How Elon Musk Made Them Rich… But Risked Their Retirement

Introduction

Bo: You can see right now you guys are creeping right up on Deca-Millionaire status, and I thought it’d be helpful for us to understand where some of these assets came from. Cash on hand that you have — I see $70,000 — and I just heard that we’re building a million-dollar house. Something does not seem aligned right here.

Brian: Things can happen. When it rains, it pours.

Karl: We’re big believers in index funds, but I didn’t know…

Brian: Are you, though? I think y’all say on paper you have a “die with zero” mentality, but when I look at how you’re structured, it’s more of, “Hey, die with as much as possible.” Those two don’t coexist when you’re on the consumption side of your life.

Chapter 2: Meet Mindy & Carl from BiggerPockets Money (0:40)

Brian: Mutants, today we have something extremely special for you. Yeah, we recently had Mindy from BiggerPockets Money and her husband Carl into the studio to do some real-life financial planning for them. It ended up being one of the deepest dives we’ve ever taken on camera. Some of the things about their high-risk portfolio, their unique money philosophy, and even their journey to wealth were absolutely eye-opening.

Bo: In all honesty, we thought it was so powerful and fascinating that we wanted to share it with you guys right here on our channel.

Brian: So we hope you enjoy this special episode of Making a Millionaire.

Bo: There’s a lot of people out there when we go through the numbers like, “Holy cow, I would trade places with you guys.” But there are some things that with some strategic thinking and some strategic planning, I think you’re going to be able to solve for. So it’s not as dire as it maybe sounds, but there are things you’re going to be able to do. And I don’t think there are a lot of folks dissimilar to this — they find themselves at this stage of life saying, “Oh wow, we have this ticking time bomb. What are we going to do about it?”

Mindy: Well, and I think people aren’t thinking 20 years ahead. If I do nothing, and the stock market returns — you know the rule of 72 — I could be facing incredibly large RMDs, required minimum distributions, where I’m now paying a lot of taxes to the government. And frankly, I’m a better steward of my money than the government is, so I don’t want to do that. I think there are ways to pull money out of the 401(k) so I can reduce my RMDs down the road. Plus, we have two children, and I don’t want to leave them a pile of traditional money when I could leave them a pile of Roth money. It’s way better to do it that way.

Brian: I want to hear more of y’all’s story, but for anyone jumping in wondering what this “trap” is that we’re talking about — you said middle class, but I think it’s more of an achiever’s trap. Because in a lot of ways, every year — and we see this with prospects all the time — y’all maximize to minimize taxes and to help build and grow assets by owning stuff. That’s great, but it has created a potential tax issue for the future. And you’re probably also getting squeezed on liquidity to some degree. But before we get into that, I love that you already have this self-awareness — you’re living this, you know what you’re struggling through, even though it’s kind of a blessing, or a good problem to have.

Chapter 3: Carl’s Early Retirement Story (3:18)

Bo: We want to know more about y’all’s story so people watching can figure out how to apply this to their own lives. Carl, if I understand — you’re retired?

Carl: That is true.

Bo: Not a bad place to be. What were you doing in your previous life?

Carl: I was a software developer.

Bo: How long have you been retired?

Carl: Oh, it was April of 2017, so coming up on 10 years.

Bo: Wow, retired for a decade. For those out there thinking about retirement — do you recommend it?

Carl: Oh, it’s been great. You have to work at retirement just like you have to work at your job — a great life just won’t come to you, you have to build it for yourself. But it’s fantastic. There’s no amount of money that would make me go back to conventional work. I tell people I work harder than ever, but on my own terms, doing things I really want to do. Right now I’m building a house, and I just installed a hydronic floor system and a water heater myself.

Bo: So you do it yourself while the house is being built. That’s great.

Carl: Yeah. I’m putting up solar panels now because I’m cheap and don’t want to pay a big electric bill — all those data centers are coming online, so I’m going to nip that one in the bud. I probably work harder than ever.

Mindy: I don’t know how we ever had time for a job. I don’t like people telling me to work.

Carl: Just you, I guess — you don’t like that either.

Bo: I’m curious, because I noticed some of the big retirement accounts in your name. Were those big earning years, back before you retired?

Carl: Yeah, I was a software developer, and then at the very end of my career I was a contractor. They said, “Hey, we want you to change the nature of your employment — you need to become a contractor,” and they offered to double my pay. I was making about $85,000 a year; they said they’d give me $85 an hour, so I said okay, great. At that point I said, “Let’s really maximize these retirement accounts — let’s go for the self-directed 401(k),” which we did, and totally maxed it out. I was subject to the highly-compensated-employee limits at my regular job, but when you have your own thing, you can go up to about $55,000 with the 25% employer match. So we took advantage of all that. Because I was the breadwinner and we were fortunate that Mindy was able to stay home and raise the kids, we just piled as much as we could in there.

I’ll back up and say one thing: I think the reason we’re here is because I never planned on early retirement. We thought we’d work until 65, and then this whole issue wouldn’t exist. Then I discovered this whole other life — I realized I didn’t need to work until 65 because we had the money. But then all of a sudden the money’s locked up until we’re 59½.

Brian: But was it your choice to leave? I have a lot of clients in tech, and unfortunately that industry is known for kind of helping you retire early — recommending the exit sooner. Great and lucrative while you’re in it, but as you get grayer, they show you the exits earlier than you anticipate. Did you get to choose when you left?

Carl: I did. I dodged a couple of bullets — my first job was with Sears, and we all know how that worked out. I was there for the downfall.

Bo: Those catalogs — that was my whole childhood, Christmas time with the Sears catalog.

Carl: You could go in and buy underwear and a lawn mower under the same roof.

Bo: Same cart.

Carl: It was a great place, but they didn’t evolve with modern times — shopping malls went down the tubes. I’ve always had a lot of financial insecurity, which explains some of our net worth too — I was always thinking “we need to save, save, save.” Turns out all that worrying was for nothing, because I never lost a job. I always left on my own terms.

Bo: You’ve been retired a decade — how old are you now?

Carl: I am 52.

Bo: Mindy, how old are you?

Mindy: I’m 53.

Bo: And what does your retirement timeline look like — how long before you enter that phase?

Mindy: I really love my jobs. I host the BiggerPockets Money podcast — I get to talk about money and real estate all day long. That’s not a bad gig. And I say “all day long,” but I actually have pretty low hour commitments — I probably work five or six hours a day, three days a week.

Bo: That’s great.

