Are You Actually Wealthy? Here’s How to Know.

Summary

Money Guy Show – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Are You Actually Wealthy? Here’s How to Know
Hosts: Brian Preston & Bo Hanson
Date: August 12, 2026

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Episode Theme

This episode dives into the timeless question: "Are you actually wealthy?" Using an Investopedia article as a jumping-off point, Brian and Bo break down five different metrics for measuring wealth and offer their own insights on their strengths and shortcomings. They highlight the importance of personal discipline, the right wealth-building behaviors, and understanding what financial independence really means. The show is packed with actionable advice, relatable anecdotes, data-driven benchmarks, and lively banter—all in true Money Guy fashion.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Does It Mean to Be Wealthy? (01:05–02:11)

• The hosts introduce the episode’s core question and reference Investopedia’s article outlining five key ways to assess if you’re wealthy.
• Charles Schwab’s survey says $2.3 million is the amount Americans say they need to feel wealthy; $839,000 to feel financially comfortable.
• Brian Preston (02:03): “That’s how much money you need to be wealthy.”
• Bo Hansen (02:10): “Those are interesting numbers. But it’s just one measure.”

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2. Five Ways to Assess Wealthiness

1. Income (02:11–03:16)

• Median U.S. household income is about $84,000.
• Income is a tool for wealth-building, not a direct measure of wealth.
• High income does not guarantee wealth if not paired with discipline.
• Brian Preston (03:16): “You can have a great income and still be broke as a joke.”

2. Debt Balance (03:16–05:14)

• Excluding mortgages, the typical American carries ~$22,000 in debt.
• High-interest debt (like credit cards) is a wealth killer, but debt can also be a strategic tool (e.g., mortgages).
• Having debt doesn’t necessarily mean one is not wealthy, and being debt-free doesn’t always equate to wealth.
• Reference to Robert Kiyosaki, who built wealth through leveraging debt.

3. Financial Flexibility (Margin) (05:14–07:01)

• 24% of U.S. households live paycheck-to-paycheck; among high-income earners, it’s still 19%.
• Margin is created by living on less than you make, but simply having margin isn’t enough if you’re not putting that margin to work.
• Brian Preston (06:03): “You can have margin, but if you don’t put it to work, you’re not really building wealth.”

4. Net Worth (07:01–08:36)

• Median net worth for U.S. households: ~$205,000.
• Much of Americans’ net worth is tied up in primary residences (homes), making it less accessible for wealth-building.
• Tracking your net worth annually is crucial to understanding your financial direction.

5. Retirement Savings (Liquid Net Worth/Investments) (08:36–09:51)

• Retirement savings (“army of dollars”) is the liquid money working for you—most accurate measure for wealth building.
• Median retirement savings by age:
  • Under 35: $25,000
  • 35-44: $79,000
  • 45-54: $97,000
  • 55-64: $150,000
  • 65+: $198,000
• Bo Hansen (09:51): “That’s not quite enough to be financially independent.”

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3. Bringing It All Together: The Real Wealth Metric (09:51–13:23)

• Many Americans (even high earners) struggle due to lack of discipline, not the lack of income potential.
• The most powerful metric: Invested net worth (money actually working for you).
• Benchmarking Success:
  • By age 30: 1× your income saved/invested
  • By age 40: 3×
  • By 56: 6–7×
• Brian Preston (11:14): “If you’re a 40-year-old with $100,000 income and $300,000 invested, you’re on track.”
• Personal finance is personal—these metrics are guides, not one-size-fits-all.

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4. Actionable Takeaways from Each Metric (11:56–13:23)

• Income: Use it as your “shovel”—the main tool for wealth creation, but only if managed with discipline.
• Debt: High-interest debt should be avoided; smart use of debt (e.g., strategic mortgages) is acceptable.
• Financial Flexibility: Margin from living below your means is essential, but must be put to work (investing/saving).
• Net Worth & Investable Assets: Assess your progress with investable net worth, not just total net worth.

Brian Preston (13:23):
“We want you to have a more accurate assessment of whether you’re wealthy, not just rely on these simple metrics.”

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5. Setting & Reaching Your Number (13:23–14:49)

• Use Money Guy resources: wealth multipliers, time value of money calculator (moneyguy.com/resources) to project and plan your path to financial comfort or “wealth.”
• If you’re in your 20s or 30s, with time on your side, you can hit big goals by starting early and being consistent.
• Bo Hansen (13:23):
  “…Build your great big beautiful tomorrow.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On High Earners Still Struggling:
  • “High income does not mean wealth. I just made my point.” (Bob Moneyguide, 05:29)
• On Financial Flexibility:
  • “If you don’t actually put margin to work, you’re not at the wealth phase.” (Brian Preston, 06:03)
• On Investing Early:
  • “Every one of those dollars…could turn into $12.69 by the time we retire.” (Brian Preston, 22:03)
• On Personal Benchmarks:
  • “By age 30, try to have one time your income saved and invested.” (Bob Moneyguide, 10:52)
• On the Real Wealth Benchmark:
  • “Your investable net worth is probably the most accurate way to measure where am I at?” (Brian Preston, 12:41)
• On Personal Finance:
  • “Personal finance is personal. What is the life that I ultimately want to live? How am I going to use my money to achieve the goals that I have?” (Brian Preston, 13:14)

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Q&A Highlights & Noteworthy Advice

Should I Keep a Large Emergency Fund or Invest More? (17:36)

• Alyssa, 35, with a husband wanting to keep 19% of net worth in cash
  • If holding excess cash is about nerves (not planned expenses), educate on opportunity cost.
  • High cash holdings at a young age can be risky for long-term growth: “What feels safe in the short term can be risky in the long term.” (Bob Moneyguide, 19:16)
  • Use the Money Guy “wealth multiplier” to demonstrate long-term potential lost by keeping money in cash (22:03).

What Counts as High-Interest Debt? (24:40)

• Land loan at 7%, question on whether to prioritize payoff
  • Context matters—if land is for future primary residence with plans to refinance, not high-priority debt.
  • If investment land, consider it more closely akin to high-interest debt.

How Should a Pension Affect My Stock/Bond Allocation? (56:38)

• Pensions can act as a “fixed income” substitute in your portfolio—aggressiveness depends on how much the pension covers your needs and its reliability.
• Continually reassess as goals and sources change, and consider consulting a professional for major decisions.

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Fun & Relatable Exchanges

• Banter about vacation stories, Money Guy “Tumblers,” editing jokes, and inside references (23:29–24:30).
• Bear in the Car Segment (47:06–50:11):
  • Hosts react to a viral news story about a bear trapped in a car honking the horn all night—demonstrating their playful show dynamic.

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Audience Interaction & Announcements

• Secret Money Guy Project:
  • Early access available at moneyguy.com/earlyaccess.
  • Teases and playful guesses from the chat (Mutant Mingle, a new course, a Money Guy cruise, etc.)
• Active Q&A throughout, with humor, direct advice, and Money Guy merchandise offered for great questions.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:05–02:11 | Are You Actually Wealthy? Intro & Schwab Survey | | 02:11–05:14 | Five Ways to Assess Wealth – Income & Debt Balance | | 05:14–07:01 | Financial Flexibility (Margin) | | 07:01–08:36 | Net Worth Metric | | 08:36–09:51 | Retirement Savings/Liquid Net Worth | | 09:51–13:23 | Bringing Metrics Together – What Matters Most | | 17:36–22:03 | Q&A: Emergency Funds vs. Investing | | 24:40–28:41 | Q&A: Land Debt and High-Interest Classification | | 35:05–39:04 | Q&A: Finding Your 'Why' and How it Changes Over Time | | 56:38–59:15 | Q&A: Pensions & Portfolio Allocation | | 47:06–50:11 | Viral Bear-in-Car News Segment |

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Tone and Language

• The hosts speak conversationally, blending actionable advice with relatable stories, financial data, and a gentle mix of humor and sincerity ("broke as a joke", "if that doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger", "consume and spend society"). They urge discipline, long-term thinking, and personalization.
• Direct audience engagement is a hallmark, making technical topics accessible without dumbing down.

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Final Takeaways

• Wealth is best measured by disciplined savings and investable assets—NOT just income, absence of debt, or total net worth.
• Consistency, appropriate benchmarks, and putting money to work early are your keys.
• Personal finance must be tailored to your goals, stage, and values—use the right tools and stay on track with regular, honest check-ins.
• Don’t let short-term comfort derail your long-term future. Every step counts—start now, wherever you are.

