Embedded - 80: Most of Us Are Human Beings

Episode Date: December 10, 2014

Bill Winterberg (@BillWinterberg) chatted with Elecia about leaving embedded engineering to become a financial planner then to being a technology adviser to other financial planners.  Bill's company is FPPad. You can subscribe to his newsletter and watch Bits and Bytes, his video blog (or read it). Bill and Elecia met at LeapFrog. Bill was instrumental in making the original LeapPad Learning System. When Elecia mentioned Domini Social Investments, Bill mentioned Vanguard Total Stock Market. Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance In Your Twenties and Thirties Financial adviser networks: XY Planning Network (by interest) Garrett Planning Network (hourly fees only) NAPFA (fee only advisers) CFP® (by zip code) Robo-advisor (automated investment management) Bill says: "It shouldn't be this hard for smart engineers."

You are listening to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alesia White. On my own this week, well, I do have a guest, Bill Winterberg, and we are going to discuss leaving engineering and financial planning, though maybe not how you expect. Hey, Bill. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you very much Alicia It's a pleasure to be with you today

Usually this is the part where I ask you to tell us about yourself and give us the elevator speech of who you are but I'm going to save that for later in the show because I want to try something different so people understand that where we are now is not where we started

We met when we were both software engineers at LeapFrog making children's toys. And what did you do there? What I did for LeapFrog started by a random phone call. Not a really random phone call, but the girl that I was dating at the time actually was a babysitter for one of the software executives at a company that was acquired by LeapFrog. And right after that transition and acquisition closed, I got this call while I'm sitting at my desk at Hewlett Packard working on printer driver software, scintillating stuff. And the gentleman said – his name is dave he said i i understand you're going to school for audio engineering and instruments and cool stuff with sound and we're developing a toy and need some help with some instruments on it would you be interested

one thing led to another and i said yes i would love to do it. And my family said, you're an idiot. You're leaving Hewlett Packard for a no-name company. But I still moved forward because I was young and naive. I was probably 19, 20 years old. And I thought the grass was greener over at LeapFrog. And I got introduced into programming, embedded systems, and software architecture, all in that experience. My primary task was to create this instrument set that fit on these little 8-bit microprocessors, but still had really good sound quality that was way better than any other electronic toys at the time, back in the end of 98 and 1999. So it was my project to come on board and shrink all the samples down of these instrument samples and see what we could do to shrink things down so it could

fit on that super tiny memory space, but still not lose that audio integrity. So you had a really rich instrument set, which helped set the product apart and that was an instrument set designed for the LeapPad learning system which was LeapFrog's first huge blockbuster success and that helped in my opinion obviously because I helped create the great sounds but that helped differentiate it from all the other electronic toys at the time because it had a really rich instrument set that they used to increase the quality of the content, which helped connect better with the children that were using it. And they were using these games and playing these Simon Says things in a great interactive

fashion to learn how to read, to learn how to do math, and to just ingest all this information from the LeapPad learning system. And that was how I got on board with LeapFrog. And then you and I connected there as you were brought on to continue the success and continue some of the development that was taking place over at LeapFrog. Well, LeapPad was the flagship product. It was so cool. You put in a book, you put in a cartridge, and then you touched different places on the book page, and it would give you sounds you could sound out things you touch the t and the h and the e and it would thaw and then you you had hundreds of cartridges

and books so this instrument library you built supported not just one toy, but lots of them. Absolutely right. If you can think about anything scalable and having a lot of legs and momentum, that was one of those core things that we were able to, because of the way it was structured and built, you just pick it up, move the samples and move the audio tables that described what all the samples were, what their bass pitch was, how far they could be pitch shifted, and how you could build an instrument with that, and drop it right into a twist and shout toy, or drop it right into my first lead pad toy,

or drop it into the Odyssey Explorer toy. And a lot of the work had already been done in 98 and 99, and there was much less to do, and it maintained the rich instrument set. And a lot of the work had already been done in 98 and 99, and there was much less to do, and it maintained the rich instrument set. And once again, again, I feel it was a differentiator in the marketplace because it didn't feel like a cheap toy. The sound was great. The music was great. And that matters when parents are making a buying decision over what toys their kids should and should not play with or what they want to put in front of their children. And when you get this group of engineers together who are dedicated to a great experience, the product arguably sells itself at that point. Because the parents in the big box toy store with one toy on the left and one toy on the right.

Toy on the left is really crappy sound and the music is horrible and it's annoying. And this other toy from LeapFrog sounds great. The audio is clear and the content is sound. Easy decision for them to buy it. And that certainly helped contribute to LeapFrog's success and our mutual success while we were there. It was a real privilege to be there during those times. Were you there when they, well, one of the stories that I heard while I was there was that some other major

name brand toy manufacturer that I will not name would have educational toys and put up to the letter F because that's what all that would fit on the toy. And LeapFrog sort of changed things by, you know, adding the other letters because, you know, adding the other letters because, you know, we don't spell everything A through F. I mean, why do you stop A through F? Six, seven letters in is beyond me. Well, then it looks like it has letters. It looks educational. It isn't, but that's a different

story. Right. But again, that was the opportunity LeapFrog had in the market to make a statement and do everything that parents were asking for. Not to do a cheap toy that only did a quarter or a fifth of the alphabet, but to deliver a rich and educational experience. And the reward for us as engineers, while we were working on these products, many times the executive team would share the letters and the notes that they would receive from parents and grandparents. And these letters said, you know, I've never written

a letter like this before, but I bought your toy. I put it in front of my child and there's been a breakthrough. And I'm so happy because of it. And I'm so happy you're creating these toys, but these life-changing products. And that was just a great time to have that goosebump experience knowing that the code that we wrote and the long hours that we worked actually made a difference in the world, which was pretty cool. I had actual direct experience. I mean, I had gone up to watch my toys being played with with kids in the lab and see all of that, and it was neat. But at some point, my manager gave me some half-time off where I would go and volunteer

at a local kindergarten and help them learn how to write, because that was what my toy was going to do. And so I would spend an hour, a couple hours a week in the kindergarten. And then I would spend another couple of my own hours. It was one of these sort of work things. And I would bring my old toys because I had them and I wanted to see what kids thought of them. And they loved them. And that was so wonderful. But what was more amazing was the young boy who was well behind his kindergarten compatriots, who didn't know the alphabet already. And I guess that's sort of a prereq now. And he took home my karaoke, the most annoying of the toys I have ever built. It was so, oh, that was such an annoying toy.