Mindy: And it’s doing something I love, so I don’t anticipate leaving that in the next 10 years. I’m also a real estate agent — I really love helping people find a house that works for them. I point out issues, like, “Hey, this is going to be hard to sell when you go to sell it, so maybe let’s not buy it in the first place.” I usually only work with one client at a time — I probably sell about 12 houses a year, but I make a lot of money doing it, and I can just say “no thank you” when someone wants to work with me and I’m busy.

Bo: From a lifestyle standpoint, you’re still working, and plan to for the next 10 years. Does your income cover your lifestyle needs, or are y’all living off the portfolio? How are you paying the bills right now?

Mindy: Outside of building a house, my income — well, he makes some money too. How much do you make, sweetie?

Chapter 4: Building a $1 Million Home (8:20)

Carl: Like $500 a month.

Mindy: Yeah, so that’s — groceries, some groceries. No, our income covers way more than what we’re spending, outside of building the house.

Bo: Building the house — you want to talk about where that money’s coming from?

Carl: Yeah, as Mindy alluded to, our core expenses are pretty cheap. This beautiful hair — I cut it myself, and Mindy cuts hers herself. Our daily life is pretty frugal — we don’t go out to eat a lot, we cook, we own our cars, so our daily life is pretty cheap. But we do have a kid in school now, and we decided to build a house, which I never thought we’d do, but here we are — that’s almost done, and it costs about a million dollars.

Brian: Are you a general contractor for yourselves, since you’re doing a lot of this work, or did y’all work with somebody?

Carl: Kind of a co-general contractor. I’m doing some of the big money items because I’m still pretty cheap and don’t want to pay someone $120,000 to install floor heat when I can do it for $20,000. So most of our life is pretty cheap, except for these big projects, or when our kids go to school.

Mindy: Right, because we didn’t put any money in a 529.

Carl: So, to answer your question: her income and my $500 a month is not covering tuition and the cost to build this house. Income is covering living expenses, and that’s likely to hold for the next 10 years. But for the big stuff — homes, travel, education — that’s going to come from the portfolio or some other source.

Bo: You mentioned daughters — how many, and what ages/stages of life are they in?

Mindy: One is a sophomore going into junior year of high school, and one is entering her sophomore year of college.

Bo: So you’re at the front end of college, and another one coming right behind.

Carl: We have seven more years of school to pay for, at least, depending on what they do.

Bo: Well, you guys are in a fantastic financial spot. You were kind enough to share a net worth statement, so we thought we’d look at where you stand.

Chapter 5: Inside Their $9.8 Million Net Worth (10:48)

Bo: You guys are creeping right up on Deca-Millionaire status — total net worth right now is about $9.8 million. I thought it’d be helpful to understand where some of these assets came from, because the very first thing I noticed is your cash on hand — I see $70,000 — and I just heard we’re building a million-dollar house, plus kids in college. Something doesn’t seem aligned. Walk us through what’s going on.

Carl: I’d say we’ve always had a very aggressive risk profile. A friend told me I should be in bonds — I said, “Can you tell me about that?” He said, “Well, you must know about them,” and I said, “Um, no, actually not.” So we’ve always been very aggressive — that’s why there’s hardly anything in cash and almost everything is in stocks, and a lot of scary ones. I’ll back up and say we’re big believers in index funds, but—

Bo: —are you, though? In a second we’re going to talk about concentration risk. Before we get into the risk profile of the investments — you’ve never had a lot of cash, always pretty lean. So how are you funding this million-dollar house build? Are you selling assets, creating liquidity? What’s going on there?

Chapter 6: Margin Loans, Liquidity & Hidden Risks (12:20)

Carl: Ooh, you’re going to love this. To build the house, we borrowed $400,000 from a friend — the same friend who said I should be in bonds; he said he gets 4–5% through bonds, so he could get the same amount from us if we wanted a loan, and we’ll pay him off when we sell our current house. And the rest — this is where it gets really interesting — is a margin loan from Robinhood against our post-tax portfolio.

Brian: How much is on the margin loan?

Carl: Around $500,000 at this point.

Brian: And what’s the interest rate on that?

Carl: I think it’s 4.25% — very competitive, but variable, so if rates go up, that goes up. The other thing we’re going to do soon is get a mortgage against this house — I think 5.4%.

Bo: Once it’s finished, you’ll get traditional financing to clear off the outstanding debt — basically swap that $500,000 margin balance for a primary mortgage?

Carl: Exactly. I don’t want to be — margin can be scary. We did that once before and almost got called out on it, even though I thought we were being conservative. We weren’t conservative enough, and with rates going up, I’d rather be locked into 5.4%.

Mindy: That was 2022, when the market had a really bad year. We had so much space in our margin, so we borrowed, and then we watched our margin cushion shrink and shrink, and I said we should probably get a HELOC on our house just in case — because we had borrowed to buy the house that was there, then tore it down and rebuilt it. We got real close, so we got a HELOC and took money out of it to throw at the margin balance to bring it back up. Otherwise it would have gone negative and they would have called us out.

Bo: And for those who don’t know: if you don’t have enough collateral in the investment account to substantiate the loan, they issue a margin call — you either have to sell assets to cover it (and 2022 was not the best time to sell), or come up with capital somewhere. It’s a useful tool for short-term borrowing, but very risky. I don’t love hearing it’s there, but I love hearing you have a plan for it to go away — so it’s a short-term bridge right now.

Brian: I’ll share — when I wrote Millionaire Mission, I talked about how home equity lines are great on paper too, but sometimes stock markets get beat up at the same time banks are getting squeezed. I thought I was smart, not keeping much cash, relying on a home equity line with six figures available. Then in May of 2011, I got a note from the bank saying, “That home equity line you value so much — because your house value’s been crushed, we’re freezing it.” No more access. That checkbook, that debit card — completely gone. And I’m thinking, this is my emergency fund. Both things you’re leaning on are what we consider access to cash, not cash itself. I don’t mind that y’all are disciplined enough that when worse comes to worse you can circle the wagons and shrink spending so it feels like you’re not taking that much risk. But you have to be careful to have at least real cash on hand, because things can happen — when it rains, it pours. The stock market can get crushed, the bank can write you a “Dear John” letter on your home equity line. You’re at a stage of life and success where I want you to maximize, but let’s also keep some liquidity to stay safe.

Brian: It’s not about how much you can make at this point anymore — you’ve already won the game, you’ve rounded third heading toward home. Now you’ve got to make sure you don’t trip. You don’t want to start showboating and end up in trouble. It’s more about how much you get to keep in your back pocket than how much you get to add to your front pocket at this point.

