Are You Actually Wealthy? Here’s How to Know.

Are you actually wealthy for your age—and how much money should you have saved by 30, 40, 50, or 60? We compare income, debt, net worth by age, retirement savings, and financial flexibility to reveal which numbers actually measure wealth. You’ll learn why a six-figure salary doesn’t necessarily make you rich, how investable net worth differs from traditional net worth, and how your retirement savings compare with other Americans. Plus, see the Money Guy wealth benchmarks by age to determine whether your savings, investments, and financial independence journey are on track—and what really matters when building long-term wealth. Jump start your journey with our FREE financial resources⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Reach your goals faster with our products⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Take the relationship to the next level: become a client⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe on YouTube for early access and go beyond the podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect with us on social media for more content⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bring confidence to your wealth building with simplified strategies from The Money Guy. Learn how to apply financial tactics that go beyond common sense and help you reach your money goals faster. Make your assets do the heavy lifting so you can quit worrying and start living a more fulfilled life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:07Brian Preston?

  Are you actually wealthy?

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Brent, I am so excited about this because this is the age old question people want to know. Am I where I'm supposed to be? How do I measure it? How do I know how I stack up? How do I know if I'm doing the right things? And I think there've been a lot of publications and articles and resources that have sought to answer that question.

• 1:27Brian Preston?

  Well, we found an article out on Investopedia and I thought, look, before we go through, because what was unique is it actually went through the five different ways that you could consider on this range, are you wealthy?

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Like five ways to accurately assess.

• 1:42Brian Preston?

  Look, and stick around to the end because we're actually going to bring it all together. And I really loved how we kind of put some purpose to every one of these five variables. But there was an interesting way they kicked it off is that Schwab, Charles Schwab, had a research study done on what is wealthy. And what came back from that survey was that 2.3 million is what people needed to feel wealthy.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  That's how much money you need to be wealthy.

• 2:09Brian Preston?

  $839,000 to feel financially comfortable.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 2:14Brian Preston?

  So those are interesting numbers.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Those are interesting numbers. And so that's obviously a measure of like net worth. That's one measure, but this Investopedia was article was interesting because it gave you sort of these five different, five unique metrics that you can use to determine if you're wealthy. And we just wanted to kind of give you our thoughts on each. And the very first one was income. And income is simply how much money you make every year? How much money do you have coming in? And we often say all the time, Brian, that this is your greatest wealth building tool, but is it really a way to assess if you're wealthy or not?

• 2:53Brian Preston?

  Yeah. And we, if you want to put some numbers, this, I like how we put numbers to actual data points. The actual median household income in the United States is around $84,000. But you kind of already have shared this is that income is a way to build wealth, but I don't think it's a very good way to measure how wealthy you are. It's actually, it's like you said, it's a tool to build. It's not actually what lets you see. You can have a great income and still be broke as a joke.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Well, I was going to say, how many people have we interacted with, both in our lives and our careers, that have huge incomes that if you're measuring it by income, they should certainly be wealthy. And yet, as you say, they are broke as a joke. So I'm going to say income, probably not the best metric. How about this next one? The second thing that the Investopedia article said was your debt balance, how much debt or how little debt you carry could be a metric to assess whether you're wealthy or not.

• 3:44Brian Preston?

  Um, once again, given some perspective here with numbers, if you take out mortgage debt, the typical American has around $22,000 of debt. So you think about credit cards, loans, other things, you know, typical American is walking around with debt on their net worth statement.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Now, if you've followed us for any amount of time, Brian, we hold the, you have the thing, you know, the thing for me? You know that we say in the financial order of operations, high interest debt can, high interest debt can be devastating. It can be a wealth killer, but that does not mean that we are necessarily anti debt. We do think that debt can be a tool that can be used. The most common and easy example is a mortgage. Being able to buy a primary residence and having a mortgage on that doesn't necessarily mean that you're bad with money or just because you have a mortgage on your balance sheet, it would not suggest that you are not wealthy. In the same way that just because you don't have debt on the balance sheet, it also doesn't mean that you are wealthy. So I think that again, debt can be a tool that potentially could work for you or more often it can work

• 4:44Speaker 03

  against you, but probably not a great measure of wealth or assessing whether you're wealthy or not.

• 4:49Brian Preston?

  Well, look, there's a lot of wealthy people. Who's that? Kiyosaki who?

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Robert Kiyosaki.

• 4:55Brian Preston?

  You know, I think he's made his entire wealth off of leveraging debt. So you can, you can have a lot of debt and still be wealthy to a degree. It depends on how the value of the assets compared to that debt is. And there's also, think about two people have the exact same level of debt, but their asset levels are completely different. That's why it's also not a good variable to by itself determine wealth.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  All right. So then they went to the third way that you can assess or the third metric you can look at, and that's your financial flexibility. How much margin exists in your life on a month to month, pay cycle to pay cycle basis?

• 5:33Brian Preston?

  Now, this is the one that kind of shocked me. When you look at the data points on this is that 24% of US households lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, what I thought, and it was in the article, wealthy, our high income, remember, income does not mean wealth. I just made my point, but, but by with this stat I'm about to share, high income families in the United States, 19%, so only 5% better than the typical American, even though they have this tool of high income, live paycheck to paycheck as well. So there seems to be elements missing like discipline and so forth.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Financial flexibility means having margin available to be able to fund and reach your financial goals. And you hear us say this all the time, that if you don't have margin, or if you're trying to increase the amount of margin or flexibility you have, there are really only two levers that you get to pull. You can increase your income, how much money you have coming in, or you can decrease your expenses, how much money you have going out. And so, uh, but even this, I think, Brian, fails in a small sense of being a great metric for assessing whether or not someone is wealthy. Cause even someone who can have income coming in and live on less than they make, if they don't actually do something with that margin, they don't actually take it and put it to work. How

• 6:48Speaker 03

  often have we seen the people who just go out and buy CDs and put it in cash? And while they're not paycheck to paycheck and they do have financial flexibility and they do have some level of margin, I would argue they're still not quite at the wealth phase because they didn't actually deploy the dollars in the right way.

• 7:05Brian Preston?

  And that leads to the, the fourth here. And this is the one that, look, I think as a whole is very powerful, so much so that we, on an annual basis, we actually make a habit, a tradition, if you will, where we do a net worth statement, where we, we try to figure out what we own, what we owe folks, and then we get our net worth. And this is valuable. This is very powerful to look at on at least an annual basis to know, hey, are things going in the right direction? Is my debt going down? Are my investments going up? Cause hopefully one day, and we'll get to this point, if you build up your net worth, especially the investable net worth, your money can work harder than you can.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. According to the US Census Bureau, the median net worth for all American households is right around $205,000, which, which sounds okay, right? It sounds like, okay, it's not negative. It's a couple hundred thousand. But the problem with net worth, and we have talked about this a ton, a lot of Americans net worth is really based more on the fact that their primary residence, the home that they own, has increased in value and is based a lot less on their behavior, how much they're saving and how much they're building. So while net worth can be a fantastic metric to assess where you are, how that network and net worth is comprised and what it's made up of makes a really big difference.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  And that was actually the fifth metric that this Investopedia article laid out of how do you actually assess whether you're wealthy? And they called it retirement savings, or we would say your liquid net worth or your investment portfolio.

• 8:40Brian Preston?

