Your Financial Order of Operations: What to Fix First SB1888

There's a version of financial advice that lists fifty things you're supposed to be doing at once: build an emergency fund, pay off debt, invest, get life insurance, start a Roth, build an estate plan. All true, all important, and all completely useless without one missing piece: the order. Joe and OG walk through the exact sequence for figuring out what to tackle first, second, and third, so instead of freezing under the weight of everything, you know precisely where to start today. This one's a Stacking Benjamins classic, originally recorded a few years back, and the framework holds up so well it earned a spot in our Greatest Hits lineup unchanged. What You'll Walk Away With A simple four-quadrant framework for seeing your entire financial picture in one place, instead of overwhelming yourself with fifty scattered tasksWhy cash flow and risk management should almost always come before any long-term goal-setting, no matter how exciting the goals areThe real difference between a strict budget and an "anti-budget," and how to know which one your situation actually calls forWhy debt consolidation can quietly make things worse if the underlying behavior never changesA clear-eyed look at which insurance actually matters most early in your financial life, and which ones get overhypedWhy starting with your tax strategy or investment picks first is almost always backwards, and what should come before itThe blunt case against co-signing a loan for a family member, no matter how good the reason soundsWhy This Matters Now The instinct to fix everything at once usually backfires, not because the individual advice is wrong, but because doing five things halfway rarely beats doing one thing completely. A clear order of operations replaces that scattered, everything-at-once anxiety with a simple next step, and that clarity alone tends to build more momentum than any single tactic. Whether you're just starting to get organized or you've been meaning to revisit your plan for a while, knowing what actually comes first changes everything that follows. From the Basement A TikTok "hack" involving sneaking into a hotel breakfast buffet to save on groceries becomes the day's cautionary tale, alongside a genuinely unhinged story about an office keg that taught an entire WeWork floor a hard lesson about unlimited free beer. Resources Mentioned Stacking Benjamins Field Kit https://stackingbenjamins.com/fieldkit — the all-in-one net worth and budgeting tool referenced in the updated introThe 201 Newsletter https://stackingbenjamins.com/201 — deeper dives on topics covered in the show, written by Kevin Bailey See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Maybe it's time we talked. Kiplinger calls it the trillion dollar talk, a conversation about inheritance, estate planning, wills, and the questions families should be asking before those decisions become urgent, because knowing what your family wants and having a plan for it can be one of the most important financial conversations you will ever have. Ready to start yours? Visit kiplinger.com to learn more about the trillion dollar talk and what this historic wealth transfer could mean for your family.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Hey, Stackers. Happy Monday to you. I'm Joe Saul. See, hi, if you're new here. You know, there's a million things that you're supposed to do with your Monday, and I want to talk about this today because it's going to really ramp up into what we're talking about this episode. You're supposed to begin your week by thinking about how to build cash, pay off debt, invest, fix your insurance, save for retirement, maybe get your estate plan together. And according to the internet, heck, you're also supposed to buy rental properties, optimize 17 credit cards, start three side hustles and become financially independent sometime before lunch, right? But here's the problem. All this stuff, what

• 1:30Speaker 00

  order do you do it in? Because it all gets up there in your brain and you're like, okay, I freeze because I don't know what to do next. So that's why OG and I are tackling today this idea of your financial order of operations. What comes first? What needs to be handled before you move on? And what are you worrying about today while financially speaking, mom's water heater spraying all over the basement behind you, because you should probably be fixing that first, right? And while you listen to today's episode, I'd love to hear from you. It's [email protected]. If you've ever heard us talk about this order of operations before, and you actually put it to work, email me and tell me what changed,

• 2:11Speaker 00

  because I think this has been powerful for a lot of us. If you're hearing it for the first time, and today makes you realize you've been doing something backward, email me that, too. Tell me what you're changing, because here is what I've been hiding behind my back about today's episode. It originally aired December 20th, 2021. Oh, my goodness, almost five years ago. Think about that for a minute. We were still deep in this pandemic weirdness, right? Inflation was heating up, interest rates were near zero, the investing world looked totally different. And nearly five years later, I still 100% agree with this order of operations. And that's why I pulled it out of the archives, because I

• 2:56Speaker 00

  really thought this belongs in greatest hits week. Some of the headlines and references you're about to hear belong, definitely belong to December 2021. Treat those like a financial time capsule. But the framework, I would not change this order today. In fact, there's one part that makes me smile now. We talk about how important it is to know where you stand, to get your budget together, see all the moving pieces, make the next decisions in the right order. Five years later, we finally built Fieldkit Finance to help you do exactly that. Get everything together in one place. So you can see the whole picture instead of chasing financial squirrels around the yard. Of course, you'll find that at

• 3:35Speaker 00

  fieldkitfinance.com. Apparently, 2021, Joe was leaving some work on the table for 2026, Joe. So, all right, listen for one question. What's my next move? Let's get your money in order, shall we? Let's go.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Oh, hello. You're probably here about the story.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Live from Joe's mom's basement, it's the Stacking Benjamin Show.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug. And do you ever get overwhelmed trying to decide what part of your finances to tackle first? Fear not. Today, to help you get your 2022 financial goals in order, we'll talk about the best financial order of operations. Today is also the anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase being completed, and you'll have just enough time to Google what that was before my trivia. Then we'll have headlines and a TikTok minute that's gonna make you groan. Don't they all? We'll also answer a Haven lifeline about the downsides of being the financially educated one in the family. And now, two guys who

• 4:59Speaker 00

  know a little something about that. It's Joe and OJ.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  We just may know a little something about that.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  A thing or two.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Maybe. Hey, everybody. Welcome to, speaking of a thing or two, a thing of one, two, or only three live shows to go in this year. OG, welcome to the Monday party of our last week of live episodes. I'm Joe Saul. See, hi, Average Joe Money on Twitter and across this card table from me, it's Mr. OG.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  It's the last day before you know what.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Your side of the table always has so much better lighting than mine. Got to do, got to do something about that.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  At least I dressed up and put on a Nike workout shirt today.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  So you did.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Zip that up and make it look a little bit.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  I got my Mickey Mouse, listening to podcast coffee mug, but who cares what we're wearing?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Espresso.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  The big thing that we're worried about, OG, is what are we doing? We're talking about order of operations. What do you do first? What do you do second? What do you do the third when you're creating your financial plan?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Isn't that PEMDAS?

