Season 4, Episode 12 Stacked: Super Serious Stories About Careers, Crypto, and Getting Rich Quick with Joe Saul-Sehy

[00:00:00] Eric Brotman: Welcome to Don’t Retire… Graduate!: The podcast that teaches you how to advance into retirement rather than retreating. I’m your host and valedictorian Eric Brotman and today we have podcast royalty joining us on our show. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Joe Saul-Sehy who is the author of the new book, Stacked. He is the host of the Stacking Benjamins podcast, which is only one of the most listened to podcasts on the planet. And we’re going to have a bunch of fun. Let me, let me tell you a little bit about his book before, before I bring him in. It’s the, the book says, “rich, wealthy, well-healed, moneyed, affluent. Not bad, but why not get stacked instead? If you’ve ever dreamed of a basic philosophy of money, that’ll help you live bigger, be bolder and laugh harder, you need this book.” Joe, I’m ready to laugh harder already. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:53] Joe Saul-Sehy: Well, thanks for having me, Eric and I, I just have to bring this up at the beginning. You get to call yourself valedictorian?

[00:01:00] Eric Brotman: Yes. It’s the only time I’ve come close ever.

[00:01:04] Joe Saul-Sehy: I want to call myself valedictorian.

[00:01:06] Eric Brotman: You actually have to go to school for that. There’s rules.

[00:01:10] Joe Saul-Sehy: Yes, yes. Yeah.

[00:01:12] Eric Brotman: Yeah. This is going to be fun. I, I am, I have not read your new book but it is definitely on my, on my to do’s and I want to hear all about it. I also want to hear what’s going on with the show, what the 2022 seasons going to look like. And I figured why don’t, why don’t we start with sort of your story. I mean, I certainly can share stories about how we met, but this show is PG. So why don’t you share your story, how you got to be the, the lead stacker and we’ll go from there.

[00:01:39] Joe Saul-Sehy: Yeah. I was a I was an English, creative writing major in college, which I think is great for becoming a barista or for teaching other people creative writing. And when I was working odd jobs, struggling with money, I had a friend tell me, he said, “Hey, we normally don’t hire people like you.” This is a direct quote. “We normally don’t hire people like you. But I think you’d be good at this.” And I grew up in farm country in west Michigan, and I had no idea what an engineer was beside somebody that drove the train, but had I known what an engineer was, I totally would have been one. Eric, I would have been one. I definitely have an engineering brain. And so I went into financial planning, knowing very little about money and being a real… being very horrible with money. But I, I, all of a sudden got these concepts I’d never heard of before and being somebody that wasn’t, didn’t have a finance background, I was very good at explaining to people like the guy next door, like how this stuff worked in real person discussions.

And, and when you’re, when you’re somebody who, like me and like I think most people, doesn’t have a finance background and we didn’t talk about money at home. I feel like I provided a valuable service for a lot of people. But I also, and this is the scary part as a brand new advisor, advising other people, I’m still figuring out my own money journey on my own.

Like I was, I was just a wreck. And then about the late nineties, I realized that I needed to start taking my own advice. I needed to get my own house in order. And what a, you know, you to some degree feel like a sham that you’re, you’re teaching other people about money and you’re not doing any of these things yourself.

So I got my own financial house in order, and then it was, it was in 2007 that a mentor mine, a guy named Chris. Chris wrote this letter for people at the firm that I was associated with that at the time by now, now my practice has really grown. I managed about $65 million for people, not a huge practice as you’ll know, but also not a tiny practice. I was the channel seven Detroit money man. I was doing a bunch of public relations stuff for the big firm, American express, that I was with. And but I own my own little franchise of the company. And a guy that was a mentor of mine wrote this letter that he was leaving the company and he wrote his letter was wonderful.

It said, “you know, I like financial planning. I don’t love it. I’ve been lucky to have saved a nice sum of money that gives me flexibility and I can do what I want.” And he said, “you know, I don’t know how much time I have. So I have other mountains I want to climb and I’m going to go climb other mountains.”

And there were a few things that were weird about this. Now, first of all, is, you know, working with some of these big, big firms, Eric, that in those, in those big firms, you don’t write an I’m leaving letter. It’s, it’s much more of a Jerry McGuire, you leave at midnight with the client files and then everybody’s calling them at 6:00 AM, right, to see, to see who gets the client. So that was weird. But then his tone was different. The fact that he’s talking about other mountains to climb, and by the way, I thought that was an analogy. It turned out he really did have other mountains to climb. He was on his way to climb most of the tall peaks. He climbed Mount Everest twice. He’s climbed almost all the tall peaks and then went into adventure travel after that. Now still does what he loves and not just for me, but for a lot of people like me, it was a, it was a real wake-up call and a lesson that I can kind of sleep walk and do this thing that I liked but don’t love, or I could do what I specifically love.

