Presidential Money Lessons w/ Megan Gorman #881

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to had to Money. I'm Joel and I am Matt,
and today we're talking presidential money lessons with Megan Gorman.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
All right, so we're finally gonna do it. Joel, We're
gonna tell everyone out there who they should vote for
who Just kidding. We're actually not even going to get
into like the recent presidential tax returns. I guess that
wasn't that reason, but or whether candidates whether they own
any stocks, or whether they own real estate. Actually, we're
gonna completely avoid the mudslinging landscape that we find ourselves

(00:47):
in today, and instead we're gonna focus on personal finance,
which is what we do best. And fortunately for us,
we're joined by author Meghan Gorman. Meghan is a history buff.
She began her career at Goldman Sachs. She founded her
own specializing in tax and financial planning for high and
ultra high net worth individuals. She's a regular contributor over

(01:08):
at Forbes and her new book, All the President's Money,
it looks at the men who have governed America and
specifically how they govern their own money, their own personal finances.
And so we're excited to look at the different financial
lessons that we can all learn from them. Megan, thank
you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Oh my gosh, thanks for having me on, Matt and Joel.
I've been looking forward to this.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
We have too, And seriously, I started digging into your
book and I couldn't put it down because there's something
about the overlap of history, our country's history, and then
money that to me, I'm insatiable because this book.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Is perfect and it humanizes these characters that are oftentimes
only seen as characters, right, Like, I'm sure the next
thing you want to look into, Joel, is like whether
or not, like what was the exercise routine of these presidents?
Did they ever go running? Like I do?

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Teddy Roosevelt at least was a pretty buff fella. But Megan,
first question we have to ask everyone who come on
the show is what do you like to splur? John,
Matt and I we call it the craft beer equivalent
because we spend a good bit of money on good
craft beer. But hey, we're saving investing the same time,
so it's all good. What's that spending line item in
your budget?

Speaker 4 (02:12):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (02:13):
So I had a feeling you were going to ask
me this question, and so I'm guessally going to tell
you the truth, even though it's sort of embarrassing.

Speaker 4 (02:19):
So I'm a tourist.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
I'm born in April and Taurus is We're the lovers
of luxury, builders of wealth, and if you ever come
to a Taurus's house, they're typically beautiful. We love houses
and decorating and decorating houses is sort of my passion.
So I would tell you the thing I like to
splurge on is vintage lighting.

Speaker 4 (02:38):
And I know I sound crazy.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
I know you usually get like different answers, but I
love going on sites like First Dibbs and estate sales
and looking for really stunning lighting pieces.

Speaker 4 (02:50):
So that's my splurge.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
And I'm very blessed to have a very patient husband,
not just because the fact that I like splurging on that,
but he's also willing to help me do all the
things that you have to do to make sure that
those lights work in today's lighting fish, So that is
my splurge.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
So can you give an example. I don't exactly know
what you mean when you say vintage lighting, Like, are
we talking about like a street lamp from France or
something that you've like, what does this look like?

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Okay, no, no, I would tell you like Morano scampces
from the nineteen sixties, right. So I love history, and
history is told through fashion, food, decorating.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
In your house.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
You can often look like I'm a child of the
seventies and eighties. I know I'm older than you guys,
but you could look at a picture of a house
from the early eighties and know exactly the time period, right,
And so.

Speaker 4 (03:39):
I love that and it's sort of historical and fun.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
And that's why lighting is so interesting, because I think
it tells you a lot about what's going on during
that time.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
Period, got it, Okay.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
It's also it makes for a more interesting centerpiece things
to talk about because a lot of the style today
I'm not going to say there's not cool stuff out there,
but it's mimicking stuff from the past, or it can
be kind of bland. But if you get like an
authentic mid century piece from the sixties, it's a statement
and people are like, oh, tell me about that.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Yeah. Remember, lighting is the jewelry of the house. So
anyone who's doing like you.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Can sound like something that you continue to recite to
your husband. You don't understand that as.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
It is, you have to say that to your spouse
to get them to buy in. Right. But you know,
it's funny because I love the mix of high and low, right,
And I think that's something true in personal finance and
even in my book.

Speaker 4 (04:25):
Right, Like the presidents, they're.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
So high end and yet we're sort of gossiping about
them in the book, which is sort of naughty.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Right.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
It's a little US magazine, which is what I love
about it.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Well, before we launch into the presidents, let's talk about you,
because we did some digging with you and just your
background and trying to figure you out. You've got quite
a resume from what I understand you were a congressional page.
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (04:46):
Oh my god, you really found that about me?

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yes, Like you've taught English overseas as well. We would
love to kind of hear.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
The many lives of Megan Gormont. Why do you have
such a diverse background. It's fascinating.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
You know. I grew up in a small town, but
my parents were from New York and so they were
always my father always was pushing us to think about
things intellectually.

Speaker 4 (05:06):
So I've always loved politics, right.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
I've loved the presidents and everything since I was like
six years old, and I really originally wanted to go
into politics back in the days when it wasn't so divisive,
and so I was a page and I loved it.
But when I was in college, I studied history fell
in love with it even deeper. I was a Medieval
British history major and a modern Chinese And I was

(05:30):
in college in the late nineties and my dad used
to say to me, China is going to be huge
during your lifetime.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
Do yourself a favor.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
Go learn about it so that you can understand. And
so I ended up going over to China. I taught
at a university in Tangent, which is the city next
to Beijing.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
And this is.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
Right as China was sort of changing, Like if I
showed up in China today, I wouldn't recognize the town
that I lived in. But it was just amazing to
really start to understand what China was going through, the drive,
what they hoped. And when I was there, there was
no middle class in China, and it's amazing to think

(06:10):
that here we are, you know, twenty five twenty six
years later, and forty three percent of all Chinese are
middle class. So being there at the time just taught
me a lot about China and how they think, and
it's helped me a lot in my career, mainly because
when you're working with people with their money, you don't
want them to be, you know, American centric in their portfolio.

(06:31):
Americans tend to own a lot of America in their portfolios.
You want them to have some areas of growth, like
emerging markets. So it does help to know a lot
about China.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
All Right, I'm curious on the book front.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
So you're a history nerd, not a historian, but history nerd, right,
history nerd?

Speaker 4 (06:48):
Yeah, I mean I think I'm starting now.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
I'm sort of straddling right both worlds because I did
have to get into primary source documents and really do
the historiography that you're required to do to do these
types of books.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Which is exactly my question.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Because you spent a lot of time, or I can
tell you spent a lot of effort kind of digging
up some of those details. How hard was it right
to research this book because most biographies of presidents they
just don't include Washington or Jefferson's detailed budget, Like you
got to the root of a lot of this money
stuff for a lot of presidents. How hard was it

(07:21):
to come by those details?

