SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history — more than all 71 other IPOs combined so far this year. Shares jumped nearly 20% on day one. Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. And if you’re a regular investor asking whether you missed out, Joe and OG have a very specific answer: the life-changing money was already gone before the ticker symbol appeared. Here’s how IPOs actually work, who really wins, and why your index fund is probably going to own SpaceX anyway.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- Why the 20% first-day pop was largely an illusion for retail investors — and what actually happened to the price between $135 and the moment you could buy it
- The auction mechanics behind IPO pricing: why institutional investors with early access capture most of the return before the stock hits public markets
- Why OG argues that even putting a million dollars into SpaceX at the IPO price and making 20% isn’t life-changing — and why that math actually makes the risk harder to justify, not easier
- The sobering stat: 71 other IPOs happened this year before SpaceX, raising a combined $36 billion between them
- How SpaceX could still end up in your portfolio without you doing anything — and which indexes will add it faster than others under new fast-entry provisions
- Why S&P 500 investors will have to wait: the three criteria any company must meet before joining, and why SpaceX’s profitability timeline makes one of them complicated
- The six new space-themed ETFs Wall Street created in the past three months — and what that pattern always signals
- OG on why the person who got rich on SpaceX put money in before you knew it existed, and why you wouldn’t have done it either
- Why being wrong on a small speculative position might be the most valuable financial education available — and OG’s Thanksgiving pan story
- OG and Anna on college planning: how to calculate your actual funding gap, why FAFSA still matters even if you won’t qualify for need-based aid, and the high school glide path that protects your savings from market timing risk in the final four years
Why This Matters Now
Every few years a story like SpaceX comes along and makes every investor feel like they missed the trade of a lifetime. The real question isn’t whether you missed SpaceX — it’s whether you have a plan that captures the next one automatically, without you having to call your shot.
From the Basement
Joe and OG dig into the SpaceX IPO mechanics, the FOMO math, and why index fund investors may own it soon anyway without lifting a finger. OG and Anna deliver the penultimate episode of their financial basics series with a full college planning walkthrough including the gap calculator, FAFSA, and the glide path strategy for the four years before tuition is due. Doug arrives with Meryl Streep trivia. The show introduces Scout, a new AI assistant built specifically for the Stacking Benjamins guides that only answers from the guides themselves — and tells you when it doesn’t know. Congratulations go out to Stacker Melissa, who finished her last day of work.
Resources Mentioned
Stacking Benjamins Community — stackingbenjamins.com/basement
Stacking Benjamins Guides — college planning, tax, and workplace benefits guides with new Scout AI assistant; stackingbenjamins.com/guides
Stacking Benjamins Basics Guide — stackingbenjamins.com/basicsguide
Stacking Benjamins Scorecard — stackingbenjamins.com/scorecard
Stacking Benjamins Newsletter (The 201) — stackingbenjamins.com/201
The College Investor — Robert Farrington; collaborator on the college planning guide; thecollegeinvestor.com
Granola AI — meeting notes tool; granola.ai/sb
Doug’s Trivia
- Today is Meryl Streep’s birthday. She has been nominated for an Academy Award an incredible 21 times. Despite all those nominations, how many Oscars has she actually won?
Have a question for the show?
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Other Mentions
- Scout joins our guides! Check out her wisdom and ability to help you find the answers you need at StackingBenjamins.com/guides
- Master the fundamentals with our step-by-step Basics Guide.
- How healthy is your financial life? Find out with the Scorecard.
Join Us Wednesday
Tune in on Wednesday when Dana Anspach from Sensible Money joins us to plan your route to reach your financial independence dreams.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Financial Rules That Sound Smart Until You Actually Test Them (Money “Rules” We Had to Unlearn) SB1857
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] Joe: Gentlemen, it’s Monday, and you know what that means
[00:00:03] Doug: We get to
[00:00:03] Joe: drink. Here’s to podcasting. Oh. We can drink coffee, water. It’s 5:00 AM, Doug. What are you doing?
[00:00:10] Doug: Polar. Polar Seltzer, Joe. Puts a little pep in your step.
[00:00:15] Joe: I actually do have just some water because as, uh, OG just found out, it’s, uh, a nasty word to call somebody a Disney adult, but we maybe own it anyway.
[00:00:25] OG: Didn’t know it was a bad thing.
[00:00:26] Joe: I didn’t know it either. St- still gonna own that thing. I’ll take it. I know. You know what else we’re gonna own? We’re gonna own the fact that we salute our troops at the beginning of each week, so raise your mugs, everybody.
[00:00:37] Doug: Raising. ‘
[00:00:37] Joe: Cause on behalf of the men and women making podcasts in mom’s basement, and the men and women stacking Benjamins across the world, thank you to our troops helping keep us safe another weekend.
[00:00:48] Joe: And I know you men and women are all working triple overtime lately, so here’s to you. Let’s go stack some Benjamins.
[00:00:55] Doug: Thanks, everybody.
[00:01:03] opener: We’re pleased to bring you our feature presentation
[00:01:14] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show
[00:01:29] Doug: Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and two weeks ago, SpaceX went public and rewrote the record books, becoming the largest IPO in history. Joe’s mom’s angry because we didn’t empty your coin jar into SpaceX stock. First, who keeps a coin jar anymore? And second, did you miss out on the world’s greatest investment?
[00:01:48] Doug: How do IPOs work anyway? While we can’t answer the first question without upsetting the boss, we can answer the latter two. Plus, Anna Alam and OG are back with their guide to the basics. Today, they’re talking college planning. Where do you start? They’ll share some ideas. And then speaking of sharing, I’ll also share some celebrity-themed trivia.
[00:02:12] Doug: It’s one big star’s birthday today, and we’ll ask about her illustrious career. And now, two guys who you think of when you think illustrious podcast hosts, it’s Joe and OJJ, JJG.
[00:02:31] Joe: There, Stackers, and happy Monday to you. Oh, it’s always fun hearing Doug’s open, and we got a fun show to match, Doug, because you’re right, man. I mean, college planning and IPOs, SpaceX all in the same show? Somebody pinch me.
[00:02:46] Doug: Yeah, might as well be at Disney.
[00:02:47] OG: If you’d have done the SpaceX IPO, you wouldn’t have to do college planning.
[00:02:53] Joe: There it is. You missed it, and the show’s over. Doug, what should we have learned today? Yeah, great, great show. Obviously, all the headlines the past couple weeks have been on this one little company that, you know, somehow-
[00:03:07] Doug: Came out of nowhere …
[00:03:08] Joe: c- yeah, nobody saw this coming at all. But a lot of people today are going, “Wait, uh, should I have?”
[00:03:16] Joe: I told you guys the story. Mom did. Mom did ask, “Why didn’t you put my money into SpaceX?” She asked me that. I was like, “What are you talking about, Mom? Come on.” So we’re gonna talk about how this whole IPO thing works. We’re gonna talk about what made this IPO different. We’re gonna break it all down for you, so if you’re not sure really what’s been going on, you’re gonna have it by the end of today’s episode.
[00:03:38] Joe: We have a couple sponsors who help us keep on keeping on. We’re gonna hear from them first, and then we’re gonna dive into SpaceX. We’ll start with this. Finally, the ferrets that spin the wheel here have finished the huge upgrade. I’ve been told by the professional teams that we work with at Array and BudgetSimple that what we called the Vault has now been upgraded.
[00:03:58] Joe: Mom couldn’t be more pleased. They call it the Field Kit because when you’re on your journey, you’re gonna need the best tools, and who wants to flip seven different apps on their phone to get it together? We know how important it is to protect your identity, stay away from unused subscriptions, get off the text and email list, control your budget.
[00:04:14] Joe: A great new budgeting app is one of the two big things they added, and also big, uh, net worth tracking as well. So lots of changes, lots of improvements. You may have heard me talk about the Vault before. Well, now with the help of Array and BudgetSimple, it is the Field Kit. Head to stackingbenjamins.com/fieldkit.
[00:04:36] Joe: That’s the shortcut to get to the landing page, and you can check it out. We have a couple more sponsors who help us keep on keeping on. We’re gonna hear from them, and then OG Doug and I back talking SpaceX.
[00:04:57] Joe: Let’s go over some numbers, guys, around the SpaceX IPO. They raised 75 billion with a B. Can we just say gajillion? 75 gajillion dollars.
[00:05:09] Doug: And haven’t we reached a point now where w- with inflation, we don’t have to specify with a B anymore? Isn’t that now the starting point- … for wow? Like million, whatever.
[00:05:20] Joe: Eh, that’s cool.
[00:05:21] Doug: That’s like, in the, in the ’90s, whoa, million? I
[00:05:24] Joe: know.
[00:05:24] Doug: $70 million.
