August 2, 2021 • 52 mins
Today on the show we’re talking with one of the greatest minds in the personal finance space- Clark Howard. Clark is a money expert with a heart of gold who hosted his own radio show for over 30 years. I had the pleasure of working with him for 14 of those years. He is also the author of 10 books and continues to produce an excellent podcast daily because he somehow has limitless amounts of energy. But some of his more impressive accomplishments have been via the work he spearheads in Atlanta and the surrounding communities, including his partnerships with Habitat for Humanity, and his annual Clark’s Christmas Kids broadcasts which have helped ensure that over 150,000 kids received presents on Christmas morning that otherwise wouldn’t have.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to How the Money. I'm Joel and I am Matt,
and today we're talking about becoming your own consumer advocate
with Clark Howard. Matt usually does the bio, but I'm
(00:28):
going to do the honors on this episode because today
on the show, we're talking with one of my favorite
humans in the world, Clark Howard. And Clark is a
money expert with a heart of gold who hosted his
own radio show for over thirty years, and I had
the pleasure of working with him for fourteen of those years.
He is also the author of ten books, and he
continues to produce a really excellent podcast every day because
(00:52):
somehow he has limitless amounts of energy. But yes, some
of his more impressive accomplishments have been via the work
he spearheads and it Lanna and the surrounding communities, including
his partnership with Habitat for Humanity, his annual Clark's Christmas
Kids broadcasts, which have helped ensure that over a hundred
and fifty thousand kids in foster care received presents on
(01:13):
Christmas Morning that otherwise wouldn't have. So Clark, my friend,
thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
This is so cool. And you hear our dog is
really excited. I hear that's Churchill who's very excited. That's
one of the joys of recording at home. That's right, Clark.
We're yeah, we're so glad to have you on. It's
(01:34):
it's long overdue. And you know, every episode that John
I record, we have a craft beer on the show.
It's a way for us to symbolize that being smart
with your money that is not all about deprivation, right,
there's ways that you can live in the here and
now while also saving for the future and being smart
with your money. So yeah, craft beer is our sort
of splurge. What is your splurge? What is your your
(01:55):
craft beer equivalent that some folks might even say is
like a waste of money, but don't care. You do
it anyway. Super premium ice cream. So my deal is
I watch what I eat six days a week, and
each Sunday is what I call treat Day. And I'm
not going to waste calories on some crappy ice cream.
(02:17):
It's gotta be ultra high butterfact really awful for you
ice cream. And recently I was able to get my
all time favorite ice cream you can buy in a supermarket.
It's a Ben and Jerry's flavor that reappeared recently at
public supermarket and it's called vanilla caramel fudge. And for me,
(02:42):
you know, you will talk about this craftier that one
and how great it is and traveling to this city
or that city to be there. For me, having Ben
and Jerry's Vanilla caramel fudge is my craft beer. Okay,
So you prefer ice cream or custard, because I know
you're a custard fan too. Definitely ice cream, I mean,
(03:03):
custard is good. And uh, there's a place in Milwaukee
I love called Cops Custard. And then in Austin, Texas,
I love Amy's ice Cream. And as I travel around America,
I discover either local or regional ice creams that I
just gotta have Greater's ice Cream in southern Ohio, and
(03:26):
then I have my favorite flavors with each of them.
So the good thing I don't have to worry about hangovers.
I don't have to worry about getting behind the wheel
of a car after over eating ice cream or custard,
and I just have to worry about my belly. But
I feel like that the next thing for you, Clark,
is gonna be a Food Network show now, like you
(03:47):
don't have enough things? Yeah, I want to know the
history behind cops. I want to know the history behind
these different places that you've been to. You know, It's funny,
It'll be as I'm traveling, I'll last somebody and there
you usually hearing from people. You know, a guy traveling
on business, you know what nightclub they should go to
or whatever, And then I say, Hey, what's the best
(04:09):
ice cream in your area? And they look at me
like am I from outer space? That's awesome, Clarke. Let's
talk about your history a little bit, and it's so
much of your ethos and who you've become I feel
like revolves around something that happened to you when you
were in your freshman year at American University. It kind
(04:30):
of changed the way you thought about money, and so yeah,
it feels kind of like this line in the Sands
moment for you, it's like you were a different clerk
before and you're a different clerk after. So yeah, yeah,
can you tell us about that moment and what that
looked like for you? Yeah, some of it was already
in me about being thrifty, it was part of what
(04:50):
made me up. But it was kind of fun, and
then it became serious as could be. My dad had
worked for his father in law's business for pretty much
his whole adult life. After serving in the army during
World War Two, he came back and had married my
mom and went to work for his his father in law.
(05:14):
And then the decades go on and his father in
law passes away, and then his brothers in law running
the company, and they decide one day that they don't
need him anymore. And he'd been there for thirty years.
And my parents had always lived a really high end lifestyle,
(05:36):
and I thought that they were just rich as could be.
I mean, who knows as a teenager, but it seemed
like they were really wealthy. And I didn't even know
my dad had been fired until I came home at
Thanksgiving and there was just a terrible spirit around the
house and everybody was somber. And when I got to
(05:57):
dinner that first night, my dad asked me to stay
at the table after dinner, and I was like, okay,
so is it he's dying? Who knows what? And he said,
I have terrible news for you. He said, I got
fired from my job, and I started smiling year at
a year and he says, why are you smiling? And
I said, well, I thought you were dying. And at
that point he kind of laughs and he realized maybe
(06:19):
it wasn't is hideous a turn in his life as
he thought. And then he goes on to say, and
I don't know if there's money for you to go
back to college in January. And then I was like what,
because I didn't realize my parents spent every penny that
came in and uh, they were kind of like a look,
see at what happened with America later on, you know,
(06:41):
where people became real spenders and borrowers and all that.
And so I went back to college and re enrolled
as a night student. I went to a college American
you that had as many nights students, if not more
than day students. So it's pretty easy to re register
as a night student. I went and scrambled and got
a full time job. And back then, tuition was cheap
(07:05):
enough that I could pay my own way through. A
year of tuition was twenty four hundred dollars at a
private school. So the hundred that I had to come
up with even when dollars were more precious back then.
Was something I could do, you know, working full time,
and I paid my way through college. But I resolved
(07:26):
that I was never gonna allow myself ever to create
the financial insecurity my parents had created for themselves. And
they were fortunate that after a few years I got
back on their feet financially. And it was great for
me because when I finished graduate school, I made the
decision that I was going to live on every other
(07:49):
paycheck and that's how I lived my life, and it
was it really worked out well, knowing that I was
always building up a cushion, and when you live on
half of what you make, it means that your whole
lifestyle is under control and you never have to work
(08:13):
in a job you hate. You can follow what you
really want to do. And so today, obviously this is
part of the fire movement what I did, but there
was nothing like it or thought about at that time.
It was just a basic fundamental thing that I wanted
(08:34):
money to create security for me, not fear. That's right,
having those options available to you, right, Clark, Uh, Yeah,
And so shortly after college, you started a travel business
when you were twenty five. Actually, my path is really
uh circuitous. After graduate school, I actually started an alternative school.
(09:00):
It was called Career Action. And at the school we
taught people who had maybe not finished high school or
had not been able to find direction in their lives
as young adults. We got them caught up academically and
taught them workplace skills and help them find work. And
(09:21):
career action that I started when I was twenty three,
and then I went two years later and started my
travel agency. So remember I started with Career Action was
the alternative school I started. So then I named my
travel agency Action Travel. So action became very much common
(09:43):
about the interested in h and travel back then, Like like,
what made you want to start that business? Okay, that's
a wonderful question. This is not going to make any
sense to you. I mean, it explains something to you.
It's gonna be like it couldn't have been. But up
the through the nineteen seventies, going back all the way
to I guess the nineteen thirties, the government set the
(10:08):
prices and who could participate in several sectors of the economy, trucking, trains, telephones,
and air travel. Uh, let's say you want to fly somewhere.
You wanted to fly from New York to Chicago. The
government decided what airlines could fly the route, what time
(10:30):
of day they could fly, how many days a week
they could fly, how many seats the airplane could have,
and what fares could be charged. Everything was decided by
the government by an agency called the Civil Aeronautics Sport Well.
I was a big believer in free markets, and back
in the era of Jimmy Carter, he had the same
(10:53):
kind of feeling. So he during his presidency deregulated the trucks,
the trains, and the airplanes. And my belief was the U. S.
Economy would just take off bad pun is these sectors
of the economy opened up. So I was like, you
know what, I wanna be in on this because people
(11:16):
love to travel, they just never could buy airplane. And
so that's why I opened an agency and eighty one.
And sure enough I was lucky or right or both,
and the industry came alive and people started flying who
had never considered going on an airplane. And I was
(11:37):
in the right place at the right time. And I
opened one agency and another another another ended up with
five offices by the time I was thirty years old Wow.
But then you ended up selling that business unexpectedly just
like a year later. Right now, it's so cool, joll
you You never want to be the one trying to
(11:59):
sell a business. I wasn't trying to sell action travel,
but I got approached by this group of men who
had been with a travel company in Dayton, Ohio, who
were looking to uh do are called roll ups by
local agencies in different fast growing cities in the South
and the West. And they had secret shopped various agencies
(12:22):
and they decided that in Atlanta, I had the agency
they wanted. And so you always make more money selling
when you're not for sale. No, no, let me convince
you that I've just found it. So I sold it
and they kicked me out the door right away, and
(12:45):
I moved to a place called Pontevedra, Florida, and became
a beach bump without any goal or intention or anything
to work. At the end, basically achieved fire, you know,
just like you said, Clark at that point, Yeah, you're
basically hanging at the beach all day. What were those
what were those years like after you sold the business,
(13:06):
were you, you know, did you get bored? What were
your thoughts at that point in time in your life.
