Q&A LIVE from Texas A&M Texarkana

19:38Joe Saul-Sehy:You're just not going to feel it. Another thing that I'll also work with our students on, and it's a lot easier to say this than do it, but if you have that invisible raise for that first year, don't even live off of it. Just go ahead and put that right back into your emergency fund or go ahead and max out what you can deposit into your Roth IRA. traditional or traditional. Yeah. It's an exciting time, but this time, this time, I think this is really an inflection point. When you graduate, if you set up these systems, Paula, right away, it's going to be great. If you don't set them up right away, three months after you graduate, it's going to be really hard because then you have to backtrack.

20:18Joe Saul-Sehy:You've already been spending the money. It gets much harder if you wait three months, do it immediately when you graduate.

20:22Jay Davis:Right, right. And I think the key thing that he just said is set up systems, because if If you have to log in and manually do it every month, you forget. You know, you just, you forget. The more that you can just set up the systems and automate it, like set it and forget it, the better.

20:37Joe Saul-Sehy:Well, I think that's the end of the Hannah's. Let's see if everybody else can keep up with the Hannah's, Paula.

20:42Jay Davis:Yes. My name is Gabriel and I'm a civil engineering major.

20:47Joe Saul-Sehy:My question is, what is the safer investment strategy? Stocks, IRAs, 401ks, or gold and silver? Awesome. Beautiful. Thank you, Gabriel. Thanks for the question. And engineering. I would have been an engineer if I knew what one was, by the way. I thought an engineer just drove a train, Gabriel. I was sure. But I had no idea.

21:08Jay Davis:So I want to put a little context around this question because you said stocks and then you said IRAs.

21:14Joe Saul-Sehy:It's a great question though, because this is everybody has questions like this. Yeah,

21:19Jay Davis:exactly. I hear this question a lot. And so I want to take a moment to elaborate on why these are different things. And so imagine that you're at a bar. Imagine there are all sorts of different glass. These are students.

21:30Joe Saul-Sehy:They've never been in a bar.

21:32Jay Davis:You're at a house party. Imagine you're at a house party. They don't do that either. And there's all kinds of different glassware. So you've got a coffee mug. You've got a red solo cup. You've got a champagne flute. You've got a pint glass. You've got a shot glass. You've got a water glass. Like the, what are those called? glass, just glassware.

21:52Joe Saul-Sehy:All the drinking implements.

21:54Jay Davis:Right. You have all, you have a martini glass, right? You've got all of these things. And then you've also got the liquids that typically go into each one. So an IRA is an example of a piece of that glassware. An IRA or a 401k or a 403b or a Roth IRA, those are all different pieces of glassware. So that's the equivalent of a coffee mug, a martini glass, a champagne flute, a red solo cup. Then the liquids that go inside of it are stocks, bonds, gold, silver, any type of asset. CDs. Yeah, CDs, just cash. Yeah. You know, those are all the liquids that go inside of it. And there are certain types of liquids that are generally better inside certain types of glasses that this is something that's called asset location, like what's the best liquid to put inside a certain glass.

22:49So generally

22:50Jay Davis:speaking, beer is drunk from a pint glass and champagne is drunk from a champagne flute and coffee is drunk from a coffee mug. But there's no actual rule saying that you have to do it that way. So you could put coffee in a champagne flute.

23:03Joe Saul-Sehy:Yeah.

23:04Jay Davis:Yeah. If you wanted to. Part of the reason that we chose the question is because the first piece of it was that I wanted to differentiate between an IRA versus the other components of the question, between an IRA versus stocks, gold, silver?

23:18Joe Saul-Sehy:So when you graduate, there's going to be these different glasses to choose from. I can put money in a savings account. I can put money at, we should say, at Red River Federal Credit Union. Absolutely. Since they have underwrited this. We can have a savings account. That's a glass. We can drink out of that glass whenever we want. We can have a brokerage account. We can have stocks. We can have bonds. and we can drink out of that glass whenever we want. If you get a 401k glass or an IRA glass, there's rules about when you can drink out of that.

