Afford Anything - Ask Paula: Help! I Can Only Save $200 a Month

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

#304: Paige and her fiancé have two autumn 2021 goals: save for a wedding and an emergency fund. There’s one problem: they only have around $200 per month to save. How can they grow the gap when they’ve run out of things to cut and ways to earn more? Kat’s investor friend connected her with a wholesaler who only deals in cash. How can she find $130,000 to buy her subject property? Anonymous “Countryside Living” is renting their grandparent’s property, which they plan to make their forever home. It’s on the older side and needs renovations, but the repairs don’t need to happen immediately. How can they fund these repairs while also avoiding a mortgage payment in their 60s? Annalis wants to know whose approach to business I prefer: Gary V’s, or Cal Newport’s? She also asks: how do you become a good speaker? Anonymous “My Job Pays for My Housing” is planning for financial independence. Given that their employer covers their housing, when should they start looking for a house? Now, or in the last year of their job? My friend and former financial planner Joe Saul-Sehy joins me to answer these five questions today. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode304 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, anything in your life that's a scarce or limited resource. Saying yes to something implicitly means. Saying no to all other opportunities, and that opens up two questions. First, what matters most?

And second, how do you align your decision-making with that which matters most? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. On the first Friday of every month, we release a bonus episode. So welcome to the March 2021 first Friday bonus episode. Every other episode-ish, we answer questions that come from you, the community. And today, former financial planner Joe Sal Sihai joins me to answer these questions.

What's up, Joe? What's happening, Paula? Happy generic day. Everybody's listening to this. Happy generic day. Woo! Fantastic. And we've got some good questions today, don't we?

Absolutely. Some good evergreen questions that help not only the people who have asked them, but also many people in the afford anything community who have similar situations or who know somebody who has a similar situation. Which is good news, Paula, because you and I have spent the last couple hours artfully pairing those evergreen questions. the appropriate evergreen answers that people can use years from now to still get ahead. Which means today's episode will help you get some more green.

So bad. Yes. Paula's here all week. Well, she's here every episode. Tip your weight, Steph. All right. Our first question today comes from Paige. Hi, Paula. This is Paige from Portland, Oregon. First, I want to say thank you for all the work you put in to afford anything. Since I started listening. Since I started listening to the podcast a few months ago. I've gotten really interested in personal finance and FI, and I've learned so much from you and all the guests you bring on the show. My question has to do with getting out of the paycheck to paycheck rut and achieving some short-term financial goals over the next year. My fiance and I are trying to build an emergency fund, are planning a

wedding for October 2021, and I'm also planning to start graduate school in fall of 2021. Our current situation is modest. Using the seven stages of FI, we're just making it a financial solvency. I'm 23 and she is 27, and we share all of our income and expenses. I work full-time making about $3,000 a month after taxes. I also drive for DoorDash five or six hours a week for a little extra income. My fiancé works part-time, bringing in about $800 to $1,000 a month after taxes, and she is currently going to school. We also have just started an emergency fund, but it isn't big enough to cover any expenses yet. As far as debt, I have about $25,000 in student loans on an income-based repayment plan that's in forbearance until January 2021.

We have about 2,000 credit card debt and owe $8,000 on our car. Our minimum monthly expenses, plus the small deposits into our emergency fund in my tiny Roth IRA, are about $3,700. So there's only about $100 to $200 to $200 left over for other savings. If that isn't taken up by things like car main ins or medical co-pays, rent and utilities take up a good chunk about 40%. Getting a cheaper apartment would help, but our lease doesn't end for another nine months. Plus, we've moved every year for the last five years, and we're just tired of moving. We've looked for other places to cut costs, but there don't seem to be any other clear paths. Our phone bill is high, but to switch to a different company, we'd have to pay off $800 on one phone.

My health insurance has the lowest premium available to me. We only spend about $250 to $300 a month on groceries, and we rarely order food out or spend money on fun shopping. We might be able to cut down our wedding to something much smaller, but it depends on COVID and whether the venue will refund what we've already paid so far. As far as earning more, I could spend more hours doing DoorDash, but I'm hesitant to stretch myself too thin for the sake of my mental health. My fiancé already has a heavy load between working in school. In order to pay for the wedding we have planned, we need to save up about $5,000 over the next 10 months and ideally also have a solid emergency fund built up by the time I start school again.

So overall, we're making it by each month, but a bit in over our heads in terms of being able to save up for our goals. We could really use some help thinking through what we can do to compromise, adjust, and come up with a plan for the next year or so. Any thoughts or advice would be be much appreciated. Again, thank you so much. Paige, first of all, huge congratulations and applause goes to you for how well you're managing your money. The thing that impressed me and the thing that kept resonating that I kept hearing as you went through all of the details of your situation is that you are incredibly conscious and intentional about your management of money. You know all of your numbers. You've thought

deeply about every expense. You've thought not just like all of the dollars go, you know, outflowing, but also you've given a lot of thought to that relationship between time and money and its impact on your mental health. You've looked at the whole picture and managed every component of it, your time, your money, your energy in a way that is a good fit for you. You know, you've managed things well. You've got clear goals, short-term goals, that,

are ambitious but reasonable. And so I just, I think you're doing an excellent, excellent job of managing. The first thing that I would say to both you and your fiancé, first of all, is congratulations on your upcoming wedding. But second, go easy on yourselves. I think you're doing a great job already. The thing is, you mentioned that you are starting grad school in the fall. And your fiancé is also attending school. Your fiancé works part time while attending school. while you are both students, your job is not to make money or to build your net worth. While your students, your job is to be a student. Your job is to learn.

That student era of your life is not the time when you're supposed to be rapidly amassing zeros on a spreadsheet, moving decimal points around, and watching your net worth grow. When you're a student, your job is to get by, get out of there without debt, ideally, or minimize the debt if you have to have it. But it's not the chapter in your life that is meant for setting and reaching big financial goals. So with regard to earning more, we had a podcast interview with Nick Loper that I will refer you to. We'll put a link in the show notes to that episode. Show notes will be available at afford anything.com slash episode 304. I reference it because Nick outlined this framework that in the world of side hustles, you have options such as gig economy work, such as driving for DoorDash,

and the benefit to those types of options is that they're readily available. You don't have to spend six months or a year doing upfront, unpaid work to try to get something, build something from scratch and get it going. Those gigs are readily available. You can get plugged in immediately. But in terms of compensation per hour of your time, they tend to be more limited. By contrast, there are more scalable types of side hustles where you are building a business, but those types of side hustles require a greater investment of time and energy up front, which is often unpaid. And so when you're not a student, you know, when you're working full time, you're working

nine to five and then you've got two hours in the evening that you can spend, let's say, two hours in the evening, four nights a week, and maybe four hours on a Saturday morning. You know, so you've got a total of those eight hours a week that you can spend building something and it's not going to make any money for the first eight months and after that, hopefully it will. You know, when you're working full time, that's the appropriate time to do that. When you're a student, just get by. And you're doing better than just getting by already. So I think you're doing well.