Resources Mentioned

• Money Guy resources, calculators, order of operations: moneyguy.com/resources
• Early access to “something big”: moneyguy.com/earlyaccess

Transcript

[Bo Hansen]

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn [e-mail] Spotify

[Brian Preston]

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[Bob Moneyguide]

Are you actually wealthy?

[Brian Preston]

Brent? I am so excited about this because this is the age old question people want to know, am I where I'm supposed to be? How do I measure it? How do I know how I stack up? How do I know if I'm doing the right things? And I think there have been a lot of publications and articles and resources that have sought to answer that question.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Well, we, we found an article out on Investopedia and I thought, look before we go through, because what was unique is it actually went through the five different ways that you could consider on this range. Are you wealthy?

[Brian Preston]

Like five ways to accurately assess, look

[Bob Moneyguide]

and stick around to the end because we're actually going to bring it all together. And I really loved how we kind of put some purpose to every one of these five variables. But there was an interesting way they kicked it off is that Schwab, Charles Schwab, had a research study done on what is wealthy. And what came back from that survey was that 2.3 million is what people needed to feel wealthy.

[Brian Preston]

That's how much money you need to be wealthy.

[Bob Moneyguide]

$839,000 to feel financially comfortable.

[Brian Preston]

Interesting.

[Bob Moneyguide]

So those are interesting numbers.

[Brian Preston]

Those are interesting numbers. And so that's obviously a measure of like net worth. That's one measure. But this Investopedia was article was interesting because it gave you sort of these five different, five unique metrics that you can use to determine if you're wealthy. And we just wanted to kind of give you our thoughts on each. And the very first one was income. And income is simply how much money you make every year. How much money do you have coming in? And we often say all the time Brian, that this is your greatest wealth building tool. But is it really a way to assess if you're wealthy or not?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah. And if you want to put some numbers this, I like how we put numbers to actual data points. The actual median household income in the United states is around $84,000. But you kind of already have shared this is that income is a way to build wealth. But I don't think it's a very good way to measure how wealthy you are. It's actually like you said, it's a tool to build. It's not actually what lets you see you can have a great income and still be broke as a joke.

[Brian Preston]

Well, I was going to say how many people have we interacted with both in our lives and our careers that have huge incomes that if, if you're measuring it by income, they should certainly be wealthy and yet as you say, they are broke as a joke. So I'm going to say income probably not the best metric. How about this next one? The second thing that the investor PETA article said was your debt balance. How much debt or how, how little debt you carry could be a metric to assess whether you're wealthy or not.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Once again giving some perspective here with numbers. If you take out mortgage debt, the typical American has around $22,000 of debt. So you think about credit cards, loans, other things. You know, typical American is walking around with debt on their net worth statement.

[Brian Preston]

Now if you followed us for any amount of time, Brian, we hold the. Do you have the thing, you know the thing for me, you know that we say in the financial order of operations high interest debt can somewhere high interest debt can be devastating, it can be a wealth killer. But that does not mean that we are necessarily anti debt. We do think that debt can be a tool that can be used. The most common and easy example is a mortgage. Being able to buy a primary residence and having a mortgage on that doesn't necessarily mean that you're bad with money or just because you have a mortgage on your balance sheet. It would not suggest that you are not wealthy in the same way that just because you don't have debt on the balance sheet, it also doesn't mean that you are wealthy. So I think that again debt can be a tool that potentially could work for you or more often it can work against you, but probably not a great measure of wealth or assessing whether you're wealthy or not.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Well look, there's a lot of wealthy people. Who is that? Kiyosaki. Who?

[Brian Preston]

Robert Kiyosaki.

[Bob Moneyguide]

You know, I Think he's made his entire wealth off of leveraging debt. So you can, you can have a lot of debt and still be wealthy to a degree. It depends on how the value of the assets compared to that debt is. And there's also, think about two people have the exact same level of debt, but their asset levels are completely different. That's why it's also not a good variable to by itself determine wealth.

[Brian Preston]

All right, so then they went to the third way that you can assess or the third metric you can look at, and that's your financial flexibility. How much margin exists in your life on a month to month pay cycle to pay cycle basis.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Now this is the one that kind of shocked me when you look at the data points on this, is that 24% of US households lived paycheck to paycheck. Now what I thought, and it was in the article wealthy or high income. Remember, income does not mean wealth. I just made my point. But with this stat I'm about to share high income families in the United States, 19%, so only 5% better than the typical American, even though they have this tool of high income live paycheck, paycheck to paycheck as well. So there seems to be elements missing like discipline and so forth.

[Brian Preston]

Yeah, financial flexibility means having margin available to be able to fund and reach your financial goals. And you hear us say this all the time, that if you don't have margin or if you're trying to increase the amount of margin or flexibility you have, there are really only two levers that you get to pull. You can increase your income, how much money you have coming in, or you can decrease your expenses, how much money you have going out. And so, but even this, I think, Brian, fails in a small sense of being a great metric for assessing whether or not someone is wealthy. Because even someone who can have income coming in and live on less than they make, if they don't actually do something with that margin, they don't actually take it and put it to work. How often have we seen the people who just go out and buy CDs and put it in cash. And while they're not paycheck to paycheck, and they do have financial flexibility and they do have some level of margin, I would argue they're still not quite at the wealth phase because they didn't actually deploy the dollars in the right way.

[Bob Moneyguide]

And that leads to the fourth here. And this is the one that look, I think as a whole is very powerful. So much so that we on an annual basis we actually make a habit, a tradition, if you will, where we do a net worth statement, where we, we try to figure out what we own, what we owe folks, and then we get our net worth. And this is valuable, this is very powerful to look at on at least an annual basis to know, hey, are things going in the right direction? Is my debt going down? Are my investments going up? Because hopefully one day and we'll get to this point. If you build up your net worth, especially the investable net worth, your money can work harder than you can. Yeah.

[Brian Preston]

According to the U.S. census Bureau, the median net worth for all American household is right around $205,000. Which, which sounds okay, right? It sounds like okay, it's not negative, it's a couple hundred thousand. But the problem with net worth, and we have talked about this a ton, a lot of Americans net worth is really based more on the fact that their primary residence, the home that they own, has increased in value and it's based a lot less on their behavior, how much they're saving and how much they're building. So while net worth can be a fantastic metric to assess where you are, how that network and net worth is comprised and what it's made up of makes a really big difference. And that was actually the fifth metric that this investopedia arc laid out of. How do you actually assess whether you're wealthy and they called it retirement savings or we would say your liquid net worth or your investment portfolio.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah, because I mean, retirement savings immediately kind of gets put into the category. You probably immediately think of like 401ks IRAs, Roth IRAs. I'm willing. What I like about liquid investments is that yes, you get to account all the 401k, the Roth IRAs and so forth, but you can also count taxable savings and your emergency funds and so forth. So it all goes in because that's just money. You actually have access. It's really your army of dollars that you can put to work for you so you don't have to work so hard with your back, your brain and even your hand.

[Brian Preston]

And so then again, looking at the numbers, this is According to the U.S. census Bureau, if we look at median retirement savings, so money that people have chiseled away for retirement, for future financial independence, by age, you can see it's a very different number than the median household income. For those folks that are under 35, the median retirement savings, only about $25,000. For those 35 to 44, about 79,000, 45 to 54, about 97,055 to 64, about 150,000 and then 65 and above. Median retirement savings is about $200,000, $198,000. I would argue, Brian, that's, that's not quite enough to be financially independent.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Well, I mean, and let's kind of bring this home because this is what I love is I want to close this out and tell you how these five things are important. They're helpful, but in their own ways. But we in America have a discipline problem. I shared that earlier because we have high income. Even in the research from this article, high income people should have all the capacity in the world to build wealth because they have the big shovel, they're bringing money in. But yet Even close to 20% is not because the typical American is 24% and then you have a high income at close to 20%. We just have a discipline problem. And the fact that we never actually engage the tool of saving and investing, that's what happens. And if you need proof, and this is why we love to kind of give you some metrics to go by, we say all the time that for the typical American, what we'd like you to have is some benchmarks of goals. Like by age 30, try to have one time your income saved and invested,

[Brian Preston]

an invested liquid portfolio.

