More with Doug:
Contact me. Ask Questions!
- Send me an email here: feedback@doug.show
- Leave a voicemail: (406) 813-0613
Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. It’s Doug Cunnington, and in this episode I am going to.
Tell you how to calculate your net worth. So this is not financial advice in any capacity, but last week I published an episode and it was about how I didn’t reach my goals, I haven’t been pushing too hard ’cause I, you know, I spent about a decade or so working pretty hard. And anyway, it’s all fine. However, I was, uh, exchanging emails with listener of the show who has been following for a while and he mentioned that he was doing pretty well. He shared some, um, interesting sort of financial numbers and I was like, dang, that’s great.
You know, it sounds like you’re doing even better. And this person was wise enough. To save money and invest and not spend it as soon as the, the money was coming in. And I’ve mentioned this in passing on a few episodes in the past where I see some of, uh, some people that were in the industry and niche sites and maybe agencies or software, what, like anything, making money online and.
The money was really good for a long time, for many years. I mean, these folks were making way more than me and, and just through us sharing stories or whatever. I don’t think it was much of a pissing contest. But, uh, anyway, the the point, the point is the folks, um, were making a lot of money, but then, you know, I see them still trying to.
Uh, in the worst cases sell stuff that they really don’t have, uh, any business selling and desperate kind of offers and products, and it’s just grasping at straws. And I, I, I must overall, I think I see that it’s because. They didn’t save money and they don’t have room to breathe, and they need to have the mu monthly cash flow just like they did before.
All that to say, I don’t think they, they were calculating their net worth. They thought, Hey, good times are gonna be here forever, and there’s no end to it. But, you know, we’ve seen things change rapidly and with no recourse. Right? So back in the day, if Google penalized your site, you could try to jump through some hoops with them, but.
I mean, you were just generally, you were kind of fucked. You couldn’t do anything about it. And you had to try to rebuild and like, again, jump through hoops and stay out of the way of future issues. And that’s almost impossible to do ’cause you don’t know, you know, where those issues are gonna come up. And the, you know, the industry changed.
So AI dramatically shifted how everything was working, algorithms changed, blah, blah, blah. Anyway. I’ll talk about how to calculate net worth because the main point of the episode last week was if you are looking at metrics and you’re tracking something, you’re far more likely to move in a positive direction.
If you are doing that on a small scale, this could be like habit tracking in a journal, which if you. Go down a rabbit hole. You could find all sorts of information on how you could do habit tracking, whether it’s reading daily or exercising, or you are counting calories. Maybe it’s just journaling.
Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, if you revisit those ideas every day, like it’s gonna be front of mind, even if you’re not thinking about it. And if you do it on a different. Interval weekly could be totally fine. That, I mean, that could fit for you. And because you’re looking at it on a weekly basis, you’re probably going to move in a positive direction and gradually changing is usually a little bit easier than like changing cold Turkey where you’re.
You know, starting a habit, you’re like, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna work out. And then you’re like, I’m gonna work out twice a day, and then you burn out because it’s too much. But if you gradually get into something, like something might happen, if you are tracking something on a, you know, weekly basis. You can move in a positive direction without being too abrupt and like disrupting your other habits or life or over training in the case of going to the gym.
Alright, so quickly I’ll mention the network calculation and then I’ll talk about the guitar that I was playing and I think I will end up doing. A whole separate video for like the guitars that I have and then like specific guitars, like the one that I’m holding here. But I will get to the point, and I will tell you that I’m reading this from my friend’s newsletter, Brad Barrett over at Choose Fi.
So he, I think he mentions it whenever he calculates his net worth, which is quarterly. So he says Q3 net worth statement. So he mentions here, and I’ll just read it verbatim. I’ll try to mention when I’m peppering in my own ideas, but I’ll, I’ll try to read to the end. It’s only probably 150 words here, so should be able to do that.
Brad says, every three months, I’d like to take five minutes to update my net worth spreadsheet, and I think this is the most important thing you could do to track your finances.
