Clark Howard Shares His Secrets to Financial Success!

i don't know if you guys can feel the excitement but we have clark howard in studio this is a big day in money guy history brian i am so so so excited because he is literally a living legend in our eyes and we have them all to ourselves today to kind of ask him some questions glean some of his insight and i i literally could not this might be the most excited i've ever been for a show i think yeah it was um i think it helped me clark welcome to the show first sure i mean that is such a buildup well my wife isn't that excited to see me that's really our wives aren't that excited to see us either so it's okay but it is i think the edge got taken off from me last night is coincidentally and look they don't pay us but i'll give a plug um cork and cow was a restaurant that i was taking brandon more about him in a minute and coincidentally there was you know we ran into andrea and you and krista right there in the same restaurant so it kind of took the edge off for me that i actually got to to say hello to you but i thought you were really disappointed that i wasn't at wendy's or mcdonald's there was a mcdonald's dinner so i mean that was that was a really great steak but uh man that's an expensive place yeah it's um but that's where you take people i don't know it's it's that's always an anniversary place that's um valentine's whenever my wife and i need a great restaurant you can't go wrong with that place and look like i said they pay us nothing so now it's gonna be even harder to get in there but i do and that is a great lead in to clark i think why you are so important to us is first of all we all are from atlanta um you are now you're a much bigger brand than just atlanta now but when we all got to know you because you've been on air since 1989 am i getting that right 87. 87. holy cow yeah was a good year by the way well i'm 900 years old let's get that out there but it ties in because i've always had this i've talked about on the show a lot i had the seven dollar date night i've always by my friends called me a tight wad and i talk about the three ingredients that create success and wealth is discipline money and most importantly time but without discipline you are probably the most disciplined person i know even now can kind of give us what what drives you because it's not that you need the money i would think at this point but what drives you on that discipline i really you mean in how i handle my money yeah yeah it really is about um being in control i mean control is such a valuable thing if you think about somebody whose spending patterns are out of control the anxiety just going to the mailbox which is a literal expression that doesn't really apply anymore because now people get their bills by email but you get the idea that that when you are afraid of the bills you have that takes away from your personal strength it takes away from your freedom you know there's all this talk that was so hot before the pandemic about the financial independence movement the fire movement what it was really about at its core wasn't being able to i'm going to quit working at 41 years old and live my life however i want it was really more about the fi part that you create this freedom in your life to do what you love to do instead of what you have to do because you have that mountain of bills waiting for you yeah and so that's the thing that i mean the reality is i haven't had to work in a long long time but i do it because i want this message in people's heads that one of the things about the paradox of choice we have so much ability now to mess ourselves up financially yeah more than we've ever had in in history really because we have this freedom that also can become a curse so we can spend money everywhere we go 24 hours a day even if we don't go somewhere we can get on our phone or a laptop and we can spend more money and so we are such a consumption-oriented culture that what i try to really get in people's heads is that you have the power in you if you seize it and you're able to take better control of your life by controlling those impulses of spending and then you develop step by step the power back in your life so that's really what it's about for me is you have choices we all have choices in life we have things that happen to us too you get hit by a drunk driver there's nothing you did wrong sure but a lot of what happens are decisions that we made little decisions and big that gave us more control of our lives or gave us less and what i want someone to do is methodically think through how to get that control in their lives so save more spend less i mean this is i mean because it's built right into your slogan and i grew up in a household where i mean we all know clark smart but then also it was like i heard on clark howard you should never do this you and my mother-in-law i mean it doesn't matter who's in your life this stuff comes up i did one i didn't want to let time get away from us because i've teased this out there clark you are also part of the origin story of the money guy show and um you know and i know this is kind of what brought this full circle to where we got to have this what i call seinfeld moment where we have the beginning and the end and they're all interconnected is that back in 2005 two huge things happened that created the money guy show the first one is back here on the wall we have i got my first ipod and i remember being a guy who loved talk radio because you were a talk radio person you know doing all the consumer finance stuff i loved audio books and when i got that ipod i was like this is going to change the the world because i couldn't always listen to you because i had client meetings and other things but as soon as i got the ipod i was like now i control once again time it's amazing and then the second thing is um i had i'd you know came out of school in public accounting and one of my close friends from from college and then we started working at the same accounting firm was brandon verner and you knew brandon he's actually here because i felt like he was very full into that collection of buildings in athens the collection of buildings it's a good year to be a bulldog by the way but it is a first year 1980s that's right the national champion i remember herschel so well taking georgia the national championship in 80. and then this past season was so exciting and georgia beat the alabama curse he knew it's been a long time coming we've been waiting for for a long time so it was so exciting coming into because we got to watch you do your radio show and that's how i knew you wouldn't like sitting down right now you'd prefer to be standing up because i had learned that and actually that's why i was standing the first year i was doing this show i learned something i learned it from clark but here's what i i want to give you credit for is that your mother and your sister came that day just coincidentally and you gave us a when it was the end of your show and it was time to go toward wsb you invited us to go to you did not have to do that that was the nicest thing and i remember thinking this guy is actually you really are what i grew up thinking you were you know usually when you meet your heroes they disappoint you in some way and you and it inspired me though because we were doing the show you were doing the show and i i had a come from a client meeting i had a jonathan clements article you remember him oh he's calling it journal yeah he's a brilliant writer he had an article because somebody called in that day and asked you what percentage of their income they should be saving um and you you had gone i could hear you talking about pensions were now going extinct you know social security was in jeopardy and i had an article from jonathan clements that had the whole 15 to 20 instead of the 10 that historically i handed it to your um producer it was not joel i don't know who you had before joel because christa was in the room on the other side he looked at it handed it to you circled at something and you used it on air and i was like i could do this and i'm telling you that is the origin story of what led to me buying that podcast book and kind of being off to the races in january of 2006. so thank you thank you thank you for being so inspired you know is still at it he has a blog called humble dollar yeah and um he works so hard on it i don't think he makes a penny from it's a non-profit and he writes about a lot of the human side of what happens with the decisions you make and the good ones and bad ones you make and it's really really helpful to people but he had that ability in print with personal finance to communicate you know you're the one in control here if you take advantage of it if you seize the moment this is yours you just got to grab it and follow these simple rules and that's what always made him such a great communicator i'm a little curious about your origin story right so you're kind of known as this king of frugality and so for our listeners out there who are here you're talking about like making choice and behavior is this something that you had to learn throughout your career or were you born this way like did you come out of the womb like just super super tight no i i was always pretty thrifty but the key thing was my father lost his job when i was a teenager okay and so he had worked for uh for his in-laws and then one day they decided in a game of musical chairs there wasn't a chair for him anymore and my parents had always lived what seemed like an incredibly affluent life and i thought that they had tons of money well my dad says um tells me he lost his job and says there's no money for you to go to college oh wow go back to college and i was like oh really i had no idea that they spent everything they made plus maybe more and lived a lifestyle beyond their means and what happens to you as a teenager good or bad but particularly bad can have lifelong impact so when i started working first of all i became a night student went to college at night was able to pay my tuition having to pay for it all on your own you had what i learned during the day you can't do that today really unless you go to a commuter school because tuition costs are out of control but i was able to get through college i did undergraduate in three years did graduate school in a year and graduated with no loans of any kind and then when i got my job out of college i saved every other paycheck i figured you know college i was just getting by on cans or whatever there was no reason that suddenly i needed to live a highfalutin life so even though my incomes started rising quite nicely i still lived on every other paycheck and that all came in direct reaction to what i saw the opposite story with my parents and so