And by that time, not only had I got my financial house in order, but I had the ability to be more flexible. And so I sold my business at age 40. I went back to school to become a high school teacher and a track coach. Something that doesn’t make a lot of money, but I thought that I really wanted to do.

Well, I found out very quickly in school that teachers, God bless them. I mean, they’re, they’re doing great stuff, but my clients that were teachers even before I decided that was my path were telling me, they’re like, “you’d be a great teacher, but you’re going to be fighting administration. You’re going to have a hard time teaching what you want to teach.”

And I found out within a year and a half of teaching classes that that, that I was actually having more fun in shorts and a t-shirt and by the way, making more money doing it, writing for other people. Writing, writing financial advisors’ newsletters, writing scripts for my friends that were also on TV. Like I had been around the radio. So I was doing all these things, making more money than a teacher and I’m teaching, but I’m teaching my way. So that quickly became a blog that I began. The blog did okay. But then we decided to do a podcast cause I had done radio and television and within a few years, the, the podcast took off, became Stacking Benjamins and here we are now. We’ve been podcasting for a decade this month. February of this year is a decade that we’ve been podcasting. It’s crazy.

[00:06:45] Eric Brotman: That’s amazing. And it’s truly one of the shows that people mark their mark on their calendars and make sure that they, that they listen to. It’s funny while you were telling the story about Chris, I wrote Jerry McGuire down. I was like, that is the ultimate Jerry. He wrote a mission statement, not a, not a letter, I guess. A great story. So, so like yourself, I was an English major. I, I studied late 18th century romantic poetry in undergraduate school because that comes in handy constantly in my later years. And but, but I think actually doing financial work and being a financial advisor, particularly if you’re in media, it doesn’t hurt to have sort of an English, psychology, liberal arts kind of background so long as you can, as you can learn the financial stuff, which obviously you and I both did. But the fact that you, that you’re able to communicate with people in a way that’s relatable and that’s authentic is I think part of what makes your show so powerful and, and part of what makes your message so powerful.

So it’s interesting that we’ve, we’ve had some, some some similar journeys along the way. You know, you, you did channel seven in Detroit. I do channel 11 in Baltimore. You know, we’ve, we’ve had some of these similar experiences. It’s pretty cool. So let’s talk about the book because it is, is this is this your mission statement?

Is this the creme de la creme for your publishing life? Or is this like, you know, because I’ve now written three books and the first two, when I look back on them, I think aren’t very good. And I think that’s I think what happens with artists, you know, they put out their fifth album and they’re like, Jesus, those first four weren’t so good. And yeah, people told me when I started podcasting, I’ve only been podcasting four years, not 10. And people said, you’re going to go back and listen to your first episode and laugh at yourself, which is absolutely true. So tell us about the book because the book is brand new, literally hot off the presses.

[00:08:32] Joe Saul-Sehy: Yeah, it is. And thanks for asking and, you know, it’s I’ll just tell you where it came from. I don’t know if it’s creme de la creme. I don’t know if it’s the, the height. I told myself that I thought I had one book in me. And it’s funny because now this book is out and I already had my idea for another one, which I thought would never come.

So, but the, but this, this project was born out of the fact that I’ve I read so much about, about finance and it, and it always, and, and, you know, like you, I talked to a lot of people in the industry and it’s amazing how many people, Eric, we’re still leaving behind. Even though, as you know, there’s reams of, you know, there’s YouTube channels, there’s podcasts like yours and mine.

There’s there’s books at the library, there’s books in bookstores, there’s financial blogs online. There’s all these resources. And yet we still are leaving people behind. And there was a study done recently by this group called Non-Fiction. And it’s called The Secret Financial Lives of Americans.

And in this study, which by the way, is filled with some just absolutely horrendous facts about our real financial lives versus what we show on the internet. That over 150 million people report that they’ve cried about their money. And I remember the one time when I was really horrible with money and I got to the point that I had no credit. I had no recourse. I borrowed money from everybody that I knew. From relatives. And I was going through the, the seat cushions of this old rusted out minivan I was driving because I’d run out of gas. And I was in the side of the road and I had nowhere to go for cash and I’m just looking for money. I found 85 cents and I walked almost a mile to this Marathon gas station and the dude didn’t want to give me the little plastic, the little plastic the gas can cause he didn’t think I was going to bring it back. He thought I was going to steal the gas can.

