Most people measure a bad boss in bad days: the meeting that went sideways, the credit that got stolen, the comment that stung longer than it should have. Money Mentor Mel Abraham, along with Paula Pant and the crew, argues that’s the wrong unit of measurement entirely. A toxic work situation has a real, compounding financial cost, in stalled raises, atrophied skills, drained energy, and years quietly lost to a job that was never going to get better. Today’s episode puts a number on it, and gives you the exact steps to build your way out.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- Why a bad boss almost always means you’re being underpaid too, and the compounding effect that has on your entire career
- A simple “stay, fix it, or go” framework for evaluating your specific work situation, tested against real scenarios
- Why waiting for the “right time” to leave a toxic job often means waiting far too long
- The financial prep work worth doing now, even if your job is fine today, so you’re ready to move fast if it isn’t tomorrow
- Why your skills and confidence can quietly atrophy under a bad boss, even if your paycheck stays the same
- How to separate your relationships with great coworkers from your relationship with a bad workplace
- A practical first-week plan for anyone who gets laid off or walks away suddenly, starting with what actually needs to be true immediately
Why This Matters Now
A difficult boss or a dead-end job rarely shows up as one dramatic moment. It shows up as a slow leak: a raise you didn’t ask for, a skill you didn’t build, an idea you didn’t pitch because you’d stopped believing it mattered. That slow leak is expensive, and it’s also fixable. Building financial and career readiness before you need it, savings, low fixed costs, a sharpened skill set, means the decision to leave becomes a choice you’re making on your own terms, not a scramble you’re forced into.
From the Basement
The crew’s trivia detour into Philippe Petit’s famous 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers turns into a surprisingly close four-way guessing game, complete with hometown bragging rights and a mid-season trivia standings shakeup that’s still anyone’s game.
Resources Mentioned
Granola — AI-powered meeting notes tool mentioned in the sponsor break
Building Your Money Machine by Mel Abraham — Mel’s USA Today bestseller on building financial freedom
Building Your Money Machine podcast — Mel’s weekly show on wealth-building and financial freedom
Afford Anything podcast — Paula Pant’s show, referenced episode: “Should We Retire in Our 40s with $4 Million?”
Our Topic:
These toxic management behaviors drive good employees away (Fast Company)
During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:
- Bad boss stories
- Public humiliation
- Toxic leadership
- Workplace fear
- Poor employee coaching
- Exit planning
- Stay, fix, leave
- Credit stealing
- Malicious compliance
- Micromanagement
- Dying companies
- Boss loyalty
- High-salary traps
- Coworker relationships
- Career opportunity costs
- Compensation losses
- Energy depletion
- Work-life spillover
- Skill atrophy
- Confidence erosion
- Lost time
- High-interest debt
- Emergency savings
- Lower fixed costs
- Career skill-building
- Personal branding
- Employer-funded education
- Active job searching
- Career insurance
- Professional networking
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
Mel Abraham
Another thanks to Mel Abraham for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Mel on his show, Building Your Money Machine at Building Your Money Machine – Podcast – Apple Podcasts. You can learn more about Mel at Mel Abraham | Keynote Speaker, USA Today Bestselling Author & Creator Fully Expressed
Check out his bestseller book Building Your Money Machine: How to Get Your Money to Work Harder for You Than You Did for It!.
Paula Pant
Check out Paula’s site and amazing podcast at AffordAnything.com
Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything
OG
For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- On the morning of August 7, 1974, high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center. How many times did he cross between the towers that morning?
Mentioned in today’s show
- The Goal: 40th Anniversary Edition: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
- The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
- Rethinking Brand You
- Glassdoor | Job Search and Career Community
- OG’s financial-planning calendar
- Stacking Benjamins on YouTube, generally live Mondays at 3:30 p.m. Eastern
Join Us on Monday!
Tune in on Monday when we move the spotlight on YOU! We’re answering your questions on dumping your 401k, setting up money for special needs situations, and converting your money toward Roth IRAs.
Miss our last show? Check it out here: What to Do When Insurance Denies Your Claim (And Why They Count on You Giving Up) SB1880 | Stacking Benjamins.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] opener: Spider pig, spider pig. Does whatever a spider pig does. Can he swing from a web? No, he can’t, he’s a pig. Look out, he is a spider pig
[00:00:19] Doug: From the basement of the YouTube headquarters, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show
[00:00:34] Doug: Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and just exactly how much money is that bad boss costing you? Today we’ll quantify that and share strategies to take control of the financial half of your career. But that’s not all. Halfway through today’s job freedom extravaganza, we’ll take a break for my always topical and thrilling trivia question.
[00:00:55] Doug: Will Paula continue to tighten this race? Will OG get back to his winning ways? Or will Team Jesse
[00:01:02] Doug: make the definitive move to defend his title? And now, a guy whose title around here is Mr. Friday Show Host. Trust me, Joe, that’s not what we call you. It’s Joe Saul-Sehy.
[00:01:22] Joe: Hey there, Stackers, and happy Friday to you. I am Joe Saul-Sehy, and man, are we super happy to do this. I love this topic. As a guy who became an entrepreneur partly because I had some pretty crappy bosses, we’re gonna be talking about just how much money is that bad boss costing you. And, uh, we’re gonna start with a guy who may or may not have had one or two bad bosses during his long, esteemed career, neighbor Doug.
[00:01:46] Joe: How are you, man?
[00:01:47] Doug: I’m fine. Just trying to keep it in the fairway today, Joe. Just, just trying to stay out of trouble.
[00:01:52] Joe: Is that what you used to tell your bosses when you’d still find a way to get into trouble back in the day? Yeah, ‘
[00:01:56] Doug: cause I can’t keep my mouth shut. So it-
[00:01:58] Joe: Who, you? I know. You… Wait a minute, what?
[00:02:02] Joe: I can’t believe it.
[00:02:03] Doug: This unfiltered mouth and corporate America didn’t mesh nicely.
[00:02:07] Joe: That is strange. Do you believe that, OG? That, that Doug, of all people, would have had some problems fitting in in corporate America?
[00:02:16] OG: Doug has problems fitting in everywhere, so it’s not surprising.
[00:02:20] Joe: He took it to another level.
[00:02:22] Joe: There’s the hot take. And we were just gonna start with a kinder, gentler show, but we’re going there. How are you today, OG?
[00:02:28] OG: Uh, pretty busy. Yep. Life is good. It’s good to be
[00:02:32] Joe: busy.
[00:02:33] OG: It is a- Good to have busyness thrust upon you
[00:02:36] Joe: Now, let’s be clear. You haven’t had many bosses really though during your career, right?
[00:02:41] Joe: Did you have a, you have a boss when you were delivering papers? Was that your grandpa?
[00:02:45] OG: Nope. Nope, I don’t believe in bosses. I think they, um, they all suck, including when I’m the boss. So I suck at being a boss. I suck at having bosses. So this ought to be a pretty good chat. Looking forward to it.
[00:02:57] Joe: It sh- it should be a great
[00:02:59] OG: chat.
[00:02:59] OG: Basically, it’s just OG sucks. That’s gonna be the- You … moral of the story as, uh, a boss and employee.
[00:03:05] Joe: And the show is over. Thanks for showing up, everybody. Glad that you could be here. Actually, you and I did have some pretty, uh, wild management teams that we worked with when we were at American Express together.
[00:03:17] Joe: You gotta admit, there were some, there were some wild ones, OG.
[00:03:20] OG: I don’t know. I, I got along with everybody. Maybe, maybe I was just nicer than you.
[00:03:24] Joe: Probably. Well, everybody thinks that already, but the nicest person on earth is here with us. Paula Pant joins us from Afford Anything. How are you?
[00:03:31] Paula: I am fantastic.
[00:03:33] Paula: How are you, Joe?
[00:03:34] Joe: Good. Did you get into entrepreneurship because of bad bosses?
[00:03:38] Paula: That is not the reason I got into entrepreneurship. Actually, I loved the boss that I had at the time that I worked at the newspaper, but I’m kinda like OG. I’ve had a limited experience with bosses. I basically had one full-time job in between…
[00:03:53] Paula: Uh, not basically, I did have one full-time job in between when I graduated from college, one job, and then I went into entrepreneurship from there. But when I was in high school and college, the summer jobs, I had some bad bosses there. Those were just brutal The summer jobs, yeah.