And my biggest recommendation would be to focus on being a student, first and foremost, and let the financial hustle part of your life come when you're not in school. What does that mean about expenses like the wedding then? Well, the tricky part is that they are already committed to a venue. and that they may or may not get their deposit back if they were to try to go to a cheaper venue. Saving $5,000 when one person is already a student and the other is about to become a student, saving $5,000 in that situation is tough. Again, if they were both out of school and working full-time, this would be a different conversation.

That's my basic conundrum here is $5,000 fast, and it's interesting, Paula. on the Stacky Budgeman's podcast. We talked to Professor Juliette Schor, who wrote a great book called After the Gig about how the gig economy got hijacked. And she's done all the math. And we're hearing this increasingly, the people working in the gig economy for places like DoorDash, Uber, Lyft, generally more and more are for people that don't understand math, because the companies that are running these places are making sure that they may be

their profit and as they take more and more and more profit there's less and what's what's what in and and by the way can we say that in a less offensive way well no what's funny is i don't mean that offensively because i i mean that to be shocking because when she said that to me i went wait a minute we understand the math and she goes no no no there's two types of math going on and i don't mean to be offensive when i say it i mean that there's line items of this more complex math as you know paula expenses around getting the workday started. Expenses around depreciation if you're using your car, filling your car up with gas, like all these other expenses that you don't think about.

I mean, a lot of us like the restaurant shows that are on TV and a lot of new restaurateurs you'll find over and over when you see the geniuses come in and fix these restaurants, that keeping food costs to 30% of what the bill is is a huge part of actually being successful in a restaurant. But too many people don't know that. And they think, okay, well, I'm making $3 a plate, but they don't do the more complex math. So I meant for that to be something that was a little shocking at first, like, wow. But I think that if you're working in the gig economy at all for somebody else, largely what you need to be skilled at is still being a business owner, which brings up to me, if you're going to be in that type of business at all, it might be better to

try to establish your own business, which, by the way, isn't going to get you there by October. It makes me go, because you're right, to make a quick dollar to working for somebody else in the gig economy might get you there, even though, you know, the depreciation, the gas, all that stuff is going to be a real weight on you. Yeah. I would not go so far. I'm just going to give the disclaimer here. I would never say that anybody is bad at math.

No, I would never go so far as to make that assumption based on the type of work that a person does. But I get what you're saying, Joe, with regard to gig economy work is not going to be work that will allow you to build a lot of wealth in the long term. It's a short-term stopgap measure. So if you have some type of emergency situation and you need cash fast, it's great for that. But for anything other than staunching the bleeding, it's not a long-term plan. And again, in Pages situation, I'll reiterate, she's a student. And so was her fiance. So they're in that phase of their life where that type of work is appropriate for that phase of their life.

I don't think that it is. I still don't think it is. I don't think driving DoorDash until the people that run DoorDash find a way to make it more equitable for the people that are the drivers of DoorDash, I don't think it's a great idea. I think that DoorDash and Uber and Lyft decide that they pay their drivers more when we stop driving. for them when we stop putting ourselves in that position. So I don't think it's appropriate. I think there are better ways to make money. I think that understanding the math is not that difficult. I love her enthusiasm. I love everything you're saying. I don't think she should drive for DoorDash. Would you recommend that she try to start her own business at this point, given that she's going to be busy with grad school? Yeah, no. No. No. For the same thing that you're talking about, the same

reason that you're talking about this, she's in school now, get school done. And this is where I think we bring up this concept in financial planning, Paula, of risk management, that when we start something, we have to look at the risks on the downside. And by the way, Paige, there's no way that you would have thought of this stuff before because the whole world, as you know, it was turned upside down. So you may now be thinking about there's this place that has this money committed to them that you're not going to get that money back for every. everybody else listening and for page in the future, that always has to go down in the risk column. If I can't do this thing that I want to do at this place, what's my risk management situation

going to be? The same thing's the same thing with a phone plan, right? With their phone play, it's going to cost your $800 to get out of that phone plan to get into a different plan. When people think about the words risk management, they think about insurance, which is way too broad and it's also way too specific. And insurance companies love you to think about things that way. It's much better to think in a holistic manner of when I make a move, what are the potential downsides? And in this case, Page has committed possibly future income and future revenue

if things change in her life, which happens to us all. And now the strategy has to be how to get out of this with as little damage as possible. So I do have some ideas around the wedding, though, because when I was in high school and in college, guess what I did, Paula? Were you a wedding planner? I was a wedding DJ. Nice. It's the way I largely paid for a college. By the way, I'm the one guy that hates all those old classic songs because I played them at 120 decibels, and I can't do it. I can't do it anymore. And leading the chicken dance. That's why you're so good with podcast recording equipment.

I barely know how to operate a microphone. Well, Steve, our mutual engineer, Steve was the DJ in clubs. So that guy is remixing this whole thing to make us sound great. In fact, he's probably going to put some mix beat in right now. There you go, Steve. But anyway, so I saw a lot of weddings. I saw a lot of weddings. And I'll tell you from a great book.

This actually doesn't come from weddings at first. It comes from a great book by a guy named Keith Farazi called Never Eat Alone. And Keith Farazi talks about the value of potlucks and about the fact that this idea of a shared experience of food and people bringing food. I think that if you present that the right way, Paula, one of the biggest expenses at a wedding is the food cost. And I don't know if her contract includes food, it often does. but if it doesn't and people can pitch in and the food, I don't know about you, Paul. I'm always happy to do that.

And I love the idea of a potluck where we get the best stuff that every family has. And you can even, if you've got a theme to your wedding, you know, that's a certain type of food. People try to pitch in in that way or something. I mean, I remember one holiday, this is going to be a little mixed metaphor. One holiday, a friend of mine's family made it so that every single gift you gave for the holidays had to come from a truck stop. It had to come from a truck stop, and it couldn't cost more than $30.

And I got to tell you, that turned the holiday, what do I get people thing, that is so annoying into the most hilariously fun thing that I've ever heard. She's talking about going through this truck stop, looking at all the different things

and thinking, do you think my mom would like this? You know, would they like? It just turns it into something fun. But I think you can look at food costs that way. I'm not big on the GoFundMe kind of thing, you know, where I just ask people for money. Yeah, no. But I do like people pitching in.