Carl: I really appreciate these comments — Mindy will tell you about this endlessly. One of the things I struggle with is optimization in all parts of my life, especially money.

Bo: Sure, and that’s why there’s no cash.

Carl: I think, “Cash earns 3%, I could probably do a lot better with other things.” But as you just said, we’ve won the game — there’s no need to keep playing, although I still enjoy it.

Bo: One of the things people often think about optimization only in terms of growth and accumulation — but there is also risk optimization, and I’d argue you have not optimized for risk given your current circumstances. Just look at your net worth — your cash holdings as a percentage of net worth is a rounding error, negligible.

Carl: Yeah, that’s a problem — that’s less than 1%. We probably ought to have at least a few percent in cash.

Mindy: Remember, he has all those “bonds” keeping him protected too. But we’ve turned our cash into a rounding error, and that’s not really that big of a safety net. I’m a member of an online group called Long Angle — a closed forum for people with a minimum net worth of $3 million or more. I asked them how much cash they keep, because $70,000 seemed like a lot. We probably spend $65,000–$100,000 a year, not including kids’ school or building a house — so $70,000 is a whole year’s worth of expenses, sitting there earning just 3% when we could do so much better in the market. In an annual poll, members said they keep around 5% in cash on average.

Brian: I thought that’s a lot of money, but you’re thinking of it in terms of your spending, not your net worth. You’re missing that it’s not just spending — it’s the $35,000 for your daughter’s college next year, for the next three years. That’s already over $100,000 just on her education, plus another daughter coming right behind at $35,000–$40,000 a year. So right there we’ve shown you well into six figures of need within the next three years, plus a house being built with $500,000 of debt, plus you need margin to cover the underwriting period while that loan converts.

Bo: And let me speak to the optimizers in you — we’re going to talk about tax planning in a moment, and one of the things you’ll need in order to implement that planning is liquidity, which you don’t have right now. So we have to figure out how to find liquidity to satisfy the mechanism for that tax planning — but we’ll get there.

Brian: One more statement on cash: some of my biggest opportunities that changed my financial life came from boosting cash — not because cash itself is great, but because it creates huge opportunities when others are struggling. I don’t want you to be a miser holding all cash, but y’all are big enough now that 5%, maybe even a bit beyond, means the next time things go ugly, you’re going to be like a pig in slop — so happy, thinking “I can’t believe I can get this for that price.”

Chapter 7: Why Cash Creates Opportunity (20:24)

Bo: Think about how different 2022 would have felt if, instead of thinking “we’ve got to pull money from our home equity line to cover a margin call,” you were thinking, “We have cash and capital we could deploy at these unbelievably attractive prices while everything’s getting beaten up.” There’s a clarity-in-chaos element too — when you’re liquid during chaos while everyone else is scrambling, it’s a superpower.

Brian: I don’t want people hoarding cash waiting to time the market — that’s not what I mean. But there is something to being “frothier” in step eight of the Financial Order of Operations, once you’ve already taken care of your other financial foundations. Think about Warren Buffett — why does everybody watch the FBOs, the private airports, whenever the market goes down? Because they want to know who’s flying into Omaha to talk to Uncle Warren for money, because they know he’s sitting on cash. There’s something to that — cash as a kind of contrarian wealth builder.

Carl: We actually encountered that back in 2011. We saw a house we didn’t necessarily want at 12,000 square feet, but it had just been built, and whoever showed up first with $400,000 got it. I thought, we could buy this, hold it until the dark clouds pass, and sell it for $2 million — but we only had $400,000 in liquid terms, we didn’t have the cash.

Brian: Nobody else did either — that’s why they didn’t want to sell. And a townhouse in Breckenridge was $250,000 back then; that thing would be $2 million now. But no one would give us — cash gives you the ability to capitalize on opportunities other people can’t. Nobody has cash when we hit these horrible economic periods.

Mindy: So you said 5%, or maybe even a little more, sounds good for us —

Brian: I didn’t say it specifically for you — I was creating a teachable concept there. You guys have some unique things: all your assets are highly appreciated. Y’all have done a good job minimizing taxes, but even your after-tax assets are all highly appreciated, so anything you touch is going to create taxes now. It’s time to pay Uncle Sam, and we have to figure out how to do that strategically. I don’t want to just say “go get 5–7% in cash” without addressing the tax friction that creates — we need to get a little cute and creative with that.

Bo: I want to make sure I understand the debt picture: we’ve got a $400,000 personal loan from a friend, and a $500,000 margin loan — about $900,000 total. Any other debt we’re not aware of?

Carl: Our current primary house is worth about $800,000, and we owe about $280,000 on it.

Bo: At about a 2.3% rate?

Carl: It’s going to break my heart to sell that house.

Bo: But you are going to sell it, right?

Carl: We will sell that house.

Bo: And the equity from that sale pays off the personal loan, and you’ll get traditional financing for the margin balance?

Carl: We should be almost clear of debt once the one house sells and we move into the new house, and once we refi.

Bo: When we look at your account structure, there’s a bit of redundancy — Carl, you have a 401(k) but also a large rollover IRA. Any reason those aren’t consolidated since you retired?

Carl: The 401(k) is a self-directed solo 401(k).

Bo: So you’re still participating and contributing to that one?

Carl: Yes — it holds one more private company investment, so we’ll wait until that company goes public or sells before we dispose of the account.

Bo: So once that’s done, or once you stop earning, there’s potential consolidation between those two accounts?

Carl: Yes.

Bo: Are you guys able to fund Roth IRAs every year based on income level?

Carl: We could — we haven’t, just because we’ve been using all our money for this house project. This year and last we did not, but we’ve done a lot with Roths in the past. One of those Roths is also self-directed, hence multiple accounts.

Bo: Walk us through — what did you buy in your Roths?

Mindy: The regular Roth IRA, the $19,000 one, I don’t even know what’s in there — there’s one at $285K, one at $16K, mine’s $109K.

Carl: The $109K is regular stocks. The self-directed Roth IRA is a SpaceX holding — we were able to get into SpaceX in that account back in 2024.

Bo: Oh wow, and it recently went public — exciting couple of weeks for you guys.

Mindy: It has been. Carl was able to get into SpaceX in 2022 through his 401(k) — a traditional 401(k). When the opportunity came up again, I asked if there was any way to put it into a Roth instead, because I wanted that money to grow tax-free. So we did some financial maneuvering to get that allocation into the Roth IRA.