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Don't know what that is.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Order of operation?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  All the math people out there know what I'm talking about.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  They do.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Parentheses, multiplication, something, exponents. It tells you how to do math.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Perfect.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  You can tell I've got it wired.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Stuck the landing on that one.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Like parentheses and some other stuff and subtraction.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Might be a little off. Luckily, while we might not know the order of operations for math without Googling that, we do know the order of operation for where to start with your financial plans. We're going to help you with that today. Let's get going on today. But first, well, you may know that chaos is the name of the game here in mom's basement, what with guests coming in and out, Cooper the cat getting in the way, Doug being, well, being Doug. The holidays make it even worse because it's all about food and big meals. And the problem is prepping for those takes forever. But what about those between meals, right? The meals between those huge, huge, huge bookends. Well, that's where Factor comes in. Factor is made with high quality ingredients that you recognize and trust

• 7:14Speaker 00

  with over 175 banned ingredients. You always know you're eating something that's good for you, even when you don't have time. It's ready in two minutes, whether it's lunch between meetings or dinner after holiday shopping. Factor requires zero prep cleanup or effort from you or mom, so you can focus on everything else in your day. Factor even has heart smart options like the Green Goddess Baramundi with tomato, rice, peas, kale, and green beans, or the enchilada style chicken and sweet potatoes. Those are so good. They're crafted with lean proteins, fiber packed fruit and veggies and healthy fats. Try those

• 7:54Speaker 00

  out. Your heart and your taste buds will thank you. For Cheryl and I, Factor has been a great way for us to stay busy and focus on family life and beating mom at card games. I use Factor and you should too. So let's eat real, Stackers. Head to factormeals.com/sb50off. Use code SB50OFF. And you know what? You're going to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year while supplies last until December 31st, 2026. That is code SB50OFF at factormeals.com, SB50OFF at factormeals.com. See website for more details.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  All right, let's get this party started.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Hello, darlings. And now it's time for your favorite part of the show, our stacking Benjamin's headlines.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Our headline comes to us from investment news. You know, one thing that we didn't talk a lot about this year, we'll not be talking about in the next couple of days is how ETFs really took center stage in 2021. And that's the headline from this investment news story. The piece is written by Jeff Benjamin. Record net inflows are just a part of the story. ETFs continue to take market share of mutual funds by doing more for less. Jeff writes, the 2021 investing story can be summed in three letters ETF in the midst of an impressively strong stock market, especially when considered against the backdrop of a persistently evolving global pandemic. Investors have poured money into exchange traded funds like never before.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Through the end of November, ETFs experienced $787 billion worth of net inflows, which shatters the 2020 record of 540 billion. We went from 540 billion to 787 billion in a second year. Truly, investors have gotten the message about exchange traded funds, OG.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, is it that? Or is it just the liquidity in the market, like all the extra money? And it's got to go somewhere. I mean, ETFs are taking in more money than mutual funds. We know that. But is the more solely because of the transition to mutual funds? Or is it because they were already doing more and now there's more liquidity? So more dollars naturally?

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, but I think the story here is that the money's not going to mutual funds. It's going ETFs.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  They blame this, by the way, in the piece. In fact, a quote by Todd Rosenbluth, Director Mutual Fund and ETF Research at CFRA, said the record flows of ETFs as a result of a confluence of circumstances, not the least of which is broad-based demand and, and I want to focus on this, greater usage by financial advisors. Financial advisors, I think largely moving lots of portfolios to exchange traded funds the last couple of years.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And companies are doing it. Companies are exchanging their mutual funds for ETFs, you know, kind of doing a like swap there. And it's all the rage. There's some great things about it. I mean, the instantaneous pricing, the fact that you can do different kind of order status, you can do limit orders and, you know, that kind of funky stuff is, is also super helpful.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Let's talk through these for a second. You say the, the ability to immediately place an order. What does that mean? How's that different than a mutual fund?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Well, with a mutual fund, you say, I want to buy $3,000 worth. And at the end of the day, the mutual fund company says, okay, today was the price. Here's the price. It was at four o'clock. And here's how much you get. In ETF, you say, I want to buy 3,000 shares. So you have to think of it a little bit differently. You say, I want to buy 20 shares or whatever the number is, and you buy it that, that minute. So whatever the price is that minute is the price that you get.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  We've also seen lately, though, brokerages like Fidelity now doing partial shares of ETFs. So you can do the same thing.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  I've seen partial shares of stock. I haven't seen partial shares of ETFs yet.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  I'll be surprised if that's not coming.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Hella soon.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that helps if you're, you know, if you're trading something, if you're trying to buy something and sell something else, and it's a volatile day, super frustrating to sell what you think is a $10,000 position, only to find out at four o'clock that it was really a $9,800 position.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Right. If you're trying to get in, in the middle of the day, something going on. Yeah. You've, you don't have a, a lot of knowledge about where you're going to end up. But in the big scheme of things, like, you know, we said back in the mutual fund days, the big scheme of things, that's not huge.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  But it is attractive and why not do it? Now, you talked about having stop losses and placing options. Tell me about that.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think just the, the ability to set different trading rules also help, you know, just like a stock, you can say, I want to have a stop loss. I want to have a, which I don't think you need, by the way, but you can do it. You can also put limit prices in. So you can say, I want to buy this. If it reaches this price or dips to this price, I want to buy more of it. So you can set up some more advanced ordering, if you will, in that, in ETFs versus mutual funds. So again, small subset of the population, but can be helpful if you're trying to add a little bit of whiz bang to it.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  A little bit of something, something. You know, a stop loss sounds like a fantastic idea. You take your portfolio, you take a percentage below it or a number below it. And if the stock price goes below that, the stock price goes below that price, it triggers a sale. You would, you don't necessarily get that price in a fast-moving market.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  But it will trigger a sale. So you don't have to sit and watch your portfolio all the time. If things are going south, you automatically sell. Sounds, by the way, phenomenal.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Sounds fantastic. And you said, probably don't want it. Why is that?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the biggest thing with stop losses, you have already talked about, it just triggers the next event. So when you say, okay, it's trading at 100, if it goes to 90, I want to get out. You don't get to get out at 90. At 90, it turns into a regular order at that point, which means you could get out at 87 or 61. I mean, that would be pretty extreme, but you get the idea. So it doesn't guarantee your price at 90. That's not even the biggest issue. The biggest issue is, is then what, what do you do with that? You just sit in cash now forever? If you're worried about the short-term fluctuations of the, of the stock market, you shouldn't have money in stocks, period. I mean, just is what it is.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  This is the hard part. The hard part isn't getting out. That part is cool, I think. That part's great. Hey, the market's fallen. I get out. I don't have to watch it. The problem is, what do you do then?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Well, we know people, Len talks about this openly, that he has lost a lot of money in the fact that he got out and is waiting for the, he's waiting for the decline. It hasn't happened, you know? So I don't know. I now I think it's kind of useless.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Now it's painful, right? I mean, it gets to the point where you're so far behind. When, when you're hoping for a catastrophe in your portfolio.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  That's bad. Man, I hope there's a major world event that sends the stock market into tailspin so I can get back in.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Could we have a war or something?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  We could have something just absolutely horrible happen. People could get in. That would be great. That'd be fantastic. I think the big thing for exchange traded funds, and this is the main reason to just capitulate really to exchange traded funds, is I think people are learning that the magic isn't in the managers. The magic is in the right asset allocation and rebalancing strategy, right?

