More Money Podcast - 164 How to Know If You're Investing Right - Pauline Shum Nolan, Co-founder & CEO of Wealthscope

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

One of the most common questions I get from people when it comes to investing is "Am I even doing it right?" It was also a question that my next guest Pauline Shum Nolan (Finance Professor) also gets, which is why she co-created Wealthscope, a website that helps investors understand their investments so they can feel more confident about what they're doing. Long description: It’s not every day I get to chat with a professor of finance! But that’s exactly why I sometimes have to pinch myself because my job as a podcast host can sometimes be so unfairly fun. For this episode of the Mo’ Money Podcast, I sit down with Pauline Shum Nolan, Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Business at York University and the co-founder and CEO of Wealthscope. Basically, when it comes to investing, she really is an expert. She not only teaches finance at York University, she also manages the school’s pension program. And if she wasn’t busy enough, she developed an website called Wealthscope to educate and empower investors. We talk a lot about investing strategies in this episode, and big point we both keep bringing up is the lack of confidence so many people have when it comes to investing. That’s why so many of us just want to hand everything over to an advisor to deal with it, even if that might actually be the worst thing we could do with our finances. You see, investing isn’t that complicated when you break it down. And once you truly understand the basics, it’s easy to slowly build up your investing knowledge to a point where you feel completely comfortable managing your own investment portfolio, buying and selling stocks, and knowing when to call out someone for spreading misinformation. Here are a few key points we discussed in our interview together. Stay Diversified & Ditch High Fees Investing doesn’t just mean dumping your money in stocks and hoping for the best. It also shouldn’t mean handing over your money to an advisor and praying they manage your money properly. The best way to invest is to be an informed investor, staying diversified (investing in multiple investment products), and saying no to high fees. Let’s first start with staying diversified. There’s nothing wrong with investing in individual stocks, real estate or cryptocurrency. But you would be making a mistake if that was the only thing you’re invested in. A better way to invest would be to invest in index funds or index-based ETFs, then some individual stocks and/or real estate. And if you really wanted to dabble in something highly speculative, throw some money at cryptocurrency. Basically, following the rule of thumb to not put all of your eggs in one basket is the best way to do it. As for fees, the less fees you pay, the more money in your pocket. That’s why a lot of people are moving away from actively managed mutual funds in favour of low fee ETFs or index funds. You could be saving 1-2% in fees, which over a few decades could equal to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Keep It Simple When Rebalancing Your Portfolio Now, if you’re on board with becoming a DIY investor (which I think is awesome!), this is actually one of the top questions I get asked after what ETFs should I invest in (which I usually suggest checking out the Canadian Couch Potato’s model portfolios for a start). Rebalancing your portfolio isn’t something you should fret over. As mentioned countless times in Andrew Hallam’s amazing book Millionaire Teacher, you only need to rebalance your portfolio once per year, or when there is a big market correction. All rebalancing means is either sell/buying some of your equities or fixed income so it goes back to your initial asset allocation goal (ie. 80% equities, 20% fixed income), or buying more equities or fixed income to balance things out. To learn more about how to rebalance your portfolio, read this article from Investopedia. For full episode show notes, visit https://jessicamoorhouse.com/164 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello, hello and welcome to episode 164 of the Mo Money Podcast. I am your host Jessica Morehouse. Thanks so much for joining me. This one is a good one because we're talking investing. And do you know what the number one question I get from my audience about investing? It usually is, how do I know if I'm doing it right? How do I know if I am on track? Well, I have a fabulous guest to really talk about this particular topic. I've got Dr. Pauline Shum-Noel on the show, and she's quite the resume. She's an expert in portfolio analytics. She's a professor of finance at the Shulich School of Business at York University here in Ontario, Canada. She also holds a BA, an MA,

and a PhD in economics, if that wasn't enough. She's also the co-founder and CEO of Wellscope, which is a new web platform that tracks, analyzes, and helps you plan your financial future. Now, it doesn't manage your portfolios, but what's great about it is it basically lets you link your current kind of investing accounts into the system and will basically give you a score, a rating on how well you're doing. How are your things performing? Are you diversified? Are you paying too much in fees? Basically, everything that we all, especially the DIY investor, or even if you're using a robo-advisor and you're like, is this doing well? I don't really know. If you use this platform, you'll be able to have a better understanding of what is going on.