Bo: So in Carl’s 401(k), is a big chunk also SpaceX?

Carl: No, that’s a traditional 401(k). My self-directed Roth IRA is entirely SpaceX.

Bo: Got it — so there are reasons some accounts haven’t been consolidated because of these unique holdings. Now that SpaceX is publicly traded, are there limitations on consolidating?

Mindy: There are lockup periods — the first comes up in August, when we’ll start receiving shares. The last comes up in December. Between August and December we’ll receive all our shares, but right now we can’t do anything — they’re locked up.

Bo: We’ve had some clients who bought SpaceX shares through secondary sales from departing employees, and there was some ambiguity in disclosures about lockup length — some as long as a full 366 days. Have you gotten clarifying communication on your specific windows?

Carl: Yes — certain employees and very early investors have more restrictive shares requiring the full 366 days. In our case, we’ll have access earlier.

Chapter 8: The Danger of Concentrated Stock Positions (27:39)

Bo: Once you have access to these shares, what are your thoughts? You shared your liquid portfolio, which is just under $7 million — and within it, nearly $4 million of SpaceX stock, another $850,000 of Tesla, almost half a million of Facebook, plus Google, Amazon, and something called Impulse Space. What’s Impulse Space?

Carl: That’s a privately held company. This is a good story — I’m a nerd, feel free to cut this out. Thomas Mueller was SpaceX employee number one, probably the most brilliant rocket scientist of our time — he developed the original SpaceX engines. Unfortunately he was an employee, not a co-owner, because he was worried the company wouldn’t succeed — so he’s “only” worth maybe $50 billion instead of whatever he’d have been worth otherwise. He left SpaceX and started a new company. To get nerdy for a second: it’s easy to get stuff to low Earth orbit, very difficult to get to higher orbits — you’d need a triple-core rocket. So this guy is deploying “space tugboats” — SpaceX launches something into low Earth orbit, and his vehicles move it to a higher orbit in hours instead of the year it would otherwise take. We got in on the same funding round as Peter Thiel, which was pretty cool. This whole investment was really a bet on Thomas Mueller, like most of our investments.

Bo: Well, and you do know something about making a bet on people. Let me give you some back-of-the-napkin math: your top five holdings are about 86% of your total liquid assets. So when you said you were an index investor — we know y’all are pretty concentrated. And here’s the mind-blower: 70% of your total is essentially “all Elon” — between SpaceX and Tesla, you’re ride-or-die with Elon, and it’s been a bumpy ride the last few years.

Mindy: It has been a bumpy ride.

Brian: Incredible wealth building has happened, and y’all have been the beneficiary of it. But I want to get your temperature on this, because there’s clearly some emotional attachment — I could hear it in the way you told that Impulse Space story. You’re probably setting a Thanksgiving table for Impulse Space at this point. What do you want to do with these holdings? You’ve got huge appreciation, spread across Roth, after-tax, and 401(k) accounts — dealer’s choice on structure. What’s your ultimate goal for these individual holdings?

Carl: We feel stronger about some than others, but I’d like to slowly get rid of them. I’m a big believer in index funds — we bought Tesla in 2012, Facebook in 2012, and Google at its IPO in August 2004 — $85 to (adjusting for splits) effectively becoming a huge return. It was just luck, honestly — I didn’t run numbers on any of it.

Mindy: Hold on — I say this all the time: if you’re going to invest in individual stocks, you need to do a ton of research, because most people who try this lose. He did have a loser stock once.

Carl: Once.

Mindy: Carl’s got a pretty good track record. I’d like to say I suggested Berkshire and Costco — they’re at the bottom, but still worth seven figures, just not like Carl’s picks. If you want to keep track with actual numbers, Carl is a little more successful at picking stocks than I am. He reads tech news all day — ask him anything about Tesla or SpaceX, he’s done a ton of research.

Our Tesla stock was from 2012, when “some random dude with a funny name” was going to make electric cars — and back then, electric cars weren’t cool, they were a pain because there was nowhere to charge them and they only got 40 miles of range. And this guy made grand declarations — “I’m going to change the world,” full electric cars on the road.

Carl: The self-driving claims came a bit later.

Mindy: And Carl wanted the earth to keep rotating, get off fossil fuels — so, sure, throw some money at that. How much did it cost us to get into Tesla?

Bo: Can I guess? I bet less than $10,000.

Carl: Yeah, I think it was about $2,000 — $2 a share.

Bo: Wild.

Carl: And where I was going with this — I discovered index funds in 2014, after we’d already invested in most of these. So now, almost all new money goes to index funds.

Bo: And that’s the question — you have some winning lottery tickets here, took some big bets, and they’ve paid off. The question is what you do moving forward, especially as you’re — I won’t say “de-risking” since you’d call that suboptimal — let’s say optimizing for risk-adjusted returns. You do have index funds — you shared another $1.7 million across various index funds, though those funds happen to own a lot of the same companies we just discussed, so it’s at least more broadly diversified. As you age and move toward retirement with this healthy portfolio, how do you build one that focuses not just on capital accumulation but also long-term capital preservation? Why take more risk than absolutely necessary?

Carl: I think the one luxury we have is that because so much is in the 401(k) accounts, we could shift those holdings into bonds or VTI with no tax consequence. But I’d also like to access some of that money sooner rather than later, and start being tax efficient — I don’t want an $2 million RMD in 22 years.

Bo: What I was nervous you’d say is that you love these holdings too much to sell. I get it — especially with investments that started as $2,000–$3,000 and became this. But there’s nothing stopping you from liquidating the taxable positions specifically, so you have access, while moving retirement-account holdings around without tax consequence.

I actually like hearing that these have created tremendous success, but you’re okay diversifying your capital structure so you can access this money and optimize your risk profile.

Carl: Thank you for saying that — these companies are near and dear to my heart, you can tell I’m obsessed with the tech. But I think going on a trip to Japan with our kids sounds like more fun than owning Tesla or SpaceX stock.

Bo: I love that — that’s the reason we build wealth, so we can use it for the experiences we care about with the people we care about. You guys have done that, and now you’re at the stage where you get to enjoy it. But that doesn’t mean walking away from optimization altogether.

Brian: Bo, this is literally one of my favorite things we get to do — sitting across from real people talking about their finances.

Bo: Yeah, you guys get to see this on Making a Millionaire, but we do this for our clients every day at Abound Wealth — digging in to figure out where the gaps are and building a plan that works specifically for their goals.