[Bob Moneyguide]

If you think about a 40 year old, try to be up to 3 times 56.4. You can see what's happening as you're building in the background, where it starts very slow, but through compounding growth, it picks up more and more momentum. Where one day, as I've said multiple times on the show already, your money works harder than you do.

[Brian Preston]

So let's assume if you were a four year old with $100,000 household income and your investment portfolio is $300,000, we would argue that you're on track, you're moving in the right direction, you are where you need to be. But on the median, Americans are not doing that. So we want you to have a more accurate assessment of whether you're wealthy, where you are supposed to be. While you may have a high income, while your debt load may be low, while your net worth may be growing, we want to make sure that your behavior is actually matching that. So we thought, okay, rather than using these five metrics as a mechanism to assess whether you're wealthy, what are some takeaways we could take away from each of their metrics.

[Bob Moneyguide]

So let's go through each of these income. This is your shovel. This is actually your number one wealth building tool. Make it valuable by then leveraging discipline. So this wealth turns into assets, the income turns into assets.

[Brian Preston]

And then if you are living beyond your means and you're using high interest debts to subsidize your lifestyle, there's a really good chance that you're not ever going to be able to build wealth, actually going to work against yourself. High interest debt truly is a wealth killer.

[Bob Moneyguide]

And then they listed financial flexibility. We talk about this a different way. We say this is margin, this is living on less than you make. And when you utilize, this is one of the three ingredients to wealth building. Because you have discipline. And then you have living on less than you make, which creates the margin or the money that given enough time can be really valuable.

[Brian Preston]

And then if you want to really assess behaviorally, how am I doing? Am I actually moving towards financial independence? We think that your investable net worth is probably the most accurate way to measure where am I at? Am I on track? Am I ahead of the curve or am I behind the curve? And that way you can determine. And this is what I think is so interesting too. We gave you these numbers of where the median American is. And if you're ahead of that number, maybe that's good. If you're behind that number, maybe that's bad. But you have to assess for yourself. Personal finance is personal. What is the life that I ultimately want to live? How am I going to use my money to achieve the goals that I have? And am I on track to be able to do those things?

[Bob Moneyguide]

So kind of to close, we've already talked about the financial order of operations. If you're looking for a system that will actually tell you what to do with your next dollar, this is the instruction manual. But I want to take it even a step further in the fact that we gave you at the beginning of this is that to feel comfortable. According to Schwab survey, $833,000 2.3. To feel wealthy, go to our website moneyguy.com resources. Look at our wealth multiplier, use our time value of money calculator and you can figure out based upon your age right now what you would have to save and invest to reach those goals. I think you'll be shocked. Especially for all my audience that's in your 20s and 30s, you can do every one of those things. If you'll just take a little bit today to build your great big beautiful tomorrow.

[Brian Preston]

I love it. So you figure out your number. Well, one of the things we get to do is as you figure out your number and you Try to figure out, okay, well, how do I continue marching along? I've got questions. I've got things that I want to get some insight on. I want to figure out how I can do money better. Because we do believe that there is indeed a better way to do money. It's why every Single Tuesday at 10am we sit right here so that we can answer your questions and load you up. So if you have a question, if you have something you want us to weigh in on, we have the team out in the wings right now ready to get that in front of us. So make sure you get that in the chat with that creative director, Rivi. I'm gonna throw it over to you.

[Bo Hansen]

We are actively adding questions to the hopper, so thanks for submitting those. And we will get to those very shortly. But first, I have a secret announcement for you. No, this is just for you. You are the first to hear that something is coming. We've been sitting on something for a while, and we're not quite ready to share it with everyone. And that's why we wanted to give early access and some hints leading up to that big announcement to you. So if you want to know what we've been cooking up, what's going on behind the scenes, go to moneyguy.com early access and you can get on the list. We're going to be giving hints, some surprise perks, and ultimately early access to this secret thing that we've been working on before anybody else. So that's mainly all I can say at this time. But what I want you to tell us right now is if you had to guess, if we're working on something big, if we have a big announcement coming, if there's a thing that you can get early access to, what do you think it is? If you drop those questions in the chat, or even better, if you are in the Moneyverse, you can drop it in the Moneyverse. I would love to hear your guesses and maybe even get Bo and Brian to react to them on the show today. So make that happen. Go to moneyguy.com early access to get on the list. You'll receive a confirmation email after you get on the list to kind of tell you the lay of the land and what's coming over the next couple weeks. And I can't wait for you to know what this announcement is.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Can I say something without giving away too much because you guys told me?

[Brian Preston]

Please, Brian, please.

[Bo Hansen]

Here we go.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Here's the thing. I love what is coming out. Pays so much homage to the Abundance cycle. Because the whole thing with the abundance cycle is to give so much value, learn, apply, grow, and become the best version of yourself. And I think that anybody and everybody out there in the audience, I think. I think it's gonna be a little shock and awe. You're gonna be like, holy cow, they really did that.

[Bo Hansen]

You know what? That was an exciting news.

[Brian Preston]

I respect that.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Well, I feel, as the educator, I feel really good about what's coming out.

[Bo Hansen]

I love it. I love it. So get on the list. First of all, go to moneyguy.com early access and then put your guesses in the chat. We're in the money verse right now. I want to know what you initially say. I think you're doing this. I would love to know that.

[Brian Preston]

I love so many of these guesses. I'm not gonna say them. Cause I know you're gonna say them at the end, but there's if they.

[Bob Moneyguide]

And that's why I'm glad they don't give me a computer screen.

[Bo Hansen]

Well, let's jump to a question, and we'll gather up some guesses. Maybe we'll do that sooner rather than later. But let's go to question number one from Alyssa right now. She says, hi, money guy. I'm 35, in the messy middle.

[Brian Preston]

Welcome.

[Bo Hansen]

My hubby wants to keep 19% net worth in cash. That's 18 plus months of an emergency fund opportunity. Cost seems too high. I get wanting to have cash on hand, but not at the expense of investing 50% net worth invested. Now, what do you think?

[Brian Preston]

So it's difficult to assess. What do we think? Right. We don't know all the variables. We don't know all the unique parts of your financial situation. But what I can equip you with is some questions to ask. Because at 35, that's young. Even being in the messy middle, that's really young. And so to hear that you have 19% of your total net worth in. In liquid cash, not really out there working, not really out there earning for you, and the fact that that represents 18 months of your expenses and emergency as an emergency fund. The very first question that I asked your husband if he was sitting in here with us, is, why? What's the. Is there some reason? And his answer may be, oh, well, we know that we have a new car we're gonna have to replace in the next 12 months. Okay, well, that just. That's a sinking fund. That makes sense. Or, hey, there's a renovation on the home that we. That we know we want to do. We need cash. Okay, that's justifiable, that makes sense. But if it's just, well, you know, I'm just nervous about the market, nervous about what's going on. Then I would walk him through, okay, well what are emergency funds supposed to do? And what are the seven? So what? It's an exercise. You work there, okay. If the worst thing happens, so what? And then that happens, so what? And then that happens, so what? And likely, if you have a fully funded six month emergency fund, you can get through the seven. So what's. Without having a cataclysmic outcome.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Look, I don't know, I don't know your husband's background, if some of this is just for safeties or what helps him sleep at night. This is one of those things where a little bit of education helps, is that what feels safe in the short term can actually be risky in the long term. You know, I grew up in a household where my parents whole idea of investing was CDs because they just didn't know how money worked. They had never done the stock market, so it felt kind of like they'd heard gambling and all kind of other things. It's only later when you, you find out, no, that's the economy, all this innovation, all the things that are going on in the world, you're getting in on that instead of trying to beat the market, you're actually just being the market. But for a lot of people who've never done it before, that feels foreign to them. That feels like there needs to be some education and comfort built into that. And then, you know, and that's one of the reasons financial order of operations, because what this is going to protect you and your husband from, from falling into is you go through the actual steps because we cover you in all aspects of the fact that hey, emergency reserves, it's so important to your husband and to us as well that we gave it two steps of the financial order of operations. With steps one and four, we want to make sure you're not leaving money on the table with the free money from your employers. It sounds like y' all don't have problems with paying off high interest debt because if you have huge reserves, you're, you're super disciplined. But I don't want money left on the table with your Roth IRAs, your health savings accounts. That's the tax free growth, the retirement accounts with your employer plans. It's the really step seven and eight that y' all look at it if you're so far ahead of the curve that you're like, hey, I want to, you know, keep this extra cash for x step 8, maybe you can do it. This is why I give people permission. If you want. If you're in your 20s and 30s and you want to pay off a 2 and a half, 3% mortgage, I don't love it. But when you've done everything else so well that you're in step eight, it's your money. Do, do it makes you happy because you've paid respect to the other parts of the system. So doing it for peace of mind or whatever the goal is is a okay at that point because you made it through the financial order of operations. But if it's before that and you're like leaving money on the table with your 401k or you're not funding Roth IRAs, we need to work on that behavioral side of things.