  Yeah. Cause I mean, retirement savings immediately kind of gets, um, put into the category, you probably immediately think of like 401ks, IRAs, Roth IRAs. I'm willing, what I like about liquid investments is that yes, you get to count all the 401k, the Roth IRAs and so forth, but you can also count taxable savings and your emergency funds and so forth. So it all goes in because that's just money you actually have access. It's really your army of dollars that you can put to work for you. So you don't have to work so hard with your back, your brain and even your hands.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  And so then again, looking at the numbers, and this is according to the US Census Bureau. If we look at median retirement savings, so money that people have chiseled away for retirement, for future financial independence, by age, you can see it's a very different number than the median household income. For those folks that are under 35, the median retirement savings, only about $25,000. For those 35 to 44, about $79,000, 45 to 54, about $97,000, 55 to 64, about $150,000. And then 65 and above, median retirement savings is about $200,000, $198,000. I would argue, Brian, that's, that's not quite enough to be financially independent.

• 9:55Brian Preston?

  Well, I mean, and let's kind of bring this home because this is what I love is I want to close this out and tell you how these five things are important.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  They're helpful.

• 10:03Brian Preston?

  But in their own ways, but we in America have a discipline problem. And I shared that earlier is because we have high income, even in the research from this, this article. High income people should have all the capacity in the world to build wealth because they have the, you know, the, the big shovel, they're making, bringing money in. But yet even close to 20% is not, you know, because typical American is 24% and then you have a high income at close to 20%. We just have a discipline problem and the fact that we never actually engage the tool of saving and investing. That's what happens. And if you need proof, and this is why we love to, to kind of give you some metrics to go by.

• 10:44Brian Preston?

  We say all the time that for the typical, you know, American, what we'd like you to have is some benchmarks of goals. Like at by age 30, try to have one time your income saved and invested.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Invested liquid portfolio.

• 10:57Brian Preston?

  If you, if you think about a 40 year old, try to be up to three times, 50, 6.4. You can see what's happening as you're building in the background where it starts very slow, but through compounding growth, it picks up more and more momentum where one day, as I've said multiple times on the show already, your money works harder than you do.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  So let's assume if you were a 40 year old with a hundred thousand dollar household income and your investment portfolio is $300,000, we would argue that you're on track. You're moving in the right direction. You are where you need to be, but on the median, Americans are not doing that. So we want you to have a more accurate assessment of whether you're wealthy, where you are supposed to be. While you may have a high income, while your debt load may be low, while your net worth may be growing, we want to make sure that your behavior is actually matching that. So we thought, okay, rather than using these five metrics as a mechanism to assess whether you're wealthy, what are some takeaways we could take away from each of their metrics?

• 11:59Brian Preston?

  So let's go through each of these. Income, this is your shovel. This is actually your number one wealth building tool. Make it valuable by then leveraging discipline so that this wealth turns into assets, the income turns into assets.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  And then if you are living beyond your means and you're using high interest debt to subsidize your lifestyle, there's a really good chance that you're not ever going to be able to build wealth, actually going to work against yourself. High interest debt truly is a wealth killer.

• 12:27Brian Preston?

  And then they, they listed financial flexibility. We, we talk about this a different way. We say this is margin. This is living on less than you make. And when you utilize, this is one of the three ingredients to wealth building because you have discipline and then you have living on less than you make, which creates the margin or the money that given enough time can be really valuable.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  And then if you want to really assess behaviorally, how am I doing? Am I actually moving towards financial independence? We think that your investable net worth is probably the most accurate way to measure where am I at? Am I on track? Am I ahead of the curve? Or am I behind the curve? And that way you can determine, and, and this is what I think is so interesting too. We gave you these numbers of where the median American is. And if you're ahead of that number, maybe that's good. If you're behind that number, maybe that's bad, but you have to assess for yourself. Personal finance is personal. What is the life that I ultimately want to live? How am I going to use my money to achieve the goals that I have? And am I on track to be able to do those things?

• 13:27Brian Preston?

  So kind of to close, we've already talked about the financial order of operations. If you're looking for a system that will actually tell you what to do with your next dollar, this is the instruction manual. But I want to take it even a step further. And the fact that we gave you at the beginning of this is that to feel comfortable, according to Schwab's survey, $833,000, 2.3 to feel wealthy. Go to our website, moneyguy.com/resources, look at our wealth multiplier, use our time value of money calculator, and you can figure out based upon your age right now, what you would have to save and invest to reach those goals. I think you'll be shocked, especially for all my audience that's in your twenties and thirties.

• 14:10Brian Preston?

  You can do every one of those things if you'll just take a little bit today to build your great big, beautiful tomorrow.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  I love it. So you figure out your number. Well, one of the things we get to do is as you figure out your number and you're trying to figure out, okay, well, how do I continue marching along? I've got questions. I've got things that I want to get some insight on. I want to figure out how I can do money better because we do believe that there is indeed a better way to do money. It's why every single Tuesday at 10 a.m., we sit right here so that we can answer your questions and load you up. So if you have a question, if you have something you want us to weigh in on, we have the team out in the wings right now, ready to get that in front of us. So make sure you get that in the chat. With that, Creative Director Rebi, I'm going to throw it over to you.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  We are actively adding questions to the hopper. So thanks for submitting those and we will get to those very shortly. But first I have a secret announcement for you.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  This is just for you. You are the first to hear that something is coming. We've been sitting on something for a while and we're not quite ready to share it with everyone. And that's why we wanted to give early access and some hints leading up to that big announcement to you. So if you want to know what we've been cooking up, what's going on behind the scenes, go to moneyguy.com/earlyaccess and you can get on the list. We're going to be giving hints, some surprise perks, and ultimately early access to this secret thing that we've been working on before anybody else. So that's mainly all I can say at this time.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  But what I want you to tell us right now is if you had to guess, if we're working on something big, if we have a big announcement coming, if there's a thing that you can get early access to, what do you think it is? If you drop those questions in the chat, or even better, if you are in the moneyverse, you can drop it in the moneyverse, I would love to hear your guesses and maybe even get Bo and Brian to react to them on the show today. So make that happen. Go to moneyguy.com/earlyaccess to get on the list. You'll receive a confirmation email after you get on the list to kind of tell you the lay of the land and what's coming over the next couple of weeks. And I can't wait for you to know what this announcement is.

• 16:28Brian Preston?

  Can I say something without giving away too much?

• 16:30Speaker 04

  It's always scary, but here we go.

• 16:34Brian Preston?

  Here's the thing. I love what is coming out pays so much homage to the abundance cycle. Cause the whole thing with the abundance cycle is to give so much value, learn, apply, grow, and become the best version of yourself. And I think that anybody and everybody out there in the audience, I think, I think it's going to be a little shock and awe. You'll be like, holy cow, they, they really did that.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  You know what? That was an acceptable and true tease. I respect that.

• 17:04Brian Preston?

  Well, I feel as, as the educator, I, I feel really good about what's coming out.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  I love it. I love it. So get on the list, first of all, go to moneyguy.com/earlyaccess and then put your guesses in the chat. We're in the moneyverse right now. I want to know what you initially say. I think you're doing this. I would love to know that.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  I love so many of these guesses. I'm not going to say them because I know you're going to say them at the end, but there are some.

• 17:25Brian Preston?

  You told me not to react if they, and that's why I'm glad they don't give me a computer screen.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  Well, let's jump to a question and we'll gather up some guesses. Maybe we'll do that sooner rather than later. But let's go to question number one from Alyssa. Right now she says, hi, Money Guy. I'm 35 in the messy middle.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Welcome.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  My hubby wants to keep 19% net worth in cash. That's 18 plus months of an emergency fund. Opportunity cost seems too high. I get wanting to have cash on hand, but not at the expense of investing. 50% net worth invested now. What do you think?

