Budget Smarter, Live Better: A Guide to Financial Independence with Jeffrey Panik

I thought if I could write something that is really, I would call it almost like a blueprint that can take you, take the reader step by step from budgeting all the way through to doing things even on the insurance side, thinking about liability and other things to try to put them in a better position so they would have a frame of reference. And the point of the book isn't to tell you what budgeting strategy to use. You have to use this strategy or that strategy. It's to lay them out. And really what I try to do is always tell people, you know, you want to do what you find that you can, that you feel comfortable with, that you can develop a habit with, and that you can find yourself doing on a repeatable basis.

You might have to acknowledge something. Okay. Jeff, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. I'm excited for our conversation today because my personal development journey started in the genre of personal finance. Now, before I jump in and have you introduce yourself and everything like that, I'd like to read a stat from your book and then get your reaction. It says 1 in 3 surveyed would rather deep clean their bathroom than check their savings account. What the heck is wrong with America?

It's, it's, you know, they, they say really that America is a consumer-led economy driven by the consumer. But, you know, unfortunately, a lot of it is driven by debt. And it's often easier to spend than it is to save. And, you know, eventually that's going to catch up with us.

Yeah, I, you know, I've read— it just seems like now that we're past this election cycle, which just happened, we're recording on November 7th. I don't know what day this podcast is coming out, but we just went through this election and the number one issue for most people was around money. It was around the economic stability of the United States. It was around the debt that they're carrying, their inability to afford groceries and other basic amenities. And so Yeah. Where do you think this problem stems from? Where does it start? Why are people financially illiterate?

Well, I think it starts at, you know, I would say at birth on. It's just not really something that families really discuss. And I think over time, just whether it be student loans, you have things that didn't exist in the '30s, '40s, '50s, earlier, you know, in decades before. And they've been added. And you look at the 401, that didn't come out until the '70s and '80s. And you look at all these different savings vehicles, it used to be most people had a very short life expectancy when they retired. And typically, I use the example of Social Security. The average age of death was the same age of when someone would take Social Security when it started in the late '30s. So, you know, you can imagine you didn't have to think very much about savings then because most people didn't live that long. And so, you know, really it's a matter of transitioning and shifting, really looking at consumer finance and focusing on that. And, you know, the challenge I think for the education system is, you know, there's a big difference between economics that you would teach in a classroom and just simple things that you You know, they're important to learn about. Like, how do you write a check? You know, how do you open a bank account? You know, how do you even get a car loan? How do you find a car? You know, these are things that you have to do that are essential, but they're not really taught. And if you don't have the, you know, a, you know, I would say unless you have some, unless you have someone that's absolutely focused on that as a parent, it's just very difficult. And it's very, you know, it's very, it can be very easy to get lost somewhere along the way.

You highlighted one of the things that I really enjoyed about your book, which is you are teaching the absolute basics and fundamentals of financial literacy, things like how to fill out a check. When we posted our review on the Book Thinkers page the other day, I highlighted that page because I'll admit this, it's a little embarrassing. I only write a couple of checks a year, and as a result, every once in a while I have to look up how to fill out a check, and I'm 30 years old. But that's the reality is we were never taught how to do this in the public education system. And so, here we are filling things out the wrong way or confused, and that creates anxiety. And so, we need a resource like this that teaches us the very basics of how money works. Yeah.

I mean, fundamentally, you have to start with a foundation, whether it's a house or your life, and that's in particular with finance. your general budgeting, your general life that you walk through financially, you have to have a strong foundation. And if you don't have that, it's very easy to make decisions that you can look back on and say, why did I do that?

So, Jeff, you've spent 25-plus years in the financial advising profession. You've worked with hundreds of families and small businesses. What are some of the biggest learning gaps? What are people walking out of school still missing as far as financial education goes?