[Brian Preston]

Really quick exercise that I would do. And again, we have this. The reason why we have these tools out there available. If you go out to moneyguy.com resources, check out a wealth multiplier. If you and your husband are both 35, say, hey, let's just think about this, all right? We're at 18 months. Let's assume that maybe we need a 12 month emergency reserve because of a super conservative risk tolerance. If we just took that six months of additional emergency reserves we had and we put that into the market to go work for us. Do you recognize our money multiplier at 35?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Is 12.69.

[Brian Preston]

Is 12.69. Every one of those dollars that we could put to work could turn into 12.$69 by the time we retire. And it's going to be a big number. That's the opportunity cost you're walking away from. So I think perhaps just education would be a great way to start that conversation.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Is it a Tumblr day?

[Bo Hansen]

It is. I'm glad you took the words out of my mouth since we answered your question on the show. You get a Tumblr if you'd like one, just email winneroneyguy.com by the way,

[Bob Moneyguide]

if y' all are wondering what that sounds. Cause I have to remember we have new audience members coming in every week. As a matter of fact, we had a react go out yesterday and I thought, I thought it was hilarious. Somebody said, I accidentally clicked on the link and then I finished the entire episode. Thank you for teaching financial literacy. I'm like another happy customer. We give out tumblers on, on Q and A days where this thing literally, as you see, I'm using it as a tumbler. Bo is actually a koozie. I should say Bo is using his as a tumbler.

[Bo Hansen]

I've got mine today.

[Bob Moneyguide]

This thing has serves multiple goals, so that's why I say it's a transformer and can change your life. By the way, mustache just like Bo. Can't grow one. I can't grow one. You have to. You have to buy your own fake mustache. Just like Bose.

[Bo Hansen]

Love it.

[Bob Moneyguide]

By the way, that does prove.

[Brian Preston]

Do you remember I know you said.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I said I'm never mean to bow. And then you're like every day.

[Brian Preston]

Literally every single day. It's all right, though.

[Bo Hansen]

All right, we're gonna go to another question before we get your reaction to some of the announcement. Guesses.

[Bob Moneyguide]

If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger, buddy.

[Brian Preston]

You've been strengthening me for the last 20 years.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Heck of a coach. If I. If I wasn't picking on you, I didn't care about you anymore. That's what my coach used to tell

[Brian Preston]

me back in the day when I was learning how to swim because I'm a pretty good swimmer. If you would have taught me, I bet you were to just throw him in kind. Ah, throw him in there. He'll swim.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Hey, let the record show when he almost drowned in the ocean, I was positioned to save him.

[Brian Preston]

He did.

[Bo Hansen]

He did save you.

[Brian Preston]

No, no, no, no, no. He, he was there. Had I needed to be saved.

[Bob Moneyguide]

But since I can position myself to his behind him so he couldn't drown me and I could throw him on my shoulder, I mean, my hip and do the whole.

[Brian Preston]

I was a much smaller guy back then, so he would have. He'd had no problem getting me in.

[Bo Hansen]

Oh, man. If this never gets resolved, let us know. If you'll keep.

[Bob Moneyguide]

By the way, because of all this conversation, we're going to go on another vacation together. Because we're like, man, we went on one couple's trip together and look at all these stories that came out of it. If we did this again, it's just fruitful for the show.

[Bo Hansen]

Can't wait. It's hilarious. All right, we're going to go to foolish parents question next. My wife and I are 27 years old with a baby arriving in weeks.

[Brian Preston]

Oh, congrats. Congratulations.

[Bo Hansen]

First of all, we are working our way through the food. What counts as high interest debt. We have a land loan at 7% rate with a balance of 127k. What do you think? Give them some guidance.

[Brian Preston]

All right, let's see how good our editing Production team can be. We do have a little metric. It's a slide that we share all the time about what counts as high interest debt. How do I determine that? And so let's start with the easy stuff first. Credit cards, no matter the interest rate, they're high interest. Even if you have a 0% credit card, we would argue that using a credit card is totally fine, but carrying a credit card balance, no matter the interest rate is never okay. So credit cards are always high interest debt. Well, then you step down to something like auto loans. Oh, look at this. Auto loans. We believe if you're going to go borrow money, you should fall into the 238 rule of thumb. So 20% down, don't finance for any more than three years or 36 months, and your payment can't exceed 8% of your monthly gross income. Well, if you're inside of the 23eight framework, it's okay. If we go through a season where car interest rates are higher. So if you're in your 20s, even if you have an 8 or 9% car loan, which is not ideal, if it's inside of 23, 8, we would say that's okay. In your 30s, 9%, and then your 40s down to 8%, and then student loans, same sort of metrics. If you're in your 20s and you have student loans below 6%, probably not high interest, 30s, 5%, so on and so forth. This one is really interesting though, because it's a land loan, which I'm assuming is some raw undeveloped land they're probably going to build on in the future that's going to be part of their home state.

[Bob Moneyguide]

That's the context we need is because there's, there's two paths this could go on. If this is investment, like you own raw land for investment, I do kind of get that into potentially the higher interest category because of. You could look at that column for student loans and I would look at that and be like 7% is pretty high. So that likely could, with an asterisk on it, qualify as step three. However, if this is land, exactly what Bo said, you purchase this for the thought that you were going to build on it and then turn this into your primary residence. Okay, now we have an issue, because I look at this as an issue is that you could build a house on this land and then refinance into a much lower interest rate or at least lower, you know, like 6%, five and a half percent depending upon where markets are at the time that you close on the actual refinanced. House. And if that that's the case, I don't consider this high interest because it's just like mortgages. We always are very careful to say if you have like a seven and a half percent mortgage, I don't necessarily treat that immediately as high interest because you always have the ability to refinance. Markets change, you know, constantly. There's deductibility of the interest which lowers it down to a degree. So there are some features. If this is part of something that's going to be your primary residence that gets the asterisk. But if it's an investment, I would consider this high interest that.

[Brian Preston]

All right, let me give you some context. This is what I love about a live chat. Foolish. Let us know. We plan to build on the land in four to five years and we placed a 15% down payment. The total cost of land and our current unrelated mortgage is 25% of gross income. We make about 150. We currently have 200,000 invested. So one thing you've immediately let me know there is and the land is on a 15 year term, you have this other home, this other mortgage that you're paying. But I imagine once you build on this property and you build your new home, you're probably going to sell your old home. Well, assuming that's the case, I'm going to assume that all the equity or a lot of the equity in that is then going to come over to this new home that you're building. So given that that's the case and given the 7% is likely a short term thing, I don't know that I would consider that high interest in this situation and begin aggressively paying it down because there's a really good chance when you sell your other house it will then extinguish this land loan that you have.

[Bob Moneyguide]

And it sounds like they have a very healthy income so they're hopefully able. And I heard the investment so is 200,000. So yes, I, it's less than ideal that you have a 7% interest rate on this. But I would, I don't want you not funding a Roth IRA. I don't want you missing out on 401k contributions because you have this moment in time thing where over the next two to three, four years, as you said, this will be your forever home that you refinance into. So I think it's just a uncomfortable nuisance that you have to kind of make it through in this season of life.

[Brian Preston]

Agreed. Well I like said man, I like it. We get more.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Well that's because that's like a personal. If that was a. If that person was a client. These are the things that I would kind of try to navigate is, you know, instead of giving you a blanket rule, I try to look at, you know, meet you, triage your financial situation and meet you exactly where you are. Personal finance is very personal.