Speaker 3 (07:22):
You know, it's each era of American history has its
different challenges. So I'll tell you anybody from sort of
HW Clinton on, any of those presidents are really hard
to get into and research because a lot of their
records are still closed. You know, they're still living, and
so you have to go about researching them very differently

(07:44):
than sort of the presidents from Reagan and earlier, where
they have presidential libraries or birthplaces. And what's really really
important when you're doing this research is we talk about
money all day long, right, We send emails, we're chatting
with our spouse, our friends.

Speaker 4 (08:00):
So for me, it was finding letters, you know, and.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Really starting to look for that one or two sentences
that sort of showed me, oh, they are talking about
finance here, we're talking about how they feel. And I
talk about this early in the book, but I found
a letter from Lyndon B. Johnson in the early forties
to one of his friends saying, I was up at
two am, you know, scared about money. And what was

(08:26):
interesting was over looking at a lot of the different
presidents that thematically was a thread I saw across all
of them, and I think that's so important today because
you know, Matt Joel, so many of us worry about money, right.
I mean, you just asked me my splurge, right, but
you didn't ask me what I was up at two am,
you know, worried about.

Speaker 4 (08:45):
And the truth is LBJ is right. You are up
at two.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
Am trying to figure out are you doing all the
right things? Regardless of what your asked.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
A basis, Yeah, it's true. Like early on in the book,
I think you said that most of their money problems
are just like ours, and I totally agree, right, like
the emotions behind that they are no different at all.
But at the same time, there are also some contrasts, right,
like you've got you talk. You start the whole book
with the FDR because he lost something like twenty six
thousand dollars by investing in lobsters, and if you inflation

(09:17):
adjust that number, it's a lot, right, it's much more.

Speaker 4 (09:19):
Yeah, I think it's half a million dollars.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
And you know it's funny because I found that story
by chance. There was one book about somebody mentioned something
about he was investing in things like lobsters and dirigibles.
So I call the FDR Library, right, and you make
an appointment to go into the archives, and you know,
people go to the FDR Library and Hyde Park because
they want to learn about the depression of World War
two or social security. And I literally called them up

(09:42):
and I'm like, I'm here for the lobsters.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
And God blessed these archivists because they are like.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
You're what But when I arrived, Because what happens is
you go and they look for this and then they
tell you what boxes they believe it's in, and then
you go to the archive room. You wear special gloves,
you can't bring anything in. They're very strict, and they
give you the boxes. And in one of the boxes
was all of this correspondence.

Speaker 4 (10:05):
And what's really.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
Striking to me is FDR made this investment and he's
like a lot of people today with angel investing. Right.
You know, my friend's got a company, or my friend
has a great idea. Let me throw twenty five thousand
at it, and I'll do like a safe note or
a convertible note. And FDR sort of does this in
nineteen twenty one. But Matt and Joel, when you go
behind the scenes in nineteen twenty one, that's the summer

(10:26):
he got polio, and so that whole lobster situation where
they're trying to figure out how to fix the investment.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
You know, he's there trying to figure out am I
ever going to walk again?

Speaker 3 (10:36):
And so you just imagine sort of what's going on
in his mind, And there's part of me that wonders
maybe the lobsters were a fun little reprieve from the
stress of trying to figure out how am I ever
going to walk again?

Speaker 2 (10:48):
But it's a small distraction, it is.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
And you think about your own money and the things
you're worried about at the same time you're worried about money,
and you sort of are like, Okay, I get it.
But but FDR was interesting in the sense that, unlike
the most of us, he had a safety net. Right.
He's the ultimate trust fund kid. His mother was his
trustee for most of his life, right, because she only
died a few years before him. And so what was

(11:12):
interesting in his situation was the letters between him and
Eleanor and him and his mother, and he'd be like, hey, mom,
things are great. I just saw so and so, by
the way, can you send me X number of dollars
I need it for this so's it was interesting and
going through his correspondence to sort of see how money
was just a part of the conversation.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
I send those letters to my mom and I just
get no reply. It's terrible. Can you do something about that?

Speaker 2 (11:33):
Mag h.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Well, it's amazing how many of our presidents were always
on allowances, right, like you know we think about today,
Oh my god, poor Millennials and gen Zers. You know,
mom and dad are still supporting them and so on.
That's something over the course of American history that's been there.
I mean, Calvin Coolidge had an allowance from his father
of the course of his lifetime.

Speaker 4 (11:54):
Dwight D.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Eisenhower, when he married Maimie, got an allowance from her
father to support her because she was wealthy and he wasn't.
So it's funny how you learn these little things and
you start to look at these historical figures and go,
oh gosh, yes, you are just like us.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Well you kind of highlight it too.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
How what's happening as you're having money issues, money successes
or failures, is you're also having life successes or life failures.
And how those things overlap and how they influence one another.
That is something all of us deal with too. I
want to kind of drill down into the financial anxiety
thing just for a second too. You actually have a
spectrum Truman to Ford financial anxiety continuum. Can you like,

(12:35):
what's the difference between those guys, those former presidents and
kind of where they stood on anxiety and how we
can kind of find ourselves somewhere on that continuum.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:44):
I mean, they're both interesting characters.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
And by the way, they both died on the same day,
different years, on December twenty sixth, in different years, and.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
They actually knew each other.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
And I think for you know, Ford is one of
these guys in American history that I think we missed
out on an opportunity because two years in he of
course loses the election to Jimmy Carter and has to,
you know, basically retire. And most presidents will tell you
it takes them two years to figure out the job.
And you know, Ford, throughout his life he had a

(13:14):
little bit of a golden touch. He sort of walked
through life and made it look like a hot knife
cutting through butter. But what's interesting about Ford is every
time he would come to that fork in the road
where he has to make a life decision that has
a financial component to it.

Speaker 4 (13:30):
He was not afraid to go the other way.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
And I think this is important because when I work
with my clients, right, I work with wealthy individuals, and
people look at them and will say to me, how
can they even worry they've got all that money. Well,
let me tell you they worry. They were just like
everybody else. But there's something about when you get to
a financial decision point, being willing to take a look
at the opportunity, set the risk, and what its impact

(13:55):
will be and be unafraid to go in a different direction.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
And you see that with Jerry Ford over the course
of his life.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
So, for instance, he's in college and one he plays football,
has this phenomenal football game where the scouts are out
and he gets recruited by two teams, the Detroit Lions
and the Green Bay Packers, and the Ford library has
the letters with the offer, and the offer would have
been wonderful for somebody coming out of college, and Ford
sort of looks at it and he's like, no, I

(14:25):
want to be a lawyer. I'm better served going to
Yale and coaching football at Yale and trying to figure
out how to get.

