What You Need To Know About Personal Finance That Can Save You Thousands

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and I'm really excited to talk to today's guest. Now before we talk to our guest, Scott, Todd is hopefully going to jump on. I'm not sure where Scott is. I think he's, he's doing a big, big land deal. So if he jumps on, that's great. If not, no worries. You know, look, I can handle this. Not a problem. Not a problem. But let's talk to today's guest. So our guest today is Jordan Goodman. He is America's Money Answers man and a nationally recognized expert on personal finance. He is a regular guest on numerous radio and television call in shows across the country answering questions on personal financial topics. He appears frequently on the View, Fox News Network, Fox Business Network, CNN, CNBC and CBS Evening News. For 18 years, Jordan was on the editorial staff of Money magazine where he served as Wall street correspondent. While at Money, he reported and wrote on virtually every aspect of personal finance. In addition, he served as weekly financial analyst on NBC News at Sunrise for nine years and the daily business news commentator on Mutual Broadcasting Systems America in the morning show for eight years. He is the author, co author of 13 best selling books on personal finance including Master your Debt, Fast Profits and Hard Times, Everyone's Money Book, Master your Money Type, Barron's Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms and Barron's Finance and Investment Handbook. He's also written six special focus editions of Everyone's Money book on college credit, financial planning, real estate, retirement planning and stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Let's face it, I'm putting on my anchorman voice. Jordan Goodman, you're a big deal.

Great to be with you, Mark. You don't have to go through all that.

Yeah, yeah. But it's great. It's really impressive. So how does Jordan Goodman become Jordan Goodman, the Money Answers guy?

Pretty early on. I've always been interested in helping people with their money in all kinds of ways. And I started at age 12 as a journalist and was just kind of started there and worked on Cape Cod where we had a summer home. Did all kinds of journalistic things in high school and in college I went to Columbia School of Journalism where I've actually got my 40th reunion coming up. I was class of 1977 and it was really at Columbia that I kind of got into the whole economic consumer journalism world and then joined Money magazine after that and learned all kinds of things about the whole personal finance world. And pretty early on, while I was at money, I started giving speeches and doing TV and radio and call in shows and online seminars and so on. And I just got hooked. To me, it's journalism that really helps people. It's where they live and that's very rewarding. You can have political journalism where people are throwing mud at each other all the time. That just doesn't do much for me. But I get actual emails from people and I help them get out of mortgage debt or invest their money or get better credit cards or insurance. This is what I've done for many, many years. I just love doing it. So it's kind of grown organically. Pretty early on, I got my website, moneyanswers.com and became the Moneyanswers man, because people ask questions. I've hopefully got some good answers. So that's the way it happened.

So, but you're at heart a journalist, correct?

Absolutely, absolutely. But you saw all the TV shows that I've been on and radio shows and Money magazine and the books and all that? Absolutely. I consider myself a financial journalist.

Okay, so let's, let's pretend you're gonna have a dinner party and you can invite three people that you'd want to talk to about money, personal finance or business. Whom would you invite and what would you ask them?

And this is from all time, not just living today, right?

Yeah, let's say all time. That'll make it more interesting.

I would say Keynes, John Maynard Keynes would be one of them. The famous economist from England, so influential in the whole way we think about the relationship between government. And I would ask him, you know, what are the limits of Keynesianism? And actually, if I saw him today and he saw what was happening today, I'd say, you know, is this the proper expression of Keynesianism? Have his words been correctly interpreted for what's happening today?

From your point of view, what do you think he would say?

I would think, he says, gone far further than he ever thought it would have. And the amount of debt that the government's taken on, the amount of projects he was talking about stimulating the economy. But I mean, the amount of stimulus we've had as far as the Federal Reserve pumping out money around the world, central banks and the amount of deficit spending is way, way, way beyond, I think, what Keynes ever would have thought. But that would be interesting to kind of ask him all of that. So that would be number one. Number two, I would think Templeton, John Templeton.

John Templeton, sure.

Who was the ultimate contrarian investor, had a Long term track record. He always said, buy at the point of maximum pessimism and sell at the point of maximum optimism. And how you do that. I mean, he had a track record of going into the places that were just burning in the streets and buying things and then turning around and just. He had a fantastic track record and a real good sense of giving back and integrity and a lot of things that you don't see in the financial world these days. Kind of a real old line world.

Of.

Doing the right thing by money, which a lot of people don't do. And then the third one, I would say, I'll take Warren Buffett, who's still around today, and everything he's done has not been right. He's made some mistakes. I remember he went into Solomon Brothers before that blew up, and he went to USA before that blew up. I've seen the bad as well as the good things. And maybe what he learned from things that did not work out as well because it's. It's easy to talk about your successes, it's hard to talk about your failures and maybe what he's learned from some of the failures he's had. Overall, he's been a big success. But I'd ask Warren Buffett what he's learned from his failures along the years.

Very interesting. What, you know, what did your parents do while you were.