[00:05:26] Joe: Brewster’s Millions, ’cause how many millions did Brewster have back in the ’80s? Like-
[00:05:30] OG: 300 …
[00:05:31] Joe: 300 million. Like that was… You remember, you can’t spend all that money. Now that’s like a starting point, right?
[00:05:38] OG: Well, he only had to spend 30. His task was to spend 30,
[00:05:41] Joe: 30 million.
[00:05:42] Joe: Spend 30 of the… Oh, ’cause he didn’t know. D- or he, no, he couldn’t tell anybody- Good point … that he was getting a lot more. That’s right. Well, that debut more than doubled the previous record, which was held by Saudi Aramco. That raised $25.6 billion back in 2019. That had been the record-holder. So you’ve got other tech and e-commerce debuts.
[00:06:02] Joe: Listen to this. Alibaba back in 2014 raised 25 billion. Of course, you know, if you think about inflation, what was going on in 2014, that 25 billion number is, is, is bigger. Yeah. Of course, you got Facebook and Meta in 2012 at 16 billion. And while those stats are impressive, listen to this one. The $75 billion that SpaceX raised by going public exceeded the combined total of roughly $36 billion, which were the other 71 IPOs that had happened before it this year.
[00:06:37] Joe: 71 IPOs together, 36 billion. One does 70, $75 billion. So, uh, man, just incredible. Of course, the personal wealth impact. Its CEO, Elon Musk, becomes the world’s first trillionaire, and immediately SpaceX is the sixth most valuable company in the United States. And by the way, you know what number seven is?
[00:07:01] OG: Lucky. Hmm. No.
[00:07:03] Joe: Six is SpaceX. Seven is Tesla.
[00:07:06] OG: Ah. Oh. Of course.
[00:07:08] Joe: Yeah, imagine. You know, it, it’s almost like that Brian Regan skit, Doug, the one where somebody’s bragging and they don’t know they’re talking to John Glenn. And John- And the guy’s like, “Yeah, I’ve got my boat, and I’ve traveled to the Maldives or whatever.”
[00:07:22] Joe: And the guy’s like, “Yeah, I walked on the moon.” Sitting next to Elon Musk, “Oh, yeah, I got the sixth and seventh biggest companies in the United States that are mine.” So that’s how big this thing was, if you missed it. Shares jumped nearly 20% on day one. The question I think a lot of stackers might be asking themself is, did I miss it?
[00:07:43] Joe: So Doug, if you wake up and discover SpaceX already up 20%, what’s your move?
[00:07:48] Doug: Well, I mean, probably nothing. I mean, we’ve all seen stocks, regardless of what the dollar figure is per share, we’ve all seen that every day there’s a headline of which stock had a big bump that day, and I don’t think there’s ever been a time where I thought, “Gotta get in on that.”
[00:08:05] Doug: Now, if I’d done some research and thought, “Well, it’s at 50 today c- and ’cause it just went up 20%, but I think it’s worth 75,” maybe it’s a good idea to still get in.
[00:08:18] Joe: Think about Friday nights at The Sizzler that buys you.
[00:08:21] Doug: Right , right. 75 bucks?
[00:08:24] Joe: Think about what you can do with the El Camino on that.
[00:08:27] Doug: Yeah.
[00:08:28] Doug: Yeah. You can fill up half the tank in the El Camino on that.
[00:08:31] Joe: Rotate all the air in the tires.
[00:08:33] Doug: Right. But, uh, yeah, I’m, I mean, I’m probably not doing… In reality, I’m probably not doing anything unless I’d been eyeing it, I’d done a bunch of research, and still felt like, man, it’s, it’s not at its peak yet, and I’ve still got some room there.
[00:08:46] Doug: But otherwise, probably not doing anything.
[00:08:48] Joe: But it’s funny, we talk about research, and I’m glad you brought that up because, oh, gee, you think about research, you think about an IPO, and you also think about this FOMO, 20% in one day. Is this exactly how people lose money?
[00:09:00] OG: Well, I mean, if you would’ve bought it, um, if it was up, you know, whatever, when you got an option to buy it, you know, on the, on the open market, you’re still profitable as of the day we’re recording this.
[00:09:11] OG: So yeah, you did miss out on some. But that could be said, I think what Doug was saying is that could be said for any stock. Just about any stock, you could find one that’s done well today and gone, “Oh, dang it, I should’ve put some money in that. I d- I knew that was gonna go up. I heard about that.” Or alternatively, one that goes down, which you can bet on stocks going down, too, you just say, “I knew that one was gonna go down.
[00:09:33] OG: I should have done this.” I think it’s really rough to see all the stuff that goes on, or that’s gone on, I should say, about SpaceX in particular, if you weren’t part of it and say, “Hey, you know, how come this isn’t me? How did I not get one- be one of these 4,400 people that became instant millionaires, or one of these,” I don’t know what the number was, “400 people that became insta-centimillionaires?
[00:09:59] OG: Or, you know, how come I didn’t put $40 million of my own cash into this and turn it into $30 billion valuation?” And the part that we have to remember with all of these success stories, or at least the period of time that we’re recording this, it looks like to be a success story for this little sliver of a week or whatever it’s been.
[00:10:21] OG: The people who invested in this company that got those returns invested before you knew it was a company.
[00:10:27] Joe: Yeah. Can we go there? Because I think this is the important thing for people to know. The IPO price, when you saw every outlet on Earth say the price went up 20%, if you were a retail investor, that price, which was by the way, $135 is what it was priced at.
[00:10:43] Joe: Mm-hmm. Most people didn’t get that price, OG. The, the 20% for 99.9% of us was an illusion. It wasn’t a price that you could get.
[00:10:53] OG: Well, I mean, the mechanics of it are such that that’s the initial … You know, you think about the old school vision that you have of the stock market, you know, with the guys yelling and back and forth and the hand and arm signals and that sort of thing, and that’s the pricing mechanism, right?
[00:11:09] OG: It’s like if you need a whole bunch of it, you know you’re gonna drive the price down. If you want a whole bunch of it, you’re gonna drive the price up, and so, you know, this is this thing that goes back and forth. Now, take away all the people and turn that into technology that can instantly price it based on the supply and demand, right?
[00:11:25] OG: Very close to instantly, within milliseconds. And so the pricing mechanism of the IPO at, you know, 135 was set by the bankers, was set by the consulting division that figured this all out and said, “We think we’ll get a lot of, we’ll get a lot of people interested in buying this at this price.” And then once it gets put on the public market, once, once you or I can get it without having to have special privileges to get, then it’s just supply and demand.
[00:11:53] OG: It’s n- it’s just like every other stock. And, you know, the first trade, to your point, I don’t even know what it was, but I’m guessing the first minute it was available, it wasn’t available at 135 anymore. It was probably available at 165.
[00:12:07] Joe: So very specifically, why does that happen?
[00:12:10] OG: I just explained it. It’s because of supply and demand.
[00:12:12] OG: It’s because somebody goes, there’s a lot of people lined up at the, queued up at the door, and there’s only so many TVs at Walmart. Yeah. And so the, the people rush in to try to get it, and will pay whatever to get it when it’s public now that you can trade it. But even that isn’t a big win. I mean, look, if you put 100 grand in SpaceX and you made $20,000, good for you.
[00:12:35] OG: Hell, if you put 100,000 in, maybe it’s up 40% since then, you know, by the time you’re listening to this, you made 40 grand. If you put a million dollars in it and you made $400,000 or 200… Like, that’s not zero. None of those are life-changing dollar amounts for most people thinking about financial independence, right?
[00:12:55] OG: If you apply that logic or that, that number to, you know, your safe withdrawal rate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, say it’s 5%, yeah, you might… You, y- if you put a million bucks in SpaceX and you sold it for a million four, you maybe added another $20,000 a year to your lifestyle. While that’s not zero, right? I mean, I think we’d all agree 20 grand’s, you know.
[00:13:18] OG: Like J- like Doug always says, “20 bucks is 20 bucks.” And-
[00:13:22] Doug: Not a lot I won’t do for that.
[00:13:24] OG: That’s well documented. The reality is, is that I don’t think that your lifestyle changes that profoundly if you had an extra 20 grand. I just don’t. I, I, I just don’t think that’s the case. Now, where the big money was made was the person who invested $10 million in their private off- you know, from their private foundation or whatever, like frigging back in 2012.
[00:13:49] OG: That guy now has a billion. You know, I think there’s a news story about the University of Michigan endowment, bought in at, at something like $40 million and now has a position worth 2 billion, you know, sometime in the last, whatever series of raise they, they were at when they put in their money, you know?
