Rich Habits Podcast - 67: From $66K to $2M w/ @PersonalFinanceClub

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

In this episode of the Rich Habits Podcast, Robert Croak and Austin Hankwitz sit down with Jeremy Schneider from @PersonalFinanceClub on Instagram!Jeremy sold his software company for $5M in 2015. He quickly had $2.2M deposited to his checking account. Since the exit of his company, he's grown his net worth to over $5M. Austin and Robert ask Jeremy how he invested his money, his biggest money mistakes, and his new company. Follow @PersonalFinanceClub on InstagramCheck out Nectarine, Jeremy's new company---👉 Join us tomorrow, June 4th, for our free options webinar with Public! Click here to save your seat. ---👉 Discover new stock ideas and analysis on Moby! Click here to learn more. ---👉 Find new investing communities that fit your unique strategies on Blossom, an investing social network. Click here!---⭐ Download our FREE Budgeting Template – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⭐ Earn 5.1% on your savings with a High-Yield Cash Account – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⭐ Trade stocks, options, music royalties and crypto on Public – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⭐ Get a $35 bonus when you start saving & investing with Acorns – ⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⭐ Automatically buy stock where you shop with Grifin – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⭐ Protect your family with term life insurance from Suriance – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⭐ Use code “Spotify” for 15% off our 4-module video course – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⭐ Optimize your portfolio with Seeking Alpha – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠---👤 Explore everything Austin does – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠👤 Explore everything Robert does – ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠❓ Ask us questions for our Q&A episodes – @richhabitspodcast on Instagram📬 Inquire about working together – [e-mail]---Hankwitz Group LLC has an existing business relationship with NEOS Investment Management LLC. The opinions expressed are those of the author, and the author owns several NEOS ETFs.

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Rich Habits podcast, a top 10 business podcast on Spotify. My name is Austin Hankwitz and I'm joined by my co-host Robert Croke. Robert is a seasoned entrepreneur in his 50s with lifetime revenues of over 300 million. And I'm an entrepreneur in my late 20s with a background in finance and economics. Since quitting my full-time job in corporate finance a few years ago, I've built a seven-figure media business and actively advise some of the most well-known fintech companies around the world. And as the show name might suggest, every episode we talk about rich habits as they relate to business, finance, and mindset. However, we try and bring you two unique perspectives, one from an industry veteran, which is Robert and the other myself, someone who's still in the process of building wealth and figuring it all out.

Robert, this is a special episode. We got a special guest with us. So break down who this is and what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. I love it. Yes. On today's episode of the Rich Habits podcast, we're joined by Jeremy Snob. You might recognize him instead as personal finance club on Instagram where he has over 619,000 followers, which is really, really amazing. Every week he posts educational graphics that help debunk and demystify the lies we see in the headline news and on social media every single day about personal finance and investing.

And he inspires millions of people to begin their wealth building journey just like Austin and I do. Jeremy, thanks for joining us. Why don't you tell the listeners a bit about your story, where you came from, how they can find you, and then we can get right in. I guess my story started in college. I had a job offer from Microsoft to go work as a computer programmer and decided that corporate America wasn't for me and instead decided to start a company. I had no idea what I was doing. I was Googling things like how to start a company. I didn't know what forms you to fill out.

I had no clue about building a brand or product or revenue or anything like that. But I was very stubborn and stuck with it for years. and the most ever paid myself was $36,000 a year. I never took any venture capital or funding. I just bootstrap basically spending less than we made along the way. Eventually hired up to seven employees. And then I sold the company when I was 34 for just over $5 million. And so I went from being, you know, living borderline poverty level in San Diego on $36,000

your salary to, you know, being a multimillionaire literally with a click of a refresh button on my, you know, checking account website. For a year after that, I did what I thought you're supposed to do as a young retired person. I, like, traveled. I played video games. I worked out. I, you know, every day it was a Saturday. That was fun for sure, but I lacked like purpose and tension in my life. And so then I started following my passion, which is teaching people about personal finance and investing, which is what I do now under the brand personal finance club. And so I, yeah, like you said, I kind of teach the basics of personal finance investing, almost all the same messages you guys are given here on your podcast.

Well, we're definitely going to get into what happens when all of a sudden millions of dollars end up in your checking account. I've been there a couple times and obviously with silly bands in a very huge way, so I can't wait to cover that later on. But yes, as you alluded to, Austin and I have several money topics and slogans. We believe in as it relates to building wealth through personal finance, but we'd love to hear your perspective. Give us three things that every listener right now should know about money and building wealth. And we can see how much they line up with what we believe, because a lot of your message is similar to ours, but everyone, has a different mouse trap because personal finance is not a one size fits all.