Speaker 4 (14:32):
Into law school there.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
And so you see this again and again, and he
ends up revolutionizing the presidency because when he leaves office,
he's young, he's in his sixties, and he is like,
I'm a capitalist, I'm going to work. And so he
decides not just to write a book, because most presidents
when they left office up to that point either wrote
a book, went back to practicing law, or just dropped dead.

(14:55):
And don't laugh, because it happened all the time. I mean,
Washington lived about a year and a half and then
he died.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
No more excitement, so why not just go to the grave.

Speaker 4 (15:04):
It's like, there's nothing better.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
And so he ends up deciding to do things like speaking.
But he just is very good at what we call
the financial pivot, which is key to financial confidence.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
Right, you're not going to always.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
Have everything be puppies and kittens and roses and rainbows
in finance, it doesn't happen that way.

Speaker 4 (15:22):
But what happens is if you.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
Catch yourself failing, you've got to be able to master
the pivot. And he was excellent at when he made
mistakes moving in the other direction. So if you think
about him, he's that example of financial confidence, even though
I'm sure he still was up at two am. And
then you have on the other end of the spectrum
Harry Truman, you know, really fascinating guy. He's often seen

(15:43):
as our poorest president. That's not true. But he does
grow up a farm family in Missouri, you know, and
he has a lot of volatility financially over the course
of his life. His father invents things and then doesn't
patent it the right way. His father at one point
goes to the futures exchange and bets all of the

(16:03):
family's money and loses it. And poor Harry doesn't get
to go to college. He start joins all these businesses
and they fail. He goes to strike rich and oil.
He can't do it, can't afford it, sells the oil well,
and then like a month later, somebody strikes oil on it.
He has a zinc mind that fails. The haberdash refails.
So he's somebody who can't seem to catch a break.

(16:25):
And we have a lot of people like that today, right.
You know, if they didn't have bad luck, they'd have
no luck at all. Right, And you see him struggle,
and you see that eroad financial decision making and what
I mean by that is when people are struggling and
they deal with this, sometimes they get obsessed with get
rich quick schemes, right, and we have those today, right,
we have them.

Speaker 4 (16:45):
They're called the lottery.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
And you see people make those types of crazy decisions,
like jumping into things like crypto because they think they're.

Speaker 4 (16:53):
Going to make a lot of money fast.

Speaker 3 (16:55):
And so Truman struggled a long time over his life,
very anxious about money and the debts that he had
dealt with. And this went on all the way till
he became president. And so I would tell you Truman
has what we would call today a little bit of
bag lady syndrome. And what I mean by that is
he actually did end up making money. What happened was
he ended up saving a lot of his presidential salary,

(17:18):
and in Congress for brief two years, gave the president
a tax free stipend that didn't require accounting for entertaining,
and Truman saved all of it because the White House
was under construction. So he had by the time of
his life about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars about
seven or eight million in today's dollars.

Speaker 4 (17:34):
And he was always very private about it. People thought,
you know, he was poor, that he was.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
Struggling, and I think part of him just worried that
he was going to end up a bit of a
bagman or bag lady. And I see this all the time.
Even with my clients incredibly wealthy, there is that fear
that things are going to get taken from them, that
they're going to fall backwards.

Speaker 4 (17:53):
And it's a really hard thing in money, because.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
What you're really trying to do when you're with somebody
in my role is make them feel safe. And I've
always wondered I wish Truman could have talked to other
people about this type of anxiety to feel safe with
his money.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
It's a recurring theme in your book. You're talking about
this sort of the continuum, but then also the journey
that a lot of these presidents go on as they
set out to achieve resiliency from a place of fragility,
but not all the presidents are able to accomplish that.
I'm curious, how did the era just appeared in time
in which each of these presidents grew up but then
governed in How do you think that impacted their financial situation.

(18:31):
I'm thinking of like on one end of the spectrum,
you've got maybe the Great Depression. But yeah, talk to
us about context a little bit.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Yeah. No, I think that's a really great question, right,
And no one's asked me that, But it's something I've
thought about a lot. And I'll use Ronald Reagan as
a great example of this.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
You know, Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Was born in nineteen ten, you know, came of age roughly,
you know, to go to college during the depression and
so on. And what I would tell you is it's
a balance between what's going on externally and what's going
on in their early money life. So what I mean
by that is, you know, if you think about it,
if he had grown up in a home where there

(19:09):
was a lot of stable finances, Reagan might not have
become so hyper almost obsessive about budgeting. But Reagan's father
was an alcoholic, and by all accounts, Reagan, to his credit,
always understood alcoholism was a disease. But Reagan's father was
a shoe salesman, and his father would get paid and

(19:31):
as his father would walk home with the paycheck, he
would spend it all on alcohol. So by the time
he got to the family's front porch, there was no
money left. And his mother, Noll, who was a very
church going woman, very good at budgeting and so on.
She even went to his employer and said, stop paying
him and pay me. But he was but she was
a woman, and they were like, we're not going to

(19:51):
give him the paycheck for a man to a woman. Right,
So of the error, right, the morals of the error.
And so you know what you see with Reagan is
the reagansh used to leave in the middle of the
night to escape their landlord. You know, they would have
changed they changed towns, and he changed his father changed jobs.

Speaker 4 (20:07):
So in his case there was a lot of volatility.
But in terms of his personal.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Life, were there things going on like the Great Depression
and things like that at the same time, yes, And
does that have an impact, Yes, those external moments do,
But I would tell you that the personal stuff impacted
him more. But what we have to keep in mind,
and this is one of the conclusions I came to
in the book, is when a lot of these presidents lived,

(20:35):
the institutions of the United States were very nimble, they
were flexible, they were changeable. Right, So in the time
that someone like a Reagan grew up the idea of
going to college, and you know, and going to college
for maybe a couple hundred dollars a year, and you know,
figuring out a way to pay for it while you're
in college, and then going and buying a house. All

(20:57):
of these things were a lot easier back then than
they are today today. And you know, you can come
to your conclusions on where they are. So many of
our institutions are so fixed that you can't maneuver around it. Right.