If you got somebody who's a photographer in the family and you can ask them, and I don't know, I haven't thought enough about the right way to do this, but in lieu of a gift, the best gift you could give us is we love your photography. If you would be our photographer, and that was a gift, that would be phenomenal for us. So maybe that. But I think there's, and you know, and everybody knows somebody who was an entertainer like Steve and I that might be able to add in some music. There's just so many things, so many little things you can do, I think, to make that budget

come down for the wedding. They can still make it a beautiful day. It doesn't feel like a compromise. You collapse everything that you don't really care. It's just like a budget, right? You collapse all the things you don't care about so that you can spend money on the piece that you really love that's going to make this a special day. Right, right. You know, I went to a wedding once that was a potluck wedding. I brought two dishes. We had a good friend who was, she was good at photography and she had a nice camera, so she was the photographer. Basically everything that you talked about, they did at this wedding. And when I think about the weddings that I have been to in the past, that's the one that stands out most in my mind because of the fact that I participated in it in some way. Like the fact that I brought food to the wedding, you know, that I brought to pot,

potluck dishes to the wedding means that I essentially I had buy-in to the wedding. And so that means that it became a more meaningful experience for me as a guest. And to be clear, in that particular case, I didn't also get a present for the bride and groom, like bringing two dishes to a potluck, dishes that were large enough to serve the whole community. That was what I brought to the wedding. Yeah, exactly. But I think it's great for everybody, don't you? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Another thing that I have heard of people doing, and I think this is great, both of you are in school. If you know anybody in the music department, and there are people that could act as a trio just practicing.

You can make it clear that you can't pay them, but if they want to get together and there are some start, and by the way, Paula, you and I are people just to be clear that don't say, hey, I want to give you exposure. We don't work for exposure. However, ma'am, when I was in college and I was just starting out, I would want to do anything to work in my craft. And I did work a little bit for free. Now, realize you're not going to get the best trio or quartet out there. But here's two things that I would do that might make your day special. Number one, if you can find people that want to do that, and they think that's a great opportunity for them to learn their craft of performing in front of people, that's great. But the second thing, Paula, that makes it really special, don't tell anybody that they're coming.

And I'll tell you what happens is everybody shows up. They're at the hall. Things seem to be going okay. And then when this trio starts playing part way through the night, it's just, it takes this thing. And just the act of it being a surprise for people, believe it or not, if people know they're coming, it's not nearly the magic as it is of, everybody's having a good time getting along, things are going really well, and then the music starts playing that nobody expected. Phenomenal.

I've actually done that at two different parties that I've thrown, taken that single idea, and it always turns a good night into just this special night that people remember for a long time. But back to the money of this, I think coming up with that much money and that short amount of time is a huge conundrum. It is, yeah. I think that one of the mistakes that people often try to make is trying to balance making money with being in school. Like when I reflect back on my school years, if I could do it over again, I would have taken a year off. Would have taken a year off, worked full time, cashed up, and then, you know, not worked or not worked as much during my actual time that I was a student.

Like if I could do it over again, that's what I would have taken that gap year and just cashed. hashed up during that gap year. And that would have been, you know, Paige talked about her preserving her mental health and not trying to burn herself out with too many hours. Being a full-time student and then also having a part-time workload, it does lead to burnout. But, you know, particularly if you want to be a good student and if you want to to make good grades, like my senior year of college was one of the most stressful years of my life.

Just because I was working 20 hours a week on top of making straight A. taking a heavy course load. That was a flex, by the way. To be clear, I did not make straight A's. So I didn't make straight A's through freshman and sophomore year. And so my senior year, I was like, all right, I really want to graduate with a decent GPA. This is my last chance. I've got to completely, like, nail it this year to make up for, like, weaknesses that appeared in my sophomore year.

So I went full on, like, took a super heavy course load so that the higher number of credit hours could skew the GPA higher, but that would only work if I got good grades in all of my courses. And so I did all of that plus a 20 hour a week load. And by the end, I was fried. Like by the end of my senior year, I was definitely not ready to go into the workforce and get a job. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Yeah. You know, I just wanted to crawl into a hole. Yeah. No, I believe it. My experience was a little bit opposite. I was paying my own way. and I was paying retail, and a lot of it was I didn't understand the cost-benefit analysis in college, which is a whole different show. And I should have, I should have frankly taken on some loans

and gotten it done more quickly. But instead, I worked two and three jobs sometimes and took a light class load. And because of that, it took me seven years to get my bachelors. But as those seven years went on and I had more experience in the working world, Paula, I found my grades went up, but I wasn't, I wasn't concerned about the grades. I became increasingly concerned about what I was learning. And was I getting something? Was I getting an ROI from the classroom that would benefit me out in the working world? And they actually show that people that do what you're talking about that take a gap year,

actually get better grades than people that just go from high school to college. And the reason is, is because they have that work life behind them where they know the ROI, right? They know. And they actually, instead of looking for the blowoff class like I did my freshman year, where I really wanted the class with the professors that didn't care and it was an easy A. By the time I graduated, I remember a couple courses. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm paying for this. And I remember another course that was so great. It was phenomenal, but my professor graded super hard, just so hard that I threw my hands in the air in huge delight finding out I got a C plus. I was just so that C plus was far more earned for me than a couple of the A's that I got. You know what I mean?

Because I was worried about what I learned and about the ROI. And so my feeling would be, you know, just getting back to the money of this is live through these short-term things and get the ROI out of being a student, learn as much as you can and just find a way to minimize the impact more than raise the money. Right. Exactly. So thank you, Paige, for asking that question. And congratulations on everything you're doing. I think you're doing a great job. Go easy on yourself.

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It's about not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big Bank Muscle, FinTech Hustle. That's your commercial payments, a fifth third better. Our next question comes from an anonymous caller, and Joe, you and I always give anonymous callers a nickname. So what should we call this one? I saw a fantastic movie that's a lot like a play recently. We talked about naming it after characters in movies that we saw. And I just saw, and by the way, if you don't like movies that are presented like plays, you won't like this.

But it's on Netflix, and it's called Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which, you don't. which is early, early jazz in the early 1900s, and Chadwick Bozeman is in it. So I think today we're going to talk about Mr. Chadwick Bozhen, who sadly passed away recently. So Chadwick, because it was an excellent performance, and this is an excellent question. Aw. All right. In honor of Chadwick, this next question is from Anonymous. Wow, that went deep. That went unexpectedly deep. I was not expecting giving an anonymous caller a name to tug at my emotional heartstrings. I like naming people after my heroes. Hey there. My wife and I are on track to be FI in about seven years if Mr. Market cooperates. Our basic strategy to get to FI is a 55%

after-tax savings rate and index fund investing. We have a twist in our lives that makes our transition to FI a little bit interesting. My employer provides our housing and pays for all utilities, maintenance, and so forth. So when I eventually transition out of my job, we're going to have to buy a house. Regardless of how we do it, our expenses are going to go up dramatically in post-F-I life versus pre-FI, assuming we keep more or less the same lifestyle. I've estimated the additional expenses in my FI calculations, and I imagine those calculations will get more accurate as FI gets closer. My question is, what should my house buying strategy be as FI gets closer? I could buy the house while I still have years of work left and rent it until we're ready to move in, or I could wait

to start house shopping until my last year of work, or I could buy a piece of land with the intent to build. I could get a mortgage, but I'm not exactly sure how that would work. If I buy the house early and rented, I suppose I would have to get an investment property mortgage. If I buy the house in my last year of work, I worried that the bank would not give me favorable. terms knowing that I'm about to quit my job. We're not quite there yet, but I foresee having enough to buy the house without a mortgage using only funds currently invested in index funds in our taxable account. But I prefer to wait to dip into those funds until post-FI when I can take advantage of the 0% capital gains rate. I'd also prefer to have money in all three of the Roth

traditional IRA and taxable buckets while in FI for maximum tax options. And if I pay for the house in full with a taxable account, it would be depleted. pretty dramatically. Anyway, this seems like the perfect question for Paula and Joe. It's complicated. It involves real estate and FI. It's exactly why I come to the Afford Anything podcast. Thanks in advance.

