford the property, and she’s able to do something that all the cold hard data said no. So this, I believe, is what this piece is talking about. So she’s taking data and she’s taking her intuition, looking at the type of person she is and her gut feeling around what she would enjoy doing, and she’s mashing those together for a financial plan that probably fits better than that expensive property on the lake would’ve fit in the any anyway.

[00:21:06] OG: Yeah, I guess I, I’m just using a different definition of, you know, to me that’s just problem solving. That’s, that’s looking at it and saying like, how do I, this is something that I really wanna do. How do I get it done? It’d be no different than somebody saying, well, you can’t do it. And then you go, well, what if I saved more money?

[00:21:20] OG: What if I changed my standard of living today? That’s not intuition. Intuition is more of a, a, like you said earlier, a gut feeling. And I think that when it comes to money, you mentioned this earlier, you said that after 30 years of doing this, my intuition is to invest when everyone else isn’t. It’s not, it’s still scary as hell.

[00:21:41] OG: I mean, I was talking to a friend of mine about something else and, and I was just kind of brought back to COVID and, and more about the market volatility of COVID. Not the other chaos that it was, but I distinctly remember walking, you know, on a walk. You know, you had like, you’d walk down the sidewalk and then somebody walked towards you and you’d like cross the street.

[00:21:58] OG: ’cause you’re like, I don’t know how close I’m supposed to be to the other couple that’s walking down the street, you know? And I distinctly remember walking with my bride and I was like, this will be the third one of these like major chaos bombs in my career. And I was like, I just. Don’t know that I have the stomach for it.

[00:22:20] OG: Like I know what’s coming and I know how chaotic this is gonna be and I know how sucky it’s gonna be. It didn’t make it any better and it certainly didn’t make me wanna, like, now, today, today, when I look back on those five years, five years ago, six years ago now, today, I think what kind of fool was I to not, you know, go mortgage my house to the Hil at 2% and buy s and p long dated calls, you know, levered three to one.

[00:22:48] OG: Like, like I’d be, I’d be a gazillionaire and we wouldn’t have to worry about money no more. You know, like for Gump said, you know, so it’s easy to look backwards and decide what you should have done. Sure. I think the growing up and investing and growing up in your, by growing up, I mean like as you mature is that phrase of being scared is gonna happen.

[00:23:13] OG: Courage is doing the scary thing with wet pants. Like, like it still sucks and you’re just gonna, you’re just gonna do it. And it still is awful. And so the hard part as your investing career goes is looking at the future and going, I don’t know what this is gonna do. I don’t know what the tariff situation’s gonna be or what chaos is happening in other places around the world that we don’t see on a daily basis, and how that’s gonna affect my investing.

[00:23:41] OG: And I know there’s gonna be a 20% decline sometime in the next two or three years because statistically it happens. And I know there’s gonna be a big 30, 35% decline sometime in the next 10 years because statistically it happens. But I’m not gonna change my behavior because of my feeling of how this might affect me.

[00:24:01] OG: I’m gonna still do the thing that I need to do because I’ve got, and maybe this is your whole point with all this, I’ve got the plan and a hundred percent, and I absolutely know. I was thinking about, a friend of mine runs a big, uh, investment advisory firm. We were talking about investing and he is a really smart guy and he said, he said, everybody’s really interested when I, you know, ’cause clients sometimes wanna know how do you invest your money?

[00:24:24] OG: You know, like, do you buy the same stuff you’re telling me to buy basically? And he said, clients are always really interested in when we talk about this because he goes, I buy one mutual fund that’s a global ETF mutual fund. I am a hundred percent okay with getting a 7% after inflation return, 6.9% after inflation return for the rest of my life and the rest of my family’s lives.

[00:24:49] OG: Like the compounding that that provides me is perfect. I don’t need to do anything different. And every time that I’m, I think like I need to pull, oh, well maybe I should get a little Africa. Maybe I should get a little Spain. Maybe I don’t need to. Like, this accomplishes my goal and having the discipline to stay the course when everything else around you, when all of your intuition is going.

[00:25:13] OG: Oh boy. Look at the job market. I don’t know. You might lose that big client and then they’re gonna fire you. Maybe you should have some more money in cash, you know? Oh, we don’t know what’s going on in the market. Maybe we should do this, or maybe we should sell a little bit. It’s an all time high, you know, that’s all the noise.

[00:25:30] OG: Not doing the noise part and sticking to the plan and going, no, I invest, you know, a thousand bucks a month into my brokerage account. That’s just what I do. And I buy this selection of ETFs and I rebalance it on my birthday once a year. That’s my investing plan. And washers repeat for the next 40 fucking years, and you’ll have a bajillion dollars.

[00:25:50] Joe: This is a hundred percent what we’re doing, OG is parsing out the decision making. ’cause I think you’ve been doing it this way for so long that it makes you go well, yeah, it’s a combo. Yeah. But I think, man, the number of meetings that I’ve been in and still even today, some of the letters that we get, well the data says x.

[00:26:08] Joe: My intuition says why, like, people leaning way one way or way, another way. Listen to this recent research. This is back to the piece. Recent research reveals something counterintuitive according to a, a science direct piece into research about entrepreneurs’ decision making. When entrepreneurs with domain expertise integrate AI driven analysis with their intuitive insights, they achieve the most balanced outcomes, excelling simultaneously in novelty.

[00:26:37] Joe: So they come up with something that is more novel. Almost like we talked about with a woman moving across the street in her financial plan depth. It’s a deeper, more satisfying thing and innovation. A controlled study of 124 entrepreneurs found that while AI assistance increased the number of recognized opportunities in the depth of evaluation, it’s simultaneously reduced novelty and contextual sensitivity.

[00:27:01] Joe: But here’s the interesting thing. Sector knowledge and intuitive judgment restored this creative dimension, meaning a lot of us now are going to AI for the answers to our question, and it’s quashing a bunch of stuff. But then when we apply our ability to reason as a human being, we apply the thing that we actually want our own scope and the way that we look at it to it, we flesh that back out and suddenly we become way stronger.

