How to Talk About Money Without Fighting SB1802

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Stacking Benjamins Show

Episode: How to Talk About Money Without Fighting (SB1802)
Date: February 11, 2026
Guests: Douglas & Heather Bonaparte
Host(s): Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, “Joe’s mom’s neighbor Doug”

Episode Overview

This special Valentine's Day-themed episode focuses on one of the most challenging aspects of personal finance: talking about money in relationships—without fighting. Joined by financial experts (and spouses) Douglas and Heather Bonaparte, the hosts dive into the tricky dynamics of financial secrets, healthy communication, and building financial literacy as a couple and family. The tone is light, humorous, and approachable, with lots of personal stories and actionable advice.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Traditions & Setting the Tone

• The Bonapartes share their unique Valentine's Day tradition: making "love lasagna" together at home, born out of their early days "when money was really tight" ([12:14]).
  • Heather: “It was an expensive lasagna, but it was still less expensive than a prix fixe dinner. But it was also a group activity… cook it together, enjoy it together, have a glass of wine.” ([12:19]–[12:27])
  • Emphasis on shared experiences over expensive gestures.

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2. Financial Infidelity: What Is It and Why It Matters

Definition:

• Heather: “A good definition for financial infidelity is doing something that your partner would disapprove of financially and then covering it up. So it’s the conscious act of not telling them.” ([13:26]–[14:25])

Why Small Lies Add Up:

• Heather: “Those little white lies become a behavioral pattern... and then we develop this behavior of lying to our partner, keeping things from them.” ([14:25])
• Doug: “Compounding works both ways. We always talk about it for good behaviors with money, but here it’ll work against you. Small lies become big ones.” ([15:13])

Privacy vs. Secrecy:

• Heather: “There are better ways to achieve that level of personal independence than not telling your partner... such as keeping a separate bank account with a set amount of money for you to do as you please.” ([15:51])
• The Bonapartes use a mutual “check-in number”—any purchase above a set amount requires a conversation. The threshold depends on the couple. ([16:43])

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3. Real-Life Consequences: Julia’s Story

• Doug: Shares the story of "Julia," whose partner hid tens of thousands of dollars of debt and legal issues, ultimately putting her in legal and financial jeopardy ([18:25]).
• The panel agrees that financial infidelity can have as disastrous an impact on a relationship as romantic infidelity.

Quote:

• Heather: “It's not to say that it's worse [than romantic infidelity]. We don't know which is worse. But... financial infidelity is as bad, because it can impact your dual livelihood and your ability to break free from a situation.” ([19:47])

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4. Fixing the Problem: Pathways Back to Trust

Don't Shame; Collaborate

• Heather: “When we shame our partner, it will have an effect on them—it just might not be the effect we want... that might have the impact of causing them to lie more.” ([21:08])

Shared Willingness is Critical

• Doug: “There needed to be a willingness for both parties... Identifying that both people want to improve is almost the most critical first step.” ([22:03])

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5. Healthy Money Conversations

Scheduling Counts

• Both Bonapartes: Money talks should be scheduled intentionally—not during “family rush hour” ([23:07]).
  • Heather: “Time and place matter... Maybe it’s not the right day to be getting into the budget and the numbers.” ([23:08]–[23:37])

Lead with Wins, Not Numbers

• Doug: “The money nerds are gonna have the spreadsheets ready... But what you really want to start with here are the wins, the victories... Look how great we did here. Then get into the constructive stuff.” ([25:41])

Make it Palatable & Routine

• Joe: Shares his and Cheryl’s “money date” technique: 20-minutes, once a week, always with pancakes or wine ([28:01]).
  • Heather: “There’s a critical component... about meeting your partner where they are. If you recognize your partner can only get their attention for 20 minutes—cap the conversation.” ([28:45])

Adapt to Learning Styles

• Doug: Describes a financial advisor who had success by matching his teaching style to his wife’s preference for visual learning ([29:43]).

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6. Including Kids in Money Talks

Create “Friction”

• Heather: With kids living in a “frictionless” world (tap-to-pay, Amazon), parents must create moments of waiting and decision-making. “If you lose something, I’m not just gonna go on Amazon and reorder a new one.” ([31:38])

Make Work-Reward Connections

• Doug: “When our oldest was young and asked why we drop mom at the train, I said, ‘Mommy goes to the city so we can have fun on the weekends.’ Work, enjoyment, family–kids can figure out those links.” ([33:14])

Encourage Real Lessons

• Joe: “We would trust our kids with a little more money than maybe they should have... I had to be brave enough to let her buy it—then circle back two weeks later: ‘Remember... you spent your money on this thing. Where’s it at now?’” ([36:09])

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7. Self-Reflection Before Couples Work

• Heather: “So much of this is self work before it’s couples work. Understanding your own money stories, your own scripts that you carry from childhood... Only then can we ask: Is this serving me today?” ([38:27])
• “If you are shaming your partner, it just may not have the impact you want...” ([39:58])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Compounding works both ways–good behaviors or investment returns work for you, but when we think about bad behaviors... it will work against you in profound ways.” — Doug Bonaparte ([15:13])
• “There needed to be a willingness for both parties... Identifying that both people want to improve is almost the most critical first step.” — Doug Bonaparte ([22:03])
• “Time and place matter... when you talk about money.” — Heather Bonaparte ([23:08])
• “Money literacy begins with our values and behaviors.” — Heather Bonaparte ([34:17])
• “It’s so much harder than just saying no, but it’s so much better than saying no.” — Joe Saul-Sehy, on letting kids make money mistakes ([37:06])
• “Great budgeting's fine, but great communication's even better.” — Joe's mom's neighbor Doug (summary takeaway, [58:59])

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Key Timestamps

• [12:14] — Bonaparte Valentine tradition: “love lasagna.”
• [13:26] — Defining “financial infidelity.”
• [15:13] — Compounding effects of behavior (good or bad).
• [16:43] — The “check-in number” system for spending.
• [18:25] — The “Julia” story: financial secrets and consequences.
• [21:08] — Don’t shame your partner; effects of shaming.
• [22:03] — Both partners must want to improve.
• [23:07] — Scheduling money conversations intentionally.
• [25:41] — Leading money talks with “wins.”
• [28:01] — “Money date”: 20-minute, weekly conversation.
• [29:43] — Adapting money talks for learning styles.
• [31:38] — Teaching kids about money “friction.”
• [33:14] — Connecting work to rewards for children.
• [36:09] — Letting kids make spending mistakes and learn.
• [38:27] — The importance of self-reflection before couples work.

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Style and Tone

• The episode is playful yet sincere, with humor from the hosts and warmth from the Bonapartes. Even serious topics are discussed with empathy and practical optimism. Listeners walk away feeling both educated and encouraged to improve their money relationships.

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Takeaways

• Communication about money is more important than spreadsheets or technical details.
• Small money secrets can spiral into harmful “financial infidelity.”
• Schedule regular, positive, and structured money conversations with your partner.
• Align on a “check-in number” for autonomy and transparency.
• Teach kids about money by introducing friction, patience, and value lessons.
• Do the self-work to understand your financial beliefs—“couples work” starts solo.
• Use technology (reminders, apps) to never miss important deadlines.

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Transcript

[Joe]

We heard you.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Nine years of bring back the snack.

[Joe]

Wrap and you've won.

[Doug Bonaparte]

But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack wrap.

[Joe]

Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.

[Joe Salsihai]

All right, Shelly, the courtship is over. Oh, the adoration. Oh, the chevaudeur.

[Joe]

You are mad, peanut.

