← The Stacking Benjamins Show
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- [00:00]
Joe Saul-Sehy
This episode is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union. Navy Federal can help you find and finance the right vehicle with ease. With Navy Federal's car buying service powered by Truecar, you can find the vehicle that's right for you. As you search through inventory, compare models and you could get an amazing rate when you finance with Navy federal. Visit navy federal.org truecar to learn more. Navy Federal Credit Union Our members are the mission. Navy Federal is insured by NCUA Credit and collateral subject to approval.
- [00:31]
Progressive Insurance Representative
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- [01:05]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Bring out your day as one. I'm not dead.
- [01:09]
Gary McDermott
What? Nothing.
- [01:10]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Use your ninepence. I'm not dead. Yeah, he says he's not dead. Yes, he is. I'm not. He isn't. Well, he will be soon.
- [01:17]
Gary McDermott
He's very ill.
- [01:18]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I'm getting better.
- [01:19]
Gary McDermott
No, you're not.
- [01:20]
OG
You'll be stone dead in a moment.
- [01:21]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
- [01:30]
Joe's Mom's Neighbor Doug
Live from Joe's mom's basement, it's the Stacking Benjamin Show. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug, and how about we set some goals and actually achieve them? Today we have the perfect mentor for the job, former Naval officer Gary McDermott. Plus, we'll answer a question from one stacker who thought, you know, I'd better call Saul. See? Hi. And OG Bonnie wonders about long term care insurance, especially for people who started late working toward financial independence. Then don't you worry, because I'll also share some of my heartwarming trivia. And now two guys who've mastered the art of turning compound interest into compound happiness. Oh, my God, it's Joe. And. Oh, jj, Juja G.
- [02:32]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And I'm super happy that you're here with us. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Welcome back to the Stacking Benjamin Show. Sit back and relax. You found us. We are about to have, well, an hour that hopefully changes everything for you because you're about to set some goals. Maybe you open up your notes app on your phone, take out a piece of paper, get ready to actually play along. It's funny. Oh, gee. When I First talked to Gary. He's in the middle of describing like good goal setting. And even though we've heard this stuff before, Gary, because he lived it in the Navy and, and he's coached multimillion dollar businesses how to do this. It's so funny. I'm like, why am I not doing this more often? What the heck's going on? But how are you, man? How's your week going?
- [03:16]
OG
Going great. I'm on a plane to Vegas right now recording this, so.
- [03:22]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Gonna just go spend all the, all the big bannerman money.
- [03:27]
OG
Sadly, no. This is a work trip, so not. No, no casino time, no nothing. This is purely, purely work related.
- [03:34]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I always love the idea of Vegas work trip, though.
- [03:39]
OG
Yeah, well, I didn't pick the location. And Vegas work triple July 15 sounds even better, doesn't it?
- [03:47]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Maybe a hard pass.
- [03:49]
Gary McDermott
Yeah.
- [03:50]
OG
I was not in charge of the destination, unfortunately.
- [03:52]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Well, today, two big topics we talked. Doug explained early on that we are going to talk long term care later in the episode. But first, sweet. Gary McDermott is just an amazing human being. Worked for the Navy. We'll get into why and how he got into the Navy. And it really wasn't his choice, as much as it could have been. Don't get me wrong, nobody. He wasn't pressed into service like the British used to do. Just, hey, you're coming with us. Where are we going? You'll be back in a couple of years. Maybe none of that, but he definitely just kind of life on autopilot when he woke up and goes, wait a minute, I need to change the trajectory of my life or somebody else's. I'm always going to be playing by somebody else's rules. If you think about that, we're all playing by somebody else's rules a good part of the time. Hey, I need this from you. I need this. I need this. We're helping everybody else with their priorities. Why not focus on your own? Especially after listening to Monday's episode. There's so many big things that we need to work on ourselves that I thought today is a great way to have Gary help us kick off the second half of 2025. Gary, though, originally became famous because he was a star of Amazon Prime's Speak up series. So you can go to Amazon Prime. You could see Gary give the talk. Gary also then wrote a book about setting. And we're going to go through Gary's strategy to help you set goals today. So Gary McDermott coming up next. But before that, we have a couple of sponsors who help make sure that you don't to pay anything for this and we get to keep on keeping on. So we're going to hear from the people that help us go and then Gary McDermot, you stackers and I, we are going to dive into how to set better goals. This episode is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union. Navy Federal can help you find and finance the right vehicle with ease. With Navy Federal's car buying service. Powered by Truecar, you can find the vehicle that's right for you. As you search through inventory, compare models and you could get an amazing rate when you finance with Navy federal. Visit navy federal.org truecar to learn more. Navy Federal Credit Union Our members are the mission. Navy Federal is insured by NCUA Credit and collateral subject to approval. Small business owners State farms there with small business insurance to fit your specific needs. Whether you're starting a new venture or growing an existing one, State Farm helps you choose the right coverage to protect what matters most. Working with a local State Farm agent helps you understand your coverage options. Offering local support to help you achieve your goals. Focus on turning your passion into a thriving business. Knowing your insurance can change as your business grows. Stay Farm here to help you succeed with your business. Like a good neighbor. State Farm is there and I'm super happy this guy's helping us kick off these eight weeks. Gary McDermott's here. How are you man?
- [06:58]
Gary McDermott
Doing great, Joe, how about you?
- [07:00]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I'm fantastic. You know, my goal was to get a kick ass guest to kick off these eight weeks and we got one. Andy's gonna talk goal setting. How about that, huh?
- [07:09]
Gary McDermott
Well, it's an important topic and happy to help.
- [07:12]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Let's start off with your service. When did you decide to go into the service?
- [07:18]
Gary McDermott
Well, that's kind of why we talk about goal setting, right? Because my story is I didn't know how to set my goals. And in fact, it was never a choice or a goal for me to join the service. It was just by chance that as a senior in high school, my father woke me up middle of the school year and he basically said, son, I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that there's no money for college. But the good news is I have a plan. Get in the car. He had a goal for me, which was that if I were to join a military, you know, whatever the branch was, that the money for college issue would kind of go away. And that was how I joined and, and why I joined. I did get a little bit of a Luxury of, you know, he told me when he opened the door to the recruiting station, he said, you got Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. I recommend Navy so you could see the world. So I guess you could say I had a goal of joining the Navy.
- [08:19]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Wow. So literally. Hey, but. But the good news is, get in the car, like, right now. Like, when this plan came together, it was, we're doing this right now.
- [08:29]
Gary McDermott
And he must have had the plan for some time. I'm hoping it wasn't a knee jerk reaction, but that's just the way it felt for me, especially to, you know, within a few hours, your whole life changes. Right?
- [08:42]
Joe Saul-Sehy
That's incredible. And so you, quote, chose the Navy, but it was on a recommendation from a guy who'd raised you. So were you going to go against dad's recommendation for the Navy?
- [08:54]
Gary McDermott
You can kind of see why the title of the book is set your own goals or someone else will.
- [09:00]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Well, and what's funny about that, Gary, you know, when you think about it, somebody does every day, right? And you point this out to us, which is that your boss tells you to do something. If you're great at your job, you go do it. If you're married or in a relationship and your significant other, your spouse, tells you to do something, and you're, you know, you want to be good at relationships, you do it. A friend asks you to do something, you go do it. We spend most of our time, you point out at the far end of the stick of somebody else's goals.
- [09:31]
Gary McDermott
And that's exactly what, just a few instances you mentioned, right. You know, significant other, the boss. I mean, it's. If you really drill down on it and you really ask yourself. And that's what I had to do. Right? Like, I never thought of it. It's commonplace. So, you know, I never personally thought of goal setting other than achieving something. Like, you're in the military, you know, there's a task at hand. You do the task. I was 16 when I started working. I was working in a diner. And a lot of times even the manager that was leading me may not have really set goals, but I knew what had to be done. So it's like those goals, were they set by me? Were they set by the manager? Was it just common sense? I don't know. But I try to get the job done, and I'd get it done at high levels and never really thought for myself independently that I could create something, do something of my own volition.
