Did you recently come into some money? Are you expecting to in the near future? How have you treated “found money” in the past? With millions of Americans receiving their income tax refund, today we discuss what smart Stackers do with “found” money.
Not only that, but we also dive deeper into tips for how to decide ahead of time what you will do with any windfalls that come your way throughout the year, so you don’t have to worry about blowing investing the entire amount on a brand new El Camino.
Be sure to stick around for Doug’s this-day-in-baseball-history-themed trivia question!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- IRS has $1 billion in 2020 tax refunds. Time is running out to collect. (The Washington Post)
Our TikTok Minute
Doug’s Trivia
- Which athlete signed a groundbreaking contract on this day in 1947?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- Stacker Nick is preparing to transition from active military to the civilian world and has a question about the taxation of Roth conversions.
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Tune in on Friday when our roundtable will talk about retirement. When’s the right time to retire?
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: The Important Role of Kindness and a Little Math When Stacking Benjamins (SB1500).
Episode transcript
Select or type to add speaker
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I guess you should have called.
I did call
earlier when using the phone. Earlier. When was that? ━ Or later? When Then I, uh, left. Left a message.
A message. What number did you call? 2 4 9 0 5 6 7 8. I
can’t hear you. You’re trailing off. And did I catch a niner in there where you’re calling from a walkie-talkie?
No, it was cordless. Mm-Hmm.
You know what, don’t not here. Not now. ━━━━─━━━━━─━━━━━─━━━━━━
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s ━ the Stacking Benjamin Show. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and in our headlines, millions are owed tax refunds from 2020. Is that you? You’re running out of time to claim it. We are diving into best uses for tax refunds, windfalls, and found money on today’s show, plus some horror stories of what not to do if you hit a jackpot, score a bonus claiming estate or are owed a refund.
And in our TikTok minute, you know what? You’re just gonna have to hear this one to believe it. Plus we’ll hear why stacker. Nick said, you know what? I’d better call Saul, see hi in og, ━─ and of course I’ll hit you up with some contractual trivia. And now. Two guys who hit it out of the park every episode That’s debatable.
It’s Joe and OG. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Oh, come on, Doug. At least
a solid double
get. You gotta give us a solid double. Yeah, I’ll give you a I will, I’ll give you solid doubles. But ground rule double sometimes it’s because the left fielder bobs it ─━━
so reached on error as the guy who, who scores baseball for our varsity baseball team. I can assure you some of them are reached on error.
Oh yeah. You know, ─── no hits five runs.
Right.
The five, the number of legit hits in high school baseball is pretty
low. It’s a little lower than the kids think. Yeah, right. ─
Yeah. Did your kids have this when they first played, uh, little League had, uh, what they called the anti Merry-Go-Round Rule. Oh yeah. The Anti Merry-Go-Round rule was none of the kids can field.
None of the kids can throw. So you weren’t allowed to take an extra base when there was an overthrow or an error and uh, well just to make sure that you didn’t have this, uh, inning that never ended.
They had to implement or re-Clarify that rule in the little league that, that I coached in because ━─ as long as that ball was moving, kids were running.
So we just kept on running. Doug running was running it up. Oh yeah. We’re winning games like eight to two. Yeah. You
were that coach?
Yeah. Nice. Well, it was in the book, like as long as the ball is moving. Yeah. I mean, if it was an overthrow and it win ob then yeah, dead ball won base. But, and so I was used to tell my team, so the team that throws it the most will lose.
I guarantee it. And it’s true at every level of baseball. Hey
everybody, welcome to How to Be That Parent podcast. I. I’m, I’m Joe
Sulci.
Hi. I knew I was gonna take a hit for that average Joe buddy on
X. We are so happy you’re here. You found us. Sit back, relax because we’re gonna talk about today OG a problem that a lot of people have and that is that we have this time of year, it comes up every year.
I wait and I wait and I wait for the fantastic tax refund check so I can blow it again, and we don’t wanna do that this year. ─
No. All right. ━━━
Hold on. This is not going in the direction I thought it was going in.
It’s
not even a double Doug that
was even at the end of the world. If you do, it’s kind of fun, right?
Then the money’s cool. You can burn
one once in a while. Yeah. So what I think that not only is there kind of an order of operations about how to think about this, obviously, and so does og, I also think that this is, this is a great time for you. If things haven’t been going right for you and it’s your first time listening to a financial podcast, you know what?
We’re gonna help you settle up and get this thing moving. But, uh, before that, we have a couple sponsors for this show to help make it free. So stick with us for just a couple minutes and, uh, we’re gonna get this party started. ──── Thanks for everybody hanging out with us through that. We have a fantastic headline to kick this off.
So let’s go. ━
Hello Darlings, and now it’s time for your favorite part of the show. Our Stacking Benjamins headlines
headline today comes from the Washington Post. This is from, uh, Michelle Singletary, and, uh, Michelle, of course, a columnist over there, their financial columnist. Michelle’s got some good news guys for people across the nation.
The IRS has $1 billion in your ── 2020 tax refunds, but time is running out to collect it. The window to claim it is the middle of next month, May 17th. Michelle writes, ─ typically the IRS doesn’t have to chase taxpayers to claim a refund. Like, have you ever No, no, no. Keep my money IRS. Please keep it. ── She says, as soon as the filing season opens, millions of Americans submit their 10 40.
Such an hassle. Yeah, right. Oh, more money. What am I gonna do with that? To collect what they’re owed as of March 15th of this year, ── the average refund was $3,109, which is up 6% from the same period last year. But there are always folks who never make it to the filing part ─ because there’s so many people OG, that haven’t even filed their taxes because they know they were gonna get a refund that they don’t realize that, uh, there’s a billion dollars sitting out there.
I was talking to a friend of a friend, uh, a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking about their kid who is 20 something years old and kinda works some odd jobs, doesn’t really have a full-time, you know, full-time, 40 hour week deal, but still makes some money and gets paid. And I said, well, you know, he’s under the limit so we don’t really file taxes for him.
And I was thinking, why wouldn’t you do that? I said, ah, it’s all the paperwork and stuff. I said, well. Even if you’re single with no exemptions, you’re getting some taxes withheld from your check every paycheck, why would you not go even, you know, you’re under the taxable limit, whatever it is, 1500 thousand dollars or $13,000. ─
If you make that, you’re getting all your federal taxes back. Why? Why wouldn’t you go file your 10 40 easy form? You can do it for free on the US website or, or some of these other tax preparing websites. If it’s a simple tax form like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and you get your money back, why would you not do that?
And if you don’t want the money to Doug’s point, you’re so rich, he doesn’t need it, why not just just check the box that says apply it to next year? Like you can keep rolling it. If you really feel benevolent to the IRS and you’re like, listen, I just wanna help out the national debt. I’m gonna let them hold down my money a little longer.
I don’t need it. You just check the box that says, apply this to next year, and then you can keep doing that for a long time. I love
this equation though of, I don’t
understand why you wouldn’t
do it. No. Well me neither, but, but well, maybe I do. I mean, if I seek to understand, to go back to the beginning of what you said, people are like, oh, but the forms, and so I think about the value of my time and I think that is a worthy thing to think about.
