October 15, 2025 • 53 mins
Our guest today is a self professed personal finance oddball! Len Penzo spent 35 years in the aerospace industry before retiring at age 58 as an electrical engineer. Along the way he launched LenPenzo.com in December 2008 (he even helped to give Joel a start writing personal finance content back in the day). Since then, the blog has drawn millions of readers and earned awards from publications like Kiplinger. Len’s work has appeared in outlets like Forbes, Time, Business Insider, CBS MoneyWatch, and he’s been featured on radio and TV segments. And he now has a new book out called True Money Stories that’s about the intersection of money and family life. We discuss:
- Intelligence vs. financial management
- Running household finances like a business
- The importance of honesty in personal finance
- Allowing children to make financial mistakes
- The annual sandwich survey and inflation
- Navigating retirement and long-term care
- And much more!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel, and today I'm
talking money truce. You won't hear anywhere else with Len Penzo. Okay,
(00:26):
So I've always appreciated oddballs. My guest today he fits
the description, and he's publicly willing to admit it. If
you're looking for generic personal finance content, you're not going
to find it in his writings. When I was first
trying to figure out how I could contribute to the
personal finance community, something I was like really interested in doing,
I started off writing on the internet, mostly because TikTok
didn't exist yet. Well, Len Penzo allowed me to contribute
(00:49):
to his already successful blog. I will not link to
that post in the show notes because it's old and bad,
but it is a testament to the beautiful community of
personal finance nerds and to Len's graciousness as well. Lenn
has a new book out. It's called True Money Stories.
It's about the intersection of personal finance and family life.
So I'm excited to pick his brain today on the podcast. Len,
(01:13):
thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Joel, thank you for having me on your terrific show podcast.
I'm honored.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
It's a pleasure to have you my friend. And yeah,
you and I've been corresponding for many years, although we've
never had a sit down chat like this, so I'm
excited to get to talk to you in a long
form way. My first question, though, of course, is going
to be what your craft beer equivalent? What does len
Penzo like disploy John? Even though he is so you're
so smart with your money, You're so thoughtful about saving,
(01:41):
investing for the future. But there's got to be something
you're like spending a lot of money on now that
people think is a little weird.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, and it is weird, probably for most people, but
I believe it. I'm a model train buff. I model
an end scale and I have a weakness for buying
anything related to the end scale model railroad hobby. So
I always always splurging on that.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Always how expensive of a hobby is this? Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
You know, it can be very expensive. So if you
want to buy just, for example, just a locomotive for
example that pools your little pulls the little cars behind it, right,
those run over two hundred dollars each.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, So and just give you.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
An I have, I think I have, gosh, I bet
you I have twenty five locomotives alone, So you can
do that just on the locomotive, so it doesn't count
all the modeling, all the models you have to buy,
the buildings and the track and the all the electronics stuff.
I mean, it's thousands and thousands of dollars over time.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Would you ever go into like Walt Disney territory and
build your own little railroad in your backyard? Is it hobby? Get?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
What is that has that called? I think that's I
can't remember which gauge that is. Is that g or
O or it's huge? And I've seen some fantastic have
you ever seen on the internet? You can go online
on YouTube, so you're getting me all excited here. You
can go online and see people's backyard railroads that they
built themselves, where they you know, these grown men, these
grown old men like myself, can sit on these locomotives
(03:14):
and they pull you can pull kids and whatever in
the cars behind, and they have beautiful setups in their backyards.
Just just just fantastic, just really it's really awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I cant of imagine when you get to that point,
laying track in your backyard and making you so that
they can pull humans it's probably getting it's getting even
more expensive though.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Oh it's it's out. You know, that would be crazy,
And I mean that gets into other stuff like hardscape
and landscaping. You know, you're building little bridges made out
of stone. I mean it's really fantastic stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Actually, yeah, okay, you Lenn Penzil, you had an awesome
gig as an aerospace engineer. You're a really smart guy.
Why did you start a personal finance blog so long ago?
And uh yeah, but just what leads someone who's got
this intense day job. You do quite well for yourself
to start blogging on the side.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Everybody needs a hobby, right And before before I was
spending money on my model railroading, I had my son
was in Little league and so I had for seven
or eight years, and I used to volunteer for the
little league. I used to be a coach and a manager,
and then I got into the board and I was
a vice president and the president and that took you know,
that was a forty hour a week hobby for me.
(04:24):
On the side, it kept me very busy. Well, my
son got out of little league and left me, but
you know, I needed to find another hobby, just keep
from from running. My wife Crazy's who I affectionately called
the honeybee. So I decided, well, you know what, I
had been reading some personal finance blogs on the side.
I was like, you know what, I could you know,
(04:45):
I have some thoughts on that myself, So why don't
I just try that just just as a hobby. I
was just trying to just kill some time. And I
started doing it, and lo and behold. I mean, within
six months it really became very popular, and it just
it just kind of blew up and grew from there.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
It was like a different era, right, Like you couldn't
start a blog today and six months later be super
popular on the internet. I mean, I guess you know,
substack is, there's that model. Some people are successful at it.
But how has blogging changed since you first started?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, blogging is it's like the horse and buggy now
to today's you know, compared to the podcasting and you know,
doing your YouTube videos and TikTok and Instagram and all
that stuff, it's kind of an it's kind of seen.
It's it's day is behind it. I mean there's still
you can still blog and there are blogs. Mine's still
going but it's nowhere near what it used to be.
But people have moved on and to bigger and better things.
(05:39):
And your podcast, for example, I mean that proves it.
That's where people are rightfully so. But back then, back
back in two thousand and eight two. I started in
two thousand and eight. Back then, blogging was just getting started,
and I remember my first my first post, I was
just commenting on the on the blogging zyche s they
call it. I guess there was at that time. I
(06:01):
was there was like nine ours. Technica did a survey
and I think they said there was by then, by
two thousand and eight, there were already like nine million
blogs out there. Wow, but it was still it was
still an ascending, ascending medium.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Well, I'm sure it's kind of like podcasting, the fact
that there are so many but there are so few
that put out good enough content and put out content
for long enough to gain traction.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I'm sure even today that can happen. It's just that
there's you just don't get the numbers that you used
to get back in the day. You know, there were
years where I would get up to two million, uh
you know views a year, and those days are long
for me, those days are long gone. Part of that
is on me because I don't blog as much as
I used to. Things have changed, medium has changed, and
so that's why I, you know, that was the whole
(06:45):
impetus for this book. I had all those articles that
I've done, there were many were very popular and they
were popular. Reason for that popularity, boy, I think my
blog became so popular as it wasn't like your everyday
personal finance blog. It was how do I describe it?
I treated it like almost like a sitcom or like
(07:05):
a like a show.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
There.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I had my family and not just my immediate family
my wife and my son and my daughter, but I
have my father in law who played a big part
in the roles. And there are characters in my life.
And I always used stories from that to relate back
to personal finance, and they were always I try to
make them very you know, there was humor stories, but
(07:29):
I always try to end with a lesson on personal
finance in each of the stories. And it resonated with
the with the Internet, and that's what got so famous
that it was really like a running sitcom for many years.
So and people became familiar with my family members and
that's just what happened, that's how that's how it became
very popular.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Actually, I think stories are so powerful, right the people
can relate to a story, it's it's easier to learn
from it. It feels less dogmatic and more approachable, And I
think that's certainly a big part of your success. I'm
curious too, just you have this kind of fancy job
that's for smart people, and how do you think about
translating personal finance for people who might not have, you know,
(08:10):
a ridiculously high IQ like you, Lenn? Does it take
Does it takes superl just but does it take a
lot of intelligence to be I've seen it on both
ends of the spectrum. Sometimes there are people who are
super duper smart and man for some reason, personal finance
just does not take with them. They don't seem to
get it. And then there are like, I don't know,
where do you think what's the intersection of intelligence and
(08:32):
personal finance?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Accumaty, I think intelligence. I think intelligence has nothing to
do at all with personal finance management, nothing at all.
I know smart, very smart, intelligent people whose personal finances
are a mess, absolute mess. I had coworkers back when
I was still working before I retired who were in
financial difficulties and they actually lost one of them lost
(08:56):
their security clearance because they got into financial trouble. Well
that's one of the you know, there's a thing with
security clearances where it's called adverse information. I mean, if
you do get into financial trouble, a lot of times
they'll pull your security clearance because they fear you're a danger,
you're susceptible to getting money from foreign.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Powers for whatever, black bail bribery.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
It's right exactly. So, I mean, so there's you know
that happens, and it has nothing to do with you know,
your intelligence at all. It's it's really your organizational skills. Really,
I think that's what it comes down to. How organized
are you and how detailed you are are willing to
be And that's that's I think that that makes the
difference between somebody who's good at managing their finances and
(09:37):
those who aren't.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
You build your blog as being the off peat, offbeat
personal finance blog for responsible people. Why did you go
in that or why off beat and and why is
it for responsible folks? Is that that organization key? Is it?
Like if you can't be responsible, you're not going to
be able to succeed.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Well, that's part of it. Yeah, I mean that's part
of managing your finances is to me, that's that's part
of being a responsible adult, right, I mean if you
don't know, if you don't manage your finances, you don't
take the time or the care to manage your person,
you're not being a responsible adult. I'm sorry, that's just
that's my personal feeling. And the offbeat part was was
(10:13):
kind of the reason for the popularity in my blog,
I believe because back when I started the blog there
was there was a lot of personal finance blogs. The
thing is they were all they're very straightforward, right, They're
very very straightforward with their lesson. I mean to just
tell you, okay, here's how you balance a budget, here's
how you, you know, manage your finances, here's how you
(10:33):
decide whether it's smart or not to buy a house
rather than rent. Just very straightforward, wrote writing boring, and
I figured, you know what I gotta it probably helped. One,
it'd be easier to learn personal finance if you kind
of make it funny, offbeat, do something strange, And two,
you know, I think it sticks more. So it sticks
(10:54):
more in the head. If you can relate a funny
story or something to your personal finances, just something, I
think it'd be more entertaining, and it helped me differentiate
myself from everybody else. So and that's and it ended
up being true. That's that's what happened. I think people
just gravitated to, Hey, this personal finance blog. But it's
not like all the others.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, so you are very organized, you love spreadsheets. Yeah, see,
it's funny you say these things, and I'm like, not
like that. I'm still obsessed with personal finance. I'm very interested.
I'm not the most organized. I'm not the most detail
oriented spreadsheets. I'd rather like play Russian Ulette than get
in the mix with some spreadsheets. So yeah, I don't
(11:32):
know how I've succeeded at this point, knowing that that
you think organization is the key to that, because man,
I just I wish I could be more organized, but
I'm not. How do you run your household finances? And
what does that look like with the honeybee? Like you're
the CEO of your household finances, right, but you she's
the CFO, is that right? Or how do you Okay,
how do you delineate and what does that look like.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, so one of the one of the themes throughout
throughout my blog whenever I always stress run your household
like a business, and we do that in the Penzo household.
We do that. As you said, I am the household CEO.
My wife is the household CFO. We each have distinct
duties that we're responsible for. Mine is more big picture
(12:15):
stuff and long term strategic hers is more on the
tactical level. So for me, it's handling the investments, the
household investments. It's looking at the our household strategic planning
for how we're going to save for, for example, their
college educations, our retirement, our big ticket items for the
(12:36):
house in the coming years. For example. You know, you
don't just say, hey, I'm going to buy but most
people don't, Hey I'm going to go buy a put
a pool in this year. You know, here's somebody and
here No, You've got to usually save up and spend that.