We talk more about how this thing works, but also her background and just then we get into the nitty gritty of investing. And I'm asking her all the questions that I get asked all the time. So I know you're going to love this episode. But before I get to that episode, just a few words about this episode's sponsor. This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is brought to you by CanSpace.ca. If you're listening right now and consider yourself a savvy Canadian entrepreneur or business owner, then listen up. As you know, your business's success depends on you having a website that is reliable and loads as fast as possible. That alone can make or break your business. Am I right? Well, if you know that to be true, CanSpace can help.

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Well, thank you, Pauline, so much for joining me on the Mo Money Podcast. I can't wait to chat with you about investing. It's one of my favorite topics these days. Well, thanks for having me. You're so welcome. So I would love to get to know you a bit more. You have a crazy resume, super, super impressive. I would love to know a little bit more about your background, how you entered this world about investing and finance, because honestly, there's not a ton of women I find specifically that deal with investing.

So it's a nice breath of fresh air to be able to talk to you, who has been in this industry for quite a while. What is kind of your background? How did you kind of enter this world of investing? Right. I was in school and I was, you know, I knew that I liked school and I was doing my PhD in economics. And in my second year, I had to look for an elective and I popped over to the business school and enrolled in a course in finance and I was hooked since then and so I did my PhD dissertation on a finance topic and when I was hired to be a professor of finance they gave me okay well we need someone to teach investments and so I think you'll be the one and so so that was 20 years ago. And I learned from scratch because I had not taken a course in investments myself. I've always been an investor.

I've always had an online discount brokerage account following the markets. But in the 20 years from teaching it and going through, you know, starting with the technology bubble and then the financial crisis and the bull run in the last 10 years with my students every term. It's been quite an adventure. I've also been helping out with the university pension plan for the last 14 years. And so, you know, how my website came to be was you know a year two years ago I wanted to you know sort of put all my knowledge together and and experience theoretical and practical together

in a textbook and then I thought wait a second you know should I be writing a textbook in this day and age and so I was able to put together a really wonderful team and we put sort of everything that I wanted to tell people about investing to help investors open up this black box that, you know, it's like you said that a lot of people are kind of, you know, intimidated and they know they should be investing, but they don't know where to start. And, you know, if they have some investments, they're not a lot of tools to evaluate how they're doing.

And so we put all of that on a web platform. And we've always wanted to have at least one version to be free, sort of basic, we call it the essential version, for everyone that can sign up and can, you know, really get started with the basics and a lot of the tools that the investment professionals have access to. But for everyday people, we want to not just provide the tools, but also the educational piece as well. Absolutely. I feel like the more I kind of educated myself about investing, and honestly,

I never really wanted to. I liked doing the more foundational things about personal finance, budgeting, and spending, and lots of the money mindset stuff. That's what got me excited. But I realized, well, if I want to achieve lots of my financial goals, I have to invest. It just always really intimidated me. There are certain kind of mind blocks. And I also just had this lack of confidence. I thought I wasn't smart enough. The people I would talk to about investing, they knew all this jargon I didn't. And I felt like completely embarrassed because I'm like, I don't know what that means. And I think that I realized talking to other people, especially other people listening to this podcast, so many other people