What is my time worth ’cause ’cause you see people pick up nickels, right? Who cuts coupons anymore? We haven’t talked about any coupon cutting thing in forever because you’re saving, those are coupons, but yeah, you’re saving 30 cents,
50 cents ──
coupons. We could have a whole episode just on that. Yeah.
We had John correct us on how I said Boise. ───
Boise. Yeah, right. Sorry, it’s Boise. What is it? Boys?
Boise. Boise. Did you go through puberty?
Ju Joe ━─━─── at the library? ━━ I
pooed during my puberty. I dunno. ──━──━─ I dunno. But, uh, yes.
Sorry about, I mean, at some level you’ve gotta kinda weigh the cost benefit of your time, but there’s some other effects there. Like how does, how does not file, I don’t know the answer to this.
How does not filing affect your reconciliation with Social Security? For example, you know, obviously you’re still getting your W2, you’re choosing not to file your tax return. Obviously the Social Security administration’s getting it, but there’s no ability for you to reconcile that, to make sure that what is being reported to the Social Security Administration is really what actually happened.
To make sure that those numbers match, which could affect you down the line and God forbid you actually owe money. ─ Now you’re in a bigger world of hurt, right? Like if you don’t file taxes and you owe money, there’s penalties and interest and, and failure to file penalties by not filing your income taxes on time.
And ─ how do you know that you’re not gonna owe money if you don’t file?
I, well, I didn’t even think about all those ROIs. I mean the, just the social security addition alone, depending on, we can’t project what our work history’s gonna be. Hopefully we earn more than some of those people that you’re, you’re talking about that are early in their career.
But that adds to it. But even without that, listen to this ── nationwide, the average midpoint for the unclaimed refunds for 2020 $932. And she makes a great point. Your she means half of those are higher than that, right? I mean, that is the median. So half are higher. And in two states, New York and Pennsylvania, if you’re listening to us and you’re there, the median is a little over a thousand dollars.
So it’s actually even higher. But let’s say you’re the median. How long, if it’s your first time filling out a 10 40 easy, ─ how long is this actually gonna
take? Oh my gosh. 15 minutes. Yeah,
but let’s give somebody the benefit of the doubt. Doubt. Let’s say it takes two hours. You’re still at $500 an hour
og. ─━───
Right, right. And, and it’s not like when you and Doug had to do your tax returns the first time when it was like stone and chisel and you know, it was really kind of archaic. I now,
I was like, what? How were you there? ─
Wow. How did, like how did you know ━━━ I was in the corner the whole time? Doritos all over.
You don’t remember talking to me. It was Fritos. It was quite the, ─ quite the party as I recall. You clearly don’t, but
I was doing it on top of a
surfboard. ── Yeah. With apps nowadays, you don’t even have to type in your own stuff. I was talking to a client a couple of days ago about their 10 99, which has the 10 99 is the thing you get when you have like all of your stock trades and it aggregates all of your gains and losses and you report those on your tax form if you have a regular non-retirement brokerage account.
And I said, oh my gosh, how long did it take? Did you import it from Schwab? And he said, no, there’s a code on the 10 99 when you’re on TurboTax. You like literally say, I got my 10 99 from Schwab. Here’s the code. ━ It imports it on there. It’s incredible. You don’t even have to do it. You take a picture of your W2 with your phone, it goes, is all this info correct?
And you go, yes, Bing. You get your 900 bucks. Just like that. So
my scanner this year, og, maybe it’s not 900, my scanner to your point, felt so lonely this year because of exactly what you’re talking about. ’cause I, you know, I got the
OCR stuff of just being able to take pictures. It was amazing. ─ Mm-Hmm. So yeah, two hours, three hours.
My gosh. If you’re owed some money, go, go get your cash. If you don’t need it, send it to me. ━
Duh. I’m gonna ask the dumb question ’cause that’s the only reason you guys have me around here. ─ Is the only reason you have money from the IRS not sent to you because you haven’t completed that tax. Or is it possible that there’s money out there owed to you because maybe you didn’t do your taxes thoroughly enough and they, they only return to you what you. ──
Like based on how you filled out your tax form that year?
That’s a really good question. Obviously the IRS knows what your tax information should be. It’s like that joke that was going around with the, you know, the IRS guy going, you know, you need to do all this stuff. I dunno how to do it. I don’t dunno if I did it right.
It’s like, well, we know. Well can you just tell me No, you have to do it right. What if I get it wrong? We’re just testing you. Yeah. You know, then you go to jail. It’s like, well, I don’t know the answer to this either. I don’t, I don’t know whether or not they would, you know, send you extra money if they said, guess what, you forgot to file this.
Let me put it this way, if you don’t put a credit that you’re entitled to the IR RSS doesn’t say like, we know that you have a kid. Right. You didn’t put the credit for the kid on here. You, you’re, you should get another 2000 bucks. They’re not gonna do that by any stretch. But, but if you forget a W2 or you forget a, that you had a job from, you know, January and February and forgot to include that, I think they’ll send you, uh, they’ll send you an amended form.
So they’ll send you a letter in the mail. They never email and they never call. So you will never get an email from the IRS. You will never get a phone call from the IRS period. Full stop. They ─ mail regular USPS mail or they show up with guns at your front porch. Those are the only two interactions you can have with an IRS person.
That’s a wide field goal between those two. ─ It is. But they don’t send you an email letting you know they’re coming and they never call and say, if you send us a check for 5,000, we promise not to show up next Tuesday. They will just show up. That’s how they work. But they will send you a form Doug to your point and say, we think that you did this incorrectly.
If you agree with our, our calculation sign here and send this form back. Uh, but they won’t add credits. I, I don’t think I, I, I mean, ’cause you’re electing that, uh, affirmative election saying, I’m entitled this because of these circumstances.
I wanted to start there because that’s free money on the table.
Possibly for some of our stackers or maybe the kids or some of our stackers who might have thought, you know what, it might not be worth the time. Probably is worth the time, but for all of our stackers at one point or another, hopefully, fingers crossed, you come across a windfall. And certainly a lot of people treat a tax refund as a windfall, not truly windfall.
It’s your money that you let the IRS hang on to, but you treat it as this time when, when it’s money that comes outta the air and I can just blow this money. So I wanted to transition into this, which is kind of our standard operating procedure for what’s our order of operations when we think about using a tax refund, well, new
car ━━━ timeshare, something with
payments, big screen TV to start off.
Yes. Does it have payments? Yes. No. If if yes, keep going.
If yes, continue. Can I rent
a sofa
with this money? ──━━ How many months of TV payments is this? Well, and I think
that’s funny
because that was OG exactly where I’m going. In my order of operations in my head, if I can use this to pay down some debt, that’s probably ─ job one of what I do with my tax refund.
I. Yeah,
I mean a hundred percent. If you’ve overpaid over withheld in your taxes, it’s not necessarily the government’s money, it’s probably your money. Uh, unless again, back to the credit thing, in which case, you know, you should calculate that ahead of time and adjust your withholdings, but you get some money.
Obviously, we want to use it for the best purposes possible. Debt pay down. If you have credit card consumer debt, which right now is averaging 24% interest is a pretty good place, a pretty good ROI on that cash. What
about mortgage debt? If I got a mortgage at
3.5%? Yeah, I mean, it depends on your goals. I, what I like to do is, any found money, and technically I would count this as found money, even though it’s not really found right, you didn’t get a surprise bonus at work.