 And talk about a low point in your life. And I remember that day. That day I cried. I cried about where I was at and I thought I was completely screwed. And it’s funny because you think that in this study, most people were low were who are crying are in that spot that I was in, but actually another interesting number from this study was that nearly half of people making $250,000 or, or more cry about their money. And you see this firsthand when you work with clients, right? I mean, people feel this this overwhelming feeling that what we value is not the same thing that we’re doing with our money. And there’s this disconnect between the two.

So, for me, Stacked, which is meant to be a funny book about money. And and I can talk about how it was made. And really what we were modeling to, to try to make it funny. And campy was the fact that, that so many of the discussions that we have are, as you know, are very heady. They’re very deep. It’s kinda like going to the dentist.

People don’t want to go. You know, you feel good after the dentist, but the day of the dentist, you definitely don’t want to go there. So it feels like these conversations we need to have, but we don’t want to have, so the goal was. To create a book that was funny enough and campy enough and usable enough at the same time that maybe some of these people were leaving behind that we can catch them.

[00:12:00] Eric Brotman: Th that’s such an important goal. I mean, there’s so many, so many things that I’ve read that show that that financial planning is perceived as a playground only for very wealthy people. And there are lots of firms out there who are, who are busy making that abundantly clear in their advertising of “if you have this many dollars, please call us.” which is so cavalier, but, but they, they do it. And it’s one thing to have a target market. It’s another thing to try and make a huge swath of the population feel, feel worthless. But, but I love that you’re trying to do something that’s accessible to anyone. It’s an important goal and financial literacy, in my opinion, is the, is the key to everything. If you’re not financially literate, you can’t possibly make good decisions. Did you return the gas can?

[00:12:43] Joe Saul-Sehy: I did return the gas can and I wanted to flip the guy off.

[00:12:45] Eric Brotman: Just wanted to make sure I well, and you probably should have mailed it to them three years later. That’s just me. But nonetheless, I just wanted, I wanted to come full circle. I didn’t want to leave that story with a cliffhanger, so.

[00:12:57] Joe Saul-Sehy: Can I jump in there for just a second, Eric?

[00:12:59] Eric Brotman: Go ahead. Of course.

[00:13:00] Joe Saul-Sehy: On what you said about financial literacy. Because this report, and I’d love for people to, to read this report the secret financial lives of Americans, because it lays the blame in two places and one of them, and I’m gonna get to it in a second is exactly what you talked about, about financial planning being a playground for the rich, which is, you know, just, oh, not even eye roll, you get so frustrated by that.

But th but they point at two different areas. Number one, they point at social media and about, and they actually look at things like real estate and how more and more people are investing in real estate. Number one, it’s hot. Number two, it looks great in pictures. Looks phenomenal on Instagram and people are supposedly by owning real estate, you know, getting rich and living this fantastic life. And they talk about how real estate now is outpacing the stock market in terms of interest and involvement, and potentially, as you know, because of the illiquidity in real estate, we could be headed for another big problem in real estate because of it.

Then the second thing they point to with social media is Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies that while some of us are excited about the technology around crypto, there’s a whole bunch of people who have experienced flat wages for a long time. They’re not going anywhere with their personal finance. They’re crying about money and the easy way out of it seems to be this new thing that looks like the lottery. It isn’t, we’re not interested in the technology. We didn’t understand the technology. We just think this is the quick and easy way to get rich. But then they transitioned from that at the end of the study to laying a lot of the blame at the foot of banks. And the fact that banks in the financial system do a bunch for wealthy people already to create rewards and programs for wealthy people by charging people at the bottom of the pyramid these horrendous overdraft fees, the small account position fees.

And instead of educating people and bringing along these people with us, and by the way, the study even does a great job of pointing out how much money banks would bring in if they actually spent time on these people, they could bring in a bajillion people so they could give even more money to rich people if they treated people to bottom of the pyramid better.

So it is frustrating and people at the top will also tell you that, that you know what, having a plan isn’t important if you’re already rich, it’s the key to get there. That is truly the key to get there. So yeah. To your point, it is, it’s incredibly frustrating when you hear misnomers like that.

[00:15:31] Eric Brotman: I’m in agreement with you. It is the key to get there. I also think it’s the key to stay there, but it’s much easier to stay wealthy than to get wealthy. I don’t think there’s any question that that’s true.