have that exact same experience, especially women. I think they're really good when it comes to budgeting, paying off debt and all that stuff. when it comes to budgeting, paying off debt, and all that stuff. When it comes to investing, they're a bit hesitant. And maybe it could be just this idea that investing is still kind of a man's world and all this kind of stuff. So it's really nice that you've created something. You were a woman. You've been in this industry for a long time. And it seems like kind of your whole purpose, motivation for this is to kind of make investing understandable and accessible to anybody, especially online. And I feel like what you've created with Wealthscope is definitely

kind of a missing piece. There's a lot of great, there is information out there. You know, if you look around, you do have to kind of do some digging. But, and there's lots of ways. Now there's all these robo advisors, so you, so you can easily start investing right away online. But I find for me, even for my husband, and this is something that we've been going through recently, he's like, okay, we have investments. We have a couple robo-advisors. He's getting into doing some DIY investing with a brokerage. But there's kind of this, are we doing it right? Are we, you know, and that's, and, and so I think a lot of people don't realize that it is really kind of on you to figure that out. Yes, you can hire someone,

though. What I've also been doing a lot more research on is a typical, you know, financial planners, CFPs, they won't actually invest your money for you. You still have to know what you're doing. They can maybe look it over, but they can't just help you with that part of your financial plan. So it seems kind of like you're, what you've created is kind of that missing piece in my perspective. Yeah, I mean, definitely. And that's why, you know, in terms of the access to the tools, that's why it's an online platform. So, you know, it could be the middle of the night, it could be two o'clock in the afternoon whenever you have time you can have access to those tools

on demand um and also that you know we like using colors we don't want to be another site that i'm very familiar with a lot of the more institutional tools where it's the black and white and and yeah a lot of them are very slow because they were built a long time ago and we try to create colors we try to have multimedia so we have some videos it's very short but to the point on explaining just like some of the jargons some of the jargons are intimidating uh maybe they're meant to intimidate but a lot of people i find in my experience would throw those jargons around but without really having a good deep understanding of what they are so we have uh texts we have videos i said

um and also try to you know sort of really to tie different pieces together uh we're not fully there i think it'll always be an evolving product that we'll have. And then we take very seriously our users' feedback and to try to explain, you know, what seems to be confusing or what, you know, what do these numbers mean. And so that's why, for example, in evaluating your portfolios, we don't just provide all the analytics or the numbers, but also we provide a simple scorecard. Let's just say, look, you know, because I'm a professor, so we give you a grade for the different aspects of your portfolio.

So it's easy to understand. And if the grade looks, oh, how come I'm getting a D in terms of my fees or in terms of performance in my portfolio, then you can dig deeper and try to understand what's going on. Absolutely. Yeah. So walk me through a little bit how Wealthscope works for anyone who's not familiar with it. What can they expect? What is kind of the main purpose of it? Yeah. So we've come to realize that there are two distinct audience on our site. So we have about, so we released the beta about three months ago. We have about 1,200 users right now test driving the site, using our site. We find that there are the sort of older, more mature, wealthier investors out there. They might be doing it themselves with a discount broker,

or they might have an investment advisor working with them um they kind of want that second opinion because they don't get a lot of information um about how well they're doing like you were saying and so they link their investment accounts with us uh you know they might have three different accounts with three different financial institutions they can bring all of those investments onto our platform and analyze each account, all of the accounts together and see the scorecard because they have a lot of money at stake and they want to know and then get that second opinion. So that's one group of audience. And the other group where we have these portfolio builders and using simple ETFs they're inexpensive we haven't have an online brokerage account you can buy them and so we kind of hold their hands a little

bit a lot of those the more novice investors they don't may not have a lot of money for investing but they know they should be investing so we have these machine learning driven portfolios, builders. So we don't just say here, look, these are our five model portfolios, choose one of them. We try to say, okay, what are you looking for? And then, so, you know, answering a few questions and help them optimize the portfolio. And then we say, okay, look,

