0:06  

Stephanie McCullough: Welcome to Take Back Retirement, the show for women 50 and better, facing a financial future on their own. I’m Stephanie McCullough, and along with my fellow financial planner, Kevin Gaines, we’re going to tackle the myths and mysteries of “Retirement,” so you can make wise decisions toward a sustainable financial future. Through conversations and interviews, you’ll get the information and motivation you need, to move forward with confidence. And we’ll be sure to have some fun along the way. We’re so glad you’re here. Let’s dive in.

In 1985, when I was a senior in high school, I was the editor in chief of our yearbook. And my friends and I on the yearbook staff decided that we didn’t want to go the usual, sappy, sentimental yearbook route. Instead, we wanted to go funny. So we actually had all kinds of what we thought was hysterical humor, sarcasm, spoofing. And the cover of our yearbook looked like a beer can because we wanted to be the lighter side. So we had it Radnor Light and it looked like a Miller Lite can and we actually had to go in front of the school board and justify ourselves, but they let us publish it. And then years later, my son went to the same school. And I went to an activities fair one time and there was the yearbook. So I went over, and they had lots of old yearbooks, but they did not have the 1985 yearbook. So I had to ask, I was like, “Hey, I was editor in chief of ’85.” They’re like, “Oh, that one.” That’s the one they keep locked up and don’t let the current kids see. Our guests today have a similar approach to a seemingly serious topic. Coming to you semi-live from the beautiful Westlakes Office Park in suburban Philadelphia, this is Stephanie McCullough and Kevin Gaines of Sofia Financial and American Financial Management Group. Say hello, Kevin.

2:01

Kevin: Hello, Kevin. 

2:03

Stephanie: So today, I am so excited. We have two of my friends who collaborated on a new book. The book is called Stacked: Your Super-Serious Guide to Modern Money Management. And our guests are the authors, Joe Saul-Sehy and Emily Guy Birken. So, Emily is a former educator, a lifelong, self-proclaimed money nerd, and a Plutus award winning freelance writer who specializes in the scientific research behind irrational money behaviors. And you know now why I adore her. She’s got an amazing approach that helps make complex financial topics relatable and easily understood. She’s authored five books, including The Five Years Before You Retire, and one of my favorites, End Financial Stress Now, in addition to this new book.

2:51  

Kevin Gaines: Joe, as some of you may be familiar with, is the creator and co-host of Stacking Benjamins, probably one of the most popular personal finance podcasts out there. Prior to that, he was a financial advisor for 16 years. And prior to that, like many of us, made plenty of money mistakes for himself, which led him to where he is today, writing books and hosting a brilliant and funny podcast, Stacking Benjamins. So let’s bring them in. 

3:29

Stephanie: Here we go. Well, Emily and Joe, welcome to Take Back Retirement.

3:33  

Emily Guy Birken: Thank you for having us

3:35  

Joe Saul-Sehy: Thank you so much.

3:37  

Stephanie: Congratulations on the book.

3:39  

Joe: Oh my goodness, it took me 10 years to write a book and it stunk. And then I realized that I needed an awesome co-author, and I was so happy that she said yes, that she would do this project. Once Emily got involved, it sped up and it was actually worthwhile, Stephanie. We wrote a book we’re very proud of.

4:02  

Stephanie: You should be. So let me ask you this. Why funny? There’s so many books out there, but I have to say like, more than once, I was cracking up laughing out loud and interrupting my husband watching the Olympics, saying, “Wait, wait, wait. I just have to read you this paragraph.”

4:17  

Emily: That is the greatest compliment that I think you could give either of us.

4:24  

Joe: On the Stacking Benjamins show, I have interviewed over the last decade lots and lots of authors, and they have lots of important conversations with people. But I’ve been reading a lot of statistics that show that there’s still a lot of people that feel like they’re being left behind, which is a struggle. There was a recent piece by a group called Nonfiction called “The Secret Financial Lives of Americans.” And this study showed that over 150 million people in the United States report that they’ve cried about their money, more than 150 million. So clearly, there’s a bunch of people that aren’t sure what to do. And you think, by the way, that a lot of these people are people living paycheck to paycheck, like I was back in the early ’90s. But of people making over $250,000 a year, nearly half of those people report that they’ve cried about their money. So clearly, there’s a big disconnect between the way we spend and what our values are. And even though, you know, we talk all the time in this little corner of the universe. And Stephanie, I think you and I have even talked about this before, about how people talk about it being saturated, and no, we need more voices. We need more voices, we need more people, we need more points of view, because… I’ll give you an example. I was at an event in Nashville, about six months ago, let’s put it this way, it was during a time when I was not even sure I wanted to be there because COVID was, was not where it should have been and I was uncomfortable. But there was a dude I met at this thing. He literally asked the phrase, “Who’s Dave Ramsey? I have no idea. Everybody’s talking about Dave Ramsey, I don’t know who that is.” And for us in our little corner of the universe, Dave Ramsey’s the bajillion pound gorilla that’s bigger than everybody. By the way, this is a guy who worked on Wall Street for 30 years. And he had idea who he was. So, we’re clearly not reaching people. What I see is that when it comes to introductions to these topics, most of my friends and family that don’t want to talk about money, they don’t want to talk about it because they feel like it’s this big, heavy discussion we have to have. The answer is yes, we do. We do have to have those big, heavy discussions. But I think the way to get there is much more Mary Poppins, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And if we start there, with the easy conversations, it’s like a slip and slide. We’ll get you there. But let’s start off much, much lighter. So that’s kind of how the project began.

