Our List of the Biggest “Gotchas” in Popular Financial Investments » The Stacking Benjamins Show

Our Topic: Red flags to look out for in personal finance.

A Fund With a 94.9% Yield? You Guessed It, There’s a Catch (Wall Street Journal)

During our conversation you’ll hear us mention:

• Signs to watch out for when evaluating potential investments.
• Importance of understanding the underlying product you invest in.
• Putting lipstick on a pig and other sleezy marketing tactics.
• Questionable ways markers appeal to your emotions.
• Simpler is usually better (for the investor).
• (Well disguised) Ponzi schemes.
• The cost of leaving money at big banks in their savings accounts and other lazy moves.
• The cost of getting too complex in your finances.
• Overoptimization.
• Action trumps knowledge.
• Analysis paralysis.
• Insurance red flags.
• The mistake of considering insurance as an investment.
• The role of annuities and common mistakes/misrepresentations.
• Going for the “easy wins” vs. getting too complex.
• How to incorporate insurance(s) into your complete financial plan.
• Saving money by shopping for auto insurance.
• Costs of “free” financial plans.
• Distinguishing between sales and advice.
• Importance of having realistic expectations for your investments.
• “Free” or “cheaper” don’t always mean “good.”

Our Contributors

A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.

Roger Whitney

Another thanks to Roger Whitney for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Roger on his show, Retirement Answer Man at Retirement Answer Man on Apple Podcasts.

Learn more about Roger at Rock Retirement Club.

Shannah Game

Another thanks to Shannah Game for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Shannah on her show, Everyone’s Talkin’ Money at Everyone’s Talkin’ Money | Personal Finance Tips To Stress Less and Live More on Apple Podcasts.

Learn more about Shannah at Home – Everyone’s Talkin’ Money – Financial Podcast, Personal Finance, Money Coach (everyonestalkinmoney.com).

OG

For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.

Doug’s Game Show Trivia

• How long is the longest bridge in the world?

DepositAccounts

Thanks to DepositAccounts.com for sponsoring Stacking Benjamins. DepositsAccounts.com is the #1 place to go when you’re looking to see if your rate is the BEST rate on savings, CDs, money markets, and even checking accounts! Check out ALL of the rates ranked from best to worst (and see the national averages) at DepositAccounts.com.

Mentioned in today’s show

Join Us on Monday!

Tune in on Monday when you’ll learn how to get more out of your career and each day with Google’s productivity expert, Laura Martin.

Miss our last show? Check it out here: Are You Ready for a 30-Year Retirement? Plus, Velocity Banking and Shoelace Patents (SB1495).

Written by: Kevin Bailey

Episode transcript

 Hey, shake and bake girl. Woo. Shake Night.

Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.

I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and on today’s show, what are the gotchas in personal finance here to help you avoid them? We welcome the retirement answer, man, CFP, Roger Whitney, and the woman behind the Everyone’s Talking Money podcast, CFP Shana Game. And finally the guy talking about money as the answer man on this podcast.

Oh gee. But do you think we’re only talking gotchas? Of course not. I’ll see which of our three contributors can get closest to the answer of my amazing Friday trivia question. And now a guy who’s got you financial planning right here for the next hour, it’s Joe Saw Sea. Hi.

I don’t know that I can stand behind that statement, Doug, but welcome to Friday on the Stacky Benjamin Show. I am Joe Saul-Sehy. Average show money on Twitter or X, the platform formerly known. As Twitter brought to you on Fridays by State Farm. State Farm agents are small business owners too, so they know how to help you choose personalized policies that fit your needs like a good neighbor.

State Farm is there. Talk to your local agent today. We’re not just gonna talk to our local agent. We’re gonna talk to the people at this round table ’cause Doug, as you so eloquently said, we’ve got a great lineup. Let’s start with a guy across the desk from me. Mr. OG is in the house. How are you, brother?

I am

sporty. I’m very sporty today.

What

is, is, is there a reason you use the word

sporty? I’m just having a day, having a moment. I’m having a day, having an afternoon. Fired up.

How’s that? All of that. It sounds like you’re having a hot flash. Are you okay?

Hey, for the female in the room, those things are very real.

They

are very real. And they hit suddenly my wife tells me. Yes, yes. I will

tell a story about that later if you guys remind me, but that voice you heard, heard Joe’s Flash. Got it. From the Everyone’s Talking Money Podcast, shut to games here. How are you?

I don’t know if I’d call myself sporty today, but I’m here a couple, couple podcast interviews in and so excited to be with you.

Just, she’s already, you know, you got the, you got the other ones out of the way. So the important one at the top of the mountain is,

is here and Ready. I saved the best for last, always

it all warm up till this point. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. And the gentleman behind the Rock Retirement Club, Roger Whitney’s here.

How are you brother? I

am sporty er because I always wanna be better than Josh and this is my warmup ’cause I’m talking to Michael Easter after this, and I think he’s probably much more interesting than you. Geez. Wow. Ooh. Coming in hot. I’m just joking. That’s, I

love you, Joe. We’re sorry Roger can’t stay.

Technical difficulties. It’s like he turns into like that little technical difficulty thing. No. What’s the name of

this guest?

Roger, I’m so, this is the highlight of my month so far. Michael Easter, author of Scarcity Brain and Comfort Crisis is coming on the show, which is a really big get for me because he’s pretty popular.

He’s a New York Times bestseller. Wait, wait a second. Did you just cut me off and play an ad spot?

We didn’t do that. No. That is fascinating. Wall Street Journal. Shauna, who do you got coming up on on Everyone’s talking money?

Uh, we had Matt Shoals. He wrote this awesome book. Ask questions, save money. Make money, all these crazy, crazy scripts and questions to ask people that save you thousands of dollars.

Wait a minute, you did it to me too. No, we,

Shauna, will we do that? I didn’t know that we actually, we would do that. You know why? Because we want everybody to listen. To the Everyone’s Talking Money podcast. Duh. So they can hear the interview.

Absolutely. I mean, if you’re not listening to everyone’s talking money, I, I really, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

Get

on board and The Retirement Answer Man podcast. I mean, that’s, that’s

why Joe has a lot of practice putting his foot in his mouth. So he’s really good at saving things, so I appreciate

that. I’m gonna back it up, back up, back up quick. Somebody cue the music so we can get into the rest of the

show.