these are the ETFs that you can buy in order to replicate this portfolio. And then we have tools. You can look up a fund and find out more information about the fund. And then also then the other piece for the sort of more novice investors is, okay, well, I found a portfolio that I think I like. What if I were to use this portfolio for my savings towards my retirement? And then we have the planning piece where you can sort of integrate it. You can build a portfolio using simple ETFs, very inexpensive, and you can plug that portfolio and look,

if I want to save this amount and I have this many years, it could be for retirement, it could be for your children's education. You can see what is the likelihood of success using that portfolio for towards a certain goal, be it again, your retirement goals, or be it your, you know, for buying a house for savings towards your children's education. Okay, yeah, that's, that's pretty clear. I know a big element of your software is kind of really highlighting fees. And this has become a lot more, you know, talked about in the past couple years, which is great, because honestly, most people a couple of years back before CRM2, most people I talked to had no

idea they were even paying fees, which is terrifying, because they were paying a lot of money in fees. What is kind of the, you know, information that you provide people about fees, which is terrifying because they were paying a lot of money in fees. What is kind of the, you know, information that you provide people about fees so they are more clear on what they're getting themselves into? Right. So you mentioned CRM2 that came into effect a couple of years ago. And so you, so for those people that are working with an advisor, you know how much out of your portfolio that you've been paying to your advisory firm. And that's a different layer of fees than the investment product fees that you're paying. And so CRM2 in our view didn't go far enough because there are so many different layers of fees that one pays. So there's the fees that you pay to advisors that now will be on your statement.

But for people that are do-it-yourselves or even you have an advisor or with your robo-advisors, you know that you don't just pay your 0.5% to your robo-advisors for managing your money. You also pay for the ETFs, you also pay a management fee. So that's what we highlight is that for the ETFs that you pay, you have no idea unless you Google each of them to look at the perspectives or the fact sheet. And then you can see the management fees that you pay to the ETF provider or manufacturer.

So on our site, you can very clearly easily see when you link your robo-advisor's account or your discount brokerage account or your account with your advisor, you can see that at a portfolio level, what is the average management fees that you're paying? Is that the ETF portfolio, it could be 0.4% or for mutual funds, the fees that you pay could be 2%. And that's all calculated, all the numbers we pulled together for you. Yeah, no, it's really important because, yeah, it's not just one fee.

It's several fees, lots of layers. And, yeah, there's definitely still a lot of education to be done about that because, I mean, it's been years and most people have no idea. And, you know, especially as a young investor, it's really important to know this in advance so you can make a decision that's right for you. So, you know, in 20, 30 years, you don't, you know, realize, oh, wait, how much did I pay in fees? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, exactly. So it's just about, I mean, the numbers are out there, but, you know,

to pull them together easily and sort of easily, you know, easily understood, easily consumed fashion. And that's what, you know, we try to do for the users of our site absolutely so uh typically who do you because i well i know you kind of just started still very new but who are the kind of um your clients or your audience members for this service are they young are they advanced is it uh kind of a whole spectrum so currently um the we would say about 45% are between the age of 40 and 60. Another 25% actually are 60 or older. And then there's a contingent that the rest of them are under 40. So far right now, we find that these are investors that have already invested

and they want to have an opinion about how well they're doing. But we'll love to reach more of the more novice investors. You know, I think you have a good audience for that is to help them get started and to look more and do more research at home before you go on and actually give someone money or you open your account. Okay, well, what do I do?

You know, what kind of basic portfolio can I build? And so this version that we released is free and you can go on. And like I was saying, you can just look at that site and do your research anytime, you know, you're free at any time of the day. Why do you find it, in your opinion, and you know, you have lots of young students that you work with too, or that you teach, why do you feel like a lot of younger people are a bit hesitant or wait to start investing? Even though I'm sure everyone knows you should invest, but they take a while to actually put that into action. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I see that all the time. So even for my students, because I teach exclusively investments and events portfolio management and you know and

