Matter of Facts: Financial Preparedness

[00:00:06] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFPodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravellay. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show.

[00:00:30] So, welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. I'm Phil Nicks here. Andrew's not here. Andrew partied a little too hard in Michigan, invaded Canada on someone's insane dare, and is currently serving time in a Canadian prison. He forgot rule number two. Is rule number two the don't get caught? Yes, I thought so. What's rule number one? Uh, don't do something stupid. Rule number two is if you do, don't get caught.

[00:00:54] Oh, see, I always remember the traditional army safety briefing, which is don't subtract from the population. Don't add to the population. Uh, deny everything and make counter accusations. And if discovered, remember your SEER training. That's fair. You know, was it survive, escape? I forget. The point is run like hell and don't get caught by the authorities. But that's rule rule number one and two. Don't subtract from the population and don't add to the population.

[00:01:24] Fair enough. Especially because there always seems to be a strip club, you know, populated by toothless women with track marks by every army base. I mean, look, man, you don't set up a hunting blind where there's no deer. Are we talking about the strippers being the hunters and the idiot? Oh, 100% they're the hunters. They are hunting that private's paycheck, just like the Ford dealership down the road. Amen.

[00:01:48] B-A-8-H, it must be a hell of a drug because many, many a stripper's retirement plan has been that silly little E1 over there with the Camaro on 22% interest who just desperately doesn't want to live in the barracks anymore. It's a paycheck that almost never misses? Funny you mentioned that. So let's do the admin work real quick and then we'll get down to the topic.

[00:02:12] Once again, I'm coming to you once again to remind all of you that we are streaming at 730 on Thursday evenings. If you're listening to this in audio and you would like to join in the mayhem, then you should come to our YouTube or Rumble or Facebook. Those links are all in the show description. And you can look at me and Nick's bright, smiling, bleary eye, occasionally intoxicated faces while we record this show. And for certain things like the SDR episode we did last week, it's really, really helpful to see the video.

[00:02:42] Otherwise, you're just listening to me talk about stuff I'm looking at on a screen, which doesn't help you much. Talking about what you were pointing to on the screen with your mouse would probably be difficult to manage via audio. Sorry about that one, guys. We've yet to figure out how to translate pictures to audio. Well, I mean, Elon's working on Neuralink, but y'all let me know how that works. I'm not letting anybody stick computer stuff in my brain. I watched the Matrix. I was I am young enough to remember when it came out in the theaters. I am not signing up for the brain implants.

[00:03:12] I'll just do really don't think anyone in the audience wants unfiltered our brain. Well, not to mention the last thing I want is unfiltered tick tock being beamed into my brain stem. Doesn't that just sound like a hellscape? That sounds like cancer in a in a drink. Yeah. Anyway, patrons, there's a couple of patrons in the chat right now. They are probably already figuring out what brand of hell to give me about this idiot topic.

[00:03:39] And Stuart is on standby to correct me any time I say something the least little bit off kilter, which is very handy. Well, it's entertaining for you. Nothing else. Oh, absolutely. He lives to give me hell. But then again, all of all the patrons do, which is it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. You started it. Started what? The patrons, the patron chat, the podcast itself. Yes, this is all your fault. All my fault.

[00:04:08] I am still blaming mother nature. If she had not decided to throw a hissy fit and flood South Louisiana back in 2016 while I was home on while I was home for a day, this wouldn't have even happened. I would never gotten the wild inclination to just Google how to start a podcast, which we should probably recount. So it's how it's been nine years this August. Sure. I should probably recount that whole thing.

[00:04:34] By the way, if the for those of you who are patrons, the random facts podcast, which is the members only patron that has back episodes going all the way back to episode one. I listened to the first three episodes the other day. It was painful. Audio is not as nice as it is now. Well, thank you to the patrons for that. Yeah, but it wasn't even the audio.

[00:04:55] It was just like my ability to carry on a conversation, which surprisingly enough has increased slightly after, you know, almost nine years of doing this practice. Anyway, anyway, anyway. So merch links are in the show description. Southern Gals Craft support a small business, support the podcast Cypress survivalist. We're actually getting ready to roll out our first quarterly event for Cypress survivalist.

[00:05:20] We did our first annual event a couple of months ago, and it was a huge success for the like for a nonprofit that hadn't even been in existence. But for a few months, the website is stood up. It is www.cypresssurvivalist.org, and I need to put that in the show notes. I will try to remember to put that in the show notes and link it now that it's actually a link that I could link. But that website is stood up.

[00:05:47] If you're in the region of like really the Gulf Coast, South Louisiana, Mississippi, maybe East Texas, if you really feel like a drive, you want to come in and see what we're about. I would encourage you all to look it up. And if you just want to come and harass me, then, you know, there's always that. Yes, Stuart, this I started this podcast in 2016, unless I've gotten my years completely and totally crossed up. But 2016 sounds familiar.

[00:06:16] It was a very, very long time ago. Okay, now, to topic after seven minutes of verbal gesticulation. Financial preparedness. Now, I have promised myself and everyone else that I won't do this topic more than once a year because a lot of people's eyes cross when I start talking about finance and economics and money and interest and all those things. And it usually winds into me to winds.

[00:06:44] It usually ends with turning into me ranting about bankers and the SEC and how bankers should be hung. And the 2008, you know, financial collapse and how everybody that participated that should have been in prison, but none of them were because why would they? But this other, they're the government's biggest donors. Thank you, Nick, for reminding me simultaneously why I detest them and they're not in prison. All in that one little nugget.

[00:07:11] Well, look, the in my opinion, the basis of any preparedness has to start with financial because if you're not in a safe financial position, you cannot afford to take the extra steps that we all take. You can't afford the extra food. You can't afford the guns. You can't afford the body armor, the ammo, whatever it is. So to Raggle Fraggle's point, we're going to get to the tariffs. Yeah. It will be part of this conversation. I think it has to be.

[00:07:38] And see, like to me, I, I, I view this topic through the lens of like, you know, my degree, my degree is a Bachelor of the Arts in business. That is what I went to college for. And I think that is what I spent a fair amount of my career working around in some capacity or the other, like in the private sector. I worked as a manager of two different, two different, uh, aviation stations at a very, very young age. And it was a lot of work, but I was really, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the pace and the challenge.

[00:08:07] And since I moved into the public sector, I find myself being like the one weirdo who thinks about things in terms of like, wow, that cost X amount of dollars to run this program. Because that's like so many hours, you know, so many hours of pay period times these salaries and yada, yada, yada, and that's the dollar figure that takes to run this. And this is how much it's costing the American public and yada, yada, yada. Yeah. It's, it's a different perspective than a lot of people that have been like career public servants, because I look at everything in terms of dollars and cents.

[00:08:37] But because of that, I also bring this, I also bring this idea to the table that like, if I can find a way to get my job done faster with less labor, with less manual effort, then it's a net positive for, you know, the taxpayer, which to me should always be the goal. It's like, how do I get this done in the way that it costs people the least amount of taxes? Because I am also footing the bill for those taxes and I don't like paying taxes any more than y'all do. Just saying. Yeah, no, it makes sense.

[00:09:07] But, you know, a lot of people that are in the public sector that some of them have been in the public sector since they were in high school. Some of them, it was their first job and they've never gone anywhere else. So they've never had to justify their work or justify their productivity in a way that is financially accounted for. Yeah. I mean, and the funny part of it is that I've also been on the opposite end of this where like the last private sector job I had before I came to public, I was a salaried employee.

[00:09:36] I was a salary manager. And my boss gave me the speech like before he hired me of, I don't care if you work eight hours a week or 80 hours a week, get your job done. Yeah. And I was cool with those rules of engagement because like if you give me, if you give me those parameters, I'm going to figure out how to get my job done in the least number of hours, period end discussion. And if something would pop off and it would take me 80 hours a week, like I think I held the record in that company. I worked 30 hours straight one time.

[00:10:06] Yeah. I went in one morning and I left the next day at noon. I have been very fortunate to not have to do that. I think the longest day I've ever had was 17 hours. I slept on my desk. Yeah. Like, that's not great. No, it wasn't. But again, my boss was like a little freaked out because I worked 30 freaking hours. But I was like, you told me to work until the job was done. You told me eight hours or 80 hours, get the job done.