Speaker 4 (21:10):
So, you know, Reagan goes to college and they give him.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
As he shows up to drop his girlfriend off at college,
the college admissions dean sees him, looks at him, says,
we want you for the football team, and gives him.

Speaker 4 (21:21):
A scholarship on the spot. That doesn't happen today.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Right today, it's a whole game, and you got to
take your kid here, and you got to hire these
people to help you connect.

Speaker 4 (21:29):
Right.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
And so you think about that, You think about buying
a house today and how hard it is.

Speaker 4 (21:33):
I mean, why do we need twenty percent down to
buy a house?

Speaker 3 (21:36):
And the reason is, back in the forties and fifties,
if a bank had to repossess your house, they usually
only could get eighty cents on the dollar for it,
so they wanted to be able to recoup more.

Speaker 4 (21:46):
So these are some of the things that are in.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
The US society today that weren't there previously that let
presidents like Nixon, Eisenhower, Reagan, Ford, you know, really be
able to build wealth much easier than it is today.
So I know him on my soapbox on that, But
that was one of the conclusions I came was that it's.

Speaker 4 (22:07):
Just harder today to achieve the American dream.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
Hmmm.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
No, I appreciate that insight, are we There's so many,
so many interesting money stories you share from so many
of the presidents, Meghan, and we've got to we've got
to get some more, including we got to talk about
Lincoln growing up in poverty, how that impacts him becoming
potentially the greatest president of all time. We'll get to
that and more right after this.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
All right, we are back from the break and we're
discussing some of these presidential money lessons with guest Meghan
Gorman and Megan, we're not going to be able to
go through the book like you wrote it, where essentially
there's like these financial building blocks and it's sort of
like a graduated lesson learning sort of journey that you
take folks on, but we do want to kind of
like pick and choose. This is like the Ali Carte vision.

(22:57):
I guess I got.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
Yeah, totally, totally, And I should say one thing Joel
is I wrote the book because I thought about what
my clients did, and people always want to know what
wealthy people do.

Speaker 4 (23:06):
So it was looking at that sort of saying.

Speaker 3 (23:08):
These are the skills they had, exactly, But I'm glad
you picked up exactly.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, well, there are some building blocks and basic skills,
but then beyond that there are different approaches that you
take in order to realize life in a different way,
to appreciate it, and then to build wealth ultimately. Yeah, but,
like Joel mentioned before the break, you write about Lincoln
and he came from so little. He was born in
a single room cabin. That's basically the stuff of flore
of lessons. But what kind of impact do you think
his upbringing hat on his ability to govern? And maybe

(23:33):
more importantly for our conversation today, what are some of
the themes? What are some of the lessons that you
discovered about his personal finances during your research that we
might be able to apply to our lives.

Speaker 4 (23:44):
One question mass a lot.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
Is their personal money impact their fiscal policy. And I
would tell you that at the end of the day,
fiscal policy is driven by thousands of people.

Speaker 4 (23:53):
But what's striking about Lincoln's story.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
And the genesis of the book actually started was I
went to his presidential life library and Springfield. But outside
Springfield is the town with the log cabin that he
lived in where he was the postmaster and he had
a store. And you go there and you look at
these log cabins, and then you end up at Springfield
and on the corner of the best street in town

(24:16):
is his house.

Speaker 4 (24:17):
And it's a stunning house. It's a huge.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
House, gorgeous, and you realize he made that jump over
ten years, which is incredibly impressive. So here's what I
would tell you about Lincoln. Lincoln was an incredibly learning being.
He was always studying. He was always learning.

Speaker 4 (24:36):
I read a story.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Once that he would when he was in Congress. He
would go over to the library and read all the time.
He really was always trying to improve himself. And that
was important because Lincoln started out with not a lot
of money. Now there's differing accounts over time about how
much his family did have growing up. It was up
and down and up and down. But he also failed

(24:58):
a lot. And so what's really interesting is one of
his contemporaries with the last name Pratt, actually wrote the
financial history of Lincoln after Lincoln died. And what you
learn is that Lincoln, really, you know, takes a lot
of odd jobs, gets involved in a lot of businesses,
loses money, gets sued. I mean, he is a hot

(25:19):
financial mess, but he's constantly learning how to do better.
And he makes his way to Springfield where he becomes
a lawyer, and he is starting to make consistent money.
He's doing well, and he does something that a number
of our presidents do that help him build.

Speaker 4 (25:36):
Wealth, and that is he marries up.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
He marries a woman, a wealthy woman from Lexington, Kentucky,
Mary Todd, and they both share a passion for politics.

Speaker 4 (25:46):
But they both come from very different backgrounds.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
And I bring this up because you know, in working
with clients, right, you can come from different backgrounds, but
you have to have very similar values on money. And
so you know, Lincoln and went from somebody who was
struggling learning how to have money, learning how to grow
wealth to being married to a wealthy woman. He moved
her first to a boarding house. She can't tolerate that,

(26:12):
so her dad comes to town and helps them buy
a house, and Lincoln will take some of the help
from him, and some of the help he won't take.
But Lincoln over time realizes that Mary is a spender
and they have very different values on this. And so
while she's off doing stuff, he's constantly saving and constantly
trying to create stability. And what's fascinating about him is

(26:37):
he does a lot of things right, and then he.

Speaker 4 (26:40):
Will do things that are really odd.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
So on the day he dies, and just you know,
if a president is killed in office, they're paid through
the last day that they serve. So Kennedy, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley,
they all were paid through their last day and then
the paycheck stops the next day because there's a new president.
And now we have pinched within have pencils of the time.
But one of the things that I think Lincoln did

(27:03):
make a mistake on is despite having all of these
visions of his death, he forgets to write an estate plan,
or if he did want, no one knew where it
was and so his son Robert Lincoln has to ask
the Chief Justice of the United States to come immediately
to help them manage the estate. Because by the time
Lincoln dies in eighteen sixty five, his fifteen thousand dollars

(27:27):
estate has now become eighty five thousand, or the equivalent
of two million dollars today, And so this is a
huge estate. And they have to go out and they
have to collect all the assets, get all the bonds,
gather everything in Springfield. And because he doesn't have an estate,
they have to basically follow the espousal share rules, which

(27:47):
is a third goes to Mary Todd Lincoln, his wife,
a third to his son Tad, and a third to
his son Robert. And so that's how the Lincoln estate
gets dispersed. So he's incredibly successful on bing wealth. But
he's almost a question mark because we don't know what
he would have.

Speaker 4 (28:03):
Done, right, what would he have done?

Speaker 3 (28:05):
And I would agree with you, Lincoln is you know,
it's always a toss up depending on what's going on
in the US today, if it's Lincoln, Washington.