• 18:00Speaker 03

  So it's difficult to assess, what do we think, right? We don't know all the variables. We don't know all the unique parts of your financial situation. But what I can equip you with is some questions to ask because at 35, that's young. Even being in the messy middle, that's really young. And so to hear that you have 19% of your total net worth in, in liquid cash, not really out there working, not really out there earning for you, and the fact that that represents 18 months of your expenses and emergency, as an emergency fund? The very first question that I ask your husband, if he was sitting in here with us is why? What, what's the, is there some reason? And his answer may be, oh, well, we know that we have a new car we're going to have to replace in the next 12 months. Okay. Well, that just, that's a sinking fund.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  That makes sense. Or hey, there's a renovation on the home that we, that we know we want to do and we need cash. Okay, that's justifiable. That makes sense. But if it's just, well, you know, I'm just nervous about the market, nervous about what's going on, then I would walk him through, okay, well, what are emergency funds supposed to do? And what are the seven so whats? It's an exercise you can work through. Okay. If the worst thing happens, so what? And then that happens, so what? And then that happens, so what? And likely if you have a fully funded six month emergency fund, you can get through the seven so whats without having a cataclysmic outcome.

• 19:19Brian Preston?

  Look, I don't know, I don't know your, your husband's background. If some of this is just for safeties or what helps him sleep at night, this is one of those things where a little bit of education helps is that what feels safe in the short term can actually be risky in the long term. You know, I grew up in a household where my parents' whole idea of investing was CDs because they just didn't know how money worked. They had never done the stock market. So it felt kind of like they'd heard gambling and all kinds of other things. It's only later when you, you find out, no, that's the economy, all this innovation, all the things that are going on in the world, you're getting in on that instead of trying to beat the market, you're actually just being the market. But for a lot of people who've never done it before, that feels foreign to them.

• 20:02Brian Preston?

  That feels like there, there needs to be some education and comfort built into that. And then, you know, and that's one of the reasons. Financial order of operations, because what this is going to protect you and your husband from falling into is you go through the actual steps because we cover you in all aspects of the fact that, hey, emergency reserves, it's so important to your husband and to us as well that we gave it two steps to the financial order of operations with steps one and four. We want to make sure you're not leaving money on the table with the free money from your employers. It sounds like y'all don't have problems with paying off high interest debt because if you have huge reserves, you're super disciplined. But I don't want money left on the table with your Roth IRAs, your health savings accounts, that's the tax-free growth, the retirement

• 20:45Brian Preston?

  accounts with your employer plans. It's the really step seven and eight that y'all look at it. If you're so far ahead of the curve that you're like, hey, I want to, you know, keep this extra cash for X. Step eight, maybe you can do it. This is why I give people permission. If you want, if you're in your twenties and thirties and you want to pay off a two and a half, three percent mortgage, I don't love it. But when you've done everything else so well that you're in step eight, it's your money. Do it makes you happy because you've paid respect to the other parts of the system. So doing it for peace of mind, or whatever the goal is, is A-OK at that point because you made it through the financial order of operations. But if it's before that and you're like leaving money on the table with your

• 21:29Brian Preston?

  401K or you're not funding Roth IRAs, we need to work on that behavioral side of things.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  Really quick exercise that I would do, and again, we have this, the reason why we have these tools out there available, if you go out to moneyguy.com/resources, check out a wealth multiplier. If you and your husband are both 35, say, hey, let's just think about this. All right. We're at 18 months. Let's, let's assume that maybe we need a 12-month emergency reserve because of a super conservative risk tolerance. If we just took that six months of additional emergency reserves we had, and we put that into the market to go work for us, do you recognize our money multiplier at 35 is?

• 22:05Brian Preston?

  12.69.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Is 12.69. Every one of those dollars that we could put to work could turn into $12.69 by the time we retire. And it's going to be a big number. That's the opportunity cost you're walking away from. So I think perhaps just education would be a great way to start that conversation.

• 22:25Brian Preston?

  Is it a Tumblr day?

• 22:26Speaker 04

  It is. I'm glad you can eat the words out of my mouth.

• 22:29Brian Preston?

  Quark, quark, quark, quark.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Alyssa, since we answered your question on the show, you get a Tumblr. If you'd like one, just email [email protected].

• 22:37Brian Preston?

  By the way, if y'all are wondering what this sounds, because I have to remember, we have new audience members come in every week. As a matter of fact, we had a react go out yesterday and I thought, I thought it's hilarious. Somebody said, I accidentally clicked on the link and then I finished the entire episode. Thank you for teaching financial literacy. I'm like, another happy customer. We give out tumblers on, on Q and A days where this thing literally, as you see, I'm using it as a Tumblr. Bo is actually, is a koozie, I should say. Bo is using his as a Tumblr.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  I've got mine today, too.

• 23:07Brian Preston?

  This thing has serves multiple goals. So that's why I say it's a transformer and can change your life. But mustache, just like Bo can't grow one, I can't grow one. You have to, you have to buy your own fake mustache, just like Bo's.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Love it.

• 23:22Brian Preston?

  By the way, that does prove.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Do you remember?

• 23:24Brian Preston?

  I know. You said, you said, I said, I'm never mean to Bo. And then you're like, every day.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Literally every single day. It's all right, though.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  All right, we're going to go to another question before we get your reaction to some of the announcement guesses.

• 23:38Brian Preston?

  If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Buddy, you've been strengthening me for the last 20 years now.

• 23:42Brian Preston?

  Heck of a coach. If I, if I wasn't picking on you, I didn't care about you anymore. That's what my coach used to tell me.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Back in the day when I was learning how to swim, because I'm a pretty good swimmer, if you would have taught me, I bet you were just throw him in kind. Ah, throw him in there, he'll swim.

• 23:53Brian Preston?

  Hey, let the record show, when he almost drowned in the ocean, I was positioned to save him.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  He did.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  He did save you.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. He, he was there had I needed to be saved, but since I can swim.

• 24:05Brian Preston?

  I positioned myself to his, behind him so he couldn't drown me and I could throw him on my shoulder. I mean, my hip.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  And I was a much smaller guy back then. So he would have, he'd had no problem getting me in.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Oh, man. If this never gets resolved, let us know if you'll keep.

• 24:23Brian Preston?

  By the way, because of all this conversation, we're going to go on another vacation together.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  You gotta.

• 24:27Brian Preston?

  Because we're like, man, we went on one couples trip together and look at all these stories that came out of it. If we did this again, it's just fruitful for the show.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Can't wait. All right, we're going to go to foolish parents question next. My wife and I are 27 years old with a baby arriving in weeks. So congratulations, first of all. We are working our way through the foo. What counts as high interest debt? We have a land loan at seven percent rate with a balance of 127K. What do you think? Give them some guidance.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  All right, let's see how good our editing, uh, production team can be. We do have a little metric. It's a slide that we share all the time about what counts as high interest debt. How do I determine that? And so let's, let's start with the easy stuff first. Credit cards, no matter the interest rate, they're high interest. Even if you have a, a 0% credit card, we would argue that using a credit card is totally fine, but carrying a credit card balance, no matter the interest rate is never okay. So credit cards are always high interest debt. Well, then you step down to something like auto loans. Oh, look at this. Auto loans, we believe if you're going to go borrow money, you should fall into the 238, uh, rule of thumb. So 20% down, don't finance for any more than three years or 36

• 25:43Speaker 03

  months, and your payment can't exceed 8% of your monthly gross income. Well, if you're inside of the 238 framework, it's okay if we go through a season where car interest rates are higher. So if you're in your twenties, even if you have an eight or nine percent car loan, which is not ideal, if it's inside of 238, we would say that's okay. In your thirties, nine percent, uh, and then your forties down to eight percent. And then student loans, same sort of metrics. If you're in your twenties and you have student loans below six percent, probably not high interest, thirties, five percent, so on and so forth. This one is really interesting though, because it's a land loan, which I'm assuming is some raw undeveloped land. They're probably going to build on in the future. That's going to be part of their homestead.

