More Money Podcast - 084 Why One Woman Started Her Own Investing Conference - Helena Liu, Founder of Canadian Investors Conference

Episode Date: January 19, 2017

Helena Liu wanted to learn from Canada's top investing experts — so she started her own online conference to get 20+ of the best together to share their knowledge with her & other Canadians. Long description: I met Helena this past summer because she was looking to add speakers to her roster for her first online investing summit — the Canadian Investors Conference. I suggested a few of my favourite Canadian experts, and now several months later the conference is just a few weeks away and registration (which is free by the way) is open to the public. It's no easy task to start your own conference from scratch, but Helena knew that this was something she had to do. There's a huge lack of education when it comes to investing, especially for beginners, so Helena wanted to create a free summit to help close that gap. Right now, there are 24 speakers and the online conference runs from Feb. 4 - 9, 2017. You can register for free at canadianinvestorsconference.com. More About Helena Helena started learning and experimenting with investing after graduating university. She started with mutual funds but then start day trading. In the end, she realized that index investing was the right strategy for her, but she was surprised that there wasn't that much information about it online and that most people didn't know all of their options. That's why she started the Canadian Investors Conference. She wanted to create a free, online event accessible to everyone to educate Canadians about all the ins and outs of investing and building their wealth. Investing Books You May Want to Check Out The Lazy Investor by Derek Foster Wealthing Like Rabbits by Robert Brown Don't Forget to Register (It's Free!) Click here to save your seat for the Canadian Investors Conference For more podcast episodes, check out the podcast page. Shownotes: jessicamoorhouse.com/84 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello, and welcome to episode 84. Happy Thursday, guys. Hope your week has been good. This is your host, Jessica Morehouse. Thanks for joining me for the Mo Money Podcast. Today is a special episode. Usually on Thursdays, I do my listener series episodes, but today I had kind of a special episode because it's a friend of mine who I kind of connected with in the summer, and she's doing something really cool and I'm like we need to do a special episode about this to you know obviously interview her talk about her but also talk about what this new project is and what I'm talking about is she is organizing herself she is a one-woman show and she is super busy right now clearly getting

everything together but she is putting together right now, clearly getting everything together, but she is putting together something called the Canadian Investors Conference. It is an online conference, an online summit with over 20 of Canada's top financial experts. And it will be an online event from February 4th to 9th. It is free. I can't remember. I don't know if I mentioned that, but it is free, guys. It is valued't know if i mentioned that but it is free guys it is valued at like a thousand bucks probably more because these you know experts usually charge a lot for their time so this is kind of a one-of-a-kind event this is the first time she's ever done anything like this is the first time i've ever seen anything like this uh happen uh specifically

for canada and uh canada's uh financial experts and everything like that. So if you want to learn more about this conference and you want to sign up, make sure you do so. Grab your seat at CanadianInvestorsConference.com. So that's CanadianInvestorsConference.com. I will include links and some more info in the show notes for this episode, but it is pretty darn cool. I see a lot of familiar faces on here from people that I know, people that have been on my podcast. So if you are really, you know, want to take this year and really learn about investing, and this is actually for people of all levels of investing. If you're a newbie, total beginner, you're kind of mid-level, you

want to just kind of learn more, or you're kind of at that expert level, they've got everything in this conference. So make sure to check it out at canadianinvestorsconference.com. And for this episode, we're going to chat about what this conference is about, what you can learn, why my friend Helena Liu started it and really took ownership of this. And there's no one else who's doing something like that. She's like, well, I'd like to see something like this. So I guess I'm going to make it myself. So we're going to talk about all that good stuff right now. Thanks, Helena, for joining me on the show today. I'm very excited to chat with you today and to talk about your summit, your conference coming up. Yeah, thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Yeah. So before we kind of get into what the conference is all about, I always like to kind of start these episodes with getting to know my guests a little bit more. I think it really always reveals like why they end up where they end up and why they start certain projects. And so let's kind of jump in and get to know you a little bit more. So, you know, starting this online investing conference, what led you to that point? Were you like, obviously, you know, I know you're very, you know, financially savvy yourself and frugal and everything like that. But like, at what point did that kind of start for you? When did you get interested in that type of stuff? Yeah, I think I got interested in it right after I graduated from college. And then I started getting paid. And then I was just, and then, you know, and then