[00:15:40] Joe Saul-Sehy: Yeah.

[00:15:40] Eric Brotman: So you, you mentioned real estate and you mentioned crypto. And this reminds me of something I used to refer to as my cab driver theory. You know, I traveled a lot and in the days before Uber, I was in a lot of cabs. And in the late nineties, every cab driver was telling me what tech stocks they were buying. Just volunteering that they were buying, you know, pets.com. And if that wasn’t the writing on the wall, these same cab drivers eight years later were telling me about the real estate they were flipping just in time.

And now I can’t even go out to dinner, you know, and, and not have a, a waiter or waitress ask me, you know, which crypto they think. I’m like, w w what are you doing? Like, no, don’t possibly go there. But th this idea of getting rich quick is so titillating that that’s why you see these folks do the lottery, or do gambling. And cryptocurrency is potentially a major shift in, in how how finance works. But right now, It is controlled by a very small number of very big players, all of whom could crush everyone else in an instant if they felt like it. And that’s a very dangerous place for the average investor or average human to be. So it, as soon as you start hearing in the back of your Uber or your cab, oh, I bought this coin or that coin, that’s usually a sign to run. Don’t you think?

[00:16:59] Joe Saul-Sehy: Absolutely. And you’re right. I remember, I mean, you and I can go into some of these old guy stories, but I got fired in 1999 by somebody, Eric, because their portfolio only did like 45%.

[00:17:13] Eric Brotman: I remember that.

[00:17:15] Joe Saul-Sehy: Yeah, I wasn’t even the type of financial planner where we would publish returns or that we, you know, would, it was always about the planning and about strategic diversification. I remember arguing with my client and saying, listen, we’re still, we’re diversified for a reason. You stay diversified because you reach your goal that way.

And he’s like, “no, my friends are doubling their money and they’re all in.” Pets.com and you know, web 1.0. And I remember hearing back then about the new economy, right? I remember hearing that. No, no, no, no, no, no. Th th the balance sheet doesn’t matter anymore, Eric. The balance sheet doesn’t matter. See, now it’s all about ideas. And even if you’re losing money, hand over fist all the time, Hey, it’s a new economy. Well, it turned out to be the same economy a couple of years later.

[00:17:59] Eric Brotman: Yeah. And, and the Munder net net story where people, I actually had the same experience in 99. When people say, why are, why are we up 45%? I did have those conversations, and I’m thinking, how about “You’re welcome. Let’s go get a, let’s go get lunch.” but, but there was this idea that if we weren’t doing a hundred percent, something was wrong. And even the indexes at that time, you know, the S&P was so heavily weighted toward a couple of small tech companies that when it got clobbered, it really got clobbered. And people who didn’t take heed of that diversification really got crushed.

And I think that’s the pendulum that we live in as advisors with consumers and just as human beings, this pendulum between greed and fear. And Warren buffet said it best. He said, “the time to be greedy is when others are fearful. And the time to be fearful is when others are greedy.” And if that’s not the most prophetic thing I’ve ever heard in personal finance, I don’t know what it is, but that’s, that’s your one rule book to, to live by, Joe. Chase the opposite direction. The lemmings are all going for that same cliff, aren’t they?

[00:18:57] Joe Saul-Sehy: Yeah. Well, think about, you know, sir John Templeton, right? I mean, Templeton built a fortune on if everybody looks right, I look left. That was his first rule of investing and served him well for his entire lifetime.

[00:19:10] Eric Brotman: So I want to talk about Stacking Benjamins. Because it is truly– first of all, I’ve had the great pleasure of being in your basement for the recordings. And I am actually in my basement today doing recordings because of some snow that we’re having at this time. So we’re swapping basements today, Joe, but tell me about the show. How, how has it evolved over this decade? And what do you look back maybe as one of the biggest victories for the show and maybe one of the biggest oops mistakes that you’ve made while, while doing the show over the years?

[00:19:40] Joe Saul-Sehy: Wow. You know, with the show, the show was created when it was created, the thing that I regret most is that we didn’t start it sooner. That, that I wish I had the year back when we hemmed and hawed and how many times is that right? Uh, In, in any of our lives, right? Just get moving, move directionally toward the goal. I have a great mentor now who talks about the 80% rule, which is if, if you’re 80% sure of the way, start walking. Like, like just start walking 80%.