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Well, this came up as a conversation the other day. Also, I think there's a big, there's a big misnomer between an ETF and an index fund. Like, people use the same words interchangeably. And if you kind of just did also, you're just like, well, an ETF is like an index fund. Not at all. You can, in fact, of all of the, all of the new ETFs that are launched this year, 100 and something of them, 89% of them are actively traded ETFs.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  So just because you're buying an ETF does not mean you're buying an index product or a passive product. You can be buying, I mean, Kathy Wood's ARC ETF is very actively traded, right? So you could be buying an ETF that's passive or buying an ETF that's active or buying an ETF that's based on an index or buying an ETF that's based on a fund manager's tie color that day. You know, who knows? So that doesn't alleviate your responsibility for kind of double checking. And I will point out one thing that mutual funds I think are better at than, than ETFs. And that is, as it relates to systematic investing or systematic withdrawals, if you've got a certain amount of money that you're putting in every single month, or you've got a certain amount

• 16:51Speaker 03

  of money that you're taking out every single month, you know, you're, you're in retirement and you're like, okay, cool. I need $3,000 a month. You can't set that up automatically because of the way that it's priced. You have to go in and make that transaction. So what do people do? They just do it kind of lump sum at a time. They say, okay, well, every six months, I'm going to go in and I'm going to take my six months worth of withdrawals and put it.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Big old chunk.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Or every six months, I'm going to take all of the cash that I've accumulated in my account and go buy, you know, my portfolio. So little smidge inefficient, just like the other side was, you know, ETFs are better, but kind of, eh, reason. On the other side, it's, well, mutual funds are better, but solvable. You know, it's, it's not, not necessarily the end of the world.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  It is funny how we focus on so many of the upsides of the efficiency of an ETF, but that's a big inefficiency. I mean, it could potentially be huge, outweigh a lot of these, you know, slight differences in fees.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Well, the set it and forget it type thing is great. It's also could be detrimental where you wake up after three years and you're like, why do I have 77,000 in cash in my 401k?

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. The question is, with all these cool things that we can do now, with asset allocation, rebalancing, super low fees, how come so many of us are still losing?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  What do you mean?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  I mean, you look at the numbers about people not getting the returns that the market gets, right? If we have this, this huge ability to get the returns that the market gets, and we're switching to ETFs to get rid of some of the fee issue, let's say we're not taking money out every month, and we're not taking money out at all. We're just accumulating money there. Why is it that we're not hearing about more people winning with their exchange traded fund strategy?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think that it has to do with the fact that it's always the same issue that we come back to, which is, it's not about the tool that you use. I mean, you can be super wealthy. If all you buy are apartment buildings, you can be super wealthy if all you buy are single family houses, regardless of the price, by the way, you can be super wealthy if all you buy are index funds or Microsoft stock or actively traded mutual fund, you could be super wealthy with funds that are the most expensive in the universe and super wealthy with the ones that are the least expensive. So all of those things do not cause financial success. You know, just because I got a better price on my house does not mean that I'm going

• 19:23Speaker 03

  to be more successful than you, or just because my investment products are, you know, whatever X percent cheaper than yours does not mean that I'm going to be that much better off than you. It helps, but it doesn't mean it. The number one reason has to do with investor behavior. It's the only reason. Because if you look at it and say that if the average investment gets 8% a year, one would assume the average investor also gets 8% a year. But we know statistically, the average investor gets somewhere in the three and a half to 4% a year. And you go, how is that possible? If you just had the average thing?

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  You didn't even try to get the above average thing. You just had the average.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  And by the way, I could even see six and a half or seven. You could say, okay, seven. Well, you know, sometimes we do a few things or whatever.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Well, but the answer is three and a half to four. It depends. It's usually 3.2 is kind of where the number sorts out. There's a company that studies this and they study all the inflows into investment products and all the outflows from investment products to deduce when people are buying. And guess when all the money went into Kathy Wood's arc?

• 20:31Speaker 00

  When it hit the high.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Last December. And guess when it's all going out?

• 20:36Speaker 00

  As she's getting smoked.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  In about two weeks from now, when people look at their statements. That's exactly what's gonna happen. I just looked up here, the average 20 year equity investment, eight and a third percent. The average equity investor, 3.2.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  So the only explanation to that is, we're doing things at the wrong time. It's not the right or wrong products, because the average investment includes those crappy products. You know?

• 21:00Speaker 00

  That's me. I'm always doing the right thing at the wrong time. Oh gee. Like I'm, you know, pulling out the beers at 9:30 in the morning, drinking a coffee before bed, going to work out right after dinner.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  I should do that, actually. That's probably a good idea.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  That's good. I've felt like it before. Big lesson here, though, is exactly that, I think, is that while ETFs are the thing we're not going to be talking about the next two days that are really a big, big story for 2021, the increased use and more dominance from the exchange traded fund market, the fact that if you want to win, it's not about the ETF, still about you. Time for our TikTok minute. This is the part of the show where we find some crazy TikToker and easier, either, either, easier, easier, easier, crazy, easier, easier dare, crazy like a fox, or just sheer stupidity. Which one we got today, OG?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they're almost always sheer stupidity.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Oh, but we've had some good ones. We've had some people that have brought it, man.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Some okay ones.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Well, this guy has hacked lower spending. You know, the grocery bill's been through the roof. This dude's hacked it. Here we go.

• 22:16Speaker 05

  Dollars with very little effort. You're gonna want to sleep in your car outside of a Marriott and go through the side door between 6:00 and 8:00 AM. And then find your way to the breakfast buffet. You're gonna want to grab as much as you can, but the key here is to make it look like you fit in. Don't be too suspicious. The average breakfast cost is between $15 and $20 a day. Over the course of a week, that's $100 in savings. 400 a month invested into the S and P with an 8% growth over 40 years should give you a nice retirement of over $1 million. It's crazy what compound interest can do.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  It's crazy what stealing from the Marriott can do.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  I'm just curious, like, who's eating breakfast for 20 bucks a day?

• 23:04Speaker 00

  I know. That's a big ol' breakfast.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Oatmeal. I can't imagine the whole box cost more than 250, maybe three bucks.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Big ol', big ol' breakfast there. But think about it, man. If you're stealing it from the Marriott, you could upgrade that to $30 breakfast and it's still zero. If your idea of a great breakfast is stealing stuff that's not yours.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Sleeping in your car.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't groan harder. I remember the, it's been a couple of years now, but that dude in one of the forums, one of the fire forums online, talking about, am I the only one that goes to the car dealer to get the free coffee in the morning? He stops at the car dealer every morning to steal coffee. Yes.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Like, you could have given me 1,000 guesses of where I could get coffee in the morning, and I would not get to.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Car dealer.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Car dealership.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  But if you think about it, there is coffee at the car dealer.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Hey, Bill. Good to see you again. Still thinking about that brand new car? Still thinking. What do you guys got on tap today?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  You got like, uh, let me guess, something in a medium roast? Excuse me, sir? Oh, I'm sorry. I meant, uh, medium size.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. When I rented an office at a WeWork, at the time, anyway, they were kind of retro cool and like they had, you know, the beer and you could get a glass of beer whenever you wanted and all that stuff. And, um, the floor that we were on, like, seriously, after, I don't know, a week of being there, I was like, oh, the beer thing's empty. Guess somebody had a kegger last night. So I went upstairs and asked the kind of staff. I said, what's with the beer downstairs? Is it gonna work? She goes, no, we turned it off. I said, why? I just got here. You guys, I gotta get mine.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I know.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  She goes, no, somebody was in here last night with a whole party and they drank the whole keg. I'm like, yeah, well, when you have a key card access to unlimited booze, what do you think is gonna happen eventually? Like, the person with the key cards could be like.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  That went wrong.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  We don't have to go out, guys. I've got, I've got all you can drink right here.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  I got a great idea. It's free. I can invite you in as my guest. What could, what could go wrong? You know, I understand that more, because at least one person paid for it and it's a perk. It's a perk going, hey, if you have, you know, guests here, and nobody said how many guests. So yeah, you roll your eyes and you go, yeah, okay, probably shouldn't have done that.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  But, but sleeping in your car so you can fit in at the buffet at, uh, the Marriott?