- [10:21]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Well, and this is something else you point out when you Talk about getting the job done at a high level. You were operating nuclear reactors, is my understanding, while you were in the Navy, is that correct?
- [10:32]
Gary McDermott
Yeah, I've done a lot of startup reactor startups and shutdowns. I've. I've done high stress evolutions. So, yes, I was operating nuclear reactors.
- [10:41]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Yes, you can be fantastic at what you do. You can be somebody with a ton of knowledge. And yet when you left the Navy, goal setting was incredibly, incredibly difficult still, because you've been taking. You've been taking orders from somebody else. And you point out that that's not just you. That's a lot of successful people who have a very difficult time setting their own goals.
- [11:05]
Gary McDermott
Well, even getting out of the Navy, there's headhunters that target people like me. So when it was like, okay, I need to get a job. How do I even do that? Right? And then the headhunters, they do it for you. Like, they have their own goals because, you know, for whatever economic reason, they're in the business of placing me in a position. You'd be surprised. Like, I guess I was qualified for five. I mean, so many different. I was interviewing for an agricultural company, a pump manufacturing company. There was at least five or so that I did before. I just said, you know, enough's enough. There was a nuclear position, and I just took that.
- [11:38]
Joe Saul-Sehy
When did you. I don't know. Is. Is. Do you think wake up is the right term? Like, when do you. When did you go, wait a minute, I'm on this conveyor belt helping all these different people with different stuff. I'm making good money, but this is not really what I want to be doing. Do you remember, was there a, like a point? You're in a coffee shop and you go, what the hell am I doing? Or in the shower one day or what?
- [11:57]
Gary McDermott
It's hard to say if there was like a turning point, so to speak. I mean, there was a lot of trajectory or a lot of a series of events, if you will, that happened to get me to come to that part of it had to do with just lifestyle. So when you look at, like when I started looking at this stuff, you know, afterwards and looking back, right, it's like when you start looking at things like ideal life, right? Like, what does that mean? I mean, if you never even think about it, you don't know what that is. You wake up every day. When I was in the Navy, you know, you wake up, you execute the mission, and the mission might be different every day. In the military, I was away from friends and family a lot. And I didn't sleep. It's high speed, there's little downtime, there's always something that needs to get done. And you're always like a year behind in the nuclear field. It was much to the same. I started getting a little bit of burnout. And then when you get burnout, you're having to restart. You're moving all over the country. You're basically reinventing yourself with new friends every time, and you're disconnected from your old friends and your family. The sleep deprivation was the tough part. So you start to get burned out and then you start to question, you know, the longevity. And so for me, I started worrying, you know, what happens if something happens to me, like, how long can I go doing this stuff with little sleep and no rest and no life, so to speak? You know, if you just think of burnout, does it happen like, and then you just crash and burn, or does it happen over time? So that stress just built up over time when I started to have to look for solutions. And so it's not like something that happens over once. It's just I'm starting to figure out solutions and what do I do? And that was what took me forward.
- [13:40]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Is that really step one in the process of getting on track, Gary, for where you want to go? Is it looking down the road and seeing where do these railroad tracks even lead me?
- [13:51]
Gary McDermott
So I think whether it's step one, whether it was my step one, or it should be a step one, I think it really, knowing what I know now, it's like the step one should just be for anybody. Just do a quick sanity check of where you are and just kind of make sure that there's alignment in where you are and what you feel and what your belief system is. That's what I never did, never knew how to do. And so I really just believe that step one is to just reset for a minute, just look at the present moment and analyze and just see what your alignment is. You know, it's like a compass, right? What is your alignment and are you being pulled or are you, you know, at zero gravity? That's really the step one, and that's what I wish I had known.
- [14:36]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And it's funny because you do say that. Listen, sometimes being pulled is not a bad thing. But being pulled all the time, when you're not doing your own thing, you're not chasing your own goals, it becomes incredibly difficult. And like you mentioned, it's easy to get burnt out. You have a more in depth 10 step self assessment that you walk people through. I'm going to use the one that you, that you use later in the book, which is a five step, simpler version and how you answered these questions. But I think our stackers can go through these as well. Gary, number one, do you like what you're doing? So when you talk about gravity, do you actually like the thing that you're doing? What was your answer to that question? On a scale of 1 to 10, did you like what you were doing?
- [15:23]
Gary McDermott
Depending on the time that you asked me. But if I just take it at its simplest value, the answer was probably close to a zero. And just the caveat, right. Like, the reason why I would have put it at a zero was because when you're not sleeping and you're not getting taken care of physically and mentally in the position that you're in, it's almost like you're a race car driver that never gets arrest. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's like that fight or flight response of just always having to perform, always having to deliver and be perfect. That is the only reason that I would do zero, because if the basic needs were taken care of, like I had adequate sleep and I had, you know, a little bit of downtime and some of that stuff, I probably would never have noticed and we'd never be having this conversation because I could have been in a nine. So just that's why it's so powerful.
- [16:13]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And it's funny, even as you talk, it almost is a blessing for you that you were a zero because you were able to then reset completely to the thing that you want to do, which I want to bring up here in a second. But question two, why are you doing what you do? Your answer, I don't know. So you gave it a. You gave that a zero. On a scale of 1 to 10, why did you choose that job again? I didn't. My dad did. 0 out of 10. Was it related to something you wanted to do? Answer no, zero out of ten. And was it because of something somebody else thought that you should do? Yes, it was. Answer 0 out of 10. And you remarked that only 20% of people actually set their own goals and 70% of those people fail to achieve them. And it's funny, Gary, the second half of that, 70% of people fail to achieve their goals. Even of the 20% of people that set them, okay, somebody goes through this and they go, nope, I'm charting my own course. It's just not going well. Why do we fail to achieve the Goals that we set, even if we get that far.
- [17:22]
Gary McDermott
There's so many different reasons why people can fail at their goals. I mean, it could really just start from, did you actually have a clear goal to begin with? You know, I was actually talking to my son the other day about a goal, and it's like, do you describe it? Like, how do you even describe it? What does it look like if it's in your head? Like, can you write it down and tell somebody? So having the clarity of the goal and having it be specific, measurable, you know, achievable, relevant, time sensitive, if you put those concepts around the goal and you have a real goal, then it's just execution. What I found is a lot of people that I've worked with or had these conversations with, it's that their goal may not have, you know, it was kind of borderline a dream or it was never really achievable because they never took the time to actually get the clarity of what does that end state look like?
- [18:17]
Joe Saul-Sehy
What drove me crazy when I was a financial planner to your point with your son Gary, was when somebody would tell me what their goal is and it would start off with, I'd like to. And it had kind of this someday quality to it, which you and I know meant this goal was a non starter. It was going nowhere. If your goal starts with, I'd like to, yeah, no, thank you. It's got to be stronger than that. How do we lock the goal down then to begin getting it? I think you mentioned that there's some language around the goals that we first need to understand.
- [18:50]
Gary McDermott
Right. And that's a format I actually learned from, you know, the Navy and nuclear power. We use it a lot for our actions. Like, so if there's a meeting and somebody's got to do something, we use that smart acronym. I just took that as an easy way to explain setting a goal for somebody that may not understand. How to take something that's in the fourth dimension, write it down on a piece of paper so that's executable and bring it into reality.
- [19:18]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And I think that's. This step is where I see people. People go, yeah, okay, goal setting, this is where they don't get it, is that it's always a. I'd like to. Well, someday we might. Well, you know, I really think that it'd be fun too. But taking that and making a reality, people do use this language. And I love how you get into the different language around goal setting. They use these terms, vision, mission, purpose, values like, let's walk through these for a second. This shared language. What's the difference between a vision and your mission? Like we hear the term mission statement that a company will have. We hear that a company has a vision or somebody's got a vision board. What's the difference between mission and vision?
