Afford Anything - Ask Paula - How Can I Send My 4 Children to College?

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

#155: How can a schoolteacher dad and stay-at-home mom send their four kids to college? Where should a 23-year-old keep the savings that she’s accumulating to buy a home by the time she’s 27 or 28? What should we know about retirement planning if we have a pension? And should I rollover my 401k from my old employer? Former financial planner Joe Saul-Sehy and I tackle these four questions in this week’s episode. Here are the details. Miguel asks: When I hear friends and coworkers talking about college tuition for their kids, all I can think about is how in the world am I going to send my four kids to college? I think I have a plan - I’d love to hear your opinion. From what I hear, college can be between $20-50k per year. I currently own two houses - one is a rental and one is our personal residence. We’re working on paying those mortgages down in about 7 years. I want my kids to get their basic courses from a community college to save some money, but for the rest I really think that taking a loan will be the best option. Usually these loans don’t have to be paid until they graduate, so I feel like that will give me some more time to become more financially stable. If I get to pay those mortgages in the time that I’m thinking, I’d like to buy a couple more rentals. I’m currently halfway to max out my contribution for my 403(b) plan. I’m a teacher, I’m making about 91k per year and my wife stays home. I would love to hear your opinion on my plan. I feel like if I had that kind of cash - $20-$50k a year - I would rather invest it and help my kids down the road. Anna asks: I am 23 and I’m saving to buy a primary residence in 4-5 years. In the meantime, I’m wondering where to invest my money so that it will grow but won’t be too susceptible to market fluctuations since I’ll be needing the cash relatively quickly. Andy asks: You’ve written before that if we contribute 10% of our salary towards retirement and our employer matches 5% automatically, we are saving 15% for our retirement. My question is, does the same principle apply to pensions? For instance, if I’m contributing 5% of my salary towards my pension and my employer is contributing 9 to 10%, making it around a 15% contribution overall, should that then count as a 15% retirement savings? Drew asks: I have a question about a 401(k) rollover. I recently switched employers and so far I’m very happy with the transition. With my new compensation, I’m now able to more than double my 401(k) contributions, and I’m on track to max out my new HSA while still maintaining the same take-home pay from my old job. My old employer had a 401(k) through Merrill Lynch and I was able to do a mix of contributions to both Roth and Traditional. My new 401(k) through Charles Schwab has this option. According to the documentation I’ve received from Merrill Lynch, I have four options at my disposal: 1. Keep assets where they are 2. Roll them into some kind of IRA 3. Transfer them into a new 401(k) 4. Take a cash distribution
 With this in mind, here are my questions: • Aside from the four options presented to me, are there any other options I should consider? • Are there any time constraints I should consider for this kind of roll over? • What would you recommend I do with these funds? I’ve heard you repeatedly mention the benefit of having all of my assets under one dashboard, so I am leaning towards transferring the assets into my new 401(k). I currently do not have an IRA, and I’ve been meaning to get one set up for a while. This seems like a great opportunity to get one up and running as an alternative strategy. 
 Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that's true, not just of your money, but also your time, focus, energy, attention, anything in your life that's a scarce or limited resource. And so the questions become twofold. Number one, what's most important to you? And number two, how do you align your day-to-day behaviors to reflect that? How do your actions match your intentions?

Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that's what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast and the founder of Afford Anything.com. Every other week, we answer questions that come in from you, the community. And today, my buddy Joe Sal Siha is here with me. Hey, Joe. Hey, it's that time, isn't it? It's that time. At the end of this episode, I'm going to talk more about the fire movement, the financial independence movement. And also, I have an incredibly exciting update about our charity water fundraiser. You don't want to miss this. But before we get to that, we're going to answer four questions that come from this community. Our first question comes from Miguel. Hi, Paola. My name is Miguel. When I hear

friends and coworkers talking about college tuition for their kids, I can only think about how in the world am I going to send my four kids to college. I have a plan and I would love to hear your opinion. From what I hear, college could be between $20,000 to $50,000 per year. My plan is I currently own two houses. One is a rental and the other where we live. We're working towards paying those mortgages down in about seven years. I want my kids to get their basic courses through a community college to save some money, but for the rest, I really just think that taking a loan will be the best option. Usually these loans don't have to be paid until they graduate, so I feel like that will give me some more time to become more financially

stable and solid. If I get to pay those mortgages in the time that I'm thinking, I would like to buy a couple of more rentals. I'm currently halfway to max out my contribution for my 403B plan. I'm a teacher. I'm making about $91,000 a year, and my wife stays home. Basically, I just feel like if I had the cash, like that kind of cash, $20,000 to $50,000 a year, I would rather just invest it and then just help my kids down the road. But I would love to hear your opinion on this. Thank you. The first thing I want to say, by the way, thanks for the question, Miguel.

When Miguel slows down and says, how in the world am I going to send? And then he pauses and I found myself leaning forward and he says, four kids to college. And I went, oh boy. All right, Miguel, first of all, I like the plan of sending them to community college for the first two years so that they can get their basic credits out of the way before they go on to finish at a four-year school. That makes a ton of sense. You'll save a lot of money. And also, ultimately, the school that you graduate from is the school that you put on your resume. So nobody's going to know that you spent freshman and sophomore year at a community college when your degree is from the University of Impressive.

So I think that's a great plan, but I would take it even further. When your children are in high school, they can take AP classes, advanced placement classes, and if they pass the AP test, they get college credit for that class. So that's a good way to take care of a bunch of college credits while you're still in high school. I know people who shaved an entire semester off of college doing that. The other thing that they can do is there's a particular exam called Klep, C-L-E-P college-level exam preparation is I think what it stands for. Basically, the CLEP exam is a way that you can test out of specific courses.

So when I was in college, for example, I did this with Sociology 101. That was not an AP class that was offered in my high school. I needed to take it, and I didn't want to pay all of the credits that would be required and plus take up all the time that would be required to actually sit through the class. And so what I did was I bought the sociology text. book, read it cover to cover in one weekend, and then on Monday morning I took the Kleth exam. Passed it. Boom. Passed out of that class. And those were three additional credits that I didn't have to pay for. Fantastic. That is a great way, particularly at the freshman level, binging on a textbook

in one weekend and taking the test on Monday morning is a really good way to just test out of classes and get those knocked out. Yeah, that's fantastic. You don't need to spend that money. You're probably going to be in a classroom that's pretty, especially a lot of these first year courses, sometimes remedial stuff that you already know. You know, the university has no idea who knows what. So they pick a spot to start. And I remember my first year, a lot of these classes, I was bored silly. And had I been as forward thinking as Paula, I could have tested out of them. My daughter did the same thing, by the way, almost a full semester of AP courses that she didn't have to take. Tested right out of them, had those credits and that much closer to the degree.