The third quarter of 2025 ends today. So this was a few weeks ago. And here’s your reminder to update your net worth spreadsheet if you haven’t done it before. It’s really simple. Log into each bank or brokerage account you own and write down the current balance. Add those balances together with a market value of any real estate or other significant assets you own, and that makes up your total assets.
Write down all the debts you owe, including mortgage, credit cards, student loans, et cetera, and then add them together. And that is your total liabilities. You take your assets minus your total liabilities, and that is your net worth. Once you do it one time, it’s very quick to update it in the future. You can use apps to track this, but.
It’s not really that much. And you know, like Mint, um, there, there’s a shit load of apps to do this kind of thing. You don’t need an app. You could just like track the handful of numbers here and that’s what we do. My wife and I, we just, write it down and have our own spreadsheet. Currently we are working with a financial advisor for the last like year and a half, and he has, you know, sophisticated simulation, uh, software and all this kinda stuff not needed.
Just to calculate your net worth. If you haven’t done this before, then get into it. Very straightforward. I will mention, you know, your total assets we mention, um. Any real estate or Brad mentions any real estate or significant assets, you can list a car in there. Um, oftentimes a car can represent a few tens of thousands of dollars.
We, we never did, you know, we viewed the car as kind of a, I don’t know. Kind of a consumable. And even if we had, uh, you know, at the, at the time it was brand new, a 2011 Honda CR-V. The value was probably, I don’t know, 25,000 bucks or something like that. And I had a truck worth a few thousand dollars, $30,000 is something significant.
But we didn’t calculate it because again, those are kind of consumable. It’s not like we can. Earn, uh, money based on those. So we didn’t even consider those in our overall net worth. In fact, there were times where we really didn’t even look at our house that we were in, even though. In some cases it would’ve been a couple hundred thousand dollars, but we knew from our, the goal that we were looking at, which was um, early retirement and just accumulating assets and that sort of thing, we weren’t going to earn any money based on the home.
Now, as time has gone on and real estate has gone up in value. It is significant. So like that is something that we have listed on our total assets, but we don’t consider it when we’re looking at retirement or future income that we may earn. ’cause we’re not gonna earn any future income from our home ’cause we’re not gonna rent it out or do any kind of, uh, anything like that.
So, very straightforward.
My wife and I, I think we calculated for the first time in 2014, so honestly, a little behind the ball at that point. We were married for five years already, and once you calculate it. It’s, it’s eye-opening. ’cause you can start digging in. So once you do this, you start looking a little deeper.
Okay. Like what are, what are we spending on an annual basis, which you should calculate. Maybe that’s the 2.0. Right? Figure out what you’re spending on an annual basis. For many people nowadays, far more straightforward than it used to be. Back in the day, like when I was in high school, I would, uh, cut grass.
I got paid in cash or checks, and there was not electronic. Uh, this was the 19 hundreds folks, so there was not fucking, uh, login on your computer or whatever. You, uh, had a checkbook and you had, uh, statements that came in monthly. But in that case, I would have to like get out. Paper, pull out my statements, write this down in a notebook and just calculate it out, you know?
But nowadays. Obviously you can log in on your phone or whatever and see, um, all your expenses for the year, right? Because most people, not everybody, but most people are using, uh, either a credit card or um, maybe a debit card, although you probably shouldn’t be doing that, probably a credit card, so you can earn points.
We pay it off every month. By the way, by the way. The whole point is, um, you can calculate your annual expenses, which is a very good thing to do because once you know that, you know how much you need to earn each year to be able to meet your savings goals, you know how much you need to accumulate in your nest egg to be able to retire early.
All very straightforward, easy calculations to get you in the ballpark, right.
My wife and I started working with an advisor because we’re looking at a multi-decade timeline with projections based on a portfolio and that sort of thing. They’re all based on assumptions and guesses and as close as we can get, but working with an advisor is a way to have someone who has seen many of these different projections and portfolios you have.
You have a lot more confidence knowing that like. You put together your own plan probably, and then maybe you had someone check over it or, we had a very, you know, a decent plan to get us to where we were at, but we wanted someone that had experience. Projecting for like a retirement plan for decades.