[00:04:10] Joe: You were training to be in the workforce, and your bosses were training how not to do their job.
[00:04:16] Paula: Exactly.
[00:04:17] Joe: Yes. Well, I thought about this topic, by the way, because it was a piece in Fast Company about what bad bosses, h- uh, turnover because of bad bosses, right? And this was written about, listen, you gotta be a better boss to keep good employees. But ultimately, companies are trying to build a money machine, and we’re all trying to build money machines, and this guy, who I thought of immediately when I thought of this topic, he goes around the country helping audiences of entrepreneurs, people working for, quote, “the man”, build their money machine.
[00:04:49] Joe: I thought, you know what? This is the perfect topic for my good friend Mel Abraham. How are you, Mel?
[00:04:54] Mel: Joe, I am awesome. Just trying to stay cool. I’m out here in Vegas. It’s 115 degrees.
[00:04:59] Joe: Is it cool by the slot machine? You know- Yeah … I, I gotta say, Paula usually does this, like, in the ba- in the, not basement, in the first floor, right, Paula, of your building?
[00:05:10] Paula: Uh, not usually, but I, I certainly have a handful of times.
[00:05:13] Joe: I gotta say, I’m a little disappointed, Mel, that you didn’t do this from, like, the casino floor.
[00:05:17] Mel: You know what? We had internet problems here, and they actually said, “If you come down to the first floor, you got the best internet in the place.” I said, “Yeah, but then I got the casino in the background.”
[00:05:27] Mel: Which might have been okay
[00:05:29] Joe: Do you think it’s a ploy? Maybe they’re just looking to increase their monthly number by getting everybody to go to the floor of the casino- Well- … maybe gamble a little.
[00:05:37] Mel: Well, just so everyone knows, maybe TMI, but this morning a pipe broke evidently in this hotel, and there were no showers or toilets, and they told us all to go down to the spa and use the spa.
[00:05:49] Mel: So, ich.
[00:05:51] Joe: Oh, hey.
[00:05:52] OG: Probably wasn’t much of a spa after everybody got done using it though, huh?
[00:05:56] Mel: No. Like a bathtub in the Old West.
[00:05:59] Joe: Right. More of a-
[00:06:01] OG: Little hole in the ground and some murky water that everybody’s showering in. That’s, that’s awesome.
[00:06:07] Joe: Well, we’re going to definitely try to make some clarity. We’re gonna shower this topic.
[00:06:11] Joe: How do I, where do I go with this, Doug? I have no idea. We’re going to, we’re gonna clean this up. We’re gonna clean up your problem with bad bosses. What is it costing you to stay with a boss that’s toxic? W- we’re gonna start off with stories of bad bosses from each of our contributors, but before all that, we have a couple sponsors who help us keep on keeping on.
[00:06:31] Joe: We’re gonna hear from them, and then Mel, OG, Paula, Doug, and I, we’re gonna dive into, uh, what are bad bosses costing you. How many meetings a day do you take notes in, or how many different just events where you have to jot something down? Here’s a hill I will die on. Granola AI is the best, the best note-taking software that is available.
[00:06:55] Joe: I’ve used a ton, and it is by far the best. It’s an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. Here’s how it works. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background Granola is securely transcribing the entire meeting. It turns it all into a clean, structured, actually useful group of notes when the meeting ends.
[00:07:17] Joe: And the best part, it works through your audio’s device, which means you don’t have to have any setup. There’s no awkward bots. It integrates seamlessly into the stuff that you already use. It’s just your normal meeting with superpowers. I absolutely love the output of my meetings. And if you wanna know how it looks, just either try it for free or write me, joe@stackingbenjamins.com, because if meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer.
[00:07:45] Joe: You can try it totally free by heading to granola.ai/sb. That’s granola.ai/sb, and get your time back. Here it is again. Try it for free. Granola.ai/sb.
[00:08:07] Joe: All right, Paula, you promised a great story, so I gotta go to you first. Let’s share some bad boss stories. What’s the bad boss?
[00:08:15] Paula: When I was, it was a summer in between my sophomore and junior year of college. I was, for that summer, living out on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. And I- That’s
[00:08:24] Joe: tough.
[00:08:25] Paula: It was, it w- yeah, exactly.
[00:08:27] Paula: A tough place to live, but someone’s gotta do it. I had this job that was supposed to be a really fun summer job as a kayaking guide. So you would do these two-hour little, like, local kayaking tours where I would take groups of tourists, and we’d point out the wildlife, like, “Look, there’s an egret. There’s a blue heron,” that kind of a thing.
[00:08:47] Paula: We had the procedures that we would go through where we would line everybody up, we would give them the safety talk, tell them how to buckle a safety vest, show them how to turn a paddle, that sort of a thing. So this boss, I remember this one particular time, one of the guys in my group, one of the tourists, was in the port-a-potty.
[00:09:04] Paula: I’m fully aware of this, and I, and mentally I am planning around this. So I, I’ve got the group organized, and I’m starting to make remarks to the group, but I’m in my head thinking, “All right. I’m gonna make sure that I just make introductory remarks and I don’t say anything that is…” You know, I wait until the guy comes back from the port-a-potty before I say all of the, the important stuff.
[00:09:28] Joe: Just keep everybody engaged.
[00:09:29] Paula: Exactly. So I’m in the process of just kind of keeping them engaged. Well, my boss looks over, doesn’t realize that that’s what I’m doing, assumes that I have not modulated accordingly, and starts yelling at me in front of this entire group. Yelling at me in front of the customers.
[00:09:48] Paula: Epic bad boss.
[00:09:49] Joe: Unbelievable.
[00:09:50] Paula: And the customers felt awkward. You could see it in their faces. Like, they, they looked uncomfortable.
[00:09:57] Joe: Did you get big tips that day? I
[00:09:58] Paula: think I got average tips that day.
[00:10:01] Joe: Yeah. I was gonna say, those are the days when, you know, you see some conflict between boss and employee, you give some
[00:10:07] Joe: I, I tip the employee- Yeah … a little bit heavier that day. That is absolutely horrible. Like, why does, why do they think fear is the thing that, uh, will help you win? Mel, you’ve, you’ve never had a bad boss, I’m sure.
[00:10:19] Mel: Never. Uh, I’m probably the worst boss of, for myself.
[00:10:22] Joe: Well, we gotta put you and OG in a match together apparently-
[00:10:25] Joe: as two guys being bad bosses.
[00:10:27] Mel: Yeah, yeah. I have not had a lot of jobs other than on my own for a couple of decades, but when I was starting out, I was working in one of the big, uh, consulting firms in downtown Los Angeles. I was in the valuation department, and I had a great boss at first, but they transferred him out and left me behind, and then put this, this new boss in.
[00:10:49] Mel: And I’m, I’m new. I’m new, uh, probably at the company for three years, and in that department for a year, and I’m doing valuations. I, I don’t know much about valuations. She asked me to write a report. So I do my very first valuation report, and I thought it was a work of art, and I hand it in on a Friday. I come back in on Monday expecting to have some, you know, comments and, and everything.
[00:11:12] Mel: But I said, “So did you get a chance to read the report?” And she says, “Yes.” She takes my report, and she literally throws it at me- And said, “This is a piece of crap.” She says, “Go buy Strunk and White’s book, Elements of Style, learn how to write, because this could’ve been done by a four-year-old.”
[00:11:30] Joe: Oh my God.
[00:11:31] Mel: Yeah.
[00:11:31] Joe: There’s so many ways to tell an employee that too, Mel, you know what I mean? Like, the S- the Strunk and White thing’s not bad advice. It’s a good book . It is. But to throw it at you and just put you down.
[00:11:41] Mel: She proved why her nickname at the office was Dragon Lady.
[00:11:45] Joe: Just yelled at people. Oh, horrible.
[00:11:46] Mel: Yeah, she did.
[00:11:47] Mel: She did. No coaching, no explanation. It was pretty much humiliation and criticism is, it was her method
[00:11:53] Joe: Oh, gee, humiliation and criticism. You said you’re a bad boss. Is, are those two tactics you use, those in your tool belt?