- [19:59]
Gary McDermott
I just like to look at it in terms of the military background and then, you know, other folks will apply it to entrepreneurship. But we always had some sort of vision that was like, where are we going? What does that end state look like in the Navy? You're going to execute a plan, right? So there's the commander's intent or the vision, so to speak. And then for the mission is like, how are we going to start executing? So that if the vision is forward looking and it's like, you know, this is where we're going to be. How do I get everything that we have, all of our assets, all of our troops, and step through the actions or develop the mission to be able to get to that end state? That's the way that I always understand it. But depending upon who I'm explaining to, if it's an entrepreneur or if it's a business owner might be different than how I might explain it to somebody that's, you know, maybe it's a weightlifting student or somebody that wants to be an engineer, but that's the easiest way because that was my first exposure to the concept was in the Navy following the commander's intent and then just breaking it down to the mission and then executing tasks through a workforce.
- [21:10]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I've talked a lot about on this show, Gary. I get coaching from a group called Strategic Coach. And in Strategic Coach, it's funny, as you are talking about this, I'm thinking Strategic Coach has us do this all the time. Where do I want to be as an end state and actually write that down? What, what does the vision look like? You know, we talked about we have in our head. It's kind of nebulous. The fact of writing it down just I don't know what it is about your brain. That tactile response of now I wrote it down and it's in front of me now, it becomes that much more real. They would have us do two things and I think you'd find this fascinating. They'd have us write down if we do this. Well, this is what it looks like if we do this. Really, this is what it looks like. And even writing down the vision that we get if we don't do it, sometimes for some people that kettle prod Gary was really important, like going, no, if I don't do this, if I do it wrong, if I mess it up, this is what happens. And it kind of raises the stakes on you so that you take the whole process seriously.
- [22:17]
Gary McDermott
It's an important, subtle detail that many people are unwilling to do. And I don't consider myself a professional coach that does that all the time, but over the course I've had a lot of people ask me to help them and mentor them. And this is sometimes one of those breaking points where if you're unwilling to write that down and like hold yourself accountable and take, you know, make it real, like those things, it's almost like a showstopper. I can't do it. And, and just like when you started, when you speak and you've baked in all those self limiting beliefs, like it would be nice to. I'd like to. Those are things that I try to change right away. And that first step, write it down, make it real. Like there's, there's power in that. It's scientific, brain science.
- [23:03]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Do you tell other people or do you not tell other people about your goal?
- [23:07]
Gary McDermott
I tell people about my goals. And a lot of times me telling somebody helps make it a little bit more real because in the past I might have been afraid to tell somebody, but then that's putting a limiting psychology, like if I'm afraid or if I don't want to share it. So like, to the point of articulating it, right? If I'm able to articulate the clear goal, then it also allows me to get some feedback, constructive feedback. It also really opened up naysayers, which.
- [23:37]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Well, and that's why I asked because you and I know there's these well meaning people out there, right? Parents, relatives, and they don't want to see you get hurt. And they go, oh, Gary, you've got a good job right now. Why would you go off and do xyz? Why would you go take that chance? I don't think I would do that.
- [23:54]
Gary McDermott
And that's absolutely what happened to me. And it's absolutely the reason why it delayed me and it delayed me in achieving my, you know, my first goal when I wanted to become an entrepreneur and free myself officially from the, you know, the W2 workforce. I shared that goal and it was pretty. This was a goal that I was writing down, you know, in the morning when I woke up and at night when I went to bed. It was very real to me. And when I shared it, I got so many naysayers. But at the Same time, it also helped me deal with it because. And this is, you know, talking to a lot of successful folks. The more success you achieve, the more naysayers and negativity. There's people that will throw that at you. So it's like if I'm going to put it out there, there's also some level of constructive, like it's real, I'm putting it out there, I'm sharing it. I'm accountable to my goal I've committed to also opens up for some constructive. So I just focus on the positive and it helps me better. You know, sometimes I'll get some advice and, and you get better at just like a military. So in the military, as a commander, your job is really to make sure that you get the most up to date information, real time, from all sources so that you can make the best decisions. By putting out your goals, you're opening that invitation so that you can do exactly the same thing. You want to get all of the information, some good, some bad, some that's trying to trick you, some is trying to help you and you sort through it and you make the best decision with what you have available. If you do it in a vacuum and you don't put it out there, you can't effectively do that.
- [25:31]
Joe Saul-Sehy
That's so important that you see some of the landmines before they come. Like these things that well meaning people are saying that are the naysayers. You're saying these are things that strangers are going to throw at you in the future. So you got the opportunity to get them up front.
- [25:45]
Gary McDermott
And it does help you to get that early access. Not to say that there's sometimes that, you know, elements of the mission need to be covert. You may not want to give, you know, the trade secret away, but the concept of just sharing the goal, writing it down and putting it out to the world and putting that energy out there is, is an important part of the process.
- [26:04]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Walk us through. You mentioned smart goals. I think a lot of our stackers have heard of smart goals before, but then Gary, we always talk about. Okay, you've heard of it? Yeah. That's neat. Are you actually doing it? And there's a big difference between people that have heard something and people that are actually doing the thing. I think it's well worth our time to dust these off and walk through what a smart goal actually looks like. How do these five steps work?
- [26:29]
Gary McDermott
So when you think of a smart goal and you think of the acronyms that we're about to go through, look at the end state and ask yourself how would you portray the path to that end state so that somebody can understand it and follow the path? And that's essentially what the smart goal is. If you have the end state and it's in your mind and it's going to be achievable. So it has to be specific. Like what is it? Are we talking about if you want to be healthy, you know, what does that look like? That's different for everybody. But if I say I want to have, if you use weight or you use something that's measurable, so something specific, you know, because healthy is not specific. So if we're talking about, you know, your lipid panel, maybe you want total cholesterol, whatever that is, you gotta put the specifics on it, then it's gotta be measurable. So if it's in your definition, the healthy is having the low cholesterol because you're breaking something that you had to do. Or if it's weight, whatever that is, you know, body fat, bca, whatever measurement. And the point of this is not to say that one measurement is better than the other. It's just to take something that's ambiguous. Like I wanna be healthy, I want to be in the best shape of my life, right? You have to at least set something so that you could. Because how do you know if you're improving? I feel better. Like how do you measure that? Right? So to show progress and also to paint the picture so that you can do it. Anybody else could do it. You know, start with something, make it specific, make it measurable. So like we talked about with the health achievable, right? Like do you want to run the three minute mile? So it has to be achievable. And so that's, if you're serious about it, you may want to talk about to some experts in the field or of whatever it is. Like if you're going to write a book or if, if you're looking at a business, maybe talking to somebody like you mentioned, strategic coach, talk to an expert. Is the goal that if you're setting a revenue goal for a company, you know, is that revenue goal achievable? It's really about defining that end state, looking at specific, measurable, achievable. You know, is the goal relevant to the vision? If the vision is here, sometimes you have some goals and there might be a bigger plan. So you want to make sure that there's alignment there. And then time sensitive, that's where you take I'd like to. And you say, I will accomplish this in the next three months or by December 31st of this year, we will have done this and then it's specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time sensitive.
- [28:57]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I found some people, Gary, that I've met and worked with back when I was a financial planner would set smart goals and they still wouldn't achieve them. Which is why I really like this next hack that you bring to the table, which is don't stop there. Build milestones in to reaching these goals. Can you talk about setting milestones toward the goals and then really what points are good to do that and how do we evaluate the milestone?
