More Money Podcast - 017 The Road to Financial Success - Preet Banerjee, Author/TV Personality

Episode Date: September 9, 2015

Personal finance author (Stop Over-thinking Your Money!) and TV personality Preet Banerjee and I talk about his journey from race car driver to leading Canadian financial expert. Long episode description: Can I just start off with saying how amazing Preet sounds on my podcast? He puts my “radio voice” to shame! I should have known, he is a podcaster and TV personality after all. I’ve got to say, this is probably one of my favourite podcast episodes (not to bash any of the episodes I’ve done up until this point, they are all amazing too!). Preet is such a cool, genuine guy and it was so nice to hear his story. I mean, how many people do you know who went to school to be a brain surgeon, then pursued a career in race car driving and ended up becoming a well-known financial expert on TV? I guess never having a 5-year plan might be the way to go? Before I get to the important links and book giveaway, I’ve got to hang my head in shame because I still haven’t crossed off 1) get a will and 2) get life and disability insurance off my list. To be fair, I almost did. I made an appointment with a lawyer to get a will done, but had to cancel and just haven’t rescheduled it. But I will get both of these things done before Christmas, mark my words Preet! And you better too…I’m talking to you blog readers and podcast listeners! Important Links Preet Mentioned Preet’s first book, RRSPs: The Definitive Book on Registered Retirement Savings Plans His personal finance blog: Where Does All My Money Go His big break in the National Post: “New Breed of Advisors Shun Mutual Funds” Preet’s podcast that he seriously needs to start up again: Mostly Money, Mostly Canadian Preet’s new book: Stop Over-thinking Your Money! Shownotes: jessicamoorhouse.com/17 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to Episode 17 of Mo Money Mo Houses, the personal finance podcast with the dash of sass. I'm your host, Jessica Morehouse, and today I'm very excited. My guest is pretty well known in the personal finance sphere. You probably already know his name. Preet Banerjee is joining me on the program today. And if you're not familiar with him, he has quite the resume, I must say. Not only is he a blogger and podcaster himself, but he also writes for the Globe and Mail, is a contributing editor for Money Sense, is a panelist of the CBC television host, the list goes on and on. So I'm very excited to talk to him about just kind of his journey. He is a kind of a crazy story from

where he started to where he is now. He's a speaker. He's a money expert. But he wasn't always an expert. Thank you so much, Preet, for joining me on the show today. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, wow. Thank you. Wow. So let's kind of start from the beginning. I want to know, I, you know, did a little research on you, but I couldn't find the dirt. So let's start like what happened, you know, from growing up to adulthood. What makes you assume there is dirt to be had? I don't know. There's got to be. You're a famous person, no? No, no. All right. So how far back do you want to go? Like, do you want to go to when I was just a glint in my father's eye? No, not that far. That's a bit too far for me. But did money influence, did you learn anything in childhood that kind of influenced you as you grew up about money and personal finance?

Nothing that stuck. So I remember I was my grade four class treasurer. And it was because my dad said, well, you should save 20% of whatever you earn. So just tell them that. So I went up and made my presentation. I said, you know, I'm going to be responsible and save 20% of what we earn. I had no idea what that actually meant in grade four. It's like, what's the percentage? I don't know. My dad told me to say this. Um, so I became the class treasurer, but again, that didn't stick cause it didn't mean anything to me. Uh, however, my first job was working at McDonald's. And after my very first paycheck, my dad marched me to the bank and said, you're going to set up an automatic contribution into a mutual fund. Oh my God.

And I had to pick the mutual fund. So again, I didn't know anything. I was, oh, geez, what was I, 15 at the time? So what I did was I looked in the newspaper, and back then, Jessica, they put mutual fund prices in the newspaper. Amazing. And there was like hundreds and hundreds of lines. So what did I do, knowing nothing? I decided to look at the one that had the best one-year performance,

and it was the Altamira Resource Fund, and it returned 108% for the last year. So I said, well, that looks pretty good. I'll just put all my money into that. So I did that, and I was saving regular, I forget what the exact dollar amount was, like 25 or 50 bucks every two weeks, something like that.