Nice. Now, the missing piece of information is that I don't know how old your children are, but I have a strategy that is going to be awesome if your kids or at least if your youngest is five or under. Ideally, three or under, but five or under. And here's that strategy. Buy a rental property on a 15-year mortgage. If your kid is three years old, then 15 years from now,

your kid will turn 18 and will be ready to go to college at exactly the time that that rental property is paid in full. At that point, you can either use all of the rental income, that abundant cash flow that's coming off of a free and clear rental property. You can either use that money to pay for college or you can sell that house because you own it free and clear and then have a giant lump sum that you can put towards that child's college tuition. So if your kid is five or under, that's a really awesome way to basically buy one house and say, you know what? This house is going to cover this kid's college and this other house is going to cover this other kid. Bam. I have a strategy that's similar to that. Okay.

What is it? What is it? Okay. My real estate strategy, and this, by the way, is not going to be my main point. I have a different one. But listen to this. I love this strategy. Purchase a house in the town where junior is going to go to school.

and the bad news is you're usually going to pay a fairly steep price because we know we have this constant stream of renters coming and people in that town know that. So don't be surprised by the sticker price. But if you can make the math work, here's the way that we work this. You purchase the house there. You then hire junior to be the manager of that property. Remember, when you pay for college, you can either pay for it out of your pocket or you can hire junior. And by the way, the amount you pay junior, and the IRS is very clear about this, the pay has to be commensurate with the work that they're actually doing. So we don't want to cheat on our taxes.

But what we do want to do is instead of paying for college at your rate, hire junior as the manager of that property. And instead of handing the money directly to the school, hand the money. to junior, which by the way, a lot of that money comes from the people, the people that live in the house, that money then flows to the person who's managing the house, i.e. junior, and that number reflects the amount of money that you would have paid for tuition. So instead of paying for it at your higher tax bracket and just paying it directly as money, and now you have a tax break, you're paying the manager at your tax bracket and at a much

lower tax bracket, they're actually paying for their school. There's one more kicker here. The great thing, obviously you have all this rental income coming in from all these people and you have this piece of property that's in a college town, which generally appreciation in a college town is a nice, nice place to be. Now, that's a very creative strategy. Doesn't work for everybody. Probably won't work for Miguel. It might. It might not. But let me give you something a little closer to home for everybody that I thought about. And this is where I put my financial planner hat on. Here's what I heard. four kids, maybe multiple children in college at one time, and making $91,000 a year as a family. I'm worried about something that Miguel didn't even think about because he's already up to loans.

Let's think first about this beast called expected family contribution. Because when you fill out this paperwork called FAFSA paperwork, that paperwork helps you apply for those loans. and it also lets you get need-based aid. And at $91,000 and maybe two or three kids in school at the same time, Paula, I hear a bell ringing that says that as long as you have your assets lined up correctly, you want to be careful here. If you have your assets lined up correctly, you might qualify for a decent amount of aid through the expected family contribution process. So you want to be really clear and you're going to want to dive into how expected. family contribution works so that you qualify for as much aid as possible. Also, I am very pro-community college, but there's one exception that I would make,

and I think this is an important disclaimer to put in here, if your child gets accepted to an Ivy League institution or a very prestigious university, number one, don't have a knee-jerk reaction to the sticker price tuition that you see, because oftentimes those universities have huge endowments. And oftentimes the hard part is getting in. Once you get in, they can come up with scholarship money for you. So if your child gets into an extremely prestigious school, work that as hard as you can to try to find the scholarship money that can fuel it. And like in Miguel's case, your expected family contribution is what it is. So the more expensive school means there's a much, much better chance that more of that is going to be funded through those endowments because

your expected family contribution, regardless, if you go to community college, state school, really expensive Ivy League school, it's still the same number. Right. Exactly. The other thing that I would say about a very prestigious school, like an Ivy League school, is that you've heard the expression, your network is your net worth. Yeah. I do think that there's something to be said for going to a school that has a higher likelihood of giving you a network that could result in an order of magnitude more income throughout your life, a very well-connected network. The difference between a community college versus the University of Mediocre is six-a-one, half a dozen of the other. But the difference between a humdrum school versus a Harvard

or a Yale, somewhere where you're going to meet people, unlike anybody that you'll meet, and you're going to make connections, the value of those connections or the potential value that those connections might yield is worth an extra few tens of thousands. I'm sure many people are going to disagree with me. I'm sure my Twitter feed is going to be inundated after this. Well, I don't know because, I mean, I'm thinking just colloquially, Bill Gates, roommate in college was Steve Ballmer. So great way for Steve Palmer to get a job at Microsoft and to become the CEO of that company

was to have your roommate be the founder. I grew up just north of Notre Dame and I'm a Catholic boy. And you know how much when one Notre Dame alum finds another Notre Dame alum and how they take care of each other. And that happens with a lot of those communities. And I think about like Harvard Business School as an example. I mean, think about how many relationships that are forged there and how people go to Harvard business school as much for the network as they do for the curriculum or to Wharton.

Yeah, exactly. If you want to learn the information that they teach you at an MBA program, there are plenty of free ways to learn the information. A big part of why you go to a highly prestigious school is for the network. You're paying for the network. So again, if it's a choice between a community college versus a university of me, then stick with the cheaper option. If it's a choice between either of those two versus a place in which your classmate might be the next president, pay the extra money for that. I think mine were better. Wasn't that brilliant?

The buy a house with a 15-year mortgage? Yeah. Right? I am patting myself on the back for that one right now. But how about buy a house and have your kid be the manager and now you're paying for college at the lower tax bracket? But it assumes that your kid is not a... face. And that's a big assumption. I don't think so. I think it, I don't know. Okay, what if you hire your kid to be the manager? Like, never hire somebody that you're not willing to fire. So what if you

hire your kid to be the manager? But then the kid just doesn't do their job. It just seems like it introduces a whole bunch of additional problems. It's innovative. You got to admit. It is innovative. Speaking of college students or people who are recent college graduates, our next question comes from Anna. Hi, Paula. Thank you so much for your podcast. I've learned a lot and I'm excited about my financial future. I am 23 and I'm saving to buy a primary residence hopefully in four to five years.