- [29:30]
Gary McDermott
Right, right. So the way that I figured this for myself and have explained it to others is you have the goal, now that you have the end state and it's measurable and it's smart, then that's when you can work backwards and sort of set the milestones or the targets. If you're in a business and you're setting a revenue goal, well, you got to work backwards into that. Like take a medical clinic, right? There's a revenue goal to hit that goal. How does one do that? So if you're talking to the team that's going to implement it, you do have to work backwards. So if patients produce revenue, well, how many patients need to come through the door on a month over month basis? What's the mix? Do you have existing patients that normally come in and then now you need to get new patients because if the baseload or the existing patients is, you know, only 50% of your revenue goal, that means you need 50% new patients. So we need to work backwards to see what the recipe is to hit the goal. And so that's what these targets or these milestones would be. And you want to be careful in setting them. So if you want to read so many books a year, you could divide the number of days and figure out the average page of a book. Right? And so what you're trying to do, and this goes back to is it achievable? So maybe you need two people to read the books and one person dictate. Like the point is, once you've got that goal, then part of the reason that it's achievable is because of this test. So now you want to set the target in such a way that in your weakest day or your weakest time period, that milestone is achievable. Because if you say that you're going to read five pages a day in the book versus I'm going to read 50 pages a day in the book because both could put you in line with your goals. What is that sweet spot where in your weakest day when everything unplanned happened that you still want to do that? And if the period is, it could be a day or it could be a week, your busiest week, your toughest week, you still want to hit that target. So that's the way that I look at the milestones is let's take the goal, let's work backwards and translate the recipe into an active milestone. So for a clinic it could be, you know, number of new patients. To get the number of new patients, that means I need to do 50 sales calls a day or whatever that is, or I need to sponsor one event or I need to send an email to this, this many people and you know those conversion rates for each one of these channels, then you can set the activity target. Okay, so I'm going to do this many emails, I'm going to do this many calls, I'm going to do this many in person visits, the books, right? I'm going to read this many pages a day. So whatever the goal is, there is a path. And so my mentor shared with me, you know, the win is in the activity. So focus on the activity. Set the target or the milestone and honor that and then the results and the goal will come.
- [32:28]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Take care of themselves. You know, it's so powerful because I feel like you've got your hand right on the drivers for the goal. When you have these milestones and you also, you see the course going the wrong way. So much quicker. Just so, so much quicker. When I was a financial planner, using these many milestones with my client, like looking at, we would have this retirement goal that's way off in the distance. Gary, you're 33 years old and we're talking about accumulating $3 million or $4 million and you have maybe $100,000 saved and you're like, this seems impractical, like there's no way. But you know, when you look at compounding interest and what they were doing, they could actually be on target for the goal. So looking at these huge ass numbers way in the distance didn't work. But when I said six months from now we have to go from 100,000 to 104,000 or 105,000, whatever that number is, they're saving money and the market's working for them or not working for them, we find that we're off just a little bit and we can then make these much, much Better decisions. I feel like this type of goal setting gives you so much more control than if you just say, someday I'm going to be healthy.
- [33:43]
Gary McDermott
And it absolutely does. I mean, this, what we're talking about here is just how multimillion dollar construction budgets and nuclear operations are done too. And so I just remember from my time in the Navy that these stoplight charts or these dashboards were built for admirals because they would track all these different goals and metrics all the way from the strategic level to the tactical level down to the individual ship level. Right. So we're just putting a framework so that we can track one goal, 50 goals, however many goals in align with a project, a vision, and given us the tool to be able to monitor and then assess. So if everything's green and then you see one turn yellow, put in the recovery plan and then never get red. And so that's really, you know, the science. And then it's just the art of how do we explain it or how do we teach it to the folks? Because it's not something that, like, for me, I, I, I needed somebody to teach me or I needed to learn it.
- [34:45]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Yeah. Let's talk just two quick things here on the end. We can have great goals. We can set them scientifically. We can put the milestones in place. And yet, as you know, Gary, sometimes we still get in our own way. First one, I think for me is always fear. I don't know if it's fear of success, fear of failure, fear of whatever. How do I work through that, that fear?
- [35:10]
Gary McDermott
That's a tough one. A lot of this I get from the Navy, the Navy planning process. However, if I were just to take the five steps that I came up with to explain this and gave it to myself, it's easy to use myself as opposed to anybody else. I'll own this. So if I were to have taken those five steps and given it to me 15 or 20 years ago, I would not have been able. And I told myself, you know, you're going to start your own company. You're going to have a portfolio of companies. These are the five steps you need. Set the goal. I wouldn't have been able to do it. That has to do with what I say is the mindset. And for me, the toughest part about setting the goals for myself, you know, I had no problem, you know, executing a mission, but for my own self, I got in the way. Why is that? It's because, you know, when I was doing it for the military or for other folks, they believed in me, you know, they knew I could do it because they've seen what I could do. But when it came for myself, I didn't believe in myself. I had to go through some powerful mindset shifts. I break it down. There were three mindset shifts that I had to make. I know that even though I had the process and a way to execute goals, I wouldn't have been able to execute the big hairy, audacious goals. I had enough self limiting beliefs and mindset issues that I wouldn't have been able to do it for myself.
- [36:26]
Joe Saul-Sehy
That's so frustrating. Is it the same with procrastination?
- [36:31]
Gary McDermott
I think it can be related because when we talk about like I'd like to or I'll do that when I, that's my favorite one. Like I'll do that after I, or I'll do that when this happens. Right. So you know, there's procrastination that could be just because of sheer laziness. And then there's procrastination that could be because you, you can't figure out how to reprioritize your time or you, you're afraid. So you basically make up an excuse to say that you'll do it later. Because something that is commonly accepted by anybody that you share with is going to understand that that's more important than you becoming an entrepreneur or you doing a goal that you actually want to do. I, I could see that as elements of both and, and I think it's kind of up to the person, you know, what, what camp do they fall in? But procrastination could easily be with how we started this. Right. That I, I like to. Or one day.
- [37:26]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Right, right. We started off with visualizing that process. Number two, we talked a little bit about seeking counsel. Your second step. Third, working backwards, setting targets. Step four, writing it down, saying it out loud. Step five is finding a suitable accountability partner. Walk us through that step just briefly. And I know this is a long, it's a long process, Gary, and there's a lot of micro steps, but how do I begin on the. Trying to find a suitable accountability partner.
- [37:58]
Gary McDermott
Yeah. So trying to find one. I think it's just recognizing that we're all human and we all make mistakes and, and so how do we find somebody that is like minded, you know, at the right level that, that can hold us accountable. And so it can be tough to find that in your own circle. And you may even have to leave your comfort zone and go to a new event or you know, networking. I mean that's been huge for me. The networking. I mean, one of my activity targets when I was growing the business was one networking event every week, virtual or in person. When you start looking and understanding that we're all going to make mistakes, how can I find somebody that would hold me accountable? And there's been times when I may have to hire somebody to do that. There's times when it was natural and organic for a specific goal where somebody was trying to achieve the same thing and we were almost like side by side trying to do it. That can cause its own challenges if at a certain point one surpasses or outgrows. I start with mindset because it's very important. So the first and foremost thing is you want to find somebody with the right mindset, positivity, no negativity. If you can't find that, the odds are against it finding that one person. Because when you find somebody that has that can do attitude and is positive, no negativity policy, whatever they're doing, they're probably going to be successful. They may not be doing what you're going to be doing, but with that attitude and that mindset, they would make a great accountability partner. So that's the first and foremost. And the second thing that I just try to do is just looking at something that's synergetic or complementary.
- [39:47]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Meaning what?
- [39:49]
Gary McDermott
Meaning if I wanted to write the book, it would be nice to have somebody that's written a book or somebody that was an author. If I. If I want to be an athlete, somebody that may not be like a professional, but it may be somebody that's also healthy. If I'm working on a software company or if I'm working on developing a software, I may not be a programmer, but maybe there's somebody in another business or there's gotta be some common ground, so to speak, where.