Well, thank you, Chadwick, Honorary Chadwick, for that question. And congratulations, by the way, being seven years away and a 55% savings rate is just always phenomenal. And obviously, not having to pay for your housing is fantastic. If you'd like to, by the way, get a look at paying for somebody's housing before you have to do your own. Like, practice, feel free to pay for mine. So that would be fantastic. But I wouldn't do that.

I wouldn't take that deal, although it's great for me. You know, with that twist, with the employer housing and deciding when to buy a house, I want to address that. I'm not sure about building. I think building, out of all the options that you talked about, look for a house now, look for a house later, buy some land to build later. The building piece, I need to take off the table for me because that's going to be specific to your location. It's going to be specific to the builder that you get. As an example, I'm in Texarkana, Texas, land incredibly inexpensive. You can build a lot of house for not a lot of money.

Of course, even if you go buy a house, it's going to be very specific on your area. But I think that taking that off the table for today to make this a little simpler, I think is best. And when it comes to now or later, I will give you one piece of information is that I don't recall anything on a mortgage application that says, are you leaving your job in the next 12 months? Yep. Now, that's exactly what I was about to say. You stole my thunder, Joe. You and I, but to-da, one time, one time. Paula gets 99% of them.

I get the one. Thank you. But because of that, I don't think there's a lot of pressure. The only pressure that you have is making sure you have that mortgage before you're done. So you want to make sure that in that last year, you get this process finished. So then buying a house later versus buying a house now, I don't like looking in the crystal ball to see when the best time to buy a house is going to be. I will say one thing that is a little market timey, and I feel Paul a little dirty even talking market timing.

But I will say this, during this one particular time during COVID, there have been a lot of moratoriums on people losing their homes. And a lot of people that I know who know real estate far better than I do think that, and we don't know how big it's going to be, there may be somewhat of a reckoning coming in the next few months as those moratoriums go away. and we will see, unfortunately, people losing their houses because there are people sitting in houses right now, not paying the rent every month, not making the mortgage payment, and they're holding on to the house. So people in real estate tell me that we may end up seeing more supply than we have now. And if you know anything about residential real estate, people are hanging onto their property.

I mean, and not just people that have no other options and are luckily able to stay in their house for now because of this moratorium, but also other people, people are just staying in one place. So that may mean supplies better in a couple years. I always hate acting on something that might happen, though, but from where I sit, the biggest problem you have is when to take out a mortgage. I think it makes it a lot more flexible for you to know that. you can take out a mortgage, not that far before you are ready to go. Yeah, exactly. Behind the camera, how do you say it, behind the scenes, off the record, off the backstage, Joe and I were discussing our answer to this question.

And I didn't tell Joe what I was going to say, but I was like, I only have one thing to say and it's really short and it's really quick. Well, let's talk about a different area, Paula, which is this money, he's got money in Roth, taxable, and true. traditional. I love this tax triangle. And as you know, I talk about this all the time, right? Having the flexibility. So I'm with you, Chadwick, on the flexibility. However, I don't know a way of keeping a larger bucket of taxable money. I mean, he's got, I guess he can put down a minimal down payment, whatever the most minimum down payment is that he can put down on the property

to keep money liquid. But obviously then he's going to have a bigger mortgage. Right. Well, the thing is, I like his story. strategy of the tax triangle. You know, he's got money in Roth, traditional, and taxable brokerage accounts. So he has that tax triangle built out. But if he's going into FI, I mean, maintaining money in a taxable brokerage account and allowing it to grow, based on historic performance, it has a high likelihood of doing better than a rock bottom interest rate loan, which is what he would most like.

likely get if you were to buy a home, even if you were to wait a few years. And so why pull money out of a taxable brokerage account to buy a home in cash if you could instead take out a primary resident mortgage, which is going to give you the most friendly interest terms of any type of mortgage out there? I don't see any reason to pass up all of those market gains for the sake of owning something in cash. If you could finance it with an incredibly low interest loan with favorable terms instead. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm an advocate of him taking out a mortgage right before he quits his job.

You know, of renting, buying a house now and renting it out to somebody else is an option, but that also depends on your appetite for being a landlord, Paula. Yeah, well, and also he would get an investor loan if he did that. Sure. The thing that I think about that is that a couple weeks ago, we saw rates bump up a little bit, on inflationary fears, mortgage rates come up a little bit, even though the Fed didn't move. And for people that don't understand the correlation, while there's a little bit between the Fed and mortgage rates, really the mortgage rate market is based on treasuries, not based on the Fed.

But you can generally look at those rates are low at the same time, and they kind of go higher at the same time. But it just brings up the conundrum of you've got this bird in the hand right now. Paula of really, really, really low rates. And if he waits six years, our rate's going to be low at that point. You know, our rate's going to be. And even for an investor loan is going to be a higher rate loan. But it certainly, if all rates go up, investor loans are going to be higher six years. Well, then he wouldn't even take out an investor loan. He'd take out just a personal loan. Right.

Personal mortgage. But we know at least for the next few years, rates will continue to be low. The Fed has pledged as much. So what they will be in six years, I don't know. But I think like all long-term plans, he can always re-evaluate this plan in a year or in two years, depending on what the economic circumstances are at that time. But the Fed and T-bills are two different things. And mortgage rates could be higher. I'm with you.

I don't think that the Fed stays low that you'll see treasuries go through the roof, right? Just historically hasn't really happened. But you could have this dichotidic. It isn't the same thing. And even though the Fed has pledged that they're going to keep rates low for a while, who knows? I mean, we saw this weird bump last week. Yeah. I think it would take too big of a dislocation in the market to have rates come up to a point

where it makes more sense to empty out your taxable brokerage account than it does to take out a loan, a mortgage loan. You know, it's one thing if interest rates move another 50 basis points or another 100 basis points. Cool. But when we think about interest rates historically, mortgage interest rates historically, which have in the past been as high as 6%, 7%, 8%, for well-qualified buyers taking out a primary resident mortgage, that has happened in the past. And it could happen again in the future. but it's not going to happen anytime soon.