And it was accumulating, accumulating. And then in university, I took it all out to have a big party. So again, wasted. So that lesson didn't really stick. And what's interesting is that years later, I met the fund manager who managed that fund. Oh, wasted. So that lesson didn't really stick. And what's interesting is that years later, I met the fund manager who managed that fund. Oh, wow.

Yeah, because I worked as a stock investment advisor for a while. And every now and then, these fund managers come to the branches to say, here's why you should buy our funds and whatnot. And I met him. And so I thought that was kind of funny. Was that mutual? Sorry, did that mutual fund do well? Yeah, at one point, I calculated how much, had I kept on contributing into it, I would have had at that point it was something like, I don't know, like $35,000 or something like that.

But lesson learned, I guess. Yeah. Wow. Cool. So how did you then how if that didn't really influence you, how what did as you grew up? Is it just kind of like trial and error? You just kind of learned by making mistakes or how'd you get interested in that kind of world? Well, I guess I could put it back onto my father. So he gave me a number of books to read and I was gravitating towards books on personal finance and investing. So my dad says I had planned my retirement when I was like 12, but I didn't do anything. But I was really fascinated about,

you know, compound interest. And if you start really early, you'll accumulate a lot more money. But again, that didn't really stick. And my, well, my parents are Indian. And any good Indian child knows you grow up and you're going to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, and that's that. So that was sort of the plan was to follow in my dad's footsteps and go into the sciences. I didn't really know what path I was ultimately going to go down. So I guess I'll do this science stuff. And when I was in high school, one of my best friend's mothers was a nurse in the neuro ICU at Toronto Western General or Toronto General Hospital. And so she said, hey, listen, if you're interested, why don't you shadow the chief of neurosurgery for a day and see if that piques your interest? Well, it did because I was exposed to the coolest things.

Like I was in the room for what's called an awake craniotomy. Oh, my gosh. And what that is is while you're awake, they open up your head. And what they wanted to do was get to a tumor that was deep inside this person's brain. I still remember her name, but I can't tell you because of confidentialities. But it seems like so long ago, I still remember every detail of that day. And so what they did was you can't just, you know, burr a hole right, you know, in a straight line to where this tumor was.

You have to figure out the right path because you want to make sure you're not hitting anything critical. So one of the exercises they did was they took an electrode and was just sort of lightly brushing her brain, like her actual brain, and said, you know, count to 10 or name some animals. And she would say, you know, one, two, three, four, zoo. And so that would indicate, well, that might be a critical point. So maybe try somewhere else. So anyways, so that was the awake craniotomy.

She was awake the entire time. It was fascinating. And right at that time, so this was right as I was graduating high school, University of Toronto had one of the first programs, undergraduate degrees in neuroscience. So I decided, okay, well, that seemed pretty cool. Let me take this program, this undergraduate program in neuroscience. And so I did that. And about halfway through, I realized, well, actually, I kind of don't want to do this for the rest of my life um and I think that's normal when you're in university you're like wait a minute still trying to figure myself out yeah um and then at the time one of my friends took me to

what's called a autocross so this is an amateur racing event where you take your own car onto a closed off parking lot and you race against the clock. Is that legal? Yeah, totally legal, totally sanctioned. And so I got bit by the automotive bug. And so when I graduated university, knowing that I didn't want to continue on in neuroscience, I did know that I had no idea what I actually wanted to do. I thought, well, if there was ever a time to become a professional race car driver, this was it.

So the day after I graduated, after my last exam, I didn't even attend my graduation, I enrolled in the Bridgestone Racing Academy's mechanic training program slash race driver training program. So it was a nine-month program. So I graduated university, lots of debt because I didn't know anything about money. Got my first credit card in university.