23:48Jay Davis:Yeah, so a 401k or an IRA is basically an agreement between you and the government in which the government says that they will give you a tax break if you promise not to spend that money until you're a certain age. So a lot of people think of it as a quote-unquote retirement account and that can be a little bit misleading because retirement is, in many people's minds, retirement is a job description or the lack of a job description. Like retirement is a description of your work status. And technically, a 401k or an IRA isn't a retirement account. It's an age-restricted account. So basically, you're just making a deal with the government that if you don't touch that money until a particular age, they will give you a big tax break.

24:35Joe Saul-Sehy:It is a great way to segregate money, though. I mean, if you're not going to spend it for a long time, if you want to make sure that you have some money after 59 and a half, which is the rule on most of these, put it in those accounts because you'll save money on taxes. But then inside of there, let's answer Gabriel's real question, Jay, which is this word safe, right? Which one is safer? I think safe has a lot of different meanings. Well, you could have a 401k and it still not be safe because it depends on what you chose to put your money inside.

25:03Jay Davis:Yeah, what are the drinks? What's the mix of drinks inside?

25:06Joe Saul-Sehy:And so even that can be a little scary when you start using the word safe. And I think the students now understand the word inflation a little bit better than I understood it whenever I was their age. Because right now, with inflation being the way it is, you start looking at your gold and silver. That's not quite as safe as it was because of inflation. For me, it's a little scary to be able to just talk about what's safe and what's not. A lot of it has to do with what your comfort level is and what your risk tolerance is going to be. Yeah. Well, and I think for me, the big thing is time frame.

25:44Joe Saul-Sehy:Because safe over the short run, if I need to spend the money in the next six months, putting money into the stock market is not safe. but if I'm going to spend money 20 years from now putting money in a savings account isn't safe it feels safe but it's going to get eaten up by Jay what you talked about by inflation so you're going to very safely never have any more money you'll actually have less money to spend based on the amount of bread you can buy than you had before but stocks stocks as a rule over long periods of time are very safe if you buy them in a diversified collection of them because of the fact that you are buying the economy.

26:26Joe Saul-Sehy:And if a company's going to make money, they have to beat inflation, right? They have to make money for their investors. And so if you're investing in Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola is what makes inflation, right? The price of sugar goes up. The people at Coca-Cola don't go, well, the price of sugar went up. We're screwed. They go, no, we're going to find a way to make Gabriel pay more money for that Coca-Cola. And when they do, all the investors reap the benefit of the higher price that they were able to have better advertising. So owning Coca-Cola means, by definition, if Coca-Cola succeeds, they're going to beat inflation.

27:00Joe Saul-Sehy:And that's a great place to be and a safe place to be long term as long as you're diversified.

27:06Jay Davis:Right. But to be clear, that doesn't mean that you should necessarily pick Coca-Cola or Pepsi or any individual stock, because if you're trying to pick winners and losers, you might be right, you might be wrong. Even professionals who spend their whole lives learning how to pick winning companies or losing companies, more times than not get it wrong. Statistically speaking, yeah.

27:28Joe Saul-Sehy:We did a show recently with a couple people that studied stock market pickers. They have a brand new book out that's great called Stock Market Maestros. The best of the best had a 45 % hit rate, which means 45 % of the stocks that they picked were winners. They lose more often than they win. And these were the best of the best of the best. These people have maestro in their title and they're horrible. So they were saying the average person's hit rate is about one out of every three stocks. Professional gamblers, 54 or 55%. Right. So just take it to Vegas, Jay. And we're done. That's the kind of teaching we do.

28:05Joe Saul-Sehy:And I do want to go ahead and share, too, your 401ks become safer when your company is going to provide a match. And so anytime that your company is going to be able to provide that match, I'm going to recommend that you're going to at least take advantage of that. Absolutely. Yeah, free money. You were talking about diversification, though.