So if rates go up to comparable to historic inflation levels, cool. They're still historically at record lows. Anyway, my answer is simply take out the loan right before you quit your job, because they don't need to know that you're going to quit your job. That's none of their business. But Chadwick, just for this one time, remember that I said it first. Thank you, Chadwick for asking that question. Our next question also comes from an anonymous caller.

Joe, you named the last one, so I'm going to name this one. When I listened to the question, for some reason, even though the question has nothing to do with Garfield the cat, for some reason the first character that popped into my head was John Arbuckle. I don't know why. I know, right? It has nothing to do with the question, absolutely nothing at all. But for some reason, as I was listening, I was imagining John Rbuckle. Arbuckle. Okay. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Because I had a character too, which was, and this will give away my age, but there was a

show on TV that was huge back in the 70s and early 80s called the Waltons. And John Boy was the main character, John Boy. So I thought about John Boy and you'll see why. Oh, all right. All right. So why don't we just call him John? Well, we don't have to. Well, you're right. Yes. John Arbuckle, John Boy, I mean, if... The crossover point. Exactly. All right, in that case, our next question comes from John. Hi, Paula.

This is anonymous from Ontario, Canada. I would like to stay anonymous as my situation may be recognizable. I have a real estate question and wanted your thoughts on the plans I have made up. I am 24 years old and currently renting my grandparents' property out in the country. It is a beautiful setting with a farmhouse that I currently live on. Upon my grandparents' passing, I'll be extremely. lucky enough to inherit it from them. I would like to live here until my passing and keep the property in the family. The problem is the farmhouse was built in 1860s, so it's very old and

outdated. At this point, I believe it would be better to build new rather than renovate the entire house. My thought is to live in the house for the next 10 years or so, and then build a new house. The problem is I don't want to start my mortgage when I turn 35, assuming it'll be around 30 years to pay off. My thought was to buy a rental property. This way I can assess. essentially start a mortgage now and have someone else start paying it for me. I'd be able to make payments on top of it if required. When it comes time to build my house, I would either fix up and sell the rental and use the capital from it to create a manageable mortgage with less term or have it as an income stream

to pay the mortgage for my new build. Since I am renting from my family, my rent is low, but the house upkeep is a bit higher. I have a good paying job with benefits and should be able to increase my salary steadily. I have a good emergency fund saved and have around $50,000 available for a down payment. I could also invest this money in my side business, but I don't think I would match the returns from rental property. I also believe building capital is an important component towards financial freedom. Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts and if there are any better options for the lump sum I have saved currently. I've been listening for around a year now and appreciate the very

actionable advice you give. Thanks, Paula. John, thank you so much for asking that question. And congratulations on the situation that you're in and on handling it responsibly. You have a great opportunity. You have this farmhouse from the 1860s, which sounds amazing. And you have a very clear vision for what you've got ahead. So you've taken everything that you've started with and you've created very clear plans for how you want to make the most of all of this.

So huge kudos to you for that. So here is how I hear your question. Fundamentally, if we zoom out, this becomes a question of how do you generate a substantial amount of capital in the next 10 years? So that 10 years from now, you then have the flexibility to use that capital in the way in which you see fit. So 10 years from now, you might use that capital, putting it towards, as you said, a mortgage with a shorter term or a smaller mortgage. You might use that capital. You could use it in any number of ways.

But essentially, the goal is, I want to amass money. I want to do so over a 10-year time frame. And I'm starting with $50,000 as seed funding that I can invest in a number of ways. And two of the ways that you can invest that, one is by purchasing a lot of money. a rental property. Another is by investing this in your side business. The first question that I would ask you, and I think you alluded to the answer in the voicemail that you left, is which of those two interests you the most? You mentioned that you could invest this same $50,000 in your side business, but you think that real estate would yield higher returns. Real estate, particularly

long-term buy-and-hold real estate, it is a slow growth game. It's not like rapidly flipping houses where you're an active investor, you're finding deal flow. You know, that's the trading side of real estate. Whereas long-term buy and hold, there isn't net for, in a lot of properties, not necessarily a ton of cash flow in year one, year two. But the more that you hold those properties, the more that flywheel starts to spin and you're able to create wealth, both in terms of equity growth through principal pay equity growth through a reasonable estimate of market appreciation. Don't get too ambitious there.

But equity growth through principal payoff, through forced appreciation that comes from renovations, through some reasonable market appreciation, plus the passive cash flow, all of those work in tandem to create long-term real estate gains. Can you create good gains in real estate in 10 years? Absolutely. Could it be better than the gains that you make from your side business? And only you can answer that because only you know the specifics of your own side business. If, however, you think that diversifying between your side business and a rental property would be a way to create a healthier portfolio, you know, because you have an assortment of nutrients on your plate, and if real estate captures your interest and becomes something that you want to do so that 10 years from now,

you're in a much better financial position to commence with the goals that you talked about, then under those circumstances, buying a rental property would be a very good option. That may be, Paula, the only thing that I'll be able to add to this discussion is that when you either have your own business or go into something as hands on as buying individual properties can be, you are going to make mistakes. You just will. And if you go in knowing that you are going to learn, when's the best time to learn, do it now. Really, it's an offshoot of the same advice that we gave page, right? Be in school. Be in school now. For him, if he wants to get into real estate, get in. Get in because you're going to make some mistakes. You're going to learn how

things work. And the quicker you do that, the better. Absolutely. Also, regardless of whether you build new or renovate, I mean, one way or the other, you may need to take out a mortgage. You know, even if you did decide to renovate, you may need to take out a renovation loan. And so getting some experience with owning and managing a property over the course of the next 10 years, you know, that will give you a lot of information that will inform the decision that you make when you're 35 and you're deciding what to do with a farmhouse, whether you should renovate or build new, what types of loans you should take out, what to expect when you're facilitating a major renovation. The familiarity that a real estate investor has with repairs, maintenance, capital

expenditures, when they're in year 10 of owning and managing a piece of real estate versus year one, it's worlds apart. It's the difference between being a freshman versus having worked in the field with 10 years' experience. Yeah. I have one other thing. Paula on the topic of mortgages. Yeah. He mentioned that, you know, he doesn't want to get a mortgage at 36 because it'll probably be a 30-year mortgage. 35.

What's that? 35. He said he doesn't want to get a mortgage at the age of 35. Oh, at 35. I didn't mean to date you, John. I totally did not mean to add a year to your life. Make you a year older. He's like, this answer is making me a year older.