[Joe Salsihai]

I am your brittle.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Live from Joe's mom's basement, it's the Stacking Benjamin Show. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug. And in honor of Valentine's Day, today we celebrate relationships and your money with a couple who literally wrote the financial book on the topic, Douglas and Heather Bonaparte. Plus, in our headline segment, know how we all want to get hit with Cupid's arrow? Well, one arrow you want to miss is the one from the IRS that says you missed a deadline. One big deadline is missed by tons of taxpayers every year. And we'll help you never miss it and a few other important deadlines ever again. And don't you worry, because of course I'll come back at the halfway point of today's show with some relationship themed trivia. Because if there's one thing people tune into this show for Joe, it's my views on relationships. And now, two guys who probably should seek out therapy for their intimate relationship with these microphones. It's Joe and. Oh, jj. Juju G.

[Joe Salsihai]

Is there any other reason to tune in besides to hear Doug's relationship advice? Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Doug Relationship podcast. I'm Joe Salsihai. And buckle up, buttercup, because, man, we got a great show today. Doug and Heather Bonaparte coming back. OG I know that this week, especially for you and Mrs. OG you guys getting all romantic. Put a fire in the fireplace, probably get the spreadsheet out, maybe fire up some Monarch money, a little Barry White. It's gonna be good.

[Joe]

No, we prefer to hide our emotional money baggage.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Just act like those 36Amazon boxes never showed up.

[Joe]

Exactly.

[Joe Salsihai]

I don't know if you know this, but that's a key point the Douglas and Heather are going to talk about today.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Just ignore it.

[Joe]

No evil. See no evil, right? I did notice. So let me ask you guys this. You have Apple Pay on your phone, right? Have you adopted that? Is that like a 50% thing? Is that 0%? Like, where are you at, Doug?

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Zero?

[Joe]

Doug's all about the fraud. He's super. He's like, please take my credit card information.

[Joe Salsihai]

Give me more fraud. You know, half of our family has adopted it, Cheryl.

[Joe]

So a little bit. Okay. But not you. I mean, you have a card on your.

[Joe Salsihai]

Do not.

[Joe]

Not a single one.

[Joe Salsihai]

Do not.

[Joe]

All right, this won't. This won't apply then.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

But it's actually on there. If I go into my wallet, my Apple wallet, it's there, but I just don't ever. You're talking about. Do I use my phone at the, like the grocery store checkout counter to pay? No, never.

[Joe]

That's not the rhythm that you have.

[Doug Bonaparte]

You.

[Joe]

You reach in your pocket and grab the wallet. Something.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

I mean, if I can I pull out my paper checkbook and write a check and make everybody wait in line behind me. That I believe that's my preferred.

[Joe]

Is it okay if I make this out for 50 dol. More and take some extra cash after.

[Joe Salsihai]

He takes out the abacus to feed.

[Joe]

The lady behind the cash registers is like, sir, you wrote the check for too much. Like, I know.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Mod lane seven. Mod lane seven.

[Joe]

Yeah. Well, anyways, if you use a lot of digital payments you can elect on your phone to have, you know, you get the little notification like you just used your AMEX card at such and such a place, little pops up, right? And tells you chevron gas station, there it is, $78 or something like that. And so the other day I was in the living room and my wife's iPad was there. And I had already told her this, but then like when I saw it, I was like, oh boy. And so on her iPad, she has all the alerts on. I have none. I don't have alerts on my phone or anything. I don't like those interruptions. But she does and she has the alerts. I don't know that she likes the interruptions. But anyways, I bought a new iPhone. I saw that there was a thing that said joshua Apple card, eleven hundred dollars. I was like, whoa, whoa. Like this does. I don't. I don't know that I want to.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Are all.

[Joe]

Are all my charges being displayed on my website iPad? You go into her settings and make some adjustments.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

How does the Pink pony Ranch appear?

[Joe Salsihai]

That's a lot of Woodford.

[Joe]

Maybe Douglas and Heather can share with me a strategy or two to be a little bit more open and in. In our. You know, honey, I want to open up our relationship.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

You down for an open relationship, sweetie?

[Joe Salsihai]

With our money.

[Joe]

With our money.

[Joe Salsihai]

That's where the pause in the right place is really important.

[Joe]

Let's eat, grandma. Right, comma, commas matter.

[Joe Salsihai]

Really, really, really important when open up our relationship. Speaking of, maybe they can help with that.

[Joe]

Help with my anxiety of.

[Joe Salsihai]

Speaking of keeping things in the Vault. I'm loving the emails I'm getting from people who are using the Vault, which we just started back in early January. We know how important it is to protect your identity. Stay away from unused subscriptions, get off text and email list, keep your privacy private. It's incredible how much has changed for me personally. Head to stackbenjamins.com vault to see how it works and finally take control. This is, you know, in financial planning for me. You know how much I like talking about risk management. Let's take control. Stackin benjamin.com vault we've got Douglas and Heather Bonaparte coming down to the basement. Douglas, of course has just run this fantastic financial planning company. He is a big voice on social media when it comes to financial planning concepts. You just put in Douglas Bonaparte. You can tell who he is because his online identity is all about that big wavy hair of his. I get hair envy every time I see Doug Bonaparth. You've seen him all over the place, but you're hearing him and Heather today talk about relationships. And you know what? This is not just relationships with your partner, although certainly we'll be addressing that. But your relationship with your money, relationship with your accountability partners, all the above. It's relationship week here on the show with Valentine's Day coming and what better people to talk about it than Douglas and Heather. We're going to hear from them next week, but we got a couple sponsors to keep us keep on keeping on because Doug, as I've said before, the Stacky Benjamin show, always free and worth every penny. So let's hear from them and then the Bonapartes join us to talk about your relationships and your money. I've worked in so many different fields. University development, water treatment, financial planning, podcasting. 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In fact, as of March of last year, Business Insider named Ethos the number one no medical exam instant life insurance provider. They have a 4.8 out of 5 stars on trustpilot rating with over 3000 reviews. I think you know why we wanted Ethos in our corner at Stacking Benjamin's Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos now by going to ethos.com sb and as little as 10 minutes, you'll get your free quote and up to $3 million in coverage at ethos.com sb that's spelled E T H O S.com sb ethos.com sb Application times and rates may vary. And look who's back at mom's basement. I think they need, like, frequent flyer miles because they're here so often lately. Heather and Doug. How are you guys?

[Joe]

Good.

[Doug Bonaparte]

I'm trying to escape my wife, but I end up with her in the basement here.

[Joe]

It's great.

[Joe Salsihai]

It is a super day. Super week to have you guys in the basement because it's Valentine's Day week. How do the Bonapartes get into Valentine's? Is it. We made reservations three months ago. Are you those people or are you. We totally forgot about it. And it's just Hallmark holiday.

[Heather Bonaparte]

This year we're going away with the whole family because it's also President's Weekend. So I don't know if we're going to carve out a sliver of romance on our family vacation.

[Doug Bonaparte]

We might get a couple's massage. I think that's at the very least.

[Heather Bonaparte]

But historically, we do have a thing that we do on Valentine's Day. We make lasagna.

[Joe]

Oh.

[Heather Bonaparte]

And we've been doing it for years. Like, way back in the day when money was really tight and we were living in the city, we started this thing where we would spend the love lasagna one time a year. We would go to, like, the fancy.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Grocery store, get ingredients, all the good.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Ingredients, and it would take hours.

[Joe]

Hours.

[Doug Bonaparte]

It's a very expensive lasagna.

[Heather Bonaparte]

It was an expensive lasagna, but it was still less expensive than, like, a prefix dinner.

