The Personal Finance Podcast - Your Super-Serious Guide to Money Management with Joe Saul-Sehy

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna talk to Joe Saul Sehy about his book Stacked and how you can start Stacking Benjamins. Join Our Newsletter here! Learn to Invest with Index Fund Pro! Our complete step-by-step guide to investing! https://mastermoney.co/index-fund-pro/ Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors!:  Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/pfp. Fundrise: My favorite place to invest in passive real estate! Visit fundrise.com/PERSONALFINANCE to join them in just minutes. Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/pfp Policygenius: This is where I got my term life insurance. Policygenius made is so easy. To get your term policy go to policygenius.com and make sure your loved ones are safe. Thanks to Ka’Chava For Sponsoring the show! Go to kachava.com/pfp and get 10% off on your first order.  Connect with Joe Saul-Sehy: Joe's Linkedin Joe’s Twitter Joe’s Instagram Joe’s Website Joe’s Youtube Joe’s Podcast: The Stacking Benjamin Podcast Joe’s Book: https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/stacked/ Checklist of relevant episodes:  The Complete Beginners Guide to Financial Independence (and Quitting Your Job Early!) How to go from 0 to $4 Million in 2 years flipping land with Pete Reese 5 Steps to Take Immediately If Your Credit Card is Stolen! From 100K in Debt to Building Generational Wealth as a Couple with Josh and Ali (The FI Couple) The Complete Beginners Guide to Financial Independence (and Quitting Your Job Early!) Personal Finance Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@thepersonalfinancepodcast  FREE GUIDES: ============== - Free Ebooks here: https://mastermoney.co/resources/  -Check out the free guide on where to put your money in what order!  https://www.mastermoney.co/stairway-to-wealth   -Here is the free How to Ask for A Raise ebook! https://www.mastermoney.co/get-a-raise-ebook   -Get Access to the 75-Day Challenge: https://www.mastermoney.co/75daychallenge    =============   We have a YOUTUBE channel! Check it out here!    Our Latest Videos:  How To Grow A Podcast Organically What Would Happen If You Maxed Out Your Roth IRA By Age?! (These Results Will Amaze You!) How to Become a Millionaire With a Small Amount of Money (Is it Really This Easy!?) Pre-tax moves for high earners   Got questions? Ask me on Instagram Here. @mastermoneyco This is the fastest way to get in touch with me.  ============   Want to Support the Show? Follow on Spotify or Follow and Leave a 5-Star Review on Apple Podcasts!   ============   Check out all the Stuff I Recommend!  Check out all my favorite Credit Cards https://milevalue.com/top-offers-mastermoney/    USEFUL RESOURCES: The Year-End Money Checklist https://mastermoney.co/year-end-money-checklist/   The 75 Day Money Challenge https://mastermoney.co/75-day-challenge/  Finally, Get That Raise https://mastermoney.co/resources/  ============     DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial adviser. This Podcast is for educational purposes only. Investing of any kind involves risk. While it is possible to minimize risk, your investments are solely your responsibility. It is imperative that you conduct your own research. I am sharing my opinion.    AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: Some of the links on this channel are affiliate links, meaning, at NO additional cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase and/or subscribe. However, this does not impact my opinion.   ============     Check us out on social fam!    Twitter   Tiktok   www.thepersonalfinancepodcast.com   www.mastermoney.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com. On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk to Joe Saul Seahy about his book stacked and how you can start stacking Benjamins. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew founder of MasterMoney.com. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking to Joe Saul Seahy about his book stacked, which is an amazing book, and how you can start stacking Benjamins as well. If you guys have any questions, make sure you hit it. us up on Instagram or TikTok at Master Money Co and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast to. And if you want to help out the show, leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Now, today, we're going to talk

to Joe Saul C. High, who has been someone who I have been listening to for a very long time. Joe is the host of the Stacking Benjamin Show. I've been listening to this show for years and years in years. And in addition, he is also the author of the new book Stacked. And Stacked is a fantastic personal finance book. And here's some reasons why I love it. One of which is he makes this book entertaining and funny. And he and his co-author, Emily Guy Burke, and they both do an amazing job writing this book. And there are so many different nuggets in this book that I truly encourage every single person to go out there and pick this book up because there's so many different nuggets in this book that really a lot of other personal finance books leave out. And so I

think this book encompasses so many different things that we need to understand when it comes to our money. And Joe and I are going to talk through a lot of those today, but there's way more nuggets in the book that you really need to pick it up and read it through so that you can understand some of this thing. So Joe and I are going to be talking about investing. We're going to talk about increasing your income. We're going to talk about how he gamifies money and he does things that allow him to make money more fun when it comes to talking about money with his family, for example. And it's really cool how he thinks about money and how he actually

goes about teaching people money. In addition, because Joe used to be a financial advisor, we talk about what you should think through if you're considering getting a financial advisor. Why it's so important to have an emergency fund. We talk about estate planning and we talk about money psychology as well. So this episode is absolutely action-packed. I can't wait for you guys to hear this episode.

Without further ado, let's welcome Joe to the Personal Finance Podcast. So Joe, welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. Andrew, thanks for having me. I'm only here for one reason. I'm here to announce my retirement because I finally made it on the personal finance podcast and what could be better. Just go out on top, they say, right? Exactly. That's exactly right. So we are so incredibly excited to have you here because I've been listening to your show for years and years and years. And I told you before the show here, like I was listening to your show when I was sitting in a cubicle. I remember trying to figure out, how am I going to get out of this cubicle? And I've been

listening to your show since all, I mean, way, way back. So I'm really excited to have you here. I was so excited to pick up your book when it came out that we read through it. And it's a fantastic book. It's going to be a book that we're going to be recommending for a long time because you make personal finance fun in this book. And that's one thing I absolutely love about that. In addition, you just make it entertaining, going through the whole process, thinking about your money, thinking about your goals, all of those different things.

So I want to dive into the book and we have a bunch of questions about the book. But before we do that, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you started to teach people how to build well? Yeah, there's a reason why I wanted it to be entertaining. I mean, it's funny because I think a lot of people think at Stacking Benjamin's, Andrew, we're just screwing around. And we truly aren't. You know, there's a statistic I read recently that showed that of 330 some million people in America, nearly half of us say we've cried about our money, that we've cried about it. And what's funny is you would think that's people living paycheck

to paycheck like I was in the early 90s. But it's, well, that's true. It's not just those people. A people making over $250,000 a year or more, nearly half of them, say they cry about their money. And now you know, and I know as personal finance nerds and guys that do this full time, there's so many resources out there. I mean, you never have a shortage of people to talk to. I never have a shortage of people to talk to. So many people doing so many exciting things. And yet we're losing so many people. And I believe very strongly it's because we need to lighten the mood. We need to make it okay to make mistakes. I mean, it's what I love about your show. You're like, go wreck stuff. You know, go, go make a mistake. That's

fine. And I think because we hold money management in such high regard and we get so worried we're going to mess it up that we end up doing nothing. So for me, I started off as a guy that was horrible with money. My parents, like most families, never talked about money. If my parents were talking about money, my sister, my brother and I, we had to leave the room. Like you do not talk about money as a family. So I got to college and I totally wrecked my money. I mean, I got accepted for an American Express card when I was at a college where you couldn't have a job. I was at the Citadel, the military college South Carolina. I literally could not have a job because I'm out marching, right?