[00:14:08] OG: But that’s been held onto it. You know, they’ve had that money locked up in an illiquid investment that, let’s go back in time, in 2012 or 2013 or 2015, Tesla wasn’t doing so great. It’s not like that was, like, an amazing… And now we got this dude who’s barely selling cars talking about putting people on Mars, and rocket ships, and satellites in outer space, and, you know, people are going, “What, what are we doing?”
[00:14:35] Doug: Freaking lasers,
[00:14:36] OG: man. And I’m gonna knock on your door as a financial advisor and go, “Hey, Joe, here’s a great idea. Let’s take 20% of your net worth and invest it in this idea.” What would you have said?
[00:14:46] Joe: I’d say, “No way.”
[00:14:47] OG: Go pound sand, man. Yeah. Like, no one would do that. You have to recognize when you see these big stories, how much, how much either cojones or extra money you had to have had, even if you had the abail- a- a- ability to get in.
[00:15:04] OG: Bitcoin’s another great example. “Oh man, I wish I would’ve put my money in Bitcoin. Oh my God, I have so much money.” Like, right, because you were gonna put your money into a computer program in 2009? That was the thing that you thought would be a good idea? No, you didn’t. No one thought that, which is why the person who did was rewarded exponentially That’s the trade.
[00:15:25] OG: But for every one SpaceX, there’s 1,000 non-SpaceXs. You know, and this story’s gonna repeat itself a couple more times this year with Anthropic and OpenAI also. But it’s very hard. I know. Look, I’m human. I look at it too and go, “Dang, I wish I would’ve had the foresight to get in on SpaceX some point in time with all of my money sometime 10 years ago,” which by the way, all of my money was about 90% less than I have today.
[00:15:54] OG: You know, so it’s like, again, would I have done, would I have mortgaged my house to put 100 grand into SpaceX? Probably not. Um-
[00:16:00] Joe: Well, and you look at, you, you, you talk about how for every SpaceX, there’s so many not-SpaceX. I wanna go back to that stat I shared at the beginning. The $75 billion they raised was more than double the other 71 IPOs that happened this year.
[00:16:16] Joe: So there were literally, OG, 71 other ones that did not do. And, and if you’re sitting there looking for the next D- IPO going, “Well, I think this is gonna be the next SpaceX. This is gonna be the next thing,” odds, odds are pretty against you.
[00:16:29] OG: Well, and, and again, back to the pricing mechanism of it, if you go, “Well, uh, I’m gonna get in on the Anthropic one.
[00:16:36] OG: I’m not gonna let two of these go by.” Okay, fine. Call up your broker. Tell, when Anthropic lists and they do all this stuff that Open- or, uh, that, uh, SpaceX did, you will s- you can go to Schwab, you can go to br- you know, E-Trade. You can go to all these brokerage. You can go to your financial planner and say, “Hey, get me in line.”
[00:16:54] OG: You know what I heard? I heard people got allocations of about 2 to 3% of what they said. So you will say, “Hey, I wanna buy, you know, $100,000 of SpaceX.” Right? “I’m gonna buy, you know, this, it’s $135 a share. I wanna buy 1,000 shares,” 135,000. You’ll get an email the day before and say, “You got 17.” Okay. I mean, cool.
[00:17:19] OG: Are, uh, are we making life-changing money on 17 shares? Are we making life-changing money on th- 1,000 shares? It’s not happening. So the life-changing money already happened. You know what I mean? It happened from the guy who put in $100,000 in Anthropic before you knew it existed. So don’t stress yourself out about this.
[00:17:39] OG: It’s just not a thing.
[00:17:41] Joe: Well, I do wanna circle back to one thing that you said, because you say it’s not life-changing money, and I think my, my standpoint would be it might be life-changing money. There might be people that are listening to us where they’re like, “Dude, this would be life-changing money.” And I think we have to double down on the fact that if it is life-changing money to you to have $20,000 more per year added to your lifestyle, triple the reason why you shouldn’t do it.
[00:18:09] Joe: Just because, oh gee, the risk factor is so high. If it’s life-changing money, then the chance that this is not gonna be SpaceX rears its ugly head even more, and now you took a gamble with money that you could not afford to gamble. And an IPO more than anything is a gamble because until the IPO time, you have very little public information about what the profitability is.
[00:18:31] Joe: We’ll get into that more later, but you have very little information to base this on. All you’ve got’s a bunch of hype
[00:18:37] OG: Well, early on, early, early on, like pre-IPO when they’re raising capital and you’re getting, you know, pre-IPO shares and that sort of thing, you have even less. You have a, you have a vision.
[00:18:48] OG: You have an idea of what you think this might turn into based on a sales pitch by a founder. But even when you get the IPO stuff, yeah, you know, you have a few days to realize it, and I think what you’re saying there is really important. I’m not saying that the people who, you know, there’s all the stories of the cashiers and the construction guy and the, you know, cafeteria person who all of a sudden have a million dollar- you know, became millionaires.
[00:19:11] OG: I’m not saying that’s not life-changing. It is. I’m saying that if you took all of your money and invested it at, at 135 in SpaceX, and then took that 20… If you could get it, and you sold it 20% up, the delta is not life-changing, and I don’t even care if you tell me- It’s not gonna
[00:19:29] Joe: change what you do day by day
[00:19:31] OG: Listen, somebody can argue with me and go, “No, you don’t understand. 20 grand is life-changing for me.” I’m not saying $20,000 is not a lot of money. Do not misread that. I’m saying it is. I’m just saying you’re not gonna do anything different in your life. You’re not gonna do anything different, and the risk, I think what you’re saying that I’m not saying, which I think is really important also, is in order to get that, you had to put all your money up.
[00:19:53] OG: You had to take all your million dollars, assuming that you could do it, and literally be like, “I’m gonna put all of this in this one thing and pray God I make 20 grand a year extra,” versus, you know, just investing it normally and it’ll go up on its own. You don’t have to… Just let it do it. Don’t have to stress out.
[00:20:12] Joe: The big thing to note here is, and this is why I went back and asked. I’m like, “Can you go through that even slower? I want you to replay it.” I’m glad you did. The fact that this is, this is like an auction. There’s so many people on the buy side that the auctioneer, the market, gets to keep going up and up and up and up and up.
[00:20:29] Joe: And so the mostly institutional investors end up celebrating a monster win because they have resources and, uh, connections that get them in pre-IPO. The weirdest part about this though, OG, and I don’t know if this is good news or bad news. Even if you’re somebody going, “You know, I don’t care about SpaceX.
[00:20:51] Joe: I don’t want any part of this thing,” here’s the question, OG: Can SpaceX still end up in my portfolio?
[00:20:59] OG: Well, yes, but you don’t have any choice over that matter. I mean, you kinda do maybe, but-
[00:21:04] Joe: Yeah, this is where it gets pretty wild. So you missed out. You might not have missed out. You might still have it in your portfolio.
[00:21:11] Joe: How does that work, OG?
[00:21:13] OG: I think the other way to look at this is even if you don’t want it, you’re still gonna get some, unless you are very actively trying to avoid it, which, you know, very few people are. And honestly, this is part of the whole purpose of the way that we invest money and the way that we teach you guys how to invest money and try to invest money ourselves is it’s easier just to say let the market work, let the market forces work in your favor, and don’t try to predict which individual position is gonna outperform another individual position.
[00:21:44] OG: Just kinda own one of everything I’m glad that different indexes have different rules, and when I say the word index, I want you to just think about it like a list. So when you say the S&P 500 index, that’s the Standard & Poor’s list of 500 stocks or the Russell 2000, it’s the Russell Investment Company’s list of approximately 2,000 stocks.
[00:22:05] OG: It’s somewhat less than that, but it’s just a company’s list. That’s all it is. And some companies have said, “We’ve got these rules around the list that we have. We’re gonna keep to our rules ’cause they’ve worked for us over the years.” Some companies have said, “Yeah, I mean, rules are meant to be broken, right?”
[00:22:26] OG: You know, like, “YOLO, baby,” and then, “I’m gonna change the rules of my list.” And depending on what list you subscribe to, which index you have your money in, will depend on whether or not, you know, you have some SpaceX in there, you know, in the near future, which is gonna have some additional pricing stuff coming up.
[00:22:41] OG: The whole thing with IPOs is there’s a lot of capital that is tied up in random places, and some, and some of it is very predictable in what’s gonna happen in the short run. So in SpaceX, you know, for example, excluding the supply and demand, you know, for example, that there’s gonna be some indexes that are gonna have to buy it, so there’s gonna be some pricing pressure on or increases basically on the fact that there’s gonna be this known amount of shares that have to be purchased, which is gonna drive the price up.
[00:23:14] OG: There’s the lockup period. If you’re an insider at SpaceX, you, you, you got it on your balance sheet. This is my favorite thing to talk about with Elon Musk. They’re like, “He’s a trillionaire,” you know? It’s like, well, he doesn’t have a trillion dollars in his checking account. He has a– his net worth is, right?