• 26:23Brian Preston?

  That's the context we need is because there's, there's two paths this could go on. If this is investment, like you own raw land for investment, I do kind of get that into potentially the higher interest category because of, you could look at that column for student loans and I would look at that and be like, seven percent is pretty high. So that likely could, with an asterisk on it qualifies step three. However, if this is land, that exactly what Bo said, you purchased this for the thought that you were going to build on it and then turn this into your primary residence. Okay, now we have an issue because I look at this as an issue is that you could build a house on this land and then

• 27:03Brian Preston?

  refinance into a much lower interest rate, or at least lower, you know, like six percent, five and a half percent, depending upon where markets are at the time that you close on the actual refinanced house. And if that's the case, I don't consider this high interest because it's just like mortgages. We always are very careful to say, if you have like a seven and a half percent mortgage, I don't necessarily treat that immediately as high interest because you always have the ability to refinance. Markets change, you know, constantly. There's deductibility of, of, of the interest, which lowers it down to a degree. So there are some features, if this is part of something that's going to be your primary residence, that gets the asterisk. But if it's an investment, I would consider this high interest debt.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  All right, let me give you some context. This is what I love about a live chat. Foolish, let us know. We plan to build on the land in four to five years and we placed a 15% down payment. Uh, the total cost of land in our current unrelated mortgage is 25% of gross income. We make about 150. We currently have 200,000 invested. So one thing you've immediately let me know there is, and, and the land is on a 15-year term. You have this other home, this other mortgage that you're paying, but I imagine once you build on this property and you build your new home, you're probably going to sell your old home. Well, assuming that's the case, I'm going to assume that all the equity or a lot of the equity in that is then going to come over to this new home that you're building. So given that

• 28:30Speaker 03

  that's the case, and given the seven percent is likely a short-term thing, I don't know that I would consider that high interest in this situation and begin aggressively paying it down because there's a really good chance when you sell your other house, it will then extinguish this land loan that you have.

• 28:45Brian Preston?

  And it sounds like they have a very healthy income. So they're hopefully able and I heard the investments is 200,000. So yes, I, it's less than ideal that you have a seven percent interest rate on this, but I would, I don't want you not funding a Roth IRA. I don't want you missing out on 401K contributions because you have this moment in time thing where over the next two to three, four years, as you said, this will be your forever home that you refinance into. So I think it's just a uncomfortable nuisance that you have to kind of make it through in this season of life.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Well said.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Man, I like it. We get more context.

• 29:22Brian Preston?

  Well, that's because that's like a personal, if that was, if that person was a client, these are the things that I would kind of try to navigate is, you know, instead of giving you a blanket rule, I, I try to look at, you know, meet you, triage your financial situation and meet you exactly where you are. Personal finance is very personal.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I love it. Foolish parents, if you would like a money guy Tumblr, just email [email protected] and we'd love to send you one. All right, let's have your reaction to some of these guesses. So something big is coming from money guy.

• 29:53Brian Preston?

  And Brian, don't give it away.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Is it Mutant Mingle?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Oh, the dating app.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Lots of guesses.

• 30:01Brian Preston?

  Hey, let the record, record show, I was on vacation when this all came out. It's like the day, not that I'm like the break on anything, but it is, it is interesting that I go on vacation and this is where you guys take the, the live stream.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  It's, well, you know what? Uh, that's it. Who knows? Maybe it's Mutant Mingle.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Is it Bo's Mutant Gym launching?

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Opening in brick and mortar.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Oh, man. The, the Third Bay Boys would be very, very excited about that.

• 30:27Brian Preston?

  Oh, my God.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  And they will love that show.

• 30:29Brian Preston?

  Do y'all have merch?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  We do have merch. We have, we have, we actually just ordered some brand new. We went, uh, sleeveless hoodies, uh, trucker hats, and then we got tank tops.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Yes or no? Is it a flex or weird that his group of friends has merch?

• 30:42Brian Preston?

  I want to be a nerd, but then you're like, can mega chads be nerds? I mean, it's just, I don't even know what to say about it. It just seems weird.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Next guess is a giveaway of $1 million to every person on the stream.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 31:36Speaker 05

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand." When leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 31:58Brian Preston?

  You know, if I was trying to run for class president of the high school, that's the exact type of thing that I would say is because you know, there's no accountability.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And pizza every day.

• 32:06Brian Preston?

  Just making blanket promises. We get pizza, no homework and you get a million dollars if you elect me to be class president of your high school.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  How about?

• 32:15Speaker 03

  You told us our rules where we could not say yes or no. So we're, that's a maybe.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  That's a maybe.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  How about a new course?

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 32:21Brian Preston?

  New course.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 32:22Brian Preston?

  New course.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Bo swim lessons?

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Maybe. What if it was Bo's swim lessons?

• 32:27Speaker 04

  What if you were teaching swim lessons?

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Given by Brian, right? Like get us.

• 32:30Brian Preston?

  Oh, I'm a good, I have a heart of an educator.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Oh, Hasselhoff and Efron over here.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. A new.

• 32:37Brian Preston?

  You got it. Remember, remember, if you did Greatest Showman, I'm not, Hasselhoff's not in Greatest Showman.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Well, I was, you know, I was trying to say.

• 32:45Brian Preston?

  Hugh Jackman. I'm Wolverine in that case study.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Okay, you're Wolverine. There we go.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  All right, a couple more. How about?

• 32:51Speaker 03

  High School Musical, is that what you're saying?

• 32:53Brian Preston?

  Yeah, you're Zac Efron. He was a wrestler.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Dude, he was super, he was jacked in Baywatch.

• 32:57Brian Preston?

  Okay, we took that way in many directions. Keep going. Sorry, Reeves.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  As usual. How about a new unscream personality so Brian can start planning for his retirement?

• 33:06Brian Preston?

  Whoa.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Okay, one, I love the idea of another personality. I do not like the idea of Brian retiring.

• 33:12Brian Preston?

  Y'all think I'm close to retiring?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Tell us.

• 33:16Brian Preston?

  I mean, I, look, I look in the mirror and I'm like, you know, I look pretty good for my age. But then, then things, the comments like that and I'm like, you know, okay.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  No, we also had some people in the Moneyverse say Brian is never retiring.

• 33:28Brian Preston?

  No, I'm gonna croak and then they go, "You gonna come do studio tours?" And I'm gonna be leaned up against the wall in a glass case.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Can we get Brian stuffed? Can we like attack the derby Brian?

• 33:40Speaker 04

  He did say one time that we could wheel his lazy boy into the set. I was like, okay.

• 33:44Brian Preston?

  This is getting dark really quick.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  Last but not least, how about a Money Guy Cruise?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 33:51Brian Preston?

  Oh man, you'll have no idea. You're preaching to my heart.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Honestly, Brian would love a cruise.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  That almost happened.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  He loves a cruise and he's been trying to convince us of a cruise for a long time.

• 34:00Brian Preston?

  You know, we had a joke, we had a joke because you know, every now and then the Ramsey Solutions people will get these wild hairs and do, we were like, what if we did a takeover?