So I was pretty beat from running my business, and
at first I didn't need to do anything. I was
just really happy to have the freedom and not always
be worried about meeting payroll and expenses and dealing with
(13:28):
the demands of owning a business. And I remember so
clearly something that would I had become a really terrible
sleep or running my own business, and I'd wake up
with anxiety a lot of times in the middle of
the night, or wake up like four thirty or five
in the morning, couldn't go back to sleep, typical entrepreneur
kind of stuff. And the first night after I sold
(13:50):
the business, I slept thirteen hours. I haven't slept thirteen
hours since taking up for time. They're no kidding, And
I just had the best time. I had gotten out
of shape running a business, because you know, running a business,
it can be seven days a week, and so I
(14:12):
started doing buyathline stuff. I was biking a minimum twenty
miles a day and swimming a minimum two miles a day,
and so I started becoming obsessed instead of running a
business with fitness, and after a while I did start
to get bored. Truth to be told I was doing that,
(14:32):
And then out of nowhere, I got a call from
a radio station familiar to Joel and me. Uh then
w GST Radio asking me to be a guest one
Sunday on a weekend travel show they had. And everything
that's happened to me since in media and broadcasting and
(14:54):
podcasting and the websites, all that all started from one crazy, unexpected,
random guest appearance on the radio. Well, it's I mean,
it's fascinating to see how far that's taking you, especially
considering it feels like you almost lived another life previous
to this life that you're currently living. Um. I want
(15:15):
to ask you, like get to some other more personal
questions to just about kind of like what makes you
up when it comes to how you view money? And
some folks have called you cheap and in fact, you
actually call yourself cheap. Matt and I kind of had
debated this topic on the show before, frugal versus cheap um,
but you're like happy to say that you're the cheap
guy so um, and that you're actually willing to buy
(15:36):
infeor products in order to spend less money. So what
made you embrace the cheap guy? Moniker um and what
and what makes you willing to shop for the cheapest
stuff around um? And And sometimes I feel like, yeah,
you prioritize the inexpensive over um quality, right, Yeah. So
the heart of that is a lot of people feel
(15:57):
like they have to keep up appearances. A lot of
people think brand names are important. A lot of people
gravitate towards spending money they probably can't afford to spend
because they feel like in order to fit in, they've
got to have you know, a woman's got to have
this particular brand of this, or guy's got to have
this this other brand of that or whatever. And I
(16:21):
embrace the cheapness thing because the brand you should be
after is your own financial security. Not having a label
on something that you wear that somehow makes it feel
like you fit in. So for me, the reason I
I am that way is it's part of who I am.
(16:42):
And I also want people to understand that it's this
thing I do with kids. Whenever I used to speak
to groups of kids, I would show a picture of
a fancy house, a fancy car, and all kinds of possessions,
and I'd say that was family one, and then I'd
show another pick sure of an old, beat up car
and you know, a simple house and that kind of thing.
(17:05):
And I'd asked the kids, and it didn't seem to
matter if they were fifth grade or twelfth grade. I'd say,
which is the millionaire family? And almost without exception, or
nearly of kids I would talk to always said the
one with the fancy house and fancy car and all
the fancy stuff was the wealthy family. But the reality is,
(17:29):
possessions make you poorer. Money that you can invest and
you have and living on less than what you make
is what creates the financial security. So the whole thing
about being careful with every dollar and being excited about
a bargain I get a dollar tree. It's not a joke.
(17:50):
It's it's a core principle. And my brother, my oldest brother,
was giving me a hard time today because one of
the tires on our car needed air and I'm there
with a bicycle pump pumping air and the tire and
he's like, why don't you just go to the gas
station nearby it's called Gate. Why don't I go to
(18:12):
Gate and pump up the tire? And I'm like, it
costs a dollar, I'm not going to spend a dollar
to pump up that tire when I can do it myself,
and I'll get exercise at the same time you're getting
the exercise exactly. I feel like there's an additional benefit there, right, Clark.
I feel like your your cheapness epitomizes just the pushback
(18:34):
against consumer culture, right, and so for that reason, we
we certainly appreciate how you approach money. We're gonna take
a quick break, and we've got a lot more topics
that we want to get to, including becoming a consumer advocate,
and so we'll get to those topics right after this break.
(18:57):
We're back from the break, we're still talking with Clark.
How and uh, Clark, I feel like, if anything has
changed since you've started your radio show, since you've started
giving financial advice on the air, it's that the world
of personal finance is a whole lot more complex. So how,
in your opinion, has the arena of financial advice changed
(19:18):
over the decades since you really started talking about money
with Peovil. In some ways things are much much better,
and in others it's become much more difficult. So if
you go back and time, um, only the very wealthiest
among us could even buy stocks. The trading fees to
(19:39):
buy stocks was through the roof. It was not at
all unusual that one trade of a purchase of stock
or sale of stock would cost you four hundred dollars.
Today that trade is free or nearly so, depending on
where you go. That all really got too free because
of robin hood, which I can say a lot about anyway.
(20:02):
But the other thing is that if you bought what
what people bought a lot if they didn't have a
lot of money. Mutual funds, you had to pay a
giant commission, either upfront or over time, known as a
load charge. So out of every dollar you put in,
you basically were investing only ninety four cents because the
(20:24):
rest would be taken in commissions and you had all
the fees. So the changes that have happened with index
funds and Vanguard being the second largest financial house in
the world and all the um E t FS exchange
traded funds, all the ways that people can invest now
(20:44):
it's actually made it potentially much much more cost effective
and democratized it where even from the first dollar, you
can walk in a Fidelity investments office with a dollar
and open an account and buy a zero cost index
fund from Fidelity, So a lot of things are far
(21:06):
far better. The problem today is that a lot of us,
as investors or would be investors, take this freedom and
we put ourselves into trouble by doing a lot of
rapid fire buying and selling, doing a lot of speculating
and the rest. So we have this freedom two invest
(21:31):
without drama and basically at no to almost no cost,
but we tend to complicate our lives by doing a
lot of really crazy kind of speculative kind of stuff.
And I've seen it with my fifteen year old son
who's been in this stock simulation game at school that okay,
(21:54):
so wait a minute, he thinks a long term holding
of a stock is seven days. Uh. So that is
a situation where we we have the ability to try
to have the discipline to just put money aside, spread
(22:14):
it out at no to low cost, build up money
for the future. But that's boring. So a lot of
people want the drama. They want to do the crypto,
or they want to buy the latest I p O,
or they want to get into the latest meme stock
like um, what game stop or the theater chain was
(22:38):
a MC and so it's hard to get people focused
on just worrying about the fundamentals, which is creating financial
security for yourself, when it's so much more fun to
get on robin hood and gamify investing and buy and
sell and buy and sell and buy and sell. Know,
(23:01):
you know, the enemy is really who you look at
in the mirror now, where if you go back even
fifteen years ago, the enemy was the high cost of
investing that, thank goodness, now are gone. Yeah. Yeah, the
institutions exist, the structure is there for us to take
advantage of, to invest in a in a smart wise way.
(23:21):
But like you said, we are our own worst enemy
at this point, Clark, let's talk about consumer advocacy. That's
just a core part of the show that you've been
doing for over over thirty years. Now. Uh, there aren't
that many voices out there that speak for consumers, and
so yeah, how do you see your role in that arena?
My job is to reach and teach. I want people
(23:43):
to know that you and I have more power than
we give ourselves credit for. And so often I hear
from people who sound defeated when they run up against
corporate bureaucracy before they've even tried anything and and so
I want people to know that they can be their
(24:04):
own best advocate. And if somebody is taking advantage of them,
mistreating them, or if it's just a big, unfeeling corporate
bureaucracy that doesn't have his act together, you don't have
to take it. And there is no one playbook. You
have to be versatile to take on an organization or
(24:27):
a company that's not doing right by you. And so
that's why this is so important to me. You know,
so much of the common theme and what I do
is about seizing personal power and personal responsibility. That there's
so many things we can do for ourselves in a
(24:47):
time that it feels harder. You know, we're dealing with big,
remote organizations were generally not dealing with local people anymore,
and so it's it's harder for people to navigate, but
you sure can. Yeah, and not only Clark do you
talk about specific companies when they're doing the wrong thing
(25:09):
by consumers um. But you're also passionate about empowering people
to solve their own problems. You want to help folks
be able to advocate for themselves. So, in your opinion,
what is it that prevents people from advocating on their
own behalf most of the time. And then you know,
what are some maybe specific ways that we can stick
up for ourselves more, especially as we're dealing with more
(25:29):
like nameless, faceless companies. Sure, I mean a lot of
it is there's a lot of alienation in society that
people feel like the deck is stacked against them and
why would they even try? And yeah, there's obviously always
throughout human history been on fairness. It's just how that manifests.
(25:50):
And today the equalizer is a company's reputation. It used
to be that if you had a problem with a company,
nobody else would ever know. But today one of the
greatest powers you have is the combination of humor, brevity,
(26:11):
and social media. I think back years ago, the first
clear eureka moment where I really realized the power of
those three things together was something before social media was
particularly prominent, was something called United Breaks Guitars and Joel
(26:33):
you may remember that, remember that video for sure. Yeah,
So this guy who was a Canadian musician was flying
on United Airlines and they broke his treasured guitar that
he was supposed to use performing, and United told him
to pound sand and so he had tried to deal
(26:54):
with United unfeeling uncaring bureaucracy and came up, uh, you know,
zero in response. And so then he wrote and sang
and posted on YouTube a very clever video that had
humor about United breaking his guitar. And that, for me
(27:15):
was a key understanding how you get these big corporations
to respond, because United, that had done nothing for six
weeks suddenly fell all over themselves making it right and
getting this Canadian singer a new guitar. And that's when
I realized that social media, with all its goods and bads,
(27:40):
is one of the most effective tools when a company
is treating like dirt to get the word out there.