In the meantime, I'm wondering where to invest my money so that it will grow but won't be too susceptible to market fluctuations since I'll be needing the cash relatively quickly. Thank you. Anna, first of all, congratulations on being 23 and so with it. I mean, the fact that you are 23 and you. You've got this awesome goal to buy a house in the next four to five years and you're thinking through all of the things that you need to do right now in order to preserve that capital as well as allow it to grow. You're absolutely setting yourself on the right track and you're doing it at a fantastic age. So congratulations on giving yourself an early start in life.

To answer your question, where would I put it if I needed to touch the money in the next four to five years? Well, I would not put it in stocks or index funds because five years is too short of a time span for the three years. that there's too much volatility involved. I might put it in a conservative bond fund, or I might put it in Treasury Inflation protected securities, also known as Tips, or Ginnie Mays, or you could invest it into laddered CDs. And the notion behind laddered CDs is that you buy a handful of different CDs that mature at different times. So the ones with the longest date to maturity will pay out the most, the ones with the shortest date to maturity will pay out the least. And as the more short-term CDs mature, which means that you can then take the money out of them,

you can take that money out and use it to buy another longer-term one. So laddered CDs are a method that allow you to preserve liquidity while also giving you some of that longer-term exposure and the higher yields that they produce. So I would choose any of those. I would actually, I think, and in this interest rate environment, if you do the bond piece, which I do like, whether it's tips to Ginny Mae is the most risk. take. And by the way, the difference between those two, income protected securities tips, Treasury income protected securities are actually products of the Treasury. So these are fully backed

by the U.S. government. Jenny Mays pay a little higher because it's an agency, which means they are implicitly backed by the government, meaning we just added this word implicitly. If something goes wrong, the government's going to step in. They're backed by that, but they're not. They're not government bonds. So they're going to fluctuate a little more. And there might be a situation that happens if everything goes wrong where things don't work the way that they used to. So because of that, investors reward Ginnie Mae holders with a little bit higher return. In this particular environment, though, where interest rates are going up and that seems to be accelerating a little lately, I like Ginny Mays even less than I did a month ago. I liked them a lot a month ago. I still like them,

but I probably only like them if you're on the long end of that, like five years. If you're on the five year end, the volatility is low enough that I think that the dividends that they pay out, the interest that it did that Ginny Mays pay out on those bonds are high enough that it'll offset any volatility. You know, for my money, Paula, even the only thing you didn't mention is a high interest money market, a separate high interest money market in this environment. You're getting right around 2% if you look at a place like magnify money. So I can't argue with that at all. That's a good point. And when I was saving up to travel, I definitely had a bunch of money in a money market account. Yeah. But I love this idea of not going into, do not go into the stock

market with a five-year goal. Please don't. Instead, take that money. If you're going to go into the stock market and you're adamant, just go find the closest casino and put it on black and you'll have a lot more fun. Put it in crypto. Yeah, you'll have a ton more fun with volatility than you will with stocks. So, Anna, those are your choices. I think all of them are good choices. Money market, treasuries, Ginnie Mays, CDs, they're all good choices. So the good news, Anna, is that you've got a lot of choices and they're all awesome.

And this is what I like about Anna's thinking. And you touched on this earlier, Paula, but I love that she's starting saving. She's asking with the end in mind. because when you start with the goal and you know the time frame, instead of freaking out about 9,000 different investments that are out there, very quickly, Paul and I and you, Anna, we can very quickly hone in on the few that fit that time frame. But when people just back in the day would come to be and say,

I want more, I want higher, then you start chasing what it says online, what it says in the newspaper, what your buddy at work says. You start chasing the hot thing. And if there's no goal for that month, money, you start making some mistakes. And it's much easier to learn about the appropriate investments when you're, you know, instead of learning about all the stocks and mutual funds and ETFs and

annuities and pension funds, whatever, all these different things that are out there, all Anna needs to think about is what is a Ginnie Mae, what is a tip, a treasury, inflation protected security, what is a CD and what's how's a laddering strategy work and how does a money market work. You just peel off those four things, and it's much easier. You probably have a good basic knowledge in a couple hours. Right. So much easier when you start with the end of mind. Right. Absolutely. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. If you're a business owner, you probably want to know, hey, how's business doing? You don't want to play guessing games on what's ODU or what you owe or whether or not you're in the red. Check out

FreshBooks, they have this notification center that's kind of like your personal assistant. It tells you what has changed in your business since you last logged in. And that way, you can see immediately what you need to deal with. You can focus on what you need to get done and get back to your real work a lot faster. FreshBooks automates a lot of important stuff. Like, for example, they'll automate late payment email reminders so that you don't have to have an awkward conversation with your clients about past due payments. You can also take pictures of receipts using the FreshBooks app, which makes

claiming expenses easier, and they'll handle your time tracking, so you'll know exactly what you did and when you did it. If you have any questions, they've got an award-winning customer service team. FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial for all my listeners, so give them a try for free for 30 days, no credit card required, by going to freshbooks.com slash Paula. That's freshbooks.com slash Paula. And when they ask, hey, how did you hear about us? mention Afford Anything. Do you know what's not smart? Making the lottery the centerpiece of your retirement plan?

Do you know what is smart? Going to ZipRecruiter.com slash afford to hire the right person. ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. Its powerful matching technology scans thousands of resumes, identifies people with the right skills, education, and experience for your job and actively invites them to apply. So you get qualified candidates fast.

That's why ZipRecruiter is rated number one by employers in the U.S. This rating comes from hiring sites on Trust Pilot with over a thousand reviews. And right now, my listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address. ZipRecruiter.com slash afford. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash afford. ZipRecruiter.com slash afford. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Our next question comes from Andy. Hi, Paula. My name is Andy. I'm a longtime listener of your podcast. I have a question regarding

retirement, savings, and pensions. So you've written before that if we contribute 10% of our salary towards retirement and our employer matches 5%. Automatically, we are saving 15% for our retirement. My question is, does the same principle apply to pensions? For instance, if I am contributing, say, 5% of my salary towards my pension and my employer is contributing 9% to 10% making it around a 15% contribution overall, should that then count as a 15% retirement savings? Thanks much. Andy, that's a fantastic question. Here's my first question back to you. What is the vesting schedule?

Because if you're not fully vested within those retirement funds, then it's a bit of a moot question until you are. Right. Until you're fully vested, that money is not yours. Right. And I've got a few more that I would ask as well. And actually, Paula, I don't think about pensions even the same way. So there's two different types of plans. They call some plans define contribution where we know what you're getting in, what you're putting in. but we're not really sure what you're going to get out. That all depends on how the investments do. So defined contribution plan would be a pre-tax 401K or a Roth 401K. We know exactly how much money.