I think it really comes down to, you know, I've said one of the greatest inventions, the greatest advancement has been the internet and technology in probably the past 150 years, just the ability to pull information. And, you know, with artificial intelligence, it's going to be even easier. So, you can know everything The problem is about knowing everything as it relates to having everything out there. If I search a financial topic, there'll be about 330 million hits that can come back from Google. Well, that's great and there's tons of information, but it really doesn't apply to your situation. And that's the biggest challenge that I see. 25, 30 years ago, when I started in the business, the internet, it was just kind of coming out. And people were really relying on going to, you know, God forbid, a library or going to a bookstore and getting a book and trying to learn things. Now, you know, it's almost like an immediate gratification. You know, I want to buy a car. Well, I'm just going to go online and just, you know, pick one. You know, it just doesn't— it doesn't work that way. And, you know, really, I see really the value moving forward is really, you know, getting customized advice for whatever your family-specific situation is and then communicating it. I think that is essential. Whether it's in a business relationship or whether it is a family, usually when breakdowns happen and you have conflict, it's usually because there was incorrect or lack of communication.

Yeah, I think back to my time growing up and my parents are the best parents on the planet. I mean, I really was raised in a, in a great home. I always call it like the white picket fence American dream, you know, middle class, upper middle class. My parents were amazing to us. They supported us. with faith and love and unconditional love in so many ways. And the subject of money was talked about a little bit, but not very much. I mean, I made a decision to go to a college out of state with no financial aid, paying out-of-state tuition and taking on student debt because my friends, some of my friends were going there. Like, I didn't even really fully process that decision or know how much money I was taking on. And they didn't know how to have that conversation with me. Either. So I mean, I guess my question is like, why aren't those subjects from your perspective taught in the public education system so that students in their early teenage years throughout their teens start to understand debt as a subject? Like I had no idea what tens of thousands or fifty or hundred thousand dollars meant at that age. I had no context.

Yeah. Well, you know, I think it really goes back to the education system. And I mean, I look now, you know, really there's only about 22 states that have a financial— they require a financial literacy program or about to require a financial literacy program to graduate. And then when you factor that, several of those, there's waivers around that. And so looking at even the textbook and the information that's being used, you know, it doesn't really get back to the basics. It's more at a higher level. And the concern that I always have is if we talk about inflation and anyone that has gone to college or has, I would say, someone that is my age in my 50s, if I can go back and see what the cost was when I was in college, fast forward, in some cases, it's double or triple. And with college, healthcare, there are certain areas that are going up at 6% to 9% a year. with no real, you know, I would say unfortunately there's not a real good sign of an end in sight. So, you know, it becomes an issue where, you know, there's no real incentive for the universities and colleges to really get a handle on it. You know, and I think our society and the education system really needs to be more focused on outcomes. And I think that's what's really lacking. And just understanding, you know, that there are alternatives, whether it be community college, that oftentimes is free, where you go through, you go for a few years and try to figure out what you want to do. You know, or there's apprenticeship programs where they'll pay you, you know, to go into something where you can get a skilled job and have a job coming out that, you know, most college students, you know, don't even come close to an income level of that without any debt. And, you know, I look at, you know, the debt that the students are coming out of and really the lack. And I mean, I can use my example, you know, where I didn't really understand student loans. I was the first one to go to college in my family, and it was really difficult. Because, you know, I didn't really— I was just— you just go in, you sign the documents, you know, you don't really think too much about it. You know, you— in some ways, I think a lot of young adults just think that they're going to be taken care of and the adults are doing the right things. And that's really not always the case as it relates to the people that are in the administration of some of these places. And, you know, I got a letter from Sallie Mae, which is, you know, I thought it was a magazine subscription service. I had no idea. You know, but it's a loan servicer and it said that I was going to owe about $1,000 a month for the next 10 years. And I really had to, you know, take a step back and understand that, you know, I racked up all these loans and I really needed to come up with a, you know, I would say a way out where I could work through it. You know, in my case, I went in the Army. You know, that's not always a decision that a lot of people would make, but they ended up paying off my loans and it taught me a lot of valuable lessons along the way.

Yeah, it reminds me of another client of ours, Ken Rusk. He wrote a book called Blue Collar Cash, and he talks about— he calls it the $400,000 swing.

Mm-hmm.

So he says, instead of going to school for 4 years, spending $50,000 a year to learn, he said, instead, why don't you take up a trade or some other type of education like the military and get paid $50,000 a year for those 4 years? So $200,000 in both directions creates that $400,000 swing. And he's a really big advocate for alternatives to college, other ways to educate yourself and make money at the same time. And I remember graduating high school and that was never even in the conversation. I mean, it really wasn't. I don't know what— now I'm in Massachusetts, which has a very good public education system compared to a lot of the country. So a high number of people, maybe 80% of the kids I went to school with, maybe more, went to college. So there were no alternatives discussed. Um, but yeah, I think that the public education system— I mean, only 22 states. I mean, sounds like we have some room for improvement there.