both uh undergrads and MBAs um and masters of finance and and I see that only a fraction of them are currently investing wow so even though there are business students and and hopefully a lot of them after taking my course will start investing um but I think that there's a lot of priorities that they are you know that that they are spending their time on. And just an inertia, that's the first push to say, okay, I'm going to wake up today and I'm going to go open up accounts and start investing. It's that inertia that they have. have and so so so a lot of times it's only until they start working and if they're lucky there's a pension plan and they have to think about okay now I have this money that I contribute to and so what do I do with it but otherwise it's a student thinking okay well yeah I can do it tomorrow

next month it just seems to be that inertia that they need that little nudge to start is it a lot of because and this is what i hear a lot is a lot of younger people feel like they need money to make money so they're like well i don't have that much money but it seems like well actually you don't need that much money to get started yeah exactly in particular with exchange traded funds etfs you can have a very diversified portfolio uh without having to invest a large sum of money. So, you know, in the old days, when you were buying individual stocks and these stocks have these expensive prices

and so it's hard to diversify in a portfolio inexpensively. But now it's, you know, with exchange-traded funds, which I recommend for a particular younger investor, the management fees are a lot lower. And as well, you know, they can just open up their own trading account. And, you know, and again, they can come to our site, look for some ideas, portfolio ideas, and then, you know, buy six, seven ETFs on their own and off they go. I think another thing too is, and I mean, this was my mindset just a few years ago. I was afraid of doing it wrong. I was afraid of making a mistake and having that fear of failure will prevent you from actually taking action. What are some of the things that are mistakes that people should just be aware of

so they do avoid? I think sometimes they're just afraid of making a mistake, but they don't actually know what the mistake is to avoid. Right, right. No, for sure. And so that, you know, I think in psychology, they call that regret avoidance, right? I'm going to, you know, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm going to think more about it and more about it. And then another year has gone by. So, so I think what we try to do too with our site is that you can you know that's that's about the opening up the black box piece you can build a portfolio and you can see how that portfolio has done and you can look at the different aspects of that portfolio and that's information right there for you you know sort of having the information would help alleviate the inertia and the regret avoidance. And so, yeah, I think we all

do it to some extent, you know, in a variety of things in our lives, but investing is certainly one. And so again, it's about having the knowledge, having the transparency, having the data, having the evidence to help alleviate a lot of those concerns. What are your kind of thoughts on, and as I have educated myself more, I am very much more interested in doing the DIY and not being afraid to make a mistake or using a robo-advisor because it's low cost and very easy to implement. What are your kind of thoughts on some people who just, they don't want to put the energy into it. You know, they'd rather spend their time doing something else. They'd rather pay someone to just handle it. Does anyone actually do that? Like, I feel like the more I talk to people, no one actually will just handle your

finances or your investments specifically. You still need to always be kind of active and involved. Yeah. I mean, definitely for younger investors, it's harder because a lot of the advisors won't be talking to you. least the you know the very experienced ones that can you know hold your hand a little bit more you know unless you have a sizable portfolio amount of money that that you invest in so so i think a sort of a safe way to do it and and have some fun with it too is that you know i like to think of what the institutional investors like big pension plans and diamond funds do is to think of the core satellite investing idea where the core is some diversified assets like etfs um you can have just a few etfs in your core you know

they are they're well diversified and uh they they track the broad market and then your satellite you can have some fun you know maybe there's certain stocks that you're interested in that that you want to follow you want to buy and put a little bit of money not all of your money put a little bit of money in those bets that you know that you think oh i think those might do well i could be wrong but i can always rely on that core portfolio that I have where the bulk of my money is in and then in the satellites then you you know you you have a bit more fun with and I think I think that's a that's a uh you know a good way to go and also you know if there's some you know you have some good stock tips that you hear about but you don't want to put all your bets in. And so there's always a good idea to have a