6:51  

Emily: When Joe brought me on board, there were two reasons why I was really excited about doing this. Well, okay, three. One, I got to work with Joe. We like to tease each other and I say, “This screwball called me up. And he wanted me to do this weird thing,” but no, really it’s a thrill that he wanted to work with me. 

7:11  

Joe: Hold on a second right there, Emily, because I have to tell you guys the pitch that I used with her. I’m like, “Okay, here’s what I want to do.” And I’ll spare you the whole story. But I said, “What I want to do is take the Hardy Boys detective manual. And I want to combine it with a Cub Scout Wolf Guide to create this book for adults about money.” And I was sure that Emily was gonna stop the Zoom call immediately. Like, “Sorry, Joe, it’s not you, it’s me. Maybe it is you.”

7:36  

Emily: “You’re going through a tunnel, sorry.” No, I was really psyched to be able to work with Joe. I also, you know, he pitched it to me that way. But he also said, “I want to take it from a light-hearted point of view and I want us to be funny.” And that was very exciting to me, because I have two major goals in life: I want shiny hair and I want to be funny. Those are the two things that I want out of life. And so, the shiny hair has very little to do with what I do during the day. Funny, I tried to put that into my work. And I’m not often able to get away with it because when I’m writing for, you know, financial sites, they want just the facts. And so even if I put something that’s kind of like a gentle humor, it often gets edited out. I was really excited at the idea of getting a chance to let my humor off the leash and just have fun with it. And then the third reason was because my most recent book prior to Stacked was End Financial Stress Now. That was a book that was a labor of love for me, I had spent like 10 years thinking about it, I was really excited. And it was really all about wanting to let people know that some of the stress that they have about money, they can let go of it, that there are things that they can change their mindset, change their habits, and feel less stress about money. And a friend of mine told me she was gonna buy the book when it was coming out. But then she confided in me that she was kind of scared to read it. I was like, “Oh, my goodness, why are you scared to read it?” Because it was really intended to be a reassuring book. And she said, “Well, I’m scared, it’s gonna tell me I’m doing it all wrong, that I’ve made all these mistakes, and I can’t catch up.” And that made me realize that no matter how reassuring my tone, no matter how much I make it clear that there is no shame, no blame, when it comes to money, there are certain segment of people who are just never going to pick up a book about money, because they’re terrified that there’s going to be finger wagging in it. And so if we come at this book about money from a place of like, we’re gonna have fun with this, it’s going to be funny, we’re going to make dad jokes, we’re going to share our own mistakes, we’re going to not take ourselves too seriously, that is going to be much more appealing to the type of people like my friends who for whatever reason, feel intimidated by the idea of reading a money book.

10:00  

Stephanie: I love that. A couple of times, I got through a chapter and I was laughing so hard, I’m like, Wait, I think I learned something in there almost by mistake. I met with a client a couple of years ago, I went to her house pre-COVID, obviously, and we sat there literally for about two hours. I’m just talking to Jane and we’re talking about this and that. I think we spent 20 minutes on the actual financial planning content and investment subject. And at the end, she’s like, “Oh, my gosh, this was so stressful.” I was like, “Jane! We talked about your trip to Spain, and your kids, and your jewelry, business, and all these other things.” But still, there’s so much stress. And I think it’s that shame and blame and inner criticisms that accompany money conversations. So I totally agree with you guys.

10:43  

Joe: But look at what has become popular in financial media. A couple of the big stars and, by the way, no stank on what they do, but Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman, you take your financial house to them, and what you expect them to yell at you. And they’re the two big players and the format of the show is going to them who are super, you know, know all, be all, and they tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Or we have to be like Jim Cramer, where we’re yelling and screaming, our face is all red and we’re sell, sell, sell, buy, buy, buy. And neither of those is really true. I almost knocked my microphone over.

11:22  

Kevin: I think that’s a problem with the perception of our industry, both in and out of it is that it’s this very serious, Wall Street, rigidness to it. In fact, you know, I read a couple complaints about your book. And there’s only a couple out there, not many. But the theme that seems to go throughout these complaints is, oh, it’s not serious. They’re making jokes and messing around, which kind of reinforces exactly what you guys set out to do, that you succeeded. But there’s this perception that it has to be serious and stoic with the approach. And that’s just not right.

12:08  

Joe: It’s funny that you say that, Kevin, because when I asked Emily to do this project with me, I said, “You’re not gonna want to do this if you don’t want the criticism that we screw around too much.” Because it’s the same criticism I get for my podcast. Whenever we get criticism of our podcasts that we mess around. My goal is to create a financial surround sound that isn’t in your face. So, if you’re looking for money tips faster, which by the way, a lot of the money geeks are really looking for, I’m not for you. That’s not who we’re trying to reach. I’m glad you picked that up. 

12:40  

Emily: When I was a teenager, I saw the actress Vicki Lawrence say, “Life’s far too serious to be taken seriously.” And she’s a comedian as well. That really stuck with me, it fits with my viewpoint of the world, which is that there is a lot of serious stuff going on, and you need to be able to laugh at it. And so, with apologies to Vicki Lawrence, I say money is too serious to be taken seriously. If you consider it only slightly less fun than a colonoscopy, you’re not going to have really great outcomes with your financial decisions. So for me, Joe knew going into it that we were going to be getting these kinds of like, “They screw around too much, there’s jokes” and like, yeah, that’s kind of what we set out to do. So, correct. You’re correct there. And I actually don’t necessarily mind seeing those complaints, because the people who are going to be turned off by the fact that we bring a light hearted and humorous view to this, they know ahead of time, this isn’t the book for them. And so this is the book for the people who want it.