that's what really focused me as a teenager forward i think you just said something that grabbed both of us because you you i know both now yours is even more modest sure and the fact that you had some things happen in your teenage years where you essentially got replaced a different household and then my father lost his job and the big takeaways i knew because i had watched my dad work for a company for 20 years and then they just decided to get out of that industry altogether and he lost the company car you know was just kind of out uh you know and i remember everything was so cheap those those three years that he was trying to get back on his feet but what i took from it was you need to to not count on a corporation always you need to kind of and that's why i had this self-employed drive behind me and then that's also what led me to become kind of like an accounting major because i knew that i needed to be very deliberate with my choices is that what you know how does that fit in because you've you've always been so good because i think a lot of people don't realize clark howard was an entrepreneur first i mean i kind of know your origin stories you had sold a business at a pretty young age 31. so i mean that that's kind of incredible what where are you because you don't strike me as a natural crazy risk taker why were you an entrepreneur what led you to to be an entrepreneur i can't explain this but i have um i had 10 first cousins not all of them are still living but we 100 of us became entrepreneurs really yeah and i think it's because i'm from an immigrant family all four of my grandparents were born in europe and when they came over you had to make your way and that translated to the next generation and all of us in various ways have run our own business and i have one brother who's 75 and retired but i have a sister who's 77 still runs her own business brother is 72 still running his own business and it's just in our family culture to be entrepreneurial that's great so i'm i'm so curious so it makes sense right you had this difficult thing that happened in your formative years and it caused you to start behaving a certain way well then you got into your career and you started having some success right and you've had a story career at this point but it seems like somehow you have staved off lifestyle creep you have staved off allowing yourself to move away from this so much so that when you were coming to visit us you actually scolded fte daniel in a very kind america's atlanta sweetheart sort of way but you said why did you book me this expensive hotel you could have all of them nice hoteling you didn't like it i did not like it i had us booked it you know a deal or a hotel just off the freeway and doors on the outside or inside inside inside inside corridor because christo is with me and you don't want to put a woman in a hotel with outdoor corridors and i was really happy because it came with free breakfast in the morning and is that just the waffle maker though no no it's like a real hot breakfast and then i find out that i'm booked in this hotel four times the price beautiful hotel but i spend somebody else's money the same way i'd spend my own i don't i don't believe in wasting money now i will spend money on things that last the things that are investments but lifestyle things that are disposable i don't like to spend money on so because this is interesting to me is because it was one of those things daniel calls me up and he says you won't believe what just happened because um he's like sorry dan because he's a huge fan as well you might have a moment to speak in defense of yourself the only reason you guys ended up staying there and this is kind of a daniel moment too because we don't have a lot of guests here daniel booked a non-refundable room so i mean we had we were stuck with these rooms or something for one million dollars it was not cheap so i was like yeah we probably need to work on that but it didn't and actually krista i think was very happy that we did non-refundable rooms so so it all played out but it does it does lead to those things because i asked you this last night because it's such an important thing is i prided myself just like you did on being so good with money that i can make it squeak to a degree but as i but i'm going i'm going to go ahead and this is why i used to have a we even had the domain name tightwad nation we were so proud of how good we were with money but confessionally as i've made more and more money i've kind of now realized the things i like to do i don't mind spending like i love good meals i love travel and um and i like staying in hotel rooms that are nice and i asked you i said how have you or is there can you give me kind of your recipe because is it that way with your family how does that all work so if you're just you tight white nation okay that's not the goal the goal is not to deprive yourself forever the goal is to build up enough independence enough resources and carry ultimately no debt in your life so that you're in a position to live your life the way you want whether it's given to charity or it's flying internationally in the front of the plane or whatever it is that the goal is not just to deprive yourself forever the goal is to live your life where you're always living on less than what you make and you're building up more and more money so that you have more and more freedom money is not the god yeah it's true and when people treat money as a god they end up pretty hollow pretty empty and they don't end up happy um just think about mr potter and uh what's the wonderful life yeah yeah that's right yeah with jimmy stewart if you don't know that reference from 80 years ago you got to go watch that movie at christmas you'll know everything you need to know about the right way to treat people and the way to handle money from that one movie but the goal is not to starve yourself of everything to deprive yourself of everything the goal is to create the choices where you're always living on less than what you make and that's how you get to where you want to be where you are in control you're the one making the choices and if you want to eat that fancy steak and you got some kind of bottle of wine that no no it's like no but it's just brandon that was brandon not me eating it today i mean what are you thinking but anyway you have you have the financial wherewithal to do that that's the key it's not deprivation it's about freedom yeah and it sounds like in order to do that you have to define what you what you value the things that are if i'm hearing you correctly what is it what are the things i want to spend money on it may not be the flashy car to show off in front of my neighbors it may be being able to build memories with my family or whatever that thing may be earlier on in your life when you got married was it difficult for you and your spouse to get in a state like because you know my wife was not quite as frugal when we first got married we've done a lot of content around that way to throw her under there i don't know i don't think she's listening right now i have been very careful because my wife gets really upset when she becomes the target you know don't let him mislead you this is also a joint effort so what was it uh difficult one for you guys to get on the same page financially and then two how did you start defining okay how what are we going to talk about that are the important things and when do we get to you said the goal is not to live like this forever how did you know you when you were at the point where you could start to shift and you could start to maybe enjoy it more so when you have enough money that living a certain lifestyle you would never have to work another day of of your life and you could maintain that lifestyle that's when you're there that's f you would you call that financial independence where you're you're you're you're you're you're you're you're that is financial independence and that is when you when you hear this obsession that was big five years ago with the fire movement it was really like getting to that day where you never had to work again but that's not to me the real goal the real goal is where you have the choice to do something else let's say you always wanted to do blah blah blah but it's not that lucrative but you've made enough money now you can do that because i find that the type of people who can work their butts off and save money so well that they really don't have to work anymore they're bored to tears if they don't do something anymore it's really about the freedom to do what it is you want and you will know if you're saving a substantial amount of your pay over time i mean my 50 is crazy right well i retired uh back you know at 31 and then kind of fell into doing what i do now you didn't really retire by that and uh i mean it's crazy because i've been working again more time than i than i had lived to the point that i was retired so but but the thing is is that i started saving 75 of my pay when i started working again because i didn't need any of them and then i started giving more and more money away and you know and and giving to charity that's my thing is being able to give to charity and then earning points so that when the deal with my wife is you'll love this so i fly mostly southwest airlines okay because they have a companion pass and i get the companion pass my wife flies with me free all year long and the trade with her is when we go international that we go front of the plane okay but i'm not spending money on front of the plane i'm using these rewards and points to go with the front that's genius i love it and so it's this great trade because all year long we do where we're you know lined up on southwest and a group b group or c group to get on the plane random seat selection and then when we go once or twice a year on an over you know over the ocean trip then we've got the lifeline and that's our mastercard circles we call it because my wife's here with money i'm here yeah but we cross over you know how the mastercard has that middle section that's part of what you do in a marriage that's the dynamic in a marriage you don't want to overpower either person because you'll create distance in the marriage uh you'll create resentment it's got to be where you do the compromises where each feels like they've been heard and they each are able to do what they want to do and i will tell you i believe that hidden debt and hidden spending in a in a marriage or people are living together that is poison that will rip that relationship apart or damage it very heavily that you need to work on is not a conversation it's like with kids where you're going to have the sex talk with them anything is one talk yeah right so it's the same thing with money and couples