[00:11:59] OG: Well, I was gonna say Dragon Lady. That was, uh, Doug’s nickname in college, so.
[00:12:03] Joe: That’s, that’s what we call him.
[00:12:05] Joe: He said that, “W- they don’t call me Friday show host, they call me something else.” Yeah.
[00:12:10] OG: You know, my worst boss story, like you said, not too many of ’em. I don’t know if you guys know this or not, but there was a time where I was training to be a detective on the police force. You know, so it’s kind of like a recruiting situation.
[00:12:24] OG: I’ve got this new boss I’m trying to impress. It was just kinda one of those weird vibes, right, where you’re like, “Something’s just not right with this dude.” And I realized very quickly he was not interested in training me. He was just testing me. You know, testing whether or not I could do the job or whether or not I would just do whatever he said I would do.
[00:12:42] OG: And you know, every time I questioned something, it was like it was my problem. You know, but I was inexperienced. I didn’t know how this world worked of being kind of an undercover police officer. And you know, at one point in time, he pressures me into taking drugs. Then I’m like, “Well, this isn’t right.”
[00:12:58] OG: He’s like, “Well, what are you gonna do? You’re a druggie. Now I’ll just turn you in.” And then we go to, like, a friend’s house, like, I thought it was his friend, and turns out it was, like, a big setup situation. There’s money everywhere. People are getting shot. It’s… This is a crazy scenario. I’m like, “What is happening with this whole situation?”
[00:13:16] OG: What, Doug, you don’t like my story?
[00:13:18] Doug: Well, I just… I, I didn’t know that you worked for Denzel Washington at one point.
[00:13:21] OG: They made a story about my s- my story. They, they made a movie about it. Uh, you guys might have seen it. Um-
[00:13:27] Doug: Did Ethan Hawke play you?
[00:13:29] OG: Uh, yes, he did.
[00:13:30] Doug: Oh,
[00:13:30] OG: wow. Um-
[00:13:31] Doug: Wow, I hope you got some
[00:13:32] OG: residuals from that
[00:13:33] OG: obviously Denzel in Training Day. No, I mean, look-
[00:13:35] Joe: Wait a minute. Before you go into your, your actual story, I love that, uh, just the look on Paula’s p- face the entire time. Wait, I think you had her until the drugs. Yeah. And then you got into- Yeah,
[00:13:46] Paula: I believed you right up
[00:13:47] OG: until- Yeah, I shot this dude in the chest with a shotgun.
[00:13:49] OG: It was a whole day. Let me tell you, it was a training day. Anyways, I had to turn my boss in, and yeah, it was a whole thing. But, um, no, I mean, look, at the end of the day, if you’re a boss or you’re aspiring to be a boss, or, you know, and ’cause you’re al- even if you don’t have the title of being a boss, like if you’re not manager or vice president, as soon as you’re not, like, the newest person around, you’re setting an example for people.
[00:14:17] OG: I was having this discussion with somebody about parenting, and because we had the pleasure of being at, uh, you know, at the family cottage for a couple of weeks in Michigan like we are able to do sometimes in the summertime, and you see all these different dynamics of- family members who have kids or your mom and dad, and, you know, you just kinda see this all laid out in front of you.
[00:14:37] OG: And I think parenting, the job of a, of a parent, or as, as you grow to be a parent, is to think about all of the things that worked with you, right? Like, oh, you know what? That, that example that dad gave or that lesson that I learned and how he taught it, that was… that landed pretty good. I’m gonna do that.
[00:14:53] OG: And then there’s probably a l- few lessons that you’re like, “That was a really bad way to teach that lesson. I’m definitely not gonna do that to my kids.” This is true, I think, when you’re, you know, working in your career, you’re just kinda moving up in your career. You see good things, and you see not so good things.
[00:15:07] OG: You see how to interact with customers and clients and how to interact with team members. And, and your job as you kinda move up the, the, the ranks, so to speak, is to say, “You know what? That was a good lesson. That was an interesting way to deliver that lesson. I’m gonna use that. I’m gonna put that in the repertoire.”
[00:15:22] OG: Or, you know, crumpling up the paper and telling me I’m a worthless POS and go get y- you know, that was, nah, that maybe didn’t land. You know? I’m probably not gonna do that one.
[00:15:30] Joe: Well, and that is interesting because for the people that are bosses out there, I mean, th- this is what this Fast Company piece is all about.
[00:15:37] Joe: Not the focus for us today, but I’ll link to it in the show notes. Mel, how much longer did you stay with that person as a boss? Were you already mentally checked out and ready to leave?
[00:15:47] Mel: Yeah, I was ready. I was ready to leave. The bottom line is w- what I ended up doing is planning my escape, is I looked at it- Yeah
[00:15:52] Mel: and said, “What do I need to acquire here from a skill set to prepare me to find something better?” Because I, I… There was no way that we were gonna get along because I lost respect for her, uh, as a boss. And so I was there just about a year before I ended up leaving.
[00:16:09] Joe: Just about a year longer, but definitely longer than six more months.
[00:16:14] Mel: Yes.
[00:16:15] Joe: Right, Paula?
[00:16:16] Paula: Uh…
[00:16:18] Joe: Sorry.
[00:16:19] Paula: That took, took me a moment to figure out what Joe was referencing. I see where
[00:16:22] Mel: he’s going. We-
[00:16:25] Paula: On the, on the Afford Anything podcast, you will hear, you will hear what Joe is referencing, and it was
[00:16:29] Joe: our- You will hear us disagree. Paula’s like, “Take the jump now.” I was like, “Uh, no, take six months and plan it.”
[00:16:36] Joe: But-
[00:16:36] Paula: Yeah,
[00:16:36] Joe: yeah … but seriously, Paula, how, how much longer did you have that job, did you have that boss before you were doing something different?
[00:16:42] Paula: Uh, I, I, I stayed with that kayaking company through the summer, but it was one of those deals where every morning you would call him to see if he had enough work for you, because whether or not he had enough work for all of the guides depended on how many people booked tours.
[00:16:55] Paula: Right. So I kinda gradually started tapering off ’cause I, I was cobbling together other summer work as well. So I kinda gradually started tapering off, doing fewer and fewer shifts per week there and more and more shifts per week at some of my other jobs. You
[00:17:10] Joe: got to work at the Salty Dog, right?
[00:17:13] Paula: I did. I was the Salty Dog.
[00:17:15] Paula: She
[00:17:15] Joe: was the Salty
[00:17:15] Paula: Dog. Yeah. I put on a dog mascot costume- … and danced around. $25 an hour.
[00:17:21] Joe: The fact
[00:17:21] Paula: that- I was the mascot.
[00:17:22] Joe: That’s-
[00:17:23] Paula: Yeah.
[00:17:23] Joe: That’s pretty good.
[00:17:24] Doug: Hold on. So Paula was a dancer? Do you tell people that sometimes? Like, “Yes, I’ve been a dancer in my…” But
[00:17:31] Joe: not what, what you might first
[00:17:33] Doug: think of. It was hot.
[00:17:34] Doug: You could say, “Oh, I was a hot dancer.”
[00:17:36] Paula: It was, it was it was super hot. “
[00:17:38] Doug: Because
[00:17:38] Paula: I was in
[00:17:38] Paula: a
[00:17:39] Paula: costume.” Yeah. In South Carolina in the summer.
[00:17:44] Joe: In South Carolina. Yeah. Oh, it was so hot, so hot. You know, there’s some situations that you have with your boss, and the first thing we can do, although we all admit that this part of the discussion, not our expertise, but we’ve also been around lots of bosses.
[00:17:59] Joe: We’ve interviewed some of the smartest people on Earth about these same things. So it’s not like we haven’t studied this a ton. Give me your opinion of these scenarios in which you’re gonna do one of three things. You’re either gonna stay or you’re gonna fix it or you’re gonna go. All right? So I’m gonna give you a scenario.
[00:18:17] Joe: You tell me whether you’re staying, fix it, or go. OG, boss takes credit for everything. You stay, fix it, or go? They’re taking credit for all your work product. Ooh.
[00:18:26] OG: Can I have a fourth option, malicious compliance?