We know what investment we're putting it in, but we really don't know where it's going to end up. But defined contribution plans are not pensions, right? Defined benefit plans are pensions. Exactly. Nice work. Woo! I passed the test.

It was on the KLEP exam. If it probably will, yeah. On the other side, and this is why I don't think about that this way, is that when you save into a pension, it's a defined benefit plan. You know what you're going to get based on what you put in. But a lot of the time, you don't even know. A lot of people, you'll ask them, so how much money is your employer putting in? They have no idea.

And a lot of pensions, they have no clue how much money the employer puts in. So because of that, I don't think about pensions in terms of the percent that I save. I think of it as the percent covered. And because of that, I don't get as worried about how much of my saving as I do like we did with Anna. When do I expect me to want to be financially independent? What year do I think I'm going to die? What's my budget during that time frame year by year?

What I think my budget is? And then that creates this big ball of money. And then how do I fund that? And I can ask ahead of time when it comes to my pension, assuming that I will be vested later, to your point earlier, Paula, assuming that I will be vested, how much is that going to cover? How much is Social Security going to cover? Or even wipe out Social Security and call that extra, right? If you want to be really conservative, which I, if you're way far away from retirement age, I would just not count it. And then

that gives me the number then that I need to cover with my saving. And you know what? Looking at it that way, I think, is a safer way to look at it, then, hey, I'm saving 40% of my money toward retirement, well, you know, my question is, what's 40%? And is that too much? Is that not enough? I don't know. So what you're saying is look at how much money you will receive in retirement from that pension and then see how big of a slice of the pie that is. Yes. And then you'll know how much else of the pie you need to fill in. Yes. And I know that's not the answer that he wants. He would like us to say, yes, that counts the same way or no, it doesn't. But I just don't even think about it that way.

I think it's an apple. A pension is an apple and a 401k is an orange. But we just called it a pie. And they both go into the apple orange pie. Apple orange pie. Well, you can have apple pie. I've never heard of orange pie. I haven't either.

Suppose you can make pumpkin pie, which is orange. Which is orange in color. And now we're off the deep end. But, yeah. But if you think about it, all of those retirement savings rules of thumb, right? about saving 10% of your income or 15% or 20%, all of those rules of thumb are meant to approximate how much a person would need to save in order to have a fully filled in pie

at the time that they get to traditional retirement age. So if these rules of thumb around how much money you should be saving are meant to approximate what you need to do in order to reach a certain goal, then to your point, Joe, it absolutely makes sense to start with that goal in mind since ultimately all of this, the point of all of this is to solve for X. Those numbers, and this is why I don't like the rules of thumb, I like using rules of thumb when doing the actual math is hard. And in this case, it's funny when people actually go and they find these online calculators, doing the math that gets you a hell of a lot closer to your actual goal isn't that hard. it's fairly easy.

So I'm not in love with save X percent of my income because for what? I'd much rather know what my goal is and say, well, guess what? Because I've got the pension and because I have, I'm saving 15 percent between me and my company, I've met that goal and I can actually reach financial independence earlier than I thought I could. As of right now, it looks like it's three years earlier. And if, you know, we have some good win, maybe it's going to be five years earlier. So if I put five percent more away, I know that that's going to affect me.

me in this particular way, you know, or if I save a little less, it's going to affect me in this particular way. Not hard to get. There's calculators all over the place. So my personal feeling for everybody listening is I wouldn't even worry about those rules of thumb. Yeah, I mean, in rental property investing, I teach people to use rules of thumb as a preliminary first pass analysis when you're using a search tool online and you've set your filters based on the type of property that you're looking for, and you have 58 results, then you need some sort of quick rule of thumb that will allow you to sift through those properties and narrow it down to your top five. Yeah.

And I'm thinking as you're talking that, you know, if I'm Anna's age, I'm 23 and I'm starting to save into a 401k right after college, we're running that number of financial independence at age 60 and how much am I going to live on at age 60? Pretty irrelevant. Right. So for Anna, okay, save 20%, and you know you're going to be okay. Yeah, exactly. So in the rental property example, it's just a preliminary screening tool that gets you to the point to which you can then narrow the field enough to do a deeper analysis.

And then, as you said, Joe, for Anna, I mean, when you're 23, you have no idea what your lifetime income is going to be. Or not even your lifetime income. I'm like, you realistically have no idea how much money you're going to be making by the time you're 35. You don't have any way of predicting what your net worth is going to look like, how large your family is going to be, what country you're going to be living in, what industry you're going to be working in. There's so much that's still unknown. And you might think that you know what those answers are. You might think you know what you want that to be. But life has a way of taking weird twists and turns.

It's funny when you say that just over my career, I saw some truisms, and these are very colloquial. But what I found is that if you can save aggressively for the youngest people listening, if you can save aggressively at an early age, that is phenomenal. And saved, by the way, into long-term places thinking about building that long-term engine at an early age. And I'm not going to get into the Rule 72 in compounding. Just that is the easiest time to save. Life has ways of turning in ways that you don't know, Paula, exactly. It's so funny how much things change between 23 and 35. Oh, my goodness.

I've been thinking about that a lot because I'm 34. I'll be turning 35 eventually. And I've been just reflecting on the last 10 years quite a bit and how the Paula of then would not recognize the Paula of today in so many ways. ways, my career, my business, my rental property portfolio, my net worth, my interests, my values, my lifestyle, basically every aspect of me other than the fact that I like Taco Bell and I like cats. Other than that, everything has changed. I'm 50 years old and I work in a career that didn't exist when I started my career. Right. Podcasting. Yeah, a whole different,

whole different thing. It's wild to see how things change. I mean, even in 2005, even 13 years ago, I started my career as a newspaper reporter for a print newspaper. That makes me sound older than I am when I say that. Like, what is that? Print what? Are those those things you see at the hotel? Yeah, exactly, those things. And they still have them at Starbucks. Well, there you go. We would measure our stories in column inches. Right. I think about magazines and word count, right? But actually, back to Andy for a second.