You know, say that over several years, you get So
I'd set out a plan on how we're going to
save the set aside money to save for that to
big ticket purchases, and then uh, basically what we do
(12:57):
is we meet once a month and we go over
the individual budget, our household budget, how we're meeting our budget.
We go over that spreadsheet that you keep mentioning that
I do all the time very restart. So we go
over our spreadsheet of our income and our outgo. We
look and see if we're meeting our plans and if
we don't. And that's my wife, the household CFO. She's
(13:20):
the one that handles all that stuff, the tracking the income,
the outgo, our expenses. I look it over and then
if there's a problem, you know, that's my job to
figure out, Okay, what do we got to do to
change if we're if we're not meeting our budget, if
we're overspending, if we're not meeting our savings goals. That's
my job to figure out, Okay, what are we going
to do to correct that? How do we fix our
(13:44):
monthly income and our outgo to do that?
Speaker 1 (13:46):
So it's a real joint effort.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It is a total joint effort.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Do you think that is where some at least from
people who have a partner, is that where some of
them go wrong. They try to put it all on
the shoulders of one person. And and that they're not
in it together or yeah, where a couples go wrong
in finances.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
The reason it's it's personal finance, right, and the personal
part was it's just everybody's different. There's no one right
way to do anything. That's one thing that I've learned,
and I've tried to tell people, there's no right way
to do it. A big, a big thing you have
to do first off is you have first decide, well,
your husband and the wife are they the same in
the spending category? Is one a big saver and one
a big spender. You're gonna run your household probably differently
(14:28):
than like me and my wife, for example, who we're
both savers. We don't. We're not big spenders. We live modestly,
we live way below our means, so it's a lot
easier for us to go ahead and do what we're doing.
It makes perfect sense for us to do the way
we're doing it because we are we're like minded. If
you have a big spender and a big savery, it
(14:49):
might be totally different. You might decide, for example, we
have joint joints checking accounts joint say you know everything's
all joint, but I can see if you have a
you know, a one's a big spender and one's a
big savor, you might have to have separate accounts and
figure out how you're going to handle that. How is
the inc you have one income or two? You know,
(15:10):
how do you handle the income? Uh? You know from
if you have a big spender and a big savor,
you know, how does that work at? It's totally different.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Do you think, Lenn, you like? I think one of
the things you're known for is honesty. You you don't
necessarily sugarcoat things. Do you think personal finance content has
become too nice? Is Is there too much telling folks
what they want to hear? I suppose what they need
to hear.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, I do believe that. I And that's another thing
that none of my stuff is that way. It's I'm
pretty much I just tell it like it is. You know,
you've got to face reality, if you know, if you're
not willing to come to the truth and say some
difficult things, then nothing's going to get fixed. So, yes,
I do Joel believe that that sometimes they're a little
(15:54):
too nice and you've got to be a little harder,
you know, and just tell those hard truths. You have
to for kids too. You know, I'm a big I
was a big believer in my kids growing they were
growing up, to let them fail financially. So I had
no problem watching, although it hurt. I mean it hurt
to watch, but I purposely let them squander money and
(16:18):
so they would learn that, you know, learn the hard
way that you know, that's the only way they'd learn
is by making mistakes like.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
The BMX bike episode you relay in the.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Book exactly Yes, that's that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
So tell me about that real quick.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
So my son he had a bike that it needed breaks,
and I told him, fix your brakes, you know, put
your money. You have saved some money, so you can
fix your breaks. Unless you do, you're not gonna able
to ride that bike. Well, one day his finally the
bike got so bad that his brakes completely gave it.
(16:54):
He had none at all. He couldn't ride them without
any breaks at all. So I said, well, okay, let's
go buy some Let's go buy get some new brakes
for your bike so you can go go ride it.
And he said, well, I don't have any more money, dad,
And I was like, and my son's down here. I
know he can hear me telling the story about it,
so he's left. Yeah, So I told him, I go, well,
(17:15):
get the money so you can buy your fix your brakes.
You're not riding that bike anymore because it's dangerous. And
he said, well, I don't have it dan. I said,
well why not? He said, because I bought a bb
gun with my last of my money, you know. And
I was like, what were you thinking. I told you,
you know, to take care of those breaks a while ago,
and he just he said, well I didn't. And I said, well,
guess what. You're not riding your bike anymore until you
(17:37):
earn enough money to to to repare those brakes. And
he couldn't go anywhere. He was basically stuck at home
unless he wanted to walk somewhere. And he was mad.
He was so upset. And but anyways, that's that's what
I just and I held to my guns until and
he had to. I think it took him like a month,
at least more than a month to earn enough money
to actually be able to go anywhere. He was basically
(17:58):
stuck at home, you know. So that's the kind of
thing that I let him fail. It is what it is.
And you pay the.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Project that Lesson did that Lesson take, like, is that
the kind of stuff that really? Is that something that
he remembers? Now he's obviously downstairs laughing right now as
you tell the story. Did that have an impact on
his ability to connect the dots as far as personal
finances goes? No?
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Okay, no, And if you go through the book, my
son's one of the stars of the book. You know,
he's one of the main characters in here. There's so
many things that he did wrong. God love him, but
you know there were lessons to be learned, not just
for him but for anybody reading this book. Things that
he did that were amazing. He used to he's quite
a precocious teenager when he was fourteen, and there's the
(18:42):
stories in this book as well as he actually tried
to sign up for a credit card as a fourteen
year old and it was Discover, Discover credit card and Discover.
Actually he almost got it. And the only reason he
didn't get it is because my wife opened the mail
one day and saw that Discover had sent my son. Uh,
(19:06):
there looked like a bill from My wife was like,
what's going on? So she she opened up the bill
and and found out that my son, who tried to
use a slight alias to his name, but for some
reason to think, didn't put his social Security number down.
So and that was they were asking, hey, you're one
(19:26):
step away, you know, what's your social security You know
you got your card, you know, and that's when we
uh called discover and that's you can listen to the
rest of the story from the book. But yeah, we
caught him doing stuff like that, so he's done that.
He did. There was another story in there where he
one day we opened up, went to the mailbox again
(19:47):
and the wife, I think it was T Mobile at
the time, there was a bill from T Mobile. Wasn't
just your normal bill in one a regular envelope. This
this was a bill that was in an eight and
a half by eleven envelope and it was about a
half inch thick. And it turns out this was before
we had unlimited texting, so my son had just gotten
(20:10):
his cell phone and the cell phone bill, the texting
bill was well over one thousand dollars and it was
a half inch thick. You'd have to see. I actually
I actually show part of the bill in the book,
but it was like a half inch. There was like
one hundred and forty one pages long the bill of
all the stuff that had happened for that month, and
(20:34):
it was I think it was over one thousand dollars.
So that was fun trying to get that fixed as well.
That's just the taste of some of the stuff my
son did. We share that kind of stuff in the
book for him.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
You've at one point in the book you say our
spending habits reveal our priorities in life. Do you think
is it just that some folks don't value financial freedom
as much as the stuff that they can get from Amazon, Target,
whatever it is. Yeah? Do people just value different things
and you are one of those people. Maybe I'm one
of those people who value financial freedom and other people
(21:06):
are like, I don't know, it's just not really something
I care about.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah. I think they're just short term thinkers. I don't
think they think of the ramifications of spending now and
not saving later. I just they don't really. They don't
look at debt. I like Joel, I know you and
I we both look at debt as slavery almost. It's
it's financial slavery. You're putting chains on yourself every time
you take a loan out. You're you're you're reducing your
(21:32):
spending power. You know this obviously, you know you're reducing
your future buying power. You're you're basically sacrificing your future
for now. And I think most people don't even think
of it that way. I think most people just think
it's instant gratification and I'm you know, I spent my
mon I'm happy, and they're not even thinking about the
impacts down the road. And I think the further you're
willing to look down the road, I think, the more
(21:53):
willing you are to embrace the discipline needed to to
not to stop doing that. And it's just a way
about how you think about.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
There's also been like a kind of cultural movement to
make it to normalize. I guess, getting the thing you
want when you want it as quickly as possible at
the costs or the additional amount of money that you're
going to pay to get that thing quickly, who cares,
it's fine. But whether that's buy now, pay later, right,
(22:21):
it's it's well, you actually sign up for this annual
subscription to Target, Walmart and Amazon, and then you'll get
your stuff in you know, like thirty minutes instead of
even two days. Right, So do you think part of
it is just the normalization that everyone's like, well, that's
just that's just the way it's done land your old school.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, well I am. I am old school, And that's funny.
Now we are so spoiled by getting things within a
day or two. I mean, I remember, I'll do my
old man thing. Now. I remember you'd send away for
something in the mail it would take weeks to get
just via mail you wanted to buy something. And Amazon
is so spoiled as you get it within a day
or the same day for something. It's just crazy. But yeah,
(23:03):
that's how it's just it's just kind of a different world.
But you have to you have to think of how
it impacts you down the road yourself. You know, like
I said, it's those chains dead dead are chains on
your future. And you don't want to do that. You
don't want to shackle yourself. It's easy though, to do
that when you're young. It's just when you're younger, you
just can't imagine being older. You know, you can't imagine
(23:24):
being sixty or you know, I'm sixty years old old.
Now it's like it's some you can't. It's just you
can't fathom it. But once you get here quick, it's
it's very fast, and so before you know it, if
you're not paying attention, it sneaks up on you.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
All Right, I've got more questions I want to get
to with you, Lenn, including I want to talk about
your aunt Doris and your grandpa, a lot of family
members that make appearances in your blog and in your
new book. So we'll get to some more questions with
Len Penzo right after this. Right, we're back still talk
(23:58):
with Lenpenzo talking about his new book, True Money Stories,
and Len's personal finance writings have I've always enjoyed them,
and Len is very honest in his approach to personal finance,
which I think is something that is missing in a
lot of personal finance content these days. I'm curious, like,
(24:19):
how do you think about And I really don't want
to get political, and we try to stay away from
politics most of the time on the show, but it
is true that like political leaders, legislation, those things have
an impact on our economy, they have an impact on
our personal finances. Like that stuff, the things that happened
at the national and the state level and the local level,
they trickled down and the impact packed us as consumers,
(24:41):
and then people around in different parts of the country
are impacted differently too, Right, I think about like offshoring
and how that's impacted in particular people in smaller Midwestern towns,
manufacturing towns. And you talk about like there's a tendency
I guess for some folks to blame circumstances for a
lack of their ability to make progress. But it is
also true, right that more difficult circumstances do hamper our
(25:04):
ability to make progress. How do you think about that dichotomy.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yes, there there are cases where people in personal finance
they run into difficulties and it's through no fault of
their own. I mean, that's just given. And people have
health issues, people have unexpected expenses that come up, natural
disasters come up. It will wipe you out for certain things.