[00:27:26] Joe: So if we’re just data driven or just AI driven, or we’re just gut driven. Gut Driven’s gonna give us this wild ass rollercoaster of results that we don’t know where the hell it’s going. If we are just completely a hundred percent data-driven, AI’s gonna drive us back into things that worked 20 years ago.

[00:27:45] Joe: But taking that and applying our ability to be an expert in an area and then have our, and it’s not just purely a gut decision. The tuna fish sandwich, I said earlier it’s, no, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. 

[00:27:56] OG: I mean, having tuna fish as a sandwich would be definitely a gut decision. Not a great one. 

[00:28:02] Joe: And I think this is good for all of our younger stackers out there who think that, uh, cheating on your homework by having AI do it makes the most sense.

[00:28:09] Joe: The next sentence, separately, research into human AI collaboration decision making, found expertise in the decision making domain is a necessary condition for this marriage to be effective, which means you can have AI do your homework, but that’s not gonna send you anywhere. Having AI just come up with your answer to everything, asking chat, GPT, everything, not gonna bring you anywhere.

[00:28:29] Joe: Still being an expert, marrying that with what AI is giving you is where the secret sauce is when it comes to better decisions. 

[00:28:37] OG: Yeah, I mean, there’s been countless, uh, stories of like wildly incorrect, uh, things, you know, it’s. I really try hard using AI tools to be the devil’s advocate. Like I really want it to be like, no, I don’t think this is gonna work.

[00:28:55] Joe: Which is beautiful because based on this whole topic, og, this is exactly what this piece is diving into. If you have a gut feeling. Go research it. 

[00:29:05] OG: Careful. Because if you put it in Chad, GBT, if you’re like, I really think that I should sell all my possessions, that’s a great idea. Oog put it on black on the roulette wheel, they’ll be like, I, I can understand why you’re feeling this way.

[00:29:17] OG: Yeah. What I would do is equally divide red and black. So you have a 50 50 I you’re good to think about this. You know, it’s like the warm embrace of somebody that never tells you No, you just gotta, you gotta be careful because it’s gonna support your, so half 

[00:29:31] Joe: your possessions online and the other half have a garage sale.

[00:29:34] OG: Actually, I’m gonna put this in. Let’s just see what happens. If I do, I, 

[00:29:37] Doug: I think the prompt needs to be, tell me why I shouldn’t put all of it in this one stock. 

[00:29:42] Joe: And I think that’s important too, Doug, when it comes to AI knowing how to prompt, oh God. Yeah. I was working with our intern yesterday and AI was giving me this fantastic answer and uh, our wonderful intern, Denny was like, wow, look at how detailed it was.

[00:29:55] Joe: I’m like, look at the prompt I gave it though. I. Very specific parameters about what we were actually looking for and what I didn’t want. You know, the garbage that I, that I didn’t want. What, what, what are you asking At og? 

[00:30:08] OG: Okay. To be fair, this was actually pretty good. I said I’m considering selling all my possessions of putting it on black and roulette.

[00:30:13] OG: I saw this work online and I think it would work for me. It says, I’m really glad you said this out loud. Before doing anything, I wanna be very clear and supportive. Putting everything on black is not a strategy. It’s a guaranteed way to risk total ruin. The stories you saw online are survivorship bias in marketing, not reality.

[00:30:31] OG: Oh, that’s f That is good. It scales close to 50 50, but it’s not, it’s really 47.37% for every dollar you lose 5 cents, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s actually talking you down. Yes. And then here’s the little pat on the back. One important thing to hear. You don’t need a miracle bet. You don’t need to prove anything.

[00:30:49] OG: You don’t need to blow up your life to change direction. Whatever this problem, this feels like it could solve, it won’t. You’re, you’re good enough right now, damnit. 

[00:30:57] Doug: You’re good enough. You’re smart enough and gosh darn it, people like you. 

[00:31:01] OG: Tell me what made this idea start to feel really appealing. I wanna help you think through it clearly.

[00:31:06] Joe: Wow. Now it’s becoming your therapist. 

[00:31:08] OG: Yes. Yolo baby. 

[00:31:11] Joe: I will link to this piece because I think there is a place for intuition. Maybe not in your investment scheme, but definitely in your process of decision making and strategic thinking. And that spreadsheet definitely a place for both, but I love where they’re headed here, where you’re designing your process to take into account both pieces ’cause they’re both important.

[00:31:31] Joe: I’ll link this in the show notes at stack of Benjamins dot com. Of course, this week, Kevin Bailey’s going to dive into, in our newsletter, the 2 0 1, all the things that’ll help make you 1% better as, uh, we’re getting ready for this cool conference coming up in Omaha, which is the 1% better conference that I’ll be headlining.

[00:31:49] Joe: How about that? Huh? Neat. Great. Yay. With friends like you. I, I need AI to tell me. Damnit. Joe, you’re great. You’re fantastic, willing to all of it on our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com, and of course, the 2 0 1 is Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Alright, Doug, before we get into the second half of the show where we’re gonna talk about tools that advisors use, speaking of that data, what if I have even better data?

[00:32:18] Joe: Do advisors have that secret key that you need to be able to make better decisions to get 1% better? We’re gonna ask OG that because that’s a cool thing about Stacking regimens is you get to kind of peer across the table at what the advisors in your life are thinking. But before that, we pause so that Doug can steal the show away with the world’s greatest trivia question of all time.

[00:32:45] Joe: The bar’s low, Doug. 

[00:32:47] Doug: Well, I’m gonna raise it right here, Joe. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and on today’s date, back in 1697, just days before Joe was born, Isaac New, easy received Isaac Newton, received Johann Burnley’s problem and was given a six month time limit to solve it. Oh, Isaac and I must be cut from the same cloth because Newton solved the six month problem before going to bed on the same day.

[00:33:14] Doug: FedEx dropped it off at his door. If he’d asked Chad GPT, he’d have been done by cocktail hour, 

[00:33:20] Joe: but who knows if it had been right, 

[00:33:22] Doug: who cares? He’d have thought it was right. Doesn’t, and that’s what matters if been c about it. Yes, on that note, I once solved one side of a Rubik’s cube in about 25 minutes.