The inspiration for today’s piece comes to us from popular columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Jason’s week. Jason always says Just fantastic pieces. We’ll link to this in the show notes, although we’re not gonna spend a lot of time here because I was reading this, I just thought, wow, there’s a lot of these things.

Jason writes a fund with a 94.9% yield. You guessed it. There’s a catch. And I know Shauna, when you read this. You were surprised that a fund with a 94.9% yield has a catch, like those are all over the place.

I mean, I was thinking, why am I not in this fund? Like, where can I sign up? Yeah, of course, of course.

It’s gotta have a gotcha. I mean, this really goes back to the emotions around money, which you know, is kind of my hot button issue and how we all just would probably rather not deal with money altogether. So if there’s some sort of fun that we can get into where we even think this is a possibility, throw out all of our.

You know, everything that we’ve learned about money, we’re gonna, we’re gonna hit the like buy now button and get into this fund and kind of roll it.

We do kind of wanna be taken advantage of. We say we don’t, but we just want the quick fix. Shauna,

of course, I mean, who doesn’t? I really don’t. I mean, you know, Vegas exists, right?

Because of people wanting the quick fix. Right?

Let’s press the easy button, and yet Roger, Jason explains, I. They are not wrong. When they say the 94.9% uh, yield on this fund. Lemme tell our stackers what’s going on. This is a covered call fund. They buy an equity. In one case, they’re buying Tesla stock and then they sell covered calls against it.

Assuming that the stock doesn’t get called away and stackers, that’s for another show, how that whole thing works, it isn’t that difficult, but it would take us about 20, 25 minutes to explain it. But assuming that that doesn’t get called away, you get this massive yield. I. Now that 94% is wrong. Jason explains for one reason and that is that these prices are not consistent.

You truly do not get a 94%. But what these, the gotcha here isn’t just, most people don’t know what the underlying product is. The gotcha here is also that they don’t understand. They don’t understand that this is not consistent income. That this income could change all the time. I mean, Roger, there’s so much technically here going on under the hood that people don’t know about.

And the problem

is we are wired to want these type of things and not understanding what’s actually in them. And, and it’s such an unforced error. And if you think about even like Apple and Amazon one pay. The speed in which we can reallocate our entire portfolio or buy something, maybe spend tens of thousands of dollars to buy this fund.

We could literally do it while chewing our Big Mac and driving. It’s easy to move a lot of money around very simply, and these type of things are attractive to us, and we don’t do a lot of research, so it’s good to slow down that decision making. Most of the time

I got heartburn and road rage. Hearing your answer there.

At the same time, I literally

once spent a ton of money on a online course that had this huge promise, this is years ago, while driving home from the airport after like a 12 hour layover type of flight. And I pulled over and said, what the heck am I doing? I did it while I was driving. It just, it’s so easy to make these kind of decisions and when you, when you see yield or you know something that’s really sexy from a financial perspective, it’s easy just to put lots of money on it, and that’s just bad decision making.

It’s

funny, Oog the, uh, we talk about over and over and over often the, the less complex, the straightforward way we talked about this on Wednesday show that that straightforward way is usually often the best approach. And yet, while street continues to crank out things like this, that have these gotchas that a lot of our stackers might not know or even hiding in the background.

So much of this, I think, is also marketing. You look at the flashy headline, I mean, even Jason’s article’s a flashy headline, right? I mean, he’s marketing his article. There’s however many hundreds of articles in the Wall Street Journal every single day. He’s gotta stand out too. So what does he do? Fund with a 94% yield, parenthetical, there’s probably a catch.

Like is your, your eye is drawn to the 94% or, or, you know, whatever the sexy thing is. And, and this is why fund companies and investment firms have lots and lots and lots of people working in the marketing department. I would wonder even if they have more people working in marketing than in other parts of the business, because that’s really kind of the, uh, the engine for all of the new money.

And you don’t see all the downsides that go with it, whether it’s tax implications, which would be the case for this type of investing. Or just a fund that’s not performing. You know, you look at like a real estate thing or something like that, where they’re just paying out huge yields and then you dig through the fine print and you find out that they’re just.

It’s taking the yields from other people’s cash investments. That’s how they’re funding the

operation. Are we talking about social security here? Are we talking about Social security

Security would be another example? Yes. You don’t read the fine print real estate

backed Social Security, Roger? Yes.

Okay.

Yes. There’s a trust fund, in fact, by the full faith and credit of. The taxing authority of the United States, which

is, uh, it is amazing how you ending read some of these, uh, private REIT and how they’re paying out their dividends. And it is a Ponzi scheme, like it says it right in there. Hey, uh, I know you want a dividend and we haven’t bought all the real estate yet, so we’re giving you other people’s money as they

put money.

I might, yeah. Gotcha. And something upcoming in a few

minutes. Well, and what I wanna do, and this is why I love having the three of you here, is that the jumping off point was I thought, wow, there’s a lot of gotchas out there. This is an obvious one, Shauna, to your point, you’re like, wow, 94% yield. What could go wrong?

Yeah. So that, that one might be an easy flag, but a lot of the ones that are out there, there may be a bunch of our stackers that don’t know what the potential gotchas would be, and sometimes they’re the marketing og to your point. Sometimes it’s the sexiness that we wanna buy into Roger, to your point.

And sometimes it’s, it’s out there in plain sight. So is it the company that is trying to hide something? Is it just, oh, we buy this thing and only think good thoughts and not realize what could go wrong with that? So I wanna start off with savings accounts, money markets, and CDs. And we’re gonna go through a few different types of products and where the gotchas might be.

Shauna, what’s the biggest. Gotcha for a, not, not the biggest, but a gotcha that comes to mind for those types of products or some a mistake people might make using those types of products that they truly need to rethink.

Well, I don’t know if it’s technically a gotcha, but you know, I think the majority of people leave their money in some sort of savings account that’s at one of the big banks.

We all know you’re earning. Basically very little interest over your checking account. And I think most people have really good intentions. It’s called a savings account, so they put their money in that account hoping that it will help them actually save and grow money. And it’s not doing that. It’s not keeping up with inflation.

And I think a lot of people look back at their savings accounts, even over a year period of time and think, wait a minute, I thought my money was actually supposed to grow. Like what’s happening here?

It’s funny that you do that one first because I just saw a piece. Shauna, you’ll love this. I think it was Bank of America.