That doesn’t mean we’re gonna keep with that exact plan for decades, right? Things change, we revisit it all the time. And that’s one thing here, right? So Brad mentions to do this quarterly. That’s probably enough. You don’t necessarily want to be in this spreadsheet calculating it every single day or anything like that, but once a quarter.
Take a peak, takes five minutes or so. Again, once you have it updated, you can keep updating. So we’ve been doing this since 2014. I think for a while. We did, you know, we did this annually and then at some point we did, uh, like every six months. So. Semi-annually. Is that semi or bi biannual? Twice a year. We did it twice a year and, and then you could see like, oh, every, every now and then there’s a down here.
But the other thing you observe if you are investing. Again, none of this is, uh, financial advice or any kind of advice. Basically, we started to see like, oh, compound interest is kicking in and it takes a little while. A little bit to kick in, but basically, you know, the more people I talk to, I hear, oh yeah, after 10, 15, 20 years of investing, it’s like, holy shit.
Like compound interest is crazy. So you’re gonna have down years, but many years are up and it works out all right. Now the other thing is, uh, you know, my wife and I both. Individually started investing as soon as we got jobs. So we laid that foundation 25 years ago. Right? So we started investing in, uh, well it was the, the two thousands by then.
But, but basically after a while, those early dollars are, are really ramping up. So it’s very cool once you, once you get moving and, and then, um, if you’re lucky, like we were like, you know. A lot of this is luck, right? Just the market has been up over the last 10 years. But the thing is, like we, we had the foundation in there to be ready when things were going great and, and not, not to be ready, like we were just ready because, um, we didn’t take any additional action.
We just kept doing what we were doing and that was fine. All that to say, calculate your net worth. Then go from there. But once you know what it is, it kind of opens up all these doors, every little step that I mentioned after that. Very small, very straightforward and easy. So calculate your net worth, figure out your annual expenses.
From there, you can understand how much you need to save and how much you really need to accumulate. To reach whatever your goals are. Now, some people, you know, you have kids or maybe you have some other spending goals. I’ll just say goals. Uh, maybe you want to help your kids go to college or something like that.
That could be expensive, but it’s just something that you need to calculate and then you can figure out what you need to do to make that happen. Alright, I think that’s it. If you have any questions or ideas, uh, you could leave a comment, shoot me an email, Doug feedback or feedback@doug.show.
Now let’s talk about this guitar.
So this is the one I’ve mentioned a few times. This is the 1933 Kalamazoo KG 11 and this is a, uh, depression era guitar. So pre-war is often how folks refer to these, and the Kalamazoo brand is made by Gibson. So this was made in Kalamazoo, which is where the, the Gibson company was founded. The super cool part is these are relatively inexpensive compared to their Gibson counterpart of like similar years.
So. They are still like sought after. And in fact, there’s a brand of guitars. So the, the really nerdy guitar folks will know callings, which is a boutique maker out of Austin, Texas. And those are super high end, um, often, I mean, these are like some of the most expensive, brand new guitars that you can get.
And there’s a secondary line made by Collings called Waterloo. So it’s a little, a little play on the Kalamazoo, but Waterloo apparently was the original name of Austin, Texas. So it kind of fits. So you have the Waterloo brand, which is sort of, uh, they pay homage to this Kalamazoo brand. So it’s intended to be a little bit more bare bones, just like these Kalamazoo.
So back in, uh, nine, in the thirties, thirties and forties. Gibson was still making their, you know, high-end flagship guitars, however. Money was tight. It was the depression. So they made these, uh, like no frills kind of guitars, and they were cheaper. They were made in a less complicated fashion. So the one notable thing with this guitar is ladder brace.
So the, the braces go. Horizontally, or, you know, if you’re holding the guitar in a playing position, you know it’s gonna be vertical, but essentially the, that’s cheaper to make. It’s a little bit easier. Um, the Gibson version has an X brace, so there’d be a brace here, and it creates an X underneath the, the top wood here.