And again, what was the second thing I said? Brevity.
If you start writing seven hundred page novel about what
happened to you, he's gonna read it, and the people
(28:01):
who start reading it are all just going to decide
you're the problem and you're crazy, right, right, So humor
and a short, short explanation about what's wrong and key
what you want to make it right. Nobody um gets
excited about hearing about your complaint and going on and
(28:25):
on and whining about what happened what's key is to
state your case and what you want to make it right,
and don't be ridiculous, and what you want to make
it right, be reasonable and that will get results on
my own personal airplane United, That's what I want. Yeah,
how about that my old guitar? Yeah. Yeah. A part
(28:49):
of consumer advocacy certainly is this holding companies accountable for
when they misbehave and whatnot. But it's also about just
finding the folks who are who are praying on you, right,
like folks who are going after you. You talk about
scams a good bit on your show. Uh yeah, So
how have you seen those evolve over the years in
sophistication and specific to today as more folks are kind
(29:10):
of re emerging from their homes and kind of re
entering society, have you seen scams take another form? You know,
in the recent sixteen months or so, You know, scams
have only the vehicle of transmitting them has changed and
then and some of the cons have what they pose
has changed, but the core of what makes a scam
(29:35):
has never changed in the nearly thirty five years I've
been doing this. So you have situations that involved potentially
greed that come forward with the scam Hey I got
something for you. This is a great dealing you got
you can't tell anybody about, but you gotta do it
right now. That's not as common as the scams that
(29:57):
pretend that you must act to meet ly or terrible
things are going to happen to you, like the fake
fraud alerts and the notices from the pretextings where we
get uh text or email or whatever pretending to be
from an organization we do business with trying to verify something. Lately,
(30:18):
there's been the very prominent one with Amazon where they
say your shipment is coming blah blah blah, and you're like,
I didn't order that, We'll just click here, and before
you know it, you've given your Amazon credentials to a
crook who then is buying stuff as if they're you.
So the sense of urgency aspect and the fact that
(30:40):
we're doing most of this on our phones and we're
distracted at the same time, we tend to be more
likely to not keep our guard up, click on something
and create the web of troubles that follow. Yeah, there
were some recent stats to clark about how younger folks
are now we're susceptible to scams, like so many the
(31:01):
digital scams that are taking place. So I think for
for a time it was assumed that, well, it's only
people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties that are falling
for some of these scams, but now really it's a
lot of twenty somethings and thirty some things that are
falling falling victim to scams on Twitter or scams in
their email. They're they're they're getting better at targeting a
younger audience that is more likely to click on something
(31:24):
like that. And that's because if you watch somebody and
watch it any place you're at, it could be a restaurant,
it could be at a red light, anywhere you are,
you'll see that the cell phone is forever present in
front of the eyeballs of every person under age thirty five,
(31:45):
almost without exception. And so that's much more common with
people under thirty five than it is, particularly with people
over fifty. And so scams so heavily used to target
people that were elderly, but today, because of the cell
phone always being engaged, that's why it's moved so heavily
(32:10):
to people that are younger. Yeah, alright, Clark, we got
a few more questions to get to, including we want
to talk about travel. Since you are the travel guru,
We've got a few questions about saving money on travel,
especially as more and more people want to travel. We'll
we'll get to that and a few more questions right
after this break. All right, we're talking with Clark. Howard
(32:37):
and Clark, We've got a question for you about sort
of the cultural view, I guess of of money here
in the United States. You know, we live in the
richest country in like the history of the world, but
even still a huge swath of the population is just
loaded up with debt and savings rates are also pretty paltry.
But that has also changed a bit recently. Why do
(32:59):
you think that is, like, what do you think is
going to cause this change in the population in the
United States. Well, there's a segment of Americans who really
are just flat out struggling. And it's not because they're
crazy with their money. They don't make enough and come
and so you may have of Americans that are wheezing
(33:24):
because their work is irregular or what they make per
hours too small, and so for people in roughly that
one in five of American adults hopefully in the future,
it looks like base pay rates are gonna rise, and
that will be a big help to that segment of
(33:46):
the population. You see it all around as you go
is stores, restaurants, businesses that you can see they're posted
wage rates, they're raising those rates. They're offering benefits they
haven't offered before, and there will be a big societal
benefit if that trend holds. But that's only roughly one
(34:09):
in five Americans. If you look at people from UH
of income on up to eight of income of the country,
you know, not the top of earners, not the bottom.
It is overwhelmingly lifestyle choices that have gotten people in
over their heads with finance. And it's so easy now
(34:33):
because credit is so widely available, and I have a
strong belief that the ability to pay for things electronically
like with our phones or use a credit card, debit card,
store value card, whatever, that we don't feel the spending
the way prior generations did when they'd have to pull
(34:56):
out actual cash. And so I think that has been
for roughly sixty of the American people. The big problem
the ready access to seemingly unlimited amounts of credit and
the fact that we don't feel the spending as we spend.
(35:17):
So Clark, I want to ask you about lifestyle creep then,
because for some of those people, I agree. I think
that the lack of physical attachment to the money that
you're spending sometimes makes us spend a little more freely.
And then we're like, when we get the credit card bill,
we're like, oh, man, I didn't realize it was going
to be that high. But um, yeah, when we're talking
about inflating our lifestyles, when is it okay in your opinion?
(35:38):
And when is it not okay? How should people think
about um as they get a pay increase or um
as their financial situation does improve, Like, how much of
that increase should be funneled towards actually increasing their lifestyle versus,
you know, saving or investing more. Yeah, wonderful question because
there is no one right answer to this, but miably
(36:00):
is that it starts with putting aside a big chunk
of your money first, and then what you do with
the rest of your money, even if it gets kind
of foolish, as long as you start by saving a
significant portion of what you make, you are setting yourself
up for success instead of failure. And as your pay
(36:21):
rate goes up and you're saving a set percent of
your pay, you're the amount you're putting aside living on
less than when you make goes up to and i'd
say today because we overwhelmingly don't have pensions, that if
you want to have real comfort in your life, you
need to save twenty cents of every dollar you make
(36:44):
to create real financial security. And over the years, I've
said a dime of every dollar, and that's the base
case that you condition your life where you're living on
nineties cents of every dollar. But if you really want
to create comfort, and especially as you progress hopefully income
wise over your lifetime, you want to get it to
(37:07):
that twenty cents on the dollar, and then beyond that,
if you want to do whatever crazy with the other
eight cents, go for it. It feel like that takes
a lot of the decision making out of those moments
where you're like, oh, should we buy this or should
we not? Like, is this one area in life where
we can splurge a little bit more? Well, if it
(37:28):
fits within that, then it's not a question of whether
or not that's something you should or shouldn't do. It's
just a matter of do I like that am I
going to prioritize that. Stop from the handwringing, I guess exactly?
Does that sound fun? But Clark, I love that. Uh.
We also wanted to get back to travel for a minute.
You've traveled a ton of your life. Used to work
in the business, but so much has changed since you
(37:50):
owned you know, your own travel agency. Now folks can
book their own travel. They can do it pretty cheaply.
You can use Google flights. What are your best tips
for folks who to see the world without spending a
ton of money. We're going back to, at least for
the next year, two very historical patterns of peak and
(38:11):
off peak pricing. People that are trying to travel right now.
There was so much pent up demand from the time
period we were locked down during the pandemic that prices
for everything hotels, airbnbs, car rentals, flights are unbelievably high,
(38:32):
and so July and August if you care about money,
and the first half of September sit it out. Sit
out these next two months, and then in the fall
that's when the deals are starting to reappear. A lot
of people um benefit from kids being back at school
(38:53):
and travel demand drops a lot in the fall, and
so we're gonna have great opportunities to travel now through
mar Arch of next year, except right around Thanksgiving and
and right around Christmas. And the absolute bargains this year
also have gone to historical patterns, and that is the
first two weeks of December right after Thanksgiving and again
(39:16):
January right after the end of the Christmas New Year's
holiday period. Prices looking right now are so cheap, I
can't believe it. And Clark so off peak. And the
time that you travel like that, specific days that you
travel and being flexible with those days, those are obviously
ways to to save more money when you're going somewhere.
(39:38):
What about specific websites? Do you have, like some specific
sites to your favorites when it comes to saving money
on lodging or the all expensive car rental right now, like, yeah,
what are some of your favorite sites to use? All right, well,
let's go with the car rental for a second, because
this is the oddest part of what's been going on.
The car rental fleets were purged last year when the
(39:59):
car rental agency is we're just trying to hang on.
Hurts went through bankruptcy, the others barely avoided it and
they were able to survive by selling off their vehicle fleets. Well,
now they're way short of vehicles, just as travel as
come back to life, So you have to turn the
whole thing upside down. And before you book nonrefundable air,
(40:20):
before you book any hotel, make sure you can afford
the car rental if you're gonna need one, and you
can try things like rental cars dot Com if your
costc member. Cost Go Travel offers some of the best
rates on car rentals. But also right now, with the
shortage of car rentals is so severe, you should try
(40:42):
things like turo, where it's like Airbnb for cars, where
you borrow at a daily cost somebody else's wheels as
a way to save money, but always start with the car.