[00:10:35] Well, I took it to heart. I worked 30 hours straight. I got the job done. I went home and I slept for, you know, half a day and I was okay-ish after that. But that's the thing of it is that like when you, when you have that, when you have that set of personalities where it's like my job is to get this done as efficiently as possible versus my job is to do whatever my boss tells me for an hour. It's just a different calculus. It's. It is. Yeah. It's a different personality for sure. Yeah.

[00:11:04] But it also requires you to be like, you know, it just, it requires a different set of personality. Really is what it boils down to. But anyway, I always get myself so freaking off topic every time I get on a topic. That's all right, man. So let's address the elephant in the room. Good. To recall what Raggle Fraggle just said. I'm just saying you picked a hell of a time to talk finance. Oh, brother, you have no freaking idea. And these comments are coming in.

[00:11:33] Worst I have is 52 hours straight. If you don't count one hour mandatory cat nap, I took. That does not count. And then that's more than two days of working. And then Stuart saying, I woke up this morning and still haven't recovered. Hopefully it's not fatal there, Stuart. It must suck to get old. I don't want to. Well, it's better than the alternative. Yeah, I guess.

[00:11:57] But anyway, so to lay the land out for everybody, what's going on right now in the U.S. economy, tariffs, globalism. Hopefully they know. I would hope so. But I thought we should unpack this like tariffs, globalism, trade war and cost of goods going to the moon.

[00:12:15] So I don't think anyone would be shocked to hear that my opinion is that like the United States has been operating in a really weird situation economically, basically for my basically for most of my lifetime. I was born 82, which the bones of globalism to my mind really got kicked into high gear about the late 80s.

[00:12:40] Like you're talking about right about the time that Bush senior lost the election to Clinton. And there are arguments that like Ross Pro pulled a bunch of boats away from because Ross Pro, despite being a philandering SOB, was a pretty smart guy and had some very good points to make about the trade deals that we were operating under. The fact that, you know, we were offshoring all of our manufacturing. We were offshoring all of our good middle upper middle class jobs, all of our factory jobs.

[00:13:10] Our entire manufacturing sector is getting strip mined and sent mostly to Mexico at that time and now to China. And, you know, right now to India. Yeah. Now to Pakistan. But I was watching I was listening to something the other day. It was actually it was Ross Pro, which interesting little historical footnote. Ross Pro was the last time that an independent candidate was part of the presidential debates because they changed the rules about how you get in the presidential debates after this.

[00:13:39] It's probably because he pulled boats away from probably because he made way too much sense. But Ross Pro's point of view was, you know, like if we set up the situation where we take this this $12 an hour job and we offshore that work to a place where the guy gets paid $1 an hour and we have this huge imbalance in the wages and not just the raw wage, but the health insurance, the retirement, the, you know, the the environmental impact and studies and everything that you don't have to do in foreign nations. You have to do here.

[00:14:09] We ended up in this situation where it was so profitable for these private industries to offshore those jobs that we almost left them no choice. And we didn't. Right. We didn't try to write the ship with a protective tariff or something to say, hey, listen, if you take that job and you send to Mexico and then you try to import the product back into the US to sell it, we're going to smack you with a tariff to make some of that money back because you are strip mining our country of jobs.

[00:14:38] And we're going to want some of that money back now. Like, yeah, I know tariffs are kind of a really hotly contested issue. There's a lot of people, especially libertarians are really upset about the idea of tariffs. It's like free trade, free trade, free trade. And I get the arguments there. But like I am a small libertarian because I look at a lot of the libertarian policies and my fear is that when they're taken to the extreme, they stop working. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

[00:15:04] The selling heroin to kids argument is where they lose me and the free trade argument, they lose me as well. I mean, in a perfect world. Wait. Yeah. A libertarian tried to justify to you selling heroin to kids. Tried to justify selling narcotics to kids at the libertarian convention like four or six years ago. Thank you, Nick. I'm going to have to stop calling myself a libertarian on the back of that. Please continue. Yeah.

[00:15:31] Well, you know, it's personal responsibility is basically what it came down to. But that's what his argument came down to. But anyway, in a perfect world where every country was a libertarian country, free trade would make sense because you would already be a pretty much unified ideologically country. But we have other countries that are willing to use what is pretty much slave labor by our standards. It's not pretty much. And sometimes actual slave labor.

[00:16:01] I was getting to the concentration camps. In order to artificially destroy and keep wages down in our country to benefit their hundred year plan. Mm-hmm. You know, look, I'm no financial expert. I'm no expert on global foreign relations or trade. But I can tell you this much. I work in manufacturing in the U.S. right now.

[00:16:28] And it has been quite slow for the last six months or so. Not uncommon with a presidential election cycle and a new administration coming into office. We see this fairly regularly.

[00:16:42] What we don't see is such a massive boost in demand in a three-week period that causes us to be booked out for most of a year and having to turn down work as a direct result of these tariffs. Now, is it going to end up being great for us in the end? I have no idea.

[00:17:07] At the very least, it's got companies looking back to American labor and looking back to American manufacturing instead of overseas. And I hate, I can't see that being a bad thing. Is it going to cost more? Yes. But there are benefits to that beyond the financial. Like you said, environmental regulations. We know how the environmental regulations are done here. If you find an endangered plant, congratulations, you're no longer building your subdivision or your factory.

[00:17:37] You find an endangered animal. Great. We're probably going to have to rip up the parking lots around there because that's clearly important too. And as it should be, that stuff should be important and should be taken care of. But man, I don't see China or India doing any of that right now. I mean, the vast majority of the Pacific garbage patch comes from China, India, and other developing nations.

[00:18:04] Because their people aren't at the point where they have enough that they can start caring about the environment. They're still worried about basic survival. And the hard part about that whole discussion is like, let's say hypothetically you take the position that like, well, we, we, the rest of the world have to impose environmental regulations on them because we're all on this exact same floating rock together. You and what army? Huh? You and what army? Well, that's really what it will come down to.

[00:18:34] Hold on. Before you even get to the functional you and what army, which is ultimately what it would take. Yeah. Let's have a discussion about morality because we had our industrial revolution and we polluted these F-U-C-K out of our country during that period of time. Like think about 1900s plant emissions compared to 2025 plant emissions.

[00:18:56] Like the air, I had this discussion with a bunch of greenies in the past and I pointed out to them that modern cars, like think about, think about the pollution a model T would emit. Oh yeah. With its four and a half horsepower engine, no catalytic converters, a single barrel carburetor. That thing was basically pissing gasoline out the frigging tailpipe.

[00:19:18] A modern car is so clean that the, if you drive one of those things through the smog of Los Angeles, the air coming out of the tailpipe is cleaner than the air going in the front. Yeah. But you don't get to that point unless you first go through the industrial revolution and realize the consequences of it and you start to clean up. So it's one of those situations where it's like, it's very convenient for industrialized nations to sit from our ivory tower and preach to the gross polluters of the world. But we did it too.

[00:19:47] Oh yeah. And yeah. We're just ahead of the curve. Yeah. Yeah. It would take an army to enforce that. But by what right do we even have the right to do it? Well, I think we do have a right to try to educate other people and say, hey, look, we made this mistake. Are you sure you want to do the same thing?

[00:20:12] Unfortunately for some of these nations, if the penalty for not doing it is economically to be behind the eight ball, they will say to hell with it and push the lever to the free all the way forward. That's the ugly thing. Anyway. So yeah, I mean, the end result of the tariffs is, in my opinion, I think like net positive. I think it's going to help to correct, like you alluded to earlier, Nick, like this huge imbalance just in the cost of labor.

[00:20:42] Like if we have to pay a person $15 an hour and another nation can pay $0 an hour because they're whipping them and making them live in squalor if they don't do their jobs. Like if we, I go back to the argument of like lithium mines. Lithium mines are some of the most toxic places on the face of the earth. Yeah. We, I do not believe it is possible. I don't think the EPA would allow us to use an open, an open air lithium mining pit in the continental U.S.

[00:21:12] I don't think we'd be done. Yeah, I'm guessing not. But that's how they do it in most of our countries. Sure. And by the way, they do it with children. Yes. Quite a lot of them. And cobalt too, which is notoriously bad for you. Yes. So kind of my point of view is, is I'm like, okay, we will not allow children to do any, almost any work. And we certainly wouldn't allow them to mine lithium and cobalt in an open air mine that pollutes the holy hell out of the groundwater for a thousand miles in every direction.

