Buckle up for this one because Host Josh Bretl, founder of FSR Wealth Strategies, is not messing around. This episode of the Retirement Equals Freedom Podcast is getting down to the nitty-gritty of tax strategy for retirement.

Following up on Episode 32, as promised we’re getting the solutions and work-arounds for a range of tax-related challenges that all too often leaving us with a compelling desire to bury our heads in the sand.

This pod’s primary message is: Don’t do that! With a little sound financial advice and some planning, we can all set a course to enjoying the fruits of our hard-earned retirement savings.

You’ll come away with a better understanding of the downsides of mutual funds and a new way of thinking about capital gains as something to manage – not dodge at your own expense.

Just in the nick of time, Co-host Dave Schmidt gives us the break we need by introducing another round of “Get to Know Josh and Dave” followed by a DR2R that is somewhat obscure (and macabre) but highly effective! Enjoy updates, laughs and a whole new understanding of the interplay between sound tax planning and enjoying the kind of retirement you’ve dreamed of – and earned!

Don’t miss this cool new pod link resource with all the latest and greatest about Retirement Equals Freedom and one-click access to your favorite platform for listening!

If you haven’t already, please sign up for all the news you can use (+ lots of fun) at this link for the Retirement Equals Freedom podcast newsletter. You might also want to join the conversation at our private Facebook group, which you’ll find here.

Click here to explore the services that FSR Wealth Strategies offers and schedule a discovery call with one of the team’s CPAs. When it comes to living your best life, it’s never too early to get started!

A lot of people just let things happen to them

and then problems can occur.

So people come into our office and they say, I don't know

how I got to this position.

They just worked hard their entire life.

They put their head down, they raised their kids, they put

money in their 401ks, maybe they inherited some money,

but they just worked hard.

And all of a sudden they get to retirement and they go,

oh my gosh, I've got these problems I didn't know I had.

And they're good problems to have.

They're better than not having money.

But there's things that have occurred, and usually

the way we see people deal with them is they stick

their head in the sand.

Buckle up for this one folks cause

we're not messing around.

This episode, which is a follow up to episode 32, gets down

to the nitty gritty of tax strategies for retirement.

Our primary message, don't do that!

With sound, financial advice, and some planning, we can

all set a course to enjoying the fruits of our hard

earned retirement savings.

You'll come away with a better understanding of the downfalls

to mutual funds and a new way of thinking about capital gains

as something for you to manage, not dodge, at your own expense.

Enjoy updates, guffaws, and a whole new understanding of

the interplay between sound tax planning and enjoying

the kind of retirement you've dreamed of, and earned.

This is The Retirement Equals Freedom Podcast.

Your host, Josh Bretl, is the owner of FSR Wealth Strategies.

And it's Josh, who for the last few decades, has been

helping fine folks like you make retirement the

best part of your life.

And me?

Hey there, I'm Dave.

Josh's longtime friend, co-host, and huge fan

of Root Beer barrels.

You know those awesome little candies.

Okay.

I'm starting to ramble like Josh.

So let me let you let me end my introduction so

we can start the show.

FSR Wealth Management is a registered investment advisor

located in Elmhurst, Illinois.

Information and opinions contained in this audio

have been arrived at by FSR Wealth advisors.

All information herein is for informational purposes

and should not be construed as investment advice.

It does not constitute an offer, a solicitation or recommendation

to purchase any security.

FSR is not providing legal, tax, accounting, or financial

planning advice in this audio.

These views are as of the date of this publication

and are subject to change.

Joshua.

David.

Happy last podcast before the Super Bowl.

Ooh.

Well, by the time these people hear this, the Super

Bowl will be long gone.

Correct.

But it's the last time we're recording before the Super Bowl.

I would like you to explain to our dear audience what

we are sipping on right now.

Sure.

So you help me with more than just the podcast in this office.

You actually help me with all marketing.

And we do a newsletter that comes out monthly and inside

this newsletter we have some updates as to what's going

on, some common sense things.

There's some really great articles.

There's podcast episodes that are in there.

There's some things to get to know our office as well

as we try and put something fun in there every month.