I get it, I get it, But there's also there
(25:31):
still doesn't absolve people of the obligation if at all possible,
to save up for those emergencies. If you can. Again,
I realize there's certain health things you could there's nothing
you could ever do. There's nothing you could ever do
to avoid that, And that's just that's unfortunate, and that's
not on the on people. Where I get rough with people, though,
is when things come up, For example, maybe they get
(25:55):
a car accident and they have damages to their vehicle
that are you know, fives six eight thousand dollars and
they don't have their insurance or they don't have enough
and they didn't have enough insurance to cover it, and
they don't have their savings, they don't have an emergency
savings account to cover that. You know, that I believe
is on them. I think you're one of your first
(26:15):
responsibilities is to somehow make sure you build up an
emergency savings account as fast as possible to at least
be able to handle a new engine in your car
or something like that. You know, you've got to have
a significant amount of emergency savings built up as fast
as you can. And that comes even before you're saving
(26:36):
for your retirement. That has to be the first thing,
in my opinion. And if you don't do that, I mean,
and that's on you. I mean, it's not hard to
set aside. It's not asking a lot to set aside
a small percentage of your paycheck every week, even if
it means foregoing things you have to do it. That
is again to me, your that's a responsible person will do.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
That's what's the biggest barrier you see for most peop
people from getting to that point where they're like, yeah,
I probably should do something. My personal finances are not
headed into good direction. I need to start thinking about
my future and my near term future because I don't
have the cash in the bank. What are the biggest
hurdles you see for most people? Or they're like they
can't quite get there or bridge that gap? What are
(27:17):
they doing wrong?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Sometimes? I think what they're probably doing is they're just
not willing to forego things that they want that they
don't need, that they could be saving, sacrificing, Okay, doing sacrificing.
For example, when we first bought the house i'm in
now currently, I know the honey you be and I
made a terrible mistake before we bought this house where
(27:41):
the honey be wanted to be a stay at home
mom and said, yeah, okay, that's great, so go ahead,
and she quit her job right before we bought this house,
which lowered the amount of income we had for the
house and to get into this house. After that happened.
I mean we were pinch and pennies. Let me tell you,
for at least two years. I mean, we weren't doing
(28:01):
a lot of anything, eating rice and beans, not going
a luxury week weekend for us. Our luxury night out
was going to McDonald's once a month. You know that
for for the first two year poor we were house poor.
I mean, we were house poor. I mean that's an
extreme example. But I didn't run myself into debt despite
that just because said, hey, well we're going to have fun.
(28:23):
We deserve it. Anyways, No, we sucked it up, and
that again that was partially a mistake on my part,
for you know, we shouldn't shouldn't have shouldn't have her
probably leave her job quite so soon. But anyways, the
point is, I think you just have to be willing
to suck it up and make some sacrifices for a
little while just to get to where you need to be.
(28:45):
So that that's that's how I feel anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
So I think probably a much bigger percentage of Americans
could reach financial independence than currently do. But then there's
other people who say, I think everybody can reach can
can chief financial independence, especially in a country like the
United States, would you agree with that assessment or do
you think no, Like there's some people who just it's
(29:08):
it's not gonna be possible for them.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, no, it's it's harder now, there's no doubt about it.
Gen Z and to a lesser extent, the millennials are
they they're screwed compared to Gen X and the Baby
Boomers and the what do they call the Silent generation
or whatever? They are totally it's it's not fair. It's
(29:30):
it's due to the monetary system. It's just the way
our debt based monetary system is. It's we're in a
position now where the way it's set up, they were doomed.
It was it doomed them from the beginning. Once Nixon
got us off the d anchored US dollar from gold,
that put us on the path to where we're at now.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So what do they have to do differently? Young young
listeners who are like, wait, you just told me I'm screwed?
What do I have to do differently.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Than well, you're screwed in that it's it's so difficult.
Now you're not totally screwed. Let me, You've got a
lot harder admittedly than gen X and baby boomers. You know,
gen X, it was no problem even in the eighties,
you could work at a grocery store. I know this
for a fact. And I have friends who didn't have
(30:14):
They just had regular blue collar jobs and they had houses.
They were able to afford a house in their twenties
with a blue collar job. You can't do that anymore.
And that's that's the fault of our monetary system basically,
but that's what's made things so much tougher for them.
I look at my kids as well, my gen Z
kids both have good jobs, and they can't afford a house.
(30:38):
They can't afford a house. You know, if this was
the eighties or nineties.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Year, also in Southern California.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Admittedly, yes, it'd be easier to afford a house somewhere
else outside of Southern California. But still it's still difficult.
It's still difficult. So how do you overcome that. Well,
you just have to I know this is not satisfying,
and I don't mean this to sound glib. You just
have to work harder. It's just harder. You're just gonna
(31:03):
have to do save more, You're gonna have to invest.
You might have to even take bigger risks with your
investments to get bigger returns. The beauty of that is
and this is a mistake I made when I was
younger as well, investing in your twenty The beautiful the
beautiful thing about being in your twenties and thirties and
(31:26):
investing is you have time to make mistakes. You can
take those risks and and survive those mistakes because you
have the benefit of time to recover. Somebody who's older
can't do that. That's why older people have to, you know,
invest in much safer investments because they can't afford a
big downturn. So when you say when you're younger you
can take bigger risks, when.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
You say take more risks as younger investors, what do
you mean. Are you saying, like, go all in on
the latest cryptocurrency len Is that your advice?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Well, one, I'm not big on and I do discuss
cryptocurrencies in my body and precious metals as well. I'm
not a big fan of cryptocurrencies at all, although I
am a big fan of precious metals.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
So what does it look like to swing bigger than
as a younger investor?
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, So make sure you're not putting anything in fixed
income bond. I mean, you got to be invested in
the stock market, and I'm not going to tell you
what to invest in. You've got to do your own
due diligence there. But you do not play it safe.
Do not do any stable value you have your four
O one K, don't do it. Don't put anything in
your stable value fund. If you're in your twenties or
(32:31):
or your thir thirties, I wouldn't and maybe you should.
You know, don't take advice for me this. I'm just saying,
if I had to do it over in my twenties
and thirties, I would have been much less risk averse.
I would have been much more risky with my investments.
I'd have been much better off. It's your only it's
the only way out. Really.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah. I remember when I first started investing, I was
investing in target date funds, and that was kind of
what had been recommended to me. And I remember at
the more research I did, I was like, target day
funds are great, low cost target day funds through some
of the Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity. But I'm also really young,
and I really don't even know that I need this
(33:12):
sort of bond exposure in my portfolio at all. So
it wasn't that target day funds are bad. They just
weren't as risky as I was willing and wanted to be,
given what I was trying to accomplish. And I say,
especially in those twenties, the target date fund for some
people up to you could be a little too risk averse. Even.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah, I think anybody in their twenties and threes right now,
you're losing out to inflation. I mean the bonds are
You're losing money. I don't care. You're not even stable
vesting in bonds just to keep a little bit, you're
losing money. I would stay far away from that and
try to, like I said, be aggressive, do your research.
There are sectors that are doing very well even in
(33:52):
this environment, that are doing much better than others. Be diversified,
but you know, take risks. You have to. You have
to somehow figure out a way to get bigger returns.
That's all I can say. It's really it's not very
satisfying right now. It's our monetary system has got everybody
over a barrel right now, the younger generations.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
It's terrible talk to me about the other members of
your family who make an appearance in the book and
the impact they've had on you. Your Aunt Doris, Grandpa right,
who else who had an impact on you from a
personal finance perspective.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
One of the characters in there in this book is
my cousin Kevin, and he's mostly in my blind taste
test challenges, So I have a whole bunch of blind tastes.
You're talking about popular things on my blog, one of
the more popular segments in my blog. But he is
an accountant. He's retired now, but he's the one that
really got me thinking about looking at debt as financial slavery.
(34:48):
And he's also very good about being organized and watching
your money and always putting your money to work and
making sure that your money's working for you. So my
cousin Kevin, I think had the biggest impact. But there's
others as well. I have my aunt Doris, who you mentioned.
(35:10):
She's she's passed away ninety four, several years ago now,
but she lived a very she lived well, but she's
a very frugal person and despite her limited income, she
did very well. I don't know, I don't know how
she and if she invested or what she did. But
(35:33):
she just showed me that you know, you can. You
can enjoy life. You don't have to spending money. Is
not all about light. What life is about, right, It's
about living your life and enjoying the things you have
and family and things like that as well.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
So you're making me think about value formation, which is
something that you talk about some like is is sometimes
like runaway spending habits and an inability to really figure
out personal finance? Is it a lack of being able
to connect your values to what's happening with your money.
How important is like the like we have this thing
(36:11):
on on how to money dot com, like people can
go through the why behind their money. We ask help
them go through a bunch of questions to figure out
what they care about so they can link their money
habits to those deeper values that they that they have
that they espouse. Do you think that maybe that deeper
step is something a lot of people have missed?
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah? I do, Actually, yes, you gotta. I think a
lot of people these days, I think they're tied to
their tied to the almighty dollar. Actually, here here's another thing.
I guess I should go back to my indoors as
well as it's really not about I know people have
these dollar amounts that they have. I'm like, oh, I
got to have this much money by this time, you know,
(36:49):
on my life. Yeah, you have to have a target
on there. But again the dollar, it's not just chasing
the dollars, right, It's just about it's your life, your
life experiences, your family. There's more to life than money itself.
That being said, money is required, especially as you get older,
(37:10):
you better make sure you have enough of it to
at least live modestly. And it really isn't that much
actually my family for example, or even today, I'm just
like we're at right now, this is the end of
September and I've just we just had our review a
few weeks ago, are previous for August, and we had
only burned through I think sixty five thousand dollars my house,
(37:33):
So sixty five thousand dollars through August, So you really
don't and that's with a lot of splurges. And we
had spent some money for us little splurge things on
trips or what have you. It could have been much
less than that. So I mean that's all Evan, you know,
that's just having a lot of fun, and we spend
only sixty five thousand dollars. You'd be surprised how little
(37:53):
you can get by on as you get older. People
think it you actually kind of spend less as you
get older, most people. I mean, if you're not wanting
to travel all around the world and everything, yeah, you
can spend a lot, a lot less than you might think.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
So do you think those commercials about oh, you're gonna
you need three point two million dollars by the time
you were tied? Are those overblown? Is an utterly ridiculous Yeah, fanciful,
over blown.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Okay, they're overblown, totally overblown. Yeah, you know, it all
comes down to you, right what you how are you
willing to live your life? You know, again, we're modest spenders.
We're not big Me and the Honeybee. We don't you know,
we don't do a lot of fun things. We're gonna
go We're gonna go to Cabo San Lucas later this
year for a week. Maybe we've got a Hawaii trip
(38:35):
next year, but that's it. I mean, those are our trips,
you know, one or two trips a year and and
then the rest is just living life, being with family
and doing family things. And it's really you know, you
don't spend a lot of money if you and we
enjoy and we have a fun, We have a very
satisfying life. So you know, you don't need a lot
you really don't.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I want to talk a little bit about retirement and
one of the most popular maybe maybe the most popular
post on your blog of all time. We'll get to
a few more questions with len Penzo right after this.
We're back still talk with my friend len Penzo and
talking about his his new book which is called True
(39:17):
Money Stories, and it's a compilation of a lot of
his most successful blog posts throughout the years. And uh
and he's been blogging for quite some time. And then
on your blog, one of I think my favorite things
we talk about on How to Money when it comes
out every year we tend to is your annual sandwich survey.
It's so just like meat and potatoes basic, it's actually
(39:38):
more like baloney and white bread, I guess.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
But it's wheat and the survey.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Sorry, my bad, bread, My bad. But like, how have
you had why why did you start writing that? And
what have you seen? Talk about? Like inflation at the
grocery store. You know, that's like instead of talking about
the weather, that's what we talk about now as humans.