have a harder time talking about money than they do the bedroom yeah absolutely yeah so it's really got to be about having the ongoing conversation where you find out you you hurt my feelings when you complained about me buying this that or the other you know that that you got to have that relationship where you can really talk it through you said something that ties in because this is something we've done quite a bit of content on the dark side of wealth because i think a lot of people young people especially and i look i'm guilty of this when i was 16 years old i said when i get to be 25 i'm going to buy a corvette because rates will go down on insurance i didn't do it by the way and then when i started working i said have you seen a c8 corvette i mean come on is that just the coolest looking batmobile car it does kind of like that you realize that clark you are the average age of a corvette buyer though that's what i always blow people's mind when i say the typical corvette buyer is actually a person over 50 years of age so it's not only 67 in a few weeks so yeah but i i wouldn't buy one you know why because it runs on this stuff that you go to a place and you have to pump it into the i hear that stuff's expensive right called gasoline i hear it's expensive right now it's something that people used to do in a prior century because he got racing skills it took me a second to catch up electronics i drive a tesla model s okay and an expensive car but what's so great it averages the equivalent of 112 miles a gallon if you convert the btus and the electric thing i mean it is so the future and i saw a rivien oh yeah yeah i saw a rivien the other day and it was fun because all these people were gathering around it because it looks like something from a sci-fi movie with those headlights and i mean this is really one of those moments inflection points in world history where we're going to electrify our fleet and the benefit to our homeland security number one where we're not reliant on just what oil we can pump out of the ground but electrons however you get them i mean this is great stuff for so many reasons and we're right at the cusp of this becoming from a niche thing to like this is how it's going to be done so are you a cyber truck fan you get in the cyber truck when it comes to no way no way okay do i look like a pickup truck driver no but that thing doesn't look like a pickup truck either it's true but but i'm just not i mean i am such a city boy we live now in a high rise okay and i love to walk everywhere there are days i never drive a car i walk the supermarket walk to eat uh walk to shop and uh it's just great for my health too you know because i average about 15 000 steps a day on purpose right like you're trying to do that okay i'm actually yes and what's so funny is i'll walk somewhere where people have to pay for parking and i just walk there and it's free for me and they're having to pay for parking i mean paying for parking is something that really bugs me yeah i guess that's why i do like to take ubers and lifts to when i go on vacation because then when they ask you hey do you have a car that you parked here and so you could say charge valet or something like nope i don't have a car see this is a sign of affluence because because you were staying at my kind of hotels they have free parking and you don't have to worry about that i told you clark i had to retire the whole tightwad thing because i gave up the the card my wife would no more go on the seven dollar date that i did in high school than the man on the moon that type of stuff doesn't so i have to be careful how i explain this because my wife is very very different about these kind of things and so she whoever founded priceline she would go up to whoever that person was and just kiss him because it changed our hotel life with doing the bidding on yeah and we have been able to stay in much nicer hotels at a price that i like and it has been a total game changer when you learn how you use the priceline system to save money yeah and she's happy and i'm happy and it works out it's those rings coming together it's those mastercard rings coming together i think it's just like we talked about dinner last night we talked about the hotel you are a game of fire i think that a lot of it because you mentioned control earlier but you could there's no doubt you could afford to spend whatever you want it's not going to impact your long-term success but i do think you get a lot of enjoyment from the gamification of your finances so priceline also appeals to that because it allows you to feel like you're getting a deal allows her to stay in a nicer place and it's a win-win for everyone you know like we talked about with the points on the flight so so that is a way of feeling better about what we're able to do where we're able to do these nicer things and i'm not worried about what it costs and you're right that probably that i could spend money and more frivolously come on we'd know better but it just doesn't feel right because okay so truth is the most important thing i can do with the wealth i've built up for me is to give it to charity that i really believe in and so that's really really core to what i'm about and so i i love doing charitable things where it involves volunteers and i'm able to leverage my money and use the multiplier effect like i'm really big into habitat for humanity which creates it's the perfect kind of charity to me because it creates independence yeah and home ownership and people get a house at a deal yeah because of the volunteer labor and so having money to be able to put towards that is really important to me and there are other things like that that i do that are charitable that's what really excites me i mean you look at my eyes i get so excited and if if i spend a lot of money on stuff then i wouldn't have the money to be able to do that those kind of things that are really important to me and i don't want my kids at three kids they will never inherit enough money that they would lose incentive to be productive and contributing citizens and so money beyond an amount that gives them like a booster shot in life will be given away you know that's one of my biggest questions because i have two young children and you know lord willing they they won't have the traumatic experience that i had or what sounds like what you had growing up but one of the things i want to make sure i do is i do pass along like sound just money decision making behaviorable principles to them how are you able to do that or what what tips would you give our listeners about like hey here's how you raise kids that are smart you know maybe like a clark smart sort of clark literally wrote this book this is when we met in 2005 i had him sign this book and you wrote it to my daughter by the way she was less than two years old now she's a senior in high school already 18 time flies but literally you wrote the book so has it worked so it didn't feel like it was working while my kids were growing up you don't know what they're absorbing or not and i remember my oldest was in an economics class at college and she was at college back in the early 2000s and the professor asked something she said well wouldn't the best thing for someone to do would be opening a roth ira and the professor said yes that would be the right thing and the other students were like what's that what is she talking about and she called me and she said dad i got to tell you about this and so you don't know what the thick head of a teenager or a preteen is actually absorbing but i s with all my kids they all learned unit pricing when they were in elementary school i taught them that because there was just a story i read recently about how people don't know how to comparison shop doesn't matter what age they are they don't know how to use these simple tools that are out there to get the best deal not what amazon tells you is a deal but what really is a deal and that's something i equip my kids with and other things i didn't realize they were getting absorbing but all three of my kids as teenagers my rule was that when they they all had to start working when they were 15. okay because that was the age that you could start having a real job and that any money they save from their job i would do what i call the mommy daddy match i would match dollar for dollar what they did not spend from their job in a roth ira so all three of my kids had their roth starting at 15. my son was a lifeguard his first real job when he was 15 last summer and he now has his roth ira and the kids get it because they see the they see the accounts i have them see the statements and now my 33 year old she's about to turn 33 has quite a hefty rod from having started at 18 years old so it's a matter of trying to get a message to kids and teaching not preaching because a parent you know as a parent we struggle with preaching we need to teach and then they absorb what they absorb and you hope they develop habits because it's all about habits in life right we develop really terrible habits in all different ways in our lives or we develop good ones you know one of my habits that upsets christa who you mentioned earlier is that i drink a lot of coke zero and she's really worried about what those chemicals are going to do for me and what i say is that all those preservatives i mean i won't need them when i'm dead i mean i got them all in me i've absorbed so many but anyway the point is is that we we over time develop good and bad habits and it's really about positive reinforcement of the good habits that our kids have i i want to bring it because i know we're running out of time and it's one of those things where you've talked about charity because that gives you so much more i call it fulfillment it's jonathan clements talks about happiness with money i think what you talked about being generous is a big part of that but you've also been a tremendous advocate a personal finance and consumer advocate and i feel like right now you might be able to help our audience because young people and we have a lot of young people who are in that 20 to 40 range are facing some unique things if you if you look at the current world we live in a lot of them come out with big student loan debt there's also new cars you can't even buy a vehicle now whether you use new there's there's no supply of it and then housing prices are doing stuff that i've never seen in my life i would love for you to put the the clark smart take on what are some things that young people ought to think about with some of these big life decisions yeah and this is a brutal time to be as an example a first-time homebuyer which has been talked about so much but why is it such a brutal time first we had the banking scandals that led to the great recession