13:47  

Joe: What I’m proudest about those reviews is that they still admit that we’re competent. They all are like, “These people know what they’re talking about. I just wish they didn’t screw around so much.” 

14:01

Stephanie: There’s plenty of books for those folks.

14:04  

Kevin: Part of the stuff Stephanie and I do is yes, we’re screwing around and making light of this stuff. But we’re not taking it too seriously. And my philosophy is if we offend you, we don’t want you as a client anyway, because you don’t have that approach with us, and it’s not going to be a good fit.

14:24  

Joe: It’s interesting you say that, Kevin, because early in my career, I had a wonderful mentor woman named Catana, who told me that you will, over the course of your career, attract people who are like you, and you’ll repel people who aren’t. And it’s been so true. We’re setting off on this 40 city book tour. And whenever we’ve gotten a bunch of Stackers together, these people are people I want to hang out with all the time. In fact, when I was a financial planner, my wife never wanted to go to the holiday parties, because she couldn’t stand a lot of the people that were that you and I know who work in financial planning. She’s like, okay, there’s a few. But she always had to find her niche. Now she finds fans of our show, and she wants to meet them all. Like, every time somebody is coming through town and they’re gonna have lunch with us, or we go someplace, we’re gonna have an event. She wants to go to everything she can, because these are some pretty cool people. But I think it’s that repel and attract thing that we talked about.

15:18  

Stephanie: Your vibe attracts your tribe, right? I love some of the things like the insurance bingo, or the estate planning Thanksgiving table. You’re kind of sneaking the message in with the fun.

15:32  

Joe: That’s kind of the goal. You know, one of my favorite things actually is when Emily wrote the section on mutual funds, and she realized that the word mutual and the word fun start with MF. And then she said, you can read this, we want you to read this like you’re Samuel L. Jackson, you know, who says MF all the time. So, she abbreviates the word mutual fund over and over talking about, well, these MFs are diversified. These MFs have some tax consequences sometimes, even when you didn’t sell. When I read that, I thought that was great.

16:18  

Emily: That was a day where I logged off early, because I had done good work that day. And that’s something that I bring to writing that I learned when I was teaching. And so, there’s a couple of things. One is something called the “known-new” phenomenon that we talked about when I was getting my masters degree in education, which is that students are going to learn better if you start with something they know and add on something new to it. Because if you start where you’re familiar and add on something new, that’s going to make for better outcomes, because they’ll be like, it’s just a half step to that instead of like, this is completely new stuff, I have no idea what you’re talking about. A common example is a kid who loves baseball, but is really not understanding statistics, using baseball statistics to teach them, that will click. And so that’s something that, you know, I was trying to do with a lot of the jokes and things in the book, is start with something that the readers might know about, and add new things on top of it. Joe did that with the very first chapter, most financial books start with, write out your goals. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a perfectly valid way of starting any financial journey. But Joe took it a step farther and said, timeline your goals, don’t just write out what you want to happen. Put it on a visual timeline where you draw a little stick figure of yourself and maybe your spouse or whoever you’re on this journey with and draw a line that represents the rest of your life. And on that line, plot out when you’re going to want to do all of these goals. Because that starts getting you thinking about things in a different way, a more dynamic way than just writing out my goal is to retire at 60, my goal is to send my kids to college, blah, blah, blah. So that’s one aspect of it. And then the other thing that I learned as a teacher is that being shocking and being funny are always going to make things memorable. So, the example that I give when I was teaching high school English, I taught American literature, and I taught the book A Prayer for Owen Meany in American literature. I would read aloud to the students because even like 17, 18 year olds benefit from being read aloud to. And I’d time it so that the first read aloud day that I had coincided with the first F bomb in the book and I would read it out loud and you know, pretty demure your teacher type and so like all of a sudden they’re like Ms. Birken did what? And Owen Meany was the most popular book of the ones that I taught for junior year English. And that was part of it because they’re just like, “What is she reading? I need to know what else is in here.”

19:14  

Stephanie: Hook them. When I was thinking about okay, who is their target audience? We’re talking about Commodore 64. We’re talking about building the Death Star. We got cousin Eddie. We got your inner Veruca Salt. I know who your target people are, it’s me.

19:30  

Emily: We do show our age a little bit.

19:35  

Stephanie: Tell us about the inner Veruca Salt and that whole metaphor. I love that idea.

19:40  

Emily: So one of the things that I find really important in talking about finance is recognizing the way that you make decisions. We all have little inner Veruca Salt who wants it all, wants it now. I want a golden ticket daddy, I want a golden goose. So, one of the things that I think is really helpful is instead of shaming our inner Veruca Salt, because that’s what we tend to do, is we tend to be like, absolutely not, no, no, you don’t deserve that, or you shouldn’t have that or whatever, to our Veruca Salt, which makes her throw a tantrum. And then like, we end up giving into her at some point. If we hold her off for too long, at some point, she’s like, “That’s it, damn it, I’m putting a $4,000 cruise on my credit card because I deserve it.” Yeah, so honoring that inner Veruca Salt and saying like, you are absolutely right, that looks awesome. And it would be so cool to have that. Let’s figure out how to make it possible so that you can have that, or what do we need in place for that to be something that we can afford? And then honoring what the inner Veruca Salt wants can be a much better way of handling those like, I want it and I want it now impulses than constantly putting it off, or constantly shaming ourselves for wanting things that we can’t afford.