• 25:27Speaker 00

  It's a whole different, whole different story. If you've got a TikTok minute for me, send those to me, [email protected]. Happy to share some of the, some more bizarre stuff. Normally here, we are getting ready for a guest, but OG, you and I are gonna go refill our coffee because we got double duty today. We are the guests. We're gonna show you, what are the, what's the order of operations? What do you look at? First, second, third, while you're getting your financial plan together? So let's go do that. And Doug is going to regale us with some words about the Louisiana Purchase.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  Hey there, stackers. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug. And on this day in 1803, the United States nearly doubled in size by completing the Louisiana Purchase. My last Louisiana Purchase was that fried oyster po'boy from a truck behind the gas station. Do not recommend, by the way. Felt like I lost half my size that day. Anyway, the United States bought about 828,000 square miles of land from France that went from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico up to the Canadian border. Don't you know? My question is, for the land that created all or part of 15 states, how much

• 26:43Speaker 06

  did Thomas Jefferson pay? Was it 5 million, 15 million, or $50 million? I'll be back with the answer right after I curl in a ball and shudder for a few minutes just thinking about that po'boy.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Well, you may know the chaos is the name of the game here in mom's basement. What with guests coming in and out, Cooper the cat getting in the way, Doug being, well, being Doug. The holidays make it even worse because it's all about food and big meals. And the problem is, prepping for those takes forever. But what about those between meals, right? The meals between those huge, huge, huge bookends. Well, that's where Factor comes in. Factor is made with high quality ingredients that you recognize and trust with over 175 banned ingredients. You always know you're eating something that's good for you, even when you don't have time. It's ready in two minutes. Whether it's lunch

• 27:43Speaker 00

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• 28:20Speaker 00

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• 28:59Speaker 00

  There is a financial conversation that's coming to millions of American families and there's a pretty good chance, nobody wants to be the person who starts it. Inheritance. And here's why that matters. An estimated $124 trillion to heirs in charity is expected to be transferred by Americans over the next 20 years. It's an extraordinary amount of money, but Kiplinger's research found that 51% of adults and their parents, get this, never talk about money. And there's a pretty big disconnect. 47% of parents expect to leave a meaningful inheritance, while only 24% of adult children expect to actually receive one. Nearly 30% of parents don't even have a will in place. Maybe it's time

• 29:44Speaker 00

  we talked. Kiplinger calls it the trillion dollar talk, a conversation about inheritance, estate planning, wills, and the questions families should be asking before those decisions become urgent. Because knowing what your family wants and having a plan for it can be one of the most important financial conversations you will ever have. Ready to start yours? Visit kiplinger.com to learn more about the trillion dollar talk and what this historic wealth transfer could mean for your family. It's incredible at a small company like stacking Benjamins, how one, one hire makes all the difference in the world. If you're a small business, the right hire can be make

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• 32:18Speaker 00

  Hey there stackers. I'm Louisiana Purchase occupant and time travel land investor, Joe's mom's neighbor Doug. You know, the Louisiana Purchase was a steal, both figuratively and literally at three cents an acre. And even though Thomas Jefferson was legendarily bad with money, it isn't true that he put the whole thing on his Amex card just to get the miles. That's just an urban myth. Truth is, in today's dollars, the total purchase would have been for $342 million. But back in 1803, when Joe was just a little baby, that amounted to $15 million. See ya.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Big day in our history. There would be no Texercana if we didn't have the Louisiana Purchase. Actually, there would be a Texercana, but it'd be called Texacana or something. That's not, that doesn't sound French. That didn't sound French at all.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  You think so though? I mean, wasn't that just part of Texas?

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Well, barely. I live 800 yards into Texas. I'm not sure if this at the time-

• 33:22Speaker 03

  800 yards from 4,000 Cubans who are trained to kill me. I don't think that you can come down here.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  It was, it was part of Mexico. So maybe, maybe I was speaking Spanish there. I had a Spanish accent, but neither one, very good. But lots of, lots of people owe their, their little piece of Americana to the Louisiana Purchase. And also to old Tommy J for getting that done.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  You got it done, didn't he?

• 33:49Speaker 00

  So let's dive in. OG, somebody's listening to this. We don't know where they're starting from, but when you're talking to a new client, very first place that you tell them to begin?

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Brandy new, very first thing, gotta absolutely have cash. Don't you? I mean, don't you, don't you? Sounds like a-

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Does this come before or after the, where do you want to go? Cause I battled with this.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  You know,

• 34:20Speaker 03

  I see what you're saying.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  I mean, really, on one hand, finding out where you want to go is super important. Like where do you want to go? What are your goals? On the other hand, sometimes that freaks people out because they get a bunch of analysis paralysis. And you and I also know that there is a value in movement. And there's a bunch of stuff. It don't matter where you need to go. You just need to get this stuff done.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Well, since you brought that up, maybe the right thing then is where are you now?

• 34:45Speaker 00

  I think that's the place to start is where are you? Where are you now?

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, take some inventory of kind of what the, what's the situation is.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  And the way that OG and I learned to do this is that you draw on a, on a piece of paper, four quadrants. And the top two are quadrants that are your short-term debts and assets and cash flow on the left, the left quadrant. The upper right quadrant is your risk management strategy. And those are the two that, the way you and I were trained as advisors, we were taught, those are the ones that you live by, right? These are the things that get you by your day to day. And that's probably a great place to start before you even need to do any goal setting. Make sure that those are, those are operating efficiently because if they're not, it doesn't matter where you're going. But the bottom two, the bottom two, the lower left quadrant is your short-term goals. What are things you want

• 35:36Speaker 00

  in the next maybe 10-ish years, maybe 15 max? And then your long-term goals are the lower right. And take your assets and your liabilities and put them into those different places. What do you have for each of those? And really, again, and you and I've talked about this a lot, it makes so much more sense to do this visually, people, the way we're telling you to draw it all out, put it all out than it does to do it line by line. Like a line by nine net worth statement is fine. But I think this idea of getting it on a piece of paper in front of you visually and seeing it all together, your brain starts then working. OG, I mean, you know, there's three types of people. There's visuals, audios, and kinesthetics.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Most people in the United States are visual, but even audios and kinesthetics work in a visual world because so many people are visual. And our brains are wired so that when we look at things, our unconscious mind does a lot of the heavy lifting. I mean, just walking down the hall to get here today, going down the hall, down the stairs to the basement, sitting at the card table, you do most of that on autopilot. Why? Because your eyes take a look at the situation and interface with your brain without you even getting involved. So the second you set your eyes to the task, I think you get a lot of the back room department working, the back departments working, whatever those are called.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  I don't think it's a bad idea to have it listed as a net worth either. I mean, like on, you know, an Excel sheet or something like that, as long as it's organized correctly. I think the biggest mistake here is that people leave stuff out. Like there's maybe like that, by the way, you're the only person who's going to go through this. You know, if you're thinking about kind of setting this up at the beginning of the year, you've got two weeks at the holiday time now to kind of get your ship with the P pointed in the right direction. So just be honest, you know, don't, don't be like, well, I don't know, should I count the student loans? Cause I mean, they might get, I'm not going to count those. Like, no. If you owe the money to grandma for something you bought 20 years ago and you haven't paid her back, put it on the sheet, you know? Like be a super, super