For sure. And I love what you guys do because when we grow up, we have this misconception about wealth, I think. You think that wealth is driving a fancy car or like making it rain to the club or whatever. But I don't think it's what wealth is. That's spending, right? Wealth is what's left over after you have spending. And so I'd say the first tip is live below your means. We all know people who make healthy six figure salaries who are living paycheck to paycheck. You know, if you make half a million dollars a year and you spend half million dollars year, you're broke. You have zero dollars.

But if you make $60,000 a year and you spend $40,000 year, for that $20,000 year you're not spending, you can easily become a multimillionaire. So that's the first thing. You have to live below your means. I say the second is to invest early and often. With that money that you're not spending, just regularly dump it into investments. The two things I invest in mainly are the stock market and real estate, things that pay for owning them over time and are likely to go up in value. And it's not about timing the market.

It's not about guessing. It's not about speculating. It's not about gambling the market. It's just about consistently buy, buy, buy, buy over time to ramp up that compound growth. And then the third I'd say is keep it simple. The first time anyone dips their toe into the world of investing, it seems impossibly complex. You know, there's visions of like Wall Street traders frantically waving pieces of paper over their head on like, you know, in Hollywood movies or day traders with 14 screens with a million charts trying to like predict what's going to happen or you know crypto or futures or options but the reality is the best investors keep it very very simple they buy a few things maybe even one thing and just keep buying more of the same thing over time and so you know

my favorite way to invest is just to buy one single thing which is called a target date index fund like you know my net worth now is over five million dollars i'd feel very comfortable putting out 90% of my portfolio into a single target date index fund that has inside of it is diversified for for you, thousands of U.S. stocks, thousand of international stocks, thousands of bonds. And it's the simplest strategy, but it's going to be most investors who are kind of like frantically guessing and making things overly complex. I love the perspective, right? And I think what's so fun about this show is, you're right. Like, we align on a lot of stuff, but we also don't on a couple things, right? So, like, invest early and often. We are right there with you. Live below your means. We're right

there with you. Keep it simple. We're right there with you. The only thing I think that's so funny is I didn't take you as a target date fund guy because with us, we always thought that the sort of these target date funds over a long period of time obviously underperform the S&P 500. And Robert and I think, right, it's like if you're going to be invested for decades, let's say you're even in your 40s, 50s and 60s, right? You're not just going to sell everything overnight. So if you're going to be invested for several years, if not decades, might as well ride the wave of the S&P 500 and other indices versus, I guess, trying to like balance that between bonds

and index funds and things like that as well. What's your perspective on that? Why do you choose sort of index fund focused target date funds for yourself? Is it because you know you do need some diversification with the bonds and the fixed income side of the equation there? And it's kind of happening automatically behind the scenes like target date funds do or is it something else? I think it's important to break down like what's inside of a target date fund.

If you buy a target date fund that's sufficiently far out, so if you're a young person you're 20s, 30s, even 40s and you're buying a target date fund that's, you know, 20 or 30 years out, it's going to be 90% stocks and only 10% bonds. And if you're saying you want no bonds, okay, fine, but like the difference between a 90% stock portfolio and 100% stock portfolio is going to perform very, very similarly. So of that 90% stocks, about 60% of it is the U.S. stock market, which is essentially the S&P 500. And so the S&P 500 is inside of a target date fund, but it also has international stocks and it also has bonds. And so why do I do it that way?

Here's why. Because the last 15 years, the U.S. stock market has crushed the international stock market. The next 15 years, is that going to happen again? Nobody knows. But if you look over history longer than 15 years ago, it's kind of more like a pendulum, sometimes international outperforms, sometimes U.S. outperforms, and if the U.S. isn't the economic superpower the next 100 years that it has been the last 100 years, I don't want to put, you know, 100% of my portfolio in a single country's, you know, stocks. That said, obviously the U.S. is like an exceptional country, about half of the market cap of the globe exists in countries

headquartered in the U.S. But still, you know, all things considered, I think the market is very efficient and people know what other countries stocks are worth. And so I'm going to diversify those other countries. In terms of underperforming long term, I agree. And so most of the time you hold on these target date funds, you are going to be 90% stocks plus because some of them actually are more than 90%. But when I talk to people in, you know, their 20s like you, Austin, they're aggressive like you are. They're like, yeah, I want to ride the way. I don't mind the volatility. I want to be, you know, all stocks. But when I talk to people in like 70, they don't want whatever, you know, clown is in the White House at a given time or whoever's running the Fed or whatever happens to the