We do have some room. And I, you know, I, I go back to say, well, you know, you, you wonder, you know, the government is asking why there's not household formation, meaning there's not people getting married, not people buying there's people that can't afford to buy homes. The real reason is because they can't, because they have all the other debt that they're coming out of school with. And it's really a disservice to the kids. A lot of them really aren't sure what they want to do. And it's not to say college is the be-all end-all, which it's not in a lot of cases. There's plenty of trade school, community colleges, things that you can go into. And if you work hard, the employers in a lot of cases will even pay for your college if you want to go to college in the evenings and part-time. And, you know, I think there's a lot of value to that, you know, learning as you go, finding the right direction, you know, and that goes back to just, you know, starting out doing things that sometimes you wouldn't think about. Like, you know, if, if you have a young adult, you know, maybe say, well, maybe it's a good idea, you know, maybe if you, if you want to be a healthcare professional, maybe, you know, one day a week, maybe volunteer at the hospital. And see, you know, what happens there. Because you may say, I can't stand, you know, I can't stand, I don't want to go to a hospital once you go there. And then you can kind of pivot at that point, whether, you know, rather than focusing and going in an area that you decide you just don't even want to do.

Yeah, I'll tell this story. I know the Book Thinkers audience has heard it a couple of times, but I really started this business because of personal finance books. So, I was a junior going into my senior year of college. I had taken an internship at a local software company. It was a sales internship, and I was introduced in that role by a mentor of mine to business podcasts. And I started listening to podcasts to and from work. I had about an hour commute each way, and over the first couple of weeks, I heard all these successful business people talking about the same books. They were giving a lot of credit for their success to the books that they had read. And the same names kept popping up over and over and over again. And the one that caught my attention was Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And so I went to my local Barnes& Noble. I grabbed a copy of that book as well as a few others. And in the first couple of chapters, Robert Kiyosaki says that the poor and middle class learn money at home from their poor and middle class parents, and the rich They learn money at home, but from their rich parents. So not everybody is learning the same information because it's not taught in the public education system in the same way that it's taught at home. And so the cycle starts to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, if you grow up in a poor or middle-class family, behaviors are typically caught, not taught. And so you'll just start to do what you're observing. And that was the first time in my entire life at 20 years old, probably. that I ever thought about it that way. I ever thought, wait, financial literacy, financial money management is a skill set. And the more time you spend researching it and trying to understand it, practicing with it, the better you can get. And so if we're all forced to play the game of money, which we are, we have to trade it for food and water and shelter, then we might as well be good at it. That was the first time I'd ever thought about those things. And in a lot of ways, that was not the perfect book for me at the time. I think that This would have been a lot better because this is very plain language. Like, this is how it works. These are the terms you should know, and this is how it applies to your everyday life. And by the way, if you're just listening, I'm holding up Jeff's book. So is that who you wrote it for? Did you write it for the, the kind of young person just getting into things?

I did. You know, I, I look back on my struggles starting out and the lack of just really any sort of understanding of money. And I absolutely agree with the analogy between the rich and poor. And, you know, really, the education system, you know, the thought process is that you can, you can, you know, educate people up. And, you know, in a lot of cases they are. However, the one area that's just really lacking is in the consumer finance and money section. And, you know, I looked at the books that were out there. You know, there are a lot of people write retiree books. A lot of people write these books, and I looked at my situation. I looked at clients I have and friends who have either young children, young adults. They're coming out. People just ask me, they say, well, as an example, my son started a job. He's working. Should he come off my healthcare? And immediately, he's thinking, I can get the kid off the healthcare. But there's so many other things to think about. And I thought if I could write something that is really, I would call it almost like a blueprint that can take you, take the reader step by step from budgeting all the way through to doing things even on the insurance side, thinking about liability and other things to try to put them in a better position so they would have a frame of reference. And the point of the book isn't to tell you You know, what budgeting strategy to use. You know, you have to use this strategy or that strategy. It's to lay them out. And really what I try to do is always tell people, you know, you want to do what you find that you can, that you feel comfortable with, that you can develop a habit with, and that you can find yourself doing on a repeatable basis.