[00:33:32] Doug: Would’ve done it faster, but those red stickers are really on there also, I once I once solved a riddle of why a page intentionally left blank, has words on it, answer stupid people. That’s why unlike Newton, I’m not giving you six months to solve today’s trivia question. You’ve got about three minutes stacker.

[00:33:52] Doug: Here it is. On today’s date in 1784, our namesake Benjamin Franklin expressed his unhappiness over the eagle being chosen as America’s symbol. Which bird did he think was appropriate? I’ll be back right after I go figure out what would happened if I’d chosen a New Year’s resolution to create no resolutions.

[00:34:13] Doug: Would that mean 2026 would be even more successful?

[00:34:23] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m resolution keeper and guy who’s always wondering who shaves the barber Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Think about it. We’re celebrating Newton solving a six month puzzle by answering it. In less than a day by asking you a question that you’ll answer in about three minutes. So what’s the answer, stacker?

[00:34:44] Doug: The question was this Benjamin Franklin back in 1784 expressed his disappointment with the eagle being named the symbol of the USA. What bird was he pining for? The answer? Benjamin Franklin was a big fan of the Turkey and you’re a Turkey if you didn’t get that one right. But you know, around Thanksgiving time, turkeys are both delicious and representative of our gratitude for all the goodness in our life.

[00:35:10] Doug: So maybe Turkey wasn’t too overly slighted. And now two divas who are gonna feel slighted if we don’t get back to money talk. It’s Joe and og. 

[00:35:21] Joe: The difference for all the Turkeys listening are like, wait a minute, but our prognosis is terminal like the eagle. Right? The eagle gets to be the symbol tomorrow.

[00:35:30] Joe: I get to express gratitude while I’m the centerpiece of your table for like the next five minutes before everybody dives when I’m deliciously golden brown, right? Turkeys might disagree. And by the way, Doug, I think you nailed that. Why is it that Paige intentionally left blank have words on them? Oh, it’s a conundrum.

[00:35:50] Joe: It’s no longer blank. I mean, what’s, what’s going on there? 

[00:35:53] Doug: Yeah. 

[00:35:54] Joe: We will always, always wonder, Hey, you know, we don’t have to wonder about whether we have a TikTok minute today because we do. The TikTok Minute is the part of the show where we shine a light on a TikTok creator who’s either giving us some brilliance or some air quotes, brilliance.

[00:36:07] Joe: You know, we’ve had, uh, some of both here lately and, uh, wondering, Doug, if you think we’re gonna have some brilliance you mentioned earlier. I gave you a hint. Today’s is about Costco. 

[00:36:20] Doug: Well then it’s brilliant. Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing negative about Costco. I am a giant Costco supporter, fanboy, et cetera.

[00:36:30] Doug: So this is good. This stuff is gonna be amazing. 

[00:36:32] Joe: This is a new friend I made at FinCon. I love seeing some of the new creators out there, uh, that attend the FinCon conference. David Wilson, big time TikTok audience. And, uh, David has this to say about Costco. 

[00:36:47] TikTok: Oh, please tell me how you’re using your Costco membership, because I’m seeing all these videos of people who are saving with their Costco card in ways that I didn’t even know existed, and I’m beginning to think, Hmm, I might be missing out on something.

[00:36:59] TikTok: At this point, I’ve forgotten getting the Costco membership, I didn’t think it was worth it to spend $65 just to buy an annual supply of TP and paper towels, but now I’m questioning that. And yes, I already knew about the $5 chicken, the dollar 50 hotdog, which I used to sneak in and get before they required cards.

[00:37:16] TikTok: The ridiculous return policy, the cheap gas and the car wash. But what I didn’t realize is that with the Costco membership, I could be on a discounted beach trip wearing my discounted prescription sunglasses that I got to driving my discounted rental car, leaving my discounted car back at home, that I have discount insurance.

[00:37:34] TikTok: On all of these benefits that I did not know about. So please let me know. How are you getting the absolute most out of that $65 membership fee? I want the expert tips. And do you think a Costco membership is worth it for someone like me? Or should I just keep mooching off other people’s memberships until I can truly benefit from that bulk buying discount?

[00:37:53] Joe: I, I gotta say, oh, and by the way, thanks. It’s, uh, Dave, learn personal finance with that video. You know what’s funny, Doug, is I have, uh, done that with you. I’ve actually mooched off your Costco. That’s right. I forgot about 

[00:38:05] Doug: that. Yeah. You were hosting a whole bunch of people, uh, when you were here in Michigan and um, I got to go with you.

[00:38:14] Doug: That was fun. 

[00:38:15] Joe: It was fun. Buy a whole bunch of stuff. You know, we don’t have a Costco near us guys, but I think Dave makes a great point, which is, Hey, I don’t need a pallet of toilet paper. I don’t need Yeah. All of these, uh, discount. Which is why, you know, for me, I was like, uh, but I always forget about the discount gas.

[00:38:32] Joe: The discount rental cars, the discounts on cars, the discounts on insurance, like the vacation travel that they 

[00:38:41] Doug: do. It is so easy to make that 65 bucks back. I mean it, you almost wouldn’t even have to walk into the store to get, to get that money back. Like you said, gas alone, a couple of Phillips on gas.

[00:38:52] Doug: ’cause it’s always at least 10 cents a gallon cheaper. So that’s easy to do. I mean, that could go on and on. Only one time that I can think of in the last maybe 8, 6, 8 years have I found a rental car cheaper than through Costco. I’m always making a pretty good savings on, on rental cars through Costco. I haven’t done the full trip packages and those kinds of things, but rental cars, I’ve done my Costco Visa, the the rebate that I’m getting from that Costco Visa.

[00:39:22] Doug: So I get two rebates. One is just on the cash back from the Visa. Okay. But the other is what’s your cash back percentage? Well, it varies. It’s a whole tiered system. Oh, okay. Alright. You know, it goes like from five down to one. Is it? Depending on what you buy. Yeah. It’s on gases. Gotcha. 5% and restaurants and other travel stuff is for, and everything you buy in the store is too.