stock market to have their nest day get cut in half when they're depending on that income to survive at that point. And that's where bonds come in, right? That's where you're kind of taking some of your chips off the table. And target date funds do that in a way where it's not reactionary to the market. I would hate to see as someone who's like aggressive, aggressive, they're all in tech stocks until they're 65. Then tech stocks drop 70%. They freak out. Then they go into bonds. And then they're like, you know, retirement way less. And the only way to do that, in my opinion, that's kind of smart and systematic, is to just take a little bit off every year, which is what a target date fund does automatically for you, starting kind of in your mid-40s or 50s. It starts transitioning towards

bonds. Then when you're 65 and 70, you have more like a 60, 40, or 50-50 portfolio. I think the key word there was systematic, right? Because you're 100% correct. That is exactly how target date funds work is it's a very systematic approach to investing over a long period of time. So I appreciate the feedback and the walkthrough. Yeah, I'm on the other. side of the fence about that. Everyone knows I'm not a huge fan of Target Date funds only because I just believe over time I can pick a better mouse trap for performance. And I just am more of the ilk that you should have active management of your portfolios. And so with Target Date funds, they could be good for the right people that, you know, have a low risk tolerance and are looking

for ways to be safe with their money, but still grow it. Because let's face it, a lot of lot of people that put individuals in target date funds, they're not there to really grow the portfolio as much as they are to sustain it and make sure it doesn't lose money. So that's where target date funds can come into play. But then you can also look at like even BlackRock right now has a new target income portfolio that is completely dedicated to bonds. And that one, you know, they're saying is going to make around 6.7% per year gains. So I think it's just this really leads us down the path that there is no one size fits all in personal finance. And that's why we bring on guests like Jeremy is to hear a different side of the proverbial fence and decide for yourself what you

think is the best way to go. So to summarize for me, Target date funds can have a place in people's portfolio. I believe that mathematically they would underperform something as simple as if I had a group of index funds like V-O-O-O-QQQ and VGT over 30 years. I think my clients that I would tell to do that would outperform a traditional target date fund, but there is a time and a place for them. So not against it. It's just not my favorite recipe for growth and sustainable gains. We always want that positive arbitrage for people to build wealth. So that would be my take on it. I would say the other side of that coin, though, is that I think of a target date fund is like the entire pie. It's got all the U.S. stocks, all the international stocks and all the bonds. And Robert, you're saying, I like

these three slices better for the next 30 years. And you might be right, but you might be wrong, right? Because we don't know what the future holds. And so the Target A Fund says, instead of speculating on individual slices, buy the whole pie, guarantee yourself your fair share of all future growth of the full market. And then I say, you know, with the other 10% of your portfolio, that's where you can kind of get into speculation, stock picking and sector picking, things like that. That's how I see it. Got it. Well, speaking of speculating, you sold your software company about a decade ago, right? You mentioned for a little bit over $5 million. And there's a video on your Instagram of you recording your checking account going from $66,000

to over $2.2 million because you click the refresh button on it, right? Because you got the wire transfer after you sold your company. So how did you approach allocating this money in both a responsible manner while also enjoying it, right? You were probably in your 30s. You're still trying to be happy and have fun. You mentioned playing video games. I also played video games. But like, How did you go about, wait a second? I don't know what to do with this. Right. It looks kind of like a big responsibility when people inherit a lot of money or see a big sum of money. They get scared, right? They're like, I don't know what to do. Now before you answer that question, Jeremy, as all of our listeners know, Robert and I don't just talk about investing. We're actual investors. I've been

investing for over a decade now and Robert's been investing for several decades. And this episode sponsor Blossom allows us to not only invest, but also share those investments with other investors. Yes, Blossom is a social investing app built around transparency, and you simply sign up for a free account, connect your existing online brokerage account like Fidelity or Robin Hood or Vanguard, or even Charles Schwab, and get started. It's that simple. Unlike anonymous platforms like Reddit and Twitter, Blossom users link their existing brokerage account to the app so that all of their holdings and portfolios shared within the feed are verified by actual data, leading to richer discussions and decisions. It's just never been easier to join a community of like-minded investors, focused on building long-term wealth together. And with that transparency, it's just really awesome from an authentic point. And for example, Robert, when I signed up for the app the other week, I chose to follow the dividends, passive income, and options communities for my personal feed. They also offer a one-stop shop dashboard for tracking all of your investments. They've got a dividend tracker, a dividend forecaster, sector breakdowns, and everything in between. Yes, Blossom is not an online broker. You're not investing into stocks on Blossom. They're simply a social app network for investors that want to connect with other investors. Did we mention that they have 120,000 active users across both Canada and the U.S. already?