Was racking up the bills. And then I decided to take this nine-month program, which didn't pay you any money. I was living on my own. There were days where I was eating crackers, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner for days on end. And it was the best year of my life. It honestly was the best year of my life working at that school and training there. And then, so here's where it sort of loops into finance. So after my training year I was

negotiating with the owners to maybe come back as an instructor on a part-time basis and what happened over the off season was the general or the operations manager quit and so they said listen we've never had someone with a degree in science or anything or any degree quite frankly working at this school in the office. Would you like to maybe be the office, like the operations manager? And I said, well, maybe. What's the pay package and whatnot? And they said, well, we can't pay you a lot in terms of cash and benefits, but we can give you seat time in the race cars.

And so for a broke student, I thought, well, that's fantastic because now I can race and make some kind of a living. Living the dream right there. And so the racing school had three main lines of business. People who want to become professional race car drivers, people who just want to try it one time to see what it's like, and then corporate entertainment. So the corporate entertainment is where it sort of comes back to the world of finance. So there was one guy who brought his company out all the time, and he was also trying to become a semi-professional race car driver. He was there all the time.

He took me aside one day and he said, when you're done wasting your time here, I want you to come work for me. I think you do really well in my world. So his original plan was for me to become a biotech stock analyst. So take the CFA, take my background in neuroscience, and figure out how to model stock prices for pharma companies and whatnot. So that was the path. And I started studying, and then he, unfortunately for me,

retired at the age of 36 from his job, so I didn't have a place to go. And so during my studies, I realized, well, now I don't have a place to go, but what I like about the stuff that I'm studying is the personal finance, the financial planning aspect, the financial advising. So that's what led me to the world of finance. And how long do you still, because you became like a financial consultant or what was the kind of first job in that world? So my first job in that world was to be a mutual fund sales rep. After about two years, I realized that the limited product shelf was really not something that spoke to me, to be diplomatic. So I switched to a full-service brokerage, and that opened up the universe of investment stocks, bonds, funds, whatever. And so I was doing that for a couple of years.

And that's when I started my blog. And so the impetus for the blog was I was a young guy. I was at a firm where you're expected to bring in million dollar clients. And so I needed a way to build credibility fast. So what I did was I looked around and I realized, well, there is actually no book on RRSPs. There's a lot of books out there that have RRSPs in the title, but then don't actually really spend much time talking about retirement savings strategies. They throw in a bunch of all this other stuff. And so I said, well, I will write the book on registered retirement savings plan strategy.

So I used the blog to write one chapter a day for 41 days. Wow. And there's 41 chapters in the book. So if people don't want to buy the book, you just go to the blog. Then you can read the whole thing for free. Yeah. And when I finished the book, I was shopping around to some journalists. And one of them was Jonathan Chevro.

There was Ellen Roseman. Send them all copies. Jonathan Chevro calls me up and he said, it's a pretty good book. My editor wants to run excerpts. And John was at the Financial Post at the time. They want to run excerpts in the Financial Post on Saturdays during the month of February for retirement savings. I was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. What an opportunity. He said, can you drop off an extra copy? I said, absolutely. And my office isn't too far away from yours. So I'll drop it off in person. And he said, oh, great. So I met him, dropped off the book and said, well, while you're here, why don't we, why don't we talk a little bit about your book? I was like, oh my God,

this is fantastic. I'm going to get interviewed. He's going to write a big piece on it. So we're talking, talking, talking. And then when I thought the tape recorder was off, he says to me, so what kind of mutual funds do you buy for your clients? And I said, Jonathan, you know what? I don't really buy that many mutual funds. I actually focus on index funds and just get sort of a couch potato approach for the clients and then focus on on the financial planning, like cash flow, insurance, estate planning, all the other things where I think is the true advisor alpha is sort of like a catchphrase for that kind of stuff. And he said, oh, that's interesting.