huge number of the nation's builders folded we've never had the productive capacity of building homes that we had before the banking scandals and so we've ended up with uh multiple millions of short housing units both rental and single family homes eating buy i heard we're like 4 million behind yeah everybody's guessing what that number is but four million is the number most quoted then you have during covid when there was panic in the world if you go back to march of 20 and central banks around the world did everything they could to stave off what looked like it was going to be a worldwide depression and they overdid it and they pumped way too much money into the economy our central bank the federal reserve did it just like in coordination with central banks around the world way too much money is out there without enough inventory of things to buy now the federal reserve is going to really accelerate efforts to draw that money back and everybody talks about interest rates but what they don't realize the federal reserve basically created nine trillion dollars out of thin air that has put way too much money out there and that is part of what's sent the demand for stuff through the roof in addition to not having enough units to start with so this will correct and there may even be a better opportunity to be a first-time homebuyer as you look um months away like could be in 23 because the economy's gonna slow there's going to be less money sloshing around that's exciting for first-time home buyers yeah because it's really exciting we all are guilty as humans of inertia bias we think whatever things have been doing that's what they're going to do forever in the future so true when the market's going down people think oh it's going down when the market's going up people think the only way it's going to go is to the sky and that's just uh part of the human chip we have you know that we have this inertia bias so know that the housing market is not going to be messed up forever this is a temporary phenomenon and it will clear the the vehicle market buyers are already going on buyers strike from how inflated vehicle prices are carmax told wall street i think just in the last couple of days that they're seeing buyer resistance now that's part of the healing process when you have supply and demand out of balance prices go too high the market signals to people and they say you know what that car i have in the driveway i don't like it that much but i suddenly have learned to like it a lot more right and i defer buying something new i mean you don't want to be in a wreck uh and have a vehicle total hopefully not hurt yeah that's a tough place to be sure you have to make a decision you have to if you're not and i have to keep driving what you got and that will correct also and then last was just the student loans i mean what are you telling i mean i mean i didn't believe me i get it because we talked about this i had a group of high school friends up this weekend last weekend and one of them i had to have a hard conversation with them because their their son was considering going out of state and when he told me the major i was like be careful because i mean he's setting himself up to have lots of student loan debt for a job that might not pay a lot coming out those two don't intersect well so right what are you telling younger people about education and student loans so after i got my undergraduate degree i went to a state directional college you know one of those that's like blah blah blah southwestern northeast whatever because it was really affordable this idea that your kid is going to miss so much of life if they don't go to the it school is just not true it's a it's a myth that we grab hold of there are very few colleges or universities maybe even less than 10 in the country they're just going to that school and the network you'll build of of peers will be valuable to you at least in the first part of your life getting the skill getting the knowledge is what's key and yeah is it possible that the professors are better at stanford than they are at a directional college obviously yes but is it enough difference to make a difference i want to tell you i met this woman in jacksonville florida who got accepted to stanford and she went instead to a school where she got a full free ride really bright kid and she said she really wanted to go to stanford but she wasn't going to get a scholarship there and she would have graduated with 200 plus thousand dollars in loans and she went to this other school that offered her a free ride went through had her education had not a penny of loans what was the better decision for overall life that was absolutely in virtually every case even though stanford some people think it's the best university in the united states i think she made the better choice malcolm gladwell in his book david versus goliath talks about some of those same things because you talked about the financial side when i was reading malcolm's book on that i thought he made a great point is that sometimes when you go to these schools you are the brightest with everybody else who's the brightest whereas you know and i know for my own children i've watched when they get that glimmer of that they're really good at something and there's something about confidence with success as well and his point in in the the david versus goliath was sometimes if you go to that state school you're on the full ride so you're not having debt but you're also rise to the top you build a confidence that will stay with you your entire life whereas maybe you go to the ivy league school or something like that and you are one of many who are valedictorian and the the brightest that you get washed out and actually don't ever build that confidence because you have this false sense of where you actually stand because you you've done this it's kind of a contrarian view and i love contrarian views because so much of money you talk about consumer world we live in and we know if you have a contrarian view and actually use it as a resource and a tool you'll be so much better all that is so interconnected and you know there's another point that is psychological as well when you go to one of those elite schools what you think life is and how other people live is like the people you're around who are generally from affluent families and you think you've got to do you know be in this country club you got to drive this car and you got to live in this house and this neighborhood you go to a school that is everyday people at that school you learn what life is really like and that a lot of people are struggling financially or there's hardship in their families or whatever you see life as it really is not this bubble you end up in at one of these elite schools not there's any i'm not saying that there's something wrong with the elite schools i'm saying there's a lot right with not feeling like you've got to spend yourself into oblivion and borrow money past your eyeballs to go to the at school because there's a lot of learning that doesn't have to do specifically with the classroom that you will get at what people might derisively refer to as a third tier university but you may actually have better lessons for life at that school than you would have at a second or first tier university uh you know i'm i'm curious so if if someone is coming out of school maybe they're not just coming out of school maybe someone is in that uh messy middle they're young they have kids or they're advancing in their career and you say right now this is the thing this is the advice i would give you the one thing i would tell you to focus on that will have the greatest impact over the remainder of your career that'll be the biggest thing that you can shift your mindset on or shift your behavior on what would that thing be is it well i won't give you some examples what would you say it would be so i'm getting really narrow here because there really isn't one thing you have to look at the individual situation but you asked me what is the most narrow perspective of the one thing i would say is that you have to mentally set yourself up where you i saw you have the book the uh wealthy barber oh yeah you take money off the table before it can be consumed by all lives noise all the things you have to do with a house full of kids and your early career mid-career that you've got to take as the wealthy barber said a dime of every dollar you make right and that's got to come off the top and go into if you have a retirement plan at work which about two-thirds of people have that that dime is going into it if you don't have that that is going into a roth ira if you max out the roth and you need to save more to get to that time that you're putting money into regular old index funds or savings account that the core the key is that from that first dollar that you're living on 90 cents yeah that that is re because you can always come up with a reason why oh my kid needs braces or i got to pay for the traveling baseball team or whatever it is you always come up with a reason why you don't have that 10 cents to save of each dollar that's why it's got to automatically come out of every paycheck or automatically come out of your account every month so that you live the discipline you know people found out early and coveted how much of their spending was discretionary yeah that's a great they never realized even if they have a house full of kids they just wanted them to go back to school but anyway even if you had that house full of kids you're like oh my goodness where did all our money go before suddenly we have money sitting in our account that is if you kept your job yeah yeah that's the point of covet and so we have more control than we realize of what happens with our money and that's why you've got to do it up front because otherwise it vanishes right before your eyes so i love this is a perfect place to kind of put the pen and the fact that we started the show talking about the three ingredients to wealth discipline using that discipline to build money essentially pay yourself first exactly what you just talked about using that money to invest and then giving that investment enough time so we've got discipline money used as a resource to invest for a long enough time we just we just covered deferred gratification and all the key parts and i think that is in this consumer society we live in it's so contrarian to think like that and i think that is we come up with concepts of force scarcity and other things and it's just been tremendous i mean there's so many things clark just because i know we're right we're at the point i need to kind of close this off but it is amazing all the echoes i now see that origins might be more than just like this whole deferred gratification