[Doug Bonaparte]

But it was also, like, a group activity. We could build this thing together, cook it together, enjoy it together, have a glass of wine. So it was like a nice.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Have several bottles of wine.

[Doug Bonaparte]

By the time.

[Heather Bonaparte]

We'D be eating it at, like, 11:30 at night, because we didn't start till 7:00pm after work, you know, but it was tradition.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yeah, we have this tradition of baking a lasagna for Valentine's Day that does just.

[Joe Salsihai]

Just the act of doing it together. That is so romantic. But I think it'd be even more romantic because I love lasagna if you had Cheryl and I over as your taste testers. Like that.

[Heather Bonaparte]

You are welcome anytime.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Your new name is Garfield.

[Joe Salsihai]

I want to. I want to dive into this because I want to talk today about relationships. And as you guys know, every relationship you have with money is a relationship with your partner, with your kids, with your friends, and with yourself. But let's really set the stakes. So you guys wrote nearly 40% of married or cohabitating adults admit they've kept financial secrets. And when people hear that, they think, well, that's normal, probably harmless. But what actually happens when those little money fibs start to pile up?

[Heather Bonaparte]

Exactly that they pile up. A bunch of white lies become the big lie. It becomes a behavioral pattern. And so, of course, we all go to Target every once in a while and have like a YOLO moment in the bargain bins in the front. And you're like, yeah, what's it matter? It's an extra $20. It doesn't matter. Nobody see this. But when the behavior stacks up and this becomes something that actually has an impact on your financials month to month, it's more than just a little white lie. And then we develop this behavior of lying to our partner, keeping things from them, because. So I think we should back up, like, our definition of financial infidelity. And I like this. And we didn't come up with this. This Researchers at, I believe, University of Indiana. A good definition for financial infidelity is doing something that your partner would disapprove of financially and then covering it up. So it's the conscious act of not telling them. That is kind of like the second cut when we talk about lies around our money.

[Joe Salsihai]

Yeah, I want to start here because this is kind of the anti Valentine's Day moment right when we're coming home from that Target run. But you're saying, heather, it's not about the dollar. Like, it truly is not about the dollar. It sounds like it's about the intent.

[Heather Bonaparte]

It's about the intent as well. Because, I mean, look, it's not to say that every single time you go to the store, you need to be showing receipts. That's not it. But when it becomes a practice in your life to say, every time I go shopping, I'm going to run the bags upstairs. I don't want my partner to see them. Or I'm going to use this credit card that he doesn't really have the visibility to, and maybe it'll just slide under the radar when I pay it this month. That's not the kind of behavior we're looking for. It doesn't promote the teamwork. It doesn't promote the communication that you really need to keep things above board and to be working towards shared goals as a family.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Just remember, compounding works both ways. We always talk about it in the context of good behaviors or investment returns. Over time, consistency and discipline will work for you, but when we think about bad behaviors like this, it will work against you in profound ways. So that little thing turns into a medium thing turns into a large thing. And people will then start pushing the boundaries and of that lie, of that amount of that behavior to the point of having something catastrophic or something you will obviously regret and have a tough time fixing.

[Joe Salsihai]

Is there times though, when it's ever just about privacy? Not really about betrayal, but just, you know what, this is my thing. It's not really our thing.

[Heather Bonaparte]

There are better ways to go about achieving that level of personal independence than not telling your partner. But Joe, to your point, I think that's how a lot of couples end up in this situation, right? They say, well, well, this isn't. I'm not trying to lie to them. I just deserve a little bit of freedom to do what I want to do. We would say to you there are tons of ways to achieve that, right? Like keeping a separate bank account with a set amount of money for you to do as you please. That's one way to do it. But should your partner wish to have visibility into that, that's not an unreasonable ask. I mean, you know, our way to do it is to say we have a check in number. We have a number where anything below the number we kind of know we can go about our business and handle whether that's for the family, whether that's for personal expense for one of us. But when we hit that number, we know it's something we have to at least touch base on and say, hey, I'm about to go do this. You're good with that?

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yeah, it's a good practice.

[Joe Salsihai]

I'm laughing because this sounds like the financial equivalent of the hall pass. The couple has the hall pass. Like Cheryl's like, hey, if Brad Pitt comes along and he's interested, like, okay, so, so, so if it's less than 100 bucks, I get a hall pass. Like it is fine, just go do it.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Boots are on sale, they're 250 bucks and your number's 500. Someone's getting a new pair of boots that day without necessarily needing to check in. And you really need to know your own financial situation a little bit here. Right.

[Heather Bonaparte]

But I want to mention too that it also goes. It's not just for discretionary spending, for fun stuff. This check in number operates in a way that can really streamline, like your family day to day affairs. I mean, I've spoken with so many women who have felt financially constrained when it comes to things they don't even want to be spending money on. Things for the kids, things for the house, you shouldn't have to check in when it's below a certain dollar amount. There's things that one spouse takes care of for the family, and you want to be able to streamline that as well.

[Doug Bonaparte]

It's a really good guardrail. Right. This is not designed so where you're constantly calling your spouse to find out, you know, if this is good. So your number will reflect some kind of equilibrium, some kind of point where, you know, hey, this. This is something I got to come to. It's. It's not going to be an everyday thing. Right.

[Heather Bonaparte]

And it's. And it's personal, though. That number might be $50 for your family or it might be a thousand dollars. That's. It's not for us to decide. It's for you.

[Joe Salsihai]

You write about a woman named Julia. She comes home, she grabs the mail. She opens up the mail. She gets this thing that says final notice. And she's like, wait a minute. Final notice? I haven't seen notice. One, two, three, Whatever it is. Can you tell us this story? Because I think this kind of illustrates, too, some of this infidelity and hiding that we're talking about.

[Doug Bonaparte]

You don't want to get into it. I'll get into it.

[Heather Bonaparte]

You can get into it. I'll chime in.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Sure, sure. So this is an example of the worst part of lying. And, you know, we tell this story about Julia in the book to showcase how. How bad it can get. And ultimately, what was happening here is her husband was hiding debt and making financial decisions that resulted in the accumulation of debt. Right.

[Joe Salsihai]

And these numbers are well above the number, Doug, that we've been talk like, these are making big decisions.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yeah, we're talking tens and tens of thousands of dollars.

[Heather Bonaparte]

He was making business decisions. I believe he took out credit cards in her name. He was. Or the debt was also in her name. There were business decisions that he was making that were going south that implicated her from a legal perspective as well. And I think maybe worst of all, down the line, she found out that he was hiding business decisions that he was making as well, like he was settling a dispute that was about to go to court.

[Doug Bonaparte]

The partner had reached out to her, saying, hey, you know, this is what' going on. Unbeknownst to her, the other business partner. The other business partner who was trying to settle the score with her husband. And again, you know, kind of just all unraveled. How do you get this back on track? And how do you recover from this? Clearly, one of the most difficult things I think a couple can do is get back on track after cheating. And this is arguably worse for there to be financial adultery rather than actual adultery here.

[Heather Bonaparte]

And it's not to say that it's worse. We don't know which is worse. It's up for you to decide what's worse. But I think you have to consider the fact that in some circumstances, financial infidelity is as bad as sexual intimate infidelity. Because you're talking about. You're talking about something that impacts your dual livelihood. And yes, so can sexual infidelity as well, and relationship infidelity. But this is something that impacts your ability to break free from a situation. It could impact your ability to move on from the situation even more than emotionally. Also financially, I think.

[Doug Bonaparte]

I think it's more of a main line to stability. And also what's going on in the family here.