And so two days later, he says, yeah, it's going to run on Thursday's paper or whatever. So I remember my girlfriend went out and grabbed a copy of the paper and brought it back while I was still in bed. And she said, I didn't open it yet. We're going to open it together and read this article. I'm like, all right, this is going to be so cool. And so it opens up to the page.

And they had sent a photographer, by the way, to take a picture. So I was like, man, this is going to be awesome. So my picture was like honestly one third of a full page. And the rest of the page was all this article. But the headline said, new breed of advisors shuns mutual funds. And when I read that, I was like, oh man, that's the end of my career. And when I got to the office that day, there were a barrage of calls, equally divided into people who wanted to become clients. They're like, wow, great,

straight shooter, awesome. And other people are saying, we would like your head on a plate. You shouldn't be seeing these things. So I was a bit naive about that whole thing, but it was the best and worst moment of my life in terms of my career. Yeah. And why do you say that? Well, because it sort of launched everything that's happened since then. So it got me on the map. And what's interesting was I had other interviews lined up from other media outlets that week. And someone called from public affairs and said, listen, little issue here. We really don't want you speaking to the media because you haven't been trained. And I said, well, I've got interviews lined up for the rest of the week. And sort of I heard this sigh on the other end of the phone.

All right, we're going to send someone over tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. to do emergency media training. Oh, wow. I'm like, oh, okay. So they sent someone in the morning, like an independent consultant that does all the training for that firm. And we went through everything from live interviews, live to tape, double-enders, which is when you watch the news and you see people staring into the screen, you're in a room looking at a camera and there's no one else in there. And you've got an earpiece.

All you hear is a disembodied voice. Oh, yeah, yeah. So that's called a double-ender. Oh, I know. I know a little bit about that from my teleprompting days for the news. Oh, okay. Okay. All right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we went through print interviews, radio, everything, right? And so at the end of the training session, the person who was there from public affairs to sort of monitor said, you know what? You did pretty good, actually. Now that we know that you're not completely stupid, we're actually going to line up some interviews for you. I said, oh, great. And I said, what about my blog? And they said, what's a blog?

This was 2007, right? Come on, guys. I said, oh, it's where I sort of write stuff at will without any editors involved whatsoever. And they're just like, oh, yeah, you can have one of those. Oh, no. And I said, oh, but I have, like, you know, at the time, I forget, thousands of followers.

So another sigh. All right, let me get back to you on that. So they actually did something that was quite unique, and I have to give them full credit. In fact, we ended our relationship on the best of terms. They were always very good to me and always very fair. What they said was, we will make you a deal because you write – at the time, I was writing every day. You write every day. There's no way we can send that for approval and get it turned around fast enough to meet your, um, you know, your output level. So now that you've been trained, we will allow you to write whatever you

want. But if you think that there's a gray area there, then send that post to us first and we'll take a look at it. If, uh, if you think that there's anything contentious there whatsoever, I said, you know what, that is really cool of you. And, uh, and it was a great experience, but, um, at the same time I was, I was realizing that more and more people wanted to hear, um, you know, about just financial literacy and education and whatnot. So I, I left there after a couple of years and, uh, branched off into the next chapter. From the director of The Greatest Showman comes the most original musical ever. I want to prove i can make it prove to who everyone

so the story starts better man now playing in select theaters and so you had the blog but you started in 2012 am i right no what year did you start the blog yeah sorry 2007 2007 that's right so you were actually one of the kind of original personal finance bloggers in Canada, let me say. Yeah, at the time. One of the big ones. At the time, there was a Canadian capitalist, another brown guy who no longer— I started reading personal finance blogs around 2007 or something. Oh, okay.

And you were definitely one of the majors. I'm flattered. Well, you're welcome. Thank you very much, yeah. I was going to say Canadian capitalist, which I now say was written by Ram Balakrishnan, another brown guy who no longer writes his blog. So maybe it's a brown blogger thing. I don't know.