But a weekend, a weekend, and he knew all his letters. And by the next week, he could recognize the letters and the sounds, and it was all because of this stupid karaoke which connected with his brain. That was how he wanted to learn. And suddenly he wasn't behind me anymore. It was, man, that was such a great job for that part. Absolutely. But you left. I think you might have left after I did, so that isn't really fair, but you left

to not continue. Well, here's how the story goes. so it was a i spent seven years at leap frog from uh november 98 until may 2005 um i guess i remember it because i always see it on my linkedin profile anyway during that tenure there leapfrog went public right around 2001 2002 pretty much at the crater absolute bottom of the tech crash and the tech collapse, little old LeapFrog comes along and they actually make money. They're not like Pets.com who are trying to make a penny off dog food bags. They actually are selling millions of toys. In fact, tens of millions of toys in the market. And the beauty with the

LeapPad learning System was it was the razor blade model. You sell the plastic unit at or a little bit above cost, but you sell the books and cartridges that are licensed and have margin in them. And so you sell one LeapPad Learning System, but you sell eight books with it and all the margin is in the books so leapfrog was a wall street darling when they went public public at like 13 closed maybe around 15 or 16 on the first day and then went on a nice five i remember i remember selling around 45 and saying oh my god i'm buying a car with this absolutely so and that took a couple of years like like two years, I believe. Maybe from 01, they IPO'd and sometime around summer of 2003, likely hit that all-time 52-week high or all-time high at this point of 45 bucks

or 46 bucks. But that was the day before earnings came out and earnings or the day of earnings and earnings came out and the CEO said, well, unfortunately, we're selling fewer of these units. We're selling fewer books per LeapPad, blah, blah, blah. And Wall Street said, 15% haircut. We've got some concerns. And over time, from 03 to 04, that was the steady disappointment from the quarterly earnings report was sales were slowing, fewer books were being sold, and Leapfrog was kind of like apple of the 80s they were had a huge hit with the apple too but then there was nothing else there was no follow-on product there were all these derivatives of the leap pad and there was an odyssey globe that was reinvented from a couple of years earlier mine yeah but there was just no follow-on product so just as quickly as leapfrog was a wall street darling, LeapFrog became a Wall Street

goat. Nevertheless, for those who were in the IPO and who were thinking about buying a car, all these new questions come up. Hey, I've got these options. I've got ISOs. How are they different from non-qualified options or ISOs or incentive stock options? What about the employee stock purchase plan? What's this thing called alternative minimum tax? What do you mean

I can't exercise my incentive stock options, hold them, but I haven't sold them, but I still owe tax on it? What's that all about? And so that was that moment where those of us at LeapFrog would start getting cold calls from brokers, people in Wall Street saying, hey, congratulations on the IPO. Doing really well. I would love to have the chance to have dinner with you, have lunch with you, and let's talk about your wealth management needs. And I'm sitting there. I'm that skeptical engineer. It's like, okay, I know what's going on here. I'm a sheep being led to slaughter or to get sheared. I'm not going to do that. So, let me

figure out what I can learn about these options, about my taxes, about alternative minimum tax. And pretty soon as I was learning that, I was sharing it with my colleagues at LeapFrog. And that was that aha moment for me of, wow, I actually enjoy reading a lot of this legalese and IRS documentation and then communicating it in a clear and effective way to my colleagues. And everybody gets a benefit. I kind of enjoy reading this. And at the time, my wife, who was that girl I dated back when I got the cold call to go into LeapFrog, we got married in 2000. Two years later, she left California to go live full-time in Baltimore to go to med school. Meanwhile, I was still back at LeapFrog, which was that deal. I would work at LeapFrog.

The company was doing well at the time, and I would help pay for her med school expenses so she didn't have to take on piles and piles of debt. And the compromise was I just have to fly across country every two weeks. I'd set up my home office in Baltimore for two weeks, and then I would go back to California and do that for two weeks. And that started to grind on me. I didn't like it all that much. Obviously, right? So in 2004, I thought about what's my next phase going to be? And again, this was as LeapFrog stock price was coming down from 45, going to 35, to 30, to 25, to 22. And it's like, whoa, is there a future at LeapFrog? And is there a future for me personally in the embedded systems market?

I guess we had all become experts in bit packing and 8-bit microprocessors and 8-bit custom ASICs, running applications in 384 bytes of RAM, which might've been coming up in some of your prior podcasts because it's that magic number of how much application memory there was, which was none. Was there any need for all these cell phones that were exploding,

Palm Pilots and trios and handsprings that had a megabyte of RAM or five megabytes of RAM? So I thought, do I have a future in doing that? And I didn't quickly come to the realization of no, but I just didn't see continuing on for another 10 years, ever having been doing embedded software for 10 years. And I took that chance to say, look, I'm going to get more formal education in this financial stuff and see what I can do to create a portable career because this move to Baltimore is not the last move. If you know anything about medical education, people move around a lot. They go to med school,

then they move for residency, then they might move again for fellowship, and then they might move one last time for their real job, and that's their first job. So, that's four moves you got to talk about. So, I needed something that I could pick up, take with me and was portable. That's how I had this segue and transition in my career progression into financial services and financial planning. And so that's what you do now? It is what I used to do. And like any good entrepreneur, I suppose, and any good freelancer, you identify that there are gaps in any industry and you configure your business to fill those gaps. So, my first entry into financial services was getting connected with a company that's known as

a broker-dealer. And we'll touch on that a little bit later about the nuances of being a consumer in this crazy business that's financial services. So I got tied up with this broker-dealer, which a broker-dealer sells its own products and they sell securities. And as a broker, as a representative of that firm, you're going to earn a commission of what you sell. And I figured out pretty quickly, that was just not the environment I liked. I didn't like the pressure of putting food on my table by selling my clients products

and pushing products. I wanted to be the solution provider, not the product provider for my clients. I lasted all of nine months, but it coincided well with the graduation and matriculation of my wife from med school. And if you know med school, they have this match day in May of every, or March of every year, and you match into your residency program. You, as a med student, you rank the programs where you'd like to be a resident and the programs rank you. It all goes into a computer and out spits a match. So, you might match in a place in Baltimore or you might match all the way cross country

if you ranked something to consider cross country. And that's actually what happened to us. We matched into a residency program in Portland, Oregon. So, we packed everything up in the U-Haul, towed a car, five days cross-country to go to Portland. And when I landed there, I decided, you know, I've got the flexibility. I'm going to start my own business and I'm going to do it independently. I'm going to get registered with the state of Oregon. I'm going to be my own registered investment advisor or RIA. I'm going to run my business the way I want to and provide

the service and solutions that I want to, not be a product pusher. So I did that for two years in Oregon and found another independent firm that needed operations help. And that was another light bulb moment of, hey, look, this firm already exists. So I don't have to do a lot of the marketing and business building because they already have this client base that they serve. But they have this low-hanging fruit of inefficiencies that can be picked. Moving from paper-based tracking to electronic tracking. Moving away from manual entry of account information to electronic data scraping and reconciliation to automate that. These are things that I could see and provided some instant return on investment to that business where they could be more efficient, help more clients, do less data pushing, and

just have great smart workflow. And I figured, well, if I can do that in one business, I bet I can do that in a lot of businesses nationwide. And once again, it coincided with a move. My wife applied to a fellowship program in Dallas, Texas and was accepted. So, in the summer of 2009, we left Portland and moved to Dallas. That's when I started the business I have now. That's when I started fppad.com, which for listeners who have made it this far, FP is for financial planning. And the pad is a throwback to the LeapPad, which was the entry I had into this crazy market of financial services. And in retrospect, it's kind of a crappy name because I have to go through this explanation.

