Afford Anything

Been listening for a few years and the quality of this show just keeps going up. It’s refreshing to hear someone so level headed about so many things, and curious and brings up so many distinct and unique subjects and guests. Clearly Paula has a bias toward real estate investment, which i think has become unrealistic for most Americans since 2021 or 2022 ish to now (2025) and that is my only mild critique of her show. However, she readily admits her bias, and I don’t remember any episodes focused on real estate (aside from answering personal questions that were submitted) in a very long time — maybe over a year (which is appropriate).

You can see how far they’ve drifted from useful with the swirl around the Efficient Frontier discussion. People will ask clear, specific practical questions about the challenges of this approach, and Joe dismisses them, calls them lazy, and insists it will only take 15 minutes a year to follow his plan. But then he ignores what they’re actually saying — but that would be 36 separate transactions across our family’s accounts every time I’m rebalancing?? He ignores the challenge of — do you rebalance by individual account or by total sum across all accounts? He wants so badly for his preferred approach to be seen as simple and obvious that he gets lost in his own smugness and is no longer helping people find clarity and take action. The fact that this has come up over and over in the questions shows it is not a simple approach and he needs to let go of wanting to present it as such and admit it’s much more complex to do on your own. The whole point of VTSAX and chill was to free people of analysis paralysis and he just ignores that over and over and insults people who want a simple financial management approach as lazy. It’s not a 15 minute / year activity Joe. You can’t even explain the steps in 15 minutes after trying 8 times. It doesn’t have to be simple to be good so just be honest with people instead of sniping at your listeners who are asking for help! I used to listen and look forward to every episode of this show and really appreciated how thoughtful the interviews and Q&As were. Then they doubled their episode cadence, making it impossible to keep up with all the episodes on a normal listening schedule. And it turns out once I have to choose *which* of the deluge of episodes I want to actually listen to… the answer became none of them. It’s funny, I probably would have listened to one episode a week forever, but now that I got behind on podcasts for a couple weeks and have a wall of missed episodes on this show — I’m not going to catch up. I’m just cutting it out.

Amazing information always

Good adaptation.