I was just like, Oh, my gosh, what do I do with all this money? And then, you know, I had no idea how to invest it. I mean, I had great, I'm very fortunate that I have really great parents who taught me how to save with every single paycheck. And, but then when it came to investing, I felt like there's just a gap. Like I didn't, I didn't know, like after I saved that money, it was just like, oh, what do I do with it now? So, you know, it probably took me a good two, three years to really figure out, you know, ETFs and robos and dividends and all that span. So I just felt like I wanted to start something to make it simpler for people to get into investing and to learn all of this stuff much faster. There just wasn't enough material on the market that had everything in one place for people to just go and learn from. When you kind of started dabbling investing yourself,

and I was totally there myself, it's like, okay, I think I've kind of mastered like the budgeting, the saving. And then when it gets to investing, it's like, oh, like, that seems a little bit over my head or complicated. And, you know, there are materials out there, but they just aren't very, I don't know, they're not very easy to digest or lots of them are just kind of outdated because there's a lot of new stuff now. When you were, you know, at the point where you were kind of, okay, let's experiment with investing, what did you start out with? And then how did you kind of discover, okay, maybe I want to change or do stuff? Like how did that kind of education happen for you? Yeah. So I think I started off when I was in college and I didn't really know any better.

So I just went to a bank, which I won't name, and invested in mutual funds. And this is crazy because I think I had a 5% in management fees. Wow, that's really high. Yeah, it was crazy. And I didn't think much of it at the time. No, because you didn't know. Right. much of it at the time because you didn't know right so so they they so the the the um the broker would take uh so for every dollar that i mean every hundred dollars i invested he would take

three dollars basically as his cut and then two percent went to the management of the mutual fund so in in total it was like five percent and that's just great and then you know and in retrospect just like wow that's probably pretty dumb thing to do. But that was probably the first investment that I made. And just as time went on, I got better at it. And then the second thing was I found a course on day trading online. And I thought that that was how people invested. So, you know, I learned all about technical analysis, you know, head and shoulders and whatnot.

And I tried doing that. I mean, and if anyone listening, if you succeeded at that, then kudos to you. I was absolutely terrible at day trading. I think I ended up losing a couple of thousand dollars, actually. So and then I just started, you know, digging deeper and like trying to find books on this. And, you know, Tony Robbins has a great book on it. It's called Money. And Ramit Sethasi also has a really good book on it.

It's called I Will Teach You To Be Rich. And those two books really taught me that, wow, okay, so you can really do this in a passive way and build wealth and is actually much more successful in most cases than active day trading and all of those active investment principles that people think in theory should work better. No, absolutely. I definitely came from the mindset where I knew about mutual funds and that's where I started as well just because that's what my parents did. That's kind of like whenever I would like pick up a book, that's kind

of what they would talk about just because that was the popular thing to do for so many decades. And then, yeah, I thought like, okay, well, and then you also hear like on the news, all these people making, you know, killer money in the stock market. And you're like, is there any in between? And it didn't seem like there was for a bit. So that's why I'm really excited that you're doing this conference to kind of open, you know, the conversation and open people's minds to other things out there, especially as millennials, where I think a lot of us, you know, depending on, you know, where we are, what stage we're in at life, you know, we're like, okay, what do I do with this money? I'm making a good salary finally, I've paid off my student loan, where do I put my

money? And I think a lot of, you know, people our age don't invest because they're afraid to and they don't think that they'll make any money because interest rates are so low. So after you did the mutual funds and then you dabbled with the day trading, what was your next step after that? Yeah. So then that's when I discovered, you know, the passive like ETF strategies from reading those books. But I think what the gaps in those books were, was that they taught you the theory. So I understood that like markets, you know, instead of trying, I think the best quote to summarize passive investing is instead of trying to beat the markets, be the market instead right so i understood the

principles of it and i totally agreed with it and so forth um but there wasn't really anything that actually taught you how to actually do this do it right yeah so it was like i get the theory and i want to implement it and and i you know and you know, and obviously there was all those like mental bear, like a whole huge part of it was like emotional as well. Like, um, you know, when I see the charts climbing as I think, Oh, is this a good time to buy? Or when I see a sink and they start panicking and things like that. So I went through all of those emotions, um, as well. Um, so, you know, so, um, it w it was the, the, the next step, sorry to answer your question is what, how do I actually implement this and come up with a system for it that I can do consistently. And to be honest, I sucked at it. Um, you just being so consistent, I was trying to invest every

other Thursday, um, like just put my money into funds. And then, but sometimes like, you know, on the, so I set, you know, calendar reminders for myself and stuff, but then come this Thursday, you know, I take a look at the news, I take a look at the charts and then I get nervous and, and I get like all emotional and stuff. And then, you know, and I was like, well, maybe I'll wait another week. And then, so then so some weeks I would like not invest in anything. And then the following Thursday, you know, I might double invest or I might push it off again. So for me, it was just managing emotions was really hard. And then I found robo-advisors, which were great because now I don't even need to look at it.