core portfolio, diversify, inexpensive. Yeah. And then playing around for some stocks. I'd like to talk a little bit more about stocks. I feel like for me, I used to always think that in order to make big money, you did need to know what's going on with stocks and get into that, buying individual stocks and everything like that, which terrified me because I'm very risk averse. And I think a lot of people my age and specifically women are very kind of risk averse. What do people need to know? Like, well, number one, people don't need to buy individual stocks to have a good portfolio. But if they do want to kind of dabble or get, you know, a little bit into that, what should they know? How should they be prepared to do that? I mean, you mentioned something very smart. Obviously obviously don't invest money that you will need it is kind of you

know speculative so you've got to be you know um careful be okay with losing it that's kind of the only way i invest when i do it in stocks i'm like i'm okay with losing this money but i'm also okay if i make money yeah no that that you you definitely need to do more research on i mean there's so much on social media these days and and one has to be very careful a lot of people could be talking up well that's the thing there's so much chat people love and people that are into stocks are very passionate about it it's almost like what information is accurate and what should i you know how what's a good step to actually start doing your research in the right way? Yeah.

So there are sites that provide, you know, good quality equity research, you know, where they sort of do very in-depth analysis of companies. So there are sites that I, you know, I don't want to advertise them, but there are ones that are, you know, sort of free of conflicts where they are not trying to push the stock because they're going to be able to make money from that recommendation um so definitely always look at the valuation you know are they very expensive you can look at the the price to earnings multiple price to book multiple price to sales multiple as compared to the overall market if the overall market you're paying you know on

average say um i don't know five dollars per um per dollar of earnings you know and your stock you have to pay 25 dollars per dollars of earnings then you know is that a company that you think the growth would be sustained right that is so looking at the valuation um you know again that you know it's it's you know what what is the business do you believe in that business um the line of business as well as the industry that is in um you know several years ago when the price of oil was going down definitely energy stocks the whole sector was performing very poorly now is it it on a rebound? Yes, the price of oil has gone up. And I think it does require a lot more research than just sort of an instinct or intuition and so on.

But again, you don't have to allocate a lot to that. You can buy a few shares now, right? Because on a lot of discount brokers, you can buy what we used to call odd lots. And I think, though, the important thing is to understand, too, at the overall portfolio level. So again, on our site, you can have your core portfolio, throw in some stocks there to see, well, overall, how know, how am I risked being diversified? Because you can have a lot of risky stocks in your portfolio, but combined, you should look at the characteristics,

because a lot of some risks might have been diversified away if you're doing the right thing, that those stocks are not highly correlated. So therefore, they're not all going to go up at the same time, they're all going to go down at the same time. Absolutely. So I think it's easy to understand how to be diversified and kind of how to understand your risk tolerance. Those are kind of the first steps to figure out, okay, where should I put my money? What should I invest in? Another question I get a lot is, how do I know how to rebalance? Or what does rebalancing my portfolio mean? Right. So let's say I decided to buy five ETFs and I decided that they're going to be, you know, I'm going to put 20% on each, the equally weighted portfolio.

But over the course of a quarter, six months, a year, some of those ETFs might have done really well. And so the weight of those ETFs in my portfolio would have gone from, say, 20% to 30% now. And some of the ETFs or the securities that didn't do as well, they are now a smaller fraction of my portfolio. So then it depends. Do you have the conviction to keep the equal weights, 20, 20, 20, 20? Or do you want to let your portfolio run its course and the ones that are doing well, let them keep growing,

be a bigger part of your portfolio? And then when they get to a certain point, we go, you know what, this particular asset or ETF or stock has grown from 20% in my portfolio now to 30% or 35% because it's done really well. So you might think, okay, you know, I think I should scale it back, right? And so that's called a rebalance, you know, event. And so what a lot of advisors, you know, claim to do for you would be, you know, will automatically rebalance your portfolio for you. Back to the original allocation when you first started.