So go sign up for Blossom using the link in the description of the show notes, and we'll see you there. All right. Let's hear what Jeremy has to say. Yeah. You know, first on the bank thing, I had learned like a week prior to this day that the bank emails me when I get a wire and I've never gotten a wire transfer before, but I got one like a week earlier when we drained some of the money from our bank account in anticipation of the sale. It's like, yeah, it happened like that. You just click refresh and there's all the money. Before that,

though, there's about a three-month period of due diligence. Basically, we had shaken hands with the buying company on the purchase price, but the wire hadn't come through. And in that period, you never know. If they back out or they go bankrupt or whatever, you know, the deal's not really done until the wire comes through. But I had basically three months to think about it. And I got to do a lot of thought experiments. I thought things like, I could go buy a Lamborghini. What's a Lamborghini cost? A couple hundred thousand dollars, I would still have two million left or one point million left or whatever it is, still plenty. Then I was like, where would I park it? What would I say to my friends? I shrolled up in a Lamborghini. Like that period of time really gave me, you know, some like time to

decompress and think about, you know, how would I really spend this money? And what I came to is like, you know, there's fewer opportunities than we all assume to convert money into happiness. You know, if you're broke and you like can't pay the lights bill, then absolutely like having more money is going to make your life remarkably better. But if you're like at a level of comfort, you know, making 70, 80, 90, $100,000 a year, buying a first class ticket instead of a coach ticket doesn't really add, you know, it's for sure a comfort and it's a luxury, but it doesn't really make you like internally much more happy and driving a nicer car doesn't really like give you like a real strong feeling of happiness throughout the day. And so basically I want to use that money to what I

think is and I still think it's going to buy me happiness, which is freedom. I didn't want to buy a bunch of stuff to have to be a slave to and be like, oh, I have to make a car payment, a house payment, a country club membership payment. I wanted to, like, build that wealth so I could live off the growth indefinitely and then basically spend my free time, spend all my time however I see fit. And so to put it succinctly, like the day I got that word, the next day I decided to do a lump some investment, I chose about six ETFs. I dumped all in. Kind of contrary to my target date fund, I suggest now, I chose a total stock market ETF, a small cap ETF, an international ETF. I did commodities like golden oil, real estate, some international real estate, just like a few different

ETFs like that. And there they sat basically since then bringing my net worth from about two million back then to over five million as it is today. But I did go back and do the math. If I bought a target date fund on that day, I would actually have about $600,000 more money. Because despite all the complex day introduced, it underperformed the total pie of the market. Interesting. Interesting. And what I think is really cool about your answer, though, is the ability to buy freedom, right? I think that's what everyone's sort of working toward and something that we really care about here on the podcast is, you know, financial freedom and what that means for people listening. It means something different for everyone. And, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of people

listening right now are those solopreneurs, small business owners who are working toward maybe having that exit or selling their company or doing something big like that, Jeremy. So that's a really cool answer. And I totally agree with you, man. My big thing as well is like, you know, I'm 28 years old. I want to get to a point in my life where my investments completely offset my monthly expenses, my annual expenses, and I'm super, quote unquote, financially independent. Yeah, and I want to touch on, you know, not many people really ever get to see a windfall like that. And you hear it all the time with athletes and musicians and actresses, you know, or actors when they get that first big check. You hear it all the time that the athlete signs the $40 million contract. They get a $10 million

signing bonus. The first thing they do is go out and buy everyone close to them a new car. They buy a few houses and they do all that. And the biggest mistake, and you touched on it, Jeremy, and I want everyone listening to make sure they really listen on this point is when you know that windfall is coming, you need to pause. You need to try and really bridle in the excitement of that 500K, $5 million, $10 million, whatever it is, whether, whether it's inheritance or an exit of a business, you need to bring it in for a while. And if you have to go spend a weekend alone in a cabin, go do a staycation because what happens is you let everyone around you hype you up. Oh my God, you made it. You're finally rich. You're

getting millions of dollars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what happens is, and it happened to me, and I want to touch on this for a moment, is you get so overwhelmed by it that you think, think the money is never going to stop. And that's why so many athletes go broke because the siphon can get turned off just as quickly as it gets turned on. And it's just so important for people to pause for a minute, really look at how long this money is going to last if they handled it correctly versus going hogwild and buying a Lamborghini and new houses and taking care of everybody because it might sound weird, but two, three million dollars, if you start going crazy with, you know, depreciating assets, it will run out quickly.

Trust me, you go by the house, you go by the car, you go by the boat, and then maybe a couple other things. Pretty soon you're going to be like, oh, shit, what did I do? So I think it's really important for everyone to pause when they know that money is coming in. And I'm going to tell you guys a really great story during silly bands. At the height of silly bands, when millions and millions of dollars were coming in, I made two mistakes, two very big mistakes. Not big enough to ever go broke, but big mistakes.

Number one, as it started to slow down, I thought, oh, I can take this $20 million, $30 million now, and I can turn this into $200 million as easy as I turned this into the $20 or $30 million. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two is Tim Croke, my cousin, the founder of Croke Capital. One day he walked into my office in the middle of the madness, and he just sat down. And I'm like, uh-oh, what's wrong? because he never just shows up. And he said, I want you to write me a check for $5 million right now.

