Many of us struggle with goals. Maybe it’s the words we use around them, like “legacy” and “purpose” that freak us out. For whatever reason we look into the future…
…and we freeze.
Jon Acuff was one of those people. After struggling through college with “purpose” and spending lots of time wondering “what am I supposed to do next?” he found a solution. The solution worked. Today he dives into how to create goals in a manner that’s not only easier, but also more fun and rewarding. Yes, you read that correctly – the process itself is rewarding and fun. We’ll share exactly how it works on today’s episode as he mentors us toward successful Stacking.
Before that we share a headline that’s also instructive. A popular money manager (Jeffrey Gundlach) took out his crystal ball and look at 2024. We’ll share his predictions (our own will come on Friday’s episode) and then we’ll of course offer you our guidance about whether you should follow them.
But that’s not all. Doug shares some incredible trivia AND we answer a benefits-related question from a Stacker. …all that and more!
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/start-2024-right-with-goals-jon-acuff-1459
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Jeffrey Gundlach: 10 Market, Economic Predictions for 2024 (Think Advisor)
Jon Acuff
Big thanks to Jon Acuff for joining us today. To learn more about Jon, visit Jon Acuff • NYT Bestselling Author & Keynote Speaker. Grab yourself a copy of the book All It Takes Is a Goal: The 3-Step Plan to Ditch Regret and Tap Into Your Massive Potential.
Doug’s Trivia
- How many pizzas did Lazlo Hanyecz buy for 10,000 bitcoins on January 3, 2009?
Stacking Benjamins Lifeline
- Erin from Seattle wants to know what to do if you accidentally enrolled in both your company’s HSA and FSA for the same year (asking for a friend).
Have a question for the show?
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Other Mentions
- How to Create an Investment Policy Statement
- Our Top 5 Moves to Make in a Down Market (Show Notes from May 18, 2022)
- Join Jon’s Guaranteed Goals Community
Join Us Friday!
Tune in on Friday when our roundtable regulars – Len Penzo, Paula Pant, and OG – review the predictions made by the Magic 8-ball last year, and get its 2024 predictions. Will Len’s 8-ball, Mr. Predicto’s, forecasts prove to have been spot on? Listen on Friday to find out!
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Lesson: Learn to Focus in 2024 (plus, how BNPL companies are killing you) (SB1458).
Episode transcript
My plan
is sound mathematically sound. It cannot fail. It’s perfect. Three months from now, I will be worth $50,000. Independent for Life.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. On today’s show, we are diving into goal setting. Everyone knows the stats New Year’s resolutions don’t work. So we’ve brought in the guy who’s already proven to millions that he can help you make it work. It’s John aov In our headlines, one big money manager is out with his predictions for 2024.
Do we agree? You’ll hear in a moment. Plus we’ll throw out the lifeline to a lucky stacker and then I’ll share some. Some might call it delectable, but I personally prefer delightful trivia. And now two guys who can help you stop worrying and start moving on your 2024 goals. It’s Joe and Oh,
that’s right
stackers. Hey, you made it. You found us. Sit back and relax because we’re about to have an hour as, uh, Dougie just said, a goal setting. Fun. I am Joe, Saul Sea. Hi, ever Joe Money on Twitter and across the card table from me, the guy bringing it three days a week in the brand new year. How are you, og?
Uh,
fantastic. I keep on swallowing my tongue though, so I’ve got a little something down there.
Airball or something. What,
how does that happen? You and mama cast. How, how, how does that, that, I have no idea. How does a grown man swallow his tongue at like, uh, 10 o’clock in the morning? I don’t know.
It’s all raspy.
So we’ll see how the, see how the rest of the Wednesday
goes.
Are you finding yourself more streamlined in the last few hours? You cutting through the wind a little bit better than you used to? You got a
very sexy haircut. New
year, new me.
Yes
indeed. It’s, it’s fantastic. Tell us how new and how new you what, what should we expect from OG in the new year?
Oh,
little lighter, but uh, wow. Same. Wait, are you, are you guys even paying attention to anything I’m talking about? This is about me guys. This is about New Year, new me. Alright, I’ll start over.
Yes, please do. Dude, that was fascinating. I just Doug. Weren’t you fascinated? I’m still speechless. It’s incredible.
We’ve got the, John Acuff started his career with the Ramsey organization, has written tons of bestselling books. He’s coming down to Mom’s basement to teach you a better way to talk about goals. But before this, we have a headline, so. Let’s get moving.
Hello darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.
Our headline today comes to us from think advisor.com. Jeffrey Atch, the big time money manager out with his predictions OG for 2024. Thought we’d walk through them, see what, uh, the Jeffrey is thinking about the market. He always has some interesting takes. His, uh, number one is that money market asset trends are bullish for high quality bonds.
He says, because of high yields assets have flooded into money market funds this year, and many think that that situation, it makes things bullish for risk assets like stocks. ’cause all that money sitting on the sideline can come into the market in fact. Uh, while we were talking between recordings, oh gee, you were talking about the amount of money sitting on the sideline in cash.
Well, the double line, CEO sees it differently. He says, I think the spike in money market assets is bullish for bonds and for treasuries and other high quality bonds because it’s much more likely to go from a money market into, say, a five year type maturity treasury bond fund than it would be to go into some massively high pe crazy volatility type of thing, like a stock.
What do you think about that? That this might be saying more about this depressed bond market we had for a long time than it says about
stocks. Doesn’t he sell, uh, bond funds? Isn’t that his, uh, isn’t that weird? Uh, angle of
attack? Yeah. As
it were. Rule number one, stackers always know how the person gets paid.
So it’s weird that number one on his list is, no, this is, bonds are great. Not those crazy high pess in the stocks. I. The stocks and the stocks. Gotta put an S on it called the, like the Kmarts. Yeah, the Fords.
Yeah. Going to, going to Walmarts. So yeah, I don’t think that that’s true at all. But what do I know?
I’m not a billionaire that manages billions of dollars for, well, a bond fund who really wants bond funds to go
up. But that’s interesting og, because I think he is right. I think there is a higher correlation to money and treasuries and the depressed bond market and it makes sense. My take on this though is who caress like, even if it says that things might be better for bonds, bonds are horrible for your long-term goals.
We have a YouTube video out that’s a clip of you saying stuff about how crappy it is to be in treasuries if you have a long-term goal and a bunch of, we’ll call them, uh, Uber nerds are commenting about the fact that we don’t specifically say that the yield, like whether it’s, you say zero and it’s like 0.5, right?
Point five isn’t gonna get you to your long-term goal zero isn’t gonna get you to your long-term goal. And it’s funny how some of these nerds can get so lost in the weeds of the little minutiae about, hey, we’re talking about how much bonds suck for long-term goals, that they forget about the fact that bonds suck for long-term goals.
Well, I mean like, does
it matter? I actually think he’s right though. I think he’s right. You think that money’s gonna go from money markets into fixed income? No chance. I do. No way. I do. Nope. That’s not what happens. Generally speaking, people are in cash, not because they have magically had this opportunity to save boatloads of cash, but because they made really terrible investment decisions from a market timing standpoint and take money from stocks and put it into, uh, money market.
Now I’m excluding. When I say money market, I’m not counting emergency fund, you know, high yield savings accounts where you’re actually supposed to have that. I’m talking about en mass. The average investor, which may be not the people listening to this are so if you’re listening and going, well, that’s not me, I didn’t do that.