Andy was asking this question about two parts of what a lot of people call the three-legged retirement stool. And when you hear about the three-legged stool, there's contributions to your plans, there's pension plans, and then there's government benefits. So you're talking about two different pieces of the stool, which is why I also don't think about it the way that he's asking the question. Oh, yeah, I forgot. I forgot what we were talking about until you said that. Thanks, Joe, for bringing it back. Circling us back, yeah. Circling with Gle. We'll return to the show in just a moment. Payroll and benefits are hard, especially for small businesses. You don't have the time to be an expert in things like taxes and regulations. And old school payroll providers just aren't built for the way that you work today.

Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. Modern technology does the heavy lifting so it's easy to get things right. Gusto makes payroll a breeze. In fact, nine out of ten users say that Gusto is easier to use than other payroll solutions, and four out of five customers actually reduce payroll errors after switching to Gusto. Most of all businesses don't have an HR expert, but you don't need one to use Gusto. With great software and great service, you can focus on your business, not on payroll and paperwork. You no longer need to be a big company in order to get great technology, great benefits,

and great service for your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. Sign up today, and you'll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com slash paula.

That's g-u-t-o.com slash Paula. Life insurance is really important, but a third of people don't have it, and that's because it's really hard to buy. You have to work out what you need, then do the research to find the best quote, and hope you don't get swindled, along the way. It's not a good way to shop for anything. So PolicyGenius made the whole process

a lot simpler. PolicyGenius compares quotes from the top life insurance companies to find the best policy for you. It takes just two minutes to get a quote. In fact, over four million people have used PolicyGenius to shop for insurance. Their user interface is simple, it's clean, it's easy to navigate. It's very user-friendly. And PolicyGenius doesn't just make life insurance easy. they also compare disability insurance, home insurance, and auto insurance. So whether you know a lot about life insurance or nothing at all, start your search at policygenius.com. In just two minutes, you can compare quotes and make an informed decision for you and your

loved ones. Policy Genius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance. Our next question comes from Drew. Hi, Paula. This is Drew from Chicago and Illinois. I have a question regarding a 401K rollover. I recently switched employers, and so far I'm very happy with the transition. With my new compensation, I'm now able to more than double my 401K contributions,

and I'm on track and max out my new HSA while still maintaining the same take-home pay for my old job. My old employer had a 401k through Merrill Lynch, and I was able to do mixed contributions both Roth and traditional. My new 401k through Charles Schwab also has this option. According to the documentation I've received from Merrill Lynch, I have four options. options at my disposal. One, keep the assets where they are. Two, roll them into some kind of IRA. Three, transfer them into a new 401K. And four, take a cast distribution. With this in mind, here are my questions. Aside from the four options presented to me, are there any other options that I should consider? Two, are there any time constraints I should consider for this kind of

rollover? And three, what would you recommend I do with these funds? I've heard you repeatedly mentioned the benefit of having all my assets under one dashboard. So I am leaning towards transferring the assets into my new 401K. I currently do not have an IRA at this time and have been meaning to get one set up for a while. This seems like a great opportunity to get one in running as an alternative strategy. Thank you for all the great work you do, and I really appreciate your assistance. Hey, Jude, doesn't this question sound familiar? Well, this is funny.

When I first heard Drew's question, I came to you and I said, said, we've done this question already. And then I realized we kind of had, but we hadn't. We actually did this on the Stacking Benjamin show. For the sake of anyone listening who's new here. So this is the Afford Anything podcast. Joe is the host of the Stacking Benjamin's podcast. Drew called into both of our shows with the exact same question. And what makes that hilarious is that Joe, once every four weeks, comes on this show to answer questions. And I, about three out of four weeks, about three out of every four Fridays, roughly, am on the stacking Benjamin's show answering questions. So Joe and I are on each other shows regularly answering questions that come in from the listeners.

And Drew called us both. So we've decided in honor, in honor of that, we're just going to play the answer that we gave on the stacking Benjamin's show, because guess what else? guess who edits both of our shows as the same guy. We've got the same editor. Why duplicate? Exactly. Why be redundant?

And plus, I don't know if Drew's trying to catch us and maybe say something different. We're not falling for that stuff, Drew. We're going to play exactly. By the way, for those people that don't listen to Stacky Benjamin's, there's going to be two people on here that are on our round table. My partner who's on three days a week, oh, gee, you'll hear his voice. and our good friend Len Penzo from the award-winning Len Penzo.com blog. So what you're about to hear is the answer.

Because the way that our recording schedules work, Joe, you scooped me on this. We probably both got the same question at the same time, but just based on our editorial calendars, you were able to play it first. Bam! I feel so proud. Actually, you scooped yourself because you're answering the question on here that we're about to play. So you scooped yourself. I suppose I did. This is like the Heisenberg uncertainty.

I don't even know what it is. My head's exploding. All right. We ready before people forget the question. Yes. Roll us back. Steve, roll this baby back.

Fantastic. Thanks for the question, Drew. Len, we're going to start with you. Any other options than those that he mentioned that you can think of? He can do nothing. And I mean that sincerely, I mean,

you can sit there and not transfer anything if you don't want. I wouldn't recommend that, but that's an option. But if he's got, If he's got great options where he's at and they'll let you stay, why not? Yeah, that's true. You know, I did mine. When I hopped companies, I transferred everything over.

I didn't like having two separate 401Ks, so I just rolled everything over into one single. And I liked it much better because I didn't like man having to deal with two separate 401Ks. But that's just me. Yeah, well, let's find out. Paula, what's just you? What do you think? What should he do? Well, he mentioned that the new 401ks at Charles Schwab.

which is a fantastic brokerage that has a lot of low-fee funds. So it seems to me as though consolidating everything under the Schwab umbrella gives you two benefits. It allows you to keep everything under one house. And that's a very, very good house. OG, what do you think? Really just boils down to a couple of different things to look at. First, is the current plan and the existing plan, is there any material differences between costs or available investment options.

Assuming that the new plan has reasonable investment options and is structured in a reasonable cost structure, and also depending on the balance of the old one, I might just recommend putting it in the new 401K because here's the thing. You can always take it back out again into another IRA. Likewise, you can put it in an IRA and take it back out and put it back into your 401K if you really want to do it.

I'm a big fan of just kind of one place. and it's going to add some efficiencies. You're not going to have double trading costs, if there are any. And the worst thing, and people swear that this doesn't happen to them, but it happens to some people, where you forget about it. You know, if you work at a job for a year, you've got a little bit of a pension or a little bit of a 401k, and you forget, you don't do anything with it. 20 years goes by or 30 years goes by. I had a client that emailed me and said, hey, I got a letter from, you know, whatever company it was, and I don't know what it's about. I said something about they're supposed to be sending me 300 bucks a month.