Um I have a trip to California in a couple
of weeks and the car rental at l a X
(41:05):
the cheapest I could find, believe it or not, was
two hundred ninety dollars a day, so I instead booked
a flight into Burbank, where I was able to get
a car for sixty five a day. I didn't want
to pay sixty five, but it was so much cheaper
than it controlled where I flew into and that is
so not normal. Right, Usually the price, not the airfare,
(41:28):
is the most important factor, and like the the pressure
you're gonna pay for that car rental is negligible. But
in in today, in today's market, that's not true, Like
the car is the most important factor in the tail's
kind of whacking the dog at this point. Yeah, hotels,
I should tell you a key tip on hotels. Hotels
in cities that have a lot of business travel and conventions,
(41:51):
hotels are still ridiculously cheap. And the weird thing is
that hotels in the suburb of a big city on
a freeway now in most cities cost double what a
big in town convention hotel or business travelers hotel we cost. Okay,
all right, that's good to know. And uh, Clark, you
(42:13):
recently you actually like just got back from a cruise, right,
so what's your take on on one people getting back
to cruising? Is that a smart way to go to?
How normal did it feel? And then yeah, are there
a lot of deals to be had if you Yeah,
if you want to get back out there, if you're
into cruising and you're itching to go again, is like
now the time to book one, so it was completely abnormal.
I went on the first cruise to leave a US
(42:36):
ports since coronavirus March of last year, and the requirement
of the cruise line, which was Celebrity, was you had
to be a faxed second shot plus two weeks out
to go on the cruise unless you were a kid
under twelve, and they limited the number of children to
be just very few, so that at a minimum nine
(42:59):
of the path messengers and the crew would be vaccinated.
It was crazy because it was the safest environment I've
been in since March of last year. They also safer
than going to a grocery store right now, Yeah, that's
and they only book thirty six percent of capacity, so
(43:19):
there were very few people on the ship, which meant
it was the nicest cruise I'll ever be on in
my own life because there were so few people. Everything
was available and it was It was absolutely wonderful. But
if you're looking to book cruises um, a lot of
the early bookings are by people that are cruise addicts
(43:41):
who need to have their fix and they're rushing to book,
and you're gonna find that if you look further out
on the calendar, you're gonna see better deals on cruises
then you're gonna see and the ones, the small number
they're going right now where the cruise addicted people are
(44:02):
booking up those cabins at any price to be able
to go. Those folks were just chomping at the bit.
That's some great advice there about travel, Clark. And honestly,
this whole conversation has been awesome. We really appreciate your
insight and your wisdom into the personal finance space, as
you've been in it now for more than we have.
I'll say that. But Clark, where can folks go to
(44:25):
learn more about you and what you're up to? Well,
if they go look for my prison record online just
Clark Howard prison No. Well that in our show notes
your full prisoner all the wrong things you've done in life.
So Clark dot com is our main website, Clark Deals
dot com is our bargain site, and our podcast Clark
(44:48):
dot com slash podcast. And then we also offer free
one on one advice. So if you're having a problem,
concern or question you don't know where to turn what do?
If you go to Clark dot com slash C A
C you'll see how to get free advice from someone
(45:08):
who is a member of Team Clark who wants to
help keep you from getting ripped off or help you
through a financial quandary or consumer problem that you have,
and that is not a scam. That is actually like
one of the only Clark That's the only service I
know of where people volunteer to help other Americans who
have a question about money or a question about a
(45:30):
scam that they might have run into. Um it, it
really is. I mean, You've done a lot of cool
things in your life, and that is one of the coolest.
So yeah, well we'll make sure we link to all
those things in the show notes. But Clark, it was
such a pleasure hanging out with you. Thank you so
much for joining us on the show today. This was great.
Thank you. What a fun conversation that was, Joel, we
just had here with Clark, Howard. Let's be honest, did
(45:50):
it feel weird for you at all talking to your
previous boss essentially? Right? I mean Clark is your boss
like way back in the day. Yeah, well yeah, not
even really hold that long ago, but he was like
your direct boss. I guess when you first came on
board there at sure, I mean yeah, I mean I've
I've worked with him, worked with him for a long time,
so but really it feels like catching up with an
old friendly yeah, because because he really is. Um, Like,
this podcast wouldn't exist without Clark Howard, right, like without
(46:13):
his influence on my life, and and getting to work
with him for so long, um and just being really
inspired by his vision for how money should work in
the lives of individuals. So so many of the things
we talked about on this show are directly influenced by
by him. So uh, yeah, how the money is really
the grandfather of how to money? Yeah, something like that,
(46:34):
and and honestly just a yeah. So it was really
it was good to hang out with with Clark and
uh and catch up and get some of his insights
on a whole lot of different money topics exactly. Yeah,
so all of that note was your big takeaway from
that conversation? Yeah, I'd say, you know that there were
a lot of great things in there, a lot of
specific things to the people can take away and you
used to save money on travel. But yeah, I think
(46:56):
one of the coolest things he said is that, you know,
he's recently increased the amount that he tells people that
they should be saving. And yeah, working on that show,
he always had a dime of every dollar. And I
love that he's increased that because I think you and
I we've said a minimum of fifteen percent of what
you make is what you should be saving, and I
think twenty is an even better thing to shoot for.
And I think he's right that if you if you
(47:17):
get that squared away, if you have that taken care of,
you don't have to worry about every single little decision
when it comes to the money that you're spending. I
think that's when money becomes more of a headache for people.
If you get those big things squared away, um, and
you are saving and investing well with twenty of the
money that you've got coming in, it doesn't really matter
how you spend the other eighty. You know, if of
(47:38):
the rest of that money goes towards your housing costs
because you live so frugally elsewhere, that's fine. You know,
you don't have to agonize over all the small decisions. Yeah, yeah,
so I love that. I think that was probably my
big takeaway. But yeah, a lot of a lot of
good stuff there. What was yours? Ye? Maybe instead of
the principles should be like the twenty eight right, because
like the the idea is that you focus on that first,
like you get that squared away, that everything else takes
(48:00):
care of itself essentially. Well, my big teaga away was
when Clark was talking about consumer advocacy essentially right he was,
and one of the things he said, he said that
there is no playbook when it comes to advocating for yourself.
And I would say that not just when it comes
to not getting ripped off or being you know, making
sure that you're being treated well by a company. This
applies to I think all areas and personal finance now,
(48:22):
because we're we're in an era where we're essentially on
our own, right, you know, like Clark missioned, how pensions
are kind of on their way out, and just all
these different things. Well, I feel that that's only going
to continue down that path, and in the end, no
one is going to truly care about your money as
much as you do, and so it truly is going
to take you being versatile. I don't think there's ever
gonna be a time in your life when you should
(48:43):
feel comfortable saying well, I'm just gonna leave that to
this person. This isn't gonna be something that I'm going
to concern myself with because this is what I do
over here, Like, I just focus on this. Even when
it comes to hiring a financial advisor, A lot of
people assume, Hey, I'm gonna make that move and then
I don't have to worry about it. But that's not
how it works either, exactly. Yeah, and so of kind
around them too. He just talked about personal responsibility and
how that's something we need to just latch onto. Uh
(49:06):
and so, yeah, in all areas of our life, they're
probably needs to be more personal responsibility, but specifically and
especially with our money, with our personal finances, I think
we need to continue to step up in a big
way and to make sure that we are continuing to
do the right things, the smart things with our money. Yeah.
He said, we can be our own worst enemies or
our own best advocate, and that's true, Like we can
(49:29):
essentially be sabotaging ourselves in our own financial future, or
we can be the best cheerleader in our own corner.
Uh And yeah, really, so much of which you're gonna
take is up to you, absolutely, man, All right, let's
go ahead and get back to the beer that you
and I shared on this episode, which, by the way,
it was kind of fun. We we we switched it up
there at the beginning. I never get to say the
part about why we drink up here. I think I
(49:50):
say that occasionally on different episodes, you know, just like
on our Wednesday episodes, but you get to say it
like every time we get to interview somebody. That's kind
of fun to uh bo bowles a little bit there.
But on this episode, you and I enjoyed fruited Berlin
of Ice. Uh. And this is a beer by New
Grass Brewing Company. What were your thoughts on this beer? Yeah?
(50:10):
So that this this one had mango, pineapple, and passion
fruit in it. It was completely tropic. Well like put
a straw in this puppy and I don't know, let
me drink it out of like a skull shaped uh glassware. Uh.
And you say skull because like on the label there's
a skull here. So it kind of makes you think
like hardcore tropical VI. Yeah, I mean this this makes
(50:31):
me feel like this is something I would drink in
a tiki bar, right, Like that's the kind of beer
that this is. And uh, I love that man like
super fruity, a lot of mango and pineapple and this one,
uh and passion fruit shines through too. Just a great
blending of those fruits made this one like truly excellent,
Like this is this is really good. I wasn't expecting
it to be as this good, but I agree with you.
(50:54):
It had tons of fruit, so much fruit that actually
the longer we let it sit here in the glasses,
like we kind of have to give it a little
world to reincorporate the fruit, like the fruits almost like pure. Yeah. Yeah,
some of it would kind of settle down there towards
the bottom. And to some folks out there, that might
sound a little bit gross, but to the hardcore craft
beer fans out there, you know what we're talking about.
And it was really good, like concentrated liquid gold. Well.
They gave a warning here too on the side. I
(51:15):
don't know if you saw that on the side of
the can, and it says warning, highly fruited without pasteurization.
They're just telling you to keep it refrigerated and drink
it fresh. But it did have a ton of fruit,
but at the same time it's still had a good
amount of carbonation, which always impresses me anytime you're able
to have a like a thicker, heavier, fruited sour like this,
a fruited Berliner vice. But then it's still has that
(51:36):
bubbled nous to it. It's there's something magical, there's something
special about the style of beer. And I'm glad that
you and I got to enjoy this one on the
show today. Dude, Yeah, me too, great beer, great convo.