And this month was a video of you and I making a

special Super Bowl cocktail.

In fact, Josh, it was our second Happy

Hour with Josh as I have cleverly branded our segment.

And our first cocktail was the Bretl Autumn Old Fashioned.

Correct.

It was a hit.

I think, if I'm not mistaken, didn't a food channel reach

out to you for the exclusive rights to the recipe?

They did.

Remember when we talked about Jeff Mauro many,

many podcasts ago.

He officially is trying to buy the rights to the

Bretl Autumn Old Fashioned.

You can't put a price on that.

Yeah, well, he hasn't called me yet but

he's still trying, I think.

what's great about this recipe, Josh, is there's

some nostalgia here because one of our favorite distilleries,

Journeyman in Michigan, we have many fond memories there with

our group of homies and we use their coffee liqueur in this.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

And for some reason we decided to do that before recording the

podcast, which is, you never know what I'm going to say now.

Tax advice for everybody.

Just wait until I talk about Dave

relates to retirees.

That's going to be special.

Do you know what Saturday is?

Saturday.

Saturday.

Saturday.

No.

It is the highly anticipated matchup between

Landon Schmidt and Kevin Collins's son in basketball.

Yeah.

So I may or may not have told Landon to

not pass and go for 30.

Just saying.

If there's any parents of Landon's teammates, I'm sorry.

I may not sound great right now.

So Dave and I have talked about our high school

glory days of playing basketball together for a long time.

Kevin was a friend of ours who we played basketball

with, and then he just decided to pick up and move out of

town and out of the country.

And now all of a sudden he is back in the Chicagoland area

and he has a son the same age as Landon and you guys

are in the same basketball league, which is kind of funny.

Yeah, it's on like Donkey Kong, baby.

So that is the second old teammate

reference in two weeks.

I mean, last week we talked about our friend

Mark Thomas, and Mark and Kevin know each other well.

So maybe one day major Mark will move back to town and his

kids can play against you too.

I bet they they could beat you.

I bet you they're probably already 7'4".

With rebounding arms galore.

This Saturday we had...

we've been looking forward to this all year.

Right around Thanksgiving, Missy got tickets to the

ice castles in Lake Geneva.

I'd never been to them.

They sounded really cool and the pictures look awesome, but it

has been too warm to make ice.

And last weekend was the first time they were open because it

was cold enough to make ice.

And then this week it was 45 all week long and

it rained all day today.

So they've decided to close for the season.

So they had one day I think they were open the whole season.

The poor Ice Castles.

Oh, that stinks.

So next year we try again for more Ice Castles.

Yeah.

What are you going to do?

Poor Ice Castles.

Speaking of ice, I wish we could use some of

that in the office right now.

It is like a sauna in here.

I'm sweating.

I just chewed into the microphone

a giant thing of ice.

I am so sorry.

Josh, how's the gallbladder doing?

Have you spoken to it since it was removed from your body?

No, we're estranged.

There's no gallbladder Instagram account

that's keeping anything?

No.

I think it went straight from my body to pathology to

wherever they take those things.

But I feel great.

I really feel outstanding, I'm eating well,

everything's hunky-dory in my book, which is good.

We're moving back into our house right now, so I'm lugging

stuff all over the place.

And you made yourself sound like you're 84

by using the word hunky-dory.

I have a beautiful stack of paper here from Erin, and I

believe today I'll let you introduce the episode, but these

look like familiar terms to me.

Oh, well, they're only familiar because we

just recorded a podcast very similar to this.

Oh, that's why.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, this is actually part two.

If you remember the last episode, I started telling

you all these horrible things that could occur.

And like my father likes to yell at me, never come to

me with a problem without a potential solution.

And I said, well, this is going to be the more important one.

This is going to be the solution to the problem.

Because you know my belief of owning your retirement and

owning the solutions that come to you, but a lot of people

just let things happen to them and then problems can occur.

So people come into our office and they say, I don't know

how I got to this position.

They just worked hard their entire life.

They put their head down, they raised their kids, they put

money in their 401ks, maybe they inherited some money,

but they just worked hard.