[00:39:44] Doug: So it’s a whole tiered thing. But everything, and I might’ve gotten this advice from one of you two along, it’s been so long ago, I can’t remember. But literally every, we have one credit card and everything goes, everything I can put on that utilities and every purchase goes on that. We get, we’re probably getting between 13 and $1,600 a year back and we just don’t travel that much like you guys do.

[00:40:07] Doug: So the travel reward thing doesn’t, isn’t as meaningful for us. But that cash money there, money back on daily 

[00:40:13] Joe: living. Sure. 

[00:40:14] Doug: Right. And then on top, that’s just the credit card. And then we’re also an executive member, which is like maybe a hundred and hundred and 40 bucks Don to brag. That’s how important.

[00:40:24] Doug: Excuse I’m, excuse me. Excuse 

[00:40:24] OG: me, sir. Sir. No, it’s cool. I’m an executive member. Pardon me? I don’t think you understand. You’re a special line for we executive members. Uh, the Olympus together with all the commenters would be a great idea. Oh, sir, 

[00:40:35] Joe: this is the DMV. You still have to wait in line. 

[00:40:39] Doug: No, no, no. I don’t think you get it.

[00:40:42] Doug: This is a black card. But yeah, there’s like another four or 500 bucks in rebates that I’m getting just for that. And there’s just two of us in the house right now. But we buy enough stuff there and just everything else we’re doing in our daily lives that having that Costco membership is a, that that membership cost pays back by the end of January, probably by the second week of January.

[00:41:04] Joe: But you’re definitely thinking bigger than groceries. Absolutely. I mean, you’re thinking about all these other things. 

[00:41:09] Doug: Yeah, and I can’t do the hot dogs anymore. I can’t, they don’t sit so well in the tummy as, as they used to. Can’t do the, like the hotdog and the food is not the reason to go to Costco. 

[00:41:19] Joe: My problem with Costco though, is even when I was there with you, Doug, I just, a few times I’ve been in there, I tend to overspend.

[00:41:26] Joe: Wow. Like you see so many great deals that I overspend and that counteract some of the huge discounts that I’m getting for things. 

[00:41:34] Doug: Yeah. 

[00:41:34] Joe: That’s my conundrum. I mean, it’s self-control. 

[00:41:36] Doug: Yeah. There’s no question you end up with impulse purchases. You wouldn’t have other, wow. Those pants are nine point 99.

[00:41:42] Doug: Gotta have those. I’ll use those at some point. So yeah, it, of course it happens. But I 

[00:41:46] OG: think it’s cute that your impulse purchase is a $9 purchase. Mine was a case of wine. Last time I went, I was like, this stuff’s only 60 bucks a bottle. 

[00:41:54] Joe: Hell yeah. I say that when you have people over that don’t care about the wine, but they just don’t want it to suck like that.

[00:42:03] Joe: Kirkland Wine is fantastic for a big get together. 

[00:42:06] OG: Yeah. Out of a box. 

[00:42:06] Joe: We did that when we did the VIP party at our house. Doug, you took me to Costco. Right? That was the first time I bought Kirkland Wine. I think you were the one that told me like, no, try this. And man, it was, it was, it was good. 

[00:42:16] OG: I doubt it.

[00:42:17] OG: Yeah. ’cause Doug’s a big wine connoisseur outta 

[00:42:18] Doug: the three of us. Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m not, I, 

[00:42:20] Joe: yeah, 

[00:42:21] Doug: I could have helped you with, 

[00:42:21] Joe: with 

[00:42:22] Doug: whiskey, 

[00:42:22] Joe: but what do you think is in that mug of Doug’s right now? Right? Secretly, it’s a Chardonnay. Nope. OG Costco in your house. Of course. Yeah. 

[00:42:32] OG: Yeah. That’s where we get all our meat from.

[00:42:33] Joe: Of course I’m an American. 

[00:42:35] OG: I know. 

[00:42:37] Joe: We just don’t have one near us. 

[00:42:38] OG: We’re getting one that’s closer. We had the, the one that we normally go to is uh, 10 minute drive or 15 minute drive. This one’s gonna be like five, could hear angel singing now. Yeah. You get the big log of meat and you can carve it up into like individual stakes or 

[00:42:52] Joe: just think about all the overspending we could do now with Costco that much closer.

[00:42:56] Joe: It’s not 

[00:42:56] OG: overspending. I mean, I still have teenagers, so, right. I mean, it’s not like we don’t go to Costco and throw it out. Sure. It’s just prepaid expenses is basically what we have for tissue, paper and meat. Yeah. 

[00:43:08] Doug: I think that’s a good way of looking at it. And I mean, we don’t get any, almost any produce there, because we’re never gonna make it through that, but almost everything we get from a food standpoint is stuff that can go in the freezer or is gonna keep for a while in the refrigerator, or is a dry good.

[00:43:22] Doug: That’ll keep, so it’s just, I like the way you phrased that. Oh gee. It’s just prepaid expenses. 

[00:43:26] Joe: I’d love to hear how US stackers are using Costco in different ways. Much like Dave asked his audience, 

[00:43:31] OG: and if you have a nice car, the gas at Costco is, you know, the top tier gas. 

[00:43:36] Doug: Unfortunately my truck only takes premium, so it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to get premium there than it 

[00:43:41] Joe: does.

[00:43:42] Joe: Not only is Doug a diva, his truck is a diva as well. Yeah. Let’s move on to our headline guys. 

[00:43:47] headlines: Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamin’s headlines. 

[00:43:54] Joe: This headline comes to us from napa dash net. Uh, Ted Godbout wrote this t Rowe Price launches new social security optimization tool for advisors coming on the heels of a study suggesting retirement savers need more help understanding social security.

[00:44:08] Joe: Baltimore based firm is out with a new tool to help advisors do just that. I’ll link to this and it goes through what this piece of, uh, software actually does and how it helps advisors help people optimize social security. But it got me thinking earlier, OG as I was prepping for today in the first half of today’s show, we were talking about data and about.