It just automatically invests in low-cost ETFs for me that's diversified and I don't even need to think about it. So that's really the strategy that works for me. And so I put a portion of my income into that. And then maybe like two to three times a year with the extra money that I have, I would say two to four times a year with some extra savings I have, I would do dividend investing. So I would find large cap stocks in the TSX and then invest in those and then make money from the dividend. So my strategy is split between robo and dividend, really.

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. Okay, I'd love to pick your brain about dividend investing

because that's something that I'm not an expert in at all. So how would – do you want to kind of talk about that a little bit more and explain like how would one go about doing that? Sure. Absolutely. And I'll just give a quick shout out to Derek Foster right now because he was the one who kind of got me into dividend investing. And you should watch that interview on Canadian Investors Conference, which is also free. Yeah, so basically you want to look for stable companies that have been around for a long time. And think about like companies, it's so a good rule of thumb that Derek was saying was that you look for companies

that you will still use in times of recession. Like, you know, in times of recession, you might not buy a new iPhone, you might not buy a new Michael Kors bag, but you will still brush your teeth. So you'll still use Colgate, you will still go to your bank. So you'll still use, you know, BMO or RBC or Royal Bank or whatever. And you'll probably still have your, you'll still heat your house. So you'll still use Umbridge or whoever heats your house, right? So look for companies that you can understand. So you can describe in one sentence and companies that you'll still use in times of recession. So those were like his two rules.

And in the Canadian market, for example, if you don't want to go in the US market to avoid currency risk, the great companies in Canada are like the big banks, the natural resource companies, and telecom and insurance. So those are probably the four main sectors in Canada that you can find large cap dividend yielding stocks. Cool. And how would, one question I have is like, so if someone wanted to do that, where would they go to do that? Like, do you have to go to a

traditional bank and talk to someone about that? Or is there kind of a robo advisor type thing that you can do? Or how do you do it? No, I don't think there's a robo advisor that does that. I just, you know, go into my low cost, um, brokerage and just place the trades myself. And, uh, yeah. And another cool thing is that, you know, you can invite, you can tell them to, um, um, do drip. So drip stands for dividend reinvestment dividend. Okay, this is bad. I don't remember the exact word for it. But basically what it does is with all of the dividend that you get, it reinvests it back into your securities. So you're basically reinvesting the whole way. And if you get Derek's books, The lazy investor, I'll give him a shout

out right now. He actually teaches you how you can get partial shares. So with any of the low cost brokerages across Canada, you can only get synthetic drip. So that means like, let's say you buy the stock for $10 to make the math simple. You have to get dividends in, you have to get $10 worth of dividends before you can buy another share. So this is kind of bad for people who are starting out with a small portfolio. So you might be starting out with, you know, 10 shares or something. It'll take ages for you to accumulate enough dividend to get another share,

right? So in his book, he actually talked about a way to get real drip so you can get partial shares with these companies. It is a lot more work. You have to fill in, basically contact those companies directly and then enroll in their drip program directly, like not through your brokerage, but directly with that company. I don't do that because it is a little bit of work, but I just wanted to. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know you could do that. Yeah, you can.

I didn't know that either. Yeah. Wow. So he does walk through the process. I mean, it is a whole chapter on itself. So he does walk through the process and how to do that. That's awesome. That's awesome. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about the conference. When did you have this idea to start one? It's a pretty big undertaking. I remember talking to you a little while ago. I'm like, this is kind of a huge thing that you're

doing. And it's awesome. It is true. It's kind of crazy. It's like, why don't we have something like this already? So I'm glad you've taken the courage to do it yourself. Yeah, it is definitely a lot of work. And I've been very fortunate that most of the speakers have been very supportive. We're very lucky this year that we have more than 20 speakers speaking. Yeah, speaking from all areas of finance. So there's some speaking about, you know, mortgages, Kyle Prevost from Young and Thrifty. We have people speaking about robo-visors and index investing and dividend investing.