[00:18:31] Joe: Oh, what does that mean?
[00:18:32] OG: Oh, they’re gonna take credit for everything. You make sure that maybe the credit they take isn’t, uh, so great.
[00:18:38] Joe: Wow. Sabotage, you mean.
[00:18:41] OG: Eh. That’s right. You know, a little, just a little repartee-
[00:18:46] Doug: Yeah,
[00:18:46] OG: or- … as they say.
[00:18:46] Joe: Who d-
[00:18:47] Doug: Yeah, or it’s
[00:18:48] Joe: the- Who needs to quit when you can get fired?
[00:18:49] Doug: Yeah, or it’s the kid who got grounded, and they took the car keys away, so they just make sure that they have a lot of things that require being driven.
[00:18:56] Doug: So it just- Yeah … hoses the parents ’cause they have to drive the kid everywhere. There is that- Yeah … like, all right,
[00:19:01] OG: fine. You, you, you know, there’s the report that the boss takes and says, “This is my work,” and then the bigger boss is asking questions about the report, and you can tell they’re… you know, he’s kinda deflecting to you, and you just go, “You know, I’m not really sure about that one, um, Doug.
[00:19:14] OG: What, um, what did you think about that? When you analyzed the inventory- Right … what did you, what did you come up with?”
[00:19:20] Joe: You could tell by that answer just how little time OG spent in corporate America. Yeah.
[00:19:24] OG: Did you analyze inventory,
[00:19:25] Doug: Doug? You only get to do that once, OG.
[00:19:28] Joe: Yes, do it once and make it really, really good.
[00:19:30] Joe: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Paula, stay, fix it, or go when the boss is taking credit for all the work product.
[00:19:35] Paula: I mean, my, my default answer to pretty much any question you ask is gonna be go. I’m trying to think of how you could fix it. If otherwise it’s the situation is great, and that’s the only thing, then it’s probably fixable.
[00:19:50] Joe: Yeah.
[00:19:50] Paula: But if there are other, you know, if, if that is, like, one of many symptoms, then it’s not.
[00:19:56] Joe: Mel?
[00:19:58] Mel: I… Here’s… My thinking is that I’m probably not the only person they’re taking credit for, and that means that it’s known that they do that. And I’m gonna get comfortable with it, and the job becomes a stepping stone to getting out, but I wanna learn what I can from it.
[00:20:15] Mel: So I, I’m not gonna try and fix it because it’s probably part of their behavior on an ongoing basis. I might try to make them aware of it and see what it does. But I’ll probably live with it until I know that I’ve got something better or I’ve got a plan in place.
[00:20:30] Joe: Much like you said earlier, plot your escape.
[00:20:32] Joe: Yeah. You start plotting your escape. Yeah. Yeah, let’s stick with you. Boss is a huge micromanager.
[00:20:38] Mel: Oh, man. I can’t deal with that. Give me some space to operate, so I probably would go in that case.
[00:20:46] Joe: Paula?
[00:20:47] Paula: I would definitely go. I would last for zero minutes. OG?
[00:20:50] Joe: Oh, just to be
[00:20:52] OG: contrarian, fix it. I mean- … if you’ve got an opportunity to, um…
[00:20:58] OG: You can manage up, too, right? Can’t you?
[00:21:00] Joe: Well, let me ask you about this one ’cause this is an interesting one. Let’s say that you love your boss, but it’s a dying company. Like, in love
[00:21:06] OG: love, or?
[00:21:07] Joe: You could… No, no.
[00:21:08] OG: Like, more than a friend?
[00:21:09] Doug: You say love your boss, not just love your boss.
[00:21:12] Joe: Not the…
[00:21:13] OG: Like, more than a friend?
[00:21:14] Joe: Not the, not the relationship you gotta report to HR. Like in a concert,
[00:21:16] Doug: you mean.
[00:21:16] OG: Oh, okay. Like the Nicole Kidman movie? Like that kinda love or not like that
[00:21:20] Joe: kinda love? Exactly, no, not that kinda love. Oh, okay. Just you’ve got a fantastic boss, but you can see the writing on the wall. The company is dying.
[00:21:27] Joe: Stay because of the great boss?
[00:21:33] OG: Uh, I mean, again, malicious compliance? I don’t know. Like, yeah, I mean, I’d probably hang out and see what’s… Because I think the thing with work is that a lot of it is about relationship. You know, it’s about trying to make sure that the people you hang out with, ’cause you’re there eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours a day, right?
[00:21:49] OG: You know, four, five, six, seven days a week. You kinda wanna like the people you hang out with. So if you’ve got somebody that you like hanging out with and y- everybody gets along, you know, you gotta keep your network going, right? So it’s like if brr it’s doing that little number, y- you know, you don’t wanna bail and then get blacklisted, so you just kinda hang out and maybe the boss will drag you along to the next deal
[00:22:13] Joe: Is that what you do, Paula?
[00:22:15] Joe: Great boss, dying company.
[00:22:17] Paula: I’d stay. Yeah. There’s research that shows that your, the probability of which you like or dislike your work is very, like, highly correlated with your opinion of your boss. So even if the company’s dying, if you, if you love the boss, you’re probably really enjoying that work.
[00:22:35] Joe: It’s like your boss and the five people, the five people around you.
[00:22:37] Joe: Your little team is corporate culture. Mel?
[00:22:40] Mel: I think, I think I’d fight side by side with the boss to try and turn it around, see what I could do. I’m loyal to a fault, so I’d probably stick around and do what I can.
[00:22:49] Joe: How about this one? Let’s swap that completely, Mel. You have a rotten boss. The dragon lady’s your boss, but you’ve got the highest salary of anybody in your department.
[00:22:59] Joe: You’re the highest paid employee. You mean- And you’re at the top… You go to Glassdoor. You go to Glassdoor, right, to compare salaries, and you’re at the top of your area.
[00:23:10] Mel: So you’re asking if I can be bought?
[00:23:13] Joe: Yeah, I didn’t think about it that way, but yes. It probably is.
[00:23:17] Mel: You know, I, I’d probably stay for a little longer than I should.
[00:23:22] Mel: There comes a time where you start to say, “The quality of my life, the quality of my experiences,” as OG was saying, that you’re spending so much time there, matters. But I know for a fact that I’ve kept clients longer than I should have. I’ve stayed in places lo- and relationships longer than I should have because there was some benefit that I was getting, but at some point that train runs its course.
[00:23:44] Joe: What if your boss is horrible, but your coworkers are awesome? Like, you love the other people that you work with.
[00:23:51] Mel: Take them with you.
[00:23:52] Joe: Oh, there we go.
[00:23:54] Mel: You can separate the relationship with the colleagues separate and apart from the, the business part, the, the career part. And I think that, that I would try to keep those relationships separate, that they’re not conditioned on the fact that we work in the same place.
[00:24:08] Joe: I like that. It’s what Tom Peters calls brand you, right? And you’re surrounding yourself with great people. Paula, back to the first one. You’ve got the highest salary that you can imagine having, but your boss just sucks.
[00:24:19] Paula: I, I feel like you’re describing a lot of people in the fire movement right now. A lot of them are high income but dissatisfied at work.
[00:24:27] Joe: Yeah.
[00:24:27] Paula: And so I think the approach there is pick a goal, pick an end date. Maybe it’s a, literally a date. Maybe it’s a net worth. Maybe it’s a level of savings. But pick a number. Make that your number, and then when you hit that number, time to go.
[00:24:44] Joe: Then get the heck out. Would you say that’s probably longer than six months?
[00:24:46] Joe: No, I’m kidding. People gotta go-
[00:24:49] Paula: Yeah, yeah, you gotta listen to this debate between Joe and myself.
[00:24:52] Joe: People gotta go listen to that episode.
[00:24:54] Paula: On the Afford Anything
[00:24:57] Joe: podcast. OG, you know, it strikes me there’s so many things. Like, you know, like Mel said, I, I may stay longer than I should because of the salary or because I have the great boss, whatever the thing might be, but having a bad boss We don’t think enough about what that costs you.
[00:25:14] Joe: What are some of the costs that you think of as a money guy that play into it when you have a bad boss for too long?