Yeah, I love that. Well said. And you brought up budgeting, so let's dive into that for a minute. There are 2 statistics that I'll read for the audience. The first says that 54% of young adults think it's easier to follow a strict food diet than a monthly budget. And the other says that 57% of young adults dread the thought of budgeting. So, Jeff, help us view budgeting through a more positive lens because I think most people in the audience today are cringing a little bit. Yeah.

And I think a lot of it has to do with just, you know, whether it's retirement or starting out, Wherever you are in life, the longer you wait to do something, whether it's to set your goals, whether it's to learn how to budget, whether you figure out what your income, your expenses are, and you come up with a plan moving forward, the longer that you do that, your life becomes more complicated and the harder it is to go back and fix it and make adjustments to it. And the point really is, and I look at it and I know there's people that buy different systems, Dave Ramsey, all these different things, and they jump right into And they jump into it and then they get overwhelmed. And what ends up happening is they just stop in their tracks and they just stop doing it completely. And so, you know, really what I try to do, especially on the budgeting side, is just say, you know, you just want to take a little bit of time, look where, you know, you want to gather your bank accounts as an example and your credit card statements. And you want to look and make sure, you know, you're not paying in some cases 2 or 3 times for the same thing. Especially if you're newly married or you've been married for years. I mean, I have plenty of spouses and I always say a good exercise is if you just have a day over the holidays that you're off, just pull your statements online or look at your activity and see how many of the same subscription services you both have. And invariably, they go back and tell me, they say, we found 2 or 3 of the same thing that we're paying for. And there's just simple things that you can do to save money over time. And what I try to do in the book is illustrate that by having calculators in there with QR codes. So you could say, well, if I found $70, $100 a month that I can save, what does that mean 20 or 30 years from now? And I think that's the other thing with immediate gratification the way it is with everybody needing everything right now. You know, sometimes it's hard to put something in perspective where you're just putting a little money in every month, but what it can do with the power of compounding and growing it over a period of, say, 20 or 30 years.

Have you ever read the book The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy?

I have not, but I have heard of it.

Yeah, right in the beginning of that book, it has sort of a fun little example of compounding. He calls it the magic penny. You've probably heard the example in other places, but he says, Would you rather have $1 million today or a magic penny that doubles in value every day for a month? And everybody says, oh, I want the million dollars. And it's funny because 20-something days in, the magic penny is still at $10,000 or $5,000, whereas your buddy has $1 million that, that took the million. But by day 30 or 31, I don't remember, it reaches a value of $10 million.

Mm-hmm.

And that just shows a very exaggerated, unrealistic version of compounding. But when you start to think of, yeah, that's $70 a month over the course of 20 years, I mean, that starts to get pretty significant.

It does. And I think, you know, the alternative is really the negative compounding in terms of debt, the interest that you pay on debt. And so, that's the other thing really with compounding. You know, you can kind of look at it both ways and it's really putting it in perspective. And I think sometimes, you know, talking and finding someone to talk to about it can be a real challenge. Because, you know, if you have debt and you have issues, it's difficult to talk to people about, you know, especially if you're going to someone that you may be a mentor or manager, someone that you trust, or even a parent for that matter. And it's, you know, really a matter of kind of laying it out as best you can yourself and working through it. And, you know, the best thing to do is just go through everything and then really try to set some goals. And I say there's really, you know, once you have a general idea of what your income and your expenses are, And really what you want to try to plan for, you know, you want to try to set up some goals, you know, whether it's short, medium, and long term. And a lot of times you'll have a little bit of all of them, but, you know, you want to really make sure that they're realistic, they're achievable, and you want to adjust them, you know, if on an ongoing basis as times change, you know, job changes, and as you reach the goals.

During The previous answer you had talked about, okay, 2, you know, spouses sit down, they compare statements, they find, they find things that they're paying double for. Uh, that's an example of miscommunication, uh, or the lack of communication.

Mm-hmm.

And so before we press record, you said that's a subject that you wanted to dive into a little bit. So let's talk about it. Why is money such a difficult thing to talk about, especially In a relationship?