what what created that in me and bo was it clark was it our parents but it all is these are the names besides you came inside when they manifest themselves out and then i love that you even talked about giving charity because we talk about the whole premise of this entire money guy concept is the abundance cycle where we tell everybody come here and just we'll go love on you and give you free information no way i think that is the problem you've always given away great content for free we are doing the same thing and that's that's not normal in this society because most people have an angle and look we even have an angle because our goal is you do this long enough you can try to keep your life as simple as possible but success creates complexity and that's the abundance cycle for us is you will reach a level of success that you'll need additional help you'll need financial planners and we're fee only and that's what i loved when you talked about charity and everything else because that is abundance happiness fulfillment all comes from that paying it forward and i think you're the embodiment of that and and i see your your fingerprints definitely in this abundance cycle that we've created so thank you clark for coming on if if our audience or our list is the first time they're interacting with clark howard how can they come find you where can they come interact and get your content what's the best way for them to find our websites clark.com and clarkdeals.com awesome because people who know me or know of me think of me as running my mouth on the microphone but our greatest impact with people now is you know digitally is at our websites and what's cool is so many people go to our websites don't even know i exist they don't know there's a clark they just think it's some kind of you know how a lot of things in the money field they use name is a way of making it seem more personal so a lot of these people don't even know there's a human named clark and that's fine with me because what i want people to know is the information where they can make smarter decisions in their lives clark thank you so much i'd love to say let's do this again but i'm going to just celebrate the moment and this is truly just a great opportunity and we're so happy that you're here so guys coming from the rest of the money guy team i'm your host brian preston mr bo hansen and then i can say with excitement clark howard money guy team out all right guys so you know one of our very favorite things in the world to do is answer your questions and since we have clark here clark you willing to answer some questions for our live absolutely i do want to i want to make sure i throw this out there for all of you all that are out there listening what's that what if they want to go listen your podcast what's the name of your podcast how do we find your podcast it's just the clark house look up clark howard yeah so we have if you go to clark.com podcast it will be to see all the ways you can download it i you know it even works on your overpriced iphone anywhere anywhere you go it's going to work and so whatever technology you use whatever service you use we're there and we're free we we were picking on clark last night because i noticed his entire team is android based or samsung right yeah i told him you realize the problem that all iphone users have is that you have the blue dot and the green dot all the messages all the messages are no longer blue now they're green and it's just that was a marketing decision by apple there was no technology reason that they had to put up this walled garden it was all about it was all about a brilliant marketing system marketing strategy i don't know if you've seen teenagers are the most fierce apple customers because they all want the blue dot and so they they have built their future customer base and the big change in apple strategy instead of issuing one ultra expensive flagship each year now they've got this full array of price points so that a preteen getting his or her first phone instead of going to android can now have an iphone and then they're in the ecosystem forever right exactly and then look it works with the mac and it works with the i don't know anybody uses ipads anymore but it works with the ipad that all integrates you can have your borg watch you know your you've got your i got the apple watch with mickey mickey are you are you a big mickey mouse fan i do love disney um because walt disney had this you know his whole mantra i love the fact that he he took he was an entrepreneur to the core with his risk on snow white and i loved how he had the plussing it because that's what you talked we were talking about kids earlier and i've always tried to tell my oldest i want you to plus everything in life you know and i always talk about on the show the great big beautiful tomorrow because i just love that optimism making the world better and i know things are controversial now but i still go back to the core of the vision walt disney had and that stuff is just i i think it's timeless i really do so he was a great example of somebody who saw life full of joy and possibility and imagination and i think it's funny that today funny in a in a bad way that people look at the future and they look at it so often with darkness and stress because life is what we make it and if you think about the long run of human history we screw up and take detours from time to time as humans but life has gotten better and better and better if you go back just 115 years the average american lived to 45 years of age we had a huge decline in lifespan kazukovit and the average is still 76 years and it's going to go up from here so much of the human experience gets steadily better as you look ahead and not worse and that is something that he had through and through his heart and soul law of accelerating returns daniel and i have done some research on this and we've covered it on content if you looked at the way we look at the 1900s to the technology and innovation of to 2000 you might experience the exact difference in 20 years now or 15 years because it's actually technology innovation making our lives better is actually accelerating i know we all get caught up in the negativity of the world but i think it's an exciting time to be around really so so you take your phone or mine think of all the businesses that would not exist that serve us if i was talking about where if you're not aware we're in suburban nashville and the first time i was in nashville was about 40 years ago and obviously there were no smartphones there was no navigation there was nothing like that i was lost the whole time i was here because the road system makes no sense at all i was always lost and now you come back and you you pull out your phone you put in on whatever nav you use it's not even going to get you to the place where you're trying to go it's going to tell you the quickest way to get up there they'll even tell you where parking is if parking is scarce haven't you noticed that it's incredible and so we forget how many things that used to take too much of our brain power now are so at the ready and think of all the businesses that wouldn't exist if it weren't for these things that have created so much wealth and opportunity and improvement in life and we can talk about you know darth vader there at facebook uh what's his name uh i mean you can talk about the negatives of technology and yes they're there sure but the positives are overwhelming and so great and so life does get better over time not in a straight line i mean who knows what's going to happen with uh dictator putin and what's going on in ukraine and where that'll lead to next i mean we've got evil in the world sure but we overcome eventually humans are so resilient in the same time we're so creative in capitalism people don't like the word capitalism now okay so let's use a word they like entrepreneurs what entrepreneurs create it has to be a match up of you having an idea for a product or service that the marketplace actually would benefit from that is enlightened self-interest you get success as the entrepreneur and society gets something that's newer better cheaper than what was there before i mean the the ability of humanity to steadily improve over the ages means that i am incredibly optimistic about the future and i i get so tied up and nuts about people who look at the uncertainty of the present and extrapolate this negativity for the future because that's not what really happens over time are you familiar you're about to tell me who the author is story brand um don miller he lives around here somewhere but he's a dynamic speaker he has a saying that the villain and victim never win and i think that that ties into a lot of the where the world is right now is you are you the hero of the story of your own personal story are you the guy that's helping others become the hero of their own story if you're you know a financial advisor or a cpa or a consultant but you never see the villain or the victim typically win when you're when you're looking at um this premise that don has with story brands so it's just a contra and americans are really good at playing victim right now i mean man the grievous thing going on in society it's like wow because you know how bitterness is something that punishes you not who you're bitter at yeah it's the same thing with the whole grievance and victim thing is that it it internalizes in such negative ways that instead we should look at the positives and the joy and the connections and i don't want to get into the political thing but definitely don't i but i really i really am distressed by the the dehumanization of people we don't agree with right now and uh people we disagree with we disagree with them people have always disagreed think about in our families yeah i mean i don't know if either of you live in perfect families but i don't and we will have disagreements particularly an extended family but they're still your family you know we and we need to remember that and one of the things that you know when you talk about having this optimistic positive outlook one of the things we love about what we're able to do here on the show is share positive optimistic ways to do exactly what you talk about and all your stuff how do you stretch your dollars farther how do you take your dollars a little bit longer and what's beautiful is we have a live chat going right now and they're just feeding us questions right and so i'm here i there's some unique ones in here around like burger king and that sort of thing uh but here's the one here's what i'm going to start with this first question is from andrew and andrew said you know right now with what's going on in the world is it better to refinance money from my house to do some work on it like