28:23Jay Davis:Right, right, exactly. So the 401k, again, that's the coffee mug that you're drinking out of. But in terms of what you actually put inside of that coffee mug, you don't want to put individual stocks in there because you, more times than not, the probability is that if you're picking individual stocks, you are likely to get it wrong. No matter how smart you are, no matter, even if you're doing this full time as a professional on Wall Street, you're more likely to get it wrong than not. And so instead what you do is you buy what are called these broad market index funds. and that means that you are buying the overall market.

29:00Jay Davis:So when you turn on the news and you hear like the Dow Jones rose or fell or you hear that the S &P 500 rose or fell or the NASDAQ rose or fell, that's what you're buying. You're buying the entire S &P 500. You're buying the entire Dow Jones, right? And so you're going to do as well or as poorly as the overall index, which is essentially the overall economy. no better and no worse.

29:28Joe Saul-Sehy:And over long periods of time, your return has been around 8 % doing that versus over the short run, a savings account is going to earn a couple percent, three. Yeah.

29:43Jay Davis:And so with an 8 % return, that goes back to the rule of 72. If over the long term, you're going to be earning 8%, that means your money will double on average every nine years. But the important thing to remember, and I got this wrong when I was in my 20s, is that the stock market is not a high-yield savings account. We're talking about over the very, very, very long term, meaning like 20-plus years, it's likely to do well. But in the short term, in the next three years, who knows? So if you need that money in the next three to five years, don't put it in stocks.

30:16Joe Saul-Sehy:I know a lot of people, Jay, that you brought up Las Vegas. I mean, you brought up gambling. And a lot of people think the stock market's gambling, which if you need the money tomorrow, the stock market is gambling. If you need a long time from now, Paula's index is much safer. Well, and we had a discussion a couple of weeks ago at one of our workshops, and it just talked about the prediction markets that are even starting to hit out there. Koushi and some of the others, there's still a huge risk involved when you start playing with something like that. So, you know, for me, it's going to be your 401ks.

30:50Joe Saul-Sehy:You're going to put, you know, your index funds and not play with prediction markets in Las Vegas. Our fourth question comes from. Hello, I'm Stefano. I'm a business major. And my question is, what are a few common money mistakes college and grad student make that I should avoid now that I'm still in school. Awesome. Thank you, Stefano. What are some common mistakes?

31:15Jay Davis:I'd say a lot of mistakes come from going to one extreme or the other. So on one side, and I think this is the mistake that you hear about more frequently, you have people who spend too much and get into debt. But on the other side, you also have people who are too cheap to the point where it is debilitating, to the point where it holds back your life. You know, there are certain things, even as a college student, you don't have a lot of money. You know, most college students don't have a lot of money. But if you can, to the extent that you can spend some money doing things that will allow you to build your career, you know, maybe that means that you get one nice shirt, just one, that you can wear to professional events.

32:07Jay Davis:Or maybe it just means that you've got gas money to go to that professional event, right? That you've got, you can put the gas in your car to go to that networking event. Those are the things that you don't want to cheap out on. Anything that will allow you to build your network and increase the odds that you're going to make more money in the long run, those things are worthwhile. Jay?

32:27Joe Saul-Sehy:Well, for me, there's two things that our students really talk about, Right. And that's, you know, using credit cards. And sometimes they use that either as a reward or they use it as maybe a supplement to their income. That right there is a concern when you start looking at 20 plus percent interest rates. You're basically taxing your future self whenever you get into that role. Yes. Supplement to the income is the one that always makes me cringe. I don't have enough money, so I'll just put it on the credit card, figure it out later. Not good. And then the second thing that our students can do is at times they're going to take out too much financial aid.

33:02Joe Saul-Sehy:So they'll actually get what financial aid calls a refund. And to me, that's not a refund at all. But they're going to end up having some extra money that they're now going to be paying interest on whenever they graduate. So, you know, not spending that money and just going ahead and turning right back around and paying that loan back off rather than using that refund to buy the latest iPhone or pizza or anything else out there. For me, a common mistake that I see students make that they will continue to make, and this isn't just in your financial life, it's that you think that discipline is the answer.