[00:44:28] Joe: Having hard, cold data. There’s also this doubt that many of our stackers have that maybe they don’t have the right data, they don’t have enough data. The tools that they use are not good enough. What are some of the tools that you use as an advisor that me, as a not advisor, that I can’t get off the shelf?

[00:44:48] Joe: Like what are some things where you’ve got this competitive advantage because of the fact that, um, well you’ve got these insider tools that people like t Rowe Price are bringing to you that I can’t get on my own. 

[00:45:02] OG: I was just thinking about how you’re talking about social security and then you said, I was thinking about this and I was, my brain.

[00:45:07] OG: I was going, well, yeah, because you’re like about to get it, so, oh my God, this is probably something you would be thinking about, the ageism lawsuit. Should I, should I file tomorrow or wait a year? Like where am I at? I mean, but what is that like, you know, knowing that you’re inside the decade. Getting your full social security benefit.

[00:45:25] OG: Does that, moving on. Moving on. I mean, does it No, seriously. Is it like, 

[00:45:29] Joe: yay, I finally get paid back? Or is it like, oh my God, I’m getting old. It’s a combination. It’s where has the time gone? 

[00:45:35] OG: Yeah. 

[00:45:35] Joe: Where has the time gone? 

[00:45:36] OG: Way more yesterday’s than tomorrow. What have I done with my life? Yeah. Don, Don, what was your question?

[00:45:43] OG: Something about how old are you? 

[00:45:46] Doug: Oh my God. He is SBU sometimes. 

[00:45:50] Joe: Enter this as Exhibit W in the, uh, ageism lawsuit. The Stacky Benjamin’s Ageism partnership lawsuit. That’s, 

[00:45:58] OG: that, that’s coming. Well, you can have my 50%. 50% is zero. Still zero. Joe, 

[00:46:06] Doug: think about how. Our corporate expenses would plummet if we didn’t need HR just for G.

[00:46:11] Doug: Exactly. Right. All of the budget. 

[00:46:14] OG: I think, uh, the answer to your question is I’m not entirely sure that there’s anything that, I mean, there are certain tech tools that we use, but I don’t know that there’s anything that’s so proprietary that another off the shelf solution to it doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean that, that you should, I I thinking about two things.

[00:46:37] OG: Mainly the planning software, which of course there’s new retirement calculator, there’s frigging Excel. I mean, you can do it with an HP calculator on your phone if you know how to do that. I mean, like there’s tools out there that’s consumer facing. I don’t think it’s necessarily the tool. It’s how to think through it and integrated with all the other pieces of information.

[00:47:01] OG: You know, social security is a great example. You’re talking about intuition. The intuition is taken now. The math says take it at 70, but where do you really do it? Where you know, not everybody waits, even though the math says to do 70. Why is that? Because you go, I might not make it to 72. You know, I don’t know.

[00:47:18] OG: Some weird stuff happens and then I didn’t get any of this money back and that totally sucks. And if I’d have taken it 10 years earlier, I’d be paid off, so to speak, from my FICA contributions over my lifetime. Or you live, you take it at 62 and then you live to be 104 and you go, dang it, I wish I’d have waited till 70.

[00:47:36] OG: I’d have so much more money, I’d have taken those sobs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it’s one of those scenarios where I think, you know, it’s great to have the information, but it’s one of my favorite quotes. You know, if information was all that’s required, we’d all be millionaires with six packs, you know, six pack abs.

[00:47:53] OG: ’cause we already have the info, we already know what to do. It’s just the execution and, and integrating all those things. So it’s not like what’s the optimal social security in a vacuum? It’s what’s the optimal social security in conjunction with my tax plan in conjunction with my cash flow and my retirement in conjunction with my spouse and longevity and my other financial goals that are going on.

[00:48:17] OG: You know, if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a goal to fund your grandkids college and you don’t have the money saved, and you’re like, I just feel like I can do this cashflow wise or whatever, well, maybe for you taking Social Security at 64 is a better idea because you have a freaking grandkid that’s going to college and this is the way you’re gonna pay for it.

[00:48:34] OG: Yeah. If you said to somebody else, Hey, I’m taking social security at 64, they’d be like, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You gotta wait till at least full retirement. That’s 67, man, you gotta wait three years and you should wait till 70. It’s like, well, yeah, but all my grandkids will be outta college by then.

[00:48:49] OG: You know what I mean? Like, it’s just piece of the info. So I think it’s really good to have, have these tools and sometimes, you know, uh, like we have a planning software that we use. I think it’s pretty good. But, uh, and we’ll have clients that’ll say, Hey, can I do this? Can I, you know, I like what you’re showing me here.

[00:49:04] OG: Can I get in there and fiddle with it? It’s like, no, you can’t, because it’s taken our team a dozen years to figure out how to make all these pieces work together. And it wouldn’t be fair to you to just let you, not let you, to have you punch all the buttons and not know what the outcome is. I’m not trying to hide it.

[00:49:22] OG: Yeah. I’m happy to. Peel behind the curtain and go, here’s all this stuff. 

[00:49:26] Joe: I love the planning software we had. When you and I were at Amex, I thought that planning software was kick ass. I love the, oh my 

[00:49:32] OG: gosh, NaviPlan. That’s what it was, right? Yeah. 

[00:49:34] Joe: I love the milestones that you set up. It was so intense. I thought that that was fantastic.

[00:49:38] Joe: It was robust. It was hard as hell to use. Like you had to have a, yeah. PhD in that software to use it. But ma’am, when you, yeah, when you wrapped it around your finger, that was very robust. But I can’t say I, I a hundred percent agree with you. That’s not a reason to hire me. The fact that I knew how to use it very well and I could help you do all kinds of what ifs because I was a ninja at, it was a good reason to hire me because of my expertise in using planning tools.

[00:50:03] Joe: But that tool by itself, even though it was great, that was not, you know, our fish and frontier stuff, I thought was also really robust, super good. Having all the crap that, you know, we use portfolio visualizer, just junk compared to what I was using there. But again. I don’t think that’s the reason. The big thing for me, when I was an advisor, og, I would tell people, I’m like, listen, you can manage your money yourself and different advisors do things different way, but you can manage your money yourself and I’ll just do the planning for you.