Well, good. Yeah, you’re, you’re one of the smart ones. But the statistics tell us that people do this a lot, they move a bunch of money into cash and then they move a bunch of money back into fixed income. You know, at the end of December, uh, the market had a, well, I mean, basically from November through December, the market had a really great run to kind of finish out 2023.
I read an article right before the holidays, right before Christmas that something like $20 billion was moved into the s and p 500, you know, after it had gone up 17% in six weeks or something like that. That’s behavior of really bad market timers and, and people who got their faces kicked in in 2022, took all their money out down 20%.
Then went, yep, the economy’s gonna crash, the market’s gonna take it crap, and waited for it to happen. And it didn’t happen. In fact, if it happened, it happened in 2022. And so they took their money out at the wrong time and then went, oh crap. Look at all these stocks that are going up. Look at all these indexes that are going up.
I better get back in. And what happened? I sold it at a low price and bought it back at a high price, which is why just doing the thing every single month. Always beats that.
Always, always, always. But I think your point is spot on, but it’s also why bonds are gonna win here, because I think people do the wrong thing.
I think with the election year coming up, the whole reason we made the upcoming election year episode back in November and all of our experts predicted people are gonna do dumb crap in 2024 because the election year, they’re gonna worry about the short term stuff, way too much. The flight to quality. I think OG is, you know, they call it on CN, bbc, it’s going to continue, but high yield bonds aren’t yielding as high anymore.
High yield money markets are starting to fall with the rate. If I wanna keep the quote flight to quality, and I’ve got bond rates now rebounding, I got bonds rebounding, it’s an easy move. It’s an easy win for somebody who wants to stay in quality. It is a dumb place for a long-term investor to be, but I think investors are gonna continue to be dumb, which is why I think gondola is right in this case.
Okay. I guess we’ll see. We, I think we will. Number two, the federal deficit will reach crisis levels very soon. He says The growing federal deficit now already high, over 6% of gross domestic product, quote, is something that’s coming barreling right at us. And I see newspaper articles all the time now, people talking about how this, what used to be something that we could worry about 50 years from now is now more like 50 months from now.
Atch said the federal deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product rose by 9.4% on average. He noted if that were to occur again, based on current GDP, the federal deficit could reach 5 trillion by 2028 or 20% of GDP. He caution. In the three years following all recessions dating to 1969, the federal deficit is a percentage of GDP climbed an average of 5.2 per year.
So he thinks that coming out of a recessionary period, we’re gonna see the deficit go up a ton the next few years. You on board with that prediction?
Well, I mean, were we in a recession? I, I didn’t, nobody told me. So, I mean, the first half of that is a little bit of an issue, but the churchy department is gonna continue to print more money and we’re gonna continue to spend more than we have, which is an issue.
Yeah. But I think the bigger thing that most people don’t really put together is that for every dollar that we spend, we produce greater sums of economic output. So it’s not a great thing. We would all like to have, you know, a bunch of balance budgets and you know, and no debt and all that sort of stuff.
But as a company, you know, if you look at the country as a company, apple has all the money in the universe. They’ve got debt. Berkshire Hathaway has all the money in the universe, they’ve got debt. Dave Ramsey would have a big issue with that because he’s got a big thing about not having any debt at all.
But smart CFOs will borrow money when they have an opportunity to and invest it into things that will produce greater output. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether or not that investment into the. The broader, you know, US economy will actually produce greater output. It has, you know, over the last a hundred years.
Whether or not it continues to do that is another matter I suppose. But, um, it’s not great, but I’m not worried about it. No, but I’m not a bond fund manager. So, but
that’s
also, again, I think you make a great point there, which is that I’m worried about it. I certainly am worried about it. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong, I don’t know, but let’s say that he’s right.
What can I do about that? What can I personally do about that today besides vote? Right? I can worry about the national debt. I mean this is a number two thing on his list. Helps take us away from what’s my job? ’cause I don’t know about you, but is it still like this og when I was a planner and you know, it’s been a long time since I was a planner.
People come into my office and this is what they’re worried about and they wanna spend the entire hour worried about the national debt. I’m like, w we gotta talk about you saving for retirement. Like we gotta talk about the fact that you don’t have any life insurance. Like, what are we doing here? Worry about the national debt when there’s so many things that you can control and this isn’t one of them.
That’s what, so this does bother me, but I just like, what can I do? Is there anything I can do?
I don’t think so. Right. You’re congressman. Yeah. Write your congresswoman,
right? Yeah. Vote or run for office. Yeah. Number three on his list. A recession could happen in the second quarter. Economic indicators are getting much more recessionary looking.
Gun LA said, per predicting, a recession could come in the 2024, second quarter. The yield curve for two and 10 year treasury bonds usually becomes inverted one or two years before recession starts. Then de inverts typically at a recession’s front edge. He noted suggesting the market’s near that point now and then he goes into exactly, uh, exactly why he thinks a recession is, is underway.
This point specifically to bond fund manager, right? Yeah. You don’t, you wanna do OG. You know how the stock market’s hot right now and nobody’s paying attention to bonds. We’re gonna have a recession the second quarter. That’s gonna mean that you probably want more money in safe places.
Well, and of course, putting money in fixed income is the opposite of a safe place as evidenced by 2022 when the market was down 20% and bonds were also down 20%.
So you didn’t get any of the protection air quotes that you were supposed to get, and you certainly didn’t get any of the rebound that came with staying the course. If you stayed in your stock investments from 20 to 22 to 2023, you’re even money. You’re pretty much even money. It’s like, it’s like the last two years never happened.
But that’s not true with your fixed income, uh, side of the portfolio. Let me put it this way, I think he’s right that there’s a recession coming. I don’t know that he has the correct timing because the reality is, is that over the next 50 years, there’s gonna be a recession every five or seven or 10 years.
There’s gonna be a 20% bear market, there’s gonna be a 10% correction. All these words that we use, there’s, those happen as frequently as storm systems. I mean, it’s just, it’s so in basilic, is that a word? Doug? Could you check my in basilic You, I see a nod that’s
approved that the council will
approve that.
Okay. All thank you. Uh, so lemme go back to it then. I think it’s so, em, basilic, I, I wouldn’t be able to spell it to devise an investment strategy on panic and fear. I just, I just don’t, this stuff is gonna happen all the time from now until the end of time, as it has since the beginning of time. So why would you, why would you worry about when the next 20% market decline’s gonna happen?
And just go, I, I, I don’t, I know it’s gonna happen. I just, it doesn’t affect you from an investment perspective because you can’t time it. Everybody and their brother said, oh, at the end of December of 2022 and market’s down 20%. There it is. That’s the recession. That’s the front edge of it. Here we go.
Here we, here we go. Oh, March 23rd. 2020. Everybody said, ah, down 30. Just wait. This is the beginning of all the nonsense that’s going on. The smartest people in the universe work at the biggest companies in the world, and when something doesn’t go their way, they have a, they’re self-motivated because all of their pay is tied to the stock value, right?
When you’re the CEO of Disney or CBS or Coca-Cola or whatever you get, you know, I mean, they make good money, right? They, they make, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, million bucks a year salary, they’re making good money, but the big money is in the stock options. You don’t see, like Tim Cook makes a million dollar salary, $280 million of a bonus from
Apple side.
He’s bam, directly motivated to make sure that that company does well. And as a byproduct of that, you have all of these CEOs, all of these really smart people whose. Singular focus is making that stock go up because it’s, it benefits them directly. So just assume that when, you know, we hear this when it comes to, we’re talking about the election, so somebody’s gonna win.