[00:25:22] OG: Hmm. It doesn’t seem to me that you would have a bad boss that pays you appropriately. That doesn’t seem like a normal scenario unless- Well,
[00:25:31] Joe: then raises too then, right? I mean,
[00:25:33] OG: that’s what I’m talking about pay Well, that’s what I’m saying, like you’re asking about total cost.
[00:25:35] OG: I’m saying, like, if you have a crappy boss, you’re probably being taken advantage of from a comp standpoint in some way, shape, or form. So certainly the compound effect of compensation. And I wouldn’t even think about that as being the biggest thing. You know, you only have so much energy on a daily basis, right?
[00:25:53] OG: And if you’re fighting this battle of trying to get your you know what to work because it sucks the life out of you, you’re not gonna have time or energy to do the other things that do provide excitement or joy in your life, like work out or eat healthy or have a great relationship at home, or all the other stuff that has to go on to make your life fulfilling.
[00:26:16] OG: I think it’s a bigger issue than just the monetary cost. I think it would just kinda leach into all the other areas of your life and make it just kinda crappy overall. You know? It’s like if you don’t fuel correctly when you work out, right? And Joe, you know this, like, if you’re on a training run, right?
[00:26:32] OG: Let’s say you’re training for another marathon, you get all of your fixed in your body, and you can do another marathon, right? Bionic everything. You’re ready to rock and roll.
[00:26:42] Joe: Something, yeah.
[00:26:42] OG: And so you’re out on a training run, you just do your 13-mile run, right? You know you gotta fuel your body appropriately, or else what happens?
[00:26:49] OG: You make it through, you don’t perform very well, and then you get home, and you eat everything in sight. You have 17 bananas, 47 Oreos, two peanut butter sandwiches, and then you go, “I don’t understand why I’m not losing any weight. I’m working my ass off.” It’s because, you know, you didn’t fuel yourself correctly.
[00:27:03] OG: So if you’re at work and you’re not getting fueled correctly with great work or great relationships or whatever, you’re gonna, you know, on the other side of that, be destructive in the other areas of your life, whether it’s just relationships or health or whatever the case may be.
[00:27:17] Joe: That’s interesting, yeah.
[00:27:18] OG: I, I mean, that’s my take anyway. I don’t know that it’s… That’s not based on any-
[00:27:21] Joe: Well, no …
[00:27:22] OG: OG science. That’s just, uh… Well, I guess it is OG science. It doesn’t make it real science. It’s just OG science.
[00:27:28] Joe: But I don’t think we think about that. You know, we think about separation of work and home, and yet I’m rereading this classic management book, The Goal, that I’ve read several times, and during this book, it spills over.
[00:27:40] Joe: The bad things that happen at work all spill over at home. It all spills over. I gotta imagine, Paula, that’s also networking, right? It spills over into your networking, spills over into your confidence. What does all that cost?
[00:27:51] Paula: Yeah, they’re high costs. It’s a two-way street. Problems at home spill over into work.
[00:27:55] Paula: Problems at work spill over into home. It’s hard having a 360-degree life.
[00:28:01] Joe: I’m thinking your skills might even atrophy a little bit because you’re not, you’re not thinking about it. Like, you know, the only reason, Mel, that you’re picking up the, the, the Strunk and White book is, is because your boss told you to.
[00:28:13] Joe: It’s not because you’re trying to get better at your job. So your skills might not be what they should be.
[00:28:19] Mel: Yeah, it affects everything, and things that we don’t see, and I think OG was the one that was s- saying some of this too, is that, yeah, your skills start to atrophy. Your confidence starts to wane because all of a sudden you don’t think you’re worth that.
[00:28:32] Mel: You don’t own your value, so you’re not negotiating your raises. You’re not taking a strong position ’cause you’re coming from a place of, “I’m not worthy, so this is all I can get.” So you stay in a job longer than you should, and you take less than you should, and you take more abuse than you should. And now, all of a sudden, you’ve spent years, and I know someone in particular who literally spent 30 years unappreciated in a job and, and unvalued in a job thinking that they could never go to another place until they finally did in the last six years and saw, wow, what a difference.
[00:29:05] Mel: Oh. And it’s like, it’s like that splinter you have that’s festering, and you don’t realize how much it’s paining you. And I think that it real- can really cost you if it is eroding the quality of your life and confidence from a salary and career standpoint.
[00:29:23] Joe: And I love that point ’cause now, Mel, you’ve burned that unrenewable resource, time.
[00:29:28] Joe: We could always get more money. We can’t get more time. Well, you know what? In the first half of this, I wanted to go over bad bosses and really what it’s costing you and the thoughts around how to get away from bad bosses. To begin, Stackers, if you’re in this position or if someday you may be in this position, to be able to begin to navigate, we’re gonna ramp this up in the second half.
[00:29:49] Joe: What our money geeks are phenomenal at is helping you on the financial side build your plan. We’re gonna talk about all the things you need to think about before you hit the escape hatch. But we have, at the halfway point of every Friday Stacking Benjamins show, this amazing, and amazing has a lot of different, uh different definitions-
[00:30:10] Joe: amazing trivia competition between Paula OG and Jesse Cramer. And Mel, today you’re playing on Team Jesse Cramer, and that means there’s some good news and some bad news, my friend. Do you want the good news or the bad news?
[00:30:24] Mel: I’m probably going first
[00:30:25] Joe: Actually, even though Jesse’s the defending champ, he is going second because OG got out in front, and it’s been a game of catch up for both Jesse and Paula.
[00:30:37] Joe: So for you, uh, today, we need to know the score to find out where you’re going. So what’s the score so far, Doug?
[00:30:43] Doug: Well, Mel, today you’re in the pursuit vehicle in OG’s Training Day movie that we’re all in right now, uh, because OG has 10 points. You’re in second place with eight points, and Paula’s not given up.
[00:30:58] Doug: She’s got six points. So it is still anybody’s game this year.
[00:31:02] Joe: And imagine what it could be after… Well, no matter what, what it’s gonna be after today.
[00:31:06] Doug: Yeah.
[00:31:06] Joe: So many storylines with just, um, what, now we’re coming up on four months to go, four and a half months to go. All right. OG’s gonna go first. Mel’s gonna go second.
[00:31:16] Joe: Paula gets to go third. I would call that a huge advantage, but it hasn’t been so far. So who knows? But we need a question. Doug, what are we talking about this week?
[00:31:30] Doug: Well, hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. August 7th marks probably the second craziest stunt in modern history. The first is doing a podcast live on YouTube, something I wouldn’t recommend trying at home. After all, I’m a trained professional. But in a close second place was this. In 1974, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit illegally stretched a steel cable between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, and then walked across it.
[00:32:00] Doug: He walked across it. Now, look, I’m not gonna lie, even though I’m a pro at podcasting live, something that is very, very dangerous, I assure you, just getting halfway between those Twin Towers would’ve been enough for me, then I’d probably turn around and walk right back to where I came from. I mean, walking all the way across, that’s just a bridge too far.
[00:32:19] Doug: I’ll admit it, I get nervous climbing the ladder to clean Joe’s mom’s gutter. Last year, I made it to the third rung and decided to update my will. In case you’re wondering, no, you can’t have the El Camino. I bequeathed that to the valet at The Sizzler. Petit made a pretty big show of his antics up there.
[00:32:36] Doug: He spent nearly 45 minutes on that wire, performing for the crowd below and the police officers waiting to arrest him when he finally came down. So here is today’s trivia question: How many times did Philippe Petit cross between the Twin Towers that morning? I’ll be back right after I see if my life insurance covers extremely avoidable decisions.
[00:33:03] Joe: Can’t wait to see what he comes back with. All right. Oh, I accidentally put Mel in the hot seat. We gotta put OG in the hot seat. So how many times did Mr. Pettit, Daredevil Man, go back and forth between the Twin Towers?
[00:33:19] OG: And for clarity purposes, this was the singular event that he did. This was not spanning multiple events.
[00:33:25] OG: You’re, you’re talking about the-
[00:33:26] Joe: One day, one time …
[00:33:27] OG: the one day he went- Correct.
[00:33:28] Doug: Happened August 7th,
[00:33:29] OG: 1974. And there is one, coming back is two. Is two, yeah. There is three, there four, et cetera, et cetera. Okay.