You’ll, you’ll figure it out as you go much faster. Which has always been true my entire life. But you know, when we, when we started out, I had, I had a lot of people cause I liked the early days of podcasts. I was a early podcast listener. Still listen to a lot of podcasts. And I was told by people, you know, you should have one, you should have a podcast. You’ve done lots of media. That you’d probably be good at it. And I continually told them, I said, I don’t have anything to say that isn’t already being said. I don’t want to be Jim Cramer. I don’t want to be Suze Orman. That’s just not my style. It’s not, it’s it isn’t me. There’s a great book by a guy named Austin Kleon called Steal Like an Artist.

And I love what Austin says. And I’ve lived a lot of my life this way, which is take things that are not in your area of expertise or your realm of expertise and import them, and then remix them and pay homage to them. Like don’t, don’t, don’t plagiarize people, but pay homage to them and take the stuff that you like and mix it up into this cool salad of things that’s uniquely yours.

And that’s what a good artist does. Artistry doesn’t come from the head of one person. It’s built on creativity that came before it. And so one day I was out mowing my lawn and I’m listening to this NPR show called Car Talk. You familiar with Car Talk?

[00:21:26] Eric Brotman: I’ve heard of it. I’ve not listened to it.

[00:21:28] Joe Saul-Sehy: Yeah. So it’s these brothers who called himself click and clack and they take people’s calls about their cars and they spend probably most of the show, Eric, laughing. And I realized while I was listening to Car Talk, I thought I I’m learning nothing about a car and yet I listen to these guys all the time. And I love it. And I’m surrounded in car culture. And whenever I read about cars then after that, because of click and clack, I want to know more. So instead of being the last word about cars, these guys are just widening the funnel.

They’re widening the number of people that are interested in the topic. And I thought, what a cool thing that is. And all of a sudden I realized that’s our show. Cause at the time there was no podcast that was the first word instead of the last word, it was curating all these great voices like the Eric Brotmans out there, that, that that are showing an audience that there are a lot of different voices. There’s a lot of different ideas and there’s not really one right way to do this. We can have fun talking about the different ways to do this and dive into it a little more and also talk about things that are financially adjacent. And that actually came later and that might’ve been our biggest win, but, but initially it was let’s make car talk.

And then from there it was a series of inside jokes. I’m in Texarkana, Texas. There are no basements in Texarkana, Texas, which is why the show is going to be live from my mom’s basement. The second thing was, was that podcasters still to this day are pretending they’re not in mom’s basement. You know, some dude who’s talking about his favorite sports team on a microphone. He’s definitely in mom’s basement. And he’s trying to tell you he’s not, he is. So we thought we’d embrace it. Plus there was a show that my kids were listening to on XM kids called Absolutely Mindy. And we love this show and she was, the setup for her show was that Mindy was grounded and she was supposed to be cleaning her room but instead she was using her hairbrush as a microphone and was had his internet radio show where she had all of her friends call in. And my kids would call this show all the time on XM. They’d hear themselves on the radio. Mindy was hilarious. And I thought, what a, what a fun construct, the fact that Mindy’s grounded and in her room.

So I thought, what if, what if me and my cohost were in my mom’s basement and we have these characters on the show. My mom’s neighbor, Doug is our announcer guy. He’s he’s this off-beat fun character. And then my cohost, who’s a working CFP, Josh Bannerman. We decided we’d just call him, well, he, he wanted to speak very bluntly at first. So he said, “okay, what if I don’t use my real name? What if I just, what if we come up with a name?” And we thought, okay, I’ll be Joe. Because by then I’d sold my business, obviously. So I, I could just be me and we’ll just call him the other guy. And then we realized the other guy is OG like original gangster. So it’s Joe and OG, mom’s neighbor, Doug, and mom in the basement. And the cool thing is, is, you know, when we put the word out to personal finance people to come on and join us, they, they, they did. And those segments are fun and they’re gratifying having some of the top people in personal finance on the show.

Really, I think we’ve had pretty much everybody I’ve wanted except for you know, Dave Ramsey isn’t come on and I really don’t know if I’d want him. We’ve talked to his daughter, Rachel Cruz. I love her. She’s fantastic, but I don’t, I don’t really know if I care to talk to Dave and we haven’t had Robert Kiyosaki, and even though I like his story, everything I’ve heard about him personally and the things that he’s done personally, kind of, kind of not really live in what he’s telling you. So while I’m a fan of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, not that big a fan of him. And we haven’t had on Jim Cramer. And we tried to get Cramer and I’d love to have Cramer on the show and, and something that’s, that is funny is, but it was wonderful. Jim Cramer’s secretary was amazing. And she, I talked to her three times about the show and she was super nice. And frankly, we were just too small. He has such demands for his time and our audience is not big enough for, for, for Jim. And you know what that that’s fine.