It could have been. They had similar discussions about Wells Fargo and Citi. So to your 0.3 big banks, but I think it was Bank of America that had their silver. Bronze, silver and gold levels, depending on how big somebody is with them. And if they were a bronze investor, they gave their high yield savings account.

People wait for it 0.01%. Woo.

I mean, that’s, we’re rolling in it. We are

rolling it. Joe. Literally on Monday, I had a meeting with a client that we hadn’t caught up in a little bit, and she had a half a million dollars in that Bank of America account,

in that account. Oh, but wait, Roger, there’s more in that.

It gets better. There’s more. If you are one of their next tier customers, silver, they give you some bonus, Roger, instead of 0.01, you get 0.02.

Double. That’s double a hundred

percent. That’s

even

better. That’s only, that’s if you’re silver. So wait for it. They really bring it for the people who are gold, right?

If you’re gold, you’re the top tier. Unless they have a platinum, I don’t know. Maybe they do and they don’t publish it. Gold people get 0.03.

It, Sean? It’s a total. Gotcha. I mean, we’ve got, you know, I mean deposit accounts.com is a sponsor of our Friday shows, and I think as we record this, and we’ll do the ad later and I’ll pull it up, but a good paying high yield savings got now is just under half a percent.

Yeah, it makes such a difference.

And you know, I have people argue with me all the time of, well what? What does it matter if I have my money in a savings account that’s 0.01% or something that is 4%? And I always tell people, if you walk down the road and there was a $20 bill and nobody else was claiming it on the side of the road, would you pick it up or would you leave it?

Of course you would pick it up. Same

principle. It’s sitting there. It’s just sitting there waiting

for you. Inertia is so powerful though. Inertia. Yep. Well, and that’s what

they’re betting on, og. You’re not gonna do it. Right. You’re not gonna make the change. Don’t care. They don’t care. Like, yeah. I’ll go do something else.

Roger. What’s another Gotcha. If we’re saving into savings account on CDs.

Well, I was, and, and Shauna, I was explaining that exact thing to this client with a half a million dollars in that, uh, amazing money market or savings account. It’s free money, so you’re exactly right. I, I’m gonna go the other extreme, which is going to too many banks to try to play the game of getting the highest rate and then moving to another, or having multiple accounts with multiple balances to try to game it too much.

I mean, some people just have the natural inclination to want to do that, but the unspoken gotcha is complexity and managing systems. You know, when you try to optimize, say your money management, the cost of that is you make things much more complex to manage and it also makes it much more brittle where you have to keep track of more things and we only have so much time and there are a lot higher uses than overcomplicating it.

And I think that’s a big Gotcha. On the other

extreme. Yeah, I think on one end, Shauna, a free 20, free 50, free hundred free thousand dollars. Hey. But on the other end, when we get this complexity, Roger, it’s, it’s what’s my time really worth? And could I spend it on, as an example, getting my investments diversified correctly?

My real investments diversified correctly. Yeah.

And I had that instance actually earlier where someone had a money market, I think it was at Capital One. Uh, and they were getting a good rate. We were able to find better rates, even doing treasury direct if they wanted to, but the friction was so high. No, they’re being good enough steward.

They don’t have to go to the next level. Yeah. Well,

and you see people have three or four, and then you’re, you, you don’t know. You know, I, I remember earlier on in my life when I had some of that complexity and. Seven years later, I discovered that I had these two funds that had $3,500 in them that I had totally forgotten that I even had.

Luckily I found them again. It was stupid that I had those out there. Oh gee. What’s another one with savings accounts, money markets, CDs. One

that I saw a couple of weeks ago, which really kind of blew my mind, was a company who was advertising the best rate, right? Whatever their top tier rate is. Was 3% and then it moved to 3.5%, and then it moved to 4%.

You know, as the rates were rising, they were advertising, Hey, we’re always the leader in the clubhouse. But what they were doing was creating new products for each one of those new tiers. So if you signed up, oh, you know, like two years ago and you were getting the top one, you had the secure check, you know, the secure plus savings, and you were getting the top of the line, 3% rate.

Then when the rates changed to 3.5%, they launched unbeknownst to their 3% customers, a new one called the secure double plus savings or whatever. And so all the new money went into that, and then when it went to 4%, they got the extra preferred savings they launched, and they just changed the wording just a little bit each time.

And what people were finding out was that they had this savings account that they got at 3% that was still stuck at three when everything else was at five because they. I didn’t read the. You know, rules and restrictions. And to Roger’s point, you know, trying to optimize that final like point whatever percent, instead of going, let me just find the solution that gets me 90% of the way there, that makes my life simple.

That’s not full of complexity. And so you ended up thinking that you were doing the right thing, but. In fact getting hosed on the backend, that’s gone out now publicly. So I think this company is, uh, this bank is kind of taking it on the chin now, but for all the money that they didn’t pay out an interest, you know, I’m sure they’re like, oh, whatever.

You know, so some people are mad at us, so be it. Well, the

bad publicity once every, once people figure it out, I think isn’t worth it. Like I don’t, well, it’s

very shortsighted for sure. Just kind of wonder, and that goes back to the marketing component of all of this stuff as well. 80% is good enough to Roger’s point.

You don’t have to totally try to be exactly all the time. The number one thing I remember we sent out a, a, a letter to our clients in October last year where we had, um, I don’t remember what the number was, maybe a 5% savings rate. And the number of emails I got back that said, well, if you looked harder, you’d find 5.1.

It’s like, right, but your money’s sitting in 0.1. So, right. You know, just a combo of both of what you guys were talking about. It’s like your money’s sitting at 0.1. I offered you five and you’re arguing with me that I didn’t get offer you 5.1. Like, what the heck? You know, take the five. Make life simple.

So read the fine print and keep life simple. It makes

me think of something I call the happiness zone, right? So really figuring out, I think what we’re all saying is like, what is that middle ground that you’re happy with that isn’t complex, that doesn’t cause friction, but brings you. The rate, the happiness, whatever it might be that makes you feel really good about your money and finding that spot that’s unique to you.

And then just, you know, closing your eyes to if there’s a better rate or whatever it might be.

This is why I love having you here, Sean, every time, is that you always find like the, the happy spot, the positive the glass is half full. Because you and I heard OG story and you came up with that and I came up with the cynical half, which is I am so tired of broke professors, people that know fricking everything and do nothing.