How what have you seen like as you've been writing
this survey over the years. What's the impact?
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, I started that survey in two thous I started
that the first year I started the blog, and it
was really popular. I mean, it got the I couldn't
believe the first year I did it, I got got
a lot of good feedback on it. I was like, well, hey, okay,
I'll do it. I didn't really plan on it being
an annual thing. It was just a one time thing,
you know, just check. I wanted to check out the price.
You know, my kids were in school. The price of
(40:24):
a school lunch was I forget what it was way
back then, a buck, buck in a quarter or whatever.
And I wanted to know.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
If it was a good old piper, But was it
cheaper to.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Make a sandwich, you know, every day for your kids
and then you know, give them the banana and the
and the little mini bag of chips and is that
cheaper than the school lunch? So that's what started it.
So I said, well, you know, I'll pick ten because
everybody has their favorite sandwiches. I said, well, I'll pick
ten different sandwiches. I'll set up the ingredients for you know,
(40:53):
as a benchmark. You know, you know, so much mustard
and so much mayonnaise, and you know, two slices of
wheat bread anyways, cheese, whatever. Set up all those benchmarks,
and I'll measure the prices of those benchmarks. I'll assemble
the sandwiches and come up with a price for each sandwich. Okay,
So long story short, there is every year it has
always come out the price of the sandwich in a
(41:14):
brown bag lunch is always far less than a school lunch,
the price of a school lunch. And it's healthier for
you too. Okay, But what I've searned since then, the
price has gone up, and this price has gone down.
I think back in two thousand and nine, the average
price of all ten sandwiches was about fifty four cents
something like that, and now it's up to a dollar
(41:34):
ten or something like that. As the average price up
a sandwich. Now it's over over it, so it's pretty
much doubled. But in those years the price has gone up.
Right before the pan then it was dropping the pandemic
it made a spike, and then it dropped one year,
and then this year the price went up again. So
this is the prices are as high as they've ever
been on those sandwiches. But there's seventeen years of data,
(41:57):
and if you go to my article, you'll see the
price is over those seventeen years of all the sandwiches.
So it's it's really turned into it's really quite interesting.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Now.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Well, there's so much data there that it's quite fascinating.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
He has kind of taken on a life of its own.
Your sandwich survey.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Yes it has, Yeah, Yeah, it absolutely has.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah it is. Well, it is fascinating to see it's
such the lowest common denominator thing. And yeah, it's something
that we're making every day. At least we are at
my house right for my kids, my kids who are
all school age, seventh grade, fifth grade, kindergarten, and so
we're in the we're in the throes of school lunches.
And yeah, like every once in a while, my son
when it's Hamburger Day, he's he wants to buy, right. Unfortunately,
(42:36):
I think a school lunch for him is like three bucks.
I'm like, okay, once a week for Hamberger that's.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
What it is. It's three fifty in our I still can.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Do that, but most days, yeah, you're gonna eat healthier,
even if, even if the price discrepancy between the school
lunch and what we're making at home is like minimal,
which it is when that's the sick because you're doing
the sandwiches. But then like he slice up some apples,
apples aren't cheap, like some carrots whatever, try to give
him a well rounded lunch. It's it is gonna it's
gonna get pretty close to the price of school lunch.
(43:04):
But you just at least you know what you're feeding them.
Then I want I'm curious you still write about personal finance.
You still have this kind of passion for the subject
after all these years, starting the blog in two thousand
and eight, Does it ever bore you? What keeps you
excited on the personal finance front? Why do you why
do you keep talking about it writing about it?
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Well, I'll be honest, so I'm not quite as excited
as I used to be. Joel. Let's say, you know,
there's been over three thousand articles right now on that
on the blog. If you can believe that I've I
think i've written about two thousand of them. The book
has what I've considered to be the one hundred and
sixty seven of the most popular blog pieces that I
(43:42):
that I did.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah, it's a lot of consistency though, and you've really
encouraged and helped a lot of people, motivated a lot
of people, I think, to take charge of their personal finances.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
So I try, and the blog is it. Don't get wrong,
the blog is still there. It's it's it's you. You
can come over, you can sign up, get my newsletter,
and I go. We do about five there's always five
articles a week there and I do every Saturday, I
do something called black Coffee. So that's my main that's
the thing I do every every week without fail. And
what I do is that's my personal finance roundup at
(44:12):
the macro level. So it's not more not so much
personal finance, but it's what's going on that's affecting our
personal finances in the macrosphere. And I do that. And
it's a humorous thing where I pick up the memes
of the week, funny memes, the best Twitter posts that
I find. Usually there's ten or eleven different things which
(44:33):
it's topics, which I call credits and debits, I opine
on them, and it's just it's funny. I have a
squirrel cam in there. It's just silly. But I mean again,
you still there's still things to learn, and it's very popular.
That's what I that's the main thing I do every
week now with the blog.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
And you, you, sir, you are now a retiree. All
that hard work is paid off. You don't have to
work anymore if you don't want to. What are the
what are the biggest difficulties of being a retired person?
Is it mentally difficult to not have a paycheck coming
in anymore because you've obviously you've done a lot of
the hard work when it comes to front loading the sacrifice,
(45:10):
I can't imagine that you're you know that you're having
to make significant sacrifices in order to be okay. Right, So,
what's what's it like as someone who has you've done
really well with their personal finances over a long period
of time to finally hit retirement. What are the things
that like weigh on you?
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Gosh, I don't want to be a downer as you
get older. There's things you have to worry about, like
long term care. It's it's like the big expense that
could in theory wipe you out maybe if something bad
you know what I'm saying, Like, yeah, like if a
family member gets Alzheimer's and you can't take care of
them anymore, Well, I have enough money for that if
(45:47):
if that happens.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
The trouble is long term care insurance could wipe you
out too. It's so dang expensive exactly.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
And that's something that you know, I had to make
and I'll just come I did the risk assessment. One
thing of being about being in one of the things
we do is risk assessment, and and that's a personal finances.
A lot about personal finance is risk assessment. You have
to make a lot of decisions on risks. You know,
it is the risk worth taking. So and in that
(46:14):
that arena, I did a lot of a lot of
data gathering and running numbers and crunching, and I decided
that the risk a better risk for me for me
on just as me to not go take the insurance
for that reason, for what you said, Joel, because it's expensive,
and uh, you know that's so so yes, that's to me.
(46:37):
That's the biggest thing, you know, is long term care
some some medical thing that will totally wipe out my
my retirement savings. That being said, you know, I think
I'm not really worried about that. I think I'm comfortable
enough even if that happened that that's not going to happen.
I mean, if I have to pay for it out
(46:57):
of my retirement SAMs, I'll be good enough anyways, because
I did a good enough job saving on the way
up to retire.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I think, just as someone who you know would like
to retire in twenty years speaking to someone who is retired.
One of the guys, my friend Wes Moss writes about
the habits of the like happy retirees, and I'm curious, like,
have you inculcated any of those, Like what does it
look like? Because so many people go full bore working
(47:27):
forty five fifty hours a week to working zero hours
a week. They just retire all the way. You've had
other You've got other hobbies. Yeah, are there any any
secrets to being a happy retiree?
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Well, you just named it. You've got to look, life
is long, and I've I'll probably t off some the
fire people, the people who want to retire at thirty
years old, you know, thirty five forty. Let's say you
retire at forty, You've got another forty fifty years of life.
I mean, what are you going to do? I mean, yes,
you can have hobbies when you're older. It's easy to say, y,
(47:58):
I get a couple of hobbies. That does it. And
usually when you're older, you have grandkids, you have you
have other things to keep you busy. But when you're
in your you know, forties, fifties, you know, that's all
how many how much tennis can you play? How much
golf can you play? Right, you really need to think
about what you're going to do to fill that time,
or you're not going to be happy. You'll probably want
to go back to work anyways, because you know, that's
(48:21):
a long life and a lot of things going to happen,
you know, so you got to make sure you're busy. Yes,
hobbies is one. It helps if you have, you know,
if you're older and you have grandkids or something like
that to keep you busy too. There's only so much
traveling you can do too. I can't imagine. I can't
imagine people who travel. I mean, there are people who
enjoy it, but I mean, gosh, you know, life is long.
(48:43):
Believe me, it's really long. It's short, but it's long,
and you got to figure out a way to fill
that time.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
All right, have something to do with those hours if
you're really aiming to retirely, because you're right, I've seen
some of those folks want retiring early and then they're
like they're clawing to get back into some Yeah. I
don't know how they do it paid labor, you know,
so I get it. Lenpenzo, this has been a joyful conversation.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Where can
(49:10):
listeners find out more about you and your new.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Book Lenpenzo dot com. That's easy. You can always say
check me out on Twitter at Lenpenzo and I'm there
on Amazon, so you can just google True Money Stories
Lenpenzo on Amazon and there it is. You can read
them more about it there.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
Wonderful. Thank you, Lenn, appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Thank you, Joel.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
All Right, it's always fun to connect with somebody who's
kind of an og really in the personal finance space.
I mean, think about writing this content for almost two decades,
putting your thoughts out there. Three thousand blog posts. That's
quite a feat from Lenpenzo and just cool that he
gave me a quick start when I was starting to
(49:49):
write about money as well. I think my big takeaway
from Len and it's kind of the unpopular truth that
a lot of people don't want to hear. Yeah there,
Lenn talked about problems with the monetary system, and he
mentioned the fact that not everybody has the same advantage
(50:10):
or starts from the same place. But he discussed the
necessity to face reality and to sacrifice, and I think
that's true that the more you're willing to face the
reality of your situation and to make sacrifices to get
where you want to go, the more likely you are
to achieve some of those long term financial goals. And
(50:31):
he talked about the inability most people have to sympathize
with their future selves to think about twenty thirty, forty
years down the line. I do think that's probably a
place where a lot of people fall short. They're like, yeah,
but what am I saving for? And there's a disconnect
between the twenty something year old you and the potentially
(50:52):
likely to be sixty something year old you. And it
just reminds me of what Fidelity found one time of
taking a picture of yourself and putting it through one
of those apps that make you look a lot older.
It really did have meaningful results in helping people increase
what they were willing to put into their four one
K or into their IRA, and so find a way
(51:13):
to think about, hey, what do I want my future
to look like? What am I gonna potentially even actually
look like when I'm reaching that age? And when you
can do that, I think it does become a little
bit easier to put aside some of the money you
would have spent today and save it for tomorrow. One
of the things Lenn said too that I really appreciated
(51:34):
he was right there at the end. He was talking
about risk assessments, and I think that's a really important
part of personal finance. And it's not just oh, which
fund should I choose to invest in because is it
gonna Am I going to get twelve percent returns in
this fund versus nine percent returns in another? That you
(51:55):
know past performance is not indicative of future results, so
you you know, that's a really hard thing to do. Anyway,
It's an imperfect process to try to figure out which
funds you should be investing in. But when we're talking
about risk assessment and risk mitigation, which was kind of
the Jeff Bezos framework of like regret minimization for life.
(52:16):
I think that's a good way to think about personal finance.
My advice to you would be to actually write down
and think about the risks of different paths you could
choose right whether it's the risk of oversaving over investing.