• 37:42Speaker 03

  honest with yourself because that, to your point, I think helps your brain to be able to start solving what it needs to solve. So you're the most trustworthy person that you know of. So don't try to lie to yourself. It backfires.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  And working on that upper left quadrant, then I think is the first thing to work on. To your point, you said you have to have cash. So let's start there. If you have very tight cash flow or negative cash flow, and you have debt, I don't know that it really matters what your long-term goals are as much as it matters to get that free cash flow working. Now, a lot of people listening to the show have the opposite problem. They have huge cash flow, right? And this was always a great problem to have, but people had huge cash flow and it was just going random places because we didn't have any system to capture it. We were just out spending stuff and, and people didn't remember. It was amazing how once we captured that cash flow by setting up automatic savings strategies,

• 38:41Speaker 00

  right? More money into the 401k, setting up a Roth IRA, or putting money into whatever it is, just making that automatic and capturing that money. So you didn't think about it every month. People save far more money than they thought they could. And guess what? The budget didn't change. Like people, are you having less fun? No. Where did that money go? I have no idea where that money went. Now it's going in my pocket.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  And again, starting with the where you happen to be, you know, if you put everything on your charge card, it's a pretty easy thing just to download all of the transactions. You don't have to put it in a fancy, you know, you don't have to go get Mint or a tool, go pay for, I mean, you can, and those are great. But if you don't want to, you can just sort by transaction. You know, when you go to Kroger, it's reported as Kroger every single time, the same way on your Amex statement. Right. So you can sort by merchant and be, and you can look like what we did just a week ago. It's like 497 transactions of Amazon. And I'm like, wait, there's only been 360 days of the year.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  We won. I think we won.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  I don't get it. But when you're working on cash flow, if you're starting from the perspective of there's not enough, then you have to do something about that. You know, that's the only thing that matters. You can't have a, well, I want to retire, or you know, I want to, you know, be financially independent early and all. So if you don't make more money than you spend, it doesn't matter.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Does not matter.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  None of it matters. And sometimes that spending is because of bad spending in the past. Like you said, consumer debt or something like that. So you have to work on those things individually. Try to lower the interest rate, try to change the payment structure.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Best thing to do, though, sleep in your car in the Marriott parking lot, Cory by Marriott parking lot, get the free breakfast.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, do that. You can try it. You know, try to increase your income. I mean, I mean, for crying out loud, inflation, we talked about it for a couple of weeks now. In fact, that was an article that I saw that was on the heels of the inflation thing, which was, you're probably going to ask for a pay raise, you're probably going to get it, and it's probably not going to go anywhere because of inflation, you know, so.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  It's just going to be keeping up. Yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you're not getting it, you're going to kind of sort of be behind. So if you're negative cash flow or even, you have to figure out a way to, to change that.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  I want to talk about the budget for a second because there's two things. Oh gee, what you were just talking about is tracking your expenses. And to your point, you can have a fancy app. Second, you can run it all through a credit card. Do that if you're not putting additional money on the credit card. If you don't carry a balance, if you carry a balance, that can be very dangerous. But that's not a budget. And I think there's different ways to budget. If it's really close, if it's really close to the vest, I think that having a budget like a YNAB or Cube Money, or one of these envelope type systems is fantastic. You'll also find that it's kind of a pain in the ass, but it's great when things are super tight. Once things loosen up, you know, you and I talk

• 41:39Speaker 00

  about the magic of pull a pants budget, which is I make sure that I'm saving for all my goals. And this is where it comes down to, okay, what is this money going toward? What, what am I really saving for? But for those people, I think having almost an anti-budget is a good answer. Once the budget's under control. And what you'll find, by the way, working with a Cube or a YNAB for a while, is that you get used to these barriers, right? I mean, you know, when they start off with kids bowling, they put those barriers over the gutters. But as you get more control over the ball going down the, going down the alley, you don't need those barriers anymore. And you take those off and you still find that

• 42:23Speaker 00

  the ball goes where you want it to go. So how about that for analogy, huh?

• 42:27Speaker 03

  I was going to say, you haven't seen me bowl lately. I asked for the bumpers. Like, can I put the bumper? They're like, sir, you're.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  I love the bumper, though. Yes. Yes. Oh, I can't do like the.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  Guard rail.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like pool meets bowling. Like if I.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Ping pong. Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  If I hit it two thirds of the way down just right, I could still get a strike.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  So I think choosing the right budget is super important if, if things are tight. And then having a debt strategy, let's talk about that for a second. Oh gee, what do you think about consolidating debt, refinancing debt? Where does that fit when it comes to your debt strategy?

• 43:06Speaker 03

  I feel like it kind of ends up with one of these know thyself type of things. I mean, if you can consolidate your debt and not go back to it, then it can work out really well. The downside is you get the HELOC, right? You say, okay, I got all these, I'm just gonna put this all in one payment. It'll be easy to manage, lower the interest rate. I can make progress. And then you do that. And then you go, whoa, now I've got all these credit cards that have no balance. I should, I definitely need a new sofa. It's just a cycle that never ends. And we all know people, some, some of us intimately, people who

• 43:46Speaker 03

  do that or have done it. Nothing is more demoralizing than waking up five years after you do that to find out that you're in the exact same spot, only worse now that you have this extra line of credit now on your house or something like that.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that point of view because consolidation, and that's, that's what I was thinking, even as I asked the question, consolidation doesn't solve the problem. It can make it easier, but it does not solve the problem. And I certainly, you know, back when I was struggling with debt to, to get out of debt and I had the right behaviors, I used consolidation to speed up the process, but I had to have the behavior first.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah. And that's really the biggest thing because if you, I think you have only so many opportunities to swing. You know what I mean? And what, and I guess what I mean by that is, so let's say you spend your twenties and you just kind of followed up and you just, you know, you get that eye opening moment and you say, okay, I need, I need to get this squared away. And so you sit down, you make a plan, you work it, and then you wake up when you're 40 and you go, I didn't make any progress. I mean, I did that consolidation thing or, you know, but now here I am, I make twice the money. I got twice the stuff going on in life and I'm still, my net worth is the same as it was 10 years ago.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay. Now I'm really seriously going to buckle down. I'm 40 for crying out loud. I need to get it together. You know, and I'm going to do, and then 10 more years later, you're in the same spot because you've gone back to that well so many times of, well, I'll just, you know, I'll consolidate it and then it'll be it. And the next pay raise, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've said that to myself, or, or I've heard people say this. I mean, you hear talk, people talk about like charitable giving or something like that. If you can't give 10% of your income when you make 50,000, there's no chance you're going to give 10% of your income when you make 500. And for people who, who make 50,000, they go, oh, yes, I will. No, you won't. It doesn't happen. It's because it's the behavior. It's not the, it's not the dollar amount. It's the fact that you're not

• 45:45Speaker 03

  doing that activity. And if you say, you know, if you're looking at your retirement plan and you're saying, I'll start my 401k when I get my next pay raise. I can tell you 99 times out of 100, it's still stuck at 3% and you're making $200,000 a year. And you go, where the heck, where did it go?