33:38Joe Saul-Sehy:And discipline fades as the day goes on. you get hungry, discipline gets replaced by Bubba's down on the freeway, discipline gets replaced with splurging. So it isn't about discipline. It's about systems. Whatever you think I need discipline, replace that with systems. And it's great. So how can I systematize my money? What can I do to make sure? As an example, for me, I was a guy who used the credit card all the time. And so I had to cut up my cards. I'd have no access to credit cards because if it was in my wallet, baby, I was using it. Like that was, that was going to happen. So I set up a system to make sure that I won.

34:15Joe Saul-Sehy:We talked about with Hannah, you know, putting money away, automating money, going into savings so that you've got that emergency fund that Jay talks about having that as a system versus telling yourself that I'm going to put some money away. If you tell yourself you're going to put some money away, you never do it. If you have it automatically go into the account, it'll happen like clockwork.

34:35Jay Davis:The other thing that you should systematize, And this goes back to the earning more money portion, because as a, especially as a student, the most powerful thing that you can do is to increase your earnings capability. Oh, you stole my next one. Oh, mind reader. Man. Mind reader. Yes.

34:53Joe Saul-Sehy:We don't ask for raises enough.

34:55Jay Davis:And even in that, there are systems that you can start to implement in your life. Like if you get somebody's email address or contact information at an event, follow up with them immediately. Don't wait until the next day. Just do it that night. Do it in the car on the way home. Make a system for yourself like, or this would really be more of a habit, but like, as I'm brushing my teeth, that's when I follow up with people. So that that way your brain links brushing your teeth to that follow up.

35:25Joe Saul-Sehy:That's the thing, Jay, that I think is so important that I didn't know. I don't know if you knew, but when I was in college, all these professors were people I remember that they would reach out they try to help I didn't want to bother them I saw other people that network with the professors the great minds that were around them some of the people that were maybe people they admired in their classes staying close to those people like when you're on a college campus network as much as you possibly can absolutely and the professors that I've been able to get to know here on campus love to be able to do that for our students and to be able to share more than just what's on the syllabus.

36:03Joe Saul-Sehy:I regret not doing that more. You know, for me, it's going back to the professor, maybe the next semester or that three semesters after you've taken them and just following back up and just saying, Hey, appreciate what I learned in your class. Or, you know, Hey, can we go grab a cup of coffee? I'd like for you to introduce me to some industry people that, you know, um, here in town. And they're happy to do it. Like you said, and one more thing I wanted to jump on is we talked about a little bit earlier, but I'll start later. That is a big mistake is I'll start later in developing an emergency fund.

36:32Joe Saul-Sehy:I'll start later in developing my budget. I'll start later in savings. That fallacy of I'll start later is big. Yeah. And building, building those habits right away. So important.

36:41Jay Davis:Oh, and just one other thing I wanted to say on the topic of like following up with meeting people, following up with people, professors, whoever it might be, industry people. One thing that I did not understand when I was in college that I only learned later in life, I thought that what mattered was my resume and in real life what mattered what has mattered are my relationships my professional relationships not my resume and now being on the hiring side you know both Joe and I have hired people in our businesses when we, well I don't want to speak for you Joe but when I go to hire the first thing I do is I talk to the people around me and I say I'm looking for somebody to fill this type of a role do you know anyone?

37:22Jay Davis:It's that word of mouth recommendation. That's the starting point. And there's two sides of that.

37:27Joe Saul-Sehy:You still have to be good at what you do. Right, of course. Because I do see some people that think it's just all schmoozing all the time, and it's not. Right, right, right. Yeah, you have to have a reputation for being good at what you do.

37:37Jay Davis:These are fantastic questions from the students at Texas A &M Texarkana. We're going to hear more right after this final word from the sponsors who make this possible.