[Bo Hansen]

Yeah, I love it. Foolish Parents. If you would like a Money Guy tumblr, just email winneroney guy.com and we'd love to send you one. All right, let's have your reaction to some of these guesses. So something big is coming from Money

[Bob Moneyguide]

Guy and Brian, don't give it away.

[Bo Hansen]

Is it Mutant Mingle?

[Brian Preston]

Oh, the dating app.

[Bo Hansen]

Lots of.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Hey, let the record show I was on vacation when this all came out. It's like the day I'm not that I'm like the break on anything, but it is interesting that I go on vacation and this is. Is where you guys take the live stream.

[Brian Preston]

It's. Well, you know what? That's it. Who knows, Maybe it's Mutant Mingle.

[Bo Hansen]

Is it Bose Mutant Gym launching. Let's opening a brick and mortar.

[Brian Preston]

Oh man, the. The third Bay Boys would be very, very excited about that. Oh my God, we do have merch. We have, we have. We actually just ordered some brand new. We went sleeveless hoodies, trucker hats, and then we got tank tops.

[Bo Hansen]

You know, flex or weird that his group of friends has merch.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I want to yell nerd, but then you're like, can mega chads be nerds? I mean, it's just. I don't even know what to say about it. It just seems weird.

[Bo Hansen]

Next guess is a giveaway of $1 million to every person on the stream. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn [e-mail] Spotify

[Brian Preston]

this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome?

[Bo Hansen]

That's new.

[Brian Preston]

It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses Set up required compatibility and availability. Various 18 plus.

[Bob Moneyguide]

You know, if I was trying to run for class president of the high school, that's the exact type of thing that I would say is because, you know, there's no accountability. And pizza every day, making blanket promises. We'll get pizza, no homework, and you get a million dollars if you elect me to be class president of your high school.

[Brian Preston]

How about you told us our rules were we could not say yes or no, so we're. That's a maybe. That's a maybe.

[Bo Hansen]

How about a new course?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Oh, new course.

[Brian Preston]

Maybe.

[Bob Moneyguide]

New course.

[Bo Hansen]

Both swim lessons.

[Brian Preston]

Maybe. What if it was both? You were teaching swim given by Brian, right? Like get us.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Oh, I'm a good. I. I have a heart of an educator.

[Brian Preston]

Oh, Hasselhoff and Efron over here.

[Bo Hansen]

Mm. A new.

[Bob Moneyguide]

You got it. Remember, remember, if you think greatest showman. I'm not. Hasselhoff's not in greatest Showman.

[Brian Preston]

Well, I was, you know, I was trying to.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Hugh Jackman. I'm Wolverine in that case.

[Brian Preston]

Okay, you're Wolverine.

[Bob Moneyguide]

There we go.

[Bo Hansen]

All right, a couple more.

[Brian Preston]

How about High school musical? Is that what you're saying?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah, you're Zac Efron.

[Bo Hansen]

He's.

[Bob Moneyguide]

He was a wrestler. Did.

[Brian Preston]

He was super. He was jacked in Baywatch.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Okay. We took that way in many directions. Keep going. Sorry, Reebs.

[Bo Hansen]

As usual. How about a new on screen personality so Brian can start planning for his retirement?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Whoa.

[Brian Preston]

Okay, one. I love the idea of another personality. I do not like the idea of Brian retire. Are you.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Y' all think I'm close to retiring?

[Brian Preston]

Tell us.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I mean, I look, I. I look in the mirror and I'm like, you know, I look pretty good for my age. But. But then. Then things that. Comments like that, and I'm like, you know, okay, I don't plan on going anywhere.

[Bo Hansen]

People in the money verse say Brian is never retiring.

[Bob Moneyguide]

No, I'm not going to croak. And then they go, you go, come do studio tours and I'm going to be leaned up against the wall in a glass case.

[Brian Preston]

Can we. Can we get Brian stuffed? Can we like a taxidermy Brian?

[Bo Hansen]

He did say one time that he could wheel his lazy boy into the set.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I was like, okay, this is getting dark. It is really quick.

[Bo Hansen]

Last but not least. How about a money guy cruise?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Oh, oh, man, no idea. You're preaching to my heart.

[Brian Preston]

That almost happened.

[Bo Hansen]

Would love cruise.

[Brian Preston]

That almost happened.

[Bo Hansen]

He loves a cruise and he convince us of a cruise for a long time.

[Bob Moneyguide]

You know, we had A joke. We had a joke. Because, you know, every now and then the Ramsey Solutions people will get these wild hairs and do. We're like, what if we did a takeover?

[Brian Preston]

What if we showed.

[Bob Moneyguide]

What if we did a. We. We like, totally. You know, just totally. What is this stowaway. You stow away on the Ramsey. And then we even. We. We probably couldn't get up.

[Bo Hansen]

Meet up on the Rams.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Travel agents. Travel agents get, like, booking fees.

[Brian Preston]

Yeah.

[Bob Moneyguide]

What if we came up with our own affiliate code for the Ramsey Solutions cruise and we. We marketed it as the. The financial Mutant.

[Brian Preston]

That would be hilarious.

[Bob Moneyguide]

That would be awesome.

[Bo Hansen]

That would be less worth money.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Take over the Ramsey Solution cruise.

[Brian Preston]

You do a good pirate. The money guy. Meet up on the Ramsey cruise. That'd be hilarious.

[Bo Hansen]

Well, thank you for all of those guesses. That was fun. Keep them coming. And Definitely go to moneyguy.com early access if you're not on the list yet, although a number of you already are. So shout out to you. I look forward to talking more about the secret announcement.

[Brian Preston]

Where do they go to get that again? MoneyGuy.com Early Access MoneyGuide.com Early Access to get on the list.

[Bo Hansen]

All right, we're gonna do another question and then hop into our segment. But first, the question is from Cosmic Penguin 1001.

[Brian Preston]

Is this the Cosmic Penguin from the Multiverse?

[Bo Hansen]

Our friend Penguin.

[Brian Preston]

What's wild is you guys wonder, do we read comments? Absolutely. Do we? Are we in the money verse? Absolutely. Even though you don't know where he is, we are in there, Brian.

[Bo Hansen]

May or may not be, can't confirm or deny.

[Brian Preston]

Yeah, we pay attention. We just. We love that even though this thing has gotten bigger, it still feels. It still feels like a family. So when I see that makes me happy that Cosmic's.

[Bo Hansen]

Well, he answered a good question. I'm excited to see what you guys say. It says, good morning, money guy team in step seven, in the step seven chapter of the book Millionaire Mission, Hold Me Accountable, you discuss finding your why. Is knowing your why a requirement for completing step seven? If so, do you find that people's why still changes after step seven? This is a really important component of really everything we teach.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Look, I think it. I don't want people to get stressed out because that's not. Step seven is actually supposed to be the first step where you're saying, hey, all these other things were very kind of automatic for the purpose of either protecting you from yourself. That's what steps one and four from emergencies two. The free money is just so Important three, high interest debt. You can never have wealth if you're paying 20% plus to a bank. And then you get really excited about 5 and 6 because those are tax favored investments. 7 is the one where you're supposed to say, how am I going to use this money? What makes me happy? And why am I even. What's my relationship with money and how the rest of the world connects. So the why component is just to give you the, the context, the flavor of how you're supposed to live your best life. But I think a lot of people, you probably go get there and if you've been good with money and you're analytical, a lot of you may have never even given thought to that. You just like, hey, I think I wanted a million dollars since I've been, you know, in the fourth grade. And you know, that's what, that's the exercise is because I don't want you to get overwhelmed with somebody flipping the script and saying, hey, instead of being so goal oriented, let's actually start thinking about us and what makes the money. Kind of the tool that gives us our best life. So if you get there and you're not really sure on your why, that's okay. It's just like when I got to college, I didn't know I was going to be an accounting major. I mean, that's why you introduce concepts so you can slowly start it. Let it start working in your brain even while you're sleeping and it's processing behind the scenes. So, so don't get overwhelmed if you don't know your why just because you've gotten to step seven.

