Our Advice For Beginning Investors and Recent Graduates (SB1679)

The Stacking Benjamins Show

Joe Saul-Sehy and Josh ‘OG’ Bannerman, CFP

Personal Finance, Financial Planning, Education, Retirement, Investing, Cfp, Business, Money

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Your burning questions fuel this episode! Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and special guest Christine Benz of Morningstar unpack some of the biggest questions facing investors today—especially those just starting out.

We kick things off by diving deep into target date funds. They promise simplicity—but do they deliver long-term results? We explore when they work, when they don’t, and what you should consider if they’re part of your portfolio.

Then Christine shares a graduation-season masterclass in financial advice:

How to begin investing, even when you feel behind
Why lifestyle creep is the silent killer of wealth
The importance of building habits now that will serve you for decades
Resources and reading recs that can actually move the needle for new grads (and not-so-new grads)

We also answer listener questions on:

Whether refinancing your mortgage is still a smart move
How global shifts in labor and supply chains may impact your finances
And why it’s time to give your favorite retirement calculator a second look

And somewhere in all this… someone may or may not reveal a dream dinner scenario that involves a pair of country music legends. But, you know, that part probably didn’t happen. Probably.

Whether you're just graduating, recalibrating, or rethinking your strategy entirely, this episode is your invitation to stack smarter—and have a little fun while you do it.

Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201

Enjoy!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Stackers. If this is your first time listening to Stacking Benjamin's welcome, a very special welcome to you. Welcome to the family, as mom likes to say, which is just such a great piece that you decided to start off with because on today's show we're going to talk about Target Day funds.
0:19.8	O.G, my partner and I have talked extensively about why we just like to talk about Target Day funds. Oh, gee, my partner and I have talked extensively about why we dislike Target Day funds.
0:25.6	But there's few, very few episodes where we deep dive into that.
0:29.2	We're going to do it today.
0:30.7	And second, advice for people just starting out.
0:34.0	Morning Stars, Christine Benz, the director of personal finance at Morningstar
0:37.9	joins us. She is an amazing woman and just we're super happy that we are friends with her
0:44.7	and that she's been on the show giving her indispensable advice so many times.
0:50.5	Christine is going to really help brand new people to the investing world today.
0:57.0	We also, for people graduating, this is a great episode because we are going to share our
1:02.1	favorite books and our favorite advice for people that have just graduated.
1:07.7	And then also, this is a greatest hits episode. It's funny. This was a time when people were really, really worried. This episode originally came out on June 3rd, 2020 at a time when we'd been locked away for the last three months and the market was weird and people were being laid off.
1:28.1	Companies were telling people not to go back to work.
1:30.6	And I'd love for you to listen to this, especially now because of the fact that so many people
1:35.3	are worried right now about tariffs and about the economy and the news really, really
1:42.7	digging into that, right? for increased ad dollars, partially,
1:48.3	partially because you should be worried and it's okay to be worried.
1:52.1	But what I love about today's episode is this was another time when we were very, very
1:56.4	worried.
1:57.3	And I want you to think back as you listen to all of that worry that we had and think about
2:02.9	how that worked out and then go to today. And hopefully this will give you a broader view.
2:10.0	It won't make you worry less, I think, but it will give you a broader view about how to handle
	...

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