Well, I think especially in relationships, I think the main reason why it is so difficult in relationships, because you have a couple often, you know, very few people are raised exactly the same that are spouses. And so, you have oftentimes, you know, they say opposites attract a lot of times. You know, that's good for many things. But one of the things that's not necessarily good for is money, you know, because different people handle money differently. And so sometimes, you know, there's just maybe an unstated discomfort for the fact that you haven't really necessarily communicated properly with your spouse, but you handle things completely different. And, you know, again, there has to be the ability to communicate and bridge a gap. And I think if you can do that, and, you know, it's not a matter of sitting down and tackling everything in one day. It's a matter of working through it over time. And just, you know, a lot of times I'll say, especially with young adults, you know, one of the times you can do is just talk, you know, tell stories, tell things that you did, mistakes that you made. You know, most people will learn from other people's, you know, other people's mistakes. And usually if you can show those and work, you know, and help them not make the same mistake, you know, that's where I think communication really comes in and you can really go a long way in terms of just, you know, building trust and keeping communication going.

Yeah, I got married about a year and a half ago, and it was such a strange experience merging bank accounts. And yeah, it created a lot of really interesting conversation. And thankfully, my wife and I, we are open and transparent, and we seek these types of conversations. But I can imagine for a lot of people, that's a really awkward moment.

Yeah, it's, it's very awkward. And, you know, because every— everyone has a different background they come from, their parents and family members handled things probably completely opposite. And a lot of times, as you mentioned before, we talk about it, you know, a lot of times the parents won't even talk to the kids anymore about money. So you're growing up, getting in a relationship, and you have your merging households. And I see— I mean, I'll use the example of insurance. I'll see people, you know, families that they both work, couples, and they both have health insurance. You know, they haven't even gone out. They haven't looked and said, well, we should combine our health insurance because we'd probably save about $300 or $400 a month just by doing that. Because they just— it's difficult to communicate, you know, getting into a space where, you know, traditionally, especially, you know, if you have couples where maybe one came from a divorce. A lot of times, money is one of the greatest causes of friction, especially in divorce. And a lot of times, people will just withdraw and just pull away when they start talking about money.

Jeff, have you ever heard of the company Tiger 21 or the group, I guess?

It's a high net worth investment group. Is that correct? Private investors.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's— I think it's more like— yeah, it's more of like a peer advisory group. But yeah, high net worth. And the example that I had heard on a podcast one time, somebody was in it and they were talking about how maybe once a quarter or twice a year they have to get up in front of the rest of their peers who are also high net worth individuals and they have to lay it all out, their entire, their entire investment portfolio. And then the group gets to ask questions and provide constructive feedback and really push. And it's like that level of transparency terrifies people. And so, I imagine the first time that most families sit down with you as a financial advisor, they're probably a little awkward and timid to share what's really going on behind the scenes, and you're hired to help them.

Yeah. Well, they would probably rather go into a dirty gas station bathroom and clean it.

Yeah.

That's kind of what the reality is. And it's just, you know, and again, I always say, you know, if you can lay everything out and be honest about everything, it goes a long way in terms of having to correct things in the future. And, you know, and that's even the case, you know, I look at identity theft and a lot of, you know, we haven't even talked about that. But, you know, a lot of the things that are going on with, you know, the internet, emails, all the phone, a lot of things where people can just make mistakes, give too much information out, and then they have their identity theft taken. And, you know, they don't even really, in a lot of cases, know how to fix it. And so, you know, it's just important if you can have a framework that you work from to kind of close all these little, I would say, little holes that, you know, can create a whole lot of problems for you. It's like a, it's like a ship. You know, if you're on a ship and it starts getting all these little holes with all the water coming in, It's probably not going to be above the waterline very long. And I think that's the case with finance and just with money. If you can't handle things, it's kind of almost like a domino effect where then you start having other issues. If you have too much debt and you don't know how to even figure out how to start paying it down or refinancing or coming up with some sort of a strategy, you end up missing payments. And then you create a whole nother cascade of issues for yourself.