You, you know, you didn’t inherit some money from somebody. This is still your cash, but it’s, you know, it’s out of your budget. It’s out of your cash flow. I decide in advance at the beginning of the year how I wanna split up, found money for the rest of the year, and I, I put it in three different buckets.
I either save it. For something in the future. I spend it on something fun today, or I use it for debt pay down to aggressively pay down something like a mortgage. Yeah. And so the way that we think about it is split those percentages in your mind in advance. For us, we do 40% toward the mortgage pay down.
We put 40% in our investing account and 20% we blow on whatever we feel like, you know, whether it’s a vacation or the new microwave that we need or something, you know, like whatever we can just write a check for and be okay with. And we decide that in advance because then there’s not that decision fatigue of every single time you have an extra 500 bucks or extra a thousand bucks or extra tax refund of $5,200 or whatever you’ve already decided in advance where that money’s gonna go.
You get the surprise bonus in August. You had to, you know, you close the deal and the boss says, here, good job. Here’s 20 grand. You don’t have to like go, oh my gosh, how do I wanna spend this? You go, oh, it’s real simple. 40 40, 20 or 50, 40 10. Like whatever, however you wanna do it for you in your, in your family’s goals.
And it makes it super simple. Is it really efficient to pay off a mortgage at 3% when you could invest some money? No, it’s not. It’s not, but that’s not my goal right now. My goal is to aggressively pay down my house regardless of the interest rate, but I don’t wanna do it at the expense of other things either.
I wanna put all of my money on my house, pay down, and then be ticked off. I don’t have any vacation money or
never saved a dime for retirement. Yeah.
Or wishing I would’ve invested some, you know? Yeah. We just picked that 40, 40 20 thing, because that works for us and it allows us to make the decision one time at the beginning of the year, apply it to every other found money scenario. ─
And have no, no rets. That’s a tattoo I’ve got. ── I do
love, ─ I love the idea of the 20 in there, even though it’s not a hundred percent optimized, because what, what I found og and I don’t know if your experience is the same, if you don’t have this, I don’t know, you know this, um, uh, valve where you can have a little fun with that money.
People that over optimize, end up making really dumb decisions later on. I’ve found that people, when they first start off with their financial plan, they get super excited and they’re a hundred percent ramen noodles, ramen noodles, ramen noodles, and then they make a really dumb decision because, you know, at some point you’re like, oh, I’m sick of this. ──
I need a boat. Like, I just need a, and then I deserve, yes. Instead of doing something a little bit stupid with the money, you do something really, really dumb. ────
I just realized this is why I eat a whole sleeve of Oreos at 11 o’clock every day after I’ve been trying to diet and fast. Yeah, by 11 o’clock, I’m like, look, I hardly ate anything all day. ───────
Gimme that sleeve
of Oreo. I deserve a sleeve of Oreos today because I’ve, I’ve been good all day and if I go to sleep now, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, I’ll be hungry. It’s not good for sleep. It’s not good for recovery because I’m a fine physical specimen, so I should eat some ice ice cream right now.
Can that sugar and
carbs before, before
I go to bed? ━━ Way, way worse.
Before I, before I go to bed is exactly the hashtag perfect. Hashtag doctor recommended. I mean, obviously you’re trying to, you know, a little tongue in cheek there, Doug, but that’s exactly right. That’s why, that’s why diets fail. That’s why workout plans fail because you go, alright, it’s the first of the year, no sugar. ━
You go like,
alright, it’s a third of the year. This sucks
and I hate broccoli, so now I’m only going to eat sugar and no broccoli. And see how that does, you know, it’s like, ─━━ I dunno. I mean, some people could pull it off.
There’s a combination with that 20% OG that I kinda like because it’s appreciative. And depending on how you use it, it can be fun.
Like if there’s something to upgrade your home or home maintenance thing now, now nobody goes, Ooh, look at the new roof. Looks exactly like the old one. Yeah, that always sucks. Or like the driveway repair that I’ve got coming, that’s also stinks. But if there’s some home maintenance thing you can do ─ that you’ve maybe been putting off, that will make your life better when you’re around your house and make your house worth more money, I think that’s a great use of money.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to people over the last 25, 26 years now, but over, you know, over the last several years where one of their financial goals is, you know, a house remodel, a kitchen, redo, something like that, right? Hey, we’ve been here for 20 years. We wanna, we wanna paint the house, we wanna refinish the floors or whatever, and you, okay, how much does it cost?
Just gimme a hundred thousand dollars and how are we gonna pay for ’em? We figure all that out and then a year later I go, Hey, how’d the house remodel go? Yeah, we didn’t do it. Right. Why that’s so much money. It’s like, who get, I mean, we’ve figured this all out from your financial plan. You’ve, you’re on track for retirement, your, since kids are going to college, you’ve done all the vacations you want, paint the freaking house, man, love where you are, do your thing.
And then it piles up. And it was funny, when we moved from Michigan to Dallas, we lived in our house for 10 years and at the request of our realtor, he said, you know what would really make this thing pop would be if you repainted everything, it’ll look brand new. I mean, the house was only 10 years old to begin with, but it will really shine.
We painted it, we fixed everything up. We fixed the carpet that was ripped. We did all this stuff, you know, put, put all this money into where we’re going. This a pretty nice place. After all. What are we doing? Why didn’t we do this stuff like five years ago? And we could have enjoyed this. So when we moved to our house here, that was one of the things listen and I talked about was, hey, if we don’t have a pool, we’re getting a pool.
I don’t wanna be here for 10 years and be like, man, you know, it’d be great if we could save the money to get a pool. You know, like dig the whole, fill it with water. We’ll figure out how to make it work in the budget and, and, um. So I think that to your point, it gives you that relief valve, but it also has a forcing mechanism.
And look, it doesn’t have to be 20%. You could say, I only wanna invest 10% of my found money, and I only wanna put 10% of my found money on my debt payoff. And I wanna blow 80% sweet man. You do. You, I think the important thing is to make the decision once and then apply it to everything from here on out.
And then, you know, after a year or two of doing that, then adjust it and see, hey, does this work for us? Are we accomplishing the things that we wanna accomplish? You know, and enjoying it along the way. ’cause um, ─ if you wanna repaint, just repaint the, it looks great when you repaint the house. I gotta be honest, we did it, it was fun.
It was five days of living in a Westin, you know, down the street from our house. ’cause I, I was like, oh, you guys are gonna start right there, right? And they’re like, no, that’s not how we do this. We tarp everything in your house. And I was like, oh, what? So we don’t, so we don’t get to go in the kitchen.
He’s like, kitchen, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t get to go anywhere. You have to leave. You have to go. ─━ Oh. Okay, so
did he also look at you in the eyes and say, I’m the captain now. ───
He said, now where’s the safe and what’s the combination just outta curiosity, ─
don’t
come back for a
week. And that’s what I found out.
He was my brother and I had no idea. Yeah,
my long lost roommate. ────────
There’s one more good use of money. I think that is also a spend it on something rather than invest it. And that is spending it on things that would increase your income. I know people talk about OG the side hustle and how excited they’d be to get the side hustle finally moving or do something that would increase their career prospects.