My father was a professor at Brown University. Political science, Soviet political science. He went to the Russian Institute of Columbia and got out of there in 1955, the year after I was born, and only had one job in his whole life. He was a professor at Brown from 1955 to 1990, basically. And as he was retiring, the Soviet Union was falling apart and the whole world was completely changing in front of his eyes. He loved it. This is exactly what he'd always wanted to happen. So that was. He was not only a professor, though, he would consult with the senators. I mean, in Rhode island, the two senators were Chafee and Pell, who were both big foreign affairs guys. And he was consulting with them. He'd go to NATO meetings. He was out in the real world a lot in kind of bringing his knowledge of Soviet life into real politics. And my mother, other than raising the three kids, was a community volunteer organizer. She founded a group called Volunteers in Action in Rhode island, which organized all the different volunteer agencies and created a way for individuals who wanted to volunteer to go to a central database and then find be matched with the place that they could do good. So that's a little bit about my parents.

So you've got a background of academia and very deep thinking professors. It's not easy. Hard work and study and publishing. Right.

He wrote two major books. Right, right.

Yeah. And then, and then your mother really.

Cared about his students. He really cared about us in a way most professors don't. I mean he is a political science professor, but he would do editing on his students language and you know, not just about the ideas of political science, but getting their grammar right. And I mean he just spent a huge amount of time really caring about students in a way that most people could not care less. So he had very, very high standards, which I. And I'm going to add my grandfather into it as well. My father's father was the ultimate entrepreneur. His name was Leisure Goodman and he and his brother Jack in 1920 founded a company called Real Silk Hosiery Mills. And they made silk stockings in the 1920s and they did really, really, really well like multi, multi millionaires and built a huge mansion in Indianapolis. And he did a really. Then things went down the 30s and he met a guy named Mr. Dupont who had something called Nylon. So he was the first one with nylon stockings as well.

Oh my gosh.

So he was the entrepreneur. So in a certain way I'm a combination of my father, the kind of academic knowledge, book writing person with my grandfather's kind of entrepreneurial venture. So I've always considered myself a journalist slash entrepreneur.

But you're also giving back. I think I can feel that you really have the passionate for moving the needle in someone's life. You want to help people, which is, you know what I think you got from your mother and your father.

My mother was a giver back and yeah, I'm doing a combination where I really help people. I make a good living at it and I give back. I just like to give out lots of positive karma all over the place and it doesn't always come back directly, but it comes back and just people like to deal with you and good things happen and I do a lot of things. I don't make any money from them at all, but I'm just helping people and I've got a lot of positive karma out there. I would love to have some with your audience too.

That's great. That's great. Okay, so I've got a 16 year old son, I got a 14 year old son and I have a 12 year old daughter. Right. And you know, all dad talks about all day long is real estate. Real estate, real estate, real estate, invest in real estate. It's the only thing you control. I think I've got the best passive income model. Right. I talk about it. I'm trying to brainwash them, Jordan. But I am also old enough now to realize dad doesn't have all the answers. Right? But if we talk to Uncle Jordan, who is the money answers guy, how would you set them up today financially? And how would you have them think about their personal finances? And what did. I mean this. I know I'm giving you a lot of questions all at once.

That's all right.

Take whatever question you want. But like how as a parent, should I start educating them? Where should I start educating them about money? And how would you. What advice would you give me? That's a lot. I think I'm just going to call you, like every week, like Jordan. Now what do I do?

I've done this myself. My son is 27 and I did it. So, you know, yes, this is a good thing. Don't assume the schools are going to do it because they may have a course or two maybe, but it's not something that most people get exposure to. If they do get exposure at work, at school, they usually love it and they become investors and they're really into it. But most people either have no exposure or not that interested for some crazy reason. So get them involved in investing. And typically what I'll do is start them off in stocks of companies they know. McDonald's, Nike, Microsoft, Google. Things that they can kind of relate to. And maybe they're early Disney, Hasbro, whatever it may be, they say, oh, well, I'm not only buying things from them, but I'm actually an investor in that company as well. Go from where they're at, where they can relate to it, and then actually have them do things. So my son, from very early on, I would take him to the ATM and I would have him make deposits. Because otherwise, if he just took cash out, he thought that just as a money machine where money comes out, he said, no, no, you got to put something in for something to come out. So things like that. My son actually had a group of friends and we had all the fathers do things with them. And I did a financial session with the kids and the first thing I had them do, I just got an empty checkbook and I gave them all checks and I had them. I gave them each mythical hundred dollars and they had them write checks to each other and they had to withdraw the amount they wrote from their balance and then they had to add what they'd gotten from somebody else and to kind of keep a running balance and actually to sign a check and endorse a check. They'd never done this before. They don't teach this stuff anywhere.

No, they don't teach it. And today with Venmo and PayPal and all the technology, they may never have to write a check.