But he may be making an assumption that, and this is less to John, that it is to everybody else. Remember, there's a difference between the terms that the bank offers in your debt strategy. So think of yourself as a CFO of a company. The CFO of a company is going to take the best terms the company can get, but then the CFO of the company, Paula, is not going to pay according to those terms. I mean, those are the minimum terms. They're certainly going to meet those, but they're going to create a strategy that's best for the overall health and feeding of the company, which is the same thing here, he may take out a 30-year mortgage, but that doesn't mean he's going to pay it for 30 years. He can decide to speed that up if he wants to. He can make it a 15-year mortgage. He can make

it a five-year mortgage. If he takes it for 30, he still has any option between zero and 30-and-30 to pay it off depending on his cash flow and his overall plan. Yeah, exactly. So I agree with that. I would not hesitate to take out a 30-year mortgage at age 35 or 45 or 55. Take out a 30-year mortgage at any age you want if you are qualified to do so. I would never hesitate to tell somebody to take out a 30-year mortgage at the age of 55 if they have the financial capacity to do so. I was just going to use myself as an example, Paula. I'm in age over 35. I just moved last year and have enough money to have other options. We'll put it that way.

And I decided to take the biggest mortgage on this new house and Texarkana that I could. You know why? Rates are low. My money's deployed elsewhere. And yeah, if I pay the mortgage over the 30 years that I took because I took the longest length that I could, I will have a mortgage until I'm in my 80s. Not going to happen. but the bank's offering these phenomenal rates, and I'm making more than that where my money is.

So it was a great idea. So age doesn't really mean anything that way, Paula, to your point. Exactly. Well, and you have the comfort of knowing that you've got money, I would assume, in taxable brokerage accounts. So that if you wake up tomorrow morning with like an overwhelming urge to pay it off, you could. Just do it. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, ultimately that's what matters. Like the constriction that comes from debt is not the debt itself, it is the inability to pay it off. If you are holding onto a loan, but you also have the ability to pay it off any time you want, well, guess what, that loan isn't tying you down anymore. With a couple clicks of a mouse, boom, it could be done.

And once you know that that is an option for you, you know, it might make strategically more sense to hang on to that debt. And you can also sleep easily at night knowing that five minutes on your laptop would have it paid off. Yeah. People get into trouble when they have interest rate discussions, but they're really tied to that minimum payment. That's when people get into debt trouble. But once you, and this is why an emergency fund is important, this is why getting assets together in flexible places is important, because that buys you the ability to then use leverage without being, you know, we look at there's two different types of options, right? There are covered options, which means

I own the stock, I have the resources, and then there's naked options, right, where you're really gambling. And I feel like people that play the interest rate game and take out a bunch of debt and use leverage when they don't have any other resources or playing the naked game, not the covered game. Right. The final thing that I would say, and John, I don't know the details of your side business. This message is partially to you and partially for the benefit of everyone else who's listening. Don't underestimate the power of a side business to accelerate your wealth growth and your net worth.

Oftentimes, financial media focuses on the investing side. We focus on index funds, stocks, options, real estate. We focus on those things because there's a lot to discuss there. and it would be too much to also layer in conversations about small business management. That's a related but separate topic. But when you zoom out and you look at the overall picture of your life, I call it the ire of fire. Fire F financial basics, I investing, R real estate, and then E entrepreneurship.

That E, that entrepreneurship component, that could be the foundation for almost everything. I mean, that is active income. And so by its very definition, it's different. It's far more time intensive, far more labor intensive and energy intensive than passively investing in index funds or passively investing in rental properties. But even though it is active or perhaps slash because it is active, the potential for growth, the potential to 20x your money, that I think is far more likely in entrepreneurship. than it is in any of those other passive, more conservative modalities of investing.

John, I don't know what your side business is, and I'm partially saying this for you, but again, partially for everyone else. Just because you can't see a direct ROI printed on a vanguard statement, you know, just because you don't receive a letter in the mail or an email with your annualized returns expressed as a percentage. That doesn't mean that money that you're putting into a business that you own and run yourself isn't an investment. I would argue that it is, and in fact it is maybe possibly the most important investment that you make. So thank you, John, for asking that question. We'll come back to this episode in just a minute. But first, our next question comes from Kat. Hi, Paula. My name's Kat.

I started listening to your podcast when the COVID lockdown hit. and I've been a fan of your show since. My question is related to buying investment property. One of my friends, who currently owns 14 investment properties, has connected me with his agent who is a wholesaler. However, said wholesaler only deals in cash, so no bank financing whatsoever. I currently own a condo, which I am still paying for.

I attempted to do a cash out refi, but was denied due to my low outstanding balance, and my loan to value ratio isn't high enough. The asking price for the property I am looking to buy is around 130K through the wholesaler. I do have the cash to buy the property, but it is tied up in a rollover IRA, which I have invested in low-cost index funds. My current portfolio consists of the rollover IRA, a Roth IRA, some liquid cash in checking and savings, and a 457B that I just started since I switched employers. My question is, would it be a good option to take the tax hit and use that money from my rollover IRA to buy investment property, but in the process, use up my nest egg?

I've also heard of people use credit cards in a calculated manner to buy property as well. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you so much. Kat, thank you for that question. So backstage, as soon as I heard your question, I said to Joe, I said, I know exactly what I'm going to say to her. And I started laughing. And I said, I know what you're going to say to her. So before I say it out loud, Joe, what do you think I'm going to say? You're going to say that Warren Buffett says, you may not say it this exact way, Paula.

But you are going to say that Warren Buffett says when it comes to investments, there's no such thing as a called strike. You can sit, and this is a baseball analogy, people don't know baseball. If a ball goes right down the middle, they're going to call it a strike, which is a bad thing, right? You do not want to let a strike go by without you swinging. In investing, you can watch an opportunity to go by and another one and another one, and it's not a bad thing. There will always be another one. And you are going to say, there's probably going to be another one. Those are horrible options.

Let this one go. Yeah. Close. Very, very close. I was going to say, why work with this wholesaler? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The premise of this entire question hinges on working with this particular wholesaler.

Why do you need to work with this wholesaler so badly? Well, maybe it's because they're looking at this specific property that the wholesaler has. Yes, absolutely true. But no reason to go with this specific property. There are a lot of good properties out there on the market. Let the deal go. Yeah, exactly. If you don't have the money to pick up a deal, then you're not ready to pick up that deal.

Do you know how many amazing deals I have seen where I've looked at the deal and said, wow, that's a freaking great deal for whoever buys it. I'm not in a position to buy it. I've seen deal after deal after deal that I know are going to be great for whoever is the lucky person who gets it, but I'm not in a position to buy it. And so I don't pick up that deal. That is your situation right now. Like you have the ability to buy a property with financing.