[Joe Salsihai]

Well, and I wanted to ask that question because of the fact that, you know, we all start in imperfect places. And I think this is a great time, Valentine's Day week for people to get the train back on the tracks. But, you know, there's all these ways of approaching when we've been imperfect or our spouse has been imperfect. How do you even approach a partner if it's not as bad as Julia's husband, but you really want your partner to do things differently than they are now? Like, I feel like if we just spent our time shaming them, you know, we'd all be wealthy. Like, everybody, if it worked, we'd all be wealthy.

[Heather Bonaparte]

A relationship counselor that we spoke with had said something that really stuck with me. When we shame our partner, it will have an effect on them. It just not. It just might not be the effect we want it to have. If you are constantly berating this partner, you keep discovering, you know, it's a pattern of behavior, pattern of lies. Like, we. Like, we started out talking about patterns, right? And you take that approach of, I'm going to shame you and I'm going to berate you. That might have the impact of causing them to lie more. I better hide this, because I know every time he or she finds out about this, this is what results is this massive fight. He's yelling at me. You're so bad with money. You never know what to do with our money. Blah, blah, blah. Like, you're costing us all these problems in our life. That's another reason to hide. It's another reason to keep burying the lie. And the lies get bigger again. The lies get bigger.

[Joe Salsihai]

I just don't want to get yelled at.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Right One of the central points another professional had shared with us in terms of people getting back on the right track or fixing the problems that may be arising from these lies. There needed to be a willingness for both parties to, you know, they both have to want to improve. And this became a litmus test for, are you going to get there? And this was also more for the extreme version of it. When one party is unwilling to change or put in the work that the other party is, you might get to an impasse. And that's where, you know, relationships ultimately break down. Identifying that both people want to improve is almost the most critical first step to make. And then you can get into the goals that you want to share and the things that you want to do together, the common ground that you already have that you can build on. But if someone's just checking out and doesn't want to do it, bigger problems are ahead in that situation.

[Joe Salsihai]

What does a healthy money conversation look like? Let's start off with this. Is it scheduled?

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yes.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Oh, yeah. Time and place matter when you talk about money, which is. This is great that we're talking about Valentine's Day here today, because maybe Valentine's Day isn't the right moment to bust out the spreadsheet or be talking about cash flow.

[Doug Bonaparte]

We are fully aware of the irony here. This is a day of love and romance and that most people are probably not diving into the.

[Joe Salsihai]

No, no, no, no, no, no. Though you guys are talking to a bunch of money nerds. We all think. Of course it is. So I think that's a great cautionary tale to say, you know what, guys, maybe rein it in a little bit.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Correct.

[Joe Salsihai]

The people around you might not be as into this as you are. So I think that's great.

[Heather Bonaparte]

But money is also tethered to so many of the feelings we have as well. Right? Like safety, security, trust, freedom, self worth. So it doesn't mean you can't engage in a meaningful, deep conversation around your relationship that pertains to money on Valentine's Day or around it. But maybe it's not the right day to be getting into the budget and the numbers. You know, we talk about having really productive conversations about shared goals and about individual goals and how you can help your partner achieve them. That's a positive conversation. That's a conversation that is infused in lovingness and sharing and shared responsibility towards reaching what each of you hope for in this life. There's a lot of romance in that. There are ways to have conversations, but, oh, yeah, time and place matter. Like when we Talk about money. One of the biggest mistakes we used to make is we would wait until the peak, the peak chaos of our day to do it. We call it family rush hour now. Like the hours between 3 and 7pm like when our kids were little and there'd be like, homework that needs to be done. There'd be like noodles being thrown across the kitchen. There's bath time, there's someone crying.

[Joe]

Yeah.

[Heather Bonaparte]

You know, like, that's not a great time to bring up something that financially came up.

[Doug Bonaparte]

And in your brain, that was, by the way, that was me, like, emerging from the basement. Like, I gotta talk to you about all this stuff. And you know, looking back at it, totally unfair. Obviously not the time and place to get into stuff that we really wanted to be able to put our heads around.

[Heather Bonaparte]

And it's not constructive. And what that does is then you associate in these important conversations with these stressful moments. And then when they bring them up at a calmer, more productive, more possible time, that makes more sense to do it. You're kind of like, ugh, you're already coming into it with that stress from the last time you guys tried to talk about it when it all ended up in a fight. But it wasn't the content that led you to the fight. It was the environment and the circumstance in which you tried to talk about it.

[Doug Bonaparte]

So speaking of those environments, fight not only time and place, but if you can find activities and things that you enjoy doing together, whether it's a walk, a cocktail, you know, going out for a bite. Associate things you want to do with the conversations that you need to have around money. And the only other tip, because I know you had a question there, how you begin these conversations. We were just joking around how money nerds have no problem diving into this. Guess what? The money nerds are going to have the spreadsheets and the numbers ready to go. First thing they're going to want to talk about. Let's see how we did this month. And I can promise you the less involved spouse will be like, let's not. And what you really want to start with here are the wins, the victories, the things that went well. I've yet to meet someone who didn't like a compliment at the beginning of a serious conversation. Look how great we did here. Then get into the constructive stuff. Then get into the numbers. Talk about the goals, the vacations, the aspirations. People generally get excited to talk about these things. What an amazing on ramp. Into. Yes. Analytics. S Into the budget. Yes. Into investment performance. We're like, yeah, let's talk about that. They might be like, all right, this is where I struggle a little bit. But I'm ready, willing, and able to talk about it now because I have a good foundation for this conversation.

[Joe Salsihai]

It's so funny. I love the cautionary tale, especially with the money nerds, because, number one, Doug, you coming up from the basement. We got to talk about this right now. You're going to start a fight. Like, it's going to start a fight because Heather and the family have other priorities and you're on. And I've been there before, a different.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Planet than I'm on right now. I'm going back to their planet. They're not coming to mind. I'm entering their world in that moment.

[Joe Salsihai]

And what, what I absolutely love is that if you're walking up the stairs and you're like, you know, we got to talk about this now. You can put the circuit breaker on, go, oh, wait a minute, we got a meeting in two days. And I know we're going to talk about this. And then, man, that, that little circuit breaker can help everything. And then the second thing is, I love the idea of not making it a Camp David summit because money nerds want it to be this, this week long thing. And oh, my God, this is nirvana. And I love you explaining to all of us that your spouse might not be in it. This is the reason why Cheryl and I set a timer for 20 minutes and it's once a week. And also to your point, it's always over pancakes or wine, depending on what time of day it is.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Pancakes and wine.

[Joe Salsihai]

That's right. So I like brunch, Heather. So we can do all the above.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Cakes and booze, but we set it.

[Joe Salsihai]

For 20 minutes because my spouse, while she's into it, she's not into it for more than 20 minutes.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Right.

[Joe Salsihai]

And what's cool is, is if it goes longer than 20 minutes, it's because we shared together. We both wanted to. If it doesn't, at least we had that 20 minute talk and it was consistent. It was every week. And all we do because we have a very set agenda, we just go through our banking app and for us, it's Monarch Money. We just go through how we spent money the week before and we chat about it and then we talk about how we're going to spend money the next week. And then those investment conversations and all the bigger conversations happen when we're out hiking, we're on our walk, we're whatever.

[Heather Bonaparte]

That's right.

[Joe Salsihai]

Those happen because the little talk Joe, I.