Like I consider that expense also. It can be fun, but also can be additive as well.
Yeah, I mean, again, back to fun slash investing slash you know, whatever. I mean, a great example of this is a, you know, a vacation home that you rent out on Airbnb when you’re not there or something like that. You know, you save the money up, you can turn this into a multi-use type of.
Expense. You know, it doesn’t mean that it’s gonna necessarily make money, but maybe it helps you break even. Or maybe it covers some of the costs. You’ve been waiting, you’ve been thinking about getting into real estate investing, or you’ve been, ─ to your point about the house, like trying to invest in something that’s gonna add some value, add some equity.
That’s another piece of this I think, which is really interesting. People get so hung up on this sort of stuff. It’s literally just moving money from one bucket to another. If you ran a balance sheet of your, of your life, right, of your net worth, which is all of your assets and all of your liabilities, right?
Those things equal your net worth. And then you say, well, I’m gonna take $20,000 outta my investment account and buy a, a rental property. You’ve figured out all the math and you think it’s gonna cash flow. Even money. You’re not gonna make any money. You’re not gonna lose any money. Well, what happens? You have 20,000 less dollars in cash and 20,000 more dollars in real estate equity.
Now it’s like the same, the same outcome in your, in your net worth. And yet we get so hung up on, you know, investing in something that is. ─ Appreciative or a, a accretive to your overall financial status. It’s not as diversified clearly, but it’s the same, kinda the same thing, but still it’s an
asset that better meet your goals.
Yeah. If it is. I mean, yeah. If you’re, I mean, golly, if you 20 years with your kids and you’re like, we should have a lake house, we should have a lake house, we should have a lake house. And then in the 19th year you finally get one, you’re gonna be like, dang it, I wish I’d have done this 10 years ago assuming you had the money.
Right. It’s like, just do it. I never
once met somebody who says, you know what? I should have waited longer. ──
Never. When it comes to investing or kind of improving the, the lives of the people around them. Is that what you mean? Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Never. Oh, I wish I would’ve waited another five years on that decision that I procrastinated on. ───
Just ━ That’s true.
Doesn’t do it. The regrets. I was glad I waited till I was 40 to max out my 401k. Right.
The regret’s always in the other direction.
No regrets.
I love all these points. I think what we’ll do is, uh, leave it right there. And you know what, we’ll continue this for people that want a deeper dive in the 2 0 1, where the day after these discussions, we curate links, we continue the discussion, and, um, and if you’re somebody right now that’s looking at, at any type of windfall, I think, uh, we have a lot of great resources for you there as well.
But now let’s, uh, move over to the TikTok minute. This is the part of the show where we shine a light on a TikTok creator and either show off their brilliance or maybe their air quote, brilliance, which, uh, almost aircraft brilliance.
Their aircraft brilliance.
What that, what that is. They’re flying high
today.
TikTok caters to the engineering audience, I believe,
apparently. So, engineering something. Some of these that we’ve seen, holy cow, they definitely are engineering some, uh, ── ugliness. But, uh, let’s go to OG since we just heard Doug’s voice. Uh, og, this one gonna be brilliant or air quotes brilliant.
I just read an, uh, thread on, read it about thin influencers and how awful they are.
So I’m going out on a limb. I’m gonna say awful. Wow.
It is so funny, Doug, that he talks about fin influencers. And just this morning I saw this TikTok, uh, from a big creator and also, well, it’s a little advertising. Let’s listen in. ─────
What happens if there’s a stock market crash when you’re in retirement or about to transition into retirement?
If you lose 20%, 40% or more in a stock market crash when you wanna retire, this could be devastating to your retirement plans. You may have to get a second job, work more, and delay retirement altogether. So. Is there a better way to grow and protect your wealth in retirement? Absolutely. Tap, learn more and I will send you a short video that explains a better and safer way to grow and protect your wealth in retirement
a better
and safer way.
You know that, uh, guy that was on YouTube or Instagram, Thomas Crown, I think was his name, ─ the From the Affair, he’s the one that had the affair was say the Thomas Crown Affair. Yeah. ━── Yeah. PI Pierce Brosnan of Renee Russo and yeah. Was was it Pierce Brosnan? Was he in that? Yes. Yeah. Pierce bro. That was the remake.
Oh yeah. Obviously. I mean, obviously not obviously, but, but yes, that was a remake. That was a great, it really is good. I think his name is Thomas Crown, so he’s been on Insta, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, about like, he was an investment banker guy and always had like how rich people do things and how really rich people do things.
That was kind of his thing. I know that guy. Yeah. So you’ve seen him and, you know, sharp dude and whatever. And then I saw him talking freaking annuities the other day. Uh, the same sort of pitch, like, you know, uh, the, the stock market, your 401k is rigged against you and it’s not a safe vehicle for retirement.
It’s a way for, for you to lose money and you’re never going to retire by just putting money so bad. 401k, bad bad. Contact me directly and I will get you in touch with, wait, how to do this, da da. And I’m like. ─── Golly, this is, first of all, it’s so hard to sell this crap when the market’s up 25%. Why? Why are you trying to sell this stuff on the market? ─
This is so much easier to sell when the market’s down 22%. Like, that’s, that’s the time to kinda get it out there.
But, well, I dunno. This one that we just heard though is interesting because, you know, if people have been watching the past year, year and a half, and the it’s gotta go down, it’s gotta go down.
Like I, I’m starting to, as I’m reading and we’re looking for new headlines, all I’m reading is dooms around the corner. Uh, somebody’s predicting when it’s finally
gonna stop some Apocalypse du jour is about
to happen. It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen. And you just throw your dart It absolutely it’s gonna happen.
Yeah, yeah.
Whatever chaos you wanna manifest
someday day, it’s out there.
It’s just waiting for us. I think the big takeaway for people we’re being snarky, but for our branding stackers, they really don’t know why we’re being snarky. And it, it, to me, OG goes back to just a, a filter When somebody leads with fear.
Suffering. Whe whether the, the conditions of that fear and suffering, maybe we’ll get into that a little bit, are valid or not, but they’re like, oh no, you know what’s gonna happen? It’s gonna be a calamity. ─ By the way, you’ll see the video on the show notes page, and we’ll also have it in the 2 0 1, but when he starts talking about the market going down, you see somebody ringing their hands and then you see a person crying like they’re leaning into even the video on this
stuff.
Yeah. Orphans in the gutter of a street. ━
Right. ── Lisa,
may I have another, may I have more, more. ━─────
I hear this. Or your Thomas crown thing. Like, you know, I, I, I understand that physical assault is wrong, but it does make me just wanna, it makes me
wanna, makes me wanna watch somebody else do it. Like,
yes, ───────
he is gonna kick
your ass. ──
We’re gonna send Doug to
your house Yeah. And teach you that. Selling people this way is wrong. And
I think also a bit of realistic education. I was talking to a client about market decline in retirement, getting close to retirement. What do we do if the market goes down 20%? What if we do, you know, whatever.