You have to explain it. What's FP Pad? Well, financial planning and LeapPad, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, it does not describe what I do. What I do today is I provide technology consulting to independent, primarily independent financial advisors so they can build an efficient business and they can help more people who want financial planning advice and do it in a cost-effective manner because the firm is able to control their overhead, control their operational costs, and that makes that planning and that advice accessible to more and more people. I'm passionate about that scale. I'm passionate about people being able to get the advice that they deserve, that they

need, that they desire. And in addition to the consulting, it's turned into this publication, these online videos, because these are scalable ways with my blog, with the website, with the YouTube channel to publish information about what's happening in technology for this industry that anyone can digest it and figure out, wow, Bill told me about this software solution and I need something like that. Then they go buy it. They test it for 30 days.

It's a winner for their firm. Their clients benefit. They may be able to reduce fees or take on more clients. And so that's kind of the universe of FPPad as a consulting business and a publication to people in financial services. But there's also applications for people outside financial services because I talk about ways to store documents online in the cloud safely and securely, how to be efficient with managing information.

And that's not particularly specific to financial services. I think anybody can benefit from that type of information. But that's how I got from the days of HP and LeapFrog through this crazy pathway with two cross-country moves and then two more intermediate moves across two time zones to get to where I am today, which I'm based in Atlanta, Georgia, if anybody's curious. I think it's funny you went into financial planning to help your colleague engineers who didn't necessarily want to read all of the financial planning and now you're into tech advising because the financial planning people probably don't want to read all about technology in its raw form and so it seems like it's a theme in your career to look around to the people your colleagues with and say, how can I help everybody do this thing that they don't want to do? Well, that's absolutely correct. Now, I think about my leapfrog days, the early days

before the IPO, if I wanted a financial plan, if I wanted financial advice, how would I go about doing that? I might go to one of these brokers where it's air quotes free, but it's not really free because that broker is going to put me into products. And when I buy that product, there's a commission that I pay. And that commission gets paid out to the broker. It gets paid out to the firm. It gets paid out to intermediaries. It gets paid out to a lot of people before that money hits, actually hits my account where I can track it hopefully once a quarter right and so leap to today and things are a lot different and now every advisor would love to have me as a client but what about the early days these advisors

didn't have an efficient way to deal with an emerging client who didn't have a lot of assets to bring to the table, but had this huge potential over 10 years of career development and work to turn into an ideal client. And that's the situation that we find ourselves today in this industry, is advisors still are spending, and arguably they should be, spending a lot of time servicing clients, but very little time on discovering the technology that helps them grow and scale their business. And they're not using necessarily all the technology available to provide some of these offerings that are scalable and low-cost to emerging clients, which might include you and me. It includes plenty of people that are listening to this broadcast. And so, we all have

to ask ourselves, well, who do I start with? And then, when I do become an ideal client, when I do gather some wealth, why do I want to do business with an advisor who three years ago didn't want to talk to me because I didn't have any money. That doesn't feel right. So again, I'm trying to empower advisors. Yes, it's important to have the face time with the clients that they have today, but I want to position them to have this efficient and scalable advice delivery model where it doesn't cost the advisor $10,000 to service a client in terms of overhead and staff, that they can reduce those costs. So even clients that might pay $900 a year or $750 a year, that should be very affordable for a very good, sound foundation of planning and advice. Okay, this is good.

This is really good. So say you were talking to me 10 years ago, or leapfrog time. I don't even want to think that that's 15 years ago. That's horrifying. But me before, I had a decent nest egg, where I'm out of college. I'm finally paid off my loans. I have money coming in, and I'm willing to save it. But right now, I'm just throwing it in S&P 500 funds

or my personally preferred socially conscious S&P 500 funds. But that's such a dork thing. Socially responsible. Yeah. Domini and whatnot has these funds that are kind of interesting, but that's specific advice. I'm looking more for what should I do at that stage of I have a little bit of money, I'm willing to save, but I don't know really what to do. Is throwing it into an index fund the right thing, or should I have talked to somebody at that point?

Well, at the risk of dispensing advice which you're not doing this is all opinion and is not direct advice to anybody this was all hypothetical what a wonderful disclaimer but here's the takeaway i believe the vast majority of the population and people who are listening to this are you're not going to shoot yourself in the foot by putting your money in a super low cost broadly diversified index fund or a fund that invests in the lots and lots in different places and is diversified and one of the leading providers of those types of vehicles is vanguard you're not going to go wrong by purchasing the broadly diversified, like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index. It basically puts all your money and spreads it

across everything. So you're not over-dependent on any one asset class like technology stocks or overly dependent on bonds, all this stuff. It gives you broadly diversified and the costs are super, super low. But there's a lot of variables outside of what to do with just your extra money. Do you have enough insurance coverage? If you or your husband or your significant other get injured, disabled, or God forbid something else happens, are you protected? Is your family protected? And what about the assets that you do have? Are you okay with probate?

Or do you need a trust or some type of vehicle to help with the distribution and settlement of your estate? And all these other things. Are you taking advantage of the tax opportunities that you have? We talked about these options that people were buying and selling. Are you just closing your eyes and pulling the trigger or are you doing it strategically with respect to taxes? And so, that's the thing about financial services, financial advice, investment advice, all of it gets grouped into this big thing that's, what do I do with my money in the stock market? Well, understand that

that's just one small slice of the pie, but it's a slice that gets so much attention because there's business news channels that talk about changes every minute and every second of the day. And let's face it, we're human beings. We love to look at shiny things and the tigers that's moving in the grass, right? That's what gets our attention. It's exciting and there's motion and it's a little bit like gambling. And that's why there's so much, it's not misdirected attention, but the industry realizes that most of us are human beings. And the industry creates this aura, this environment, and these fancy names to lead us to do exactly what the industry wants to do, which is buy product that's probably not appropriate for our personal

financial situation, that comes with a lot of commission, that gets paid out to all these intermediaries, and there's lacks of transparency of what these products actually are. We can go on and on, but this is how the subprime mortgage crisis transpired, is all these intermediaries figuring out how they can manipulate buyers and sellers for their own personal advantage. And we all know how that ended up. And a lot of us, you and me, got left holding the bag whether it was 50 paper losses in our investment portfolios and our stock holdings or the fact we couldn't refinance a house or the house was underwater all that actually i want to point out that christopher and i having a successful business long-term careers as engineers no problems on credit, could not qualify for a home loan.