[Brian Preston]

Yeah. And I want to give you guys some. I love the last part of this question. Hey, if so, do you find that people's why changes after step seven? I would argue yeah. I think about our personal journeys. You know, we, we were fortunate enough that we both hit step seven a long time ago. And our why when we hit there was very different than our why. Today. As this show is growing and the firm is growing, the reason why we get to do it and the impact that we're able to have is so much different than it. Than it was when we first started hitting 25%. I think it's okay. I think so long as you're going through the exercise of revisiting your why and reassessing your why and rechecking your why and making sure that the decisions you're making still align with the why. If the decisions don't align, then ask the question, why am I Doing the things that I'm doing. So long as you're constantly working through that exercise, I think it'll help you stay on track. It's one of the things that my wife and I, you know, we do these, these at the beginning of every year. We'll go over the net worth statement. I'll go over the what do you do if I die thing. And then we do all of our trip planning and then we ask the whys. Hey, why are we saving this money? Why are we building this wealth? Why do we want to do this trip? Why do we want to create these experiences? If you can work through that exercise, it just reminds you and it keeps it top of mind why you're making hard decisions when they're hard and why you get to make easy decisions when they're easy.

[Bo Hansen]

Yeah.

[Brian Preston]

And it's okay that that changes through time. I think it's, I think it's supposed to change through time as you mature.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah, I mean, we, we, you don't become completely different people, but you definitely evolve throughout your life.

[Bo Hansen]

That's great. Wonderful. Well, Cosmic Penguin 01, it's my honor to give you a long awaited tumblr. So email winneroneyguy.com if you want to cash in on that. All right, next we are going to move on to our from the wings stick segment. This segment is where we get to get Brian and Bo's reactions to some recent headlines going on in the news right now. And they are going to tell us,

[Bob Moneyguide]

do we do these?

[Bo Hansen]

Yes, please. Look, we've trained you so well. You knew exactly where to get your thumbs up, thumbs down, paddles. They're going to tell us. Is this headline thumbs up news? We should pay attention for our financial lives or thumbs down. It's noise. It doesn't really hold any weight. So without further ado, I'm going to read the first headline. It says, mortgage rates in the US increase to 6.69% highest since July 2025. Is this news or noise? Ooh. All right. Bo says it's news, Brian says it's noise. Fight, fight, fight, fight.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Who do you want? Who should go first?

[Brian Preston]

Brian?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Look, I even think the headline is hilarious in the fact highest since July 2025, not July 2025. If you're going to get try to hit me with a shock and a stat, it needs to at least be like three years in the past. I mean, at least, you know, some type of season. That's why it's like we haven't reached this since. And like they do something 90 days ago and I'm like, how is this, that doesn't even have the shock and awe, gets pulled out when it was something like last week. I mean that's, that's the part. So look, mortgage rates are constantly evolving and I think it goes into the calculation of affordability and what you should do with your own personal finances. But I don't know that I necessarily think watching where mortgage rates are on a daily basis in your long term planning is something to fret about.

[Brian Preston]

Yeah, I'm going to agree with you. I don't believe watching it on a daily basis is something that you ought to do. But I just think there's so many young people, and I'm going to classify young as people below 40 that really want to get into the homeownership side of things. Like it is a, it's probably one of the most difficult decisions to make right now in our present day for folks who have not already been on that side of the equation. Trying to get in the home, trying to get in your first one. And so I just think that mortgage rates are super important because that is a financial goal for a lot of people. And so I just want you to be mindful of that. Not so much that, oh, they've hit an all time high, but more recognizing, okay, now might not be the right time for me to buy a house because a house isn't affordable, but I am going to begin saving cash. I'm going to build up that down payment. I'm going to at least keep my finger on the temperature of okay, where are mortgage rates? Because if, you know, whatever goes up, generally speaking should come down at some point or offer some sort of reprieve. So if mortgage rates get down to six, five and a half, five, maybe that introduces a more favorable time to buy for those folks who are trying to get on that side of the equation. So I think it's, I think it is newsworthy just because it's home related and so many people right now want to be in homes.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I hesitate because I sent something to the whole Money team over the weekend. I came across two or three pieces of information on that. There's some glimmers of hope with housing with home prices now, interest rates still stink, but so that facets not fixed. Would, would y' all be interested if. Because I know, look, I always hesitate because our show Rent versus Buy did really well. So that makes me think, hey, there is an audience of people wanting to know our, our thought and our temperature on housing. But Then there's also, I always like if you're not in that season, are people even going to show up for that show? So, you know, let us know in the comments because I do, I've, I've told the content team I think I could do an update is probably in a Q and a, you know, money guy answers. We could give you guys some feedback on what's going on with those first

[Brian Preston]

time home purchases with the idea being it seems like prices are cooling off a little bit. Is the.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah, that's one, that's one indicator. That's one indicator.

[Bo Hansen]

All right.

[Bob Moneyguide]

But mortgage rates still sting.

[Bo Hansen]

News from the stock market. Up next, stock market today, major indexes are steady as S&P 500 looks to add to record high. That's from Investopedia. Both said noise. How come?

[Brian Preston]

If, if you, if you think it's high now, wait till you see it ten years from now. Right? Like always be buying, baby.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I think this headline cracks me up because it's like they, we need a little shock and awe. But, but things are the same as they were, you know, last week. So it's steady but they are all time high. So it's like they were like, hey, let's put some sensation with our boring headline. Look, all time highs just happen. Markets go up 80% of the time. If you look at, on an annual basis, 80% of the time, they're up 20%, they're down. So that's why you get two recessions typically throughout the decades through a decade. So there's a lot of, as the economy is expanding and growing through innovation, you're going to see more and more all time highs. Yep, I remember. You know what's interesting, boy, we had a conversation probably right post 2008 where we were telling a client, it's like, hey, if you think that because the Dow had gone down to below 10,000, and I was like, you realize there will be a time when The Dow crosses 100,000. He was like, no way. And I was like, just give it enough time. It'll happen. It'll happen in your lifetime.

[Bo Hansen]

Next headline. Americans are spending plenty, but they're saving much less. That's from Market Watch. I mean, Bo says news. Oh, Brian switched to news.

[Brian Preston]

Well, he looked at mine. He cheated. I did cheat. I did cheat you.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I didn't realize it, but I was like, let me see what Bo said.

[Brian Preston]

Let me cheat it. I think that's newsworthy. Americans are consumers. They have been for a long time. We thought when the pandemic happened and savings rate shot up. We're like, oh my goodness, people have woken up, they're going to change their behavior. No, it's just because they were trapped inside. They couldn't go spend. As soon as we got out of the pandemic, as soon as stuff opened back up, people started spending money again and we saw savings rates plummet again. We have a real deferred gratification, saving and building for the future problem in this country. So I think it is newsworthy. And the more we can talk about it and the more we can tell people, hey, the earlier you start, the earlier you figure this out, the less hard you have to work at it. It's real easy if you start early, but maybe you didn't start early, maybe in your 30s, maybe in your 40s, maybe in your 50s. Even though you have not done the things up to this point that you wish you would have done. The second best time to change your behavior, if you can't go back in time is to change it today, to start living in less than you make today, to start building for the future today, Start saving for tomorrow today, and your future self will thank you. But I think so many Americans, they ignore it, they don't pay attention to it, and they let our feeds and all the stuff we're looking at it just pull the dollars out of our back pocket. And that's not, that's not the way it should be. There's a better way to do money. There's a better way to do your financial life.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I mean, we live in a consumption society. I mean, you think about, there's all, every. Most industries are set up to try to help you spend all of your money. And that's why, you know, last week we had the whole conversation of what's our counterculture point here at the money guy show. I think ours is, is that we actually try to help you be that financial mutant that actually builds and grows versus just consume and spends. And it goes beyond just, I know these, they're hard times. I know housing's expensive. I know we've been told lies about education and just go to college and it'll all turn out. There's a lot of negative stuff. And that's why I like that we get to be the voice to say no. Let's show you how you can actually take whatever comes your way, give you the tools, give you the education, so that you can actually be counter to the, the consumption that surrounds us all.

[Bo Hansen]

Yep, there's video with this last headline. It says bear gets Trapped inside. SUV honks, horn all night. So if you want to know before, you know, say if it's news or noise, well, we can show you the video.

[Brian Preston]

All right, well, talk about a route.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I can't see. I can hear something, but I can't see anything.

[Brian Preston]

And got locked inside. So a Colorado man did.

[Bo Hansen]

Well, what's your initial reaction?

[Bob Moneyguide]

We just heard a Colorado guy.

[Bo Hansen]

Oh, there it is. There it is.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Okay, here we go.