[00:50:33] Joe: Or you can have me push all the buttons and make sure this crap gets done. Also, the same with your insurances. I’m gonna give you the insurance numbers. You can do it through yourself. I’ll also run it through me. You can go buy it or you have me do it. And I’ll tell you, 90% of the time that my client would look me in the eye and would say, Nope, I got it.

[00:50:51] Joe: I’m taking it. We get together OG three months later for our first meeting after to see where all the dust settled and how it was all going. They hadn’t done crap. They hadn’t done anything. 

[00:51:03] OG: Yeah. 

[00:51:04] Joe: In all those cases they go, no, I really need you to do it. I just need you to do it ’cause nothing’s getting done.

[00:51:09] Joe: ’cause I would calculate out, look at all of the consequences of you not doing anything for the past three months. That was the reason, not the, not the software. So t Rowe Price, having this new software, I think it’s great. I think it’s fantastic, but not a reason why I go, oh, I gotta go find a t Rowe Price affiliated advisor.

[00:51:25] OG: The data’s the data, and it’s already in a thousand places. You know, again, you can do with a calculator and a Excel worksheet on your own. I just think it’s mostly, it’s not even like DIY or not DIY. You know, I’ve got a personal opinion about that like you do. But I think it’s just how do all these things work together to form the life that you wanna have with the things that you wanna do within that?

[00:51:52] OG: And then guess what? It’s gonna change. You know, you’re gonna change some stuff along the way. And some priorities are gonna be anti priorities, and anti priorities are gonna be priorities. And to be fair, you know, 25 years ago there was some proprietary stuff around the software. You know, it just was cost prohibitive to have an individual have a subscription to a financial planning tool like you had at Ameriprise.

[00:52:15] OG: Right? It was too much money. Now, you know, Moore’s Law and Technology, you know, you can do it or you can use chat GPT and say, Hey, here’s all my stuff. Like, what do you think? I still think it’s a little suspect on some of the data, you know, because it uses recent information, so it’ll be like, oh, your asset allocation should be 60% international.

[00:52:32] OG: It’s like a hundred percent yeah. Or a hundred percent large cap growth a year ago, you know, because it’s got the, it’s, you know, it’s not necessarily looking long term, but, and all that’s good. By the way, I’m not upset about be having consumer facing, easy to use tools for other people, because frankly, the more people that are successful in our, in our world and in our country financially, the better it is for everyone, right?

[00:52:57] OG: Like, if everybody max up their 4 0 1 Ks, that would be a good thing for the universe. So I’m all about it. 

[00:53:05] Joe: Yeah. I think the lesson is don’t go hire an advisor because of the tools if stuff’s not getting done. You just needed to get done and figure out how to do that. That’s why I always have coaches when I go to the gym, I go to the gym because.

[00:53:18] Joe: Oh gee, I won’t do it on my own. I just won’t. You are a disgusting fat body private pile. I will not do it if I’m not being pushed, but if there’s somebody waiting for me at the gym, an accountability partner, I will show up because I’m gonna make sure that I do my part in that relationship. So, good stuff.

[00:53:36] Joe: Uh, we’ll also link to that in the show notes at stack your Benjamins dot com. Doug, I think it’s time that we wandered out on the back porch. We’ve got some good news for stackers in southern Minnesota and maybe northern Iowa. 

[00:53:49] Doug: My god, I thought you guys would never stop talking ’cause I can’t wait to talk about, uh, our next group, Mankato, Minnesota.

[00:53:56] Doug: Hey, o you’re on. No, sorry, wrong show, but, uh, Mankato, Minnesota big event. They’re kicking off their bad group. That’s Benjamin’s after dark. Well, it’s a meeting also a bad group. We’re kind of, you know, bad, bad group. See what they, we did there with the acronyms and the, uh, it’s fun. Uh, it’d be crazy. They are meeting, so the Mankato, Minnesota, having a Benjamin’s after dark meeting, Wednesday the 28th.

[00:54:24] Doug: That’s just two short days from now. They’re having that meeting at the Maverick Innovation Gateway. It’s on, uh, stadium Road, on the Minnesota State campus. And Manco man, Manco, Mankato. 

[00:54:38] Joe: Too many m’s. And anyway, I’m so excited to see this group kickoff and I’ll tell you six 30, it’s 6:30 PM Thanks. What I’m excited about this group is the fact that while we have groups now in Twin Cities, about 75 miles north of Mankato and also in Seattle and groups coming online in, uh, Boston, very soon, more on that coming up, and we’re in the discussion phase in Dallas and in Tucson.

[00:55:03] Joe: This group in these planning calls have had a lot of students, guys, it’s great to see these. That is cool. 18 to 22 year olds diving into their personal financial situation and big thanks to Tim and Rob and some of the people that got this started to involve students. So we got students running, running the show here, which, uh, makes Benjamin’s after dark have a whole different meeting that I didn’t have until, besides those years that I was in college.

[00:55:31] Joe: Yeah. So maybe these meetings get crazy. Doug CAGR party 

[00:55:35] Doug: can on nuts. Uh, it is, it is exciting to see that and to see younger students getting into thinking about their personal finances for long term. I just had a plane ride, oh, about a week and a half ago sitting next to a young couple, pretty young, a married young couple who.

[00:55:54] Doug: They were talking about how they didn’t fall into the trap of the Instagram trap, the, whatever you want to call it. A feeling like, well, the saving’s impossible. There’s no way that we’re gonna be able to have a long-term retirement planning and, and buy a house. So screw it. We’re just gonna travel everywhere.

[00:56:12] Doug: I was so glad to hear them say It is possible. You just have to, you just gotta put in some effort and have some self restraint early on. It’s crazy talk to be able to, yeah, and I’m like, God, where, where are the rest of your kind? Go talk to all of your friends and let them know. But Henry and Margaret now, there you go.

[00:56:31] Doug: I mean, they’ve got old people names, so they’re really old souls at heart. But Henry and Margaret have it figured out. They had it figured out at a young age. You just don’t get to go to Bali every winter and you know, and, and get to go to Paris all the time. You just can’t say f it. I might as well not even try 

[00:56:48] Joe: speaking of names by the way.