Some people really do have that risk, whether they're saving
too much or the risk of not doing enough. The
(52:39):
trade offs that you're going to make, actually like writing
those down and having a conversation with a friend, bouncing
ideas off of them, or with your significant other. Like
I think doing some more risk assessment work would help
us make better personal finance decisions. Trade Offs are the
old clement reality in life, with so many of us
(53:02):
make those trade offs without having weighed the pros and
cons beforehand. So thank you, as always for listening. I
really appreciate it. You'll find show notes, links to Len's
new book and his website up on the website at
howtomoney dot com. Until next time, best Friend Out.
Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel, and today I'm
talking money truce. You won't hear anywhere else with Len Penzo. Okay,
(00:26):
So I've always appreciated oddballs. My guest today he fits
the description, and he's publicly willing to admit it. If
you're looking for generic personal finance content, you're not going
to find it in his writings. When I was first
trying to figure out how I could contribute to the
personal finance community, something I was like really interested in doing,
I started off writing on the internet, mostly because TikTok
didn't exist yet. Well, Len Penzo allowed me to contribute
(00:49):
to his already successful blog. I will not link to
that post in the show notes because it's old and bad,
but it is a testament to the beautiful community of
personal finance nerds and to Len's graciousness as well. Lenn
has a new book out. It's called True Money Stories.
It's about the intersection of personal finance and family life.
So I'm excited to pick his brain today on the podcast. Len,
(01:13):
thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Joel, thank you for having me on your terrific show podcast.
I'm honored.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
It's a pleasure to have you my friend. And yeah,
you and I've been corresponding for many years, although we've
never had a sit down chat like this, so I'm
excited to get to talk to you in a long
form way. My first question, though, of course, is going
to be what your craft beer equivalent? What does len
Penzo like disploy John? Even though he is so you're
so smart with your money, You're so thoughtful about saving,
(01:41):
investing for the future. But there's got to be something
you're like spending a lot of money on now that
people think is a little weird.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, and it is weird, probably for most people, but
I believe it. I'm a model train buff. I model
an end scale and I have a weakness for buying
anything related to the end scale model railroad hobby. So
I always always splurging on that.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Always how expensive of a hobby is this? Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
You know, it can be very expensive. So if you
want to buy just, for example, just a locomotive for
example that pools your little pulls the little cars behind it, right,
those run over two hundred dollars each.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, So and just give you.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
An I have, I think I have, gosh, I bet
you I have twenty five locomotives alone, So you can
do that just on the locomotive, so it doesn't count
all the modeling, all the models you have to buy,
the buildings and the track and the all the electronics stuff.
I mean, it's thousands and thousands of dollars over time.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Would you ever go into like Walt Disney territory and
build your own little railroad in your backyard? Is it hobby? Get?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
What is that has that called? I think that's I
can't remember which gauge that is. Is that g or
O or it's huge? And I've seen some fantastic have
you ever seen on the internet? You can go online
on YouTube, so you're getting me all excited here. You
can go online and see people's backyard railroads that they
built themselves, where they you know, these grown men, these
grown old men like myself, can sit on these locomotives
(03:14):
and they pull you can pull kids and whatever in
the cars behind, and they have beautiful setups in their backyards.
Just just just fantastic, just really it's really awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I cant of imagine when you get to that point,
laying track in your backyard and making you so that
they can pull humans it's probably getting it's getting even
more expensive though.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Oh it's it's out. You know, that would be crazy,
And I mean that gets into other stuff like hardscape
and landscaping. You know, you're building little bridges made out
of stone. I mean it's really fantastic stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Actually, yeah, okay, you Lenn Penzil, you had an awesome
gig as an aerospace engineer. You're a really smart guy.
Why did you start a personal finance blog so long ago?
And uh yeah, but just what leads someone who's got
this intense day job. You do quite well for yourself
to start blogging on the side.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Everybody needs a hobby, right And before before I was
spending money on my model railroading, I had my son
was in Little league and so I had for seven
or eight years, and I used to volunteer for the
little league. I used to be a coach and a manager,
and then I got into the board and I was
a vice president and the president and that took you know,
that was a forty hour a week hobby for me.
(04:24):
On the side, it kept me very busy. Well, my
son got out of little league and left me, but
you know, I needed to find another hobby, just keep
from from running. My wife Crazy's who I affectionately called
the honeybee. So I decided, well, you know what, I
had been reading some personal finance blogs on the side.
I was like, you know what, I could you know,
(04:45):
I have some thoughts on that myself, So why don't
I just try that just just as a hobby. I
was just trying to just kill some time. And I
started doing it, and lo and behold. I mean, within
six months it really became very popular, and it just
it just kind of blew up and grew from there.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
It was like a different era, right, Like you couldn't
start a blog today and six months later be super
popular on the internet. I mean, I guess you know,
substack is, there's that model. Some people are successful at it.
But how has blogging changed since you first started?
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, blogging is it's like the horse and buggy now
to today's you know, compared to the podcasting and you know,
doing your YouTube videos and TikTok and Instagram and all
that stuff, it's kind of an it's kind of seen.
It's it's day is behind it. I mean there's still
you can still blog and there are blogs. Mine's still
going but it's nowhere near what it used to be.
But people have moved on and to bigger and better things.
(05:39):
And your podcast, for example, I mean that proves it.
That's where people are rightfully so. But back then, back
back in two thousand and eight two. I started in
two thousand and eight. Back then, blogging was just getting started,
and I remember my first my first post, I was
just commenting on the on the blogging zyche s they
call it. I guess there was at that time. I
(06:01):
was there was like nine ours. Technica did a survey
and I think they said there was by then, by
two thousand and eight, there were already like nine million
blogs out there. Wow, but it was still it was
still an ascending, ascending medium.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Well, I'm sure it's kind of like podcasting, the fact
that there are so many but there are so few
that put out good enough content and put out content
for long enough to gain traction.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I'm sure even today that can happen. It's just that
there's you just don't get the numbers that you used
to get back in the day. You know, there were
years where I would get up to two million, uh
you know views a year, and those days are long
for me, those days are long gone. Part of that
is on me because I don't blog as much as
I used to. Things have changed, medium has changed, and
so that's why I, you know, that was the whole
(06:45):
impetus for this book. I had all those articles that
I've done, there were many were very popular and they
were popular. Reason for that popularity, boy, I think my
blog became so popular as it wasn't like your everyday
personal finance blog. It was how do I describe it?
I treated it like almost like a sitcom or like
(07:05):
a like a show.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
There.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I had my family and not just my immediate family
my wife and my son and my daughter, but I
have my father in law who played a big part
in the roles. And there are characters in my life.
And I always used stories from that to relate back
to personal finance, and they were always I try to
make them very you know, there was humor stories, but
(07:29):
I always try to end with a lesson on personal
finance in each of the stories. And it resonated with
the with the Internet, and that's what got so famous
that it was really like a running sitcom for many years.
So and people became familiar with my family members and
that's just what happened, that's how that's how it became
very popular.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Actually, I think stories are so powerful, right the people
can relate to a story, it's it's easier to learn
from it. It feels less dogmatic and more approachable, And I
think that's certainly a big part of your success. I'm
curious too, just you have this kind of fancy job
that's for smart people, and how do you think about
translating personal finance for people who might not have, you know,
(08:10):
a ridiculously high IQ like you, Lenn? Does it take
Does it takes superl just but does it take a
lot of intelligence to be I've seen it on both
ends of the spectrum. Sometimes there are people who are
super duper smart and man for some reason, personal finance
just does not take with them. They don't seem to
get it. And then there are like, I don't know,
where do you think what's the intersection of intelligence and
(08:32):
personal finance?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Accumaty, I think intelligence. I think intelligence has nothing to
do at all with personal finance management, nothing at all.
I know smart, very smart, intelligent people whose personal finances
are a mess, absolute mess. I had coworkers back when
I was still working before I retired who were in
financial difficulties and they actually lost one of them lost
(08:56):
their security clearance because they got into financial trouble. Well
that's one of the you know, there's a thing with
security clearances where it's called adverse information. I mean, if
you do get into financial trouble, a lot of times
they'll pull your security clearance because they fear you're a danger,
you're susceptible to getting money from foreign.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Powers for whatever, black bail bribery.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
It's right exactly. So, I mean, so there's you know
that happens, and it has nothing to do with you know,
your intelligence at all. It's it's really your organizational skills. Really,
I think that's what it comes down to. How organized
are you and how detailed you are are willing to
be And that's that's I think that that makes the
difference between somebody who's good at managing their finances and
(09:37):
those who aren't.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
You build your blog as being the off peat, offbeat
personal finance blog for responsible people. Why did you go
in that or why off beat and and why is
it for responsible folks? Is that that organization key? Is it?
Like if you can't be responsible, you're not going to
be able to succeed.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Well, that's part of it. Yeah, I mean that's part
of managing your finances is to me, that's that's part
of being a responsible adult, right, I mean if you
don't know, if you don't manage your finances, you don't
take the time or the care to manage your person,
you're not being a responsible adult. I'm sorry, that's just
that's my personal feeling. And the offbeat part was was
(10:13):
kind of the reason for the popularity in my blog,
I believe because back when I started the blog there
was there was a lot of personal finance blogs. The
thing is they were all they're very straightforward, right, They're
very very straightforward with their lesson. I mean to just
tell you, okay, here's how you balance a budget, here's
how you, you know, manage your finances, here's how you
(10:33):
decide whether it's smart or not to buy a house
rather than rent. Just very straightforward, wrote writing boring, and
I figured, you know what I gotta it probably helped. One,
it'd be easier to learn personal finance if you kind
of make it funny, offbeat, do something strange, And two,
you know, I think it sticks more. So it sticks
(10:54):
more in the head. If you can relate a funny
story or something to your personal finances, just something, I
think it'd be more entertaining, and it helped me differentiate
myself from everybody else. So and that's and it ended
up being true. That's that's what happened. I think people
just gravitated to, Hey, this personal finance blog. But it's
not like all the others.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, so you are very organized, you love spreadsheets. Yeah, see,
it's funny you say these things, and I'm like, not
like that. I'm still obsessed with personal finance. I'm very interested.
I'm not the most organized. I'm not the most detail
oriented spreadsheets. I'd rather like play Russian Ulette than get
in the mix with some spreadsheets. So yeah, I don't
(11:32):
know how I've succeeded at this point, knowing that that
you think organization is the key to that, because man,
I just I wish I could be more organized, but
I'm not. How do you run your household finances? And
what does that look like with the honeybee? Like you're
the CEO of your household finances, right, but you she's
the CFO, is that right? Or how do you Okay,
how do you delineate and what does that look like.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, so one of the one of the themes throughout
throughout my blog whenever I always stress run your household
like a business, and we do that in the Penzo household.
We do that. As you said, I am the household CEO.
My wife is the household CFO. We each have distinct
duties that we're responsible for. Mine is more big picture
(12:15):
stuff and long term strategic hers is more on the
tactical level. So for me, it's handling the investments, the
household investments. It's looking at the our household strategic planning
for how we're going to save for, for example, their
college educations, our retirement, our big ticket items for the
(12:36):
house in the coming years. For example. You know, you
don't just say, hey, I'm going to buy but most
people don't, Hey I'm going to go buy a put
a pool in this year. You know, here's somebody and
here No, You've got to usually save up and spend that.
You know, say that over several years, you get So
I'd set out a plan on how we're going to
save the set aside money to save for that to
big ticket purchases, and then uh, basically what we do
(12:57):
is we meet once a month and we go over
the individual budget, our household budget, how we're meeting our budget.