[00:21:40] But if we buy it from another country and it's someone else's kids who are going to die before they're 25 years old, somehow that's morally okay. And I just disagree. So it's those moments in time where I think to myself, okay, there has to be something here to correct this horrible imbalance in the, the standard of living, the cost of living, the wages and everything else to disincentivize companies from participating in this. Like there has to be, there has to be some mechanism.

[00:22:06] And since I'm going to sound like such a fricking environmental wacko closet liberal when I say this, but like, you know, given that I accept the fact that the, the ultimate purpose of a business is to make money for their shareholders and themselves. I get that. That means that there has to be some other mechanism to write this imbalance because we're not going to be able to depend on the good graces and the morality of business because business is not designed to have morality. It's designed to make money. Yeah.

[00:22:36] Yeah. I would agree with that, but you know, I think that there is a problem with the, I love that joke. Minecraft proves that the children yearn for the minds. They do. They yearn for the minds and to do heavy construction. You ever seen the joy on a child's face when they operate a backhoe for the first time? Dude. The first time I watched my daughter play Minecraft, she's like running around, she's cutting down trees. She's fighting off. She's killing animals to eat them.

[00:23:03] She's building a tree house and she has a safe place to exist. I'm like, I think we, I think modern civilization screwed up. Like these kids are regressing. They want to live like primitive savages again. They're just doing it in a digital world because we haven't gotten, we haven't gotten to the point of like, you know, letting society collapse yet. You know, you bring up the fiduciary duty of companies to their shareholders.

[00:23:31] I don't know that that is necessarily a good. Does that make sense? I realize, I realize the argument that you're supposed to create value for those shareholders. Great. But not at any cost. But not at any cost. And I think that there, and you cannot really legislate morality that well. No, but here's the thing.

[00:24:00] I agree with you on the principle that if we had a principal person at the helm, then their natural morality would course correct them very slightly from participating in the worst abuses of power in the pursuit of making money. Comma, however, comma. Or however, comma. Comma, however, comma. That's how it works.

[00:24:21] The problem is if that CEO intentionally leaves meat on the bone because he's a good guy and he's trying to embrace morality and the shareholders vote him out because they want more money, then he's literally not only sacrificing his own job. I guess what I'm saying is like that only works. That dependence on morality only works if everyone who's going to take the job is a moral person.

[00:24:47] And if you believe that, like a beachfront property in Arizona, I'd love to show you whenever you're ready. Democracies require a moral populace to function well. Yeah, Stuart's going to argue about this. We do legislate morality. But it doesn't work well, Stuart, is the point. Legislating morality doesn't work well. Legislating morality only works if there is broad consensus on what is moral. Exactly.

[00:25:15] In other words, like when you let whether you call it legislating morality or establishing boundaries or determining illegality, whatever you whatever term you want to hang on it. It only works if a majority of the population agrees with it. It's like the old adage that the governed have to consent to be governed. We had this discussion just the other day when we were talking about why gun control is like kicking and screaming in its death throes right now. Because the majority of the gun owning public all think that the ATF is run by jackbooted thugs.

[00:25:45] And they are. And believes that people should be able to like cash and carry cans out of Walmart, which they should. And that SBRs are cool. And the fact that you have to pay $200 for tax tape is stupid, which it is. And because of all those things, because the gun owning culture has shifted so radically over the last 20 years, all of the laws around firearms are being ignored to the degree that most people can't ignore them. Because the people are saying this is dumb. We're not doing this anymore.

[00:26:15] This is stupid. We're not we're not playing this game anymore. So it's one of those things where like if you want to legislate morality, it can only work if a majority agree that that is where the line is. But the minute you get into this situation where like you're legislating something that like broad sections of the population disagree with, like marijuana, for example, you get widespread disobedience. Yep.

[00:26:41] Widespread disobedience and active attempts to dissolve that regulation. Yeah. To Stewart's point, laws about murder. Sure. But the vast majority of people agree that murder is not a great thing. But table this for another time. Most people would have agreed 30, 40 years ago that punching random people on the street was bad, right?

[00:27:10] Like that was a pretty broad agreement. But then we got into the it's okay to punch Nazis era. And now Nazis was arguably always okay, except for in Germany. Until we started calling everybody we disagree with a Nazi. And now you're just punching everybody. So right. I mean, but justifiable assault and justifiable homicide have always been a thing. Self-defense has always been a valid justification. Until you get to the point where words are violence.

[00:27:39] Well, look, if we want to argue words are violence, then the left has been doing violence upon me and you for many decades now. Yeah. I guess what I'm saying is it's like we're entering in this situation where there's a not insignificant pocket of our civilization that would disagree that murder is always, you know, that that murder, not justifiable homicide. But that murder is wrong. Murder is wrong when it happens to a person on their side.

[00:28:09] Oh, that now you're just debating what the definition of psychopathy is. Now, Phil, you have to remember, you have to remember when you're applying a person, when you're looking at a person's moral beliefs, you have to analyze it as though whatever is happening is happening to them, not to someone else. So it's like a burglar is not going to say that stealing from Phil's house is wrong, but the burglar is going to say that Phil stealing from his house is not great.

[00:28:36] So do you know why this thought exercise always falls flat with me? Sure. Because I'm neurodivergent and I have a hard time applying one sided standards. It just something in my brain just does not compute them very well. So I think I think about things rationally, which is probably why I have such a hard time figuring out leftists.

[00:28:59] Anyway, so on top of the tariffs, globalism, trade war, the cost of goods going to the moon, we also have, I think, very legitimate concerns about a at least a U.S. recession, probably a global recession. Because we're already in a recession as of two years ago. Yeah, but a lot of people didn't want to didn't want to admit it. And now I'm finding more and more people are actually like warming up to the idea that, yeah, we might actually be in a depression.

[00:29:24] Although, you know, just a few months ago, something was going on where people would people did not want to use the R word. I can't imagine what that was. Erection? Election, that's the one. That's it. It's not erection. Erection is what happens when you don't have a recession. Build a building. Riggle fraggle. I've stopped letting y'all disrupt my train of thought. It's already on the last set of tracks. Is that really neurodivergent?

[00:29:54] I don't know. I just know that like. Neuro spicy. Yeah. I hear that's the word people use nowadays. But look, recessions happen on a pretty regular cycle. Yeah. I mean, we've had a number of them in my working lifetime. We've had probably a similar number looking at yours because we're not that far apart in age. No. But there are pretty good things. I mean, there are pretty good ways you can try to recession-proof yourself as best as possible, right?

[00:30:24] Biggest one that everybody's going to bring up. I know you're going to love, Phil. Getting rid of any unsecured debt that you can as fast as you can. I'm not talking about your mortgage. I'm not talking about your car loan. Unless you happen to have that $80,000 car loan at some percentage that starts with a number greater than 4.0. Oh, yeah. Dude, I've seen people within the 30s on cars.

[00:30:53] I feel like we talked about this just recently where I was recounting for y'all the absolute unimaginable horror I experienced the first time somebody ever told me what a negative equity trade-in was. Yeah. So you have to indulge me in this, bro. I have a business degree. I understand how interest works. I didn't bought the potato truck. It certainly didn't hit last night. I get it. I understand how all this works.

[00:31:19] But I, in my wildest nightmares, in my most adrenaline-fueled night terrors, I had never even considered the fact that a lending agency would allow you to purchase a new vehicle and roll the existing debt from the prior one into the new one. I had never heard of such psychosis. I didn't know it was possible. I mean, I understand how it works, but I never thought they would actually do it.

[00:31:46] And the first time I heard about somebody doing it, I stopped. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I understand what equity means, and I know what negative means. Put those two words together. Walk me back through this one more time. Like, what do you mean negative equity trade-in? And they were like, well, you know, it's like when you still owe on the vehicle and you trade in for a new one. So they take what you owe on the previous one and they add it to your loan. And I'm just staring at this person wide-eyed. Like, there is no way this is possible.

[00:32:16] There's no way this happens. This must be like Uncle Bob's lending agency or something. It happens a shocking amount. Yeah. Well, you know, and what they do a lot of the times is they extend their term. They extend the term of the loan. Well, that's a lot of times what they do. If I recall correctly, the average car loan right now is pushing six years. When we bought my wife's car, they offered us a 96-month loan as one of the options.