We did eventually, we found something, but it was incredible to us. We could have paid off the house in cash. We just wanted the loan for tax reasons, really. And they said no. Because of all of the subprime mortgages that had happened, you couldn't just have essentially perfect credit, plenty of cash if you can fog a mirror, you got a loan. And you get 120% of your home value. You can cash out right away. And then after the subprime mortgage crisis and all that stuff washed out the drain, the pendulum is on the other side.

And even to this day, it's 2015 almost. It might be when this gets edited with how long we're going on about everything, right? It's 2015 and you and I and everybody else, you're bending over backwards, you're grabbing your ankles just to get a mortgage. It's ridiculous. So the pendulum is all the way over there. But again, this is the reaction of the industry in the market and there's some commentary there. And I'll shut up because I want to make sure that I focus on some of the questions that you have surrounding this and what listeners can do to actually navigate and make sense, which gets back to that question of, you know, consider us 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Well, I'll be gentle. 10 years ago at LeapFrog. You know,

if we know now or had the situation now today, what would we do? So, I'll turn it back over to you to figure out where you want to go with this conversation. Well, you mentioned the insurance and all the other stuff. I was shocked to find out how much a funeral costs, which I happily, I mean, happily it wasn't me or my husband. But we're of the age where parents or grandparents need more assistance. And a funeral costs about as much as a wedding. And I always have sticker shock when I look at weddings. And it was not something I had been saving for for because who wants to think about such things? And that's where insurance kind of gets lost in the shuffle because nobody, that's just money that goes out the door.

I'm not going to think about the bad thing that it represents if I ever get it back. So I definitely at that point was just throwing money into index funds. And then I did, you know, I did house insurance and car insurance, but the stuff that you kind of have to have. I didn't do life insurance. I still actually don't because now at this point, Chris would be fine without me except for he'd be sad. I wonder if he's going to listen to this.

Not to be entirely morbid, but... Put in some sad violin background music here. Yeah, if it has sad violin, email me so that I know. But how do you find this checklist of all these things that, okay, I finished college, I'm almost an adult, I'm ready to start thinking about life as a grown-up, what do I need? Is there like a checklist or a book? I would have not enough money to interest one of the real financial planners. Yeah, so I'll mention a book, and it's actually a pretty decent book it's been around a while

it's called get a financial life beth kobliner i hope i'm not butchering her last name she's out on twitter google her name she's books out on amazon it actually might be in multiple editions but it is just that playbook of get a financial life. You have your career set. You're making some money. And now you're thinking about setting some money aside. You're thinking about protecting yourself, your assets and your family and your significant others. And you're thinking about the future and planning for the future.

That'd be the first place I'd go. And Beth is not, she's not the celebrity like Susie Orman is or what's-his-face, the financial peace guy. Dave Ramsey, not like Tony Robbins. She's just a regular human being like the rest of us that asks the same question that you had is, now I've gotten to this stage of life, what's next? And she – so very good book. I actually still have it on my bookshelf because i think it was one of those books i bought when leapfrog ipo just like okay i guess i gotta grow up now i'm 22 and

i gotta came into some money and what do i do and i'm not gonna trust the cold caller from the big wire house or brokerage house who says hey i gotta help you out with your wealth management needs i'll take you out to lunch if you'll introduce me to your whole team. Oh, yeah. I mean, you see right through it. Exactly. But at the time, there were just very few resources. The internet and personal finance blogs just really had not come of age.

And so the interesting thing is today, you can get that book, Get a Financial Life, but you can hop onto popular personal finance blogs and read till the sun goes down about all sorts of random topics well that's my problem actually is i i don't find it that interesting and it's kind of like i really i want somebody else to do this because it's like mowing the lawn i'm i'm fine with cutting the roses i I enjoy doing that. And I enjoy engineering. But once money comes up, maybe it's because I grew up without enough. And it just makes me crazy. Talking about it is one way for Christopher is like, yeah, okay, if you want to talk about money, please talk to the bear. I'm leaving the room because you get all stressed and craggy oh and that book the the full title is even better get a financial life personal finance in your 20s and 30s and so yes i'm totally going to check out that book although i no longer qualify but all of this is this a title you mis-thing, misjudgment. But nevertheless, what do you and I do given the stage of life that we're in? And also, what you're, not what you're alluding to, what you're talking about is how emotional money is, not just for you and me, but for everybody listening to this. Oh, it's tainted.

All your, how you were raised and whether or not your family had money when you were raised, what the industry is discovering, here's a little tidbit, not very many people know about it, it's financial life scripts. So, what's the script of your life, the way you were raised, the way you were brought up, and then your career progression as you went through college and spent money and made money and how you prioritize things, those are all scripts that influence what you do today. So, when you talk about money, when money comes in or money gets tight because you got credit and all this stuff you got to pay and you had a slow month in freelancing, you get nervous, you get apprehensive, you start sweating and you can't speak straight. That is

because those money scripts influence how you react to money. And there's a movement in the industry to develop and mature what's known as financial life planning. So, here's the first tip for listeners is there's got to be a Google for financial life planning. There's a gentleman by the name of George Kinder, and he does an evoke training series, and he tries to teach advisors about life planning because it's more than just money. It's more than just money management. It's managing our lives, which falls into this behavior. And advisors need to be pseudo counselors and coaches. And they need to say, Alicia, I don't know if people know you as Elle. I know you as Elle. They say, Elle, tell me about how this makes you feel.

And tell me about the emotions about money. Don't tell me about the dollar amounts and all this stuff. Just tell me what you're feeling right now. And that advisor and that coach, that counselor has to have some training to interpret that and guide you into scenarios where you feel comfortable, you feel you're empowered to make prioritization of what you're going to do with money and how you're going to allocate your resources, what you're going to protect, what you're going to choose to indulge yourself on, because you got to celebrate sometimes. You can't just have a complete 100% deferred gratification and sock everything away to retirement, because the fact of the matter is you might never make it to retirement. That's the morbid side of things, but you should be able to enjoy equally throughout your entire life.

So one of those things, George Kinder, financial life planning, that's a decent place to start. But unfortunately, nationwide, you're not going to find too many advisors that have gone through this training. And so, then what? Then what do you do? Well, I would implore everyone to look for these independent registered investment advisors and those advisors who carry certain certifications. And one of those differentiators is the Certified Financial Planner Certification, or CFP. And the CFP board requires an education, an examination, an ethics requirement, and one more E. It's on the website, cfp.net, and they have a planner lookup.