[00:23:29] OG: Probably has very little liquidity relative to that number. But he can’t sell a stock and, and nor can a lot of people. Fidelity, if you participated in the IPO, like if you got shares, Fidelity sent you a letter and said, “If you sell this within X number of days, we’re gonna blacklist you from IPOs for the rest of your life.”
[00:23:46] OG: So there’s this artificial, you know, floor set up with this predictable stuff that’s going on as it relates to, like, this index is gonna have to buy 1% of the, of, uh, you know? And so you can map that out and say, “Well, there’s all this buying pressure. Tells me that the stock is gonna go up.” Which, by the way, if you’re one of those investors, you’re going, “This is a great thing.”
[00:24:09] OG: But I think in six months from now, I think you start evening out that sort of artificial buying and selling, and you get back to, you know, real, I don’t wanna say valuations because it’s already obscene, but real metrics around what the market wants to pay for it. So if you are buying it, if you are, you know, investing in it, if you’re a s- a shareholder, I’d be paying attention to the known knowns right now and see how to optimize for that on your own personal balance sheet.
[00:24:40] Joe: Let’s talk about the rules generally of how this would get into your portfolio. So, and we’ll go over a couple because you mentioned that depending on what the rules are, you’re going to, uh, either see it sooner or later. So the Nasdaq index, uh, ticker symbol QQQ, changed their game. They changed their rules.
[00:24:58] Joe: They changed it for everybody, but it was around SpaceX specifically. SpaceX is gonna be allowed to join within 15 trading days of the IPO. The IPO is June 12th. 15 days is not regular days, OG. I understand that’s trading days.
[00:25:14] OG: I think so, yep.
[00:25:16] Joe: This is called a, quote, “fast entry provision” under Nasdaq’s updated index rules.
[00:25:22] Joe: So you may now, if you own the Nasdaq index, you may have this added to your index. Now, the S&P 500 did not change their rules, so if you have a ticker symbol, there’s quite a few, but IVV is one, uh, SPY is one. There’s several others. But if you own the S&P 500, there has to be a public trading history. So SpaceX or any other company has to have 12 consecutive months of being public before they can get added to your index.
[00:25:54] Joe: The second is they have to be considered what they call financially viable. That means there have to be four consecutive quarters of profitability, and then- Which
[00:26:04] OG: might take about, uh, seven years based on the current numbers.
[00:26:07] Joe: Okay. And then at least 10% of the shares have to be available to the public. So it can’t be 90%, 91% privately held and only 9% available.
[00:26:17] Joe: Those are three of the basic things. It’s gonna be a while for S&P, and, and different indexes also have different rules. So over the next several years, assuming that SpaceX meets the criteria, it will be added. The, the thing to watch out for here again, though, OG, is the hype because you won’t find this shocking, on Wall Street, the people that are always looking out for your best interest and to make sure that you can get in on stuff, in the last three months, there have been six new space-themed exchange traded funds created just to help you help yourself get in on this great deal.
[00:27:04] OG: Yeah, it’s just like, um, you know, years ago when there was all the cannabis stocks were all the rage, and that company added cannabis to their name. It was like a tool and die maker or something. It was just they changed their name from, you know, Doug’s Tool and Die Shop to Doug’s Tool, Die, and Cannabis Shop, and the stock went up like seven hundred percent in one day because everybody was just screening for the word cannabis without having any sort of thought process on, you know, like how to, how that fits in your plan.
[00:27:39] OG: And this, I think, kind of goes back to the o-overarching theme, I think, with investing overall, which is at the end of the day, it is impossible, no one can do it, to predict outperformance in advance. And more specifically, even if you actually do it correctly once or twice or five times, there’s no evidence to suggest that the next time you will be successful based on your previous successes, right?
[00:28:08] OG: So there’s no evidence of the persistence of that outperformance based on your system, your skill set, your knowledge tree, your fastest computer in the history of mankind, like none of that is correlated to, to performance. The thing that we can say that is, is time that you spend invested And so if you strip away all of the decision-making that doesn’t matter, which is, is SpaceX good?
[00:28:34] OG: Is it bad? Is it gonna be profitable, not profitable? Is it gonna be in my index? Is it not gonna be in my index? And just say, “The only thing I can control as an investor is putting money into investments.” That’s the singular focus that you should have your entire life, like the whole thing. Maybe a sliver of that is you say, “Do I wanna add a little bit of flair to it and maybe have some small companies instead of big companies, or some international companies instead of US-based ones?”
[00:29:02] OG: Totally fine. But the minute you start going down the rabbit hole of trying to decipher things that you can’t control the output of or outcome of, you’re spinning your wheels. And then God forbid you’re actually right once or twice, and you will mistake your luck for some sort of magic crystal ball of success that is not there.
[00:29:26] OG: The best thing that can happen is for you to be wrong. I hope there’s people that invest money in SpaceX at 225 a share and it goes down to 150. Like I’ll just like go, “Good. We learned our lesson. Just do it with like 100 bucks and… or 100 shares.” You know? Don’t ne- you don’t need to cripple yourself financially, but, you know, sometimes you gotta touch the hot stove to remember that the frigging stove is hot.
[00:29:48] OG: Last Thanksgiving, for some stupid reason, I thought it would be a great idea to preheat a pan in the oven. I don’t even know what the hell I was doing. And I put it on the stove, put the pumpkin pies on the pan, because I was like, I, I, I didn’t want the pies to slosh over into the oven, you know, so you put them on the pan.
[00:30:02] OG: And I touched the frigging pan that had just been in the oven at 400 some odd degrees. Oh.
[00:30:07] Joe: Oh.
[00:30:07] OG: You, you know what?
[00:30:09] Joe: Oh.
[00:30:09] OG: I don’t do that anymore. It took… You know, I did it when I was like four. I did it when I was 48. Like there’s a, get a bl- Like I had a little brain lapse. I forgot that that ‘s hot. Gu- guess what I’m hypervigilant on right now?
[00:30:21] OG: Anything that’s by the stove. I’m like, “Whoa, hold on. Huh. Huh. Huh. Huh. Oh, better get a hot pad. You never know,” you know? Just didn’t burn myself, I just learned a lesson, you know? So maybe we’ll just learn a lesson.
[00:30:33] Joe: Well, and I think on that point, I love this idea that losing on might be the best, might be the best thing.
[00:30:38] Joe: It’s funny. Hot take. OG, listen, I know as much about investing as the next guy, and I practice the fundamentals, but I’ve, I’ve said before, I have a small portfolio where I mess around with individual stocks. Mm-hmm. I bought into the cannabis hype. I bought one of the top cannabis companies that just a couple years ago I had to write off out of my portfolio because they went bankrupt.
[00:31:00] Joe: Because this company, it was, it was great until it wasn’t. Until all of a sudden the balloon popped and it was, and it was gone. And because I don’t follow it on a daily basis, there’s two things going on. Number one, I don’t follow it on a daily basis. Number two is- Your brain, because you own this thing, is looking for the turnaround story.
[00:31:18] Joe: Well, wait a minute, they’re one of the biggest players in cannabis. Nothing bad’s gonna happen to one of the biggest players. Oh, wait a minute, they’ve got this thing they’re doing, right? They’ve got this thing and, ’cause, you know, you read all the literature, and everybody’s going, “Oh, but wait, they’re coming out with the next innovation where it’s gonna be in more healthcare stuff, so this is gonna blow up.
[00:31:34] Joe: It’s gonna blow…” Well, it blew up, meaning- Yeah, managed to- … it blew right out of my portfo- yeah, it blew out of my portfolio. So a company can do great things for humanity. The number of clients I had that, when I was an advisor, that would tell me, “But Joe, they got a new drug coming. But Joe, they got the next thing.
[00:31:51] Joe: They got the what-…” They can do great stuff for humanity, but if they’re not a well-run, profitable company where there’s money going back to the investors, nobody’s gonna invest in that company. There’s a clear distinction between the drug and the profit. Those are two different things. When you can line up both of those, and again, you gotta be incredibly lucky to call that from the outside, unless you want it to be your full-time career.
[00:32:17] Joe: And still, talking to the people about Stock Market Maestros, go watch our video called, uh, The Investing Playbook. People talk about the ma- the maestros are wrong 55% of the time. The best of the best are wrong 55% of the time. What chance do you have?
[00:32:33] OG: I was thinking about this the other day when I c- when, when we were talking with somebody else about, uh, IPOs and, “Oh, this company’s gonna be around forever.”
[00:32:40] OG: I remember Jeff Bezos did a bit, I don’t know, maybe inside the last five years, where he was like, “I fully expect Amazon to cease being a company by 2040 Like, it will have run its course, and someone will come out with the next thing that’s better than us. Could you imagine that right now? Could you imagine life without Amazon?