Speaker 4 (28:12):
Or Fdr As our greatest. But he was amazing, But
I would say this to anyone.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
He was a self learner, and so I believe financial
literacy and resiliency comes from constantly learning, and podcasts like
this are a great example.

Speaker 4 (28:27):
You know, financial literacy.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Literacy should be taught in schools, but it's not like
you should turn eighteen and you stop thinking about it.
It should be a constant how are we learning, how
are we growing?

Speaker 4 (28:36):
And what are other people doing?

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Our one one President Megan that could have used some
financial literacy or And it's also I think this particular
example highlights somebody who was brilliant beyond belief, but not
good with money, and so IQ doesn't necessarily translate into
solid money habits. Is Thomas Jefferson, I know, and I
feel like his how he handled money he kind of

(28:59):
reflects a modern trend, right where he had plenty of it,
but he couldn't control his spending, even to the point
where he had to auction off some of his possessions
later in life.

Speaker 4 (29:07):
Right, yeah, he almost auctioned off Monticello.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
So I always ask myself this question, like if I
could be a great writer, philosopher, thinker like Jefferson and
be really bad with money, or be really good with
money but not be able to write like that.

Speaker 4 (29:20):
I mean, what would I choose? I mean I totally
would have picked the former right, like he picked right
in that decision making.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
But Jefferson brings up a really interesting phenomenon that we
see today, which is Jefferson really was not good at
connecting with his future self and planning ahead. Now, part
of that had to do with the fact that a
lot of his assets were illiquid, right, and so he
wasn't able to really get good cash flow. And he

(29:45):
was a slaveholder, so that was a problem as well.
But you know, in his case, Jefferson loved the good
things in life. He loved almost some sort of instant gratification.
And it's because of Jefferson that, you know, French wines
started to come to the United dates parmesan cheese. We
should all thank him every time you have an ice
cream cone, because he was the first one who brought

(30:06):
ice cream to the US. But he was living such
a big lifestyle, especially since he went to France and
saw how the French lived, that he wasn't good at budgeting,
and he wasn't good at managing what he was trying
to achieve financially.

Speaker 4 (30:22):
It was almost like he was like I'll figure it
out tomorrow, and I will tell you what.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
Happens is he ends up accumulating the equipment about two
million dollars of debt in today's dollars. And this culminates
really with the last letter Thomas and Jefferson writes, is
this beautiful treatise on freedom and democracy.

Speaker 4 (30:39):
And so on.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
But the second to last letter is a letter asking
if he could buy wine on credit.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
So you know, he just couldn't change who he was.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
And you know, I often think about how do you
work with someone like a Thomas Jefferson. I have clients
who are a lot like this, and the thing is
you're constantly trying to ground them and get them.

Speaker 4 (30:58):
To commit to try trying.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
To meet some of the goals and trying to really
you know, he was never going to be a George
Washington in terms of budgeting.

Speaker 4 (31:07):
But how can we create liquidity?

Speaker 3 (31:09):
How can we create a buffer so that in case
something happens, you have some protection from the downside.

Speaker 4 (31:16):
And you know, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Jefferson would have said something very eloquent to talk me
out of that, but you know, I think with him,
it's how can we delay gratification and think about what
you want in five, ten, twenty.

Speaker 4 (31:29):
Thirty, forty years. So anyone who.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
Works with a financial planner when they ask you, like,
how do you envision your retirement?

Speaker 4 (31:34):
Where do you see yourself? I think visualization is something
we should do a lot more of with.

Speaker 3 (31:41):
Our finances today and sort of thinking about who we
want to be. How do we want our money to
feel as we age, Right when we're in our seventies,
what does that look like? Am I going to be
up at two am because I can't pay the bills?
Or am I going to be up at two am
because uh yeah I can afford to. But I decided
to take all the kids to Disy world, right, And

(32:02):
this is the type of work that I think people
could really benefit from. And doing it with your spouse
as well, because you have to also visualize together the
same dream.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
Oh yeah, you got to figure out what you each
want and what you want together as a team. I
love how you're looking through all of the presidents and
their different stories through financial planning lens, because that is
what you do. But like, so at the opposite end
of the spectrum of Jefferson, like, I've got to think
you've got a good sense of maybe the most frugal
or the thriftiest president that there was. Can you share

(32:34):
who you found?

Speaker 4 (32:35):
Yeah? So Calvin Coolidge is an interesting character. He would
tell you he was thrifty, and he's a quirky guy.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
We all know him as silent cal You know the
famous story of the reporter who goes to to him
at a cocktail party and says, I bet I can
get you to say more than two words, and he
looks at him and just says.

Speaker 4 (32:54):
You lose. You know.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Coolidge is a funny character, quirky guy, interesting, but incredibly frugal.

Speaker 4 (33:00):
You know. The leading historian on Coolidge.

Speaker 3 (33:02):
Always says, think of him as a missionary. But he
had a lot of trauma in his early life, right
His mother and his sister die fairly early on, you know,
and he's living in this small town and his father
has some money, they have some land holdings, and so
he decides he's going to be thrifty over the course
of his life. He's almost like, I don't want saye
he's part of the fire movement, but he's got his

(33:23):
own little movement going on, and he finds a woman
who's in it with him as well. They live at
a boarding house at one point, and at one point
the boarding house goes out of business and they go
buy all the old sheets that say Norwood Hotel. They
think it's charming. They rent the whole time. But what
was fascinating with him was he how he dressed. So

(33:44):
he was very thrifty, never wanted to spend money, was
a total renter, even when in the White House. The
woman who was the head of the White House, she
was the only one in him. He was the only
one in her memoirs that she complained about because of
how cheap he was.

Speaker 4 (33:55):
But he was dressed to the nines and the reason.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
And if you look at any pictures and go closer
up of Coolidge, you'll see his suits are beautifully tailored,
as is his wife's clothing. Grace was considered a beauty
at the time, and she dressed very well.

Speaker 4 (34:12):
And that's because he had a.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
Big department store supporter who used to help them with
their clothing.

Speaker 4 (34:19):
And so again another way of being thrifty.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
So the sad thing about Calvin Coolidge is he does
eventually have a significant amount of money, but he never
really enjoys it because he dies fairly early on after
he leaves office, so again he's thrifty. But I almost
felt it was too extreme, almost to the point where
it was like, come on, Calvin, like relax a little,
Like it's okay.