And then I told them about insurance and what happens if your house burns down and life insurance and all those kind of things. And then with stocks, if you can get them interested and show them how charts work, they really get into it. I've done a lot of teaching. I mean, I am really passionate about personal financial education because so little of it's being done. I've given classes for several years. I'm in Westchester, New York, the Bronx, not too far from here, a place called the Bronx School of Science. And I do this class where I have the kids talk about stocks of things they could relate to, things even in the, you know, in the room they're in. Who's providing the electricity to this room right now? Or what shoes are you wearing or what did you eat for lunch? Or what website do you go on? And then I have, I looked them up on the chart and show them how the chart did and explain the business and what their earnings are. They're just totally fast. It's something they don't even consider. It's not in their worldview that you can actually invest in things you're personally involved with all the time. And they love it. And they come out, they're like, I'm going to invest. This is great. Can I get started for $100 kind of thing? So get their enthusiasm going. And then it built. They're like stock clubs at high schools and colleges and so on. So that's good. There's a resource that can help people which is called Jumpstart Coalition, jumpstartcoalition.org which is a central clearinghouse for all kinds of personal finance education, K through college, basically. And so the material exists. It's a matter of getting it out there. I've done a lot of these things on military installations, campuses, all kinds of different places. And I got a lot of stories about how financially ignorant people are. It's just amazing.

I wanted to ask you about that. What conventional wisdom is out there that makes you absolutely crazy?

Well, I'll tell you one that drives me crazy is the way you should be taking out a mortgage.

Let's talk about that.

Yeah, the traditional way of taking out a mortgage is you get a 30 year mortgage and you pay the same amount for 30 years. Interest is almost all upfront. You know, first 10 to 15 years amortizes very, very slowly. The last few years you pay off the principal. And a lot of people, the average people stay in their home for seven years and then they do it all over again and start a new 30 year mortgage all over again. And meanwhile, your money is sitting in a checking account earning zero. That's the way the system works very well for the banks. That's the traditional system.

Right? Right.

That is totally wrong. That's the totally wrong way of doing it. The way I like to do it is using what's called the mortgage optimization strategy, where all the tables are reversed. Instead of you being the victim of the bank, you are the master of the bank. And the way that works is you use a home equity line of credit, a HELOC as they call it, which is a liquid line against your house, which is typically in the second mortgage position, which is completely liquid. You could put money in, you can take it out whenever you like.

Now, Jordan, let's rewind. Because a HELOC is different than a second mortgage, correct?

Correct. HELOC is. You can write checks on it. A second mortgage is like a first and you make the same payment. It's not liquid.

It's not liquid. Okay, so you'd recommend a heloc.

Heloc, not a second mortgage.

Got it. Okay.

The key thing about the HELOC is it's liquid. You can put money in and take it out whenever you like. Got it. So you keep your income, which is normally on the traditional system, sitting in a checking account, earning nothing. You keep your income in the HELOC because you could put any money you want in any time. You pay your bills out of the heloc. But every day the money you have going in there is pushing your principal down and you are actually paying your mortgage off at an accelerating rate. And literally you can pay off your 30 year mortgage in about 5, 6, 7 years, depending on how the numbers work out.

I'm confused.

This is amazing.

I'm confused. All right, so let's say I put. What's the average home in America?

Let me give you an example. I'm gonna give you. Say you have a house worth 300,000. I'm just gonna make up numbers here, okay. And say you have a 200,000 first mortgage at a good rate, 4%. Got it.

Okay.

So you're gonna take out a $50,000 HELOC. You've got plenty of equity, the house you know, we've got a hundred thousand.

Made them put 20% down, right? So in the scenario, they got at least 60 grand in, right?

So, okay, so you take out a $50,000 HELOC. You would then write a check on the. You just open the HELOC, it's now free and clear. You write a $50,000 check towards the first. So instead of owing 200, you now owe 150 on the first. Got it. And then you use the technique we just talked about, where you're paying that HELOC off over six months, nine months, you know, however it works. So your money's constantly going in there, pushing that 50,000 down on a consistent basis. And after say six months, the 50,000 was paid off. Just to give an example, okay. And then you do it again. You write another $50,000 check from the HELOC to the first. So now instead of 150, you owe 100, pay it off, do it twice more, your first is now paid off, you pay off the HELOC, depending on how the numbers work out, five, six, seven years, you are now completely mortgage free.

Now what about for someone like me, that makes 300, 1000% on real estate when I not ever want to pay off my mortgage and just keep borrowing at 7%.

I think for most people, I'm talking about their own homes do this for investment real estate. With investment real estate, if you use the tenants rents to pay down the mortgage faster, right? Property becomes free and clear faster. So it's a way of increasing your cash flow from that. There is a website that can help people with this in more detail, which is truthinequity.com and there's a free website. You put in the numbers that apply to your situation, what your current mortgage is, your income, your expenses, your house value, all those things to say, okay, based on what you're doing today, it's going to take you 28 and a half years to pay off your mortgage. With the numbers you just gave us, it's going to be 6.2 years, whatever the numbers come out to be. And they step by step show you how to do it. So there's something, the traditional system works really well for the banks. This is a way that you literally can take 25 years off your mortgage and save tens of thousands of dollars in needless interest.