That’s a fact. We have no idea who, but someone will win, and that person, roughly half of the population will go, is an idiot, and the other half will go, thank God. Roughly, give or take, it’ll be like 55, 45, or 52, 48, but it’s roughly gonna be about half and half, right? Yeah. Ish. Ish. Yeah. And there’s gonna be some policies or something that you’re gonna disagree with, whether it’s the person you voted for or didn’t, but I’ll just give an example.
When changes happen in the energy market. Do. The CEOs of Exxon and BP and those guys, they just go, well, I guess we just don’t have oil anymore. Huh? Fold up shop. Everybody. Just close it up. Sell all the tankers, get rid of all the oil. No, they go, Hey, we gotta pivot to natural gas. We have to invest in this wind energy.
We have to do these other things to make money because my freaking pay depends on it and I’m not going down. I got stuff to pay for. You know, I got a big house in the Hamptons. I wanna build another 10,000 square feet on, so I need this freaking stock to go up. So they pivot. They figure out new ways. I dunno.
Doug’s trivia on Monday. You can’t do, uh, advertising for cigarettes anymore. How long have the cigarette companies been making money without advertising on tv? They went no advertising on tv. Well, I guess guys, shut it down. No more smokes for anybody.
No. Oh, please don’t say that. It’s gonna be the end of us.
They’re
like, all right, fine. Let’s get celebrity endorsers. Let’s figure out a way to make it cool. K-O-O-L-I. Like, here’s the thing. All this stuff is gonna happen. All these predictions, all of these smart people are gonna come out and say, this is what’s gonna happen in 2024. This is what’s gonna happen.
Da da. Who cares? It doesn’t affect your plan. What’s gonna happen in the next 12 months or 18 months or five years really isn’t gonna affect your
retirement?
He’s, he’s like, did Joe, did you pull the string in in OGs back and then just let the talking happen? He’s like one of those dolls where you just like Zoom.
That was
fabulous. It was absolutely. Wow. That’s the best radio we’ve had so far in 2024. By
far. Can it get better than that? I submit that it cannot.
Uh,
I don’t What happened? I blacked out for a
second. Oh, it was great.
He was at another level of consciousness. Some
good radio Maslow.
I was at like number 10 on Maslow’s list of self-actualization.
We will dive into the rest of Mr. Gal’s, uh, predictions. I do think, uh, I like these og you say, who caress it doesn’t affect your plan. I like looking at these, each of these and goes, if he’s right, how does that affect my plan? If it’s wrong, how does it affect my plan? So no matter what happens, it’s in my investment policy statement, right?
I’ve got, okay, okay. Is this covered my investment policy statement? No matter what happens here, am I covered? Then I know I have a good investment policy statement versus, but you’re right. I don’t wanna throw a dart and bet all my money on, uh, we’re going into recession in the second quarter. I pull that money out in October, or excuse me, March 31st.
So, good stuff. Uh, we’ve, I have a, a question for
you about investment policies. What’s up? And I don’t remember the last time we gave a, we talk about it all the time and it sounds like something that’s critical. Do you have an example of what one sounds like or looks like? Is it a four page document? Is it a three sentence
statement?
It’s a great question. It’s a document that generally is a pager. Less does not. I mean, if you wanna write out all your why’s, it’s great. My investment policy is that based on this goal, I want my diversification to be 50%, this 30% this, 20% this. Number one, my policy is to stay there. My next policy is if I deviate 5% off of that, then I will rebalance to get back to those exact numbers.
But until then, I’m gonna let it run. That’s second investment policy. Third investment policy is if the stock market drops more than 15%, I can feel free to then rebalance sooner so that I get back to the goal. I’m only going to change those target numbers every other year as I get closer to the goal, not because of the market, but because I’m closer to that goal.
So those are the types of things that we’re looking at. And when I know that I’m gonna rebalance once a year, unless it goes more than 5%, unless the market goes down X percent, which I’m gonna give myself permission, I’m not gonna change that mix much more likely to hold the course. I’m not gonna play all these dumb games.
So
when we used to set up metrics and dashboards for large organizations within companies, we would set up, here’s what we’re gonna measure, here’s what our upper and lower parameters are going to be for each of those measurements. I heard you say that. And then here’s how we’re gonna. Change it. Here’s our allowable changes.
Once we, once the trigger happens that says we gotta change something. I think I heard you say those three things there it is about building it. Probably another episode. I’m really interested in this, like how do we decide what that diversification is? How do we set our upper and lower parameters? Maybe we think about that as a topic in a future episode.
Absolutely.
No, let’s cover that. I think that’s an important place to go because we definitely don’t want people hanging here. We’ll also have Kevin in our show notes linked to a few episodes where we’ve touched on that topic because we have talked about asset allocation about the efficient frontier before.
We’ve also had guests that have covered that. So, but you’re right, Dustin, that often going over it again, good stuff. But between now and then we’ll do two things. Number one, have links to some of those episodes in the show notes. And then number two, Kevin Bailey, who does a brilliant job with our 2 0 1 newsletter every Tuesday and Thursday.
He’ll dive into this more in the two oh ones with some curated links so you can go deeper in the meantime. Coming up next, John Acuff. I love saying that name. I mean, not because it’s a phenomenal name, just he’s a hell of a dude. Uh, this is John’s third trip down to mom’s basement, and every time it’s just brilliant.
I’m so glad that he mentors our stackers as much as he has because the stuff that he brings is what we’re all thinking about. You know, we’re thinking about right now, we’re thinking about New Year’s resolutions, and we know New Year’s resolutions are frustrating, and we often think big and we get all weirded out because we don’t know what we really want.
And it’s so scary to think about what you really want. Like, I don’t, I don’t know what I want for breakfast tomorrow. Like, how am I supposed to think about what I want 10 years from now? Really? He’s gonna talk about a great method. To do that. So buckle up everybody, because before that, well, John’s getting situated.
Let’s, uh, have some trivia from Doug.
Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and as you know, I love pizza as much as the next guy, but not as much as the guy who may have overpaid for his slices. Back on today’s date in 2009, a man named Laszlo JE paid 10,000 Bitcoin for how many pizzas. I’ll be back right after I pick the pineapple off this slice.
Ochi ruins every pizza whenever he orders that Canadian pineapple ham
crap.
Hey there, stackers. I’m pizza lover and your deep dish of trivia. Oh, that’s a good one. I like that. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Today’s question on this date, back in 2009, Laszlow Hach wanted some pizza, so he called Papa John’s and ordered some paying with 10,000 Bitcoin. The question, how much pizza did he get for that 10,000 Bitcoin?
Your answer? Two. That means given the cost of Bitcoin as I wrote this, which was roughly $41,500, he may be slightly overpaid for those two pies by giving Papa John’s $415 million. I hope they were good. Speaking of good, nah, he’s great. At helping you find goals that work. Here’s John Acuff
super happy. He’s visiting us back in mom’s basement. Friend of the show, John Acuff joins us again. How are you man?
Yeah, thanks for having me back again. I appreciate
that. Well, happy New Year to you. What happens at the Acuff family household over New Year’s?
Uh, we’re not that crazy. Like I feel like every movie makes it seem like New Year’s Eve is like this amazing party you’re not invited to.
So it’s pretty chill this year. Um. We went to, we, I, one of the rules I live my life by is always know at least one Cajun. I think everybody should have a Cajun friend. Great
rule of thumb. Yeah. ’cause I think I know where
you’re
going with this. Yeah. And so we went to a Cajun friend’s house who put on a huge foray.