But unfortunately, the planner lookup says, please put in your zip code and we'll find you an advisor in your area. Well, that worked 20 years ago when we didn't have Skype and iMessage and all these collaboration tools. So, another one of the sites out there that allows you to match with a planner who is independent is XY Planning Network. Just Google XY Planning Network, and they're going to skew to the Gen X, Gen Y generation, which I think both you and I fortunately still fall in the middle of, but not for long. But that's one that you don't have to search by zip code. Now you search by interest. Are you looking for an advisor who works with engineers? Are you looking for an

advisor who works with people who make money freelancing? All those topics. And that's what I'm really interested in. That's how I would love to find an advisor, based on what's important to me and based on my situation, not based on my zip code. That's the old thing where you used to drive in your car to go to the wood paneled office and get all impressed with what this advisor has. To me, that doesn't matter. I don't know if it matters to you or not. And I would suspect that it doesn't matter. But what matters is that advisor knows your business as a freelancer, your online presence, and what's important to you, not just, oh, we got to get you in these investment products and we're going to

make an extra two or 3% return and beat the market. For me, that's not what it's about. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you got to think about what you want from an advisor. And is it to try and out chase the market and be better than everybody in stock investing? Or is it to listen and digest your goals and think about how you're going to organize your money and allocate it to your priorities to make sure that you're going to meet those goals? That's always the hardest part when I meet, because now we do have a financial advisor and I go back and forth whether I think it's a good idea for this particular one. But the best part is when they say, what are your goals and how happy are you with where you are now?

And where do you want to be in five years, 10 years, 20 years? And it took them a long time to understand that when we retire, we don't really want to travel. All that money they're planning for us to have and spend, we're going to use on gear. And at the rate we're acquiring it now, we may not need as much gear as they think we need, but we do want enough buffer never to have to seriously worry about it when we retire in 20 30 i hope it's not 30 years well or if if you will ever retire you have a choice yeah i mean there's plenty of people who are 70 80 90 100 who are working every day because they don't want to be idle and what retirement is can mean so many different things.

To some extent, after working long hours at LeapFrog and other startups, I feel like I am retired. I do what I want most days. I get paid. But sometimes I don't work that hard. And sometimes I do. But it's more about what I want and not am I putting food on the table. I'm so blessed.

And that's the, yes, that's the gratification that you're able to enjoy today for trade-offs and all these prioritizations. I just tell you straight out, if you got the goofy feeling in your stomach that the advisor is just not connecting with you, there are a lot more advisors out there. Don't be afraid to keep going around until you find the next one don't absolutely money is hard i mean it tax tax crap and it's just a pain in the ass to switch it's a pain in the ass to switch accountants or tax people or web services providers. I agree. I hear what you're saying.

However, there are transfers you can make from custodian to custodian that do not require outright sales or liquidations of what you have. It's an ACAT transfer and it's automated and all the custodians and everywhere where you can hold money, most of them honor it. However, if any listeners have really exotic stuff that's not at all the major custodians or it's really esoteric. The offshore accounts. You're going to have to sell penalty because you just move the asset from one account to another account with a new custodian or a new broker. No selling required. It's just an automated account transfer, an ACAT in the industry. But then you don't have to worry about

the tax thing. But I absolutely agree. But make the investment of a short-term disruption for 20 years of a relationship with an advisor that you and your husband get along with and you feel that that person gets you and their support staff gets you. Life is too short to work with an advisor with whom you're not comfortable. So, anyone who's listening to that, take that as motivation of, you know what, Bill's right. I just don't get that great warm and fuzzy feeling with my advisor. I'm going to make 2015, the first quarter,

the time I make that move. But then where are you going to move to? And I'm jumping ahead, but if you're interested in that, let me know if that's the direction you want to go. Well, you did suggest we look at tfp.net and XY Planning Networks. So that's one place to start. Where else would you suggest?

I'll give two more resources. Another network of independent advisors who are not working for brokers. They're not product pushers. One of those is the Garrett Planning Network. I think it's G-A-R-R-E-T-T. Cheryl Garrett founded this network about 15 years ago, and it's a network of independent advisors, most of whom work by hourly fees. So they're not even charging you a percent on your assets.

They're just charging you for planning. They're charging you for advice and doing it kind of in an a la carte fashion or perhaps a low-cost retainer option. Now, that separates the fees from the size of your assets. And for the consumer, it's a pretty attractive model because if you got, hypothetically speaking, $500,000 and I have a million dollars, well, am I getting twice as much value? If I'm paying a percent on that? So I'm paying 10 grand a year. You're paying five grand a year. Am I getting twice as much value from my advisor

than you are for paying twice as much? I don't know. I don't know the answer. But if we use one of these Garrett planners and each of us paid $2,500 a year for planning, we're both getting basically everything that we want. And we probably have the same mutual funds or similar asset allocation or something because we're still young and we're still many years from retirement. And there's no penalty for me by just having more money. So that's another network that's really worth investigating. And then the last network is a professional organization called NAPFA, N-A-P-F-A. I think their website is napfa.org. It's the National Association of NAP Personal Financial Advisors.

And they're also a professional organization of fee only. And this gets into this whole crazy thing of, well, what's a fee only advisor? What's a fee based advisor? And everybody who's not those is usually a commission based advisor, but they're dedicated to charging only fees, either an asset based fee, a percentage of your assets or hourly or retainer fees. But that advisor being fee only does not earn commissions. So there's no incentive to push a product. There's no incentive to sell one thing versus the other

because the advisor gets paid a little bit more. So from the conflict, the reduction of conflict, the fee-only model should be desirable for anyone who's listening to this podcast. And there's a lot more to discuss about the specific nuances of all the fees and stuff. But that's basically the language that you're looking for. And anyone from these networks, NAPFA, Garrett, XY Planning, I got to take a step back on CFP board. But the first three,

your advisors are acting as fiduciaries. And that's a legal requirement that the advisor needs to put the client's interest ahead of the advisor's. That's good. But people do weird things with money, and not everybody acts in the best interest of clients, especially when money is involved. When a free trip is involved and an advisor might go to Hawaii for free and sell some products, that might influence what they do. And the legal requirement's a crappy way to market of, hey, Elle, you should work with me because I'm legally obligated to act in your best interest. Well, gee whiz, I hope you always act in my best interest,

whether you're required legally or not. So the fiduciary thing just kind of is a crappy marketing angle. But if you ever felt slighted and you felt cheated, you can go to court and say, hey, judge, this advisor did not meet his or her fiduciary obligation. And if you can prove it in court, then you've got a case and you can win. But who wants to go through that? Who wants to bother with all that?