Amazing.

Something a lot of people have not heard about. One of the books I did you mentioned called Master your debt. I've got a chapter in there called mortgage free in five to seven years, which is all about this strategy, and it's something most people have never heard about, even those in the real estate field.

I've never heard of it.

There you go.

How is this possible? Oh, my gosh. All right. I'm really financially blushing right now, so. Okay to blush even more. My wife and I are. This is a real argument we had a few days ago. Right. So be our marriage counselor, if you will.

Okay.

I say to her, you know, we're talking about our trusts and this and that and funding it, and we've got a revocable trust and the family trust and all this. Right. And we got to go to the bank, we do the certificate of trust and rename everything for all the LLCs and blah, blah, blah. But I've got a term insurance policy. And she says, mark, my dad always said, buy permanent insurance. I said, well, if you. I could see how, if you're a doctor, maybe it's for savings. It's not the greatest investment. Yeah. It never goes away. But what I've always heard was buy term, invest the rest. Jordan Goodman, who's right?

Well, in your case, because you're earning such a high rate of return on your capital, you were right.

Thank you.

But in many people's cases, she would be right because they're not investing the money and earning a good return on it.

Yeah. Okay. And I made that.

You really are investing the difference, right?

I really am investing the difference. But the greatest investment ever, most people.

Say buy term and invest the difference, and they don't invest the difference and they get to retirement, they have nothing. So the advantage of. And I wouldn't say whole life. There are other kinds of insurance I would like to that are forced savings. And the advance of insurance is that the money is growing tax free inside the policy. And if you do it right, when you get to retirement, you take it out tax free. Now, my favorite in the permanent insurance area would be index Universal Life, as it's called iul.

I've heard of index Universal Life, which.

Is as opposed to cash value index Universal Life. The index is tied to the s and P500. And when the market goes up, the cash values go up to the level of market, typically with a cap of maybe 12 or 13%. But when the market goes down, like a really badly year, like a 2008, it does not go down. You get a zero in a year like that. So it protects you on the downside and you participate in the upside. The money is growing tax free. And then when you get to retirement, you've got a nice cash value nest egg. You borrow it out so it comes out tax free. And when you die, the death benefit pays off the loan, so in effect, you never pay the loan off. So that's the way I would use. And I have one, I have an IUL myself and I put a certain amount into it every month. And that's going to be a nice little nest egg for me when I get to retirement.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay. Is there anything that you believe that other financial advisors like Jordan Goodman's nuts?

Well, when they talk about mortgage optimization, they've never heard of that before.

Yeah, but when you explain it, they probably aren't like, well, he's nuts. Right. Is there anything that you think, oh, they do.

They do.

Oh, they do think you're nuts.

I'll give you some other ideas too. If they. If people in the financial world have not heard of something before, and this, by the way, is true of financial journalists who are the worst, they don't think it can be true because they know everything. I just run into this all the time. Well, you know, there must be some huge risk or whatever they.

Trapped by expertise.

Exactly. So that's all it's. So I'll give you another example of something that I'm involved in. I do, which again, people think is impossible and financial advisors don't like it because they don't make any money off of it. Something called commercial mortgage bridge loans.

Commercial mortgage bridge loans. Okay, I'm going to Google this.

Commercialmortgagebridgeloans.com is a website for that.

Commercial mortgage bridge loans dot com.

And so that's a way of earning between 6 and 8% over one to two years. 6% for one year, 8% over two years. Extremely safely, very secured. You get monthly checks at the end of the term, you get your principal back, at which time you can reinvest your interest or whatever you like.

Do you like this more than, say, Lending Club?

Yes, Lending Club, which I do as well, is much more risky. I mean, when I'm in Lending Club, I do. They have A through F loans and I do B loans. Okay. Safe.

Right.

I can tell you right now, I've had 64 defaults. Lending Club account.

Oh my gosh.

I've had lots of loans paid off on time, but doing B loans, you wouldn't think I'd have that many defaults, but I've had the actual experience of it. So that does not happen with commercial mortgage bridge loans. So basically what happens is they're lending money to high Quality commercial real estate projects. They use it for typically a one year period to renovate or improve or do some kind of a deal with the project. And then they're paying interest and then when the project is done, they pay the principal back. The maximum that they lend on the value of the property is 65% loan to value. 65%.

Interesting.

What I call the equity cushion there to protect you.

That's a huge equity cushion.

Yeah. And the people who are taking out these loans are doing it to improve their properties, not to lose their properties. So repayment rate is extremely high and the loan originators that put the deals together take on a second position behind you. So if there is a default of any kind, which is rare, they'll actually pick up the difference and make sure you get interested in payments and principal payments on time.

Do you have to be an accredited investor to do this?

Accredited and not accredited.

Accredited and not accredited. Excellent.