- [40:17]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Sure. Shared language, almost.
- [40:19]
Gary McDermott
Yeah, right. So that's just, I think first and foremost the no negativity policy. And then second, like, what is the common ground that we have? So even if we don't have an identical goal, the way I look at it is if somebody is an accountability partner for me and holding me accountable to achieve something, is there something synergetic or complimentary that maybe I can also do to help them? And that's when it becomes a little bit more natural. So like, my accountability partner had a slightly different goal when I first started with my real estate company because the real estate company that he had was a completely different model. But the activity targets were the same. That was complementary because we both had the same activity targets. We had to make a certain number of calls or offers, so to speak. Just different, different structure. But that complimentary, that synergy made it, you know, it was a battle rhythm. I, I get kind of used to the military analogies, but you know, you're in that battle rhythm the same time every day or the same time every week. We're, we're exchanging the call like, okay, did you do it well?
- [41:22]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And that's why people not watching the video of this didn't see me smile when you said one networking meeting a week. There's your smart goal right there. That's part of a smart goal setting. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it once a week. I'm going to continue to do it. Obviously over time then you get better at it because you're doing it every week and you get that. Gary, to use your words, battle rhythm. The book is called set your own goals or someone else will. Clearly someone else does every minute that we do the thing that our boss asks us to do. We're working on their goals. And the subtitles, how to overcome self limiting beliefs and get things done. And Gary, I'm assuming this is available everywhere. How do we get it right?
- [41:59]
Gary McDermott
So set your goals. Book.com and Amazon. Set your own goals or someone else will or my name Gary McDermott. But setyourgoalsbook.com is an easy way to find it.
- [42:15]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And you know what, if you're walking the dog or you're on your commute, we have you covered. Stackers. We'll have links to all those places on our show notes@StackyBenjamins.com Gary, thank you for helping us kick off this eight weeks and help people set goals as we make our way through the last half of summer and into the fall. I appreciate you very much. Thank you too for your service, by the way.
- [42:35]
Gary McDermott
Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of your show and look forward to setting goals and having your audience achieve.
- [42:49]
Joe's Mom's Neighbor Doug
Hey there, Stackers. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug, and let's talk multiple streams of income, shall we? Sometimes it's easy to make more money because a new project pops up that's related to the current project and other times an idea strikes you right out of left field. The latter was the case for voice actor Paul Winchell, who, among other things, was the voice of Tigger in Walt Disney's version of Winnie the Pooh. But Winchell took part in some scientific efforts that hopefully made him millions because it helped save a ton of lives. In what may be the weirdest sentence I've ever said, answer this question. What artificial organ did the voice of Walt Disney Tigger receive a patent for on today's date in history? I'll be back right after I practice my bouncing. Maybe Tigger has something there. It's pretty fun.
- [43:41]
Joe Saul-Sehy
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- [45:39]
Progressive Insurance Representative
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- [46:15]
Joe Saul-Sehy
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- [46:50]
Joe's Mom's Neighbor Doug
Hey there, stackers. I'm fun lover, but guy who jiggles too much when he bounces. Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug. The character Tigger was a huge part of AA Milne's classic Winnie the Pooch Tales. And actor Paul Winchell brought Tigger to life with his iconic voice. But it wasn't his voice that helped save tons of lives. Today's question is, what artificial organ did Winchell receive a patent for on this day in history? Back in 1963? If you said an implantable artificial heart, you'd be correct. How about some more weird history? He developed the artificial heart with the assistance of of Henry Heimlich. Yep, the same inventor of the famous anti choking Heimlich maneuver. And now back to two guys who think finance is fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. Joe and Og.
- [47:41]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Hey, guys, this is Shane. And when I'm not chasing kids around.
- [47:46]
Gary McDermott
Driving a tractor or scraping up horse, I'm stacking Benjamins.
- [47:52]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Big thanks to Gary for helping us out. Oh, gee, it's 100% true. You're always working on somebody's goals, but you think about the amount of time you're working on somebody else's end game. It's a big number.
- [48:07]
OG
Yeah, I think when you pair that with what we were talking about on Monday in terms of risk and the reward and the components of building your own kind of financial independence, whether it's real financial independence with money, but also financial independence in terms of time independence and your work life balance, that sort of thing. Absent your own vision of the future, absent your own, your own goals, you're just marching to the beat of whatever drum is out there. It's great if your goals line up with other people's and you guys can all, everybody can kind of move in the right direction or the same direction with one another. But yeah, like he says, eventually you have to decide, is this the path that I want to be on and for how long?
- [48:49]
Joe Saul-Sehy
So did your dad take you down to the recruiter's office one day, blindly, you went into the military.
- [48:54]
OG
No, it wasn't. I got the same message of we don't have any money for college. But no, it was not. Here, jump in the car, I'll show you the new plan. I chose it all on my own, actually. I thought, you know, the chicks would dig the dress blues, so that's what I went with.
- [49:09]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And man, when I was at the Citadel, I always thought that women would love that Citadel uniform. And they did, until those dudes from Paris island showed up in the Marine Corps stuff. And then you're like, oh, I'm just a child. I am just a child. Literally, you'd be like, oh, there's, there's the badasses. Hey, we got a very quick headline today, so let's do this.
- [49:32]
OG
Hello, darlings. And now it's time for your favorite part of the show. Our stacking Benjamin's headlines headline today comes.
- [49:40]
Joe Saul-Sehy
To us from Yahoo. Finance. Here's how the new Trump accounts work and why financial experts don't love them. Pretty soon, Americans will be the proud owner of their very own Trump account. This Yahoo. Finance piece says, which they have yet.
- [49:52]
OG
To name, by the way. They're not gonna, I don't think they're gonna call it this.
- [49:55]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Everybody's calling it Trump accounts, though. President Trump's sprawling tax law creates a new tax advantage investment account, Pre funded with $1,000 for each child born from the beginning of 2025 through the end of 2028. Kids born before this year are eligible for the IRA style accounts, but they don't get the thousand dollars of seed money. So does this mean people gotta, people gotta get busy to get their thousand bucks? Oh, gee, we just, after it, put some Barry White on, there could be a thousand dollars there. The idea is, backers say the accounts are a way to get all kids into saving and investing early in life while helping them save for goals like college or a home. You know, they say in the headline, experts don't love these accounts. Do you like this account or not?
- [50:40]
OG
I'll be honest, I don't know that I've spent a lot of time on looking into them. A bunch of. I love the idea of getting some free cash put into an account. Obviously somebody's paying for it, so it's not really free. It's just transferring from somebody to another person. I guess the part that the parents have to decide on is are they going to add to it? The question becomes like, I mean, sure, if I've Maxed out all my other accounts and my kids 529s are good and they all have brokerage accounts. And, and, and, and, and, and, and I'm loaded and you're going to give me another five grand I can put in this thing and the gross tax deferred.
- [51:16]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Okay, cool.
- [51:17]
OG
But I don't know where it falls in the hierarchy of where I want to put money at some level. This is just money for my kids down the line, which is great, but my brokerage account is also money for my kids down the line, and I get all the control and the liquidity and I don't have to wait till my kid's 20 to take it out or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, if I got five grand extra for my kids, I'm going to put it in my account because I might need it before they need it. At least where I am in my.
- [51:42]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Life right now, the only thing that I like about it is the thousand dollars. I think that if children get that money and seed it into the account, but I wish they, they couldn't get the money until maybe 65. If you look at all of the research that's been done on if you just give a kid a little bit of money when they're first born and then they get it at 65, our Social Security burden is going to be a hell of a lot less. Like the financial markets historically have taken care of that in a much, much better way than Social Security does.
- [52:16]
OG
Yes, but then what would the government have to borrow against? Quiet. Do not pay attention to the smoke, please, sir.