It's certainly, you know, I think that they'll say, oh, we'll do it every quarter. We'll do it, you know, around three, four months. That's not necessarily, you know, to do it at that, you know, at that frequency because every time you rebalance, you're buying and selling the securities to get back to the same allocation the same weights in the portfolio and that's you know and that involves commissions right because you're buying and selling trading exactly so i would say that you know unless the market has moved you know have experienced large swings, you know,

look at it once a year. I don't think that's necessarily going to hurt you at all. Okay. So should, say I am investing through a discount brokerage, should I check what's going on every few months, but that not have the, but not rebalance until either there's a, you know, something significant has happened or I've got it in my calendar once a year. But because that's kind of Yeah, what lots of other people say is just don't check it too often, because that's where the emotions get involved. And you'll want to do something drastic and sell all the things at the wrong time. So it really is passive, like that is kind of, you know, one of the best strategies that I keep hearing from other people that have found success that way. Right, Because I think it's a bit ironic that, you know, for example,

the World War Vices that you're with, they want you to invest for the long term. That's why you earn these very diversified ETFs. But then you get the app on your phone where you can look at your balance, you know, sort of every single minute of the day. And that's really, you know, not what you want to do if you don't need the money for, you know, you're saving for something down the don't need the money for you know you're saving for something down the road in five years ten years and so on you don't want to be checking that too too frequently just like you said that's when your emotions is going to get the best of

best of you so i i would definitely say that you know you don't need to have a a systematic rebalancing schedule. People might say, well, that's what I'll do for you if you pay, you know, these supplies they need. But really, you know, not until the market has moved, like, you know, with these big swings, you might want to go in and check to say, oh, okay, now the weight's a little bit off. You know, it's probably not big enough

to need a rebalance, uh, right now. And so, so, so I would definitely not say, you know, not, not say that you need to be on a schedule. Okay. Good to know. Um, before I let you go, what is one, uh, tip or just a piece of advice that you really want, uh, especially young investors to know, to know so they can either start investing or just be confident as an investor.

Well, I would say that a lot of young millennials, they've grown up actually playing stock market games in school. And so go back to that, you know, you've actually had more experience, albeit with a stock market simulation game than actual real experience, but you've had more exposure than my generation, right? Your parents' generation. So just think back to that as, you know, use that experience, even though it was just sort of a game, and just open an account. You know, you have to, you know, as people say, the best time to start investing was yesterday.

So, yeah, you might have, you know, you might just have $1,000, a couple of thousand dollars, but it's easy to just use that to buy, you know, a few ETFs and, you know, and just having the conviction just to start. And again, today, today, investing is a lot easier than it was 20 years ago. So there's really no excuse. Yeah, there's no excuse. It is so much easier, even in the past. I mean, seven years, I remember when I first started investing, it was through a bank. It was an online bank. And I was terrified because it was actually just right after the recession. So I was like really afraid.

But I'd done a lot of, you know, reading of books that said you need to start investing as soon as you can, as early as you can. And so I did. And it was hard because I would sometimes check and it would just like dip, dip, dip, dip, dip. But then I just didn't touch it as you're supposed to do because it was for long term investing. And now seven years forward, I'm so much more ahead. So I think it's just, you know, it's hard to get started, but you'll be so glad. And this is what I tell everybody, especially now that I'm in my 30s, like you will not realize how fast time flies. In your 20s, you feel like, oh, you got plenty of time. And then you blink and you're 32. And you'll be so glad that you started investing at 25. And you started at the perfect time after the financial crisis. Yeah. At the time, I didn't

know that. I was just like, well, I think I should start. But at the time, I'm just like, oh, gosh. I know everyone lost their money. This I hope this rebounds. I hope things get better. Right. Well, and so maybe now, again, we've had a break in the market. So this is, you know, I think this is a time where, you know, things are a little bit cheaper than they were a few months ago. So this is a good time.