Not accredited. Can do it. Absolutely.

Can I do this out of my qrp? Let's. Let's say I've got some money sitting in my QRP and it's just sitting there and you know, now it's illiquid after that year though. I can't take it out one year at a time. One year time. Okay.

It's not designed for liquidity during. It has to be money you commit free. If you do it for one year, get six. If you do 18 months, you get seven. If you do two years, you get eight. But it should be money you don't need. That's correct.

Should be money you don't need.

Okay, but when I tell financial advisors about that, they say, impossible. You know, there's no way on earth with treasuries at 2% to earn 6% quite safely. I say, all right, well, they don't believe it. So that's another example where they don't believe me. But it happens to be true.

But it happens to be true.

And that's why I love it. You can find out right about it. Commercialmortgagebridgeloans.com Is there anything else where the.

Financial journalists pile up on you? Well, okay, what else?

What else you got?

Jordan? You know, I know I told you this is gonna be a three minute podcast. We're going all night, man. This is a marathon.

Okay, let me give you another one. People don't think it's possible to refinance your car loan.

Okay, let's talk about that.

But you can do it. A lot of people have taken on cars that with bigger payments they really can afford.

Right.

Want to go into a real growth business in America? It's repossessing people's cars.

Really?

Oh yeah, because they took on a bigger payment and they got a bigger SUV or whatever that they can't really afford. Their eyes got bigger than their wallets, I guess you might say.

Sure.

And so these people need help. And the help is available is to be able to refinance your car loans. And there's different ways of doing it. You could lower the interest rate or you could stretch out the maturity. Say your car loan is three years. You stretch out the maturity from three years to six years and chances are the car will last six years. Your payment can be cut in half. So it makes you. Makes it more affordable and therefore you're able to avoid the repo man, the hook. Ah, there's a website for that. I've got a website for everything. And check this one out. Mylone gen. G E N mylonegen.com myloengen.com.

Okay.

Free website. And you go on there and you put in. And you can actually do this while we're there. Put in your.

Wait, I did something wrong. M Y L O N G E.

N L O A N G E N mylone gen Got it.

I think I just J.

Okay, No J. And you put in your. How many more months you have to go? Okay, what your payment is, what your interest rate is. I guess those are the main things. I think your credit is your credit grade or modest or whatever it may be. Okay.

Okay.

Are you there?

I'm there. Okay. Now this is what I did because I just paid off my wife's car, okay? So she buys it last month and she gets a loan at 3%. Right. So I said to her, honey, why don't we use our QRP? We can borrow up to 50,000 on it. So I did that. So I took the 50,000, I paid off her car, and now I'm paying myself back at 10% over five years on a depreciating asset. I think I'm George. Okay, There you go.

Most people don't have that ability, but in your case that's fine.

Okay?

Right. Say you're an average American and you don't have something you can borrow from like that.

Right?

So, okay, so you see, you put in the numbers, basic numbers there, right?

Okay.

And then you click onto the next screen and you're going to see a little dial come up.

Okay? 30,000.

Did you put in some numbers there? Right?

I'm putting some numbers months Remaining, let's just say 48 months.

Okay. Whatever it may be.

Monthly payment. What's the average monthly payment for? 549. And I'll give myself a credit, whatever.

Number you want to put in.

Average.

Okay. And now you're going to see a little dial come up.

Yeah. And monthly payment increase $52.

Now you move that dial wherever you want, and it shows you how it affects your payment and your payoff. So you can move it to the right. And you're going to lengthen the maturity of the loan.

Okay.

And then you're going to see how it affects your payment and interest rate.

Oh, my gosh. So now I'm extending it 24 months. And now instead of 549amonth, my new loan is at 8% at 525.85amonth.

Yeah, well, whatever.

Yeah. So it wasn't a huge change, but.

Depends on the numbers you put in as to what. Yeah, it's now. So what a lot of people can do is by extending maturity from, say, three years to six years, whatever it may be, their payments going to come down a lot and they're able to afford their car much better. And then once you do that, you click submit and it's submitted. And a whole bunch of credit unions around the country compete for your business to give you the best deal. And you complete the application online. Done. You have now refinanced your car loan.

Wow.

People don't think that's possible either.

Yeah. Myloengen.com. okay, so how often do people ask you, jordan, should I buy my car? Should I lease my car?

All the time.

Should I buy my house? Should I rent my house? There's no cookie cutter answer. I know, but is there some general.

There are reasons to do one or the other.

Okay.

I mean, I always like to say, buy things that appreciate least, things that depreciate. So you don't have money tied up in a depreciating asset.

Genius.

So in the case of a car, unless it's an antique car, it's pretty much a depreciating asset. So I usually lease. I've leased my last five cars, and I give it back and get a new car. I don't have any money tied up, and I get the latest technology, and it's a wonderful thing. As opposed to putting a lot of money into a car on a down payment and then having loans for five years. Some people have loans for eight years on their car today because the price of the car is so high. And then you've got old technology and the thing breaks down. About 30% of people getting cars today are leasing and they're particularly the higher end kind of cars. Yeah.