There's him. There was Alan Witten who writes Canadian Finances. There's Million Dollar Journey. Yeah, all those guys are like the old school guys that I remember at the time there weren't as many as there are now that's for sure there's a lot now

I can't keep up with you kiddos there's too many to keep up with but it's nice to see people are talking about it because no one was talking about it when I started reading blogs because there weren't that many blogs so okay this was also an important,

uh, fork in the road. So I was driving to work one day and my girlfriend called up and she said, honey, I just heard that the W network is holding an open casting call for people who want to be on air talent. I thought, wow, that's great. Um, you know, let me know how I can help you out, sweetheart. And she said, no, stupid, it's for you. I think you should apply to be their money expert. And the reason she thought this was, and this is a bit of a back story. I mean, it's too long. You can totally edit this out later.

I'm not going to. Okay, okay. Let's just keep going. Let's keep going. So I was working at a company, and there was some event a bunch of us in the office were supposed to go to, and we arranged for a limo to pick us all up and leave to go downtown. And so I'm waiting at reception for the limo, and the receptionist, whose name is Brenda, if you're listening. I hope Brenda's listening right now.

She said, oh, Preet, the limo left. You're going to have to find your own way there. And I was freaking out. I was like, wow, there's no way I can make it there on time. And then she said, ah, April Fool's. And so I turned to her, just like dead eyes. I said, I will get you back. And that's the last I ever said to her of it until the following April. So what I did was I recruited a friend of mine to go in and also her boss. So two separate people. I said

to her boss, I said, listen, I need you to convince Brenda that Rogers local TV is coming in to do a special interview on women in the financial services. And she said, what the hell are you talking about? I said, just go with it. Just go with it. She said, all right. So I sent my friend in. We'll call him Andy because that is his name. And so he went in and interviewed Brenda as if he was this person from this TV show.

And what we had done was we had designed these questions that would hopefully elicit a wide range of answers. So he went in. He filmed this interview. We took all the footage, and we cut out all – we wrote down every single word, every sentence that she said. We cut up all the different sentences and put them on the floor and said, all right, now how do we rearrange this and ask new questions with me asking the questions to make it look like she's killing her boss? Oh, that's amazing. So it took us days and days and days and we did it. And it's fantastic if I do say so myself. So on April Fool's, I had her boss say, here, that video from Rogers arrived they finally did the interview here it is so she puts it into her computer

and once she realizes that she had been punked like no one has ever been punked before she laughed so hard they had to send her home oh my god and just to make the story complete her manager is my girlfriend that is one good April Fool's.

So that video production was the reason why she thought, well, you guys had so much fun making that video. Why don't you apply for this video? And to be honest, I really had no inclination of doing it. So my friend and I, we were getting together, having fun. We went on the internet and watched the other submissions that had already been posted. And we watched them and we kind of thought, you know what? Everyone's kind of stiff here. Let's make another funny video just for the sake of making a funny video.

No intention of winning. So 700 people entered this contest. They whittled it down to 20. Those 20 were selected to do a follow-up video where they sent a camera crew. And what you had to do was they would tell you like 10 minutes before they shot what you were going to be doing. So I had to walk around Scarborough with a sandwich board sign that said free money advice. So I had to go and give people free money advice. Those 20 videos were voted again to the top seven. Top seven had their own reality TV show

called The Ultimate W Expert Search. I was one of the competitors. Again, entering thinking this is so surreal. There's no way the money guy is is so surreal. There's no way the money guy is going to win. There's no way the money guy is going to win. I was competing against hairdressers, interior designers, all this stuff. I'm like, there's no way the money guy is going to win. Just have fun with it.

Again, because I had so much fun with it, I wasn't too worried about it. I ended up winning. The prize was a development deal for my own show. And to make a long story short, that parlayed into hosting the Million Dollar Neighborhood on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Damn. That's how it all came about. That's amazing. Let's just go with it. Not chase the opportunity, but just are open to trying again. Neuroscience, but just, you know, are open to. Listen, neuroscience, auto racing, finance, applying for reality TV. Clearly, I've never had a five year plan.