We go over that spreadsheet that you keep mentioning that
I do all the time very restart. So we go
over our spreadsheet of our income and our outgo. We
look and see if we're meeting our plans and if
we don't. And that's my wife, the household CFO. She's
(13:20):
the one that handles all that stuff, the tracking the income,
the outgo, our expenses. I look it over and then
if there's a problem, you know, that's my job to
figure out, Okay, what do we got to do to
change if we're if we're not meeting our budget, if
we're overspending, if we're not meeting our savings goals. That's
my job to figure out, Okay, what are we going
to do to correct that? How do we fix our
(13:44):
monthly income and our outgo to do that?
Speaker 1 (13:46):
So it's a real joint effort.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It is a total joint effort.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Do you think that is where some at least from
people who have a partner, is that where some of
them go wrong. They try to put it all on
the shoulders of one person. And and that they're not
in it together or yeah, where a couples go wrong
in finances.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
The reason it's it's personal finance, right, and the personal
part was it's just everybody's different. There's no one right
way to do anything. That's one thing that I've learned,
and I've tried to tell people, there's no right way
to do it. A big, a big thing you have
to do first off is you have first decide, well,
your husband and the wife are they the same in
the spending category? Is one a big saver and one
a big spender. You're gonna run your household probably differently
(14:28):
than like me and my wife, for example, who we're
both savers. We don't. We're not big spenders. We live modestly,
we live way below our means, so it's a lot
easier for us to go ahead and do what we're doing.
It makes perfect sense for us to do the way
we're doing it because we are we're like minded. If
you have a big spender and a big savery, it
(14:49):
might be totally different. You might decide, for example, we
have joint joints checking accounts joint say you know everything's
all joint, but I can see if you have a
you know, a one's a big spender and one's a
big savor, you might have to have separate accounts and
figure out how you're going to handle that. How is
the inc you have one income or two? You know,
(15:10):
how do you handle the income? Uh? You know from
if you have a big spender and a big savor,
you know, how does that work at? It's totally different.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Do you think, Lenn, you like? I think one of
the things you're known for is honesty. You you don't
necessarily sugarcoat things. Do you think personal finance content has
become too nice? Is Is there too much telling folks
what they want to hear? I suppose what they need
to hear.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, I do believe that. I And that's another thing
that none of my stuff is that way. It's I'm
pretty much I just tell it like it is. You know,
you've got to face reality, if you know, if you're
not willing to come to the truth and say some
difficult things, then nothing's going to get fixed. So, yes,
I do Joel believe that that sometimes they're a little
(15:54):
too nice and you've got to be a little harder,
you know, and just tell those hard truths. You have
to for kids too. You know, I'm a big I
was a big believer in my kids growing they were
growing up, to let them fail financially. So I had
no problem watching, although it hurt. I mean it hurt
to watch, but I purposely let them squander money and
(16:18):
so they would learn that, you know, learn the hard
way that you know, that's the only way they'd learn
is by making mistakes like.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
The BMX bike episode you relay in the.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Book exactly Yes, that's that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
So tell me about that real quick.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
So my son he had a bike that it needed breaks,
and I told him, fix your brakes, you know, put
your money. You have saved some money, so you can
fix your breaks. Unless you do, you're not gonna able
to ride that bike. Well, one day his finally the
bike got so bad that his brakes completely gave it.
(16:54):
He had none at all. He couldn't ride them without
any breaks at all. So I said, well, okay, let's
go buy some Let's go buy get some new brakes
for your bike so you can go go ride it.
And he said, well, I don't have any more money, dad,
And I was like, and my son's down here. I
know he can hear me telling the story about it,
so he's left. Yeah, So I told him, I go, well,
(17:15):
get the money so you can buy your fix your brakes.
You're not riding that bike anymore because it's dangerous. And
he said, well, I don't have it dan. I said,
well why not? He said, because I bought a bb
gun with my last of my money, you know. And
I was like, what were you thinking. I told you,
you know, to take care of those breaks a while ago,
and he just he said, well I didn't. And I said, well,
guess what. You're not riding your bike anymore until you
(17:37):
earn enough money to to to repare those brakes. And
he couldn't go anywhere. He was basically stuck at home
unless he wanted to walk somewhere. And he was mad.
He was so upset. And but anyways, that's that's what
I just and I held to my guns until and
he had to. I think it took him like a month,
at least more than a month to earn enough money
to actually be able to go anywhere. He was basically
(17:58):
stuck at home, you know. So that's the kind of
thing that I let him fail. It is what it is.
And you pay the.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Project that Lesson did that Lesson take, like, is that
the kind of stuff that really? Is that something that
he remembers? Now he's obviously downstairs laughing right now as
you tell the story. Did that have an impact on
his ability to connect the dots as far as personal
finances goes? No?
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Okay, no, And if you go through the book, my
son's one of the stars of the book. You know,
he's one of the main characters in here. There's so
many things that he did wrong. God love him, but
you know there were lessons to be learned, not just
for him but for anybody reading this book. Things that
he did that were amazing. He used to he's quite
a precocious teenager when he was fourteen, and there's the
(18:42):
stories in this book as well as he actually tried
to sign up for a credit card as a fourteen
year old and it was Discover, Discover credit card and Discover.
Actually he almost got it. And the only reason he
didn't get it is because my wife opened the mail
one day and saw that Discover had sent my son. Uh,
(19:06):
there looked like a bill from My wife was like,
what's going on? So she she opened up the bill
and and found out that my son, who tried to
use a slight alias to his name, but for some
reason to think, didn't put his social Security number down.
So and that was they were asking, hey, you're one
(19:26):
step away, you know, what's your social security You know
you got your card, you know, and that's when we
uh called discover and that's you can listen to the
rest of the story from the book. But yeah, we
caught him doing stuff like that, so he's done that.
He did. There was another story in there where he
one day we opened up, went to the mailbox again
(19:47):
and the wife, I think it was T Mobile at
the time, there was a bill from T Mobile. Wasn't
just your normal bill in one a regular envelope. This
this was a bill that was in an eight and
a half by eleven envelope and it was about a
half inch thick. And it turns out this was before
we had unlimited texting, so my son had just gotten
(20:10):
his cell phone and the cell phone bill, the texting
bill was well over one thousand dollars and it was
a half inch thick. You'd have to see. I actually
I actually show part of the bill in the book,
but it was like a half inch. There was like
one hundred and forty one pages long the bill of
all the stuff that had happened for that month, and
(20:34):
it was I think it was over one thousand dollars.
So that was fun trying to get that fixed as well.
That's just the taste of some of the stuff my
son did. We share that kind of stuff in the
book for him.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
You've at one point in the book you say our
spending habits reveal our priorities in life. Do you think
is it just that some folks don't value financial freedom
as much as the stuff that they can get from Amazon, Target,
whatever it is. Yeah? Do people just value different things
and you are one of those people. Maybe I'm one
of those people who value financial freedom and other people
(21:06):
are like, I don't know, it's just not really something
I care about.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah. I think they're just short term thinkers. I don't
think they think of the ramifications of spending now and
not saving later. I just they don't really. They don't
look at debt. I like Joel, I know you and
I we both look at debt as slavery almost. It's
it's financial slavery. You're putting chains on yourself every time
you take a loan out. You're you're you're reducing your
(21:32):
spending power. You know this obviously, you know you're reducing
your future buying power. You're you're basically sacrificing your future
for now. And I think most people don't even think
of it that way. I think most people just think
it's instant gratification and I'm you know, I spent my
mon I'm happy, and they're not even thinking about the
impacts down the road. And I think the further you're
willing to look down the road, I think, the more
(21:53):
willing you are to embrace the discipline needed to to
not to stop doing that. And it's just a way
about how you think about.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
There's also been like a kind of cultural movement to
make it to normalize. I guess, getting the thing you
want when you want it as quickly as possible at
the costs or the additional amount of money that you're
going to pay to get that thing quickly, who cares,
it's fine. But whether that's buy now, pay later, right,
(22:21):
it's it's well, you actually sign up for this annual
subscription to Target, Walmart and Amazon, and then you'll get
your stuff in you know, like thirty minutes instead of
even two days. Right, So do you think part of
it is just the normalization that everyone's like, well, that's
just that's just the way it's done land your old school.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, well I am. I am old school, And that's funny.
Now we are so spoiled by getting things within a
day or two. I mean, I remember, I'll do my
old man thing. Now. I remember you'd send away for
something in the mail it would take weeks to get
just via mail you wanted to buy something. And Amazon
is so spoiled as you get it within a day
or the same day for something. It's just crazy. But yeah,
(23:03):
that's how it's just it's just kind of a different world.
But you have to you have to think of how
it impacts you down the road yourself. You know, like
I said, it's those chains dead dead are chains on
your future. And you don't want to do that. You
don't want to shackle yourself. It's easy though, to do
that when you're young. It's just when you're younger, you
just can't imagine being older. You know, you can't imagine
(23:24):
being sixty or you know, I'm sixty years old old.
Now it's like it's some you can't. It's just you
can't fathom it. But once you get here quick, it's
it's very fast, and so before you know it, if
you're not paying attention, it sneaks up on you.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
All Right, I've got more questions I want to get
to with you, Lenn, including I want to talk about
your aunt Doris and your grandpa, a lot of family
members that make appearances in your blog and in your
new book. So we'll get to some more questions with
Len Penzo right after this. Right, we're back still talk
(23:58):
with Lenpenzo talking about his new book, True Money Stories,
and Len's personal finance writings have I've always enjoyed them,
and Len is very honest in his approach to personal finance,
which I think is something that is missing in a
lot of personal finance content these days. I'm curious, like,
(24:19):
how do you think about And I really don't want
to get political, and we try to stay away from
politics most of the time on the show, but it
is true that like political leaders, legislation, those things have
an impact on our economy, they have an impact on
our personal finances. Like that stuff, the things that happened
at the national and the state level and the local level,
they trickled down and the impact packed us as consumers,
(24:41):
and then people around in different parts of the country
are impacted differently too, Right, I think about like offshoring
and how that's impacted in particular people in smaller Midwestern towns,
manufacturing towns. And you talk about like there's a tendency
I guess for some folks to blame circumstances for a
lack of their ability to make progress. But it is
also true, right that more difficult circumstances do hamper our
(25:04):
ability to make progress. How do you think about that dichotomy.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yes, there there are cases where people in personal finance
they run into difficulties and it's through no fault of
their own. I mean, that's just given. And people have
health issues, people have unexpected expenses that come up, natural
disasters come up. It will wipe you out for certain things.
I get it, I get it, But there's also there
(25:31):
still doesn't absolve people of the obligation if at all possible,
to save up for those emergencies. If you can. Again,
I realize there's certain health things you could there's nothing
you could ever do. There's nothing you could ever do
to avoid that, And that's just that's unfortunate, and that's
not on the on people. Where I get rough with people, though,
is when things come up, For example, maybe they get
(25:55):
a car accident and they have damages to their vehicle
that are you know, fives six eight thousand dollars and
they don't have their insurance or they don't have enough
and they didn't have enough insurance to cover it, and
they don't have their savings, they don't have an emergency
savings account to cover that. You know, that I believe
is on them. I think you're one of your first
(26:15):
responsibilities is to somehow make sure you build up an
emergency savings account as fast as possible to at least
be able to handle a new engine in your car
or something like that. You know, you've got to have
a significant amount of emergency savings built up as fast
as you can. And that comes even before you're saving
(26:36):
for your retirement. That has to be the first thing,
in my opinion. And if you don't do that, I mean,
and that's on you. I mean, it's not hard to
set aside. It's not asking a lot to set aside
a small percentage of your paycheck every week, even if
it means foregoing things you have to do it. That
is again to me, your that's a responsible person will do.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
That's what's the biggest barrier you see for most peop
people from getting to that point where they're like, yeah,
I probably should do something. My personal finances are not
headed into good direction. I need to start thinking about
my future and my near term future because I don't
have the cash in the bank. What are the biggest
hurdles you see for most people? Or they're like they
can't quite get there or bridge that gap? What are
(27:17):
they doing wrong?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Sometimes? I think what they're probably doing is they're just
not willing to forego things that they want that they
don't need, that they could be saving, sacrificing, Okay, doing sacrificing.