- [52:24]
Joe Saul-Sehy
But we said this about the accounts that President Obama set up. I don't think we need another account, OG I mean, it just, it's more spaghetti. Just yet another account. Everything that you can do in these new Trump accounts or back in the Obama accounts is the same exact thing that you can do in an account without this. The rules are kind of confusing. It's a little bit of spaghetti. It's just another thing. I'm also not a fan for all those reasons. Although I love the thousand bucks. I wish it didn't stop at 18, though. I wish it went to 65.
- [53:03]
OG
Well, obviously I'm not going to sit down and do the math on it in terms of inflation adjusting and all that other sort of stuff, but to kind of save everybody from having to do the math. Basically, if you put $10,000 in an account and it grows at 8% for 65 years, you got about a million and a half bucks. Adjust it up or down based on 9%, 10%, 7%, 6%, 10,000 going in or 20,000 going in. To your point, think about all of the cost, all the money that go. If you're trying to solve Social Security, think of all the money that goes into Social Security over your lifetime and you just have to pull, you know, just go on SSA.gov log into your own account and it tells you, here's how much you've paid in Social Security taxes, here's how much your employers have paid in Social Security taxes, and here's your future benefit. And I happen to think Social Security pays out pretty good. I think it's a pretty good ROI as long as you are alive to get it. And that's obviously the trade off, that's how the math works for everybody, is that some people unfortunately don't get their Social Security checks and they don't get any money they paid in their whole lifetime and they don't get anything. Which feeds into the I got to get it at 62 idea. Despite this, every single solitary study saying 70 is a better time to take it. But if you look at the total payout of Social Security right now for a normal life expectancy person, whatever, it's going to be some number less than a million bucks, right? So, I mean, it's still a lot of money. A million dollars, that's a boatload of cash. But I've put in, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of Social Security between me and my employers over the years. You've done that? Everybody who's 50 has done that. And it's like, but for 10 grand, once I can get the same million five, why wouldn't the government go, well, this is a way better idea, Way better idea. Like save hundreds of thousands of dollars of FICA taxes and just go, well, just when you're born, we put 10 grand in, that's your Social Security check. And when you turn 65 or you turn 70 or whatever it is, we run some sort of calculation. And oh, by the way, if you die along the way at 65 or whatever age, we'll pay that out to your beneficiaries or we'll use that. If you die young, we'll use that as your seed capital for your kids or, you know, to help them or your family. If you live to be 150 and you've burned through your cash, that sucks. It's like that's the trade off, right? I mean, just, that's what we do. But solving Social Security is pretty easy for you and me. I think pretty difficult for congresspeople due to their jobs being on the line.
- [55:30]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I also like the fact, different than the Obama plan, which was in treasuries, which I didn't understand in the market. Yeah, this, this is invested in broad stock index. But it just is one more thing. So I don't know. My advice, it's so wild.
- [55:42]
OG
It's like we're like half doing this stuff. I know what I mean. It does like just do it like if you're, hey, this is a great idea. We're going to help people and help their da da da da da. For a thousand dollars. And it's like, okay, I mean it's not zero. A thousand bucks over 20 years is going to double twice or three times. So that's three, four grand when the kid's 23 or four grand when I was 20 would have made a big difference in my life. No doubt about it. Absolutely it would have. It wouldn't been a down payment on a house, but it would help to ease the burden of college. And you know that's not zero, but it's not like fixing anything. You know what I mean? It's like just a little teeny tiny band aid. Make it 65 that you can't touch the money. Make it 10 grand that goes in and go, well, okay, so now you're good. Think about the, this is the bad side of it. Think about the economic impact of not having to save any money knowing you got a million and a half dollars.
- [56:30]
Joe Saul-Sehy
When you turn 60.
- [56:33]
OG
Like I don't say anything, man. I'm good. I was a born in America.
- [56:37]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Welcome back to that real consumerism argument, right?
- [56:39]
OG
Yeah, exactly.
- [56:40]
Joe Saul-Sehy
You want to see consumerism? Hold my beer.
- [56:42]
OG
The economy. Give everybody a million and a half dollars. There's no inflationary effects on that, so pay no attention to that either.
- [56:48]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I'll link to this piece at Yahoo. Finance, but definitely take advantage of it. Parents, if you have a job, get your free thousand.
- [56:55]
OG
I mean I might have two or three more just to, just to see. You guys should try.
- [56:59]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Okay, good news. We're going to have some more kids.
- [57:02]
OG
Great news, Cheryl. Boy, do I have a deal for you.
- [57:05]
Joe Saul-Sehy
You're 55 years old and we're getting back in the summer.
- [57:08]
OG
One of those things. I figure over that three year period you're good for four kids. If we time it out exactly right, that's $4,000.
- [57:16]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Just think about that.
- [57:17]
OG
Think about that.
- [57:20]
Joe Saul-Sehy
When you're 70, hashtag blessed when you're 73 years old. They're going to be graduating from high school. Oh my goodness.
- [57:28]
OG
With three grand in their accounts.
- [57:31]
Joe Saul-Sehy
74 years old. I can't imagine time for our segment where a stacker realized, you know what, I better call Saul. See? Hi. And Og, if you've got a question for us, head to stacking benjamins.com voicemail and you can be as cool as stacker Bonnie is. Hey, Bonnie.
- [57:52]
Bonnie
Hello, gentlemen. My 55th birthday is next month and I'm hoping you can gift me some of your wisdom. What are your thoughts on long term care insurance? If one is a late starter with retirement planning with lowish retirement assets and I'm not convinced I can amass the one plus million dollars various tools suggest I need to pay for my care. Should I live to be 100? Nor am I convinced I can work until I'm 70 without flipping a table. I'm definitely sure that should I get laid off at 55 in a knowledge management technology job, I would not get another job at this level. But retirement planning tools are incredibly conservative and I get very frustrated when I try to plan things out. They generally say you should stay in your job until you're 70 and then live off your portfolio and then, you know, probably leave my daughter hundreds of thousands of dollars. No, I don't want to do that. I'm very proud of how I've clawed myself back from a number of setbacks. The dot com bust affected me. I'm a single mom. The 2007, 2008 crisis affected me. I lost a house and filed for bankruptcy. My real savings didn't start until I was in my 40s, but I now have 400,000 investable assets. I'm a renter, but I have no debt. I've seen some things. I'm scrappy, but I would look to you to give me some advice.
- [59:15]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Oh, Bonnie, before you give you any advice, congratulations. And that shows doji you can, you can get there, I mean from 0 to 400,000 in that short amount of time. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice.
- [59:27]
OG
Yeah. She said she doesn't think she'd get to a million. I would beg to differ.
- [59:30]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I think so.
- [59:31]
OG
I mean, not going to be to a million tomorrow, but it's just a little bit over a double and a half away.
- [59:36]
Joe Saul-Sehy
That's, I mean between the amount she's.
- [59:38]
OG
Going to put in, seven years, eight years, 10 years maybe. I bet you 10 years, you know, if she can make it to 65, might not be the vision she has.
- [59:45]
Joe Saul-Sehy
But long term care. Oh gee, is Bonnie not Just for you. And for late starters, long term care just for everybody is the, that is the Achilles heel of the retirement plan.
- [59:56]
OG
Yeah, I mean, so think about it this way. So what is long term care? First, how do I define it versus maybe if there's a colloquial difference here. So I think of long term care assistance as having somebody help you out when you're unable to do some of the things you're able to do right now. And that could be anything from twice a week somebody shows up and just kind of checks in and makes sure there's food in the fridge and you're taking your medicine all the way to you're in a nursing home, the proverbial long term care facility, and you have 24, 7, 365 care. It's not one or either of those. It's a spectrum of, of potential care needed. What we all want to have happen is we all just want to be really healthy and then go and we're dead, you know, like, you know, and hopefully that happens at like 95 or something.
- [60:50]
Joe Saul-Sehy
That's the dream come true.