[00:33:00] OG: What would we do? I was ordering something for our anniversary, uh, last week. Well, I went into the store to buy it, and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t have it.” I thought, “This is really wild because this is the store that sells it, but okay, cool.” They’re like, “You can order it, and we can get it shipped here.”
[00:33:15] OG: And I’m like, “Well, if I’m gonna order it, man, I’m gonna ship it to my house. I’m not driving all the way back here to get it. Like, that’s dumb.” They’re like, “Well, we can still order it for you.” I’m like, “No, you don’t get to get a sales commission on the thing that I wanna buy from you, but I have to buy on my own and do all on my own.
[00:33:31] OG: Like, that’s not, that’s not how this works.” And I was telling my wife this about how I didn’t have a present for our anniversary. But, um, It’s a good story. And she was like, “Yeah, you pro- I’m sure you ordered it a week ago. I’m sure you thought about this a long time.” Oh, yeah. “Probably you didn’t. Probably ordered it last night on your phone the night before.”
[00:33:49] OG: Um, but, uh, but she’s like, “In today’s day and age with Amazon and DoorDash, you’re just, like, appalled by the thing.” You’re like, “What do you mean I gotta wait?” Like Right.
[00:33:58] Joe: Like, wait,
[00:33:58] OG: what? What? What, you know. And so you think about that, you go, “Well, Amazon will be here forever, right?” I don’t know.
[00:34:05] Joe: Somebody’s gonna figure out how to do it
[00:34:07] OG: better.
[00:34:07] OG: Somebody’ll figure something out, and something else will be, you know, impactful. So that’s not to say SpaceX isn’t gonna be around for the next 50 years and do great things, and like you said, maybe they’ll be the biggest company in the world and be wildly successful and make tons of money for all their investors.
[00:34:22] OG: I hope they do. And if they do, then I’m gonna profit from it by owning a sliver of it in my ETF account, just like I will profit from American Express making money on my credit card swipes and Costco from my giant rib eye purchases. And, um, you know, I’m happy to buy Starlink, you know, and support it in that way.
[00:34:42] OG: But I’m not gonna go out of my way to try to find the stock and, you know
[00:34:46] Joe: I think that’s a great place to end it. 20 years ago, people worried about the fact that they missed Google. People worried about the fact that they missed-
[00:34:52] OG: I’m still worried about missing Google, honestly. Yeah. I’m like, “Dang, maybe I should get into Google.”
[00:34:57] OG: I think this thing’s going places.
[00:35:00] Joe: Today they’re worried about the, missing SpaceX. But the real lesson, I think, Stackers, isn’t whether SpaceX wins or not. It’s really focusing on the controllables, and the controllable is looking at your end goal and how do you reliably reach that goal. And guess what the good news is?
[00:35:16] Joe: If you have index funds, you own Google. And if, uh, SpaceX continues to win, then you’ll own SpaceX. It’s all gonna end up on your team and you don’t have to overthink it. All right. Great discussion. Thank you so much, gentlemen. At this point in the show, we pivot over to Doug, who has, uh… Apparently we have, uh, one of our favorite stars having a birthday.
[00:35:40] Doug: Joe, we sure do. Hey there, Stackers, I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and today is Meryl Streep’s birthday. The actor turns… Well, we never talk about Meryl’s age around here because she’s a big fan of the show, and gentlemen don’t discuss such things. Joe’s mom is celebrating by creating her own new small budget film, The Devil Wears Kohl’s Cash.
[00:36:01] Doug: Oh. You should see You gotta see the outfits she’s found on sale for my part. Apparently you can mix stripes and polka dots. It’s unbelievable. Meryl is famous for many iconic roles, all of which have led to a career where she’s been nominated for an Oscar a whopping 21 times. Despite that, how many times has she won?
[00:36:22] Doug: I’ll give you three guesses, and I’ll be back right after I go see if we can do a sequel called The Devil Wears Tractor Supply. That look should impress all the Texarkana singles
[00:36:44] Doug: Stackers, I’m resident Meryl Streep fan, and guy who Joe’s mom made watch Mamma Mia so many times I’m thinking about starting an ABBA cover band, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. We’re celebrating the queen of actresses in the basement today, Meryl Streep. Streep, who Joe’s mom calls her sister by another mother, just, just, just go with it.
[00:37:05] Doug: This all ends with her making chocolate cake if we do. Well, she’s been nominated for Academy Awards a whopping 21 times, but how many has she actually won? If you said that she won once for Sophie’s Choice, again for Kramer vs. Kramer, and a third time for The Iron Lady, you’d be correct. That’s 18 trips to the ballroom and not being the bell of the ball for Meryl.
[00:37:30] Doug: Sources estimate that her net worth is north of $150 million. So look, she, she’s gonna be just fine. And now it’s time for the segment designed to help you also be just fine with money. Here comes OG and Anna. Hey, look, I’ve also not not won an Oscar 18 times. It’s not that big a deal, Ma.
[00:37:51] OG: All right, Anna, what are we on, week seven?
[00:37:53] OG: Is this week seven already?
[00:37:54] Anna: Week seven. We’re almost done.
[00:37:56] OG: The penultimate episode is Five Dollar Words. So we’re gonna talk about college funding today. And, uh, before we get into it, we’re gonna point out a few things in the guidebook that, uh, maybe we got wrong, and maybe made it a little more complicated Than it needs to be.
[00:38:11] OG: But we’ll circle back to that. So talking about college, college funding, super fun. College is cheap, right?
[00:38:18] Anna: Yeah. I mean, you probably don’t need to worry about it right now. Just, like, figure it out when you get there. It’s gonna be okay. Yeah,
[00:38:24] OG: that’s what we do
[00:38:25] Anna: with our kids. And it will probably be free by the time you send your kids, so.
[00:38:28] Anna: Yeah.
[00:38:29] OG: I mean, that’s a real thing. Obviously, you know, you say that a little tongue in cheek because, you know, we don’t know what the future’s gonna hold. But this is why it’s this l- little bit of a gamble with college funding, right? Because if you believe that, if you say, “Hey, look, I, I think the future of education is changing.
[00:38:45] OG: It’s AI, you know, all this other sort of stuff that we’re reading about, therefore, I don’t need to have this capital set aside,” and you’re right, well, sweet, you win. If you’re wrong, you’re out a whole bunch of money, or your kid’s got some loans, or you have loans right at the time where you’re- Yeah
[00:39:01] OG: trying to have this, like, peak earnings. So probably a good idea to, uh, at least think through the risk factors of that and, uh, do what a lot of people are doing. We’ll talk about this at the end, too, do what a lot of people are doing and maybe kind of have a contingency plan on both sides of the equation.
[00:39:16] OG: Yeah.
[00:39:16] Anna: I don’t think you’re gonna be penalized if we get to a place where college ends up being free, and there’s even ways where parents are protected now if they save, and then their kids get scholarships or things like that. Mm-hmm. And so we’re gonna all be in this together at that point, and there’s gonna be ways that we can get money out of these accounts and- Yeah
[00:39:34] Anna: not be penalized. So there’s no bad part of saving now-
[00:39:38] OG: Yeah …
[00:39:39] Anna: and planning for it to actually cost something.
[00:39:41] OG: Yeah. All right, so let’s work through this. So we’re on our guidebook. If you don’t have the guidebook, stackingbenjamins.com/basicsguide, and you’ll get, um, both of them, season one and season two, actually, and we’re at the end of season two already.
[00:39:53] OG: But you’ll get both of them. You can go back and read through it. Uh, let’s talk about the college gap calculator as the step one here. What are we, what are we trying to work through and ascertain when we get through this?
[00:40:03] Anna: The first part of this is, like, the scariest part of it. Yeah. It’s looking at the number that it’s gonna cost you for all four years in the future value.
[00:40:13] OG: Just a profoundly earth-shattering number.
[00:40:16] Anna: It is so scary, but it’s okay. We’re gonna hold your hand. What you wanna start with, line one, you’re gonna see estimated total for four-year college. So, like, go on your, you know, if you’re looking at, like, an in-state school or maybe where you went to school or your partner went to school, whatever it is, look at that number on their website and just use that in today’s dollars.
[00:40:35] Anna: Yeah,
[00:40:36] OG: total cost of admission, that’s gonna be published somewhere on the financial aid section or something. It’s a pretty healthy number and pretty all-inclusive. It’ll include things like your tra- estimated travel costs and food and that sort of thing.
[00:40:49] Anna: Yeah, so take that number, add a 5% inflation to that number.
[00:40:54] Anna: So instead of using, like, regular inflation numbers, we’re gonna use 5%- Mm-hmm … to figure out what that future value is.