[00:32:44] And I just looked at the guy and I laughed and I said, are you serious? That's eight years. Yes. That's an eight-year car loan. And I looked at him and I laughed and I said, are you, was that a joke? He said, no, that's, you know, people take them. Like, so I would pay almost three times the value of the car for the car. No. No. Five years and I'm going to pay that bitch off ahead of time because compound interest is a motherfucker. Yeah.

[00:33:14] So this is, to your point about like, if you have interest-bearing debt, get it, get rid of it as fast as possible. Like what I- If you have, especially if you have unsecured interest-bearing debt. So credit cards, personal loans. Anything that depreciates, in other words. Anything that depreciates. You know, cars, I can see the argument for why you would take loans out on cars. They're expensive. You keep them for a while. I've had my truck for, it's a 2015. So it's going to be 10 years old now.

[00:33:44] So that thing has been paid off for seven years probably. And I, it owes me nothing as far as I'm concerned. Now, if you do have a car loan and the car loan is less than the value of the vehicle. So you could sell the vehicle to get out from under that loan. That's not bad. But you can't sell the crap you bought on your credit card to get out from under your credit card debt, more than likely.

[00:34:08] Well, and the bigger issue with cars is that like certain types of vehicles, they will lose value. But if you pay them off aggressively enough, you can stay under that magic line where like the vehicle has more residual value than you owe, which is always a more comfortable place to be. It is because then worse comes to worse. If you have to, you can get out from under that debt. If we are in a recession and say you lose your job.

[00:34:37] Why do I feel like there's a story here? There is. So hold on. For the audio, for the audio listeners, Nick's wife just dimed out some of her father and said, you keep cars unless you're my dad. He that man has, I think in the first five years, my wife and I were together. He had four different traverses due to a variety of occasions. I mean, he did hit a lot of animals with those cars.

[00:35:07] And one, I think one of them got killed by a hailstorm. That was after we got married. The man went through cars like some people go through pants, man. It was, it was shockingly fast. That's nauseating. It was. It was. And, but, and you know, it, it was, it wasn't normally that he just traded it in. It was normally that he hit something or something ran out in front of him. That's just bad luck. Like you shouldn't stand. Yeah.

[00:35:36] He doesn't, if you can help it. He doesn't have great luck with vehicles. They went on a family vacation in a brand new car and it got told by a hailstorm or damn near totaled. It's just, but yeah, he, he went through a lot of cars. He still does go through a lot of cars, but I would hope he's never done a negative equity trade. If he has, I'm going to yell at him when I see him, if I find out. Because he is, he is smarter than that. For sure.

[00:36:06] My, my, what saved me when I bought Tacoma and when you buy Toyota, you pay Toyota tax. It's just a thing. If you don't want to buy, if you don't want to pay Toyota tax, don't get Toyotas. I don't know any, any way around that. But when I bought that truck, it, I, first of all, I bought it four and a half years old, traded in, used 70,000 miles. Got a, I thought a pretty screaming deal on. I think I paid 20 grand for it. Right.

[00:36:34] When a comparable brand new Tacoma was well into the mid thirties. Yeah. I consider that an immediate, you know, plus to me. And then I got a five year loan on it and I had it paid off in four years and two months, I think. Yeah. And I, I mean, literally, I tell, I tell everybody making extra payments on a vehicle, you can do the same thing on a house, but it arguably works. It is debatable, works better on a house or a car, but you should do both.

[00:37:03] But it's really simple. If you look at your loan paperwork, and this is really easy on a house because a house is broken down, like, you know, principal interest, you know, and, and escrow, yada, yada, yada. But you can find it on a car loan, but it will tell you how much of your payment is principal and how much is interest. And over the life of the loan, those numbers start to flip around until most of what you're paying is, is principal because you've paid off most of the interest.

[00:37:31] You paid off, well, you've paid the principal down. So you're generating less interest. So the trick here is that you don't have to make a huge extra payment to have a huge impact on the, the speed at which you're paying off the principal. When you consider the fact that like my $320 a month truck payment, I want to say at one point only like at the very beginning, I think it was only like 32, 31 or 32 bucks was going to principal. Everything else was interest.

[00:37:59] So do the math when I paid an extra $25 a month, which is a pittance it's these days. I mean, like it's, it's basically Starbucks for two people. Yeah. But that was enough to almost double the amount of principal I was paying off at the beginning of the loan. And yeah, doing that, that, that $50 a month extra consistently throughout the life alone, knocked 10 full months off the backside of the loan.

[00:38:24] But even in spite of the fact that I paid that big, that I bought a used vehicle, I got a four and a half percentage straight. I paid it off early. That $20,000 truck cost me $25,000. That is the cost of interest. That's what interest does. You, it is a tax you're paying to have your stuff now and you can make the argument for a car house. It's worth it, but it's still, you're paying extra. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:38:49] Now, to be fair, when you're talking about interest rates, there are certain interest rates that you can get that it does not benefit you to pay it off early. Those of us that lucked into the mid-COVID interest rates of the two and a half, two and three quarter, 3% interest rates, there is no reason at all to pay a dime more than your minimum mortgage payment.

[00:39:14] If you can take that same money and put it in some kind of interest generating account, whether it's a retirement account, a high yield savings account, anything like that, because you're going to be getting back a higher return on that money than you are spending on the interest on a home loan at two and a half, two and three quarter, 3%. Especially if we're watching the situation we have recently, where the entire stock market has taken a nice little dive. Nick and I were talking about this before the show started.

[00:39:43] Fantastic buying opportunity. Well, not today, but a couple of days ago. Yeah. Well, I mean, and like I've talked to the patrons about this, but like over the course since January the 1st, I've watched my 401k go from 92 grand. Like I was charging headfirst at my first hundred grand in it, and I was really excited because like once, that's the way 401ks work is that once you hit certain milestones, then the growth starts to kind of like. Really starts to accelerate, yeah.

[00:40:12] And a hundred grand is like kind of that first big milestone. Like once you hit that, things start to really accelerate. First hundred grand is a pretty big accelerator. First million is a massive accelerator. So I've watched that 401k go from about 92 grand on January 1st. It got down as low as 75 about a week ago. Now, while that is a little disheartening to me, it's not that disheartening because the banner that's up right now says buy the dip.

[00:40:39] So, and this isn't just the stock market. This isn't just 401ks. This is also, if you're in the, if you are the person who says I'm holding out for the right moment to buy a car, you wait until the market is flooded. And, you know, like you wait till interest rates get nice and low. There's a lot of nice cars on the market. And that's when you pounce.

[00:41:01] If you're looking to buy a house and you're smart and you're in the market, you wait until the housing market is flush with houses and interest rates are nice and low. And you pounce, you buy the dip. You wait until the market is in the position you want it to be in. And then you jump. That only works in two circumstances. First of all, you have to have expendable money on standby so that you can hit it when it's hot. And second of all, you have to be in a position to wait.

[00:41:30] Like if your car blows up on the way to work tomorrow, it almost doesn't matter how crappy the market is. You have to replace your wheels so you can get to work. That may influence. But that doesn't mean you have to buy an $80,000 F250. True. That doesn't mean you make the worst decision you could. It just means you may not be able to make the best decision you would like to. But in this situation right now, like I have watched, especially on Reddit. Reddit is my favorite place to watch. Like just people watch Alarmus.

[00:41:59] Because I'm watching people left, right, and center screaming about pulling all their money out of their 401ks. And, you know, the stock market is going to zero. And it just makes me chuckle. Because I am not. Dude, I am not touching a dime that is going to my 401k. If I had the expendable income and it wasn't about to have to bite off $10,000 a year on private school tuition for my daughter to go to high school, I'd be throwing more money into it. Because the cheaper the stock gets, the more my money stretches to buy more.

[00:42:29] So, buy them. That was way off on the price of F250s. Apparently, you can see some of them that are $115,000. Yeah. I bought my first house for $70,000. I am not paying more than that for a vehicle. Fuck you very much. Bro, Ford is like way too proud of their trucks. Damn right they are. Jesus fucking Christ. I can still buy a house for $115,000 around me. Hard no.