[Heather Bonaparte]

What I like about what you just said was that you know that your spouse does not like to usually do this for more than 20 minutes. So that's where you cap the conversation. There isn't a critical component of all this that's about meeting your partner where they are.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Love it.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Just because it's the way you like to do it. If you recognize that your partner, you can only get their attention for 20 minutes or that they like leading with this piece of this conversation. Lead with that piece of the conversation. You want their buy in. This goes better when they are bought in.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Last quarter, Heather had me do the meeting using only heated rivalry references. And it was the best meeting we've ever had.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Killed me, Hollander.

[Doug Bonaparte]

I have no idea what she's talking about, but yeah, stuff like that. No, no kidding. But it's a gilded age of financial content. Like if you can find your partner away. You know, we had a couple that both had buy in. They wanted to do this. Like they were very.

[Heather Bonaparte]

He was a financial advisor.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yeah, he's a financial advisor. He's a professional. And you know, his wife was like, yeah, I want to do it. And after several meetings, like, it wasn't clicking, it wasn't getting there. It was a lot of frustration until one day he brought out a whiteboard and started drawing some of the concepts and the things. And it just turned out she was a visual learner. Everything he was doing in terms of he did it for his clients or how he would do it for himself just did not work. So what he did is figured out how she'd like to learn, met her where she was at, and it clicked unlock right there. Productive meetings ever since. Little things like that go a very long, long way.

[Joe Salsihai]

That's super. More listening, less talking, more listening. We just talked about that in romantic context and romantic relationships. But I think all the advice you shared is suitable if you have just an accountability partner, a roommate. But let's move toward what you referenced earlier, which was the chaos of kids. Enter the picture. Right? How do you have these money conversations with your kids and as a family? How do you start including the family in these discussions?

[Doug Bonaparte]

Oh, you want this?

[Heather Bonaparte]

It's a hard topic.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yeah, it's tough.

[Heather Bonaparte]

I, you know, I. It's so sensitive for so many reasons because our kids are not native to, like, dollars the way that we are. They live in a frictionless world. And many of our kids, I mean, our kids are still. They're 10 and almost 7. Our kids were born into a frictionless world. So the concept of money needs to be almost fabricated through learning opportunities where I create friction for them versus them, seeing, oh, mommy goes out, she holds her phone up to. Up to a pavement thing, and then we get what we need and we walk out. And I don't. I know that sounds privilege, but that plays across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, where we are all using things that are made to have spending money be easier.

[Joe Salsihai]

Even if you just have a debit card. I mean, it doesn't have to be the phone, just the debit card. It's like, oh, you got that little magic plastic.

[Doug Bonaparte]

My mother an angel, right? She was a learning disabilities Teacher of 35 years, would always do inclusion in the classrooms, elementary school. And she told me this story once, that when they got to currency, second or third grade, when they got to currency, a majority of the kids could not identify the coins that were being shown because they just never really seen them used in the wild.

[Heather Bonaparte]

That was years ago.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yeah, this is years ago. So this notion that. Oh, that's. That's silly. Kids are not. No, they. They legitimately have not interacted with currency. They see this mobile banking, the frictionless system that Heather's talking about. On top of that, hey, an Amazon package comes in a day or two, it can be replaced. Heather's right. They need to be kind of. We need to reverse engineer.

[Heather Bonaparte]

So in addition. In addition to creating moments of friction for our kids, which look like creating moments of patience for them. Right? That's. That's one example. You know, you. You lose something. I'm not gonna just go on Amazon and reorder you a new one. Tomorrow we're gonna talk about it. We might go get it in person on the weekend, or I might just honestly hold it for a little while and not give it to them. That's one example of how you teach a young child about patience and about working against this idea of, like, unlimited abundance, that things just show up, that no things have value, they cost money, and that's why we take care of them. Another great example is teaching kids and creating moments to show them how our work translates into the things that we have. Right. Do you want to tell. I like this one.

[Doug Bonaparte]

I like this one. Because what we're doing is associating values. Money has a lot of nuance to it. Spare me. I taught my third grader how to invest in the stock market. There's a lot of nuance there. I've done these things for our daughters, Girl Scout troops. And some kids will pick it up because they're super smart. But when you're doing values. For example, when our oldest was very young and asked why we were constantly dropping mom off at the train to go to work into the city, I just told her, do you like what we get to do on the weekends? Do you like the fun that we have? She says, I love that. Yeah. I'm like, mommy goes to the city on this train so we can have fun and enjoy family time on the weekends. Work enjoyment, family time, the rewards that come from working hard. A kid can figure out those links that, that connotation. And that to me, was what's super important to give. Especially young kids who will not get to the nuance of. Of money. Currency compounding. There's like some pretty rough math and a lot of stuff that you'll figure out much later in school. Some adults don't even understand compounding. Right.

[Heather Bonaparte]

So there's ways early on to begin to give them foundation for things that develop into good financial habits down the road. But it doesn't have to be an immediate like, how do we sit down and teach them these eight concepts of financial literacy? Financial literacy begins with our values and our behaviors.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Check this one out. Both girls are good at saving. Like, they get their tooth fairy money, their holiday money. It goes in a jar in their piggy bank. They're safe. But are they good at spending? Did you create a world in which they're hoarding that money because they know mom and dad are just going to get them what they want anyways? I'll just wait till my next birthday or next holiday and I'll just keep this money over here. At what point do you say, hey, there are things that you want. There's money that you have. You either earned or were gifted. And now we need to think about how we deploy that money. And that might lead to a conversation around investing, where it just might lead to a conversation about smart spending. You get to the store, you can have these five things for the $10 where you can have this one big thing. Let's talk about that. Now. You're having some real productive conversations, not just around saving and spending, but how to budget wisely, how to make decisions around the money attachment that you might have to that item. Things like that go a really long way with kids.

[Joe Salsihai]

I had to laugh a lot of bravery around this part as a parent, because we would trust our kids with a little more money than they maybe should have. We'd be in a Target or Walmart or wherever, and my daughter would say, oh, I want to buy this thing. And I know the thing is garbage. I know it's going to end up on the floor. I know she's going to use it once or. And. And it's just going to go away. It's a total waste of money, sure. But I had to be brave enough to let her buy it. And then I also had to be brave enough to put on my calendar two weeks later to circle back with the rest of the lesson going, remember, we were in Target and you spent your money on this thing. Where's it at now?

[Heather Bonaparte]

That's right.

[Joe Salsihai]

Do you value it?

[Doug Bonaparte]

That needs to be more of our job as parents. And I love that, Joe, because same thing happened. Younger daughter wanted a coloring drawing app on her thing. It was a subscription. I hate these, you know, subscription models for games and stuff like that. It's usually a hard, hard. No. She was home with the flu, and she got me right in the feels, like, oh, poor kid. I told her, like, if we don't use this in three weeks, we're not renewing it. And to your point, you have to sit on your. This is how they get you, right? You don't put that reminder on your calendar you're renewing. And she was good. She loved it. She stopped using it in, like, three days. Right? And you know, that was it. You just cancel it right then and there. But that's a really good point. But I took her aside and I said, hey, are we still using that? Remember what we said we're going to do? She says, yes, we're going to cancel it. I'm like, are you like, are you sure? Yes, let's cancel it. And there you go.

[Joe Salsihai]

That's fabulous.

[Doug Bonaparte]

You reinforce it. And that goes a long way. You got to do it over and over again, by the way. Not just that one time.

[Joe Salsihai]

It is, though, Doug. It's so much harder than just saying no. But it's so much better than saying no.

[Heather Bonaparte]

It really is. I mean, we tell. Especially our older daughter who's 10 and now, like, finds herself in stores with her little girlfriends and whatever, and if I'm there with them, and she says, mom, can I have this? I say, you sure can. You have money at home? Would you like to spend your money on it?