Hmm. One of the beautiful things about reading different perspectives is that you can kind of pick and choose what works for you. I mean, I remember reading Robert Kiyosaki and Dave Ramsey back to back in my early journey, and here Kiyosaki's out here like, debt is the best investment instrument ever. And then Dave Ramsey is like, Debt is evil, and you can fall somewhere in the middle or a little bit to one side.

Yes.

But it's so great to just read different perspectives. I want to pivot the conversation for a second back to where we are today, which is November 7th. We're a couple of days after this election, and I've noticed a lot of— from both sides of the political spectrum, I've noticed a lot of people pre-election having a little bit of a victim mentality. And I think that money as a subject— I'll be careful how I say this—

Right.

I think that money as a subject is an example of personal responsibility. Like, at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. You are responsible for your own money situation, your financial education, your literacy. It's up to you. It doesn't really matter who the president is. You are responsible for making sure that there's food on your plate and a roof over your head at a certain age. And so I just think it's the ultimate form of like self-care and self-love to educate yourself so that you can remain independent and you don't have to worry about who's president because you know how to operate within the system. Does that come across clearly?

I think it— you know, I think there's a level of exhaustion at this point where I think everyone feels like they need to take a vacation from the billboards. Uh, you know, I'm, I'm in Georgia, so it's, it's, you know, it was one of the swing states.

And I was from Pennsylvania, right?

Yeah. So, so this is— so I'm from, I'm from Pittsburgh originally, and then I'm also— I live in Georgia, in Atlanta. And 2 days before, for the— for Sunday, Monday, I was in North Carolina in meetings. Oh, wow. It's like, you know, I— so I'm, I'm absolutely exhausted by it, and I think most people are. And I think You know, the sad thing is, you know, we have such a great country and, you know, we have every opportunity if you're just willing to work from it. And, you know, I think there's a lot of places you go, you know, a lot of places in Europe, a lot of countries where you go. And, you know, if you, if you are, you know, if you're, if you come from a poor family, you, you know, minus having some lucky break, you're going to probably be poor. You know, and you could work as hard as you can, but you're just not— you're in a— it's more of a caste system where, you know, that's where you stay. You know, the beautiful thing about America is you can come with nothing but end up with, you know, what you— the sky's the limit. And so I think, you know, there should be a greater focus on that. And, you know, unfortunately, I use the statistic, what would you say, Nick, the percentage of people who have passports are right now that are active, US citizens out of the overall population of adults?

Yeah. As a travel lover, I might know a little bit more about this, but I know I've looked it up. I'm going to say it's only 30%.

So, it's a little bit more than that. It's 48%.

Oh, that's more than I thought actually. Yeah.

So, it's more— the problem really, I think, stems from really The, you know, people not coming out of their shell and not understanding the way the world is around them. And, you know, they say travel soothes the soul. You know, I think travel also really puts things in perspective and makes you appreciate what you have, probably, maybe, hopefully a little bit more.

Yeah, I've spent a lot of time in Central and South American countries, and when you get off the beaten path, it really wakes you up to how the rest of the world works. And just like your high If you're born in rural Colombia, in the mountains outside of Medellín, in a small farming town or something like that, and your family for generations has worked on the same little coffee finca for decades, it's like, how do you get out of that situation? We really do take it for granted, all of the opportunity here to be able to walk into a major city and hand in an application somewhere and get a job. in a place that you don't know anybody. That's just not realistic in much of the rest of the world. So, yeah, we do live in a beautiful country. I see the American flag behind you. I've got one tattooed over here somewhere, if you can see it. And yeah, I believe in a lot of— yeah, I believe in a lot of what this country has to offer for people. And you're right, you just need to do the hard work. Buying a book like this for $20-some-odd and spending a few hours of your time reading and implementing it is not a big ask.

Yeah.

I mean, that's $20. It's cost of a couple of coffees. A few hours of time is probably what you spend on social media every day anyway. So just focus it a little bit more on a book like yours and you can start to change things.

I mean, I absolutely agree. And I think, you know, really it's, it's not, you know, and I use the example of the chapters, you know, you don't want to go through and look, you don't want to do every single chapter. You want to break it out and do one thing at a time and really use it as a reference because I look at it and I say, you know, you're not really gonna be sitting there, you know, once a month, once a month and buying a house. You know, maybe, maybe if you put enough pennies away, right? But, you know, and it's same thing goes for a car. But the important thing is really to have a reference that you can use when these things come up, you know, whether it's trying to figure out your benefits. You know, you're eligible for healthcare. You know, what's the difference between a POS, PPO, PEO, HMO? ADHD, you know, the acronym central. You know, the book was designed where you can go in and understand and read and see what the difference is between those.