21:06  

Joe: I found when I was a financial planner, that using almost like the deli counter approach to your goals was was really good because that Veruca Salt stuff is not what most people think you do when you’re in a financial planning meeting, that you’re not talking about the fact that I want the new Xbox or I want the new whatever the thing is, we think we need to be planning retirement, we got to be planning kids college. And so when I was a financial planner, I truly did the deli counter, what else, right? They hand you the ham, then they go, what else? And then they hand you the salmon, what else? They hand you the next thing, what else? They just keep asking, what else? And I found when I was planning, it was usually the third or fourth thing that their eyes would finally light up. And they go, oh, yeah, I talked about all this stuff I was supposed to talk about, here’s what I truly want. I really want to be able to take two months off, to be able to tour Europe, and just get away from my job, which is high stress. There you go. We found it. And you can almost always tell when the Veruca Salt came out. So, leaning into that and finding out what that is, I think makes the whole plan shine.

22:17  

Kevin: Well, we were talking about some of our peers in the financial press world, shall we say? And their advice always seems to be about denial, denial, denial. Gotta save for the future. It’s refreshing to hear somebody say that now’s kind of important as well. And I think that’s probably something that needs to be taken away. Do you see that? One of the appeals to your book, you think, that people are going to find is permission to spend money?

22:47  

Joe: Yeah, well, that actually leads, Kevin, to a joke in the book that the editor wanted to take out. Emily and I both agreed that Nina, who’s a ninja editor, if she said something came out, it came out except we gave ourselves one Mulligan each. We got one each and one that I had kept, your point was, I wrote most of this book while I was homeless living in Vermont, which is a whole different story about how that happened, which was crazy. So I’m living in this condo in Vermont. And everybody, by the way, before then had told me how beautiful Vermont was. And I have this discussion in the book about how you can’t take it with you. You have to have some fun today. Like I’ve never been to Heaven, but I’m not sure that’s the way Heaven works that you show up with all this stuff, like the pharaohs thought that you took it all with you. And so I wrote this joke that said, I’ve never been to Heaven, so I’m not sure this is the way it works, but I have been to Vermont and people from there tell me it’s the same thing. I’m fairly certain, and I thought it was funny as hell. Emily thought it was funny. And Nina’s like that’s got to go and we were like, no, that joke stays.

23:58  

Stephanie: My mother grew up in Vermont. She would disagree with that analysis. But my brother lives there now.

24:02  

Joe: Oh, she thinks it’s not the most beautiful place in the world? Because after just living there a month, I tend to agree. It’s gorgeous. I’d go back in a heartbeat. Cheryl won’t because of winter.

24:20  

Stephanie: And then my mom hated mud season. 

24:24  

Joe: Mud season does not sound like fun either. I was not there for that.

24:27  

Emily: One of the things we’re talking about is the way that there’s often this emphasis on saving for tomorrow. And it becomes, I feel like, an overemphasis because it’s putting your happiness at the other end of something. There’s a couple problems with this one, nothing’s guaranteed. My father passed away at age 62. And he never got to retire exactly. Because he had a glioblastoma which is the same kind of brain tumor that John McCain had and you get diagnosed with that, and it’s kind of curtains, basically. And so if he had not spent time enjoying himself in those last few years, because he was like, gotta focus on retirement, it would have been like, and for what? So there’s, there’s that aspect of it, nothing is guaranteed. And then there’s the other aspect of, you deserve to live a life that is fulfilling and happy at every moment. And so, when people are overwhelmed and unhappy at work, I am so sympathetic to pinning all of your hopes and dreams on retirements and so the people who end up going for early retirement, but if you are depriving yourself, eating nothing but rice and beans, and living in a dark cold house because you don’t want to turn on the heat or the light because it’s gonna cost money. What are you doing this for, because when you get to that other side, when you can do that early retirement, the first three weeks are going to be great. But after that, you’re gonna look around and go, now what? And so recognizing that your life is all of your life, it’s the now, it’s the past, it’s the future, and honoring all three, rather than putting all of your eggs in tomorrow’s baskets, is the best way to create a fulfilling life rather than this sense that I got to deprive myself so I can earn the fun times later.

26:24  

Joe: That doesn’t mean that it’s not about striving for things, because I’ve never seen anybody get anywhere that didn’t have to push, to work hard. It’s not all hedonism that Emily’s talking about it, you definitely have to do those things. But it’s much more about outlook. The Stacking Benjamins show one time, to show this concept, we found this old Saturday Night Live video that stars Adam Sandler. And Adam runs this Italian travel company. And he talks about they’re going to take you to Rome, they’re going to take you to Venice, they’re going to take you to Florence, it’s going to be beautiful. And then he says, “And I know some of you might have seen some of the reviews of our tour that weren’t so nice. So I just want to give you some expectations. Number one, if your marriage is failing right now, your marriage will still be failing in Venice. If you’re very unhappy with the way that you’re living now, you’re going to be very unhappy when I take you to Rome.” And that’s more what we’re talking about. It’s got to be the journey. Even if you’re climbing that mountain, to just get out of debt or get wherever you’re going to have a glass half full and how great is it that I have the opportunity to pay off this debt or to climb up this mountain? Having that outlook I think is half of the fun of life.

27:44  

Stephanie: That brings me to the woowoo chapter on fear. I love that you included that. Talk to me a little bit about the role fear plays in getting in our way of achieving our financial goals.