Uh So that was a lot of fun. All right,
Well that's gonna do it for this episode. For folks
who want show notes, will have all the links that
Clark mentioned up on our website at how to money
dot COM's right, so, Joel. Until next time, Best Friends Out,
(51:56):
Best Friends Out. M
Welcome to How the Money. I'm Joel and I am Matt,
and today we're talking about becoming your own consumer advocate
with Clark Howard. Matt usually does the bio, but I'm
(00:28):
going to do the honors on this episode because today
on the show, we're talking with one of my favorite
humans in the world, Clark Howard. And Clark is a
money expert with a heart of gold who hosted his
own radio show for over thirty years, and I had
the pleasure of working with him for fourteen of those years.
He is also the author of ten books, and he
continues to produce a really excellent podcast every day because
(00:52):
somehow he has limitless amounts of energy. But yes, some
of his more impressive accomplishments have been via the work
he spearheads and it Lanna and the surrounding communities, including
his partnership with Habitat for Humanity, his annual Clark's Christmas
Kids broadcasts, which have helped ensure that over a hundred
and fifty thousand kids in foster care received presents on
(01:13):
Christmas Morning that otherwise wouldn't have. So Clark, my friend,
thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
This is so cool. And you hear our dog is
really excited. I hear that's Churchill who's very excited. That's
one of the joys of recording at home. That's right, Clark.
We're yeah, we're so glad to have you on. It's
(01:34):
it's long overdue. And you know, every episode that John
I record, we have a craft beer on the show.
It's a way for us to symbolize that being smart
with your money that is not all about deprivation, right,
there's ways that you can live in the here and
now while also saving for the future and being smart
with your money. So yeah, craft beer is our sort
of splurge. What is your splurge? What is your your
(01:55):
craft beer equivalent that some folks might even say is
like a waste of money, but don't care. You do
it anyway. Super premium ice cream. So my deal is
I watch what I eat six days a week, and
each Sunday is what I call treat Day. And I'm
not going to waste calories on some crappy ice cream.
(02:17):
It's gotta be ultra high butterfact really awful for you
ice cream. And recently I was able to get my
all time favorite ice cream you can buy in a supermarket.
It's a Ben and Jerry's flavor that reappeared recently at
public supermarket and it's called vanilla caramel fudge. And for me,
(02:42):
you know, you will talk about this craftier that one
and how great it is and traveling to this city
or that city to be there. For me, having Ben
and Jerry's Vanilla caramel fudge is my craft beer. Okay,
So you prefer ice cream or custard, because I know
you're a custard fan too. Definitely ice cream, I mean,
(03:03):
custard is good. And uh, there's a place in Milwaukee
I love called Cops Custard. And then in Austin, Texas,
I love Amy's ice Cream. And as I travel around America,
I discover either local or regional ice creams that I
just gotta have Greater's ice Cream in southern Ohio, and
(03:26):
then I have my favorite flavors with each of them.
So the good thing I don't have to worry about hangovers.
I don't have to worry about getting behind the wheel
of a car after over eating ice cream or custard,
and I just have to worry about my belly. But
I feel like that the next thing for you, Clark,
is gonna be a Food Network show now, like you
(03:47):
don't have enough things? Yeah, I want to know the
history behind cops. I want to know the history behind
these different places that you've been to. You know, It's funny,
It'll be as I'm traveling, I'll last somebody and there
you usually hearing from people. You know, a guy traveling
on business, you know what nightclub they should go to
or whatever, And then I say, Hey, what's the best
(04:09):
ice cream in your area? And they look at me
like am I from outer space? That's awesome, Clarke. Let's
talk about your history a little bit, and it's so
much of your ethos and who you've become I feel
like revolves around something that happened to you when you
were in your freshman year at American University. It kind
(04:30):
of changed the way you thought about money, and so yeah,
it feels kind of like this line in the Sands
moment for you, it's like you were a different clerk
before and you're a different clerk after. So yeah, yeah,
can you tell us about that moment and what that
looked like for you? Yeah, some of it was already
in me about being thrifty, it was part of what
(04:50):
made me up. But it was kind of fun, and
then it became serious as could be. My dad had
worked for his father in law's business for pretty much
his whole adult life. After serving in the army during
World War Two, he came back and had married my
mom and went to work for his his father in law.
(05:14):
And then the decades go on and his father in
law passes away, and then his brothers in law running
the company, and they decide one day that they don't
need him anymore. And he'd been there for thirty years.
And my parents had always lived a really high end lifestyle,
(05:36):
and I thought that they were just rich as could be.
I mean, who knows as a teenager, but it seemed
like they were really wealthy. And I didn't even know
my dad had been fired until I came home at
Thanksgiving and there was just a terrible spirit around the
house and everybody was somber. And when I got to
(05:57):
dinner that first night, my dad asked me to stay
at the table after dinner, and I was like, okay,
so is it he's dying? Who knows what? And he said,
I have terrible news for you. He said, I got
fired from my job, and I started smiling year at
a year and he says, why are you smiling? And
I said, well, I thought you were dying. And at
that point he kind of laughs and he realized maybe
(06:19):
it wasn't is hideous a turn in his life as
he thought. And then he goes on to say, and
I don't know if there's money for you to go
back to college in January. And then I was like what,
because I didn't realize my parents spent every penny that
came in and uh, they were kind of like a look,
see at what happened with America later on, you know,
(06:41):
where people became real spenders and borrowers and all that.
And so I went back to college and re enrolled
as a night student. I went to a college American
you that had as many nights students, if not more
than day students. So it's pretty easy to re register
as a night student. I went and scrambled and got
a full time job. And back then, tuition was cheap
(07:05):
enough that I could pay my own way through. A
year of tuition was twenty four hundred dollars at a
private school. So the hundred that I had to come
up with even when dollars were more precious back then.
Was something I could do, you know, working full time,
and I paid my way through college. But I resolved
(07:26):
that I was never gonna allow myself ever to create
the financial insecurity my parents had created for themselves. And
they were fortunate that after a few years I got
back on their feet financially. And it was great for
me because when I finished graduate school, I made the
decision that I was going to live on every other
(07:49):
paycheck and that's how I lived my life, and it
was it really worked out well, knowing that I was
always building up a cushion, and when you live on
half of what you make, it means that your whole
lifestyle is under control and you never have to work
(08:13):
in a job you hate. You can follow what you
really want to do. And so today, obviously this is
part of the fire movement what I did, but there
was nothing like it or thought about at that time.
It was just a basic fundamental thing that I wanted
(08:34):
money to create security for me, not fear. That's right,
having those options available to you, right, Clark, Uh, Yeah,
And so shortly after college, you started a travel business
when you were twenty five. Actually, my path is really
uh circuitous. After graduate school, I actually started an alternative school.
(09:00):
It was called Career Action. And at the school we
taught people who had maybe not finished high school or
had not been able to find direction in their lives
as young adults. We got them caught up academically and
taught them workplace skills and help them find work. And
(09:21):
career action that I started when I was twenty three,
and then I went two years later and started my
travel agency. So remember I started with Career Action was
the alternative school I started. So then I named my
travel agency Action Travel. So action became very much common
(09:43):
about the interested in h and travel back then, Like like,
what made you want to start that business? Okay, that's
a wonderful question. This is not going to make any
sense to you. I mean, it explains something to you.
It's gonna be like it couldn't have been. But up
the through the nineteen seventies, going back all the way
to I guess the nineteen thirties, the government set the
(10:08):
prices and who could participate in several sectors of the economy, trucking, trains, telephones,
and air travel. Uh, let's say you want to fly somewhere.
You wanted to fly from New York to Chicago. The
government decided what airlines could fly the route, what time
(10:30):
of day they could fly, how many days a week
they could fly, how many seats the airplane could have,
and what fares could be charged. Everything was decided by
the government by an agency called the Civil Aeronautics Sport Well.
I was a big believer in free markets, and back
in the era of Jimmy Carter, he had the same
(10:53):
kind of feeling. So he during his presidency deregulated the trucks,
the trains, and the airplanes. And my belief was the U. S.
Economy would just take off bad pun is these sectors
of the economy opened up. So I was like, you
know what, I wanna be in on this because people
(11:16):
love to travel, they just never could buy airplane. And
so that's why I opened an agency and eighty one.
And sure enough I was lucky or right or both,
and the industry came alive and people started flying who
had never considered going on an airplane. And I was
(11:37):
in the right place at the right time. And I
opened one agency and another another another ended up with
five offices by the time I was thirty years old Wow.
But then you ended up selling that business unexpectedly just
like a year later. Right now, it's so cool, joll
you You never want to be the one trying to
(11:59):
sell a business. I wasn't trying to sell action travel,
but I got approached by this group of men who
had been with a travel company in Dayton, Ohio, who
were looking to uh do are called roll ups by
local agencies in different fast growing cities in the South
and the West. And they had secret shopped various agencies
(12:22):
and they decided that in Atlanta, I had the agency
they wanted. And so you always make more money selling
when you're not for sale. No, no, let me convince
you that I've just found it. So I sold it
and they kicked me out the door right away, and
(12:45):
I moved to a place called Pontevedra, Florida, and became
a beach bump without any goal or intention or anything
to work. At the end, basically achieved fire, you know,
just like you said, Clark at that point, Yeah, you're
basically hanging at the beach all day. What were those
what were those years like after you sold the business,
(13:06):
were you, you know, did you get bored? What were
your thoughts at that point in time in your life.