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39:23Jay Davis:welcome back let's hear more questions from the students at texas a &m texarcana um i'm valerie and i'm an accounting major um what are some good money management tips to limit

39:36Joe Saul-Sehy:spending oh good money management tips to limit spending man that's so hard so i had to learn a lot of these, Valerie, the hard way. So Paula, you want to start?

39:47Jay Davis:Yeah. When it comes to limiting spending, there are two categories of expenses that you have. You've got your fixed expenses, like your rent, your car payment. If you have a car payment, these are the things that are, they're fixed in your budget. You're locked into a lease and your rent is going to be the same amount every single month. And it's really hard until, unless your lease ends, it's really hard to get out of that. Same thing if you have a car payment, it's a fixed amount every single month, and it's really hard to change that unless you refinance that loan. Those are your fixed costs.

40:21Jay Davis:And then you also have discretionary costs, or variable costs, I should say. You've got variable costs. Some of those variable costs are truly necessary, like groceries, and some of those variable costs are discretionary. That's where we talk about the iPhone and the pizza and the new sweater and all of those sorts of things. I think the mistake that a lot of people make is that a lot of people, when they try to save money, the first thing that they target is variable discretionary spending. And the reason that people often target that is because it's the low hanging fruit and there is low friction, there's a low barrier to getting rid of those expenses.

41:05Jay Davis:Like there's, there is not a lot of headache or hassle around not buying a new sweater. You simply don't buy it. And I get that there are behavioral, you know, there's the psychology of that and there's the behavior and there's the habit formation. But ultimately at the end of the day, variable discretionary spending is the lowest friction category to eliminate. By contrast, when you talk about fixed expenses like your rent or your car payment, there's huge friction to changing that. To change your rent, you literally have to move out or get a roommate or get more roommates. But because those are so high friction, once you make that change, as difficult as it may be, it's locked in.

41:49Jay Davis:And much higher impact. Much, much higher impact. So if you really want to move the needle, go for the fixed expenses.

41:56Joe Saul-Sehy:Well, Polly, you mentioned friction a few times there. And for me, it's make it hard to spend money. I can literally go a day or two or even three and not pull out my wallet anymore because I do have payments on my iPhone. And so I can just go scan a QR code and my groceries get paid. I can scan at the gas pump and my gas gets paid. If I want to order online, I already have my debit and credit cards already in the system. And so for me, whenever I'm talking to students that really are having an issue with spending, turn off the accounts, make it to where you have to pull out your wallet and heaven forbid spend cash.

42:37Joe Saul-Sehy:But even if not, you still have to pull out your debit card or you have to pull out, you know, whatever payment method rather than just rely on just walking up and placing your phone on top of something or just scanning a QR code. Yeah. Most people think of a budget and they think of a pain in the ass. Like it's really going to be tough. So I like gamifying it. And I think turning this into a game and making it fun really changes things. There's this cool app, and you don't need the app to do it, called YNAB. And it's You Need a Budget. And I don't want to talk about YNAB, but I want to talk about why it turns it into a game.

43:11Joe Saul-Sehy:So if you really want to do better with money, do what the YNAB people do. And that is, before the beginning of the week, plot out how you're going to spend it. So every dollar has a purpose ahead of time. So you begin your week, and you're like, okay, I want to go out to a restaurant with my friends on Thursday, so I'm setting about this much money for that. And then I've got my rent due. I'm setting that aside for that. And before the week even begins, you've done all your spending. And because of that, you turned it into a game and you did it ahead of time. You're still having all the fun you had, but now you know where every dollar went versus what I did.

43:48Joe Saul-Sehy:Jay, it sounds like what you did. Friends are going out. I didn't expect it. And I didn't have any money in my budget for serendipity. I didn't have any money set aside. Oh, if my friends asked me to go out, I'm going to have 15 bucks sitting over here, whatever the number would be. I didn't have any of that. I would just whip out the credit card then and get myself further in a hole. Well, I have some phenomenal programming that I'm wanting to do in the, in the fall. And if YNAB wants to contact me, they can, but I will go ahead and plug them real quick because our A &M students with their A &M email address get one year free of YNAB.