And all of a sudden they get to retirement and they go,

oh my gosh, I've got these problems I didn't know I had.

And they're good problems to have.

They're better than not having money.

But there's things that have occurred, and usually

the way we see people deal with them is they stick

their head in the sand.

If I'm understanding correctly,

this episode is the mustard to last episode's hotdog.

It's the giardiniera to last week's Italian beef, the

pepperoni to last week's pizza.

Am I kind of on the right track here?

It's the solution to the problem.

I mean, it's the best part.

This is the episode if you're going to listen to an

episode, you want this one.

So, I'm right.

Like giardiniera, like pepperoni, like pizza.

And mustard.

Yeah, whatever.

So Erin is very detailed, and as I was reading through

this, she made sure to tell me that we were supposed

to recap the problem.

So I'm going to recap the problems first.

So if you're talking about the problems, actually this

is one of the two episodes that we're not talking

about IRAs and 401ks.

We're talking about the money that's not inside IRAs

and 401ks and some of the problems that occur with it.

Now, first off, one of the problems comes

to be mutual funds.

Mutual funds are a very popular investment, especially

when you're just getting started, but they also have

their own inherent problems that people don't deal with.

And what are those?

Well, first off, they're expensive.

You're going to pay anywhere from 0.15 up to 1.5 to invest

inside of a mutual fund.

And that is on top of whatever you pay an advisor

or anything along those lines.

Now, obviously you want cheaper.

The cheaper, the better.

But with technology nowadays, for a lot of positions

you can actually replicate it with just plain stock,

which is free of charge.

So for example, people love their S&P 500 index funds.

They're great.

Vanguard is a great one, Fidelity.

They all have good S&P replication funds and they're

going to range anywhere from 0.08 up to 0.19.

But you can now buy the individual stocks

for free of charge.

And those stocks don't have those underlying investments.

So that is a really smart thing to do when you have that option.

The next part as it comes into play, is those mutual funds,

when you own those, they have distributions inside of them.

So they have capital gain distributions and

dividend distributions.

We talked about those last week.

But those occur whether you like it or not, and

you have no control.

But when you own the underlying stocks, you

have control over that.

You're begging me for an example here.

I mean, I was just kind of like, punching you.

Yeah, give me an example.

So let's say you own this mutual fund, and it is a

large cap growth mutual fund.

A mutual fund has its own underlying rules

that it has to abide by.

They might own anywhere from 30 to 300 different

companies or investments inside the mutual fund.

They all have certain percentages and certain ranges.

And what they do is they might say, hey, if it gets

out of range by X percentage, we have to rebalance and

bring it back into range.

It's called rebalancing.

It's a good process to have in place.

We rebalance all of our client's portfolios.

You helped me rebalance after

my second cocktail.

I'm not giving you two cocktails.

But the rebalancing comes into play if you have it

inside of a mutual fund, inside of not an IRA, that

becomes a taxable event.

They could be buying and selling inside of there

and there's capital gains that get pushed out.

Now what happens is, if you own the underlying stocks, you

can decide when to rebalance.

If it gets really out of whack, yeah, you may want

to rebalance, but if it doesn't, you can kind of keep

it how you have it there.

So by owning those individual stocks, if you have more than

just, say, a couple hundred thousand dollars, you can

do it really efficiently.

And there's people who walk into our office with millions

of dollars and they're sitting in expensive mutual funds

that there's a lot better option and ways to do it.

Does that make sense, Dave?

Yeah.

I mean, of course.

No, this is common knowledge to me.

I'm letting you go on a rant here.

That capital gain distribution, those dividend

distributions, those are what we commonly refer to

as tax drag because they're causing unnecessary taxes.

And when you pay unnecessary taxes, that means you've lost

money you didn't need to pay.

Hashtag tax nerd.

Boy, I didn't think we'd get that in this episode.

Sure did.

But when that happens, you can fix that.

It's like adding an instant rate of return to your

portfolio and you didn't have to do anything for it.

Now, another problem that occurs is you can

have high appreciation.