[Doug Bonaparte]

And she goes home, grabs the money and hands it to us.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Or 90% of the time, she thinks a little more critically about it. And she goes, nah, I guess not really. And maybe in her brain she's like, someone will get this for my birthday, and maybe we will. But that taught her I'M going to take an extra beat and think about this. Now that I've got skin in the game on this purchase. She really does.

[Joe Salsihai]

It goes back to your original word, Heather, that I love at the beginning. Sometimes creating this friction is really good.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Yes.

[Joe Salsihai]

Yeah.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Yes.

[Joe Salsihai]

That's super. You know, all of these conversations, and I love this with roommates, with romantic partners, with kids. They're all important. But I think this is what you guys do a really, really good job of. You can't really have these conversations unless you've examined your own money belief. Beliefs. Right? I'm gonna link back to our original discussion on this last fall because we really dove into this. But let's just do a quick cheat sheet before we have these conversations. Where do we start to dive into our own money beliefs so that we can have a better conversation with somebody else?

[Heather Bonaparte]

Well, so much of this is self work before it's couples work. Understanding your own money stories, your own scripts that you carry from childhood, because it comes from many different places, right? Our beginning, our origin stories with money, they can begin with our family, with our socioeconomic background, they can begin with a traumatic childhood experience, or just from our culture. Our culture itself tells us so many of the beliefs we carry into adulthood around money. But we have to really explore them to understand some of the behaviors, beliefs, and messages that we're still living with today. Because only then, when we understand it, can we ask ourselves the harder question, which is, is this serving me today? Are the circumstances that were present back then that made me feel this way still in my life? And if they're not, maybe it's time for me to evolve. Maybe it's time for me to think about this differently or behave differently. And doing this critical self work is the first step to being able to do couples work. Because it's really, really easy to point the finger at your partner and say, the reason we're here is because of you. But it takes two to tango in almost every situation. And even if your partner is hung up and they've got their own money baggage, how are you communicating with them? I would stand to argue that you are contributing in one way or another. Like this brings us back to an earlier point in our conversation. If you are shaming your partner, shame will have an impact on the discussion. It just may not have the impact you want it to have.

[Joe Salsihai]

Your book on this topic is called Money Together. It is gotten all kinds of acclaim, and it's available everywhere. What a great Valentine's Day gift to yourself.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Perfect Valentine's day gift. And I'll throw this out there too, if you don't think your partner is receptive to reading Money Together with you. Or before you or after you buy the audiobook and put it on your Google home and just play it.

[Joe Salsihai]

Oh, awesome. While you're making lasagna.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Gentlemen, nothing spices up your night like giving your wife a copy of Money Together. Listen, it's not pg, but you're good. You're good here, gents. Don't even need to wrap it.

[Joe Salsihai]

I need some Barry White music under that.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Oh, yes, baby.

[Joe Salsihai]

Heather. Doug. Happy Valentine's Day.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Happy Valentine's Day.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Happy Valentine's Day, Joe.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Hey there, stackers. I'm Joe's mom's name. Hey, neighbor. Doug. And talking about love. During the 1950s and 60s, the USA had a love affair with the hips attached to one crooner who moved so salaciously that when he first appeared on television, camera operators were instructed only to show him from the waist up. But it wasn't until 1979 that the first biopic about this Memphis raised star was made back on today's date. That year, a young Kurt Russell starred as the hit making superstar. And Shelley Winters and other popular actors also appeared. But who was this Benjamin stacking pop star that 40 million people watched a drama about back in 1979? I'll be back after I start the next chapter of my own memoir. That's a word for overwhelmingly good looking. Gotta shorten the sentence.

[Heather Bonaparte]

What would you do if your online store converted 36% more shoppers? You could take 36% more vacation.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Another pina colada? Yes, please.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Open a new retail location with 36% more square feet.

[Joe]

Fantastic.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Hire 36% more help.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

You're hired and you're hired.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Shopify has the world's best converting checkout up to 36% better than other e commerce platforms. What you do with those extra sales.

[Joe]

Is up to you.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Switch to Shopify [e-mail] listen and get a $1 trial. Shopify.com listen.

[Joe Salsihai]

Mic drop.

[Doug Bonaparte]

You ready? Let's do it.

[Joe Salsihai]

Hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Ridland. It's unfiltered. You know, you go to the sound of the gun, bam, you're gone.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Twitter, I mean, I've had so many.

[Joe Salsihai]

Near death experiences, it's raw. I love this country. I offered my life to serve this.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Nation and protect its people.

[Joe Salsihai]

Question, what's the meaning of life?

[Doug Bonaparte]

And.

[Joe Salsihai]

And to me, it just boils down to one single word, which is purpose. Mic drop. Follow and listen on your Favorite platform.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Hey there, stackers. I'm handsome, gorgeous and stunning announcer for this show, Joe. Joe's mom's neighbor, Doug. Gotta say, writing a memoir is hard, especially for a guy as humble and loquacious as me. But I'm up to the challenge, probably because I'm so patient, calm under fire. But enough about me. Today is about a guy who could have been my twin. They made a TV movie on today's date back in 1979 that over 40 million people watched on ABC. Who was this Memphis based crooner owner who has us all shook up? Of course, it's none other than Elvis Presley. And now back to the mic. Two guys who are hunka hunka burning money mavens. That's just disgusting. It's Joe and OG get me out of here.

[Joe Salsihai]

How's that?

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Hunka hunka burning money mavens.

[Joe Salsihai]

I don't know who came up with that.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Gonna hire some writers.

[Joe Salsihai]

Big thanks to Douglas and Heather. And it's funny because, oh gee, people focus on the spreadsheets, but it truly is about the communication. Always about the communication. Much more than the spreadsheet.

[Joe]

It's always about the notifications on your wife's iPad. You better have hoped that you communicated that before that thing pops up. Because let me give you a little secret. There's no delay. When that swipe goes through, it goes ba ding it like in your face.

[Joe Salsihai]

And it is pretty amazing how if you don't know, Gee knows this firsthand. If you don't communicate with her, she will communicate with you.

[Joe]

Yes. Yes. If you want communication to be a two way street, just go ahead and.

[Joe Salsihai]

Spend a bunch of money.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

And everybody was like, yeah, don't put. Don't just give it to me straight. I want the truth. Nope. You want velvet on that.

[Joe Salsihai]

You do want velvet on that.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Communication comes back to you.

[Joe Salsihai]

Yeah, please. Hey, let's get into our headline, guys.

[Joe]

Hello, darlings. And now it's time for your favorite.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Part of the show.

[Joe]

I was stacking Benjamin's headlines.

[Joe Salsihai]

Our headline today comes to us from financialplanning.com. there is some news OG out of Vanguard that Elijah Nicholson Messmer, who wrote this piece, was the first person to let me know that this problem was this big. I often think that there's an issue that maybe people miss deadlines from the irs. It turns out we truly need some help with this one deadline. Vanguard research shows that one in three required minimum distribution age. Clients either missed their distribution or withdrew Too little. 1 in 3 OG I didn't think it was that big. That's a big number of people that are, like, going, oops, I forgot my required minimum distribution from my ira.

[Joe]

Well, I mean, the IRS didn't do anybody any favors by changing a whole bunch of it recently and making it so that, you know, during this period of time, you don't have to do it because of COVID but now you do have to. And, oh, by the way, if you inherited money you don't have. Well, actually, you do. Well, no, I mean, sort of. You're supposed to. You should. Well, you don't have to catch it. Well, you can catch up, but you'd absolutely have to have it caught up. But you don't have to do anything right now. But you could maybe, if you wanted. For sure. But it's okay. I mean, it's not. But just.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Yeah.