Which is probably great because, yeah, you know, sometimes if you plan too far in advance, you'll kind of miss a lot of opportunities. I wouldn't know. I take the shiny ball philosophy of career management. What's that? What's that? Ooh, what's that? And so that, I guess, eventually led into a couple things, including you started a podcast. Yes.

And then you eventually wrote the book Stop Overthinking Your Money. Yeah. So I've had two podcasts now. The first was the Where Does All My Money Go? Internet Radio Show. I forget how many episodes I put out. Is it on iTunes or anything? It probably still is.

Okay. I don't know if they delete shows, so I'll try to take a look. It was probably worthy of being deleted. It was my first crack at the, kick at the can. And then I took a hiatus for a while, and then I relaunched the podcast as Mostly Money, Mostly Canadian. And for any of my listeners who happen to be listening to this, I know I'm a little bit behind in publishing the next episode. In fact –

Big time. Yeah, I know. It was December 2014 when you're like, I'll be right back, guys. We're waiting. Yeah, I even had this sort of big announcement. I was like, you know what? I'm back. I've got the mojo again.

I've got a lineup of great guests. And I'm going to be coming at you on a regular basis. Yeah, it didn't happen. Eight months later, here I am. But the podcasts have been fun. And so when you asked me to be on, I was excited. And maybe this will give me the motivation to start my own podcast again. I hope so. And you'll have to be my guest.

I will totally be on there. And you can tell me all about Mo Money and Mo Houses. I have Little Money and No Houses. Right. That should be my blog name. Little Money and Mo Houses. I have Little Money and No Houses. Right. That should be my blog name. Little Money and No Houses. But I'm working it. I'm trying to get there.

But yeah, so let's kind of talk about your book because it was nice when you did release it last year, contacted me to review it, and I did a review on my blog, and I really liked it. Thank you. because it was just a very straightforward listen if you want to get your stuff organized do these things right of course i still have to do some of those things what i know i know i know like seriously right

after i'm like josh we need to get life insurance and we need to get a will and we still haven't are you shitting me no i'm sorry sorry am I allowed to swear on this podcast? You'll edit it out? Yeah, fine. Go ahead. I'll have you know that my podcast is... I'll put the little E on there for you. Yes, mine are explicit. No, I know.

Yeah, you can swear on here now. That's fine. You ruined it. Sorry. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But no, I know. I know I'm bad, but it's on the list of things to do.

So what's your rationale for not getting the life insurance right now? I think I have. I know I have some with my employer, but Josh does not. So, yeah, laziness is really the excuse. There's no excuse. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry for disappointing you, Preet. You know what?

This comes down to one of the points that I make in the book is that personal finance is 90% psychology and 8% math or knowledge. And the missing 2% is a testament to how unimportant the math or the knowledge is. It's really about these behavioral processes that get in the way of us doing the things that we know we have to do. So, you know what? I know a guy who works on Bay Street who's worth millions of dollars, smart, financially savvy guy, married, two kids, and I was chatting to him about estate planning, and he said, you know, I got to admit, we still don't have wills. We still don't have, you know, XYZ, powers of attorney.

Like, how is this possible? You work on Bay Street working in finance. How is this even possible? Right, so it's clearly not solely knowledge. It's that some kind of behavioral drive that needs to be instilled into people. And, you know, one of the things that life insurance agents will say to people who are sort of on the fence about getting some types of insurance that they need is they'll give them one of these sales lines. It's like, all right, make you a deal. You tell me the day you're going to die, I'll pop over the night before and I'll write

up all your insurance. And of course, you can see the flaw in that logic. The point is you don't know when you're going to die. That's the whole point. So, Jessica, do you know when you're going to die? No, I don't. Ergo, you should be getting- I'll get it tomorrow.