Cleaning my rifle, making sure that my brass looks good at this military school. And yet I got an American Express card. In the very first time that I was able to, I took all my friends out to lunch and paid for it because I wanted to be the guy they all liked. Never once thinking about that I'd have to actually pay the bill. That there would be a bill coming later. And when that bill came, I did what any smart person, would do. I called my mom and I said, hey, mom, we got a problem. And she's like, no, no, no, no, no,

you've got a problem. But it's funny, even when I spent the whole next summer trying to pay off this credit card bill that had been taken away that was now in collections, I still kept touching that stove, right? I still, when I could get credit again, I tried to get credit. I would always borrow way beyond my means. And I always had this lie that I believed, which was if I just make a little more money, things will get better. And what I had to learn the hard way, which is a way long story, but what I had to learn the hard way and what you and I try to teach people is, you can't, you can't out earn bad spending habits. You can't out earn. I worked with people that made $50,000 a year when I was a financial planner, and those people were amazing. And they could

save, you know, 40% of that. And I would think, how the heck could you do that? I had other clients. I was the Channel 7 money man in Detroit for a number of years. And I would work with a lot of the on-air talent. And there was one of our anchors who made over $250,000 a year. She couldn't pay her bills on time. So it wasn't about how much you made. It was about how you actually manage that money. So I was a wreck with money.

I figured out how to do better myself. And then, you know, after 16 years of being a financial planner, moved over to the financial media side. And now I get excited every day about making people laugh and showing them that, you know what, we've all made mistakes. We've been there and we can all get there. And you absolutely do that. You make it so fun and enjoyable to even think about money.

That's one of my favorite things. What drew me to your show, stacking Benjamin's initially, was how fun that you actually made it and enjoyable. And you talk about, you know, a lot of high earners that really live paycheck to paycheck. And those percentages are extremely high. I mean, it's 60, 70%. So you're so right in terms of just understanding how to manage your money. How can you actually handle this money once it comes in so that you can

invest those dollars, grow it, preserve it, save it. And that's what your book hits. Exactly. So that's what I absolutely love. And you lay out the framework in your book on how to set goals. And you do it in a way that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about, which is timelining. So can you explain how timelining works? Yeah, the reason I like timelining and thanks for bringing this up because goal setting is so ineffective. Like everybody, as you know, says, hey, start off with your goals, right? Begin with the end of mind. Start with where you want to go and then build a map to get there. Makes a lot of sense. But, you know, January of every year, people make these New Year's resolutions and by mid-February, you're like, New Year's what?

Oh, those things. Yeah. Exactly. The reason New Year's resolutions don't work. The reason most goal setting doesn't work is that real life shows up. And so I might set these great goals for 2023. I know exactly what I want for myself. And then my muffler is dragging behind the car.

The dishwasher breaks or have some other struggle. Life just hits. And when that happens, we throw this stuff out the window. So that's why I think we talk about these long-term goals. We need to make them real. We need to make them like the things that are happening to us right now. In fact, studies show that for most of us, when we say for those long-term goals, our brain doesn't even recognize that we're saving for us.

It's just I could give money to a stranger or I could save into my Roth IRA and I will have the same neurological feeling in my head. So we got to make it much more concrete. And to do that, you know, it took us, if you're able to speak, it took us a while to learn language when we're born. So this idea that we're communicating now via language is something that we learn over time and we communicate better and better. But something, if we're born with sight, that happens immediately. And we get this spatial recognition immediately. So one of the most innate senses we have, if we're cited, is this relationship between where one thing is and where another thing is. So if I can build up, and this is why vision boards work, right?

People talk about laying out your vision board and wherever you brush your teeth, just stick it on that mirror in front of you so you can see it. Timlining is the same thing. So when I got really good at this with my clients when I was a financial planner, I would use a whiteboard, but for everybody hanging out with us, you can just take a piece of paper, put yourself as a stick figure on one end, draw a line across the paper, and that's your life, hopefully going a long time and then, you know, make a little grave marker on the other end, RIP, when you're done.

And then take all those things that you want for yourself, whatever it is, and draw them as bags of money. Like start drawing, okay, I want to be financial independent at this age. You know, I think I want to be able to work from anywhere. I want to be a digital nomad. I want to be location independent. I want to start that on this day. I want to join a gym.

I mean, it doesn't even be big things. They can be these things that you don't necessarily think of as money goals, but it's going to take money to fuel them. Like, if I join a gym, I'm going to need to pay for that. Where's that money going to come from? I want to hire a coach, whatever it might be. So I put those all out on a timeline. And this does about 50 things that are awesome that basic goal setting doesn't do.

Number one is immediately our subconscious brain, we see these. we start comparing them to each other, right? It's like an MMA match. We start having them fight it out against each other. So which goals are more important than each other? Our brain starts asking this question. Oh, do I want that one or do I want that one? And then the next question we ask is, well, how much am I going to need for these?

So now I'm going to very naturally then draw a line back from all these bags of money to today and say, well, how much do I need to put away today to make that a reality tomorrow? Or what changes do I need to make in my life to make this a reality? And then, and this is what usually happened, not all the time, it was always great when it didn't, but usually there's more goals than there is resources, right? We don't have enough money to reach them all. Then we have this phenomenal discussion, either with the people we're planning with or with ourselves, which is this, which of these is more important than the other one?

And now we're talking not about money, because none of this stuff we're talking about, Andrew, you and I are about, is about money. It's about values. What do I truly value? And so let's say that I wrote down I want to be financially independent by 50. But I also have, you know, kids that I want to help with college. Well, the first discussion I have is how important is college really? You know, there have been a lot of discussions about this lately with the student loan crisis.

Do I really want to get into that type of debt? Do I want to pay that much money? Is the ROI really there? I mean, no judgment. If it isn't, it isn't, if it is, it is. But now you're having this, do we value it discussion, which will make that college education mean more. versus how important is it that I retire at 50? You know, maybe 52's okay, maybe 53, 55.

But I can start playing with these levers now. I can say, is this one more important than that one? How much money do I need to save? It also helps me choose the right investments. You and I are seeing a lot of people getting their butt kicked right now by crypto, right? And why did we get into crypto? A lot of people got into crypto because of FOMO, because everybody else was doing it and they were making a ton of money.

Well, what's neat about timelining your goals is you can then invest based on that time frame. And then it's okay for my buddy. If my friend Andrew comes up to me, he goes, hey man, light coin is where it's at. I can then look at my goals and I can go, hey, Andrew, that sounds like a fantastic investment, but it just doesn't meet my timeline. And now instead of, is it a cool investment or not, now it's just does it fit? And it's okay to say, you know, Warren Buffett has said there's no such thing as a called strike with investing. I can let stuff go. I can say no thank you. It can still be good. So I can pass on some

really good investments and still be very comfortable with the fact that I pass. So I get a lot less FOMO too. So I love this idea of timelining for all of those reasons. And that's what I loved about it too, was that you really were finding a way for people to find what their value is. And money is there to bring you value. That is what money is there to truly do is to use it towards your values, towards what you want to do in life. And that's what timelining absolutely does. It gives you that picture and you can visualize it, especially if you're a visual person, this is an amazing way to look at what your actual goals are long term and figuring out what those values are based on what those goals are. So I absolutely love the way that you laid that out. And I think it's a much

better way to look at our financial goals than just writing our goals every single year. And like you said, most people get to the end of the year and they're like, oh, I remember writing those last year, but it's something that they didn't really actually pursue day in and day out. Well, there's another thing here, Andrew. It's also more fun, frankly. It's a lot more. Writing down, your goals, just kind of a slog. But drawing this picture of my goals and then think it. It's so much more fun to go through that process too. Absolutely. And that is one of the biggest things that you really have to do with your money is to make it fun, especially if you're working, you know, with someone like a partner or something like that. You got to make it fun, you know, to do this

together. I think it's one of the coolest things about the book as well. And one thing we have to understand is we want to set these goals up. We have to understand where our money is going and how to actually manage this money. And you lay out the case for tracking and budgeting. So can you explain the difference between tracking and budgeting? Oh yeah. Yeah, because this is another big one. You know, when I was a financial planner, I'd say, so how's your budget? Like, well, I've mint on my phone. It's almost like a checkbox, right? Hey, I've mint on my phone, so I'm good. Well, if you actually open Mint, have you looked at it? Oh, well, you know, not really, but it's on my phone. I'm good. I have my baking app. Well, what's cool about mint or a baking app or some of these things that

show where you've been, kind of throw your, show your footprints in the sand or the snow that This is good because now you're keeping track of how you spent money. And it's impossible to make changes unless you really can see where you mess stuff up. A guy who was phenomenal at tracking money was Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson knew every dollar. He would log every dollar that he spent. But anybody who knows history, if you don't know history, you won't know this. Thomas Jefferson was in debt up to his eyeballs.

