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