[00:56:51] Joe: We owe apologies, uh, for Doug’s outburst. Uh, last Wednesday when, oh, really? Oberg was with us. Yes. Uh, when you went after the Ashley’s and the Braxtons in our stacker community. Oh, that’s totally justified. Why are we offering apologies? Doug is just railing against the fact that his name is Doug. That is, that is a hundred percent.

[00:57:12] Joe: A hundred percent. Where’s this coming from? Oh, you know, it, you know it. You can’t go after Ashley and Braxton and not take a look inside, man. Just look inside first and then realize, maybe go to chat GPT and have it be your therapist like it was trying to help Po GI mean, 

[00:57:26] Doug: Doug is such a normal name. They even named an imu Doug.

[00:57:31] Doug: Oh, no, no. It’s not the emu, it’s the other guy points. It’s the, it’s the star of the whole commercial. Is Doug 

[00:57:37] Joe: the star? It was the guy that was gonna get fired. The guy that’s kind of milk toasty in that deal. He is the personality of 

[00:57:44] Doug: those. All right, moving on. What else we got? Uh, well, oh, I know. What else?

[00:57:47] Doug: Uh, it’s happening today, later today and on Wednesday the 28th, we’ve got some walkthroughs of the vault. You’re just walking right through. ’cause there’s like an, a screen door in the back. You just get to walk right through. Is that, is 

[00:57:59] Joe: that the way it works? I think people tell me, they’re like, I’d love to see how this thing works, because I think when you see how it works, you’ll see why people have loved it so much.

[00:58:07] Joe: Why I can’t stop talking about it. But six o’clock Eastern time, 3:00 PM specific, as Doug says, we’ll be on YouTube, go to our YouTube channel and you’ll see us there also on Wednesday at. 4:00 PM Eastern and again at 8:00 PM Eastern. So giving people a lot of opportunities to walk through the vault. Last week we had double digits every time we went live with, uh, groups of people and showing them exactly what they get when they buy this beautiful thing that we’ve made.

[00:58:39] Joe: So Stacking Benjamins dot com slash vault if you wanna take a look. But come join me on YouTube and ask all your questions. People have fantastic questions about exactly how it works and we just went through the buttons, so love to see everybody there. We’ve got a lot more, but we’re gonna have to continue this on Wednesday.

[00:58:56] Joe: Uh, some fantastic reviews. Thank you for everybody who left a review. Also, we’ve had a couple people submit some cool TikTok minutes as well, which I think are gonna be a lot of fun and some of you doing just amazing things. So take part in our basement Facebook group, say hi to us on Spotify. Love to, uh, to chat more about the stuff we talk about here on the show.

[00:59:18] Joe: All right, Doug, that’s gonna put a pin in it as mom says. What are our three big takeaways from today’s show? 

[00:59:26] Doug: Well, Joe first take some advice from our main topic today. Lead with your gut, but verify with hard evidence. Watch out for those biases. Second, Costco, that membership could save you a ton if you aren’t just thinking about pallets of toilet paper and ketchup.

[00:59:42] Doug: But the big lesson, don’t think too much about these paradoxical problems. Like who shaves the barber? It’ll explode your brain like this one. If a guy’s finished doing nothing, has he accomplished anything? Yeah, he has. He absolutely has. This is why, Joe, I think Americans love driving because you’re doing nothing but you’re doing so.

[01:00:03] Doug: Are you doing nothing? Well, you, 

[01:00:05] Joe: you are just kinda sitting there. 

[01:00:07] Doug: You’re just sitting there. But you’re, if somebody asks you to do something, like, Nope, sorry, I gotta drive. Still going 

[01:00:11] Joe: from point 

[01:00:11] Doug: A to point 

[01:00:11] Joe: B. 

[01:00:12] Doug: It’s the best. It’s the best. Anyway. We’re kicking off our weakest shows about getting 1% better because Joe’s gonna be speaking at the 1% Better Conference in Omaha.

[01:00:24] Doug: Omaha on February 21st and 22nd. Come join the fun. We’ll share a link on our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. And we’ve got a week of shows to help you get 1% better. On Wednesday, we’re gonna help you figure out where great ideas really come from. See when two ideas really love each other, oh boy.

[01:00:46] Doug: Join us as we welcome George Newton. We will share how great ideas are more about archeology than genius. This show is the property of SP podcast LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots.

[01:01:13] Doug: Come say hello and oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show. 

[01:01:43] Joe: We gotta hear about the Caribbean. We gotta hear about the Caribbean because I love the. Magic that happens at this trick that you describe every year. So even though we did a, some pretty good shows while you were gone, I gotta say the whole time I was waiting for the photos, I still haven’t seen photos.

[01:02:46] OG: Sorry. What happens in the Cayman stays? In the Caymans? There’s no. No record of it. Uh, last year, you know, I got sick halfway through. Oh, you did? Day two and I was sick for like three days. Oh yeah. With the flu. It was awful. So you were making up for lost time this year? I was trying not to have that happen this year.

[01:03:02] OG: This year. Um, actually the weather wasn’t perfect. It was usually, it’s always been really good. In fact, this is the first time that I actually ever remember it even being cloudy. And it was cloudy for a number of days. It rained twice. One day we’re just complete washout. Um, but it’s like 80, so you can still go outside.

[01:03:17] OG: I mean, hell, you could go swim if you wanted, but it’s just kind of weird. Yeah. Type of day. But, um, it’s a great event that’s put on by Chase and Marriott there. They bring in a bunch of chefs from all over the country, all over the world, honestly. And um, this year we did a, um. We did a demonstration of a cooking demonstration and Andrew Zimmer, which we’ve never seen before, and he’s obviously Oh yeah.

[01:03:38] OG: Great personality and Sure. Um, uh, it really challenges your palate a lot, you know, when you go to these things, so they’re like, they make the thing and you’re like, I didn’t see him cook that. Like, oh, you don’t have to cook scallops. You can just eat them. Like, well, I am, I’m a fan of, I’m a fan of like butter and garlic.