Speaker 4 (34:44):
You can't take the money with you.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Do you want to take it overboard and go all
Thomas Jefferson with it? But if you go through hard
in the coolist direction, that we won't have enough money to
buy your vintage.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
Lighting exactly exactly, And look, I'll have you guys over
for a beer under my vintage lighting.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
And that's a bad existence too, Right, The extremes are
kind of what we're trying to avoid here. I'm curious
to Megan, you're right about there's a presidential obsession with
the game of poker. Apparently, Yes, was it Dwight Eisenhower that,
of all the presidents was most into it. What does
that reveal though, if there's like an over indexing of
presidents who play poker about the presidential personality in general.

Speaker 4 (35:22):
Yeah, And it was interesting.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
The Wall Street Journal just had an article about a
trading firm where they have all of their traders play poker.

Speaker 4 (35:27):
Poker is a really fascinating game.

Speaker 3 (35:29):
It teaches you how to think and think in a
very different way. And I want to talk about Eisenhower
here because you know, I walked away from writing the
book and I got to tell you I didn't just
like Ike. I love Dyke awesome, but he's a hard
guy to get to get to get close to. And
you know, he grew up poor, and he grew up

(35:50):
in a town called Abilene, Kansas. And when he was
growing up in Kansas, you know, he really struggled. His
father was very tough on them. Life was tough there,
and he ended up befriending a guy in town.

Speaker 4 (36:04):
He was like a bachelor guy, probably didn't have a
lot of money.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
And the guy would take Ike hunting, take him fishing,
and they would be out there, you know, on the lake,
and he would teach Ike how to play poker, how
to view the cards, how to calculate odds, how to
have a poker face.

Speaker 4 (36:21):
And Ike was just his.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
Personality was very very good at this. And so over
the course of Ike's life, and of course he's in
the military. For most of his life he plays poker.
Although in the military, I have to tell you he
did stop at a certain.

Speaker 4 (36:34):
Point when he became too senior.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
Because he often won and he wasn't He didn't want
to take the money from the from the guys who
were junior to him. And so the story I tell
in the book is actually a story I found. It
was hard to find. But you know, Ike fell in
love with a woman who was wealthier than him. Mamie
Eisenhower Maymie Dowd was from a family, wealthy family. They

(36:57):
had servants in Denver. Her father was a manufacturer, and
she lived a very lovely lifestyle growing up. And if
you ever see pictures of the two of them when
they're young, I mean, both Mamy and Ike are good
looking people, like you get it, like they are just
drawn to each other.

Speaker 4 (37:14):
They see each other and he decides he must have her.
He wants this woman who's a jewel in his eyes.

Speaker 3 (37:22):
And you know, he eventually gives her his West Point pin,
and Mamie's like, yeah, no, Like I don't want the pin.
I want your West Point ring because it's really big.
And at the same time, I want a big engagement ring.
And so Ike goes and borrows some money and he
buys her the ring she wants, and then he starts
playing poker and playing poker against his peers in the military,

(37:45):
in the army, and he wins, and he wins, and
he pays off all the debt on the engagement ring
from poker. And I love that story about him because
it tells you a lot about how he learned how.

Speaker 4 (37:59):
To manage his emotions. And money is emotion, right.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
I mean, you guys have a show about it that
you wouldn't have a show if money wasn't so emotional rights.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Right, if it was just math.

Speaker 4 (38:10):
Right, we don't read a book. It'd be like, Okay,
we're all good. But you know, but it.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
Told me a lot about him that he felt one
of the biggest priorities in managing his finances was to
have a little bit of emotionlessness about it and be
more calculated in thinking through the opportunity set. And I really,
anybody's listening, I would really encourage you to think about that.
And it's not lost to me that a lot of

(38:36):
presidents play poker, you know. Richard Nixon was a good
poker player in World War Two, saved about eight grand
doing it, you know. And even Obama's a good poker player.
This is not uncommon today presidents and poker, but it's
a lot about calculating risk and managing your emotions.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
When it comes to investing. I mean, you can't grow
your investments without taking risk. It's just inherent and putting
your money in the market, and I think that's just
one of the traits that a lot of the presidents
and body Megan. We've got more to get to, maybe
a couple more lessons about what it is that we
can learn from presidents and how it is that they
handle their money. We'll get to those right after this.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
We're back from the break and we're still talking about
presidential money lessons with Megan Gorman. So many fascinating ones,
so much stuff I had no idea about until I
read your book, Meghan, and I'm so glad to hear
even more color about some of those stories. But during
the break you mentioned you have a question for us,
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (39:38):
Yeah, So I'm always curious who's each of your favorite presidents?

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Oh so I would have to go with John Adams,
mainly because I did a report on him in like
fifth grade, and so some of the things you learned
as a young child, they just, I don't know, they
stick with you. Yeah, what about you? Joel I'm going
to say.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
I'm going to say Lincoln, and I know that's kind
of the stock answer, but every book I read about him,
The Team of Rivals with Thris Karnes good Win such
a good book. I read another one recently kind of about.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
What was it called.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
I want to say it was Eric Erickson's book or
something about kind of the lead up to the Civil War.
It doesn't even really talk about the Civil War at all,
just the lead up to it, and just hit how
he reacted in the face of kind of growing uncertainty
in the country, And I just have so much respect
for him as an individal. He seems like a singular
individual for a specifically difficult time.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
I will modify my answer, though, because I'm reminded Megan
of how after reading your book and learning more about JFK,
I was really fascinated with his story, just because of
the fact, like him coming from money, but then him
also being incredibly frugal when it came to like, was
it JFK where he would ask the folks in the
White House to not pop the additional bottle of champagne
until yes, Yes, That's what I say to my kids

(40:47):
when they're like popping like Seltzer's, or we're opening another
thing of milk. I'm just like, let's make sure that
we drink all of the one that's already open. You
and jfk so much.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
You know, it's fine. So with Lincoln, I totally get it.

Speaker 3 (40:59):
As a side note, for the long time, United Airlines
used to have Lincoln on the plane as one of
the movies, and every time I was on there and
I was flying, I watch it because there was something
magical about him.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
That's a Daniel d Lewis one. Right, It's so good,
so good.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yes, But you know you brought up John Adams, and
he's an interesting one because I always find the interaction
with John and Abigail really interesting because they address their
letters to each other of my dearest friend, and and
you think about like, you know, I'm married, and sometimes
when I come home and I want to talk to
my spouse about money, I'm not gonna be like, hey,

(41:34):
my dearest friend.