This dude owed everybody on earth a ton of money. He was always so damn broke that I often wonder when I read about Thomas Jefferson, like how he was able to have time to do all the cool stuff he did because he owed everybody so much money. So tracking is cool, but tracking just lets you kind of check that box unless you do something about it. And the doing something about it is using that tracking now to set up a realistic budget. Like I can go and I can set up a budget about how I'm going to spend money next week. but if I've never tracked my money, I don't know if that's real. I don't know where I'm at now. So it's

much easier to set up a spending plan for next week if I know where I went last week. But it truly is a one-two punch. I like technology as I know you do for a lot of this stuff. I've been playing around lately with cube money. I don't know if you've played with cube money before. I have. Yeah, it's pretty neat. I really like the idea that you have this envelope-based system of tracking dollars. So when I go into the grocery store, I just go on the app. I open up that cube and then that makes that little piece of money. Only that little piece of money that's for groceries opens up. And I think that's great for budgeting.

So Cheryl and I once a week will lay out our cube budget and we will then fill up these cubes with money. And when the money's gone, what's cool is at the grocery store, if I overspend, there's not no money in that cube, I number one, don't completely bankrupt myself because I have money in other cubes that I can move around. But number two, there's also no fee. A lot of times your bank will hit you with this monster fee when you have a non-sufficient funds charge or they'll let it go through and they'll charge you a ton of money for it.

They just will deny it and there is no fee. And there's just maybe a little embarrassment at the, who cares about that? I'd rather be a little bit embarrassed and not have any fees and not overspend. But I love that. I play with Tiller money. Tiller's awesome. Tiller's a great budget for the spreadsheet nerds out there. I love Tiller because of the fact that you can take this Excel spreadsheet.

sheet or a Google sheet and you can turn it into the most whiz-bang awesome budget like for the true spreadsheet nerds that are in your community like tiller is just amazing so I'm always playing with these new budgets with budget tools out there but you know the budget and you already know this the budget that works best is the one you're going to use right right the one that you actually use like don't make it so sexy that you have no idea how it works and because that wrecks your budget just keep it simple and get it done. Exactly. And you mentioned, you know, early on I used to only just track with like automated budgets for a very long time, very early on in my career. And I remember when I was doing that, I was always broke because I didn't know where my money was actually going.

I was just kind of looking at it periodically in between. So it's really, really important to make sure that you are actually consciously setting up some of these spinning plants and having these budgets set in place. And that's what absolutely changed my financial life very early on is knowing where my dollars were going so that I could utilize those dollars towards my values. And that was the most powerful thing. You know, Andrew, the most effective thing about all this for me was actually none of the above. It was communication with my spouse. And if you're planning with somebody or if you're single, setting aside like 20 minutes, like when you said, and the reason I thought of this is you said, well, I was only looking at it from time to time, setting aside 20 minutes a week,

keeping it light, keeping it fun. And I'll tell you what you do with this meeting. All you do is you scroll through your bank app and all of the money that you spent last week. This is tracking, right? Like we talked about. And then we would literally just talk about the big expenses that we have coming up the next week. And I got to tell you spending 20 minutes just doing that, not even worried about the app or the spreadsheet or the whatever it is, but just looking at last week, thinking about how I'm spending next week, makes you so much more intentional. That for me was the thing that more than anything started turning my money around. Absolutely.

It's just that communication point. And that's my wife and I do the same exact thing where we meet once a week, do that thing. We actually do it over drinks, make it a little more fun, a little more light. And that's how we do it. It's just the best way to actually keep that communication going so that everybody's on the same page for sure. Like I said, this book has been one of the more fun books I've read on personal finance. And you gameify money in a bunch of different ways, which I absolutely love on how you do that. I know you're a big board game fan as well.

And one cool thing you talked about in the book was the game that you set for your family to save on your electricity bill. So can you talk about that game and how you incentivize your family to do that? Yes. Yeah. I got so mad, Andrew. I got so mad. I would come home every day, like a lot of parents out there that are hanging out with us. Parents know exactly what I'm talking about.

I would come home. It's the fall, so it's a little bit cool in Michigan. All the doors to the house are open. Just the screen doors are closed. But all the heat, I'm heating the earth. All of this global warming probably started to solace. all see high residents. Every light in the house is on. We had two televisions. They're both on. And you know how many people are in the house. Nobody. Everybody's out in the backyard.

I'm like, what the hell are we doing? Like, what do you think I made a, you know, I started doing those dad things. You think money grows on trees? Do you think we're made of money? What the heck? And sounds like my house now. Yes. So I decided I could keep yelling. But, you know, yelling gets you nowhere. And it really isn't teaching my kids anything about literacy about what's important in our family. So I turned it into a game, and this was the game, was that back then, my kids are 27 now, but back then, in the mid-later 90s,

we would just get the bill once a month. And when the bill came, the goal was to see if we could make the bill lower than the one the month before. And I don't even remember if we had a prize. We had a pizza sometimes, but what's funny was, even without a prize, just because we were all excited

didn't turn it into a game. Everybody got excited then about conserving energy at our house. And my utility bills went for a monster to almost nothing in a short amount of time just because instead of yelling, we turned it into a game. So I remember one time I'm watching my Detroit Lions Luz on TV. And I walk out of the room, just to get a glass of water, I come back in the room, my daughter's turned off the TV and she's getting mad at me, Andrew. She's like, Dad, you know, when you leave the room, you got to turn the TV off. I'm coming right back. Come on. But how cool is it when your kids are yelling at you? You know, and the tables are turned. So yeah, the utility game was really fun. We did this at the grocery

store too. I don't know if I wrote about this in the book, but I also got tired of, Dad, can I have? Dad can I have? Dad can I have? And we go grocery shopping. And so instead, we would, number one, make the list together at home and they'd help me. And number two, then we would play the unit cost game, which if your kids are old enough to do, do, you know, if they're eight or nine years old, when you go through the store, you know, there's the cost of what it is, and then there's the per unit cost. So as an example, when you're looking at paper towels, we'd look at the different brands of paper towels and my kids would try to find the cheapest one, which often wasn't the one that had the lowest number by it.

That would almost be the smallest container, but sometimes the unit cost was one that would surprise you. And so I started my kids working on comparison shopping. And all of a sudden then, once they were involved and going on the grocery store attack, they forgot about asking for something and, you know, dad pulling his hair out. I absolutely love that both ways because it honestly is teaching your kids about money and how to save more money and how to price match and do all those different things. But in addition, it's making it lighthearted and it's making it fun for everyone. Instead of having to have those difficult conversations, you actually flip the script on them and you were able to kind of make it a fun game that everybody enjoyed. It was something that I really, really loved that.