I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, I know you. He goes, you've never made this much money before in your life. And he goes, and I want to take $5 million away from you now so I can invest it properly. So you make $500,000 a year for the rest of your life. And he goes, and that's what I want you to do right this minute. And I didn't do it. I wrote him a check for $1 million on the spot,

which was smart, which was great, but I just felt that I was the king of the world during that moment, and I didn't do the pause. I was so busy making so much money, I thought I was just the king of the world. Don't make that mistake because it can leave you as quickly as it comes if you're not smart with the money. So everyone listening, if you're coming into a windfall, I don't care how much it is. It's so much better to put it away. Give yourself some time to breathe and think and see what happens next. before you go out and start buying all these depreciating assets.

I love that. One thing I learned when I sold my company is that there's no limit to how much you can put in a savings account. And you could just, yeah, if you got, you know, whatever it is, 100,000, 10 million, you can just go dump it into a savings account and just leave it there for six months, right? And I think leaving this cash alone for six months, you're never going to look back in that and say, if that was a cash traffic mistake, the opportunity cost of six months is what ruined me. That's never going to be the mistake. But I think it does give you that time to decompress, like let the craziness die down and help

avoid making those like kind of in the heat of the moment, need your decisions, which can, you know, be dangerous. Yeah, definitely. Now, Jeremy, before we jump into your new company, which I'm really excited to learn more about, I want to backped a little bit to your answer before Robert here was talking about a silly band days because you said something about how your investments now pay for your life, right? You're pretty much saying that you're financially free at the moment. How is that broken out, right? I think you said you have about $5 million in that worth. How is that between if it's real estate or your target date fund or any income generating assets. Like, how are you paying for your life right now from your investments?

Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of people ask that because it seems so abstract. Like, how do you live off your investments? In broad strokes, you just buy a bunch of index funds or ETFs or stocks, whatever it is. And then when you want to live off that, you just sell a little bit every year. And so, for example, you know, they say the safe withdrawal rate is 4%, which is, you know, a very broad strokes number. But basically, if you have a million dollars invested, you can take $4,000, you can take,

$40,000 per year out every year, even increasing it for inflation and never go broke. And so, Robert, when you said your brother was going to take $5 million, I was like, is the mistake writing the check? Because that sounds like a good idea. And your mistake was not writing him that check because he knew that. He's like, hey, if we just go and put this in like reasonable investments, then you're going to have forever income, you know, and you can just whether the market's up or the market's down or it's producing dividends or whatever it is, you can just basically either take those dividends and put them in your checking account and live on them or sell a few shares or sell a couple percent per year, whatever it is, and put that into a checking

account and live it on. And that's essentially what I do. I mean, now a couple of other sorts of income, like my passion projects has kind of become a side business, which has become like a business. But, you know, basically when I need money, I go to my ETFs and I sell $50,000 or whatever at the beginning of the year and transferred into my checking count. And there it sits. And my five million is about a million is in my home. I live in San Diego. And so my home is a two bedroom condo. It's not a mansion in San Diego for a million bucks. About three million is in ETFs, like those ETFs. I mentioned I bought when I sold the company and the other million is some equity I have in my businesses, some real estate, some angel investing, like stuff like that kind of. What's a million

bucks between friends, right? Just somehow they're assorted. You mentioned you're in California. I mean, obviously you could be there for a plethora different reasons, but considering like the tax rates and I mean, I would argue that you're definitely on the wealthier side. Like, have you thought about living somewhere else that ever been like an equation from a tax perspective? Like after you got this amount of money was there ever like, wait, how do I best optimally? How do I best optimally? perhaps tax strategies or different types of ways to just make sure that you're not paying $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 back to Uncle Sam. I've been asked that question too.

And I think that's kind of funny that, you know, when you get more wealthy, you have to move because of your money. I feel like it should be the opposite, right? And so my take on it as since I have all this money, I can live exactly where I want to live regardless of the cost, regardless of the high home cost, regardless of the tax rates. And so I'm living exactly where I want to live. I live like a mile from the beach in Southern California. I think it's beautiful.

I love the area. I love my friends. And so I live here because I can afford to live here. You know, if I had like a million dollars, I was trying to retire early, then I might, you know, kind of do some geo arbitrage where you either move to low cost of living city or low cost of living country. But I think I'm at a point where I'm not super rich. Like I'm not Robert rich, whatever, but I'm, you know, good enough where I can at least like cover my cost of living in San Diego. So that's where I choose to spend my days. Dude, I love that. Right. And that's the whole thing, right? We are financially free so we can make whatever decisions we want, right? We can live where we want. We can hang out where we want.