[Brian Preston]

Talk about a rude awakening. A bear somehow broke into a car and got locked inside. So a Colorado man did what any of us would do, right?

[Bo Hansen]

Wrong.

[Brian Preston]

He used a long rope to free the animal.

[Bob Moneyguide]

What? Wow.

[Brian Preston]

The bear stuck in the car. You get a bear rush. And I heard honking.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Thinking all night.

[Bo Hansen]

Thought it was.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I wouldn't even be doing this.

[Brian Preston]

It was just this guy. What are you gonna do? Leave the bear in the car? How'd the car.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Why are the windows all up?

[Brian Preston]

Opened the door, the bear took off into the woods, buddy. Look at that. Cameraman was gone.

[Bo Hansen]

For those listening on podcast, a man is like putting a string around the

[Bob Moneyguide]

door handle and going far door open. Or was this bear like Yogi Bear and walked up and opened the door hand. Because there was no broken windows.

[Brian Preston]

Because. Because bears know how to like, they know how to do that stuff because they've been around people and then they

[Bo Hansen]

can't get back out.

[Brian Preston]

What. What would you have done?

[Bob Moneyguide]

I don't know. Because, I mean, look, it's. It's not like a. I mean, can't you just.

[Brian Preston]

Can't you just like, tell your car?

[Bob Moneyguide]

No, I could. I could open doors on mine. I could just open the doors with my. My mobile app.

[Brian Preston]

Could you imagine a. How heartbroken Brian would be if there was a bear in his Tesla? Could you imagine?

[Bo Hansen]

Honestly?

[Bob Moneyguide]

You know what? I give it a ride.

[Brian Preston]

It would just give it a bear.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I'd put it on pet mode, cool it down so it was comfortable in there, and then I'd give it a ride.

[Brian Preston]

You know what? I like the idea that the guy went and got the rope. I think I would have called a professional, though. I think I'd have called him like, hey, do you think.

[Bob Moneyguide]

You think animals. Local animal services is designed. Is set up to. To get a bear out of.

[Brian Preston]

I'm going to be honest.

[Bob Moneyguide]

You look like a well behaved bear.

[Brian Preston]

I think they're more prepared for it than I am.

[Bo Hansen]

Yes.

[Brian Preston]

I don't know. I don't know what their training is.

[Bob Moneyguide]

It.

[Brian Preston]

It's more than mine. Has to be more than mine.

[Bo Hansen]

Have some More to deal with a bear. Resources like protection. I don't know. I just think we'll let the authorities handle that.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Hong.

[Bo Hansen]

So I say it's news.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah. I mean, it's news.

[Bo Hansen]

Clearly, it got off.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I love the. The pictures, the videos, all the, all the things. Things that, that let us have an extra angle. That's so much more.

[Brian Preston]

Somebody said, oh, it's going to be. It's going to be fun to clean that car. I didn't even think about that. I bet it really is quite a big problem.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I was sitting there thinking that.

[Brian Preston]

I was thinking bear. That's called bear scat all over the house. That's not a.

[Bob Moneyguide]

It's a different type of scat.

[Brian Preston]

Was that singing? That was a scat. You guys got that for free. You're welcome.

[Bo Hansen]

All right, let's go back to the hopper and pull some more financial questions. This one's from Phil V5J. It says, I have a great employee sponsored health plan where all the plans take nothing out of my paycheck.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Whoa.

[Bo Hansen]

Should I still do the high deductible plan for the HSA eligibility or take the Cadillac plan?

[Brian Preston]

No, we can't say no. We can't just come out and say no, we can't do that. We don't know all the situations. We don't know everything. We don't know.

[Bob Moneyguide]

It sounds pretty fast.

[Brian Preston]

We don't know all the variables. It seems that's the correct way to say this. It seems like the best solution for you would be to take the fully subsidized Cadillac insurance. Because even if you were to do the high deductible plan and you were able to contribute to an HSA and you got a tax deduction for the contribution to your hsa, there's a good chance that tax deduction is not going to be more than the premium that you're paying to be on the high deductible plan if you have fully subsidized. So it seems it's highly likely that the fully subsidized option is going to be the best. But you still need to do the math. You still got to do the math just to make sure. But I'd be surprised to know if that wasn't the case.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah. And look, a lot of them, I don't know how big your company is, but a lot of companies, it's an issue for most small businesses because I'll just go ahead and confess it to you. It's one of the most expensive things we do for our employees, and they Hate us for it because everybody complains about their health insurance. It doesn't matter how much money we sling at this thing.

[Brian Preston]

You think they hate us?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Well, I mean, because here's the thing. It's not our fault completely is every year it seems like, you know, I won't even say the provider's name, but it's like, is anybody shocked?

[Brian Preston]

It goes up.

[Bob Moneyguide]

It's 18 to 22%. It seems like, how can something go up 18 to 22% every year? And it seems like that is what we deal with with health insurance. So you can imagine it's just hard to keep up when things are going up that much. But it is one of those things where I would ask you, and this is the point I was trying to make, a lot of small businesses, they want to give you or they try to do the right thing and give you health insurance. But what they might, and they might have heard, hey, let's add a health savings account eligible high deductible plan. But they still, just because of what they did last year, they just have all the money going into the Cadillac plan. You ought to ask your employer, hey, how much are you putting into that Cadillac plan per employee? And has anybody actually done a benefits analysis? Especially if you have a young workforce, you know, if all of your employees are in their 20s and 30s, maybe the way you did it last year isn't the best benefit for the employees. And we ought to look at, hey, is this, should this be a set amount per individual or family? And then that way you actually get true choice in the plan, or is this what's. What's the why? And that's what I'd be curious, whoever is designing these benefits, how it was structured and what the incentive. Because if it was just done by what was done last year or five years ago or seven years ago, and they haven't, they've added the high deductible, but haven't actually put the benefits of, hey, the reason the high deductible was supposed to be put in there is because for young people who don't have a lot of medical need, this allows you to get a saving in the premium, but also to build assets for the future. You're really not honoring all of that if you just keep loading up the Cadillac plan. So there might be a discussion with your employer on what the why is. While one is heavily subsidized and then the other one, yeah, you get to do a hsa. But man, oh, man, it'd be nice if we kind of Got to do the best of all things.

[Bo Hansen]

Love that. That's great. Well, Phil V5J, you get a Tumblr if you'd like one. Email winneroneyguy.com since we answered your question here on the show.

[Brian Preston]

Reba, you ready for this?

[Bo Hansen]

I'm ready.

[Brian Preston]

Did you happen to see what kind of car it was that bear was in this What? As you were talking, it was a

[Bob Moneyguide]

Toyota Highlander, wasn't it?

[Brian Preston]

I came up with two answers. It was either a Toyogi or how about this one? It was a Subaru.

[Bo Hansen]

Are you kidding me right now?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Did you come up with that or somebody put that in the comments? You thought that rose to the level of doing?

[Brian Preston]

That's where my mind went. I was trying to come up with three. I couldn't come up with a third one. The content team or fans? Content team are fan. You're. Well, no one guessed. A joke book is.

[Bob Moneyguide]

You know who I blame Megan.

[Brian Preston]

That was.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I blame Megan because of her daily that we have every day. We're constantly doing these things every day. So you've decided let's go ahead and put this in the content.

[Brian Preston]

Subaru is pretty good, but it was

[Bob Moneyguide]

a toy Yoga, Yogi, Yogi, Toyogi, yogi. Something to that one.

[Bo Hansen]

Okay, that was for free. Almost as good as my scab extra bonus content.

[Brian Preston]

I thought I was going to get a bigger laugh from Justin. He didn't give it to me. That's fine.

[Bob Moneyguide]

He's still mad at us. He's salty. Because we made fun of his hilarious react. Which by the way, I feel like the joke was put on us. Is because it was hilarious. Is because we were the butt of the joke. We were. The hilarious part is they put some riddles and traps and other things in there and we fell right into them. They didn't have to put pine straw in it. We fell right into it.

[Brian Preston]

If you've not watched yesterday's. Yesterday's react video, you should totally watch that. After there was a mutation.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Mutiny. There's no other word. Instead of financial mutants, we have financial mutinies with the content team. Joe figured name. It's true. Go watch that video, especially around that six minute mark. You'll see. You know, there's supposed to be some sacred things with, you know, the content team and us when we create content and they're, you know. Nope.