So that was one really cool piece of the book that I absolutely love. I got to say it was just more fun for me. I mean, exactly. It makes it so much easier. Exactly. I love that. So one major factor to getting our money right. And you talk about this in the book as well.

And we love to talk about this on this podcast is increasing our income. And like you said earlier, increasing your income will not solve your problems if you don't know how to handle money. So first you have to understand how to handle money. But once you understand this and you understand how to grow your wealth, increasing your income can really change a lot of things for you. especially if you put those extra dollars towards wealth building. So what are some of the ways that you think a lot of people who are sitting here saying,

hey, I don't have enough money to get by right now. I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I want to increase my income. I know what to do with these dollars. I want to increase my income. How can I go about doing that? What are some ways that people can do that today? Well, and I'm glad you brought this up because, and I emphasize this early in the book,

because so many times during my career, people would be really good with money. And they come to me going, I don't know where else to cut. And the thing is, you can't shrink your way to greatness. the way to get to greatness is often earning more, finding ways to earn more money. Think about this, you can only cut so much earning more is that was blue sky. I mean, I can earn and earn more and earn more, and we often don't focus enough on that. So I'm super glad. There's two ways.

The first way is making more money from your primary job. Every study I've seen over the last 10 years shows that your boss probably wants to give you a raise and that you just haven't asked. And this is the key. I think a lot of people think it's on their boss to tell them when they're getting raises. And certainly companies will have these times of year that they get people increases. We just did for the Stacky Benjamin's team. It's going to be effective at the beginning of the year.

But if you don't think you're earning enough or you need to earn more, don't wait for their timeline. Go to your boss. I spoke with some experts in this area. In fact, at the end of every chapter of the book, I have an interview from the podcast that's transcribed. Or if you listen to the audio book, you'll hear the actual. interview. But Mori Teherapur helped me in this area, Andrew. She's helped the NFL Players Association. She's helped some other big organizations with negotiation technique. She has a top class that's at Wharton on the topic. But Mori said a few things that are really interesting. Often, your boss that you're

talking to is not the decision maker. And we often get nervous about talking to our boss and we get all worried about it. It's much more comfortable when you realize your boss and you are probably on the same team. And all you need to do in this discussion is give your boss enough fodder to go to the decision makers on your behalf. Your boss wants you to stay. Your boss wants you to be on the team. You got to give them information. That's the second thing. You can't come to them with your personal issues. You can't come to them with dad needs new shoes. You got to come to them with ways that you're going to help the team if they give you more money. So how are you undercompensated? What can you do to deserve this next raise? Bring competitive analysis with you, if possible, from Glassdoor and other

areas, and make a good case with your boss so they can take it to the decision maker. There's a basic concept that she brought to my attention, which I thought was really cool and it's called the Cube. And if you imagine that you and I are having a discussion right now, and I, by the way, have thought about this from the time I started preparing for this discussion you and I were going to have, which is Andrew has something he wants out of this interview for the personal finance podcast family. I have a point that I want to get across. Andrew's looking at how do I get the most out of Joe for the personal finance podcast family? I'm looking at, you know, how do I promote myself well?

Whoever, whoever works the other person's side of the cube better is going to, to be the better negotiator. So the better I am at accomplishing what Andrew wants, the better it's going to be for both of us. Better Andrew is accomplishing what I want, the better it's going to be for both of us. And if both of us are working each other side of the cube, what an amazing relationship this becomes. And what's cool is instead of these negotiations that we think are, you know, I got to bust somebody, one of us wins, the other one loses. You know, I don't like the old truism of win-win. But it truly is. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to. be that way. It doesn't be confrontational. Just bring your best stuff, which I think is super important.

And not just me. I recently watched the master class, you know, this online thing, the masterclass stuff that Bob Eiger did. And Bob Eiger, of course, back at Disney, back at Disney now, whether he kind of wants to be or not. But Eiger even said this. He's like, I don't like going into a negotiation and holding stuff back. I'll just give them my best. And I assume you're going to give your best. So when I hear people like, you know, Chris Voss is a fantastic negotiator, people know him. There's so many people with some great techniques. The fact that both Mory and Bob Eiger say you can shove those techniques and still be good at negotiation and not to worry about any of that, I think is great.

All right. The second thing, though, by the way, is developing a side hustle and I'll go very quickly through this one. Do not. If you have bills that are short term, you're just trying to get out of debt, just trying to make a little extra money, go ahead and do the quote, sharing economy. But every study shows there ain't no sharing going on in the sharing economy and they are preying on your inability to do good math. You don't understand the depreciation on your vehicle. You don't

understand all the costs that goes into it. They are robbing you if you do that. Now, I guess some people make it work, but when I've had people tell me how it works and then I've interviewed those people, the huge amounts of math and work they had to go through is horrible versus if you really want to have a second income, which I think is a great idea, go build something. Create an online store, create a course, create something, some way that's going to be much more yours and not somebody in Silicon Valley's that you're just participating in. So I love a side hustle. I used to think side hustle is competed with your main job so you shouldn't do both. I totally disagree with that now. I often think having a second job can make you even better at your first job. Get a little bit more

empathy for your boss, you'll know a little more about how the world works, you know about pricing, you know about so many, communication, you know about so many things. So starting a side hustle in 23, I think is a great idea. I could not agree more, especially with building something. It is the best way to make extra money. I think I remember a post a long time ago that Mr. Money Mustache did where he drove for Uber for like a week or something like that. And after depreciation, all the costs, he incurred and everything else. He did all this math, wrote it all out. It was like a negative net income is what he came out with. So it was absolutely one of those things where, you know, if you're doing that for short term, fine. If you're trying to get out of some debt or some high interest credit card

debt or something like that, then that's one thing. But if you're doing it for long term, building something is going to be something that could end up being your full-time gig. But I agree with you as well. It really does help you in your day job because it just, it creates so many additional skills that you can utilize in your day job as well. And you have some great insights on investing in this book. And investing is obviously a major factor when we want to build wealth. And it's something that we talk about in this podcast all the time as well. So can you talk about why it is so important to start investing your dollars and some things that maybe new investors need to overcome? I think the biggest thing that new investors need to overcome, and I'm going to start there, is this idea of risk.

You know, if you look at that timeline, your goals are 20, 25 years away. I always get frustrated. I see people in their 20 saving into a Roth IRA that they can't touch until 59 and a half and they're saving into this uber conservative stuff. If you've got that amount of time, and you're in an index, you want to be in the places that historically have lit it up over those periods of time.

And time is your best friend. So this idea of volatility being your buddy is I think the thing that we need to get a grip on. But even before that, realize this, you have to invest if you're going to go anywhere. When your money is in a bank account, this last year. If inflation truly is 8.7 something percent, and we can talk about how that's not

even a real number. It's actually way higher than that. But if we say it's 8 percent and your savings accounts earning one, why do you put money in a savings account? You put it there because it's safe. You are safely losing 7 percent worth of earning power every year, very safely losing earning power. We can't do that. And if you, by the way, if you only get what inflation is, you're going to have to save you want to live the same lifestyle you do today you're going to have to earn you're going to save dollar for dollar today what you're going to need tomorrow so these people talking about fire retirement if i'm going to live the same lifestyle for 30 years and i'm going to have a 30 year career i have to live on 50% of my money so i can save the other 50% well people you know that's not

realistic so i need the financial markets to help me i need my money to go to work as well as i do I used to be a big Robert Kiyosaki fan. I'm not so much anymore. And that's a whole different podcast. But I do like an analogy that he has, Andrew, which is about you go to work and you take your lunch pail to work and you sit down, you do your job, you get paid. You need every day that you go to work, your money to go out with the lunch pail to and go out and come back and bring some more money back home with it, you know?