So I was pretty beat from running my business, and
at first I didn't need to do anything. I was
just really happy to have the freedom and not always
be worried about meeting payroll and expenses and dealing with
(13:28):
the demands of owning a business. And I remember so
clearly something that would I had become a really terrible
sleep or running my own business, and I'd wake up
with anxiety a lot of times in the middle of
the night, or wake up like four thirty or five
in the morning, couldn't go back to sleep, typical entrepreneur
kind of stuff. And the first night after I sold
(13:50):
the business, I slept thirteen hours. I haven't slept thirteen
hours since taking up for time. They're no kidding, And
I just had the best time. I had gotten out
of shape running a business, because you know, running a business,
it can be seven days a week, and so I
(14:12):
started doing buyathline stuff. I was biking a minimum twenty
miles a day and swimming a minimum two miles a day,
and so I started becoming obsessed instead of running a
business with fitness, and after a while I did start
to get bored. Truth to be told I was doing that,
(14:32):
And then out of nowhere, I got a call from
a radio station familiar to Joel and me. Uh then
w GST Radio asking me to be a guest one
Sunday on a weekend travel show they had. And everything
that's happened to me since in media and broadcasting and
(14:54):
podcasting and the websites, all that all started from one crazy, unexpected,
random guest appearance on the radio. Well, it's I mean,
it's fascinating to see how far that's taking you, especially
considering it feels like you almost lived another life previous
to this life that you're currently living. Um. I want
(15:15):
to ask you, like get to some other more personal
questions to just about kind of like what makes you
up when it comes to how you view money? And
some folks have called you cheap and in fact, you
actually call yourself cheap. Matt and I kind of had
debated this topic on the show before, frugal versus cheap um,
but you're like happy to say that you're the cheap
guy so um, and that you're actually willing to buy
(15:36):
infeor products in order to spend less money. So what
made you embrace the cheap guy? Moniker um and what
and what makes you willing to shop for the cheapest
stuff around um? And And sometimes I feel like, yeah,
you prioritize the inexpensive over um quality, right, Yeah. So
the heart of that is a lot of people feel
(15:57):
like they have to keep up appearances. A lot of
people think brand names are important. A lot of people
gravitate towards spending money they probably can't afford to spend
because they feel like in order to fit in, they've
got to have you know, a woman's got to have
this particular brand of this, or guy's got to have
this this other brand of that or whatever. And I
(16:21):
embrace the cheapness thing because the brand you should be
after is your own financial security. Not having a label
on something that you wear that somehow makes it feel
like you fit in. So for me, the reason I
I am that way is it's part of who I am.
(16:42):
And I also want people to understand that it's this
thing I do with kids. Whenever I used to speak
to groups of kids, I would show a picture of
a fancy house, a fancy car, and all kinds of possessions,
and I'd say that was family one, and then I'd
show another pick sure of an old, beat up car
and you know, a simple house and that kind of thing.
(17:05):
And I'd asked the kids, and it didn't seem to
matter if they were fifth grade or twelfth grade. I'd say,
which is the millionaire family? And almost without exception, or
nearly of kids I would talk to always said the
one with the fancy house and fancy car and all
the fancy stuff was the wealthy family. But the reality is,
(17:29):
possessions make you poorer. Money that you can invest and
you have and living on less than what you make
is what creates the financial security. So the whole thing
about being careful with every dollar and being excited about
a bargain I get a dollar tree. It's not a joke.
(17:50):
It's it's a core principle. And my brother, my oldest brother,
was giving me a hard time today because one of
the tires on our car needed air and I'm there
with a bicycle pump pumping air and the tire and
he's like, why don't you just go to the gas
station nearby it's called Gate. Why don't I go to
(18:12):
Gate and pump up the tire? And I'm like, it
costs a dollar, I'm not going to spend a dollar
to pump up that tire when I can do it myself,
and I'll get exercise at the same time you're getting
the exercise exactly. I feel like there's an additional benefit there, right, Clark.
I feel like your your cheapness epitomizes just the pushback
(18:34):
against consumer culture, right, and so for that reason, we
we certainly appreciate how you approach money. We're gonna take
a quick break, and we've got a lot more topics
that we want to get to, including becoming a consumer advocate,
and so we'll get to those topics right after this break.
(18:57):
We're back from the break, we're still talking with Clark.
How and uh, Clark, I feel like, if anything has
changed since you've started your radio show, since you've started
giving financial advice on the air, it's that the world
of personal finance is a whole lot more complex. So how,
in your opinion, has the arena of financial advice changed
(19:18):
over the decades since you really started talking about money
with Peovil. In some ways things are much much better,
and in others it's become much more difficult. So if
you go back and time, um, only the very wealthiest
among us could even buy stocks. The trading fees to
(19:39):
buy stocks was through the roof. It was not at
all unusual that one trade of a purchase of stock
or sale of stock would cost you four hundred dollars.
Today that trade is free or nearly so, depending on
where you go. That all really got too free because
of robin hood, which I can say a lot about anyway.
(20:02):
But the other thing is that if you bought what
what people bought a lot if they didn't have a
lot of money. Mutual funds, you had to pay a
giant commission, either upfront or over time, known as a
load charge. So out of every dollar you put in,
you basically were investing only ninety four cents because the
(20:24):
rest would be taken in commissions and you had all
the fees. So the changes that have happened with index
funds and Vanguard being the second largest financial house in
the world and all the um E t FS exchange
traded funds, all the ways that people can invest now
(20:44):
it's actually made it potentially much much more cost effective
and democratized it where even from the first dollar, you
can walk in a Fidelity investments office with a dollar
and open an account and buy a zero cost index
fund from Fidelity, So a lot of things are far
(21:06):
far better. The problem today is that a lot of us,
as investors or would be investors, take this freedom and
we put ourselves into trouble by doing a lot of
rapid fire buying and selling, doing a lot of speculating
and the rest. So we have this freedom two invest
(21:31):
without drama and basically at no to almost no cost,
but we tend to complicate our lives by doing a
lot of really crazy kind of speculative kind of stuff.
And I've seen it with my fifteen year old son
who's been in this stock simulation game at school that okay,
(21:54):
so wait a minute, he thinks a long term holding
of a stock is seven days. Uh. So that is
a situation where we we have the ability to try
to have the discipline to just put money aside, spread
(22:14):
it out at no to low cost, build up money
for the future. But that's boring. So a lot of
people want the drama. They want to do the crypto,
or they want to buy the latest I p O,
or they want to get into the latest meme stock
like um, what game stop or the theater chain was
(22:38):
a MC and so it's hard to get people focused
on just worrying about the fundamentals, which is creating financial
security for yourself, when it's so much more fun to
get on robin hood and gamify investing and buy and
sell and buy and sell and buy and sell. Know,
(23:01):
you know, the enemy is really who you look at
in the mirror now, where if you go back even
fifteen years ago, the enemy was the high cost of
investing that, thank goodness, now are gone. Yeah. Yeah, the
institutions exist, the structure is there for us to take
advantage of, to invest in a in a smart wise way.
(23:21):
But like you said, we are our own worst enemy
at this point, Clark, let's talk about consumer advocacy. That's
just a core part of the show that you've been
doing for over over thirty years. Now. Uh, there aren't
that many voices out there that speak for consumers, and
so yeah, how do you see your role in that arena?
My job is to reach and teach. I want people
(23:43):
to know that you and I have more power than
we give ourselves credit for. And so often I hear
from people who sound defeated when they run up against
corporate bureaucracy before they've even tried anything and and so
I want people to know that they can be their
(24:04):
own best advocate. And if somebody is taking advantage of them,
mistreating them, or if it's just a big, unfeeling corporate
bureaucracy that doesn't have his act together, you don't have
to take it. And there is no one playbook. You
have to be versatile to take on an organization or
(24:27):
a company that's not doing right by you. And so
that's why this is so important to me. You know,
so much of the common theme and what I do
is about seizing personal power and personal responsibility. That there's
so many things we can do for ourselves in a
(24:47):
time that it feels harder. You know, we're dealing with big,
remote organizations were generally not dealing with local people anymore,
and so it's it's harder for people to navigate, but
you sure can. Yeah, and not only Clark do you
talk about specific companies when they're doing the wrong thing
(25:09):
by consumers um. But you're also passionate about empowering people
to solve their own problems. You want to help folks
be able to advocate for themselves. So, in your opinion,
what is it that prevents people from advocating on their
own behalf most of the time. And then you know,
what are some maybe specific ways that we can stick
up for ourselves more, especially as we're dealing with more
(25:29):
like nameless, faceless companies. Sure, I mean a lot of
it is there's a lot of alienation in society that
people feel like the deck is stacked against them and
why would they even try? And yeah, there's obviously always
throughout human history been on fairness. It's just how that manifests.
(25:50):
And today the equalizer is a company's reputation. It used
to be that if you had a problem with a company,
nobody else would ever know. But today one of the
greatest powers you have is the combination of humor, brevity,
(26:11):
and social media. I think back years ago, the first
clear eureka moment where I really realized the power of
those three things together was something before social media was
particularly prominent, was something called United Breaks Guitars and Joel
(26:33):
you may remember that, remember that video for sure. Yeah,
So this guy who was a Canadian musician was flying
on United Airlines and they broke his treasured guitar that
he was supposed to use performing, and United told him
to pound sand and so he had tried to deal
(26:54):
with United unfeeling uncaring bureaucracy and came up, uh, you know,
zero in response. And so then he wrote and sang
and posted on YouTube a very clever video that had
humor about United breaking his guitar. And that, for me
(27:15):
was a key understanding how you get these big corporations
to respond, because United, that had done nothing for six
weeks suddenly fell all over themselves making it right and
getting this Canadian singer a new guitar. And that's when
I realized that social media, with all its goods and bads,
(27:40):
is one of the most effective tools when a company
is treating like dirt to get the word out there.
And again, what was the second thing I said? Brevity.