[Bo Hansen]

Just remember, nothing is sacred here. If you want to watch that, it's called financial advisors react to hilarious money clips, I believe so go check that out. It's got Brian and Bo and George Camel on the thumbnail, actually. That's how you know you're in the right place. All right, let's do Another question from huskers2216. Hey, money guy, how does one spouse's pension that will replace 33% of household living expenses in retirement affect the stock and bond glide path strategy nearing retirement? It has a max of 1% cost of living adjustment.

[Brian Preston]

Yeah, this is, this is a more specific question to a general question that we get often. Hey, if I have pensions, if I have guaranteed income, how should I think about that in terms of portfolio allocation? Would it be appropriate? Would it make sense for me to think about my pension income as sort of a pseudo fixed income or risk off risk reduced part of my portfolio so that with my liquid portfolio, could I be more aggressive? Could I have a higher equity allocation than I would otherwise, given I have this like guaranteed source of income? How would you answer that? What things would you tell them to look at to assess that?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Maybe it depends, because I do. I have specific clients where they have enough pension income that it offsets all their needs. So we started. And they have children and grandchildren that they want to leave a legacy for. So it did make sense to think more long term than even what their life would be. Because, you know, the glide path is somebody who's in their 70s. You might be thinking, hey, this is going to be a super conservative portfolio to make sure the money's there and we don't get into risk capacity issues. But if all of a sudden they don't need the money and it's more about, hey, what can we grow this for? For either the charities we want to leave it to or our loved ones we want to leave it to, then that comes to play. Now the question here, this isn't covering all of it. This is only 33%. So I would, I'd want to build this as part of a bigger plan to see how much that moves the needle. But potentially this could allow you to, you know, dial down some of the the risk free or the risk off asset class.

[Brian Preston]

Only two things I would add to that. I'd want to know a little bit about the pension.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Yeah.

[Brian Preston]

Who's the sponsoring company? How well funded is the pension? Like, is this a government pension or

[Bob Moneyguide]

is this like a eligible for pension benefit guarantee corporation?

[Brian Preston]

And is your benefit how far above the minimum guaranteed benefit is your benefit? Because with a 1% cost of living adjustment, odds are if we see historic average inflation somewhere around 3 to 4%, the value of your Pension will become less and less and less through time because it's not going to keep up with that. But then you'll likely have Social Security and other sort of guaranteed income sources. So you want to kind of measure all of those things to determine. Okay. For me personally, how should this affect my allocation? This is a great time when a lot of folks want to take the relationship to the next level. Okay. I'm making big decisions around allocation for the next 30, 40, 50 years. How should I think about this? What consideration should I put into this? Because two different people with two different pensions and two different portfolios with the same size might have two different solutions that, that make sense for each one of them.

[Bo Hansen]

Great. Huskers 2216, you get a Tumblr email winneroneyguy.com to cash in on that. Let's go for one more.

[Bob Moneyguide]

One more go.

[Bo Hansen]

Lucky Monkey has a question for you. Hi, Money Guy team.

[Bob Moneyguide]

I bet they like bananas.

[Bo Hansen]

They probably do. I have the ability to cash flow college, but also have subsidized student loans available. Should I take the loans and put the loan in a savings account to get the interest or just cash flow?

[Bob Moneyguide]

Oh, man. Bo.

[Bo Hansen]

Bo just squinted at his eyes and put his hand over his face. Let's see what he's gonna say.

[Brian Preston]

Here's where my mind falls. First win immediately. I need to know the numbers. Like, I have the ability to cash flow college. Does that mean your college is, you know, two to $3,000 a semester and you can cash flow, that you can go buy money or I have the ability to cash flow College. College is $40,000 a semester. Like these. The, the, the scale and scope of those are very different. I'd want to know that. And then I want to know, what degree are you pursuing and what's the vocation look like after that? Are you going to have an ability, if you do pay cash, to then generate an income where you can replace that money that you forewent, forgoed, forgone, that you walked away from over the last three to four years? I'd want to do that assessment to figure out, okay, what's the best use of those funds. And I do think in this case, size matters.

[Bob Moneyguide]

The biggest question with education, because look, this is the one that I get the most ticked off about, is the lie that has been told to young people about that. Just go to college and it'll all work out. And hence, now we've left with an entire generation where the most noble thing in the world is you bettering yourself by Education, other things has been distorted in a way that now it is entrapping people with huge debt loads. So before I even did this stuff is exactly what Bo said is I want to know what's your degree going to be in and what are you going to do afterwards? Because if it came before we even start talking about student debt and cash flow, I want to know that you're not going to leave college with more debt than what you can make in your first year out of school. Because how often have we. We've even had people on Making a Millionaire who took jobs that you know, got a degree in something that they're. Their debt was like a factor of three over what they were going to make. And that is a trap from the get go. So. So put that on the shelf first. You know, answer that. What's the ground rules of education? What am I going to make at the end of this? And then after that I think it becomes more of scale. Exactly what Beau was talking about. Because if it's a small amount of money, I'm going, oh, here we go. We got, we got context. Read that.

[Brian Preston]

College is $8,000 per semester, but I have grants covering 5,000. So for me it'd be $3,000 in loans. I'm going into electrical engineering.

[Bob Moneyguide]

This is awesome.

[Brian Preston]

I know my thought. What do you think? Should you take out loans or pay cash?

[Bob Moneyguide]

I mean at 3,000. See this is where I need a little additional context because especially like electrical engineering, probably go have co op opportunities. There's going to be other things where if you have. Because also it's your age, if you can be funding a Roth IRA every one of these years, I don't want you to forego doing that for, for. But, but if you are co oping and you're going to be able pay $3,000 off but then go tell yourself, hey, I'm going to also make enough. Aw. I'd love for you to fund a Roth IRA and pay this $3,000 off every year you're in college. And I think you'll be a. Okay in life.

[Brian Preston]

Yeah, I love that answer too.

[Bo Hansen]

That's great. Well, go lucky monkey. Thanks for the question. If you'd like a money guide to

[Bob Moneyguide]

electrical engineer grants and all the other stuff, we're going to be doing this show for the next 15, 20 years. Remember who planted the seed? Who was it? Who's planted all the apple seeds? Johnny. Johnny Appleseed. Remember Johnny Appleseed? Bow and Brian.

[Bo Hansen]

Just call them Bo and Brian Appleseed.

[Bob Moneyguide]

That's better than Johnny Appleseed, Bo and Brian. That's much better.

[Bo Hansen]

Go Lucky monkey. Email winner moneyguy.com if you if you would like your very own MoneyGuy Tumblr as a thank you for asking a question, Remember, go to moneyguy.com early access get on the List we're gonna be having a lot of fun with some hints, some perks, some early access over the next undetermined amount of time. Well, I've determined it, but you don't know it yet, but you will if you get on the list, so definitely do that. I'm really excited to share what's coming and what we've been working on that we've made especially for you guys.

[Bob Moneyguide]

Thanks so much for joining us. Remember, value. That's what we're trying to load you up. It's the abundance cycle fulfilled. You get so much value that you learn these concepts, you apply these concepts, you reach a level of success. And that's why if you haven't gone to moneyguy.com resources we literally are creating a library for you to be the better version of yourself. Actually a financial mutant. I'm your host, Brian, joined by Mr. Bob Moneyguide team out.

[Bo Hansen]

The Money Guy show is hosted by Brian Preston and Bo Hansen. Brian and Bo are partners with Abound Wealth Management. Abound Wealth Management is a registered investment advisory firm regulated by the securities and Exchange Commission. In accordance and compliance with the securities laws and regulations, Abound Wealth Management does not render or offer to render personalized investment or tax advice through the Money Guy Show. The information provided is for informational purposes only, may not be suitable for all investors, and does not constitute financial, tax, investment or legal advice. All investments involve a degree of risk, including the risk of loss. You know those tiny back to school emergencies that somehow become your problem. That's why I love Uber Eats. You can order school supplies, snacks and lunchbox essentials for $5 or less. So when your kid casually drops I don't like peanut butter anymore or I need five green highlighters for a project due tomorrow, Uber Eats has you covered. Get everything you need for back to school today from your favorite brands like Aldi and staples on UberEats. Order now ends. 97 $5 or less before taxes and fees. Select items only. Availability varies. See app for details.