And I just see ’em over and over and over and I’m like, really? What are you doing with that? Oh, well, you know, there’s, and then they start to backpedal. It isn’t about what you know, it’s about what you do. So I’m always amazed She def, she

definitely is a ray of sunshine. She

totally is. Especially ’cause I was about to run in a very

dark room with the two of you.

I was gonna say Ray of Sunshine was my nickname in college. What are talking about? I’m sure. Yeah.

Yes, yes.

Alright. Pinocchio. Good one. Mine was gonna be not a gotcha. That was um, from the banks themselves, but a gotcha. Kind of Roger to what you were talking about. I see people with too much money. That sits in the savings account turning nothing.

And it’s either because of fear or it’s because they feel safe. It gives them comfort. And I think when you feel this comfort because your money’s sitting in a guaranteed spot, you’re making things harder on yourself, and future you’s not gonna be happy because you really need to beat inflation and you’re very safely gonna beat nothing by leaving too much money there.

So I think a gotcha is, you know, not even just the, the interest rate, which can be big, it’s it. You gotta get your money moving. Um, and think about the other types of risk. Speaking of risk, let’s move on to insurance products. ’cause God knows there’s no gotcha insurance products. We started with Shauna last time, so let’s start with Roger this time.

Roger In insurance, what’s, uh, the thing where people groan later and go, oh, if I’d only known,

oh, if I’ve only known that insurance is not an investment. Oh, come on. Being the vintage of planner, I am with whatever, 25, 30 years. I’ve sat through so many presentations on insurance as well as other things. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an illustration work out the way or even close to the way that it was presented in when it becomes insurance as an investment vehicle.

I, I liken when we think about investments, and I think this is the big gotcha. I like in investments to food, eat food, you want to be organic. And insurance, especially nowadays for sure is the twine of investments. It is a total manufactured process. We think we know what’s in it and we think we know what it’s gonna do for us, but we really won’t know.

So keep. Everything in its box. Insurance has a important use, but when you start to try to use it as an investment vehicle, it gets to be more like a twine where there are lots of words that you don’t quite understand and that’s dangerous.

Yeah, don’t look at the ingredients.

I’m

suddenly very hungry.

We’re talking about burgers and Twinkies, and I feel like I need a

snack. Well, Shada, you were nodding during that, so I’m assuming you agree with Roger there.

I do agree. I mean, I, I cut my teeth, uh, many, many years ago with, uh, my father and his insurance, uh, agency, and so I’ve seen. Every scenario that you’re talking about.

Lots of very unhappy people coming to you with illustrations from years ago that they thought they would be a specific way and they are not turning out that way. So yeah, absolutely.

There’s a gotcha right there, guys. Why when you have an insurance product, are you allowed to use forward looking statements where you show a quote illustration of how it will work, and it’s a variable product.

If it’s a universal life policy, it has a variable interest rate and it’s a variable universal life. You’ve got these mutual fund like things in it. So why does the SEC allow a forward-looking statement in a life insurance illustration? But they don’t allow it with a mutual fund. I

think they do require you to show like the guaranteed rate too.

So you can’t just show the forward looking, but they do allow you to use the forward-looking. And this isn’t a bash against insurance per se. It’s the same thing in the investment world. We’re just happen to be talking about insurance right now. But I think they do require you to have a. Balance, but nobody wants to look at that.

They wanna look at the, the dream and the people that are marketing it or presenting it are selling the dream. So that’s just, no, don’t look at that over there. Look at this.

You know what’s funny is that, um, I’ll fight with you a little bit here, Roger. Just, just

I tried that last year. I lost, just so you know.

Ask Kyle, our friend Kyle about that. Yes. I

lost, I was embraced when it comes to permanent life insurance. And having investments inside of it. I actually think it can work. And now let me backpedal off of that. I think it truly can. I think that if you use the product very, very correctly and you understand how the product works and the product is built for it, and those products exist.

You can actually make this thing hum. My problem with with it, and why I agree with you, Roger, is because for 99.9% of people out there, it’s so damn complicated to get it work exactly the way that it should. So it does run well. Like a guy, like a David McKnight would use it as an example. I feel like if David McKnight, who’s a big life insurance advocate, if David McKnight were my advisor, I would need to call him every fifth day just to make sure that I’m still, you know, right on that modified endowment contract line and, and I just lost 99% of my audience.

But that’s where you gotta be. To make this thing work. Do you, do you disagree with that, Roger? Am I splitting hairs? No,

actually I have a UI actually, I, I agree with you and it’s a matter of degrees. I’ll give you an an actual example with a client a years ago, and I don’t have my insurance licenses, so I wasn’t the one that sold it, but I worked through the strategy was we wanted to buy guaranteed payments that were gonna start, let’s say in 10 years.

To turn on a pension ’cause they wanted a safety first approach to retirement. And well, you can do that with organic, right? You can divide a, you can buy a deferred income annuity and just do the math and they’ll tell you exactly what you’re gonna get at that future tenure date. And so we walked through getting that illustration, but what the client ended up going with was an indexed annuity, which is like totally twinky.

There’s so much going on in there, but the indexed annuity offered as a base income that was guaranteed to turn on in the same amount of time was much higher than the organic, and they were able to offer that teaser. And actually that’s a way of, uh, of looking at this because it’s a twine, they can offer that teaser ’cause they know nobody’s actually buying it for that.

They’re buying the dream. So in this case, we bought a twine that gave us the organic that we want and we just ignored all the other stuff that was going on in the policy. So I, I agree with you. It’s a matter of degrees of what exactly are you using it for. ’cause there are advantages to using some more manufactured things.

Did he just say, I went for organic. I bought organic with a twine, and I ignored the twine, and I understood the analogy. Is that what that just happened? I can’t believe I understood any

of that. Whitney. That’s 10 years of podcasting, buddy. That’s 10 years of podcasting.

Incredible. All right. Oh gee, you’re up.

Insurance products. This is like fish in a barrel, man. There’s, there’s so many gotchas here. I’m thinking

about it from a planning perspective of the things that we actually need to spend our time and energy thinking about versus the stuff that we do spend our time and energy thinking about, like for example, disability insurance.

Nobody wants to buy or pay for disability insurance because it’s. A lot of money and or long-term care coverage, right? If you’re 50 or 60 or 70 and you’re thinking about how am I going to afford some level of assisted care, whether it’s in my own home or at a private facility, and what’s that look like?

Because it’s a lot of money, but all insurance is priced the same. It’s based on the likelihood of that thing happening and the cost of the thing happening, if it does. So we look at it purely from a cost standpoint. Meanwhile, we completely overlook the opportunity to to save boatloads of cash on the easy things that are in our laps.