[00:41:00] OG: So really simple how to do that. If you’ve got a scientific calculator, that’s the little caret symbol, so it’s just 1.05 caret symbol raised to exponential, if you’re, if you’re remembering algebra, to the number of years until you need the college.
[00:41:16] OG: So if you have a 10-year time period or if you have a newborn and you have an 18-year time period, just gonna use 1.05 raised to the 18th power. That gives you, you know, a number, and then you multiply that times the total cost for four years, and that gives you your inflation adjusted estimated number. Uh, you should be sitting down when you do this.
[00:41:37] Anna: Yeah. Sit down, have a glass of water. Um-
[00:41:41] OG: I was gonna say wine, but
[00:41:43] Anna: no. Whatever you want. What-
[00:41:44] OG: whatever you’re into.
[00:41:44] Anna: Make sure somebody’s close by to make sure that you’re okay. Then, yeah, years until enrollment, so you’re gonna fill that out. Current 529 balance. And this could also be any, you know, whatever college savings method you’re using, you can substitute that in.
[00:41:58] Anna: So if it’s 529, great, put that there. If it’s a savings account, a brokerage account, whatever, use that. So then we’re gonna take that number of what you currently have, and we’re gonna do that same calculation that OG just took you through. But we’re actually going to calculate it based off of the projected returns that your current value is going to get by the time your kid is enrolling in their freshman year of college.
[00:42:24] Anna: So basically, we’re trying to figure out what the gap is here. If your current 529 value is zero, then that number’s gonna be zero. If it’s $10,000, you just complete that calculation to figure out what that number’s gonna be.
[00:42:34] OG: Yeah, what’s it gonna grow to-
[00:42:36] Anna: Yes …
[00:42:36] OG: over, you know, if you don’t make any other contributions.
[00:42:38] OG: So you’re gonna end up with some calculation here that says, “I think college is gonna cost $200,000 in the future. I presently have X dollars that I think will be worth, you know, $50,000. I gotta come up with 150K.” And, and that becomes kind of the baseline for this gap that we’re trying to solve for. And, you know, all decisions are rooted in facts, so we’re just gonna– it is what it is, right?
[00:43:01] OG: Mm-hmm. We’ll, we’ll solve how to get to it in just a second, but we gotta establish where we’re, where we’re gonna be. So then the second thing that you wanna do is have a real conversation, I think, with decision-makers, whether, you know, it’s your kids, you know, if they’re close enough to have some of these discussions, which, you know, if they’re old enough to maybe making decisions like this, you’re probably w- in trouble from a savings standpoint a little bit.
[00:43:22] OG: But your spouse or your parents or, like, who’s, who’s in this with you from a funding standpoint? And then what’s your belief system around this? Do you think, “Hey, I should be providing all of my kids college because that’s what was provided for me,” or, “I should be paying none of it. None of it was provided for me.
[00:43:38] OG: Uncle Sam took care of my college. You know, I served in the military, and that’s how I got…” You know, there’s, there’s no right or wrong answer here, but I think having a clear understanding of what your goals are and then, you know, letting your kids know what’s happening gives them something to shoot for, too, from a academic standpoint, scholarships, and that sort of deal.
[00:43:57] OG: So step two then is, like, literally just figuring out, here’s how much I wanna cover. I wanna cover 100% of it. I wanna cover three years of it. I wanna cover half of it. I’m gonna cover two years of community college and then two years of university. What’s your vibe? As the, as the cool kids say, right?
[00:44:14] OG: What’s
[00:44:14] Anna: your vibe? Yep.
[00:44:15] OG: Yep. And kind of settle on that. So then we wanna get to where we’re at and what do we gotta do to close this gap, and I think this is the part where we left it a little unclear in the workbook, and then there’s a line item in here that’s not accurate as of 2026. But how are we gonna work through?
[00:44:31] OG: So if we have this need that we figured out in step one, how are we gonna work through and figure out what do we gotta do every single month to fund this?
[00:44:38] Anna: Yeah, so there is a way you can do it on your calculator, which is very complicated, and you need a specific calculator to actually do it.
[00:44:46] OG: Yep, just a future value, present value calculation.
[00:44:48] Anna: Yes. Or we could go onto the many plethora of 529 college savings calculators that are online. So basically, Fidelity is a great one. I think Schwab has one. Just take those decisions that you’ve made. What are you saving for? You’re gonna enter that information in, and it’s going to help you break down what you then need to save on a monthly basis to get there.
[00:45:11] Anna: And the good thing with that is that you can really adjust. Like, you find out that your monthly savings is $1,000 a month and you guys don’t have $1,000 a month. Okay, let’s go back to the decision-making step up here, and are we gonna adjust from there?
[00:45:23] opener: Yeah.
[00:45:23] Anna: The other aspect of that decision-making is the thought of cash flowing a little bit while they’re in school too.
[00:45:30] Anna: Like, that’s another option. If you’re paying for private school right now, we’re gonna have a little bit of money free up when they go to college, and maybe that’s just gonna be shuffled over to your college tuition at that point. Mm-hmm. So that’s something to consider once you get that monthly number.
[00:45:44] Anna: If it’s also a little scary, doesn’t fit into the budget right now, go back to the decision-making part of this workbook and adjust from there.
[00:45:52] OG: Yeah, we’re trying to establish a time when life isn’t stressful. You can sit down and just kind of think through these big decisions that you have to make because u- ultimately, you’re gonna make it at some point in time.
[00:46:04] OG: You know, when your kid gets done with high school and gets accepted to college and the tuition bill comes It’s time to make a decision, right? Mm-hmm. And so hopefully you’ve thought through this, you know, when they’re eight or when they’re 10 or when they’re 12 or when they’re a newborn. And recognize, I think also, this isn’t set in stone.
[00:46:22] OG: Just ’cause you decided when they were four that, hey, I, you know what? I don’t feel like funding any of their college, you know, nothing was paid for by me, and now y- they’re 10 and you’re going, “Hey, you know, life’s a different spot. Maybe I got promotion, I got some extra money. Maybe I should, you know, the rising cost of this is pretty obscene.
[00:46:38] OG: Maybe I wanna, uh, contribute some of it.” That’s okay, too. All right. One thing that we have on here that we’ll– uh, I wanna talk about just for a quick second, 529s are technically gifts. You can gift up to the gifting amount per year.
[00:46:51] OG: We have in the book that it’s 18. We know that in 2026 it’s $19,000 a year. But 529s are unique in the sense that you can do five years of that upfront. So if you are in a position, you did have a big bonus, your stock options, you’re a SpaceX person and you just have a bajillion dollars now, and you’re gonna fund everybody’s college, you can do $19,000 times five per kid, per person in the family.
[00:47:16] OG: So if you’re married, each person can do $19,000 times five times the number of kids. So you can see, you could Really fund all of this all at one time if you had the liquidity, which is quite a bit. And then the other thing that I wanna talk about real, real briefly before we get to the glide path stuff, Anna, that you can walk us through is FAFSA.
[00:47:36] OG: FAFSA is a five-letter word that everyone hates. A lot of people that are listening, they’re saying, “Look, I’m not gonna get any need-based aid. I don’t need to do this.” You still need to do it because it counts for, it opens up loan opportunities. It opens up scholarship opportunities. They’re gonna need it anyway for school.
[00:47:52] OG: Just get it done. Get it done as soon as you can at the beginning of the school year so that you’re eligible and your kids are eligible for all the stuff that you need to do. You do that based on two years ago money, by the way. So I get it. You’re going, “Hey, I make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year.
[00:48:06] OG: I’m not gonna get any need-based aid.” I know. You’re not, but you still have to do it just to open up that opportunity. All right. As we wrap up, I wanna talk about this glide path. What, what are we talking about with a 529 runway glide path?
[00:48:20] Anna: Again, this is for any sort of college savings account that you have designated- Yes
[00:48:24] Anna: for your kid if there’s investments involved. So if you’re already sitting in cash, that’s fine, but as your kid gets closer to needing this money, we wanna start setting it aside. So let’s say that we are fully on track to fund college by the time that they are a freshman in college. We wanna start moving 25% over every year of high school.
[00:48:47] Anna: So freshman year of high school, we’re gonna be moving 25% to fixed income or cash. Once they get to sophomore year, another 25%, so 50% should then be sitting into fixed income or cash. Mm-hmm. Same thing with junior and senior year. So by the time they’re a senior, the whole account is sitting in a very conservative portfolio, and it’s ready to be utilized once they get into school.
[00:49:10] Anna: We just don’t wanna get too close to college and start, like, risking market timing or anything like that. Just get it into a conservative portfolio. I know there’s a lot of kind of like target date funds, but for college savings. Right. Um, they call them, like, is it a glide path fund or something like that?