44:18Joe Saul-Sehy:Oh, cool. So there's no reason for them not to, but YNAB could still call me. We've got some programming that needs to be paid for. I did not know that, and I brought it up. I fed right into that. But it is a great program for that reason because it turns it into a game. Cheryl and I have this weekly money meeting where we talk about how did we spend money last week? What are we going to spend next week? It's a fun meeting. We cap it at 20 minutes. We have a timer. We cap it at 20 minutes, and it's done. And it makes it so much more fun, and we find in the weeks that we don't miss that because we do miss it from time to time.

44:48Joe Saul-Sehy:We do really well with money just because we talked about it. Yeah. Another thing that I wanted to say, though, was this is a problem that I had with money when I was a college student. I would get really excited about this. And when you get really excited about personal finance, you decide, I'm going to live on ramen noodles every day and save every dollar. And that's awesome for like four days. So you have to build in splurges because otherwise splurges are going to find you. You're going to get done with three weeks of doing great. And then you're going to say the words that are death for any broke person, which is I deserve it.

45:27Joe Saul-Sehy:I've been great for three weeks, so I deserve it. And what I deserve it means is I'm going to go blow up all the good stuff I did those last three weeks. No, that's definitely a common mistake that's out there. And another, I guess, tool that you can use is have that 24-hour rule. So if you've got something in the cart. Oh, this is good. But if you've got something in the cart, leave it there. And if you still want it 24 hours later, then maybe it could be the right decision for you. And you may even get a discount because they want you to go ahead and check out. But and have that magic number and everybody's going to be a little bit different.

46:01Joe Saul-Sehy:It could be anything over$50, anything over$100. You know, whatever that magic number is for you and your family or your household. If it's over that, think about it rather than just go and do that. that was probably and is the biggest thing that my wife would say I had an issue with when we were younger. I'm getting better. That's me too. Cause I'm laughing. Cause I have to do that with board games and my board game buddy, Angelo's hanging out with us tonight and he knows it can be a problem. You get the new hot game. You want it. You're not even thinking about the budget. You think, Ooh, this new thing came out, but putting it in the cart and waiting 24 hours, then you're, then you're like, do I need it today?

46:40Joe Saul-Sehy:Do I need it now?

46:41Jay Davis:And to your point earlier about increasing friction, I know people who, you know, because there are a lot of websites where you can have your payment information saved. I know people who intentionally will not save their payment information. They won't save it in a password manager. They won't save it anywhere. So that you have to physically get out your card and type in all 16 digits in order to buy something, even just that little bit of friction, because you know, right now you've got that bright purple shop pay button that makes it very easy. The more you can not save your information in that and your wallet's on the other side of the room and you're in bed and it's cold, right?

47:23Jay Davis:And you have to actually get out of bed and walk all the way to the other side of the room and get your wallet and punch in the numbers. Creating that friction stops impulse spending.

47:33Joe Saul-Sehy:It's a great theme. It's gone on all the way through the night. It's funny because the world is making it easier to buy, but they're also making it easier to save. You got to decide what team you're on. Yeah. We have one more question. How do I manage my finances and student loans after college? Awesome, Thomas. Thank you. Finances and student loans after college, and you're a senior, right? This is a little bit like Hannah's question, but Jay, Thomas has his degree. He's got his new job. Bob, what does he set up first tactically? Well, the first thing you've got to do an inventory check and you've got to figure out exactly if you're, if you have student loans, what those balances are, what those payments are and get that set up with your service.

48:14Joe Saul-Sehy:When they start. That's going to be the first thing that you're going to want to do. And then secondly, you don't want to go out there and have that deserving aspect. You know, I've made it four years, so I'm now going to go and spend every penny that I have saved up. And we've already alluded to this, but just start. Start developing the emergency fund, start saving, start developing your budget, and just start. Hiding that money from yourself, like we were telling Hannah earlier, is so important, Paula.