And Cajuns are always like, there’s crabs, there’s a boil of some kind. So we did a Cajun, your traditional Cajun New Year Eve, obviously.
Fabulous. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I am dressed in my alma mater t-shirt just for you. Gold, Michigan State, Spartans. Ah, look at you. Look at you. Well, because your story, John, starts with a recent trip.
You had to, uh, your alma mater, right? You did, did, I can’t believe, like I was just at Michigan State a few weeks ago. I loved it. You didn’t have that similar experience?
No, that was not my experience. My experience was the opposite of that. We were there to tour my oldest daughter at the school, my wife and I both went to and she said, wasn’t college amazing?
And I said, no, it was a train wreck. I was looking back on four years of just knucklehead decisions, put on social suspension for a year, for Halloween, prank bad grades. What does social suspension mean? Well, so it means you get to meet with the dean, the dean of us. Oh, good. That’s good. Student activities.
Good. Yeah, he’s no longer there. And he was fine. I thought he was very scary at the time as a freshman. So it just means, it’s almost like a it, Hey. It’s like the first two strikes, you know, in a three strike program. They just go ahead and give you the first two and then you’re on like, Hey, I better never visit this office again.
That’s what social suspension means. Like, I don’t wanna see you again. Fair enough, sir. Fair enough. You had some crazy jobs too. Yeah, I, I mean, I worked at a shaved ice stand out in front of Walmart freshman year. I worked for like a day at a shoe store. I was just bouncing all around college. And so I came back home and was like, why didn’t I live up to my potential?
And instead of kind of sitting in the regret of that, I thought, what can I do going forward? And that’s where this book kind of kicked off with, I’m not living up to my potential. What can I do about that? And then are other people feeling the same way? And so we did a study with 3000 people and 96% of people said they weren’t living up their potential.
So then it was enough for us to go, wow, I should spend some time really digging into this. What does it mean to live up to your full potential? We just got through
Christmas. You had a great Christmas analogy
on this. Yeah, it’s essentially, well there were two stats, the 96%, and then the second stat dude was 50% of people said, uh, they were only leaving 50% of themselves in the game.
They were leaving 50% of themselves on the table. And so I related it to be like walking down the stairs every Christmas morning, only opening half your Christmas presents. Like that would make for a really sad Christmas if people were going, Hey, those are yours over there. Those are your presents too.
And you’re like, no, I’m not gonna, and that’s what most people are walking around with. So that was the kind of the start to the whole conversation. What’s a great
time to talk about this January 3rd? Obviously everybody is what? What a new year, new you,
TM, John. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. All it takes is you drink the right amount of water, you’ll be a completely different person.
Change changes everything.
Change your whole life. But so what do we start with? You know, back in the nineties, there’s a book that I like a lot, Stephen Covey. Right? So habits highly affected people says Begin with the end in mind. Yeah. And you walk that walk and I think a lot of people end up where you end up with that, where it’s, it’s so hard.
There’s a lot of intimidation. So I think over the years, what’s happened with that idea is that we’ve turned it into, until I know the end, I camp again. So I meet countless people that go as soon as I figure out my life, then I’ll start changing it. I need a life plan. I need a life mission. I need to know my why.
You know, another great books, uh, start With Why by Simon Sinek. We’ve misinterpreted that into, until I know my Why, I can’t Try. So I’ve had friends spend six months trying to figure themselves out. Meanwhile, not changing anything. I call that the vision wall. When you walk, run into this big wall of vision that you have to figure out before you get started.
And I’d much rather you take some small steps to begin. I’d much rather you not try to go, here’s what the next 10 years are gonna look like. Whenever somebody tells me their 10 year plan. I think that is adorable. ’cause I guarantee Covid wasn’t in it. Like I guarantee if you made a 10 year plan in 2018, you weren’t like, and then three years right in the middle, the world gets shut down and then after that.
So I think that that’s part of the pressure we put on ourselves, especially in motivational circles, is, oh yeah, I knew exactly where I was headed. I didn’t know that 10 years ago. I, I had no idea I would be writing books or doing what I’m doing now. And so I think once you kind of settle into that, it gives you the ability to plan some small things and actually take some small steps that build some momentum.
So you have this,
you know, I think, okay, so I, I’m not looking forward. Mm-Hmm. I don’t know how to look forward. You’re like, the biggest thing I can think about is my Jeep, right? Yeah. Or about the fact that I want a Jeep. In fact, it turns out you didn’t even want a Jeep.
No, no. I ended up getting a VW GTI, which is like the opposite of a Jeep.
It’s a hatchback. It’s a hot hatch, as they say in the biz. Is that the biz talk? Is that what they say? Well, the street racers that I hang out with, we, when I, when we’re, uh, Tokyo drifting,
I think of street racers, I think
John Ako. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I look like I definitely don’t look like a suburban dad.
No, not at all. I look like a cool street racer. That’s what people say about me. They’re like, man, that he’s hip. They don’t even use hip. That’s too bad. That’s too bad. It is too bad. Hip’s a good word. I say, dude, way more than the average person, but no. So I realized, okay, I can’t look forward. I feel stuck in the present.
So I started to do something that everybody says you shouldn’t do, which is I looked backwards and I started to say. What are the moments that have lit me up? Like what are the things that have really encouraged me, that have really made me feel alive, big to small to medium? So all I did was I created what I call the best moments list.
I wrote the phrase Best Moments on a piece of paper in the Augusta, Georgia Airport, and I started to list out things. And before
we get to those things, John, what even made you decide to look backward? ’cause that just seemed, when I read that, that seemed totally counterintuitive.
Like why would I, oh yeah.
Everybody says, don’t look back. You’re not going that way. It’s right. I think that’s bad advice. I think the problem is we don’t learn from who we are and then we try to create a new person versus going, okay, wait a second. I could try to dream about the next 20 years, which is really overwhelming, really intimidating.
Or I could look at the last 10 years, the last five years, last two years, and go, what were the moments that made me feel alive? And that’s history. One is fantasy and requires tremendous imagination, tremendous grit. One is just you taking notes on things that have already happened. And so part of the reason I look back was it was easier.
It felt possible, it felt encouraging. I like to try things that are counterintuitive. In this book finished, I talked about cutting your goals in half because everybody goes, if your goal doesn’t scare you, it’s not big enough. And I was like, I don’t know. That sounds good on a mug. I don’t see that working in real life.
The people I know that have done big things started in small ways. So that was part of it was I wanted to take a counterintuitive approach to it to see if it worked and if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be talking about it on this podcast. But what happened was my list of a few things turned into 171 items over a couple of weeks, and I felt grateful.
Like it taught me gratefulness, it taught me self-awareness. I was able to go, oh, these are the things I care about. Um, it helped me be present. If you ask your head and your heart to look for great things from your past, they automatically start looking for them in your present. So you start having this running list of like, oh, that’s a best moment.
And then I tested it with hundreds of people. ’cause that’s always my process is like I try something in my life, does it work? If it works, I go, I wonder if it would help other people. So I go, do other people need it? So I do the studies with this PhD, Mike Peasley, who helps me, and then if other people need it, I’m like, all right.
And then I test it with hundreds of real people. And then if it works, I put it in a book. And so for me, that was, I was marching through the process step by step by step. And at each level I’d ask people to do 30 moments and they’d do 150. They do 300. And I started to see people go, oh, this actually showed me things I didn’t know about myself.