[Joe Salsihai]

Oh, boy.

[Joe]

That is the official IRS guidance on required minimum distributions as of 2026. The exact wording on that 100% verbatim from the publication. There's a penalty, but maybe there's not a penalty. There should be a penalty, but if you ask nicely about the penalty not being there, then they'll probably. And it's also on you to do all of this. It just reminds me so much of the. Of that skit, you know, hey, I'm, like, 22 years old. I got my first job, like, call. You know, like this skit. Those stupid youtubes. Thank God they don't exist anymore, very much, where it's like, the same person talking to each other, like, wearing a different hat or something.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe]

So dumb. Where it's like, you know, how do I know how much to pay? It's like, well, you just fill out your forms. Well, what if I get it wrong? Don't worry. We know how much you made, and we know how much taxes are. It's, like, awesome. Can you just tell me? No, you have to do all this paperwork first. It's like, what happens if I get it wrong? Oh, you. Big penalty. It's like, well, why don't you just tell me how much I owe that. Well, because we want you to do it first.

[Joe Salsihai]

You tell us. No, we know, but you got to tell us.

[Joe]

But the way around this, by the way, if you're somebody who's concerned about this RMD thing, I mean, it's a big deal. It used to be a pretty powerful penalty. Whoa, that's alliteration.

[Joe Salsihai]

Pretty powerful penalty.

[Joe]

Yeah. And now it's not as bad. It's still 25% of what you should have Taken out. So it's still. Still not zero.

[Joe Salsihai]

Still a big number.

[Joe]

You can, with your IRA at your custodian, check a box that says, y' all just send me the money. Just do it now. If it's an inherited ira, they're not going to do it because it involves a different calculation that only you can do. So as my friend Katniss Everdeen said, may the odds be ever in your favor and hopefully you get it right.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

I don't think that was Katniss.

[Joe]

She didn't say that.

[Joe Salsihai]

She didn't say it, but it's from that book.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Yeah, there was a book.

[Joe Salsihai]

Moving along. This is one big deal. And obviously for people that are of a certain age in the stack of Benjamin's universe, but we got a bunch of people og that this does not apply to that are hearing this and they're like, what is that have to do with me?

[Joe]

Nothing.

[Joe Salsihai]

This is not the only deadline people miss. There are some deadlines in the past where I've gone, oh, my God, why did I not do that? Why did I? And every year, how many years do you hear from somebody? Like, the day after you could put money in your Roth ira? Somebody one day late is like, hey, can I put money in my Roth ira? What are some of those big deadlines that should probably go on our calendars?

[Joe]

December 31st is a real big one. Generally, everything needs to be done by December 31st.

[Joe Salsihai]

Get it all done by December 31st.

[Joe]

It's probably not on your calendar. It's not highlighted in any way. In any way, shape or form of being a finality of anything. Like, it's just. It seems such a random date for them to use to tie everything up. But really what you want to do is, you know, you get the. I don't know if you guys have this. I was like 12 pages or so. And each. Each page has like a bunch of different boxes on it with numbers in it. And they all have different names. Like, one says January. The next page says February. This is clever. Every year it's different. They slightly change it just to keep you on your toes. You can't reuse it. But every year you get a new one. You hang it on your wall and you flip to the last page, and there's one box at the very end that says 31. That's the day that all your needs to be done by.

[Joe Salsihai]

Circle it, highlight it, highlight it. That's the one.

[Joe]

I mean, there's some other stuff, but just be done by the end of the year.

[Joe Salsihai]

I was trying to think of some of these. Obviously, tax day. Everybody makes a big deal out of that. So that's not one. The tax day is different for some business owners. I mean, March is important for some business owners. There are tax forms to do in March for them. But I was thinking for the average stacker, you know, if I'm doing tax loss harvesting OG and I've got mutual funds that might have some capital gains distributions, maybe I want to put a mark at the beginning of November to look at that because they will generally, you know, start declaring what date they're going to make those distributions. So I want to be on top of that. That might be one.

[Joe]

Yeah.

[Joe Salsihai]

For a few people.

[Joe]

Yeah. Not enough to get out of bed.

[Joe Salsihai]

For different deadlines on setting up your retirement account. If you're going to be.

[Joe]

I mean, look, if. If there's. There's a million deadlines, right? I mean, depending on the big ones. If you're a business owner, you gotta. Every month, you gotta pay taxes. The 30th 1st of December of January, you got to get your W2s out.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Out. Yeah.

[Joe]

1099 has got to be distributed by the middle of February. You have to have K1s out by the middle of August. You have to FSA do your, you know, dependent care spending account or flexible spending account, you got until the end of January, but it's really based on the end of December. That's why I said be done by the end of December. If you're setting up a retirement plan, depends on what kind you're going to set up. You have certain deadlines for when you got to set it up and when you have to fund it by. It never ends.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Yeah, you're just creating stress for me. Why did you.

[Joe]

I know. That's the point. You'll never get this right.

[Joe Salsihai]

I sometimes think he is the irs. Doug. I had lunch with my friends at the IRS and we just cackled together the entire time.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

He can't understand why he doesn't get invited to parties.

[Joe Salsihai]

It's crazy. Yeah. You don't want to be one of these. One in three people facing tax.

[Joe]

I find that number to be highly suspect.

[Joe Salsihai]

Very high. But it's from Vanguard. That's what blows me away.

[Joe]

Well, in that case, might as well be from Yahweh himself.

[Joe Salsihai]

Wow.

[Joe]

Came down from the mountain, put it on stone tablets.

[Joe Salsihai]

Hot take. I'm not saying they're the end all be all. I'm just saying that they're not putting irresponsible stuff out into the universe on a frequent basis. You're. You're not seeing Vanguard, just going crazy with, oh, you know what? After a few pints down at the local watering hole. Let's go right up. A press release about so many people are.

[Joe]

So if you have an IRA at Vanguard and you have an IRA at Fidelity and you decide to take your RMD from your Fidelity ira, the Vanguard people will be like, oh, my God, he didn't take one out. But you can take it out. You know, it doesn't have to be out of each account. It's each type of account.

[Joe Salsihai]

You don't think they would have thought about that before they put this out.

[Joe]

How would they audit it? How would they know if they're like 30% didn't. Did they call those 30%? Be like, hey, bro, check it. Did you end up doing this or not?

[Joe Salsihai]

Yeah.

[Joe]

I don't know.

[Joe Salsihai]

Yeah. Who knows how they check that? If you work at Vanguard, let us know. Write me [e-mail] I want a source document.

[Joe]

Source code it primary research. That's what that's called in the research world.

[Joe Salsihai]

I'll link to this piece on our.

[Joe]

Show notes page@stacked benjamin's.com TLDR don't jack up your taxes.

[Joe Salsihai]

Well, TLDR I think is have the deadlines that are important to you down on that thing. What's it called? A calendar.

[Joe]

Calendar memorized.

[Joe Salsihai]

Get a tattoo with all of those dates so you don't end up with a big tax penalty.

[Joe]

No, but you know what I would do, honestly, use this technology. I have recurring to dos that pop up, you know, for the things that are like every year, every two years, every three years. You can just put it as a recurring thing.

[Joe Salsihai]

I do too.

[Joe]

It will pop up. And yeah, you don't have to use the space up here to memorize that. My whatever is due on this, this, this time 100.

[Joe Salsihai]

Take out that calendar app on your phone and just make it annually. December 31st. And I would even do it December 31st. I would do it. December 31st is the knockdown down drag out. But maybe.