And by the way, the more you get your money to take the lunch pail to work, the less you have to go to work. So I always think about that. How do I get more money in a spot? where it's taking the lunch pail so I don't have to. That's how I try to think about my money and winning with my money. Absolutely. It's one of those things where you absolutely have to invest your dollars, get those dollars working for you so that you don't have to work anymore. It's one of the things that if you don't start investing your dollars, it's almost impossible nowadays to be able to

retire unless you have a massive nest egg that you can live off of. You have to have those dollars working so that you can start to actually be able to retire. So that's one of the most powerful things that you can do. And opportunity cost is one major part of investing as well. And you guys cover this in the book, and I love that you cover this, because this is something I talk about all the time in this podcast. We use different opportunity costs situations to figure out what could your dollars do if you invested those dollars instead of doing X, or what could your dollars do instead of, you know, doing something else. But a lot of times, you can also overanalyze some of the opportunity costs that are available to you. So that's what most people actually do. So how do we

avoid, you know, overvaluing or undervaluing opportunity cost? I think that, you know, on one hand, people get, and we see this when I play board games. You mentioned my love of board games. There are people that will suck the joy out of a board game because they spend all their time with analysis paralysis. You can spend so much time analyzing stuff that you end up doing nothing. And that drives me crazy. There's a group of people out there, Andrew, that might even be listening today, and I call them broke professors. They're people that know everything about everything. They've learned everything there is to know. And I feel very lucky here that I'm one of the few people. that have seen a lot of people's financial statements. And I'll tell you, sometimes the smartest

people among us have done nothing. And it's not about what you know. It's about what you do. So get enough information to do the thing and then go do it. But I do like doing some basic math. And there's actually a story about a client of mine. Once again, I don't even remember if it's in the book. Is this funny or what? A guy named Tom and we'll call him Tom. Tom came to me, time's 27 years old. Tom comes to me and he had $10,000 sitting in his 401 plan. And he was leaving one firm to go to another firm. Now, when you leave one firm to go to another firm, you've got some things you can do with your money. You can roll it over to the new 401k. You can roll it over to an IRA. Those are the two big. With third one is sometimes they'll let you keep it there, right? By the way,

$10,000 at 27 sounds like not much money. I used to never see that much. Like people wouldn't even started into their 30s. So while some people may say, wow, Tom's way behind, as Tom's doing about as well as a lot of people are doing. So Tom doesn't take any of those three. He doesn't roll it over. He doesn't leave it. He doesn't open an eye. Right. Guess what he does? What? He decides to spend the money, right? And he says to me the same thing that everybody says. He's like, dude, it's only $10,000. It's only $10,000. And you know what he needed. He needed a car, right? I think everybody can complete that sense. I needed a car. So I took the $10,000 out. And I spend on a car and I'll just start over. I'm pretty close to zero anyway. Why don't I just start over?

So let's just look at the opportunity cost on this. So on one hand, he took his money out. Now, he's going to pay taxes. Let's say that that's 20%, but then there's a 10% penalty on top of that, say 30. In a lot of cases, it can be close to 40% gone. So he is somewhere between $6 and $7,000 for a car. How much car can you buy for $6 or $7,000? You might be able to buy kind of a clunky, used car. I like driving those, but he didn't do that. He put a down payment on a brand new car that was about $40,000. So he takes out this money, pays a ton of penalties. This car that he has is going to depreciate, right? So it's not even going to be worth $40,000 later. So he takes his money out to buy a car payment is essentially what he did. Versus, we can use this rule called the rule of 72. And if we take

the interest rate, he thinks he's going to get divided into 72. it's this mathematical, magical rule that says you take the interest rate, you think you're going to get divided by 72. It tells you how many years are going to take your money to double. So let's say he gets 8% divided into 72. That means every nine years, Tom's money would have doubled. So Tom buys his way into car payments on this depreciating thing versus his money is 27. His money would have doubled when he's 36, would have doubled again when he's 45, again, when he's 53, he wanted to retire like a lot of people around 62, so we'll do it one more time, 62, right? So four times his money would have double. So when I was explaining this to Tom,

I was telling him, this isn't 10 grand you gave up. It's 20 grand with that first double, becomes 40 grand with the second one, becomes 80,000 with the third one, $160,000 toward retirement you gave up for a car payment. The reason Tom had come to see me, by the way, was that he, he had realized his mistake and he wanted to take it back. And the bad news is if you know how this works, after a certain amount of time, you cannot take it back. And so just doing a little bit of opportunity cost work, Andrew, I think would have solved Tom a lot of grief.

Absolutely. That is incredible. And it's one way that a lot of people are doing the same exact thing. I talk to a lot of people right now who will make similar decisions. And making those similar decisions just has a major impact on your financial health over time because it is massive how much a small amount of money, especially when you have a long time horizon, it can grow over time. And that wealth building ability is something where it can be something where it would take you 10 more years to retire if you would just take advantage of that. So that is

one amazing thing. And it's a lesson in psychology as well for people thinking they have a longer time horizon when really utilizing that money for your future is one of the best things that you can do instead of buying something like you said, like a depreciating asset. And it's just so incredibly powerful to be able to just leave that money invested. So as people start to invest, maybe there's new investors who are listening to this podcast. What are some of your favorite account types for people who are looking to get started investing? Maybe they want to retire early and or if somebody just wants to work until traditional age of 59, for example. Well, the cool thing that wealthy people have known that beginning investors don't know is that having multiple assets can

really save your bacon and things get bad like it was this year in 2022. Also, when things get good, if you don't pick the right one, diversification also helps you there. So the bad news is a beginning investor goes, oh my goodness, but there's all these different investments that I can buy. Do I buy 10 of them? Well, what's cool is if you just buy either a mutual fund or an exchange traded fund, it does 90% of that work for you. You get instant diversification. It will generally, if you choose one that aligns itself with an index, like the S&P 500 is an example. You can buy that as a mutual fund. And what will happen is, you now own the 500 biggest companies in America. And people freak out when they're brand new at this and they're like, but what if a company goes

bankrupt? You own 500 of them. What if one of them does go bankrupt? 499 are going to keep it afloat. Also, what's the chance all 500 are going to go down at the same time? Now, some years they do. But what's cool is if you're investing this based on a long-term time horizon like you should with stocks and real estate should be 10 years plus money. That should be your long-term money. For short term money, keep money in a very safe, close to the best place. But having some volatility out there becomes your best friend because what's cool, Andrew, with the market down this last year, you can buy into something that is kind of risky. But if you're in a mutual fund, you know you're safe from losing all your money and you can

buy these stocks when they're down and you can buy them at a discount. You can buy a ton of them. So when the market goes down, like, you know, everybody's talking about recession. if I lose my job, I've got a lot to worry about. But if I'm lucky enough to be able to have a job, I know my job's secure, this can really be an opportunity for you to sock some money away at discounted prices. I field it, I'm sure you have. You must have been fielding questions this year all year long, Andrew, from your fans about,

hey, should I shut off my automatic investment plan because of, you know, into the stock market because of how bad the market's doing. Absolutely, every single day. I know, I can't tell you how many times. And I'm like, no, man, this is what you double down. It's so exciting. And by the way, what I've done in mine, and I'm not advocating this for everybody, but for me, I've gone from those large companies into smaller, even more aggressive companies.