• 34:07Speaker 03

  What if we showed up?

• 34:08Brian Preston?

  What if we did a, we like totally, you know, just totally, what is it? A stowaway? You stole away on the Ramsey and then we even, we probably couldn't get a.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Made up on the Ramsey.

• 34:19Brian Preston?

  Cause travel agents, travel agents get like booking fees.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:22Brian Preston?

  What if we came up with our own affiliate code for the Ramsey Solutions Cruise? And we marketed it as the financial.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  That would be hilarious.

• 34:32Brian Preston?

  That would be awesome.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Can confirm, that would be less work than putting on a cruise.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Money.

• 34:36Brian Preston?

  Like, "Arrrr, take over the Ramsey Solution Cruise."

• 34:39Speaker 03

  You do a good pirate. The Money Guy meetup on the Ramsey Cruise. That'd be hilarious.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Well, thank you for all of those guesses. That was fun. Keep them coming. And definitely go to moneyguy.com/earlyaccess if you're not on the list yet. Although a number of you already are, so shout out to you. I look forward to talking more about the secret announcement.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Where do they go to get that again?

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Moneyguy.com/earlyaccess.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Moneyguy.com/earlyaccess to get on the list.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  All right, we're gonna do another question and then hop into our segment. But first, the question is from CosmicPenguin1001.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Is this the Cosmic Penguin from the Moneyverse?

• 35:15Speaker 04

  It is. Our friend Penguin.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  What's wild is, you guys wonder, do we read comments? Absolutely. Do we, are we in the Moneyverse? Absolutely. Even though you don't know where he is, we are in there.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Brian may or may not be. Can confirm or deny.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, we pay attention. We just, we love that. Even though this thing has gotten bigger, it still feels, it still feels like a family. So when I see, that makes me happy that Cosmic's still here.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Well, he answered a good question. I'm excited to see what you guys say. It says, "Good morning, Money Guy team. In step seven, in the step seven chapter of the book Millionaire Mission, you discuss finding your why. Is knowing your why a requirement for completing step seven? If so, do you find that people's why still changes after step seven? This is a really important component of really everything we teach."

• 36:01Brian Preston?

  Well, I, I think it, I don't want people to get stressed out because that's not, step seven is actually supposed to be the first step where you're saying, hey, all these other things were very kind of automatic for the purpose of either protecting you from yourself. That's what steps one and four from emergencies. Two, the free money is just so important. Three, high interest debt. You can never have wealth if you're, you know, paying 20% plus to a bank. And then you get really excited about five and six because those are tax favored investments. And seven is the one where you're supposed to say, how am I going to use this money? What makes me happy? And you know, why am I even, what's my relationship with money and how the rest of the world connects?

• 36:42Brian Preston?

  So the why component is just to give you the, the context, the flavor of how you're supposed to live your best life. But I think a lot of people, you probably go get there and if you've been good with money and you're analytical, a lot of you may have never even given thought to that. You're just like, hey, I think I wanted a million dollars since I've been, you know, in the fourth grade and you know, that's what, that's the exercise is because I don't want you to get overwhelmed with somebody flipping the script and saying, hey, instead of being so goal oriented, let's actually start thinking about us and what makes the money kind of the tool that, that gives us our best life. So if you get there and you're not really sure on your why, that's okay. It might, it's just like when I got to college, I didn't know I was gonna be an accounting major.

• 37:27Brian Preston?

  I mean, you, that's why you introduce concepts so you can slowly start it, let it start working in your brain even while you're sleeping, you know, and it's processing behind the scenes. So, so don't get overwhelmed if you don't know your why, just because you've gotten to step seven.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I want to give you guys some, I love the last part of this question. Hey, if so, do you find that people's why changes after step seven? I would argue, yeah. I think about our personal journeys, you know, we, we were fortunate enough that we both hit step seven a long time ago and our why when we hit there was very different than our why today. As this show is growing and the firm is growing, the reason why we get to do it and the impact that we're able to have is so much different than it, than it was when we first started hitting 25%. I think it's okay. I think so long as you're going through the exercise of revisiting your why and reassessing your why and rechecking your why and making sure that the decisions you're making still align with the why. If the decisions don't align,

• 38:25Speaker 03

  then ask the question, why am I doing the things that I'm doing? So long as you're constantly working through that exercise, I think it'll help you stay on track. It's one of the things that my wife and I, you know, we do these, these at the beginning of every year. We'll go to the net worth statement. I'll go over the, what do you do if I die thing? And then we do all of our trip planning and then we ask the whys. Hey, why are we saving this money? Why are we building this wealth? Why do we want to do this trip? Why do we want to create these experiences? If you can work through that exercise, it just reminds you and it keeps it top of mind why you're making hard decisions when they're hard and why you get to make easy decisions when they're easy.

• 39:00Brian Preston?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  And it's okay that that changes through time. I think it's, I think it's supposed to change through time as you mature.

• 39:05Brian Preston?

  Yeah. I mean, we, we, you don't become completely different people, but you definitely evolve throughout your life.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  That's great. Wonderful. Well, Cosmic Penguin 01, it's my honor to give you a long awaited Tumblr. So email [email protected] if you want to cash in on that. All right. Next, we are going to move on to our From the Wings segment. This segment is where we get to get Brian and Bo's reactions to some recent headlines going on in the news right now. And they are going to tell us.

• 39:37Brian Preston?

  Do we do these?

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Yes, please. Look, we've trained you so well. You knew exactly where to get your thumbs up, thumbs down paddles. They're going to tell us, is this headline thumbs up, news, we should pay attention for our financial lives? Or thumbs down, it's noise. It doesn't really hold any weight. So without further ado, I'm going to read the first headline. It says, "Mortgage rates in the US increase to 6.69%, highest since July 2025. Is this news or noise?"

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Ooh, all right. Bo says it's news. Brian says it's noise. Fight, fight, fight, fight.

• 40:14Brian Preston?

  Who do you want? Who should go first?

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Brian.

• 40:17Brian Preston?

  Look, I even think the headline is hilarious in the fact, highest since July 2025.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Not July 2025.

• 40:23Brian Preston?

  If you're going to get, try to hit me with a shock and awe stat, it needs to at least be like three years in the past. I mean, at least, you know, some type of season. That's why it's like, we haven't reached this since, and like they do something 90 days ago. And I'm like, how is this? That doesn't even have, the shock and awe gets pulled out when it was something like last week. I mean, that's, that's the part. So, look, mortgage rates are constantly evolving. And I think it goes into the calculation of affordability and what you should do with your own personal finances. But I don't know that I necessarily think watching where mortgage rates are on a daily basis in, in your long-term planning is, is something to fret about.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm going to agree with you. I don't believe watching it on a daily basis is something that you ought to do. But I just think there are so many, uh, young people, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna classify young as people below 40 that really want to get into the homeownership side of things. Like it is a, it's, it's probably one of the most difficult decisions to make right now in our present day for folks who have not already been on that side of the equation, trying to get into home, trying to get in your first one. And so I just think that mortgage rates are super important because that is a financial goal for a lot of people. And so I just want you to be mindful of that. Uh, not so much that, oh, they've hit an all-time high, but more recognizing, okay, now might not be the right time for me to buy a house because a house isn't affordable, but I am going to begin saving cash. I'm going to build

• 41:48Speaker 03

  up that down payment. I'm going to at least keep my finger on the temperature of, okay, where are mortgage rates? Because if, you know, whatever goes up, generally speaking, should come down at some point or offer some sort of reprieve. So if mortgage rates get down to six, five and a half, five, maybe that introduces a more favorable time to buy for those folks who are trying to get on that side of the equation. So I, I think it, I think it is newsworthy just because it's home-related and so many people right now want to be in homes.