Speaker 4 (41:34):
But I also think about it.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
I'm like, you know, if you do say, hey, babe,
let's talk about money, it does lessen the tone. And
I think it's a clever thing between the two of them.
The Adams says, they always were framing things with that endearment,
and it's implied a connection and money and marriage.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
There needs to.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
Be a connection. And it's funny that you bring up
JFK because you know, I think in his marriage there
often was a disconnect about money.

Speaker 4 (41:58):
But there's a miscception.

Speaker 3 (42:00):
About people with money, which is that they don't care
and they just spend whatever.

Speaker 4 (42:04):
And I will tell you point blank, oh, they care.
They care.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
You know, it's interesting, you know, being in the industry,
the finance industry, you know what's always heartbreaking is that,
you know, most people don't push on fees, but the
high net worth they grind.

Speaker 4 (42:18):
On fees constantly.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
Right, So to take a tip for me, be like
a high net worth person and really push on fees.
As a side note, but you know JFK, he grew
up with a lot of money, a lot of access
to things. You know, everything came easy to him. I
feel like you know Barbara Streisen and the way they were,
He's very much.

Speaker 4 (42:38):
Of that character.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
But he did care about money, and he did care
about making sure it wasn't squandered or spent frivolously. So
one of the best things with JFK and trying to
explore him. And this is true of all the libraries,
is they have oral histories of their friends and families, right,
and some of them are hilarious. Like on the Truman
Library there was oral history from the farmer who lived

(43:01):
next door and he was always like, I don't understand
the Trumans. They should have just you know, raised cows
for milk and everything, but they didn't like milking cows
because they were sort of lazy.

Speaker 4 (43:10):
It was just sort of random. I'm like, where does
that come from?

Speaker 3 (43:12):
But you know, with Kennedy, one of his oral histories
was from a gentleman named lem Billings, which if you
know Kat John F. Kennedy's story, it's his best friend.
And Lem Billings talks about when they were in college
they would go to New York. You know, two gugg
looking guys in New York. They'd go to the Store Club,
which was the place and you know, they would you know,
store club did what we would call now like bottle service,

(43:35):
very expensive, and they would go and the store Club
would have all these balloons on the ceiling that would
drop down and the balloons would open and there would
be like money, your prizes and there was in there.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
Yeah, and it.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
Was great and it was fun and it's sexy, but
it was expensive and you know, lem didn't have the money,
and there were just some of their other friends and.

Speaker 4 (43:53):
So they would go.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
They'd get a cocktail and then they'd say, hold our drink,
and then they'd run down the street and slam back
some beers, like a bunch of you know, twenty something
guys would and then they'd come back to the stort
club to come talk.

Speaker 4 (44:05):
To the girls. So, you know, very much.

Speaker 3 (44:08):
When I found that story, I really loved it because
I was like, oh my god, that could be happening today.
And it makes Kennedy so much more accessible right and personal.
And he's not just especially for us we were I mean,
you guys are younger than me. We were not around
when he was alive, and he always feels so hard
to access. He's always just in a film in that

(44:28):
technicolor of color. Yeah, And so I just love that
about him. And I was also struck by so much
in the fact that he also had some of the
same struggles with Lincoln in terms of Jackie's spending. And
there's a story, you know, JFK when he was in office,
whether he was a congressman, senator, president, he always donated
his salary to charity. And and by the way, like

(44:52):
if the charities he donated to, I think today he
would probably get lit up by the press on because
you know, it was like the United Negro colleg Fund.
It was like the Boy Scouts like stuff like that.
And apparently Jackie never knew he was donating a salary.
She found out in nineteen sixty two because it was
in the newspaper and she was unhappy. And you know,

(45:14):
Ben Bradley, the former Washington Post editor, tells a story
of being there where JFK is like ranting and raving
about where is all our money going?

Speaker 4 (45:25):
What are you doing? And she's sort of innocently sitting there.
And you know, one of.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
The things that JFK ended up doing and his brother
Robert had done it with Ethel was they had this
accountant who helped them with some of the investigations the
Attorney general investigations into the mob, and JFK and RFK
hired this guy to look into their accounting to help
them create budgets. So very wild stuff going on there,

(45:53):
but again struggles we see today with a lot of
people and their spouses and money in.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Poor communication, which always upsets the apple heart.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Megan.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
I'm curious, last question, what are the most odd ball
stories you heard about how presidents managed their money? Was
there anything that just stuck out to you is like
I've never seen that before, or that's mind blowing.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
So I found his story about Richard Nixon, and you know,
I am Richard Nixon.

Speaker 4 (46:15):
I always feel he's so awkward.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
Right, very very awkward man, and now he seems quite
quaint compared to the political environment where in now that's true.

Speaker 4 (46:24):
He grew up poor.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
His father came came west from Ohio, I believe, and
set up in Whittier, California, in Orange County, a gas
station and a fruit stand. And each of the Nixon
boys had a specialization, and Richards was citrus. His brother
one brother was specialized in meat, the other vegetables, and
so on dairy. And you know, he goes to college

(46:46):
in Whittier and he goes to Duke Law, and unlike
his Duke Law classmates, he has to go home and
he doesn't get any big offers for jobs. And he's
in Wittier, he's working at a small law firm. He
bobbles the first case he has, almost gets suit. He
actually gets dude for it.

Speaker 4 (47:01):
But he's in Whittier. He's trying to be a good guy,
and he ends up.

Speaker 3 (47:03):
Befriending some other senior guys in Whittier, like elder statesmen.
And one of these guys has this brilliant idea. It's
like nineteen thirty seven, nineteen thirty eight, wouldn't it have
be amazing if across America everybody could wake up to
a fresh glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed. Now we
take this for granted, but today we're all excited about AI.

(47:27):
If we were sitting in the nineteen tens and twenties
and thirties, we would be very focused on food and
the ability to freeze food and transport it around the nation.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
Okay, like this was cutting edge technology, the AI of
its day, the AI of its day. Right, you never know, right,
So again, Richard, this guy.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
Has this idea, We're going to freeze the juice, and
I have this gelatine, this special thing. Will you run
the company? And Nixon's so excited he sets the company up.
He's the attorney for the company. They make him the
President's CEO, and he's trying to run this company and
he just has no experience running a company.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
He's done a.

Speaker 3 (48:07):
Big angel invest from these businessmen, and you know, the
company struggles, great idea, but they just can't get it
to succeed. And at one point they have a whole
box car of juice in the train yard in Los Angeles,
and of course the juice inadvertently ferments because of the
yeast and the alcohol, and the box car explodes and

(48:31):
juice everywhere. And then of course what really does Nixon
in is he fails to do Social Security payments for
his employees. He's not withholding Social Security, and the company
goes bust, and Nixon is ashamed and horrified because these
are people that he grew up with that he lost
all their money for. And you know what's really you know,

(48:53):
so even though the company was supposed to go bankrupt,
Nixon decides that he's going to personally assume the debt
and he keeps it a secret from his girlfriend, Pat Nixon.