a cash out refinance or to get a home equity line of credit right so how do i approach making that decision in this market so this is a difficult time to do home rental and if you can actually wait till interest rates provide some of a break on the demand finding home improvement contractors and the supplies for home improvement will make the overall job cheaper so the first thing i'd say this is a time to go on uh buyers strike for doing the renault to your home give that a little time but then to the question asked about doing the heloc or doing a cash out refi question is how long will it take you to pay off the money that you would be borrowing for this job if you can pay it off in 36 months or less do the heloc because the heloc is very sensitive to the immediacy of the rising interest rates but if you can pay it off in three years or less then it's better not to take on new 30-year debt against your life by taking out a cash out refi but the other thing is credit unions offer a somewhat unique product called a home equity loan that if you borrow money for five years you can lock it in at a fixed rate so you got 60 months so it's not subjected to the rising interest rate exactly and it's something banks won't do but credit unions are owned by and for the benefit of their members so they offer this vastly superior product to what the banks do with the floating rate helocs where you have a specific purpose like you're doing doing work to your home and some credit unions will let you stretch it out 10 or 15 years but that's really a disaster because the rates go a lot higher but the five year home equity loan at a fixed rate is the sweet spot for home improvements and so for if if someone was wanting to approach a local credit union are the rates competitive with fixed rate mortgages what's great is you can go and look at their websites and you see what are they doing for people they'll show a range based on credit score and they'll show you what they're doing five-year home equity loans for and then credit unions not all of them have the ability to join just by breathing but a lot do or community credit unions or you're a member of something that you can be a member of that credit union and then you can uh make that match game and get that really great rate from the credit union on a five-year cycle the only thing i would add is that refinancing can be expensive but the home equity lines of credit the helocs as well as those credit union loans typically have a much more competitive price point if they're not even just doing it all for you just to give you access to it then a traditional refinance and the only way you can make a traditional refinance affordable is take a premium on the rate and when rates are already going up that's probably that's right i completely missed that point that your existing mortgage is almost certainly at a lower rate than what you can refine now with the rising interest rates so again doing the cordoned off separate borrowing is a much better thing but the best thing of all is sit on your hands you're living in your home it may not be exactly what you want but wait for the market to become less overheated i'm noticing a trend with cars we talked about with houses you kind of just need to stand in place if you can stand it until this market settles back into something a little more sustainable i mean one of the things about capitalism is we go through economic cycles what's different in this case it doesn't matter if it's a dictatorship a controlled government a free economy like ours that everybody is having the same cost pressures pretty much around the world all based on the stuff that happened with covid it was kind of like they put this stuff in the oven and instead of the cake rising perfectly the cake exploded and that's what's happened to everybody around the world and you just gotta let things settle down you got to let the oven get clean and then you can cook again and you all you'll love this clock one of the ways that we try to help with that is uh if we if we let someone ask a question we pick their question we send them a free tumbler so andrew uh if you'd like a tumblr you can write k-d-k-a-t-i-e-n-moneyguy.com we'll get that in the mail to you all right here's the low-low shipping and handling charger 29.95 we'll cover it for you we'll cover that but we cover that by the way the shipping is getting as expensive as the tumblers are it's it's amazing how much things come out you know what we'll start doing we'll start telling people that they have a tumblr with their name waiting in the studio they just got to swing by and come get it right that makes a lot of even if they're in guam that's right here come see us we only sent one to france once we got this way to start making a disclaimer that you have to be in the continental united states because we did that was it four people in us in uh hawaii and alaska you're just dissing them all right here's our next question this is uh from tightwad diy is the one that's this question he said i have a question at what point can your side hustle become your main job i currently make 30 more my side hustle than i do my regular job but i have a pension if i stay for 10 more years so i think we're seeing a lot of this in a day's economy it's easier than ever to start a side hustle or start something on the side well some people are recognizing man this is this is good this is perhaps even better than my day job but how how do i find comfort in leaving my day job and what about if i'm someone who does have a pension i've been working towards or paying into yeah so the pension is something that you can run a calculation anybody who is a fee only financial planner can figure out the actual true value of that pension you'd be walking away from and you have to treat that as part of your overall compensation and what the value of that would be if you stayed the 10 more years versus your likely future earnings from your side hustle and so it's not this is not one that's like a light switch or you say oh yeah absolutely you should dump that job and go do your side hustle or not it really requires the financial side analysis but there's something else too are you having a lot more joy doing your own thing than you are working for the man even if the man's a woman you're working for somebody else are you going to feel much more fulfilled in life if you take that risk and you're out on your own because you've shown the ability at the job you're at to have stability you've shown that that you are a loyal employee you're giving up certainty but you also have found that you have initiative and you're doing well on your own one other thing that sounds mamby pamby you may be able to take a leave of absence from where you work a lot of employers if they'll let you you can go away for uh 12 months or 24 months and come back in and not lose your pension accrual if you decide hey i got to test the waters out to see if i like right now companies don't want to lose you so they may be more willing to give you a chance to see if you can fly on your own or not but i think seeing a fee only person to figure out what that intrinsic value of that pension is is really a worthwhile thing plus the health coverage you get from a big employer you're then going to have to be buying health coverage on your on your own on healthcare.gov and you're going to be paying 10 000 a year and up for that health coverage can i ask a clarifying question you and i had a discussion earlier that your father lost his job while you were a teenager my father lost his job when he was in his mid to early 40s and i was a teenager and those had dramatic impacts i knew it was hard for my dad in his mid-40s to go out there and find another job because of his age and when i started my first company i was 28 and part of the reason i chose to do it at 28 is because if it fell on its face i was still young enough that i felt like i could jump right in does age have any impact on your answer as well for 40 something that's a great question that's a great question i'd say that if you were asking me this question 30 years ago i would say yes but today employers more rent us than hire us for the long term and we more rent them than go to work for them with the intention of being there forever and if you look at the big problem of age discrimination it really is people that are mid-career 45 and over that employers find some reason to as they call it now this is so orwellian right size are employment and they they you have a bullseye target on you if you're 45 and over so i don't think the rules apply the same as they used to that if you've if you're a mid-career and you've found that potential real entrepreneurial spirit in you and you're finding it's working you've been testing it on the side then i wouldn't let age alone keep you from doing it that's great this was a great uh question tightwad dia what a great name tightwad diy if you'd like a tumbler you can write katie k a t i e moneyguy.com this next question is from chris i think a lot and i've seen a lot of questions around this idea you were talking about how with you and your wife you use a special type of card and you get you know points and so you get a companion pass do you want to talk a little bit about some of well maybe even some of the either some of the cards you use or how you approach how you use credit cards and how you use the point system well to your benefit did my wife's question so because i'm telling you my wife has been on me to try to get like one of these amex platinums or some of these other things i would love to know what clark has in his wallet that wasn't a hard question all right so this is going to really it's funny you know this is inappropriate to ask you clark okay got to make sure the numbers don't see it so there you have the amex platinum my wife she is so good 695 dollars how in the world could i justify having this card see you're shocked i i i for clark to pay six hundred dollars a year 6.95 oh goodness so the rewards i get because i travel so much make it pay you get it's for somebody who has high charge volume and high travel volume so i travel uh 20 30 trips a year okay and so this is this is a no-brainer if you travel that much because i get in lounges for free your gamification you get airline junk fees they pay you back i get 200 and uber credits a year so it really is geared towards a certain person who travels a lot and this works then i've got this one that is a newer card that is the capital one venture x that is also for travel don't know if you know this one capital one has always had a um they've not gone after the affluent market the mass effluent market and so they're selling this way below what uh american express is doing theirs and chase is doing the