Because if our economy is going to continue, it's driven by the stock market. Stocks have to succeed if the market's going to continue. Once again, that's a whole long podcast for you and I to do. But the economy's based on these things. So if you believe the economy is going to be fine at some point, man, shovel money into stuff that has pretty high volatility. Absolutely. And it reminds me of my one of my favorite Warren Buffett quotes, which is a very simple quote, but he says, whether it's socks or stocks, I like to buy things on sale. And it kind of makes me think through, you know, we just had Black Friday, for example, when we were

recording this. And, you know, when things go on sale, a lot of people are just willing to throw dollars as much as they can towards those things. But when the stocks go on sale, a lot of times people begin to panic. It's really just a psychology. It's experienced things. A lot of things that we could talk about there. But really, this is a really exciting time, especially like you said, if you have your job, if you know your job's going to be secure, this is an exciting time to buy these assets on sale. And people get really wealthy during these times. Yeah. So it's a really, really cool thing to think about as well. So lately, I've been noticing how fast things are changing at home. The kids are growing like crazy. Clothes don't fit anymore and routines are changing. And it just hits

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Just go to Indeed.com slash personal finance right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash personal finance. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. As people start to invest, maybe they think through this and say, hey, I would like a little bit of help. Maybe I want to get an advisor or something like that, where I've talked to a lot of people who want to consider a financial advisor and maybe are trying

to think through those steps. So you were obviously an advisor at one time. So how can people maybe look at finding a financial advisor if this is the decision they want to make where they don't lose all of their money to fees? Because fees are a major impact in this equation. And fees can truly eat away at your wealth if you're not careful here. So how can they do that and how can they actually think through finding the right advisor for them? This is one of my favorite topics. my favorite topic because the one thing that I was surprised by when I moved over from the advisory side to largely the do it yourself side and the financial media side is the swarms of people who say you're smart enough to do this yourself you don't need help you are way smart enough to do

this yourself it isn't rocket science why would you pay somebody for this and you know what while I agree that you don't want to overpay and there is a discussion to happen around fees I think that is the wrong discussion, Andrew. The true discussion is every single smart person I worked with when I was a financial planner. I work with vice presidents at Chrysler. I work with VPs and engineers that worked at Microsoft. I work with the person who negotiated with the IRS on behalf of the Fortune 100 company she worked with. Like she not only knew tax law, she knew financial planning.

Why would they hire me, right? The person in charge of the minivan platform was one of my clients. Why would they hire me when they're clearly smart enough to do this? The question isn't, are you smart? Of course you're smart enough. There's nothing that you and I have talked about today that is rocket science. 90% of what I did as an advisor, maybe even 95%, you could do without me. The other 5% I had these certificates and expertise that you couldn't do it like I could do it.

But why? Why would you go into something that's important and not surround yourself with smart people? So certainly everybody in the financial community online gets obsessed with fiduciary certified financial planner. How do they get paid? Yes, all of that stuff. But even before we get there, let's do this. Surrounding yourself with smart people is the first thing you want to do if you want to go somewhere, period. Just surround yourself as smart people. So somebody who's walked that walk before. So I'm even saying, by the way, Andrew, even though I will say if you're hiring a financial planner, CFP, you know, fiduciary, all this stuff. Surround yourself with just good people.

So they don't even have to be any of that. Ask people who've been there what they've done. Have regular meetings with those people. So I have a coach for diet and wellness through a company called MetPro. Jesse is a pain in my ass. I'll tell you, she's, oh, she kicks my butt. But you know what? I went on a 40 city book tour this last year and I maintain my weight

when I'm eating at restaurants every day and in airports and these. bad places and I'm showing up at these events almost every single night talking to my community who I really need to be on for and I'm on because I've made sure that my fuel is correct and that I'm ready to go for these things and it was because of Jesse I'm smart enough to eat. You know, eating is at rocket science. Working out is not rocket science. But she knows more of this than I ever knew. So anyway, I think surrounding yourself with smart people is a number one, money or otherwise.

Number two is when it comes to fees, I don't start there. I start with what am I going to get? What am I going to get? And even before that, I asked, what is it that I need? So for some people as an example, they want the advisor to not only make sure that all of their life dovetails so that if I'm doing one thing that I'm not stepping in another. And I'll give you an example. A lot of times people buy these insurances that are unnecessary because they have an emergency fund. and a good advisor will point that out to like, hey, you don't need this.

You don't need your deductible this low. You could raise those deductibles and save yourself all that money because you put money away to emergency fund or the opposite, right? I have no insurance and I have no emergency fund. Let's build an emergency fund first. That's a best investment we can do because our best ROI is going to be reducing these deductibles. That's going to be a huge ROI that we're going to get to in a few months.

So helping you set up a game plan so that your whole life is together, I think is great. but some people also want the advisor to shepherd the assets to watch them between meetings. That's an additional fee. You know, how they buy those investments also can be fees. So asking those questions is important, but even more so, what do I get versus what do I need? Do those two align? And then am I paying a reasonable cost for it, which means I really need to interview, you know, don't interview just one person.

I'd interview two, three, four people. And because of the fact that everybody's got a reasonable. a sales pitch. I had an awesome sales pitch, but everybody's got an awesome sales pitch. And I think you only learn about the sales pitch when you've talked to three different people. You start going, oh, okay, then you can see the nuance, the differences. You can start to compare advisors. If it's important to you, I'd interview a few people. I would completely agree with that as well, because I think just aligning what your values are and what you're going to get out of that situation. And interviewing a number of people is how you really get there. We just did that with tax

strategist on my side. We interviewed a bunch of them. They all had a similar pitch, but then you can kind of find those nuances in between after you kind of looked and talked through some of these situations as well. And you mentioned emergency funds there and how emergency funds can actually help you, you know, actually reduce some of your insurance costs. So can you talk a little bit about that because I absolutely loved how you broke that down in the book. Yes, absolutely. You know, one of the things that makes me really tired online, there's a few things that make me tired. Believe it or not, Andrew, and I know you feel this way. Sometimes social media can make you really tired. You just go, oh, come on, guys, we can do better than this.

We're fighting with strangers on the internet. But I'll tell you, the biggest internet fight I think I've had over and over is when people are like, forget emergency fund. You just have a line of credit. You got your credit cards. You get in trouble. Use your credit cards. Use your line of credit. First of all, well, let's think about why they say that.

They're like, you're sitting money in a bank account. Maybe earning 1%. Inflation, like we said, up above 8%. So we're losing money sitting there. Why would I not invest 100% of my money? I'll give you 50 reasons, but let's start with this. go back and do just a little bit of history and look at 2007, 2008 when that crisis hit. And I don't know, Andrew, if you remember this, but they were shutting down lines of credit.

Like, you could have all the credit you wanted and all of a sudden you didn't have it. Your bank sent you stuff going, hey, I know how we had a $10,000 line open. It's now $5,000 or it's now $2,000. And so this credit isn't assured. It's through somebody else. Money in a bank is assured. I know I have that. Number two is that 1% return that you're getting from your bank.

that's not the return on investment. The return on investment is I can have fewer insurances. I can raise the deductible on my insurances because now I'm self-insuring. I can be more aggressive with my investment strategy because I know I don't need it for six months or for three months or whatever your investments are. I will see otherwise aggressive investors invest a little more conservatively with their long-term money because they don't have an emergency fund. Well, hell, let's solve that. Let's get an emergency fund. Let's put the pedal down. Let's go. Because when this market comes back, historically, it's always come back quick when it finally decides to do it. And if you're not there just a few days in a year, there's just a few days

that make the difference. So let's maximize our returns in our investment portfolio. So I think a lot of people are looking at a few branches. You know, they're looking at the leaves. They're looking at the branches. We want to look at the root. Let's solve a bunch of problems with one thing that seems suboptimal, right? A good mentor of mine told me once they're short-term and obvious, and then there's long-term and not-so-obvious. Having an emergency fund truly is a long-term, not-so-obvious approach that solves many, many ills, even though it seems sub-optimal.