So then I was like, okay, it’s worth adding to a book. It’s worth teaching for years and years and years. ’cause that’s what happens when you write a book. You talk about it for years.
Gimme
an idea of some of the things that appeared on your list.
Yeah, so, um, there were some serious ones. There were some silly ones.
So an obvious one would be like, oh, hitting the New York Times best sellers list. That was a best moment. A smaller one would be seeing the headlights in my driveway when my teenage daughters drive home from an event. ’cause it means they made it back safely. And that moment was like one of those parent moments.
You’re like, oh, they’re here. That’s great. It can be small things. Like I love getting a new notebook. I’m a big notebook guy. So like when I get a new notebook and I, it’s day one and I unwrap it and I go to page one, like that’s a best moment for me. It can be, you know, favorite music. It can be a song that you stay in the driveway for, you came home and you’re not getting outta your car until the Boys of Summer by Don Henley’s off.
The big thing is you give yourself permission to put anything you want on the list. And so other people that that did this test with me would say like, I remember one woman said. Best moment for me happened today. I was watching my son get off the school bus and he walked out and then he rerouted his entire walk home to jump through a puddle.
He went out of his way to jump through a puddle, and that was this unexpected little boy moment of joy. And she was like, that was the best moment I got to see. And so it doesn’t have to be massive, but again, it turns on your radar for it. She might have missed that if she wasn’t in that moment. And so what happens is you create this list and then the coolest switch happens where all of a sudden you go, I want more of that.
Every single person that does this, when you make this list, you automatically go, oh, I want more of that in my life. And then you start to go, how can I make those things intentional? Not accidental, because a lot of them happen by accident. So now you get this really sneaky life plan. I. So you go, you’re not trying with a blank piece of paper to go, what are the things you go, man, dude, what’s my legacy?
You know, what’s my legacy is one of those words that’s so comical to me because no offense, in 200 years, no one will be talking about you. Like I always say, name the president from 1898, or name the richest person from 1912. Nobody goes, oh yeah. Or Tell me what job your great-great-grandfather did.
You’re like, I don’t, I don’t even know his name. You have this circle of people and maybe the next circle of people, that’s who you’re supposed to love and serve and pour into. But the legacy thing is, I think just a funny way to be like, I remember Eddie Murphy. They were, they were kind of picking on him in a Rolling Stone article and like, you’ve made some bad movies.
Like they’re. Picking up a hymn about the clumps and whatever those movies were. And he was like, yeah, no offense, no one’s gonna be talking about my best movies in 400 years. Like, no offense, like no one’s gonna be like, remember, uh, coming to America? They’re not gonna be. So, yeah. So it gives you this life plan that you actually get to build your life based on the things that you really care about, and you don’t have to guess at them.
I wanna back up John
though, too, word you said earlier, because I think that some of those moments that you put on the list, those little moments, which, you know, we talk about this, this last year, 2023, I think I did more interviews with experts on burnout, huh? It just seemed to be what the publishers were interested in, right?
Like our, our life is faster. We’re trying to be bigger. Social media is telling us we gotta do more. We just talked about the joke around legacy. And when you talk to me about the mud puddle moment, that is, use the word gratitude. The gratitude around a simple walk. Mm-Hmm. Or splashing the mud puddle. Like you’re eight years old.
Like I feel like it’s those little moments where the gratitude
lives. Yeah. And I’d heard people talk about it forever. That gratitude’s important, but I didn’t know how to practice it. I’m a practical, tactical kind of guy. I don’t like when people go, you should have an abundance mindset. I’m like, yeah, agreed.
But how? And this was one of those exercises that helped me remember things I had forgotten. And again, it turned on my vision for the things that I was missing. And it becomes a game. It becomes a little game where you can’t wait to add some stuff to your list. And so I, I think as far, like for me, it’s interesting you’re talking about burnout.
The thing I think about burnout is, I would say the majority of the people I know that experience it, it’s usually they’re not burned out from working too hard on things they care about or working too hard in their passion or working too hard on their purpose. Usually it’s, they don’t have a purpose, they have unhealthy boredom.
They are not connected to their life mission. Like I know a lot of dudes, I can’t speak to women about this ’cause I’m, you know, just the men I work with. They’re burned out ’cause they don’t have a purpose. And it’s not that they’re overworking, they’re underworking. If anything like it’s not that.
They’re going, man, I got a mission and I’m giving it my all and I love it and I feel alive and I’m doing too much. They’ll go, I really need to get some rest. And I’ll go from what? You’re not doing much right? Like what are you resting from? I think there’s just general sense of like, I don’t even know if burnout is the right word.
’cause burnout is, you burned so brightly, you burned out. The people I see that feel stuck. It’s not that they burned so brightly, they eventually burned out. It’s often they haven’t had the match lit in a long time and they feel the sadness of that and the weight of that. That’s what I see.
I’m spinning my wheels on stuff I don’t really care about.
Yeah, and you’re just like, I haven’t, or just think about our world. Our world is not designed for you to succeed. Our world is designed for you to shop. You have to recognize that it’s not designed for you to succeed. It’s designed for you to shop. Right now, there are a hundred thousand of the smartest developers, psychiatrists, doctors, programmers, advertisers, all with one goal for your time.
That is their goal. Goals are hard because Netflix is easy. Goals are hard because Instagram is easy. Netflix doesn’t want you to get in shape. It doesn’t want you to live outta your purpose. It wants you to binge their next show, and it should. That’s their business model. Even dating sites don’t want you to get married.
Dating sites want you to have a hundred meaningless hookups because that continues the business model. If you fall deeply and madly in love and delete the app, that’s a failure. They actually lose money. So I think right now what people are experiencing is that more so than ever before in history.
You’re seen as an ATM machine. You are a tired, exhausted, ATM machine, and there are smart people that recognize that and are doing everything they can to keep you in that position.
What I love about going backwards too, before we move on to some of the prompts that you have. Yeah. I wanna go through a few of these for our stackers.
If you don’t mind, John, before we get there. When I’ve looked at the biggest problems that I’ve had in my life, I often look externally, right? I look outside, I look at what is, what can the world give me? What can I do for the world? This look backwards feels like the best advice I ever get, which is always, it’s inside you.
Mm-Hmm. What you’re seeking more of is already there. You don’t gotta, you know, create the pyramids. It’s already right there inside you. And it looks like looking back at this moment takes you back to this thing that’s existed
forever. Yeah. And you often, you have plenty of it, you just haven’t seen it. Or one of the dangerous things is when you say, when this happens, then I’ll feel happy.
Or like perfectionists like to say, when this is done, then I can rest. They give themselves conditions to rest versus just going, I need to rest. And what happens is often when they get to that level, they just move the goalpost anyway. When I have this amount of money, then I’ll feel at peace. And then you get that amount of money and you move the goalpost, you move the goalpost.
And so I think that’s some of it is that idea. And then also like the internal versus the external. I control my actions. I don’t control the outcomes. Like I say that to people all the time. I’m the CEO of my actions. I’m not the CEO of my outcomes. I’m really not. So I can do the best I can with a book. I don’t control it going viral.
I really don’t. There’s not a, whenever somebody goes, oh, that person had a system, well then why doesn’t everybody use the system? I, I heard that over and over in Nashville. People go, oh, well, Taylor Swift has a system to her success. Then some other people should use that system. If it’s just a system they should do, I’d recommend a lot of people use that.