Exactly. So why do people say, oh, you should work with me because I'm a fiduciary advisor and I'm required legally to put your interests ahead of mine? Who cares? I want everybody to put your interests ahead of mine. Who cares? I want everybody to put their interests ahead of mine. So it's incumbent upon the consumer, anyone who's listening, find out how your advisor's registered. Find out what the regulations are. Because I alluded to these brokers calling me when LeapFrog IPO'd. Look at their standard. If they're registered with FINRA or the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, F-I-N-R-A, FINRA, their

standard is just suitability. The stuff they recommend that you buy only needs to be suitable for you. There's none of this best interest stuff. There's none of this low cost stuff. It just needs to be suitable given what the broker knows about you. And that's it. Pretty broad definition, given they were calling you cold calling, they didn't know much about you, which makes suitability even easier. Bingo. Other than I came into money because a company IPO'd. And so they're going to put me in their managed account platform. It's going to be beating the market by X and all these promises and proprietary research and blah, blah, blah. And I'm going to pay 1.75% for the privilege? No way. When I have an option to go to low-cost index funds that charge 0.1%, I'm saving 1.6% every year in my

pocket. That's stuff that I can control, but let's not lose sight of I'm not getting my insurance advice. I'm not getting my asset advice. I'm not getting my asset advice. I'm not getting all this other stuff. That is very valuable. And I'm not getting business advice. I'm not getting tax advice on taking advantage of tax opportunities. That stuff is valuable. You should be willing to pay for it, but you should be receiving value for it. Rather than just blindly paying 1% to an asset manager and not getting much else other than a portfolio management and maybe some rebalancing, that's a lot to pay for that stuff. And thankfully today, there are a lot more options. Advisors are getting efficient with their business because

they're watching my shows, they're reading my content, they're figuring out how to decrease their overhead and scale their operations. That's, again, coming full circle. That's what I want advisors to do because you need to have the confidence that you find somebody that gets you, that you feel understands you, and steps up with some great technology because you can't go into a firm and be presented with this paperweight of 60 pages of a plan and say, oh, this is what we put together for you. Come on, my time's too valuable. I don't want to read all that crap.

Bingo. And you don't want to wait every three months for a statement of your portfolio when you're like, I could just open up my iPhone or my Android phone and open an app and I can see all my accounts. What do you mean if I go to work with an advisor that I can't do that? So, an advisor needs to step up to table stakes today of providing this digital interactivity experience. And many advisors have had a pretty easy time in the last decade of not investing in technology, not creating this delightful digital experience and collecting a lot of money. And now the industry, other solutions have come along. We might mention some of these. Other solutions, other solutions.

Brobo Advisors, are we there yet? Are we there yet? We are. We're at these online investment solutions they come in and say look you don't need to pay one percent for portfolio management and rebalancing pay us one quarter of that pay us 0.25 percent a year and we will run automated investment management for you no advisor required which realistically most of the times I've talked to advisors, they are just putting all your numbers into an Excel sheet or something prettier than that. But they aren't considering it. They're just running that 60-page report is generated by a robot, except it's not a robo-advisor.

You still have to pay the guy to push the button. Yep. Their operations staff, their back office, that's that overhead robo-advisor. You still have to pay the guy to push the button. Yep. Their operations staff, their back office, that's that overhead that we're talking about. Yeah, so if an advisor, their value proposition is only, hey, we do investment management and we rebalance for you.

And for that privilege, we charge 1%, which is 100 basis points. But robo-advisors come along and say, we basically do the same thing and we charge just 25 basis points or 35 basis points so clearly 66 off the price or even 75 cheaper they're able to do almost equivalent services so that's a good segue into the where the state of the industry is so you are a fan of robo-advisors. And why can't I just program one up for myself?

You can. You can. There's a bit of access though, right? Yeah. So I like online investment providers, online investment services, although I might have been attributed to originating the robo-advisor term or popularizing it a couple of years ago, but whatever. Look it up on Google and find out the history of that. But this came about because Wealthfront came along.

They used to be a company called KaChing, which was a Facebook game to figure out which investment managers were beating the stock market and running sophisticated strategies and then opening up access to those investment strategies through the Facebook-Kachin interface. They pivoted, got away from the Facebook model, and tried to fill the gap, which is this gap of, I don't want to pay 1% for asset management. It shouldn't cost that much. And Wealthfront comes along and says, we're going to be the next generation financial advisor. If you look at the internet way back machine, December of 2010, December of 2011, you'll

see their page and it says, we are going to be the next generation financial advisor. And that's when I kind of said, well, you're calling yourself an advisor. So you're nothing more than a robo advisor. And that's the origin of that you know internet wayback machine it's out there um and they come along and we're going to do all the asset management we're going to do daily rebalancing and we're going to do it for 0.25 percent or 0.35 percent whatever their fee schedule was back then but the the misnomer was they called it advice they called it a financial advisor advisor. And that's not what it is.

It is automated investment management. You, as a consumer, you say, I'm 36, I'm married, I make this much a year, and this is my risk tolerance because I really don't want to lose more than 20% in any down stock market because that would make me nervous and I would sell. And just with those questions, Wealthfront and Betterment and Future Advisor and the other similar platforms, their algorithm spits out an asset allocation and then the little button that says, okay, fund it. And with Wealthfront, with Betterment, you move a bunch of cash into it and then they buy and sell the securities. They re fund it. And with Wealthfront, with Betterment, you move a bunch of cash into it and then they buy and sell the securities. They rebalance it. If you have more than $50,000 in your account, they rebalance it every day for free. And what they've figured out is how to allocate all these accounts and all these holdings and trade them in blocks and keep the commission

super, super low, where basically as a consumer, you're not paying fees to trade. If you worked with a traditional advisor and they custody you with Charles Schwab or TD Ameritrade or Pershing or Fidelity, some cases when you buy and sell mutual funds, it costs you 50 bucks. Or if you buy and sell an exchange traded fund or a stock, it might cost you $9 or $15 or whatever it is. And there's some funds and stocks you can buy at no transaction fee, but that's besides the point. Basically, Wealthfront and Betterment and Future Advisor, they'll buy anything in their platform, and they don't charge you a commission. All they charge is that 25 basis points or that 35 basis points.

But now they've kind of wised up. If you look at Wealthfront, you look at Betterment, they don't call themselves advisors anymore. They're only giving investment management. So they're just handling that little slice of the pie that I talked about a half hour ago that totally discounts tax management. And we're not talking about tax efficient investing. We're talking about you just sold a boatload of options. Capital gains. Capital gains, short-term versus long-term. Yeah, you just sold a boatload of options. You have to pay alternative minimum tax, or you could do charitable giving, or you could donate highly appreciated stock to get that out

of your estate and give you some tax advantages. They don't do any of that stuff. And if you call them up and say, I just came into a bunch of money, what should I do with it? Are they going to ask you about your emergency savings? Are they going to ask you about your high interest and low interest debt? Are they going to ask you about how much insurance coverage you have? I believe the answer today is no. Their answer is put your money into a broadly diversified asset allocation and we'll charge you 25 basis points for it. And that's rinse, lather, repeat. That's all you're going to get from them until they wise up and figure out a way to maybe enhance their platform to offer advice.