sapphire reserve i think it is that's okay 550. this one's 395. okay and gets you a lot of benefits and when i signed up i got a hundred thousand of their points which was worth about fifteen hundred dollars and so i'll i'll see if this one works over time and then i have the southwest visa that we use for corporate expenses so i qualify for the companion pass and with it and then my wife flies with me free all year but see that's only because i'm so into travel someone who's not into travel the card you should be carrying is a cash back card and look for one of the two percenters you don't have to worry about availability or anything like that you're getting a flat two percent cash back and if you're a costco member have theirs because you get four percent of gasoline or if your sams club member you get five percent with their card gasoline he had three percent restaurants and travel so my wife i had to do a cheat sheet for her because she was having trouble kicking out like what card do you use man these are the same type of problems that we have so i one day i was at costco which is where my mail's delivered as well because i'm there so much [Laughter] and this guy comes up to me says i heard you talk about the problem with your wife with not knowing what card to use and he showed me he has these little stickers that he has on every card he puts them on the card it tells each of them because he says he gets flaky too they know use this card for gas use this card for this use this card for that and so it is it is an affluenza thing where you have where you're showing your cards but it only works if you do one thing first and that is you're using plastic as a payment system payment system only meaning you never never never not ever run a balance on a credit card ever in your life exactly i love it i think that's so good so point of clarification too because i love adding to this because it's also very confirming and i know there's going to be a lot of our financial mutants out there that are going to love hearing this this type of detail i didn't hear you saying because i know the the revolving you know cash back by categories is a thing that all these credit card companies are trying to do discover does it i won't chase it so i don't so you don't do those because i can't stand them i never can remember there's no way maybe one percent of people or a fraction of one percent can keep up with the ever-revolving categories that is a gimmick that the banks know works so well because people will it's just like people who don't know what interest rate their card has because they never intended to run a balance and they're paying 18 interest nobody would go get up in the morning say you know what i want to take out a loan at 18 interest it's the same thing with the reward categories they they do the behavioral research and they know almost nobody is going to be able to keep up with that so i want to know certainty over time if i do this i get this much back if i do this i get that much back if i use this card i get this other thing and so that is key and you know the one credit card mistake that most people make what they get a monoline card they get an american airlines credit card they got a uh united or delta or they got the southwest or whatever and they don't fly a lot or they don't charge a lot you're paying an annual fee for a card that you're never getting bang for your buck because you're not meeting those two criteria i talked about high charge volume high travel volume on a particular supplier last thing on credit cards and then we can move on what do you think about that amazon prime card because it does have a five percent discount that's the one i don't have it in my wallet but i'm like that's the one i'm looking at going maybe i should have another credit card here's the hard part because amazon is a convenience service it's not a discount service amazon built market share and killed off rivals by selling things for years and years and years below cost amazon was a huge money loser through its whole growth cycle now they've got network effect they've got amazon prime memberships in so many people's hands that amazon is now all about convenience and is more often than not more expensive than shopping other places it's being of the behavior thing amazon now knows that people most are price sensitive on the items that they buy the most that they can comparison shop you know the items that are really very regular yeah and so amazon will be very price competitive on those and not at all on other things so the lure of the amazon five percent discount is that you're getting a discount by paying too much to start with is an example walmart plus doesn't have the reliability of the delivery that you have with amazon but they're good they're getting better and walmart's prices day in and day out are repeatedly lower than what you're going to find from amazon so getting the walmart card that gets you the discount is actually if you're about saving money is better than amazon amazon goes after the most white-collar most affluent part of the market and it is all about seeing that amazon delivery show up like clockwork day after day and so if people are out there and they're like feverishly trying to take notes going back trying to remember what cards you said where you mentioned where you put that is all that on your website can they go to clark.com and kind of see your rundown so our writers like you know we we've just incredible writers and they write about different specialty areas like one of my beefs is how much we overpay for technology that are subscription based how much we overpay for our streaming content how much we overpay for our cell phone plans how much we overpay for our monthlies so we put a special emphasis on clark.com with tools you can use to figure out with these expenses that just am i overbaked into your life how to figure out what's the best for your exact situation not for people generally but how do you make the decision for your exact family structure or friend network what's going to be the best thing for you to do for your wallet and that's what i really want you know you all talk so much about the proper way to accumulate assets my big area is how to not blow those assets by overspending unnecessarily where you keep the same quality of life but you spend less money doing it i have a question i'm going to jump in line because so this next question is from brian but let me give this away if you'd like a tumblr chris you can write katie at money k-a-t-i-e katie moneyguy.com this next question is from brian preston and so you get one too that's right that's right i'll give them this one so here's the question car because you will know the answer this and this is something i struggle with i was so proud of myself when i cut the cord because i got rid of my satellite bill because it was it was over a hundred dollars a month and i thought i was like this is great i'm going to youtube tv and at the time it was like 34. and then somehow over the months to watch like because i love my sec football so i can't give up oh i can't cut the cord completely but when i started stacking up all my subscriptions to youtube i fired youtube tv and went to hulu with their bundle with disney plus plus the espn do you have if somebody is trying to be very good with their resources and their money but they do get the value now i know people like beau and his generation they don't you don't watch tv i mean it is not maybe everything's on demand for you right that's right everything is every man and so this is a generation gap it is i know that it's different so what advice because i know you've done the research and you can go to clark.com and i know you publish this stuff but give us the kind of cliff notes if somebody is trying to have traditional tv and maybe some dvrs type things where they can record what's the because this market seems to be changing all the time yeah and but it seems to be settling down we went through the um pioneer stage with everybody putting things out losing money on them like google lost a fortune on youtube tv at 35 yeah and they've raised at the point where it's now at least not losing a money at 65 but there's so much free streaming content now and the business is going to a model where if you're willing to watch ads for on-demand programming you'll pay nothing okay and for the live tv there are many many choices at different price points starting about 20 25 a month the tool we developed it took a lot of work at clark.com is where you put in your first favorite channel first and then we'll tell you which service is the cheapest that you can get that channel and then you add another one and you see okay oh see you customize it to the individual and so you'll hit like your fifth or sixth favorite channel and you'll see uh oh i just went from 40 a month to 55. how much like i don't need that channel and i'll watch their stuff delayed instead of watching it live because then with all the free streaming products out there you can probably watch it a few days delayed except for sports events sure have those live but you know what's not acknowledged enough is the value of rabbit ears yeah it's true like you mean like over like over there you've got a better picture you've got an hd tv you're streaming stuff you're not using the capability at all being like having a ferrari and never being able to go out of second gear when you were watching streaming content because how it gets uh degraded compressed by the time you're watching on your tv you hook up an antenna you're getting full bore if you get that channel the picture is going to be like what you actually saw in the store when you were buying the tv that you've never seen again in your home and the contents free think about if you're watching your beloved georgia bulldogs and you're seeing them with a digital antenna and you're seeing the picture like you're in sanford stadium instead of like oh well i can't really see the blades of grass you watch with that antenna you're going to see the blades of grass or the astroturf depending on the state so let me ask a clarifying question on that because this is going to show my age a little bit i was one of the early adopters of tivo and i did a lot i had over-the-air antenna and it would save the shows on the dv essentially the the tivo would say is there anything because tivo's gone you know you don't have those type of products anymore but is there something that can give you that dvr that hard drive recording with over-the-air antenna that yeah that you can recommend no i can't recommend one because i'm technologically announced but there are a number of them now that that the more technically capable you are the cheaper they are as an option and there are