Now I told my wife and she thinks I'm nuts. I said, honey, we should not be buying our children a car or a third car or keeping a third car. They should Uber everywhere or Lyft everywhere. And when you look at the gas and you look at the maintenance and then you look at the Insurance for a 16 year old kid to 24 year old kid and the safety, I've got an experienced driver taking this kid around. Why would I ever teach this kid how to drive? Now clearly, you know, I'm, she's not gonna let me not teach him how to drive. I'm teaching him how to drive. But am I, am I my sound here?

Well, you're right, but how about the social aspect? I mean, you're gonna go on a date with an Uber and you're gonna go to the cliffs, you know, I mean, in the back of the Uber.

My wife and I go go on dates in the Uber and that way we can have a drink at dinner and we can Uber home and have to worry about it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Not that I'm telling my child to.

Drink, but so, but I think in the future, millennials and younger are going to buy a lot fewer cars. They are going to be Ubering around and doing driverless cars and automated cars and so on. But I was just talking about the buy versus lease. So if you're not, if your mileage is not a lot, if your mileage is say under 15,000 miles a year, then leasing is going to make sense. If your mileage is 50,000 a year, leasing makes no sense.

That's why we had to buy my wife's car. She's schlepping those kids everywhere.

So often. What you might do if you have two cars, buy one, go 200, 300,000 miles, drive it into the ground and lease the other. That's relatively short mileage. That's kind of the best of both worlds.

That's exactly what we're doing. Yeah, but now obviously when my lease comes up, she's gonna take newer car and I'm always taking the worst car. Right. That's just how it works in my family. I mean, maybe you'll talk to her about that.

Like, come on, leasing car should be the nicer car because it should be the newer car.

Yeah, yeah, typically. Right?

Not in this case.

Yeah.

By the way, if you want to get the best Deal on buying a car. I recommend a car buying service that'll get you the best deal. Absolutely. On a car. And My favorite's called Car Q.com C-A-R letter Q.com.

Okay. Carque.com I'm check that out.

And they are car buying. They only work for you, the consumer, to get you the best possible deal on your car. Whether it's leasing, financing. They help you figure out which car you want. The woman who runs is named Linda Goldberg. I've known her for years. She's gotten the last five cars I've gotten through Linda. And you can either she does the whole thing or you can bring her an existing deal, which she'll beat. I went to my local dealer when I got the car I have now Infiniti and agreed to buy a car. You have a three day rescission period. And I faxed her the deal I got. She beat it by $4,000.

Are you kidding me? On a lease.

On a lease, Correct. There's all kinds of tricks. You are not good at buying cars.

Okay, no, no, I'm gonna be doing this from now on.

You're good at negotiating for land deals. She's good at buying cars. So there's a way to save yourself tons of money on buying or leasing.

And tons of time.

Tons. And so she shops around your, maybe 500 miles around your metropolitan area and gets the best deal. They may have the car delivered to you, whatever it may be. So this is something she's been doing for 30 years. And so she charges between three and $500, depending on how much she's involved. 500 is like the full boat. She takes it from beginning to end. I'm willing to spend 500 to save 4,000. And a lot of time and effort.

No, absolutely, absolutely.

Saved you a ton of money on your car there as well.

Yeah. Now, Jordan, presidents come and go, administrations come and go, and the bureaucracy always stays in D.C. how often do you think, I mean, especially given the fact that your dad was a political science professor. How often do you think, uh, oh, when a new administration comes in, a, a new Congress comes in and there's all this uncertainty, Is that when you think, oh, now it's time to get greedy, or now it's time to like, go to cash and let's wait.

This administration certainly been a time to get greedy because the expectations are so high that we're gonna get what I call the big four tax reform and tax cuts, deregulation, repatriation of foreign profits, and health care. Reform infrastructure. Infrastructure. If we get those four, even not in full boat, but some of those as a tremendous stimulus to the economy and is why the stock market's been doing so well since the election. So this has not been a time to. There's always the variance between fear and greed. We're in total greed right now.

Yeah, but it's total greed right now. Don't you get fearful?

And this is what we talked about Templeton before, he said, you know, be fearful and everybody's greedy and vice versa.

Right. That's what Buffett does, too.

And Buffett does the same thing. Maybe not as extremely. He's not like a deep value guy. He's not going in there with things. I mean, Templeton would like. I remember like Korea, there was the financial crisis in 1997. It was like complete shambles, you know, and he bought a ton of Korean stocks when it was in complete shambles. And there was a fantastic bargain. I mean, Buffett's not that aggressive.

Right.

It's nice to say it's hard to do. It's very easy psychologically to buy when things are up and sell when things are down. You just don't make a lot of money that way. But psychologically, you feel better with going with the crowd on the upside right now, with the market doing extremely stock market. It's hard to be a bear and all the bears are getting crushed right now. So it's hard.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know the old saying, contrarians are right once a day, like a broken clock.