It's not appreciation like I have appreciation for you.

It's appreciation as in the value goes up, okay.

And we see this a lot.

Someone is working, actually had someone in my office

this week that through work, they had acquired quite a

bit of shares of McDonald's.

They'd worked at McDonald's for a long time and so they

had about a $20,000 basis in McDonald's, but their stock

was worth well over $400,000.

So what occurs there though is that gain, that

difference is $380,000.

If they sell it, that's a taxable event.

That is a capital gain?

That is a capital gain, my friend.

Oh, man.

I knew it.

Oh, you're going to be like 60 and you're going to

be like, I can be an advisor.

Take me that long to pass all those

exams, that's for sure.

That's true.

But that appreciation occurs.

Now, my opinion on this is, that is there for you.

That money is there for your use and your desire.

Now, what most people do is they stick their head in the

sand and they say, hey, I'm not going to touch it, I'm

not going to think about it.

Then why do you even have the money?

If you're not going to use it, if it's just going to be useless

and you're afraid to touch it, what's the purpose of it?

Why have it?

But that money can make a real difference in your life.

It can make a difference in somebody else's life.

Now, the reason people don't touch it is because

there is a rule called the step-up in basis rule.

The way the step-up in basis rule works is, let's use

the person who came into our office with McDonald's stock,

if they were to die with that stock, all of a sudden the

capital gain gets wiped out.

And so they call it a step-up in basis.

The basis was 20, if they die with it, all of

a sudden the basis gets stepped up to $400,000.

The value of the stock?

The gain value goes to zero.

It's in there.

So what you have it in there for is called your basis and

what it's worth is the gain there, or the difference

between the two is the gain.

And so when the basis gets stepped up, the growth or

the gain goes to zero, and that happens upon death.

So people will often say, well, I'm just going to die with it.

And when that's the case, your plan is death.

Your plan, I mean, you might as well not even have the asset.

Now for some people that make sense.

For some people they've got so much money that death, okay,

you're going to leave a legacy anyways, let's plan on this.

But there's a real problem.

One of the big problems is the step-up in basis is a

gift given to you by the US tax code, and they could

change that in a heartbeat.

If you are planning that the whole time, you are really

relying on the US government and you're giving them control.

You're giving them the ability to set your control there.

You make it sound risky.

It is risky.

It's very risky.

Now, if you're near dead, it's probably not much risk.

you know, our mission statement of making sure that your

retirement is the best part of your life, why have that

money if you're just going to plan on dying with it?

But there's things you can look at.

So one is, I tell you people, let's take control of it.

We can look at minimizing capital gains.

But there's other ways to do it too.

One is just having a plan for how you're going to get it out.

Maybe we can get it out in what we call the 0% tax bracket.

By managing your income, which comes with good planning,

we can actually work on getting stuff out at 0%.

So that person that we just talked about, the 0% tax

bracket for them can go up to about $100,000 of income.

So if they have $380,000 of gains, in about four years

we could get all that money out, assuming no additional

growth, for 0% federal tax.

That's pretty darn impressive.

That now all of a sudden you've got that money there

for them to spend, to use.

It's no longer just a piece of art that says McDonald's on it

that's hanging on their wall.

Or like emu artwork with McDonald's.

Emu.

Like the bird or like?

Yeah, Emmanuel Todd Lopez.

Yep.

It becomes usable then.

It's not just emu artwork with golden arches on it.

But maybe you're a really high income earner.

Maybe you have large capital gains, you've got dividends,

you've got rentals, you've got pensions, you've got all

sorts of things, and you're always going to be in a

high capital gains bracket.

Well then maybe it's just managing it to get it into

the 15% bracket out of the 20% bracket, or managing

it to try and avoid the net investment income tax.

These are all things that I'm speaking gibberish to you,

but they're all tax terms that if you actually manage them

can be taken under control.

And the next one there is charity is not a bad

way to go about too.

There is some really cool charitable strategies that

if you're just going to leave money to the next generation

anyways, you can get a pretty darn big charitable deduction,

still leave the same amount to the next generation, but

also in the same time, convert a large Roth conversion.