We can spend our time how we want. I love that. Now, the new company, right? You have a new company. It's called Nectarine. Talk about that. What inspired you to come up with this idea? How did you hire all of the financial advisors behind the scenes?

What was the vetting process like? Give us the play-by-play as to what nectarine is. And if anyone's listening right now that would want to be a customer of Nectarine, what benefits come with that. Like, give us just the walk-through. Man, what a setup for a plug. Thanks, Austin. But basically the last five years, I've struggled with one of these questions I got asked.

So when I'm talking about personal finance and investing like you guys are, the question I would ask is, how do I find a good financial advisor? And the word financial advisor itself isn't regulated. And so anyone can put that on their business card or a name plan on their door with like reckless indifference to what they actually do. And there's lots of insurance salesmen, for example, who love that because they claim to be financial advisors. Yeah, IULs are a great thing for everybody. Like when we, like the Target 8th fund thing, we're 90% online. That's maybe we're basically all in the same team here except for the insurance salesman, right? Because they only get paid if they sell this one specific product, which in my opinion and experience is

a horrific product. In ours, it is also horrific. We're right there with you. Right. And like, it's just like they paint this picture that all these like rich people are buying insurance to get rich. I was like, no, no rich people I know are buying insurance to get rich. That's, I literally know, I'm not some millionaires, none of them do it. But, you know, when a young person goes and seeks out a financial advisor, I'm making air quotes if you're listening to this on the podcast for the first I think more often than not, they find themselves either in the office of a commission an insurance salesperson or a commissioned financial advisor who just gets paid for pushing specific high fee products, whatever it is. I know you guys have mentioned a past episode. Sometimes you look at

a financial advisor's portfolio. They have like 50 different actively managed funds that are all high fee. And in my opinion, they're basically introducing complexity in order to prove their value. They're like, this is so complicated that I have to be here. Right. And so when people have asked me, how do I find a good financial advisor. I've always been like, that's tough. But I do think there's kind of a simple solution. And the solution is pay the financial advisor for the advice, not for the products they're selling you. And that model is called advice only. Advice only financial advisors don't manage your money. They don't push any products. They don't earn any commissions. They don't sell anything. They simply sit down with you next to you as a partner. You pay them for the hour or for the project

and they give you their expert opinion. You know, there's CFPs or CFAs or fiduciaries, whatever the case may be, but they're just getting paid for the advice. And so I'd usually give this pitch to people last five years. And then the young investors would say, that sounds great. How do I find one of those advice-only fiduciaries? And my answer was, I have no idea. There's very few of them.

They're kind of hard to find. They all have different business models. They're hidden out there. So internectrine. That's why we built nectar. It's an advice-only financial advisor marketplace where we can go. It's $150 for an hour. All the advisors have agreed to that pricing.

So you can filter based on their expertise, based on where you are, based on what you need. You can see their live availability right on the site. You can book right through the site, see the reviews. You know, you can record the meeting if you choose. You can see the recording and you get like kind of a wrap up email with the notes from your hour. And so far, our average review has been like 4.95 stars because I think to those who have met with the financial advisor before, it's like a breath of fresh air to be like, oh, man. When they're not trying to sell me something, suddenly it feels more like a partner who's like giving me advice, not pushing me in a specific direction that feels a little bit weird to me.

Yeah, we've been talking a lot about it with Crow Capital, you know, since I've got. and so big in the financial education space is allowing people to come on and pay an hourly rate or a monthly retainer, $2,500,000 a month. And we're an independent, but what people don't realize in a lot of instances, so I love what you're doing with nectarine, is that when you go into that office, your best interest is not in their mind. They're going to tell you it is, but they're going to sell you based on the products that they make the most money. And that's why with Crow Capital even, we're an independent so we can work with whoever on whatever we want, which is nice, you know, my family, not me. But I love it because, you know, I do a lot of this educational

process with people on a daily basis. And it is a breath of fresh air because I have nothing to sell them. I am just taking my 35 years of experience and saying, hey, this is what I would do if I were in your position, given where you're at financially, where your business is, do you have a trust, do you have whatever it is? And I think it's so great. So I'm going to definitely look into it more just because I think it's something that is greatly needed in society to give people a piece of, you know, a lot of people book with me because they know they're going to get the straight shot. And that's so important because whether people have $100,000 or I deal with people every day that have 10 million plus, they just want to know how to optimize their

portfolios and their businesses. So the positive arbitrage goes in their favor and they grow their wealth. That's it. They don't want the games. They don't want the high pitch sales and all of that. So I really like what you're doing and definitely can appreciate it and I'll check it out more. Thanks. I think the industry is moving that way. I feel like in the 90s when like the internet was kind of in his infancy, you kind of had to walk into a broker's office and, you know, whether it's insurance or investment products. But, you know, we live in a different world now. Investing in the world's stocks and bonds are at everyone's fingertips on your phone. And so we don't need to be paying these commissions to get access to that anymore. And, you know,