[00:42:59] One day, I'm going to have to meet somebody who paid $115,000 for a truck and ask them, like, if their parents are cousins. I might get punched in the nose, but it'd be worth it. I have to ask my brother-in-law's buddy what he paid for his truck. Because it's a very expensive truck. I might be able to introduce you. Oh, Jesus. But anyway, yeah, I mean, the first bit of advice I have is just buy the dip.

[00:43:23] When the market goes to end, by the way, like, everybody's heard that there's certain ways that rich people get rich and stay rich. This is one of the ways. It's one of the ways. They wait until the market goes to hell, which it invariably does eventually if you wait it out long enough. It's cyclical. And they sit there and they sit on their mountain of cash. And when the market goes to hell, they friggin' jump in with both hands and both feet and, like, full commit buy everything. Because they're buying it cheap.

[00:43:50] And then when the market rebounds, which it almost always does, then they walk away giggling. And like I told Nick, like, the only scenario where that doesn't work is if the market never recovers. And if the market never recovers, we have so many more problems to worry about than what's in my 401k. I don't even care at that point. Like, it's monopoly money at that point. It's doish worms.

[00:44:14] I mean, but even then, even then, on a long enough time scale, that market recovered. Yeah. We've never so far had a market never recover. And never is an awful long time. Like, I understand it if you're like one of our patrons here, Stuart. He's in his 60s. You know, he's closing in on retirement age. Like, my parents, they're closing in on retirement age. Phil's parents are retired already.

[00:44:44] Doesn't look great right now for the people that are closing in on retirement. But if you're my age, if you're in your mid-30s, you've got another 25, 30 years ahead of you before you can really even rationally consider retirement. Just because of how much money you would have to have to retire in your 30s. I mean, hey, man, if you can do it, all power to you. Wish you the best. But our accounts are going to have so much time to recover.

[00:45:14] I mean, look at the value of stocks 30 years ago compared to today. The ones that are still around. It's ridiculous. Oh, it is. It's a logarithmic growth curve at that point. Almost. But, you know, every time we have a new administration, especially when it's a shift in political parties, the market has wild overcorrections.

[00:45:43] It'll stabilize out sometime around the midterms. And then it'll go back to doing what it normally does for a while until we have another election cycle. Yeah. Now, granted, we are still dealing with fallout from the COVID pandemic and the decisions that were made worldwide that I argued at the time was going to cause a recession.

[00:46:07] And I have been arguing for years that we have been in a recession or at least a stagnant economy. Something about shutting down like our entire job market and then printing, what was it, 25 to 30 percent of the entire U.S. money supply over the course of a year? Yeah. I can't imagine that was ever going to end well. Right.

[00:46:30] I mean, law of supply and demand at the very most basic level tells you that that is going to crush the value of whatever it is you're making. And you do understand because a lot of people fight me on this, which is hilarious to me because like, you know, I studied economics. But like you do understand that there is the loss of supply and demand also also apply to fiat currency. Yes. It applies to everything. A lot of people don't want to accept that. If you want to have that conversation, like you can look me up.

[00:46:58] We can discuss it left, right and center. But like fiat currency and not even fiat currency, even hard currency, gold, silver, everything. Like if I could wave a magic wand tomorrow and double the amount of gold in existence, it would have value. That's the way it works. Look at the inflation that happened in Elizabethan. I think it was not Elizabethan England. When Francis Drake took all of that Spanish silver and gold from the new world and brought it back to England, there was a massive inflationary spiral when he brought all that back.

[00:47:29] Largest treasure hoard ever recovered. And the better question is like part of the English economy. Who thought it wouldn't result in that? Right. I mean, well, I don't know if they actually had discussed at the time whether or not it would result in that, but that's what happened. Yeah. So, so, so I do have two things in here. I want to make sure we hit cause we're closing it on 50 minutes. Go for it.

[00:47:55] Like given these times, and by the way, this is not, these are two things that like I espouse, I'm pretty sure Nick espouses them. Cause damn it. I know he and I've talked enough to know that he does both of these things and so do I. And these are not, by the way, oh, the orange man is in power and the economy is melting down. Y'all should start doing these now. Y'all should have been doing these all along. Because if you wait until the house is on fire before you go by our fire extinguisher, you're doing this whole preparedness thing completely backwards.

[00:48:26] But the two things that I always really try to push people on when we start talking about financial preparedness, like to me, okay. The three, the three benchmark, the, the, the, the, the three steps, the three pillars for financial preparedness. One is have a home budget. Yep. That's not rocket surgery. That is frigging like Dave Ramsey 101. That is the most basic financial advice. That is every dollar you make, I say should be spent before you make it. In other words, every dollar should go someplace like this much goes to retirement.

[00:48:56] This much goes to bills. This much goes to this. This much goes to this. This much goes to savings. Every dollar in my paycheck is spent before I earn it so that the minute I get it, I know where all the money's going to go. Short of any savings. Yes. Treat savings like a freaking bill. Like it is not a, if I have money left over. Cause you never will. But like, if you have a budget and you stick to it and like the, the amount of neuros of neuroticism you attribute to this is up to you.

[00:49:25] I know people like I used to do this with a spreadsheet where I would literally like track every dollar that went in and out until I managed to get myself into some spending habits that now I don't really have to watch my money like a hawk. I just, I don't spend money on stuff that's not budgeted. Well, it's like you said, you have ingrained a quality, helpful habit in yourself. Yeah. I mean, I did the same thing.

[00:49:52] I have, I have an Excel doc actually that I use right now that has all of our bill expenses going back to when I first bought my, my original house. I can tell you exactly what I spent on groceries for the two of us, the year I bought our house. Now, do I need that? Probably not. But the data is in there and I'm a data hoarder. Hard drives are cheap. Budget. First step. Agreed. A hundred percent Phil.

[00:50:16] Because if you don't know where the money's going, how can you figure out where you can make adjustments? Andrew said the hippie household he's in does not pay him. I'm pretty sure you get payment. It's just not monetary payment. It's true. Turnips are a form of economic exchange. I don't think we're talking about turnips either, unless turnip means something that I'm not familiar with. All the emojis have a secondary meaning, Phil. You should know this. You have a teenage daughter. Okay, I know peach and I know eggplant.

[00:50:46] I'm going to have to look up turnip. Look up turnip and let me know. Because that one I don't know either. If I ask my 12-year-old and she knows, then we're going to have to have a whole different conversation. Fantastic. I'm glad I have introduced family bonding. So, like I said, having a budget I think is key. I think that's a really important first step to have for everybody.

[00:51:11] I mean, quite frankly, even when I monetized this podcast and we started having like real podcast bills, like, you know, hundreds of dollars at certain times of the year have to go to certain subscriptions to keep the lights on in this freaking, you know, this nut house. And I have all that in a spreadsheet. I know that, you know, based on X amounts coming in from Patreon every month, I'm going to have X amount in my account. It's going to clear against these expenses.

[00:51:36] It's like I literally have a podcast money planning document that I update every year in December for the next 12 months. And that is strictly for me to keep track of the money coming in, the money going out. And to see when I have that slack, like, oh, I need a new microphone for a new co-host or I need this or I need that so that I know the money is still going to be in the account. So it doesn't have to come out of my checking account where other things have to come out of. Exactly.

[00:52:05] The very next thing, Nick already said savings account, emergency fund. Like, I've heard the benchmark stated, like, you should have enough for six months of your income in an emergency fund. I don't think that's a bad number. But to me, I don't put a number on it. Like, it's the same conversation you and I have had about, like, you know, like food and about every other facet of preparedness. It's not I get here and then I can stop.

[00:52:32] It's I get here and then what's the next thing to do? You know, I actually had this conversation with my financial advisor and look, I really do think everybody should, if they have a retirement account, sit down with the financial advisor that's tied to that account. Because a lot of the times it's extremely discounted or free for them to go through all your finances and help you out with this stuff.

[00:52:57] And his recommendation to us, to me and my wife, now this is a two-person household with a house, was six months or $25,000, whichever is greater. Now, I don't know where that number comes from. As far as I knew prior to talking to him, it was six months or $10,000, whichever was greater, inflation, of expenses. And now not of income, of your expenses.

[00:53:25] So if you live a very frugal life, that six-month number is probably lower. But we all know medical stuff gets wildly expensive. Yep. And, oh, geez, I had a surgery a few years back and it was like seven grand out of pocket after my insurance paid out everything. And maybe that's why they're not recommending $25,000.