There's things that you can do that make it

really, really impressive.

And the other avenue is you look at if you have a

high capital gain, those are the single greatest

assets for you to donate.

Everyone wants to be donated cash, but Dave, if you wanted to

donate your shares of McDonald's to me, I'll take them.

I'm not a charity, but you should give them to a charity,

so don't give them to me.

But if you gave your shares of highly appreciated stock

to a charity, you kind of get a double deduction.

The way we talk about that is, if you just gave cash, so let's

say you gave $20,000 in cash.

You're going to get a $20,000 deduction.

But let's say you gave $20,000 of highly appreciated stock.

So let's say the stock is a $5,000 basis, it's worth 20,

so it's a $15,000 capital gain.

So you're going to avoid the $15,000 capital gain

and you're going to get a $20,000 deduction.

It's kind of like a double deduction, so it's a

great thing to donate.

So I always tell people, don't give to charity just

for the tax deduction, but if you're going to give to

charity, get the biggest tax deduction you possibly can.

All right, so what else could you do?

I mean, you don't have an IRA because this is not IRA money.

This is money that's not inside of an IRA.

What should you do?

Again, this all comes to good, solid planning.

There's a few things that we look at on here.

First off, one of the few tax-free vehicles that we'll

utilize that is not an IRA and you don't have to qualify

from a financial standpoint to it, but it's specially

designed life insurance.

If you have a lot of non-qualified assets,

there's some pretty neat things you can do from a tax

perspective with specially designed life insurance.

The other thing is using some tax deferrals.

So there's some things, maybe you're in a high tax rate

right now and you want to avoid dividends and capital gains.

You can use some different annuities to avoid income right

now and defer it to a spot where you're in a lower tax bracket.

There is a thought process on how you spend.

Usually we'll tell people to spend their non-IRA money first.

Well, there you want to make that almost kind of the

safe money then if you're going to spend it soon.

And so you start spending it down, you have a spending

plan to start minimizing some of those things.

Charity is always a great play.

We talked about charity for a few seconds.

But the last one there is appreciation versus income.

If you just love to have the stocks and that's the best

thing for you, inside of your non-qualified account let's

look for stocks that are highly appreciative versus stocks

that pay a lot of income.

So stocks that pay income are going to be the stocks

that are dividend payers and they're producing income

every year, which is a taxable event, versus a stock

that doesn't pay a dividend but grows significantly.

That's a capital appreciation and that has a better tax

advantage for you than some that's paying you a

dividend every single year.

So there's always this hierarchy of what you're looking to do

and with a good plan, you can really maximize the value there.

Now, most people that come in and see us, they're

focused on their IRAs or 401ks or Roth accounts.

But for about 25, 30% of the people that come in and see

us, this is also a problem.

And there are solutions to it.

And it's don't just die with it.

Don't just give up on the asset and pretend it's not there.

Because you've worked hard for this.

Even though you don't know how you got to this

position, guess what?

You can fix it.

And if you're going to make this the best part of your life, this

is something you're going to have to take control of as well.

There is my soapbox.

How do I put this lightly?

My head hurts.

This is, I think, your most technical episode to date.

Yeah.

I kind of thought that was coming.

I mean, I'm sitting like, I know all

these things, obviously.

Obviously.

But I mean to like...

Yeah, before the episode, Dave comes

in and he goes, "What are we talking about?"

I go, "Don't worry, this one's all on me, buddy."

all right, I'll just stick to my

cocktails and my DR2R.

I mean, if it weren't for this cocktail, Josh, I

think I may have run out the room crying and screaming.

I mean, that was hard knowledge.

We give quarterly education

seminars to our clients, and Dave comes and helps us

record them and edit them.

He was in charge of the video production for our last one,

which was all on Medicare.

And we have some podcasts on Medicare coming up after

this one, but the topic bored the snot out of Dave,

and he could barely look at the camera anymore.

In fact, I did submit my virtual

resignation after that event.

You did.

You realized it was kind of, Ooh.

Yeah, but then you bought me pizza that night,

and I'm like, okay, fine.