Like we all have $500 deductibles on our car when we should probably have $2,500 deductibles on our car because that would drive that premium in the in the ground. Thus freeing up the capital necessary to, to actually cover the things that matter, like our lifetime income, uh, producing ability through disability insurance, or this gigantic cost of assisted care, potentially later in life.

Same thing with homeowners insurance and that sort of thing. We have, we hold onto these like really teeny tiny deductibles or these really teeny tiny things, or we spend money on frivolous policies like accidental death or a jewelry endorsement. How many people have jewelry endorsements on their, on their homeowners insurance and then have never actually read the contract that says, in order for this to be in place, you have to go get all of your stuff appraised and send us a copy of the appraisals.

No one does that. They go, I’ve got a jewelry endorsement. It’s like, well, no you don’t until you’re covered for 2000 bucks like every other policy until you go spend the money to go get the, you know, the stuff. So like we look at the easy thing without trying to. Solve for the actual need, which is insurance is like Roger said, an important component of a financial plan.

But, but we just go, eh, I’ll just get the $500 deductible through Geico. It’ll be fine. And, and, oh, disability insurance. Long-term care. Nah, that’s too expensive. That’s, that’s 3000 bucks a year. I don’t wanna do that. Like, well, that’s the thing.

Probably gonna mute this goes to Marketing Point that OG talked about is we have all these levers from a financial planning, I think of like this dashboard with all these levers.

There’s a lot of levers that are really cool looking. They have, like, they’re bedazzled, they have sprinkles on them. It’s like your jeans, but they’re, but they’re, yes, it is, but they’re very small. They’re not on a very big fulcrum, and they don’t make a difference in our life. But they’re so cool to look at that.

We wanna play with those and we ignore these big, dull levers that can really have an impact to the plan, because they’re just not cool. I think, uh, Josh makes an excellent point.

Well, and there’s, and, and not only are the not cool, it also is, I think it’s a way you need to change your thinking, which is that if it’s a super expensive insurance policy, that doesn’t mean you need to buy the insurance policy.

But that means actuaries who do this for a living know that this thing is a problem. So I’m not saying buy the long-term care policy, just run out and buy it. I’m saying long-term care is a problem and you need a plan. And that might. That might mean long-term care insurance, but it certainly means we need to look at it.

And I think Roger, we’re afraid disability’s the same thing, right? Disability insurance on your own is expensive. I know when I was a financial planner, like I’d bring up, Hey, it looks like you’re short on disability. And they’re like, I’d rather talk about anything but that. Yes. Anything other

than that, please, yeah.

Tell me an annuity for God’s sake,

like the broker down the street an just gimme an index annuity

and call today.

Yeah. Until they need that. Until they need the disability insurance and then they’re calling you up and asking you, why didn’t you talk to me about disability insurance? I tried many times.

I

had a family member, Shauna, and this is horrible, but I had a family member the day after they were diagnosed, said, can we reconsider that long-term care coverage?

You had talked to me about. I said no, because now that you’re diagnosed it’s game over there. Uh, let’s, let’s move on from that though. That’s, that was an ugly one. That was a dark moment. I know, right? I’m, I’m bringing dark

moments. I can bring the happiness. I gotta bring the happiness.

That’s right. Shauna, what’s another Gotcha.

Maybe a happy. Gotcha.

Well, you know, I was thinking about car insurance and I dunno if this is so much of a gotcha, but I had someone on the show, uh, about a year and a half ago, and they worked at that company, the zebra.com, and they talked about the fact that most people think that when they get the car insurance, they just.

Stick with the same carrier and that they’re always getting the best rates. And she talked about you need to be shopping your car insurance at least two times a year. And a lot of companies, even if you get in an accident or something like that, they, they will talk to you in a way that makes you feel like you’re stuck.

There’s nowhere for you to go, but that you have lots of options. And most people end up saving a ton of money just by shopping around. So. I think that’s really interesting. I actually had never considered doing that and have done it since and saved quite a bit of

money. I had an Allstate agent, actually a traditional Allstate agent, Sean, and tell me the same thing, and he actually said it’s because different companies, and I don’t know what she said.

I’d be interested to hear why twice a year. I, I’d never heard that often, but he said that when you have a birthday. That, um, you might be outside of the band then of who they really market to. So while from 35 to 45 you were in their wheelhouse, you turned 46, nothing else changed. They’re not as interested in you, you’re not the type of person they work with anymore, so you’re outside their field of expertise.

And that kind of blew me away. It’s not that Allstate or Zebra or whoever is a good or bad company, it’s, you’re just not their target anymore.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think we don’t think about that. That’s one of those things we just kind of set and forget it and we figure we got car insurance. We don’t need to like, you know, OG was saying we don’t need to deal with the deductible.

We don’t need to look at it twice. It’s there and it’s something to at least consider, I think.

Well, and on that note, talking about, uh, property casualty type insurance, when our house was broken into, you know, a gotcha that I didn’t realize, and you guys kind of brought this up earlier, insurance is a contract and you should read it OG when you’re talking about jewelry endorsement.

There’s one read your contract, and frankly, most of them are far less onerous than you think they are. A lot of them are written in a question answer method, and it makes it fairly easy. What I didn’t realize when our House got broken into was that. My insurance company was very happy to reimburse me for things in my house, but to give me an accurate number, I needed serial numbers for my electronics.

I know, I, I just saw Roger for people listening on the podcast, just his eyes got big. ’cause I’ve been doing this forever. I had no idea. But the, for two reasons. Number one, they can go back and they can look at the model and we can buy the new model. If you got replacement value coverage, then we can guarantee we get the same thing.

But then the second, by the way, they were very happy to do it. The second thing was, was also for recovery with the police. Most of these thieves are gonna turn your stuff into a pawn shop. They give pawn shops a list of the, the items, and it’s, it, it’s then, uh, recoverable. So, uh, lots more. In the second half I want to talk about investing in the financial markets and in retirement accounts, but between now and then, guys, I.

If you’re new to the Stacky Benjamin Show, you may not know that we have this year long competition between our three frequent contributors, Mr. og, and then, uh, Len Penso from len penso.com and Paula Pant from Afford Anything. We’ll just keep the genders the same to make it easy guys. So Shauna, you’ll be playing on behalf of Team Paula Pant and Roger, you’ll be Team Lezo, and that means Roger, uh, you’ve got some good news and some bad news.