27:55  

Emily: A lot of times the decisions we make, particularly when it comes to money come from a place of fear in many directions. So like if you are someone who doesn’t spend money because like, what if I don’t have enough, that is fear based financial decisions. If you are someone who’s like, well, there’s no way I can ever have enough, so I might as well spend it all, that is a fear based decision. And so recognizing that this fear of scarcity is really where it comes down to. You are afraid of what is going to happen if you run out of money or you’re afraid of what is going to happen if you never get a well paying job, or if you never do this, that, or the other. And that can be really tough to work around because those fears are very deep. One thing that I’ve recently been thinking about is how hope is kind of the opposite of fear in a lot of ways. And I actually am thinking that not only hope, does it feel good, does it feel better to have hope, it’s also the more responsible way of living your life. And I say that because of what I do. I write about money, I have friends from college I haven’t seen in 20 years who will talk to me about it. And they’ll say, because I’m Gen X, so very ironic and sarcastic, and they’ll say stuff like yeah, I’m hoping climate change gets us before I’m ready for retirement because there’s no way I could ever retire. And talk about fear. The thing is I understand what they’re saying they’re saying I don’t have any idea how to do this and all I can hope for is that we’re all going to be goners because that’s the only possible way things can go well and so and I share those fears when it comes to things like climate change, I definitely share those fears or those concerns. There are times when I’m in despair, but if we give up, if we say that there is no hope, if we say I hope the hope the oceans rise before I before I have to take Social Security, we are not going to do the things that prepare us prepare our families, prepare our loved ones prepare our society, our governments, our world, for things work out. Coming at any kind of financial decision from a place of hope instead of fear is, I think, not just Pollyanna because I’m an optimist. It’s not just an optimistic thing. It’s not just something that feels good, I think that it is the more morally responsible way to deal with things. Because then you are prepared for a world that could be better than you’re afraid of, and is, frankly, more likely. And by preparing for that world, you’re also paving the way for it to happen, whereas just giving up is just allowing the bad things to happen.

30:47  

Stephanie: Oh, I love that. That’s deep.

30:51  

Emily: Sometimes I go a little deep.

30:56  

Kevin: So you’re on these book tour interviews, the question is always what’s the most important chapter in the book? I don’t care what the most important chapter is. What was the most fun chapter?

31:04  

Joe: I thought you were going to say, what’s the least important chapter?

31:08  

Kevin: Yeah, what’s the one throwaway chapter that everybody can skip?

31:13  

Emily: The most fun chapter? Well, there’s the one that Joe and I both really love. But I don’t know if it’s, would you say it was the most fun to write? Or is it just the most like, we love how it came out?

31:24  

Joe: I didn’t know which one you’re talking about.

31:26  

Emily: Chapter 6. What to expect when you’re investing.

31:29  

Joe: No, chapter six, what to expect when you’re investing, was a ton of fun. And that includes the mutual fund thing, the MF thing. We talk about the difference between saving and investing. With saving you look at right now, the way inflation is, if with inflation as high as it is, if you’re just saving money into a bank account, you’re safely losing money. So in England, they say God Save the Queen, if they really want to save her, it should be God Invest the Queen, because that’s how you’re gonna beat inflation. So that was one of our favorite nerdy jokes. I don’t know if there’s a full chapter, Kevin. But there’s a couple that I really liked writing that I’m responsible for. I think in terms of stories, and I really enjoy, in the part about risk management, telling this story about the first insurance company and how it kind of worked. That story, by the way, that I tell is truly the story of how I think about how insurance started. Because then I think, okay, this is how the insurance company works, right? Everybody in town puts their money in a barrel just to tell everybody the story and not just foreshadow, Earl realizes that in town, these people have these calamities, we’ll just put a barrel in the middle of town. And everybody will put some money in. And then if somebody has a problem, we’ll just take money out of the barrel, this would be perfect. And, of course, but then Ruth, because she had a little bit of a foamy beverage problem, would go and dip into it. Sometimes they had to have a guy watch it. That’s aka the insurance company. And for his struggle, he got to take a scoop every once in a while and take a little bit of the money off the top, which is his profit for doing it. And then, the insurance industry just gets more and more complicated. And I think that’s really what happened. I think term insurance kind of started first. You have this insurance. If you use it, that’s great. And but then it got more and more expensive as people got older. So then they created whole life insurance. Then whole life insurance sales people went, wait a minute, this thing has a savings feature. We can call it a savings vehicle. Not at all what it was for, but they decided we’re going to do that. Then whole life insurance agents are getting beat up because in the early 80s, interest rates are going crazy and they’re not keeping up. So then they come up with universal life insurance. And then mutual funds get hot in the mid 90s. And they’re like, Oh, we got to put the hot new thing in there. So let’s put mutual funds in there. I feel like it’s like, you know, Jim Gaffigan, the comedian talking about granola bars. Oh, you know what we’ll do, we’ll throw some chocolate in it. That’s what we’ll do. Well, maybe we’ll put a little bit of caramel in it. That’ll be good. Or maybe if we just got rid of the granola I don’t know. I feel like the insurance industry is the same way. So I like that one. I also like, because not many people have this inside outside view that I’ve had in 16 years as a financial planner, and then being on the financial media side, and being able to talk about hiring advisors, and why I think you need an advisor that I really enjoyed writing that chapter because I don’t know that’s a lot of fun. And I know it’s a viewpoint I’ve had that a lot of people don’t have.

34:44  

Emily: I also loved, in that chapter, I came up with Latin genus and species names for all the different types of financial advisors. That was so fun.

34:57  

Stephanie: Okay, I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet. I must confess. I’m going to read it as soon as we’re done.