And it gives it a different sound. Now there these vary in quality. I mean, these old guitars, even the Gibsons, they vary in quality. Some sound better. They were all handmade back then. Uh, very little machinery. And this one’s still ladder brace. Some people actually, um, take out the ladder bracing and they brace it.
In an X brace fashion like a Gibson would be. But there’s another group of people that really like to have the ladder bracing in here. They say it’s a little bit more, uh, responsive so it doesn’t have the same resonance and it doesn’t vibrate for as long. However, um, for certain styles of playing like figure style or.
Slide or some blues finger style stuff that I like to do. It actually, um, works out great. So turns out, uh, this guitar, I got it. In, I can’t remember, say April of this year. It needed it. It was all original. I was like, I think there might be a little crack in here, but it’s not too bad. And it has a beautiful weather checking, and I know it’s a 33.
You could actually see the, um, the order number in here. So it’s not an actual, essentially it’s a serial number, but one of the key features on these early ones. It’s a sunburst guitar, but it’s mostly black. It has a very small brown spot, so the sunburst is just one little dot, and it’s very, very small, and that’s characteristic of like the 32 to 34 or something like that.
33 give or take. Right. As time went on, I think they were using a little bit higher quality wood, like I think this one might be a three piece top because they just didn’t have as much wood. They use smaller pieces and they don’t want seams to show up with a grain. This is my interpretation. So the sunburst is super small as they got maybe better wood or maybe they were using a two piece.
So you end up with sort of a mirror image, which is a fairly standard way to have, uh, the top of the guitar, e even electrics, right? Like if you see a Les Paul with flame, a lot of times those are just flipped. Um, and the seams right in the middle anyway. You’ll see a much larger sunburst in the say 37, 39, whatever.
And I actually had, um, it was a different brand, different kind of guitar, but I had a, it was a Carson j Robinson, gosh, I can’t remember the model, the exact model, but it didn’t really fit my hand and it actually was re braced in the. X brace fashion. It was a 12 fretter, but it didn’t fit my hands very well.
Sounded awesome. So I got this guitar really good shape. The frets were a little small, so they used smaller frets back in the day. And then of course after, you know, some wear and stuff, it wasn’t necessarily. Gonna be like, uh, a perfectly playing guitar. So I took it to a, a shop down in, uh, Arvada, and I realized, I’m telling a, a very long story, and I’m gonna have a whole video on this, so I’ll, I’ll just wrap it up.
I dropped it off down at this amazing shop, and there’s a luthier down there that took a look at it and got back to me. It’s a good shop if it takes him a while to actually finish the work. And I mean, this, this shop is super amazing specializing in vintage stuff. Um, it’s called Old Town Pick and Lar down in Arvada, down in the downtown area.
Okay. So basically he was like, it’s in great shape, needs a couple things. If you’re interested, it does need a fret job. And I was like, ah, shit. I was thinking it needs a fret job. But I also knew that’s expensive. And I mean, this is roughly player’s grade. I’m not a collector. I’m just a, I’m just a dude. Oh, maybe I’m a little bit of a collector.
But I was like, you know what? I wanna play it. I don’t want to, I don’t want to think, uh, the frets don’t play that great anyway. Glen like knocked it out of the fucking park. He does awesome fret work. Refre fretted it with modern frets and it plays so good. And the big punchline, the thing that I was starting with is like the ladder bracing.
Many folks say it doesn’t have the sustained and resonance that the X bracing has. I think this thing plays better than it used to. And I, I didn’t record a lot before I had the work done, but if he had to regale a couple braces, but largely it was in great shape, no cracks. The saddle, um, was replaced. The bridge had a lot of work done.
That was the worst part of it. But anyway. This thing resonates forever. It sounds just amazing. So if I hit a chord or even a single string, it’ll just keep going. So like I said, I’ll have a video where I kind of organize these random thoughts I put together with a lot more playing samples and stuff like that.
So that’s it for today, and I’ll play you outta here.