Which one would you like first?

Oh, I’m sorry. I had a choice. I was thinking the I, I’ve played for Len before and I think I’ve really. Screwed his chances once before. So I feel some pressure. I want the bad. I want the bad.

Yeah. The bad news is Len is leading. Len was two time champion before OG was two time champion, and Len has four, OG has three, and Paula has two.

And people listening to this, they’re like, why is it bad? That len’s leading, not the pressure thing, Roger. It means you’re gonna have to guess first. Shauna, which is good news for you because Paula pant is always in last place. Maybe the smartest. The smartest panelist we have, but horrible at trivia. She has, uh, two points, so you get to guess after these two yahoos to get us there.

Doug, uh, you’ve got some work to do. First my friend.

Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor Doug, and I am loving today’s gotcha episode. In fact, I thought it might be a huge gotcha when this guy standing outside the Albertsons over on State Line Road told me he had a bridge to sell me. Well, I’ve heard that story before. So I said, oh yeah, what bridge?

And he told me it was the longest bridge in the world, just outside Lisbon. Portugal. Turns out this thing’s a hundred percent legit. There is the longest bridge in the world and it’s right outside Lisbon. So, you know, I’m considering it. But here’s the question. How long is the bridge? And I gotta do the math and figure out if it’s like a good price per foot or something.

However you measure, measure bridges. I’ll be back right after I verify I’ve got the funds in my account to buy this thing. I mean, what a deal.

Uh, that may not be Doug the deal that you think that that is Roger, you’re guessing first now it’s gonna be, he said in miles, but, but I, I do know the answer to this.

It is miles with a point. So we’ll go one decimal point. So it’s gonna be X point, whatever.

I really wish Len had a bigger lead,

100.5 miles.

The longest bridge is 100.5 miles og.

I think that the longest bridge over, or at least for a while, uh, longest type of bridge was the Mackinac Bridge. There’s something about that bridge that makes it the, you know, some classification. It’s a certain type of. Style that they built it in and that bridge is five miles and some change.

So a hundred seems like a really long, gigantic bridge. This isn’t like

arai, right? Is it? If I’m over, I’m out.

Very ridiculously aggressive thing. How long is the channel, by the way? Does anybody know that? Like 60 miles or something? From the UK to France? Oh, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like if, you know, it’s, it’s shorter than a hundred, I feel like, um, so I think this number is much shorter than a hundred and a half miles.

I’m gonna

say, wait a minute. I feel like you fought Roger before, and you said Roger won, and I feel like you’re still getting back at him now. Like there’s, there’s some

digs in there. It’s impossible to, to No, no, no, no, no.

Not at all. He beats me in intellectual competitions.

Yes. Arm wrestling.

Is this his, is this intellectual?

I don’t think everybody, anybody’s ever called our halftime trivia segment in intellectual competition, Roger, but thank you. Roger

did beat me in a mean battle of oil wrestling, which was to the death. But, um,

I still have oil in my ear. Anyway,

go ahead. Yes, I’m gonna say that this number is substantially less, and I will say it is, uh, the, the, the, the lucky number, 13.7

miles.

13.7 miles is og. So Shauna, you got a big delta between those two a hundred miles. Wow. And 13.7.

I’m just gonna pick a number somewhere. I’m gonna go closer to og. I’m thinking 22.6 feels good

to me.

22.6

miles. She just boxed you out. OG Long. Well, maybe I’m thinking of Louisiana. They got some long bridges, so there’s some long bridges out there.

I

need to study up on my bridge length. Obviously we’ve got

a hundred miles, 13.7 and 22.6. We’ll be, we’ll be right back. Roger, you began this, uh, competition at a hundred miles. How you feeling, my friend? That’s why

I’m the retirement answer man. I’m

not the bridge answer, man. And then, uh, OG you went 13.7.

Uh, I’m feeling pretty good at 13, but I

don’t know. And then Shauna, you took closer to og, not nearly as far as Roger. 22.6. Feeling good.

No, I’m not. If I’m gonna be honest, I’m

not. But she’s still happy, isn’t she Still a race?

Doesn. She even though she, she says it while she’s laughing. Well, Doug, you’ve got the answer.

Who’s gonna get this one?

Hey there, stackers on Future Real estate Mogul and Guy who nearly stepped in it. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug man. Did I almost get duped? Well, it’s true. There is a longest bridge, and yes, it’s also in Portugal. Turns out this dude doesn’t even own it. Good news, though. He does own part of the Everglades, so I’m gonna be the proud owner of part of that dream soon.

But for now, your trivia answer, what is the length of the longest bridge in the world named after famous Portuguese Explorer, Vasco de Gamma. The vasco de gamma bridge is a whopping 92.4 miles shorter than what Roger guessed. 15 miles shorter than what Shauna guessed, and just 6.1 miles shorter than what Captain Grumpy pants guessed.

Yes. If you’re really good at math, you already know that the vasco de gamma bridge is 7.6 miles long, and we thought Joe’s stories were long. More importantly, that means OG is our winner.

Oh boy. Roger.

Yeah. Oh boy. Sorry, Len. Len, send me a note. I’ll, I’ll send you a gift of some sort.

I wanna go over the a hundred mile bridge though.

I do

too. When? If you had to go to the bathroom. Yeah. I didn’t even think about logistics here.

That’s right. Is there a Whataburger like at every 25 mile mark onto the second half of this show? The second half of our Friday stack of Benjamin shows brought to you by, as I mentioned earlier, deposit accounts.com.

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On a rate, as I mentioned earlier, 0.52%, half a percent, if you’re in the top, 1% of all of them, 4.99%. So if you’re in one of the top, that’d be the top. Uh, 2,700 savings accounts, 4.99. That’s up slightly, and it’s gonna be different when you go there because that’s the number as we record on a cd. Rate a one year cd, the national average, 4.04, a little better.

The top 1% average 5.57. You’ll find out that and where those rates are at, deposit accounts.com where you can compare, ditch, switch and save. There’s some money there. Chaing. Speaking of money, let’s get back into the gotchas guys. Let’s talk about investing in the financial markets. Uh, uh, Shauna, back to you.

What’s a gotcha if you’re investing in any of the. Products out there where you can get involved in the stock market?