• 46:04Speaker 00

  And let's put a positive spin on this. It's a great and fun muscle to build. Cause once you start building that muscle, all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is a whole different world. Like this is way fun. And I feel like there's these, I don't know, two different types of people. There are people that are gamifying staying in debt and people that are gamifying.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Building assets.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  And you think about this too. I mean, in the get out of debt game, and this is what ultimately scared me a lot, is that my debt is somebody else's asset. And that just peeves me. It makes me, it makes me really frustrated that I am a positive line on somebody else's balance sheet. And you know, who's, who's the winner there, right?

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  I want somebody to be the line on my balance sheet. That's the place where you're winning. So I don't know. I don't know what motivates you, but that certainly, certainly motivated me. Let's move over. That's the upper left quadrant. Certainly then, the upper right quadrant is also important. And this is your risk management strategy. And you know, I have a family member who's struggling right now. And you know, we're looking at all of their, their estate stuff. And this is something, oh gee, I think that no matter what age you are, whatever's going on, at the very least, have your estate plan in order. Cause you don't die at the end of your story. You die in the middle of your story. And we don't know when that is, you know? This family member of mine, a few weeks

• 47:31Speaker 00

  ago, healthy, everything's going great. Not so much today.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the time to do it is when you're, when you're ticked off that you got to do it. That's what, that's the time to do it because you're not going to make really great decisions in the moment. You're not going to make great decision, money decisions. If you're trying to mix money decisions and, and emotional things at the same time, you open up the opportunity for people arguing with you, you know, like, that's not what mom wanted. I talked to her.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Last Christmas, and she said that the grandfather clock is going to me.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  You know?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  And if you didn't, if you didn't hear our show on this last Wednesday, go back and listen to it because David Eadie was fantastic on this topic.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it has to be at a time when it's, it's a nuisance. You know, if you're trying to rush around and call the attorney while grandma's on a respirator or something, I mean, I guess.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Not good.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Not a great time to be doing that.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  No. And a couple of little points that he pointed out, the code to get into your phone is now huge. Somebody needs to know how to get into your phone.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  I talked about that with somebody. I can totally see, I can totally see this happening. It's, it hasn't happened to my knowledge yet where this is going to be a little morbid. You're at the funeral home and there's grandpa, you know, and somebody reaches in with his phone, with his fingerprint to get it unlocked.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Or they, they hold it over his face. But ding. Okay. I'm not grabbing his phone, everybody. Got it. I can get all the pictures. Now, I will tell you, Apple, I'm sure Android does this too, but Apple and their new release, I just read about it the other day in the Wall Street Journal. They're actually allowing you to designate a legacy survivor, actually five of them.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  But you still have to do that.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Well, you have to designate them. Absolutely.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  You still have to.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  And then they get, now, now they get access to your text messages. They get access to all your pictures. You know, be careful.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  It's a whole different, different ballgame.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Whatever, whatever your search history is, somebody's going to find it eventually.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  But you definitely need to give, give those, because everything's there now. I mean, increasingly, everything is, is there, or a lot of your stuff is there. That is important, and that's generally a good place to start because that's universal. The other things to look at, of course, are your insurance policies. And without going into all these, it is less important to look at the different insurances out there, which is what the insurance industry wants you to do. And instead, OG, look at what your risks are and make sure that you're covering the biggest risk. So the biggest risk of all, and the one that we see people cover the least is disability coverage. Right? That is a

• 50:19Speaker 00

  huge risk and people don't cover it. So that's, that's the one to focus on. Look at.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  You just look at it from, again, from a probability and magnitude standpoint. I love it when people are like, but it's so expensive. I go, why do you think that is? Do you think that it's just some random guy in an ivory tower that's like, you know what we'll do? Here's an idea. Let's charge a whole bunch of money for this, this type of insurance. And we'll just give this stuff away kind of cheap. You know, that life insurance stuff? Yeah. Why don't we make the, uh, your healthy 25 year old? I know. Let's do this. Let's do $2 million life insurance costs you 300 bucks a year. And then let's do, uh, 5,000 a month of disability insurance. You get, let's do, uh, let's do 4,000 a year. Like, he's not making it up. It's based on the likelihood of using it. So if it's really high, there's a freaking high chance

• 51:10Speaker 03

  that something bad is going to happen. And then you multiply the, you know, if you have a, a family, right? A couple, then that increases your likelihood of that happening.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  And at the very least, that doesn't mean that you have to buy more insurance, but that means you need to have a strategy in that area. You just have to have a strategy. Doesn't have to be insurance, but you have to have a strategy.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. Yeah. It's exactly right. It's not about, let's sell some insurance or let's buy some insurance. It's about, let's figure out a way to solve the problem if something bad happens.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Insurance for this reason generally goes in a U shape, I find during people's lifetime. You need to start off with a fair amount. I remember for younger people, I'd always recommend fairly big amounts because they don't have cash set aside. It's hard to self insure. So we have to cover the things that are big magnitude with big insurance policies. Then we get closer to the goals and we have these big amounts that we can now siphon from. As an example, when it comes to disability coverage, we're at a point where we're like, okay, yep, probably, probably we can coast in, you know, this is going to be fine. But earlier in our careers, not the case at all. When it comes to your car insurance, as an example, and your, your homeowner's lower deductibles.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  But then as you, once again, could self insure, you can raise those deductibles and save some money on insurance. However, late in life, later in life, I find that sometimes the insurance costs go up, but in different areas, right? Now we're talking about healthcare. We're talking about long-term care.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  And for some people that have accumulated a lot of assets, life insurance costs end up being a very good way to do estate planning. If you have done a phenomenal job and you're high net worth, can be a fantastic tool, but that is definitely not even 201. That's probably 401 stuff.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  The stuff on the bottom, and I don't think we ought to spend a lot of time on this. You know, people always ask us, what's the right tech strategy? Should I put this in a Roth IRA or not, OG? Should I look at the, at the, I'm going to say the word. Should I look at annuities? Should I think about which part of my 401k should I, I put in, hey, we're, we're, we just got some stuff. Where do we put it? And the answer for all of these is going to be based on where you want to go. It's all based on where you want to go. Once you know, when you're harvesting the money, when you've, you've got this crop in the ground, you want to plant it, you want to have it go through the growing season. When does that growing season end? Because that will drive your tech strategy and it will drive the investment.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  And this, by the way, gets rid of a lot of consternations, you know, OG, that a lot of investors have, because they go, oh my God, there's so many different choices of investments that I can choose. The fear of missing out becomes big. I'm going to miss the right one. What, what is, what is the right one? And instead of focusing on the wide range and thinking there's so much I don't need to know. When you start with the end in mind, now I can focus on just the small number of investments that historically have done that. And then my research becomes a hell of a lot less. And then I know that a lot of these opportunities don't even fit me, so I don't even have to worry about them.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of times people start with the wrong, you know, start with the wrong thing, which is, I saw on CNBC, or I read on Reddit that, da, da, da, da, you know? And if you think about the timeframe that you need the money to be, and by the way, sometimes that timeframe is darn near indefinite. You know, you think about retirement, you need money the first year of your retirement, but you also need money the 50th year of your retirement. So what you start, to your point, you start narrowing down, where should I put money? If I think I don't need it for 50 years? You know, I mean, basically aggressive stocks, right? I mean, like, like there's no other place to put it. Where do I need money? If I am going to buy a vacation house in 25 months from now?