Yeah, it's always a good time. Today is always the best time, pretty much. Right. Well, thank you so much, Pauline, for joining me. Where can more people find more information about you and Wealthscope? So wealthscope.ca. Perfect. Awesome. Well, I will encourage everyone to check it out. I think it's a really great platform, especially there's the free essentials version that people can check out for themselves. Thanks very much for having me. And that was episode 164 with the fabulous Dr. Pauline Shum-Noel. I hope you enjoyed it. I love talking about investing with more and more people because the more I talk to people and the more I

share episodes with guests talking about investing, the more we're all more educated and confident when it comes to the topic of investing. Because honestly, I feel for years as people were in the dark, they just kind of gave their money to some investment advisor and just hoped for the best. But those times are long gone. If we want to really invest our money strategically and know what's going on so we can really be prepared for our futures, our retirements, whatever our financial goals are, we really need to know how to invest, what it means, what are all the terminologies that we need to know, and whether our portfolios are actually doing anything. And it seems like Wellscope is something that is kind of helping us get there. It's empowering investors. They kind of do it themselves, especially for the DIY investors out there.

Now, you can check out Wealthscope at wealthscope.ca. Right now, it's just for Canadians. However, it says on their website that they're going to be launching a version for U.S. investors in the fall of 2018. So look out for that, my American friends. And of course, you can check out the show notes for this episode at jessicamorehouse.com slash 164. I'm going to put a lot more information about stuff that we talked about in the show

notes. So make sure to check that out. A couple of things that I want to share with y'all, but just stick around, just have a few words about this episode's sponsor. This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is brought to you by Canspace.ca. If you're a local business owner and want more Canadians to use your website online, don't forget to check out Canspace. As I mentioned before, they've been trusted for over 10 years by Canada's largest corporations for providing affordable, reliable web hosting with the fastest load times in the industry. Plus, they offer plenty of perks like a 30-day money-back guarantee. And they'll even help migrate your site from your current provider for free. If you're ready to

switch providers or launch a new website, you can get $10 off the web hosting plan of your choice. Just visit canspace.ca slash Jessica M and enter email address to get the coupon. Once again, check out canspace.ca slash Jessica M and enter email address to get the $10 off coupon. Okay, so first and foremost, I'll have my book giveaway open to everybody, but it will be closing as of like the end of next week really so i've only got two more weeks in the podcast i've got one last episode next wednesday i'm gonna be taking a little bit of a summer break um and by that i just mean not airing any episodes but busting my butt so i can get new guests for the next season and uh trying to play catch up a little bit on that front. Anywho,

make sure to go to jessicamaros.com book giveaway or check out the show notes for more info on how you can enter to win one of the many books I'm giving away. I'm giving away books that were featured on this season, season six of the show. And yeah, you never know. You might be a winner. So you'll never know if you don't enter. So make sure to enter to win. Also, again, if you missed my live Facebook live, my live Facebook live, that's redundant, but you know what I mean, with Chris Kilbo a few weeks back, well, you can check out the replay on my YouTube channel or my Facebook page. And yeah, also just check out my YouTube channel. Just do it because I'm putting out more and more videos up on there, especially throughout the summer. While I won't have the podcast, it's a great way to kind of keep in touch, see what I'm up to, see what I'm talking

about. And yeah, really just do it. Just go to jessicamorris.com slash YouTube and you can check it out. Subscribe. Let me know what you think. Let me know in the comments and all that kind of jazz. I think that's really it for me. That's all I've got at the minute. Got one more episode for you next week. And then I'm out. I'm out. And I'm happy about it because I need a little breaky poo. I need some time to just collect my thoughts and, you know, get ready for an awesome next season. Also, I guess that also means if you have any ideas or thoughts of who you would like featured on this show that I haven't had already, let me know. Shoot me an email. Jessica, Jessica, Morehouse.com is my email or tweet me anytime. I'm always on the Twitter. Okay. Anyways, that's it for me. See you back here next week for the final episode of season six of the show. See you next week. Have a good rest of your week. Ciao.