[00:49:28] OG: Age-based, yeah.
[00:49:29] Anna: Yeah, age-based fund. And they might do this automatically for you, but I would just go in every year and just double-check that they are aligned with that philosophy too. Yeah,
[00:49:36] OG: the problem with the age-based ones is I think they start it, I, personally, I think they start it too early. I think they start that glide slope when the kids are, like, 10 and not 14.
[00:49:45] OG: And look, there’s a risk on both sides of this. The risk on one side is, hey, we go through a bull market, and I could’ve had twice the money if I’d have just let it sit there. But this is a known outcome and a known timeframe. You know, we know that you’re gonna need X dollars in four years from now. If this was your retirement, we’d say, “Hey, you need to have– You’re gonna retire in four years.
[00:50:03] OG: You need to have four year f- money from now.” We talked about that in season one. You know, you need to have some foundation money so that you can pay for your bills, and this is a bill that you know is coming. So you’re taking a little risk off the table. You’re taking a little return potential off the table, but the exchange for that is certainty.
[00:50:20] OG: And I like the idea of just your freshman year of high school is your freshman year of college money. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You just follow it all the way out. Lastly, real quick, there is a new thing with the tax law that came out about, uh, two years ago that if you do have extra 529 money, there is an opportunity to put that in a Roth for your kids.
[00:50:38] OG: But you gotta follow a bunch of rules. The biggest one is money has to be there for 15 years. So if you’ve got a kid, and you’re thinking about doing 529 contributions, it would be a great idea to put money in a 529 as soon as you can, even if it’s just 100 bucks, just to start the 15-year clock. 15 years, uh, is the cutoff for the ability to use this for the future retirement needs.
[00:51:02] OG: Lots of strings to pull to unravel this to make it go right, but, um, oh, I don’t know. Have you ever seen anybody do extra 529 to Roth? I haven’t yet. Not
[00:51:10] Anna: yet. Not
[00:51:11] OG: yet. It’s on paper, it sounds really great, but, um-
[00:51:13] Anna: Yeah … it’s, it’s not really a thing. And I mean, it’s like, I think people will plan for their kids’ college, and then this comes in if they gummed up going to a different college- Yeah
[00:51:21] Anna: or they go to shorter college, something like that. Like, that’s where this can come in, just as a just in case situation.
[00:51:28] OG: Yeah. Gives you an opportunity to use it in the future. Okay. Um, next week coming, we’re gonna wrap all season two up, and, um, maybe reflect a little bit back on season one as well. In the meantime, if you haven’t got the guidebook, stackingbenjamins.com/basicsguide is a great place to get all of them.
[00:51:43] OG: Can follow us on YouTube. And if you haven’t done the scorecard yet, I’ve had a bunch of people do that, uh, hundreds of people, which is really cool, um, to kinda assess where you are with all of these things, stackingbenjamins.com/scorecard, and you can, um, see where you stand. We’re out of here I guess, uh, we’ll flip it back to you or maybe Doug.
[00:52:02] OG: I don’t know who’s talking next. Maybe Doug. I’ll say Doug. Doug, take it from here.
[00:52:06] Anna: Bye.
[00:52:07] Joe: And there you have it, college planning. In the books, nice job,
[00:52:12] OG: OG. Nice job, Anna.
[00:52:13] Joe: That’s true. We should… We- nice job, Anna. Let’s wander out on the back porch. I’ve got a couple things here, uh, Doug, before I turn it over and see what else is happening.
[00:52:24] Joe: But number one is, he mentioned it earlier, I was gonna bring it up now, but happy anniversary to the Bannermans, to OG and Mrs. OG. I, I, I have no idea. I’ve, I’ve known Mrs. OG for a long time. I have no idea, Doug, how she’s stuck with him for that long. Just the guy won the lottery.
[00:52:43] Doug: I’m a little bit worried about her prefrontal cortex ’cause her decision-making is suspect.
[00:52:47] Joe: She is a brilliant woman.
[00:52:49] Doug: I don’t know how she’s that smart, but just has no decision-making ability to stick with Josh.
[00:52:54] Joe: Ye- yes. Congratulations, my friend.
[00:52:57] OG: Okay. Thanks for that, Doug. And, uh- … also, thanks to you, Joe.
[00:53:02] Joe: With friends like you, right. Did
[00:53:05] Doug: I go too far with that one- … maybe?
[00:53:08] Joe: Uh, second, we also have a good friend of ours from Detroit, a Stacker who I know became financially independent last week, finished her last day on the job.
[00:53:20] Joe: She may have been financially independent for a while, but you know how brave it is, OG, to take that step out the door. So congratulations to Stacker Melissa, friend of ours. Back when I was in Detroit, we’d hang out with Melissa and her husband, Mike, and, um, lots of other of the Detroit Stackers. So miss our Detroit community there, but congratulations to Melissa on financial independence.
[00:53:44] Joe: Great work.
[00:53:45] Doug: Good job, Melissa. You know, if she’s like most people who see that retirement horizon, your last day on the job was about two months before you actually checked out.
[00:53:58] Doug: I think there’s some coasting involved there.
[00:54:00] Joe: There might be a little phoning it in, is that what you’re saying?
[00:54:02] Doug: Senioritis, yep.
[00:54:03] Joe: That could happen to a lot of people. Melissa, we would never, ever accuse you of that, of course.
[00:54:08] Doug: Here’s what else I need to talk to you about is this n- new kid on the block that is gonna be taking up real estate in the basement.
[00:54:15] Doug: I’m not… Like, we didn’t talk about this at the meeting. I didn’t know that somebody else was coming in and using up some of the snacks in the break room. Can we-
[00:54:26] OG: You guys
[00:54:26] Doug: get snacks? Like, what can I do to get rid of Scout? We… I’m not comfortable.
[00:54:30] Joe: Number one is I don’t know about getting snacks either, OG, because I think Doug has them gone by the time we show up for work, number one.
[00:54:37] Joe: So the fact that mom lays out snacks, new to you and I. But second, yeah, I should have brought that up at the team meeting earlier that, uh, Scout was coming on board. So who is Scout? Well, every month for our guides, and we have three guides so far, the plan is to have five. We’re busy working on guide number four right now, but our three guides are w- your workplace benefits, a guide to your taxes, both tax prep and, uh, tax planning, and guide to college planning, which we just heard from OG and Anna on, and, uh, we collaborated on that guide with Robert Farrington and the big team over at The College Investor who just focus on college all the time.
[00:55:14] Joe: So three ga- great guides. The cool thing is we update them every month. You pay for it one time, we update them every month. Well, the issue still with the guide is, you know, these guides are comprehensive. They’re pretty big, and while we have this fantastic checklist at the front that people go through, and you just take the checklist, and immediately you find out your strengths and weaknesses, do this, do this, do this.
[00:55:38] Joe: It takes five minutes, and you solved the majority of whatever your issues are in that particular area, and you’re, you’re good to go. And then you dive in more into the topics as they become applicable over the years, and we just keep it updated for you every month. So we’ve done that over the months, but still a lot of the time you don’t- know where to look to have a question answered.
[00:56:02] Joe: You’re digging through the guide, and we heard you loud and clear. So Scout knows the guides up and down, and her job is you ask her a question about anything tax planning. What’s a Roth IRA? How much money can I put in it? Can I write off my car? What do I do if my kid’s in middle school and I’m planning for college?
[00:56:19] Joe: What’s the first things I should think about? Everything that’s in the guide is stuff that Scout knows. And what’s frustrating is we found a lot of people asking AI these very questions, and the issue is, as OG, you, and Doug and I have talked about before, is that AI will so often give you the wrong answer, mostly because of the fact that it’s crawling the entire internet space for the answer.
[00:56:43] Joe: Well, all Scout knows is our guide. If it’s in the guide, Scout knows where it’s at. Scout knows the answer. Scout gives you the answer and tells you if you want to dig in more, here’s exactly where in the guide to look. So you can not only get your question answered right away, but also you can dive in more to that very area, just know exactly where to go.
[00:57:03] Joe: If it’s not in the guide, she will let you know. What’s cool is if it should be in the guide, because we update them every month, it now goes on the list, and guess what you’re gonna see next month? Oh, that question that I really wanted answered that for some reason we missed. We haven’t found one yet, but for some reason we missed it, it goes on that monthly update, and w- we also know which areas to even, you know, dive in.
[00:57:26] Joe: We’re getting ready to put videos in the guides, more flowcharts in the guides. So as we do those, we’ll see what questions people ask Scout. Yeah. So glad she’s here.