And having a plan for that. So that’s, that’s an important component of that. There were a lot of people, Joe, when you were an advisor in January, first of 2008, pretty much an all time high. Everybody living the dream going, I’m retired. And then you go on a year long cruise and then they come back and go, wait, where’d half my money go?
You get unlucky with the timing of. Of retirement, you have to have a plan for that. I think it’s helpful to define what is likely to happen. What’s a normal day? ── You know, the stock market’s doing really well right now. It’s up a whole bunch since the end of October. It’s up a whole bunch this year.
Everybody’s feeling really good, but the average inter year peak to trough decline. So we know that over time the stock market goes up, right? We know that the s and p averages 10% a year. So if you just kind of chart that out, you can see like do, do, do, do doo it goes. But in between those in the year, January to December, it’s like ━━ UNK bounces around. ─
Yeah, it bounces around a all it. So there’s gonna be a high watermark, a low watermark, and then it’s gonna finish the year up. Ted, that’s kind of an average year. The high watermark to low watermark on average is minus 14.9% ── in the year. So there is a period of time on average every year where you can look at your statement and go, I have this amount of money, and look at it again and see minus damn near 15%, and guess what?
That’s an average year. For an investment account. ─ So, you know, I think it also helps to kind of paint out and, and, and like look at what, you know, what’s realistic, what am I getting myself into from an investing standpoint? Yeah. We look at all the rosy stuff and see, hey, I’m an average 10% a year and my doubles every seven years, and all that kind of cool stuff.
But on the ride, the ride itself. If you’re looking at it every single day or every single month, there’s gonna be some not so fun days in there. You know? Uh, especially if you’re paying attention that close. And honestly,
when you’re on the rides, that’s the downhills that are the fun part. Right? I don’t get on rollercoasters for the uphills.
I got on roller
coasters for the downhill. That is a great analogy. I’m gonna use that. I I like that. You’re welcome. Love the downhills. You didn’t come here for the tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick part. Anybody can go off. He came here
for the, ah. ━──━─━─━━──
And then you know that awesome feeling when the market’s at the bottom and you lose your stomach and it’s got in your throat.
Yes. ━━─ Yes. And we got more of
that for you. Yes. It’s coming. ━ G used that in this meeting. This is what you paid
me for. This is it. This is, oh, we’re in the
toilet. It’s great. This is fantastic. ──
There, there is a strategy around this and, and I think this is an important point, is that a lot of these lies start off with the truth.
He starts with the fact that the sequence of return risk, which is what this TikTok minute’s getting at, is a real thing. And if the market takes a dump on the day you decide to retire, that is a very, very
risky time. Super unlucky day.
Yes. But what’s our strategy then to mitigate that risk if it’s not just going and buying an annuity?
OG. Buying two annuities. ─━─── Oh my God. If one is good, let’s buy two and then, and then a big life insurance policy.
Buy two and make sure that you buy the first one up to the break point where the advisor gets paid more at the end of the first one. The annuity
sales person. So it’s
like an annuity ladder, that’s what you’re recommending?
Yes. You wanna do an annuity ladder ━━─━━ so that they come due every year. So the annuity sales guy has a new commission every year. That’s really the annuity
sales guy’s like. I love it. I thought I hated these guys. They’re
wonderful. Great. An annuity ladder. Why did I think of that? ━─━──
You’ve heard of a CD
ladder.
This is the new, new thing. This is way better. You thought infinite banking was neat. The
biggest thing from a, an investment standpoint to mitigate the, the unlucky time. This is just bad luck, right? You can’t predict the future. You retire and the market takes a crap. This year you didn’t know it was coming or else you wouldn’t have done it.
Nobody retires at the bottom of a bear market. It doesn’t happen. So the way that you mitigate this is you make sure that you have the next two years worth of money in cash. It’s that simple. And if you wanna be ultra conservative, three years of money in cash, I’d be happy to send people a book on this.
I’ve got a book on it. Somebody sent me an email, I’ll send a book. I’ve got a bunch of ’em sitting here. I’m gonna, I’m gonna pull the book card now, Joe, me, how about I’m gonna send books now I’m gonna send all
these books to you and you can do it from now ‘
cause No, no, no, no, no. I’ve got my own pile right here.
Thanks
very much. There’s nothing to do with the fact that Mrs. OG said you gotta get rid of this crap
outta your
office. Yeah, yeah. But talking about like kind of that sequence of return risk, really the only way around it is to make sure that you’ve got the cash savings. Because if you give yourself long enough time, who cares if the market’s down 40% and the bear market great recession 2008, in 2009, you know, the SP was down 50% ─ and, and what did it close at? ─
Do you know? Anybody know? Closed at 600 and as a low watermark. What’s it at today? Five freaking thousand. We just have to give it enough time. And the way that you give enough time is you have enough. ─ Dry powder, you have enough cash to like maintain your lifestyle so that it can recover. So two years, three years of cash before you retire, ── invest the rest.
I love when we have Peter Euan who said that, uh, the stock market’s the opposite of a casino. A casino, the longer they keep you around. Like you start winning OG they want you to play longer. Yeah. ’cause they know it’s just a matter of time. And he said it’s exactly the opposite for the stock market. If you can just buy yourself enough time, you will win.
Mm-Hmm. Because that’s the impetus that drives the economy. It’s gonna go up and down, but the longer you’re in, the better chance that, that you win that game. Absolutely. ─ Coming up in just a moment, we’re gonna take a question from a stacker who thought, you know what, I better call Saul. ─ See hi in og, ─ but before that Doug, I think you’ve got, uh, today’s, oh, can’t wait to see what it is.
What’s today’s trivia question? Well,
here you go, Joe. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug baseball season’s in full swing, which means it’s time for me to oil up my glove and volunteer to coach. It’s just your glove. Just the glove. What? ─━ Oh, I guess I could oil up with the balls too. Probably could do that.
Yeah. Okay. I think they do that before they play in the major leagues. Anyway, um, it’s my time to volunteer to coach another seasonal little league. Last year I coached the chicken nuggets all the way to the champ chips. ─ If they gimme another year at this, I pretty sure I can take us all the way to the Little League World Series.
That would be a great thing to add to my dating profile, wouldn’t it? Coached in the World Series. Gotta probably take out the words little league. But, uh, you know, only because of the character limit. You understand if you wanna get technical, I actually only filled in on the final two games of last season when another coach got sick.
But, you know, still technicality. If you can win an Emmy for being in like a single episode of Frazier, then you can claim a little League world championship after coaching only two games. Am I right? I’m right. Today’s trivia question is which athlete signed a groundbreaking baseball contract on this day in 1947?
I’ll be back right after I see if my baseball uniform still fits. I’ve been going nuts with the Thigh Master and there’s a good chance I bulked up too much, kind of worried
about it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━─────────────────────────━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Hey there, stackers. I am hot dog connoisseur and championship little league coach Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Great news, the uniform still fits, even though I’ve definitely added muscle since last summer, but surprisingly. In the stomach cold region. Must be those minutes of planking I’ve been doing. Gotta say I look like a pro.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I get recruited into the minor leagues just from talking about it right here. Today’s trivia question is, which athlete signed a groundbreaking contract on this day in 1947? Well, the answer. A decade before they moved to Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Trolley Dodgers, as those of you old enough to know, Joe signed Superstar, Jackie Robinson to the team making him the first black player to be hired to play Major League baseball.