Brian: If you’ve been watching and thinking, “I want that — a professional with decades of experience looking at my specific situation” — we’re here to help.

Bo: We’re fee-only fiduciary advisors, legally required to work in your best interest, and we love helping clients optimize their army of dollar bills so they can live their best lives. Head to aboundwealth.com and let’s see if we’re a good fit. Head to aboundwealth.com.

Chapter 9: The Retirement Tax Bomb Explained (37:29)

Bo: Let’s see if we can do this for you too, because you’ve already said, “We’ve got this problem,” and fortunately we’re able to model it out for you. What you see on screen is a projection, based on your living expenses and portfolio, of what your tax return looks like each year — each blue bar is your active tax base. We didn’t know exactly what your working years would look like, so we assumed roughly five more years of decent income, after which all your income shifts to capital income from the portfolio. Depending on how a portfolio is structured, a lot of people pay 0% capital gains tax in the early retirement years, so the tax bill drops close to nil if things are structured right. That works beautifully — you could live off brokerage assets, sell at 0% cap gains, generate the capital you need. But eventually that gets exhausted, and you’d have to start pulling from retirement assets. And what really gets you is in your mid-70s: because your qualified accounts are so large, you’re going to face huge RMDs. We ran the numbers conservatively — about a 6.5% rate of return — and your first RMD, around 2049, comes out to roughly $850,000 of income you’d have to recognize whether you want to or not. That pushes you into the highest tax brackets — 24%, 32%, and even 37% under current tax code. So there’s no point in all that tax-deferred saving over your lifetime if it just means paying way more taxes in the last 20–30 years of your life. One strategy available for early retirees — before a pension or Social Security kicks in, before RMDs start — is Roth conversions.

Chapter 10: Roth Conversion Strategy That Could Save Millions (40:32)

Bo: If all we did was max out the 22% tax bracket every year with conversions — there’s an argument for going up to 24%, but let’s just say 22% — starting this year until age 75 (RMD age), what changes about the plan? You never cross into those 30-plus percent brackets — you never hit the tax bomb, because you’ve converted so much of your pre-tax assets to Roth. If you ran this scenario, your first full-year RMD would drop from about $850,000 to about $300,000 — roughly a $500,000 annual income offset because you’ve shifted assets to Roth. And by the time you pass — we used age 95 as a mortality assumption — this adds almost $3 million in present-value dollars to what your kids would inherit, because the assets have grown tax-free and were taxed at lower rates along the way. Your cumulative lifetime tax bill drops by over $1.1 million in present-value dollars. So this looks like a slam dunk.

Brian: Right. And the legacy factor is huge — under the updated beneficiary rules, heirs get 10 years to let inherited Roth assets grow tax-free, versus an inherited traditional IRA where they’d have to take taxable distributions. It’s a huge legacy win.

Carl: From a selfish standpoint — if we convert to Roth, can we use that money after five years?

Brian: Technically yes, but once people build up meaningful Roth assets, they hold them like Gollum’s ring — it’s hard to actually spend them, because you know how powerful that tax-free growth is. That’s why I’m always amused when people doing something like Coast FI say, “I’ll just use my Roth first to bridge me” — you think you will, but you probably won’t want to burn through it, partly for legacy reasons. Now, I know y’all also have a “die with zero” mentality, and we’ll get to that — there are better assets to gift, especially with 0% capital gains treatment for lower-income recipients like your kids, than burning through Roth assets.

Mindy: I’d like to leave them as much Roth money as possible, and get money out of the 401(k) as soon as possible so it can go into Roth. The only issue is the liquidity problem — we have the money to pay the taxes, but we have to find it somewhere. So doing a Roth conversion at our age means paying taxes next year. How do we do that?

Bo: One thing that’s important with any Roth conversion analysis: we always set a target strategy — say, convert up to the 22% or 24% bracket — but in practice it’s a year-by-year decision based on what happens that specific year. Maybe you sell 10 houses instead of 12; maybe in a year like 2022 you harvest capital losses, reducing capital income. For clients, every October/November we run an income projection for the year to figure out how much you can actually convert and how you’d pay the associated tax. We put together an illustration of what that could look like: assuming five more working years (2031–2035) before retirement, if all your income becomes capital income structured to avoid heavy capital gains or dividend income, you’d have a fairly muted tax bill. Converting at the 22% bracket would mean roughly a $211,000 conversion each year, increasing your tax bill by about $60,000 — but because a lot of your income is 0% capital gains, your effective tax rate stays under 20%. I’d argue that right now, while you’re still earning at a higher income and there’s not much room to convert, these years may not be the ones to convert in. It likely makes more sense once your earnings drop, or in specific low-income years, and continuing that until age 73–75 when RMDs kick in.

Carl: That makes sense.

Bo: We remind clients all the time — you’re likely going to have better opportunities to convert to Roth in the future than in your current high-earning years. Now, if you believe you’ll always be a high earner, or that tax rates will meaningfully rise in the next one to three administrations, there’s an argument for converting now up to the 24% bracket. But then you have two options to cover the tax bill: save up cash from earnings each year, or slowly divest taxable brokerage assets — which is hard to do in a year you’re also paying for college and building a million-dollar house.

Brian: To put it simply: you guys need to get comfortable with the idea that you’re going to pay capital gains on some of these after-tax assets, because it’s the lowest-cost access to capital — 15% for a married couple at your income level is a pretty low bar from a tax standpoint. You’ve already won a lot of this — you just have to accept that’s the toll to get access to liquidity.

Chapter 11: The Smartest Order to Withdraw Retirement Assets (48:27)

Bo: I know y’all had asked about 72(t) and some other things when we were emailing. What was your thinking there?

Mindy: Just access to the 401(k) — taxable access, but not penalized access, since I don’t like paying taxes and I really don’t like paying penalties. So it’s a way to generate income and pull money out of the 401(k) that isn’t a Roth conversion, since a conversion locks the money for 5 years and requires paying taxes upfront — the opposite of solving our liquidity problem this year.

Brian: Right, but your ordinary income tax rate — plus Carl’s earned income while Mindy’s still working — runs through a higher bracket than capital gains would. Capital gains rates are more favorable; you don’t hit the 20% capital gains bracket until combined income is around $600,000. So it’s roughly 15% (ignoring the Medicare surtax and other details, oversimplifying a bit) — still the lowest-cost access to capital, and that’s the framework for thinking through where to access money.