I promise. All your ducks in a row. Yeah, you are not going to get it tomorrow. Monday. I'll start Monday. Yeah, you won't. It is on my list, though. I swear, it really is.

Oh, so let's say you die. Okay. And Josh is taking care of all your affairs. Yeah. Are you going to go to an insurance company and say, hey, listen, it was on Jessica's list. It's on her to-do list. Yeah. It's on her wonder list account.

Right. Does this account for anything? If I get like $100,000, $200,000, $50, $5? I know. It's terrible. I know. It's terrible. So? account. Does this account for anything? If I get like, you know, 100 grand, 200 grand, 50 bucks, 5 bucks? I know, I know. It's terrible. I know, it's terrible. So? I'm going to do it, I promise.

Are you? Yeah. All right. I'll write about it to prove to you, okay? Okay, I like that. Once I do it, I will write a blog post and be like, listen. I like that. What about disability insurance?

Because you know in the book, one of the first things they start. Yeah, I know. We don't have that also. I do have it. What the hell? I have it through my employer, though. Okay. But yeah, no, for Josh, no, I swear to God, when I finished reading it, I gave it to him.

I think he read half of it. Don't judge him. He doesn't read too much. But I'm like, Josh, for real, you need to get disability insurance because if something, you know, goes wrong with your ears, you won't have a job anymore. If you're, well, actually, if your arms get cut off. Does everyone know that Josh does something that involves his. I think you all know he's an audio engineer. Okay. Poss a engineer okay possibly i was gonna say that's an odd statement if something goes wrong with your ears it's like we're financially screwed what does he do yeah so

it's like he actually does you know if he loses you know mobility with his hands or his ears or sight really all the important things sure he you know won't be able to make any money. So, I'll talk to him tonight. I'm sorry. I'll get on that. That's, oh, yeah. Damn.

That's what I do. That's what you do. Yeah. And it works. It works, man. Just got to keep it simple. You know, these are the fundamental things that people have to do.

And I think the title of the book kind of sums it all up. Stop overthinking it. Yeah, because I think, and that's part of the reason why I like personal finance so much is, for me, I like the simplicity of the book kind of sums it all up. Stop overthinking it. It's yeah. Cause I think, and that's part of the reason why I like personal finance so much is for me, I like the simplicity of it. I don't like when it gets crazy complex. That's when I start to drift off and think about

other things. I like the basics and that's why I liked your book so much. Cause it's like, literally just do these things and you'll be fine. There's five. The, uh, the reason that I wrote the book in that style has to sort of do with my transformation as a personal finance blogger to the things that I started doing after that. So when I started my blog, it was very technical. I loved writing about advanced investment, all the stuff that you would hate. And that's fine because lots of people love that stuff. Well, no. A few people do. Not a lot.

That's the whole point. I just assume a lot of people like that, I guess. No, no. Okay. Not do. Not a lot. That's the whole point. I just assume a lot of people like that. No, no, not really. Not in terms of the percentage of the population. And so in 2010, there was a Globe and Mail contest for best blogs. And in the investing category, my blog won. And that, to make a long story short, parlayed into me writing for the Globe and Mail in their personal finance section. So I started writing for them, and the first few columns that I submitted, they said, listen, you've got to dumb this down. This isn't your personal finance blog where you can get all nerdy to the nth degree.

You've got to make this appealing to a wider audience. I'm like, all right. So it took me a while to get used to that. After a couple of months, the editor of the Life section contacted me and they said, we're doing a revamp of life. Every Tuesday, we're going to do a money feature. Would you like to write the money feature for the life section? I'm like, sure. And so I submitted my first column for that and they said, oh, sorry, this isn't going to work.

I said, why? You've used numbers. Oh, oh, oh. I'm like. You're not allowed. Okay. Oh, you're not allowed. Okay. Oh, yeah. Listen, you got to bring it down a notch in terms of how technical you get, even from the personal finance section, to reach a much broader audience.