Two years later, Robinson was named most valuable player of the MLB. He went on to lead his team to six league championships and won World Series at a salary of $600 per month. It was a pretty good ROI for the Dodgers. Wow. I know. Amazing. Right. And now back to Joe and og. ─━━━━━━━━──
Isn’t it wild how when you think about managers in Major League baseball, you think of like the most outta shape people?
Like you think of a major league baseball player, generally pretty in shape, but, but you know, I think of Mike Trout or um, um, he’s a manager now. ── Who’s the No, I’m talking about players. No. ─ Yeah. Or ━ do we does at all? Or? Uh, speaking of betting, speaking of betting, who’s the guy’s interpreter was, uh, ─ just caught up in show Ani.
Yes. His interpreter. Did you hear what Pete Rose said? Yes. If I had an interpreter. Pete Rose has got the comment of the century. ─ I sure wish I had an interpreter back in 1971. ━─────━
Oh, that’s fantastic.
For people that don’t know what we were talking about, you don’t follow baseball. Just put embedding controversy.
Yeah. Yes. Major league baseball. And, and you’ll catch up. Hey, time, uh, to, uh, shine a light on a stacker. Help out a stacker who said, you know what? I better call ── see. Hi N og. Uh, this is the part of the show where we help somebody out, we swoop in and, uh, help them at their time of need. And today we are going to help out stacker.
Nick. Hey Nick. ━━━
Hey, Joe OG and that other guy. This is Nick from whatever, uh, two star Motel the military has me staying at this week. Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to ensuring I learned absolutely nothing. When I listen to your episodes, you all set the bar for learning absolute least possible. ─
I’m nearing my transition date to go from active duty service to the civilian world, so I’ll be losing all those little military nuances that help our small paycheck actually be tolerable. I’m not in the high three retirement plan and I’ve been investing in the B-R-S-T-S-P to earn the 5% match during my military service.
Since I expect these to be my lower earning years, I’ve been putting my contributions into the Roth TSP, but obviously the match is going into traditional. I’m expecting a few low earning years as I transition from military into my civilian job. So I planned on doing a rollover in the traditional amount, converting it to Roth while my income was still low. ─
My question is, are Roth conversions tax only federally or also at the state level, and if taxed at state level, can I utilize the state by claim for my military pay purposes? I’ve kept Texas as my state of residence for tax purposes, even though that military has PCs me out of Texas. But I’ll also be moving to a state with income tax after my separation.
Thanks. I’m looking forward to my other guy, 24 T-shirt. Just hope I can actually remember his name when I get to the right end section.
Wow. ━──━━
He’s dudes brutal.
He’s got it for you, man. By the way, he’s not wrong. ─━━──────────
Whoever that other dude is that’s running for, I can’t even remember who the other people are that are running, let alone you man. ── Or maybe it’s not that I can’t remember. It’s that I don’t want to know. ━ Just, ──
just block it out. Just write dude from Stacking, Benjamins that’ll cover all your bases. They’ll, they’ll narrow it down.
I like it. It’ll be more of like a three-prong approach, just kind of trade off.
Nick, thank you so much for your service first. Thank you for that. And by the way, I think you, you may have heard if you didn’t hear Ed slot agreeing with exactly what you’re saying, which is get into that Roth 401k. So nice job there.
But, oh gee, let’s explain to people that don’t understand what he’s trying to do. First, what, what exactly is Nick trying to accomplish here? ’cause he used some words that maybe some of our new stackers don’t know. Well,
it sounds like he’s got some money that’s already been taxed. So it’s in the Roth in his 401k, which means it’s gonna grow tax deferred and then when he takes it out in retirement, it’s a hundred percent tax free forever.
So Roth is tax free forever. And then the the match or your, in this case the government match, but if you’ve got a 401k, your company match at present can only go into the pre-tax side. There’s some legislation that suggests that they’ll allow it to go into the Roth, but there’s some issues there around how did the businesses would deduct that.
If, oh yeah, you’re getting the Roth contribution. But anyways, it’s going in the pre-tax side, which means it’s growing tax deferred. But when he takes that portion of his 401k out in retirement, he will pay income taxes on the full amount. So one of the strategies that exists is you can pay that tax whenever you want.
You don’t have to wait until retirement to pay the taxes. You can pay the taxes today if you’d prefer. And one of the strategies that we think about here is if you’ve got a low income year and you don’t have any earned income, or you’ve got really low earned income, maybe you’re, you know, maybe he’s going back to school, for example, right?
He is gonna get some government benefit to go back to school, doesn’t need to work because he is gonna have some stipend and therefore really no income. So he can take some of his, uh, four, all of it if you wanted, and move it to his Roth. Now he is gotta pay taxes on that today because of the transition from the taxable side to the tax free side. ─
We call that a Roth conversion. You can do it in little dollar amounts or big dollar amounts or any dollar amount you want. There’s no limit on how much you can do except the limit of your balance of your account and no limit on the timeframe. So you can do a little bit every year, you can do a lot once.
You can never do it. It’s entirely up to you in your tax situation. So that’s what he is trying to do is figuring out, you know, how much to convert in, in what years and that sort of thing. ─ The problem is, is that when you do that conversion, you gotta write a check for taxes, and if it’s in a low tax bracket, it might be a small tax or a small check, but it’s still gonna be a check.
And sadly, I. It’s gonna count as income for all sources, whether it’s state or federal or wherever you happen to be. So if you’re paying income taxes at the state level, and I should clarify and say that every state’s gonna be a little different, some states obviously don’t have income taxes. Texas and Florida come to mind, and there’s some others, some states only tax interest in dividends and not IRA, uh, withdrawals.
Uh, so you have to know which state you’re moving to, but you wanna check with it. But I don’t know that you can get out of it if you actually are living in one state and then pretend to claim that you live in another. Uh, yeah, that’s, that’s a game I don’t wanna play. The best way to do this would be to ─ actually live in the state where you, you know, his tax advantage and, and or do the conversion.
Now, if he’s almost out and, you know, this is gonna be a low income year, do the conversion as soon as he retires, so to speak, or as soon as he’s done with his contract. ─ Before you officially move to, you know, insert state, wherever he’s going. Uniquely for the military, of course they can actually be living in wherever, but their actual residence is their state of
residence where they’re from.
Given that he spent his entire career working for the government, I have a pretty good notion that they’re gonna figure out where his real residence is. ─
Yeah, ── yeah. I mean, not, not for nothing. I think that military. ─ Pay and probably teacher pay honestly should all be tax free because of all the stuff they have to deal with.
But, uh, that’s a letter you have to write to your senator to get that across the plate. Yeah. Yeah. For some reason, if you’re in a, if you’re actually fighting bad guys, that is tax free. But if you’re getting ready to fight bad guys, that’s not tax free. And if you fight bad guys, but you do it from a, you know, a drone, I was gonna say in an office somewhere, that also doesn’t count.
You have to actually be, you know, standing out there shielding yourself from real live bullets, which to me seems a little silly. But, uh, that’s a writing, that’s a different kind of write in campaign we should probably organize, uh, other than the Doug 2024. So this is a great question for a CPA double check and make sure that the CPA signs on, signs off on all of this.
