What's Up With Money?!

Our first of a 3 part series... This is in honor of September being, amongst other things, Life Insurance Awareness Month! Let's look at the types. Term Life Insurance - This is temporary coverage that is low cost with high death benefit for a certain period of time... or a term... but only about 2% of these ever pay out, so they are mostly a sunk cost. Term is good to cover short term high li...

On the heels of reading Mindfulness by Ellen J. Langer, Ron and Ryan discuss the role of mindfulness in finance. A fascinating and fun topic we hope you enjoy!

Guess who's back. Back again. Pension's back. Tell a friend. We brought this idea back because of how surprised Ryan was. Just like Doogie Howser came back in The Matrix: Resurrections, the idea of pensions are coming back, but not in the way you think. A pension is the idea that you get money for the rest of your life from your employer. Pretty good deal! A lot of us think everyone used t...

Young people always have a way of questioning the status quo, asking difficult questions, and being ready to throw out conventional wisdom that may not be working. The people that founded the U.S. were a bunch of young people with the aid of some older folks. A couple signers of the Declaration of Independence were 26. At the time of the revolution Alexander Hamilton was 21 - which is probably why...

Should we let Chat pick our stocks? Are robots better at market timing? Will AI replace everyone? Here's the thing about AI, it already effects our daily life everywhere! Is it time for AI and our use of it to take a breath? Ryan thinks so. Behavioral pattern recognition is one thing, predicting with accuracy what people are going to do is something else. While we do have consistency in many o...

We are talking about 1980's advice, and we are Morpheus sitting down with you - The One - and presenting you a choice. In one hand we have blue pill and the other we have a red pill... The choice is yours. We can only show you the door, you must walk through it. We can all kinda admit that there are some things about the financial world that seems like The Matrix where we are moving around, bu...

This week we are continuing our conversation with our first guest! We have a 9-year-old joining us with his perspective and questions about money. Following some of the great traditions of shows like "Kid's Say The Darndest Things," chatting with kids is some of the best entertainment. Kids also see the world through a different lens than adults. And sometimes - they understand the w...

Even though the "short-squeeze" on hedge funds with GameStop occurred several years ago, there are some lessons from that time that are still important for all of us to understand. For a quick recap of what happened, hedge funds shorted GameStop's stock at an alarming rate. They were betting on GameStop collapsing and profiting off their demise. A group of Reddit users banded togethe...

Got a fun one coming your way with two of everyone's favorite things to talk about... Death & Taxes! Well, mainly taxes. Taxes are designed to get us more benefits by pooling our resources than if we were to try to privatize every social need, like roads, law enforcement, military, public school and so on. Sounds good so far... Yet, most of us feel like we are not getting value for our tax...

Is owning vs. renting a sacred cow that we need to reconsider? If you rent, are you just throwing money away? Today we live in a world where people are thinking critically about home ownership as part of their financial picture. And many are deciding that renting may not be the financially saavy choice and deciding to be a "renter by choice." There is a stigma out there regarding renters...

Our final Star Wars themed episode. Be your own banker, or the financial concept of "infinite banking," and a few other clever ways people are talking about how to use permanent life insurance while you're still alive. You've probably seen any of a number of people on social media talking about this idea and using things like an I.U.L. or a Whole Life to do this. You've also...

Debt! Oh, no! Run far away! Debt! Yes, please! Give me as much as possible! If you have it, you're smart! If you don't have it, you're smart! What is going on with these competing philosophies on debt?! If you have spent any time looking into financial information you can probably name the cast of characters on each side of the spectrum. But, it's confusing since they are using the...

There is one idea where it seems that 1980's financial advice and social media strategies converge... The Emergency Fund (cue ominous music). It seems like everyone agrees that you should have one, but what is it exactly? Is it a set amount of cash? Is it a certain number of month's expenses? Is it just the money in savings? We think it could be any and all of those things, but we want to...

Occasionally, we have a "secret scene" segment we call, "It Doesn't Make Cents." Cents. Get it? Money pun that is better written than said. "It Doesn't Make Cents" is where we explore magical social media strategy videos that we have carefully curated for our enjoyment and yours. They are magical because there is financial truth in them, but they often seem wi...

Here it is! We thought we would share our first conversation that we ever recorded. No notes. No plan. Just chatting about Ron's work, "The Future Poor," to see what we had. Obviously, it was magical and the rest is history. "The Future Poor" is a simple idea that the sub-50 (those under the age of 50) & the sub-150 (those making less than $150k) are going to retire at...

Oh the Stock Market... What are we to make of it? We are bombarded with all kinds of information, recommendations, Stock Market shows, constant market updates, Robinhood, rates of return, mutual funds, Wall Street Bets, robot investors, stock picking algorithms, options trading - Now, I'm dizzy. This episode is an intro - a very basic one - on stocks and bonds, but more focuses on a few things...

Welcome to our first hard hitting, deep dive look at something financially specific - The 401(K) and retirement. Even as a youngin' you hear adults talk about the goal of life being to get to the end and retire. This has been the goal of the American middle class. For a time, we were able to do retirement well, exit the work force, and enter leisure - golfing, traveling, and spending half the...

If what you believed about money turned out to not be true, when would you want to know? The financial "poles" seem to have become 1980's finance advice or magical social media strategies, and neither seems to work for us. So, what are we to do? Listen to this podcast? (Of course!) Jump into this financial conversation with us as we work to make sense of these extremes, relieve money...

Getting off the financial anxiety ride is one of the most difficult things to do. Certain times are better than others and sometimes we are off the ride. Yay! And yet, the ride invites us back on with complimentary fast passes. If you are like us, you may find the alternative to the ride to be even more terrifying than the ride itself. We know the ride. We've memorized the turns and loops. Our...

Do you like roller coasters as much as we do? Money anxiety is like a roller coaster that we don't ask to get on. It's a dynamic between several factors that get us on, keep us on, and can be the keys to exiting the ride. The "5" Shoulds - Things you could have done. Things you should be doing. Behind - The general feeling that you are not where you need to be. Others - Family, f...

In this episode, we tackle the challenging - dare we say, controversial - idea that your financial situation is not entirely your fault. The financial industry and the gurus like to 'tout' that 100% of your financial situation is the result of what you've made for yourself. We disagree - at least, Ron disagrees and Ryan is warming up to the idea, and we hope you do to! "Financial...