For example, when we first bought the house i'm in
now currently, I know the honey you be and I
made a terrible mistake before we bought this house where
(27:41):
the honey be wanted to be a stay at home
mom and said, yeah, okay, that's great, so go ahead,
and she quit her job right before we bought this house,
which lowered the amount of income we had for the
house and to get into this house. After that happened.
I mean we were pinch and pennies. Let me tell you,
for at least two years. I mean, we weren't doing
(28:01):
a lot of anything, eating rice and beans, not going
a luxury week weekend for us. Our luxury night out
was going to McDonald's once a month. You know that
for for the first two year poor we were house poor.
I mean, we were house poor. I mean that's an
extreme example. But I didn't run myself into debt despite
that just because said, hey, well we're going to have fun.
(28:23):
We deserve it. Anyways, No, we sucked it up, and
that again that was partially a mistake on my part,
for you know, we shouldn't shouldn't have shouldn't have her
probably leave her job quite so soon. But anyways, the
point is, I think you just have to be willing
to suck it up and make some sacrifices for a
little while just to get to where you need to be.
(28:45):
So that that's that's how I feel anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
So I think probably a much bigger percentage of Americans
could reach financial independence than currently do. But then there's
other people who say, I think everybody can reach can
can chief financial independence, especially in a country like the
United States, would you agree with that assessment or do
you think no, Like there's some people who just it's
(29:08):
it's not gonna be possible for them.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, no, it's it's harder now, there's no doubt about it.
Gen Z and to a lesser extent, the millennials are
they they're screwed compared to Gen X and the Baby
Boomers and the what do they call the Silent generation
or whatever? They are totally it's it's not fair. It's
(29:30):
it's due to the monetary system. It's just the way
our debt based monetary system is. It's we're in a
position now where the way it's set up, they were doomed.
It was it doomed them from the beginning. Once Nixon
got us off the d anchored US dollar from gold,
that put us on the path to where we're at now.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So what do they have to do differently? Young young
listeners who are like, wait, you just told me I'm screwed?
What do I have to do differently.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Than well, you're screwed in that it's it's so difficult.
Now you're not totally screwed. Let me, You've got a
lot harder admittedly than gen X and baby boomers. You know,
gen X, it was no problem even in the eighties,
you could work at a grocery store. I know this
for a fact. And I have friends who didn't have
(30:14):
They just had regular blue collar jobs and they had houses.
They were able to afford a house in their twenties
with a blue collar job. You can't do that anymore.
And that's that's the fault of our monetary system basically,
but that's what's made things so much tougher for them.
I look at my kids as well, my gen Z
kids both have good jobs, and they can't afford a house.
(30:38):
They can't afford a house. You know, if this was
the eighties or nineties.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Year, also in Southern California.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Admittedly, yes, it'd be easier to afford a house somewhere
else outside of Southern California. But still it's still difficult.
It's still difficult. So how do you overcome that. Well,
you just have to I know this is not satisfying,
and I don't mean this to sound glib. You just
have to work harder. It's just harder. You're just gonna
(31:03):
have to do save more, You're gonna have to invest.
You might have to even take bigger risks with your
investments to get bigger returns. The beauty of that is
and this is a mistake I made when I was
younger as well, investing in your twenty The beautiful the
beautiful thing about being in your twenties and thirties and
(31:26):
investing is you have time to make mistakes. You can
take those risks and and survive those mistakes because you
have the benefit of time to recover. Somebody who's older
can't do that. That's why older people have to, you know,
invest in much safer investments because they can't afford a
big downturn. So when you say when you're younger you
can take bigger risks, when.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
You say take more risks as younger investors, what do
you mean. Are you saying, like, go all in on
the latest cryptocurrency len Is that your advice?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Well, one, I'm not big on and I do discuss
cryptocurrencies in my body and precious metals as well. I'm
not a big fan of cryptocurrencies at all, although I
am a big fan of precious metals.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
So what does it look like to swing bigger than
as a younger investor?
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, So make sure you're not putting anything in fixed
income bond. I mean, you got to be invested in
the stock market, and I'm not going to tell you
what to invest in. You've got to do your own
due diligence there. But you do not play it safe.
Do not do any stable value you have your four
O one K, don't do it. Don't put anything in
your stable value fund. If you're in your twenties or
(32:31):
or your thir thirties, I wouldn't and maybe you should.
You know, don't take advice for me this. I'm just saying,
if I had to do it over in my twenties
and thirties, I would have been much less risk averse.
I would have been much more risky with my investments.
I'd have been much better off. It's your only it's
the only way out. Really.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah. I remember when I first started investing, I was
investing in target date funds, and that was kind of
what had been recommended to me. And I remember at
the more research I did, I was like, target day
funds are great, low cost target day funds through some
of the Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity. But I'm also really young,
and I really don't even know that I need this
(33:12):
sort of bond exposure in my portfolio at all. So
it wasn't that target day funds are bad. They just
weren't as risky as I was willing and wanted to be,
given what I was trying to accomplish. And I say,
especially in those twenties, the target date fund for some
people up to you could be a little too risk averse. Even.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah, I think anybody in their twenties and threes right now,
you're losing out to inflation. I mean the bonds are
You're losing money. I don't care. You're not even stable
vesting in bonds just to keep a little bit, you're
losing money. I would stay far away from that and
try to, like I said, be aggressive, do your research.
There are sectors that are doing very well even in
(33:52):
this environment, that are doing much better than others. Be diversified,
but you know, take risks. You have to. You have
to somehow figure out a way to get bigger returns.
That's all I can say. It's really it's not very
satisfying right now. It's our monetary system has got everybody
over a barrel right now, the younger generations.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
It's terrible talk to me about the other members of
your family who make an appearance in the book and
the impact they've had on you. Your Aunt Doris, Grandpa right,
who else who had an impact on you from a
personal finance perspective.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
One of the characters in there in this book is
my cousin Kevin, and he's mostly in my blind taste
test challenges, So I have a whole bunch of blind tastes.
You're talking about popular things on my blog, one of
the more popular segments in my blog. But he is
an accountant. He's retired now, but he's the one that
really got me thinking about looking at debt as financial slavery.
(34:48):
And he's also very good about being organized and watching
your money and always putting your money to work and
making sure that your money's working for you. So my
cousin Kevin, I think had the biggest impact. But there's
others as well. I have my aunt Doris, who you mentioned.
(35:10):
She's she's passed away ninety four, several years ago now,
but she lived a very she lived well, but she's
a very frugal person and despite her limited income, she
did very well. I don't know, I don't know how
she and if she invested or what she did. But
(35:33):
she just showed me that you know, you can. You
can enjoy life. You don't have to spending money. Is
not all about light. What life is about, right, It's
about living your life and enjoying the things you have
and family and things like that as well.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
So you're making me think about value formation, which is
something that you talk about some like is is sometimes
like runaway spending habits and an inability to really figure
out personal finance? Is it a lack of being able
to connect your values to what's happening with your money.
How important is like the like we have this thing
(36:11):
on on how to money dot com, like people can
go through the why behind their money. We ask help
them go through a bunch of questions to figure out
what they care about so they can link their money
habits to those deeper values that they that they have
that they espouse. Do you think that maybe that deeper
step is something a lot of people have missed?
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah? I do, Actually, yes, you gotta. I think a
lot of people these days, I think they're tied to
their tied to the almighty dollar. Actually, here here's another thing.
I guess I should go back to my indoors as
well as it's really not about I know people have
these dollar amounts that they have. I'm like, oh, I
got to have this much money by this time, you know,
(36:49):
on my life. Yeah, you have to have a target
on there. But again the dollar, it's not just chasing
the dollars, right, It's just about it's your life, your
life experiences, your family. There's more to life than money itself.
That being said, money is required, especially as you get older,
(37:10):
you better make sure you have enough of it to
at least live modestly. And it really isn't that much
actually my family for example, or even today, I'm just
like we're at right now, this is the end of
September and I've just we just had our review a
few weeks ago, are previous for August, and we had
only burned through I think sixty five thousand dollars my house,
(37:33):
So sixty five thousand dollars through August, So you really
don't and that's with a lot of splurges. And we
had spent some money for us little splurge things on
trips or what have you. It could have been much
less than that. So I mean that's all Evan, you know,
that's just having a lot of fun, and we spend
only sixty five thousand dollars. You'd be surprised how little
(37:53):
you can get by on as you get older. People
think it you actually kind of spend less as you
get older, most people. I mean, if you're not wanting
to travel all around the world and everything, yeah, you
can spend a lot, a lot less than you might think.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
So do you think those commercials about oh, you're gonna
you need three point two million dollars by the time
you were tied? Are those overblown? Is an utterly ridiculous Yeah, fanciful,
over blown.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Okay, they're overblown, totally overblown. Yeah, you know, it all
comes down to you, right what you how are you
willing to live your life? You know, again, we're modest spenders.
We're not big Me and the Honeybee. We don't you know,
we don't do a lot of fun things. We're gonna
go We're gonna go to Cabo San Lucas later this
year for a week. Maybe we've got a Hawaii trip
(38:35):
next year, but that's it. I mean, those are our trips,
you know, one or two trips a year and and
then the rest is just living life, being with family
and doing family things. And it's really you know, you
don't spend a lot of money if you and we
enjoy and we have a fun, We have a very
satisfying life. So you know, you don't need a lot
you really don't.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I want to talk a little bit about retirement and
one of the most popular maybe maybe the most popular
post on your blog of all time. We'll get to
a few more questions with len Penzo right after this.
We're back still talk with my friend len Penzo and
talking about his his new book which is called True
(39:17):
Money Stories, and it's a compilation of a lot of
his most successful blog posts throughout the years. And uh
and he's been blogging for quite some time. And then
on your blog, one of I think my favorite things
we talk about on How to Money when it comes
out every year we tend to is your annual sandwich survey.
It's so just like meat and potatoes basic, it's actually
(39:38):
more like baloney and white bread, I guess.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
But it's wheat and the survey.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Sorry, my bad, bread, My bad. But like, how have
you had why why did you start writing that? And
what have you seen? Talk about? Like inflation at the
grocery store. You know, that's like instead of talking about
the weather, that's what we talk about now as humans.
How what have you seen like as you've been writing
this survey over the years. What's the impact?
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, I started that survey in two thous I started
that the first year I started the blog, and it
was really popular. I mean, it got the I couldn't
believe the first year I did it, I got got
a lot of good feedback on it. I was like, well, hey, okay,
I'll do it. I didn't really plan on it being
an annual thing. It was just a one time thing,
you know, just check. I wanted to check out the price.