I'll stay on it for a few more weeks.

So yeah, there was pizza and then, yeah, what, what, okay.

We did karaoke?

Hey, Mr.

Josh, let's take a break.

You've been talking for so long and my ears are sore.

Let's not make them snore.

Listening shouldn't be a chore.

So let's get to know Josh and David, watch our ratings soar.

That bird's my favorite.

The bee?

Yeah.

We're going to come up with a new one next time.

I challenge you to a new name of bird.

What is the average wingspan of an African swallow?

That is not our question.

No, but that is Monty Python.

Again, I'm going back.

Oh yeah, that is true.

Oh, man.

So I went back to the Pod Deck this time and pulled a card here

because I was running out of questions to ask you, and this

one, we'll see where it goes.

You ready for it?

I'm excited.

Yeah.

Hit me.

What is one surefire way to grab your attention?

Oh man, Josh, some of these questions are...

It's hard to find a single path forward, like your

favorite podcast question because it's no such thing.

There are times when I think I should show

Dave this card before the podcast starts, but there's

something about the having to answer it on the spot I think

our audience enjoys about you.

So I'm going to interpret this as I'm

sitting on the couch, or I'm at my day-to-day job and

something that is for sure going to catch my attention.

It's going to be a movie trailer or some type of trailer

for something creepy like a new Tim Burton movie or show.

I think that always stops me in my tracks, and I'm like, oh,

yeah, there's something macabre.

Let me tune into this.

Not necessarily Tim Burton, of course, but something

more dark and creepy.

I get that.

Because I do spend quite a bit of my time in front

of a television and computer.

You do, yeah, you do.

I took this from a different viewpoint.

I do a lot of public speaking, and I've done a lot of training

in public speaking, and they talk about the power of story.

So the value of a good story.

So if you come to any of my workshops, you will know that

the first word out of my mouth goes straight into a story.

Always.

I try and go into a story as often as humanly possible.

But I have found my own brain all of a sudden

is attracted to stories.

You know, you scroll social media and you have those

random videos that show up, and as they start telling the

stories, the words crawl across, I can't stop looking at it.

So you giving me a good story?

Now, I may scroll off if it's a stupid story.

I'm with you on that.

I get sucked into when people are rescuing random animals.

I'm like, oh God, I got to see this.

Oh, I wish I was that good of a human being to do that.

Oh yeah, without a doubt.

So yeah, you do love a good story.

You tell a good story.

Sometimes they ramble.

Dave Schmidt:

Sometimes they ramble.

Why must you needlessly complicate everything?

So a cop car just came flying in your parking lot.

It was kind of weird.

It was kind of creepy, but it

made me think about this.

Dave relates to retirees, yeah.

I can't wait to see where this one's going.

Well, look, my DR2R does not relate to police.

My pen is just falling apart.

Where do you buy these things from, Josh?

Those are expensive pens.

Are they?

You're manhandling the thing.

I did.

I mentioned earlier, this episode's a little hard for

my small little brain to understand, but I picked

up a few pieces and a light bulb went off in my head

and I said, yes, I got it.

I know how I can relate to this whole-

I was worried about you relating to this episode.

More money, more problems episode here.

I mentioned the name Ichabod Crane.

You know who that is?

I'm sure it has something to do with Tim Burton.

Yeah, but Ichabod Crane, you know,

Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Yeah.

So he's essentially assigned to the case

of the Headless Horseman in the small town of Sleepy Hollow.

He's from-

he is not the Headless Horseman?

He is not the Headless Horseman, no.

He is a constable in New York, and he's assigned to this case.

And so he goes and brings his fancy tools to the small

town of Sleepy Hollow, and he arrives and he thinks

I got a lot going for me.

I've got these fancy new age instruments that I can

help solve crimes with.

No one else in this small town has it, but I have it.

Ichabod's kind of like retirees that have all this income, Josh.

Would you agree?

And they think they're doing great, and they are doing great.

Like you said, money's a good thing.

But then Ichabod is tasked with solving the crime

of the Headless Horseman.