35:01  

Joe: Yes, definitely. It’s like commissionis salesus.

35:03  

Emily: Pretium Solarum.

35:10  

Stephanie: And the problem is that the general public, regular humans, don’t realize that there are so many different kinds of structures that advisors can live in different formats. They kind of think one is the same as all and if they’ve seen one, they’ve seen them all which either means like, oh, I don’t have a million dollars, you can’t help me, or that guy was a jerk, and ripped me off, therefore, all other advisors are going to rip me off.

35:33  

Joe: That’s the one, Stephanie, that drives me crazy. I had an advisor once I had an advisor, one so all advisors are bad. That could be your thesis, or your thesis could be. I stink at interviewing, and I needed to do a better job. That could be the thesis, but call me crazy. We go with the other one versus the looking inward, sorry, my snark just came out.

35:56  

Stephanie: My first advice is always get clear on what you want the adviser to do for you. And then go try to find an advisor that does that thing. Because we have lots of different business models.

36:07  

Emily: Well, and so many people feel intimidated walking into an advisor’s office. That’s part of the problem as well. There are a lot of advisers who don’t help because they just are dropping alphabet soup of things. My dad was a financial advisor, I grew up in the industry. I’ve always been a money nerd. And the first time I walked into an advisor’s office, who was not my father, I was just like, What am I doing? What am I doing? I can’t look. And that’s something that is a problem within our industry, that there’s not enough impetus to change because making it seem like money is opaque means that it is job security for financial advisors.

36:57  

Stephanie: I guess so except for so many advisors, as clients, and so many women don’t even use advisors, because they don’t want to deal with someone like that. The fancy cufflinks and the wood paneling just turns people away. Even that term wealth management, which I despise, like, Oh, I’m not wealthy. So therefore, that’s not for me.

37:15  

Emily: It’s this very strange line where I feel like there’s a relative few advisors who I have met just on a general basis, who feel like, let’s talk where you are, instead of, let’s bring you up to where I am. That’s one of the things that I appreciated about my dad is I felt like he did a really good job of understanding where his clients were to start, and kind of bringing them slowly, walking them to where they needed to be. This is completely anecdotal. But just having met with some advisors, myself, and being in this industry, I think there are a lot of people who feel like they need to prove what they know. And we all, like everyone, like the adviser and the client need to leave their ego at the door, and just be like, Hey, what are we doing here?

38:09  

Joe: Which does bring up a few things. One important thing I think people can do to help them so pick the right advisor, is if you walk into a room, and they start off with product and not process, you need to run because there is no magic thing that’s gonna fix everything. And yet, we all know we see it like TikTok. Oh, this super thing that you should be doing when they don’t want you to know about. That’s another one I love. They don’t want you to know about this. The second anybody says that I’m like, Oh, yeah. Run.

38:40

Kevin: So, other than just simply hiring Kevin or Stephanie, which clearly is the perfect choice for everybody, but if you don’t want to take the easy way out and you actually want to interview advisors, which first of all, any advisor worth their salt is willing to be interviewed and understands, they’re not going to be the number one pick, they’re willing to spend an hour with you to help you understand if you’re going to work or not. So you do the interview, what type of questions, other than the red flags we’ve already discussed, what else should people be thinking about or talking about?

39:20

Joe: Well, I can share two. And then, and then I’m sure, Emily, you’ll have more. But two that I have is, number one, don’t ever just interview one. And even though there were clients that I had who were a fantastic fit. And we worked together for many years, when I found out that I was the only person they met with and they met with nobody else, it actually would have done them me a better service, if they did interview several people, and then ended up with me, because then they knew how awesome it was that they ended up with me instead of one of those other idiots. But actually, nobody knows what questions to ask. And you kind of find out when you start comparing them. It’s like when you compare cars, you don’t just buy the first car, you look at several different ones. And you learn from the basic stuff through deeper things about what questions to ask, you find out where advisors are strong just because of what they emphasize. During that meeting, they’ll emphasize different things. But generally, during that meeting, I want the advisor to ask me a lot about what my goals are. And I want them, by the way, even before I hire them, I kind of want them to help me solve some of them. Because here’s what I found, when I was an advisor, was that advisors that also held there, we used to call it hold your cards up, I’m not going to tell you anything until you hire me. I will tell you, those people had nothing. There was nothing that they had. And they were like, no, I can’t give you any tips until you pay me something. Generally, the advisors that were giving it away for free when they didn’t know you, once you gave them more information, they actually then were able to dive deep because in that first meeting, you’re talking generalities. But once they gave you deeper information and documents and your flexible benefits at work, as an example, gave you all this stuff, they could then give you even more stuff. I want an advisor who seems like they’re open about giving it away, because that person probably, if they’re confident in that free meeting, they’ve got plenty more where that came from. So I like those things as a starter.

41:25

Emily: So for me, one question that I recommend that people ask is after you’ve had that meeting, or as you’re winding up that meeting, say like, Can you tell me what it is that you see as my main goals? And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One, there’s like, it shouldn’t be a gotcha question. But there are going to be some people who, Oh wait, what?

41:48

Stephanie: They weren’t paying attention.