You know, my kids were in school. The price of
(40:24):
a school lunch was I forget what it was way
back then, a buck, buck in a quarter or whatever.
And I wanted to know.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
If it was a good old piper, But was it
cheaper to.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Make a sandwich, you know, every day for your kids
and then you know, give them the banana and the
and the little mini bag of chips and is that
cheaper than the school lunch? So that's what started it.
So I said, well, you know, I'll pick ten because
everybody has their favorite sandwiches. I said, well, I'll pick
ten different sandwiches. I'll set up the ingredients for you know,
(40:53):
as a benchmark. You know, you know, so much mustard
and so much mayonnaise, and you know, two slices of
wheat bread anyways, cheese, whatever. Set up all those benchmarks,
and I'll measure the prices of those benchmarks. I'll assemble
the sandwiches and come up with a price for each sandwich. Okay,
So long story short, there is every year it has
always come out the price of the sandwich in a
(41:14):
brown bag lunch is always far less than a school lunch,
the price of a school lunch. And it's healthier for
you too. Okay, But what I've searned since then, the
price has gone up, and this price has gone down.
I think back in two thousand and nine, the average
price of all ten sandwiches was about fifty four cents
something like that, and now it's up to a dollar
(41:34):
ten or something like that. As the average price up
a sandwich. Now it's over over it, so it's pretty
much doubled. But in those years the price has gone up.
Right before the pan then it was dropping the pandemic
it made a spike, and then it dropped one year,
and then this year the price went up again. So
this is the prices are as high as they've ever
been on those sandwiches. But there's seventeen years of data,
(41:57):
and if you go to my article, you'll see the
price is over those seventeen years of all the sandwiches.
So it's it's really turned into it's really quite interesting.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Now.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Well, there's so much data there that it's quite fascinating.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
He has kind of taken on a life of its own.
Your sandwich survey.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Yes it has, Yeah, Yeah, it absolutely has.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah it is. Well, it is fascinating to see it's
such the lowest common denominator thing. And yeah, it's something
that we're making every day. At least we are at
my house right for my kids, my kids who are
all school age, seventh grade, fifth grade, kindergarten, and so
we're in the we're in the throes of school lunches.
And yeah, like every once in a while, my son
when it's Hamburger Day, he's he wants to buy, right. Unfortunately,
(42:36):
I think a school lunch for him is like three bucks.
I'm like, okay, once a week for Hamberger that's.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
What it is. It's three fifty in our I still can.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Do that, but most days, yeah, you're gonna eat healthier,
even if, even if the price discrepancy between the school
lunch and what we're making at home is like minimal,
which it is when that's the sick because you're doing
the sandwiches. But then like he slice up some apples,
apples aren't cheap, like some carrots whatever, try to give
him a well rounded lunch. It's it is gonna it's
gonna get pretty close to the price of school lunch.
(43:04):
But you just at least you know what you're feeding them.
Then I want I'm curious you still write about personal finance.
You still have this kind of passion for the subject
after all these years, starting the blog in two thousand
and eight, Does it ever bore you? What keeps you
excited on the personal finance front? Why do you why
do you keep talking about it writing about it?
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Well, I'll be honest, so I'm not quite as excited
as I used to be. Joel. Let's say, you know,
there's been over three thousand articles right now on that
on the blog. If you can believe that I've I
think i've written about two thousand of them. The book
has what I've considered to be the one hundred and
sixty seven of the most popular blog pieces that I
(43:42):
that I did.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah, it's a lot of consistency though, and you've really
encouraged and helped a lot of people, motivated a lot
of people, I think, to take charge of their personal finances.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
So I try, and the blog is it. Don't get wrong,
the blog is still there. It's it's it's you. You
can come over, you can sign up, get my newsletter,
and I go. We do about five there's always five
articles a week there and I do every Saturday, I
do something called black Coffee. So that's my main that's
the thing I do every every week without fail. And
what I do is that's my personal finance roundup at
(44:12):
the macro level. So it's not more not so much
personal finance, but it's what's going on that's affecting our
personal finances in the macrosphere. And I do that. And
it's a humorous thing where I pick up the memes
of the week, funny memes, the best Twitter posts that
I find. Usually there's ten or eleven different things which
(44:33):
it's topics, which I call credits and debits, I opine
on them, and it's just it's funny. I have a
squirrel cam in there. It's just silly. But I mean again,
you still there's still things to learn, and it's very popular.
That's what I that's the main thing I do every
week now with the blog.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
And you, you, sir, you are now a retiree. All
that hard work is paid off. You don't have to
work anymore if you don't want to. What are the
what are the biggest difficulties of being a retired person?
Is it mentally difficult to not have a paycheck coming
in anymore because you've obviously you've done a lot of
the hard work when it comes to front loading the sacrifice,
(45:10):
I can't imagine that you're you know that you're having
to make significant sacrifices in order to be okay. Right, So,
what's what's it like as someone who has you've done
really well with their personal finances over a long period
of time to finally hit retirement. What are the things
that like weigh on you?
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Gosh, I don't want to be a downer as you
get older. There's things you have to worry about, like
long term care. It's it's like the big expense that
could in theory wipe you out maybe if something bad
you know what I'm saying, Like, yeah, like if a
family member gets Alzheimer's and you can't take care of
them anymore, Well, I have enough money for that if
(45:47):
if that happens.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
The trouble is long term care insurance could wipe you
out too. It's so dang expensive exactly.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
And that's something that you know, I had to make
and I'll just come I did the risk assessment. One
thing of being about being in one of the things
we do is risk assessment, and and that's a personal finances.
A lot about personal finance is risk assessment. You have
to make a lot of decisions on risks. You know,
it is the risk worth taking. So and in that
(46:14):
that arena, I did a lot of a lot of
data gathering and running numbers and crunching, and I decided
that the risk a better risk for me for me
on just as me to not go take the insurance
for that reason, for what you said, Joel, because it's expensive,
and uh, you know that's so so yes, that's to me.
(46:37):
That's the biggest thing, you know, is long term care
some some medical thing that will totally wipe out my
my retirement savings. That being said, you know, I think
I'm not really worried about that. I think I'm comfortable
enough even if that happened that that's not going to happen.
I mean, if I have to pay for it out
(46:57):
of my retirement SAMs, I'll be good enough anyways, because
I did a good enough job saving on the way
up to retire.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I think, just as someone who you know would like
to retire in twenty years speaking to someone who is retired.
One of the guys, my friend Wes Moss writes about
the habits of the like happy retirees, and I'm curious, like,
have you inculcated any of those, Like what does it
look like? Because so many people go full bore working
(47:27):
forty five fifty hours a week to working zero hours
a week. They just retire all the way. You've had
other You've got other hobbies. Yeah, are there any any
secrets to being a happy retiree?
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Well, you just named it. You've got to look, life
is long, and I've I'll probably t off some the
fire people, the people who want to retire at thirty
years old, you know, thirty five forty. Let's say you
retire at forty, You've got another forty fifty years of life.
I mean, what are you going to do? I mean, yes,
you can have hobbies when you're older. It's easy to say, y,
(47:58):
I get a couple of hobbies. That does it. And
usually when you're older, you have grandkids, you have you
have other things to keep you busy. But when you're
in your you know, forties, fifties, you know, that's all
how many how much tennis can you play? How much
golf can you play? Right, you really need to think
about what you're going to do to fill that time,
or you're not going to be happy. You'll probably want
to go back to work anyways, because you know, that's
(48:21):
a long life and a lot of things going to happen,
you know, so you got to make sure you're busy. Yes,
hobbies is one. It helps if you have, you know,
if you're older and you have grandkids or something like
that to keep you busy too. There's only so much
traveling you can do too. I can't imagine. I can't
imagine people who travel. I mean, there are people who
enjoy it, but I mean, gosh, you know, life is long.
(48:43):
Believe me, it's really long. It's short, but it's long,
and you got to figure out a way to fill
that time.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
All right, have something to do with those hours if
you're really aiming to retirely, because you're right, I've seen
some of those folks want retiring early and then they're
like they're clawing to get back into some Yeah. I
don't know how they do it paid labor, you know,
so I get it. Lenpenzo, this has been a joyful conversation.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Where can
(49:10):
listeners find out more about you and your new.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Book Lenpenzo dot com. That's easy. You can always say
check me out on Twitter at Lenpenzo and I'm there
on Amazon, so you can just google True Money Stories
Lenpenzo on Amazon and there it is. You can read
them more about it there.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
Wonderful. Thank you, Lenn, appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Thank you, Joel.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
All Right, it's always fun to connect with somebody who's
kind of an og really in the personal finance space.
I mean, think about writing this content for almost two decades,
putting your thoughts out there. Three thousand blog posts. That's
quite a feat from Lenpenzo and just cool that he
gave me a quick start when I was starting to
(49:49):
write about money as well. I think my big takeaway
from Len and it's kind of the unpopular truth that
a lot of people don't want to hear. Yeah there,
Lenn talked about problems with the monetary system, and he
mentioned the fact that not everybody has the same advantage
(50:10):
or starts from the same place. But he discussed the
necessity to face reality and to sacrifice, and I think
that's true that the more you're willing to face the
reality of your situation and to make sacrifices to get
where you want to go, the more likely you are
to achieve some of those long term financial goals. And
(50:31):
he talked about the inability most people have to sympathize
with their future selves to think about twenty thirty, forty
years down the line. I do think that's probably a
place where a lot of people fall short. They're like, yeah,
but what am I saving for? And there's a disconnect
between the twenty something year old you and the potentially
(50:52):
likely to be sixty something year old you. And it
just reminds me of what Fidelity found one time of
taking a picture of yourself and putting it through one
of those apps that make you look a lot older.
It really did have meaningful results in helping people increase
what they were willing to put into their four one
K or into their IRA, and so find a way
(51:13):
to think about, hey, what do I want my future
to look like? What am I gonna potentially even actually
look like when I'm reaching that age? And when you
can do that, I think it does become a little
bit easier to put aside some of the money you
would have spent today and save it for tomorrow. One
of the things Lenn said too that I really appreciated
(51:34):
he was right there at the end. He was talking
about risk assessments, and I think that's a really important
part of personal finance. And it's not just oh, which
fund should I choose to invest in because is it
gonna Am I going to get twelve percent returns in
this fund versus nine percent returns in another? That you
(51:55):
know past performance is not indicative of future results, so
you you know, that's a really hard thing to do. Anyway,
It's an imperfect process to try to figure out which
funds you should be investing in. But when we're talking
about risk assessment and risk mitigation, which was kind of
the Jeff Bezos framework of like regret minimization for life.
(52:16):
I think that's a good way to think about personal finance.
My advice to you would be to actually write down
and think about the risks of different paths you could
choose right whether it's the risk of oversaving over investing.
Some people really do have that risk, whether they're saving
too much or the risk of not doing enough. The
(52:39):
trade offs that you're going to make, actually like writing
those down and having a conversation with a friend, bouncing
ideas off of them, or with your significant other. Like
I think doing some more risk assessment work would help
us make better personal finance decisions. Trade Offs are the
old clement reality in life, with so many of us
(53:02):
make those trade offs without having weighed the pros and
cons beforehand. So thank you, as always for listening. I
really appreciate it. You'll find show notes, links to Len's
new book and his website up on the website at
howtomoney dot com. Until next time, best Friend Out.
Hosts And Creators
Joel Larsgaard
Matthew Altmix
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