• 42:19Brian Preston?

  I hesitate because I, I sent something to the whole money team over the weekend. I came across two or three pieces of, of information on that there's some glimmers of hope with housing, with, with home prices. Now, interest rates still stink. Um, but, so that facet's not fixed. Would, would y'all be interested if, because I know, look, I always hesitate because our show Rent Versus Buy did really well. So that makes me think, hey, there is an audience of people wanting to know our, our thought and your temperature on housing. But then there's also, I always like, if you're not in that season, are people even going to show up for that show? So, you know, let us know in the comments because I do, I've, I've told the content team, I think I could do an update as probably in a Q and

• 43:03Brian Preston?

  A, you know, Money Guy Answers, we could give you guys some feedback on what's going on with those first-time home purchases.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  With, with the idea being, it seems like prices are cooling off a little bit, is the, is what the article was.

• 43:15Brian Preston?

  That's one indicator. That's one indicator.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  All right.

• 43:19Brian Preston?

  But mortgage rates still stink.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  News from the stock market up next. Stock market today. Major indexes are steady as S and P 500 looks to add to record high. That's from Investopedia. Both said noise. How come?

• 43:37Speaker 03

  If you, if you think it's high now, wait till you see it 10 years from now, right? Like, always be buying, baby.

• 43:44Brian Preston?

  I, I think this headline cracks me up because they, it's like they, we need a little shock and awe, but, but things are the same as they were, you know, last week. So it's steady, but they, but they are all-time highs. So it's like, they're like, hey, let's put some sensation with our boring headline. Um, look, all-time highs just happen. You know, markets go up 80% of the time. You know, if you look at it on an annual basis, 80% of the time they're up, 20% they're down. So that's why you get two recessions typically, um, you know, throughout the decades, you know, through a decade. So there's a lot of, as the economy is expanding and growing through innovation, you're going to see more and more all-time highs.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 44:24Brian Preston?

  I, I remember, you know, what's, what's interesting, Bo, we had a conversation probably right post 2008, where we were telling a client, it's like, hey, if you think that, because the, the Dow had gone down to, to below 10,000. And, um, and I was like, you realize there will be a time when the Dow crosses 100,000. And he's like, no way. And I was like, just give it enough time. It'll happen. It'll happen in your lifetime.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Next headline, Americans are spending plenty, but they're saving much less. That's from Market Watch.

• 44:59Brian Preston?

  I mean.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Bo says news. Oh, Brian switched to news.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Well, he looked at mine. He cheated.

• 45:03Brian Preston?

  I did cheat.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  I did.

• 45:04Brian Preston?

  I did cheat. I didn't realize it, but I was like, let me see what Bo's doing.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Let me tell you why I think that's newsworthy. Um, we're, Americans are consumers. They have been for a long time. Uh, we thought when the pandemic happened and savings rates shot up, we're like, oh my goodness, people have woken up. They're going to change their behavior. No, it's just because they were trapped inside. They couldn't go spend. As soon as we got out of the pandemic, as soon as stuff opened back up, people started spending money again, and we saw savings rates plummet again. We have a real deferred gratification, saving and building for the future problem in this country. So I think it is newsworthy. And the more we can talk about it, the more we can tell people, hey, the earlier you start, the earlier you figure this out, the less hard you have to work at it. It's real easy if you start early. But maybe you didn't start early, maybe in your 30s, maybe in

• 45:51Speaker 03

  your 40s, maybe in your 50s. Even though you have not done the things up to this point that you wish you would have done, the second best time to change your behavior, if you can't go back in time, is to change it today. To start living a lesson you make today, to start building for the future today, start saving for tomorrow, today, and your future self will thank you. But I think so many Americans, they ignore it, they don't pay attention to it, and they let our feeds and all the stuff we're looking at it, just pull the dollars out of our back pocket. And that's not, that's not the way it should be. There's, there's a better way to do money. There's a better way to do your financial life.

• 46:25Brian Preston?

  I mean, we live in a consumption society. I mean, you think about, there's all, every, most industries are set up to try to help you spend all of your money. And that's why, you know, last week, we had the whole conversation of what's our counter culture point here at the Money Guy Show? I think ours is, is that we actually try to help you be that financial mutant that actually builds and grows versus just consume and spends. Um, and it, and it goes beyond just, I know these, they're hard times. I know housing's expensive. I know we've been told lies about education and just go to college and it'll all turn out. There's a lot of negative stuff, and that's why I like that we get to be the voice to say, no, let, let us show you how you can actually take whatever comes your way,

• 47:07Brian Preston?

  give you the tools, give you the education so that you can actually be counter to the, the consumption that, that surrounds us all.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  There's video with this last headline. It says, bear gets trapped inside SUV, honks horn all night. So if you want to know before you know, say if it's news or noise, well, we can show you the video.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  All right.

• 47:32Speaker 06

  Well, talk about a rude awakening.

• 47:34Brian Preston?

  I can't see, I can hear something, but I can't see anything.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  Car and got locked inside. So a Colorado man did.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Well, what's your initial reaction?

• 47:42Brian Preston?

  We just heard a Colorado man.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  Oh, there it is. There it is.

• 47:45Brian Preston?

  Okay, here we go.

• 47:47Speaker 06

  Well, talk about a rude awakening. A bear somehow broke into a car and got locked inside. So a Colorado man did what any of us would do, right? Wrong. He used a long rope to free the animal.

• 48:00Brian Preston?

  What?

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 48:02Speaker 07

  The bear got stuck in the car and locked himself in last night.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  You get bear rushed.

• 48:05Speaker 07

  And I heard honking all night. Thought it was a crazy neighbor.

• 48:08Brian Preston?

  I wouldn't even be doing this.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  What are you going to do? Leave the bear in the car?

• 48:14Brian Preston?

  How the car, why are the windows all up?

• 48:16Speaker 06

  Open the door, the bear took off into the woods.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Buddy, look at that cameraman. It was gone.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  For those listening on podcast, a man is like putting a string around the door handle and going far away.

• 48:29Brian Preston?

  So was the door open or was this bear, like Yogi Bear and walked up and opened the door? Because there was no broken windows.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  I bet you.

• 48:36Brian Preston?

  There was no broken windows.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Because, because bears know how to like, they know how to do that stuff because they've been around people and stuff.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  Then they can't get back out.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  What, what would you have done?

• 48:44Brian Preston?

  I, I don't know because I mean, look, it's, it's not like a, I mean, oh.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  I call the authorities.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Can't you just like tell your car, hey, open doors?

• 48:52Brian Preston?

  No, I could. I could.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Hey, car, open doors.

• 48:54Brian Preston?

  On mine, I could just open the doors with my, my mobile app.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  Could you imagine how heartbroken Brian would be if there was a bear in his Tesla?

• 49:00Speaker 04

  I know.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Could you imagine?

• 49:02Speaker 04

  Honestly, that'd be bad.

• 49:03Brian Preston?

  You know what? I'd give it a ride.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  I was just going to say, it would just.

• 49:07Brian Preston?

  You'd give a bear a ride. I'd put it on pep mode, cool it down so it was comfortable in there, and then I'd give it a ride.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Uh, you know what? I like the idea that the guy went and got the rope. I think I would have called a professional though. I think I'd have called him like, hey.

• 49:22Brian Preston?

  Wait, do you think animals, local animal services is designed, is set up to, to get a bear out of?

• 49:29Speaker 03

  I'm going to be honest.