- [60:51]
OG
I think part of long term care planning, honestly is thinking about the stuff when you're in your 40s and 50s and going, what sort of health decisions do I need to be making so that I can have a better health life expectancy, not just a, okay life expectancy and you know, my health is declining. You know, like you kind of think about that happens from 70 to 90 or something. I love the concept that Dr. Peter Attia, he's not been on the show, but we should get him. He talks about the lost decade, right? The last 10 years of your life. You don't want to have that be the sucky 10 years, you know, or just you're just hanging around waiting to die. So a lot of that planning starts when you're in your 40s and 50s about making good health decisions. Okay. So on the insurance front, the way that I think about this is how much is the exposure that you have now and how much of it do you want to transfer to a third party, if any? Because it's not about the money necessarily. It's about what do you want to have happen if something happens to you that requires some level of assisted care. Again, all the way from every so often somebody shows up to 24, 7, 365 memory care. Right. And so we know a couple things. We know that the average cost of care is about $6,000 a month, depending on where you are. That's a little bit Dynamic based on location and high cost living areas and that sort of thing. But a good rule of thumb is about 6,000amonth in today's dollars. We know that that's a medical cost, so that's increasing at a rate greater than inflation. We also know that statistically, if you're using a form of assisted care, you probably need that for about 30 months on average. Now there's plenty of examples of like, well, my grandpa was in a memory care facility for 12 years with Alzheimer's. Yep, that's true. And there's plenty of examples of somebody who like went to nursing home and was dead in a week, you know, so there's all manner of of things there. You just have to think about an average number and work off of that. So if you just pencil that out and say, I need 30 months of 6,000amonth, it's 200 grand. So if you had a raise check for 200,000, do you have it and would you choose to spend it on that or what are the other things that happen? So if you are in a state, I think almost all states have this. They have certain levels of spend that's required before they're going to start taking care of you. You're not going to end up on a likely anyway end up on a street corner, you know, of old age, trying to take care of things. There's a program for you, but to get there, you got to spend your own money first, right? You got to spend all your stuff, which makes sense, right? We're not going to have the state step in if I got a million bucks in my brokerage account, right. They're going to say, well, you just let us know when you're broke and then we'll help. Now there's some stories about how maybe the state thing isn't as great as like a private. Of course it's not going to be. So you just have to think about like how much of this do you potentially want to cover and can you earmark some of your retirement expenses or earmark some of your retirement assets for that? So let's say that you look at it and say, all right, I've done my financial planning, I think that I could cover half that cost. Well, now you have to go find insurance carrier that will cover the other half of the cost. And what does that look like today's day and age? If you wanted to buy a full coverage long term, like all the soup to nuts, all the bells and all the whistles, it's probably 5,000 a year might be $7,000 a year, depending on how old you are in terms of premiums. Well, if I'm going to write a check for $100,000 and I expect my insurance company to write a check for 100,000 and I'm going to pay 6 or 7 or $8,000 a year of premiums. Hold on a second, that's like 10 years of premiums. And then I would have just been able to pay the whole thing on my own.
- [64:30]
Gary McDermott
Hmm.
- [64:31]
OG
So you have to kind of evaluate that, you know what I mean? Is it something I'd worry about at 55? No. Is it something I'd really start looking at at 65? Yes, 60, maybe. Is there a chance that you have assisted care need at 57? Of course there is. But you know, that's just sometimes how life is.
- [64:52]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And you'll hear long term care experts that will argue about that. They'll be like, well, you know, I know people that work for. Yeah, okay, there's the outlier of the person that's 45.
- [65:00]
OG
I mean, it happens, right? It absolutely does. But that's what disability insurance is for, right?
- [65:04]
Joe Saul-Sehy
We're just playing the probability game, right?
- [65:06]
OG
100%. Now, if you've, again, if you've got bajillions of dollars and you're like, I can insure this for pennies on the dollar and no harm to my cash flow. Yeah, of course, transfer all that risk, buy insurance, get as much as you want, like, who cares? But I think in the real world you have to kind of evaluate what those, what the averages look like, what your plan would be, you know. And by the way, when does this happen? Generally speaking, the last three years. Right. So if your average, it's your 85th through your 88th year. So guess what, you got 30 years of market growth to go. So what's your portfolio going to do over the next 30 years? Probably do.
- [65:40]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Okay, I like where your argument started and I want to paint this more as a. Let's talk about the way OG thinks, everybody, because I think this is super important. Insurance companies want you to begin with evaluating the insurance.
- [65:57]
OG
Yeah. How much can I buy?
- [65:58]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Yeah.
- [65:58]
OG
Is this, what's the payment?
- [65:59]
Joe Saul-Sehy
And here's all the bells and whistles instead. Oh, gee, you started with two things. What's the quality of care that I want? And what would this money be doing if I didn't spend it on long term care? Would it be going to beneficiaries? Would I live more life? Like, what are the things that I would be doing? When you start with the quality of care that I want, what does that cost? And then what would my assets be doing otherwise? You're going to come up with a better solution where insurance is maybe still in the picture, but it's at the end instead of the first thing I evaluate. So, Bonnie, you know, you asked, how do I look at long term care insurance? The appropriate answer in the most snarky way possible is you don't. You, you, you ask about the condition and how do I want the condition to go? And then maybe I look into insurance as a way to cover that, that condition because frankly, you only have. And this just breaks down. OG I know what you already said, but, but what OG did was, was basically said this. You have two choices. You shoulder the risk yourself and you broke down that. Or you hand it to an insurance company that's going to demand a premium, but then that's going to cap that portion of exposure or all the exposure, or to get to the, the portional part, which you talked about is, okay, maybe I can handle 50%, well, then I hand the other 50%. So maybe there's a midway between the two. Maybe I take part of the risk, maybe the insurance company then takes part of the risk. So I start off with the top of the funnel being what is my asset going to do? What's the quality of care going to do? Then I have this option. Do I shoulder it? Do I become the insurance company myself? AKA what you said, well, wait a minute. If I made the premiums to myself, if I called this a premium, I made the premium myself for 10 years, I could totally cover this. Okay, well, there's a strategy. Now. The thing people don't do, and you know this OG they say they're going to do that and then they don't do anything. They don't, they don't actually pay the premium. So you gotta, you gotta do that if you're gonna, if you're gonna follow that approach. But I look at those two options or I find a middle ground at the end. And I think that's the beautiful way of handling what truly is. OG A really complex question because then, you know, you've got these insurance policies that just have long term care riders on them. You've got full blown long term care coverage. You've got, you know, Medicaid that picks up to your point. You also have lawyers who are telling you that, hey, you know, if we do some asset planning around the edges.
- [68:26]
OG
Here early, that's my favorite one. If you get rid of all your stuff, then the government will pay for it. It's like, okay, no offense to the government, but I'm good. Yeah, I'll choose door number two, where I'm rich and I do with what I want with my money. There's one little piece here that I'll add just a little wrinkle to some thinking on this, which is there is some circumstances, and I only say this because it sounds like she's in a position where she has high income and is like saving a bunch of money to kind of catch up. That's kind of the, the sense that I got from that intro. There is some thought or potentially could be some thought around saying, well, if I'm going to work for the next 10 years, is there a way for me to fund this over the next 10 years while I have all this excess cash flow? If it was really important to you or if you have a history of, you know, this is all personal stuff, right? Like tons of family history of needing this level of care. And it's just like, you know, whatever things are in my DNA have led me to think this. You might choose to explore it sooner rather than later, if only to say a, it's a little less expensive because you're 55, not 65. But also you can say, well, hold on a second. Insurance company, I've decided I want to cover half of this. You do through that whole process. And then you say, I want to cover a portion of this and I want you guys to cover a portion of it. The portion I want you to cover, I want to pay for while I'm working. I want to be done paying for it when I'm, when I'm done working.