Bo: We use the Financial Order of Operations to think about accumulation — and when you start decumulating, you generally pull money out in the reverse order you put it in. For most people, the first money saved is Roth (opened young), so that’s the last money you want to pull. The second money is 401(k) contributions — that’s typically the second bucket you pull from in retirement. The last money most people put in is taxable brokerage — so that becomes the first bucket you draw from. I think that holds for you too, because capital gains rates will be lower than 72(t) ordinary-income rates. While 72(t) gives you access, I’d argue you’re better off using taxable assets, preserving the tax-deferred assets to convert to Roth later when your income is lower.

Carl: That’s a good point — and a lot of what I’d like to get rid of is in the brokerage account anyway, so that makes a lot of sense.

Bo: And it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. You two don’t seem to have anxiety around selling these positions, but a lot of people do — “I can’t sell SpaceX now, it’s going to do this,” or “I can’t sell Tesla now.” Whenever there’s emotion in a decision, we try to remove it by adding a system. Even with highly concentrated, highly appreciated positions, something like a dollar-cost divesting strategy works — the mirror image of dollar-cost averaging in. Sell a fixed amount on an automated schedule regardless of price, so you’re not trying to time it.

Mindy: That’s interesting — I’ve never heard of dollar-cost averaging applied to withdrawals, but I get it — you automate it and you’ve made the decision once.

Bo: Exactly the same thing, just in reverse — taking the emotion out of deciding when to sell. It becomes an automated process instead of a human one.

Mindy: And we’ve made the decision one time, and it just happens.

Carl: I think Brian hit on something important earlier. To back up — I had healthy income as a software developer, but we were super cheap and frugal, so we minimized our taxes so much we hardly paid anything, maxing out the self-directed 401(k). My struggle — maybe I need a therapist instead of a CFP — is just getting over the “paying taxes” thing. I’ve got a friend at SanDisk who told me he’s got a $500,000 tax bill to write a check for; that made ours feel more manageable by comparison, but it’s still a struggle. We spent so many years absolutely minimizing taxes, and now we have to pay up — and it’s going to be okay.

Bo: I still think you’re going to minimize it appropriately — during your highest-earning years, your capital gains rate might have been 23.8%. You’re still paying taxes, but paying as little as makes sense, and you’re still going to be able to do that.

Brian: I’m going to challenge y’all from a mindset standpoint: all the things that rewarded you in the past have to be rewired to some degree, because you were rewarded for being as minimalistic as possible.

Chapter 12: Escaping the Achiever’s Trap (54:16)

Brian: I love that y’all shared notes about reading Die With Zero. I pick on that book because it makes assumptions — you have to be high income and able to generate capital easily — that don’t hold for most Americans. But you guys have already won the game; you can turn income up or down. So I agree with the “die with zero” philosophy for you, with this challenge: you have to think about time as a diminishing resource. I’m the same age as y’all, so I understand — success at this age is unique because you still feel healthy and good, but you also know chronologically where you are. Time is limited, and so is the energy to go do the activities and experiences you want. As Carl found out right after retiring — “holy cow, I don’t have time to work, I’m so busy!”

The most valuable things to you at this point are probably time and energy — more than the wealth itself. So don’t think purely in terms of maximizing or minimizing taxes — think about maximizing life. We can still do the tax piece strategically, but I want you to live your best life, because you’ve won the game. I think y’all say on paper you have a “die with zero” mentality, but structurally, it’s more “die with as much as possible, while minimizing what I pay Uncle Sam” — and those two don’t coexist once you’re on the consumption side of life. One of my favorite things about clients — and I play a bit of an unlicensed therapist here — is that people who’ve been really successful get rewarded for allocating capital well during accumulation, but when it’s time to consume it, they lose their minds a little, because they’re not used to it. They feel guilty, feel weird. Part of our job is helping people focus on the diminishing resource — time — so they can live their best lives.

Bo: We get to tell people it’s okay to do things that don’t naturally feel that way — it’s okay to spend money, it’s okay to hold a bunch of cash, it’s okay to pay taxes when it makes sense, even though it grinds against a builder’s natural instincts.

Brian: Y’all know — before podcasting and YouTube, there was Suzy Orman on her nightly show, with that segment where people asked “Can I afford this?” and we all loved hearing her say “No.” That whole segment was about killing dreams. What’s funny is once you do this for a living, you realize the job is actually the opposite — a financial planner isn’t there to say “no,” we’re there to say “please, go do this,” because statistically your probability of success is still north of 95%. Let’s go do more. Y’all just have to free your minds to feel okay with that — that’s the achiever’s trap. You’ve been rewarded for building, so consuming hurts. That’s why the “die with zero” mindset is valuable for successful people, once you find the right balance.

Mindy: With “die with zero,” it’s more about wanting to do experiences with our kids — or maybe buy them a house at 30 — rather than leaving them a giant pile of cash at 65.

Brian: I like 50-year-olds reading that book; I don’t love 20- and 30-year-olds reading it. When you’re 20 or 30, more than most Americans anyway — I was somewhat miserly in my 20s and 30s, and looking back, thank goodness I was, because that’s why my money is working harder than I do now. Telling that message to a 20- or 30-year-old is probably the wrong message at that stage of life.

Chapter 13: Raising Financially Successful Kids & Final Advice (58:52)

Bo: With die-with-zero, one efficient move: you can gift up to the annual gift-tax exclusion to each daughter, and one especially efficient version is gifting appreciated securities. The cost basis carries over, so if they sell it, they pay tax at their rate, not yours — and if they’re in a low bracket, there’s a good chance they can sell up to that gift amount tax-free.

Carl: Oh, that’s a great tip.

Brian: Especially for your college-age daughter, who’s more independent for tax purposes — there are kiddie-tax considerations for minors, but for adult children filing their own returns, there’s real planning opportunity there.

I was talking to someone this week with a wealthy relative whose kids are apparently “looking forward to” his death because of the inheritance. I don’t want anyone looking forward to that — you want your kids pulling for you to stick around.

Mindy: Yeah, well, there is a curse of success — you need to start having these conversations, and it sounds like y’all already have been given the girls’ ages. I’ve had to start talking to my daughter about money, because growing up in a successful family — even living a tight lifestyle like you do — it’s pretty obvious there’s a big net worth, and you want to plant those seeds so their best life isn’t just “while under your roof.” You still want them to have the drive to create for themselves.