You do not have the ability to buy a property with cash. So you should not be working with a wholesaler who only deals in cash. You should be working with a licensed real estate agent who shows you properties that you can purchase with financing, whether that's financing from an institution such as a bank or credit union or whether that's seller financed properties. You know, there are many ways to obtain financing for properties, but dumping out your retirement funds is not the way to do it. Credit cards, not the way to do it. If you don't have the cash to buy $130,000 property in cash, then you shouldn't be looking at deals like that, and you shouldn't be working with people who are only showing you deals

that you're not qualified for. You know, and I don't mean unqualified in a bad way. There's no judgment around it. Like I said, I myself am unqualified to buy many, many, many amazing deals that I see. Man, and some of them hurt. Some of them I look at and I'm like, I can't believe. Darn it, just somebody, life, please fast forward the clock like another four years so I can save enough money to be able to get into that deal and then rewind the clock back four years so I can get into it now. I've seen so many deals where if I were in a different spot in life, I could pick up that deal and it would be amazing.

But the reality is I'm not and I need to deal with what is, not what I hope to be. Our final question comes from Annalise. And if you listened to our interview with Cal Newport, you will notice that this question sounds familiar. So here's the question in full. Hi, Paula. Onalise here. I have two questions for you today. The first is, which school of thought are you in? One, Gary Vaynerchuk or two, Cal Newport. Gary Vaynerchuk believes that you should broadcast your life 24-7 on social media, develop a following, and that you can't afford to live without one or be successful without one. And why would you ever pass up that opportunity of our modern time versus CalM? Newport, who seems to say the opposite. You can't afford to be on social media if you want to have a successful career and instead should be focusing on deep creative work and your quality of work and that social media only gets in the way. So somebody with a really successful following and

somebody who I really admire for creating such brilliant work, I would be really curious to say what you have to think about it and how you keep that balance. And then the second question I have is how did you become such an articulate speaker? Were you trained? Did you take a class? Did you join Toastmasters? Or did you just roll out of bed with this gift? I truly believe you're out of green over herself.

So I must know. My friends and I all listen to your podcast and also wonder this ourselves. And thank you so much for the ongoing inspiration, wonderful things you put out into the world. And I can't wait to hear your answer. I hope your year is going fantastically. Annalise, thank you for asking that question. And as you know, and as everyone who listened to the Cal Newport episode knows,

I heard your question the same week that I was scheduled to interview Cal Newport. So when I heard it, I was like, well, what a coincidence. I'm about to talk to him in a couple of days. Why don't I just play this first part of the question for him? I'll give my take and then I'll get his take on my take. So, hey, if you're going to call in with a question about Cal Newport, I'll take it to Cal directly. Annalise, I'm sure you, I know you've already heard that. For anyone else who wants to hear that, just listen to our episode with Cal Newport, episode 303.

And you will hear the answer in that episode. That was a fun little Easter egg to plant into that episode. I bet it was great for him, too. Yeah, he enjoyed it. To pull back the curtain just a little bit, people may not know this, Paula, but the best time to talk about some of these very thoughtful people are when they have a book tour. It's the one time they're not busy doing the thing that they love to do. They generally don't do, in some cases, don't do any media outside of that. So the sad fact of podcasting is, is I know and you know

that we're going to talk to people that are probably doing a lot of podcast. And you know already, there's nothing more fun for both you and somebody like Cal than asking them a question. They're not going to get anywhere else. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Because when you go around doing a lot of interviews, you answer a lot of the same questions over and over and over. That's why one of the reasons that when I prep for interviews, I listen to that guest on other podcasts so that I can get a sense of what they've already been asked and I can do something different. Well, and also to pull back that I'm sure you do the same thing, Paula, is when I get their advanced copy of their book, it always comes. with this PR sheet that are suggested questions for radio stations or podcasters that don't want

to do their homework, I never read it. Exactly. I take that piece of paper and I throw it away because I'm like, that's, I probably should read it just to know what not to ask them, right? Yeah. But I don't even want it to influence your mind. To show up in my consciousness. Yeah.

Right. Exactly. So I just throw it out. Same. Same. I intentionally don't look at that. Every now and again, I get a guest who, you know, they'll email, their PR team will email me the suggested questions like the morning of. And so the guest will open our conversation

with like, hey, did you know, did you get that email from our PR team? And I'm like, yep, and I intentionally didn't open it. Yeah. So to the second part of Annalisa's question, speaking, I thought that this would be a good discussion between you and I, Joe, because, you know, you've been podcasting and doing radio for far longer than I have. How did you develop your comfort in front of a microphone and how can the lessons that you've learned apply to anybody who's listening? You know, most of the people who are listening to this are never going to be podcasters, but they might have to do public speaking, some degree of public speaking, in their work,

even if it's as something as simple as making presentations at meetings. So how have you honed your gift of gab? And what can the people who are listening learn from that, that they can apply to of their own lives. Well, I don't want this to be a cop-out, Paula. We all want to know what she asked, which was not about me. It was about you. So I want to make sure that we get to that. But I will answer your question, which is that there's so many things that are factors. The first one is, I actually am two things people don't expect. The first thing is I'm an introvert, not an extrovert. So it's difficult. But for people out there that are introverts like me, you train yourself to be in

front of people and it ends up being gratifying and even though I'm always horrified when we start recording I get into it. I enjoy this and frankly that we've done it so long Paula that it's just you mean a microphone and you're just having this discussion. You kind of train yourself that way. But I also got training. I talked about being a wedding DJ. So being in front of these crowds of people where you are responsible for the flow of this wedding. That helped. But even before that, I had just a natural problem speaking, which the therapy I had to help me deal with that also helped my public speaking, which is I'm a natural stutterer. Most people don't know that I stutter because one of the things I learned when I went to Western Michigan University for a couple

years when I was young was when I stutter to be silent. So every once in a while, when we're answering questions, now people might notice I'll have a weird pause. And the weird pause is me stuttering away because of the fact that I can't say the next word. I know the next word. I can think of it. People that stutter, you know, know it's the most frustrating thing ever. And so you just stay calm and you don't say it out loud and you just get through the next thing. So I had to practice speaking a lot at a young age. But that wasn't enough. Later on for me, when I became a spokesperson for American Express and then later for AmeriPrize,

I not only went to Toastmasters, like Annalise said, which is hugely helpful. And it's funny if you've ever been to a Toastmaster, well, if you've never been to a Toastmasters, I think this would be even funnier, because Toastmasters, they look at your ums and Oz. Have you been to one, Paula? No, I've never been to one. So they count your ums and ahs and you also have to give this presentation and they have lights. And so you learn to talk and to try, you know, don't drone on and on and on and on. Just get it done with.

