Holiday Special: 2025 Lessons, Risky Bets, and an Alaska Surprise (BONUS EP)

How to Money

iHeartPodcasts

Education, Investing, Business

4.6 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2025

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A big thanks to our friend Joe Saul-Sehy for inviting us to join an episode of Stacking Benjamins – we had a blast, and we think you'll enjoy this convo as well!

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It's the most wonderful time of the year in the basement, and we're kicking off the holiday season with our biggest, most packed episode yet.

Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and Neighbor Doug welcome Joel Larsgaard and Matt Altmix from the How to Money podcast for a year-end celebration of everything that mattered in money during 2025. Think of this as the holiday parade of personal finance episodes. There's a lot happening, it's all connected, and you'll want to stick around for the whole thing.

First up, Joel and Matt join the crew for their Top 5 Lessons from the Events of 2025. From AI's real impact on everyday work to market surprises nobody saw coming, this segment unpacks the money moments that actually changed how we think about our finances. These aren't just headlines rehashed. They're the insights that'll help you make smarter moves in 2026.

Then the show shifts to a fascinating trend everyone's noticing but nobody's quite figured out yet. Why is everyone suddenly betting on everything? Prediction markets are exploding, retail investors are taking bigger risks, and the line between investing and gambling feels blurrier than ever. Joe, OG, Joel, and Matt dig into what's driving this shift, whether it's brilliant or reckless, and how to think about risk when it seems like the whole world just discovered the casino.

But wait, there's more. Nick from Alaska calls in with a real-world budgeting challenge that proves even the most prepared Stackers face seasonal money surprises. His situation sparks the kind of practical, helpful conversation this show does best.

And because this is a holiday kickoff episode, we're wrapping with big news about the Stacking Benjamins Vault, the new tool designed to help you organize and protect your most important financial documents without the headache.

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Best friends out!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:02.5	Guaranteed human.
0:07.0	New Year's resolution.
0:08.8	Own how you show up online.
0:10.7	It's easy with a domain and matching email from GoDaddy.
0:13.7	Now just 99 cents per month for new customers their first year.
0:18.2	Ring in 2026 with a domain and matching email at goaddy.com slash new year. That's go daddy.com
0:25.3	slash new year to own how you show up online. Hey buddy. How's it going? I'm great. How are you?
0:35.3	I always love it when you start the episode. It's so different. It's so different than what we normally do. And when listeners hear something like this, they typically know that besties are on the way, bestie episodes. And it's, man, it's like smack dab in the middle of the Christmas break, the holiday season. And I wonder if folks even notice that we had some excellent bestie episodes lined up for you.
1:11.6	We call them besties after all. Why? Not only because you and I are best friends, but also because these are the bestie episodes. These are good ones. They're still good. They're goodies. And if you haven't, or if it's been a long time since you've heard them, we hope that you enjoy them because, like, gosh, there's still so much good information, especially with the ones that we resurface, we're like, these are the crim to the crumb.
1:27.7	There's a good word in there. But that being said, we did want to publish a little bonus episode here for you. We thought folks might want to hear some fresh content. Recently, we spoke with our friend Joe Saul See High over at Stackingjamins. The show actually that we referenced.
1:29.4	Try saying that three times fast, by the way.
1:30.8	It's not easy to say.
1:31.4	Joe Saul C.I.
1:31.8	Joe Saul C.
1:32.0	Yeah.
1:32.6	You got it.
1:33.0	You got it. One more time.
1:33.9	But he invited us on because he likes to do a year and recap sort of episode.
1:37.8	And we thought, you know what?
1:38.6	This might be a fun episode for our listeners to hear as well. Hear us getting interviewed and talking about really the things that we thought were
1:46.3	some of the most important trends of 2025, how they impacted people's finances.
	...

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