Absolutely. And I think it is the number one place to put your money very early on, because I think having that emergency fund in place is your safety net. It protects you. But the ROI, like you said, is so many various things that you can have in place and just having that set up early on protects you for a very long time. And I'm even a huge fan of, you know, as you get closer to retirement age, I like to extend that emergency fund out even longer and have, you know, preferably like when

I would do that initially, I would even like to have it longer closer to a year only because I just like to have that extra protection. And in addition, then you can really get aggressive on your investments, like you said. So I absolutely love that as well. My friend, Andrew. Sure. Andrew, just to your point there, you are right on, you know, our mutual friend, Paula Pant over to afford anything. She's a contributor to stacking Benjamin's.

Paula and I talk about this all the time. Paula has a monster emergency fund, partly because of the fact she owns rental houses. And if people leave her rental houses, then she needs to pay these mortgages. So if you start developing that side hustle, you develop things. Your emergency fund over time should get bigger to reflect the fact that, you know, you're relying on yourself more. Exactly. Because there's so many different situations where you're going to need a larger emergency fund. And with rentals, Like that's the same. Do we have rentals as well? And when we have those rentals, I just want to have that extra cash available. There's a number of reasons why, but it just really costs a lot of money

in certain situations I've been in where it really depletes your emergency fund if you don't have enough cash available. So it's one thing that you definitely want to have for sure. One thing I love about the book is that you talk about estate planning as well. And a lot of personal finance books leave this out. This is a big piece that I think a lot of people don't really know about and they're not educated enough on. But you guys actually talk through estate planning through this book. So what are some of the minimum things that most people should have when they think about estate planning. And when they do that, a lot of times, you know, people may be thinking about a will or something along those lines. How old should they be to actually start estate planning? How old should they be to actually maybe

start thinking through some of this stuff? I think it's easiest to do it as you open the accounts because a lot of the accounts that you open, you open a 401k at work, you can put a beneficiary on that account. That's estate planning. You open up a account at your bank. You can also put estate stuff attached to that. You can do that with every account that you open. So I like just kind of doing it as you go. The thing about estate planning is that, you know, I lived in Michigan forever. A lot of my careers of financial planner is in Michigan. Andrew, I don't know how often you've been to Michigan or know anything about Michigan, but Michigan's... I've never been. Dude, Michigan's got some crappy roads. You would think for being the motor city, right, that Detroit would have these awesome roads,

the motor city. The roads are horrible. They're phenomenal. And I used to tell my clients, you know, if you don't have a will, you know who decides where your kids go and where your stuff goes? The state does. And everybody has a, you already have a will. Just the state has decided how it works. If you've nothing, the state's decided. And I would always point with my clients to the roads and I, you see how they mess this up. Imagine what they do with your stuff. Like, it's going to be horrible. They can't even solve this one seemingly easy thing. So if I don't want the states involved. It's super easy to do some do it yourself wills. What's cool is that there are even fintech companies out there that will do wills for free. And you can just do a quick

Google search for those to find these places. But just having some basic stuff in line so that your beneficiaries don't have to decide what to do with whatever you have. I mean, the second I think that you leave the house, setting up this basic fundamental stuff is super important. The reason I say it's important is this. There was a guy who I interviewed several years ago named Adam Baker who'd done a documentary, and it was about end of life. And what Adam found out through the process of looking at this documentary was none of us die at the end of the story. We think we do. We think, you know, there's this big. And then act three and then, you know, like Star Wars. Everybody, we blow up the death star and things are great. It doesn't happen that way.

We almost always die in the middle of the story. Things are going along. All of a sudden, they're not going along. My brother died a year ago. I just saw a picture of him from this day last year. He was having a birthday celebration. My brother looked great. He had no idea that three weeks later he was going to be deceased. No idea. So because we don't know when it's going to happen, just set it up early. There's so many basic, easy ways to do this. It doesn't have to be complicated. I got to tell you, when I got mine done the first time, I felt so good. Like, I didn't realize how good I was going to feel. Like, I'm like, really? I got to do it. Oh, what a pain. I got it done. It just felt like this huge relief. I didn't even own anything. I was so broke. I was so broke when I set mine up. And I was

like, but the fact that I just freed up my family from worrying about what would happen was so, so good. And I had the same exact feeling when I did it the first time as well. I just remember it was just like this lingering thing that was always there. And I always wished I did it earlier. I probably did it two or three years too late. It was like when my kids were born is when I actually did it. But I always wished I did it earlier because there was just, you know, little things where I just didn't want anybody to have to deal with all this stuff. So it just makes it so much easier for a lot of people, you know, early on, you're on your own.

It's easier to just to do this stuff. And like you said, I did it online. I mean, it was easy to do it online and kind of just walk through the process. They walk you through that process and make it really, really easy. Now, one thing that is major that we talk about in this podcast all the time is money psychology. And I think money psychology is one of the most important things when it comes to getting more money together because I think money is 80% psychology and 20% actually what you know. And it might even be even more highly skewed than that.

And so that's kind of how I think through money. And so what you guys talk about in the book is money scripts. And I love kind of thinking through some of these and how they actually cause people to operate within their life. So how can you kind of, what are money scripts and how should people kind of think through these when they're managing their money. This is so important. And by the way, this is why I love your TikTok channel, Andrew. It's because I feel like you go over behavior so much there.

And I think behavior is 95% of the game. And so we have to understand ourselves. We have to understand where we've been, why we do what we do, where we come from. Only then can we really make some progress. Another great TikTok channel is by a guy who I'm sure is a mutual friend of ours. You and I haven't talked about this, but Dr. Brad Klontz. and so Brad has allowed us to use his descriptions and a survey that he created right in our book, which is cool because in the book,

you can take the survey and find out what your money script is directly from Dr. Claude's behavioral economist, I think is his title. But a money script is really these things that you play in your brain whenever you make a financial decision, right? You've got all these different things that happen in your brain when you make decisions. And I know as an example, I have family members that that dopamine hit is a real thing in this idea of retail therapy makes them feel really, really good. Well, knowing that that makes you feel really, really good to go buy something is some valuable

information, especially since every person I know that feels that way also feels a tremendous amount of guilt afterwards about making the purchase when it wasn't a life decision. It was just for the therapy, you know? it isn't this lasting feeling, it's this quick feeling. But because we know that this regrets coming later, we can avoid going to the store in the first place and we can kind of put a circuit breaker in there ahead of time. For me, as an example, I'm a spender. My dad's a spender.

My dad loved to spend money growing up. I was always, if my dad wanted to get something, man, he would go get it. He would go spend the cash. So the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree. But me knowing that I'm a spender and me knowing, that I come by that honestly has allowed me to set up some blocks for me. As an example, you know, Dave Ramsey talks about how for the average person, having cash in your wallet is way better than spending on credit. And every study shows this, right? For the vast majority

people, cash beats credit. I'm exactly the opposite. Because I have set up systems so that I monitor my cash and on our weekly meeting that we talked about earlier, Andrew, that Cheryl and I are going to see me spend that cash, me putting something on a card is horrible. I don't want to see it again if it's not a good purchase. I don't want to be accountable for it. So I don't want Cheryl shoving it in my face. I don't want any of that. So if it's on a card, I don't make the expense. But dude, if I have a dollar bill in my wallet, it is not accountable. That is my cash. I will blow that so quick. I will blow it right away. So I never, ever carry cash in my wallet, which sometimes bites me in the butt, right? You're at a place. You want to give a tip to somebody.