Just wanted to kind of cover the whole spectrum of things that you needed to know when you want to make better investment decisions for yourself. So just wanted to kind of like have everything in one place and in a very digestible format. So it's not like you had to read 10,000 blog posts. You can watch these videos when you're going to work or working out at the gym or waiting in line or whatever, right? So I think it will be a good resource for people to have. Yeah, and it sounds like it's kind of for like anyone depending on like at any stage, whether they're like a beginning investor or they haven't even started or if they're a little bit more advanced, there's probably like a guest speaker for all of those kind of people. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, you know, the talk I did was Rob Brown, who's the author of Wealthing Like Rabbits,

is, you know, at a more basic level. So that's more targeted towards beginners. And then, you know, we have like the talks with Derek Foster, which is a much more advanced and I didn't even know some of the things that he was mentioning. So that's a good thing. So you can kind of start with some of the beginner stuff and work your way up to some of the more advanced stuff and then pretty much be an expert probably if you watch all of the sessions. Right. And it's all completely free. So, you know, I think it's one thing that I'm trying to do is because we're not taught financial literacy in school. So I, you

know, one thing I wanted to do is just make it more accessible for people so that they don't, it doesn't take them two, three years to learn, actually learn how to do something that's actually very simple in theory. But, you know, I, you know, my goal is to help people like get over that learning curve faster because it actually took me two to three years to actually learn everything that I know now. Yeah, that's a long, you know, education. I mean, I've been, you know, talking about personal finance, writing about personal finance for five years now, and I'm still learning new stuff. It's kind of an ongoing education, but it does get easier once you kind of build up that foundation, especially for investing. Once you kind of build up that

foundation, you really know lots of the keywords and kind of the main principles. It does get easier with more advanced stuff. Right. Absolutely. So in case, I know lots of people listening are probably very interested in learning more about this. How can people learn more and register so they don't miss anything? For sure. So go to CanadianInvestorsConference.com and investors has an S on it. And yeah, you can just register. It's free.

And the talk is from February 4th to 9th. So make sure you watch. You sign up and watch them. And you don't obviously have to watch everything. You can pick and choose whichever speakers you want to watch. And they're all there. And, you know, it's an online event. And it's all completely free for people to attend.

Awesome. That's awesome, awesome. I hope it goes super well so you do another one next year. And it keeps going. You'll definitely need a big break in between, I'm sure. Yeah. It is quite a bit of work to put everything together. I'm very excited to watch the videos myself. And I will definitely be sharing with all of my friends who want to start investing because there definitely needs to be, you know, there's definitely a need for, you know, general basic personal financial education, but there's definitely a need for kind of that next step once you've kind of mastered some of those things, the investing side. And I think what you're doing is awesome.

So thanks again for joining me and sharing some of this information. And I will definitely link to all this in the show notes. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for having me, Jessica. And that was episode 84 with the lovely Helena Liu, the organizer, the creator of Canadian Investors Conference. It is a digital online event that you can attend for free, and it runs from February 4th to 9th. All you have to do is sign up at CanadianInvestorsConference.com, claim your seat, and enjoy and learn about investing and get your investments right this year. Make sure to check out the show notes.

Also, I'll put a bunch of information that we chatted about, more information about, uh, some of the things you can expect at the conference in the show notes at JessicaMorris.com slash 84. And before I go, I just want to do one, uh, last podcast, uh, shout out. I have a review here from Heidi, who is actually a listener on my podcast not too long ago. I just want to give her a special shout out. So she wrote to me, I found this podcast while searching for Canadian personal finance bloggers. Jessica is very real and honest in telling her story and sharing what she's learned. I love the listener series and find the stories of other people learning how to manage their money encouraging. Got to be on an episode with Jessica as well. She's a great interviewer who is easy to talk to and made me feel very comfortable. It's a slow process paying

off my debt and simplifying my expenses, but listening to this podcast regularly helps me keep me motivated and on track. Thanks, Jessica. From Heidi in Vancouver, Canada. So thanks so much, Heidi, for your kind words. It was a delight having you on my show so if you're listening right now and you have a story that you want to tell you know it could be anything you want in terms of personal finance it could be like your money story in terms of you know paying off debt saving investing whatever you want if you want to be on my show in a part of my listener series that always airs on Thursdays make Make sure to just shoot me a quick email, jessica at jessicamorehouse.com. And we will see if there is a spot for you. I look forward to hearing from you. And that's about it. I will see you back here next Wednesday with another

wonderful episode on the Mo Money Podcast. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.