[00:57:36] Doug: I found out the hard way that she’s only focused on info in the guides, ’cause I tried to ask her a number of times for the best scotch to pair with Montreal Steak Seasoning, and sh- she just kept telling me to go pound sand, and I didn’t-
[00:57:50] Joe: Yeah, and-
[00:57:51] Doug: Scout’s a wonderful us
[00:57:53] Joe: the fact that she gave you the eye roll was the part that got me. That was good. So if you have the guides, go, go ask her a bunch of questions. We have it capped right now at five questions per 24-hour period just so that we can get an idea, because if bots get ahold of this stuff, then we end up with Scout answering questions that nobody wants the answer to.
[00:58:15] Joe: So we’re gonna watch it and see how it goes, but we do want you to ask her as, as many questions as possible. So go ask all five. Uh, really test her out and see what she does. That’ll help us help you even more. If you don’t have the guides and you wanna check out the guides, how you get those, it’s just stackingbenjamins.com/guides.
[00:58:33] Joe: And a huge upgrade we’ve been working on for a long time. And I wanna thank two people in particular. My daughter Autumn started this journey. She works with AI and works in, uh, comput- what’s called computational linguistics, so she began this process for us, which was really cool. And then Doc G’s son, Cameron Grumet, brought it home.
[00:58:53] Joe: Doug, you’ve spent some time with Cameron, just a smart, smart young man. Very, very smart young man.
[00:58:58] Doug: Smart kid, great kid.
[00:58:59] Joe: Just like Doc G. The acorn didn’t fall far from the tree there. All right, speaking of acorns, on Wednesday, our good friend Dana Anspach joins us to talk about- Holy cow … living off your acorns.
[00:59:10] Doug: Did you work this whole thing just for that segue?
[00:59:13] Joe: I did not. It was funny, ’cause I, ’cause I – … the acorn, I thought, “Oh my God, Dana’s gonna be on and her whole new-” How did you
[00:59:19] Doug: pull that off?
[00:59:20] Joe: I don’t know. Her whole new thing is living off your acorns. It’s what she calls it. Yeah, who knew? Anyway, that’s it for today.
[00:59:28] Joe: Big thanks for hanging out. If you know somebody who is all wrapped up in FOMO around the SpaceX IPO, please send this to them. And if you know somebody that just doesn’t really know how IPOs work, SpaceX is a great, uh, story about how, you know, an IPO kinda takes over the news in personal finance for a couple weeks.
[00:59:47] Joe: So please send it to those people as well. All right, right now we’re gonna send it to Doug, because Doug, you’ve got the three things we should’ve learned on today’s show.
[00:59:55] Doug: So what should we have learned today? First, take some advice from the SpaceX IPO. Big event in history? Absolutely. Something you need to invest in?
[01:00:05] Doug: You probably will in your index funds, but no need to call your shot. Second, take some advice from Ana and OG. Planning for college? Take it one step at a time. And if you can, start early. If not, start right now, because it’ll be here before you know it. But the big lesson. Wanna know how to get Joe’s mom to cook for you?
[01:00:27] Doug: Because she is such a huge Meryl Streep fan, just remind her that Streep played Julia Child in Julia and Julia, and she’ll start cooking in three, two, o- one. Yep, there we go.
[01:00:44] Doug: This show is the property of SP Podcasts LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. And oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
[01:01:10] Doug: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamins show
[01:02:19] Joe: Have you ever thought about, like, comparing years? I didn’t think about this until I saw the video that I’m gonna play. One year versus another, like what the best year was. Can you think of, Doug, like, what a great year was- Well,
[01:02:31] Doug: what, yeah, what criteria?
[01:02:32] Joe: Yeah, what was a great year for either pop culture, uh, maybe the best in pop culture, or a great year just in your life?
[01:02:42] Joe: Like, I think, like, 1993- Well- … was for me, for a bunch of reasons. Newly married, found out then later in the year that Cheryl was pregnant, and, uh, just a great fricking year. ’93 and ’94 were two fantastic years.
[01:02:57] Doug: Yeah, I think I have different criteria, ’cause, uh, we probably… Well, naturally, most people will think of those kinds of years, great moment- momentous occasions in their relationships or things like that.
[01:03:11] Doug: But you can also go with what year did I have my favorite piece of pizza, or great music and concerts that I went to. So, like, what are we talking about here? ‘Cause I’ve got different answers for all of those things.
[01:03:27] Joe: Yeah. No, it, it, it definitely could be. God, now I’m trying to think of years that I went to a bunch of concerts, but that would be almost around the same period.
[01:03:36] Joe: Yeah. Maybe slightly before. OG, did you get a banner year, like, a best year?
[01:03:42] OG: I love the now.
[01:03:43] Joe: Yeah. I do, though. I always think about this year’s gonna be the best year. Like, every year, don’t you? I mean, maybe that’s the life of an optimist, like OG.
[01:03:51] OG: Mm-hmm. Wildly optimistic. Everything in the future’s gonna be amazing.
[01:03:56] Doug: Everybody calls OG an optimist. It just oozes from him all the time.
[01:04:00] Joe: So Bill Simmons, the sports commentator, has a hot take on what year he thinks was the best year of all, uh, I’d say maybe in the last 100 years, of, uh, pop culture
[01:04:15] trailer: I thought 1984 was the greatest year ever for people like us. Yeah. Like, with the sports, the pop culture.
[01:04:20] trailer: So you had Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, you had Purple Rain and The Terminator- Yes … you had Arnold’s entrance. You had Sixteen Candles and Karate Kid laying the template for the ’80s teen movies. You had the peaks of Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Huey Lewis, and you also had, in February, Billy Jean at Motown 25, probably the single greatest television moment of my lifetime.
[01:04:39] trailer: Hulk Hogan wins WWE title. Jordan joins the NBA and Mario Lemieux joins the NHL. We had the first Bird-Magic NBA finals. We have McEnroe, Gretzky, Bird, and Montana in their absolute primes. Mm-hmm. We had the peak of Big East basketball. We have a Thursday NBC with Cosby Show, Cheers, and Family Ties. We have the start of Miami Vice.
[01:04:58] trailer: We have Letterman breaking through, first slam dunk contest, Madonna’s arrival, Flutie wins the Heisman, Tom Hanks makes the leap, Howard Stern, and the ’84 Olympics with no Russians. I could keep going and there’s, like, 40 other things I could put in there, but it just felt like, I can’t explain it, but everything felt really authentic back then.
[01:05:15] trailer: Like, Ghostbusters is a summer movie that it just came out. It wasn’t like, “Summer movie season has begun- Sure … with Ghostbusters.” Things just kinda happened, and it was cool to be there for that.
[01:05:25] Doug: All that in one year. One year. You know, it’s funny, I wouldn’t have picked ’84. If, if, if you had narrowed the question down to me earlier, Joe, and said, “What is the greatest pop culture year?”
[01:05:37] Doug: I might, I was leaning towards ’86. Before hearing this video, I would have, I would have gone on ’86, but da, what he just listed off was a lot of pretty amazing stuff, so that, he makes a pretty good, pretty compelling case.
[01:05:51] Joe: I hear some of those years in the early ’90s with, you know, the height of Nirvana and, uh, you know, the Seattle music scene that you might be able to go into.
[01:05:59] Joe: I didn’t, I, I’m th- trying to think back what was really exciting in sports back then and who was coming out. Maybe early Derek Jeter.
[01:06:06] Doug: Musically, I think that was not as broad. That scene coming out of- True. Very narrow … the Nor- Pacific Northwest I don’t think- Yeah … was as broadly popular. Not
[01:06:15] Joe: Springsteen, Prince, Huey Lewis, and Mi- Michael
[01:06:19] Doug: Jackson
[01:06:20] Joe: Michael Jackson.
[01:06:21] Doug: Madonna.
[01:06:22] Joe: Yeah.
[01:06:22] Doug: I mean, didn’t even list Madonna. Yeah.
[01:06:25] Joe: But a Cosby Show. Obviously, Cosby didn’t, th- th- that, that didn’t age well, but for the rest of the people that made that show, just what a powerhouse.
[01:06:34] Doug: There was still a huge night of television, like, from, from probably that time, early ’80s through early ’90s, there was a Thursday night sitcom lineup that- Oh, you’re right
[01:06:45] Doug: you made time for.
[01:06:46] Joe: No, all the way, all the way through the ’90s, ’cause that rolled into Seinfeld and Friends.
[01:06:49] Doug: Right. You wouldn’t… Like, if somebody said, “Let’s go to the bar,” you’d be like, “No, this is a night I get to sit home for free and get free good entertainment all night long.”
[01:06:59] Joe: A bunch of my friends were in fraternities, and the fraternities would have sororities over specifically for Thursday night viewing of the TV scene.
[01:07:09] Joe: It’s crazy. Crazy times.
[01:07:11] Doug: NBC and chill.
[01:07:14] Joe: That’s, that’s what they said
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