And I said, well, did you work there? And he said, well, yeah, but back when I was 18 until I was 20, I mean, it was 40 years ago. I said, well, good thing they found you. You know, you're going to get 300 bucks for the rest of your life. That's nice. So I just wanted in one place. And unless there's some really big issue with the new plan, I'd probably just put it in there. And then if you ever want to take it back out again, you can.

I'll be the dissenting guy here then. I like rolling it to an IRA. So basically you get to pick anything. You can keep it where it is. You can move to the new one. Yeah. Yeah. You can open like 12 new ones.

Why not have one, Joe? Well, here's the deal. You can use something like a personal capital to have it on one dashboard. When we said we like one dashboard, I don't think we might have it all in one place. The thing that I don't like about most 401Ks is that there usually is an Achilles heel. And if there is an Achilles heel with the IRS. I can do whatever I want. So I can roll it wherever I want.

And I can also then emphasize the funds that I don't get in the new 401K. And I can then have, I can over-emphasize in the 401K with that 401K does well. And the areas they don't do well, I can have my IRA pick up the slack in those areas. So I can maintain good diversification. And by one dashboard, Drew, when I've said that in the past anyway, I didn't mean having it all in one place. I met you something like a personal capital where you can look at all your stuff. in one one spot. Thanks for the question, Drew.

If you've got a question, we did kind of say, do whichever what you want, didn't we? We have Lens saying, move it to the new company. Well, actually, you guys all pretty much said move it to the new company, except me. And there you have it. I suppose I agree with myself. High five. But here's the thing that's important that we actually didn't get to in that clip is that it isn't about which one he chooses, even though we jokingly said you can,

you can choose any of those, it's knowing the methodology and the reason you choose each one of those. You leave it where it is because you've got fine funds and there's no reason to move it. You roll it to the new place to have one dashboard, even though you can have one dashboard by using some outside firm that aggregates your account for your dashboard. Then the third answer, which is roll it to an IRA so that you can emphasize maybe against weaknesses that your new 401K might have in the lineup. Exactly. So there are tradeoffs to each one. There's pros and cons to each one. And there's a reason why you might not want to write us both because we will have fun with it. And actually, Drew, we're just having fun. Nice job. Yeah. It's a good question. It's a fantastic question. And it's a question that a lot of people have, right? What do I do with my 401k money when I switch employers? Like, that's the fundamental question. And that's something that almost everybody deals with at some point during their career. I am very curious if next week on so money we're going to hear Farnoia answer this question. Oh, wow. That would be amazing.

Drew, if you don't call into Farnocia's show, I will. Asking the same one. Okay. Well, I think that's our show. I think we broke the internet, Joe. I think we might have. So, Joe, normally at this point in this show, I do a sign off by asking people where they can find you if they want to know more about you. But I think we just established.

That every Friday on the stacking Benjamin's podcast, we answer questions that, among other things, we also answer questions that come in from the audience. And about three out of four Fridays, I'm there as one of the guest roundtablers. So if you don't get enough Paula here and you want Paula mixing it up with other people at our roundtable, come find Paula on Fridays there. Nice. And if you don't get enough Joe over there, you can find him in about one out of every four episodes here. P.S. All right. Here's the epilogue. So today is Sunday, October 7th, and I am recording this from a hotel room in London. As you know, we had a interesting week last week. Exactly one week ago today, I released an episode in which I interviewed personal finance celebrity, Susie Orman.

She stated, among other things, quote, $2 million is nothing. It's a little. pennies. She stated that if you want to retire early, you will need a minimum of $10 million. That way, at a 5% withdrawal rate, you're withdrawing $500,000 a year after taxes. It's $350, a year. And you may need at least that much. So those are some of the statements that she made. And they were certainly some of the more eyebrow raising statements, but she did also raise some very valid points around catastrophic coverage, long-term care, long-term disability issues. So now that I've had some more time to think about the Susie episode, Susie was very critical of the fire movement. Now, if you're not familiar with it, I think most of you are, but just in case you're not, that stands for financial independence, retire early.

So first I would like to address those criticisms and then I would like to take a step back and describe at a meta level what her criticisms and what all of the media coverage that has ensued means for the fire movement. First, I'd like to remark on the content of the criticism, which centered around risk mitigation for catastrophic events. First, obviously, when you are FI, when you're financially independent, you're going to have health insurance, just like you would if you were self-employed. You'd also have health insurance in that case, too. So I personally, I've paid for an individual health care plan for 10 years. I have bought individual health insurance on the open market since long before the

Affordable Care Act. I quit my job back in 2008, and I have been self-health insured since then. By self, I mean, I've bought an individual policy. So back at that time, back in 2008, pre-existing conditions were not covered, and pregnancy and maternal care was not covered. So for many years, I had a health insurance policy that would not cover either of those two events. And I remember at that time thinking, okay, Paula, if you're not, if you're not, you're If I ever want to start a family, I'm going to have to go to Thailand so that I can pay out a pocket. That was quite literally the thought in my head before the passage of the ACA.

That was my maternity plan. But now, today, both preexisting conditions and maternal health are covered. So that makes things even easier. So right now I have an ACA bronze plan through health care.gov. It has a $6,000 annual deductible. And that $6,000 annual deductible plus the, uh, additional out-of-pocket annual max, all of that combined. I mean, that's a tiny, tiny fraction of my overall net worth. And I'm not saying that to brag. I'm not saying that to like,

check out my private island. Check out my 11-year-old Honda Civic. I'm saying that to illustrate the broader point that even if you did have to pay the full amount of your deductible, plus the full amount of your annual out-of-pocket maximum, plus copays, even if there was a year in which you had to do that, or two or three or four years in which you had to do that, that would still be, if you were financially independent, a small portion of your overall portfolio, your overall net worth. And that is another way of saying, this is a deal withable event. Now, Susie raised the very valid point of what do you do if your health claim is denied? Or what do you do if your homeowner's claim is denied?

Well, first of all, if you have health insurance, you have health insurance, and if you don't, you don't. The denial of a claim would be equally devastating whether or not you're working for an employer. So if you have health insurance and your claim is denied, then it doesn't matter if you're working for a Fortune 500 company versus if you're not. Either way, the denial of a claim is going to put you in a very bad position. No matter what, there are a fortune. unfortunately plenty of employed, salaried, or wage workers who have valid claims that get denied. And that sucks. That's not an FI issue.