Brian: We both grew up without much money, and I know you both come from humble beginnings too — we all want to make our kids’ lives easier so they don’t have the same struggles, but we need enough struggle left in there that they get the fulfillment when they eventually buy their own car, their own house. There’s a hedonic-treadmill concept — spread the good stuff out, so every dopamine hit stays meaningful. That’s why you don’t start with the Lamborghini or the fancy BMW — you start smaller and work up, same with vacations. You want your kids to have some earned achievements built into their own life so they get to become the best versions of themselves.

Carl: We’ve put some carrots out there — trying to “wag the dog,” so to speak. We’ve told our girls, “We’ll help you, but that help isn’t coming for another decade or two, maybe your 30s. You’ve got to get out there, get good grades — and by the way, we’re rich.”

Bo: I love it — “all our money,” great line.

Brian: Do parental matching. One of the best things I did with my daughter — when she started babysitting at 15, then worked fast food at Chick-fil-A through high school — was a dollar-for-dollar match on her Roth contributions. It’s been huge; she’s full-time employed out of college now and still loading up Roth IRAs and more. Priming the pump, like pouring a little gas in the carburetor to get things going — you do the same with your kids through matching. It models the behavior, and once they see the power of compounding growth, it sticks. When you realize your kids are hard workers who understand deferred gratification and investing, that’s a parental dividend right there.

Mindy: They’ll take over the world. You do have to be very clear with your kids about what you mean. I told our youngest — who just started at Taco Bell a week ago — “Dad and I will match your salary dollar for dollar,” and she said, “This is great!” Later I had to clarify: “You think I’m just going to hand you cash? No — it goes into your Roth IRA.” She said, “Oh, I don’t get it in hand?”

Bo: (laughing) That’s hilarious — but think about the learning value: deferring gratification, putting money away you don’t get immediate access to, but watching it grow so you don’t have to work as hard later.

Mindy: Right — and I get it, she’s 16, so 60 feels like a thousand years away. She’s like, “That’s so far away.” It is — but I hope you make it to 59½, and I hope you have a lot of money in your Roth when you do. Did you do the same thing with your older daughter when she was babysitting?

Brian: Yeah, though for babysitting income, you file a return and typically owe little beyond self-employment tax for Medicare and Social Security — you just needed to file so you’d qualify for a custodial Roth IRA. It’s a great planning move for anyone whose kids are starting to earn money — let them know a portion of that ought to be working for them, going into their “army of dollars,” so they build the habit early. What I always did: we’d get the statement, look at the change — especially in good months — and say, “You made $300 on what you put in a year ago; at $10 an hour, that’s almost two weeks of part-time work you made without doing anything.” That’s when the connections start forming in the brain.

Bo: That’s what we’ve all figured out — spending money is fun, but what’s really cool is when your money can grow so you can spend without having to work for it. I come from a public accounting background — everyone I know still working in public accounting might bill $1,000 an hour, but they hate having to work that hour to bill it. At a certain age, no matter your bill rate, you want to be able to say “I don’t have to work” — and the only way to do that is having money that can do the work for you.

That’s the biggest lesson I share with people — if you come from nothing, own stuff. That’s the secret, whether real estate, index funds, or the five biggest individual names, because Carl’s kind of brilliant without realizing he’s brilliant at picking big winners.

Brian: How about Nvidia — did you not want to grab that one too? Didn’t want to be greedy?

Carl: I whiffed on that one. And man, I wish someone had told me about Anthropic a couple years ago. Not moving on that one was bad.

Mindy: Nice job, Carl. Thanks for nothing.

Bo: You turned out okay. Any other questions we can answer? Anything else you’re curious about?

Mindy: The comment about long-term capital gains versus 72(t) income was eye-opening — I knew the long-term capital gains brackets are 0%, 15%, and 20%, and that ordinary income tax is more, but it hadn’t clicked before. Did you hear that part about selling after-tax stocks?

Carl: I did — capital gains kicks in around… let me check… 0% bracket goes up to $96,700 for a married couple filing jointly, for 2025. We’re probably a year off since they index that.

Brian: So right under $100,000.

Carl: Yeah, that’s huge. I think people underappreciate a brokerage account — if you’re not a big spender, it’s kind of like a Roth, but even better in some ways because it doesn’t have the same restrictions, as long as you stay under that threshold. The only other thing we talked about was wanting to be charitable — we’re going to start a donor-advised fund.

Brian: Those are brilliant — we both use them ourselves. You’re giving appreciated assets, so the charity gets the full market value, you get the full charitable deduction, and you never pay the capital gains tax on it. With your appreciation levels, that’s a huge benefit.

Bo: One thing to think through: depending on how much you plan to give, since the standard deduction is so high now, some people give every year but never actually get to itemize and capture the deduction. When we see that on a client’s return, we suggest “bunching” — instead of giving $15,000 every year and never itemizing, give $30,000 one year and $0 the next, alternating between itemizing and the standard deduction. You still get the deduction in the years you itemize, and the donor-advised fund lets you keep distributing to your actual charities every month regardless — you’re just bunching the contribution, not the giving.

Carl: That makes a lot of sense. So we do a big contribution one year, zero the next.

Bo: Right.

Carl: Is there a way to get money out of the 401(k) into the DAF directly?

Bo: Not into a DAF specifically, but once you turn 70½, there’s a very efficient option: a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD). You take money directly from an IRA or 401(k), and instead of it coming to you, it goes straight to the charity — and it never shows up as income on your tax return. Give $10,000 as a QCD and it’s never taxed. The real benefit is it reduces your forced income in the year you’d otherwise face a big RMD.

Most people who give tax-efficiently use a donor-advised fund until they hit that age, then switch to QCDs.

Bo: Y’all are a little too young for that one yet.

Mindy: It’s nice being called young.

Carl: He called me old and young in the same episode.

Mindy: One last question about Roth conversions — right now, at 53 and 52, if we convert, we have to pay the taxes. I thought I’d heard that at 59½ you can convert and pay taxes differently, or from what you converted?

Bo: No — you can still convert to Roth right now the same as after 59½. What changes at 59½ is that your existing Roth assets come into play if you need to take distributions — you could actually use Roth funds penalty-free. Where we see clients practically use this: in a tax-planning year, something comes up — say a car needs replacing — rather than triggering more capital gains or an IRA distribution, they pull $40,000 from Roth to stay within their target tax bracket.

The reason people talk about the Roth as a “bridge” before 59½ is that your contributions (basis) can always come out tax-free regardless of age — that’s why 59½ is the key date for full penalty-free access. For 401(k)s still with an employer, the key age is 55 if the plan document allows it; for IRAs and most other retirement accounts, it’s 59½.