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Very different place, for sure.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Very, very different. And that means at this point, you, you start off with where you want to go. And people want the optimal tech strategy. Everything is inside of that.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  That's going to do it. You know, if you want more on this topic, we have a fantastic newsletter called the 201. The 201 is a newsletter that we've been told, OG, that we should make this, these blog posts, in fact, our amazing engineer, Steve Stewart, wrote me a note saying, there's so much packed in here. I feel like it's getting wasted by not being a blog post. And we say, that's kind of the point. This is the inner circle for people that want it. And for people that don't want it, then we don't, we don't provide stuff people don't want.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  I'm going to clog up your inbox.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Yes. So the 201 is there. It's always free. You can always unsubscribe at any time. Our goal is to make sure that you don't want to do that. And we have found so much, uh, great, fun, ancillary stuff to these stories that we tell. It's not so much a guide to the show as a ride along going deeper into the same topics that we have. stackingbenjamins.com/201. Brooke Miller, who puts that together, is going to have lots, lots, lots, lots. She's a former CFP, OG. So she dives into this as much as, as you know, as much as you and I do. And it makes her giddy when she can write about all of the exciting things going on

• 56:31Speaker 00

  when it comes to what to do first, second, third, fourth. So we will have a curated list for you if you sign up for the 201. stackingbenjamins.com/201. And if you're listening to this the day it came out, you got that 201 yesterday. And on that note, and this is weird because normally here I'm thanking the guest. Thank you, OG, for all your insights.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Happy holidays. Oh, I guess we still have to come back for a couple more days. Nevermind.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  We can play some bumper music here just for a second.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Wow. That was a fantastic conversation with that Joe and OG. They were, they were great. Hey, let's help a stacker tackle some of life's biggest problems. Hey, Julia.

• 57:19Speaker 07

  Hi, Joe and OG. How's that saying go? You can't teach a new dog old tricks? Well, I'm a young pup, but I've learned plenty from you two. I have a question in regards to cosigning. Becoming financially educated has its perks, but it also has its downfalls, like being the go-to for family members in a bind. My husband and I are preparing for an upcoming situation in which we may be asked to co-sign for a cash out mortgage refinance for around $50,000. I won't go into the details because I know there are a lot of factors that go into this decision that we are already considering. However, I'm having difficulty finding information on the technicalities of cosigning. Will this affect our credit immediately or only if it goes into default?

• 58:03Speaker 07

  Will we be notified and have a chance to make payments to avoid default if it were to come to that? We're considering moving in the next five years, and I know that our credit score is important for getting a mortgage, so we are mostly wondering how it will affect that. Thanks for any insight you are able to provide. By the way, I was a size medium before quarantine, but I might need a large after a couple of years of stress eating and gym shutdowns.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Julia, thanks for the message. And I'll tell you, with this difficulty in my family, with a family member, I have been, oh geez, you can believe I've been eating my feelings. So Julia, I'm right there with you. I told Cheryl the other day, I picked her up from where she works and said, let's go get a hamburger. She's like, I don't think that's healthy choice. I'm like, I don't really care. I have to tell you what's going on in our family. And I really want a hamburger and a shake and some fries. And yeah, so I knew it was a bad decision ahead of time. So I'm right there with you, Julia. But speaking of bad decisions, ba dum bum, hold on. Nope, not that one. Yes, let's, uh, let's talk

• 59:10Speaker 00

  about cosigning for somebody else.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  No, God. No, God, please, no, no, no, no.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  I agree with Michael Scott there.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. So will it affect your credit immediately? Yes, it's your debt. Absolutely. It's going to show up on your credit report. Will it affect your debt to income and your ability to buy the next house? Absolutely, it will. Hundred percent. Will you be notified if there's a default? Eh, probably because the, when you get the collection notice on your doorstep that says, oh, hey, by the way, that mortgage hasn't been paid in a month. So that 30 day late? Yeah, sorry, that's on your credit report for the next seven years.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Speaking of family members, I had this happen, oh gee, between two other family members. And unfortunately, being the money guy in the family, I was asked to intervene, which was not comfortable at all. But I found out that with the one family member who cosigned for the other, didn't find out for about six months that it was late.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. You are a hundred percent in charge of this loan. There is no circumstance in which you should do this. Not a single one. Because if the person can't, like, what are they doing with a cash out refinance on a house? Oh, I really want a pool, man, and I can't afford it. So can you help me?

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  I think it's something bigger than that. I mean, I think it's, I think it's gotta be, if Julie is considering it, I mean, it might be a healthcare concern. It might be a business opportunity that they-

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Not my circus, not my monkeys. Like, if you can't afford to start the business without my help, then you're not starting a business. I'm starting a business. And guess what? I don't want to start a business.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  And the healthcare issue, you just don't have any ability to repay it.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  So what's the outcome? Like, there's better programs for people that don't have health insurance than those that are like marginally qualified for health insurance programs and have money. So don't, like, I've, again, thankfully, thankfully, never been in a circumstance where, you know, like that movie John Q, right? With that Denzel Washington, where, you know, the doctor won't give him the procedure because he doesn't have the, have the cash, you know, to pay for it and the insurance won't cover it. Thankfully, never been in that circumstance. But I also know that the times that we have used the healthcare system aggressively, that every single time they've been willing to work with

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  us in terms of the payments. They just want to get paid. So I would explore other options and work to solve other scenarios than to have a chance of ruining your credit for the better part of a decade because your sister in law forgot to make a payment on time. There is no coming back from it. Like, there is no, hey, sorry. Yeah, I know that that's, but that's my sister in laws. Like, that doesn't count. Like, it is un-removable on a late payment. And if you get one late payment, I don't remember the exact number, but I think it drops your credit score by a hundred points. And it stays on there for

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  seven years. It affects you for two. That money will count against your debt to income when the bank, because you go to the bank and you'll say, hey, I want to buy a new house. And they'll go, cool, let's look at your credit report. Oh, it says here you got a line of credit on a house. And you'll say, oh, no, that's my sister's. They'll be like, well, it's on your credit report. Don't have to tell you.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  It would be better, it would be better to gift them cash than to do this.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Yes. And not even think about it.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  Be like, okay, you need 50 grand, here's 50 grand. I don't ever want to talk to you again.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Let it go away.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  About money.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Yep. You're never paying me back. Here it is.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Or if you need money out of your house that badly, I will buy your house from you. And then I will own the asset that goes with the debt.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Still a better option.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  If I got the debt, I want an asset that goes with it. You know what I mean? Like, golly, this goes bad in a hurry so many ways. And it only goes right one way. And that is asymmetric, in my opinion.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  I can't tell you how ugly this was, just in my family, like firsthand. Oh, it was horrible.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  Don't do it. Don't do it.