[00:33:37] Joe: That’s right.
[00:33:37] OG: Well, I mean, you guys, I know everybody’s gonna laugh about this, but interestingly enough, this guy’s from my hometown.
[00:33:44] OG: So- And I do think it’s a little unfair ’cause also Paul is in New York, so there’s a little bit of, uh, she probably knows this also. But Pettit, we called him Andy. I don’t know what his first name really was, but we called him- … we called him Andy. Andy made a big deal of this. It was quite a show. And then when he got older, he talked about it, you know, did little…
[00:34:05] OG: He would, like, do it a c- like, in the park. Anyways, everybody knows he went five times because he went and then he came back, and then he went again, and then he came back, and then he went again and was like, “Okay, I’m good.” That’s five. Is
[00:34:18] Joe: that what five times mean? There, back, there, back, and then he- There,
[00:34:21] OG: back
[00:34:21] Joe: back again?
[00:34:21] OG: There, back, there. Ah.
[00:34:23] Joe: I’m glad you defined it.
[00:34:24] OG: Well, yeah, like, as you said, he was performing, and then he was like, “Okay, the cops are over there.” The funny story was he was actually, he was actually, like, trying to get the cops to move. Like, he’d be like, “Ah, I’m over here,” and then he’d run back to the other side.
[00:34:36] OG: Be like, “Ah, psych, I’m over here.” And then finally the New York cops were like, “Wait a second. We’ll just put people on both sides.” And then after that, he was like, “Okay, cool.” So.
[00:34:44] Joe: I’m sure Doug will verify that that’s a true story.
[00:34:46] OG: It was
[00:34:46] Joe: five times. Mel. Mel, uh, OG says five. What do you think about that number?
[00:34:51] Mel: I’m guessing now. I’m saying 250, 300 feet between the towers, 45 minutes up there. I’m doing math. You know, there’s probably a wind. I, you know- It was probably four times.
[00:35:07] Joe: Four times. All right, Paula. We got four, we got five.
[00:35:12] Paula: Wow. There are two ways I could take this. So on one hand
[00:35:17] Joe: Are you gonna now mansplain above and below to us?
[00:35:20] OG: There’s a four and a five, guys. So I can either pick
[00:35:25] Paula: six
[00:35:25] OG: or three.
[00:35:27] Doug: It would’ve been different trivia if it was four and a half. I
[00:35:29] OG: don’t know if you guys know this or not, but six is greater than five, and three is less than four.
[00:35:35] Doug: Yeah. Joe, she’s not mansplaining, she’s shelaborating. Shelaborating.
[00:35:39] Doug: Shelaborating? Yes.
[00:35:39] OG: Shelaborate.
[00:35:42] Paula: Well, Doug, when you first asked your question, I imagined that he walked out to the middle and then just performed a show from the middle, which would mean he would cross only one time.
[00:35:55] Doug: Possibly.
[00:35:56] Paula: Right? So, so when you first asked- Yeah … the question, I was like, “Well, this has gotta be a trick question,” because-
[00:36:01] Doug: That’s still on the table.
[00:36:03] Doug: That, that’s not-
[00:36:03] Paula: Right …
[00:36:04] Doug: that is a possibility of how things-
[00:36:06] Paula: Right … unfolded. Right.
[00:36:08] Doug: Unless you believe OG.
[00:36:09] Paula: So that is one possibility. On the other hand, if I took the over, I would capture so much more upside.
[00:36:17] OG: Including 1,700 trips where he had to- Right … like just run nonstop for 45 minutes.
[00:36:23] Paula: Yeah. Man, I’m gonna take the over.
[00:36:26] Paula: I’m gonna take the over, so six.
[00:36:28] Joe: Six times. That’s the way it works. Four, five, and six. Who’s got this? We’re gonna find out in just a minute. All right, OG, you opened up with five, and, uh, I, I don’t think they actually meant to sandwich you, but that’s the end product of what happened. You feeling good with five?
[00:36:47] OG: It’s a life goal for a lot of people actually, but
[00:36:52] Doug: You cannot tee it up for him like that,
[00:36:54] OG: Joe. You would be surprised at how many solicitations I get on a weekly basis. Out of curiosity, Paula, ’cause I was toying with the idea of six just to play the game, would you have taken seven if I picked six?
[00:37:07] Paula: Honestly, I was hoping that Mel would go higher than you because I was angling…
[00:37:13] Paula: I, there is a part of me that really thinks the answer is one.
[00:37:16] OG: Yeah.
[00:37:16] Paula: And that this is a trick question. Yeah. Doug, uh, Doug, how was that? So if Mel had gone over, then I would’ve taken the under.
[00:37:23] Joe: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:23] Paula: But then with him taking four, then I was like, well, if I did take the under, I’m really boxing myself into a tiny number.
[00:37:31] Mel: Which is exactly why I took the under.
[00:37:33] Paula: Yeah.
[00:37:34] Joe: Was, was to try to get one?
[00:37:35] Mel: Too small of a gap, but I could capture one if it was just one.
[00:37:39] OG: Yeah.
[00:37:39] Joe: Right. Yeah.
[00:37:40] OG: Well, I thought about one also just to put everybody on tilt, but then it’s either one or none, right?
[00:37:45] Joe: Right. Yeah.
[00:37:47] OG: He fell to his death. The answer is zero times.
[00:37:50] Joe: He hit,
[00:37:51] OG: he hit half.
[00:37:52] Doug: Too soon? Nah.
[00:37:53] Joe: Well, we’re not playing Price is Right rules, so it’d depend on how close they got to you, but yeah, if you anchored them at one, then it was gonna be difficult. Let’s see who’s right. Is it, uh, Mel taking the downside, four or below, OG with five on the nose, or Paula, anything above six?
[00:38:07] Joe: Who’s got it, Doug?
[00:38:12] Doug: Hey there, Stackers. I’m world famous podcasting daredevil and guy who has his insurance agent on speed dial, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Before the break, I asked you how many times Philippe, sorry, Andy Pettit crossed between the Twin Towers. Now, here’s the crazy part. He didn’t just walk across. He laid down.
[00:38:31] Doug: He danced. He knelt to admire the view. He even saluted the police who were waiting to arrest him. See, that’s where he lost me. The first crossing, yeah, amazing. The second, still pretty incredible, but eventually you’re not doing it for personal growth, self-actualization, and enlightenment anymore, dude.
[00:38:48] Doug: You’re an attention hound. You’re like, “Hey, look at me. I can walk like 9,000 feet in the air.” Like, come on, man. Just go to the community pool and show off your back hair like the rest of us. I mean, after a while, even the pigeons had to be saying, “Buddy, we get it. Let’s move this along.” So how many times did old Philippe walk back and forth between the Twin Towers?
[00:39:07] Doug: Well, the correct answer was Four more times than what Mel guessed, three more times than what OG guessed, just two more times than what Paula guessed, making
[00:39:24] Joe: Paula today’s winner because the correct answer is eight crossings. Wow. Unbelievable. What is going on here, Doug? What is going on with this mid-season surge from Paula Pant?
[00:39:29] Doug: Nuts.
[00:39:29] Joe: She’s on
[00:39:30] Doug: a run.
[00:39:30] Joe: No idea. And we can’t blame it like we were early on. Like, we had Sarah Catherine Gutierrez, and she got you two points at the start of the year, so we did blame it for a while, and you had some great people who filled in.
[00:39:40] Joe: Yeah. But you’ve been doing this all on your own.
[00:39:42] Paula: Right? It only took a few years- … but I’m, I’m starting to catch on.
[00:39:47] Joe: She’s finally figured, “Hey, this, uh, this whole thing is actually… I can do this.”
[00:39:52] Paula: Little bit of a late bloomer, but I get there.
[00:39:54] Joe: Gaining confidence. And you know why you have confidence? It’s ’cause you don’t- Why is that?
[00:39:57] Joe: you don’t have a bad boss. Because you don’t have a bad boss. So- Look at
[00:40:01] Paula: that segue.
[00:40:02] Joe: Paula, let’s help people build their escape plan. Your boss isn’t changing. Your company ain’t changing. What should a stacker begin doing today to get that exit plan Mel was talking about?