41:50

Emily: Yeah, so there’s that. And then there’s the fact that a lot of times we have trouble articulating what it is that we want. And part of the advisor’s job is helping you understand exactly what it is that you’re hoping to get for, helping you figure out where your values lie. Oh, you’ve mentioned your child and how well they’re doing in school, like three times and all of that. And so it’s clear to me that education is important. So that’s something that I think is really helpful, because it not only can help you put into words, what it is that’s most important to you, it starts having that back and forth conversation, because that’s what the relationship is with the advisors, it is that conversation, and so that you are able to kind of like, clarify if they say, Oh, I think this is important to you, and you’re like, you know what, I haven’t thought of that. And I think you’re right, but maybe this and it becomes a back and forth, which is really important. The other thing, this is something that I’ve been doing as a writer for several years now, when I interview a subject matter expert for an article, the last question I always ask is, what do you wish I’d asked you? And I’ve found that as a journalist, that often gets me my best quotes, because there are oftentimes things that within an industry are very clear. But for someone looking from the outside, you just don’t know because you don’t know what you don’t know. And then when it comes to advisors, if you end with like, what do you wish I’d asked you, that gives the advisor to be like, well, you spent a lot of time talking about retirement, but you don’t seem to have anything on plan for healthcare. Or it’s really important to you, I hear, to take care of your elderly mother, but I haven’t heard how you’re planning on taking care of yourself and your children if her care is x expensive. And so that’s something that, again, deputizes the financial advisor to be your partner and help you figure out the things that are gonna be most important to you.

43:51

Stephanie: I love that.

43:55

Joe: This is so not worth it.

43:58

Kevin: I definitely want to hear this.

44:00

Joe: I’ll say this to you before I say this comment. But there was a time early in my career and I worked in office with a lot of young new advisors in a big sales organization at first and we went out for drinks at the end of the night, and there was a things your client does not want to hear their advisor say, and with Emily’s question, all I could think of so what do you wish I’d asked you about? And if the answer from the advisor is, well, you didn’t ask about that prison stint. Thank goodness you missed that one.

44:36

Emily: Didn’t ask why I’m not allowed within 500 feet of elementary schools. 

44:45

Stephanie: Luckily, you didn’t find that one on Google search.

44:50

Joe: Thank goodness you didn’t Google my name before this. So how are you related to Bernie Madoff?

44:56

Stephanie: So obviously, we could have fun talking all day. But we want to let you get on with your day. So tell us how can people find you, follow you and learn more? Joe, you go first.

45:06

Joe: We’re going on a 40 city book tour. So come hang out with us. Because in every city, you’ll have money nerds, we’re gonna invite all of our friends and every city we go to. So stackingbenjamins.com/stacked and hangout with a bunch of like minded people, that’ll be fun. You can find the book wherever books are sold. We like independent bookstores, and in a lot of cities, we’re going to independent bookstore, so support these places that are disappearing. We’d like that if you like audio books, we have a lot of fun there. Emily introduces all the chapters and then does all the stuff for the badges. I narrate a good part of the chapter. But the additional two things you get with the audio book are we have a lot of asides by my very snarky mom in the book. And the woman who plays my mom on the podcast–when Penguin Random House said Hey, is your mom gonna? Is your mom gonna do your mom’s parts? I’m like, Oh crap, I totally forgot about that. So I called my good friend Julie Ray and I said, Hey, do you want to play mom again? She hasn’t done any soundwork or voiceover work for us in a couple years and she said absolutely. So having Julie go in and be mom again was fun. And then instead of at the end of every chapter, we have excerpts of interviews that we’ve done over the past 10 years with some very smart people from our community. Tiffany Aliche, the Budgetnista, is in there, Bola Sokunbi from Clever Girl Finance, Farnoosh Torabi, Jean Chatzky. Lots of very smart people. You actually hear the real interviews in the book. If you listen to the audiobook, we have the interviews there, so the audio book is a lot of fun.

46:40

Stephanie: Excellent. Emily, how about if people want to follow you?

46:46

Emily:You can go to my website emilyguybirken.com. There’s links there for all five of my books, the four prior to Stacked and then the one with Joe. And you can also reach me on Twitter. I’m on Twitter way more than I should be, I love it and I love hanging out with people. I also have a project I’ve been working on for three years now, more than three years now called My One Good Thing. Every day I post one good thing that day. And so I’d love to see what your one good thing is. So @emilyguybirken is my Twitter handle. And I’d love to say hi.

47:21

Stephanie: I love the One Good Thing I have to say. There’s often very heartwarming, it was lovely especially during the dark days of the pandemic and lockdown to thank you.

47:30

Joe: I always get jealous of it. So I want to do one that’s a parody. It’s like what’s one bad thing?

47:37

Kevin: What’s one crappy thing? 

47:40

Joe: What was some train wreck that happened to you today?

47:44

Emily: What made you curse out loud today?

47:50

Kevin: So one final question. What’s the one question you guys wish we would have asked? See what I did there.

47:59

Emily: How the turntables.

48:05

Joe: Definitely not the prison sentence question.

48:10

Emily: Well, I guess I always love talking about how Joe and I do the humor aspect of it. A question about you know, how we handled writing the jokes and making sure that we’re funny just because I personally find it fascinating hearing how creatives do their work. And the way that we did it was we each took, there’s 14 chapters, and we each took seven, I think or something like that to write the original draft and then we swapped. And we edited each other’s and so we edited for both contents and then also for the punch up any jokes, to add in some jokes. And one of the things that I found really wonderful about this was being funny in a vacuum can be tough. If you don’t have a specific audience in mind, I had Joe in mind, and I knew when I came up with that MF mutual fund thing, I was just like, oh, Joe is gonna love this. I had so much fun thinking of how he’d react to my jokes. And so that I found was just a wonderful way of being humorous and using the comedy. 

49:20

Stephanie: Awesome, how about you Joe?