48:41Jay Davis:Yeah, I think with debt in particular, with student loans, you'll want to be thoughtful about how much of your money you want to put towards student loans versus how much of your money you want to put towards starting your retirement savings. Because going back to what we said earlier about the rule of 72, every dollar that you put towards retirement savings when you're 22, assuming that you leave it there until you're 67, that's going to go through several compounding cycles. Five doubles. Yeah, exactly. I had some friends who were super focused on just paying off debt and wanted to be debt free as fast as possible.

49:18Jay Davis:And that's great. like it's coming from a good place, but don't let it come at the expense of retirement savings. And particularly, Jay, to your point, if you have a 401k match, definitely get the match. If you don't, because many jobs don't necessarily offer a match, you'll still want to put some money aside, even if it's unmatched, into a 401k or if you don't have access to a workplace 401k into a Roth IRA.

49:44Joe Saul-Sehy:And this all starts with general mindset. We've had a lot of smart people that Paul and I have been able to talk to over the years that we've done our shows. There was a very brilliant guest we had on. I was very lucky to have him on twice. His name is Jonathan Clements. For a long time, he was the personal finance columnist at the Wall Street Journal. He actually passed away recently, sadly. What was really neat about Jonathan was he was so brave. He even wrote columns about the process of dying and all the things that you need to do. But what he wrote, I think that's important for us tonight was he said, you have this choice.

50:22Joe Saul-Sehy:You're going to, almost like Paula, you say you can afford anything, but not everything. Jonathan said, you have two choices. You can party in your twenties or you can party later. You can work your butt off early and party later, or you can party early and work later. You get to choose which one you want to do. And he said for most people, for him, especially, he was very glad that he chose that he was going to work his butt off those few early years so he could party in the later years. But we all have that, have that choice. And I think having that mindset when you retire that this is not going to be forever.

51:01Joe Saul-Sehy:I'm just going to put my head down. I'm going to have roommates for a while. Like we told Hannah, I'm going to, I'm going to keep living the same lifestyle just for a few years so I can get that doubling going. And then things get exciting in a hurry. And then Jonathan, sadly, didn't get to party as long as he wanted to. But I'll tell you, he lived a great life. And in his columns, you see that he lived a really great life.

51:23Jay Davis:Right. And not only that, but like he lived a great life. And towards the end of his life, the fact that he was still saying, I'm still glad that I did it, right? You know, so that his final years could be more peaceful.

51:37Joe Saul-Sehy:Yeah.

51:38Jay Davis:That kind of goes back to your question about like, how do you balance peace and purpose and all of that. There's a certain degree of peace that you have when you know that your finances are solid. All right. You've just heard the live Q &A that we did with the students at Texas A &M. Thank you so much to the staff at the university, to Jay in particular, for inviting me to campus and providing both me and Joe the opportunity to talk directly with the students. Thanks to Joe, Saul Sehi, and to his spouse, Cheryl, for welcoming me to their home, letting me crash at their place for a couple of nights.

52:16Jay Davis:Thanks to everyone in the Texarkana community who works so hard to make that small city a thriving and vibrant place. And thanks above all to the students who are enormously inspiring. You are the reason that we do this. And thanks to all of you for being Afforders. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share this with the students in your life. Share this with college students that you know. That is the single most important way that you spread the message of great financial health to the next generation. I am a believer that financial well-being is core to who we are. There's physical well-being, there's mental well-being, there's spiritual well-being, and there's financial well-being, and none of those can be ignored.

53:02Jay Davis:So please share this with the people in your life, particularly the students, people in their 20s, people who need to hear this message. Oh, before I go, I'm hosting a live webinar on the topic of real estate in 2026. If you've got questions, if it's been on your mind, affordanything.com slash rental 2026 is where you can go to sign up. That's affordanything.com slash rental 2026. It's free. The webinar is on Tuesday, May 12th. I'll be live answering your questions. So if you want to interact live, affordanything.com slash rental2026. All right. Thank you so much. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.