But if this is gonna be a low income year and you’re thinking about doing the conversion, I would do it as soon as you, you know, retire, you know, within those, you know, few weeks after you retire, get the money moved over. The other thing you can check, by the way. Without having to wait until you’re actually done is see if the TSP allows an in plan Roth conversion.
This is becoming more popular. I’m not aware that the TSP does it, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t changed the rules.
Well, and I like you saying this OOG because, you know, extending this out beyond Nick. Yeah. Somebody else is listening going, Ooh, this might affect me, but I don’t, I’m not in the, this is for anybody listening.
This is,
yeah. So this is becoming more popular. Not every plan has it by any stretch. And what they’re allowing you to do is literally do your Roth conversion within your 401k while you’re still working. So you can say, I’ve got this pre-tax money, I’m gonna do a Roth conversion on it Works really great if all your money’s pre-tax or all of your money’s Roth, and then at the end of the year you get a profit sharing bonus, you know, of whatever, 5,000 bucks you go, well, heck, just convert that right now, boom. ─
And get it over to the Roth. You gotta pay some taxes on it. But if you can do it within the plan, makes it a lot, uh, a lot simpler. So check with the TSP or if you wanna do it on your own and you’re, you know, not a government worker. Check with your plan and see if you can do what’s called an in plan Roth conversion.
That’s what you’re looking
for. I get really excited about seeing how many companies are, uh, adding that to the plan.
You, you would nerd it. Well,
it, it seems to be, ─────── wow, ────
that took a turn. I didn’t expect
Round House. I know. That’s what makes it funny, right? Like I I made it funny guys, guys. I made it funny.
OG sitting at home around the dining room table. Hey, guess what dad did today?
Yeah, I know. It’s so great. I made Doug laugh and Joe laugh.
I I cracked one. Oh, it was was Great. Evans once every six years. It’s amazing. I know. ─━━──
It’s like a Clipse. ━━━━──────━
Thanks for the question, Nick. You know what, uh, go ahead and grab yourself a uh, Doug 2024 T-shirt on.
The, the, I almost said flaming pork. What is with me? And just make it up. New flaming phrases today. Isn’t that like a flying pork apparel
site? Flaming pork? Can’t you get those at the bowling alley out of the chip machine? Fla?
Yes. Flaming
pork rinds. Yes. Flaming pork RINs. Yes. Oh, those are great. Delicious.
Fantastic. Wonderful. Only a bowling alley. Yeah. Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail is the place to go. By the way, if you’ve got a question for, uh, for us, and, uh, great idea for all of you. Look at your plans and see if, uh, see if you can do this too. And frankly, even if you can’t side plan, like OG explained, you can definitely do it outside, but check with your CPA first. ─
If you don’t have a question though about, uh, backdoor or Roth IRAs, your question is bigger. ━ Like, I am not doing a great job with my financial plan. OG and his team are taking new clients right now. So here’s where you go, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash og that leads to their calendar and it’s the first step in seeing how his team can interface with you to make better money decisions.
I can’t believe it. I just get, you know, got back OG from Strategic Coach and I can’t believe the first thing, the first thing our coach said, Adrian. She said, can you believe the first quarter’s over? ─━━ Isn’t that crazy? It felt like we just met like three days ago. Nope. We met in December and now the first quarter is done.
She’s like, what’d you do about it? And nearly half the room’s like, uh, you know,
crap. Uh, I finished my taxes. Like, alright, major accomplishments?
Well, I’ve been traveling for 10 of those 12 weeks, so ─── in
the two weeks I was home, I played Xbox just to Yeah. ─ Get it moving stacky Benjamins dot com slash og ── time for us to wander out to the back porch and, uh, very simple back porch today, because Doug, you’ve been going through a bunch of, uh, a bunch of movie reviews.
Yep. And TV show reviews. We’ve given you a minute to talk about them. You still haven’t gotten through them. I can’t imagine
why we don’t get through ’em all. They get like four seconds per show.
What are you talking about? For We give you a full minute and you just don’t make it and you
talk for 48 seconds of
it.
Because, because you, you need better opinions.
I need more correct opinions. ──── All right. Do you want me to just dive into this? What do you wanna do? Yeah.
Yeah.
Let’s do
this. Uh uh, you start off with the next one on your list and then I’ve got one, ──── so I get to do one. ─ Yeah, you do one. I do
one. Alright. I’ll tell you what, this one doesn’t even count, but I will agree with an, I think with a review you had several weeks ago about poor things.
Yes. ──━ Yes. Yeah. I mean, I’d have to get into some pretty deep stuff to say why it sucked, but it just, it didn’t execute.
I get not even deep, not even deep. It would kind of give away the show to go into really what it’s about. I, yeah. And
I saw what it was trying to do. I’ve seen lots of other very artistic, very weird kind of creative movies that really are thought provoking and make you work for it.
And I like that. I, I like the mental workout sometimes. This just didn’t, it just didn’t execute well. I felt like there were about 30 minutes of that, two and a half hours that I
liked. Why don’t we just spend this time on poor things a little bit, because you were the second person I gave this review to and said, I don’t think you really wanna see it.
I actually, I think for you, I think I said, I’d love to hear your take you did ─ with these other people. I said, don’t go see it. And, and, and our friend Stella said. ─ But it won Academy Awards. And I said that does, look at all the movies that we don’t like that Win Academy Awards or movies that are hard. ─
I’ll, I’ll say this about poor things by the way. If people wonder what the hell we’re talking about. This is a finance show, is that on the back porch? We talk about things going on in the community. We share, you know, you only have so much time for entertainment in your life. So we do a lot of reviews of, of uh, what we’re watching, what we’re video games we’re playing, saving you time, like uh, things we do, saving you money, uh, trips that we go.
Yes. ─ Here’s the thing about poor things. I don’t know if you’re that far along yet, ’cause I know you just saw it. ─ I have enjoyed talking about that movie and what it’s doing much more than I enjoyed
watching it. Oh, it’s super provocative. I mean, it, it, it executed the hell out of that. It’ll provoke you for a lot of thoughts and a lot of discussion.
So major success from that perspective. Agreed.
The use of, the use of, and, and, and I don’t think this is a spoiler, this movie’s about sex. There’s a ton of this movie that’s about sex. I
think it was unnecessary and nobody’s ever heard me say that before. ─━━━━━
But the use of, if you’ve ever wanted to see what Emma Stone looks like naked and Mark Ruffalo, no.
Kind of, you don’t really Naked. ─ Yeah. You see his butt once I think. Okay. So if you wanna see ruffle low’s butt. But if you wanted to see Emma Stone’s chest, well here it is folks, a lot. Many times, a lot, many, many, many times. And by the way, that wasn’t my review, that was my spouse’s review. But I’ll say that Sex though.
It’s funny ’cause I didn’t think that it was either until I thought about it later. Doug. And that is that sexist is recurring theme. And as, as Bella is growing up, sex is changing for her. Yeah. Like the entire movie, the sexual experience is changing from her. So. When she is early in the movie and she’s much more childlike and less experienced.