49:23

Joe: I love that too, I love the process of like, how stuff happens, how stuff gets done. And I’m always fascinated by how people write and how they come up with ideas. There’s a great resource that’s really guided me for a long time. I was practicing it before I read the book, but it really kind of codifies this idea that I’ve had for a long time, which is, Austin Kleon is a writer who has a book called Steal Like an Artist. And a lot of my best stuff has always been doing that, take things that you love in your life, and change them around so that they you know, honor them, do not plagiarize because it takes all the fun out of it, but pay homage to them, you know, Hardy Boys detective manual, meets the Cub Scout Wolf Guide, throw in Emily Guy Birken and see what happens. So take these different things and mix them together. And that was truly, truly fun. But then it had to get written. And I think for me, having a co-author was great, because we were able to help each other with deadlines and making sure it got done. And then second, I had listened to a lot of podcasts about writing, and about how different people did their stuff. And I know Hemingway wrote 500 words a day, but there was a woman, Gail Carriger, that I heard on a couple podcasts. She’s a science fiction writer. And she had this idea of writing 2000 words a day. And so I would write, when I was doing the heart of my part of the book, my half, I was writing 2000 words a day. And exactly what she said would happen is what happened. Some days you feel like the words are horrible, and they’re not coming. And she said, But three days later, you find out that those words didn’t suck as bad as you thought they did. And then other days, they would come really quickly. And I would tell Cheryl, when I got done, I’m like that was brilliant. Talk about Hemingway, that was incredible. Three days later, you find out you weren’t nearly as hilarious as you thought you were. Those words aren’t nearly as good, like the standard to use money geek verbiage. The standard deviation is a lot tighter than you thought it was. I also found that when I wrote 2000 words a day, it built a muscle, and it really got easy. I was told over and over how hard this process was going to be. And I won’t say that it was easy. But it was so fun because of the fact that because I got to write it with Emily. We had the jokes. We were competent about our stuff. That was fun.

51:48

Stephanie: Awesome. Good. Well, thanks, guys. Thanks for being here.

51:53

Joe: Thanks a ton.

51:55

Emily: Thank you for having us. This was super fun. 

52:00

Stephanie: Oh, my gosh, Emily and Joe are so much fun. I tell you, I’ve gotten to know them at some conferences over the years. And this is who they are. They’re darn funny. And they know their stuff. And it’s so perfect. When I first heard that they were collaborating on this book. I was so excited. I pre-ordered it like six months ahead. And I’m going to carry around with me when I see them both in person, I’m going to have my Sharpie and make them both sign.

52:21

Kevin: It’d be interesting to see how they sign it. 

52:26

Stephanie: When Joe was talking about that study that showed that over 150 million people have cried about their money. I totally believe it. And that’s a big number. That’s a big number, that this epidemic of financial stress. One of my favorite books of Emily’s is End Financial Stress Now, and the fact that she actually discovered that it wasn’t necessarily reaching all the people she wanted to reach because it still felt like too scary and serious a topic.

52:56

Kevin: What I enjoyed the most shockingly was the concept of humor. To echo Joe’s analogy of the slip and slide that you know, you’re getting in with the humor. Next thing, you know, down the slide, they go, and they’re accidentally learning stuff and feeling confident about what they’re doing and what their next steps could be. And I think that’s so important for people to understand. There’s a lot of different personalities that can help you, some you’re going to gravitate towards, some you’re going to be repelled from doesn’t mean the advice is good or bad, necessarily. It’s just that’s what you’re going to take away from, we all learn different. So naturally, we respond differently to these things as well. I think that’s important to understand. The humor isn’t taking away from what they’re saying, the points they’re trying to make, I would argue, slightly biased, it enhances the value of what they’re trying to get across.

53:59

Stephanie: I love when Emily brought in that educational philosophy piece that she had learned about the Known-New Phenomenon. So an effective way to teach people something new is to tie it to something they already know. So in the budgeting section of the book, they’re talking about how to afford to build your own Death Star. And do you want to save money by avoiding putting on some piece that would have stopped a single fighter from blowing it up with one shot, which of course, they decided to cut those corners and then blew up the Death Star. The Star Wars reference and the joke of it, and then it gets you into the idea of budgeting without it seeming too intimidating and scary.

54:42

Kevin: Again, it’s all about making stuff accessible and relatable. This stuff is serious, but let’s take it gradually. You don’t have to jump in all at once and absorb everything immediately.

54:57

Stephanie: Well, thanks, everyone. We hope you enjoyed this, we’ll have the links to all the various things that Joe and Emily mentioned in the show notes, including the book tour. I think when this is coming out, there’ll be an upcoming visit to Philadelphia, where we are and a lot of other cities still going on. I think the tour goes through June. So if you want to see these fun people in person, check it out. And definitely, I got to go get the audiobook now, because I have the physical book, but the audiobook sounds like a lot of fun. So thanks so much for being with us. We’ll talk to you next time. It’s goodbye from me.

55:28

Kevin: And it’s goodbye from her.

55:35

Stephanie: Be sure to subscribe to the show and please share it with your friends. Show notes and more information available at takebackretirement.com. Huge thanks for the original music by the one and only, Raymond Loewy through New Math in New York. See you next time.

55:47

Disclaimer: Investment advice offered through private advisor group, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Private advisor group, American Financial Management Group, and Sofia Financial are separate entities. The opinions voiced in this material, are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice, or recommendations for any individual security. To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor, prior to investing. This information is not intended to be substitute for individualized tax advice. Please consult your tax advisor regarding your specific situation.