• 49:30Brian Preston?

  He looked like a well behaved bear.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  I think they're more prepared for it than I am.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know what their training is. It, it's more than mine. Has to be more than mine.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  I think they have some more resources, like protection. I don't know. I just think we'll let the authorities handle that.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Oh, so.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  I say it's news.

• 49:50Brian Preston?

  I, I, yeah. I mean, it's news.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Clearly they got off talking.

• 49:53Brian Preston?

  I love, I love the, the pictures, the videos, all the, all the things that, that let us have an extra angle. That's so much more.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  Somebody said, oh, it's gonna be, it's gonna be fun to clean that car. I didn't even think about that.

• 50:06Brian Preston?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  Cause I bet.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  I know. It really is quite a big problem.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  It's called scat.

• 50:10Brian Preston?

  I was sitting there thinking that. I was thinking bear scat.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  That's called bear scat all over.

• 50:14Brian Preston?

  That's not a.

• 50:17Brian Preston?

  It's a different type of scat.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  Was that singing?

• 50:20Brian Preston?

  It was a scat.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  You guys got that for free. You're welcome.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  All right. Let's go back to the hopper and pull some more financial questions. This one's from Phil V5J. It says, I have a great employee sponsored health plan where all the plans take nothing out of my paycheck. Whoa. Should I still do the high deductible plan for the HSA eligibility or take the Cadillac plan? This is the most financial mutant question.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  No, no, we can't say no. We can't just come out and say no. We can't do that. We don't know all the situ, we don't, we don't know everything. We don't know.

• 50:55Brian Preston?

  It sounds pretty fast.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  It gives specific advice.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  We don't know, we don't know all the variables. It seems, that's the correct way to say this. It seems like the best solution for you would be to take the fully subsidized Cadillac insurance. Cause even if you were to do the high deductible plan and you're able to contribute to an HSA and you got a tax deduction for the contribution to your HSA, there's a good chance that tax deduction is not going to be more than the premium that you're paying to be on the high deductible plan. If you have fully subsidized. So it seems it's highly likely that the fully subsidized option is going to be the best, but you still need to do the math. You still got to do the math just to make sure, but I'd be surprised to know if that wasn't the case.

• 51:36Brian Preston?

  Yeah. And I, look, a lot of them, I don't know how big your company is, but a lot of companies, it's an issue for most small businesses. Cause I'll, I'll just go ahead and confess it to you. It's one of the most expensive things we, we do for our employees and they hate us for it. Because everybody complains about their health insurance. It doesn't matter how much money we sling at this thing.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  They don't hate us, do you? You think they hate us?

• 51:59Brian Preston?

  Well, I mean, cause here's the thing, it's not our fault completely. Cause every year it seems like, you know, I, I won't even say the provider's name, but it's like, is anybody shocked?

• 52:08Speaker 03

  It goes up 18%.

• 52:10Brian Preston?

  It's 18 to 22%. It seems like, how can something go up 18 to 22% every year? And it seems like that is what we deal with, with health insurance. So you can imagine it's just hard to keep up when things are going up that much. But, um, it is one of those things where I would ask you, and this is the point I was trying to make. A lot of small businesses, they want to give you, or they try to do the right thing and give you health insurance. But what they might, and they might've heard, hey, let's add a health savings account eligible, high deductible plan. But they still just because of what they did last year, they just have all the money going into the Cadillac plan. You ought to ask your employer, hey, how much are you putting into that Cadillac plan per employee?

• 52:52Brian Preston?

  And has anybody actually done a benefits analysis, especially if you have a young workforce, you know, if all of your employees are in their twenties and thirties, maybe the way you did it last year isn't the best benefit for the employees. And we ought to look at, hey, is this, should this be a set amount per individual or family? And then that way you actually get true choice in the plan. Or is this, what's, what's the why? And that's what, I'd be curious, whoever's designing these benefits, how it was structured and what the incentive, cause if it was just done by what was done last year or five years ago, or seven years ago, and they haven't, they've added the high deductible, but haven't actually put the benefits of, hey, the reason the high deductible was supposed to be put in there is because

• 53:33Brian Preston?

  for young people who don't have a lot of medical need, this allows you to get a saving in the premium, but also to build assets for the future. You're, you're really not honoring all of that. If you just keep loading up the Cadillac plan. So there might be a discussion with your employer on what the why is, while one is heavily subsidized. And then the other one, yeah, you get to do a HSA, but man, oh man, it'd be nice if we kind of got to do the best of, of all things.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Love that.

• 53:59Speaker 04

  That's great. Well, Phil V5J, you get a Tumblr. If you'd like one, email winner at moneyguy.com since we answered your question here on the show.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Reb, are you ready for this?

• 54:10Speaker 04

  I'm ready.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Did you happen to see what kind of car it was that bear was in? This is what I, as you were talking.

• 54:14Brian Preston?

  It was a Toyota Highlander, wasn't it?

• 54:17Speaker 03

  I came up with two answers. It was either a Toyogi or how about this one? It was a Subaru.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  Are you kidding me right now?

• 54:27Brian Preston?

  Did you come up with that or did somebody put that in the comments? You thought that rose to the level of you were doing.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  That's where my mind went. I was trying to come up with three. I couldn't come up with a third one. The content team are fans. Content team are fans. Uh, you're welcome. And no one guessed the joke book is what was coming out.

• 54:42Brian Preston?

  You know who, I'm blaming Megan. I, I blame Megan because of her daily riddle joke that we have every day. We're constantly doing these things every day. So you've decided, let's go ahead and put this in the content.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Subaru is pretty good.

• 54:58Brian Preston?

  But it was a Toyoga, Yogi.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Yogi, Toyogi.

• 55:01Brian Preston?

  Toyogi. Something to that one.

• 55:04Speaker 04

  Hmm. Oh, okay. That was for free.

• 55:07Brian Preston?

  Almost as good as my scat.

• 55:09Speaker 04

  Extra bonus content.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  I thought I was going to get a bigger laugh from Justin. He didn't give it to me.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  That's fine.

• 55:15Brian Preston?

  He's still, he's still mad at us. He's salty because we made fun of his hilarious react. Which by the way, it did, I feel like the joke was put on us is because it was hilarious is because we were the butt of the joke. We were the hilarious part is they put some riddles and traps and other things in there. And we fell right into them. They didn't even have to put pine straw in it. We fell right into it.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  If, if you've not watched yesterday's, uh, yesterday's react video, you should totally watch that after this live stream.

• 55:45Brian Preston?

  There was a mutiny, mutiny. There's no other word. Instead of financial mutants, we have financial mutinies, uh, with the content team.

• 55:56Brian Preston?

  It's true. Go watch that video, especially around that six minute mark. You'll see, you know, there's supposed to be some sacred things with, you know, the content team and us when we create content and they're, you know, nope.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  Just remember, nothing is sacred here. If you want to watch that, it's called financial advisors react to hilarious money clips, I believe. So go check that out.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  It's got Brian and Bo and George Camel on the thumbnail. Actually, that's how you know you're in the right place. All right. Let's do another question from Huskers 2216. Hey, money guy. How does one spouse's pension that will replace 33% of household living expenses in retirement? Effect the stock and bond glide path strategy nearing retirement? It has a max of 1% cost of living adjustment.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is, this is the more specific question to a general question that we get often. Hey, if I have pensions, if I have guaranteed income, how should I think about that in terms of portfolio allocation? Would it be appropriate? Would it make sense for me to think about my pension income as sort of a pseudo fixed income, a risk off, risk reduced part of my portfolio? So that with my liquid portfolio, could I be more aggressive? Could I have a higher equity allocation than I would otherwise? Given I have this like guaranteed source of income. How would you answer that? What things would you tell them to look at to assess that?