[00:53:46] And let's also consider that, like, if you lose your job and your job is the one that had the health insurance tied to it, now you might be in a really bad situation where you're having to come out of pocket for a health plan and pay the whole thing. Yeah. And if you're not familiar with what your health plan costs, consult your pay stub on how much your employer is contributing to that weekly.

[00:54:07] I can tell you that my employer kicks in, last I checked, which it was a couple of years ago, but my employer was kicking in just shy of $1,000 a month. I would not be surprised if that has doubled. I don't think it's doubled just because of the size of the – you're talking about group health plans. Yeah. It's a lot of people in the group. Well, yeah, because you're in the federal group, so it probably has not doubled. I know mine has almost doubled. It has gone up.

[00:54:37] No debating that, but I don't think it's doubled. But the point still remains is that, like, any decent-sized corporation is going to be – like, there's a reason why they really like it when they can pay Chinese and Mexican people to frigging do their manufacturing for them because then they don't have to pay for health benefits. True. And that's an enormous cost. It is, yeah.

[00:55:00] I mean, it's really – you know, this is one thing that I've had to walk my friends through a couple of times when they were looking for new jobs is you need to include in your compensation numbers when you're talking to new employers the total sum of your benefits. That's your health care that they're covering. That's your – any 401K or IRA additional that they're dropping in, your vacation time, your sick time, because that's all comp time.

[00:55:29] And that's all part of your wage. Yeah. So many, many years ago when I just dipped into the public sector from the private sector and in the process of doing so, I took almost a 25% pay cut. Okay. A lot – like, didn't have any benefits with the other – you know, in the private sector. It was just straight pay. Sure.

[00:55:59] But took a 25% pay cut. Yeah. I got an opportunity to – because a friend of mine worked for British Petroleum at the time. He was trying to get me on, like, started roughnecking oil rigs. Mm-hmm. And he told me – he said, yeah, dude, it's a six-month contract, and you started about 60K a year. And I very quickly sat down and did some math and was like, I'm cutting my throat. And he was like, what?

[00:56:26] And I'm like, dude, I'm like, I am making – I am basing at, like, $33,500 right now in pay. But then when you add in the health insurance and the amount that the agency is kicking in on my behalf and then what they're matching me on my TSP and what they're throwing in for my retirement annuity, I'm like, I sat there and did exactly what you said. And I added all those numbers up, and I was like, 60K a year, and in six months I might be laid off again, and I might have to go find another contract to jump on. No.

[00:56:56] These – this math does not math. No. But that is a very common way that people that are not accustomed to having benefits get screwed is that they think to themselves, well, it's more money. And it's like, yeah, but if you lose somewhere else. But then again, I mean, things like retirement and health benefits matter a lot more to some people. Like when you have a family or when you have a spouse, those things become really, really, really important. Oh, absolutely.

[00:57:25] And when you're young and your entire life is going to work and party with your friends, then that's just nerd stuff. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, no 20-year-old is really thinking about what's going to happen when they're 75. It's so far in their future that they can't conceptualize it. And fair enough. But we all hopefully get there eventually. Absolutely.

[00:57:52] Funny thing is that because of the nature of this podcast, I think our average listener age is like right around 45 or 50. Interesting. Well, I mean, you think about it. You have some outliers that are like closer retirement age and you have some outliers that are like early 30s, late 20s. But the majority tend to be right about that age where – Yeah, people with families. People with families, people with responsibilities, people that are thinking about the future. Like that's just how things kind of like start to marry together. Yeah, it makes sense.

[00:58:21] But the last thing after an emergency fund, and this is where like the old beans, bowls, and Band-Aids really starts to come in handy. Stacking now means less purchases later. So like one of the things that – It can mean less purchases later. It can if you do it appropriately. Yeah. But like this has kind of been one of my thoughts was – Because during COVID, that was when my wife and I really started focusing really heavily on bulking up our pantry. We did – I mean we bought a chest freezer.

[00:58:49] We started really ramping up the amount of like butter and eggs and meat that we were putting away in a way that we never had before because we just couldn't fit that much in a standard upright fridge and freezer setup. And in addition to that, we started putting away lots and lots and lots of non-perishable dried goods because it doesn't require refrigeration. Like if the power grid goes down for a week and I lose everything in my chest freezer, that's annoying. I'll have an awesome cookout for my neighbors before it all spoils. We'll eat like cans for a couple of days.

[00:59:19] And we'll salt the hell out of whatever we think we can. But like the non-perishable dried goods was always the weapon of last resort to stave off starvation. Well, if you have a substantial enough pantry – and not just pantry, but pantry, toiletries, feminine products, paper goods.

[00:59:38] If you have enough of this stuff set aside, then when you're stretching pennies because you're between jobs or when the cost of goods goes to the moon, you can start making decisions like I don't really need toilet paper right now. It's the first two weeks of COVID. People are getting into fistfights in the grocery stores over toilet paper. Guess who didn't have to go get into fistfights with people for toilet paper in the grocery store? The guy that had two cases sitting on the shelf. And it's not that big of a deal.

[01:00:07] Like, oh, that's nuts. Those people are fistfights in each other over toilet paper. I'm not going to go down that aisle right now. But you can't make those decisions if you don't have the stuff stocked. You have to have it. Well, you know, I don't keep a year's worth of food around the house. You know, me and my wife feel fairly comfortable with, you know, three-ish months of stuff around the house. But if I had to be looking for a job, I mean, what's groceries for two people right now anymore?

[01:00:36] Like $500, $600 a month? So that's $600 a month that you don't have to come up with. Yeah. And especially if you're looking to cut costs. I mean, I feel like you and I had a discussion where you recently bought, like, most of a cow or was it most of a pig? I bought a quarter of beef. I was going to buy half a pig, but the price was really high for some reason. But, yeah, I've got most of a quarter of a cow in my freezer right now.

[01:01:02] And it's substantially cheaper than buying it, like, piecemeal from your local butcher, I'm assuming. $1.5 to $2.5 a pound? Cheaper. I mean, unless you're talking premium cuts like filet mignon and stuff like that, then it's, like, wildly cheaper. But the trick there is that I know because in addition to, like, having everything that's stocked up in the freezer, I'm still buying meat. Yeah. Pretty much any time I can think I need it. Sure.

[01:01:32] My viewpoint on food is really simple. It's, like, there's a lot of places I would try to pinch pennies. I will wear pants until they have holes in them. I will wear underwear until they have holes in them. I will wear socks until my toes are poking out the end. I am hell on clothing and shoes. I wear them to destruction. As you should. It is just the way I am wired. I do not replace things like toothbrushes until the bristles are falling out.

[01:02:00] My daughter threw one of my toothbrushes away because it was so raggedy. And she was so just, like, you have to replace your toothbrush. And I'm like, it still works. Well, there is, to be fair, at a point where you're getting diminished effectiveness from a product. That now you're starting to sound like my child. But anyway. Well, no. I mean, it's like anything you look at.

[01:02:24] Like, there are things like, there are jackets that you've had for so long that they're no longer warm enough anymore in the same weather conditions. They're fine. They're fine. Because the insulation is completely shot out of them. They're fine. So they didn't wear three sweatshirts. Nope. They're still good. I live in a subtropical environment. It doesn't get that cold down here most of the time. I believe that. Except for this year. But the point remains, I will pinch pennies in a variety of places. I am not pinching pennies on food.

[01:02:49] I am not buying crappy food and carbohydrates and repackaged junk because it's cheap. If the cost-benefit analysis I have to run in my head is, it makes the grocery bill higher, but we're eating eggs and we're cooking with real butter and we're eating real meat and we're cooking from home, then I'm okay. I'm emotionally at peace with that. Like, that is a fair trade.

[01:03:13] Well, the health consequences are even more expensive than the savings on money from eating crappy food. I mean, that's what I'm saying. But I guess my whole point is, like, stacking now means potentially less purchases later. Or at least being able to defer the purchase for long enough that you can find another job. Yeah. And deferring that cost sometimes winds up being the thing.

[01:03:38] Like, if during the time I still had the job, I prioritized having extra things on the shelf instead of spending it on crap, then that means that those things are still there when all of a sudden money becomes more expensive. It's more of a premium. Like, you know, like, I'm sure most people in the audience have had this experience. Like, I got, I was laid off at one point. I was three months between jobs.