Make your point and get done. But at the same time, they count your ums and your eyes. So I would come home from Toastmasters and I would talk like a robot because I didn't want to say an um and I didn't want to say uh-uh. And I was the most annoying speaker on earth after Toastmasters. after they took those rails off and you get a little more comfortable again, that helped. The other thing that I had, because I was going to speak on behalf of, you know, a Fortune 100 company, they sent me to PR training to learn even more, like how to rework the question so that I can answer it logically and in a fun way that people would understand. And I would tell anybody getting into public speaking, find somebody that's in that PR realm.

that knows how to make an effective argument when you're either on television or a podcast or radio and pay for some training from those people. But what I learned is the same thing that I've learned over time. And you know this too, Paula, because you and I have the same philosophy here. The more I know about public speaking, the more I know that I don't know. So I spend a ton of time listening to people who are fantastic interviewers. I used to listen all the time to Barbara Walters. Barbara Walters, by the way,

had a great book that she wrote back in the 70s that I even dug up called How to Speak with Practically Anybody about practically anything. I devoured that book. Mark Marin on his podcast, I listened to him. Larry King, who just passed away, studied the heck out of Larry King. Even when he's not making crude jokes,

even Howard Stern, the way that he talks to is these superstars and get stuff out of them. So I find that like anything, you have to sharpen the saw all the time or you just, you get rusty. Right. I do that too. When I listen to interviews, I often am not listening to what the guest is saying. When I'm listening to interviews that I'm not participating in, when I am listening to other podcasts,

I am often only half listening to what the content of the guests answer. often what I'm also equally listening for is, all right, what is the host thinking right now that leads to that next question? So when I listen to another podcast, I'm putting myself in the shoes of the host, and I'm listening to that guest's answer from the perspective of the interviewer, and I'm asking myself, all right, based on the answer that they just gave, what would I draw out next? What's the next natural question that comes from this? And I found that most follow-up questions are iterations of how or why. Fundamentally, a lot comes down to those two

questions. And so when I'm stuck and I don't know what question to ask a guest, I'll ask a variation of how, a variation of why, or I'll restate what they just said, and often that alone is enough to get them to elaborate. What about being able to speak fluently and accurately like you do? So I have not done nearly as much work as you have. I think one of the major things that has helped is that I read a lot of books. I've done that my entire life. As a child, I read a ton of books. I don't read nearly as much now as I used to in my childhood, but that priority that I have always placed on reading has enhanced my vocabulary and made me overall more confident with words. I tend to gather my thoughts before I speak.

And so in real life, this gets edited out in the podcast. When you're speaking on a podcast, if I'm gathering my thoughts and there's dead air for one or two or three or five or ten seconds while I'm thinking of the next thing to say, that, of course, is going to get edited out before the podcast is released. In real life, I do that too. In real life, sitting around a dinner table, I'll take lengthy pauses before I answer. And I often, just in my normal day-to-day life, I get interrupted a lot because people mistake those pauses as the cessation of my statement when, in fact, I'm just gathering my thoughts

before I state them. Okay, so can I brag about you? And you have to promise me that you're not going to cut this out. Okay, fine. Because I know you better not cut this out because I'm going to listen and you can't, you can't cut this. There'll be hell to pay. What I love about answering these questions with you is that you are not afraid to hit

pause on the podcast and walk through it before you answer the question as well. So you make sure that your community is going to get a full answer. And there's times, frankly, Paula, when I'm way done answering it and you will take the world's longest pause. And then you'll come back with something brilliant. After I was, I thought, okay, we're out of here, Paula. Let's move. And you're still quiet. And I know you well enough to know that let's just stay quiet for a second.

It isn't uncomfortable. I will tell you when I first met you, there were times that it felt uncomfortable. I'm like, what the hell am I supposed to say something here? And then I realized that we just need to be comfortable with Paula. There's something cooking there. And it is always fantastic. But you're not afraid to pause, which is great because you and I have heard, especially when it comes to financial shows.

I mean, number one, it's important to be entertaining because if it's not entertaining, people aren't going to get the messages that they need, right? So I think sometimes we under-emphasize entertainment. But even more than that, it's important to be responsible and to give a full answer and your commitment to that is it isn't only commendable. It's phenomenal. It's fantastic. So you can't cut that out.

Do not cut that out. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I'm glad to hear that I think one of the things that's nice about the way that you and I speak is, as you said, we have that rapport. So that when I do take an extremely long pause, you know that we can just comfortably sit in silence. One challenge that I face is when I'm interviewing a guest, as soon as they're done answering, I'm expected to immediately ask a follow-up question. And oftentimes, I need to take that pause.

I need the five seconds, ten seconds to gather my thoughts. And with a guest who I've never spoken to before, people get very weirded out by that level of silence. I had one guest, in fact, recently, who, after we stopped recording, he commented, he was like, oh, that's so nice that you leave. that dead airspace in there for your editor for post-production. And I'm like, oh. That's exactly the strategyery going on and follows that. Oh, you thought that's what I was doing? No, I was, I sure. Yeah. Uh-huh. That's exactly. No, no, that was not what I was doing. That is a piece, though,

that Annalise doesn't get to hear, which frankly, I think you and I both have to nod to, which is the power of Steve, right, of Steve Stewart's role in this, because there are times when there's not only dead air, we'll repeat ourselves, and he is a master, even before you get your file or I get my file, of taking all that out. Right. Exactly. So if I could find somebody to be my Steve when I give live speeches, that'd be take away the alms and the odds before I even say them. That'd be awesome. I sometimes trip over myself on phone calls. My thoughts will race ahead of my mouth,

and then I have to pause and reel them back. See, I don't have to worry about that because the second I do that, I start stuttering. I mean, that's the thing going on in my head is that my thoughts race so far ahead. At least that's what they think, right, when it comes to stuttering, is that your thoughts speed ahead. I remember my mom growing up just telling me, that's because you're brilliant and your brain's going really fast, which is a fantastic way to talk to a kid who's getting made fun of at school about this issue that he has.

So thank you, mom. Yours is an inspiring story, Joe. You had a stutter and now you've overcome that stutter and you host a podcast on the Westwood One network. Right? Do the same thing I shouldn't even be doing, right. So thank you, Annalise, for asking that question. And for everyone who's listening, if you haven't heard the episode with Cal Newport, episode 303, check that one out because that's an example. Look, there was another pause.

Got to leave that one in, Steve. Leave that one in. See, see, that's an example. That's an example of myself taking a pause to gather my thoughts on how I wanted to describe that episode. That's an imperfect example right there. All right, Joe, I think we've done it for today. That was great. Thanks, everybody, for some great questions.

Joe, where can people find you if they would like to know more about you? You can find. we call it the greatest money show on earth because it's a circus every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the Stacking Benjamin show. Paula is on with us on Fridays, so especially listen to those. And yeah, we have a good time, Paula. Absolutely, absolutely. Excellent.

Well, thank you so much for tuning in. This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pan. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do four things. Number one, share it with a friend or family member. That's the single most important. way that you can spread the message of financial independence and greater financial health. Number two, make sure that you hit subscribe or follow in whatever app you're using to listen to

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