• 57:20Brian Preston?

  Maybe it depends because I do have specific clients where they have enough pension income that it offsets all their needs. So we started in there, they have children and grandchildren that they want to leave a legacy for. So it did make sense to think more long-term than even that their, what their life would be. Cause you know, the glide path is somebody who's in their seventies, you might be thinking, hey, this is going to be a super conservative portfolio to make sure the money's there and we don't get into risk capacity issues. But if all of a sudden they don't need the money and it's more about, hey, what can we grow this for? For either the charities we want to leave it to, or our loved ones we want to leave it to, then that comes into play. Now the question here, this isn't covering all of it. This is only 33%.

• 58:02Brian Preston?

  So I would, I'd want to build this as part of a, a bigger plan to see how much that moves the needle. But potentially this could allow you to, you know, dial down some of the, the, the, the risk free or the risk off asset bet class.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Only two things I would add to that. Uh, I'd want to know a little bit about the pension.

• 58:22Brian Preston?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Uh, who's the sponsoring company? How well funded is the pension? Like, is this a government pension or is this like a private company pension?

• 58:27Brian Preston?

  Eligible for pension benefit guaranteed corporation.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  And is your benefit, how far above the minimum guaranteed benefit is your benefit? Because with a 1% cost of living adjustment, odds are if we see historic average inflation, somewhere around three to 4%, the value of your pension will become less and less and less through time. Cause it's not going to keep up with that. But then you'll likely have social security and other sort of guaranteed income sources. So you want to kind of measure all of those things to determine, okay, for me personally, how should this affect my allocation? This is a great time when a lot of folks want to take the relationship to the next level. Okay. I'm, I'm making big decisions around allocation for the next 30, 40, 50 years. How should I think about this? What considerations should I put into this?

• 59:11Speaker 03

  Because two different people with two different pensions and two different portfolios with the same size might have two different solutions that, that make sense for each one of them.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  Great. Huskers 2216, you get a Tumblr. Email [email protected] to cash in on that. Let's go for one more.

• 59:32Brian Preston?

  Yeah, one more.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  Go Lucky Monkey has a question for you. Hi, Money Guy team.

• 59:39Brian Preston?

  I bet they like bananas.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  They probably do. I have the ability to cash flow college, but also have subsidized student loans available. Should I take the loans and put the loan in a savings account to get the interest or just cash flow?

• 59:57Brian Preston?

  Oh, man, Bo.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Bo just squinted at his eyes and put his hand over his face. Let's see what he's gonna say.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Here's where my mind first went immediately. I need to know the numbers. Like, I have the ability to cash flow college. Does that mean your college is, you know, $2,000 to $3,000 a semester and you can cash flow that and go buy money? Or I have the ability to cash flow college. College is $40,000 a semester, right? These are the, the, the scale and scope of those are very different. I'd want to know that. And then I want to know what degree you're pursuing and what's the vocation look like after that? Are you going to have an ability, if you do pay cash, to then generate an income where you can replace that money that you forewent, foregoed, foregone, that you walked away from over the last three to four years? I'd want to do that assessment to figure out, okay, what's the best use of those funds?

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  And I do think in this case, size matters.

• 1:00:49Brian Preston?

  The, the biggest question with education is, look, this is the one that I get the most ticked off about is the lie that has been told to young people about that just go to college and it'll all work out. And hence now we've left with an entire generation where the most noble thing in the world is you bettering yourself by education and other things has been distorted in a way that now it is entrapping people with huge debt loads. So the, before I even did this stuff is exactly what Bo said is, I want to know what's your degree going to be in? And what are you going to do afterwards? Because if it came, before we even start talking about student debt and cash flow, I want to know that you're not going to leave college with more debt

• 1:01:34Brian Preston?

  than what you can make in your first year out of school. Because how often have we, we've even had people on Making a Millionaire who took jobs that, you know, got a degree in something. They, they, their, their debt was like a factor of three to what they were going to make. And that, that is a trap from the get go. So, so put that on the shelf first, you know? Answer that. What's the ground rules of education? What am I going to make at the end of this? And then after that, I, I think it becomes more of scale, exactly what Bo was talking about. Because if it's a small amount of money, I'm going, oh, here we go. We got, we got context. Read that out.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  College is $8,000 per semester, but I have grants covering 5,000. So for me, it'd be $3,000 in loans. I'm going into electrical engineering.

• 1:02:19Brian Preston?

  This is awesome.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  I know, I know my thought. What do you think? Should I take out loans or pay cash?

• 1:02:24Brian Preston?

  I mean, at 3,000, but see, this is where I need a little additional context. Because especially like electrical engineering, probably go have co-op opportunities. There's could be other things where if you have, because it also, it's your age. If they can, if you can be funding a Roth IRA every one of these years, I, I don't want you to forego doing that for, but, but if you are co-opping and you're going to be able, pay $3,000 off, but then go tell yourself, hey, I'm going to also make enough to where I can, I'd love for you to fund a Roth IRA and pay this $3,000 off every year you're in college. And I think you'll be A-OK in life.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that answer, too.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  That's great. Well, go Lucky Monkey. Thanks for the question. If you'd like a Money Guy.

• 1:03:06Brian Preston?

  Electrical engineer, grants and all the other stuff. We're going to be doing this show for the next 15, 20 years. Remember who planted the seed. Where, where, who was it? Who's planted all the apple seeds? Johnny, Johnny Appleseed? Remember Johnny Appleseed, Bo and Brian?

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  Just call them Bo and Brian Appleseed.

• 1:03:27Brian Preston?

  That's better than Johnny Appleseed, Bo and Brian. That's much better.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Go Lucky Monkey. Email [email protected] if you would like your very own Money Guy Tumblr as a thank you for asking a question. Remember, go to moneyguy.com/earlyaccess. Get on the list. We're going to be having a lot of fun with some hints, some perks, some early access over the next undetermined amount of time. Well, I've determined it, but you don't know it yet. But you will if you get on the list. So definitely do that. I'm really excited to share what's coming and what we've been working on that we've made especially for you.

• 1:04:00Brian Preston?

  Guys, thanks so much for joining us. Remember value. That's what we're trying to load you up. It's the abundance cycle fulfilled. You get so much value that you learn these concepts, you apply these concepts, you reach a level of success. That's why if you haven't gone to moneyguy.com/resources, we literally are creating a library for you to be the better version of yourself, actually a financial mutant. I'm your host, Brian, joined by Mr. Bo. Money Guy team, out.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  The Money Guy Show is hosted by Brian Preston and Bo Hanson. Brian and Bo are partners with Abound Wealth Management. Abound Wealth Management is a registered investment advisory firm regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in accordance and compliance with the securities, laws and regulations. Abound Wealth Management does not render or offer to render personalized investment or tax advice through the Money Guy Show. The information provided is for informational purposes only, may not be suitable for all investors and does not constitute financial, tax, investment or legal advice. All investments involve a degree of risk, including the risk of loss.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Hey, Bo's here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front. Every choice deliberate. With Bo's, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bo's.

• 1:05:20Speaker 06

  If you're building AI agents, you should check out Strands Agents. It's an open source SDK for Python and TypeScript. The idea is simple. Give a model some tools, let it decide what to call and when, and loop until it's done. No chain configs, no graph orchestration, and works with any model provider. It's also open source and built and tested for production agents. Get started at strandsagents.com.