also I think consumers are kind of wisening up to the weird incentives that are presented by these other business models. And so I hope you guys do offer that flat few service. I think it's a great idea. And I think the industry is going to move that way. And by the way, it's at hello nectrine.com if you want to check out nectrine. It's just getting people to understand the difference between a fiduciary and a non-fiduciary. It's a huge difference. And people are very often misled and they don't understand that with a fiduciary, you're not paying commissions, you know, because you see these companies like you say. said that are buying and selling all the time with 50 different instruments, it's because they get a commission on every buy and sell. And they're not really looking out for the customers,

you know, what's best for them overall. And I think it's really cool that Nectarine is this marketplace solution, right, for people who just want that straight up advice. They don't want the large planning. We're not saying that people don't need financial advisors, right? Obviously, financial advisors exist for a very good reason. And when you're at that stage in your life, where you do need to start thinking about your entire financial picture, if it's with the college savings, or if it's with your tax optimizations or your trusts and your estate planning, like financial advisors are awesome for that stuff. But if you're 32 and you don't know where to invest $100,000 because you just don't know, nectarine sounds like an awesome platform

to find someone who's going to sit down with you for an hour and explain to you what's going on as well as where you should probably park that money. It's kind of amazing how the advice changes when the conflict of interest goes away, right? Like, you have no conflict of interest other than then you like your friend and want to do the best for him. And suddenly, you know, the fiduciaries, that word is kind of problematic because in my experience, every single financial advisor or every single person in the space will say that they're a fiduciary, even if their business model isn't a fiduciary business model, right? Like, they say they're a fiduciary, but they only get paid if they're partially certain products. So it just turns out that's what they think you should do,

right? When you take away those incentives and just say, okay, pay for your time, then you can actually sit with an expert. I think that is a breath of fresh air for investors. Well, it's kind of like in business, Jeremy, I always tell people, don't get all your business advice from your business lawyer. Because at the end of the day, you know, they may not know what is best for you of how to grow your business, how to exit your business. What are the best tax strategies? What are the best marketing strategies? And I think that's why people like the three of us are so important for so many people around the world because we have the experience and the knowledge firsthand, not just from school, of how to do all these things. and how to handle the problems that come along the way with life and building business and building wealth and exiting businesses.

Before we wrap things up, we're all humans and we've all made mistakes in our financial careers. And Austin and I have been pretty vocal about our mistakes over the years. So if you're comfortable, share one of your biggest financial mistakes. And it doesn't have to mean losses of capital. It could be missed opportunity. It could be something that you knew you should have done and didn't do. Give us an example for the listeners.

Now, before we hear about Jeremy's biggest financial mistakes, we want to take a moment to talk about Moby. Moby is an up-and-coming research platform used by over 5 million investors to help them make better informed decisions. Between their consistent market updates and individual stock picks, it's been really great becoming weekly users ourselves. I actually discovered Kava, after their IPO on the Moby app, and their stock is ripping, Robert. That's right. I really didn't know about Moby at all. all last year until you mentioned it and I really started like watching it and learning about it. And their weekly stock picks are awesome. And I love how straightforward they are. And they don't make

analysis overcomplicated, which is always so important to our audience. So you've all heard me talk about analysis paralysis being a big issue for investors. And I feel like Moby does a great job of helping retail investors be efficient with their time and not overcomplicating things. Their graphs are really great. And especially those of you that are really ready to diversify into single stocks and you've built your base already, I think Moby is a great platform. Yeah, Robert, their 2023 picks had an average return of over 30%. And their 22 picks during a bear market had an average return of over 35%. It's pretty unreal. You know that the ultimate goal of the rich habits community is to help you take back control of your money. And Moby is one of those tools that I truly believe will help you do just that. You know we're always breaking. out the new stuff and trying to give you the best of the best of everything that we research.

And so check out the link for Moby Premium in the show notes below and in our stand stores. As always, let us know if you have any questions, but we love Moby and think it is a great tool. Yeah, Robert, you know, I'm a stock analyst myself. I enjoy analyzing single stocks. And I actually use Moby to not just kind of check my work, but find inspiration. So if you want to get inspired to find some single stocks, go check out Moby in the show notes below. All right. Let's hear from Jeremy.

I'll give you some quick ones. I've done a lot of dumb stuff. I invested in like an oil drilling operation. I didn't understand. I lost $40,000 and went to zero. I invested like $20,000 in Sears Canada. I was like, it's going to go back up. It went bankrupt, lost my money.