Speaker 4 (49:03):
And you know, throughout the war, he.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
Is basically sending money home to help pay down the debt,
and he's writing in the letters to his law firm
secretary and I say secretary because that was the term
at the time. I know today we'd say ea, and
he would say, just make sure Pat doesn't know. And
it took him years to pay off this debt and
he never did anything again. And what I find fascinating

(49:26):
is we're coming upon the sixty eighth anniversary of the
Checkers speech from nineteen fifty two when he was accused
of stealing money from the campaign and Eisenhower was going
to drop him from the ticket. And he does this
TV presentation to the America and he basically reads the
United States his net worth and what you find is

(49:47):
he really doesn't have a lot. He has a house
and everything, but he really doesn't have a lot. And
I think that the experience with the Orange Juice Company
and paying down that debt sort of held him back
from making wealth. And it's almost like STUDI loans today.
He had this big burden over him.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
That's fascinating because like, on one hand, it's admirable, right,
the fact that at the risk so yeah, and like
he was just basically there for these folks that he
felt like he had personally let down. So maybe the
lesson to everyone out there is like, if you're starting
your own business, make sure you're paying faika.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
Yes, And I will tell you what I once had
a client want want to invest in something, And the
pitch that they gave me is, you're really lucky you're
coming along now with this company.

Speaker 4 (50:24):
We failed at our first two companies. Now we know
how to do it.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
I got to say I laughed like crazy when they
said that to me, because there is an element of
truth to that, and I think if Nixon had done
another company, he may have succeeded.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
That's true.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
Yeah, don't let that first failure like stop you from
trying again, which apparently it kind of did for Nixon. Megan,
thank you so much for joining us today on the show.
This was so fun. Where can our listeners find out
more about you and more about your new books.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
Sure you can find me at Allthepresidents Money dot Com
and the books available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble Books
a million and it's out on September twenty fourth, so come.

Speaker 4 (50:57):
Check it out.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
Awesome, Megan, thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 1 (50:59):
Thanks so much for having me all right, Matt, that
was a unique conversation. Yes, having so much thinking, fun,
We've never talked about that on the show before. Most
of those stories, I didn't know until I either heard
Meghan talk about it just now or read it in
her new book. But yeah, what was your big takeaway
from that combo?

Speaker 2 (51:16):
Well, I'll say I'm so glad we got to JFK.
You know, she shared the story about him and how
they would leave the fancy club go to the place
where they could get cheap beers. I don't think there's
any story that resonates with how the money nearly as
much as that story. But I get him now, Yeah, exactly.
And it's not just the beer part, but the fact
that he was being considerate of his friends that didn't
have the same means that he did like is incredibly

(51:39):
endearing to me. But okay, so my big takeaway though
is going to be, Gosh, it's gonna have to be
Jefferson his inability to delay gratification and think about his
future self. And we literally say that on the show
all the time. But Meghan framed it, well, what do
you want your life to look like in ten, fifteen,
twenty years, How do you want to travel? How is
it that you want to retire? Like making that connection

(52:00):
between your future self and the actions you're taking today,
Like that is what brings about resolve and what causes
us to follow through with the hard things that we
have to do today. It's for the not the pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow, but multiple
pots of gold, like all along the path towards the
end of our lives, towards the environment.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
We talked about this briefly, but you would think someone
as smart as him would be able to figure out
personal finance. But there's no disconnect between sometimes your ability
to articulate beliefs or be an incredible prodigious writer, or
be a leader of people, in your ability to manage
personal finances. They are not the same. They don't necessarily
overlap different skill sets. Yeah, what was your big takeaway?

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Though?

Speaker 1 (52:35):
I think my big takeaway is and just thinking about
this holistically. We tend to put presidents on a pedestal,
especially presidents from further off in history. Maybe not the
ones from recent history because we know more about them.
Social media didn't exist back at the time of Lincoln, right,
But I love getting to see the human side, the foibles,

(52:55):
the mess ups, the mistakes side of some of these
presidents because it shows that, yeah, they are in so
many ways like us.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
We talked about the.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Anxiety that a lot of these presidents exhibited, whether they
were fruglos all get out and came from nothing, or
whether they came from money. I mean, those things that
are common to you and I, Matt, you and me,
but also to all of our listeners in how we
think about and worry about money were common to people
of who achieved an elevated position, in fact, one of

(53:24):
the most powerful positions in the world.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
So yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (53:27):
I guess I just appreciated that that forest viewpoint that
the president's hey, in some ways at least, they're just
like us.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, exactly. So okay, let's mention the beer. It's funny
because she was talking about the end there Richard Nixon
and the orange juice explosion out there in California. But
we enjoyed Julius by Treehouse Brewing, which was sent to
us by Michael. Thanks again, Michael for sending some beers
our way. This is a hazy Julius has got orange
juice connotations, like written all over it's an orange label

(53:56):
looked like orange juice in the glass. What were your thoughts.

Speaker 1 (53:58):
This was sister's to the mac, but also well rounded.
And this is one of those beer beers mat that
has tons of hype, kind of like Lincoln's presidency. People
are like, oh, he's the best president ever, and I
tend to agree with him, but I've done my research,
like I know that he's my favorite president. I'm not
just like go riding everyone else's coattails. But this beer
similarly has a lot of hype, and I wanted to
see does it live.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
Up to the hype. It totally does. This was delicious. Yeah, okay,
So the only asterix here is this is a special
edition of Julius. I think it's so it's JJJ Julius. Yeah,
it's a third anniversary version, I think. Yeah, so I
think this.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
Is a special version of the special beer Judge Julius.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
Yeah. Still very good. But this one is super creamy, hazy,
had all those hot flavors going on, amazingly citrusy, and
I'm glad that you and I got to enjoy this
one today.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
And I know this brewery has a cult following and
it's probably really hard to get a beer of this
caliber from Treehouse, so true, massive, Thanks to you, Michael,
presenting this on our way. We really appreciate it. All right, Matt,
that's gonna do it. For this episode, we'll put links
to similar stuff we mentioned up on our show. Note
said how to money dot com, including a link to
Mega's new book. That's right, So until next time, best
friends Out, Best Friends Out,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Presidential Money Lessons w/ Megan Gorman #881