We’ll get Jim Cramer and at some point, on the show.

[00:25:40] Eric Brotman: We’re we’re, we’re nearing the end of our show and something you said just resonated with me it struck me very funny, which was that when, when I started exploring podcasting years ago, we hired an agency to help us set up the show and, and I, I think, you know, the, the team from Interview Connections and so forth, but they asked, they said, “well, what is your objective in doing media and doing podcasts?” And I said, “the world deserves better than Suze Orman and Jim Cramer. Why not me?”

[00:26:06] Joe Saul-Sehy: Hmm.

[00:26:06] Eric Brotman: And you said those exact two names together. So either you’ve been listening to my inner thoughts, or you have, like, my iPhone, or great minds think alike or something like that.

[00:26:16] Joe Saul-Sehy: It’s probably that. We’re pretty brilliant.

[00:26:19] Eric Brotman: Well maybe, well, yeah, great minds think alike but sadly so do feeble minds. Just for the record. So we’re nearing the end of the show. I want to make sure that you give everybody a chance to know how to find you and you’re everywhere, but, but the best place to find you and to get a copy of Stacked and I need an extra credit assignment. That one takeaway the one thing folks can do from saying you know, “I spent time with Joe, I wasn’t with the whole cast of characters. OG. And his mom and, and in the basement and so forth.” But you know, your, your show’s like a cross between Wayne’s world and the Howard stern show, which I think is a huge win in and of itself. Great characters and good times. So where can folks learn more about you and pick up your book and what would your extra credit assignment be for the, for the folks out there who don’t want to retire? They want to graduate.

[00:27:05] Joe Saul-Sehy: Well, thanks for having me on and as always you and I just don’t get to talk enough. And when we do, we always have these great conversations. You can find me every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at the Stacking Benjamins Show. And we’ve had some great guests on lately. I like to do financially adjacent stuff, as I mentioned. Stuff, that’s not actually you don’t think of it when you first think of finance and we just had a guy named Daniel Lamar on who is the longtime CEO of Cirque de Solei and talking about adding more creativity to your life. And how he went from before he was with Cirque de Solei, being a regular person and not thinking about creativity to all of a sudden realizing how indispensable creativity is and obviously Cirque de Solei does that really well. So we, we try to do crazy stuff like that. And then we’ll have a wonderful people, like Eric Brotman, on from time to time. But Stacked, if you go to stackingbenjamins.com/stacked, you’ll find all the links to the book and even more important, you will find that starting March 1st, fingers crossed because of COVID, but we’re hoping to do a 42 city tour and that is getting close.

So come meet me and other finance geeks in your community. And that’s also at stackingbenjamins.com/stacked. So I’ll be on the road from March 1st, in Dallas to our last stop in mid June in Vegas. But we’re coming to hopefully a city near you where we can hook up and hopefully we’ll get Mr. Brotman when we come to Baltimore.

[00:28:30] Eric Brotman: I’d love it and count me in. So that’s a good extra credit assignment for me. How about for our audience before we close?

[00:28:35] Joe Saul-Sehy: Oh yes. My extra credit. And this is big. This is not just big in the book. You’ll find this resonates all the way through my book, but it’s big for everybody in life. Go automate something today because the key, I don’t think, Eric, is discipline. W w if you’re, especially, if you’re just getting started, it’s not discipline. Anybody who’s wealthy will tell you. Discipline did not get, discipline had a role, but it didn’t get them there. Automation got them there. Go hide money from yourself. Get a savings plan automated, or you get your debt payoff automated. That is, I think, the key to wealth.

[00:29:09] Eric Brotman: Phenomenal advice. Joe Saul-Sehy, thank you for joining us. I look forward to our next conversation, be it your basement or mine, or somewhere on tour. Be great to see you.

[00:29:19] Joe Saul-Sehy: Sounds great, man. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:29:21] Eric Brotman: I’d like to thank all of you for listening to Don’t Retire… Graduate!

If you like, what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast and leave a review on apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Please also check out our books, workbooks, and online financial literacy resources at brotmanmedia.com. We’ll be back next week with another installment of office hours and in two weeks with another engaging guest. For now, this is your host, Eric Brotman, reminding you don’t retire. Graduate!

[00:29:48] Narrator: From this day forward, let us begin changing the way we view retirement .Today, I implore you: don’t retire. Graduate. Visit our website at brotmanmedia.com to subscribe and please like us and post comments on social media.

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