That's an insurance issue. From a health insurance perspective, people who are FI and quit their jobs are in the exact same position as people who are self-employed or people who work for small businesses or family businesses. And so, if you have an issue with FI, then do you also object to self-employment? Do you also object to working for a family business? Jim and Becky, who run the dry cleaning service on the corner, do you object to them having that family business?

Because I guarantee you that that little family business that has two full-time employees, maybe three at the most, also does not have the type of benefits package that you would be eligible to receive if you worked for a massive corporation or a government entity. That's the nature of benefits in the world of self-employment and small business. So Laura and Fred, who run the Italian diner on Main Street, do you object to that too? Because FI people who quit their jobs are in the same boat. So the answer to what do you do about health insurance and other forms of insurance if you're FI is just like it is if you're self-employed.

Now, Susie did raise the point that we should get long-term care insurance, and that's something that in the FI community is probably not talked about enough, so I am glad that she brought this issue to the forefront of our minds. Long-term care insurance is insurance that can cover home care, assisted living, adult day care, and nursing home care. So if you are unable to perform what is known in the insurance industry as activities of daily living, things like going to the bathroom by yourself or buttoning your own shirt, long-term care insurance could cover you for a portion of the care that you will need. And that is a very reasonable thing to bring up. So, okay, buy it, buy it and make it part of your budget. In the same way that your budget needs to include groceries and utilities and your health insurance premiums, expand that budget to include the premiums for long-term care insurance.

If, as Susie voiced on the podcast from a week ago, if your concern is lack of long-term care insurance, if that is the reason that she cites to be anti-fire, well, then go ahead and buy some long-term care insurance. That seems like a rather solvable problem. Now, I want to emphasize there is a difference between long-term care insurance and long-term disability coverage. Long-term care insurance, as I stated, is insurance that would cover something like nursing home care or assisted living. Long-term disability coverage is a policy that will replace a portion of your income. So if you have self-employment income, you can buy a long-term disability policy, and most policies for the self-employed will cover between 50 to 60 percent of your gross self-employment income. Now, I'm not telling you that you should or should not get this.

I'm just letting you know, this option is always out there. If you think it's important, go buy it. If you want to buy both long-term care and long-term disability, go ahead and buy both. I'm not saying you should, but you can. You can go to policy genius or wherever. I'm not telling you to go specifically there, but go to a website like that, shop for policies, look up what those premiums are, and then those premiums are part of your budget. And by the way, with regard to long-term disability coverage, because I have shopped for that for myself,

if you have a two-year elimination period, which means that you cannot make a claim until two years after the date of onset of the disability, that two-year elimination period makes the policy much more affordable. A pro-tip right there. Zooming out, the broader point is, how is, let's say that you decide that you want both of those insurance policies, how is that different than having any other line item on your budget?

The line items on your budget are the things that you think are important enough to pay for. So if you think that those items are important enough to pay for, then go ahead and pay for it and plan your budget accordingly. That's what money management is, right? It's deciding what your values are, deciding what your priorities are, and aligning your money accordingly. So to Susie's comment that she is against the notion of financial independence or early

retirement, based on these factors, these factors are solvable. You buy a policy. We can have a separate discussion on whether or not you believe that you should buy a policy. That's a subjective matter. But if you do believe that you should, and there are very valid reasons for believing that, then go ahead and buy one. Problem solved. So that is a more specific address to the criticisms that Susie introduced. But zooming out, I would like to add a few remarks about what her criticisms and the attention that they received mean for the fire movement. Number one, fire is getting stronger. We were too small to be messed with. You know, first they ignore us, then they mock us. We are now big enough to be criticized. We are big enough to be criticized

by some of the biggest names in the world of personal finance. Susie Orman has 1.47 million followers on Twitter. Think about that for a second. Nearly one and a half million followers on Twitter. By comparison, Mr. Money Mustache has fewer than 100,000. So we're talking about a celebrity with, at least on that platform, a reach that is 15x greater. It's an order of magnitude bigger.

and yet she is fired up enough about the fire movement to have some incredibly intense criticism of it. If she had never heard of it or if she ignored it or if she was apathetic towards it, that would not have boated well for us for the fire movement. The fact that we are big enough, visible enough, important enough, that the headliners are getting worked up about it, I think that means that we're on to something. We're growing. This movement is coming out of being a subculture.

It's coming out of being a niche, and it's going mainstream. And speaking of which, Susie's remarks, her remark that you need at least 10 million to be able to retire early, Her remark that if you need, if you have 20, 30, 50, 100 million like her, you can retire early, but if you had less than that, don't bother. Mainstream media has picked up that story. Time Magazine, Time.com, wrote a story using a quote from this podcast as their headline. They used the quote, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, as the headline on Time.com. MarketWatch ran two stories, one of which was their most popular and stayed at the moment.

the most popular spot for several days. We were the number three story on Yahoo. Our friend Clark Howard, who has one million followers on Facebook and who hosts a syndicated radio show. He offered an excellent rebuttal. We'll link to it in the show notes. His rebuttal is in full support of fire. He could not believe that anyone could possibly be against it.

Oh, you've got a group of people who are saving 50% of their income. What is there to criticize about that? And Clark, by the way, retired when he was 31 years. He reached F.I. when he was 31. And he spent a few years in his early 30s, chilling on the beach. But then, predictably, he grew bored of the beach bum life rather quickly. And he started his own media brand and became a consumer advocate. And he is now in his 60s and he works hard every single day. But he doesn't need the money. He works because he believes in his cause. He is a perfect example of life after FI. And I tell you about this because I want to share the point. point the idea that mainstream media is picking up on this. The fire is growing. It's getting hotter. It's getting hotter and hotter. And what that means is that even in the last week, there are thousands of people who are now exposed to this idea who may have never heard of it before. I received so many messages from people saying, wait, what's fire? Or I'm Googling

fire right now. This is introducing the idea of fire to people who have. have never heard of it, and that is life-changing. Think of all the kids who will be able to spend more time with their parents, both parents. Think of all the relationships, friendships that get deepened when you have time to devote to it. Think of all of the physical health and the emotional healing that a person has time to do when they don't have to be super stressed out about basic bill paying. Think of all the volunteer work and the community outreach. That is the downstead effect of fire, of spreading the fire. And the effect that this past week has had on me personally, if I'm sure you can hear this in my voice, I'm sure you've surmised it already, I am more on fire