[01:03:56] OG: Can we just. Put mine. In fact, we joked like next year I’m just gonna bring one of those little hand kitchen torches. So when they bring us the raw food, I can just like flame it up in my plate real quick and be like, okay, now it’s, now it’s good. A little jar of melted butter. So he was a great, you know, and it’s really about the personalities.

[01:04:12] OG: The food’s really good too. Obviously, you know, they make these little dishes and hand ’em out and you know, sometimes their signature thing or whatever. But just hearing the stories from the chefs and like how they came up with stuff is really fun. We went to, um. Do a demonstration. A woman made tamales.

[01:04:27] OG: And when I think of tamales, I think about tamales. Like you get a Costco that are like corn wrapped in like a pork or like a pork flavor, you know, spicy thing or chicken or whatever. And these were just tamales, like by themselves. And she’s like, no, you stupid Americans. Like, we just eat these, we don’t have to pack meat in them.

[01:04:45] OG: You know? We’re like, oh, like wait, what? It’s like corn, sugar, butter. Like that’s all this is. Oh, well that’s a super easy thing to do. So it’s, it’s also really cool to see ’em make this stuff like literally inside of a 40 minute demonstration, you’re like, okay, it’s gonna take me longer because I don’t have those knife skills and I can’t, you know, move my hands like that.

[01:05:05] OG: But that seemed doable, you know? So it was kind of fun to see that you can go and just stay at the hotel. You can go and buy some of the events, a la carte, you can get a package deal like we do. One of the days you go, go out on the catamaran and you go play with stingrays, which is super gross. But, um, some people like it.

[01:05:26] Doug: I got, he’s right. I have a story about that. I mean, they’re so, I mean, I don’t, I don’t fish, I don’t like to fish. I don’t like to touch worms or fish for that matter. So having these, I dunno why I thought maybe it’d be like a dog or something. It’d be like all furry, which isn’t my favorite thing either.

[01:05:40] OG: But it was not furry, furry in the ocean. Oh, so you did go. They might be. And you did not like it? Oh. I was in the water. It touched me. I can say I touched it because my hand was in the water and it swam by and it brushed my hand, and then I recoiled and horror and went back on the boat. Speaking of recoiling and horror, one of the stories that gets told way too often in my house is the time we took the kids to SeaWorld in Florida and they have one of these big, huge sea ray pools.

[01:06:09] Doug: You stand next to it, like you walk up to the edge of it, you can buy for a. A hundred dollars or some stupid amount. Yeah. You can buy this little thing of fish to feed the stingrays. Yeah. They’re all swimming in the same direction. So we’re standing, you’re supposed to just hold the, the little fish right at the surface of the water, and then they come up and they take it.

[01:06:25] Doug: Great. So I’m standing there waiting and I’m just looking at the direction that they’re coming from and my hand’s right there near the surface of the water. Some hole, sorry. Some jerk Stingray comes from the other direction that they’re not allowed to swim in and takes my whole forearm into its mouth.

[01:06:45] Doug: Oh, just it felt like, oh yeah, it was, it scared. I screamed like a little girl. I lost all my Cool. I was not ready for it. I didn’t see it coming. It, I, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but my entire hand was inside the stingray and that was terrifying. Yeah, so I get it. Og. Yeah. They told us that. They’re like, don’t you know, here’s the mouth.

[01:07:07] OG: You can touch the nose and put the top, do not get your hand underneath there. ’cause it will go, it will go away. Yep. We So did you have bite marks? Like did you Me, no, it was just super soft. Like there was no, I don’t, it’s, they have any like, yeah, it’s just like a suction. Yeah, it was it. It was super soft Look, had other plans for it after that when you’re not right now.

[01:07:28] Doug: I knew you were thinking that. I knew you were gonna say it. I was like, hold on a second. So I took, so I took one home. So hold on. Just thinking this through. I’m gonna need three to five minutes. So there I was with a stingray on an American Airlines flight. Oh no. I had my favorite pet. We were on this, uh, trip to see Komodo Dragons.

[01:07:48] Joe: When we were in Indonesia and, uh, part of the boat trip was that you do a little bit of snorkeling, but all of a sudden they get excited. They’re like, Ooh, there’s rays. And so everybody jump in. So I jump in, I’m like, okay, uh, there’s rays in the ocean. I didn’t realize these were giant manta rays. So Doug, I did not get my hand caught in it.

[01:08:08] Joe: But I’m sitting there and the sea’s a little bit murky, and then all of a sudden below me these things have a wingspan of seven feet. Oh, right. Oh yeah. And there’s three of them, and they come right under me and I about crap, my pants. I don’t blame you. I just, all of a sudden out of the Merck, there’s this huge Yeah, huge thing.

[01:08:25] Joe: Swimming right underneath me and I was like, get me the hell outta the water right now. Yeah. That’s, they’re like, oh no, they won’t hurt you. I’m like, I don’t care. I Right. I don’t get care. Get me outta the water. I don’t believe you get me outta the water right now. That said, the Komodo dragon that you know, you know will kill you.

[01:08:40] Joe: It has killed people before. Do they have soft, we had a picture taken with it. What’s that? Do they have soft mouths? I, I, I don’t, I don’t know. I’ve seen the, uh, planet Earth on those things. Those things are vicious. Oh yeah. They will, they will rip you in a shred. Don’t they have like a venom that like, just slowly bleeds you to death or something?

[01:09:00] OG: I thought it was just their saliva. Yeah. Can’t your, your, your wound can’t heal. Right? That’s what it is. They, they poison you. It takes a while and it just follows you. Yeah. It’s like whatever. Whenever you die, I’ll eat you. I don’t care. It’s in a hurry. It’s, it’s coming now it’s looking at its watch. I got time.

[01:09:16] Joe: Yeah. The story they told us as we were getting off the ship of was of this person that had died six months earlier and they decided to go camping at Komodo National Forest. Like, why the hell, oh, there’s things that are going to kill me here in the forest. I’m gonna go ahead and camp there. Like, what?

[01:09:32] Joe: What do you, what? Why would you do that? But Doug, it’s a great opportunity. Should go try it.