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  You get a free t-shirt anyway, but don't do it.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Julia, thank you so much for asking us that question. To your point, there are a ton of factors to consider. And I think, oh gee, hit, hit them all. Bold a strike. Didn't need the guard bumpers at all.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  No bumpers required.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  If you have a question and also would like to pick OG's brain on this stuff, stackingbenjamins.com/voicemail. That's going to do it for today. Remember, man, a big week coming up this week. One of my favorite, we, we have a few weeks we do every year. We always have a financial superstar on to talk about what we should have learned this year. No exception to that rule. Clark Howard, the Clark Howard.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  One and only.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  Coming down to the basement. I think it's his third or fourth time here, but always one of the nicest people on earth and just, just a guy who's helped so many people. I can't wait to talk to Clark Howard on Wednesday. And then our roundtable regulars get together on Friday. And it's all financial lessons we should have learned from this year. So we started off today with the order of operations, and then we're going to end this on a high note. And then don't forget, next week, next week, we are bringing the year home with five episodes, all about financial independence. So if you're thinking about financial independence, retire early, want to just dive into that, we're going back into the archives with OG

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  and I kicking off five special days of episode. Of course, then, it doesn't slow down in the new year. We've got Ramit Sethi kicking off 2022, and Aaron Sky Kelly helping you get the hell out of debt. And the episode after that, the Magic 8-Ball kicks off the year, which if you've never heard our Magic 8-Ball episode, it's where we take a Magic 8-Ball from Walmart and OG, Paula and Len ask it questions. And the thing was rolling about the first five years of the show, and then went off the rails for a couple of years, OG, but came back during last year's episode, had a good year. We're going to see if the

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  Magic 8-Ball had a good year again in 2021, and we'll ask it questions for 2022. That is all the fun coming up on the horizon. To keep up with all the madness, subscribe to the 201 stackingbenjamins.com/201. If you haven't subscribed to the show and you're new to the family, welcome, hit follow or subscribe wherever you're at. If there's a stacker that needs to hear this stuff, if you remember the 201, we have a reward program over there. Sign them up for that. And then also, they can listen to the show as well. Yes, we will give away some swag. And by the way, we had one stacker who set up four different email addresses and referred himself. We're on to you. Don't get me wrong,

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  it's not as cool as sleeping in your car at the Marriott to get the free breakfast. Actually, that's probably better.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  That would be fun.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Because a free breakfast is better than stickers and a t-shirt, you know?

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Maybe it's a cool t-shirt. But all right, that's going to do it for today. Last but not least, if you're someone who wants to make better decisions in 2022 than you did in 2021, and before, OG and his team are taking clients and their financial advising team, ready to help you think bigger, head to stackingbenjamins.com/OG for access to their calendar and getting rolling into next year. All right, that's it for today. Doug, you got it from here, man. What should we have learned today?

• 1:06:55Speaker 06

  So what should we have learned today? First, don't try to tackle all your financial issues at once. Address them in order so you can stay more focused and feel less overwhelmed. Second, deciding where to start? The best thing to do is to get started. And remember that even if you're paying down debt or getting the budget in order, saving early and often so that compound interest works in your favor, should always be part of the plan. But the big lesson? If you ever get the chance to make an investment in 1803, definitely do it. I'd recommend it. If you ever get the chance to eat unlabeled shellfish sandwiches

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  out of a rusted Chevy Fleet Side, definitely not. This show is the property of SB Podcasts LLC, copyright 2021, and is created by Joe Saul Seeha. Our producer is Karen Rapine. The show is written by the brilliant Paulette Perhatch, with help from Joe and Doc G from the Earn and Invest Podcast. Know how I know how brilliant Paulette is? She wrote the words I'm reading right now. While she's not putting awesome words in my mouth, she helps writers power their work and businesses

• 1:08:12Speaker 06

  power their words. See how she can help you at thatwriterpaulette.com. After you listen to our show, check out our show notes page and the 201 deep dives, written by our website manager and blog editor, Brooke Miller, at stackingbenjamins.com/201. Once we get all of this goodness bottled up, it goes over to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart, who helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Want to talk about the show later? Mom's friend Gertrude is our social media coordinator and room mother in our Facebook group, The Basement. So say hello when you see us posting online. Here's

• 1:08:55Speaker 06

  a weird fact. She and Tina Eichenberg are never in the same room at the same time. To join all the basement fun with other stackers, type stackingbenjamins.com/basement. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug saying, and let's all say it together now. Three, two, one. See ya.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

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  Our stackers are going to get a $75 sponsored job credit. That's you to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support stacking Benjamins by saying you heard about Indeed in mom's basement. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  All right, Joe, you, my friend, I've got your next trip. This is from the Daily Mail. Don't know anything about it. All aboard for a new track record. Woo hoo. Your interest has peaked, I can tell. Travelers can now go from Portugal to Singapore on the longest continuous railway journey in the world.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  You're kidding me.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  The route stops in Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Laos and elsewhere. Ends in Singapore. 11,654 mile journey takes 21 days. Ultimate challenge for the ultimate train bug.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  Oh, sign me up.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  Thanks to the opening of the railway in Laos earlier this month, it's now possible to travel from Lagos in southern Portugal all the way to Singapore with just a few changes. Tops a previous record by around 1,000 miles. The journey, which does require some short interchanges between stations, has been calculated by users of the Reddit website with British train enthusiast Mark Smith. So Lagos to Lisbon, to France, to Paris, to Moscow, to Beijing, to another place in China that I can't say, pronounce, then some other place, then some Vietnam, and then Bangkok, and then Malaysia, and then Penang, and then Kuala Lumpur, then to Singapore. There you go, man.

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Game on.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  So you start with an Atlantic dip in Lagos. And then you end up in the Indian Ocean.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  When I was in Southeast Asia, they were pronouncing it Laow

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  instead of Laos.

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Hey, I use all the letters.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  I'd always pronounce it.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  I use all the letters.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  If they wanted to be Laow, then they would say L A O. They would just.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:50Speaker 03

  L O W.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  Wow. Yeah, we're looking at you, Mackenack.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  Get your train tickets. Merry Christmas. I'm also not buying it for you, but if I was.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  I was.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  You're just bringing it to my attention.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  I was a gazillionaire, I would.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  You're dangling it there.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Well, you know, maybe, maybe I could have Julia co-sign on one for me.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Sounds like she'd be open to it.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Not after you just talked her out of it. We should have answered that call differently.

• 1:14:22Speaker 05

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