[00:40:13] Paula: Pay off any high-interest debt.
[00:40:15] Paula: That means anything with a double-digit interest rate. Save, I know this is cliche advice, but save cash reserves, like six months worth of your spending, at minimum. Keep your fixed costs as low as possible. So for example, if you’re a renter, when you go to renew your lease, if you’re living in a place that’s kind of expensive, downsize.
[00:40:38] Paula: Get a much cheaper place. If you’ve got a car payment, get rid of it and buy a clunker that has no payment associated with it, that you can just buy in cash. All of that’s gonna give you the bandwidth to be able to leap.
[00:40:49] Joe: Mel, what do you add to that?
[00:40:52] Mel: I totally agree with everything she said, having the margin and all that.
[00:40:55] Mel: I think there’s a couple things to prepare if you can, and that is, first off, what skills do you need to be more valuable in the marketplace to start creating something to build skills and value? The second thing, I think this is something that every employee or everyone should be thinking about, is, is that start to think of yourself as a personal brand, and what kind of reputation can you build that precedes you?
[00:41:19] Mel: The, the things you do and how you do things and all of that allows you to be more marketable for the n- the next opportunity and entitled to a larger compensation. So I think beyond the financial elements that Paula just said, start to look at your skillsets, the value in the marketplace, the things that people are paying for.
[00:41:39] Mel: What things can you get done while you’re still employed on their dime, if you will, so you’re more qualified and more valuable to g- get in the marketplace. You’ll get your job faster, and you get paid more.
[00:41:50] Joe: That’s interesting. So if HR allows you to, let’s say, courses at a local college or university and they will subsidize that training, you’re saying go for that first.
[00:42:01] Mel: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:42:03] Joe: Uh, OG, what else you adding to that?
[00:42:04] OG: My biggest one is not necessarily preparation, but just actually- Doing something, taking action. If you’re working at a company, unless it’s some very specialized work that you do, and your environment sucks, frigging, like, put your application somewhere else.
[00:42:24] OG: Like, what are you doing? Like, why are we wasting any time? I’m not saying you need to quit your job tomorrow, but probably unless you’re, like, super high up, although I don’t know the… I don’t know this to be true, I just think it is, you’re probably not getting a bunch of, like, recruiting phone calls along the way.
[00:42:41] OG: You have to go actively do something to facilitate the change, and I think preparation’s a really good idea, but you can prepare till the cows come home. You still have to, like, brush up your resume and post that thing on a job site, you know what I mean? You still need to hire a recruiter and get out there and start shopping jobs.
[00:42:58] OG: Now, if you transition to being an entrepreneur, that’s maybe a little different. I, I mean, obviously different circumstances, I get all that, but my goodness, just do something different. Put a stake in the ground and frigging go.
[00:43:11] Joe: And this is interesting because as Mel was talking about, you know what, look at what skills in the marketplace are, I feel like even if you have a good boss right now, shouldn’t we be doing those things today?
[00:43:24] Mel: Yeah. Yeah, I think we should.
[00:43:25] Joe: It just, to me, makes a, makes a bunch of sense that my boss changes tomorrow, I need to… It’s almost like, Paula, we talk about having a go bag, right?
[00:43:33] Paula: Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:34] Joe: What is your go bag? Well, maybe, you know, let’s call it career insurance. Let’s say that your job’s fine now, but you might get a new boss tomorrow.
[00:43:42] Joe: Mm-hmm. What are some of the things you should be doing today as career insurance to make sure that you’re more ready to go when the bell rings?
[00:43:49] Paula: I, I think it’s everything that we’ve just discussed. It’s high savings, low debt, and keep building your skill set.
[00:43:57] Joe: How much do you think mentors play into this?
[00:44:00] Paula: Mentors are important, but often mentorship isn’t something, real mentorship isn’t something that’s formalized. It isn’t some program that a company or a professional organization starts. For a true mentorship to form, it has to be an organic bond. And it often happens almost unconsciously. Like, I think there’s a very innate human drive to teach and to learn.
[00:44:25] Paula: And so if you’re connected to a handful of people and they s- they see you kind of as a younger version of themselves, and, you know, you recognize that they’ve got something to teach, and they recognize that you are a worthy protege, I think that sort of happens naturally.
[00:44:39] Joe: It is interesting though, because I feel like we start thinking about that stuff when we start thinking about changing careers, and doing it sooner is probably a great idea.
[00:44:48] Joe: Mel, I want to shine a light on something that you do, which I have always admired about you, my friend, which is that you obviously already work for yourself. You’re always looking, though, for business opportunities, and I think that when we talk about brand you, to me, you espouse a lot of that. I get a text from Mel maybe once every three months.
[00:45:07] Joe: Let’s put it this way. I get a text from Mel often enough to know it isn’t luck, and it’s not happenstance. You know, salespeople call it the Rolodex. They might call it now the CRM, right? The, the customer relationship management. Mel, can you give us a little bit of that secret sauce? ‘Cause you’re not looking for a new boss, but you’re certainly always looking for a new opportunity.
[00:45:27] Mel: I’m always looking for an opportunity to serve ’cause that’s kind of like my love language if, if you wanna call it that. It’s just to matter. And so one practice I have every single morning, I, I take my dogs for a four-mile walk, and on that four-mile walk, my time is spent thinking about the things I’m grateful for but also the people that are in my life or around that I wanna connect more with.
[00:45:51] Mel: And I literally will send a text or a video or an audio to them from that walk. And I do that as a practice probably three to four times a week, uh, to different people that I wanna keep good contact with ’cause it’s so easy to allow the, the text or, or the distance, the tyranny of distance to get between that relationship.
[00:46:17] Mel: And you and I, we had some time to, to chat before, and I go, “We can go along our path and continue to have a friendship or a, a relationship,” not with any idea of some transaction down the road, but just by virtue of enriching my life with other people and me hopefully being able to enrich their life and staying in contact and, and deepening that.
[00:46:38] Mel: And so I, I made it a practice to do that on a regular basis, and I have that time and space in my day because of the way my day is structured to make that happen. I know some people that will do something similar, and they’ll just pick one day out of the week, and they’ll pick one or two people on that day to make sure that they’re gonna contact.
[00:46:57] Mel: Not going through a Rolodex for transactions, but to go through a, if there’s such a thing anymore, a phone book or a contact list for a relationship because when something happens and you need to make a change or you wanna make a change, then you, you might say, “Hey, man, do you know of anyone?” And they’re gonna be more apt to help because it’s not that they owe you.
[00:47:19] Mel: It’s because they care about you, and you’ve got that relationship
[00:47:23] Joe: It is interesting because if you did do it when you needed something, then it is tra- then it feels transactional. You know what I mean? Yeah. It is completely. And it’s only at times like these that we’re talking about today that a lot of the time people will reach out is because of the fact like, “Oh, I, I finally need something.”
[00:47:41] Joe: So it’s better to have that parachute ahead of time. OG, when somebody… Let’s say a stacker got laid off yesterday. We talked about the things that they needed to do to get ready to leave. What are the things we need to do right after we leave the company?
[00:47:59] OG: Well, if it’s a sudden change, and you said laid off, I think the initial instinct is to like burn everything to the ground.
[00:48:07] OG: Like, “Oh, my God, I gotta cancel everything. I gotta…” You know, and I think the, the reality is, is probably you can go just a skosh slower than that. Take a breath, slow down on your decision-making. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to make any changes, but I think you’ve got just a smidge more time than you gotta do everything by nightfall.
[00:48:25] OG: But I think it does make sense to kind of inventory everything. When we talk about budgeting, you know, it seems like everybody’s got like things that are in the budget that are unmovable, the proverbial sacred cows that we’re, you know, “I can’t… You know what I mean? I can’t do that. Like, I gotta have the, you know, whatever.”
[00:48:40] OG: And when you have a radical change, you know, everything needs to be on the table. Everything needs to be built up from scratch from the bottom, and you start with housing and food and, you know, you know, like shelter really, food and utilities, you know, water and electricity basically, and you start building it around there.