Well, this isn’t directly correlated to that, but this is something that kind of comes to mind. Uh, I know that I’ve had a lot of listeners, uh, send this in question into me and, and wonder about this.

There are a lot of financial advisors that will tote, you know, get a free financial plan. You know, that sounds really great. And a lot of people will be like, wow. I mean, that’s. Gonna save me, you know, a thousand, 2000 bucks. And then they get the quote, unquote free financial plan, and then all of a sudden they’re signing up for their, their assets to be moved over and they’re paying an advisor fee and whatever it might be.

And a lot of people have, have sent me questions saying like, I mean, can they actually say that they’re giving me a free financial plan when in actuality it’s not a free financial plan,

a free financial plan with some marketing attached.

There’s always marketing, there’s always a little bit of red tape attached.

I have a question there, which is, can somebody be a fiduciary and do a free financial plan?

That’s a good question.

I don’t know. I think literally you could be, but I think that, uh, you should have a blinking red light if you’re going that way. ’cause I feel like there’s gonna be some. There’s gonna be some heavy duty marketing coming.

I don’t know. The free financial plan thing got me, Shauna, when I was an advisor. I remember these people, nice people, and they said, oh no, I’m going to this, uh, multilevel marketing place, Primerica, where they will do my financial plan for free. And I said, you know, you’re going to end up buying their loads loaded.

Products, you’re also gonna be, ’cause it’s an Amway type multilevel marketing thing, they’re also gonna ask you to start selling the stuff. They’re like, oh no, no, no. This person’s really nice. They’re really nice. I’m like being nice at working. That’s the answer. Always being nice at working for free. Like I don’t think I, I don’t know where the correlation is, but I would always

say, is your friend completely financially independent?

And they would go, what do you mean? Like, is he, you know, did they win the lottery? Why would this person be working completely for free at this point? Like, there’s gotta be. Some sort of catch. It’s like Facebook. If you can’t figure out how you’re paying, you are the product. You know?

So true. Roger, what’s another Gotcha.

If you’re investing in the financial markets, the

obvious one is that there are amazing active management strategies that if you pay enough, you’re gonna have some secret insight. I think that one has been. Talked about ad nauseum, but I’ll, I’ll go along the lines of what Shauna was talking about of when you’re looking for financial guidance.

Everything on the internet is a sales funnel. Everything, every article written, every thing posted, whether it’s by a professional or in the business, or a blogger, ultimately is a sales funnel, and which means you’re not. It’s very difficult to get. Quality information without that sales pitch coming in some way.

And that’s a gotcha. That you just need to be aware of so you can filter information because how you present, even education is gonna be influenced by the incentives. Charlie Munger always said, always follow the incentives. And I think that’s a gotcha that we, we think people always have our best interest in heart and a lot of us do, right?

We all have podcasts and we have ads and we, but. Just realize the nature of how you’re getting information and the incentives behind it can help you be a better consumer. One

of my favorite games, Roger, to that end, is watching CNBC or Fox Business and whoever the guest is, you know, so and so is a growth stock manager.

Uh, they’re gonna come up with their feelings about growth stocks right now, even though, let’s say that, you know, it’s not, now, it’s 2022 and uh, times are a little shaky. We’re gonna talk to them. If it’s 2022, they’re in growth stocks. We’re poised for a turnaround. Jim, it’s a great time to be in growth stocks.

I think growth stocks are amazing, and here’s some names that I would look at. Whenever you see the carrot of what they do, you’re gonna find that, um, that it’s just a marketing pitch. We all talk. Our

book would be the trader Speak, right? Whatever we’re into, we’re gonna always, if it’s bad times, it’s about to turn around.

If it’s good times, it’s gonna keep going. You don’t never have to wonder what they’re gonna

say. og. How about a third one? You’re investing in the financial markets.

I think the biggest one is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You guys were talking about that from a, you know, an advice component.

I think it’s also true just purely from a product standpoint. I. There are all these different layers of people that earn their living, doing whatever it is that they’re doing associated with, you know, this piece of financial information, knowledge, product, whatever. It’s, and that’s totally fine, right?

People earn good money and they support their families and their communities and all these things. Need all of that to be available to the general public. But if you don’t recognize that, that’s part of it and you go, well, this, this person’s gonna do this for free, or This product doesn’t have any cost, or like the article that we started with, this thing has this amazing a hundred percent yield.

It’s like, well, there’s always some sort of other end of the stick of what is, you know, why is this the case? I think this is mostly manifested in conservative type things versus quote unquote aggressive things where people are trying to find the product that has all of the return, but none of the risk.

And you were talking about things that are on CNBC and and Fox Joe or whatever, and all of the product manufacturers all say the same thing. Ours returns a better adjusted return than this other thing. It’s like it’s not possible to do that. The economy is too efficient to have the one thing, and this could also be whether it’s a fund manager or something like, Bob’s always great.

It’s like, well, no he is not. If he was so great, he would manage all the money. Warren Buffet people would say he was one of the best investors of all time. He doesn’t manage Roger’s money. Mine or Joe’s or, you know, if, if he was the best, like everyone would have all of their money with Warren Buffet.

It’s like, there’s Warren, I

can’t talk right now. Josh is talking. Call him w I’ll put my phone down. I’m sorry. You call

him w My point is, is that there’s always something behind it, you know, and that doesn’t mean that, you know, my favorite debate is the active passive thing. I love it when people are like, active management doesn’t work.

It’s like, yes, it does. It just costs a lot to make work, and there’s no proof in advance that it will work. So you’re guessing. It doesn’t mean it’s not gonna work, it just means that it’s really expensive to try. That doesn’t mean it’s not right for you. It probably isn’t. You know, and so we just use these, this terminology and we use this stuff to try to get out of having to make good, educated decisions.

Roger said, being a good consumer, which is a probably better way to say all this, but. Anyways, no such thing as a free lunch. Know what you’re getting into. If somebody’s promising you the stars and it just sounds too good to be true. It probably is. There’s, there’s gotta be some other

end of that. Well said.

That

was one of my favorite lessons, by the way, growing up. I used to think that Free and good meant the same thing I. Free can be great, it can be fun, it can be awesome. But free and good are two different words for a reason. They’re not synonymous with each other.

And sometimes free is actually means

included.

Oh, good point. Or wrapped in, right?

Yeah, wrapped in, yeah. It’s included in, it’s like, this comes with free breakfast. It’s like, well, it’s not free. It’s. Part of the price.