Yeah. Yeah. And you go, no, it’s not a system. It’s a million things. A lot of them outside of her control, a lot of them inside of her control. So I think that’s part of it too, is that we sometimes obsess about the external stuff versus doing the internal, which you actually have a lot of control over. You have a
couple of prompts.
I like the fact that this is, this project, John is much, feels like a workbook. Yeah. Like we’re gonna work through this together. Chapter one. Chapter two leads into chapter three, chapter four. We’re gonna do this. You actually have a funny thing at the beginning of, of the second chapter where you’re like, Hey, so you like that stuff we did in the first chapter?
Let’s get started. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like
let’s, let’s actually
do it. You’ve got some prompts. I wanna ask just about a couple of these. One of your prompts is time speeds, upper slows down. When I dot, dot, dot, what are we going for there?
Yeah, so there’s scientific research around your brain, experiences time differently when you’re engaged in activities, depending on is this like the flow state stuff?
I think it’s probably related to that. I mean, whether it’s flow or being in the zone or dialed in. Yeah. People when you describe this can automatically go, oh yeah. Like when I’m writing, I look up and it’s been an hour or when I am knitting or when I’m talking with a friend. We’ve all had a moment and so the goal of the prompts was to say, okay.
Let’s make it easy to come up with these. If we are having a conversation at coffee, I’d probably give you five or six things and go, what about this? Have you thought about this? And so the time was okay, it speeds up or it slows down because everybody’s had that experience. I wanted to create some universal prompts that were easy for people to go, oh yeah, I have had that experience.
That is what happened to me. The second prompt
is, the best job I ever had was blank. And the reason I liked it so much was because blank. Yeah.
So part of that is, again, finding the best parts of things that you might not even remember as having best parts. ’cause if you really sit with somebody and they go, I didn’t even like that job, and go, I.
You went eight hours for zero eight hours every day for 50 weeks and they go, no, there was this one project I did or no, there was this one person I connected with. And so some of that is going back and finding the diamonds that might be hidden in plain sight. And then so what happens there is you go like one of mine and it’s silly, but I love that at Autotrader we had a weekly standing meeting with the executives, which meant my week had shape.
I love when my week had shape where it meant I better have my projects ready for Wednesday. ’cause I had an hour with the top level people to show them the stuff. And that gave the rest of my week shape. And I liked being prepared for that. And that taught me a lesson for later on in life. Now I run my own business.
There’s technically no executive coming to do that review. How do I pattern what I’m doing now knowing that information? The thing about the list is that it gives you self-awareness. You can’t change your life if you don’t have self-awareness. And I, the examples I give are like. The executive who gets fired for anger issues thought he was passionate.
He was like, what are you talking, no, I’m loud, passionate. They’re like, no, that was abusive. No self-awareness. The person who dates 10 losers in a row never stops and goes, huh, what’s the one thing in common in all these dating? Oh, it was me. Why do I keep accepting losers? Why do I keep thinking that’s a healthy thing?
So once you have self-awareness, it’s kind of like those video clips you see online where a baby gets cochlear implants and they hear their mom’s voice, or the people get the color glasses and they can see. Finally, it’s like you start to notice things, and again, you bring them forward. The whole point of the exercise isn’t, wow, I remembered some good things.
I like the whole point is, bring those forward. Put those in your present. Put those in your future.
I wanna go over just one last piece to get our stackers started on this, and then the book is out now for people that want it, but you categorize these into four areas. Yeah, really you can take this big long list that people lights people up.
As you mentioned, people get excited. They put way more stuff on these than you ever thought would happen. What are the four areas and why does categorizing these in into four make sense? What, what are we doing with it? I
really studied the list to say, okay, 171 is, is so many, are there patterns here? I’m always, I’m always looking for frameworks that make it easy for me to understand the information and to do something with it.
So I started to study my list, other people’s lists and every moment fit into one of four types. The way I described it, it was like looking at one of those 3D posters where an image comes out of it. If you look at it long enough and the moments where an experience moment, an accomplishment moment, a relationship moment, or an object moment, an experience moment would be if you went on a hike, you went on a beautiful hike by yourself and just enjoyed it.
That’s an experience. A relationship moment is if you went on the hike with a friend who was going through a divorce and you poured into them, and that’s why it mattered. The relationship moment was on that list because of the person. So I go to dinner with a group of friends. We went last night, every Wednesday night.
Sometimes like I think if I went to that same restaurant without them, would it be a best moment? It wouldn’t. I’d be sitting there eating alone. Like it’s the people that make it the best. So that’s a relationship moment. An accomplishment moment is something you did some sort of effort led to it being a best moment.
So if you went on a hike and you hiked it faster than you’d ever hiked it, ’cause you wear a Garmin watch and you tracked your time, that’s an accomplishment moment. And the last one is an object. If you win on the hike and you grab the pine cone to remind yourself of that moment, that’s an object. And so what I encourage people to do is to start to label their list.
And the reason it’s important is again, it’s another layer of self-awareness. ’cause what happens is all of a sudden you go, wow. I’m 80% accomplishment and I didn’t even know that I really like accomplishments. But I grew up in a family where accomplishments were kind of frowned on. Don’t be too big for your britches.
So I’ve been pulling back, whoa, maybe I’m made for that. I need to lean into that. Or you go, wow, I’m 60% relationship and I felt really isolated because of three years of covid. No wonder I feel in a funk, like my entire backstory is relationship, relationship, relationship. I’m not pursuing them right now.
No wonder. And then the fun one was like everyone’s list, every single person, their smallest item, uh, list was objects. They didn’t care about. Objects. Objects was never the number one for anyone.
Kinda reiterates what we talk about in finance, right? That it’s not about the stuff.
No, it doesn’t matter. And what’s funny about that is every bit of marketing is stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff.
But every bit of, when somebody’s heart and head got to write what they care about, stuff was pretty small. And, and even if they had stuff on it, it was often tied to a person. It was tied to a person or like an accomplishment. So they’d go. This Porsche reflects that. I told myself 15 years ago when I got into real estate, someday I’m gonna have a nine 11.
And I finally got there. That’s an accomplishment item. Or this knife my dad gave me when I turned 13. Like it’s not even sharp anymore. It doesn’t even open anymore. But man, that’s a relationship moment. So that’s what was really interesting about it. But again, it gives you a tool to build the future you want.
It was funny when I was going through this myself, just prepping for this interview, I’ve always thought, ’cause I travel a lot, I love to travel. I thought, okay, experience is gonna be all over mine. Yeah. Experiences were fine. It was relationships that were number one, and I thought about the most fun I have when I travel is meeting new people.
And what’s funny is I, I mean I’m actually an introvert disguised as an extrovert ’cause I do this stuff. But it was the relationships on the travel
John, it’s like this. Aha. Yeah. That’s the thing that’s fun. I always say it’s the most honest personality test I ever created because the joke I say is, I’ve lied on every personality test I totally get.
’cause
no, I won’t steal pencils. I promise I won’t steal pencils. Yeah. Well they
go, Hey, here’s a thing an honest person does. Do you do that? And you’re like, I sure do. Like you know what they want you to say? They’re like, do you ever punch people in the face? You’re like, never do. Never. You know? And so like I always put a degree of should into it.
This one’s not this. Just the things you care about and it’s really who you are. And then you do the categories after and that’s what goes, oh. Okay. I didn’t like for me, I would’ve told you before the list, man. I love skiing with friends. I love skiing with friends. Skiing was on there three times and every time I was by myself and I was like, oh, okay.
I like some introverted time and I love my friends, but the best day I had was in Utah by myself. And that felt really refreshing, like, oh, okay. So that was very eye-opening for me.