- [69:48]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Like some sort of a paid up option.
- [69:50]
OG
Yeah, I'm going to do it for the next 10 years, which is totally common. I'm going to pay for the next 10 years while I'm working. It just comes out of my work bonuses that I get in my RSUs and I'm just good. Now again, there's a downside to that, which is that's money you're not consuming for fun. That's money you're not saving into another place, into your investment accounts for the future. But it does give you a measure of security. Saying, okay, I know that when I'm done with work, this payment's done. I don't have to factor it in my cash flow. I'm covered for life. Asterisk. Unless, of course, the insurance company changes their mind and says they want to raise the premiums or drop my benefit in the future, which they're always able to do with a bunch of paperwork and they do, but at least it gets you like 80% of the way there. So if it is a concern, don't sleep on saying, well, how do I maybe, maybe I want to handle this. Right now I've got excess cash flow. I'm feeling pretty good about my position. You know, I lock it in, I can pay for it today and just be done in the next decade.
- [70:45]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I'm going to also make an argument on the other side, which is that you, Bonnie, said, you know, I don't really care about my daughter's inheritance. I don't know if you're joking or not, but if you weren't joking, if that was a truth that was wrapped in a laugh, that you truly don't care about the inheritance and you think you are going to remain single, then your money is for you. And then in that case, OG spend her money on whatever. A lot of the time when it comes to long term care, I wasn't as worried as a financial planner about the person who's spending down the money. I was much more worried about what is the surviving family member going to do.
- [71:22]
OG
Absolutely. It's the surviving spouse that matters the most because they're the ones that are healthy. With only two grand in the bank account and yeah, no assets left.
- [71:30]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Yeah. So I also mitigate what OG said against that as well. But you can see how multifaceted that is. Yeah, thanks for the question. If you've got a question for us, it's stacky benjamin.com. voicemail gets you on the line with us and we've got a few questions in the queue, but we can get to you fairly, fairly soon. All right, that's gonna do for today. Just a quick wander out on the back porch. We've got our new guide, the college planning Guide coming online. But the guides are going up in price on August 1st. So if you want to get the current pricing because you're a fan of the show, we're going to give you a month, almost a month here. Well, now we're down to about half a month.
- [72:11]
OG
Liar.
- [72:11]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I know, I'm looking up like, wait a minute, that's based on when we're recording this. Based on this, you got a couple weeks here. But our tax time guide and our HR guide, you buy it once and you get to keep it for forever. We update it every single month so you don't have to buy a new updated one in a few years. We're always updating it and the price moving up August 1st. So if you want to get it at current locked in price stacking benjamin.com guides that's stacking benjamin.com guides for that. All right, that's going to do it for today. Doug. You got it from here, man. What should be on our to do list today?
- [72:49]
Joe's Mom's Neighbor Doug
So what's stacked up on our to do list for today? First, take some Advice from Gary McDermott. Write down your goals, smart them out and set milestones. You're much more likely to reach them if you practice little tweaks than if you have some vague idea in your head. Second, long term care, you definitely want a strategy. Long term care insurance. That's another story between self insurance and handing coverage to a company. You'll need to shop widely to find a solution that works for you. But the big lesson, don't tell Joe's mom you're going to smart your goals. She'll make some joke about being a smart ass, which truly isn't funny, and will tell you which goals she has for you. Seriously, isn't that what we're supposed to be getting away from? Didn't she listen to any of what Gary talked about today? Thanks to Gary McDermott for joining us today. You'll find his book Set yout Goals or Someone Else want will@setyourgoalsbook.com we'll also include links in our show notes@stackingbenjamins.com and you can also see Gary talk goals on Amazon Prime. Speak up. This show is the property of SP Podcasts, LLC, Copyright 2025 and is created by Joe Saul Sehi. Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You you'll find out about our awesome team@stackingbenjamins.com along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah. And before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don't take advice from people you don't know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug, and we'll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
- [75:03]
Joe Saul-Sehy
Sam, welcome to the after show. This is the part of the show that doesn't exist. And in the after show we generally talk about other things going on in our life and a lot of the time that's movies. Oh gee, I saw this little movie that is made by Apple. And it is produced in part by driver named Lewis Hamilton, who might be one of the top race car drivers in history. And it is Formula one, the movie starring this little known guy named Brad Pitt.
- [76:05]
Gary McDermott
See, like straight talk, straight and arrow, no sugar. Why are you here, Sunny? When you look in the mirror, you.
- [76:23]
Bonnie
See this rough and tumble old school cowboy. Doesn't take orders, goes his own way, huh?
- [76:37]
Gary McDermott
A lone wolf. Well, I have news for you. Formula one is a team sport. It always was. Listen, let's get this straight.
- [76:56]
Bonnie
We all lose our jobs if you.
- [76:57]
Gary McDermott
Can'T pull off a miracle.
- [77:00]
Joe Saul-Sehy
No pressure.
- [77:03]
Gary McDermott
The only question here is why does Sunny Hayes come back to F1? I think it's really wonderful that Apex are given second chances to the elderly. It's all right.
- [77:15]
Joe Saul-Sehy
You just wait.
- [77:15]
Gary McDermott
I'm quicker than you.
- [77:18]
Joe Saul-Sehy
I could listen to them working on cars all day long. I could. I could totally do that now, given I'm a race car fan. But I know a lot of people have seen this, this movie that are not Formula one fans, not racing fans. It is the story of Brad Pitt who clearly from that trailer OG is this washed up racer old guy comes back and has to help this team that needs a miracle get their stuff together. It's funny, I just did this fantastic media press tour with Barclays and General Motors. And my contact at Barclays, a wonderful gentleman named George. George, when we were in Detroit the night before our media tour, said that he went because he's not from Detroit, just went to see Formula one by himself. This OG was George's assessment of Formula one, the movie. He said, is it a good movie? No. But for two and a half hours, I was super entertained. And then I talked to a wonderful young woman who works with us, Debeney. Debeney does a ton of our graphics and some of our social media stuff. Debeney said it's like Top Gun 2 but with race cars. So if you liked Top Gun 2. And you know, it's funny, we walked out of the movie theater yesterday and I told Cheryl Debeney's assessment. Cheryl said a hundred percent, this was Top Gun 2. So if you like Top Gun 2, the old Maverick teaching the young guy all the stuff he needs to learn about teamwork and about the fact that we got this mission and the stakes are really high and things aren't going to go right and he's the WY veteran, you're gonna love Formula one, the movie if you don't like that formula. Well, then maybe not. But I can totally see OG Why this thing gets like a. I think it's a 91 or 92% from the people and gets low 80s, low to mid 80s score from the critics. It's a good movie. It's a fun two and a half hours. It is long, but it doesn't feel long. It never feels long. But two and a half hours, man, that's a lot of time to sit in the movie theater. And by the way, even though this is either on Apple or coming to Apple, I'm not sure if it's there yet because we disconnected our Apple TV for a little bit and saved some money on streaming services. Over the short term we'll be back to Apple and we'll cancel something else later. But I don't have it, so I don't know if it's there yet. It will clearly be coming to Apple. If not, this is the kind of movie you see on a big screen. I mean, oh gee, those cars racing, you know, the, the noises, the views, the motion, the excitement. That's big screen stuff. If I could have seen it in imax, if we had an IMAX locally, I would have demanded that we saw this movie at the IMAX theater. And I know that they have an IMAX experience where you can see this film. So if you're interested at all, Formula one, thumb up from me, thumb up from Cheryl, who doesn't like racing, thumb up from my son Nick, who also is a racing fan who is in town visiting and went with us and all three of us really enjoyed the two and a half hours of Formula one the movie. I think you'd love it.
- [80:28]
OG
OG Yeah, I saw, I was flipping on Apple TV yesterday and I saw the headline for it that I didn't click on it, but it made me think that it was going to be available on Apple TV soon.