- Welcome to Portfolio Rescue, our new show here at The Compound. I'm your host, Ben Carlson. This is the show where we're going to be answering questions directly from you, the viewer, every week. We're going to be here live Thursdays. Just a little background on why we started this show.

When you produce content for a living and you build up an audience, eventually you're bound to get some feedback. That's the best and worst part about the internet. Sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative, but because we produce financial content, we also receive a ton of questions asking us for our opinions.

There's really no handbooks for this stuff when it comes to your finances, so each week our inboxes are full of questions from people who listen to our podcasts or watch these videos or read our blogs, and sometimes these emails from people make us laugh, sometimes they make us cringe, sometimes they make us think, sometimes they help us learn.

One of the really cool parts is that people place their trust in us, and they share this very detailed information with us. How much money they make, how much they have saved, what kind of stock options they have at work, their retirement plan, their investment strategies, the financial problems they're having, all this kind of stuff.

We've come to realize, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe these questions would be useful beyond our inboxes." Because you can look at these questions and go, "Wait, how would I handle that situation?" Or, "I've dealt with something like that. Did I do the right thing?" Or, "What if something like this happens to me?" Or, "What is this person thinking?

How could they be so stupid?" We don't pretend to have all the answers here. As with most things in life, there's a lot of gray area here. There's no right or wrong answers when it comes to a lot of things with your finances. I want to get this out of the way, too, that this show is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions, as we have to say, and the legalese, but we've been doing this long enough where we hope we can provide some context, some perspective, and some opinions based on our experience.

We just want to help people make better decisions with their finances and just think through all the things that come into play when making these decisions. That's what the show is going to be. Each week, I'm going to be here. If you have a question for us, email us.

Askthecompoundshow@gmail.com. Now, real quick on some of the format of the show before we get started here. We get a wide range of questions. Everything from personal finance, to taxes, to investing,