You can lose a lot being contrarian. And that's what's happening recently is there's been a lot of bets against things. And the stock market took off. They had to cover their shorts and just gave fuel to the market going up even more.

Yeah, yeah. So what advice then would you start giving my children today? Besides what we talked about earlier, which would be buying stocks. But as far as thinking about the world, thinking about money, just from a fundamental basis, thinking about debt, is there some place that you would have a child go, or a millennial go now to learn, educate themselves. It could be infotainment that would engage them in some way.

The way you're going to make the most money in the long run is your own skills.

Right.

Your own career. So that's the first thing, is to find out what you are passionate about and what you really want to do and where there's gonna be a future. Think of how the world is changing right now and you don't want to go be a Truck driver and you know, they're gonna be automating, driving trucks. Right. Where there's a future of some kind. Look at the trends and it's pretty clear. You don't want to be a machine operator where a robot can come in and take your job.

Right, right.

You don't want to be in retail where since in the last three months there's been about 800,000 layoffs in the retail closing all these stores and malls. So think about what you want, but also think of what's, what's coming, you know, and where, where those jobs will be.

Do you think there will be jobs? Do you think we're entering a time where it's just gonna be like, like the Renaissance and we'll just kind of get paid to live on planet Earth and Google and Apple and you know, Amazon will just kind of like, here's, you know, enough to live on. And if you could add value for us, you can write code or whatever it is and there'll be a, you know, a small group of people like the Tesla's of the world that, I mean, it's like winner take all. And like there's not going to be a lot of jobs. And so I would disagree, like write poetry. Okay, great, let's. I love it. So what's going to happen?

The jobs are shifting. It's not as though there's going to be no jobs. So for example, right now you. Every month the labor department puts out the unemployment report, which people are familiar with, but they also put out a report that nobody is familiar with, which is called the job openings report. How many jobs are open? In the latest month there were 5.6 million jobs that were open.

What are these jobs?

Employers could not find people to meet those criteria. Cannot. Okay, so plumbers, electricians, computer coders, car mechanics. There's tons and tons of jobs available. And that people are not trained to take those jobs. Now they're not considered prestigious or glamorous, but it doesn't mean the jobs don't exist and they don't pay well. I'll give you an example. I was talking to a guy the other day who's working in the electric utility business and there is 50,000 jobs available for linemen. The people that put the lines up and when the storm brings the line down, puts the line. There's a whole training involved. You don't need a fancy education, but you can earn about $100,000 a year as a line, a utility lineman. And there's 50,000 jobs that are open that they cannot find people. That's just one example in one field. It has to be done by somebody.

Right, right.

Now here's the good news is there are jobs to be done. And if we could somehow match all these jobs with people with the skills to get those jobs, we'd have very, very low unemployment. I mean, technical schools have been closing down and they never teach shop in high school anymore. And part of it is a snobbishness. I want my son to be a doctor or, you know, entrepreneur or something like that and not drill line, do utility lines.

Right, right, right. This Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs, he was onto something.

Good example. He talks about this all the time. The kind of, the training gap. So anyway, I'm just saying there are loads of jobs available and people just don't want to take them. And these are high skilled, high wage jobs. I'm not talking about picking grapes in the field or something. Right, right.

Okay. So you are a professional journalist. Clearly I'm not. Is there any question I should have asked you that I didn't ask you? Before we get to the tip of.

The week, let's talk about financial journalism. The state of financial journalism.

Yeah, let's talk about it. Because every other journalist, you know, things going down.

Well, it's been going down. I mean, when I left Money magazine, which was 20 years ago, we had a staff of 80.

Okay.

I went back there last week. I'm part of the Timing alumni society. So I went back to see it. It's a staff now of 10 way. Whoa. And I was there. We'd have 400 page issues. The latest issue is like 70 pages. So there's been a dramatic shrinkage financial journalism, but all kinds of journalism, frankly. And the reality is that the money that used to go for subscriptions and advertising to traditional media, not only magazines, newspapers, tv, radio, has all gone to Google and Facebook where they get very effective advertising and they're starving the traditional media. And I see this all the time. And the media people think that the audience doesn't care. It doesn't know the difference and we have to cut costs. I'll just give you a personal example. I'm here in Westchester, New York. For 20 years I was on News 12, Westchester, the cable news, operation meeting, all Westchester. I did a financial piece for them and they would take. Cablevision was taken over by Altice, which is a French cable company last year. The next day I was thrown off because I was a guest. They had no more guests allowed for any subject ever for the rest of the history of time. And then last week, they laid off a third of the staff. Anybody over age 40 was laid off, basically. I think that's age discrimination. But nobody seemed to notice. And then they altese runs news 12, which is normally Long Island. They consolidated Long Island, Westchester, Connecticut and New Jersey, all running out of Long Island. So they closed the other offices to save money. So each of those places, there was like, I don't know, maybe 50 people that got laid off in Westchester alone. And so journalism is shrinking just because the revenue base is shrinking and all the companies that take over, that's been tremendous consolidation in newspapers and radio stations, and the whole media industry has been shrinking dramatically. Now, in return that there's a vacuum that's been created to some extent. It's been filled by podcasts. Right. That's been a big growing area because people still want information, but they're not getting what they did before. So anyway, this whole field is very interesting to me and the kind of huge changes going on in the journalism field, and I don't think it's going to change. We talked about shopping malls closing and retail is closing. The same thing's happening with the media all over the place. Newspapers are closing, radio stations going dark. So it's a sea change in the entire media environment.