Yeah, part of it. They can also say cheaper and good are different words too. That’s a good point

too. That’s true. Yeah. That’s cheaper.

Cheaper is cheaper.

Yeah. There’s cheaper and less expensive. Those are two different things.

I also love the part of that OG, that every strategy has an Achilles heel. Your job is to find it. If there is no Achilles heel, you have to figure out what it is. ’cause I’ve, I’ve never, I’ve never seen it. And once you’re okay with that Achilles heel, then move forward.

I would always get frustrated when, when somebody would find the Achilles heel in the strategy that meant they didn’t move forward. I’m like, well, you’re never gonna move. ’cause every single strategy has one. You. You just gotta know what it is and figure out. It’s actually more

concerning when you can’t find it.

I think so too, because it’s. Still there and the fact that you can’t identify it. I, you know, I’ve had instances of that where it was a no go because I know there’s risk in this, but I can’t figure out what it is, so I, I can’t even step to the table.

It is, it is so frustrating. Well, I love this, guys. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our stackers on these gotchas.

And there’s so many more. I mean, we just, we just barely, barely started, uh, gotchas. So, uh, you’ll be back tomorrow for another bonus episode now. Let’s find out what’s going on, where all of you guys live, and we’ll have our special guests go Last, uh, og,

uh, it’s uh, Easter weekend, so some family time, got a little, uh, after school activity, travel today over to the great state of Alabama, then back to the great state of Arkansas, and then back to the great state of Texas over the next couple three days.

So, bouncing around a little bit, uh. Over the holiday

weekend. Well, it sounds like travel is on your, your, uh, agenda.

Indeed. A little bit of travel, a little bit of family time. A little bit of both.

Shauna, thanks for hanging out with us again. It’s so great to see you. What’s coming up on Everyone’s talking money.

Oh my gosh. You know, we have three episodes a week, just like I think you’ve got over here on your neck of woods. So there is always. Someone good to listen to. We talk about, gosh, every different topic around money. So we’ve got somebody great coming up who’s talking about travel rewards and how she saved $75,000 over the last couple of years on Family of Four Travel and Free.

So that’ll definitely be an episode you wanna check out.

Wow. I love those episodes. I’m so into the hacking and then I hear people like that and for some reason talk about inertia. I’m like, yeah, I might start that later on. In fact, Roger Whitney, you and I were at Camp Phi together. We were guest at, uh, camp Phi last year, and I went to the session on travel rewards.

Were you in that session? I don’t know

if

I was, but, uh, how was it?

Well, they were walking through it. It was really good. I learned that. Did you get

tired listening to strategies?

No, actually they were really good. What I did learn is I’m in the crappiest points programs of all the fact that the fact that I’m doing the points and I’m taking advantage of the points and I work the points is great.

I mean, in one of them, like when it came to airline points, everybody talks about like the Southwest Companion Pass and stuff like that. We don’t have Southwest here. You know, in Texarkana I’ve got one choice and it’s the crappiest. Point program of all, which is American Airlines. So for me, stock,

which is mine, that’s the only one I have.

Yeah.

We’re, we’re together. Well, yeah, but you, you do have Southwest. You could do Southwest if you wanted to. ’cause you’re, I’d

have to go to Dallas and I don’t like to go to Dallas. But don’t

you gotta go to Dallas anyway to go to df. It’s

semantics,

I guess. Yeah, it’s semantics. Yeah, it’s semantics. I just choose that in Marriott and I don’t even, that’s as much optimization as I have.

Well, that’s,

and Marriott, I learned is the crappiest program when it comes to point rewards for hotels. Like that is not the thing. The winner. The winner apparently is Hyatt. I don’t know if Shauna, your expert agrees, but the winner’s Hyatt. The problem is Hyatt often doesn’t have places in the place where you’re at, but if you wanna score free nights quicker, go with Hi Hyatt.

If you wanna sponsor the show, just write me joe eck.com. Roger, what’s going on with the retirement answer, man? Dude.

Well, I think the week after Easter, we have Michael Kitsis on the show to talk about the difference between. Financial planning and retirement planning, which I think is extremely important, is a generalist, financial planner is not a retirement planner.

Oh. And I’m more convicted about that. So we’re gonna explore that. And then, uh, we have retirement plan live coming up where we take a, a listener and do a case study, uh, I think towards the end of the month. So. Just hanging out after 10 years. We just had our 10 year anniversary for the show, which I’m really stoked about.

But to you guys that’s like long ago. So we’re

like, go. How cute, Roger. That’s so great. Yeah. Oh, so cute. 10. That that. That is great. Shauna, your show’s been around a long time too.

Yeah, nine and a half years. Yeah. Somewhere in the neck of

the woods here. I think that makes us all in the eyes of most people.

OGs in this area. Speaking of OGs, thank you to og. Thank you to Shauna. Thank you to Roger and Doug. You got it from here, man. What, uh, what are our takeaways from today’s episode? So,

what’s stacked up on our to-do list for today? First, take some advice from our panel if your plan seems perfect. Think what am I missing?

Because every plan has an Achilles heel. Second, take more advice from these guys. Cash. Too much safety can be too much of a good thing. Insurance too safe again, can be too much. You have to use assets that beat inflation to get ahead or do the impossible, which is saving dollar for dollar for your long-term goals.

That’s too hard, but the big lesson, it turns out this dude doesn’t own the Everglades either. Next thing you know, he’s gonna have some swamp land in Florida. He’s offering me. Oh wait, well wait. I guess I dodged that bullet too. Thanks to Roger Whitney for joining us today. You can find all things about [email protected].

We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Thanks to Shauna Game for joining us today. You can find all things about Shauna at everyone’s talking money.com. And finally, thanks also to OG for joining us today. Looking for good financial planning. Help head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG for his calendar.

The show is the Property of SP podcasts, LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Our producer is Karen Repine. This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast with help from me. Joe, Kate Youngen, Karen, Repine and G from the Earn and Invest podcast. Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.

You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Wonder how beautiful we all are. Of course you do, but you’ll never know if you don’t. Check out our YouTube version of the show. Engineered by Tina Eichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast.

Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now. Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude Stacey Doe and Julia Garib are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement.

So say hello when you see us posting online to join all the basement fun with other stackers, type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement. For more interactive fun, join us on Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday for our Instagram lives. Kate Yakin and Joe Host those weekly. Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.

This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.

Wait, where are

you going? I was gonna make espresso.