Maybe cross country skiing in the woods is
more for you. Never, never. No. Once they invented downhill, forget it, dude. Forget it.
Like that should have been the day cross country ended in my opinion. Who wants to ski uphill? I don’t wanna work while I ski. No, no. I wanna enjoy it.
This project is uh, such like everything you do, it’s, if everybody looks left, John KO’s gonna look right. It’s called All It Takes is a goal. The three step plan to ditch, regret, and tap into your massive potential.
We began the journey here. If you want more of it, the book’s available everywhere.
Yep. It’s everywhere. You can get@johnacuff.com. I read the audiobook. So if you’re an audio person, you’re listening to this, there’s 10 bonus stories in the audiobook. And then I teach a goal community called the Guarantee Goals community@johnjacob.com slash goals.
Awesome. And
we’ll link to that on our show notes page at stacky Benjamins dot com. John, I got two more things I just gotta say to you. Let’s do it. ’cause normally. Normally when I thank uh, guests, you know, that’s the end of the interview. But I gotta tell you here, with all our stacker community here, every time you come back, I think this is your third time on Stacking Benjamins Karen, our wonderful producer, said that when she saw you live with Finn, she said it changed her relationships, it changed her view of the world.
Like we get excited about all the mentors we have here. I just wanna tell you how much gratitude we have for you, my friend, and then Stacy. Oh, that’s great man, who just started working with us a month ago, said she read Quitter and Stacy, by the way, financially independent at a fairly young age. And, uh, it made her look at work differently.
Like all of a sudden she’s like, oh, I don’t have to do the crap everybody else does. So John, we are very thankful for you here in the mom’s
basement, my friend. Oh man, I appreciate that. That’s really encouraging. This is Aaron from Colorado Springs, and when I’m not teaching three boys how to patch hockey, stick holes and drywall, I’m
Stacking Benjamins.
Huge. Thanks again to John for mentoring us. I love the idea Oog, of looking back versus looking forward. You know, look at what has lit you up in the past and that will give you key more of that, right? Tequila. Yes. Yes. Thank good. There’s a, there’s a woman
in Australia. We’re gonna have, is there something else we were supposed to be thinking about on
the show?
She has this fantastic metric. She calls the to gold ratio. And we want less. We want more gold. So look back at the stuff that was gold, the stuff that was, and you know what? Change that up. I just said that over and over so Steve could bleep all that. So you said a swear. Hey, let’s throw out the lifeline guys, and we’re gonna help a stacker get better with their money.
If you’ve got a question that you’d like OG to answer, head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail and uh, we’re sure to come to your aid very, very quickly. Right now, it seems like this time of year, generally over the holidays, people thinking about other stuff, the queue gets shorter and you get closer to a front row seat.
Then we get around closer to summertime, and it might take us a few months to get to you, but right now with that line is fairly short. Stuck Benjamins dot com slash voicemail. Today, we are going to help out stacker. Aaron. Hey Aaron.
Hey Joe and og. This is Aaron in Seattle. I happen to know from listening to this show that spouses can’t contribute to an FSA and an HSA in the same year.
I happen to mention this in passing to a coworker during open enrollment and he went, oh crud. I was talking to him yesterday and neither he nor his wife could get anyone in HR to talk to them during open enrollment. So now they’re set to contribute to an FSA and an HSA both next year. What do they do?
Thanks for taking the question. And you know what? I like a size Triple XL because I wanna swim in my shirt. Thanks.
Wow.
Aaron there in Seattle. There’s a lot. Is, is there water in Seattle? I think there might be some water. I. In Seattle. Nice
balmy, warm seawater there in Seattle.
Mm. Nice. Swim over to Bainbridge Island.
Yeah. I feel like this was a asking for a friend type question like this couldn’t have been her, couldn’t have been her husband that were both, I would’ve never done that.
Contributing. No, never.
How does my, let’s say I have this friend, OG F-S-A-H-S-A dilemma. What do we do?
This is a, an interesting question, Aaron, because most of the time your company benefits election program, if you will, simply won’t allow you to do it. Like, you know, when you go to put in, I want this health insurance, it will not allow you to say, I want this health insurance, which is tied to an HSA high deductible plan.
And then also allow you to select the FSA on your payroll ’cause that’s, you know, pretax contributions or you know, pretax savings as well. Maybe this is a spousal thing where one spouse picked one thing, one spouse picked another, they didn’t communicate very well or. Got whatever confused. In any case, this is kind of a mess.
You can’t have an HSA pay for the same expenses and during the same period as an FSA as it relates to medical expenses. That’s what an FSA is for. And an HSA is for also is for out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. And HSA has no annual limitation in terms of spending. Whereas an FSA you, it’s use it or lose it.
You have to consume all of the FSA money by the end of the year or you know, whatever that period of time is to submit for reimbursements after the end of the year. So you have to be aware of that. But there is a provision for FSAs to be considered limited purpose, which mean that you can’t use the FSA for medical expenses incurred while you were also eligible for the HSA and also using that.
So, kind of a mess. I don’t know how to. Officially tell anybody that this is a limited purpose. FSA, if there’s a form to fill out or, or something along those lines. I suspect that it might all get reconciled on your tax return in 2025 when you file for the 2024 tax year, and you might have to check a few boxes on your tax return or have a CPA.
It can help you walk through that. But in both cases, if you’re contributing to the FSA, you have to make sure that you consume all of those dollars by the end of December, 2024. Otherwise, they go, bye-Bye. Maybe there’s some chance that this is a dependent care FSA, which is a completely different thing, and it’s to be used for like preschool expenses, daycare expenses, that sort of thing.
That’s up to 5K. So maybe that’s it. And that’s, that’s different than A HSA. So maybe it’s a dependent care FSA, but anyways, go get those teeth cleaned. If it is a regular FSA, get ’em cleaned every other. Every other week because teeth cleanings are like 150 bucks and you’re gonna, you got like five grand FSA money if you maxed it out.
So, so
many dental procedures you possibly have. Oh, a lot.
Prepay a lot. Just be like, can I give you all of my teeth cleanings from now until 30 odd
seven?
And can I take all the suckers on the counter on the way
out? Best
wishes. Yeah. Good luck, Karen. Wanna know how it goes? Yeah, please do. Because I’m, we wanna make sure we keep other people out of that situation.
And, uh, you know what, we will send you a code and you can make that T-shirt as absolutely big for swimming as you want it. Uh, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail is where you go to ask a question like Aaron did and to get help in an area that in this case, man, very, very difficult. That’s gonna do it for today, except for our back porch.
If your goal isn’t just to have one question answered, but you need lots of question answered, in other words, lots of question answered, lots of question be answered, I think is the correct phrase there, Joe. Uh, you know what? You may be looking for better financial help in your corner. OG and his team taken on seven clients this first quarter.
So don’t walk, run. Yeah. Run. Don’t walk. If you’re, if you’re the seventh caller, you’ll win a free date with OGs team to talk about your bunny management. Stacky Benjamins dot com slash OG gets you to OG and his team’s calendar to get going on better financial goals.
I don’t think that was quite the polished, sophisticated promo that he had in mind.
That’s why I do a podcast about money and I’m not a pitch man for Kaytel probably right there. You are not. We’ve got, uh, so much fun stuff happening, Doug. I know that, um, we’ve had some of our, speaking of Aaron and her swag, we’ve had some swag out in the wild. Yeah,
we have. And we’ve been asking about this for a while and it’s so glad.