If you start writing seven hundred page novel about what
happened to you, he's gonna read it, and the people
(28:01):
who start reading it are all just going to decide
you're the problem and you're crazy, right, right, So humor
and a short, short explanation about what's wrong and key
what you want to make it right. Nobody um gets
excited about hearing about your complaint and going on and
(28:25):
on and whining about what happened what's key is to
state your case and what you want to make it right,
and don't be ridiculous, and what you want to make
it right, be reasonable and that will get results on
my own personal airplane United, That's what I want. Yeah,
how about that my old guitar? Yeah. Yeah. A part
(28:49):
of consumer advocacy certainly is this holding companies accountable for
when they misbehave and whatnot. But it's also about just
finding the folks who are who are praying on you, right,
like folks who are going after you. You talk about
scams a good bit on your show. Uh yeah, So
how have you seen those evolve over the years in
sophistication and specific to today as more folks are kind
(29:10):
of re emerging from their homes and kind of re
entering society, have you seen scams take another form? You know,
in the recent sixteen months or so, You know, scams
have only the vehicle of transmitting them has changed and
then and some of the cons have what they pose
has changed, but the core of what makes a scam
(29:35):
has never changed in the nearly thirty five years I've
been doing this. So you have situations that involved potentially
greed that come forward with the scam Hey I got
something for you. This is a great dealing you got
you can't tell anybody about, but you gotta do it
right now. That's not as common as the scams that
(29:57):
pretend that you must act to meet ly or terrible
things are going to happen to you, like the fake
fraud alerts and the notices from the pretextings where we
get uh text or email or whatever pretending to be
from an organization we do business with trying to verify something. Lately,
(30:18):
there's been the very prominent one with Amazon where they
say your shipment is coming blah blah blah, and you're like,
I didn't order that, We'll just click here, and before
you know it, you've given your Amazon credentials to a
crook who then is buying stuff as if they're you.
So the sense of urgency aspect and the fact that
(30:40):
we're doing most of this on our phones and we're
distracted at the same time, we tend to be more
likely to not keep our guard up, click on something
and create the web of troubles that follow. Yeah, there
were some recent stats to clark about how younger folks
are now we're susceptible to scams, like so many the
(31:01):
digital scams that are taking place. So I think for
for a time it was assumed that, well, it's only
people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties that are falling
for some of these scams, but now really it's a
lot of twenty somethings and thirty some things that are
falling falling victim to scams on Twitter or scams in
their email. They're they're they're getting better at targeting a
younger audience that is more likely to click on something
(31:24):
like that. And that's because if you watch somebody and
watch it any place you're at, it could be a restaurant,
it could be at a red light, anywhere you are,
you'll see that the cell phone is forever present in
front of the eyeballs of every person under age thirty five,
(31:45):
almost without exception. And so that's much more common with
people under thirty five than it is, particularly with people
over fifty. And so scams so heavily used to target
people that were elderly, but today, because of the cell
phone always being engaged, that's why it's moved so heavily
(32:10):
to people that are younger. Yeah, alright, Clark, we got
a few more questions to get to, including we want
to talk about travel. Since you are the travel guru,
We've got a few questions about saving money on travel,
especially as more and more people want to travel. We'll
we'll get to that and a few more questions right
after this break. All right, we're talking with Clark. Howard
(32:37):
and Clark, We've got a question for you about sort
of the cultural view, I guess of of money here
in the United States. You know, we live in the
richest country in like the history of the world, but
even still a huge swath of the population is just
loaded up with debt and savings rates are also pretty paltry.
But that has also changed a bit recently. Why do
(32:59):
you think that is, like, what do you think is
going to cause this change in the population in the
United States. Well, there's a segment of Americans who really
are just flat out struggling. And it's not because they're
crazy with their money. They don't make enough and come
and so you may have of Americans that are wheezing
(33:24):
because their work is irregular or what they make per
hours too small, and so for people in roughly that
one in five of American adults hopefully in the future,
it looks like base pay rates are gonna rise, and
that will be a big help to that segment of
(33:46):
the population. You see it all around as you go
is stores, restaurants, businesses that you can see they're posted
wage rates, they're raising those rates. They're offering benefits they
haven't offered before, and there will be a big societal
benefit if that trend holds. But that's only roughly one
(34:09):
in five Americans. If you look at people from UH
of income on up to eight of income of the country,
you know, not the top of earners, not the bottom.
It is overwhelmingly lifestyle choices that have gotten people in
over their heads with finance. And it's so easy now
(34:33):
because credit is so widely available, and I have a
strong belief that the ability to pay for things electronically
like with our phones or use a credit card, debit card,
store value card, whatever, that we don't feel the spending
the way prior generations did when they'd have to pull
(34:56):
out actual cash. And so I think that has been
for roughly sixty of the American people. The big problem
the ready access to seemingly unlimited amounts of credit and
the fact that we don't feel the spending as we spend.
(35:17):
So Clark, I want to ask you about lifestyle creep then,
because for some of those people, I agree. I think
that the lack of physical attachment to the money that
you're spending sometimes makes us spend a little more freely.
And then we're like, when we get the credit card bill,
we're like, oh, man, I didn't realize it was going
to be that high. But um, yeah, when we're talking
about inflating our lifestyles, when is it okay in your opinion?
(35:38):
And when is it not okay? How should people think
about um as they get a pay increase or um
as their financial situation does improve, Like, how much of
that increase should be funneled towards actually increasing their lifestyle versus,
you know, saving or investing more. Yeah, wonderful question because
there is no one right answer to this, but miably
(36:00):
is that it starts with putting aside a big chunk
of your money first, and then what you do with
the rest of your money, even if it gets kind
of foolish, as long as you start by saving a
significant portion of what you make, you are setting yourself
up for success instead of failure. And as your pay
(36:21):
rate goes up and you're saving a set percent of
your pay, you're the amount you're putting aside living on
less than when you make goes up to and i'd
say today because we overwhelmingly don't have pensions, that if
you want to have real comfort in your life, you
need to save twenty cents of every dollar you make
(36:44):
to create real financial security. And over the years, I've
said a dime of every dollar, and that's the base
case that you condition your life where you're living on
nineties cents of every dollar. But if you really want
to create comfort, and especially as you progress hopefully income
wise over your lifetime, you want to get it to
(37:07):
that twenty cents on the dollar, and then beyond that,
if you want to do whatever crazy with the other
eight cents, go for it. It feel like that takes
a lot of the decision making out of those moments
where you're like, oh, should we buy this or should
we not? Like, is this one area in life where
we can splurge a little bit more? Well, if it
(37:28):
fits within that, then it's not a question of whether
or not that's something you should or shouldn't do. It's
just a matter of do I like that am I
going to prioritize that. Stop from the handwringing, I guess exactly?
Does that sound fun? But Clark, I love that. Uh.
We also wanted to get back to travel for a minute.
You've traveled a ton of your life. Used to work
in the business, but so much has changed since you
(37:50):
owned you know, your own travel agency. Now folks can
book their own travel. They can do it pretty cheaply.
You can use Google flights. What are your best tips
for folks who to see the world without spending a
ton of money. We're going back to, at least for
the next year, two very historical patterns of peak and
(38:11):
off peak pricing. People that are trying to travel right now.
There was so much pent up demand from the time
period we were locked down during the pandemic that prices
for everything hotels, airbnbs, car rentals, flights are unbelievably high,
(38:32):
and so July and August if you care about money,
and the first half of September sit it out. Sit
out these next two months, and then in the fall
that's when the deals are starting to reappear. A lot
of people um benefit from kids being back at school
(38:53):
and travel demand drops a lot in the fall, and
so we're gonna have great opportunities to travel now through
mar Arch of next year, except right around Thanksgiving and
and right around Christmas. And the absolute bargains this year
also have gone to historical patterns, and that is the
first two weeks of December right after Thanksgiving and again
(39:16):
January right after the end of the Christmas New Year's
holiday period. Prices looking right now are so cheap, I
can't believe it. And Clark so off peak. And the
time that you travel like that, specific days that you
travel and being flexible with those days, those are obviously
ways to to save more money when you're going somewhere.
(39:38):
What about specific websites? Do you have, like some specific
sites to your favorites when it comes to saving money
on lodging or the all expensive car rental right now, like, yeah,
what are some of your favorite sites to use? All right, well,
let's go with the car rental for a second, because
this is the oddest part of what's been going on.
The car rental fleets were purged last year when the
(39:59):
car rental agency is we're just trying to hang on.
Hurts went through bankruptcy, the others barely avoided it and
they were able to survive by selling off their vehicle fleets. Well,
now they're way short of vehicles, just as travel as
come back to life, So you have to turn the
whole thing upside down. And before you book nonrefundable air,
(40:20):
before you book any hotel, make sure you can afford
the car rental if you're gonna need one, and you
can try things like rental cars dot Com if your
costc member. Cost Go Travel offers some of the best
rates on car rentals. But also right now, with the
shortage of car rentals is so severe, you should try
(40:42):
things like turo, where it's like Airbnb for cars, where
you borrow at a daily cost somebody else's wheels as
a way to save money, but always start with the car.
Um I have a trip to California in a couple
of weeks and the car rental at l a X
(41:05):
the cheapest I could find, believe it or not, was
two hundred ninety dollars a day, so I instead booked
a flight into Burbank, where I was able to get
a car for sixty five a day. I didn't want
to pay sixty five, but it was so much cheaper
than it controlled where I flew into and that is
so not normal. Right, Usually the price, not the airfare,
(41:28):
is the most important factor, and like the the pressure
you're gonna pay for that car rental is negligible. But
in in today, in today's market, that's not true, Like
the car is the most important factor in the tail's
kind of whacking the dog at this point. Yeah, hotels,
I should tell you a key tip on hotels. Hotels
in cities that have a lot of business travel and conventions,
(41:51):
hotels are still ridiculously cheap. And the weird thing is
that hotels in the suburb of a big city on
a freeway now in most cities cost double what a
big in town convention hotel or business travelers hotel we cost. Okay,
all right, that's good to know. And uh, Clark, you
(42:13):
recently you actually like just got back from a cruise, right,
so what's your take on on one people getting back
to cruising? Is that a smart way to go to?