Invested $10,000 in Lyft. That's down 75%. Still hold that one. But I'd say that my biggest mistake is not the losers that I've held, but the winners that I've sold. When I sold my company, I bought $400,000 worth of the stock of the company that acquired my company.

because I believed them. I kind of knew that they had a good business. And that 400,000 doubled to 800,000. The share price went from 12 to 24. And I sold like 80 or 90 percent of it. I like doubled my money. I called myself a champion. Today that share price is $230. So that $400,000 would be worth about $9 million had I not sold. And so I think that, you know, maybe my, you know, conservative nature of investing has cost me there. or if I would have let my winners run, if I would have held that for longer, even if, you know, instead of selling 90% or 80%, if I sold 30%, you know, kind of took a little bit more aggressive stance towards that, I would have been, you know, in a dramatically better financial situation than I am today.

You know, that said, at the time, it could have gone from 800,000 to 100,000, and I would have felt like an idiot. So we don't know in the moment. But I think, you know, letting your winners run in, maybe selling your losers might be a strategy. It would have served me better. That's so funny you say that because, and by the way, you got to tell us what the actual ticker is because I want to go check them out too.

But I saw a video today on Instagram. J.D. Durkin is a guy who posted it, works at the New York Stock Exchange, and he's awesome. But he essentially said, if you bought Apple stock at IPO, what would it be worth right now? Just 10 shares. And then IPO it at $22 a share. And so that's what? $220.00, after all the stock splits and everything over the time, would be worth over half a million today. $220 to half a million. He's like, but no one has that because you see, to your point, Jeremy, the 2x, the 3X, whatever it is. And we sell. because you know, you can't get mad at yourself for ever making a profit. That's incredible. We should all feel good about that. But dude, I am right there with you. So my biggest financial mistakes come from selling my winners too early. Yeah, every time someone bemoans their bad luck in investing where they sold too early, I sent them a screenshot of when I sold my first hundred Bitcoin at $700 a piece. And I thought I was a genius because the dollar cost average on each one of that section of Bitcoin was like

47 bucks. And so, you know, we feel like we're geniuses, but I also think you can't look in the rearview mirror. You have to always just look at it from an ROI perspective because no one on earth, I don't care how famous, popular, or rich they are. No one ever always gets it right. You know, no one sells it at the top when it is truly the top. No one ever gets it completely right. So I just tell people have a thesis and an understanding that works for you, whether that is when you get to 100% 200% return. You take 50% off the top and let the house money ride, whatever that may be. And do your best not to look in the rearview mirror because, you know, if I looked in the rearview mirror, Jeremy, I was at in Austin and I figured out the math. I was at an investment group

meeting to be one of the last people in Uber. And my $25,000 that as we left the building that night, I decided not to put in the next day because the next day I think was the last day of it. My one friend did and the other two of us didn't. And that $25,000 adjusted for everything over time would be $7 million right now. So, you know, but you just can't do that to yourself, especially at our level because you'll drive yourself nuts. And then what happens is you pull the trigger on too many projects and you find yourself losing and having a bunch go to zero.

I fully agree. And everyone has that story. Everyone has like, oh, if I multiplied this by this where I would have been. But the thing is, you know, you probably wouldn't have $7 million because you would have turned that 25 into 125 and called herself a gene. It's just like, I remember when Bitcoin was 10 cents a coin. I'm a computer scientist. So I like, just remember learning about early on. I was like, nah, I'm not going to buy that. There's no way it will ever be worth a dollar. And of course, like, you know, like, do the math on that. I'd be a trillionaire or whatever. But we all had those

mistakes. And we're right, time only marches forward. And so buy, buy, buy, acquire, choir, choir, acquire, I think that's what's going to, you know, serve us all over time. Yeah, not have knee jerk reactions. So everyone listening right now, Jeremy, this has been amazing. I love it. Please, please, please, please, listen. Don't have knee-jerk reactions. Buy, buy, buy. Use the dips as an opportunity.

And just look at investing as a long-term play. You are building wealth long-term. If you think it's in and out and filled with emotion, you're a gambler. You're not an investor. I 100% agree. I always talk about speculating versus investing. Investing is buying and holding over time, speculating or gambling is jumping in and out, guessing, you know, making those knee-jerk reactions.

Those are the people who are going to still be broken 40 years looking for their necks to get rich quick win, not the people who have been accumulating shares over time. Thanks so much for hanging out with us on this episode of the Rich Habits Podcast. Just as a quick reminder, that was hellonectrine.com. We'll have the link in the show notes below. And hopefully we'll have you back here pretty soon, man. Maybe get the update when you hit 10 million. I would be honored.

Thanks so much for having it. It's been a blast. See you soon, Jeremy. Thank you.