programming guides you can get that are free to look at and you can tie them into uh recording on a hard drive you have think about what an external hard drive costs now yeah so the you can buy um turnkey solutions that you're typically going to pay some money for or you can if you're technically capable you can do these things that other people are doing you look on youtube you'll see videos of how people do it where they're able to record what they want and watch when they want of live tv being broadcast over an antenna that's great that's awesome um bro can i get a tumblr yeah if you want a tumblr you can katy [Laughter] thanks thanks guys for letting me have a question all right uh this is an interesting clark and i i i think i know your answer but i don't know we have a lot of young folks who are listening uh who are starting families and they're buying their house and stuff make yourself sound old when you call them yeah he wants everybody to think he's older than he actually is uh and they're they ask questions around life insurance right and you know one of the things that we always talk about here is really low-cost term insurance when it makes sense right and so this question came from uh restore sanity and it says hey are there any situations where whole life might make sense you know does it make sense for me to do that if i'm younger and it's cheaper and it locks in my rate over the long term what are your thoughts on that and i think we're seeing a little bit more of that now i'm not sure why but we seem to be getting that question a lot any thoughts on the best way to get insurance what type of insurance and then does like whole life reported insurance makes sense yeah so whole life is really great if you have a relative who is trying to make it as an insurance sales person they need the sale i mean there's there's almost never a situation that that permanent or whole life insurance is a better choice than buying term because a young family they're they're being pulled a million different directions and what you're trying to cover is your kids getting to adulthood are you getting substantially through your career so if you buy and buy typically pretty easily up to 30-year level term for most of us at the age that people are having kids now it will cover both your kids growing up and the core of your working lifetime because you'll likely be in your 60s at that point and so you cover that time so the whole life thing let's say you're in a position where your family has a really bad genetic history of an illness that might later disqualify you to qualify for insurance and you're really worried about money much later in life and you're willing to pay the massive amount i don't know 20 times the premiums or whatever it is for a whole life versus level term and you're really really worried about the genetic time bomb going off and you not being able to underwrite for insurance in the future that would be a case where permanent insurance would make sense but keep it simple level term none of these exotic uh variable and universal and index blah blah blah life insurance things that have massive commissions and not even the person selling it to you has any idea what the policy actually does or how it might blow up on you there the only thing i'd add to that is some term policies you have to pay a little bit of a premium but they they are convertible to to some type of permanent insurance so if you are worried about that underwriting time bomb that you might have there are ways it will put a premium on that term policy but it's going to be substantially cheaper than if you just start from jump street with the whole life that's got a huge cost that you don't deal with with term insurance the other thing with whole life is people don't buy enough coverage because the premiums you know the salesman's trying to sell your salesperson trying to sell you what they think they'll get you to say yes to in your budget and you're not going to have enough death coverage for your loved ones where with uh term life you can buy a benefit easily 10 times what you make in a year and the premiums will be tiny is that your rule of thumb how much insurance someone should buy 10 times annual income so i say that just as a back of the envelope thing because most people are never going to run through one of those tools that will take what you owe and what you earn and what your obligations are and come up with an exact number so as a default i just say by ten times ten times the worst thing that happens is your survivor got too much money from you because you bought 10 times your annual income so clark i have to ask because one of the things we do is we do tick tock react videos you spend a lot of time on tick tock see i knew that but here's what here's what's funny so tick tock tick tock is out there i got to tell you you would be shocked at how much of the bad tick tock advice we could do hours is pushing whole life insurance and i think it is so interesting you have this cutting social you know social media tool or app and yet they've gone back to trying to push whole life it's all about the money right that is to be made that come with the money i always ask what do you get paid for this product and always all the other thing the contrarian in me always says what do the insurance companies do with that money because what they do they can give you a guarantee because they usually restrict your behavior for you know by overcharging on the premiums or if it's some other type of permanent type solution they'll restrict your ability to pull money out for like a decade they will invest that money that's what they're doing with a lot of those resources so cut out them making that money and just guaranteeing you just a small small amount you actually i like the old saying buy a term invest the difference right and it really can be good for you and you pointed something out with tick tock is uh the marketers at companies are very smart using influencers using every form of social media to spread their message about why you should do something that's going to make the company more money and somebody will be will have a really engaging personality be a great communicator will have a certain edginess to them and people like yeah i really trust that i trust that person yeah and so they they get into it and people don't realize until much later that person who they believed in so much that was pay for play yeah you know they were they were getting paid to sell you down the river and they're going down the river in a nice boat and you got nothing because they're the ones who made the money and the company they're pitching for made the money uh and and i don't want to go on too much of a sidebar but i've noticed some consequence i know i want tangents i've noticed content creators that i felt like went into it with pure heart they were going to become content creators and personal finance but then they get a taste and i'm not saying this is a bad thing but crypto is one of those things where i've seen people who've gotten a taste of the the vig or the the commissions or the referral fees or the affiliate marketing on crypto and all of a sudden now all their content is pushing all this stuff it goes back we've said it earlier and i'm not saying anything's bad about kryptos necessarily oh why not why don't we infuriate people and get into talking about quickly nice you don't try to upset but it is one of those things where i think that people always ask what is somebody getting paid or what do they benefit that's why i do love the abundance cycle is because we tell you come take the free information reach that level of success and then that's when you can come and have the feeling services and i love how you've always paid it forward too clark you were just so generous with with the way you give out information and that's why everybody go check out clark.com and i think you'll see that there's a reason when i i had families because i think most people think financial advisors can tell you how to get out of bankruptcy or deal with bankruptcy or to get out of bad debt and i always used to say no go to go listen to clark howard he's going to tell you how to you know if you go to clark.com he'll tell you how to freeze your credit he'll tell you how to you know work with the credit card companies on negotiating you are a great resource for the people who are struggling with basic discipline too and that's a powerful tool thank you and i'm not thank goodness i'm not the lone ranger there are several people that are trying to help people get control of their finances because people accept information and adapt information differently from different people and it's great that that there are in addition to me there are other people doing this as well and you find who it is you connect to and use his or her guidance and advice to get control of your wallet to be in charge you know i never want you to live an anxious life where you're afraid of what's going on in your life with money and so it really is about you lowering the voltage and getting rid of those anxious moments i think about how many people in a couple fight about money yeah and it's not because there's too much it's because there's too little that's right and it can disintegrate a great what could be a great relationship otherwise so this is this is key to your uh personal happiness and your sense of control and your relationships to have your money act together and so that's why this is so important to me is that people do it's basic blocking and tackling getting your finances under control but it all starts here it all starts in the head and whoever reaches you uh emotionally mentally um that's who you want to get that guidance from to get your spending under control and get you on a path that feels more freeing than where you are right now that's great that's awesome clark thank you so much for coming on the show this has been awesome i feel like this is a again a living legend hanging out with us thank you thank you thank you so much i mean it is one of those things i wish we could have had recorded just our conversation the team had to basically say we've got to start recording the show because we were just all nerding out on being really fun with dealing with financial life so guys thank you so much for tuning in i'm your host brian preston mr bo hansen clark howard money guy team out

Channel: The Money Guy Show

Views: 57,691

Keywords: money guy show, debt, budget, cash, real estate, insurance, how to make money, save, credit card, compound interest, buying house, buy stock, success, personal finance, Clark Howard Shares His Secrets to Financial Success!

Id: y7377VWpM64

Length: 94min 0sec (5640 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2022