I’m so glad. It’s so glad that I’m great. I’d be so glad. I, yeah, I’d be gladdening. There’s happiness emanating from me because we’ve had, uh, several, uh, great stackers have posted in the basement. We had Adam, uh, who posted a great shot of him rocking his recently procured SSB Lifeline shirt Today. The great thing that Adam did was he didn’t tell his family that he had called in.
So he like had the family listen to the episode and when they heard his name called, apparently they went crazy. It’s a celebrity. Of course, food was getting thrown around the kitchen. It was incredible. Couldn’t believe it. Yeah. And uh, so we had fun with that. And then, um, this is something I still don’t understand.
Adam posted a picture of himself in his T-shirt in front of his Cleveland Shrine. He has a shrine to Cleveland. Did, did Cleveland die? Did we not know it? Grover.
Grover Cleveland.
Right. But that was very cool. Thanks for that. And then this was awesome. Remember back in early December our writer, writer, a writer, a writer Lisa, a writer or writer, Lisa Coy, our writer, Lisa Curry, uh, filmed a special, a standup comedy special in Madison, Wisconsin, and I challenged stackers within a six state radius, and Janelle answered the call.
She went there. That was awesome. Not only did she, yeah, she posted a picture of herself in front of Lisa’s, uh, promo picture in the lobby. But then, and this is my favorite part, she called me out. To say, Doug, where the heck are you now? I tried, I really tried Janelle to get there, but I got way laid at the bar and then the line just kept on getting poured.
And next
thing I know at the union, at the union there along the lake,
I missed it. And, uh, I, I had every intention to go, but those go down smooth. So that was great that we had a couple of stackers post and we’ve had others. Um, but uh, those were two recent ones that we, we really liked. You know, Joe, moving off of T-shirts, I wanna talk about the great Instagram lives that we’ve really been stepping up lately.
We’ve been doing a lot more of those and bring in some great. Thanks man. A stacker Colin is recognizing how great those Instagrams are. He says, thanks Joe Sal. See hi and Kate Youngen and the team for doing the live Instagram interviews. I was just reflecting on what a unique opportunity we are given to ask these great guests questions.
For example, where else can you go to ask the founder of one of the leading budget apps your questions about why you should join their platform? Pretty cool. And he is right. We, you know, we, uh, because of our access, uh, to great guests within this community, we bring those to our stackers and you could talk right to him.
I, I would not be surprised if we’re about to get Nobel Prize winners and, and, uh, we’ve had ’em on
here. We’ve had ’em on the podcast. Yeah. So could be next over there. You know what I, you know what I like though to, to respond to Colin, thank you for the kind words, but it truly is the questions that you guys bring and ask that make that, I mean, you know, we could just have ’em on the podcast like the brilliant John Acuff today, and I get to ask John all my questions, but being able to bring people on an Instagram where you get to ask your questions, it’s the fact that you guys show up and ask the questions that let us keep doing it.
If you wouldn’t have shown up for those, we wouldn’t have expanded it to be twice a week instead of once. So, yeah, but we had a great week just before the last week of the year break, Y Espinal, who’s just an amazing guest talking about her end of the year stuff. And then of course, uh, we talked to the founder, uh, Val from Monarch Money about how the app works.
And we had, we had a ton of people asking Val all kinds of questions about how that app actually works. Fantastic stuff. So thanks Colin to you. I’ve got something for you, Doug. And actually, and for you, og this is a little something that I heard that that might have hit a little close to home. So I’m gonna take a little umbrage maybe with this.
Uh, this was a Facebook reel that I heard recently. Listen to this.
People don’t know this, but sleep is bad for you. Did you read that somewhere? I don’t read it. Lows. Your testosterone. Really. Podcast police.
Put the mics down, put the mics down. Don’t even take about This episode is over, fellas. We’re the podcast police.
We’re a task force that stops white guys from starting podcasts for no
reason. Anything you say
can and will be used against you. Subscribe to the patriarchy. Go right
on now. It’s become a real problem
here in Los Angeles. These guys reuse Mike’s, share. Mike’s podcast in the morning podcast at night. Al.
Half the time they don’t realize the M’S not even plugged in. Poor guy didn’t even have a co-host. Mike’s
down with night. My dad. Glad. Ugh. Just missed
the mic’s. Still hot. Jesus.
Every year we lose about half our
recruits. Do they die? No.
We’re losing the podcast Class of 2015 Lost a lot of good men. Just busted
a 17-year-old for podcasting
already on the mic.
What life advice could you possibly be sharing? Hey, get back. Parents go. I had
no idea my son was podcast. You had no idea your son’s 11. He’s asking for a goddamn pole plug. Alright
man, what do you need? I got mics. I got whatever
podcasting equipment you need. Oh, you know what I need, uh, for you to get on the ground.
Come, come, come. Get down. Get down. Suspect apprehended. Suspect apprehended. This is personal to me because I lost my brother to podcast. He was top of his class.
They, one day he
says
to me, you have such funny
conversations. Why don’t we start recording? That point on here sucks. You gotta follow the money.
All this is funded by big sponsors. You got Roman Better Help Athletic Greens. Those guys go under this whole nightmare.
You
know, not, not for nothing, but can we reach out to Roman and hymns? I hear they’re good products. That’s, I’d
be helpful. That was great. Our friend, uh, David Hooper, who has a, a show about podcasting.
A podcast about podcasting. Found that. So thanks to, thanks to David Hooper.
Appreciate this. We just need to make it clear we were here before. It was cool. We, we were here as middle-aged white guys before it was cool as way Cool
as it is now. We’re even cooler. Yes. Right. Absolutely. Just to be clear. Yeah.
And kids stay away from podcasting. We can tell you firsthand what it does. All right. That’s gonna do it for today. Coming up on Friday, you guessed it. Len Penso brings his Walmart purchased Magic eight Ball, and we are going to find out how the eight ball did last year. We’re going to, uh, dig into some our prone predictions.
Jeffrey Gun Latch had his today, we’ll have ours on Friday. But before that, Doug, everybody take your paper out. Ready paper and a pen because Doug’s about to give you the top three to-dos from today’s
show. Here’s your to-do list from everything we talked about on this episode. First, take some advice from John OV struggling with goals and long-term purpose discussions.
Look backward at what lights your fire not forward into the void. Use that list to light up your life more and you’re gonna have goals that inspire you much more than scare you. Second, predicting the future with your investments. Not a great idea. How about hitting pause on your trading slash betting and instead make an investment policy statement that’ll serve you far better than trying to look in your crystal ball.
But the big lesson I have only one goal. John Acuff, not to be the guy who changes over Joe’s mom’s laundry. How do I make that a thing in 2024 A OG? I got a trade idea for you buddy. Maybe I’ll start washing mom’s car and you, oh wait, that’s worse. Nevermind. I’m good. I got it. I’m good. Thanks to John Acuff for joining us today.
You can find out more about his work@johnacuff.com and you can find his latest book. All It Takes is a Goal wherever books are sold. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is The Property of SSB Podcasts LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
Our producer is Karen Repine. This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast. With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are. Of course, you’ll never know if you don’t. Check out our YouTube version of the show. Engineered by Tina Ichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast.
Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. I wanna chat with friends about the show later. Mom’s friend Gertrude Stacey Doe and Julia Gar are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.
So say hello when you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement. For more interactive fun, join us in Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday for our Instagram lives. Kate Yakin and Joe host these weekly. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds.
Don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
Leave a Reply