Yeah. Well, listen, we covered a lot of great subjects today. I'm happy that we had a chance to sit down for this conversation. I'm happy that I read your book. Uh, for those that are on the fence, they've listened to this conversation, they're still here, they're hanging on, and they're like, yeah, I'm kind of on the fence. What do you have? What message do you have for that person who's like ready to buy, but they're just not quite sure?

Yeah. So I would say if you go to Starbucks once or twice a month, I would say just maybe just go once and just maybe just sit the other aside for maybe 2 or 3 months and buy this. And you'll be able to go, you know, you could go to, if you do that and you just delay a little bit of the immediate gratification for a few years, You know, when you get older, you'll be able to go to Starbucks as much as you want.

Yeah. And maybe just cut the Starbucks out in general. It's a lot of sugar. Yeah. Sugar. Yeah. Coffee. Yeah.

It's just, you know, there's nothing the matter with regular drip coffee from a Keurig or some, some other, other entity. So.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. 2 final questions for you. First, where can people go to learn more about you and grab a copy of the book?

Sure. So you can go to— I have a website, JeffreyPanik.com, and it's P-A-N-I-K. It's not with a C, but it's basically pronounced the same. And I also have a website for my business, Balanced Wealth Partners. But, you know, it's on Amazon, Barnes& Noble, everywhere books are sold. And I do think it adds a lot of value. And you can, you know, again, there's calculators, a little bit of everything in there that You, there's takeaways that you can actually, actually implement. You know, sometimes you can read books and there's books that don't really necessarily things apply necessarily. I think you could turn around and if you read this on, you know, day 1, there's a few things you could do right away to kind of fix maybe some things that are maybe broken.

Yeah, I think so too. I think that actionable, clear, pragmatic books are the ones that have the best chance of influencing action and behavior change. So I'm a big fan of the way that you wrote this one. It's super clear, super concise. You can pick and choose your own adventure depending on what you want to focus on and learn more about. Okay, here's my final question. Normally my co-host Luke is on here to ask it, but I'll do, I'll do my best today. He says something like, Jeff, imagine if your business disappears, all the podcast interviews you've given, they disappear, the book and the next one you're writing, they disappear, but you can leave the world with one message. And it has to fit on a billboard. What does that message say?

Well, I would say right now after the election, why can't we all get along? That would be the, that would be the primary message. And I would say communicate. I think sometimes there's, you know, we get so entrenched, you know, I would say Democrat, Republican, you know, whatever your background is, you get so entrenched in your specific— just watching, I'll say, you know, some people watch Fox, some people watch MSNBC. CNN, all, you know, you get so entrenched in what they're saying that you never ask the people that are on the other side. And I think if you can have more, you know, where you go to a fence and you talk to one another as opposed to start, you know, wanting to throw things at one another, I think, you know, hopefully, you know, at some point we can get back to that where you may disagree with the person's policies or their opinions, but you don't vilify them.

That's a beautiful message to wrap things up. I'll, I'll do a quick share and then we'll, we'll press end. The, the day after the election, yesterday, yesterday, yeah, yesterday morning, I was getting a haircut and, uh, I was the first cut of the day. All the other barbers were, were in there in a barber shop. Barber shop talk is a great place to kind of get a sense of things. And, uh, we were having a really good conversation, um, You know, my opinions maybe didn't line up with everybody else in that shop, but we were able to talk about it. And I would love to see more and more and more of that. We talked about the fact that the average Republican and the average Democrat citizen have more in common with each other than they do the people that represent them oftentimes. And so if we could just open that dialogue a little bit more, get curious, try to understand how somebody else came to the opinion that they came to.

Mm-hmm.

on the same policy. We're on 2 different sides of the fence, but we're looking at the same item. How do we see that differently? And yeah, what I mean, what a, what a great place we could be in over the next few years if we start to have some more open dialogue like that.

Mm-hmm.

All right, we'll end it there. I will press