And that's kind of the scary future of thinking about, because these companies, Wealthfront, Betterment, LearnVest, and Future Advisor and Company, they've raised well over $250 million in venture capital, a quarter of a billion dollars. And that is a ton of money in the kitty that they can start putting into really smart algorithms and scary smart planning algorithms, basically an IBM Watson for financial planning.

If that happens, not if, when that happens, now the advisor who talks about insurance and tax planning and estate management, now their value proposition is in serious trouble, especially if they want to charge 1% for it. Because now you've got IBM, Watson, artificial intelligence that can do it at scale and for very little cost. I don't know if that's the direction of these companies. I actually am in favor of that

because a computer can be programmed just to give me back of the envelope priorities. Hey, Bill, you're 36, you're married, you got a five-year-old. You really need to have this much insurance. And we've analyzed your numbers and this is really what you can do, the basics to save on taxes. And you really ought to get a trust because you've got some complicated assets with your three businesses and stuff like that. But then the advisor steps in and says, Bill, tell me what you really feel. And then the advisor helps reprioritize things.

That's something that the algorithms can't do. But the algorithms can feed the advisor the basic priorities and then use empathy and their intellect and their intuition and their judgment to create something that I'm comfortable with. And from the advisor's perspective, it's scalable. The algorithm is always running every day. It sees cash flow in and out of my accounts. It sees when I get a bonus and it triggers my advisor to say, hey, Bill, congratulations. I saw a bonus. What would you like to do? Would you like to sit on it? Would you like to invest it? Would you like

to split it up? That's the conversation that an algorithm can't have. But the algorithm tells the advisor, talk to Bill. We saw this anomaly in this event while you were sleeping. Because the algorithm works 24 hours a day. And that's, I think, the wave of where this is going in the future. It's not here today. So, if you're looking for low-cost, streamlined investment advice and nothing else, certainly those online investment services are worth looking at. But don't fool yourself into thinking that that's a financial plan. It's not. You need to have all these other aspects taken care of. And that gets you into a human being with the judgment ability, the empathy.

And then you have to decide how much you're willing to pay for that. And with XY Planning, with Garrett Planning Network, with NAPFA and CFP.net, you now have some resources. You can look for people and call them up, read their websites, although you might not be very impressed by what you find on most of these advisor websites, but those who dedicate and do a good job of communicating what it is they do and how much they charge for it, then you're off on a good path to figuring out who you want to work with, especially if you're a delegator, just like you are, Al. I want to make sure that I can trust somebody and that they're looking out for me, but I just

don't want to be caught up in the day-to-day minutiae. I just want to know that things are being taken care of. And that's why advisors are not going to become obsolete. There's plenty of people like you and me that I'd much rather be making my videos and creating my content and helping other businesses. I don't want to be rebalancing my portfolio. Boring. So, you know, it's finding that advisor that you trust, that gets you and charges a reasonable amount and provides value for that service. Okay.

Very cool. And I'm going to change subjects because I think we've covered that. And I want to go on what you just said, actually. You have a video show and an extensive blog. You mentioned at the top of the hour when we started talking that you're doing advice for financial planners. But I found what you were saying to be very reasonable. I mean, it wasn't like reading, you know, The Motley Fool or whatever, The Fool's Guide, which sometimes I get bored and wander off to Acute Overload.

But, so you have this video, and I watch that sometimes. I don't like videos very often, so that's seldom. But I almost always read your blog now but when I do watch your video there's a chicken yes what's with the chicken I know we shouldn't start with what's with the chicken we should start with you have a video show bill that's wonderful what is it about yes Then we should get to what's with the chicken. There we go. So, my video show was the idea I had last year in the summer of 2013. I was doing a popular weekly recap that I call the FPPad Bits and Bytes, which I collected all I could about

technology news that was useful in financial services. And I picked the top stories that I felt were most applicable to advisors, businesses, and people in financial services. And I would write some commentary about those. And week after week, that gained in audience and people appreciated the roundup. And I thought, what better way to choose something and add a technology element and embrace some of this new media and new ways of communicating than taking that what was a written update and let's turn it into video. And also at the time, I was speaking at a number of industry conferences. So, I would get on a plane, fly to a conference and do my 55-minute appearance, stay in a hotel, hit on a plane, get back home, and that takes two or three days out of my life away from my wife and son. So,

I'm looking for a way to scale myself. I am still a sole proprietor of FPPad six, seven years in. So, all the stuff that you see, I do. I don't even have a full-time or even part-time virtual assistant. And so, I thought, what better way to kind of allow me to decrease this time I spend on the road, yet not lose that appearance and not lose that face time or that brand awareness of what I do and how I add value in this industry. let me do that in a video fashion. I'll upload videos out to YouTube. There's no cost. Everybody can watch YouTube videos. And then they get all the same content, but they see that I'm passionate about it. I'm adding my flair of commentary. And I only cover the stuff that matters to these advisors. So I launched

FPPad Bits and Bytes in the summer of 2013. It's now, I've done 46 or 47 episodes in the last year. I try to do it weekly, but that work-life balance comes into play where I take vacation and I take weeks off. But still, advisors really appreciate, and I like it, they should not be wasting their time reading magazines, scouring blogs, and reading all this web stuff. They need to be spending time with clients. They need to be making investments in their business. But how do they do that? Well, they do that by watching my five-minute podcast. They get the top three or four stories that matter or that I feel matters to their business, and then get on with managing their business.

You know, and take some action and say, wow, what Bill said about this software, that fills a gap in my business. Let me go and buy it. And that gives me scale. Thousands of advisors watch it, but then I'm not spending two, three days on the road every week at a conference doing the face-to-face presentation. I'm able to set up a studio in my basement and create pretty high-quality stuff using green screen, lights, cameras, stuff I bought off Amazon. But I believe, and this goes back to the engineering and the audio engineering that I did back in school almost 15 years ago,

I'm using the video production, I'm using the audio production and the editing and the post-production, which is fun. I thought I had to hang that hat up, but now I'm able to use that skill that I had from way back but provide value to the advisor community. That's what this show is all about. But how do you make money on it? So I have curated an audience of advisors who are interested in technology. So I make money by providing impressions and sponsorships for my shows. So I start my show. I do the teaser of what I'm going to cover, do my music intro, and then I get 30 seconds.