[01:04:03] I drew my last paycheck in October and I didn't start working again until almost the end of January. So it was almost four months before I saw a paycheck. And in the course of that time, we never missed a bill. The mortgage got paid. The things got taken care of. Christmas was taken care of for my daughter who was a year old. Um, we did a very low key birthday for my wife.

[01:04:29] Cause like, you know, we were really stretching things by that point, but like everything got done that had to get done. We didn't, we had that emergency fund put aside. And as soon as I got, I got back to work, even though I had to take that pay cut, we were rapidly shoving money into the mattress, try to get that mercy fund built back up.

[01:04:51] I'm happy to say that now after years of work and, you know, incremental raises and working my way into a better position, we've got a very healthy emergency fund fund. So if me or my wife lost our jobs tomorrow, it would be upsetting. I'd mope about it for probably a day. Cause you know, most people will mope a little bit when they get laid off or fired. It's just, it's a thing. You got to kind of lick your wounds emotionally. Take the time to process it.

[01:05:17] But I wouldn't feel the panic of, Oh Jesus, the rent is due at the end of the month. What am I going to do? It's like, I'm going to mope. I'm going to suck it up. And I've got, you know, a pretty good span of time to go find her a job. And if that job doesn't fully replace that income, then this is where, you know, I don't have a banner for this. This is where things like when you're doing your budget planning and you live well within your means, that then means that when, if your paycheck has to shrink a little bit,

[01:05:47] it's not the end of the world because you already have slack, you're spending money somewhere that doesn't have to be spent. Yep. You know, it's either on nerd stuff or it's on vacations or it's usually on nerd stuff. But the point is, is that there's something there that you can curtail to make the money get back into balance with your bills. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the normal rule of thumb is what is it?

[01:06:13] 30, 30, 30, 10, 30% on your house or apartment, 30% on needs, 30% on wants, 10% on savings or retirement, something like that. But the only problem is that percentage, obviously those percentages have to flow, but general rule of thumb, don't go over 30% on your housing. Don't go over 30% on your necessary bills outside of that. I'm not going to lie.

[01:06:42] And maybe one day we can get a financial planner to come on and tell me why I'm so bad at this. But like, I completely eschew that advice because I tried to add that up one time looking at my paycheck and my numbers don't make any sense. Like, really? Okay. So it's worth pointing out that like I spend a greater amount than is the typical recommendation for housing.

[01:07:08] Because in this area, housing costs, I mean, the cost of living where I live is very high compared to like if we drove even like 15 or 20 miles, then the cost of living would be less. But then the commute would be even more hell for me to get to work and the schools would be even worse. So it's just one of those things where it's like there's pluses to living where we do, but the con is that the cost of living is higher. The cost of housing is higher. Sure. Well, that's like any general advice that you get.

[01:07:36] It's always going to be wrong on a specific individual. But I was going to say the one thing that made my little analysis balance was the fact that when I put a pen to like once, I didn't have any. Like, okay, you would think, especially given some of the things we talked about on this show that are cripplingly financially, you know, implausible at times.

[01:08:01] But like that is like a once a year I'll splurge and like check a big box on my preparedness nerd list. But I don't spend money on stuff like the crippling plastic crack addiction like I do. No, the greatest devices I have are pipe tobacco and cigars and coffee. Like I just I don't spend money on stuff. I don't want stuff. I usually spend my time goofing off with my wife and daughter.

[01:08:31] And that doesn't cost much of anything as long as I can keep the two of them away from the beach. That gets expensive very quickly. Like, yeah, but the point remains like I don't know. I have tried to follow that advice, the 30 30 30 10 rule. And I it just makes me laugh because I'm like, this doesn't this math doesn't math for me at least. I think it's meant to be like a general.

[01:08:52] Hey, this is a very achievable, like as in like financially secure position to be in. If you're kind of close to that, it's good, I guess. Yeah. Raggle whiskey is in the budget. Yeah, it should be. I mean, if you're if you enjoy whiskey, if you enjoy coffee, it should be accounted for.

[01:09:19] So I will simply say that, like, especially me being somewhat of a social drinker, like. There are times when I'll get a bottle of whiskey and it will literally take me a year or more to drink through it because I just. But that being said, like, if I have the right company over, I can smash half a bottle in an afternoon. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. But it's not one of those. I joke with my wife. It's not one of those. I'm going to walk. I'm going to, like, grab it off the shelf every time I walk by. And I'm just not I don't have that personality. Yeah.

[01:09:48] I joke with my wife that I'm a terrible alcoholic and that I'm so bad that I forget to go buy another bottle of whiskey. I'll be like, oh, you know, we're all out of whiskey. I'd like it. I'd like a glass, you know, Friday when I get home from work. Sunday comes around. Did I ever go buy more whiskey? Basement. Nope. All righty, then. Maybe next Friday. But here's the thing Rag was saying. I enjoy all those things. I enjoy all those things, too. But here's here's the trick. And this is this is probably a good thing to end on, because this is this is the advice I gave.

[01:10:18] I used that one my wife over to my way of, like, thinking about money and budgeting and everything else. And it is the only advice I give to couples who are arguing about money. The hardest part about getting my wife to commit to a budget was that she saw living on a budget in turn. She heard that and heard two things. No fun. And we have to live like we're poor. That was that was that was.

[01:10:43] But again, this is this is what she had been taught in childhood was that people that have to say I can't afford that are poor. And she didn't want to live like she was poor. So but then the inverse, it makes you poor, which is I just spend whatever I want with no regard for whether I have it or not. That's what creates poverty, in my opinion. So what I explain to my wife and men, women, if you're having this argument with your spouse, write this down. I don't know. I can't take credit for this genius because I'm not that smart, but it works.

[01:11:13] What I explained to her was you put fun in the budget. Yep. But at the time, at this time, like my wife and I are in our mid to late 20s. No child. She likes to go out with her friends. I was I was working, going to college. I didn't have friends and I didn't have time. But, you know, her thing at that time was she liked to get her hair done every so often. She likes to get her nails done. And she still does go get her nails done.

[01:11:42] And I don't know if you are aware of this, but like ladies, haircuts are cripplingly expensive, like bad enough. To make night vision look like a pretty friggin frugal purchase sometimes. Yeah. Over the year, they definitely do get that to that point. So what I explained to my wife was I'm like, how much help? Like you you need to get your nails done so many times a month. What does that cost? And we put it we put a line item in the budget for getting her nails done with a little bit extra to cover the tip. Absolutely.

[01:12:08] And then what I explained to my wife was I'm like, now you can spend it because it's budgeted. No questions asked. It's as long as you spend within that amount. It's a line item in the budget. No discussion. Like spend that money getting your nails done. And she's like, what if I don't spend it getting my nails done? I'm like, well, then you can spend it on something else or it can go into savings. Like, but it's budgeted. So you can that's that money is we have both agreed that money is for getting nails done. Spend it. Do what you want.

[01:12:35] And at the time, I didn't have a lot of hobbies because I was still a college student. And that's just the way it works when you're working full time going to school. But at the time, I was like, now we're going to put this in the budget, this in the budget, this in the budget. We had in the budget to go out to eat together, I think, once a week, literally one meal, one meal a week date night. Well, because of the way our schedules lined up, like we literally didn't see each other for six days straight.

[01:13:04] Like by the time she would get home from work, I was already in bed. By the time I woke up in the morning, she was still asleep. Like we passed generally two ships in the night for six days and we were awake and together and off work one day a week. So that makes it count. Had to. I mean, especially as newlyweds. Absolutely. You know, you absolutely do. And budgeting doesn't have to just be money. You also have to budget your time because you have limitations on both. But therein lies the thing.

[01:13:31] By budgeting time, by budgeting fun, whether that's time, money or both, you can sell your, your. I'm not, I don't want to use the word recalcitrant. You can sell your spouse the idea that as long as it's budgeted, then you can use it or spend it debt, you know, guilt free because it's a budget. Absolutely.

[01:13:54] And if, if there's too many things on this side, not enough things on this side, then obviously you have an imbalance and you have to be mature adults and say, well, something over here has got to give or this has to give. But once you establish that budget and there's fun in the budget and it's an amount of fun you agree to, then you can spend it and not worry about it because the money's there. The time is there. That is how I convinced my wife to like buy into this idea of living on a budget. And it has solved so much of our issues with money.