[00:48:56] OG: And as you’re able, you can add those so-called luxuries back in, but when you stop looking at things and saying, “I have to have my car,” in s- instead say, “I need transportation to work,” that changes the mental image a little bit of, well, that’s a little different. That could be, you know, a bus. That could be subway, right?
[00:49:20] OG: You know, Paula, you don’t have a car. You live in New York City. It’s not unheard of to not have a car. In fact, it’s probably more obnoxious to have a car, right?
[00:49:28] Paula: Yeah.
[00:49:29] OG: And so you-
[00:49:29] Paula: Especially in Manhattan, yeah.
[00:49:30] OG: Yeah. Scoreboard. So if you’re like, okay, if you, you, “I don’t have the money for the subway,” well, then you’re walking or you get a bicycle.
[00:49:38] OG: You know, like, there’s a lot of ways to get around. You know, it would be different in the suburbs of Dallas obviously than in New York City. So I think the biggest thing is recognizing that, A, you’ve got a few minutes to take a breath, and then B, as you’re building the life back up, you can Have to start everything from scratch and evaluate everything piece by piece
[00:49:58] Joe: There is a tendency though, having been through this with a lot of clients back in the day, Paula, for people to kind of panic, and I love what OG said, “Take your time.
[00:50:06] Joe: Don’t do rash things.” But to Mel’s point, you also might not have the skill set that you hope that you have. Now is a great time for training. Let’s say you have that emergency fund in place, that great six months emergency fund, but you realize, “Man, if I had these skills, if I had XYZ skills, I would be more marketable.”
[00:50:27] Joe: Is it more important to preserve your ability to eat another day or to gain those skills? So do you take the class and pay the fee, or do you Not take the class, hope that you can get hired someplace to begin bringing money in, and instead preserve your liquidity
[00:50:48] Paula: Well, I would start with the question: Is the class necessary to gain the skill?
[00:50:53] Paula: There are certain skills that you can gain by either YouTube University, by teaching yourself, by doing, by working as an assistant or an intern for somebody else. Like, there are a whole bunch of skills that you can learn either for free or learn by doing. And depending on what skill it is, I would start by asking the question: Is this something that I can learn on my own in one of those other ways?
[00:51:21] Joe: It’s interesting, Mel, because I think this is what you do with your CPA background, too, is what OG and Paula both talked about, was a little bit of challenging assumptions. It sounds like challenging assumptions should be a big part of what you’re , what you’re doing now that you’re laid off.
[00:51:36] Mel: Absolutely. I heard someone talk, and it was a really interesting idea of this realization of what we’ve done because of the internet.
[00:51:44] Mel: ‘Cause the internet puts the most popular things at the top of the list when you do a search. Doesn’t mean that they’re right, but what it’s doing is the internet, if it’s gonna list out all the most popular search results based on a question you ask, and you don’t ask a, a challenging question, you’re gonna get the most popular answers, which basically means that it’s confirmation bias to begin with, and if we’re not gonna challenge assumptions or start critically thinking and saying, “What’s a better way?”
[00:52:14] Mel: And I love what OG said. He said, “If we were gonna rebuild this from the ground up, zero base, I need transportation. That doesn’t mean that it’s a car. It could be the bus. It could be walking.” That we start to look at the things that are in our life that we are taken for granted and believing that that’s the only way.
[00:52:34] Mel: And when we start to challenge it, we might see that there’s a better way to do things, and it’s actually better for us, and it’s gonna move us e- even further. So I think that critical thinking a- and assumption challenges are huge, especially when you have these life-changing events that get you to start thinking differently about, “Well, where do I wanna go, and why?”
[00:52:55] Joe: That’s an interesting answer, Mel, especially with your CPA background. You know, CPAs challenge the math, but challenging the assumptions gives you a much, much better… Like, do we need to do the math in the first place? What math should we truly be doing? I love that, and I think that’s a great place to end.
[00:53:10] Joe: Let’s find out what’s going on where all of you are. Not only is Mel on stages, like I said at the start of the show, and has a book called Building Your Money Machine, but he also has a podcast where he talks about building your money machine. So what’s coming up on the Building Your Money Machine podcast?
[00:53:26] Mel: Well, we’ve got a couple of episodes coming up, uh, challenging assumptions about-
[00:53:30] Joe: Excellent …
[00:53:30] Mel: about the, the fact that retirement isn’t an asset game, it’s a cash flow game, and if we don’t understand how that dynamic plays out, then we’re not ready to retire.
[00:53:41] Joe: Free cash flow is everything, right?
[00:53:42] Mel: Yep.
[00:53:43] Joe: Yeah. OG, what do you got going on this weekend, my friend?
[00:53:47] OG: It is the final weekend before everybody goes back to school.
[00:53:50] Joe: Party weekend at the OG house, then.
[00:53:52] OG: It is a little bit of chaos, and then a week from now is, uh, Alex goes back to A&M, so we go back to a, a two-kid household instead of a three in a week.
[00:54:02] Joe: It goes too fast, though, doesn’t it?
[00:54:04] OG: Eh. Eh.
[00:54:08] OG: We’ll see
[00:54:09] Joe: Oh, spoken like a dad. Paula Pant, besides you and I arguing over whether it’s one month or six months, what’s coming up on the Afford Anything show?
[00:54:19] Paula: Well, that, actually. I would direct everyone to that episode. So, uh, the title of that episode is, Should We Retire in Our 40s with 4 Million? But the question where Joe and I really, like, go to blows is not that question, it’s the middle question of the episode.
[00:54:35] Paula: A caller named Olivia has a side hustle. She’s got proof of concept. She’s been growing the side hustle for a while. She’s got a six-month emergency fund. Should she quit her job? Joe and I, like… So this is the first, like, rough and tangle that we’ve, uh, done in
[00:54:52] Joe: a while. Yeah, wow, we’ve had a few, but this is the first one in a long time.
[00:54:55] Joe: And it’s one of those rarer episodes where you can hear Paula Pant be wrong. It’s really cool.
[00:55:01] Joe: And that’s at the Afford Anything podcast.
[00:55:03] Mel: What if you are both wrong?
[00:55:05] Joe: Oh, come on, Mel.
[00:55:07] Mel: Ooh. I’m just saying. I mean, you know, challenge assumptions, right?
[00:55:10] Joe: That, that is- … that is, that is a good point. Well, go listen to it, Mel, and tell me, write me. I will, I will. That’s your next time walking your dog, that’s your mission.
[00:55:19] Joe: All right. Hey, thanks to you, Stackers, for hanging out with us, all of you who hung out with us today, and, uh, made the show on YouTube. We’re generally here Mondays at 3:30 Eastern Time. Do the math on when you are, w- w- in wherever, whatever part of the country or the world that you’re in. We’d love to have you.
[00:55:37] Joe: We love seeing some of the comments, and we love helping people live as they watch the show. But if you know somebody who is, either has a bad boss or, man, they are looking for the exit, give them this episode as well. All right. That’s gonna do it for today, except this. Doug, you’re bringing it home, man.
[00:55:54] Joe: What should we have learned on today’s episode?
[00:55:56] Doug: Well, Joe, first take some advice from our special panelist, Mel Abraham. You should always be looking for ways to create your own personal brand. What’s different about both your skill set and how you do your work that makes you more marketable? Second, if you’re in an untenable position with your boss or job, don’t forget Paula’s advice on what to do to prepare yourself for quitting.
[00:56:20] Doug: Start reducing expenses, and focus on any debt that has a double-digit interest rate. But the big lesson, don’t let Joe’s mom hear that you only made it to the third rung of the ladder while cleaning gutters last year. Now she knows the gutters never got cleaned, and she’ll double dog dare you to get to rung number four.
[00:56:38] Doug: It’s a double dog dare. I mean, what am I gonna do? I gotta take her up on it. Thanks to Mel Abraham for joining us today. You’ll find Mel’s book, Building Your Money Machine, wherever books are sold. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. Thanks to Paula Pant for hanging out with us today.
[00:56:57] Doug: You’ll find her San Fran-tabulous podcast, Afford Anything, wherever you listen to finer podcasts. And finally, thanks also to OG for joining us. Looking for good financial planning help? Head to stackingbenjamins.com/og for his calendar. This show is the property of SB Podcast LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
[00:57:22] Doug: 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.
[00:57:41] 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
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