Yeah, yeah. It's unbelievable. All right. Well, Jordan, your mentorship has been amazing. This, this, this podcast. I mean, I'm. Now I know how to buy a car.

Yes.

I know how to pay down my house. I know if I'm gonna, how I'm gonna buy, like, lease a car, rent a car. I mean, it's unbelievable. I know how to parent my children. Teach them about money.

Refinance your car as well.

Refinance my car? I mean, it's, it's, it's been phenomenal, but now I'm getting greedy. I'm gonna ask you for one more tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Let me give you something for business. I've been talking about individuals, but for business. Okay, Okay. A lot of people have trouble funding their businesses because it's really hard to get loans from banks these days. Banks want collateral, and a lot of people who are in the kind of idea business don't have warehouses filled with stuff that they could go take if you don't pay your loan. So there's a whole world out there of people who want to invest in Small businesses. And then there are these clearing houses that will help you find loans. And just to give you one example, there's hedge funds that want to invest in small businesses and they're willing to make money available relatively cheap. You know, 6, 7, 8%, something like that. But you have to go through one of these clearing houses to find that money for your business. And they make sure that you're real business and so on. And you can get money today. That's the news. Instead of just being turned down by the bank. A website for that is corporate lendingsolutions.com corporate lendingsolutions.com and by the way, I'm.

Going to have links to all of this.

Good. And that's kind of a clearinghouse to find business, small business money in a way that most people wouldn't know exists.

I'm there right now factoring.

And they do just all kinds of different ways of getting small business. So there's something for small businesses because they often have good ideas, but they don't have the. You can only tap so much friends and relatives. And if you can't get financing from vendors and banks, there's a solution for you for small businesses to get.

When they do real estate.

In many cases, it's not secured lending.

It's not secured, huh? They just want a good idea.

Yeah, well, no, they want. No, this is not for absolute startups. You gotta show you serious.

Yeah. You got, you gotta have money something.

You gotta have bankable receivables. They'll lend on cash flow, not on inventory.

Got it, Got it.

Okay. So if you show you're serious, you've got some momentum, but you need money to expand. That's. But they're not going to do like an absolute startup with no track record. Just to be clear about that. That's typically friends and family that do that.

Okay.

Maybe you're six months or a year into it and you need some money. They've got access to all kinds of sources of capital that you wouldn't know about. And so there's something for small business.

Awesome. Very awesome. Well, I have to say, like, this has been phenomenal. I think I have to come back, Jordan. There's so much more to talk about.

There is just scratch the surface.

We just scratched the surface. I mean, we might have to have you every month. This is crazy.

This is crazy.

I can't thank you enough. And by the way, listeners, the only way Jordan Goodman is going to come back on this podcast is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got to rate. You got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of the review. To support the landcake.com we're going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit and my tip of the week. By the way, Jordan Goodman is better than yours. It is moneyanswers.com moneyanswers.com there's this guy who's written tons of books. He's been on tv, He's a big deal. His name's Jordan Goodman and he answers all your. He's got even a radio show called the Money Answers Radio show. So you've been on.

You were the star of it. I was.

I was. And it was phenomenal. It was phenomenal. Not as good as this. I'm a.

But it was great.

I wish I gave that much value to your, your listeners.

But I love to help people. I really do. So have them send emails on any. We've talked about a lot of things, but a lot of things we didn't cover. I can do credit cards. I could do insurance.

Oh, let's, you know, let's, let's book you right now. Here, I'm gonna send you the link. We gotta go. We're gonna have a credit card insurance podcast. So here I'm sent to you right now.

All right, we'll do that as well. Anyway, I love to help people and you can see I'm really trying to give back and provide really good resources that can help people. And I think we've given just a few ideas during this podcast.

No, it's been amazing. So, Jordan Goodman, moneyanswers.com thank you so much. Thank you listeners. And just a reminder that this podcast has been sponsored by Geek Pay GeekPay IO. It's a set and forget it. It's the only financial CRM system in the country. Your borrowers can go on, see their current balance. They can make prepayments. If ACH fails, it can charge your credit card. The credit card fails, charges ach, you're gonna get paid either way. Learn more Geek Pay IO Jordan Goodman, thanks again.

Thanks so much, Mark. Appreciate it.

Yeah, let freedom ring. Thanks.