[Joe]

Well, it can't be December through. I mean, I Listen, here's December 15th.

[Joe Salsihai]

I might have.

[Joe]

Yeah.

[Joe Salsihai]

Make sure you're working on this stuff.

[Joe]

I mean, all the custodians say if you want something done before the end of the year, it's got to be in by the second week of December. You know, all that sort of stuff. Same thing with your Roth contributions. And you know, you got until tax Deadline. But if you try to call schwab on the 15th at 4 o' clock in the afternoon going, how do I set up my account and wire this money? They're going to laugh at you. So it needs to be done before then. Use the technology to set reminders for yourself to get this stuff done.

[Joe Salsihai]

Doug, let's wander out onto the back porch. We've got just a little bit here today.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

I think it's probably time to just remind everybody about the guides. They've been updated, right?

[Joe Salsihai]

Super exciting. I've got four pieces of news on the guides. Number one is you just had those.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Like in your pocket waiting for me to queue you up. Please ask me, please ask me. Got four.

[Joe Salsihai]

The guys are just so fun because we do, we update them every month. If you're not familiar with our guides, you purchase them once. We update it every single month so it always stays up to date and big, significant changes inside the text guide. Speaking of text time, we also have some cool new usability tools in the college planning guide that makes it just easier to use some of the charts that we have put in the guide. And then third in the HR guide, we've really rounded out some of the benefits so that you get a better for people that are just diving into, like how these different benefits work, we've given you more resources so that you can, can dive in deeper. So we've done a little bit different work on all three of those guides. But the big news is our financial dashboard guide, how to set up your dashboard so that you can see all your goals and your progress all in one very easy dashboard. How do you set all that up? That guide is going to be out in the next two or three weeks. So I'm super excited to say that out loud. It's being laid out right now, as they say. So super excited that we'll have that available and more coming up in just a couple weeks.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Also, real quickly, Joe in the basement, our Facebook group. On the Facebook, Kendra asked I thought a pretty interesting question a little while ago. Just a few days ago, Kendra wanted to know, for those of you who take advantage of bank cash offers, what's your minimum free money amount? Like, you know, a bank is offering you 50 bucks or whatever it is if you switch to go to them. And yeah, I just thought that was a, like, I haven't thought about that in years. I haven't actually even seen those offers. I didn't know that was a thing. Jason replied that he's, he's made about $3,000 last year from earning bank signup bonuses. Yeah.

[Joe Salsihai]

Wow.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

It's crazy. He says the efforts usually minimal enough that he'll go for anything offering $300 or more. Like, I have not seen these. They're not offering me that. Maybe they know that I need more.

[Joe]

Than you have to have money.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Oh, but then other people. Annette says I've yet to be offered a high enough amount of money to switch banks. So I mean, there's people who are, I don't know that to me it doesn't feel right. Something doesn't feel right about just willy nilly moving your money to different banks for a quick signing bonus. It's. I don't know why.

[Joe Salsihai]

We talked to Stacker Allen, who lives in Wisconsin about this a couple of years ago, you know, for him, because he does it so much, almost like Jason does. He keeps a spreadsheet to make sure. Because as you know, you'd have to.

[Joe]

Yeah.

[Joe Salsihai]

If you, if you don't have a spreadsheet, you're going to mess this up. You're going to take the money out and move it someplace else. And then, you know, you only got the, you only get the bonus if you stay there for X amount of time.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Yeah.

[Joe Salsihai]

Much like with the credit card offer. So he keeps a record of the credit cards that he's using and all that he's churning and also the churning he's doing with bank accounts. And similarly he reported. I don't remember the number but, but I do remember it was a big, big, big number that he, he was doing per year.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Yeah. So it's just a, I mean, by now stackers know. I love it when they use the basement for that purpose to ask those kinds of questions to the hive mind. Hey, I've got kids. I want, you know, should. Would you do this with a 529 or this with the NATMA? I just think that's such a great use of our community. So. So keep it up, folks. Ask the really important questions out there.

[Joe Salsihai]

I've got two more quick things which is next week, in nine days on February 20, we're having a meetup of Stackers in Omaha, Nebraska. Because I'll be there. I'll be there for the 1% better conference which will be Saturday the 21st and Sunday the 22nd. So join us at the conference on the 21st and 22nd. We'll link to it in our show notes. But if you can't make it, at the very least stop and say Hi on the 20th. We'll have details of where I'm going to be. David Gillis, the founder and I working on getting that set up for the 20th. We still don't have the home, but we will have one. It's going to happen. 6:30pm stackybenjamins.com meetup and you can sign up, come find out where we're going to be and say hi to me and David and a bunch of other stackers that'll be there. So excited to go to Omaha and.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Just look for the the line of cars that are all going in the same direction and you'll find there it is.

[Joe Salsihai]

Everybody coming to see us at Omaha, of course. Thank you so much for lending us your ears. What an action packed show. And Doug, you're gonna kind of march down what the three big things are that we should have as our takeaways.

[Doug (Joe's mom's neighbor)]

Today bringing this ship into the harbor. Well, Joe, first take some advice from Douglas and Heather Bonaparte. Great budgeting's fine, but great communication even better. Let your accountability buddies, your partner, partner and your spreadsheets know what you're doing and you'll find your money working for you instead of against you. Second, those IRS due dates, pop those into a calendar. This thing that it's got all the months and pages and pause it now and just go do it. Oh gee, gave you the whole description. But the big lesson, don't mention relationships to Joe's mom. She'll tell you how you should reaffirm your relationship with Windex and those basement windows. Not romantic, Ma. Not romantic. Thanks to Douglas and Heather Bonaparte for joining us today. You'll find their book money together wherever books are sold. We'll also include links in our show [e-mail] this show is the property of SP Podcast, LLC, Copyright 2026 and is created by Josal Sehei. You'll find out about our awesome [e-mail] along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. And oh yeah, 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.

[Joe Salsihai]

Sa.

[Joe]

So if you sit down with your significant other and you totally rework your budget, you totally rework your spending and you drive that into the ground and you're not going to have any more fun ever again. Is that called the Valentine's Day Massacre?

[Doug Bonaparte]

I love that. You know, it's a good hard look in the mirror.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Chime in with a little something else on there.

[Doug Bonaparte]

It's just a good hard look in the mirror. You know, I think most people. She's cracking up. Most people. You know, the easiest part of this process is so we have this thing.

[Heather Bonaparte]

About how, like, if I give like a great fulsome answer, Doug. Doug's like salt bae, you know, the guy, the steakhouse chef who comes in and he feels like he's gotta like throw a little extra on top. But I kind of feel like we were good where we were, you know?

[Joe Salsihai]

See, I like. No, I like watching this relationship.

[Doug Bonaparte]

No comment.

[Joe Salsihai]

This is. This is the relationship I like watching right there.

[Heather Bonaparte]

We go on podcasts together, Joe. It's hard. This is real life.

[Doug Bonaparte]

Not my fault. It could use a little salt, hun.

[Joe Salsihai]

Should we just do the mic drop there? Should we have the mic drop?

[Doug Bonaparte]

You can just cut all that out. It's all good.

[Heather Bonaparte]

Or leave it.

[Doug Bonaparte]

We don't care. Whatever gets higher ratings there, Joe.

[Joe Salsihai]

I think what I might do is include this in the after show just to show that all of us as couples, we're human. We're human.

[Doug Bonaparte]

It was good as is. What an amazing answer, honey. What else you got for us, Joe?

[Joe Salsihai]

Bam. All right.