Today's show is brought to you by X Company. X Company will help you solve this problem to go get a free trial or download a white paper or whatever the call to action is. Go visit company X. Now on to this week's top stories. So I try to do a very arm's length thing, but that sponsor, again, remember advisors, they've had their heads buried in their business. They're not looking for tech solutions. So how do these vendors even let advisors know they exist and they have a solution? This is one way, one small way that I can offer value and exposure to the sponsor. But then the advisor, they don't have to pay for this content. There's no membership fee

for FBPAD. They can watch it on their iPhone and connect via iTunes whenever they want and get valuable information for their business at no charge. But that's because I monetize it on the sponsorship angle. And when I'm on the road speaking at conferences, I make a little money for my appearance fees out there. And then I do consulting with firms and with vendors in the space. I make money there. And I produce a conference for some of these enterprises in

financial services. So it's actually a two-day physical conference, if you can believe it in this day and age. But there's a lot of value in getting the right decision makers in the same place for 48 hours. And I earn a little bit of profit share off those conferences as well. So like any good advisor or like any good investor, you diversify, right? So you have multiple lines of revenue so that if one dries up, I'm not up the creek. I've got all these other activities going on. And that's a blessing and a curse because it seems like the video show is taken off, the blog is popular, the speaking, I keep getting requests, and lots of people want to consult.

And it's like, I've got to stop some of these things so that I can just take a break. That's the business of FPPad. And it can be feast and famine. You know, everybody wants to talk to you for three months and then they're all off doing something and it's too quiet for a little while. And then you take that time to recharge and find new stuff to talk about and then you're off again and it's just crazy. Yeah, and let's not forget if the market dropped 50%

in the next couple of months, do you think that vendors, advisors, and my clients are going to have disposable revenue to spend on a consultant? No, they're going to have a problem paying their own salaries and paying their staff salaries because of the huge haircut.

Because remember, they're charging on assets under management primarily that their clients have. And when the client assets drop 50% or 40%, the revenue to the business drops 40%. How would you like it if your revenue dropped? You're not going to hire a consultant, all that stuff. So it's cyclical.

It's tied to the economy. But nevertheless, some of that diversification in my business of FBPAD helps even that stuff out. So how about the chicken? Well, at this conference, this one vendor says, look, we've invented this new technology. It's time for advisors to put an end to the chicken dinner seminar. Nobody wants to go to a chicken dinner seminar and hear about the advisor, talk about how great he or she is. So he opens this pot. He pulls out this live chicken.

Never seen it before at a financial services conference. Pulls it out. Says, you got to put an end to this. Then he's got somebody, one of his employees, dressed in a chicken costume. Runs up from the back. Grabs the chicken. The chicken's flying all over the place.

The guy runs out. Boy, he made an impression for sure that it's time to put an end to these chicken dinner seminars and try to get a new technique, a new way to get consumers interested in financial planning and the benefits that they can have from scalable, low-cost access to financial planning. And that was the method that they chose to introduce that product, which I've never seen before. And now you have a chicken on your show.

I do, among other crazy things, including a pirate costume that I wore for last Halloween. So, I mean, that's the thing. When I do that, I could sit in my chair and say, I'm Bill Winterberg. Thanks for watching this recap. Story number one, story number two, story number three, I'll see you next week. What up? Who's going to watch that? But when I get up and I put on a pirate thing and I said, are you listening to what I have to say?

There's this opportunity to grow your business and help more clients. And you're going to tell me through this camera that you're not going to do anything about it. And people hear that passion. They see that passion. It's way different than reading text on a blog page. And that was the idea of adding personality. And now when I go to conferences, people come up, hey, Bill, man, I feel like I already know you. And that's the power of the new media. That's the power of these sites now, is people can watch a couple of my shows and

they feel like they're generating a relationship with me. That, I think, is applicable to any freelancer. Whether you're a debugger, a code designer, a firmware engineer, you start putting portfolios out there and talking about how passionate you are about building products that make a difference in today's world, you're probably going to get discovered. Someone's going to share your video. Someone's going to share the Logical Elegance podcast. And it's feast all over again because they are doing their due diligence about you.

And they're like, oh, she has it together. And she's worked on these projects and we have this gap and how would I not hire her and her team and her group and whatever? That's the new wave of putting yourself out there, putting your portfolio and being relatable. But I'll be the first to admit, it's taken me years to get to this point and not everybody can just hold a camera or an iPhone in front of their face and nail it. You're just not going to do it. Take practice, get trained, do a bunch of fake videos on your own and just share them privately with friends and family. Get a coach to look at them and work on those things so that your passion really comes through. That's another

thing that these online advice providers totally don't have. Yeah, they're trying to disintermediate and revolutionize the financial services industry, but what they don't know is they're actually devaluing the advisor, which I've just spent 30 minutes talking about how important it is to have somebody that gets you and can make judgment calls. But yet they're choosing to market their business completely on technology alone and algorithms alone and completely removing the advisor from the equation. Yes, yes. And I think that you are right. And I think that we are about out of time which is sad because i think i have more

questions but maybe we'll talk again i think a part two if you're up for it and i'm up for it and if you're listening email l email me i'm bill at fppad.com and say man i'd love to have you back on submit your questions whatever we i mean this is, man. We can do whatever we want, right? But if we've got demand and you're listening right now and you made it this far, thank you so much. That's a lot to listen to. But you made it this far, let us know. I mean, because we do this for your benefit. Al talks about all sorts of stuff for your benefit. And I hope that you've learned something about navigating this crazy market of financial services because guess what? The odds are against you.

The deck is stacked against you. It's made complicated. So it's hard even for smart engineers to navigate this thing. And you just want to throw up your hands and like, forget it. I quit. But I want to help you feel that you're empowered and can navigate this and really get the help that you're looking for. Because in this day day and age it should not be that hard bill at fbpad.com email l look up the logical elegance website and then l i'll let you i'll let you close it out thank you so much

for chatting with me bill it's been a while since we've talked but i really enjoyed this it's been a pleasure thank you so much for having me. And again, I look forward to the opportunity to be on once again. My guest has been Bill Winterberg, certified financial planner, founder of fppad.com, a technology consulting firm to financial advisors and publisher of FPP's Bits and Bytes, a weekly video broadcast covering technology for financial advisors and for curious engineers. Subscribe to FPPad newsletter at fppad.com slash subscribe, or check it out in the iTunes podcast section. Search FPPad on iTunes. Thank you also to Christopher White for producing. He'll be back next week, I suspect,

once he's over his cold. And thank you all for listening. If you'd like to say hello, you heard Bill's email and our show email address is the same, show at embedded.fm or hit that contact link on embedded.fm. If you want to talk to me about business stuff, it is best to hit the contact link on Logical Elegance or email info at Logical Elegance. But if you just want to chat about the show, you know, embedded.fm is the way. I do have a final thought for you this week. And it is from, let's see. Henry Ford. It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system. For if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.