for fire than ever. Yeah, I've always, if you've been listening to me for a long time, I've always had kind of one foot inside, one foot out. I've always been kind of a little bit in the world of general personal finance and a little bit in the world of financial independence. I'm similar to J.D. Roth in that regard, a friend of mine and the writer of Get Rich Slowly, the owner of Get Rich Slowly. He and I have both sort of been at the fringe of the fire, what would you call us, fire media? As you've heard, I always address my community without making the assumption that your goal is financial independence. I know for many of you it is, but I don't assume that for all listeners that's the goal. And I will continue to do that. But as you can hear from my voice, I am so on fire for fire now. This past week has elevated my sense of mission around that. And specifically, when I say fire, fire rolls off the tongue much more easily than FI, but specifically what I really mean is that I'm full FI. And that leads to my fourth and final point, which is this. Now, I've said this many times before. FI is completely different, financial independence is

completely different from RE retiring early. FI is the goal. Once you reach FI, and I define financial independence as the point at which your potential passive income, typically through investments, is enough. And we can have many later philosophical conversations, both philosophical and practical conversations about how to define enough. But I define FI as the point at which your potential passive income is enough. And once you reach FI, then retiring early is, you know, it's one of many possible options that you might take if you so, chose, but it's only one of many. You could also choose to open a gluten-free bakery. You could choose to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary. You could become a part-time ski instructor. Or in the middle of your life, you could become a Peace Corps volunteer, or start your own summer camp.

I've always believed, and I continue to believe very strongly, that this is really about FI. It's not at all about retirement. And I would like it. I realize this is just a matter of semantics or not, or maybe it's more than semantics. I don't know. But I would like like it if we called this FI and not fire. But that being said, fire, when you're speaking into a microphone, fire just rolls off the tongue so much more easily. It's so much more, I don't know. It's, um, this is the type of stuff that you think about when you don't have a job, I guess. But I do want to make that clear. When I talk, when I, when I personally talk about fire, I'm really talking about financial independence and I don't care at all about the retirement

part. Unless your definition of retirement was so broad that, Again, we're getting into semantics here, but you get my drift. Here's what I can tell you. As somebody who has reached FI, it's a game changer. Let's say that you decide that you want to quit your job and you want to work in a fulfilling but lower paying field. Maybe you're religious and you want to work for a ministry or a temple, but they don't have a huge budget and they can only pay you $30,000 a year. Or let's say you want to work for an animal shelter, a no-kill animal shelter. Or maybe you want to try your hand at working the gig life while you travel around.

Let's say that no matter what you choose to do, your pay will go to $30,000 a year. As many of you know, I used to make $30,000 a year, exactly 10 years ago, in fact, in 2008, at the time that I quit my job, I earned a full-time salary of $31,000 per year. Exactly 10 years ago. And I can tell you from experience that when you do not. own a home, when you do not own a reliable car, and when your net worth is close to zero, earning $30,000 a year in that context is incredibly stressful. By comparison, when you have a fully paid off home, when you have no debt, and when you have a million dollars or more in your

portfolio, earning $30,000 per year in that context is a totally different ballgame. And that is a perfect illustration of how FI, truly it is a fully funded lifestyle change. It is the way in which you can do whatever work you want to do without facing the same economic stresses that someone in your exact same position would face if they were coming at it from a place of instability. or insecurity. As I said on a previous episode, FI in many ways is self-employment with a safety net, or entrepreneurship with a safety net, or at least it could be, because you might reach FI and decide to keep your current job. You might reach FI and absolutely nothing in your life changes. And you keep your fulfilling, high-paying job as a radiologist or as an oncologist or as a patent attorney, whatever it is that you currently do. Maybe you keep that job. Maybe you keep that job,

but you enjoy going to work more because you have the quiet confidence that comes from knowing that you could walk away at any moment. The pursuit of FI in that regard is the pursuit of quiet confidence. It is the pursuit of options, of choices, of freedom. FI gives you wings. The rest is up to you.

Finally, a huge announcement about what a person can do once they've reached fire. We have an incredibly generous member of our community named Richard Potter. Thank you. I'm calling you out on this podcast, Richard J. Potter. Thank you. He has pledged to match cash donations for the next three months, October, November, and December of 2018 from this community, up to a maximum of $4,000 with regard to our fundraiser for charity water. Now, if you haven't heard of this, here's the backdrop.

So Charity Water is an amazing organization that funds clean drinking water projects in communities that need it. Every day, about 1,400 kids die from diseases caused by unsafe water. And this organization, Charity Water, they fund things like digging a well or giving out biosand filters. And so at the beginning of the year, what I pledged was that I want the Afford Anything community to fully sponsor a water project. I want us to build a specific, tangible, GPS identifiable project that brings water to hundreds of people. And so far, we have raised $4,330 as of today, Sunday, October 7th, 2018, the day I'm recording this. So so far we've raised $4,330. And this amazing member of our community, Richard has volunteered to match any cash donations for the next three months up to $4,000,

which means if we donate $4,000, he will donate another $4,000. And that, in addition to the $4,000 that we've already raised, that will get us to our goal of $12,000, which means we, the Afford Anything community, will be able to sponsor a water project. So please, if you want to double your money, risk-free double your money, go to afford-anything.com slash water and make a donation to our charity water campaign. It's a tax-deductible donation. For every $1 you give, you'll actually be giving two. Because Richard, thank you so much.

Richard will match that donation. This is the most amazing way to double your money that I can think of. And it highlights the power. of fire. Richard wrote on the Afford Anything Charity Water donation page, he wrote, quote, I am a fire individual, now in a position to give back to worthy causes. This is why it matters. Fire and water, right? Help us sponsor a water project in a community in which people get sick from drinking water. Go to afford anything.com slash water. And for every dollar you give, that dollar's going to turn into two. That is amazing. Thank you so much.

I am so excited about this. And thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit the subscribe button in your favorite podcast player, whether you're listening on Apple or any of the Google Play apps or Spotify, Stitcher. Hit that subscribe button so that you won't miss any of our upcoming episodes. Coming up, we have an interview with James Clear about how to improve your life by creating great habits and getting rid of bad ones. Thank you again for listening. My name is Paula Pant.

I'll catch you in the next episode. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. We've created a ringtone, both for iPhone and Android, that you can have for free. Just head to the show notes at Afford Anything.com slash episode 155, and you can get that as your ringtone for free. Also, we created a transcript of the Susie interview. So if you want to download that for free, head to the show notes.

afford anything.com slash episode 155, where you can download the transcript or download the ringtone, totally free. Well, Joe, we've got a good 35 minutes before we start taping your show. Maybe I'll go run and get a hot dog. Excellent, fantastic. A vegan hot dog. Oh, man. Sorry.