How normal did it feel? And then yeah, are there
a lot of deals to be had if you Yeah,
if you want to get back out there, if you're
into cruising and you're itching to go again, is like
now the time to book one, so it was completely abnormal.
I went on the first cruise to leave a US
(42:36):
ports since coronavirus March of last year, and the requirement
of the cruise line, which was Celebrity, was you had
to be a faxed second shot plus two weeks out
to go on the cruise unless you were a kid
under twelve, and they limited the number of children to
be just very few, so that at a minimum nine
(42:59):
of the path messengers and the crew would be vaccinated.
It was crazy because it was the safest environment I've
been in since March of last year. They also safer
than going to a grocery store right now, Yeah, that's
and they only book thirty six percent of capacity, so
(43:19):
there were very few people on the ship, which meant
it was the nicest cruise I'll ever be on in
my own life because there were so few people. Everything
was available and it was It was absolutely wonderful. But
if you're looking to book cruises um, a lot of
the early bookings are by people that are cruise addicts
(43:41):
who need to have their fix and they're rushing to book,
and you're gonna find that if you look further out
on the calendar, you're gonna see better deals on cruises
then you're gonna see and the ones, the small number
they're going right now where the cruise addicted people are
(44:02):
booking up those cabins at any price to be able
to go. Those folks were just chomping at the bit.
That's some great advice there about travel, Clark. And honestly,
this whole conversation has been awesome. We really appreciate your
insight and your wisdom into the personal finance space, as
you've been in it now for more than we have.
I'll say that. But Clark, where can folks go to
(44:25):
learn more about you and what you're up to? Well,
if they go look for my prison record online just
Clark Howard prison No. Well that in our show notes
your full prisoner all the wrong things you've done in life.
So Clark dot com is our main website, Clark Deals
dot com is our bargain site, and our podcast Clark
(44:48):
dot com slash podcast. And then we also offer free
one on one advice. So if you're having a problem,
concern or question you don't know where to turn what do?
If you go to Clark dot com slash C A
C you'll see how to get free advice from someone
(45:08):
who is a member of Team Clark who wants to
help keep you from getting ripped off or help you
through a financial quandary or consumer problem that you have,
and that is not a scam. That is actually like
one of the only Clark That's the only service I
know of where people volunteer to help other Americans who
have a question about money or a question about a
(45:30):
scam that they might have run into. Um it, it
really is. I mean, You've done a lot of cool
things in your life, and that is one of the coolest.
So yeah, well we'll make sure we link to all
those things in the show notes. But Clark, it was
such a pleasure hanging out with you. Thank you so
much for joining us on the show today. This was great.
Thank you. What a fun conversation that was, Joel, we
just had here with Clark, Howard. Let's be honest, did
(45:50):
it feel weird for you at all talking to your
previous boss essentially? Right? I mean Clark is your boss
like way back in the day. Yeah, well yeah, not
even really hold that long ago, but he was like
your direct boss. I guess when you first came on
board there at sure, I mean yeah, I mean I've
I've worked with him, worked with him for a long time,
so but really it feels like catching up with an
old friendly yeah, because because he really is. Um, Like,
this podcast wouldn't exist without Clark Howard, right, like without
(46:13):
his influence on my life, and and getting to work
with him for so long, um and just being really
inspired by his vision for how money should work in
the lives of individuals. So so many of the things
we talked about on this show are directly influenced by
by him. So uh, yeah, how the money is really
the grandfather of how to money? Yeah, something like that,
(46:34):
and and honestly just a yeah. So it was really
it was good to hang out with with Clark and
uh and catch up and get some of his insights
on a whole lot of different money topics exactly. Yeah,
so all of that note was your big takeaway from
that conversation? Yeah, I'd say, you know that there were
a lot of great things in there, a lot of
specific things to the people can take away and you
used to save money on travel. But yeah, I think
(46:56):
one of the coolest things he said is that, you know,
he's recently increased the amount that he tells people that
they should be saving. And yeah, working on that show,
he always had a dime of every dollar. And I
love that he's increased that because I think you and
I we've said a minimum of fifteen percent of what
you make is what you should be saving, and I
think twenty is an even better thing to shoot for.
And I think he's right that if you if you
(47:17):
get that squared away, if you have that taken care of,
you don't have to worry about every single little decision
when it comes to the money that you're spending. I
think that's when money becomes more of a headache for people.
If you get those big things squared away, um, and
you are saving and investing well with twenty of the
money that you've got coming in, it doesn't really matter
how you spend the other eighty. You know, if of
(47:38):
the rest of that money goes towards your housing costs
because you live so frugally elsewhere, that's fine. You know,
you don't have to agonize over all the small decisions. Yeah, yeah,
so I love that. I think that was probably my
big takeaway. But yeah, a lot of a lot of
good stuff there. What was yours? Ye? Maybe instead of
the principles should be like the twenty eight right, because
like the the idea is that you focus on that first,
like you get that squared away, that everything else takes
(48:00):
care of itself essentially. Well, my big teaga away was
when Clark was talking about consumer advocacy essentially right he was,
and one of the things he said, he said that
there is no playbook when it comes to advocating for yourself.
And I would say that not just when it comes
to not getting ripped off or being you know, making
sure that you're being treated well by a company. This
applies to I think all areas and personal finance now,
(48:22):
because we're we're in an era where we're essentially on
our own, right, you know, like Clark missioned, how pensions
are kind of on their way out, and just all
these different things. Well, I feel that that's only going
to continue down that path, and in the end, no
one is going to truly care about your money as
much as you do, and so it truly is going
to take you being versatile. I don't think there's ever
gonna be a time in your life when you should
(48:43):
feel comfortable saying well, I'm just gonna leave that to
this person. This isn't gonna be something that I'm going
to concern myself with because this is what I do
over here, Like, I just focus on this. Even when
it comes to hiring a financial advisor, A lot of
people assume, Hey, I'm gonna make that move and then
I don't have to worry about it. But that's not
how it works either, exactly. Yeah, and so of kind
around them too. He just talked about personal responsibility and
how that's something we need to just latch onto. Uh
(49:06):
and so, yeah, in all areas of our life, they're
probably needs to be more personal responsibility, but specifically and
especially with our money, with our personal finances, I think
we need to continue to step up in a big
way and to make sure that we are continuing to
do the right things, the smart things with our money. Yeah.
He said, we can be our own worst enemies or
our own best advocate, and that's true, Like we can
(49:29):
essentially be sabotaging ourselves in our own financial future, or
we can be the best cheerleader in our own corner.
Uh And yeah, really, so much of which you're gonna
take is up to you, absolutely, man, All right, let's
go ahead and get back to the beer that you
and I shared on this episode, which, by the way,
it was kind of fun. We we we switched it up
there at the beginning. I never get to say the
part about why we drink up here. I think I
(49:50):
say that occasionally on different episodes, you know, just like
on our Wednesday episodes, but you get to say it
like every time we get to interview somebody. That's kind
of fun to uh bo bowles a little bit there.
But on this episode, you and I enjoyed fruited Berlin
of Ice. Uh. And this is a beer by New
Grass Brewing Company. What were your thoughts on this beer? Yeah?
(50:10):
So that this this one had mango, pineapple, and passion
fruit in it. It was completely tropic. Well like put
a straw in this puppy and I don't know, let
me drink it out of like a skull shaped uh glassware. Uh.
And you say skull because like on the label there's
a skull here. So it kind of makes you think
like hardcore tropical VI. Yeah, I mean this this makes
(50:31):
me feel like this is something I would drink in
a tiki bar, right, Like that's the kind of beer
that this is. And uh, I love that man like
super fruity, a lot of mango and pineapple and this one,
uh and passion fruit shines through too. Just a great
blending of those fruits made this one like truly excellent,
Like this is this is really good. I wasn't expecting
it to be as this good, but I agree with you.
(50:54):
It had tons of fruit, so much fruit that actually
the longer we let it sit here in the glasses,
like we kind of have to give it a little
world to reincorporate the fruit, like the fruits almost like pure. Yeah. Yeah,
some of it would kind of settle down there towards
the bottom. And to some folks out there, that might
sound a little bit gross, but to the hardcore craft
beer fans out there, you know what we're talking about.
And it was really good, like concentrated liquid gold. Well.
They gave a warning here too on the side. I
(51:15):
don't know if you saw that on the side of
the can, and it says warning, highly fruited without pasteurization.
They're just telling you to keep it refrigerated and drink
it fresh. But it did have a ton of fruit,
but at the same time it's still had a good
amount of carbonation, which always impresses me anytime you're able
to have a like a thicker, heavier, fruited sour like this,
a fruited Berliner vice. But then it's still has that
(51:36):
bubbled nous to it. It's there's something magical, there's something
special about the style of beer. And I'm glad that
you and I got to enjoy this one on the
show today. Dude, Yeah, me too, great beer, great convo.
Uh So that was a lot of fun. All right,
Well that's gonna do it for this episode. For folks
who want show notes, will have all the links that
Clark mentioned up on our website at how to money
dot COM's right, so, Joel. Until next time, Best Friends Out,
(51:56):
Best Friends Out. M
Hosts And Creators
Joel Larsgaard
Matthew Altmix
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