Mindy: Talk to me about that 55 rule — we have a self-directed 401(k), which is where his SpaceX shares are.

Carl: If it’s written into the plan and we can access it at 55, that’s just three years away for me.

Mindy: It’s a bit “squishy” though, right — don’t you have to separate from the company at that point?

Bo: Right, you need separation from the employer at that point. But for you guys specifically, it comes back to tax rates — you’d pay ordinary income tax rates pulling from the 401(k), versus capital gains rates elsewhere. So it could be a penalty-free access point, but from an optimization standpoint, I’m not sure it’s the ideal choice for you.

Mindy: So at 55, as long as Carl were actively participating in the plan through the year he turns 55 and then retires, he could access it more cleanly than 72(t) distributions?

Bo: Right — it’s not fixed in time like 72(t), you can access it ad hoc. But as you said, you’re still paying ordinary income rates, which are less attractive than capital gains rates.

Mindy: Okay, well, we now have a lot to talk about.

Carl: One closing thing — we talk about money all the time, including on the walk over here. I asked you the other day: do you feel wealthy? What was your answer?

Mindy: No.

Carl: But I think part of the reason we don’t feel wealthy is why we’re here — we’ve got this, but we’re too afraid to reach in, like the monkey trap, grabbing the food and getting stuck. You don’t want to put your hand in the cookie jar.

Mindy: But it would feel good to actually be able to use it.

Brian: We touched on this but didn’t give you the explicit action point: I do think y’all need to boost your cash, given the college tuition coming that you can’t avoid. Y’all should boost that cash up so the volatility of markets doesn’t collide with tuition payments you have to make regardless. Markets are frothy right now — a good time to build the cushion so you don’t have regrets if it turns into a rainy day; it’d be nice to have a little more liquidity.

Bo: I’ve got a few homework items for you, if you’re interested. Homework item one: build your cash up. I wrote down $500,000 — only because that’s 5% of $10 million, not prescriptive, but as a starting point for an appropriate cash goal. As you think about how you’re earning and what to do with real estate commissions or other income, rather than deploying those dollars immediately, consider building cash holdings to the extent you can. If you set up some kind of reverse dollar-cost-averaging / dollar-cost-divesting strategy, also review your overall allocation — you’re currently 100% equity, 0% anything else. Maybe not bonds exactly, but municipal bonds — a sexier way of saying “bonds.” There are opportunities there, less about rate of return and more about risk mitigation. I also think you should be doing an end-of-year tax projection every October/November — what did we earn this year, what do dividends and capital gains look like, how much room is left in our current bracket? Even small Roth conversions — “we can only convert $15,000” — still count, so it’s worth doing that exercise every year to see where you land. And: talk with your kids about money, which you’re already doing — but also think about whether there are efficient ways to give them access to some of these dollars now, rather than waiting until you’re gone.

Brian: I’ll put an exclamation point on that — we work with a lot of successful families, and y’all are at the tail end of the window where you have real influence on these girls. Please have those conversations now. We talk to wealthy families all the time who say, “I screwed up, I didn’t talk about money, or didn’t talk about it early enough,” so the kids formed misunderstandings from somewhere else. Y’all understand how money works — please put that in their heads, because if you don’t, somebody else will, and it may not be the ideal framework — especially once spouses and other dynamics get involved. This is your moment to make good things happen.

Carl: (laughing) We had that conversation on the way here too — about requiring our kids to get a prenup so they don’t have to deal with that mess.

Brian: If you asked our kids, they’d say “Mom and Dad will never stop talking about money.” By the way — I haven’t pitched you on this yet, but this is a great reason to have a financial planner: do you know how often I get to be the “bad guy” on things like prenups? Instead of it being you at Thanksgiving and Christmas, it can be, “Sorry, the advisor made me do this.” We’ve had adult children’s marriages where we’re brought in specifically because it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but it’s also legal protection worth having. I’m all about “two becoming one” — I love joint accounts — but if you come into a marriage with assets, you also have to be smart and realistic about protecting them.

Carl: Man, I’ve never wanted a CFP more than I do right now.

Brian: That’s the thing — most people don’t need a financial planner while they’re building, but once you get close to seven figures, no matter how simple you’ve tried to keep your life, it gets complex with success.

Carl: (laughing) I can picture it now — “Talk to Uncle Brian about this.”

Bo: “Talk to Uncle Bo.” There you go.

Bo: How do you feel about having $500,000 in cash — and what does that mean in context of a $10 million portfolio?

Bo: Well, a high-yield savings account or high-yield money market fund — right now, if you hold over $100,000, you’re getting around 3.47%. If you want to get sophisticated, you can build a Treasury ladder — you can make it as complicated as you want. Don’t tell him that — he’ll go clean up on it. But yes, readily available liquid cash paying somewhere between 3.5–4% right now, just sitting there for when you need to pay for things, write checks, or when opportunities present themselves. It’s kind of a revolving door — your total portfolio dips a little as you use it, then you replenish it as you sell securities elsewhere. That’s the life cycle of what your allocation should look like. So — how does that feel?

Mindy: It feels good, now that I’ve talked to Uncle Brian and Uncle Bo.

Bo: Sorry, I’m younger than you, so that’s a little awkward.

Mindy: That’s all right — weird family dynamics, some people start young.

Mindy: I really appreciate the time you took putting together these slides and looking at our situation. We obviously know we have a little too much — okay, a lot too much — money in Elon-controlled companies. And the $70,000 in cash — when I saw that slide I thought, “Wow, we really only have $70,000,” which sounds so snotty to say given our net worth, but compared to our upcoming known expenses — seven years of college minimum —

Carl: And it’s actually less than that now, since I paid a bill this week — while building a house, which, if anyone’s ever built one, you know the builder always says “Sure, I can do that, but it’s going to cost you.”

Brian: Back when I built my last house, an upgrade like that was maybe $300–$500; now with inflation it’s more like $10,000–$15,000. So four upgrades and that $70,000 disappears pretty fast.

Carl: One of the workers pulled up in a new pickup truck this week — nicer than any of our cars. Probably from the last bill I paid. They’re doing great — financed for the next seven years, if you’re listening, guys, you do great work, not throwing you under the bus, enjoy the pickup truck.

Mindy: The orthodontist also drives a really nice car.

Carl: We don’t drive a nice car — well, they’re okay, you have a nice car.

Mindy: $35,000 — it’s a Tesla Model Y.

Bo: Of course it is — we all knew it.

Carl: It drives itself. I don’t drive it.