Hi everybody, how are you doing? I feel like Andy Rumi, my guest. Anyway, this week is my birthday. Yeah, it’s not easy reaching 39 finally. I want to read you the card. I want to talk about some things that I do on my birthday, some money things I do on my birthday which is this week and I thought you might be interested to see, kind of some discipline stuff. I'm going to read to you the card from my son-in-law Keith and my daughter Meredith. It says “For you dad from both of us. For your birthday we thought we’d give you something to help you enjoy a dinner with a four-star restaurant of your choice.” All right!
It’s a toothpick. Sorry funds are kind of low this month. Thanks kids. But look what they gave me, they gave me two XL. I’m a big guy. I've had a Red Sox shirt when they won the world championship, the World Series in 2004 and people are bragging me like “What happened to 2007? Don’t you have a shirt?” Well I did until they gave me one and I'm not going to ask the technician to zoom in but it says B, Boston Red Sox, World Series champions, 2007. I've got them both covered. They won in 2008 and every year that I may need a bigger closet.
But anyway, there are three or four things that I do on my birthday that you might be interested to hear that might be helpful to you too, guys and gals. Number one, every time at this year, what I do is I got it right here, I go to SocialSecurityInfo.com, SocialSecurityInfo.com and get something called a PEBES, P-E-B-E-S, Personal Earnings and Benefit Estimate Statement. What it does, it shows all the money that I paid into Social Security over the years and tells me at least at this point, in terms of where I am in my career and pay, what my Social Security benefit is projected to be.
Now you often will get one, occasionally we’ll get one cent to you, but if you don’t have one cent and don’t have one recently, go to SocialSecurityInfo.com on your birthday as I just did. I just did it. And they will—you could do it online but then they send it back to you because they don’t want that stuff going over the mail. So that is another way—that’s something you should do every year. I do it on my birthday for discipline. And then what I do is something we talk about on radio and television all the time, once a year, I do it on my birthday week, you can go to AnnualCreditReport.com, that’s AnnualCreditReport.com and ask for a free credit report. Why on your birthday? This is easy to remember. Free credit report once per year, AnnualCreditReport.com.
Number three, you know what I do on my birthday, now it just happens to be in January so it works very nicely because the year is just starting and anybody can work just as well for you no matter what month it is and then as I reviewed the last 12 months of my brokerage statements. I used to have some to look at the bank statements too but more of those, more activity generally on the brokerage statements, just to see what’s going on and how am I doing, and I'm paying enough attention to it. I look at the yearend because my birthday is in January. I look at my yearend in December. But it’s something that you may want to take a look at.
Something I'm not good at but I always remember on my birthday, it’s like Pavlov’s Dog to check for car maintenance situation. Check the tires, when is the last time I changed the oil, is it time for a 75 or a 10,000 or a 25,000-mile tune-up? I don’t worry about stuff like that during the year too much. And yet since I don’t drive a great deal, I can almost remember once or twice a year to remember to change the oil. Car maintenance, something else I do. Does it relate to money? Well, yeah, I mean you don’t want your house to burn down. I've changed all the alarms in the security, fire and carbon monoxide alarms in the house once per year on my birthday week.
And last but not least, you know what I do when it’s really worked and I've actually one or two of them already this week, my birthday just passed the last couple of days, is I vow to do three things around the house that I've been putting off since my last birthday. And one of the ones that would—the one I did so far, I won’t tell you they have a two because I'm not sure what they are yet, but the one thing for sure is what I hate to do. I hate to hose down the screens in the patio. You know when flies like hit the screen and make a mess, I look at them most of the year. But on my birthday, during my birthday week, I hose all those patio screens down at our house. I hate to do it. I already did it this week. So I have two more things to go.
So that’s some money stuff that makes some sense to me and I know during the course of the year that I'm going to do all of these things and if I don’t get to it before my birthday, I know I’ll do it during my birthday week.
To my daughter and son-in-law, thanks and to all of you who wish me happy birthday, I appreciate it. Money moves to do on your birthday.
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