And it was interesting. I forget where I heard this story, and I don't even know if it's true anymore. It's been so long. But I heard that when Stephen Hawking was writing his book, A Brief History of Time, his editor said, for every single formula that you put in that book, cut your audience in half. So if your potential audience is, let's say it's 10 million because I think he sold 10 million books, and you put one formula in there, it'll be 5 million. You put two, it'll be 2.5 million and so on and so forth. So if you make a book about physics with a lot of formulas, which you would kind of think, well, isn't that kind of what you would do? You're not going to have a lot of people read it. And so for that reason,

the only equation that's in that book is E equals MC squared. And everything else is explained in plain language, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do. I don't know if you've read that book or not, but the concepts in there are mind-blowing. And yet he doesn't use a lot of math, right? It's so interesting. So that was the approach with the book was to also just make things as relatable to the most number of people possible. And that means do not get into the

specifics. And so the premise of the book was, I believe that most people have a C or a C minus when it comes to their personal finances. And there are a lot of people who will spend a lot of time reading a lot of books and blogs and whatnot trying to get an A-plus with everything, with their investing, their budgeting, and what have you. But I think the vast majority of people would rather have an easy A. So that book, those five rules,

are designed to get you an easy A. And if you want to get an an A plus in any of those categories, you can do that. And I sort of give you resources where you can go. This is just, here's the basic stuff you need to know to get you that easy A with your personal finances. And if you are one of the few people that wants to go on and spend the time to get that A plus, you can do it. You're not going to get in this book, but this is the basics. Which is great because I think, yeah, you do reach a broader audience. But for me, you know, being a millennial and just thinking of like my younger sister who's still in university,

that is a good book to give to someone that's like, if you're kind of scared about, oh, what does being an adult mean and what does money mean and all that stuff, this is a good starting point for like just do these things. And this is a good starting point. It's not scary. And then you can kind of move on to educate yourself on this this and this and i think it's hard to find a book kind of like that because when i started getting in personal finance i read a lot of blogs i did read some books and some of them scared the crap out of me because i'm like i don't think i'm doing adult life right like oh like honestly i'm not not even

joking when i was like oh how old was I? I don't know, 21 or something. I remember Googling how to be an adult. Because what are the things that I need to do? So, you know, like those people keep talking about RSPs. What is that? I feel like I need it, though. Yeah. Well, I can tell you that that feeling never really goes away. I mean, I still I feel like I'm a few years out of university in terms of, you know, mentally. Physically, you know, things change. But yeah, I don't know.

And I look at, like I don't have kids, so I think that's a big part of it. I see a lot of friends that have children and whatnot and they just seem grown up. You know, whereas I still don't have a five-year plan.

I am sort of flying by the seat of my pants I'm having a hell of a fun time it seems to be working out just fine so I wouldn't really worry about it well thank you so much for joining me today I think we had an awesome conversation I think so yeah hopefully we didn't bore everyone to death

well we'll find out if no one listens and you're going to get back to me on your life insurance, Josh's disability insurance. You'll be the first text message. Really? Be like, Preet, I did it. All right. Excellent. I expect like a happy face emoticon after that.

Changing people's lives, sometimes for the better. So nice to talk to Preet about his journey and just his success and also his awesome book, which I am giving away a copy of. So make sure to check out my show notes for obviously show notes of this episode, but also a chance to enter a contest to win a copy of his awesome book, Stop Overthinking Your Money. So make sure to go to momoneymohouses.com slash 17 for the show notes for this episode. And if you want to check out all of the episodes up until now and show notes for those episodes, just go to momoneymohouses.com slash podcast. And of course, to find out more about Preet, you can check out his website, PreetBannergy.com. And there's also links to his podcast that he needs to resurrect. So maybe if we all get

together and just tweet at him and tell him, listen, come on, he'll start it up again. On that note, thank you so much for listening. And I will see you next Wednesday. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.