[01:14:24] When we were at that age where we were young and stupid and most people get themselves eyeballs, eyeballs deep in debt. But I mean like, okay, so Gillian and I bought our house in 20, 2011. So I was 29 years old when I became a homeowner. She was 28. I don't know how most of y'all feel, but that felt very young to me to become a homeowner. I think I was 24. 24.

[01:14:53] I was wondering when people were going to say that it was a joke that they gave me a mortgage. I remember having this conversation with a buddy of mine. I picked him up on my way home from the closing because we were going to demo a wall in the kitchen the day of the closing. I picked him up and we sat down on the, on the floor of the living room, zero furniture and two sledgehammers and a six pack of beer going. They gave me the money for a house.

[01:15:22] That don't seem right. Yeah. But by the time, by the time I became a homeowner, I was already a combat veteran and you know, you're proven you're a responsible adult. As responsible as any army vet can be labeled. If Nathan were in the chat, I'm sure he would disagree with you that any, any combat veteran can be labeled responsible because we did some pretty irresponsible things in our day. But we survived them. So that's important. The government said you were fine. Yeah.

[01:15:51] They're a great judge of character. Thanks, Nick. True. That's very fair. All right. So is there anything else to punt into this, this topic? I mean, I feel like, I feel like we've talked financial preparedness over the years. And for those of you who've been around for a while, you've probably remember us talking about this. Like, this is a thing that comes up every now and then with me because I look at it in the guise of you prepare your household budget. You prepare your finances like you prepare everything else.

[01:16:21] It's all the same principle. It is. I sacrificed for today. So I have more tomorrow. It's deferred gratification. And it's just learning some of the ins and outs. Oh, I forgot Jeff Jag. He's also an Army vet. I don't remember if he's a combat vet or not. But anyway. But it's just, it's all part of that same thing, you know?

[01:16:46] It's like to me, when we start talking about like tariffs and we start talking about the possibility of goods increasing in costs, we start talking about the possibility of job loss and recession. Like, those are all opportunities for a person to look at the lay of the land financially as well as they do everything in their home and say, am I prepared to weather a bad time? Because we have never been one of those shows that indulges in like the zombie apocalypse side of preparedness.

[01:17:14] Like, we want to focus on things that I think are not probable. They're going to happen on a long enough timeline. Yeah. Look, you work long enough, you're going to be unemployed or laid off. It's going to happen. It is just going to happen. I've been very fortunate. It's only happened to me once for a very short period of time. So, you know, I've been very, like I said, I've been very fortunate in that.

[01:17:41] And like I said earlier in the show, you cannot do the rest of preparedness if you're not financially looking out for yourself first, because you won't have the extra funds to be able to buy the quarter of beef that's in my freezer right now or to buy the two cases of ammo Phil bought when he bought his new shotgun. That way he made sure that he was stocked up on three cases. Yeah. But still, the point stands.

[01:18:09] And if you don't have the money there, yes. Can you run it all up on credit card debt and hope that the balloon goes off before you have to declare bankruptcy? Sure. I don't know that I recommend that. It's a long shot bet, but you can do it. Maybe you'll be right. You'll be the first person to see the apocalypse coming and be actually right about it. But I would just like an opportunity to borrow somebody's time machine so I can go back, you know, go back in time, like five months.

[01:18:38] And I can laugh hysterically in my own face when I said, I'm going to get an A300 instead of a 1301 because it'll save me money. It did, though, because you would have still bought three cases of ammo alongside the 1301 and you know it. And a scalar works mount and a red dot and yeah, things. But anyway, point is, I have easily sped the difference between those two shotguns in other stuff. Oh, Raggle's got a good point here. Oh, Jesus Christ.

[01:19:07] If you're going to be fiscally irresponsible, what should you get? Why do I feel like this is just going to turn into a trip through Phil's armory? I mean, I mean. That that bag on that bag on that back shelf is it's a bag of fiscal irresponsibility that that's that's the that's the price of a fairly cheap used car. Yeah, but there again, is it fiscally irresponsible?

[01:19:36] If you had the money in savings, if you didn't have to take out debt for it and if it didn't ding your emergency fund? Yes, it was financially responsible. I did eat into the emergency fund just a little bit, but I put it back in almost immediately. Right. So really, I mean, let's in a in a in a say like a quarter, a quarter of a year time scale. Did it really impact your emergency fund at all? No, no, but I will.

[01:20:05] I will admit to I will admit to being like so so neurotic that I didn't rest easy until I had that emergency fund plumped back up to what it was pre night vision levels. Well, I think as a homeowner, you kind of have to be because let's be honest here. Just about anything breaks on your house is a five thousand dollar bill. Yeah, especially when you consider that over the last two years I've had to replace the washer.

[01:20:32] The dishwasher, the clothes washer, the clothes washer and the fridge, and that's four years since we had to replace the entire HVAC system. Mm hmm. Yeah. And HVAC would, gosh, got to be at least seven or ten. Ten and a half. Yeah, it sounds about right. Yeah. Had to replace the HVAC system and the gas furnace. Oh, yeah, that sucks. At least when you do them both at once, you kind of get a discount.

[01:21:00] I'm sure they gave me a little bit of a lube with the reach round. Well, it's just because you're not paying for them to come out twice is really all it comes down to. You're not paying the travel, the travel fee twice. That's that's that's what my guy told me. It's like, it's really not a discount. You're just not paying me to drive here three times. Yeah. All right, bud. I think the only traveling I got done was in my colon on that deal. But, you know, can't live without air conditioning down here in the Gulf Coast. Good God, no.

[01:21:30] You would literally die. Well, my wife would have killed me. But anyway. OK, so I still dead either way. So I guess that might be that might be the topic for next week is financial irresponsibility. Thank you, raggle fraggle. We can do that. Unless I circle back around to that guest that I have kicking around. And if he can make it next week, then we might bring him on. That can be fun.

[01:21:56] But if not, we'll talk about financial irresponsibility, which will devolve into. I don't know, Nick, you can you can bring all your Warhammer stuff out because I can promise you that it would not be Warhammer related for fiscal irresponsibility. I can be far more irresponsible than that. Oh, this is going to turn into a competition. I have a phone number for a CNC machine salesman.

[01:22:23] Oh, Jesus Christ. You want to see fiscal irresponsibility. There's a million dollar five axis machine for sale right now. Oh, Rachel, if you need me for an intervention, just just give me a holler. She might. All right. Matter of fact, this podcast is going out the door. We might see a guest next week.

[01:22:51] We might talk about fiscal irresponsibility. If y'all would like to participate in the discussion. Dumbass Texas Redneck. So I will tease this. I'll tell the patrons who it is so y'all can check out his content and come come to the show prepared. But the rest of you freeloading bastards that don't contribute to the bottom line. He is a manufacturer of nylon tactical goods.

[01:23:21] It's a good way to put it. And he showed up on my radar specifically because he's a best I can tell a small one man operation. I love small business. I love promoting small businesses. And also because he did something that was like freaking really stand up. He had a little bit of an issue with I think it was USPS lost a bunch of his customers orders and then told him to eat crap.

[01:23:46] And instead of making them wait and everything else, he cleared out all the rest of his stock to fulfill those orders immediately so that the people that spent their money got the goods. Absolute stand up guy. Yeah, as soon as I was kind of interested in having him on before that. But once I saw that move, I was like, OK, I want this guy on. I want to talk about his product line and I want to talk about his ideas behind how it came out.

[01:24:12] But I also want to get to know him because that level of like just no BS nice guy energy is so rare in the world today that I like to give it a platform. Anyway, matter of fact, this podcast is going to go out the door. Rachel, if you need me for an intervention, holla at your boy and we will take Nick's debit card away from him and zip tie his hands and feet behind his back so he doesn't buy a CNC machine.

[01:24:40] Unless unless he's going to move it across the border out of Illinois and start a business making things that thread onto the ends of other things, because if he's going to do that, then he might just need a business partner instead. It is bigger than my garage. So you'll have to you. I would have to find a manufacturing space. That would be a requirement. I mean, if you could talk Rachel and move in Louisiana. I'm pretty sure we can make something happen.

[01:25:10] That is far too warm for her. No good air conditioning is north. Perhaps south. Probably not. We'll discuss later. All right. Matter of fact, it's going out the door. Bye y'all. Good night. Good night. Good night.