He is not just lopping heads off, he's actually

taking heads back with him.

He soon realizes, oh, I'm not in as great of a position

to solve these heinous murders as I thought I was.

I don't know what to do.

In comes Katrina Van Tassel played by Christina Ricci.

You knew that, right?

No.

No.

Okay.

Spoiler alert, she's a good witch and she kind

of foreshadows all this, and she gives Ichabod a

different perspective.

She says, "Ichabod, don't rely on your fancy tools.

It's just a matter of optics.

It's a matter of just seeing things in a different way."

To me, Josh, you are like a Katrina Van Tassel.

I'm a good witch?

You are a good witch.

You gave your clients kind of the ability to see,

hey, there is a good path forward with all this.

You don't have to be stuck paying all these taxes

that you don't need to pay.

So yeah, I get this.

This episode is right in my wheelhouse, baby.

You, Katrina Van Tassel, and retirees are like Ichabod Crane.

Do you know the last episode?

Yeah.

Your DR2R involved...

It was AST9000 or something.

It was-

mST3K.

Yeah, that one.

Mystery Science Theater 3000.

You went home and you binged it.

Nope.

Haven't watched it still.

And there was all sorts of weird names in there that

I didn't really follow or understand or any of that stuff.

It was hard to relate to that.

So you pulled it out again this week with names and

characters that I have no idea who they are.

Really quick.

Dear listener, Josh attended the premiere of Sleepy

Hollow back on that fateful night in November 1999.

He was there next to me, loving it as much as I did.

November of '99?

I came home from college to go watch that with you?

You were home for Christmas break because it

was like around Thanksgiving.

Oh, good God.

What did I see in you?

You probably paid for me too.

Probably did buy your ticket and everything.

But I actually have a relation to this, believe it or not.

I actually think you're pretty dead on.

Ichabod, if I'm hearing this right, comes in to solve this

heinous murder and he thinks he's got everything going.

And then he realizes, oh no, I really don't.

I've got these issues and I don't even know what the issues

are at that point in time.

So kind of like retirees, they look at their statements and

they say, man, I am great.

All of a sudden I've got this money I wasn't expecting.

I'm doing fantastic, but oh wait, I can't touch

this money, so I'm just going to die with it.

Or they don't realize that if they did it in a slightly

different way that is more efficient and well planned

out, that they could be in a much better position.

They could not have to just waste it.

They could give a lot more to their selves, to their

family, to their charity, whatever it might be, if they

just would seek out the right help and the right guidance.

So for as much as you pull random characters that very

few people care about to relate to, you're actually not

too far off, in my opinion.

Thank you, Josh.

As you're talking I'm thinking, you know what?

I'm always looking for a good way to write a good story.

What if we do a mashup between Sleepy Hollow and Full House?

Because your Full House moment is so majestic.

Do I have to have a Sleepy Hollow moment?

I mean, well, you'd be really cool if you did.

What are you guys doing for Super Bowl?

Anything?

Missy is selling Girl Scout cookies

for the Super Bowl.

This year she is the cookie mom, as you know, and she's

scheduled a cookie booth and forgot it was Super Bowl Sunday.

She's in front of the York Theater, which is

right next to Starbucks.

So she's in downtown Elmhurst.

Yeah, people be out and about Sunday getting

ready for the big game.

That's my Super Bowl.

How about you?

Yeah, we're having the fam over.

I believe I'm going to be making this new...

What did we call it again?

The Scott Smith Super Bowl special.

Scott Smith Super Bowl special.

We're having the fam over.

I am in charge of planning the food, and I have yet to send

out the email to plan it, so I should probably get on that.

You should.

I'm taking the kids over to a friend's house and I

volunteered to bring my super special grilled shrimp recipe.

He's firing up the charcoal grill, and we're going

to have a great time.

That sounds, can you make a stop in Glen Ellyn?

Yeah, sure.

Is that sarcastic?

Oh yeah, without a doubt.

Oh, well, in that case, Josh, bye.

Scott Smith Super Bowl special.

Scott Smith.

Was that episode at all listenable?

It was hard.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll see.