I always feel bad. I have to borrow a tip from a friend of mine. The number of people that I borrowed money from for tips and then had to go repay them is huge. But that, you know, those times, frankly, are few and far between. But because I know what my script is, I'm able to set up my money based on me, not based on the, quote, vast majority of people. That's where knowing your script really helps. Absolutely. I could not agree more. And I'm the same way. I'm actually a as well. When I checked my phone before we started talking here, and I think I had two, too many Amazon boxes on my front door already. So I'm the same way. So I have to know how to kind of control that. And it's one of those things that over time I've actually learned how to do that. We're early on

when I couldn't control that, that's where I got myself into trouble. But now, like you said, making sure you're tracking and understanding where your dollars are going is one of those things that's really, really going to help you through that as well. So Joe, I want to shift gears here because there's some questions that I love to ask all of our guests. And these are some of my favorite to because a lot of people go deep on some of these. And there's something where we get different answers every single time. So these are some of my favorite ones for sure. So what part of your worker life makes you come alive?

You know, what's great is that in my old job, I felt very responsible for people's decision making as their advisor. And I get frustrated when they wouldn't do what I recommended. And that didn't end up being good for my psychology. Sometimes it wasn't good for my liver. Sometimes it was really. tough during downturns. I felt like I took a lot of what happened in the financial markets and I internalized it. Well, now what I do, I make myself laugh all day and how great is it when you can

give people advice? If they don't, you're giving them the best advice you can. If they don't take it, that's fine. Don't take it. It's your problem, not mine. I feel very passive aggressive right now. But I love that. And I love the fact that because I believe that a light teaching style makes it easier for people to make some of these sometimes tough and important decisions. The fact that if I'm laughing all day, things are going really well for me in the Stacky Benjamin's brand. And it makes me come alive when I'm laughing. There's nothing I like better than my life now. Like waking up every day going, how hard am I going to laugh today? It's just freaking amazing. Exactly. That's absolutely incredible. It comes through the book and it also comes through the podcast as well, which I absolutely love.

So that is one thing that I even remember, you know, back in the day sitting in my cubicle and laughing, you know, giggling out loud and people were probably looking at me like, what does that guy laugh at? but that absolutely shines through through the podcast as well. The second one is an interesting one as well. So what is the best money advice you've ever received? Man, I knew you were going to ask me this one listening to your show. And I've thought about this so, so much. And I'm going to give you an answer.

I don't think I've given anybody before, but it was huge advice. And it was back in college. I owned a little disjockeying company, making some money, pay my way through college. And I had this guy, and I remember telling him about how, you know, I wanted to open up a storefront. and I wanted to have this space.

I want to have an office and all this stuff. And this guy who was a caterer at one of the events I went out, he goes, hey, man, I've been in business for a long time. Keep your overhead low. And it's funny because that's not just good professional advice for somebody that owns a company. That's phenomenal life advice. Like you know, Andrew, if you keep your housing low, your housing costs low, your auto cost low, your grocery bill low, you keep those three things low, you don't have to coupon clip.

you don't have to save 15 bucks on your utility bill. You can do all of those things and waste tons of money in those areas and you'll come out way ahead. Keep your overhead low. I didn't know it at the time. I went, oh, yeah, that's neat. That's great. Like, I look back on that moment now and think I should have internalized that quicker. But keep your overhead low is a phenomenal piece of advice. Absolutely. And that is one where it will really, if you can do that and you can maintain that over time, because a lot of people have lifestyle inflation and they go through life where their overhead really starts to increase. And that's normal. But at the same time, if it gets too high, I mean, if you control that, if you can truly control that, it can absolutely change the way that you build wealth over time because

those extra dollars are going towards your freedom instead of, you know, going towards things that you really don't even care about, your frivolous expenses that you don't care about. But especially, Andrew, I love it when I hear that people in high school are listening to us or people that are in college or just out on their own. Just think about this. If you are getting ready to leave college this year or leave home this year, if you can live for like five years the way that you lived in college and not think these three dangerous words, there's three dangerous words to a college graduate and it's, I deserve it, right? When you say I deserve it, you are screwing. I'll tell you 90% of the time what comes to what you think you deserve really screws you. But if for five years,

you could just live the way you did in college and still get the higher salary that you maybe get with that first job out of college, you can avoid a lot of the pain that I went through, like just five years. Absolutely. It really is life-changing to be able to do that. And I've seen so many people who just live how they did it in college, for example, that became financially independent in their early 30

because they maintained that lifestyle. I mean, the track, if you do that, is really, you know, really early retirement if you want to, if you set everything else upright. And then the last one is my favorite one. And it is one where, you know, we always say, we're going to stitch a bunch of these together and have them on a separate episode because I love this question so much. And we get a different answer every time. So what does wealth

mean to you? Well, to me means doing what I want when I want with the freedom to not worry about money, doing what I want when I want without worrying about what it cost. I love this. You know, when I said earlier, Andrew, that I'm a spender. I don't necessarily like spending on super expensive stuff, but I do like it that I have to worry a lot less about when I want to go buy something than I did when I was younger. that is fantastic. And, you know, there's a piece of this too, because I felt like, you know, this is why I hate your questions because I've got like five answers to them. But another thing that I've learned about wealth, and this will be a big piece of my next book, is that the stronger my relationships are with people, the wealthier I am. And I've just found that I feel very

lucky that there are people that I've been able to surround myself with. I've no idea sometimes why they like me, but I feel so wealthy in my life because I get to spend time with cool people, having great discussions, playing board games, just, I don't know. Wealth, I think there's a gratitude thing in there too, right? I am really messing up this question. Absolutely. I'm really messing it up. But there is a gratitude thing. There's a relationship thing. But overall, I feel wealth is doing just what I want, when I want. That's when I know that I'm doing all right. Absolutely. And I think it's one of those big pieces where there's so many different angles to wealth. And there's so many different things that you can kind of think of from, you know, even from your health,

like you said, the relationships that you've built. And then your freedom, it's just amazing what you can do with that. So I think that's fantastic. And it's what all of this is all about. What we're trying to teach people how to do is to find a way to get to that point where they can build wealth as well. And I have to worry so much and reduce that stress, anxiety, all of that other stuff. So, Joe, thank you so much for coming on. This has been absolutely incredible. We were so excited to have you and this has been absolutely amazing. So I can't wait for everybody to hear this. Where can people find out more about stacked, stacking benjamins, all of those things? Dude, thank you so much for the invite and it was so fun. I've been looking forward to this all

week. People don't know this for recording on a Friday. Friday afternoon. I absolutely, what a great way to end my week. But the Stacky Benjamin show is every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, wherever you're listening to us now. We call it, as Andrew already knows, we call it the greatest money show on earth because it truly is a circus. We try to make it a circus. It's a variety show. It's a lot like me where we've got a lot of different segments. We try to mix it up. We do try to give you a lot of good takeaways, but we try to disguise them so that it just seems like you're having a good time, which is our goal. If you can have a good time and come away with a few really big uh-has, then we did our job. So great, great, great fun. Money Wednesday, Friday. Absolutely. And

where is the best place for people to buy the book? Yeah, yeah. Wherever you buy books, but you know what? I love our independent bookstores. And as I went around the country and we got to have some of our events at these independent bookstores and you and I both know, they're going away. You know, let's keep these bookstores alive because what a great place to go in there and just get lost and feel this creativity. So your independent bookstore, but it's available wherever finer books are sold. We'll link up everything down in the show notes below. I encourage everybody to go check out Stacking Benjamin's amazing show. I've been listening to it for years. And then the book stacked. We're going to be recommending that for so long.

It's absolutely amazing. So thank you so much for coming on. We truly appreciate it. Dude, thanks a ton. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time. Let's play. Feel the fun with Play Ojo.

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