I love the line in the movie. She’s like, why would we do this all the time? Yeah. Like why
would, why would, why would
anybody do anything else
but this? But furious jumping Yes. ─ And Greatest Euphemism, ─
but then later on it becomes manipulative and thoughtful about why she’s doing it and sex and money and sex and power and, and that I don’t think it’s unnecessary.
I think it’s a much bigger part of the movie than I thought it was. And because it’s introduced in such a way, ── because I get what you’re saying, but it’s just the longer that I, there, there are
so many, so look, there are hundreds of movies a year that go into all of those same themes about. ── The role sexuality plays in our lives throughout our different stages of maturation.
It’s a theme that’s been absolutely done to death. This movie had an opportunity because we’re gonna, we’re probably gonna give it away, uh, but because of ─ how Bella came to be as a creature, right? Like basically it’s a Frankenstein story. I’m just gonna say it. Yeah, sorry. Sure. Stackers. I’m giving it away.
You’re probably not watching the movie at this point, unless you just wanna see Emma Stone’s, nipples. But, uh, Steve, don’t cut that. Um, ─━━━━━━─━─━━─━─
but, uh, we had an opportunity because we we’re, she, he. The mad scientist, Willam Defoe created a being and we had a chance to explore so many other dichotomous themes in a human life beyond sexuality. It’s the easiest one to go after. It just felt like it felt so cheap and it went way too far on it. We didn’t need, well, there was, to see all of her becoming a prostitute and, and I just didn’t need all, I would’ve much rather, really challenged me on other things.
Well, then it goes
from that. I thought the prostitute part of the movie was really interesting. ─ Because of the power dynamic and the No, I actually did. I did. That’s when I became interested, all the stuff with her and Ruffalo, and let’s jump up and down again on this thing. Like this is great. Like that part that, that part, I was like, okay, whatever.
And then we got to the, and I’m like, why is this in the movie? And then I thought, okay, this is really neat. And then, and then the part that I thought was interesting was then she has a relationship then later in the movie with a different person. And then it becomes all about power. Then it’s this, it’s this and it’s this horrible, horrible thing.
And, um, ─ I don’t, I’ve really enjoyed talking about it. I thought that there was a lot there. I don’t think it was done to death, but I do think that it was sandpaper the whole time I wanted to lead the theater. In fact, Cheryl, this is one of the few movies that Cheryl during the movie said, when is it ending out loud?
Yeah, I remember you saying that out loud with other people in the theater, Doug, there were other people in the theater. I love that. And Cheryl’s like, this isn’t over yet. Oh my God. Make it over. It was almost like Ricky Vet humor where you’re like, I don’t even wanna be in this room. I think that because this is so uncomfortable,
the first 35, 40 minutes were hard to watch.
Just from a construction of the story and the movie standpoint. I did not like the first, but, and not because of it was weird and, but it was just, I don’t think it was done well. I thought it really got good when they got on the ship. I. ──━ I agree
on the boat. By the way, one of the more beautiful films like I do agree with them getting the costume.
Did they get best costumes? I don’t know. I think they got costumes and they got something about art. I, I think it was art direction they got That makes sense. If only to a place I could look this up. Yeah, but it’s not worth it. Don’t see poor things unless you wanna have a 20 minute conversation where everybody was disappointed. ─
A lot like sex ━─
A lot. Except that’s more like a two minute. ──────
Alright, so that was the review that we weren’t even supposed to do. I’ll do my one review and it’ll be 11 seconds mending the line. You know, I’m big into fly fishing. I should love any movie that has to do with fly fishing. It’s movie made a couple years ago.
Just came out on Netflix. It’s super formulaic. Uh, I’ll piss off a lot of people because everybody in the fishing and fly fishing in outdoor world loves this movie. It’s got Brian Cox in it. The movie itself was just, eh, just super, like you knew exactly what was coming the whole time. I thought there were some really good acting performances.
Brian Cox is amazing. And then the female lead, I don’t know her name, never seen, I’ve seen her anywhere else before. Again, if there was a place for us to look this up. But I thought she was really natural. Really. Um, you just didn’t look like acting, which I think is a huge accomplishment. So those two performances were great.
Saw some cool outdoor stuff. You know, this whole thing is set in Montana. ── Watch River runs through it, which is like, got anybody who knows fly fishing just threw something at their device because I said that. But if you’re looking for pretty, like, just pretty outdoor fishing stuff, watch that movie, but don’t mending the line.
You’ve seen this, ─ you know, it’s karate kid with fly fishing or it’s, you know, pick an inspirational, we’re gonna pull somebody out of the darkest moment of their life and, and set ’em on a new path. You’ve seen that movie a bunch of times. Oh,
Patricia
Heaton’s in that movie. Yeah. Barely. She’s barely in that movie and she needs to fire her Botox person. ─────━━───
You heard it here first. ─ Her upper lips is bizarre. That’s
why people lis, that’s why people listen to Stacking Benjamins right there. ── Uh, I have no news about her meetups. Uh, hopefully I’ll have those, uh, very soon. But for those people that, uh, haven’t heard recently, I am coming to Cleveland. I’m coming to Detroit.
I’m coming to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Hopefully, Kalamazoo’s gonna be a tough one just ’cause of the date. It’s a Friday night. Tough to get a space then, but we’re trying to figure that out. I’ve got some help on the ground, so we’ll see. A couple stackers helping me there and then, uh, coming to Boston. Uh, but I’ll have dates and, and, uh, everything for you soon.
If you get to 2 0 1, I’ll be able to send you, uh, specifically an email that tells you about all that. But otherwise you’ll hear that in future shows
there’s a 3.9% chance I can, uh, join you in the Detroit meetup. ──
That’d be super fun. Yeah. Detroit would be fun, but not Boston. ─ You’ve, you have family in Boston?
Yeah. Get me there. I’ll go to Boston. That could be fun. ━──
Well, ─── if,
if I get you there, I mean, pick you up at the airport. ───────
You’re
generous
Absolutely. ━
Beyond words.
It’s fantastic. Should I do the, the, the wrap up now, Joe? Okay.
Yes, we should. Because you know what, besides the fact that poor things sucked, there was a bunch of stuff I think today on our, on our takeaway list.
And what do you think the big three are? Here they are.
Joe. First take some advice from our headline topic coming into money, whether it’s your tax refund, a windfall, or the lottery. Begin with savings and paying down debt. And also look for ways to use that opportunity to raise your income after that.
Yeah, then go wild on vacations, depreciating assets, and throw in a party for your favorite podcasters. You know, like hypothetically. Second, take note of our TikTok minute, is an advisor leading with fear? If so, they may not be an advisor as much as a salesperson. Fire beware. ─ But what’s the biggest to do ───━━━━ I need to sponsor my own little league team?
That’s the answer. I can name them. Uh. Name ’em. Uh oh. Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug’s Nuggets. It’ll be great for the show. When I coached them all the way. Nope. No. To the, Nope. What? Why not? Nope. We’re gonna The World Series. I’ll
explain it later, but nope. ────────
This show is the property of SB Podcasts, LLC, copyright 2024 and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
Our producer is Karen Repine. Karen and Joe get help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah. And before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time. Back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show. ──━──━━─━━──────────────────────────────
You’re still here. ─── It’s over. ── Go home. ───── Go. ──────
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